Learn everything about Parenting in After Effects and use it in your videos!

Are you just starting out with After Effects? Here is an excellent tutorial to teach you one of the fundamental concepts of creating amazing visual effects: parenting.

Parenting is an essential tool in After Effects to link different layers together in terms of their transform – position, scale and rotation. Any transformations of the parent layer will then automatically be applied to all child layers.

Parenting can be used to create complex animations but is most common when performing camera tracking. A null object is tracked to the footage and then stock footage elements like explosions, blood hits or fire can be parented to the null object to make them follow the movement of the camera.