After Effects CS4 TipsUser Interface| 00:00 | For those who are new to After Effects
or who haven't used it for a while,
| | 00:02 | we want to give you an overview of
its user interface. You'll find that the
| | 00:06 | user interface of many Adobe
applications are similar. So things that you'll
| | 00:09 | learn here can be applied to other
Adobe programs. You'll also find that the
| | 00:13 | Mac and Windows versions are almost
identical. The main differences are in
| | 00:16 | Command keys. When we say Command on Mac,
we mean Ctrl on Windows. When we say
| | 00:20 | Option on Mac, we mean Alt on Windows.
| | 00:23 | Now the first thing you'll notice is
After Effects resides in the master
| | 00:26 | application window. You can move it as
a whole. You can resize it by clicking
| | 00:30 | on the lower right corner and changing
it to how big or how small you need it
| | 00:34 | to be to fill your screen. After
Effects application window is broken into a
| | 00:38 | series of frames. Each one of these
major sections is referred to as a frame
| | 00:42 | and you can tell that a frame is selected
because you'll see this yellow outline around it.
| | 00:47 | Each frame can hold a number of panels.
Each panel holds specific information.
| | 00:52 | For example, this frame in the upper
right corner holds the Info panel and
| | 00:57 | the Audio panel. I switch between them
by clicking on their tabs along the top.
| | 01:01 | If there are lot of panels on one frame,
you'll also see a scrollbar along the top
| | 01:05 | that allows you to slide in between them.
| | 01:06 | Now to show you a little bit more
about the user interface in After Effects,
| | 01:09 | I am going to open a composition.
A composition is where you build your graphics
| | 01:13 | in After Effects. You can go ahead and
make a new composition or open an existing
| | 01:17 | composition by double-clicking it in
the Project panel and compositions open
| | 01:21 | into two panels in After Effects.
The Composition or Comp panel for short,
| | 01:26 | which shows you your graphical content,
and your Timeline panel, which shows
| | 01:30 | you all the layers that make up a
composition. Their timings, plus any
| | 01:33 | additional keyframes you
have applied to those layers.
| | 01:36 | Now this Composition panel is very
important because this is the same frame that's
| | 01:40 | used to display other graphical content.
For example, if I needed to look at a movie,
| | 01:45 | I can Option+Double-click or
Alt+Double-click it and that would open a
| | 01:48 | Footage panel which opens into the same
viewer. If I needed to do some detailed work
| | 01:53 | on a specific layer in a composition,
I would double-click it and it would
| | 01:56 | open into a Layer panel docked into the
same viewer frame. I can click on these
| | 02:01 | tabs to go ahead and move
between these panels inside this frame.
| | 02:04 | Now something you'll find working in
After Effects or any application is that
| | 02:07 | you have a constant fight for space.
We can go ahead and resize the frames
| | 02:11 | and panels inside After Effects. So go
ahead and use your screen's real estate
| | 02:14 | to its best advantage. Position your
cursor in between frames and slide to make
| | 02:19 | frames smaller or larger and you see
that you trade-off making one smaller
| | 02:23 | while another gets bigger. We can
even click on a corner and do resizing of
| | 02:27 | multiple frames all at the same time.
| | 02:30 | You can also change what frame a panel
appears in. If you click its tab,
| | 02:34 | you'll see a series of dots in the upper
left corner of each panel's tab. Grab those
| | 02:40 | and drag to another frame to go ahead
and move that panel's location. If you
| | 02:44 | drag a panel into the middle of a frame,
you'll see a little highlighted area
| | 02:48 | in the middle, which means you're
going to go ahead and dock it into this frame.
| | 02:51 | There we go. Audio is docked in
the same frame as my Effects & Presets.
| | 02:56 | If you want to create a brand-new
frame for a panel, go ahead and grab these
| | 03:00 | little buttons again and drag it along
the edges of an existing frame like this
| | 03:04 | or like this. By doing so, when I release,
you'll now see a brand new frame has
| | 03:10 | been created along side of the frame I
was targeting. Of course, you do have to
| | 03:14 | trade off space, so you might want to
go ahead and dock it back into another
| | 03:18 | existing frame. If you want to create a
brand-new frame along the edges of your
| | 03:22 | application window, grab those dots
and drag it until you see a green bar appear
| | 03:27 | along one of the edges of
the overall application panel.
| | 03:30 | That says you're going to go ahead
and open up a brand new frame along that edge
| | 03:35 | and you see what I have done there,
and I will put this back to where it was,
| | 03:38 | there we go. Now in addition to
docking panels into frames you can also
| | 03:44 | float panels into their own windows.
