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Now, one very important thing that you are more than likely to be doing when working with compositions is zooming in and zooming out on those. So, you can actually look at the detail more closely and then drop back out and see what the final composite looks like as well as scroll around the screen and focus on the specific part of the image that you wish to work with. Well, there are few ways you can do this inside After Effects and the first the most obvious option is to come up here to the tool bar across the top left hand side and you will notice that there is a zoom tool. It is very much the same as Photoshop illustrator and design, only though the application allows you to do the same thing.

Now, if you click on this tool to highlight it, it will change to the zoom tool which can then be positioned in the screen anywhere and use to magnify it. But the down side to actually selecting at all is you always deselect the one that you are currently working on and if you can use a shortcut to access this, quickly use it, and then let go of the shortcut again. You can always return back to the original tool. So, instead of just using this tool here from the tools palette, we are going to go back and click on the main selection tool, we will stay on that for now. Put the cursor back into the intro comp that we are currently looking at and we actually have two options we can do here. If you hold down the "Z" key on the keyboard, you will see your cursor does change temporarily to the zoom tool. If you now position this anywhere and just click and let go, you will zoom in to the next preset magnified size. You can actually see that down here in the lower left hand side of the composition window. We are currently viewing this now at 100%. If you continue to click, it will go up in preset sizes.

Now if you do let go of the "Z" key, you go straight back to the selection tools. You do not actually have to switch to the tool. However, if you hit the "Z" key and let go immediately, you do actually switch to the zoom tools. So, bear that one in mind. These tools tend to work in an interesting way that you can hold them down to get temporary access and then let them go again when you are down to return to the original tool. So, if you want to go back at this point to the main selection tool, you can use a keyboard shortcut to do that as well. I am actually going to hit and let go of this because we do want to switch back permanently, we just hit the "V" key. That takes you back exactly the same way as the other Adobe applications do as well. So, if you are familiar with Photoshop and Illustrator, that one should be fairly familiar to you.

Now again, if you hold down the "Z" key just to give us temporary access to the zoom tool and then, add the "Option" key or the "Alt" key on the PC. You will notice that the cursor changes to the minus zoom tool. Clicking on that will now drop you back down by the same increments; every time you click that you are zooming by just a second ago. And again, when you let go of the keys, you return back to the main cursor tool.

Now, as well as using the zoom tool. You can also zoom up and down with preset amounts in another couple of ways. As long as you are inside the composition, if you press either the period or the comma key on the keyboard, and the best way to think about that is actually the small chevrons that appear above the keys, the greater than and less than key. Pressing either of those if we press the left hand one, the comma or the less than sign, that will take us down again by a preset amount. If you press the right hand one, the period or the greater than key this will then increase the zoom as many times as you press it and you will notice at the same time it always zooms on the center of the composition.

So, if you are trying to zoom on a certain area. I will just drop this back down, so it is at 50% and I wish to zoom up here on the right. This is not going to be the keyboard shortcut to get there but it is very handy to go in and out. If you do want to zoom very quickly up there and not hav

Now, one very important thing that you are more than likely to be doing when working with compositions is zooming in and zooming out on those. So, you can actually look at the detail more closely and then drop back out and see what the final composite looks like as... click to read more