If You Want To Make Better Animations Quicker & Easier, Read This

I've been experimenting with After Effects to make some pretty complex animations recently, and I wanted to share this one valuable tip that's helped me make my animations much quicker.

That tip is to Pre-comp your layers before you add the animation 🔑

Pre-comping in After Effects is essentially the same thing as nesting your clips in Premiere Pro.

The reason you do this is best explained by showing you this example.

Below is a link to an example animation I created for an upcoming video I'm editing for my YouTube channel, and in this animation I want you to pay attention to the layers animating like the thumbnails & the text.

🚨 Watch The Animation Here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jdqe9oKudAsg7UyYc9vPHnC6B03fi4QE/view?usp=drive_link

For these thumbnail & text layers, what I did to make it much easier was I scaled them and positioned them exactly where I wanted them to end up, and once I had the layout set, I pre-comped (nested) each layer individually.

Then for the thumbnails, I created a smooth slide-in animation one time, and because we pre-comped, I can now copy those keyframes and just paste them onto the bottom thumbnail layer without having to adjust the position because I pre-comped them.

Then I just move over the keyframes a bit so it comes in a bit after.

Simple.

Now for the text, I pre-comped each text layer...

Created one fade-in / slide-down animation...

And then copied & pasted onto the other two text layers.

Then I moved the keyframes a bit for each layer of text, and boom I was done.

Instead of having to animate the slide in for each layer manually because all the positions and scales would have been different...

I could do it once and then copy & paste since we pre-comped.

🚨 BONUS TIP: When creating smooth animations like in the example shown, to get it to be that smooth you need to adjust the keyframe speed graph to look like a steep halfpipe ramp (Check the image attached to this post below)

Then once it looks like this, drag the second keyframe out more so that it approaches the end position much more smoothly & slowly. Continue to adjust the timing of it until you get a speed you think is smooth 🔑

Let me know if you found this helpful 🙏

9 comments