Now, hopefully you are starting to become slightly more familiar with the workings of the timeline and understanding the fact that we can move back and forth in time base on the current time indicator. But what will do now is take a little bit more of a detail look at the actual items we see here over on the left hand side. The timeline is effectively broken down into two main sections. The actual timeline or key frame information that we will see over here on the right side and all of these panels over here on a left side.
Now, there are a lot of panels that are already active and they are others that can be activated. If you have one here that set your pair in. This is actually the default view that comes up now in After Effects. We can actually hide the columns simply by right clicking on it or control clicking if you do not have a two-button mouse and choosing the height of this option.
However, just before you do that, if you go down to the column’s options, you can also see all of the other column types that can be brought up. So, there is a comments column, we have modes which will look up in just a second. We have a keys option which relates to key frame animation when we start working with that later. And then next for or relate to duration which we can actually activate all in one place. So, we are not going to choose any of these at this point in time but we are going to come up here and choose the height the pair in column.
Now, what After Effects has done scaled the timeline back out and given us a little bit more room to animate with but we are now left with the default panels that we wish to work with. Now the first panel you see here, each one is actually divided by the small vertical line and that line is some cases can actually be used to change the size.
If you come over here to where it says source name and just position the cursor just to the right, you will see it changes to a double arrow on that vertical line. This will actually allows us to increase the size of that particular panel, so we can see the names of the layers a little bit more easily. And After Effects is again scaling the timeline down so we can still see all the information together.
Now over on the left hand side, this first panel is called “the AV Panel”. This gives us the ability to see, show, hide, and lock layers as when we need to. And this is actually a classic example that we see right now. We come up here to the comp window. I am just going to change ourselves back to fit up to 100%. We can see that the Golden Gate image is on top of everything else and therefore we cannot see what is going on underneath.
So, let us say we want to hide the Golden Gate image for just one second. Now, if you are familiar with Photoshop and the Illustrator and with the In-design, you are probably familiar with these icons. These represent the visibility of any layer and if you go ahead and click on it, it will turn off all of the pixels and the visibility for only that layer.
Now, if you decide that you need to work on only one layer and let say just the backdrop composite here, then you would possible think that you have to go in and turn off the visibility for all of the other layers just to leave this one available. But it did not take very long to do just a half dozen layers here.
It is not very practical. You may have a timeline here that is got two, three, maybe even 400 layers in it, just to see one of them. It does not make sense to go ahead and turn off all of the visibilities and at the same time when we get on of using track math in the later lesson. There are in fact some icons that need to remain off because they are being used for a mask. If you were not ahead and turn then off manually and accidentally turn them back on, it change the way that your animation looks.
So, this is not the way how I would recommend hiding the contents of a layer if you just need to work on one or two at a time. There were those will click and drag inside one of those to bring them all back on again and instead look at the third column. The small white c
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