Every week, Frame.io Insider asks one among our professional contributors to share a tip, software, or approach that they use on a regular basis and couldn’t dwell with out. This week, Laurence Grayson exhibits the best way to use the After Effects Essential Properties panel to remain targeted in your creativity.
It doesn’t matter in case you’re an professional in After Effects or simply beginning out, it’s essential to know concerning the Essential Properties panel. It’s a game-changer for anybody working with a number of After Effects compositions.
What is the Essential Properties software for?
As Adobe’s help page describes it, “Essential Properties work as primary controls allowing you to access layer and effect properties of a composition when nested in another composition.”
In different phrases, Essential Properties provide you with entry to the first properties of a nested composition with out having to go away the composition you’re at the moment in. This saves digging by means of a stack of comps to search out the factor you wish to change, and allows you to deal with the artistic work.
By default, the Essential Properties panel already contains Anchor Point, Rotation, Scale, Opacity, and Position—all of that are extremely helpful to have handy. You may even name them important. But you don’t should restrict your self to simply these, as After Effects permits you to add customized parameters to this panel, too.
You can both add properties to the Essential Properties panel forward of time, or drop them in later when issues turn into clearer. The course of is so much like building a Motion Graphics Template, and it couldn’t be simpler.
How so as to add a layer property to the Essential Properties panel
- Open a composition that’s already been nested (positioned inside one other comp),
- Make positive the Essential Graphics panel is seen (Window->Essential Graphics),
- Find the layer property you wish to add and easily drag it from the timeline to the Essential Graphics panel,
- Repeat this course of for all of the properties you wish to embrace,
- When you come back to the principle composition and choose the nested comp, the properties will now be seen and adjustable within the Properties panel.
Wait, there’s extra
The customized properties you added are additionally now seen within the Essential Properties twirldown of your nested composition. So you possibly can modify them there, if most well-liked. This location additionally means that you can make use of the pickwhip, if wanted, and offers a Pull and Push buttons that may pull knowledge from, or push knowledge to the supply comp. Which generally is a helpful approach to get your unique settings again in case your changes don’t work out.
Just keep in mind that the Essential Properties panel solely goes one layer deep—you possibly can’t view the values of a layer that’s been nested in a nested comp, and so forth. Things might get a bit Inception-y if that had been the case.
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