After Effects: Slideshow

In this lesson i learnt how to make a slideshow with photographs as an introduction to Adobe After Effects. I started by importing the images into After Effects.

The next step is to create a new composition by clicking on the new composition button or going to Composition>New Composition. In the Composition Settings i changed the preset to 'HDV/HDTV 720 25' and set the duration to '0:00:35:00' whilst checking the Frame Rate is 25.

I then select all the layers and grabbed the bars on the timeline and dragged them to the 5 second marker shown on the top of the timeline.

With all the layers still selected I pressed the 'T' on the keyboard which opens the Opacity for the layers. I then moved the Timeline Curser to the beginning on the frame '0s' and then clicked on the stopwatch to create keys on each layer. I then changed the Opacity percentage to 0%.

I then zoomed into the timeline and moved the Timeline Curser to frame 5 and changed the Opacity percentage to 100% which adds more keys on each layer at frame 5.
I moved the timeline to the end of the layers and moved the curser 5 frames backwards and added a key at the current time making more keys appear on the timeline with the Opacity to 100%.
I then moved the curser to the end of the layers on the timeline and changed the Opacity level to 0% which adds more keys to the layers and then zoomed back out.

Next step I closed the layers to hide the Opacity levels. I then pressed 'shift' and dragged the layers one behind each, by pressing 'shift' they will snap to the end of each layer. This has all created a slideshow with a fade in/out transition between each image.

I then changed the composition duration to '0:00:40:00' by going to Composition>Composition Settings. I selected all the layers and dragged them to the end of the timeline.

To add a title layer for the slideshow I selected the Text tool and clicked on the preview window to type a title. I then dragged the end of the layer to the 5 second marker in front of the picture layers and changed the size of the text in the Character Window.

Now I had finished I had to render the slideshow so I selected the composition and went to Composition>Add To Render Queue. Then I clicked on 'Lossless' on the timeline and changed the Format to 'h264' and then clicked on 'Format Options' to change the Profile to 'High', the level to '3.1' and the Bitrate to 10. Then i gave the Output Location and clicked Render.

Here is my slideshow. This is the first time I have ever used 'After Effects' and I thought it was a good introduction to the software by starting with something quite simple to create. However, I did struggle with the understanding of 'Keys' and couldn't get the slideshow to work at first but now I have learnt how to use the Keys and some of the tools on the software.