Adobe After Effects ACP key terms

A saved arrangement of panels such as Project, Composition, Timeline, and Effect Controls. Switching workspaces instantly reconfigures the screen for tasks like animation, effects work, or text editing, and custom layouts can be saved for later recall.

The dialog that defines a composition's frame size, pixel aspect ratio, frame rate, resolution, duration, and background color. These values establish the canvas and timing that every layer placed inside inherits.

The central storage area listing every footage item, composition, solid, and folder in the project. Items are organized into folders here and dragged into the Timeline, where they become layers.

The panel where layers are stacked and arranged over time. It holds the layer switches, keyframe tracks, and time ruler used to build and refine animation, and it can be switched into the Graph Editor view.

Settings that tell After Effects how to read a source file's frame rate, field order, pixel aspect ratio, and color. Correct interpretation prevents stretched images, stuttering playback, and mismatched colors.

Reinterpreting a footage item's frame rate without altering its individual frames, which changes how long the clip plays. It is used to create slow motion or to match sources captured at different speeds.

A lower-resolution stand-in file linked to a full-quality source. Proxies speed up editing and previews, while the final render still uses the original high-quality media.

A command that gathers a project and all of its used footage into one folder. It is the reliable way to hand off or archive work without leaving broken links behind.

An extra channel storing transparency for each pixel, letting a layer composite over those beneath it. Files may be straight or premultiplied, and interpretation must match how they were saved.

A marker on a property's timeline that stores a specific value at a specific time. Two or more markers holding different values create animation, and the spacing between them sets the timing.

The rule governing how values change between keyframes, such as linear, bezier, or hold. It controls acceleration, easing, and whether a value jumps instantly or flows smoothly.

A Timeline mode that plots property values or speeds as editable curves. Dragging handles on those curves gives precise control over easing, overshoot, and motion timing.

A relationship where one layer follows another's position, rotation, and scale without changing its own values. Parenting suits rigs like a hand attached to an arm attached to a body.

Nesting selected layers into a new composition that becomes a single layer in the parent. It simplifies crowded timelines and lets effects apply to a whole group at once.

A layer switch that enables keyframed control over playback speed, including freeze frames, stutters, and reverse motion. Speed is set by the spacing of the time keyframes.

Determines how a layer's pixels combine with those beneath it, such as Multiply, Screen, or Overlay. Modes appear in a column in the Timeline and can also be animated.

Toggle icons in the Timeline that control visibility, quality, motion blur, adjustment status, and locking. They decide how each layer is processed, previewed, and rendered.

An invisible, non-rendering layer used as a controller. Other layers parent to it so that a single set of keyframes can move, rotate, or scale an entire group.

Uses one layer's luminance or alpha to control another layer's visibility. The matte layer is automatically hidden and may sit directly above the filled layer in the stack.

Sets whether a mask adds to, subtracts from, intersects with, or excludes the visible area. Several masks on one layer combine according to these modes to build complex cutouts.

Softens mask edges by a chosen number of pixels, producing gradual transparency instead of a hard line. Feather is animatable and can be set differently horizontally and vertically.

The frame-by-frame drawing and adjusting of mask paths to isolate a moving subject. It is usually paired with feathering or tracking to hide the matte edge and reduce manual work.

A layer that applies its effects to every layer beneath it instead of containing media of its own. It is a fast way to grade, blur, or distort an entire composition.

A saved bundle of effects, keyframes, and settings that can be applied to layers in one step. Presets are browsed in the Effects and Presets panel and can include text or shape behavior.

A vector layer built from paths, fills, strokes, and shape operators. Shapes stay sharp at any scale and can be animated, repeated, and combined procedurally rather than rasterized.

A shape operator that duplicates a shape many times with offsets in position, rotation, scale, and opacity. It builds patterns such as grids, rings, and radiating bursts from one path.

A shape operator that reveals or hides a path between start and end percentages. Animating those percentages produces line-drawing reveals, progress bars, and dashed outlines.

A per-character, per-word, or per-line control inside a text layer that offsets properties like position, scale, rotation, and opacity. Range selectors decide which characters the offset affects.

Controls font, size, leading, kerning, tracking, and fill for selected text. It works alongside the Paragraph panel, which handles alignment, indentation, and line breaks.

A layer switch that adds position, rotation, and orientation along X, Y, and Z axes. Such layers respond to cameras and lights and can intersect each other in space.

A virtual camera that defines the viewpoint of a 3D composition. Its position, point of interest, zoom, and depth of field settings control framing and focus.

Analysis that follows a feature across frames and stores its movement as keyframes. Trackers can stabilize shaky footage or attach effects and layers to moving objects.

Analyzes footage to solve the original camera's movement and places 3D nulls on tracked points. Those points anchor text or objects so they sit correctly in the scene's perspective.

An effect that maps a layer's four corners onto a moving quadrilateral, such as a phone screen or billboard. It is standard for screen replacement and simple planar tracking work.

The panel holding compositions queued for output, each with its own render settings and output module. Items render in sequence to disk or to a watched folder.

A template specifying a rendered file's format, codec, channels, color depth, and audio handling. Several modules can be attached to one render item to produce multiple deliverables at once.

A companion application that encodes compositions into delivery formats such as H.264, ProRes, or HEVC. It queues jobs sent from After Effects and can process them in the background.

The per-channel precision used for a project or an export, typically 8, 16, or 32 bits per channel. Higher depths preserve highlight and shadow detail during heavy color manipulation.

Defines how interlaced video stores each frame as two half-height fields and which field displays first. Wrong settings cause visible jitter or combing on interlaced displays.