After Effects for beginners: your first animation

Step 1

Check your computer and install After Effects

Adobe offers a 7-day free trial, and once billing starts you still have 14 days to cancel for a full refund. Check your hardware first: Adobe lists a minimum of 16 GB of RAM (32 GB or more for 4K) and a GPU with at least 4 GB of memory. The basic After Effects workflow is always the same:

• •import your material into the Project panel;
• •create a composition and arrange the layers;
• •animate layer properties;
• •add effects, preview and export.

💡 You don't need footage to learn: every exercise in this guide uses text and shapes created right in After Effects.

Step 2

Create your first composition

A composition is a scene with its own duration, frame size and timeline. Choose Composition > New Composition (Ctrl + N on Windows, Cmd + N on macOS), enter 5.00 in the Duration field (that's 5 seconds), pick a size preset and click OK. Add text with Layer > New > Text and type your name. Get to know the panels:

• •Composition: what's in the frame;
• •Timeline: layers and time, what happens when;
• •Project: all the files and compositions in the project.

Step 3

Keyframes: your first motion

A keyframe records a property's value at a point in time. Expand the layer in the Timeline, then the Transform group, and click the stopwatch next to Position: the first keyframe appears. Drag the text to the lower-left corner, move the time indicator to the end (the End key) and drag the text to the upper-right corner. After Effects creates the second keyframe itself and works out the motion between them. The spacebar starts and stops the preview.

• •P, S, R and T show only the Position, Scale, Rotation and Opacity of the selected layer;
• •try animating each of these properties on its own, then together;
• •careful with the stopwatch: switching it off removes all keyframes for that property.

Step 4

Smooth motion: Easy Ease and the Graph Editor

Uniform motion between keyframes looks mechanical: in real life, objects speed up and slow down. Select the keyframes and press F9 (Easy Ease): the object slows as it approaches a keyframe and gradually speeds up as it leaves. Shift + F9 eases only the way in, Ctrl + Shift + F9 (Cmd + Shift + F9 on macOS) only the way out. Then open the Graph Editor (Shift + F3) and look at the speed graph: that's where you shape the character of the motion.

💡 Make two copies of the same animation, one without easing and one with Easy Ease. Put them side by side: you'll see the difference on the first play.

Step 5

Export and your first mini project

When the animation is ready, add the composition to the render queue: Composition > Add to Render Queue. In the Render Queue panel, click the underlined text next to Output To, choose a name and location for the file and click Render. Another route is Composition > Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue, which lets you keep working while the file renders. Final exercise: a 5-second logo or title animation with Easy Ease, taken all the way to a video file.

💡 Share it in the community and ask for feedback on something specific: pacing, smoothness or the moment where the eye gets lost.