Congratulations to all the attendees of last week’s After Effects Expert training at the studio, you’ve earned your expert wings in the first of such courses we’ve run. Jerry Leer, a top-flight Adobe trainer, was here from London for five days’ in-depth training in VfX, motion graphics and compositing. Thank you Jerry, you really know your stuff.

The training went through the whole workflow and covered areas such as text animation, chroma key and motion tracking. Five days’ work culminated in shooting on our green screen then compositing the footage into a 3D virtual set that the trainees built themselves.

One of the important lessons in using an application like After Effects is to learn to be as mechanical and structured as possible. As Jerry explained, After Effects itself isn’t creative. Part of the skill in this is using the mouse as little as possible – that means shortcut keys. So below is a list we’ve compiled of the most important shortcut keys (on Mac) for After Effects. Hopefully we haven’t missed any.

And here’s the full list from Adobe (PC and Mac).