To do that, you want to click on the
| | 03:49 | Options menu for a frame. Every frame
has this little button on the upper right
| | 03:53 | hand corner, which opens up its Options
panel. It will include options that are
| | 03:57 | specific to that panel such as going
ahead and opening up the View Options for
| | 04:01 | this particular viewer, and generic options
such as undocking a panel or undocking a frame.
| | 04:07 | Undocking a frame means all the
panels in that frame would go into floating
| | 04:11 | window. I want just one panel to go
into a floating window, I say Undock Panel
| | 04:16 | and now you see I have got a nice
little floating window. You can also dock
| | 04:20 | multiple panels into your floating
window. I can go ahead and grab that and
| | 04:23 | dock it back into an existing window or
I can just go ahead and hit this Close
| | 04:27 | button to get rid of it as well.
| | 04:30 | If you need to temporarily see one of
your panels full screen, to see a
| | 04:33 | lot of detail on large composition
for example, hit the Tilde key.
| | 04:37 | The Tilde is the little button that exists
between the Escape and Tab buttons along the
| | 04:42 | left side of your keyboard. Hitting Tilde
again toggles you back to your normal user interface.
| | 04:46 | Now we want to turn our attention to some
things that are very specific to compositions.
| | 04:51 | For one thing, you can open
multiple compositions. I will go ahead and
| | 04:54 | double-click them in the Project panel
and now I have got multiple tabs to go
| | 04:58 | ahead and navigate between them in the
Timeline panel. I can also click on the
| | 05:02 | dropdown menu along the top of a
Comp panel and select a composition.
| | 05:07 | Sometimes you'll have a chain of
compositions where one composition is used as
| | 05:11 | element in another composition. After
Effects CS4 has introduced a couple of
| | 05:15 | new ways of taking advantage of this.
One is the Composition Navigator that
| | 05:20 | exists along the top of a Comp panel,
which lets you quickly move between a
| | 05:24 | chain of compositions as one flows
into another. There is also more elaborate
| | 05:29 | version of this called Mini-Flowchart.
You can click on this arrow in the upper
| | 05:32 | right corner and open up this fancier
flowchart that actually shows how all
| | 05:36 | these different compositions
interconnect to each other.
| | 05:39 | A quick way of opening is tapping the
Shift key. Go ahead and navigate, click
| | 05:44 | on the composition I want, hit Home
to navigate to the start of its time,
| | 05:47 | Tab+Shift key again, navigate back to
another composition. Composition panels
| | 05:53 | also have two very important concepts
you need to keep in mind, magnification
| | 05:57 | and resolution.
| | 05:59 | Magnification is how large you're
viewing your current composition. 100% is
| | 06:04 | full size. So one pixel of your comp is
one pixel of your screen. If you don't
| | 06:09 | have a very big screen, you may want
to do up to 100%, which automatically
| | 06:12 | resizes the composition based in the
amount of available space. If you have a
| | 06:17 | little bit of trouble looking at
crunchy things at partial scales and
| | 06:20 | in-between scales, go ahead and take
a very specific size like 50% or 100%.
| | 06:27 | I will go back to 50% for now.
| | 06:28 | Similar but different is Resolution.
That's whether or not you're seeing all of the
| | 06:33 | pixels in your composition. Full means
every pixel is being rendered. However,
| | 06:39 | if you're only viewing it at 50%, you
might as well save some rendering time and
| | 06:43 | only have every other pixel rendered.
So you go down to half resolution when
| | 06:47 | working at 50% and when you go back up
to 100%, then you want to go back up to
| | 06:52 | full resolution so you
can see all the fine detail.
| | 06:54 | Now once you have an arrangement of
panels that you like, you can save this as
| | 06:58 | a workspace. Go ahead and say New
Workspace and say my favorite layout.
| | 07:06 | Click OK. If you want to go back to one
of Adobe's preset workspaces, just pick it
| | 07:11 | from this Workspace menu. We do most of
our work in the Standard menu but there
| | 07:15 | is also other useful layouts such as
the Animation layout which has Smoother,
| | 07:19 | Wiggler and Motion Sketch all opened
at the same time or Text which opens up
| | 07:24 | the Character and Paragraph palette for you.
| | 07:27 | After Effects saves any changes you
make to a workspace and when you recall it,
| | 07:33 | it goes back to the state you last
left it in. If you need to reset a
| | 07:36 | workspace, for example, Standard,
where we docked the Audio down to Effects &
| | 07:40 | Presets, just go ahead and pick Reset
from the bottom of the Workspace menu.
| | 07:46 | Go ahead and discard my changes and
now I am back to my original layout.
| | 07:50 | If you need a window that's not open
and you don't feel like going through all
| | 07:54 | the workspaces to figure out which
one has that window, just click on the
| | 07:57 | Window menu and go ahead and open up
the window that you need, such as the
| | 08:01 | Character palette to go
ahead and do text type setting.
| | 08:04 | Finally, along these panels can then
be resized to go ahead and save some space.
| | 08:07 | For example, we often close down
the Preview panel that just shows the
| | 08:11 | transfer controls. We rarely need to
play around these Ram Preview Options, so
| | 08:15 | go ahead and close them
away to save more space.
| | 08:17 | Now the one problem you might get
yourself into is you might get carried away
| | 08:21 | closing panels in After Effects. You
might say Command+W or Ctrl+W to close,
| | 08:25 | close, close, close, close, and all of
a sudden, your Timeline panel has gone
| | 08:30 | altogether. Well, don't worry. You can
get it back. One way is just go ahead
| | 08:33 | and open up another composition. That
will open up your Comp and your Timeline
| | 08:37 | panels for you. Or, just go ahead and
open up a workspace. That will restore
| | 08:41 | your panels to where you last saved them
and if necessary, you can go ahead and
| | 08:44 | reset them. So you can get
back to nice clean starting point.
| | 08:47 | So just a quick overview of the
After Effects user interface. It's pretty
| | 08:50 | flexible to move around
and customize to your needs.
