[Todd Kopriva]

You can use color labels to help with this. See “Color labels for layers and footage items”.

Careful naming of layers combined with the ability to filter in the Timeline panel can really help, too.

Even more snazzy is Zorro, a script that allows you to tag layers and then filter by the tags (and much more):
https://aescripts.com/zorro-the-layer-tagger/

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Wow. Brian and I have identical writing styles. 😉

Citations are appreciated.
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7eae.html

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

If you’re new to After Effects, I recommend that you start by working your way through the items under the “Getting started” heading on this page. We see a lot of people on this forum who dive into the deep end without learning the basics first and then waste a lot of their own time thrashing about.

Regarding your specific project: You’ll need to do some color keying, and you’ll need to create and animate the cloud and sun shapes. For the shapes, I’d use shape layers, which are layers that contain vector graphics elements that you create and animate in After Effects.

See “Keying introduction and resources”. Note that most of the pain in color keying work comes from bad planning and bad shooting; the post-production work can actually be relatively easy if you acquire the footage right.

See “About shapes and shape layers”.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

> Do not understand where I begin to drag composition into another.

Compositions are listed in the Project panel, along with footage items. You can drag a composition (composition A) from the Project panel into the Timeline panel for another composition (composition B); this adds (nests) composition A inside composition B. When a composition is nested inside another composition, it is also called a “precomposition”.

See “About nesting and precomposing” for a full explanation. The last section on that page points to some beginner-level introductions/tutorials about nesting and precomposing.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

Why take it off? I tend to leave several versions on my computers at once.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

See this page.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

As Steve and Dave indicate, there are a lot of factors to consider.

If you know the specifications of the playback device, you’re much of the way there. The only way to be sure is to test, of course.

Perhaps this section will help: “Planning your work”. It talks about how to plan your project with your final delivery specifications in mind, and it points to a great article from Aharon here on the COW about how to do some tests to make sure that you’ve got things set up right—before you waste a lot of time working at the wrong settings.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

I do a lot of work in Photoshop, then import the Photoshop document as a layered composition, and then animate the pieces separately. If there’s something that I need to redo or add in After Effects, that is less time and work then trying to recreate the entire image from scratch in After Effects.

A _lot_ of things are directly transferred when you import a PSD. Have you tried?

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

Have you tried simply importing your PSD file into After Effects rather than recreating the image from scratch in After Effects?

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

You can use some of the Channel effects to do this sort of thing. Depending on exactly what you’re doing, you might want to start with the Shift Channels effect.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.