Organizing a Project With After Effects

Video Transcript

"Alright, now we are going to talk about organizing your project in after effects. This may seem a little boring but, it will be very important once you star getting into all these layers here it's going to be nice to have them all organized. It's also very important to keep your project organized so that when you hand it off to another after effects animator they'll know what is going on in your project. Instead of having all these files scattered about they'll be organized in a logical way. So, one of the ways to do it is to just think about the different kinds of footage your going to have in your project. Maybe we'll have a piece of video like like we have here a .mov file, maybe your have a Jpeg in some audio, a wav file and possibly some art work either a photo shop file or illustrators file. So, what we're going to do is just create some folders in the project. You can either create a new folder by clicking on this folder icon, down here on the bottom, and then title it art work and let?s pull or photo file into the art work folder. Then, maybe make another folder and you can also right click and select new folder. Let's make this audio and pull or audio into that folder. Let's make another file for Jpegs and we'll pull our brush Jpeg into that folder. Let's create anther one for video and we'll pull our video file into that folder. You can also anticipate different kinds of elements that you?re going to want to organize in your project panel here. One of those will certainly be compositions and pre- compositions. If we want to pull this folder, right now it's inside that accounts folder; if we want to pull it out we just drag it out. There's a good chance that almost any element that you create is going to end up in one of these folders. You might just want to create a template in after effects that has all these folders and then save that project as a template, that way, you don't have to recreate all these folders in after effects every time you start a new project you can just open your template and you will have all of this already set up. So, this is a good way to get ready for any project that you may be working on. It's just to create a template. That'll be ready and waiting for you when you start any project."