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| Effects and Presets| 00:00 | One of the handiest tools in After
Effects is the Effects & Presets panel.
| | 00:03 | As its name applies, it does two things.
It allows you to search and apply Effects
| | 00:08 | plug-ins and it allows you to search,
apply and save animation presets. Now,
| | 00:13 | this is a fairly tall panel, so it's useful
to rearrange your panels to give it more room.
| | 00:17 | We usually collapse Preview to get a
little bit more height and if necessary
| | 00:20 | we'll even pull down the timeline and
pull over the Comp panel to give him more room
| | 00:25 | so that we can see longer names.
| | 00:27 | Let's say you were interested in
finding what plug-in effects had the word Blur
| | 00:30 | in their names. Just type blur into the
Quick Search dialog and you'll see two things.
| | 00:35 | Animation Presets that have blur
in their name and also all of your
| | 00:40 | Effects plug-ins that have blur in their names.
| | 00:43 | There are two ways you could apply one
of these effects to a piece of footage.
| | 00:46 | One, if you can see the footage already
in the Composition panel, just go ahead
| | 00:51 | and grab your effect and drag it straight
onto that footage and just see it opens
| | 00:55 | over here in the Effect Controls panel.
| | 00:56 | Another ways to select a layer or
even multiple layers ahead of time, then
| | 01:02 | double-click the effect and it will be
applied to all of your selected layers and
| | 01:06 | you see it's on all those pieces of footage,
pretty simple. Now there are other things
| | 01:10 | that this panel can tell you.
For example, you see some very small
| | 01:13 | icons that say 8, 16 or 32. That tells you
the maximum bit depth that plug-in works at.
| | 01:21 | For example, CC Radial Blur only
processes footage at 8 bits per color channel.
| | 01:26 | However, this Radial Blur I just
applied, we'll go ahead and work in Floating
| | 01:29 | Point mode, 32 bits per channel.
Additional information on options can be found
| | 01:34 | underneath the Options menu for the
Effects & Presets panel. You can go ahead
| | 01:37 | and search by categories and then
these would match the Effects menu.
| | 01:41 | Finder folders, the folders saved on your
hard drive, or in alphabetical order. You can
| | 01:46 | also decide what to show or not show.
For example, if you did not want to be
| | 01:49 | distracted by animation presets, you
would turn that off and the Animation
| | 01:53 | Presets menu will disappear. I want
to go ahead and leave it on for now.
| | 01:56 | Now the other thing this panel is
useful for is applying Animation Presets.
| | 02:00 | Let me go ahead and delete my previous
search and I will twirl open the Animation
| | 02:03 | Presets folders. An animation preset
can contain effects, keyframes, masks,
| | 02:10 | basically anything that you can see in
the Timeline panel can be saved in an
| | 02:14 | Animation Preset. These can then be
later applied to whatever layer you choose.
| | 02:19 | After Effects ships with literally
hundreds of presets developed by Adobe to
| | 02:22 | create automatic backgrounds,
different image processing effects.
| | 02:27 | We particularly like the behaviors which
appear at the top, lots of great presets.
| | 02:31 | There is a couple ways of applying a
preset. If you already know what preset
| | 02:36 | you're after, for example, if I know I
want to apply this Colorize - gold dip
| | 02:40 | to a piece of footage, I just go
ahead and double-click it or drag it over,
| | 02:43 | just like any other effect and
you see it applied to my footage.
| | 02:46 | On the other hand, if I want to browse
my presets, there is a very handy Browse
| | 02:51 | Presets command right here in the
Options menu. What that will do is open Adobe
| | 02:55 | Bridge. Here I am inside Adobe Bridge
and you'll see folders that have the same
| | 03:00 | names as we saw back in
the Effects & Presets panel.
| | 03:03 | Each one of these folders contains a
different category of Animation Presets
| | 03:06 | that Adobe supplied with the program.
For example, if I open up the shape
| | 03:10 | layers and look at its backgrounds,
I see a number of animated backgrounds that
| | 03:15 | Adobe has provided. If I click one of
them, you'll see it's previewed over in a
| | 03:19 | special window. Here's a
couple of the different presets.
| | 03:23 | Now Adobe provides quite a few useful
presets. For example, there is a large
| | 03:27 | number of text animation presets broken
down in several categories. Again I'll
| | 03:32 | select one and see it animated in the
Preview panel to see what looks like.
| | 03:36 | Then let's say that I wanted to apply
one of these presets to a selected layer
| | 03:41 | back in After Effects. For example,
I'll select one of these Bad TV presets and
| | 03:45 | you can see what it looks
like over here in Preview.
| | 03:48 | Just like I did in the Effects &
Presets panel, I double-click it and that will
| | 03:51 | be applied in my selected layer back in
After Effects. Bridge just switched me
| | 03:55 | back to After Effects automatically
and you'll see here's my treated footage
| | 03:58 | and here's all the effects that we're
in an animation preset. As I grab my time
| | 04:02 | marker through, you can see that my
footage is now then processed by that
| | 04:05 | Animation Preset. If I don't like that
preset, it's a simple matter of undoing
| | 04:10 | to remove the effect, and switching
back into Bridge and choosing a different preset.
