Creating a comp

- [Instructor] Okay, so now you've seen the lay of the land in After Effects, it's time to put what you've met already into practice and also, to build on it. What we're going to do is create a lower third here that we're going to use later on in another chapter. I'm here in After Effects, as you can see, and I've got a new untitled project going. I just clicked New Project from the splash screen when it came up, although kind of created me one, anyway, in the background.

We're going to add a new composition to that. We can go to the composition menu and choose New Composition from there, or we could do Command+n, that would be Control+n on the PC. Whichever way you want to do that, that's what we'll get, a New Composition dialogue like so. Let's give this a name, first of all. We're going to call this Monstrz. So, M-O-N-S-T-R-Z for this particular one, and then I'm going to type L3.

That's just the way I like to refer to Lower Third, so I if see them in a list, I know what they are. I'm going to change the preset that I'm using just here. I'm going to go to this humongous long list here, and I'm going to choose HDTV 1080 25. That's 1920x1080 in terms of pixel dimensions, 25 frames a second and you can see that there. I'm in the UK here, so I'm using the power frame rate of 25 frames per second, but for those of you in the US, you'll likely have footage that is 30 frames per second.

If you're using audio from a source that has a time code, such as a broadcast web file, or a QuickTime file with a timecode track, it's very important that their frames rate match, or the sync will be off and, in fact, the longer the video, the more different frame rates will impact on that sync. If your video is at 30 frames per second, for example, make sure that that is the same frame rate of your audio source, as well, when you're setting that up. Now, often, video editing software like Premiere will automatically translate differing frame rates to match the project frame rate, but you should always double check.

Then what we need to do is, add in some time, and so we're going to click in the Duration field and highlight that. We want 10 seconds. We don't have to select those individual numbers, what you can do is just type 1-0-0-0 like so. Notice that when you tab out, it actually does that to 10 seconds. That's just a handy shortcut for getting to that time. Once you've done with that, you can hit Okay.

You will find that you are in your new composition. If you look, the top of the work area you can see it's MonstrzL3 just there. Our composition is ready. In the next movie, we're going to bring in some content to use inside this composition.