After Effects CS4 comes prepackaged with a ton of different Templates that you can use to learn about the structure of how compositions are put together and you can also use them to modify and make them your own. In a way, you're taking what Adobe has created and you're able to then change the text, change the background, and even change the entire thing to suit your own needs. To see these Templates all you have to do is go to the File Menu and choose Browse Template Projects. When you choose this your Bridge will launch Ð and mine was already open by the way which is why it snapped open so quickly Ð and I'm in my Filmstrip Mode, and by clicking on one of the Thumbnails I can see a preview that will show what that's going to look like when I go to After Effects. Every single one of these Templates can be modified, so if you want to do something for a client or you have an upcoming presentation and you really don't have a lot of time you can use one of these guys as your building block. So, let's go ahead and choose one. That looks kind of cool, the Spider Web one. I'm going to simply double-click on it and when I do, After Effects will prompt me to save my project if I have one open already, and since I don't I'll say Don't Save. And what I'm going to do at this point is I'm going to open this file up just to show you what it looks like. If I hit the Spacebar I can get a preview, but as you can see it's a pretty heavy file so I'm simply going to use my Current Time Indicator to slide through it. What I can do is I can, you know, grab things, and change the text. I can see what's going on in each layer here, I can move things around if I want to, grab this move it over, grab that move it over, and modify it. If I want to save my changes I have to go to Save As. I will not be able to Save Template, and that's what the dialog box was warning us about when we first launched this. Templates themselves are simply a blank canvas based on something else. You won't be able to change the actual template, but when you modify it you can save it as something else, so this is really a great way for you to have an almost non-destructive way of working with Adobe's Templates. So, once again, you can move things around, modify them, and now the Spider is going to go sideways instead of up and down. So, have a good time. Play around with those, and don't forget, you can go to File, Browse Template Projects, to open up the Bridge and then simply click on the Thumbnail to preview the template that you want to modify.