Intro to Adobe After Effects Effects

Hi, welcome back to educator.com. This next lesson is on effects.0000

What are effects? Effects are fun and exciting.0005

They are similar to filters in Photoshop. Only in After Effects we call them effects.0009

Where do effects live? Let us jump into After Effects here.0017

So, effects. Let me show you a quick little sample here.0021

Is like if we show you this Six gun Sally logo. Let us break down.0024

Here, you can see if you open up a layer.0032

If it has effects applied to it you are going get this FX on the side here and this has a drop shadow.0035

So, if we turn this off you can see that the drop shadow on the logo disappears.0041

If you do a break down over here.0048

Look at the Western town on the back. Let us solo that for a second.0051

It has a blur brightness contrast and has a hue and saturation.0056

If I turn this off one by one the blur is gone, the contrast is gone and the hue and saturation is gone.0061

We have the original photo there.0069

How do we apply effects?0074

Well, there is different ways to apply effects but let us do it the basic simple way.0077

So, let us turn these effects back on here.0083

And why do not we take our pistol here and let us delete the effect that is on there now, which is the brightness and contrast.0089

So, to add an effect you simply go up to the effects menu.0105

In this case, we are going to go to color correction, brightness and contrast.0112

And now we have this window that pops up right next to our project folder.0119

This is our effects and controls panel here.0126

So, you can see, let me pull this out for you some. So, in brightness and contrast has been applied.0129

We can actually now change the values here.0136

So, if I change the values here, on the left, you can see that the gun gets brighter or darker.0139

In fact, let me turn off these layers on top of it and there is our gun.0148

See what is happening in there?0156

So, let us say we wanted to add a drop shadow as well.0157

Back to effect. In this case, the drop shadow is in the perspective and we add drop shadow.0161

Cannot quite see it yet. So, we are going to adjust this here.0170

There is distance. You can apply softness.0173

You can even change the color of the shadow. Looks kind of funny, but.0180

That is how you apply effects.0187

Like I said, there is other ways to do it but this is the simple way, for now.0191

So, enabling effects while you are working or disabling them is pretty important.0196

Because a lot of times when we are working the comp gets very bogged down and it slows down the processor.0206

So, is good to sometimes turn off the effects.0217

So, for instance let us open up this layer at the bottom here.0221

And if we want to turn off the effects we just unclick the effects buttons here on the left side.0225

It makes the work flow go faster.0232

Let me talk a little bit about plugins.0236

So, I should probably mention third party plugins now as opposed to waiting, because these days people love plugins.0240

What is a plugin? Well if you go back to the After Effects here.0248

You will notice that up in my effects window I have several extra options here.0250

I have Sapphire plugins, Red Giant plugins, Trapcode, Video copilots.0258

These are all third party companies that actually make plugins for After Effects.0263

Sometimes there are very handy. You might spend an hour or two After Effects creating a certain effect.0268

Or as a plugin might just have that premade effect and be done in minutes.0274

So, it is kind of important.0280

OK, well, that completes our discussion on effects.0283

Thank you for watching educator.com. I will see you next time.0289