General User Interface Items - Adobe 12040118 - After Effects Standard Tutorial

General user interface items

Activate a tool
Open panel, viewer, and context menus
Columns
Search and filter in the Timeline, Project, and Effects & Presets panels
Scroll or zoom with the mouse wheel
Undo changes
After Effects user interface tips
Activate a tool
The Tools panel can be displayed as a toolbar across the top of the application window or as a normal, dockable panel.
Note: Controls related to some tools appear only when the tool is selected in the Tools panel.
Click the button for the tool. If the button has a small triangle at its lower-right corner, hold down the mouse button to view the hidden tools.
Then, click the tool you want to activate.
Press the keyboard shortcut for the tool. (Placing the pointer over a tool button displays a tool tip with the name and keyboard shortcut for the
tool.)
To cycle through hidden tools within a tool category, repeatedly press the keyboard shortcut for the tool category. (For example, press G
repeatedly to cycle through the pen tools.)
To momentarily activate a tool, hold down the key for the desired tool; release the key to return to the previously active tool. (This technique
does not work with all tools.)
To momentarily activate the Hand tool, hold down the spacebar, the H key, or the middle mouse button. (The middle mouse button does not
activate the Hand tool under a few circumstances, including when the Unified Camera tool is active.)
To pan around in the Composition, Layer, or Footage panel, drag with the Hand tool. Hold Shift, too, to pan faster.
To show or hide panels most relevant to the active tool, click the panel button
active opens or closes the Paint and Brushes panels. Select the Auto-Open Panels option in the Tools panel to automatically open the relevant
panels when certain tools are activated.
Open panel, viewer, and context menus
Panel menus provide commands relative to the active panel or frame. Viewer menus provide lists of compositions, layers, or footage items that
can be shown in the viewer, as well as commands for closing items and locking the viewer. Context menus provide commands relative to the item
that is context-clicked. Many items in the After Effects user interface have associated context menus. Using context menus can make your work
faster and easier.
To open a panel menu, click the button
To open a viewer menu, click the name of the active composition, layer, or footage item in the viewer tab.
To open a context menu, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS). This action is sometimes referred to as context-clicking.
Columns
The Project, Timeline, and Render Queue panels contain columns.
To show or hide columns, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) a column heading (or choose Columns from the panel menu), and
select the columns that you want to show or hide. A check mark indicates that the column is shown.
Note: In general, the search and filter functions in the Project and Timeline panels only operate on the content of columns that are shown.
To reorder columns, select a column name and drag it to a new location.
To resize columns, drag the bar next to a column name. Some columns cannot be resized.
In After Effects CS5.5 and later, sort footage items in the Project panel, click the column heading. Click once more to sort them in reverse
order.
in the upper-right corner of the panel.
if available. For example, clicking this button when a paint tool is
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