Let's go ahead and take a look at After Effects and the interface. So I'll break all of this stuff down so we can get comfortable with our work environment. First of all we have as is common in most applications our toolbar and in our toolbar you notice we have our selection which I often call the move tool as well because you do move things with this tool as well as clicking on it to select it. We also have our hand tool which you can also access by hitting your spacebar to move things around in your interface. For example if I were to just draw a rectangle like so and I want to move around in my window as you see here as I hold the spacebar down I'm not moving the square itself, I'm moving the whole area. So let me go ahead and just zoom out a little bit so you can see that. I actually zoomed out just a bit too much. So this is our composite window and this is the square and as I hold that down you see I'm moving the entire workspace around, very, very handy and I very rarely use this by clicking on it. Next what we have is our zoom tool which will allow us to zoom in on regions and it's very handy as well so you click on this to zoom in. When you want to zoom out just on your keyboard what you want to do is hold down the alt or option key on your Mac or PC and you can click and zoom out in small increments like so. Next, we have our rotate tool, we have our orbit camera tool which is very handy when you're in 3D mode, we'll talk about that later on. We have a very interesting tool called the pan behind tool and what we will be using this tool for primarily is to move the rotational pivot point in our objects, which we'll talk about later as well. We also have some tools here that we can use to draw shapes and these also act as masks, once again we'll talk about those later, we have our pen tool which allows you to draw your own Bezier vector shapes and also gives you the ability to add, delete and to convert vertexes or vertices. We have our type tool which will allow us to create text and by the way you know something very interesting happened, as I click on these tools, because I have this option here, auto open panels selected it will change my workspace in the tools based on what I have selected. As you see I click on the brush tool to paint and all my painting tools show up, very smart interface indeed. So as you see we have our brush tool, we have our clone stamp tool which is quite fun and we'll talk about how to use this but in a nutshell it allows you to clone things in your images. Very cool indeed. We have our erasure tool and we have the all powerful puppet tool, we're going to spend some time using this animate things and let's go ahead and talk about some of the other things in our interface and we'll cover these guys as we need them because they can change based on what we have selected. For example I click this and some listings vanish, you see that? So we'll talk about these as we need to. Over here we have our project panel and this is where we can keep track of our folders and all of the elements that are in our composite. Over here we have our comp panel and our comp panel allows us to view our comp and we can also once again by holding down the spacebar move things around in our comp window and see what's going on. We have our info panel and audio tools panel which helped us look at the volume of our music in our audio. We have our time controls, these work like a VCR so I can play a step back, a frame, I can go to the very beginning, the end and that kind of thing. I can also play my audio, meet my audio and I can also loop things and I can also do a RAM preview and don't worry we'll talk about all that stuff later on and it'll make more sense. We also have our effects and presets where we can access all of our special effects and that kind of thing and we have our timeline which is the heart of any animation package where we can see things happening across time and we can turn off and on many of the controls that we'll dealing with in our tutorial as we go forward in After Effects CS3.