Learn how to properly add and manage footage within Adobe After Effects compositions, including key techniques for organizing layers and avoiding common mistakes. Understand the difference between timeline and layer windows, and how naming conventions impact your workflow and file integrity.
Key Insights
- Dragging footage into the timeline, not the composition panel, adds it as a layer; After Effects utilizes the timeline to manage layers instead of a separate Layers panel like in other Adobe apps.
- Double-clicking a layer opens it in the Layer Window, which is necessary for using tools like the clone stamp, eraser, paintbrush, and rotobrush, but does not display timeline-based animations.
- While you can rename layers and items in the After Effects project panel for clarity, renaming or moving the original source files on your computer will break the link and disrupt your project; Noble Desktop emphasizes the importance of maintaining source file names to avoid errors.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Now, adding footage to a composition. I can't read the names. So by the way, the reason I number the folders is so I can control the order.
I like controlling the order. In the project panel, this is basically like a spreadsheet. The headers on top have little dividers.
You can make them wider. It's a column or bigger, so I can read the name better. Background for pics.
I want that in my composition. So I drag it into my timeline. If you're used to other Adobe programs, we don't have a layers panel.
We have the layers in the timeline. I want to rename this. So I try like other programs to double click on it.
And instead, it isolates that in its own window called a layer window. Do not double click. Is there a time when you'd want to isolate it? Yeah.
Oh, definitely. The certain tools, the clone stamp, the eraser, the paintbrush, and the rotobrush only work in a layer window. There's something called tracking where you basically track the move.
You have the program analyze how something in video moves. You can follow along with it. That only works in a layer window.
So there are definitely times you need that layer window. Just usually when you're first starting, it's an error when you open it. Because it's like you have animation that's visible in the composition.
You move something in the composition. Here, look, selection tool, draggy, draggy, draggy. But when I double click on this, I'm seeing the entire layers content.
So it vanishes. There's no animation visible in a layer window. There's nothing except the actual layers content or isolation.
But if I wanted to paint brush, I could paint on this now, by the way. So here's your choice. As long as you don't rename the files on your computer, you can rename anything you want.
So for example, this particular background file right here, right click, reveal in finder. That file in After Effects is linked to that file. It's basically referencing it.
If that name changes or that file gets deleted from my computer, the link breaks. I'm gonna show you what happens, by the way, with after this lesson. So do not change the source names, which are the names of the file on your computer.
The names that are here in your project panel are irrelevant, but Bob Follett cares. I don't wanna call it Bob, but you get the idea. The layer names can also be renamed the same way, right click or return key on the keyboard.
But the only thing you can't rename is the source name, the file on your computer. If that gets renamed, deleted, or moved, we got a problem. Okay, but yeah, this is the name of in the project panel is based on whatever the source file is called, but you can rename it whatever you want.
Layers can be renamed over and over again because you might actually use the same layer multiple times and you give it different names, which we're gonna do a little later. Okay, what is the one? So you just drag it in. When you drag it in, it ends up centered in your screen.