Okay, we are going to start out this lesson again, building on what we have seen in the previous one. But we are going to star out with the default composition organization. What I am going to do is come up here to the top of the viewer window where currently have all of the current open compositions, the intro clip, Americons and climbing white screen. I am going to come up here and chose close all so they go away. We can now come back I and work purely on the intro clip. So, I will just double click to open this one up and what we can do is come down to the bottom of the composition window because it is remembering our four view options, go down and choose just to reset it back to one view only and what we will do is come over here to the preview size and we will make sure we always fit that up to 100%.
Now, we are going to start working down in the time line and the first thing we want to do is import some footage. Everything you see is already setup for you. We have the files already loaded in the project window, but the timeline is already populated with footage. So, how do we get new stuff in there? what we will do is get ourselves a little bit more room in the timeline just by stretching the interface up just a touch and then we will come up to the project window and let us go into the photoshop files folder, just twirl that down and we have our large golden image in there. Remember this is a high definition file that we can bring in.
Now, before we bring it in, I just want to make sure we are all at the same place and time in the timeline. In my case, we are currently around two seconds. So, what I want you to do if you are anywhere at the start of your timeline, just click inside the timeline and hit the home key on the keyboard. That is actually going to return us back to zero. Now, the reason I am doing that is where the current time indicator is which this blue icon that you just saw is shot across to the left hand side. Wherever that is, if you drop a piece of footage in, it can come in at that point in time as well.
So, just making sure, we will go back at the start, we can see the different ways to tackle this. Now, you can get the footage into the composition a few ways. You can actually go completely away from timeline and drag it straight from the project window over here into the composition window. Now, you can see I am dragging it around. We see a wire frame showing the exact size of the clip. You can see it is much bigger than the comp itself, but as you drag closer to the center of the comp, you will notice it does snap into place. Now, this is a default option whenever you drag a layer, its center will always snap into the center of your composition. We will just undo that for one second because you can also do the same down in the timeline. Let us take the same piece of footage, drag it down now into the timeline and we are going to make sure that we drop it right at the very top. Now, have a look for that solid black like that appears just above the first layer you see in the timeline and simply let go. You get exactly the same result. Upon dragging this way, Aftereffects always centers the layer on the screen, at least when you drag into the composition manually, you can choose where to drop it, but straight in the timeline, the clip is always centered.
Now, you can see in the timeline as this clip is being dragged in, this red bar that shows the exact duration of this clip suggest that it is actually taking out the entire length of the timeline and in fact it is. It is going all the way out to seven seconds. This is a default option now that any layer you drag in will automatically populate the entire timeline no matter what its length. But you can go in and change that, you do not have to have that set as your default. If you go up to the Aftereffects menu, we are going to go down and chose preferences, but on the PC it is actually under the edit menu and down to preferences. But when you find that preferences option, just go across and make sure that choose the import options.
Now, the dialog box that comes up does tell that steel footage when it is placed in the timeline will automatically go to the length of the composition. If you wanted to, you could come in here and instead say, let us choose a different value, maybe set to one second, maybe we will just adjust that to around two and just return, enter to exit the preferences. If we now backup one step by pressing command Z or control Z on the PC to remove the previous layer that was placed, now when we drag the same footage item down into the timeline at the top and let go, you can see the Aftereffects is trimming it automatically to those two seconds.
Now, we can trim this trim this either way. It is a static image. We can make it as long or as short as we want to, but this is a good way if you are trying to get everything the same length and you are constantly dragging clips in. This is just a really fast way to do so.
Another thing you may notice is that when we drag the clip down into the timeline, it is automatically starting at zero seconds. Remember that this solid error you are seeing is the duration of this layer in time and it is starting at zero seconds and in this case ending at two. In fact all of these layers here are starting at zero seconds. If they did not, we would not actually see them in the composition because this is our current point in time that we are viewing and this is where the layers get generated by default. But you can also change that as well. Let us quickly undo again the placing of that golden gate image and what we are going to do is jump three seconds forward in time. Now, you already know that you can click on here in the comp window to bring up the time dialog. You can also do the same over here in the timeline. This value is clickable to bring up the dialog. If you just escape that, it is also scrubable. Have a look at your cursor as you hover over it, you can click and drag and scrub the timeline by dragging on this value, but at the same time you can still use the same keyboard shortcut, command G or control G on the PC to go to time. I am going to simply key in three periods and that will take us to three seconds exactly when we click okay. If we now come back up to the project and drag the same image in to the same location here at the top of the timeline, again you will notice it goes back to zero seconds. This is a new preference inside of Aftereffects.
All we do is come up to the Aftereffects menu again. Do not forget on the PC, you are going to the edit menu, but go down to preferences, go across and choose general. The second option down in this check box as you will see it right here, create layers. Composition start time is turned on. That is happening automatically to prevent you dragging a layer in without realizing that your time indicator might be at three seconds and therefore the layer gets imported at three seconds. So it is up to you how you wish to work. You could go ahead and turn this off in the preferences, say okay. Again undo the import that we just did, drag the footage back down once more, lay it down in the timeline, you will it now starts exactly where the current time indicator is.
But another way that you can do this without really worrying about that preference is if we undo this once more, grab the image, drag it back down and instead of this time dropping it here on the left hand side of the timeline, drag over here into the timeline itself. And look at what is happening. You are basically creating a new current time indicator that is choosing where you wish that layer to be drooped in. So, even though the time indicator is still set to three seconds, I am choosing here that I want to drop the layer in at one second in time. When I let go, it does exactly that.
So, the preference is up to you, but now that you have the ability to drag straight down into the list here and have Aftereffects take care of it for you or you have the ability to move into the timeline and custom position it where these things appear. Now, just to keep things straight forward, we are just going to shoot back up the pr
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