Duplicating layers is an essential tool to master right away. This is helpful because you can reuse layers in your project:
- Select your layer
- You can either hit Ctrl + D/command + D on Windows or macOS, respectively, or just choose Edit | Duplicate from the menu:
When you follow this process your layer is duplicated. This duplicated layer is an exact copy of the layer. Look closely at your layer and find the triangle to the far right. Click on this triangle. This is called twirling down:
Twirling down your layer will reveal the transform properties. Twirl down the triangle icon to the left of the word transform . You will see the transform properties: Scale, Rotation, Opacity, and Position. All of these have shortcuts.
Here are the shortcuts for your layer transform properties:
- The shortcut for scale is S
- The shortcut for rotation is R
- For opacity the shortcut is T
- For position the shortcut is.. Yep you guessed it P
These shortcuts are easy to remember. The only shortcut that's not self explanatory is T for opacity. An easy way to remember that is think of T for transparency or that T is the last syllable of opacity (opaci-T):
In order to select anything in After Effects, you need to have the selection tool selected. Navigate to that tool in the upper left hand corner of your screen in the tool bar. Choose the top layer in the time line:
With this layer selected, we are going to select our scale property. In order to use the shortcut simply hit letter S. You will see this reveals the scale property only. Lets adjust the scale parameter. To the far right of the word scale you will see two numbers. Scrub either one of those parameters to the left. This will shrink this layer down in size:
