HUGE Time Saver Discovery

I haven't done loads with After Effects in my career, but I've done my fair share in the last 5 years. My talent lies more in Premiere which I use almost every day. After Effects was always that expensive toy that I couldn't get my hands on let alone learn very well. With that being said, up to this point if I ever wanted a title sequence or something I made in After Effects, I would "simply" render it out and then bring in the file to Premiere. I've been doing this for 3 years only to find out today that it was a waste of my time. Thanks again to ECAbrams, I learned something awesome in this tutorial on workflow between After Effects and Premiere. Here's the tutorial:

THE biggest thing I learned from this tutorial was that I didn't have to export clips from After Effects or Premiere to go from one to the other, I can just import the project file! Unbelievable! I vaguely remember hearing something like this when I was drooling over the Adobe CS5 roll out videos 2 or 3 years ago, but it must have faded since then.  Thanks ECAbrams for a great tutorial. This tutorial alone will save me a ton of time in the long run.  

This has me thinking now. If I went for 5 years doing something inefficient for this long, there has to be something else I'm missing as well. If you're an experienced editor/graphics animator and you can think of one of those aha moments you had like I just did, post it in the comments below. Workflow shortcuts are so essential to our work. Maybe we can save each other some serious time by citing all the seemingly obvious things that some of us just plain miss. Take care and happy editing.  

So That's How They Make Transition Packs...

Today I came across a tutorial by ECAbrams about using the repeater. It took me about two hours to play with it and actually make something of good use, but I really feel like I have a better understanding of it now. With a bit more practice, I should be able to manipulate the repeater to do quite a few handy tricks for transitions, logos, and anything else that pops up in my grey matter. The thing that makes the repeater so powerful is that it doesn't just allow you to repeat; it allows you to manipulate the scale, position, and rotation of these shapes AS THEY REPEAT...What does that really mean? It means that I can take a rectangle, turn it into a slim little bar, and then make its repeated duplicates fan across the screen and change their scale in the process (see it here). All in all, it finally made sense how animators can make all those superb transitions from scratch. There's still much more to learn like... How does the alpha channel play into this? When I bought a transition pack once, it said it came with an alpha channel so that the user could color the transitions any way they wanted to.  How do I add that?  Also, how do I do circles? I tried for 30 minutes and got stuck. I suppose each shape is a bit different to animate.