Hi, in this video were going to look at making a comp automatically form the video that you might already have. So in the first video there, or the last one we look at making a new composition and that might be because you're just going to start new composition, you're going to start making your own type animation, its going to be full on motion graphics, no actual live video. But you might be using after effects slightly differently, you might have an existing video that you're going to sex up with after effects. So instead of making a comp and then trying to put the video in it, were going to make a comp from that video automatically. The reason this is good is if you make a comp like we had on the first video there or the last video and then try to put the video in it, you might find that it’s the wrong size, it might be a slightly different frame rate and things don’t quite match up and you end up having to stretch things and move things around. So you may as well just make a comp that’s exactly the same as the video.

This is really good, mainly because what happens, people often they’ll make a comp following my advice using the HD version and they might have some video footage that is lower quality, it might be 720, which is standard definition and they'll try and scale it up and there's no real point in doing that, you may as well just keep whatever version you’ve got, if you're scaling it up its just going to make the file size bigger but no extra quality.

So to do it, lets import our video, so I've got something existing here, were going to go import, were going to go to file, now on your desktop or wherever you downloaded the exercise files, if you haven’t yet, there's some exercise files to download and unzip and you can play along. You can use your own videos obviously but if you want to, check out the website and download the exercise files. So lets open him up, and in here we’re looking for the one called particle background mp4, so just a video that I've made. Were going to actually make this particle thing later on, its quite cool. But were just going to use it as a background graphic at the moment for our type animation that were going to do next.

So I've got a video, there's my first comp, he's a little bit used to this now we can delete him. But well just ignore him. There's my video, to make a comp from him, right click him, go to new comp from selection, and you see its given the exact same name, this is the little icon that were looking for, this little tape wheel here. or this film reel, this is the comp window, this is the raw footage and this is the comp that’s come form it. And thank you after effects, what its done is its made a comp the exact same size, the exact same frame rate to match my video so then I can go through, I'm going to click in here and I'm going to hit space bar and it should play my little animation, can you see the little dots moving around. Its just a little particles that were going to do later on, just as a background for our type. Hit space bar again to stop it. Now you might see, mines cropped round the edges, I'm going to go down here for 100% and go to fit. So that just fits in there so I can see everything.

So that’s the way to make a comp from a video, and I do this very often especially if I'm doing things like screen captures for this courses that I do for you. I cant get them at HD because of my laptop and the screen recording software, it comes through at about 720 standard definition so I just use those rather than trying to scale it up to HD for no reason.

Alright, that’s how to match a comp magically to your video.