After Effects CS5 Essentials

1. Introduction
Introduction
What is After Effects?
How to use the exercise files

2. Introductory Project
After Effects workflow overview
Bringing elements into After Effects
Adding elements to the Timeline
Working with layers
Creating animation with presets
Applying effects
Creating animation without presets
Previewing your work
Exporting content as a movie file

3. Getting Started with After Effects
Touring the interface
How After Effects projects work
What is a composition?
Tips for adding content to compositions
Understanding the properties of video

4. Learning to Animate
Importing an Illustrator file
Animation basics
Animating opacity
Understanding anchor points
Animating position
Animating rotation
Animating scale
Using the Puppet tool
Copying and pasting keyframes
Animation shortcuts

5. Precomposing and Nesting Compositions
Understanding precomposing
Navigating through compositions quickly

6. The Power of Effects
A showcase of effects
Creating a layer for effects
Applying effects
Animating effect properties
Using Glow
Creating patterns and textures
Creating a fireball
Using the Cycore effects
Adding blur
Creating a galaxy scene from scratch
Distorting objects with effects
Creating and using lens flares
Creating lightning bolts
Viewing random variations with Brainstorm

7. Working with Video
Shortening the duration of layers
Trimming in the Footage panel
Slowing and accelerating video speed
Applying video transitions between clips
Working with image sequences
Importing footage with an alpha channel

8. Color-Correcting Footage
Brightening dark footage
Changing colors in footage
Creating cinematic color treatments
Creating a quick vignette
Colorizing black-and-white objects
Using adjustment layers

9. Creating and Animating Text
Creating and editing text
Applying text animation presets
Animating text manually
Applying layer styles to text

10. Becoming More Efficient
Let's get better
Using work areas
Creating markers
Replacing layers
Mastering Timeline navigation
Aligning and distributing layers
Selecting layers quickly
Cropping layers
Adjusting comp resolution

11. Painting
Using the paint tools
Using the Roto Brush tool
Animating growing vines

12. Working with Masks and Shape Layers
Creating and using masks
Exploring mask options
Creating masks with Auto-trace
Masking objects with other objects
Making shape layers
Modifying shape layers

13. Working in 3D
Turning 2D layers into 3D layers
Creating lights and cameras
Creating shadows
Using depth of field
Working with 3D effects

14. Keying and Compositing
Removing a green screen background
Refining the matte
Compositing with color adjustments
Compositing with blend modes

15. Intermediate Animation
Understanding spatial interpolation
Creating and adjusting motion paths
Orienting moving objects along a path
Drawing motion with Motion Sketch
Creating pauses in animation
Understanding temporal interpolation
Easing keyframes
About the Graph Editor

16. Stabilizing and Tracking Motion
Stabilizing shaky footage
Tracking the motion in footage

17. Parenting and Expressions
Setting up parent layers
Working with null objects
What are expressions?
Modifying simple expressions
Using the wiggle expression

18. Working with Audio
Understanding audio in motion graphics
Previewing and mixing audio
Enhancing audio tracks with effects

19. Rendering and Compression
Adding comps to the Render Queue
Exploring key Render Queue settings
How should I export my video?

20. Integration
Using Photoshop with After Effects
Using Illustrator with After Effects
Using Flash with After Effects

Conclusion
Goodbye