[music] [Kyle Hamrick] Hello, everyone. - [Nol Honig] Hello. - Hi. - Oh, come on in. - Yes. Hello. Hello, especially to her. Yeah.

So thanks for coming to the session. Yes. - I'm Nol. - It's going to be good stuff. I'm Kyle. Guess what? We have a whole slide about that. Oh, yeah, that's right. So who are these guys? Well, these are two people who do stuff in After Effects and teach other people how to do stuff in After Effects. - There you go. - This is a short version. - I'm the one with glasses. - Yep. Despite the fact that we do look fairly similar, fortunately, we're not wearing the same color shirt today, so that helps. But we are in fact different people. And I do need to take a second and acknowledge the somewhat awkward fact that I, kind of, semi accidentally-ish, kind of, volunteered Nol to do this thing without really consulting him first. Yeah. That's pretty much true. And I was, kind of, let's just say, maybe a little bit bitter about it for-- Six to eight months. Yep.

- No. - Just kidding. I'm psyched to be here, but it's true that he did, kind of, wrote me into doing this, so-- Oh, it's okay. That's all right. Well, let's get to the real. What will you learn today? Well, there's a couple things to learn today. - Oh, yeah. What's that? - Yeah. Well, they'll learn some great After Effects tips. That's true. They'll learn that we probably are both going to make some terrible puns. That's right. And one of the biggest things that they'll learn is that we're going to be, kind of, sparring a bit because ultimately, this is really all, kind of, a pretense for us to compete with one another here. Because we will in fact be competing for your affection. We got to feed our egos here, right? And so we're going to, kind of, have a couple of rounds of tips as part of this. And after each round, we're going to ask for your applause to see who rates. I feel like we should see if that is a functional mechanism here so we test that real quick.

Whoo! Okay. That cutoff wasn't quite as tight as yesterday, but that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. We don't really need that again, but okay. And you know what? Should we show them? - Yeah. - Okay, we can show them. So there is something extremely important that we're competing for 'cause we do have some stuff here. We have the stopwatch of power.

And then more importantly, we have a keyframe crown. So whoever wins this will, in fact, be the king of keyframes for this rest of the evening. And maybe we'll be required to wear this all of Bash. If you win, and isn't if it's me. That seems fair.

- Okay, we should probably get into this. - Yeah. Actually, give them the stuff they came to-- You guys will learn something. - All right. - Yeah. Good. All right. So we'll start, you know, kind of, ease into it. Yeah. - We got you a couple of them. - Yep. I do. I did it every time 'cause it does what it needs to do, right? Okay, so we're going to hop into this. We're going to start doing some-- We have a question already.

- Oh! - Well, see, you knew where we were going. I think it was implied, but okay. Thank you for, you know, making that really obvious. We're going to ease into it in the most easy way possible. You know, you've had a long two days. We don't want to blow you away right off the top here. - Yeah. - We'll start small. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I believe my good friend Nol is going to actually take the start. So let's kerchunk, get right over to him. Yeah, right. I'm going to lead us off with a short tip, but real quick one, but I think is definitely life-changing, okay, in After Effects. You ever need to put something exactly in the center of your comp, but you're like, how do I find the exact center of my comp? Okay. Well, obviously, you want to put the rulers on by pressing Command-R. But if you're dropping a guide, sometimes it's pretty difficult to know exactly where the center is, you, kind of, eyeballing it. Maybe you're like eyeballing this like that, right? Well, I am here to tell you that there's a better way to do this, all right? So if you Ctrl+Click on your Guide, it allows you to type a value in there. And if you happen to know that 1920 divided by 2 is 960, which I think at least half of you do. You can just enter 960 in there, and it'll stick that right in the center. I could right-click on this and make that. If I could press on it, 540. And now I know that my guides are right in the darn center, anything I put there is right in the center. Thank you. Yes. No. That's been it forever. I think it's new-ish actually. - At least five or six years-- - Okay. Okay. I'll take it. All right. Great start. Great start. Let's see what we've got. So here's something that has been around for a very long-time and maybe a lot of you know about this. But a lot of times in After Effects, you might have something that's tucked away in a pre-composition, right? Yeah. And you want to be able to tweak it but then, you know, you go in there. You can't really see what you're doing. Well, there's this, extremely, just rolls right off the tongue, acronym here, ETLAT. You can edit this while you look at that. Okay. So if you come up to the name of your composition in the viewer. If you click on that, one of the things you can do is New Comp Viewer, okay? So you can have multiple viewers. There's a couple reasons you might want to do this. You'll notice that the new viewer, it's locked once you create it. And so that's going to hang on to that one. You can do this with other viewers. Just click the little lock icon. And then when I double-click this pre-composition to go into it. Now I can edit this thing while I still look at the place where it actually matters. And so I could come in here and play with one of these properties like this and go, whoa! And now I can see the beautiful artwork that I've created still in my original comp, even though I was in another one.

