After Effects - Filling time gaps between footage - Lynda

In this movie we're going to look at a quick and precise way to fill up gaps between footage. If we look at this project, we'll skim it real quick, I have four little diamonds here, a green one, and a blue one, and then a teal one, and then a purple one. You'll notice that the first two are right next to each other. There is no gap between them. But after the blue one, there is a gap, and then the teal one and then another gap, and then the purple one. I don't want these gaps. So here's a quick way to fill up those gaps again quickly and precisely using only keyboard shortcuts. The first thing I want to do is go to the end or the outpoint of the last layer. That would be in this case the blue layer. So I'm going to hit the number 2 on the numeric keypad to select that layer. Then I'm going to hit the letter O to jump to its outpoint. Then I'm going to hit the Page Down key to advance one more frame beyond that. Next I'm going to select the teal layer. I can do that by hitting the number 3 on the numeric keypad, or by pressing Command+Down arrow or Ctrl+Down arrow on the PC. Next to make the teal endpoint, I'm going to go to my Current Time Indicator. I'm going to hit the Left bracket key. Now I realize that that's a lot of steps, but we have one more to go. So we'll go through it again, a little bit more quickly this time. I'm going to hit O to jump to the outpoint of the teal layer. Then I'm going to advance it one more frame because we don't want both of these diamonds on at the same frame. Hit Page Down. Now I'm going to press Command or Ctrl+ Down arrow to select the purple layer. Then I'm going to press the Left bracket key. That's the key immediately to the right of the letter P on your keyboard to make the endpoint of the purple layer snap to where the current time indicator is. Now what I'm going to do, just for the sake of previewing, I'm going to press O to get the outpoint of the purple layer. Then I'm going to press the letter N as in Nancy to make this the end of the work area bar. Now we can preview all of the diamonds by hitting 0 on the numeric keypad or just by pressing the Spacebar and now there are no gaps between these diamonds. So again, we used the keyboard shortcut to jump to the end of the first layer, or in other words, the layer at the beginning of the gap. We advance one more frame beyond that. Then we press the Left bracket key to make the endpoint of the layer at the end of the gap snapped to the frame immediately after the layer before the gap. Now once you practice with those keyboard shortcut steps a few times, you'll get the hang of it and you'll find that it's not only easier and quicker because there are keyboard shortcuts, but also it's just a more accurate way, more precise way to fill up gaps between footage as well.