In this tutorial, you’ll learn a couple of different techniques for extending the length of After Effects templates. Eri shows us both the Cut method for extending After Effects templates, and time stretch method for extending templates. Both methods work well in specific scenarios. Especially, if you don’t have the time or patience to move around hundreds of keyframes.
Transcription
Hey, I am Eri, and today I am going to show you a couple of ways you can extend the duration of your After Effects projects. This is something we get asked a lot, so we decided to make a tutorial showing you how to do it. Here it goes.
This first way to extend a project involves using a simple CUT transition inside your video editing application. It is easy, and it will probably give you the best results. For this tutorial, I will be using Final Cut Pro X, but it works just as good in any editing program. For this example, I will use a portion of one of our awesome templates. As you can see, this is a really cool animation with a placeholder for a shot of video or picture, but it just so happens that my shot is longer than that. So, I need to see the shot for a little bit more before going into the next animation. So, the first thing I am going to do is figure out the out point on my shot. I do this by dropping the opacity of my original shot and laying it on top of the animation. Then you can simply use the blade tool to cut right on that point on both the animation and shot. Bring the opacity back up on the original shot, and move the front end of the animation and drop the front end of the original shot. As you can see going from animation to the original shot is pretty seamless because the action on the shot remains linear. This technique can be useful with just about any of our photo/video templates, and it’s guaranteed to work in most situations.
Another way to play with the duration is re-timing, and if used carefully it can also work really well. Here is an example. In this shot this text animation does not hold as long as I want, so I would love it if it we stayed on that text line a little longer before going into the next one. The first thing we are going to do is split the intro and outro from the hold portion. We will do this using the blade tool again and cutting right after the intro and right before the outro. Then we want to slow down just the portion in the center. Careful here.If you try to slow down too much it may start to feel weird. I usually will not slow down anything more than 30-40%. There, the intro comes in we hold a little longer, and then the outro happens. The deal here is not to slow down the portions of the animations that keeps thing dynamic, but just the moments that we want the viewer to see something a little longer. So that’s it… two simple ways to get sequences lasting a little longer. These techniques provide flexibility when working with after effects templates.
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