New to After Effects? Commit these keystrokes to memory

I don't have to tell you long-time AE users about the benefits of using the keyboard as much as possible, but for those of you who may be in the nascent stages of becoming familiar with the motion graphics juggernaut, it would behoove you to get acquainted with the following shortcuts. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are the basics for everyday production (at least for how I work), and hopefully they'll be of some help to you as well:

The holy trinity of F9, Command+Shift+F9 (Mac)/Control+Shift+F9 (Win), and Shift+F9
The three of these make heavy Timeline sessions just a bit more bearable, as they assign Easy Ease, Easy Ease Out, and Easy Ease In properties to any selected keyframe(s) in the timeline.

Option+] (Mac)/Alt+] (Win)
This shortcut sets the out points of selected layers in a comp to wherever the current time marker is. Very handy for universally setting the out points of all the layers in a comp after you've made it longer. Of course, if you want to set the in points of layers in your comp, you would use the left bracket equivalent, which is Option+[ on the Mac or Alt+[ on Windows.

u
Rather than twirling out all the properties of a layer just to get to whatever keyframes you've made, just hit the u key to reveal only those properties which have been animated. This one should become automatic very quickly.

p, t, r and s
The four basic properties of animation - Position, Opacity, Rotation, and Scale. Hit the corresponding letter keys to quickly reveal (or hide, if already revealed) each of those properties, respectively.

`
The venerable "accent grave" key (which also is home of the tilde) is a huge time and space saver in AE7. Whichever panel you happen to be over when you hit this key will expand to fill the entire work area, a feature I find indispensable once my timeline starts getting filled up with layers and keyframes. Hitting it again sends everything back to where it was.

Command+Up Arrow (Mac)/Control+Up Arrow (Win)
This, along with the Commaind/Control+Down Arrow, will select the higher or lower layer in a comp. Very handy.

So, there you have it. In the words of Brad Hamilton, learn it. Know it. Live it.

Posted at 09:19AM Apr 10, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Motion Graphics  |  Comments[0]