As you first launch After Effects CC it's really important to understand how project files are saved and how all the assets that you'll be working with should be organized on your hard drive before you ever bring them into an After Effects CC project. The first time you launch the application you'll notice the Start screen and working from the top down it's divided up into two sections, the Work section and the Learn section. We're going to focus on the Work section and go to the upper left corner here and RECENT is selected. And that gives me a list of the recent projects that I've opened. Now obviously if you've never opened an After Effects CC project before you probably won't have anything in your list. Now usually when I get started I click on the New Project. But since I already created a project for us to work with I'm going to choose Open Project.

Corel Knockout 2 Plug-in For Adobe Photoshop here. When the Open panel pops up navigate to your project files. If you don't have these project files you can feel free to follow along using your own Assets. In the Open dialog box let's look at our project files. Notice I have four different After Effects CC project files and if you come over here on the right-hand side you'll notice under the Size that none of them are particularly large. In fact, they're less than a megabyte a piece. Let's continue to look at our project.

I'll click once on the Open & Save Projects file and then go to the lower right-hand corner and click the Open button to open that file. Now as you can see in this After Effects CC project, I've got quite a lot of things going on. If we just press the Spacebar we can preview the animation. And just press the Spacebar to stop playback.

And as you can see I've got video files in there, I've got graphics in there, let's take a closer look and figure out where these files actually are. If we go to the upper left corner of the interface there's this area called the Project panel. Click once in the Project panel to make it active and I know it's the Project panel because it says Project in the upper left-hand corner. This is the panel where you will import and organize all the assets that you'll be using in your different After Effects CC projects. When you build graphic builds like this they'll be built in something called a Composition which is represented here in the Composition panel and down here in the Timeline. Composition is just a stack of layers that create this composite.