Now that we have created and organized our footage, we can move back in the After Effects I can either click on the application or use COMMAND+TAB or ALT+TAB on a PC to navigate back to After Effects In After Effects, I could simple start importing instead I want to open up the project that has all of the folders already organized for me. So go to the file pull down menu, select Open Project then navigate over to chapter 3 Start Project. There is other one above it, is simply the After Effects project and everything already imported, I will click Enter to open the file and we will begin. Here you see all of the different folders that I might use in my animation. The first one is Photoshop, second one, Illustrator because I want import in Illustrator file, I will select the folder into which I want to import that source material. So, do that selected, I will go to file and go down to import.

In the import dialog box you will see a few more advanced features that have been added to the CS3 list but we are just going to stick with file and multiple files for now. You will see the shortcut key for file is COMMAND+I. I am just going to go through the file dialog because multiple files are essentially the same. The difference is, after you import each file, After Effects is automatically going to come back and ask you what file that you want to import next. Basically, multiple files is just a looping question of which file do you want to import next. So, we will click import file and navigate to where you have the source materials for this chapter. I will select the Illustrator file and here in the dialog box you can see that After Effects automatically recognizes this document as an Illustrator file and wants to import it as footage.

We will get in to this other options in a second. I will select open and get a new dialog box. After Effects wants me to either import it as footage and now because it knows it has layers, asks whether I want to merge the layers or choose one of the layers because I have named those in Illustrator, selecting choose layer will show up with the named layers from my Illustrator document. I can choose anyone of these and bring them in individually. For this example, I will just choose merged layers and say OKAY.

Another easy import is to select Quick Time, so number 3 folder Quick Time and again we will import. Now, we will navigate up to chapter 3 and go into the Quick Time folder. Here, you will see two movies. I will choose the corner blob because this movie does not have layers. I can only import it as footage, say open and now I get a new dialog box for the movie. This movie comes with an alpha channel. After Effects wants to know how I want to treat the channel whether I want to ignore it, use it as a straight or pre-multiplied Mac or invert the alpha channel, I will say OKAY.

We will get in to the details of this dialog box a little bit later. Another common import might be a sequence of frames rendered by a 3D application. Again, I will go to file, import and choose file. By now you should now COMMAND+I is the shortcut key to import a file, CTRL+I on a PC. This time we will navigate up to the chapter 3 file and go in to our 3D renders. Here, we will see a folder that contains the entire sequence of frames rendered to this animation called strand. We will open up this folder to reveal all of the frames, clicking on one of them you will see the After Effects recognized this is rendered sequence. Make sure that this option is turned off, if you do not want to import the sequence. It is might be a catcher if you are using numbers to increment until you save your documents because I know this is a sequence, I only need to choose one then select open.

Again, the sequence has alpha channel, so After Effects wants to know how it should interpret it. For now, I will just say OKAY. Up here in the project pane, I can see that After Effects is imported the entire sequence 91 frames and its millions of colors plus a straight alpha. In addition to importing the entire file, there are times when you want to only import a specific layer from the document they have created. So, after selecting the Photoshop folder, I will import a single layer from a layered Photoshop file. Again, I will just use COMMAND+I, it is CTRL+I on a PC. I want to navigate to the Photoshop folder and select our friend Flig here.

Again, import it as footage and select Open. Rather than to choose the merged layers, I can choose any layer, here is where naming your Photoshop layers is really important. I don’t have a visual Q of what the Photoshop document it looks like. Instead, I have to rely on the names that I’ve given to each one of the Photoshop layers. So here, when I click on this pull down menu, I can see that I have named each one individually. I will just pick Flig’s eye for now and say OKAY. Now, I can see the After Effects has the Photoshop document in the Photoshop folder and it is telling me that this is the Flig eye layer of the O1 flig.psd. I can do with the same with Illustrator. Now remember, Illustrator has to have the specific layers so that After Effects will recognize those. I use COMMAND+I and navigate to the Illustrator project folder.

Here, I have got one large arrow, two smaller arrows on one layer and the center button. I will choose the two arrows and hit OKAY. Here, I can see that I have the entire composition of all of the layers as one source. So, here I am using the same Illustrator document but only selecting one of its layers.