3.1 Horizontal Transition

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the modern animated transitions course. In this lesson we'll learn how to create a horizontal slide transition. So let's begin by creating a new composition and after effects by clicking on the New Composition button here. And for this tutorial we're going to go for a size of 1920 by 1080, with a frame rate of 30 frames per second, and a duration of four seconds. Let`s change this to four seconds here, like so. And then let's go ahead and name this Horizontal Slider, and then click OK. And then once we've created our new composition, we want to go to Layer, New and Solid to Create a new solid. And for this one that we want to just have a color of whites, like so. Click OK, and this will act as our first slider element. Now, you'll see that we have a new white solid layer, which fills up our preview window. And before we start to animate it, let's give it a few effects so that we can add things like color to it. So to do this we need to go to Effect and then we need to go to Generate and Select fill here, and this will automatically add a fill effect to our white solid layer, making it easier to control the color, should we want to change it later on. Now all we have to do is go to the effects controls panel at the top here, and then click on the colour square to change it. So let's go ahead and change this colour now and we want to start with a nice blue color. Now fortunately I have the color code for this. So we're just going to go with 4CC3D9 to start, and then click OK. And then the next effect we're going to add is a subtle drop shadow effect, to add this go to Effect, Perspective and then Drop shadow. Again, this will automatically be added to our layer which we can then edit in the effects control panel at the top here. So for this we want to make sure that we have a color of black for our shadow, like so, then we want an opacity of 17%, direction of 135 degrees with a distance of five and a softness of 88 like so. And this will give us a nice subtle shadow that will be displayed on top of our footage and at the slider layers. Excellent. Now we're ready to animate our layer. So let's make sure that we're at the very beginning of our timeline. So let's select the white solid layer. Press P to bring up our position. And then we want to go ahead and hit the stopwatch here to create a key frame. Now we just want to move our timeline over to just about, just over one second, like so. And then we want to create another key frame, and then we're going to move about half a second in front of that. So at around here, create a another keyframe. And then finally, we want to move to just over two seconds to create our final keyframe like so. And this is how we're going to animate our, our layer here. So for the very first keyframe, so make sure that's our timeline is all the way over to the left, we want to go ahead and use the Move Tool and move our layer to the left out of the viewer, like so. Then when we move to our first keyframe, so you can see now that as I'm scrubbing the timeline forward, we have this little animation of our solid moving from the left to the right. And over here we want to keep the layer for about half a second before moving it to the right here, all the way off screen like so. All right, so for our first keyframe, we have a value here of -972. Then for our middle two keyframes, the value stays at 960. And then for our last keyframe here, we have a value of 2898. Excellent, so now if we go ahead and preview our animation, you can see how this is starting to take shape. Now, the movement or the speed of our animation needs a little bit of tweaking. So let's go ahead and fix that. So I'm just going to bring the timeline up here so you can see what I'm doing. Let's go ahead and click on the first keyframe, right click, go to Keyframe Assistant, and we want to select Easy Ease Out, for the second keyframe right click, go to Keyframe Assistant, and then we want to select Easy Ease In, and then for the third one go to Easy Ease Out, and then for the last one, go to Easy Ease In, like so. And now if we go ahead and preview our animation now, you'll see that the speed has improved a little bit. So it just makes the speed of our animation just a little bit smoother. Like so. Awesome, now all we need to do is duplicate these layers to add more color. So let's go ahead and select the white solid layer. Just gonna hide the position here for now. And then let's go ahead and press Ctrl D on the keyboard three more times to create three more duplicates or three more colors that we're going to use. Cool. Now let's go ahead and color in each one. So for the second solid, we're going to have a new color. So I think this one's going to be a yellow color. So the color code here I've got is FFC65T, so I've got a nice yellow color there. And so I'm just going to hide the previous layers so you can see what colors we're using. And now for the third layer, I'm going to select the third layer. And this color is going to have a orange color, so it's going to be F16645, like so. And then for the last solid let's go ahead and make it pure white, like that. Cool. Now you'll see that the problem we have here is all of the layers are on top of each other. So we don't see