When you first open after effects, you will see that it flutes in its own application window like some other adobe products this whole window contains the entire application. Moving this around we can see all of the different frames included inside after effects. Windows users maybe familiar with this idea but this maybe a little foreign to Mac users. Before we start, one of the most important navigation features of after effects is the tool the key located right next to the number one on your keyboard. You will see the little tool the key and by hovering over one of the windows and pressing the tool, the key after effects will enlarge or take up the entire applications screens space with that panel. Here I will press the tool the key while hovering over the project pane.

Pressing the tool the key again brings it back to its previous state on a Mac another important features to note the three dots in the upper left hand corner of the screen. There is a red dot, which will close the application using the yellow dot, you will minimize the application and using the green plus dot you will be of the increase to size of the screen real state used by after effects. Another easy way to do this is simply using the command key and pressing the backslash will increase the size of the entire application. On a PC you will need to use control and backslash. Similarly, we have got a small bar at the top of the application indicating the name of the file that we are working on. Using command and backslash again will conceal this bar it will give you about ten more pixels or workspace.

On a PC you will need to use control and backslash again now if you want to see that use command and backslash to reveal it. The state of our application now is considered a workspace all of these different windows and the way they are arrange is a workspace. If you views Photoshop illustrator or any the other adobe products you will notice that most of them have a sign the workspaces. In the upper right hand corner we see a workspace defined as standard. This first draw at the top is our toolbar and we have several different tools inside this toolbar, directly below it we have a project paint, a composition paint several different windows open and at the bottom a timeline.

Currently we have no compositions started although after effects automatically gives us on title project as soon as we have launch there is no new composition created so we have no elements in our timeline or composition window. We can change a layout of all this windows by simply clicking on each one of their tabs and dragging them around. Here at the top of the tab for time controls I can click on this tab and drag it to another location. Once I click and drag, I will see the other tabs now I have drop zones located in the middle and along the sides of each frame. Additionally in between the frames I also have small bars which indicate drop zones in between the areas selecting one of the sides the top or the bottom will drop the panel next to the frame. If I click and drag it to the center of the frame it will create a new tab which it merges with this frame.

For now, I bring time controls back down under information. If I want to change the order of the tab windows I can simply drag one in front of the other. Or I can drag one behind another. Moving these panels around is relatively simple once we decide where we want our permanent panels to go we can delete the ones that we do not want. Simply clicking on the small “x” next to the name of the panel and we can close this down. Effects on presets I close down leaving time controls info and audio for now.
In the different tab the pallets if I click on audio it will come to the front, there are still tab together. Here I can see audio controls for the audio that might be in my timeline, notice on the upper right hand corner there is a small arrow. That arrow indicates a fly out window for this panel. If I click on it, it will reveal all the different options that I might have for the panel. Well we already know that we can undock the panel by dragging it around. We know we can undock the frame as well we can close the frame very easily by clicking on the small “x”.

Additionally command W or control+W on a PC will work for this as well. You can close the frame maximize the frame using the tool the key and there are options, here options are going to be different depending on the different panel you have open because we have audio our options will relate to audio.

If I click here, here we can see there are audio options referred to the units that we use to view the audio. We can either view it in decibels or percentage levels because there are just slide are involve in this panel we can also decide what our minimum decibel level are percentage level will be. I click okay to close this out, alternatively if we go to the info panel and again click on the small flat window we will see that this has different options. Below here we see our options include auto color display, a percentage of colors, web colors, hue saturation brightness and different colors bases for eight bit, 10 bit or 16 bits per channel.

There is also has a decimal value. Here in the info window I can see what the values will be directly onto my cursor for red, green, blue or my alpha channel. I can also see exactly where my cursor’s positioned inside of the comp window. In my time controls panel I have different options, which will check out later ones we have setup a composition and have a timeline. This frames can be resized here I have a composition area which might be a little bit small if I click on the bottom of the comp window I can see that the icon changes to a scaling icon and I can click and drag to change the scale of the windows above or below it. If I place my cursor between three or more paints you will see that the cursor changes to a by directional icon, meaning I can scale it upper down or left to right or both.

We will close these windows using command W control+W on a PC. I also select the composition paint notice the composition paint takes up a lot more real state now because those other frames are gone. If I want to bring those back on I can always go back to the window menu pull down and choose audio info affects presets or any other one that I might need. You will notice that many of this have shortcut keys assign to them. Information, which you might use quite a bit, is a sign to command two, control+two on your PC. Invoking the shortcut key or clicking here for the info window you will see that it appears in the same place it was before you close the window. We will use command W again to close that window.

At this point if you want to get back to the standard workspace at the top we can choose workspace standard and at the bottom we can see that we can reset the standard view by clicking the resets standard after effects will ask us if we want to discard the changes that we can make. This includes scaling, closing or opening any new windows. We will say yes discard those changes. Now we go back to the exact same way the workspace was saved when it was originally created. We will create our own so select the facts and presets and use command or control+W to close that. We will select time controls and close that as well. Here under info and audio we will select those and close those. Now instead of workspace standard we will create our own by clicking and navigating down to new workspace. Clicking new workspace after effects will ask us what we want to name our new workspace. We will call this total training efficient. I click okay to accept the new workspace and now we can see in the workspace list, this new workspace appears alphabetically in the selection of workspaces that are available to me. If in anytime I make different modifications to this by adding an audio panel or by adding a paragraph selection. And I want to revert back to the total training efficient workspace I simply select it, reset it and discard those changes that I have made since the time that I saved it.