From the course: After Effects CS5 Essential Training

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Understanding anchor points

Understanding anchor points

When you are dealing with the five basic transforms, one of the most important concepts is the Anchor Point. It is the center around which most of these transformations take place. So, let's look at that a little bit here. I am going to scroll down and again, I can do that using the wheel on my mouse. As you can probably tell us, it pays to have a three-button wheel mouse when working with After Effects. If you don't have that, you could use the scroll-bar, all the way around the right-hand side of the Timeline panel here to scroll down, and get to the Sun layer. Now what I want you to do is to, the left of the Sun layer you'll see this column underneath this circle, I want you to click that circle. This is the Solo button, and this allows you to solo a layer so you could see only that layer. Now right now, you're seeing this white and gray checkerboard in the background, kind of like in Photoshop. This is the Transparency Grid, letting me know that there is transparency here, but…

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