All right. Well, that'll be hard to top, but let's just say you have an animation that you love just like this one that I made all on my own without Kyle helping at all, okay? And I love null objects, okay? One of the things that I really like to use null objects for is for housekeeping things like this. Okay, so you make this animation, and your client's like, I love it. It's the greatest thing, way better than anything Kyle could have ever done. Got you. But I want it bigger and I want it down at the bottom of the comp, okay? So there's actually a lot of keyframes going on in here. So I can't just grab my layers and stick them at the bottom of the comp or scale them up or whatever, right? So I could use a null object for this. I'm going to make a new null object Shift-Option-Command-Y. All right. Who knows that shortcut? And then I'm going to select all of these layers, except for this one, which is already parented to something. So you got to be careful about this. So I'll deselect that. But if I parent everything else to this null, right? Now what I could do is make this null just say, like, 250 scale, right, and then I can take this-- Oops. Take my null. And move it down here to the bottom, right? And what's cool about this is once it's in the right place and it's the right size, I can just go ahead and delete that null, and nobody is any the wiser that that ever changed, right? - Except all of them. - Except, well. Yeah. Yeah. But don't tell anybody. Thank you. All right. Good stuff. All right, so you have before you three extremely beautiful examples. And, you know, sometimes, especially when you start layering up a lot of effects, things in After Effects can get a little slower, which and you can just yell it out. It doesn't really matter here. Which of these, you know, we'll say one, two, three, which do you think is the slowest for After Effects to render? Okay, we have a two. No one else's strong opinions. Well, wouldn't it be nice if there was an objective way to know this instead of just, kind of, like toggling things on and off and guessing? Well, there is. We actually just got this last year. It's called the Composition Profiler, and it tells you exactly how long each layer, or each effect, or mask, or expression is taking to render. So here in your timeline, you can right-click up here at the top, and choose columns and render time, or and hopefully, this is visible on the screen, but down here in the bottom left, there's this little snail icon right here. His name is actually Oscar as in Oscar Go, which is a food pun, which the After Effects team loves. Good. They got it today. - You pronounced it the right way. - Yeah. I did. Okay. And if I click on that, you'll see-- Oh, here's this little thing, and it tells you exactly how long each layer is taking to render on every frame.

And in this case, I could reveal the effects, for example, and you can see how long each effect is adding up, how much they're contributing. This is, kind of, color-coded. So the more green it is, the faster it is, the more red it is, the slower it is. And in this case, the thing that's slowing everything down is actually-- Well, not on this frame 'cause it rendered, is our friend Echo, which is on number three. So if you thought three, you were correct.

- Nobody said three. - Nobody said three.

Okay. So I heard one person starting to nervously clap over there, and then they stopped because they felt self-conscious. But in fact, you were just a little ahead of the game because-- You're a pioneer, sir. This is our first chance to vote for your favorite. So my friend Nol over here had the guides-- And the Nol object. And the Nol object. And then I had the ever memorable ETLAT.

And then whatever the thing I just showed, the Composition Profiler. Oscar Go. So if you want to vote for Nol for that round, let's hear it.

Whoo! There we go.

And if you want to vote for me that round, let's hear it. Whoo! Whoa! Okay. - Oh, that was definitely you. - Yeah. I got some woos. All right. Okay, I'll take it. Okay. Well, let's move on to, you know, got to heat up just a little bit, but not too much. Still, still, you know-- - Just getting a little warmer. - Yep. Okay. Okay. - Like, luke hot. - Yeah. Luke hot. Yep. That's the name of an action star. Oh, is it? Yeah. Well, we'll see. - Sorry. I didn't mean that. - Okay. I believe this comes over to you next. This does. All right. So we're slowing it down here for a sec. We're going to do slightly longer things. And what I wanted to talk about in this section was the Properties panel because it's new to After Effects, basically, but it's been in Photoshop and Illustrator for some time. So if you're a designer and you're trying to get into After Effects, I think this is a good thing to think about as the Properties panel, right? So couple of things that I like about it. I'm going to demo here. One thing is, if you have a very complex object like the one that I've selected now. You can look at it in the Properties panel and see a lot of information about it. Well, actually, I guess I should do this first just to show this to you. - All right. - Whoa! I can't believe I did that. That is so cool, right? Again, totally without Kyle's help. But now if I select this and we look at it up here in the Properties panel, we can, kind of, see at a glance how I put it together, all right? So I have these two, kind of, groups here or folders that contain these other three layers. And if we turn one off, we can see that the one called Outline actually makes an outline of the cup, and the Inside Bits one actually just pulls in the inside bits. And I've just merged three different shape layers together in two different ways and stuck them together, one that makes the outline and one that makes the inside bits, all right? So if I had to, like, dig through my timeline to find all of those pieces, that would be a complete nightmare, right? Anybody like twirling and twirling and twirling? No. Nobody really likes twirling that much, right? So Properties panel is your friend for that, kind of, thing, right? Now I want to show you something else, which is pretty cool about Properties panel. Got this type here that says Kyle because I love Kyle so much, right? I want to show you how you can do a simple animation using the Properties panel and not even get into your timeline at all mostly, all right? So what I'm going to do first is right-click on this to create shapes from text, all right? And you can see up here in the Properties panel, that is now giving me a really nice layout with K-Y-L-E and the two exclamation points there. And when I click on each individual layer, I can adjust these things down here for it, right? It's very simple. So for example, I'm here at frame 10, and I'm just going to make a simple animation, oops, on the K, right, by pressing this button here. Hey. All right. So I'm going to do this. Did I just press that twice? Yes, I did. Now I'm going to go back to the beginning and change the value. Promise you, this will be really exciting to watch. All right, I'm going to take these two keyframes, and I'm going to put some ease on them because I am that, kind of, guy. All right, now I'm going to copy this. Now I'm going to do the rest in the Properties panel, all right? I'm going to select my Y, and I'm going to press Page Down and just move one frame. I'm going to paste. I'm going to select my L, Page Down to move one frame and paste. Select the E, Page Down, etcetera.

