Kyle Hamrick who does motion design and editing and is a creative director at School of Motion. He’s an all around tech guru for all things motion in After Effects and other motion design programs.
He gives tips for how to work smarter not harder. Here are some of his tips that I discovered here at NAB 2022!
Tips!
Essential Properties
Helpful Hotkeys
Shift-Click - Opens only selected properties
CTRL+F - Timeline Search
Markers are really helpful on the timeline. Option click will help with duration markers.
Shift and a number you can label your markers.
Effect Masks and Compositing Options
If you look in the compositing options which every effect has. You can use these options to fade different options. You can restrict the effect to certain areas with the mask. This is really helpful when animating. It saves you time in creating five different layers.
How to stay organized in your project!
digitalrebellion.com/posthaste - This is a great website to help generate project folders based on what you are doing.
Give your files a unique name so if you loose it later you can find it later! This is a really helpful tool to do.
Create an after effect template project that helps with your “perfect template project”
When exporting create templates in your render settings also helps so you don’t have to create every time. Whether you are exporting for YouTube or elsewhere.
Another exporting hack that I’m loving is that you can actually add naming conventions as well.
aescripts.com/gifgun (Create gifs from AE)
battleaxe.co/anubis (Create better mp4 in AE and not in media encoder or premiere)
4. Don’t be afraid to start your project in Premiere
You can import your storyboards to get your timing. Animatics can be created there instead of just creating a million layers in After Effects. Adding scratch VO inside of your timeline works as well.
Export your sequence in Premiere with an image sequence
You can also create an After Effect composition in the Premiere composition
Importing also allows unrendered After Effect compositions - Or if you need to render it you can.
