After Effects - Animating a star - Lynda

Continuing on with the Step 3 project from the Chapter 02 folder, we are going to do here is adjust properties and animate the star. First let's look at adjusting properties. If I click on the Rings layer and hit the letter T that will bring up the Opacity Setting. I want to take this down to about 30%, so I'm going to click here and type in 30. Next, I'm going to hit the letter S to show me the Scale property. Scale controls the size of an object. I could click on one of these numbers here and drag to the right to increase the size. Now I actually want this to be much bigger, so I'm going to click in this field and type in 1600, and hit Enter. Now if you had a photo or video that you scaled up this much the quality would be terrible, but because these are shapes in After Effects you can scale them up as big as they want and they will still be razor sharp. Let's do the same thing to the Sun layer, and I select Sun, hit the letter T to review the Opacity property and click- and-drag down to the left until you get to 30 or just click and type in the number 30, your preference. Let's also hit the letter S and again we can increase the Scale here as we drag to the right or left we decrease it. I'm going to click in here and I'm going to type in 1800. And again, because this is a shape, we don't have to worry about any loss in quality. So now our project is starting to come together a little bit here. Next is go ahead and hit the letter R for Rotation. Now rotation is a little bit different because we are actually going to animate this. We are going to have it change overtime. So here's how we are going to do this. Firstly to make sure that my Current Time Indicator is at the first frame, and then there are three steps to creating an animation. We will be revisiting this pattern over-and-over again throughout this training series. What I'm going to do is first click this stopwatch, then I'm going to move in time. In this case I'm going to go to the end of my composition, and then I'm going to change the value. There's two digits here, we will explain that later when we talk about Rotation. For now I'm going to click in the second value and type in 50 and hit Enter. By doing this we have told After Effects so we want it to be at its default rotation state at the first frame, and at the end we want it to rotate 50 degrees. So in roughly eight seconds After Effects is going to automatically animate this thing 50 degrees for us and if we scrub the Timeline we could see that happening. Now we didn't have to animate these rings because they already contain animation when we applied them. That's just the nature of that Preset. You might be looking at this project thinking, well, there is only one more step and it looks terrible right now. So what are we going to do? Well, in the next step we are going to answer all questions because we're going to look at effects. So let's go to the File menu, save this as Step 4 in the Chapter 02 folder and let's get to the Effects movie next.