Put all your files in one place - collect files
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Hi, in this video we are going to collect our files. What that means is-- We've used a MP4 in here, and let's say we've used some music, some images. And if we surf all over our hard drive, it's everywhere. I do this at the end of every one of my video, my jobs. I've pulled files that I've downloaded, and stuff I've made. Things from other people, they're all over the place. What I want to do is be able to save them in one little spot, so I've got the record of them. I might kind of save them as an archive, so they're all in one little spot.
To do it, we're going to use this thing called 'Collect File'. But first what I might do is import a few files. So I'm going to bring in you, I might bring in some audio as well, and I'll bring in the Octopus legs. I'm holding 'Command' down to select multiple objects, or 'Control' on a PC. I've got a few of them. I'm going to add my music. Music, I've got random logo. And now I've got random Octopus legs.
So I've got all these files I've used in this project. Now what I want to do is, I'm going to 'Save' it. And I'm going to go 'File', 'Dependencies'. And I'm going to go to 'Collect Files'. Dependency is a weird name for it. 'Collect Files'. If you've come from all of the graphic design background, this is the same as packaging a document out of Illustrator or InDesign. I'm going to 'Collect', 'Reveal'. Find it when I've finished collecting everything. And I'm going to 'Collect'.
Where am I going to stick it? I'll stick it on the 'Desktop'. I'm going to call this one 'BYOL Office with Type'. I'm not sure why I'm calling it that. It's going to go over, I open it up, here it is. So on my 'Desktop', there is a folder called 'BYOL Office with Type'. And in there is my After Effects files. There's a text file, and text files just tells you what was collected. So if you've sent it off to somebody, and they're missing a file, they can check to see what files might be missing. So this, and that, and then footage.
You see, here's my ai file, my MP3. All bits and pieces that I've used for it. This is the nice tidy thing. Say if I want to send this to somebody as well, say I've got somebody else working on the project, I can just right click this now, and go to 'Compress' and now I've got a nice little easy email-able, shareable thing with people. So that is how to collect files using After Effects.