Right? And now I've just made that little animation right there without even going into my timeline or really even looking at too many keyframes, all right? Properties panel is amazing. I think if you have been using After Effects for a while, you should definitely try to get used to it and work it into your workflow. And if you've never used it before, you should definitely try using it, okay? I want to point out one more thing about the Properties panel just in case we got any Photoshop people in the house? Yeah, all right. Okay. So I love Photoshop too and After Effects. Now use those two things together a lot. And I desperately searched for a way in which the Properties panel in Photoshop would look just like the one in After Effects. And I'm sure it's being worked on, and it's going to get lot better. But right now, I only found this, kind of, one thing, all right? So I have this, it says, "Vote for Nol," right? Yay! And if we look at this here in the Properties panel in Photoshop, which is over here, okay? You can see that we've got basic information about this type, right? This, kind of, typeface that it is. It's dim. It's medium. It's 110 size. It's black. It's got 20 tracking, and the paragraph is centered, right? Well, if we go back over to After Effects and look at that same thing, boop, right here. Okay. This is the Photoshop layer itself. Well, right now in the Properties panel, it's, kind of, got nothing up in there, right? You can change the anchor point and the position and so on, just all the basic things. So that's not too cool, but here's the thing. If I right-click on this, okay, and I Create, Convert to Editable Text. Yeah. Now not only do I have live text now where I could get in here and say, like, "Definitely vote for Nol." But if I select this, now you can see that the Properties panel has, oops, all of the same things dim, medium, 110, auto save, tracking, black, and paragraph in the center, right? So there is a way to set those two things up. If you work with Type in Photoshop a lot, and then you want to animate it, you can definitely use the Properties panel to help that if you create to live type in After Effects. Right on. I agree. I've becoming a big fan of the Properties panel, help to make After Effects a little more accessible, and just keeps a lot of stuff in one place. - It really does. That's totally. - And you know what? I'm going to, kind of, use, I'm going to springboard off some of what you did for this too. So I'm a big fan of essential properties, which are a newer feature to After Effects. Any of you using these already? Couple. Okay. So-- - There's two people over there. - Yeah. So these came to After Effects a couple of years ago, and honestly, they, kind of, revolutionized the way I work in here. And to show you how they work, I'm going to go ahead and pre-compose a couple of layers here, but I want to show you what I have here. You see these top two layers. I've got yellow circle and a wavy line, okay, both animated. I'm going to go ahead and just pre-compose those and give it a very important name 'cause that's always, you know, good to do. And now if I want to change anything about that, I need to dive into that pre-composition to do it, right? And, you know, I showed you one strategy for that a minute ago, but going back and forth can get a little old. So let's go ahead and come into this pre-comp here, and I'll turn that off so you can see the line. Again, all the same stuff. But what if-- And let's go ahead and get rid of that profiler. Let's go-- What if I could take some of this information and actually make it available in the parent composition, okay? So I'm going to go ahead and open up something called the Essential Graphics panel, and you can use this to make templates and stuff, the motion graphics templates that you can pass to Premiere. But you can also do this for all kinds of cool stuff directly in After Effects. So if I were to open these layers up and just grab a couple important things like maybe the fill color from that circle and maybe, like, the stroke width from that line. And you know what? I'm feeling a little sassy here. What about that Position property? The one with the keyframes? The one with the keyframes. - Oh! - Oh, yes. Very astute of you to notice. We notice that. Yeah. Yeah. Literally. So I'm going to come back over here to that parent composition that was originally in-- Wait a minute. There's some new stuff down here in the timeline. Something called Essential Properties. And notice over here in the Properties panel that we just talked about. Same thing. That fill color, that stroke width, and the property. I didn't bother to rename it when I did it, I should have. But you'll see all of it right there. So let's say I wanted to go ahead and just change that fill color to a beautiful, reddish color. Maybe crank that stroke width up. There we go. So I just changed stuff that's locked away in a pre-comp without actually going into it. Pretty handy, right? But wait, there's more. Okay. So I'm going to take this and just move this down a little bit on screen. I do want to point out that even though I have that Position property that I brought through, that's from the stuff inside. That's different from the position of this layer itself, as you can see here. Okay? I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this and move the other one up.

Whoa! Yep. And then I'm going to open this up. And I'm going to use this little pull switch right here that's going to pull the original values back in.

Wait a minute. So I have two different versions of that pre-comp and they're right here, and it only exists once here in the Project panel. Yes. This is what Essential Properties lets you do. So let's say, I decide, you know, there's something that I want to change, but on all instances of this, I could like make the circle a little smaller here, okay? If I go back into my parent comp, all of the circles are smaller 'cause I didn't make that Essential Property. It's going to change in all of them. But then you can give yourself properties that you can only change per instance, which is really neat. So something like this is really helpful for, like, you know, graphics, templates, or something like that, but obviously for just things that you're making, like, I showed you. So I have a little thing right here, and I've already added a few properties, you can see just the name and the title. So the text bits that we're going to work with here. And you can see I have a couple of copies of that thing. Close this down so you can see it. So if I look at the lower version of this here, we'll just make that another color so we can see it. Maybe I want to change this to be...

Kyle Hamrick and more generous gentleman, yeah? - Impossible. - Impossible. But we still have the photo of Nol, and I don't want to have to make two copies of this thing just for that. That's a bummer, right? So what if I were to go back into this composition? Open up Essential Graphics again, take that image of Nol that's here, and just drop that right into the panel as well. Let's go ahead and be good and name that image.

And then when I go back into the composition that exists in, I can select that and, hey, look you're there. There's that image that I just added, which is now also a replaceable thing. So I could take this photo of me and just drop it right on top. And now I have a bunch of different versions of that graphic, but it all goes back to one place if I need to make more universal changes. So that is the power of Essential Properties. Love them.

