Learning After Effects at Barcamp London 8

Though I've been editing film on Premiere Pro for the past 2 years, I've never used After effects before. So when I saw an After Effects for beginners session on at Barcamp London 8, I jumped at the chance to find out more.

Emma ran the session. She explained that animation, graphics, and rich media is handled better in after effects. Excitedly, you can bring in video to colour correct. I wish I looked into this earlier.

It is great if you are using other adobe software as it's compatable. You can bring in drawings from illustrator, and cut video from premier. When you look at the set up of After effects, it's also similar visually. To me this would make it even easy to use.

Here are a few tips/ functionalities that Emma went through:

• When importing, footage flattens whole document, composition brings in layers.


• Placed higher up in the order, the file becomes the top layer


• Every layer has a transform layer underneath: anchor point, positions, scale, rotation and opacity.


• Pan behind tool allows you to move anchor point.


• All compostitions can have different settings within the project.


• Effects panel: Alot of effects are generative and you will lose what you had on that layer if you add it directly to the layer. You need to create a new blank layer as a place holder. - effects control panel opens


• When in the effects panel, the conductivity state moves the animation using keyframes.


• You can also use Moca to select an area and it will tell how selection is moving throughout the clip.

I'm definitely going to try to use this for my next project. Thanks Emma for getting me thinking about this and thanks Barcamp London 8!