Using this course - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] Okay everybody, let's talk about how best to use this course. The answer, however you want to. This course does not require you to watch any single chapter or movie in any particular order. You can jump around based on what you want to know or you can watch straight through to learn about some awesome, random After Effects scripts and interesting techniques. There are course materials and exercise files you can download if you have access and want to work along but it was designed so you don't need course materials at all. It's meant to demonstrate how to use third-party scripts to add additional functionality to After Effects, not how to do any specific kind or sort of animation. So if you're using your own project files, or just watching to see what's some of these awesome scripts do, that works great. Nevertheless, here is what's included in the course materials. Within the exercise files, you'll find the After Effects project file for this course which was created with After Effects CC 2017. In the previous Ae versions folder, there are several After Effects project files dating all the way back to CS6. Fair warning, not all effects or scripts may work that far back but most should. If you're working on CS6, just remember there may be some bugs or differences in the look and layout and maybe something just won't work. There's also a footage folder containing all of the assets, images, drawings, textures, and everything else used within this project. Also within the exercise files folder, you'll find a pdf. This pdf contains links to all of the scripts that I use throughout this course. So all you have to do is open that pdf, click on or copy-and-paste the link to find any script I go over. This list also has links for the next course in this series and a bunch of extra scripts I love and recommend. When you open up the After Effects project file for the first time, you may notice a warning saying that it is missing several effects by DUIK. We will be installing the DUIK script later and this will take care of that warning, but also, the effects aren't really necessary DUIK creates expressions when you use it which are native to After Effects, so regardless if it's installed or not, everything will work just fine and you can just ignore the warning for now. Within the After Effects project file, you'll find individual folders corresponding with the different chapters of this course. Each folder contains several compositions that I'll be using for each specific chapter. In most compositions, there will be locked and hidden layers that you can see if you disable the little shy guy icon here. Most text has been converted to shape layer so there won't be problems with font files you may or may not have on your machine. I am mostly using the OpenDyslexic font which is available free at OpenDyslexic.org because it was created specifically to make reading easier for people with Dyslexia. Also, the font looks rad. At the bottom of the project window, you'll find an assets folder that contains all of the assets that we use throughout this course, and let's not forget, After Effects solid folder that's always there and created by After Effects itself. To get the most out of this course, you should have some familiarity with After Effects. You should know how to key frame and some basics like parenting, masking, and using shape layers, but part of the purpose of this course is to show you shortcuts, show you workarounds, additional helpful functionality and simpler ways to do things that most beginners don't know about which can save lots of time and make your animation look way better with way less work. So don't fear watching even if you're a newbie, actually, you should watch especially if you're a newbie. Worry not, I'll be calling out keyboard shortcuts as I go and explain what I'm doing. And I've gone length to make sure everything is set up to keep instruction as simple as possible so go ahead and jump on in.