Adobe After Effects 7 - How to Use the Flow Chart Option

This content requires Flash

To view this content, JavaScript must be enabled, and you need the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player.

Video Transcript

The final button we click again, let us take a look at is a flow channel option. Now, I am going to come over here and close down also these stricks composition; so we can see our full four views in the main window and if we look down in the lower right hand side of our comp view here. The last icon will activate the flow chart.

Now what it does, you will notice it opens in a separate viewer. It is very handy you can still switch back and forth between the two. The flow chart is fairly straight forward. Again, you can hold by your space bar to give you the hand tool and scroll this around to look at it.

The one you are seeing is a basic flow chart breakdown of how our common project is being constructed. This is the name of the composition over here on the left hand side, the small plus next to it.

It tells us if we have expanded out the view so we can see its contents. You go ahead and click on that, you will see that the entire breakdown just zooms back into the left hand side, clicking on it again will then expand it.

Now, what we are seeing over here are the actual layers inside the composition. This is recognized by the small layer icon over on the left. We start directly relates to the layer icons you can see here on the timeline. It tells us there are series of standard layers but those layers are actually being populated by footage.

Now, this is the footage over here. If you had perhaps change of the name of the layer inside our effects it would show up with a different name here but the original footage that is being used to display on that layer is always shown over here on the right hand side.

Now, there is also layer in the background which is made up of a composition. Again, going right back to the very beginning where we have the separate comp in the background made up of another two layers.

Again, that is all nesting and we are going to touch on that later on. But after fixing the flow chart for you just show us. This is the layer, it is being populated by another composition. If we scroll over here, we can see that composition contains another two layers but both of those layers are populated by the same quick time movie over here.

Now, you can also rearrange this window very slightly as well. You get a wonderful curvy lines that allow you to just spread out the space if you are looking to organize it slightly different and you can get it better idea of what is going on. But you also have icons down here in the lower left hand side that can help you display certain things.

The third across will turn off the flow chart recognition of any layers that are in the composition. As you can see they have the layers disappear but the actual content that is populating those layers is still link into the composition. And sometimes this is actually a better way to figure out how many things have been used.

Again, going back to this final clip over here, it now only shows one movie has been used in this comp. But if you do go back and turn on the layers, you can see that movie was indeed used twice in the same composition.

Now, you can also show and hide effects in here. So, if I just scroll along a little way here, turn on the F icon here which basically allows us to see any filters that have been applied to layers. You can see that these two silhouettes both have a fill effect.

So, these are really here just to allow you to enable or disable certain things inside the flow chart to make it easier to work but if you move these layers around and you wish to reset them.

You can do that very quickly by simple right clicking anywhere in here or control click if you do not have a two button mouse to bring them all of the options for the flow chart and simply choose clean up here at the top to rearrange that back to its original state.

But once you actually seen that and work with it. You can just come up here and close the flow chart back down, to get us back to the original four viewed composition and we now ready to start working down in the timeline.