| | 04:14 | For example, let's try this Night
Vision preset instead, okay you might like
| | 04:19 | how that looks, double-click it, I'm
switched back in After Effects and now you
| | 04:24 | see I have this Night Vision look
applied to my footage and there is the
| | 04:27 | brand-new effect this Animation Preset
applied. If I want to see those in the
| | 04:31 | Effect Control panel, I just bring up
forward and there is my new effects.
| | 04:35 | Now in addition to applying
Animation Presets you can save your own.
| | 04:38 | For example, if you came up with a stack
of effects or masks or keyframes the
| | 04:42 | client particularly likes or if you
want to go ahead and modify one of the
| | 04:46 | existing Animation Presets. For
example, if I want to make this more of a
| | 04:50 | purple night rather than a green night
vision, I'll go ahead and select all the
| | 04:54 | effects or keyframes or masks that I
want to be part of this preset and save
| | 04:58 | them in a couple of different ways.
| | 05:00 | I can click on this icon in the lower
right corner of Effects & Presets panel
| | 05:03 | and now we'll go ahead and create a new
Animation Preset or I can click on the
| | 05:08 | Options menu for Effects & Presets
panel and say Save Animation Preset.
| | 05:12 | Here I get to choose my new name such as
purple night, choose where I want to save it.
| | 05:19 | I can go ahead and keep it under same
folder I was in. Maybe put it loose in
| | 05:23 | the Presets panel. Maybe I will make
my new folder called my user presets.
| | 05:30 | Click Create and Save.
| | 05:34 | After Effects will update that panel.
I will twirl down Animation Presets and
| | 05:38 | there is my brand-new folder, my
user presets, and there is preset purple
| | 05:43 | night. Now there is one gotcha I
need to warn you about, about Animation
| | 05:47 | Presets and that if they have keyframes,
they're very sensitive as to where the
| | 05:52 | current time indicator is. They
start applying their keyframes after the
| | 05:56 | current time indicator.
| | 05:57 | I want to go ahead and undo to remove
my previous presets, there we go, and
| | 06:02 | pick a transition preset. Oh, just for
fun let's go ahead and pick one of these
| | 06:06 | Block Dissolves. If I double-click
it or drag onto my layer and type U to
| | 06:12 | reveal my keyframes, you see that the
first keyframe is not at the start of my layer,
| | 06:17 | but instead where
the current time indicator is.
| | 06:21 | So therefore, if you're applying any
preset to have keyframes, it's very
| | 06:24 | important to first go to where you
want the first keyframe to be, then apply
| | 06:31 | the Animation Preset. Now the
keyframes will start where you want them to.
| | 06:36 | So I hope that makes you more familiar
with the Effects & Presets panel, makes
| | 06:39 | you feel more comfortable with it and
you don't have to use it. Virtually,
| | 06:42 | everything that's in Effects & Presets
is duplicated by the Effects menu and
| | 06:47 | the Animation menu.
| | 06:48 | However, I think you'll find Effects &
Presets are very convenient to use.
| | 06:51 | For example, you don't need to remember
what folder anything is in. You go ahead
| | 06:55 | and type something like radial and
quickly get all of you effects to have
| | 06:59 | radial in it, regardless of what
folder they're saved in. So it's very handy
| | 07:03 | time saver and I think you'll find it
will save you some time while you're working.
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| Text Essentials| 00:00 | Text is one of the most important
elements of motion graphics. After Effects
| | 00:04 | has a very powerful text engine. In
this movie we'll show you how to type set
| | 00:07 | text and in the separate movie,
we'll show you how to animate that text.
| | 00:11 | Now to work with text, you need to have two
windows open. The Character panel and the
| | 00:16 | Paragraph panel. You can open these
directly from the Window menu item or
| | 00:20 | if you select the Type tool in After
Effects, you'll automatically open up
| | 00:25 | the Character and Paragraph panels.
| | 00:28 | And you'll see this is because of an
option in the Tool panel called Auto Open Panels.
| | 00:32 | You can work with these panels
that open automatically or you can take
| | 00:36 | advantage of the special workspace that
Adobe has created for you. Just choose Text.
| | 00:41 | Of course you can create your
own arrangement of panels and even save
| | 00:45 | yourself a new workspace. But we'll use
the Preset for now. To create text,
| | 00:49 | we need to select the Type tool, choose
a font and a color that we like. Going to
| | 00:55 | go ahead and start with 90% white for now.
| | 00:58 | And then just click over in the
Composition panel and start typing, such as
| | 01:02 | After Effects. When you are done
typing your words, it's very important that
| | 01:09 | you do not press the Return or Enter
key as part of the normal keyboard.
| | 01:14 | If you do that, After Effects will think
you just want to type more lines of text.
| | 01:19 | If you are done typing instead you want
to press the Enter key that exists as a
| | 01:23 | part of the extended keypad. Hit Enter
and now your text entry will in essence
| | 01:29 | be sealed off and you'll see that
instead of having a cursor, you have
| | 01:32 | these little selection boxes around the type.
| | 01:35 | After you have entered your type, a
special text layer will be created for you
| | 01:38 | in After Effects and will have a
default name that matches the type that you
| | 01:42 | entered. If you need to change this
name it's just a matter of selecting it,
| | 01:47 | hitting Return and typing something
like main title. And it will use that name
| | 01:52 | from now on. Now it's very important
to distinguish between Layer mode and
| | 01:57 | Editing mode when working with text.