And I think that's the end of this. - I think that's the end of this-- - Okay. So now we need to again choose a winner. So we had the Properties panel, which is excellent. Yeah, let's hear it. Oh, so good. But we also had-- Thank you. Thank you. We also had Essential Graphics, all right, which is pretty amazing tool. Oh, that was me. - Yeah. - That was me. - You're crushing this one. - Yeah. - Wow. - Off to a good start. - All right. - You won actually. Okay. Okay. So we need to move on to our next segment. That's right. So still heating up even more. All right. And just the way things worked, it's back to me. So I'm just going to keep doing stuff. You go to keep listening to me talk. Okay. Who in here is a big fan of Track Mattes? Wow. Okay. Good. Some. Well, if you don't know what they are, you're about to find out. So there's a couple of different ways in After Effects to, kind of, trim what you see of a layer, right? And these images actually both have what are called masks, which are great. You know, you can use them to, kind of, trim out different things or make it a particular shape. But if you want to start animating this layer around and have that shape stay in the same place, masks are not great 'cause they travel with the layer. And animating a thing to stay there while you move it? No. No. Thank you. No. So instead, you can use what are called Track Mattes and have another layer be the thing that decides what's visible from this one. So if, for example, I wanted this yellow circle to be the thing that makes this photo visible within that, okay? Most of the time, you're going to see this Switches panel right here. There's a little button down here at the bottom that says Toggle Switches and Modes. So if you don't see all of these little dropdown menus, you can click that. Go over here. And now there's this other column called Track Matte, okay? And so for any given layer, this is my night photo. I can just use this dropdown menu and choose the thing that I want to, sort of, frame it, All right? In this case, the yellow circle. And now that layer is only visible in the yellow circle. I could animate it away and all that. You see, it still only stays within that layer. So it's very handy.

Sometimes, you might want the opposite of that. So there's a little switch right here that inverts that. Now you see anything that is outside of that yellow circle. So you can do a cutaway.

Or if you're really getting fancy, you could use something like this where you have white and black values on another layer and you can use what's called a luminance matte to look at the white and black values of some other layer and use that to determine what's visible on this one. So on this day image, I'm going to set that to use the Gradient Circle as its thing. Right now, this is an alpha matte, so it's set up just like the other one. But I can change it by clicking this little thing right here from little cut out box to a sun, and now it's going to use that luminance value. So you can make, kind of, a fade off like this. Pretty cool. So those of you that may have been using Track Mattes for a while, for a long time, each of these little pairs, see how they got these little new icons here. These little pairs had to stick together. And if you change their order in the layer stack, they would just break and not work anymore. No longer the case. Now you can move these around. I'm going to bring the yellow circle just down somewhere else. So you can make a matte for something, and stick at the bottom of the composition. Super helpful, but guess what else? I'm going to go ahead and un-invert this one. That means you can start doing cool stuff like turn the matte layer back on and then, like, use a blending mode to composite a layer over its own matte, which is pretty cool. And you could also, like, take this day layer-- I'm going to go ahead and set that back to an alpha matte, and I could set that to also use the yellow circle. Move it over here, bring it up in the layer stack. And now you could have multiple layers matted by the same layer, okay? So you could start doing neat stuff like this where you have a fully editable text layer that has several layers, layer to composite it together to make something that looks cool, but then your-- Oops. Your text layer is still completely editable. And so you could make all kinds of neat stuff like this and still keep it alive. Oh! Yeah. Okay. I think I'm going to turn it over to you with that. Right on. Yeah. Well, I'm just going to say before we unmasks completely, I've got a use for masks here. I think that most people don't know about in this room. Does anybody ever use Effect Masking? Anybody? Okay, it was built as a composite-- Yes. One guy. It was built more as a compositing tool. Are you a compositor by any chance? Yeah. Okay. So it was, kind of, built that way, but I think for designers, I know there's plenty of designers in this room, that this is an amazing feature, okay? So what it allows you to do is edit things directly in After Effects and apply masks and apply effects rather to specific places on your layers, okay? So I have this scene here, and this is photo of this weird sign. And just say I'm working on a shot, and I actually, as I'm working on it, I realized that because there's so much depth of field in this shot, everything's in focus. So the sign, you know, people's eyes might look at the mountains, or they might look at the sky, and I want their eyes to look at the sign mostly, okay? So what I want to do is get in here and, kind of, like put some effect masks on and, like, turn everything else down so that the sign is the thing that's really obvious, right? So I set this up ahead of time. I built two masks into this shot, okay? So you didn't have to watch me do it. One is a hard mask that just goes all the way around the sign 'cause that's like a hard metal object. And then I've got a mask down here that cuts along the bottom that's feathered, so I can provide more of a gradual transition, all right? So let's go ahead and put a Color Correct on here, like a Hue/Saturation Effect.

All right, let me actually this a little bit bigger. Cool. So if I were to dial this down right now, okay, everything in the photo would become black and white. You can't see it, but everything in the photo is black and white. But if I press E, okay, and I reveal my Hue/Saturation Effect, and then I twirl this down, there's this little plus down here, okay, Compositing Options. And when I press that plus, what it's going to do is look for masks on my layers, okay? So when I press this, it finds the first mask that I put on there, which is my sign mask. And then I'm going to press this again, and they put on the second mask, my bottom mask, okay? And now you can see the sign and the ground are in color, but the sky behind is black and white. So I can continue to adjust this and give it, like, an old postcard, kind of, look or something by desaturating it. And then why don't I go ahead and stack another effect on there. Like, let me put like a Blur on there so I can, kind of, blur the sky out a little bit, right? And I pull a Fast Box Blur. Okay. And I'm going to press E again and reveal that. And then I going to press this plus twice, okay? And then I could just set this it's something like three and just knock that down a little bit in the background, right, without affecting anything else, except where my mask is a little crappy around the sign, but whatever. Try not to notice that. What's cool about this is now I can also apply other Color Corrects on top of this, and it'll still apply them to what it looks like here. So for example, I can apply-- Oops, let me select the layer. And apply, like, a Curves effect...

