Hi there, in this video we're going to look at Easing. Basically it's going to turn boring animation into something a little bit more lifelike, and interesting. So the bottom one is going to be boring, the top one is going to be nice, with Easing. Boring, nice. Boring, nice. See? Easing just adds a little bit of life to pretty much any animation in After Effects. Let's go and do that now.

So to work on Easing, we're going to click on our 'Icon1 House'. And what we're going to do is twirl this down so we can see the Keyframes that we're working on. Now, this can be quite complicated, as in, we've got, we can see, Anchor Point, and Position, it's quite messy, especially when you start twirling down a few of these. Gets all kind of ugly looking. To make it a little nicer, is have this layer selected, have it completely twirled up and click the 'U' key on your keyboard. All that does is that it brings down only the attributes that have Keyframes applied to them. So the stuff you're probably going to work with. So it's hiding Anchor Point and Position, they're still there. You can close it up, open them back up. But just type 'U'. Keeps everything nice and clean while you're working.

I'm going to get my Play Head close, hit the '+' key to zoom in. Now at the moment, it's doing this kind of, like it's not very nice, I'm going to turn off the sound. See these here, I turn these off just so that I can't hear the music. The problem is, if we export it, it will have no music and voice over, so make sure you turn them back on. Yes, they're a bit Powerpointy. Just kind of like appears a bit lame. So what I want to do is apply Easing. Now what a lot of people do, is they'll select this Keyframe and this Keyframe, so I'm holding down 'Shift' and click both of them, they go blue. Right click any one of them. Actually you can click 'F9' if you're on a PC. And that applies 'Easy Ease'. If you're like me, on a Mac, and F9 opens up a bunch of other things like iTunes, or something you can't use that shortcut. But if you right click any of them, go to 'Keyframe Assistant', and there's 'Easy Ease'. That there changes them from diamonds to these little hourglasses. And it gives it a little bit of Easing. Watch this. It's better, a little hard to see but it gives it a little bit of resistance at the beginning and the end. Gives it a little bit of life. And that's going to be a huge part of this class. We're going to look at Easing, plus a bunch of other tricks to give our Icons a bit of anthropomorphism.

So what we're going to is-- so Easy Ease is great, I never use it because I like to crank it up even higher. So to do that you can manually type it in. So I'm going to right click it, and we're going to go to this one. Instead of 'Assistant', go to 'Keyframe Velocity'. So what Easy Ease does is it changes it from 0 to 33.3%. And that's kind of like, gives it a little bit of influence but I like to crank it right up to 75. 75 for both of these. Both the in and out points. Works fine, click OK. So it's kind of like an Easy Ease, but it's like an extreme version. Now click back, and watch. I like it lots more anyway. Just got a better flow to it.

If it's going a little fast, like mine is, I'm just going to click on one of these icons and separate them out. That's got a nicer feeling to it. That my friends is considered Ease. We're actually using Velocity but you can use those terms in this case interchangeably. Now we could do it to the Fade In. So I'm going to zoom out, go back, I'm going to minus out a little bit. See my whole animation. Remember, this Text fades in. So to see, click on the Text Layer.

How do I see just the Keyframes we made for this, remember the Fade In. That's right, clicking 'U' on the keyboard. So here's my Keyframes. Now I could do Easing for this but for Opacity, I can't see the difference. You might decide that you play around with it and you're like, you can see the difference in Easing and Opacity, and that's totally fine. Doesn't really matter what Velocity you play around with it, there's not a whole lot of difference when you're playing with Transparency or Opacity. So I'm just going to leave those and get on to the next video.