Video: Setting Up Work Area With After Effects

Set up your video production tasks to match you work style. Learn how to set up work area using Adobe After Effects compositing software in this computer software lesson from a video production expert.

Video Transcript

Alright, welcome back to the After Effects Basics on Expert Village. What we're going to be talking about here is how to set your work area. What I have in a time line down here is this awesome comp and it's got several layers. What I want to do is focus on an area in the composition, particularly in between the one second part of the time line and the three second part of the time line. What I'm going to do is navigate to one second, here, by typing in a one, zero, and zero. It'll take me to one second and I want the beginning of my work area to start here. So what I'm going to do is drag the end of this work area to line up with my play head. Then what I'm going to do is drag my play head to three seconds into the time line and I'm going to use a shortcut key here. I'm going to press end and that'll bring the end of my work area to three seconds. Now, when I play back my footage, it will only play back footage between one second and three seconds. Sometimes it's even helpful to focus on a smaller area. What you can do is just loop, by using your time controls over here, that particular area. So, there are lots of reasons to set your work area to a specific part of your composition. Probably the most important is to preview a particular section that you?re working on. One other cool trick that I like to use, in after effects is, after you have set your work area, what you can do is right click on the work area and select trim comp to work area. What that will do is change your composition settings so far as length of the composition goes to match the work area. I hope those are some useful tricks for you and we'll be moving on to some more advanced techniques here in the after effects training.

Setting Up Work Area With After Effects

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