Right? And then what I could do is, kind of, find the blue, for example, and, like, kind of, ramp this up, right? And now that's influencing the sign, and the ground, and the mountains below, which I've made desaturated, right? If you have a lot of power to influence the way your image looks in one layer without going back to Photoshop, this way using effect masks. I would urge all of you to try this out because I think this is a really underrated feature in After Effects. - Yeah. - Thank you so much. A lot of power there.

Okay. So who in here likes to use expressions in After Effects? - Okay. Okay, good, decent amount. - Yeah. So for those of you that have not used them before, in After Effects, you can use these little strings of code called Expressions to either add to existing animation or sometimes they could create animation for you, or you can use them to, like, kind of, rig stuff up in all kinds of crazy ways. And there's one that-- There's a couple of things that I like to use just, kind of, every day, and they're actually a lot more approachable than you might think. Some folks get scared off by expressions 'cause, you know, you probably didn't get into design to start doing code unless you're doing webby stuff. I don't know.

And this one in particular, if you want to have a little checkbox control that could turn off a layer or a whole bunch of layers, that sounds, you know, sometimes you'll see, look up a tutorial for it, and it's like this complicated. If that thing then zero, otherwise, this, like, it just seems like too much. But you can actually use some really simple concepts to do this. So I'm going to go ahead and turn this off and turn this on. We've got some tacos here. And I don't, I don't know why anyone would not want tacos, but we're going to make a little toggle to get rid of the tacos. So I'm using this other layer just as controls. So I'm going to add this here, but you could put this anywhere. I'm going to add an Effect, Expression Controls, Checkbox Control, okay? Expression Controls just exist to drive other things like this. I'm going to go ahead and rename that tacos. And then let's go ahead and turn this on just so that the code, kind of, works once we do it. So this Checkbox Control is just on or off, right? And in computer speak, that just means zero or one. And then it does stuff based on that. So if you think back to, like, third grade math, anything times zero is zero. Anything times one is itself. Yeah. You see where I'm going even though if you don't know how to do this yet. So instead of doing some complicated conditional thing, I can just Alt+Click on the stopwatch for this property. That's how you create an expression, and I'm going to type value, okay? That means the value of this thing before we do any expressions. I'm going to multiply that using an asterisk. That's just how you do it in this code. And I'm just going to use this little Pick Whip thing to point to that checkbox. So whatever the value of this thing is times either one or zero depending on if it's on or off, okay? So if I close that out, it's on. I could click this, and it's off. But this isn't just zero or 100. It's whatever this value is, which means I can change it to 68%. And more importantly, I can keyframe it, right, and have animate that Opacity property, but still have an on/off switch. And you could apply this to a whole bunch of layers, to groups of layers, whatever you want to do. It's very versatile. I'm a big fan of that. There's another thing that I think is even more useful.

You can use the same idea with scale. So a lot of times you might bring in an image, for example, and you size it to be the actual size that you want it to be. And when you don't have to animate, that's not a big deal. But when you're trying to animate, like, working at 9.2% scale, it just starts being a little, like, weird. And if you're trying to match what another layer is doing, for example, it's just clunky to try and do that. So you can use a similar concept to what I just showed you to make this a lot easier. I'm going to add another Expression Control to this layer. I'll right-click, Effect, Expression Controls, Slider Control, okay? This is just one number, basically. Let me expose it down here for you. Go ahead and hide those.

Hide that. So Slider Control.

