Transcript of 25 After Effects Secrets YOU Need to Know in 2025

Here are 25 After Effects features that even experienced After Effects users might have missed. Time stretch any footage item by alter option clicking and dragging on the in or out point. And that will speed up or slow down the clip. You can see by exactly how much by clicking on this button down here. This is the stretch amount. You can also click and drag it right there. This also works for pre-MPS. Any footage item, including pre-MPS, can be stretched just by clicking or dragging on that in or out point while holding Alt or Option. I've animated a ball bouncing from the same height at a regular interval. But if I go into the graph editor viewing the value graph and make a selection of these key frames, I'll enable the transform box by clicking on this icon. Now, if I hold down alter option and click and drag on one of the corners, I can skew the key frames. And if I hold shift, this will constrain it to just the vertical distortion. This isn't going to give you a realistic ball bounce, but it's definitely getting you a lot closer. And from here, I can grab selections of key frames. And again, use my transform handles to just modify this to get something that looks a lot more visually appealing with an actual decay curve. You can also proportionally space out your key frames by making a selection of them and holding alter option and then clicking and dragging on the first or last key frame. This will proportionally spread out each one of the key frames between the first and the last. and it works across as many layers and key frames as you have selected. You can very quickly unparent any layer from its parent layer just by control or commandclicking on the parent pickhip for the layer you'd like to disconnect. You can also do this across multiple layers. Just select all of them and hold control or command and click on the parent pickhip and they're immediately disconnected. You can browse the internet and even watch videos directly in After Effects. Just go up to the window menu down to review with frame.io which opens up this extension. give yourself a little bit more room in your workspace for it. Then just open up the website that you want to view in After Effects and click and drag the URL directly into the Frame.io panel and it will instantly open up that website and even play a YouTube video where you have full control over the players. This is a great way to watch tutorials while following along in After Effects. It's also a great way to browse other websites, including my own, where you'll see that I am now offering course bundles at jakenmotion.com that will save you a lot of money if you're interested in multiple courses. And on top of that, I'm currently running a summer sale for 2025 where you can take 20% off everything on my website, including these new course bundles. So, head to jinmotion.com now to check out everything I have to offer and to take advantage of these savings. You can quickly cycle through blend modes by holding shift and pressing the plus or minus key to go forward or backward in the blend mode list. You can point any layer in the direction that it's traveling just by right-clicking on the layer, going up to transform, and down to autoorient. This will allow you to orient it along the path. And now my arrow is always going to point in the direction that it's moving. You can also adjust the rotation from that point and the orientation will be offset from its default value. And when you're working on an animation like this that needs to have smooth flowing motion, but you have a bunch of key frames that are creating that motion, you can take advantage of roac across time key frames. So if I select this second key frame right here, which is right here on the motion path, if I right click on it and go to rove across time, the icon is going to change to being a smaller circle. And it's now going to automatically space out that key frame between the two key frames on either side of it and try to create the smoothest motion possible based on the motion path. It's kind of allowing you to forget about the timing of that key frame and just say I want that point of my motion path to exist wherever it needs to to give me smooth motion on either side of it. And it works with easing. If we go into the graph editor and I connect these two handles with alter option clicking on that key frame, then I can adjust this easing to be whatever I want it to and create very smooth motion since this key frame is set to be rove across time. And with just a little bit more work, we can end up with something that's extremely smooth with really only having four key frames to worry about. You can transfer and link almost any property in After Effects from one layer to another. Just select what you want to copy, go up to edit, copy with property links, or control alt C or commandoption C on a Mac, and then paste on any other layer just like normal. And those effects and properties are now linked with expressions to the source properties. So I can adjust my original effect properties and see them being updated in the copy as if they were existing on the same layer. Speaking of expressions, you can double tap the E key to reveal all of the expressions on all of the layers in your composition or selected layers. So, if I just select one layer and double tap the E key, those are all of the properties with expressions from our copy with property links function. And while you're editing an expression, you can increase or decrease the size of the font just by holding control or command and using your mouse wheel to scroll in or out. This is temporary, though. As soon as you apply the expression, it goes back to its default size. But if you go to the preferences under edit preferences and then all the way down off my screen recording is scripting and expressions. This is where we can customize the way that our expressions editor works including the font size. So I could increase this up to a maximum of 24 pixels and see a preview of how large that is and it will permanently change that setting. We can also change all kinds of things about the syntax as well as the colors. They're fully customizable and there's also a large list of presets. So you could change it to something else and click okay. And then when you go in to edit your expressions, we're going to see those changes in place. Almost any property in the After Effects UI can be adjusted at faster or slower speeds than default. If I increase or decrease the contrast