If you see a cursor, you are in Editing mode.
| | 02:02 | This is where you can go ahead and change
the actual characters in your text. Like this.
| | 02:10 | It's also very important to know
that when you are in this mode,
| | 02:13 | items in the Character panel affect the next
character that you type. For example, if I put
| | 02:18 | my cursor at the end of this text and
go ahead and change my color to say red.
| | 02:24 | Now when I type CS4, it will take on
the new color. When I press Enter and I
| | 02:32 | get these little selection boxes around
the edges of my text, I am now in Layer mode.
| | 02:36 | Any changes I make in the Character panel
will affect all of my selected text.
| | 02:41 | And you see now that I have changed
my color, all of the text is selected,
| | 02:46 | and therefore changes color.
I will cancel for now.
| | 02:49 | To reposition the text, you can return
to the Selection tool. The shortcut is
| | 02:53 | we and just go ahead and pick up your
layer and move it around the screen.
| | 02:57 | These little handles on the side will
actually rescale your text. This is not
| | 03:01 | necessarily the way you want to do it.
We'll talk about text size in a second.
| | 03:05 | If the Type tool is active and you do
want to resize your box, you will hold
| | 03:09 | down the Command key on Mac or Ctrl key
on Windows and drag on those handles to
| | 03:13 | resize it. Up at my text, back at the
top to the Comp panel for now. And return
| | 03:17 | to Type tool.
| | 03:18 | Another way to create a line of text is
go ahead and choose Layer > New > Text.
| | 03:24 | What this will do is place the cursor
so its baseline is at the exact center of
| | 03:29 | your composition. If you go to your
Paragraph panel and choose Center to text,
| | 03:34 | now your typing will be exactly
centered. It's a good starting point. You see
| | 03:38 | it's going to use the color that I
most recently selected and I'll type
| | 03:42 | Apprentice and again press Enter and
now I am in Layer mode as opposed to Editing mode.
| | 03:48 | If my Type layer is deselected and I
want to re-enter Editing mode, I can go
| | 03:53 | ahead and double-click the layer and
now you see all of the text has been
| | 03:56 | highlighted. I can either click my
insert point directly in the middle of my
| | 04:00 | text or use the cursor keys to move
around in between characters. There we go.
| | 04:05 | I am going to turn these off for now
and show you a third way of entering text
| | 04:11 | in After Effects.
| | 04:12 | Again I have got my Type tool selected,
but instead of clicking and typing I am
| | 04:16 | going to click-and-drag out of box.
This is a paragraph box and my paragraph
| | 04:22 | will be constrained inside that box. I
make something narrow here for now. And
| | 04:28 | as I type, the text will be wrapped
for me, there we go. Now you see in this
| | 04:39 | case, I have got a solid line all the
way around that shrinked the size of my
| | 04:43 | paragraph box and my handles are
actually hollow. At this point, I can go ahead
| | 04:48 | and resize the box and my text
will automatically wrap. There we go.
| | 04:55 | If I press Enter, you'll notice that
those solid lines disappear. I am back to
| | 04:59 | solid boxes and now I am back in Layer
mode where I'll go ahead and change the
| | 05:03 | color, well I might type it once.
Double-click. I am back in Paragraph mode
| | 05:08 | with my handles.
| | 05:09 | Another very useful thing about
Paragraph mode is if I had a large amount of
| | 05:13 | text in my clipboard, I can go ahead
and select it, copy it and then just paste it
| | 05:17 | directly into After Effects. So
paragraph is particularly useful if you have
| | 05:22 | got to put text to fill a very
particular section of your composition.
| | 05:25 | Now let's talk a bit more about
modifying your text. I want to go back to one
| | 05:29 | of these single lines of text I made
earlier. One thing that's important to
| | 05:33 | know is that After Effects's text is
continuously rasterized. That means you
| | 05:38 | can keep scaling it as large as you
need it to be and it will always be sharp.
| | 05:43 | One big advantage. There is two ways
of changing the size of text in After
| | 05:47 | Effects. One is to go ahead and change
the scale size; the other is to change
| | 05:52 | the point size over in the Character panel.
| | 05:55 | Honestly, we prefer to change the
point size first. Get our text looking the
| | 06:00 | way we want to and then if we want to
animate it, then perhaps we might animate
| | 06:04 | the scale. But we tend to leave the
scale to 100% then set point size to
| | 06:09 | what we want it to be.
| | 06:10 | You can select individual characters
in After Effects and give each one a
| | 06:13 | different treatment. For example, if I
wanted this first letter to be larger
| | 06:17 | than the other characters, I just
select it, scale it up and maybe even give it
| | 06:21 | a slightly different color like a
lighter blue. You can also give individual
| | 06:25 | characters their own styles such as
Bold rather than Black not quite as heavy
| | 06:31 | and alter other characteristics about
it and I'll press Enter to select
| | 06:34 | my entire line of text again.
| | 06:37 | There are several ways of changing
the font that you use. One, you can just
| | 06:41 | type in the name of font you are
looking for to just Verdana and After Effects
| | 06:45 | will automatically recognize it. The
other thing you can do is place your
| | 06:49 | cursor in this box and use the Up and
Down Arrows on your keyboard to scroll
| | 06:53 | through the various fonts you might
have loaded on your computer. So this is a
| | 06:58 | quick way of just to check out some
different ideas or scroll through some text
| | 07:01 | you might have.
| | 07:02 | Another approach is to click on this
arrow and now you can directly select the
| | 07:06 | font family from the list that appears.
