Creating a new After Effects composition - Premiere Pro Tutorial

- Let's explore one of the most basic workflows of Adobe Premier Pro, and that is adding a new After Effects composition via Dynamic Link. To begin, I'll go into my project files here and start with Adobe Premiere Pro and open up this one called Alaska. Depending upon your system, you might have to reconnect media and this is a simple process, I'll show you how to do it now. With the dialogue open, just click locate. You can now navigate to the folder. In my case, I'm going to go to my desktop. There it is. I'll right click to add that to my favorites for easier access. Now it appears at the top and this makes it simple and I'll choose the folder called exercise files, and follow the previous path. Now I see that I last opened this up on a Macintosh, and that the files were located in Capture Scratch in a folder called Alaska. So if I keep drilling in, this gets a bit easier. You can also click display only exact name to make it simple. Now select the file that matches the name and click OK. Everything else should reconnect and the project should open. Now we're inside a simple project that has just one clip, a sequence, and an audio file. Let's go ahead and clean up the project panel here. I will hide the preview area, making a little more room in the project panel. And let's switch to the editing workspace, and I'll choose window, workspace, reset to saved layout. Now I can see what's happening here in the project and I'd like to add a new After Effects composition. In this case, it's going to be for a title. Now there's a couple ways of doing this. To add an item, simply choose file, Adobe Dynamic Link, new After Effects composition. If After Effects isn't open, it'll launch automatically. When you choose this, it's going to pick the frame dimensions and the frame rate, as well as the pixel aspect ratio from the current sequence. Clicking OK will launch After Effects and ask you to name the project. Now I'll navigate to the folder, going into my downloaded exercise files, and project files. I'll go inside of Adobe After Effects here, and what I'll do is I'll call this Alaska. Using the extension .AEP for After Effects Project, and click save. Now I have a similarly named project that matches my Premiere Pro project and you see it opens. Let's go ahead and switch this to being viewed over black, I'll just click the checkered icon there, and I'll turn on the safe title grid. It's available right here. Makes it a little bit easier to position. Now I'll click on the text tool and drag to define my text box. Let's type in a name, this is a working title for the show, and using the character panel, I can easily preview different fonts. I'm going to go with Arial, and choose a heavier weight with black and adjust the point size. I can also use the paragraph panel to center this within the block, and if I go to the align panel, I could center the entire element in relationship to the overall composition. Let's press Shift + Down Arrow to nudge that into place, and I'll press Ctrl + S for save. Now, if I switch back to Premiere Pro, you're going to notice that that element is there. In fact, we can drag that right into the timeline, and it adds it. Now you notice in this case, it's getting rid of the audio there, so I'm going to be a little more careful. Let's control this by unpatching the audio tracks and patching the video, and I'll load this into the source monitor. Now, I can make an overwrite edit and add that to V2, and it's put in place. Now the title is completely static, but it doesn't need to be. To switch back to After Effects, just select the comp and you can right click and choose edit original. Or the shortcut is Ctrl or Cmd + E. Now you're right back in After Effects. Let's go over to the animation panel, I'll choose effects and presets here, and type in the word blur. And here we have some text animators. I'm going to try blur by word, and drop that on. Now when I press the space bar, I see it build. I like that, but let's tweak it a little bit. With the layer selected, I'll press U to see the user added keyframes, and I see range selector. What I want to do is adjust the timing here, so I'll go to one second, and put the start keyframe, and then I'll go five seconds forward, plus five, zero, zero and drag the other keyframe. Remember, keyframes are just like Premiere Pro, and they're useful for controlling the timing of an animation. Now what I'd like to do is a little more control. So let's twirl this open all the way and see what's happening. I see that we've got a lot of different things for the animator, and what I'm looking for is this section called advanced. Now what I'm showing you here is how to customize the text animation. Remember this is just an introduction. If you've never used text animators in After Effects, you might want to check out one of the full length courses available in the library. I'll twirl this down for more advanced controls, and right now it's animating based on words. Well let's change that to characters, and while I'm at it, I'm going to play with this a little bit. Chose randomize order, set that to on. Now, if I play this you'll see that the letters blur on one at a time, randomly, and that's an interesting reveal. If I switch back to Premiere Pro, and go to the front of the timeline here, I could press play, and you see that that updates, which works well. Let's turn on our dropped frame indicator. I'll click on the settings wrench here and make sure to display the dropped frame indicator. Show dropped frame indicator. Now let's press play. I can see the dropped frame indicator and it's currently green. If I mouse over, it'll tell me if there's any dropped frames, and right now I see zero dropped frames during playback, which means that this animation played back in realtime. That works quite well. If I select it and press Ctrl + E, I switch back to After Effects. Now in order to control things a bit, I recommend that you enable the disk cache. This can be found in your After Effects preferences. Edit, preferences, media and disk cache. Or if you're on a Mac, this is under the After Effects menu. You can choose where this is stored. By default, it's going to be in a temp folder, but if you'd like, you can actually target the working folder that you're using. For example, I can go into exercise files, I can go to my graphic renders, and make a new folder and just call it cache and select it. And click OK. Now, any of those preview files will automatically update. I like that, but let's tweak here. I'm going to turn off the random order, and press U for user added keyframes, and speed up this animation a little bit. Let's go to four seconds, and drag this forward. I'll right click, and from the keyframe assistant menu, choose to ease in there, and if I look at the acceleration curve, I like the gentle stop. Alright, let's do another preview. There it is. The file's cached, and if I switch back to Premiere Pro, and press play, you'll see that the animation updates. So that's a simple workflow of making a new After Effects comp. By taking the time to make sure that the project folders are well structured in that common media folder, Premiere Pro will know exactly where to look for the After Effects project, even if I move systems. This is a great idea because it allows all of the assets to preserve the same general structure. So even though earlier I moved from a Mac to a PC for this course, it was simple. All I had to do was point the folder at the right level and everything quickly reconnected.