- About Classroom in a Book
- Prerequisites
- Installing After Effects
- Optimizing performance
- Restoring default preferences
- Copying the lesson files
- How to use these lessons
- Additional resources
- Adobe certification
- Getting to Know the Workflow
- Getting started
- Creating a project and importing footage
- Creating a composition and arranging layers
- Adding effects and modifying layer properties
- Animating the composition
- Previewing your work
- Optimizing performance in After Effects
- Rendering and exporting your composition
- Customizing the workspace
- Controlling the brightness of the user interface
- Finding resources for using After Effects
- Checking for updates
- Review answers
- Review questions
Copying the lesson files
The lessons in Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom in a Book use specific source files, such as image files created in Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Illustrator®, audio files, and prepared QuickTime movies. To complete the lessons in this book, you must copy these files from the Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom in a Book DVD (inside the back cover of this book) to your hard disk.
- On your hard disk, create a new folder in a convenient location and name it AECS4_CIB, following the standard procedure for your operating system:
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Windows: In Explorer, select the folder or drive in which you want to create the new folder, and choose File > New > Folder. Then type the new name.
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Mac OS: In the Finder, choose File > New Folder. Type the new name and drag the folder to the location you want to use.
Now, you can copy the source files onto your hard disk.
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- Copy the Lessons folder (which contains folders named Lesson01, Lesson02, and so on) from the Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom in a Book DVD onto your hard disk by dragging it to your new AECS4_CIB folder.
When you begin each lesson, you will navigate to the folder with that lesson number, where you will find all of the assets, sample movies, and other project files you need to complete the lesson.
If you have limited storage space on your computer, you can copy each lesson folder individually as you need it, and delete it afterward if desired. Some lessons build on preceding lessons; in those cases, a starting project file is provided for you for the second lesson or project. You do not have to save any finished project if you don’t want to, or if you have limited hard disk space.
About copying the sample movies and projects
You will create and render one or more QuickTime movies in some lessons in this book. The files in the Sample_Movie folders are examples that you can use to see the end results of each lesson and to compare them with your own results. These files tend to be large, so you may not want to devote the storage space or time to copying all the sample movies before you begin. Instead, find the appropriate Sample_Movie folder on the book’s DVD and copy the file it contains onto your hard disk as you begin work on a lesson. (You cannot play movies from the DVD.) After you finish viewing the movie, you can delete it from your hard drive.
The files in the End_Project_File folders are samples of the completed project for each lesson. Use these files for reference if you want to compare your work in progress with the project files used to generate the sample movies. These end project files vary in size from relatively small to a couple of megabytes, so you can either copy them all now if you have ample storage space, or copy just the end project file for each lesson as needed, and then delete it when you finish that lesson.