Easy After Effects Tricks for Beginners [Video Tutorial]

Hey everyone, welcome back to FilterGrade. In this video we’re going to talk about a few awesome tricks for beginners in After Effects. After Effects is a complicated piece of software, so it’s nice to know a few quick tips.

Watch the full video tutorial on our YouTube channel.

Audio Keyframes

Have you ever wondered how much time it takes to create a video where text or another asset animates in time with the music? It seems like it would take a long time, but with this simple After Effects trick, even a beginner could create one of these videos in minutes.

To do this, drag your audio clip into the composition. Then right-click on the clip and select Keyframe Assistant, then Convert Audio to Keyframes. This will create a layer called Audio Amplitude. Now if you click on the graph editor button, you’ll be able to see a visual representation of the audio keyframes you just created. Now you basically have an effect that you can apply to any visual layer. Before you go to the next step, expand the Audio Amplitude parameters so that you can see the Slider control.

So you can choose text, or a video element, or any other visual layer, and change various parameters. For this kind of effect, Scale is going to be the most common choice. Hold the Alt or Option key on your keyboard and click on the animation stopwatch next to the Scale parameter – this will activate expressions. Now take the pick whip next to Scale from your text layer and drag it onto the Slider control on the Audio Amplitude layer.

When you play it back, you’ll see the text animating its scale in time with the music, but it’s probably going to be really small. You can either add an *X or a +[X,X] to the end of the expression, where X is how much you want to increase the size by. Experiment with different numbers until it looks good to you.

If you want to make the animations smoother, you can open the graph editor and customize the curves.

Copy and Link Effects

If you’re working on a project with a lot of similar layers that need the same effects applied to them, and you think you might want to adjust those over time, there’s an easy way to speed up the process. It’ll be a waste of time to manually change each setting every time you want to make an adjustment, and remembering to copy and paste the new settings isn’t much better.

So, when you’re creating elements that need the same settings, set up the parameters on one layer, then select them all, press Edit, then select Copy With Property Links. Now you can paste onto your other layers, and when you adjust something on the master layer, it will affect all of the others. In fact, to make it easier to remember, you may want to create a layer, make it invisible, and designate it as the master layer. This could make it easier to keep track of.

Null Objects

Null objects are awesome. They make many things in After Effects possible and many other things much easier. In this case, we can use a null object to move a selection of layers all at once without creating a precomposition. Right-click on the timeline and create a new Null Object. Drag the pick whip from the layers you want to move onto the null object. This is called parenting.

Then you can adjust the position, scale, or any other parameter of the null object, and the objects that have been parented to it will move together as one unit. And you can even delete the null object afterwards if you don’t need to use it anymore, and the parameters will stay the same.

That’s just one way to use null objects, but they are really useful in general. They are invisible holders of information that can be applied to any layers you want, and are an essential part of using After Effects to its full potential.

Math Expressions

I won’t judge you for being bad at math, and neither will After Effects. After Effects allows for simple math expressions pretty much everywhere that numbers can be found. For example, if you want to move something 500 pixels to the side, you don’t have to figure out what that number is, you can just add “+500” to the existing value.

Change Anchor Point

When you create a new solid in After Effects, the anchor point is automatically set to the center of the composition, even though you would probably rather it be centered on the shape itself. Go to Edit, Preferences, General, and check Center Anchor Point in New Shapes Layers. Now when you create a new shape, the anchor point will be centered on the shape. This makes it way easier to adjust certain properties in a way that just makes sense.

Graph Editor

The graph editor is a tool that you’ll be using for the rest of the time you use After Effects, so it’s important to understand how it works. It is the key to convincing and smooth animation and motion graphics. If you’ve ever used keyframes in After Effects or Premiere Pro, this should be relatively easy.

The graph editor can be accessed by clicking the graph editor button just above the project timeline. This graph can show two different things and how they change over time – one is the speed graph, which shows the speed of a property, and the other is the value graph, which shows the numerical value of a property. The speed graph is going to be the one that makes the most difference for your motion animations.

So if you create a simple scale animation for a layer on your timeline, then open up the graph editor, you’ll see those keyframes and the speed of the animation between them. A linear animation almost never looks good, so you’ll often be using the graph editor to create a speed curve. This means that the animation will start and end at different speeds than the middle, so for example the middle of the animation can be the fastest point of the animation, and the animation can speed up and slow down, respectively, rather than maintaining a constant speed for the whole duration.

This is an essential tool, and even just basic knowledge of it will amp up your After Effects potential.

Take a Still Image

There are plenty of times you might want to take a screenshot as a reference point or in order to insert a still image into your project. If you’re looking around unsure of where to take a still image, you may be drawn to the camera icon right below the composition player. This however, does not really take a screenshot. A snapshot takes a temporary still frame that lets you compare to whatever is on the screen. You can hold the Show Snapshot button to overlay the last-taken snapshot over your current frame. And these snapshots are stored on your computer, but it’s not the ideal way to take a screenshot.

To do it the right way, go to Composition, Save Frame As, then File. Your frame will then be added to the render queue and you can render out your frame as a jpeg, png, or other formats. It will initially show as a Photoshop format, but then in the render queue, you can click on the output module and select a specific format and location. If you need to use this image in your project, you can just import it.

Okay, those are half a dozen tips about how to get into After Effects as a beginner. Hopefully you’ll find at least one of these tips useful and brand new to you. Let us know in the comments if you did learn something and what other After Effects tips you’d like to learn.

View next: The Complete Guide to Keyframes in After Effects