Move animated images around the frame - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] With our initial animation of images in place, we can rearrange them around our Composition window to allow for the best framing for each image. With our positioning in place, we'll adjust the timing of our layers as well using Sequence Layers. So, I have those five images and they all animate on at the same time and in the same place, and that's really not very helpful, so let's go ahead and rearrange some of these guys. I'm just going to click and drag inside the Composition window and try to make some room for it, and you'll notice that the biggest problem, right off the bat, is that these images are just entirely too large at 100%, so let's go ahead and resize all of them. I'm going to select all my layers and I'm going to tap S on the keyboard and that will bring up the Scale properties and all the keyframes that are associated with it. And what I can do to rescale these things is, I can select multiple Scale keyframes across multiple layers and make one big change to them all together. Now, I can certainly move my current-time indicator directly over one of the keyframes, and by doing that, I can click and drag here, and rescale them this way. Be sure to park over one of those keyframes because if you do not what you'll get instead is a brand new keyframe, we don't want that. So, another alternate way to do it is to select those keyframes and double-click on one of them, and you'll get this Scale dialogue box, and from within here, now you can scale this down numerically or slide it gesturally here or type it in, if you want, so I'm going to bring this down to about 40% and there you go, we've made one simple change across multiple keyframes, across multiple layers. And let's go ahead and bring and reframe these guys into place now so we can see their beautiful imagery. Love these images, these are pretty cool, so something like that, and now let's go ahead and play it back. The only thing is that they're all coming in at the same time and if we wanted to stagger the images to come on a little bit one after the other, we can certainly go do that at the keyframe level. I can go through, select all my Scaling keyframes, push them off, move it this way, push them off, but, oh, I forgot I have transparency on each one of them, too, so let's go ahead and undo because rather than doing it that way, let's go ahead and take the layer itself and stagger the layer. So, now we're moving all of the keyframes inside that entire layer and I'm just arbitrarily moving them one after another, and you'll notice now we get that staggering. So, that's pretty cool, but I'm doing it in such a way that I'm just kind of eyeballing it and not really too concerned about how far apart or how spaced out they are in terms of time. It might be five frames, it might be six frames. What if I needed something a little bit more definitive? Well, let's go ahead and bring all these guys back to the beginning, so I'll select all of them, take my current-time indicator back to zero, and now I'll just hit the left bracket button and you'll notice that the endpoints of all the selected layers go to wherever my current-time indicator is. And now, I'll do the same thing for the endpoint. Let's go down to 30 frames, for instance, and what I'll do now is hit the Opt + right bracket key and that's going to set a new out point here for my layers, and I'm going to do that just so I can show you this part right here. If I want to stagger these guys all off like 10 frames or something, let's go ahead and select layers one through five and we can do exactly 10 frames by coming over here to Animation and using the Keyframe Assistant Sequence Layers. When we first open this up, it's going to give us the option to overlap or not, and if I say no overlap, watch what happens. I'll say OK and After Effects has sequenced out the layers according to the duration of the layers themselves, so one shot will finish first and then it will start the second shot. The second, the third layer, and so on. I don't want that, I do want some overlap instead. I just want this to be exactly 10 frames off from each other, so 10, 20, 30, and 40. It's fine, we can do this manually since we only have five, but what if you have multiple layers, more than five, say 10, or more? Well, this will become really handy, so let's go ahead and reselect layers one through five, and come over back to Sequence Layers and now we'll turn on that overlap. And now these are all 30 frame-duration shots, these 30 frame-duration layers. So, if I say a frame duration of 10, I want 10 frame offset, you would think that that might work, but no. Instead, this is giving us what we asked for, it's overlap, literal overlap. Like layer one is overlapping layer two by 10 frames, so it's working from the back here. So, not quite what we want and so maybe to get the 10 frame stagger that we're looking for, we have to think a little bit differently. So, if we think about this, that each layer is 30 frames, let's take the 10 frames and subtract it from 30, and that gives us a duration of 20, so work backwards. And they're all 31 frames, huh? Yes, they are all 31 frames, so let's go make that exactly 30, there we go. So, now we can say Keyframe Assistant, Sequence Layers and then that duration of 20 frame overlap will get us what we're looking for. Let's go back and zoom out. So, 10 frames, 20 frames, 30 frames, 40, and 50. And now what we can do is redefine the out point of everything, let's go ahead and come over here, and just Opt + right bracket and that will get us the duration that we need to get all these guys showing up at the same time but with that 10 frame staggering. So, here in this movie, we saw how After Effects allows us to select multiple keyframes across multiple layers and to make global changes to them. We also saw how we were able to adjust the timing of our images by using the Sequence Layers option inside the Keyframe Assistant.