all of the colors. So what we want to do is we want to stagger the animation a little bit. So in order to do that, what we want to do is, let's go ahead and hide the top two layers for now. And let's go ahead and move our timeline to a position of say 0.8 seconds. And bring the second layer here, just so it starts the animation a little bit later than the first layer. And then for our third color, let's go ahead and move this forward to about 0.18, like so, I move that over here. And then for our final layer we want to move this to about 1.4 seconds like so. Then unhide that layer. You can see how each of our layers start their animation slightly later than the last. Now the problem we have here now is during this time here, we want all of our colors to pause slightly, so they all need to pause in the middle and that needs to sync up as well. So for this, we need to adjust the layers individually. So let's go ahead and open up the position. So press P on the layers here, so on the second layer, press P, so we can see where our keyframes are, I'm just going to hide the top two layers again. Now on the second layer, we want to move the second keyframe to about 1.12. So let's bring that there, so 1.12, and we want to set the position of this to 481. And so the same has to happen to the third keyframe. So let's set the third keyframe a little bit later as well. So 2.6, so let's bring that back over here. And we want to make this a position of 481 as well. And let's right click this keyframe, and Easy Ease that. So you can see now we've got a nice pause In the middle here, where both these colors are showing at the same time. And then for our fourth keyframe, we want to set this one at about over here, so 2.22, and then that should be fine as its final position. Okay, so, let's bring out our third color, which is the orange. Press P on the keyboard to see where the keyframes are, and we want to set the second keyframe at two seconds, so just over two seconds, 2.02 and bring that over here, like so. And we want to make this a position of -2, like so. And then on the third keyframe, let's bring this to 2.13, like so, and then we want to right click Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease that. And then for our fourth keyframe, let's take this to just over three seconds. So 3.05, and move that, click and drag that over there, and then make sure that's its final value which is 2898, excellent. So now as we scrub down here, you'll see there should be a pause just over here. So our third key frame, we need to make this value the same as our second key frame, which is -2. And now hopefully you'll see a nice pause in the middle here, like so. Now let's go to our final solid. Press P on the keyboard to see where its position keyframes are. Now on the second keyframe, let's bring this to about 2.15 and bring that second keyframe over here, and let's put this at -483 as well. And then for the third keyframe, we also want to make this -483, but let's bring this to just over two seconds, so it's 2.2, right click, Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease, and let's make this at -483, like so. And then for the final key frame which is going to be at 3.15, and let's make this 2898 like so. So, hopefully, at around the middle here we'll have a nice pause where all four colors are showing. Now you'll notice as we scrub back and forth, in our timeline, we've got these black spaces here that are showing. Now, this is quite an easy fix what we have to do from here is find out where along our timeline, this color is showing. And let's go ahead and duplicate the layers, so let's name these layers first, so the first layer, let's right click and Rename. Or you can just simply select it, hit Return on the keyboard. I'm just going to name this O1 the first layer, O2 for the second layer, O3 for the third and O4 for the fourth, just to make it easily identifiable. We want to duplicate the first layer, so press Ctrl D to duplicate that. This will be 01 and then we just want to reduce the size of this layer, like so. Just so that it covers the area where it moves, now first of all, we wants to remove the keyframes, so press P on the keyboard, highlight these keyframes, press Delete and this should successfully hide that dark spot there. So press the Eye button here so we can see where the window is. So it goes from here to here, so that's where the dark spot is. So you can reduce that a little bit further. And then if we unhide that, we'll see it's now covered by the blue. And you'll see we've got another dark spot here, so this needs to be covered by yellow. So let's scrub over here, find our second layer. We want to duplicate that press Ctrl D, press P on the keyboard, remove the key frames, press Delete and let's go ahead and cut this to where the dark spot is showing. Like so. So I'm just going to see where the dark spot is, so it goes up to there, and starts around here. I think it's showing again and you'll see that we've got a nice yellow cover here. And then that's it, cool. So now let's go ahead and press the Play button on our Preview to see how it works, awesome. Now we have a nice, horizontal transition animation. So that's it for this video. In the next video, we'll learn how to create a rotational transition. See you all there.