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Before we go any further, we need to talk a minute about what After Effects
projects really are. First thing you need to know about After Effects projects,
is that they basically save all of your work. They have this .AEP file
extension, short for After Effects project. Any animation that you make, any
effects that you apply in those settings, all that stuff is saved within the After Effects
project. Now if you are new to the world of video,
this concept will probably be very new to you, but After Effects only saves links
to imported files. So if you import a video file or a Photoshop file for
example, the file is actually not stored in the After Effects project. The After
Effects project only maintains a link to the original file.
So if you move, rename or delete the source file, After Effects will not be
able to find it. This is the way that most video programs work, because video
files are so large, that you wouldn't want them to be on your hard drive, and
store in the project as well. This also allows you to have more flexibility
when you are creating your projects. So you could import things, and
not really worry about increasing the size of your project very much at all. That's
because After Effects project files tend to be very small.
The next thing you need to know is that the .AEP file format for projects, is
not an output format, because most programs don't understand the .AEP file
format, you will need to render out into a common format like a .MOV file or
.AVI file, so that those programs will understand the work that you have done
in After Effects. Also, you could only open up one project at
a time. If you were to go to the File menu, and select File > Open Project,
then it would ask you what you want to do with the current project. Do you want
to save it or close it or whatever? Because it can't have this current project,
and a new current project opened at the same time.
You also create new projects from the File menu. You go into File > New > New
Project. Again, that will completely wipe out everything you have going on, and
start completely fresh from scratch. This is completely different than creating
just a new composition which we will look at in the next chapter.
Notice there are also many options for saving, such as Save As, if you like to
rename a file, or save it in a different location. You save a copy of a
project, you save a copy as an XML file, and you could also increment and save.
Well let's say for example, this project is called After Effects projects. If
we click Increment and Save, it would save this project as After Effects
projects 01. If we click it again, it will be After Effects projects 02, and so on.
Now one other thing you need to be aware of as far as projects go is that
importing is not opening. We will see an Import command, and an Open Project.
Importing is for bringing files into the current project. That we will talk
about in the next movie. But opening again, will open an entirely new project.
One of the cool things what After Effects does, you could actually import an
entire After Effects project. So if you've worked on a project a long time ago,
and there is an element in that project that you want to use in your current
project, you will have to close the current project. You just import the old
project, and use whatever assets from that project you want to use. So that's
what you need to know about After Effects projects.
Again, make sure that you save your projects often. After Effects is fairly
stable, but it does crash from time to time, and sometimes with like tedious
animation jobs, those things are hard to duplicate. So you want to make sure
that your work is backed up. Also remember that After Effects is linking
to your project files. So you might want to get them in a good safe location,
a location that probably won't change, before you import them into your After
Effects projects. Now that we know what projects are, let's
get into importing footage in the next movie.