Workflow
Whether you use Adobe After Effects to animate a simple title or create complex special effects, you generally follow the same basic workflow, though you may repeat some steps—such as the cycle of modifying layer properties, animating, and previewing until everything looks right. You can choose a predefined workspace to facilitate each stage of your work, or create your own workspaces adapted to your needs.
Import and organize footage
After you create a project, add your footage to the Project panel. After Effects automatically interprets many common media formats, but you may also specify how you want After Effects to interpret attributes such as frame rate and pixel aspect ratio. You can view each item in a Footage panel and set its start and end times to fit your composition. For more information, see Importing and interpreting footage items.
Create and arrange layers in a composition
Create one or more compositions. Any footage item can be the source for one or more layers in a composition. You can arrange the layers spatially in the Composition panel or arrange them in time using the Timeline panel. You can stack layers in two dimensions, or arrange them in three dimensions using 3D light sources and camera views. You can use masks, blending modes, and keying tools, to composite, or combine the images of multiple layers. You can even use shape layers, text layers, and paint tools to create your own visual elements. For more information, see Compositions, Layers and properties, Drawing and painting, and Text.
Add effects and modify layer properties
You can add any combination of effects and modify any of a layer’s properties, such as size, position, and opacity. Using effects, you can alter a layer’s appearance or sound, and even generate visual elements from scratch. You can apply any of the hundreds of effects, animation presets, and layer styles. You can even create and save your own animation presets. For more information, see Effects and animation presets.
Animate
You can make any combination of a layer’s properties change over time, using keyframes and expressions. Use the Tracker Controls panel to stabilize motion or to animate one layer so that it follows the motion in another layer. For more information, see Animation, Expressions, and Motion tracking.
Preview
Previewing compositions on your computer monitor or an external video monitor is fast and convenient, even for complex projects, especially if you use OpenGL technology to accelerate previews. You can change the speed and quality of previews by specifying their resolution and frame rate, and by limiting the area and duration of the composition that you preview. You can use color management features to preview how your movie will look on another output device. For more information, see Views and previews and Color management.
Render and export
Add one or more compositions to the render queue to render them at the quality settings you choose, and to create movies in the formats that you specify. In some cases, you will export using the Export or Composition menu, rather than using the Render Queue panel. For more information, see Rendering and exporting.