Quick Tips

We're going to be putting out another Quick Tips volume this week, and so I'm going to put those up here so you guys can see them early.

Also, I'm thinking of switching around the way some of these tiers work. I find that it's more difficult for me to keep up with this while I'm in the middle of projects, so I'd be offering more free stuff (textures, presets, maybe even songs) for each tier. So I think it'd probably be a benefit to you guys, while making it easier for me to bring you guys extra content. More on that soon.

Anyway, let's get to the tips!

1. Guide Layer your audio—if you have a main comp, and you need audio in your precomps for timing, make them guide layers so they won't play in the main comp and double up your volume!

2. You can actually reverse keys in the graph editor. Select the keys in the graph and it gives you handles you can flip. (Credit to Victoria Nece, Product Manager for After Effects)

3. In properties with the chain link (like scale or size properties) you can option+click on the chain icon (or where it should be) to set the make them equal. (Credit to Vimeo user Jorge Sorbara)

4.  Radial gradient fill on a circle shape—change the highlight length and it looks like sunlight passing over a planet.

5.  CC HexTile + smearing looks like a bug’s eye (extreme smearing is like pixels, kind of) <--- this one is straight from my notes so I'll probably have to show an example in the actual tutorial.

6. Graph edit, click line, info panel has min/max values - Drew Kerr on Reddit about the audio amplitude tutorial

7. Select a ton of keyframes (like a hundred layers worth), by clicking and dragging where there are no keyframes, then when you get to the last layer, keep dragging and move the frame over the keys so that they all select at once. Otherwise, it gets slower and slower with every keyframe you select.

8. Just like shift+dragging values increases them by 10x instead of 1x, you can command+drag values to go in smaller increments, usually tenths.

Thanks for your support!