Hi. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to customize an After Effects template. If you're unfamiliar with After Effects or just sort of know it and you purchased a template, they pretty much all work generally the same way. The first thing you want to do is import your assets. And so, the first way to import is to go to file, import, and then select file. And then you want to navigate to your folder on your hard drive, or you have your placeholders. And we're going to use this one. We're going to click open, and you can see that it's been imported into our project panel.
So another way to import is just doubleclick inside the project panel. So just tap, tap inside there and a window will pop up where you can import. Another way to do this is to simply open either a Windows, if you're on a PC, Windows Explorer, open up a finder window if you're on a Mac, and you can select an image or select your file and just drag it into After Effects.
So we're going to drag it over and there you go. So to put our images inside this template, we're going to go to the replace images here folder, twirl that down, and then we're going to select the replace image composition, and you're going to click to open that up. And as you can see in our timeline, we have a placeholder file. You can either turn these off or delete them. Sometimes this might just be an empty comp and you won't have to worry about something like that. If we go back to our project panel, we can select our image that we imported, and all you do is just drag it into the timeline.
Or you can also just drag it into the comp viewer. Either way works great. Now, let's say you wanted to scale this up. You could just twirl down to go to your transform properties and sort of scroll on that scale property. So I'm going to reset this size and I'll show you another way to fit this image into your composition window. If you right click on your layer and go to transform, and you can choose fit to comp, fit to comp width, or fit to comp height. And you'll see that we need to be a little bit wider or just take up space on the left and right side. If you do fit to comp, the image is actually going to look a little bit warped, because it's actually going to change the proportions to fit inside that comp, and you probably don't want to do that. So what we're going to do is go to fit to comp width. There we go. So that's an easy shortcut to do, if you don't want to mess with scaling transform properties. And if we go back to our render comp, our final composition, you can see that our image has been replaced. And all the animation is there. And then you would just repeat that process for each placeholder.
And they're all listed. They all should be named descriptively so you know which compositions that need to have assets put into them, either photos or videos or whatever you like. So next, let's customize our text. So if we go to the project panel, go to replace text here, we have our compositions labeled where you will change or edit your text. So let's go ahead and click on the replace text scene composition. Open that up and you'll see there's some other things going on here, but we do have our text layer. And if we look in our layer stack, you'll see a capital T next to this layer. That means that it is a text layer. And to edit that, you can either click twice on the layer name, and you'll see in our comp viewer, the text has become highlighted. You can also actually, with your selection tool, you can click twice on that layer in your comp viewer and it becomes editable. And you can also just double click on the layer itself in the timeline, and there you go.
Then you can start typing. If you go to your character panel, if you don't have your character panel open, you go to window and then select character, and this is where you can change the fonts. You can change the color. And there you go. And in this particular example, this text is actually animated. So just to be on the safe side, always just double click on the text layers that are included with your template, and don't delete them and then add another text layer. Unless you're adding to it, then that's fine. But if there's a text layer included, just to safe, go ahead and just edit that existing text layer. So that's pretty much it for our basic customization tutorial. If you were thinking about using a template in After Effects to create a video, these are pretty much the basic steps needed to put your images or your videos and replace your text layers. And then all you really need to do is just repeat that for each placeholder, and then render and you're done. Thanks for watching.
So another way to import is just doubleclick inside the project panel. So just tap, tap inside there and a window will pop up where you can import. Another way to do this is to simply open either a Windows, if you're on a PC, Windows Explorer, open up a finder window if you're on a Mac, and you can select an image or select your file and just drag it into After Effects.
So we're going to drag it over and there you go. So to put our images inside this template, we're going to go to the replace images here folder, twirl that down, and then we're going to select the replace image composition, and you're going to click to open that up. And as you can see in our timeline, we have a placeholder file. You can either turn these off or delete them. Sometimes this might just be an empty comp and you won't have to worry about something like that. If we go back to our project panel, we can select our image that we imported, and all you do is just drag it into the timeline.
Or you can also just drag it into the comp viewer. Either way works great. Now, let's say you wanted to scale this up. You could just twirl down to go to your transform properties and sort of scroll on that scale property. So I'm going to reset this size and I'll show you another way to fit this image into your composition window. If you right click on your layer and go to transform, and you can choose fit to comp, fit to comp width, or fit to comp height. And you'll see that we need to be a little bit wider or just take up space on the left and right side. If you do fit to comp, the image is actually going to look a little bit warped, because it's actually going to change the proportions to fit inside that comp, and you probably don't want to do that. So what we're going to do is go to fit to comp width. There we go. So that's an easy shortcut to do, if you don't want to mess with scaling transform properties. And if we go back to our render comp, our final composition, you can see that our image has been replaced. And all the animation is there. And then you would just repeat that process for each placeholder.
And they're all listed. They all should be named descriptively so you know which compositions that need to have assets put into them, either photos or videos or whatever you like. So next, let's customize our text. So if we go to the project panel, go to replace text here, we have our compositions labeled where you will change or edit your text. So let's go ahead and click on the replace text scene composition. Open that up and you'll see there's some other things going on here, but we do have our text layer. And if we look in our layer stack, you'll see a capital T next to this layer. That means that it is a text layer. And to edit that, you can either click twice on the layer name, and you'll see in our comp viewer, the text has become highlighted. You can also actually, with your selection tool, you can click twice on that layer in your comp viewer and it becomes editable. And you can also just double click on the layer itself in the timeline, and there you go.
Then you can start typing. If you go to your character panel, if you don't have your character panel open, you go to window and then select character, and this is where you can change the fonts. You can change the color. And there you go. And in this particular example, this text is actually animated. So just to be on the safe side, always just double click on the text layers that are included with your template, and don't delete them and then add another text layer. Unless you're adding to it, then that's fine. But if there's a text layer included, just to safe, go ahead and just edit that existing text layer. So that's pretty much it for our basic customization tutorial. If you were thinking about using a template in After Effects to create a video, these are pretty much the basic steps needed to put your images or your videos and replace your text layers. And then all you really need to do is just repeat that for each placeholder, and then render and you're done. Thanks for watching.
