In this tutorial, we walk you through a really cool technique to help you position media in your pre-comped projects. It’s a good method to avoid the need to go back and forth between media placeholders and final compositions.
Transcription
Hello! I am Eri and today I’m going to show you a really cool way to position your pictures or videos on framing devices that live inside some of our After Effects templates.
More specifically, I am talking about situations like this where there’s a lot of framing devices going on in the final comp and perhaps your images are not where you want them to be. This means your shots or pictures.
So here we go, this picture over here for example it’s a person on this, kind of backlight sky and its nice but maybe this person is touching the edge of this framing device. I kind of want him to be more in towards the center. The logical thing to do would be to go to image one for example, where that picture lives, and maybe move it up. Then go to the final comp only to maybe realize that you wanted it in the center.
So if I go back to image one and maybe move it and scale it a little bit more to the left and go to the final comp. And you know? It’s getting close but it’s just kind of a clumsy way to do it and it can be a pain. Well, a pain it is no more.
This is how you do it: first you will click on the composition window and your going to do Command, Option, Shift, and the letter ‘N’. Now you have a couple of things happening here. First, it opened another window over here where you can zoom by just making it fit up to a hundred. This kept the original final comp open here but see what happens now is if I go to image one this window remains. That means that I can have a visual representation of this image in respect to the final comp and that is pretty cool I think. Because that way, I can now move this image up higher or lower and have a clear visualization of the final comp. That way, the position of this picture can be seen right here, live and updating as I move it. So yeah! That’s it! It’s not a lot but I think it’s useful especially when you are dealing with a lot of framing devices such as this template over here. Some of our templates actually work that way and this will be hopefully really helpful for you.
If you liked this tutorial, we’ve got lots of other tutorials for Premiere Pro, After Effects, and filmmaking in general! If you’ve got any questions or want to see another future article topics, leave us a comment down below.