of this fractal noise just by clicking and dragging, it's the default rate. If I hold shift, it's going to increment that 10 times as quickly. And if I hold down control or command instead, it will go 10 times slower. So you can make very fine-tune adjustments this way or very large adjustments with the shift key. And that applies to just about any property or panel inside of After Effects. Adjust color properties directly in the timeline without even opening up the color picker. Just hold down alter option and click and drag left and right to adjust the hue and altclick and drag up or down to adjust the saturation. Now, when editing a shape layer that uses a gradient, it's easy to lose track of these handles that control the start and end of the gradient. If I click off and then click back on, they're not there anymore. But all you have to do to reveal them again is double click on the shape and there they are. You can adjust them however you need to. Just make sure that that gradient is actually within a shape group. If it's outside of a group in just the parent contents folder, it won't show up when you double click. And if you've ever wanted to create controllers for these handles or any 2D point control in After Effects, you can do that just by right-clicking on that property, going down to key frame assistant, and then choose null controllers for positional points. And that's going to generate a null object that is labeled based on the layer and property that you had rightclicked on. And then link that property to the null object using expressions. And now I can click and drag this around and even parent this null object to other layers, allowing me to precisely control where the start and end of that gradient handle is. And like I said, that works for any positional control inside of After Effects. You might have already known that you can save presets from any number of effects, but did you know that you can apply that preset directly in the effect? I'm going to add a grid effect to this shape layer. And let's say that I want it to be square. So, I'm going to change the size from property to width slider, and I'll change the width to 128. So, now I've got a large square grid. If I want to be able to quickly get back to this grid size without having to change those values every time I apply the effect, I'll come up to the effect controls panel settings, say show animation presets, and now this is going to be visible in every effect. And I can now save the selected effects as a preset. So, I'm just going to call this square grid. This is in my user presets folder for After Effects. So, all I have to do is click save. And now that's going to show up in my effects and presets list as well as the drop-down for the grid effect. So, if I delete this effect and I apply grid one more time, that drop-own menu is going to allow me to choose square grid and I can get to that result very quickly. If you've ever finished a composition and then realized you need to change the size of that composition, you can do it very easily with a built-in script. Just go to file, scripts, scale, composition, and then choose how you'd like to scale it up or down. You can do it with a scale factor. You can enter in a comp width or a comp height. So, I'm just going to change this to two times scale. Click the scale button, and it's going to automatically adjust everything so that we are now working in 4K resolution, and it's preserved all of the animation and camera movement that I had in my original composition. If you ever need access to a composition that exists in a different After Effects project than the one that you're working on, you can import the entire After Effects project. Just select the project that you need, click on import, and it brings it into an After Effects folder with all of the contents of that project. In this case, just one extra comp. When working in a composition with lots of layers, it's important to stay organized, and layer labels is one way to do that. But did you know that you can make a quick selection of every label color by clicking on that color and then saying select label group? That way you can quickly get to a specific set of layers. We can do the exact same thing with key frames. If you make a selection of any number of key frames, you can rightclick, go to label, and then choose from the same label colors that we have for our layers. And just as easily, right-click, go to select key frame label group, and choose between selected layers, all layers, visible key frames on selected layers, or visible key frames on all layers. So, I'm just going to say on all layers, and that makes a selection of all of my red key frames. This is a great way to stay organized with lots of layers and key frames in a composition. When you're working with an audio track in After Effects, it's usually very important that you hear the audio so you can synchronize the motions with it. But After Effects doesn't give you an audio preview when you scrub through the timeline. All you have to do to hear that audio though is hold down control or command while you're dragging and then you can synchronize your motions to that audio very precisely. When you're working with lots of layers in a composition like this one, you can easily bring up any one of these layers by selecting it in the composition viewer and pressing X on the keyboard. That will bring it to the top of the timeline so you don't have to go digging for it. And if you have all the contents of a layer expanded, but you really only need a few properties visible, make a selection of whatever properties you need to see and then double tap the S key to solo those properties. In a very similar way, you could open up all of the properties again and then just remove specific ones by holding alter option plus shift and then clicking on the property that you don't want to see anymore. And that will hide those specific properties or groups within any layer. Those are the 25 After Effects secrets I think you should know about in 2025. I do have one final bonus secret that I'm going to leave you with. But before I do, if there are any After Effects secrets you know about that didn't make this list, leave them down in the comments and maybe I'll make a follow-up video with 25 more After Effects secrets. Now, for this final After Effects secret, I honestly do not recommend that you do this with headphones on. But if you're curious, head over to the effects control panel, hold down shift, and click on the composition name and see what happens.