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Animating opacity in After Effects CS5 is one of the coolest effects. It is very easy, it is easy to blend different players on your stage, and it is very easy to animate. Let’s take an ‘opacity’ tour.
Opacity might be my favorite attributes to play with because bedroom furniture it is so easy and because it is so obvious. Choose an object, a shape you have added or even a movie and enter ‘t’, the keyboard shortcut for opacity. With your opacity value displayed click the value and move it up and down. Having objects appear and disappear is one of the most useful tools in animation. It plays to your timing; it plays to your sense of sequence. It helps tell your ‘animated’ story.
Every advertisement and movie we see use controlled appearance as part of the message. As different players appear on the stage, they don’t just abruptly drop in from the sky; they ‘fade’ in from the distance and ‘fade out’ as their role is fulfilled.
How do you animate opacity? It is really easy getting started and a great source of new ideas. This is very important. As you begin to familiarize yourself with different tools, the things you can do and say grow with them. If it is easy to have something fade in and out, what if you could synchronize that with other players? What if they could overlap where in one frame their bodies touch or their surroundings trade places?
These are only some of the things we see so often as our politician is walking among the streets, the libraries, the fields of grain, allowing us to essentially mix many messages in a tailored ‘Moment’.
After playing with your opacity settings, seeing your object fade in and out, click the stop watch next to your opacity setting. Make sure your current time setting is at the beginning (‘home’ keyboard shortcut). Set your opacity to 0. Now enter the ‘end’ key to take the shortcut to the end of your movie and move your opacity to 100%.
Enter the ‘home’ key again and then the space bar, the keyboard shortcut to preview your movie. You will see your object gradually appear with its appearance distributed evenly across the time of your composition. After Effects does the math. What if you want it appear in the first couple of seconds? No problem. Move your time indicator to 3 seconds, move the opacity value to 100% and view your movie again.
What if you want your object, let’s say a text message, to fade in during the first 3 seconds, disappear then reappear near the end? That’s easy too but watch how the effect is distributed across the time window it is placed in. You set opacity to 0 at the beginning, 100% at 3 seconds, back to 0 at 5 seconds, and then 100% at 10 seconds. It won’t really ‘reappear’ at 10 seconds; its ‘reappearance’ will be distributed between 5 and 10 seconds.
What can be helpful is setting ‘control’ keyframes. In this example, our text has faded in, then faded out at 5 seconds and we want it to remain out of view until it reappears at 10 seconds. Add a control keyframe just before your 10 second keyframe. Keep your opacity at 0% there. Now your text fades out, it stays out until 9 seconds where you have also set it to be 0%. Then it becomes completely visible in one second, between 9 and 10.
This is easier to view and experiment with than to explain but the lesson is that any setting for any of your animated properties will be distributed between the keyframe settings and this can be a bit of a surprise, until you ‘take control’, using designated keyframes to control where your effects truly begin and end.
