After Effects Composition basics

A composition is a framework for a movie. Each composition has its own timeline. A typical composition includes multiple layers representing components such as video and audio footage items, animated text and vector graphics, still images, and lights. You add a footage item to a composition by creating a layer for which the footage item is the source. You then arrange layers within a composition in space and time and composite using transparency features to determine which parts of underlying layers show through the layers stacked on top of them. 

A composition in After Effects is similar to a sequence in Premiere Pro.

You render a composition to create the frames of a final output movie, which is encoded and exported to various formats.

Simple projects may include only one composition; complex projects may consist of hundreds of compositions to organize large amounts of footage or many effects.

In some places in the After Effects user interface, composition is abbreviated as comp.

Each composition has an entry in the Project panel. Double-click a composition entry in the Project panel to open the composition in its own Timeline panel. To select a composition in the Project panel, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (macOS) in the Composition panel or Timeline panel for the composition and choose Reveal Composition In Project from the context menu.

Use the Composition panel to preview a composition and modify its contents manually. The Composition panel contains the composition frame and a pasteboard area outside the frame that you can use to move layers into and out of the composition frame. The offstage extents of layers—the portions not in the composition frame—are shown as rectangular outlines. Only the area inside the composition frame is rendered for previews and final output.

When working with a complex project, you may find it easiest to organize the project by nesting compositions—putting one or more compositions into another composition. You can create a composition from any number of layers by precomposing them. After modifying some layers of your composition, you can precompose those layers and then pre-render the precomposition, replacing it with a rendered movie. 

You can navigate within a hierarchy of nested compositions using the Composition Navigator and Composition Mini-Flowchart. 

Use the Flowchart panel to see the structure of a complex composition or network of compositions.

Create a composition

You can change composition settings at any time. However, it’s best to specify settings such as frame aspect ratio and frame size when you create the composition, with your final output in mind. Because After Effects bases certain calculations on these composition settings, changing them late in your workflow can affect your final output.

When you create a composition without changing settings in the Composition Settings dialog box, the new composition uses the settings from the previous time that composition settings were set. However, the new compositions do not inherit the previous Preserve frame rate when nested or in render queue and Preserve resolution when nested settings available under the Advanced tab of Composition Settings.

Create a composition and manually set composition settings

Create a composition from a single footage item

Create a single composition from multiple footage items

Create multiple compositions from multiple footage items

Duplicate a composition

Timeline panel

Each composition has its own Timeline panel. You use the Timeline panel to perform many tasks, such as animating layer properties, arranging layers in time, and setting blending modes. The layers at the bottom of the layer stacking order in the Timeline panel are rendered first and—in the case of 2D image layers— appear farthest back in the Composition panel and in the final composite.

The current time for a composition is indicated by the current-time indicator (CTI), the vertical red line in the time graph. The current time for a composition also appears in the current time display in the upper-left corner of the Timeline panel. 

The left side of the Timeline panel consists of columns of controls for layers. The right side of the Timeline panel—the time graph—contains a time ruler, markers, keyframes, expressions, duration bars for layers (in layer bar mode), and the Graph Editor (in Graph Editor mode).

Composition settings

You can enter composition settings manually, or you can use composition settings presets to automatically set frame size (width and height), pixel aspect ratio, and frame rate for many common output formats. You can also create and save your own custom composition settings presets for later use. Resolution, Start Timecode (or Start Frame), Duration, and Advanced composition settings are not saved with composition settings presets.

Working with composition settings

• To open the Composition Settings dialog box to change composition settings, do one of the following:

  • Select a composition in the Project panel or activate the Timeline or Composition panel for composition, and select Composition > Composition Settings, or use Ctrl+K (Windows) or Command+K (macOS).

  • Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (macOS) composition in the Project panel or Composition panel (not on a layer) and select Composition Settings from the context menu.

• To save a custom composition settings preset, set Width, Height, Pixel Aspect Ratio, and Frame Rate values in the Composition Settings dialog box, and then select the Save button.

• To delete the composition settings preset, select it from the Preset menu in the Composition Settings dialog box, and select the Delete button.

• To restore default composition settings presets, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (macOS) the Delete button or the Save button in the Composition Settings dialog box.

• To scale an entire composition, select File > Scripts > Scale Composition.jsx.
  

Basic composition settings

The Composition Presets dropdown lists composition presets to pick from, including presets for a variety of social platforms.

Timecode or frame number assigned to the first frame of the composition. This value does not affect rendering; it merely specifies where to start counting from.

Use the color swatch or eyedropper to pick a composition background color. Learn more about selecting a color or edit a gradient.