So on the Scale property, I'm going to Alt+Click to create an expression and say value times that Slider Control. And I could stop here, but then I would only be able to go between zero and one on the slider. And that's a little tricky to do. If I want this to work like scale does, which is a percentage 0 to 100, I just need to divide this by 100 to make that a percentage. And while I don't need the parenthesis, it just, kind of, helps my brain a little bit. So that value times that thing, but make it a percentage. And so now if I click out of that, let's zero. So let's go ahead and set it to 100. Now it's a 100% of whatever its other scale was. And so if I wanted to create some other scale keyframes with the original scale value, then I could, kind of, use this for some extra stuff, right? Or maybe I have some other images in this composition that have already gotten their own scale adjust things set up. And you can see these layers are set at 13.3% and 40.5% on their scale. But they already have some animation, and I want to be able to make all of these animate the same way. So let's just copy paste that to that handy-dandy slider I made. And now all three of those layers have that exact same pop-on animation, even though their actual scales are, like, way all over the place. So I really like that. It's just a great, kind of, everyday, a little trouble saver. And I'll throw this thing into. You can save something like this as an animation preset right there. Now you don't even have to remember the code. So there you go. And now Nol has an even better expression tip for you. I agree. I don't know if you ever use dropdown menu, but I really like-- Oh, I'm sorry. I'll change that later, everybody, I'm sorry. - Super cool. - Oops. Yeah. In this case, I love dropdown menus or dorpdown menus, whatever you like. And I like them for this, kind of, thing, right? You ever work with a client and you've got, like, a specific palette. They've got, like, five colors, and every shape needs to be one of those colors, right, for the whole project, right? And you're just going to be making, like, a ton of shapes and then making them those colors, right? What you could do is add a dropdown menu onto a shape so that when you duplicate it, it's really easy just to, like, pull down and find the right colors, right? So let me show you how to do that, all right? So here's my colors up here, okay? And let me go ahead on my circle and add a dropdown menu, which is here at Expression Controls, and Dropdown Menu Control, all right? So just to point this out, this is the, kind of, thing, like, when you're like, what state do you live in? You pull down a dropdown menu because we all know what this is like, right? So what I'm going to do is edit this, okay? And I've got five colors up here, and I've got three items in here. So I'm going to press this plus twice to just have five items in here. Now After Effect sees this not as item one, item two, item three, or light blue, dark green, whatever, it sees these as one, two, three, four, and five, okay? So just, kind of, hold that in your mind. The index value of this is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, okay? Right. Great. So now let me just explain in case it's not clear, the way shape layers work is I've got contents here. Okay, I've got my ellipse. I've got this fill color here. Right now it's white. If I change this to something else, that shape will change that color. I think we all get this, right? Okay. But what you've may maybe never done before is there's a Properties Pick Whip here, okay? And if I Properties, Pick Whip up to one of these other colors, now it will turn that color, okay? Now let's look here at the code that just got written. It says, and I'll translate this into English, right? Which comp are we in? Well, this comp. Okay, what layer are we talking about? The layer name palette. All right. What effect are we talking about? Color one. And what property are we talking about? Color. Okay, so another good thing to know about After Effects is when it looks at a stack of effects like these up here. Okay, it also sees these as 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, okay? It doesn't see color 1, or blue, or whatever. It just sees 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in that stack, right? So this means that we can use this Dropdown Menu to essentially switch between these colors, right? So for example, if I got in here where it says Color 1 because this sees this as 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, instead of saying Color 1 in there, I could just get rid of-- Oops. I could just get rid of Color 1. And just say if I type 5, it auto saves. And then it changes it to this color here, okay? If I typed 1, it would have changed it to this color, 2, it would have changed it to that, etcetera, etcetera, all right? So if you're clever and following along, now what I could do is get in here and define a variable real quick. That's just dorp, okay? And that dorp, I'm just going to expression Pick Whip up to my dropdown menu, right? Just so, everybody, the After Effects knows what I'm talking about when I say dorp. And then instead of putting a hard number in here, I could just write that variable name in there, dorp, and if I spell it right, right, and then click out. And then, yeah, I can just pull down on here and choose a different color, pull down on here, and choose a different color. Now what's nice here is if my client comes back to me and says, you know what? That color green, we don't like it anymore, right? We're going to change it to this. Well, that will automatically update to all these shapes if they have all this code on there, right? So my animators or myself could just take this circle and duplicate it. Oops. I duplicated both. Duplicate the circle only. And even without using Kyle's amazing Essential Graphics trick, now set this to be a different color really easily, right? And now I know for my whole team or for myself that I'm choosing the exact right colors and I can always change it later, and it will update across my whole project. - Yeah. All right. That's good stuff. - Try that out sometime. Yeah. So we have again come to applause time. So I'm going to try a little experiment here. If you liked my Track Mattes and Value Expressions, let's hear it.

Little restrain. I like grouts here. If you like Nol's effect masking and dorpdown menu, let's hear it. There we go. All right. Good. Okay. One at least. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we have come to my favorite part of this presentation, which is the Hotkey Battle Royale. Is that how you say it? Royale. Royale? Yeah. We'll say that. Okay. But for this, we need a little assistance and our good friend, Anaisa has decided to graciously help out here. I totally, like, attacked her when she walked in. I was like, "You're going to help out." I just want to say it's very scary getting up here on stage. So let's give a big round of applause for volunteering.

Okay. So we thought, you know, we didn't want to, like, influence anybody here. So we needed an impartial third party to operate this for us while we do these hotkeys, okay? Let's get you back to the beginning. Just a quick setup for a second here. - Okay. - Okay. So come back over to Nol's machine. And then we're going to step through these one at a time. And hopefully everything works out. And just make sure you don't fall off side of the stage. Yeah. I think I can stand here. So yeah, this isn't like a real test. We've got the answers up on screen. So you could take photos of these if you don't know these shortcuts already, all right? So anybody here know how to-- Oh, I should ask you. You know how to set the beginning and end of your work area using hotkeys? I do. All right. Well, go ahead and press B to set the beginning of the work area there. And now I'd like the work area to be ended where that last keyframe is. So go there and press N, right? B and N set your work area, the beginning and the end, okay? And that's all good and stuff. Will you select Control Layer and then click that...

Check box right there? Right on. Okay, so everybody knows B&N, but this is, like, my favorite shortcut of all time. I use this all the time. If you want to set the work area to length of a selected layer, yeah, like, you've got the Control Layer selected there, go ahead and type Option-Command-B.

Boom. Snaps it right to the selected layer, and now you could just preview that. Oops. Sorry. Good stuff. Yep. Thank you. All right. So if you could go to the next composition here, the little teal one, so it'll just be all lined up for you right there. There we go. Okay, so I'm sure most of you know that the J and K keys let you hop around on your timeline between exposed keyframes and layer markers and stuff like that. If you just want to kind of, like, hit K and just start, kind of, jumping around in there. And you'll see, like, there's, kind of, a lot of stuff exposed, so it takes a while to get through it, right? But let's just select one of those yellow layers, whichever one you like. And if you hold Shift while you press J and K, this is, kind of, new too. You'll only jump to the selected layer or properties. So if you could select the Scale property on that pink layer, and then you could do the same thing. So now hold Shift and J or K, and you will only be jumping to those scale keyframes and ignoring everything else. So it just saves you a lot of clicks there, right? - All right. - Amazing. Great one.

And it's fun to do as well. It is. Okay, let's move on to the next pink one there.

Yep. Correct. All right. So you ever have a composition where you have, like, hundreds and hundreds of layers, and sometimes you don't even know where those layers are at a certain point 'cause it's so confusing. Go ahead and press the X on the screen, like with the trackpad, like, select it, right? So that's my layer. And I've got hundreds of layers. So rather than twirling down, there's a handy shortcut. Would you press X, please? Ah, it finds the layer and it moves it to the-- It displays it at the top of the stack, okay? It doesn't actually move it up to, like, layer number one. It just displays it at the top of the timeline, right? So and it gives you plenty of space to work on. And in fact, if it's one of the lower layers, you can't even scroll and put it there 'cause if you try to scroll down, it goes, like, all the way down to the bottom.

