When to Use Adobe After Effects

Series Summary

The development of film came alongside the rise of America as a world empire. The technology developed in the late 19th to early 20th century and quickly became a staple of modern culture and mass consumption. Many trace the beginning of film to a moment also considered the advent of the comic strip as we know it: Eadweard Muybridge's famous pictures of a horse's stride, which proved that in fact there is a moment when all four hooves are off the ground. Film making is the process by which a film is made. The different stages of film making include development, pre-production, production, post-production and distribution.

In this free video series, our expert John Carstarphen will demonstrate how to use Adobe After Effects software to edit and manipulate your video files. He begins with a quick tour of the controls, then demonstrates how to use several features such keyframes and layers. You will learn how to insert your own images into your video file, as well as how to create effects such as fades. Need to add credits to your movie? After Effects is just the program for you, with excellent font controls.

Video Transcript

"Welcome to Adobe' After Effects. After Affects, as its title suggests, is a program that's used after the post production process. So you do your editing, or you do your 3-D building, and rendering. And once all that is completed then you come to a program like After Effects. Basically, what After Effects does is composite. Compositing means that you can take layers and layers of images and combine them into a single image or a single animation. There are a number of programs on the market that do similar things and they have strange names like Flame, and Flint, and Combustion, Shake, Formack, and so forth. But, they all do essentially the same thing. Well, we're going to look at After Effects today. And this program is so deep and there are so many components to it which makes it a great program, but also makes the learning curve a bit steep. So what we're going to do is kind of pear this down into the very basics."