Tap Into Your Motion Magic

Create your very own magic with preview shortcuts. Set up different shortuts with customised presets, to preview your animation the way you need.

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Use Preview Shortcuts

By using preview shortcuts to play back the timeline, you can magically tap into different preview presets.

After Effects screenshot hover over shortcuts dropdown, dialog box open — Set different presets for available shortcuts in dropdown menu

After Effects screenshot shortcut dropdown menu, spacebar highlighted — Open the preview window (CTRL+3)

Open the preview window (CTRL+3). Click the shortcuts dropdown. Each shortcut on the list has presets that can be adjusted individually.

Skip Frames

By adjusting the presets, you can define the playback range, the starting point, a different playback frame rate or choose to skip frames etc.

After Effects screenshot preview shortcuts panel — Force Framerate or skip frames

When you are animating at a high frame rate, which takes a long time to pre-render and play back, you can set up one shortcut to skip frames. When I use the SHIFT+Spacebar shortcut for 60fps comps, it only renders 30fps and plays back faster.

After Effects screenshot skip frame tick box, dialog box — Input number of frames to skip

Select Range

By choosing the preview range, you can determine if only the work area is being played back or any part of the timeline outside of that.

After Effects screenshot range dropdown menu, work area highlighted — Click on range dropdown to select preview range

When you choose ‘Work Area’ as a playback range, your timeline will only play within the bounds of the work area and start at the beginning when it reaches the end. ‘Entire Duration’ allows you to
play back without a boundary.

Tap Into The Magic

You can access your preview presets by using the keyboard shortcuts, displayed in the dropdown menu. You only select them to change presets.

After Effects screenshot shortcut dropdown menu, spacebar highlighted — Open the preview window (CTRL+3)

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Great explained tips that every motion designer should know. Thank you :)

Great teaching style; very clear and thorough. Some very high level best practice advice in here too. Looking forward to the other two lessons in this series and the other classes by Sonja.

Great tips which can shorten the path for beginners to become faster animators.

Learned loads of helpful tips and tricks to make my workflow much more efficient - thank you!

This teacher is one of the reasons to use Skillshare!

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Great contents and value in your channel ! ;) I have to recover the old streams on the motion side !

Love your stuff! I would love to see some short-form video content from you in the vein of tutorials or showcasing your workflow.

I love what you do.

Really enjoying these live streams!

Really cool to be learning new things watching you Sonja. Keep it up!

Thanks for sharing! It's so great to see other people's workflows, and that tip about the multiple passes to get the hand-drawn effect is really helpful!

Thanks for the Stream. Good work, as always. It is a lot of work just for the setup of the animation.

That was a nice process to watch! Thanks for sharing.

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