Theoretically. Right.

Like this, right? And then that's the farthest up that you can display that yellow layer, right? But if you press X, it moves it up to the top, right? - Cool. - Very handy. Good stuff. All right, let's do the next teal composition here. Okay, so if you would go ahead and press Command-A to just select all of those layers. So, you know, this one isn't too bad because they're all separate. But a lot of times, you get a lot of layers going on. You have all these bounding boxes. It just becomes a lot to see. But if you want to just temporarily turn those off, you can press Command-Shift-H, and you'll just hide all of those layer controls and masks if they exist. This is per composition, so you can hide them here and not have them hidden in any other compositions. So you could just keep pressing that as you work, turn them on, turn them off, move on with your day. I find that's really useful from trying to line something up precisely. - Exactly. - The bounding box just gets in your way. - Yeah. - Yeah. Cool. All right, let's move to the next pink one, please. All right. So whoops.

It's not supposed to be like that.

All right, so I'll have you pull down through that list, okay. So, yeah, so the Y series, you probably know some of these, but maybe not. When you use the Y key and various hotkeys, you can create new things for your timeline, okay? So, for example, if you'll go down to the first one. Command-Y is to make a new solid. So go ahead and hit Command and Y. Yep. And you can make a full screen of color, right? - Whoo! - Yeah. Oops. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Go for it. That's what it looks like. Well, now delete it. For undo might be easier. Undo might be-- Now select the control layer and pull down to the second one.

Third one, which is an adjustment layer. Anybody use adjustment layers here? They're great in Photoshop. Yes. Okay. You know the keyboard shortcut? Option-Command-Y. Go ahead and make one. You won't be able to see it, but it is there. Adjustment layers are, kind of, like blank invisible layers that you can put effect on that affect things underneath them, but not above them. They're really useful. All right. And for our final one, will you tab down to that last one? It's my favorite one 'cause obviously they named null objects after me, but, the keyboard shortcut for that is Shift-Option-Command and Y, which is just, kind of, like mashing every button and pressing the clock. - There's a whole clock there. - Yeah. But then you can make a new null object and it's also invisible because we just turned the layer handles off. But trust me, it's there. So, yeah, the Y keys, try those out sometime. Why not? - Why not? - All right. What do we have next? My next blue one here. Ah, yes. So this is a really good one. If you would, here in the viewer, maybe just, kind of, zoom out or, like, you know, hold down the space bar to, kind of, move it over or something like that. Yeah. Just literally just push it anywhere else.

Great. Perfect. So sometimes you're working, you're zooming in and out, and then you come back out, and it's not where you want it to be. But if you press Shift and the forward slash, which is the one that shares with the question mark, it will put your viewer.

Yep. Shift. Shift. Oh, here. You might need to-- Yeah. Let's try it. Oh, why aren't you working? I did so. It should be Shift. It should be shift. Yep. And it'll put it right back. - Let me try it. - We promise this works, actually. It definitely works. I tested this. It's probably a Mac thing. - I don't know. - I don't know.

That one definitely works. But it will put it back in the viewer in except right now. So take my take my word for it. Very confusing at times. We got a manual assist here, which I think is very good.

All right. Well, moving on from that fiasco.

All right, let's look at the next one. All right. Oh, the bracket keys. Very essential, right? The left bracket tends to control the start of a layer and the right bracket tends to control the end of a layer, right? So if you will select number one and pull down to the second thing on the Control Layer. Thank you. Yes, okay, so to move the start of layer, you just use either right bracket or left bracket. So if you select number, layer number two. Sorry. There's a lot of selecting on this one. And press right bracket or left bracket, whichever, you will move that either beginning and end of the layer to that. That's very useful, okay? But how about if you want to trim? Go ahead and select the first layer again there and pull down the menu to the third item.

And so if you want to trim, like, move a little bit in time, and then you can option and left or right bracket, and then it will trim your layer, okay? And then it's-- Yay! Very nice. - Yeah. Either way. - That's okay. It's all good. So pull down to the next thing on the control, right? And this is to move up and down in the layer timeline. If you select, maybe select the second layer there and then move it one up by pressing Command and right bracket.

Yep. And then move it one down. Yep. So you can move things up and down one layer at a time that way. But even better, if you, yep, choose the last one. If you want to move up to the top or bottom of the layer stack, pull that down please, right? There's a shortcut for that as well, which is-- All the way. All the way up to the top or bottom Shift-Command-right or left bracket will move you up or down all the way in the layer stack theoretically. Theoretically.

Yeah. It should. Shift-Command.

- There we go. There we go. - Oh, hey! Hey!

All right, the bracket keys are really useful for organizing your layers quite a bit, right. Yep. It looks like we're at time, but we just have a few more of these here. If you'll stick with us. Let's go to the next one here. Okay, how many of you use the search bar in the timeline? - Nobody. - Yeah. Not enough of you. So right at the top of your timeline, there's a little search bar. You can click in it and type stuff. You can also always just hit Command-F and look for, yeah, stroke, for example. And so now anything that uses the word stroke in this entire composition will get revealed. And so you don't have to click your way through it, looking for it. The same one works you could select the Project panel and do that, which you don't need to do. But you can look for stuff there or in effects and presets as well. So really handy. And it's the same as in your Word document or, you know, browsers and stuff. - So-- - Easy to remember. - Easy to remember. - Yep. All right. Where are we at? Yes, all right, Will you go ahead and press space bar and play this amazing animation that I built? Who knows about hold keyframes? Anybody fan of hold keyframes? All right, so this is the keyboard shortcut for making hold keyframes. If you will select those two keyframes and Option-Command-Click on there. Oh, click. Yeah. Right? Now play the animation.

