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[After Effects CC Essential Training with Ian Robinson] Before you add other graphic elements and shapes to your projects, it's important to consider exactly when and where you'd like those objects to appear.
For this project, I want to go to the timeline and actually clean things up a little bit before we add our text.
Select Layer 1 and press cmd+a to select all the layers.
If you press the "u" key on any layer, it'll automatically show you any parameters that have key frames or animation.
If you press the "u" key again, it'll go ahead and collapse those layers.
If you notice, in the middle of my project I have a bunch of layers, and I'm just going to click and drag with my current time indicator to see what those are.
That's all these different graphic elements.
I know I already like how these fade into the scene.
What I want to do is control the number of layers I'm seeing in my timeline.
I'm just going to deselect one of the layers just by clicking over here near the eyeballs, making sure not to click on one of the visibility eyeballs.
And I'll click on Layer 4 and scroll down and hold down shift and click on Layer 10.
Now I have all the graphic layer elements selected.
I just want to hide them from the view, but I don't necessarily want to delete them out of my composition.
That's where you want to use the shy button.
It's right here, to the right of the names.
It looks like a little guy popping over a fence.
If you click on the shy button for all the layers that are selected, notice his little eyes disappear.
In order to actually hide him in the layers panel, you need to click on his larger button here in the top of the layers panel.
Let's click on that, and now we've hidden all those layers.
If we scrub through our project, now you can see everything is still there; it's just disappeared out of my timeline.
So I do want to add text, but I want to consider where I'm placing that text.
So let's scrub down the timeline here.
Okay.
I do want to add text next to this word "training."
Also, as I'm scrubbing, I'm realizing I have one bright plus button right here.
When that was originally designed, it was designed to appear right next to the word "training."
It's kind of meant to mimic the h+ design over here, with the plus in the upper right.
Any time you have a layer with animation already applied, like key frames or anything else, you can still slide that layer down the timeline, and those key frames will stay in place.
Select Layer 3 and press "t" to open its opacity.
I know that's where the key frames were residing, so that's why I just press "t."
You could also press the "u" key, and it would show you the opacity because that's where the key frames live.
Now click on the layer and drag to the right.
If you hold down shift as you drag, it'll snap to the inpoint of the training layer.
Holding down shift as you drag is a great way to snap many things to different things.
For example, if I click on the current time indicator and hold down shift as I drag, it too will snap to the beginning of that layer or snap to the next key frame.
Now, if you haven't done so, click and drag down to around frame 8:13.
Notice now I have the word "training" there and the plus element.
Since I can't see that, I'm going to use a key command, shift+cmd+h.
That'll hide any control handles of layers that I currently have selected.
Now we're finally in a place to where we can add text.
I want text to appear here that says Day One.
But it's kind of interesting how we already have text in the scene, but we haven't even learned how to add text.
That's because we imported this element as a layered Photoshop document.
Now, I know in Photoshop that text was editable, but in After Effects it came across as a normal layer.
If I select Layer 2 and I open its different transform options under Transform, you can see I have my normal XY options, and my anchor point and scale, but I don't have any other ability to edit this.
Well, if I go up under the layer menu and choose Convert to Editable Text, I can convert that Photoshop layer to fully editable text.
It's appearance changed, and if I open Layer 2 again, you can see that I had layer styles applied.
Sometimes when you have layer styles applied to text and it's imported into After Effects, when you make that text editable again, sometimes it'll disappear, not all the time but sometimes.
Well, anyway, let's go ahead and collapse Layer 2.
Remember when I hid those control handles?
If you press shift+cmd+h, you can reveal them again.
Since I've converted this text to editable text, the anchor point is here on the left-hand side.
I'm going to scroll up so you can see it better.
See?
It's on the left-hand side.
That's because the text is left justified.
To learn about the justification settings, let's go ahead and add another layer of type.
I'm going to go up and click on the text tool in the tool panel.
You could also press cmd+t, or ctrl+t on Windows, to open that up.
If you look over to the right, you should see Auto Open Panels.
That's selected.
As long as that's selected, if you look in the lower right corner of the interface, you'll see your character panel and your paragraph panel.
The character panel determines the typeface that you'll use, and the paragraph panel determines the justification.
Let's just click in our comp panel.
Let's click up over here and type the words "day one."
Press Enter on your keypad to set the text or just grab your selection tool by clicking the tool panel.
This text is way too small, so if we go to our character panel we can click and drag on that parameter to crank up the size of that text.
I don't want it to be the same size as the training text, so I'll just make it a little bit smaller, maybe around 30 points.
I could also just click in the value, just like anywhere else in the interface, and type the value and press Enter on my keypad to set that.
Notice this text is left-justified as well.
If I clicked the Center Text, now the anchor point is set up around the center.
If we press "w" to grab our rotation tool, I can click and drag on that layer, and it will rotate around its anchor point.
I'll just press cmd+z to undo.
So we've added the text where we'd like it to appear in the timeline.
But if we look in the timeline, notice my magnification has changed.
I'm not seeing the full 10 seconds.
That's because this paragraph panel appeared.
If I want to zoom back out on my timeline, I can click on this little time navigator end button and drag to the right.
Now I can see where my text layer is and my current time indicator.
Notice, when I added the text, it created text and it added it to be the entire length of the project.
Well, I'm going to quickly and easily trim this to start with the other text.
The way I can do that is just by hovering my mouse over the left edge and then clicking and dragging.
And, you guessed it, hold down shift after you start dragging, and it will snap to the start point of the other layers.
If I want to add the same fade-in to that text that's on the plus layer, I can click and draw a lasso around those two opacity key frames.
If you press cmd+c, or ctrl+c on Windows, to copy, then you can select Layer 1.
Press "i" to move the time indicator to the start of that layer, and then press cmd+v, or ctrl+v, to paste.
So if we scrub through our animation, moving the current time indicator, we've now added our second row of text, and it fades in with the other text.
So remember, when you add text, pay attention to where its visibility is within the layer hierarchy but also where it lives within the timeline itself, so you know exactly when it's going to appear in your animation. -