For information on specific Basic composition settings not listed here, see the related sections:

• Pixel aspect ratio and frame aspect ratio
• Frame rate
• Resolution

Advanced composition settings

• Anchor
  • Select an arrow button to anchor layers to a corner or edge of the composition as it is resized.
• Preserve resolution when nested and Preserve frame rate when nested or in render queue
  • For a composition to retain its own resolution or frame rate, and not inherit those settings from the containing composition. For example, if you have deliberately used a low frame rate in a composition to create a jerky, hand-animated result, you must preserve the frame rate for that composition when it's nested. Similarly, the results of rotoscoping may look wrong when converted to a different frame rate or resolution. Use this setting instead of the Posterize Time effect, which is less efficient.
• Motion Blur settings
  • Shutter angle: The shutter angle is measured in degrees, simulating the exposure allowed by a rotating shutter. The shutter angle uses the footage frame rate to determine the simulated exposure, which affects the amount of motion blur. For example, entering 90° (25% of 360°) for 24-fps footage creates an effective exposure of 1/96 of a second (25% of 1/24 of a second). Entering 1° applies almost no motion blur, and entering 720° applies a large amount of blur.
  • Shutter phase: The shutter phase is also measured in degrees. It defines an offset that determines when the shutter opens relative to the beginning of a frame. Adjusting this value can help if an object with motion blur applied appears to lag behind the position of the object without motion blur applied.
  • Samples per frame: The minimum number of samples. This minimum is the number of samples used for frames for which After Effects is not able to determine an adaptive sampling rate based on layer motion. This sample rate is used for 3D layers and shape layers.
  • Adaptive sample limit: The maximum number of samples.

For information on specific Advanced composition settings not listed here, see the related sections:

• Specify resolution to use for rendering shadows
• Preferences and composition settings that affect nested compositions
• Motion blur

3D renderer settings

You can use the options in the 3D renderer tab to choose the right 3D renderer for your composition. You can choose from the following renderers in the Renderer menu:

• Classic 3D
  
• Advanced 3D
• Cinema 4D
  

The 3D functionality of the Cinema 4D composition renderer is nearly identical to the extrusion of 3D text and shape layers and the bending of other 3D layers (solids, footage, and so on) into curved planes. However, the rendered results can be different because they generate results using different renderers and support different sets of features. For example, there are differences in the 3D layer material options and other layer behaviors. 

The Cinema 4D composition renderer renders 3D layers including extruded text and shapes and curved 2D planes to make the process of animating 3D text and logos from scratch easier. 

Classic 3D renderer

Classic 3D is the traditional, default renderer. Layers are positioned as planes in 3D space.

Classic 3D renderer

Advanced 3D is a high-quality, GPU-based, and performance-oriented composition renderer. It's an additional rendering option to Classic 3D and Cinema 4D in After Effects. This composition renderer's underlying rendering engine is shared with other Adobe products and uses Adobe Standard Material properties for physically-based rendering. Any solids, precomps, text, and shape layers with the 3D switch activated in After Effects are now textured and rendered with Adobe Standard Material for more accurate and photographic looks.

CINEMA 4D Composition Renderer options

The Quality level that you set on the slider affects the parameters that determine how the Cinema 4D composition renderer draws the 3D layers. You can see the resultant renderer parameters in the Options, Anti-Aliasing, and Reflectance boxes. The single Quality setting makes it easy for you to choose a balanced combination of rendering speed and acceptable 3D rendering quality without understanding and modifying the various rendering quality parameters.

The following parameters are modified when you adjust the Quality slider:

• Ray Threshold: This value helps to optimize render time. 
• Ray Depth: It determines how many transparent objects (or areas made invisible using the alpha channel) can be penetrated by the renderer. 
• Reflection Depth: When a ray is sent into the scene, it can be reflected by reflective surfaces. The higher the Reflection Depth, the further rays are followed into the scene and the results rendered.
• Shadow Depth: It behaves analogous to the Reflection Depth. The Shadow Depth setting defines the shadow depth with which visible shadow rays are calculated. 

Geometry is the default anti-aliasing setting that smooths all object edges (automatically with 16x16 sub-pixels).

Layer sampling is the default Reflectance setting that defines the quality of matte reflections.

When you select Cinema 4D in the Renderer drop-down box, the Enabled column displays the 3D options that are enabled and the Disabled column displays the 3D options that are not available.

To select a quality level for your 3D rendering, select the Options button after selecting Cinema 4D as the renderer and set the quality level using the Quality slider. The values of Ray Threshold, Ray Depth, Reflection Depth, Shadow Depth, Anti-Aliasing, and Reflectance change accordingly.

After Effects installs a default renderer on your machine. You can change the renderer to a full retail version of Cinema 4D if you have it installed.

The default editor is the latest installed version of Cinema 4D or Cinema 4D Lite.

To select another Cinema 4D installation, select Choose Installation and select the path to the installer in the Rendering and Editing boxes.

Improved composition toolbar for 3D designing

With the improved composition panel toolbar, work faster and without distraction when creating and designing 3D scenes within After Effects. The UI and placement are the same as the default composition toolbar at the bottom of the Composition panel when you work with 2D assets. Once you add 3D content to your scene, the composition panel containing the 3D menu is displayed. After Effects adds more 3D controls to the composition panel toolbar, and controls that are not needed for your current workflow move out into the Composition menu. Learn more about 3D Design space.

How is this composition toolbar different from the old composition toolbar?

Composition thumbnail images

You can choose which frame of a composition to show as a thumbnail image (poster frame) for the composition in the Project panel. By default, the thumbnail image is the first frame of the composition, with transparent portions shown as black.

• To set the thumbnail image for a composition, move the current-time indicator to the desired frame of the composition in the Timeline panel, and select Composition > Set Poster Time.
• To add a transparency grid to the thumbnail view, select Thumbnail Transparency Grid from the Project panel menu.
• To hide the thumbnail images in the Project panel, select Edit > Preferences > Display (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Display (macOS) and select Disable Thumbnails in Project Panel.

More like this

• Creating layers
• Basics of rendering and exporting
• About precomposing and nesting