Hey there, in this video were going to look at projects vs compositions. So when you first open up after effects you get this little welcome video, what were going to do is were going to click close it, and were going to discuss what a project is vs a composition.

So think of a project, as the housing for your project. It’s the main file that you'll open on your desktop and within that project, you need compositions. At least one, think of compositions as pages in a document. And a project as the housing for it all. So when I've got after effects open here, I've already been given one untitled document, so you don’t even have to start a new document. You can if it feels good, you can go to file, you can go to new, you can go to project. Nothing really happens, you’ve just got the same window. So you cant really have after effects open without at least one project open and it might just be this untitled one.

So what were going to do is were going to save it, and what well do is, even then it wont let us save, you can see there its greyed out, it just means that we don’t have a composition. So a project without a composition or a document without any pages isn’t very useful. So to create a new composition or a page within this document, we need to go to file, and its not in here. That’s the weird bit about compositions, is that it feels like it’s really important to have compositions, but they’ve, in after effects one of the weird programs where they’ve snuck it over here under composition. You can still use your shortcut, command N or control N on a pc. And you click on new composition. And this is how you create a new page. I'm just going to leave the defaults. Well look at the new compositions window in the next one but you see there I've got at least one comp now and now I can go to save, and I can save my little project. And what were going to do in this, well do it in the next video but you can save it onto your desktop, well leave it there for the moment.

Now, just so you know you can have more than one comp. Let me show you one of my projects, file, and I'm going to go to open recent. And it’s going to say, say you can only have one project open at one time, you can see it’s trying to the one that I had there. I hadn’t really done anything useful so I'm going to hit don’t save. But you can only have one project open at one time. So normally when were working through this class especially, were only going to have one composition, were going to be dealing with one bit of type animation, it might be one bit of character animation or one bit of motion graphics. So well probably only have one comp like we saw in the last part. But in this one here, can you see I actually have, there's about 40 or 50 compositions in this one. so if they’ve given us pages in a document, this one here just happens to have lots of pages now the reason I have this is that I've done this one intro, watch this, if I double click him, here’s my comp here I'm going to slide it back, hit the space bar on my keyboard and its going to play through and it plays the little logo and then the intro for my Chinese version of the websites. Now that’s great, now I've got 50 videos, so what I've had to do is copy and paste this, and literally you just control c control v or edit copy, edit paste when you select on these guys. And you can just create lots and lots of versions. And what I've done is I've copied it, pasted it, opened this one and just changed the text because it’s the exact same animation but with slightly different text. So depending on your project, if you're doing lots of different titles, you might just have one project and lots of compositions within it. When you export these compositions they're all exported as their own separate little movies.

Alright, so hopefully you’ve got an understanding of what a project is, the housing, the outer wrapper and a composition you need at least one within the document and that’s where you put your animation, in that comp. Alright, see you in the next video.