But let say we are making changes of this. We are working on these three silhouettes at the beginning and they are going to play for a total of around two seconds. After that point, we do not really care. We know this part of the animation is complete. We are going to play around with this area. What you have already seen when we do a RAM preview, every time it plays, it is going to go straight pass a bit that we were working on and continue to play the entire timeline. But we can control that, we can use something called a “Work Area”.
Now, the work area bar is this bar you are currently seeing where the markers are. You can see, it has got a blue highlight on each end. This tells After Effects what to play back, what to render, what to preview. We can control exactly how much of it is going to do. If you come over to the right hand side of the work area and grab the blue bar, you can decrease the amount of work areas and you see that is represented by this gray highlight that I select as the part of the timeline that is going to be previewed.
However as always, the shortcuts are much easier ways to do this. I am just going to pull this back up towards the end. Let say we only want to preview from marker one out to around about two seconds, okay. Let us hit the “1” key on the keyboard to take us to marker number one and let us hit “B” on the keyboard. That keyboard shortcut simply specifies beginning.
The beginning of the work area you see has moved here inwards to marker number one and if they to lead trim out the preview of this part of the timeline. If we now drag the time marker across around the about two seconds, maybe just that one frame where the last silhouette disappears, we now hit “End” on the keyboard. That is basically the shortcut for end. We have now isolated this entire area here, if you now go ahead and hit the zero key to do a RAM preview. You will only see the leaping section as defined by the work area.
Now, I am just hitting the spacebar or clicking the mouse there to stop the RAM preview and let say you need to reset the work area now because you want to make more changes to the length of the animation. Instead of dragging these points out from the left and the right, again, we might be zoomed in on the timeline so you cannot actually drag to the end of the real timeline, only the current view that you are looking at. You can simply reset the work area by the double clicking anywhere inside the work area bar here and you will see that immediately spreads out to the duration of the original composition.
Now the reason we are doing this, is one change you want to make is the silhouettes up here are only playing for that short amount of time and then disappear again. They kind of find if they duplicate it again and again throughout the animation, so maybe at two-and-a-half seconds, let us scrub along here, so we are at that point in time. The third silhouette layer is selected, so what we are going to do is hold down the shift key and click on the second layer. That will actually select all three of them between that selection area and now, what I am going to do is press “Command+D” or “Ctrl+D” on the PC which will duplicate those three selected layers in time.
Now, just to explain what happened, we have three layers selected in a certain order and by hitting duplicate, they have been duplicated on top of their original layer. The next original layer is there, the duplicate is here and so forth. What we could do to make it easy to see with all those still selected, click on one and drag it to the very top of the timeline and all three of them now appear in that place. What we can do is drag the top layer only because we are going to move all three at the same time and move it across so it is in point starts at two-and-a-half seconds.
Now, I am using the shift key there that will actually snap in. If I do not use the shift key, I can choose roughly where that starts but the shift key will snap this in point. We now have another three characters appearing at this point in time. Let us go ahead and do one mo
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