For example, I'll go something like
| | 07:12 | Baskerville. In addition to selecting
the font family, you can also select the
| | 07:16 | font style. For example Baskerville has
many variations like Italic, Semi Bold,
| | 07:23 | Semi Bold Italic etcetera. And just
like with font, you can go ahead and use
| | 07:27 | the up and down cursor to scroll
through these different weights.
| | 07:32 | That's very important to know the
difference between a real Italic and a fake
| | 07:35 | Italic. Baskerville is a good case.
It actually has an Italic weight in the
| | 07:40 | families. This is different than
what's known as a full Italic, this little
| | 07:44 | button down here in the Character panel.
What full Italic does is just add a
| | 07:48 | little bit of a slant to whatever font
you have selected. It's kind of Italic,
| | 07:53 | but it's not as true as selecting the
real Italic in this particular font.
| | 07:58 | Same goes with full Bold. Here's what
the different bolds look like semi Bold,
| | 08:03 | and normal Bold. After Effects has
what's known as a full Bold where it just
| | 08:07 | kind of thickens up the text little bit.
Now full Bold and full Italic do come
| | 08:12 | in handy for fonts that do not
have all these options and weights.
| | 08:16 | For example if we went back to Bell
Gothic. You'll see the Bell does not have a
| | 08:21 | true Italic. So if I needed to get
something that look like Italic, I can go
| | 08:25 | ahead and use the full Italic to give a
bit of slant to this font. Switch back
| | 08:29 | to Baskerville and I'll switch back to
normal weight and turn off full Italic.
| | 08:37 | Now Baskerville is another interesting
font because it has very nice quotes.
| | 08:40 | There is a difference between inch
marks and honest curly quotes. For example,
| | 08:45 | if I go ahead and enter a quote mark
before and after this you'll see I get
| | 08:50 | some really nice curly quotes as
opposed to just up and down inch marks.
| | 08:55 | This is because After Effects has an
option called Use Smart Quotes. Smart
| | 09:01 | Quotes automatically enter curly
quotes without you having to type a special
| | 09:05 | keyboard combination. If I was to turn
Smart Quotes off and use exact same keys
| | 09:10 | on the keyboard, you'll see that I
just get these boring inch marks or
| | 09:15 | footmarks. Curly quotes, by the way are
one of the things that help distinguish
| | 09:19 | good type setting from bad type setting.
| | 09:21 | You really want to take advantage of
these curly characters where possible,
| | 09:25 | because it will just make your type
look that much more professional. I'll take
| | 09:28 | the quotes off for now, press Enter.
Let's go ahead and tour around some of the
| | 09:32 | other options in the Character panel.
In addition to font size, there are many
| | 09:36 | other options such as the spacing in
between the lines, how tall the characters
| | 09:41 | are, how fat the characters are,
baseline shifts or superscripts etcetera.
| | 09:48 | It's very important to keep track of
what characters or what lines are selected
| | 09:52 | when you play with the Character
panel because again only the selected
| | 09:55 | characters are going to get your
alterations. If you only want to superscript
| | 09:59 | one character, select just that
character. Then go ahead and give it a
| | 10:03 | baseline shift offset.
| | 10:06 | In addition to clicking on the color
swatches to change the color, you do have
| | 10:09 | a handy eyedropper where you can go
ahead and pick another colors such as down
| | 10:12 | in my Timeline layer bars. There is
also a quick access to change your color to
| | 10:17 | black or to white. There is white type.
Currently, I have my stroke disabled.
| | 10:22 | But there is a lot of options
with strokes in After Effects.
| | 10:25 | I'll bring that swatch forward, and I
will click on this to open up a Color
| | 10:29 | panel. Let's go ahead and pick just
something like a red stroke for now. Click
| | 10:32 | OK. Now as you alter this stroke size,
what's very important is how the stroke
| | 10:38 | is being drawn in relation to the fill.
You see here, very quickly the stroke
| | 10:42 | overwhelms the text. Well that's
controlled by this option over here.
| | 10:46 | For example, the default, the Stroke
Overfill, so as you get a fat stroke,
| | 10:52 | it paints over the fill color. If I change
it to Fill Over Stroke, you'll see that
| | 10:56 | even as I fatten up my stroke,
I can still see some of my fill.
| | 11:02 | When I am using Fill Over Stroke, as I
increase the stroke with, you can see
| | 11:07 | where the stroke for one character
starts to paint over the fill of an adjacent
| | 11:12 | character. If you see that going on,
you can this option to All Fills Over All
| | 11:19 | Strokes. That'll keep all of the fill
colors clean and on top of everything and
| | 11:24 | then you can go from very fat
strokes for special effects and such.
| | 11:28 | Now another very nice feature
concerning strokes is that how do the stroke ends
| | 11:32 | join. I am going to go ahead and
increase the size of my type here. You can go
| | 11:36 | ahead and see some detail on the ends
of my strokes. I'll go ahead and increase
| | 11:40 | my stroke size here.
