How to Create a New Composition in After Effects CS3
Before you can begin really working on Adobe After Effects you need to create what’s called the composition and this is basically the canvas that you create your animations on.
So to do this, if you have a folder that you would like to store the composition then go ahead and select the folder first from the project pane and then go up to the composition menu and then go to new composition and you’re going to get this dialog box. The first thing you’ll need to do is you will need to give a name to it.
Down on the advanced settings, you have several settings here. And while you can change these now you will often find that you’ll need to go back and then change them as you really kind of decide what you want to do. So I’m just going to kind of go over how to quickly create your first composition. You have some presets here and these are basically frame rates and the size, the type of composition you want to compose. You can also have, you have the standard width and heights that are build in to the presets. If you’d like to customize this yourself, go ahead and unclick your lock aspect ratio and you could go ahead and change those.
You also have some pixel aspect ratios and this have to deal with your pixel resolution. You have frame rate which can be changed. You can change resolution, if you’re looking for smaller file size that’s a good thing to do. You can also change your start time code if you want it to start at something at zero and then you could choose how long.
Again, you can access this at any time and make these changes to a composition after you’ve already started creating your animation. So I’m going to go ahead and click OK. And you could see that it went ahead and I have a composition set up now and it’s in my composition’s folder. I can of course go ahead and I can drag this to be in our folder or to be on its own. So that’s one way that I can keep my project nice and organized.
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