- Oh, yeah. - Whoa! Hold keyframes. They hold a value until they reach another keyframe and then they change all at once. And this saves you going to that right-click menu and finding it. Yep. Okay. All right. So this is a good one. We do need to zoom out a little bit, which, for some reason, this-- There we go. Now it worked. See? Shift. I promise you it worked. Okay. So what I want you to do is to go up and get your mask tool, and you're going to start. Yeah, the little, yeah, probably hard to see.

Just a plain rectangular mask and then start drawing one. Yeah, just make a rectangle. That'll be, kind of, easier to see. - There you-- - Yeah, that's fine. And then just start drawing it, but keep it held down, okay? And then while you are drawing one of these, you can actually press these letter keys so that-- - I think you're making a shape layer. - Yeah, we got a shape layer here. Shape layer there. - Uh-oh. - Yep. That's okay. Same tool does two different things in mask drawing. There we go. Okay. So you start drawing a mask and then you could hit N while you're still drawing it. And it will set the mask to none, so you can actually see what you're doing while you're making it. Or you could hit S and set it to subtract, or, A to hit it to add. You actually get all the mask modes, but I don't know how often you needed to, like, hit the difference while you're doing this, but it's there if you want it. So really handy for making mask a little easier to draw. Yeah. - That end trick is really useful. - Yeah.

So she wants to keep doing it forever.

Let's go to the next one, or I thinks it's my last. All right. So here we got shape layers and we got two shape layers and the anchor points are not in the center of those shape layers. And I want to first put the anchor point in the center. So let's go ahead and select both of those and Option-Command-Home, which is that button there, Home, right? Anchor point just went into the center. Now even better, select layer number one for one second.

The control. And then hold that down. Yep. To the bottom one. Yeah. Okay. Now that the anchor points are in the center of the layers, we can actually drop them into the center of the comp. Are they still selected? No. Selected are the two shapes.

All right. And now Command and Home-- Boop. - Oh! - Go right into the center, right? So with two keyframes, you can take all your shape layers, put the anchor point in the center, and then drop them into the center of the composition. Awesome. All right. One last one here. Okay. Here, let me go back one frame. Boop, boop. There we go. Okay, so who loves twirling open layers forever? That's what I thought. I, kind of, do. I really like shape layers and text layers have all that stuff. But if you don't want to have to click it 10 times to open everything up, you can actually Command-Click on the layer twirly, and it will open up everything inside that layer, even in the case of, like, that pink one right there. If you Command-Click on the layer twirly just to the left of the thing. Opens absolutely everything. And so now you could-- Yeah. Keep it open. Now you could. If you would Command-Click just a couple of properties in that layer, just, kind of, whatever you want to choose. Maybe like three. Perfect. Now if you hit SS, it will Show Selected. So only the properties that you just selected are now visible. Yeah. There's the payoff, right? Most unfortunate shortcut in-- Yeah. It's not ideal. Yeah. And then if you decide that you don't want to see one of those, you can Option-Shift-Click on one of those properties, and it will hide it now.

- She's doing so great. - It's a lot of pressure, basically. - Yeah. - I am nervous.

And then, let's say if we want to-- Yeah, that's fine. There's one more and we won't demo it. But if you have some of those, selected and you accidentally close the layer, you can actually Shift-Click the layer twirly to reveal the selection that you just had. Yep. So I'm going to come back over to my screen right here, and we do need to come up with a winner for this round, but there's obviously only one winner here. - And that is a good friend Anaisa. - Our good one. Yay! Thank you so much. Oh, my goodness, we couldn't have done it without you. Thank you so much. - But before you leave the stage-- - Yes. We do have something more important to do, and that's crown me the winner because clearly I had more points here.

So we do need to give me the stopwatch power here. I'll just, I'll put it on here. It's it actually was like a flavor flav costume clock originally. And then I have a little sound cue. We'll see if we can time this all right.

- Hang on. - Wait for the chime.

All right.

Congratulations to Kyle. - Anaisa, thank you so much. Thank you. - Anaisa, thank you so much again.

All right, folks. Well, we are done here. We have one or two more things to say if you care. So mostly thank you for being here. Thank you. Nol, you want to give them a little bit of biographical information about yourself before they walk out? Yeah. Take a picture of this. I don't want to take too much of your time, but there's my website. I run a studio called TDR, The Drawing Room. It's tdr.nyc There I am on Instagram. You could follow me for pictures of my cats and so on and so forth. And also, if you like the way I teach, I do teach two classes at school of motion, they're basic After Effects class called After Effects Kickstart, and a very advanced Expressions class, which is really, really fun and definitely challenging. So check it out. And also, I forgive you, Kyle. Yeah. Even though I won. Yeah. Yeah. He won yesterday. So this works out nicely. Well, you're welcome for dragging you into this. Thanks to all of you for coming. There's my info. If you want to follow me. I do a show with my friend Evan Abrams on Mondays on Adobe Live, and among my titles down at the bottom, you see Adobe Community Expert. If you want to know more about what that means, you can ask me, or find one of the folks in the Creative Park that have similar things. Please remember to fill out your surveys. It's good for MAX. It's good for us. It's good for you 'cause you might win something. We recommend rating this 10 out of 5. - Ten out of five. - I think is the ideal score. We want your feedback and it's positive. Right. Exactly. So again, thank you so much. Here's our info again. If you want to take a picture, thanks for coming. Enjoy the rest of MAX. Thank you all very much.

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