| | 11:42 | There is new option in the Character
panel called Line Join. Right now we have
| | 11:46 | a Miter Join, which means we have a
fairly sharp edge. If we pick Rounding,
| | 11:50 | you'll see that we get rounded off
characters on our strokes. And if I choose a
| | 11:55 | Line Join of Bevel, you'll see that I
will get this cut off beveled edge. Nice
| | 12:00 | for some special effects you might
want to keep it at Miter, which is
| | 12:02 | the default look.
| | 12:03 | Now another very important element
of good type setting is tracking and
| | 12:09 | kerning. These two affect the space in
between characters. Tracking affects the
| | 12:15 | entire selection. For example all of
the characters in a word. So you can go
| | 12:19 | ahead and increase it to get sort of
a spaced out look. Or decrease it to go
| | 12:25 | ahead and pull things in
very type for a very crowded look.
| | 12:30 | Kerning affects only the spacing in
between character pairs, not the whole
| | 12:36 | text, but the characters on either
side of where you have got the cursor
| | 12:39 | placed. So the first thing we'll do is
get the tracking to get an overall look
| | 12:43 | that we like, then use kerning to
fix any problems in between characters.
| | 12:48 | For example you see that these T and
this I are pretty tight to each other to
| | 12:52 | where they are touching but none of the
other characters are touching. In that
| | 12:55 | case, I'll put my cursor right in
between those two characters and alter the
| | 13:00 | kerning for that pair. You can go
ahead and scrub the value right here in the
| | 13:04 | Character panel. There is too much
space, too little space. Somewhere around,
| | 13:10 | there is much better. You can also use
keyboard shortcuts. If you hold down the
| | 13:15 | Option key on Mac or Alt key on
Windows and use the left and right cursor
| | 13:19 | buttons, it will increase or
decrease the kerning and increments to 20.
| | 13:24 | We personally find that to be a little
bit high. We'll go ahead and fine-tune
| | 13:27 | this to get exactly the look that we
like. And then go through your type and
| | 13:31 | change other character spacings. For
example, if you think that's a bit on the
| | 13:34 | large side, let me go ahead and
reduce it to get the C tucked in little bit
| | 13:38 | closer to the I. Kerning is another one
of those things that really sets apart
| | 13:42 | a professional type job
from an amateur type job.
| | 13:45 | Now we've been spending all of our
time in the Character panel. But there are
| | 13:48 | some very interesting options down in
the Paragraph panel as well. Such as
| | 13:51 | whether that type is left justified,
centered, right justified, and other
| | 13:56 | automatic justifications and spacings
including indents. Now they are really
| | 13:59 | useful options on the Paragraph panel.
| | 14:02 | But the one thing that's very
important to notice is nowhere in the Character
| | 14:06 | panel nor the Paragraph panel do you
see any little animation stopwatches.
| | 14:11 | These parameters are not animatable.
There is an entirely separate type
| | 14:15 | animation engine in After Effects,
which we will cover in another movie.
| | 14:19 | So the mindset to use is use the
Character and Paragraph panels to get your
| | 14:24 | type the way that you like it. Maybe
the way that the final title is supposed
| | 14:27 | to look. Then use the animation engine
to make it fly on screen, fly off screen
| | 14:33 | or do other interesting things. And that's a quick
overview of how to set your type in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Text Animators| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to show you
how to animate text in After Effects.
| | 00:04 | Now to start out, you go ahead and
enter the text that you want to animate.
| | 00:07 | Choose, for example, what font you
want it to be. Maybe change the color just a
| | 00:12 | little bit, there we go, maybe
something in the goldish range.
| | 00:16 | After you have set the type the way
that you wanted it to be, you will notice
| | 00:19 | that there are no animation
stopwatches in the Character or Paragraph panels.
| | 00:23 | Instead, you need to add text
animators into After Effects.
| | 00:28 | What After Effects does is pick a range
of characters and then animates them by
| | 00:33 | offsetting their position, scale,
opacity and other Transform properties.
| | 00:38 | Just like when I edit text using the
Character palette, the first thing I do is
| | 00:41 | I pick what characters I want to animate.
If I want to animate the entire title,
| | 00:46 | I will just go ahead and select the
entire layer and then all of the characters
| | 00:49 | will be selected. Then I will twirl the
layer down and you see next to the Text
| | 00:53 | line is this button for Animate. What I
want to do is pick my initial property
| | 00:59 | that I wish to animate. So I will pick
Animate > Position. You will see that it
| | 01:04 | created an animator, which includes a
Range Selector and my property Position.
| | 01:10 | The way that After Effects thinks is
that it picks a range of characters, then
| | 01:15 | it offsets everything inside that
selection by the parameters that you've
| | 01:19 | entered underneath. There are a few
ways of seeing which characters are
| | 01:22 | selected. There is Start and End
parameters underneath the Range Selector and
| | 01:27 | you will see it's 0% and 100% to
begin with, the beginning and the end.
| | 01:30 | You also see these special cursors
inside After Effects, which show you what is
| | 01:35 | inside your selection. As I go ahead
and scroll Start and End, you will see
| | 01:41 | those special selectors move. For
example, I'll edit Start and End so just the
| | 01:45 | word Dropping is included in my
selection. You can also grab these directly and
| | 01:49 | move them to select specifically
the characters or words that you're after.
