How to Use Master Properties in After Effects

Learn how Master Properties work in After Effects with this exclusive After Effects tutorial.
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Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇

Music (00:02): [intro music]

Caleb Ward (00:11): Hey, what's up. This is Caleb with school of motion. And in this after effects tutorial, I'm going to show you how to use this brand new feature in after effects called a master properties. Now, master properties has the potential to dramatically change your after effects workflow, especially when it comes to doing a tedious task. So let's hop in. So the first thing that you need to do is download the project file to follow along with this tutorial, you can find that project file over on our website, just click the link in the description of this video. So the first thing that we need to do is talk about what master properties actually do. So let's take this example. So if we're inside of after effects and we want to pre composed something, let's say we want to pre compose these three triangles down here. So we have this animation and the triangles kind of move over just like that.

Caleb Ward (01:05): So what you would typically do is select all of your triangles here. You would go to layer pre compose, or hit command shift C, and we would call this, um, triangle comp and hit, okay, now what happens if you duplicate this triangle and you rotate it by 180 degrees, and let's say that you want to actually change the colors of these triangles up here, but you don't want to change the colors of these triangles down here. What would you do? Well, usually what you have to do in after effects is you would physically have to go in now and double click in here. You'd have to copy all of these triangles. You'd have to paste them. You'd have to pre compose those rotate it. It's an annoying process to say the least. So master properties basically allow you to change certain properties inside of compositions that can then be pushed to master compositions.

Caleb Ward (02:00): And so they are appropriately named master properties. So I'm going to go ahead and undo all of those changes that we just did. And I'm going to get down to some very specific examples. So let's say that you were tasked with creating some graphic intros for a new HD TV show called master properties and master properties wanted you to create four different intros with different background colors. Now, typically the way that you would do this is by duplicating your composition for different times and going in and changing the composition. But with master properties, it's really, really easy to do this in a non-destructive way. So what I'm going to do is go up here to window and I'm going to make sure we have our essential graphics panel selected. And when we have that selected go in here and hit so low supported properties. So this is going to pop up all of the properties that are available to you, um, to use in an essential graphics panel or a master properties composition.

Caleb Ward (03:01): So you'll notice that with the latest update to after effects, you now have the ability to, uh, bring over new properties like anchor point position and scale. That's very handy. If you want to learn more about using the essential graphics panel to edit after effects, compositions in premier pro, go check out the essential graphics tutorial here on school of motion. So what I'm gonna do is scrub all the way down to the bottom, to our background layer here, and I'm gonna drag up this color. That's being generated from this fill effect, and we'll call this BG color and I'm going to go up here to this clear box, color, this little box right here, and I'm gonna drag up that color and we'll just call this the box color. Excellent. So what we can do now is take this logo here, uh, this logo intro composition, and I'm gonna drag and drop this into the new composition button.

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