Managing keyboard settings

- When working in After Effects, it's important to understand that the application prefers a full size keyboard. What I mean is an extended keyboard with the keypad all the way on the right-hand side. Now if you're working with smaller keyboards, there are other shortcuts you can use. But regardless of the keyboard that you're actually using, it's important to make sure that we actually have the function keys set up to work in their default settings. Now what I'm about to show you is how to reset the keyboard settings on a Macintosh computer. So I'll make my adjustments in the system preferences.

But if you're on Windows, you'll wanna go to the keyboard settings of your control panels. So to reset these settings on the Mac, I'll go up under the Apple menu and go to my System Preferences. Once that opens, let's go to the Keyboard section here, and you wanna make sure to enable use all F1 and F2 function keys as the standard function keys. Now if you wanna gain the operability of the other function back, just hold down the function key as you use those keys. Now let's go back into After Effects.

As you're using the application, you'll hear me call out some keyboard shortcuts. If you wanna familiarize yourself with those shortcuts and more, I suggest you go up under the Help menu. Under here you'll notice there's an actual shortcut to the keyboard shortcuts. So that'll take you to the Adobe website where it's constantly being updated with the latest keyboard shortcuts available for Adobe After Effects CC.