The Power of Precomps in After Effects

In this tutorial we'll take a look at the true power of precomps in After Effects.

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Partial, Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇

Joey Korenman (00:17): What's up Joey here at School of Motion, bringing you day 15 of the 30 days of after effects. Today, I'm going to talk about pre comps. Now, if you've used after effects for more than a week, you probably know about pre composing, but in this lesson, I want to reinforce the power of pre comps. And a good way of doing that I found is to show just how quickly you can build very, very complex animations. That really don't take that much work. And don't have very many key frames, but actually look really cool and complicated. I'm hoping that along the way, you're going to pick up some tricks about working with pre comps. Now don't forget to sign up for a free student account, so you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on school emotion. Now let's hop in and make something cool.

Joey Korenman (01:03): So let's talk about pre comps. Um, and one thing I wanted to say about pre comps is that when I was starting out with after effects, they sort of freaked me out because you know, you do all this work and then you, you pre-com it. And all of a sudden you can't see your work anymore. And it feels like you're hiding key frames from yourself. And God forbid, you want to go in and tweak something. Now it's kind of hidden and it's, it's kind of, it makes it trickier. Um, and you have to manage it. Um, this is actually something after effects artists have been complaining about for years is the fact that you can't sort of see your key frames while they're in a pre-camp, um, very easily anyway. So, um, what I want to show you is some of the really, really, really cool things you can do with pre comps.

Joey Korenman (01:41): Um, this is a little bit more of a beginner tutorial, but, uh, I'm just going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing the pre comps until you get something that looks really, really complicated like this. Um, and hopefully what I'll show you guys is that this is actually really easy to make. Um, it it's, it's shockingly easy. So, uh, all right, so let's just hop in and get started and let's talk about pre-com. So I'm going to make a comp a 1920 by 10 80. All right. And I'm just going to call this square. Okay. Um, all right. So first thing I want to do is just animate something really simple. All right. I'm going to turn on my guides here by hitting the apostrophe so I can kind of make sure I have things in the center where they need to be, and I'm just going to make a square.

Joey Korenman (02:24): So a, an easy way to make a square and make sure it's in the middle of your comp is go to, uh, go to your shape layer tool here, grab a rectangle tool and just double click that button. And what that'll do is it'll make a shape layer that's right in the middle of your comp. Um, and then you can come into the shape layer settings here and Turrell open the rectangle and the rectangle path, and then you can unlock this size property. So the width and the height aren't linked anymore, and just make the width and the height the same. And then you can scale that down. And now you have a perfect square, right in the middle of your comp. You can do the same thing with a circle too. It's pretty useful. Make sure that, um, you know, if you rotate this thing, are you doing anything to it?

Joey Korenman (03:02): It's right in the middle. Um, and what I want to do, let me rename this square and I don't want to fill on it. Uh, I do want a stroke. So what I'm going to do is maybe it had like a, a two pixel stroke. And I think I had some nice kind of pink color in there. So, so let's get rid of the fill a quick way to do that. As you can click on the word fill, if you have this selected, uh, it brings up this little box and then you can just hit this guy and now it gets rid of the fill. It's kind of a neat little shortcut. Okay. So now we have our square and let's just do a simple little animation with it. Okay. So, um, you know, here's a simple thing. We'll have it start scaled at zero and then we'll go forward, you know, a second and we'll have it go up to 100.

[baroqueit]

WE ARE NOW 10 LAYERS DEEP---dude, this is just like Inception. so cooool~

[FilmProductionWrkShp]

brilliant teacher - thanks for giving the shortcuts really helpful!

[drewspartz]

This is one of the most incredible hands on tutorials I've ever seen. I love how you showed all these little tricks to make something simple look beautiful. Every other tutorial on Youtube barely uses actionable and relevant examples at all.

[lavtekk]

I love the fact that he did two separate examples, and the one from the tutorial is more simple, but he explains it so well, that now I understand and can appreciate the things that he did for the first one.
That's how you teach! Great content

[TheIanpow]

Thank you for this Joey. I have watched 100's of AE tutorials on YouTube and I have to say this is the best one so far. So informative and useful with so many shortcuts etc which can be used when working on other projects. Being able to take someone from a blank comp right through to the end with a fantastic and professional final animation is very skillful. I appreciate just how much thought you must have put into this and will be recommending this channel to everyone!

[BinaryMethods]

One of the most thought through instructional videos I've found. Well done

[craftycurate]

Awesome thanks! It's not just the main tutorial content itself, but all the tips and tricks e.g. keyboard shortcuts you throw in that double its usefulness. It's the same with your other tuts. Great stuff!

[loveinmendoza]

is not only important to make good tutorials video, but also the empathy of the guy talking with the ppl who are watching the video, like telling he was afraid of pre-compose too at the begining! je tyvm

[dallasroberts]

Best channel I have found! Learning so many great tips with these tuts. Thanks so much.

[ribahnasir]

Thanks for great tutorial. I laways tried to avoid using pre-comp in AE but this tut really shows great power of using them. Thanks again. Subscribed.

[ennbee]

Watching this video got me excited about motion graphics again - great use of a simplistic function fer an incredible result!

[shoraspacech.]

Usually, i won't spend my time on so long 40+ minutes video, but this video really drags me in, and it so perfect for me. It makes that cool animation is looking so easy. Thankss~

[rakpat]

Love your style - the way you speak, the way you explain, the way you teach! Excellent stuff - learnt a lot!

[mvf]

Brilliant and simple. The first Tut in AE I felt engaged- start – finish!

[kwackkwack]

School of Motion is the best thing to ever happen. I’ve decided to change career and am pursuing MoGraph. College student again and these videos are soooo helpful!

[Darriebp]

Many thanks for showing it has inspired to learn more about After Effects, Very cool.

[gabrielhartley]

Wow—this is an incredible illustration and resource! I woke up this morning thinking that as a beginner in the After Effects world, I need a better understanding of precomps. And this was the perfect first shot at diving into that! Thanks so much for making this available.

[KUTVimaging]

Such a fantastic Tutorial!!!! So many helpful shortcut keys given out during the session! Awesome Job! thanks so much!

[chazthetic]

This tutorial was awesome and I picked up a whole bunch of other things unrelated to precomps that helped me in my pieces!

[maneisdmitry]

Useful techniques, easy to follow, nice to watch.Thank you