Let us come over here to the Intro Backdrop Composite and let us close this viewer down. So, we only actually have two open. So, there is the Street’s Comp, it is still locked, so we cannot open another composition in there. But if we go back to intro clip and pull up the menu, you can see we only have those two open right now. But we want to see streets at the same time. Well, we can do this by simply clicking on the streets. So, we can do one of two things.
If you do not like the fact that these viewers are docked together like they are, it is possible to view them one on top of the other by actually holding down the “Command” key or the “Ctrl” key on the PC and just grabbing the left hand side of the one viewer tabs here and pulling it out. You will notice what After Effects has done is actually separated it into its own floating window. Its timeline is still down here and we can work with but does give you the ability to maybe move this over on to a second monitor. This is a very handy thing you can do if you have that kind of set up.
However, if you do not and in this case as you can see we are working on one monitor, we still want to see these two comps side by side. So what we can do instead, I am just going to reset this back to where it was by grabbing that tab and moving it into the top area here. I am not going to move it up, so we see this green bar. That is how you are going to change our entire interface if we do. So, make sure you see the blue bar that highlights just across the top of the viewer and let go, that puts it back in its original position.
What we will do this time is pick up the tab. We are not going to use the command key this time and drag it around inside this window. It is like we are moving a palette around and we can choose where this palette is going to dock. So, if we drop it over here on to the right hand section of the current viewer, what we now get our two viewers stacked side by side inside the same frame. So, we can still switch back and forth. We can still see the timelines back and forth but we can actually work on two animations very quickly at the same time just by clicking from one window directly into the other.
Now, remember that both of the sizes of these has been set to fit maybe one up to full screen and one up to a 100%. But if you were then to change the actual size of these viewers by dragging the interface around, you will see that After Effects will continue to scale them up or down accordingly depending on the size that you specify. And this is just wonderfully interactive way to work with your compositions, especially, if one composition is included inside another one. Remember earlier on, we saw the background for this one was open separately. If we saw that in this window, we can know work entirely on this comp and see the changes over here immediately. So, a lot of good things can be done with this.
Now, another thing you can do with these windows is actually split them into multiple views. Now, this is different to a viewer. Remember that each one of these panels is its own viewer. But we see inside of it is a view. What we are going to do to make this a bit more clear, let us hover the cursor over the intro clip composition and just hit the tilde key to enlarge ourselves to full screen and them we can see a series of buttons that make up the interface down here and the lower left hand side.
Now the reason I have max this out, if I just drop back down is because we are working in a smaller windows space here. We do not see all of the buttons in one go. So, just by enlarging up there, we can actually see that.
Now, if you look at the bottom, there is a menu that does say we are looking at one view. This is one view of our composition inside the one viewer that we are working in. If we come down here, we have many options to choose different views but all based on the same comp.
So, let us come up and select two views horizontal. What After Effects does is now split this entire window into two horizontally aligned views that both are exactly the same composition. A
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services