How to Create a New Composition With After Effects

Video Transcript

"All right, welcome back to the After Effects basic series on Expert Village. Now what we're going to be talking about in this clip is how to create a new composition. As you can see down here, I've already got a few compositions already open. If we wanted to create a new one, all we need to do is select the composition menu at the top of the screen, and then "new composition". We could also simply hit "command n" and end up with this composition settings window open to us; both very effective ways of creating a new composition. And what you have here is all different kinds of settings, preset, premade by After Effects. If you want, you can select one of these settings. I'm going to stick to the NTSCDV setting. You can also customize your setting by changing the aspect ratio or the height and width of your footage. But, NTSCDV - not a bad place to start. You can also change the frame rate of your composition here. And don't forget that once you make these selections you can always come back and change them in your composition settings after it's been created. The duration of your composition can be changed here. Let's make it ten seconds. And it is kind of important how long you want your composition to be. It's a little bit different working in After Effects from Final Cut Pro or Avid or any other NLE. The timeline is limited to the duration that you create it to be. So let's start with ten seconds. We can change it later if we need to. Okay, now we have a new composition. And that composition automatically opens a window, a new tab in our timeline, and we have a composition window here with the composition ready to go. Like I said, if you wanted to, you could come back in here to the composition settings and change the frame rate to whatever you desire. You could change the duration, if you needed to, to make it a little longer. Let's say fifteen seconds. And then just hit "okay". Now you're composition is fifteen seconds long exactly, instead of ten. So, yeah. It's very flexible. And that is how you create new compositions."