| | 01:52 | Once you've set up a selection, you can
offset it with your parameters that you
| | 01:57 | chose with the Animate button. You
then offset it. In this case, if I offset
| | 02:01 | the Y position, you will see just
the characters inside my selection get
| | 02:07 | offset. I will go ahead and just jam
it up here for now. Then as I scroll my
| | 02:13 | Start and End selections you will
see the characters will move from being
| | 02:17 | inside the selection, which means
they are offset to outside the selection,
| | 02:23 | which means they are no longer offset.
| | 02:25 | Remember, characters inside the
selection pick up these offset values;
| | 02:30 | characters outside the selection do not
get these offsets. I will go ahead and
| | 02:35 | back that up. Then you go ahead and
include the entire word if you want.
| | 02:39 | If I wanted to animate these characters,
there are a few ways to go about it.
| | 02:42 | For example, if I just wanted to
animate just the word Dropping and have it
| | 02:46 | drop in, you think well, it's simple,
I will just animate my Position value.
| | 02:51 | But if you want to make the characters
fall one at a time, instead you need to
| | 02:55 | animate their Range Selection.
| | 02:59 | So in this case let's go ahead and go
Start at 0, End 100% and set a keyframe
| | 03:05 | for Start. I will move 2 seconds later
in time and then set my Start keyframe
| | 03:10 | to be 100%. So in this case all of my
characters are outside of my selection
| | 03:16 | and no longer getting offset. I'll RAM
Preview and now you see as my selection
| | 03:21 | moves through the characters, they move
from being offset to not being offset.
| | 03:27 | The handy thing about that is all you
need to do is just change your keyframes.
| | 03:30 | For example, if I want to make it
happen faster I will just drag this keyframe
| | 03:33 | earlier and now you will see they drop
in much faster. I will go ahead and add
| | 03:38 | keyframe interpolation. For example,
press F9 to Easy Ease this particular
| | 03:42 | keyframe and then you'll see the
animation slows in towards the end where In
| | 03:46 | drops in and slower pace
in rest of the characters.
| | 03:50 | Once you've set up an Animator Selection,
you can start adding other properties
| | 03:54 | to also be offset. For example, I
will move my Time till I see a few of my
| | 03:59 | characters. I go ahead and
Add > Property > Rotation.
| | 04:06 | Now as I include my Rotation offset,
for example, maybe 180 degrees or so. You
| | 04:11 | see the characters outside of my
selection are not rotated; characters inside
| | 04:16 | of my selection are rotated. As I drag
my Current Time Indicator through here,
| | 04:21 | you will see that they drop in with
Rotation and Position. There we go.
| | 04:26 | Let's go ahead and add another
parameter such as Scale. It's very common to add
| | 04:31 | Scale so you make things seem to fly
down from a large scale to a small scale.
| | 04:36 | Go ahead and increase my character size,
maybe a bit earlier so I can see what
| | 04:40 | things look like and have lot of fun
now as using scale down and drop down into
| | 04:46 | position, rotating on their way. Here we go.
| | 04:52 | You can also alter other parameters
such as Color and again this is an Offset.
| | 04:56 | What is the color of the characters
inside of the selection? I pick Fill Color
| | 05:01 | > RGB and go ahead and change that
swatch to a different color such as maybe a
| | 05:07 | richer, darker gold like around there.
Then as my characters drop in, you will
| | 05:13 | see they go back to their original
color and their original scale, etcetera.
| | 05:20 | I can still edit the characters inside
the Character panel. For example, I can
| | 05:25 | go ahead and change back to different
fonts, such as Arial Narrow and I will
| | 05:29 | keep all the same animation. I can go
ahead and change the ending color.
| | 05:33 | For example, let's say we want to go to
something more of a violet color. You see
| | 05:37 | the ending color was changed in the
Character palette, but the animation
| | 05:41 | remains the same. I go
back to Arial Black for now.
| | 05:49 | Now the problem with this is you may
say well, the starting point of this
| | 05:53 | animation looks kind of stupid to be
honest. That's why most of the animations
| | 05:58 | also include the Property Opacity.
Give myself a more room here, you want to
| | 06:04 | start with an opacity of zero or
invisible so that anything inside the
| | 06:10 | selection is invisible and then as
characters fall out of selection, they then
| | 06:15 | become visible. This is the most
common sort of animation. They come from
| | 06:19 | outside of being visible to being visible.
| | 06:21 | You see that I've got some characters
moving very faster and I am getting a
| | 06:29 | very strong look to my animation.
Another property that goes hand in hand with
| | 06:34 | a lot of type animation is Motion
Blur. So I will go ahead and enable the
| | 06:38 | Motion Blur switch for my type layer
and then also enable it for the entire
| | 06:43 | composition. Now you will see that each
character has a very nice blur to it as
| | 06:49 | it drops into position. I will
go ahead and Ram Preview that.
| | 06:52 | If I want something a bit slow more
elegant, I will just drag my second
| | 06:57 | keyframe out. There we go. You see
they're changing color, changing scale,
| | 07:03 | changing rotation as they go out of being
selected and fall into their original position.
| | 07:07 | Just as a reminder, Motion Blur has
changed in the Composition Settings.
| | 07:13 | Command+K on Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows
is the shortcut to open it. Go under the
| | 07:17 | Advanced Tab and you can do things like
increase the Shutter Angle, the amount
| | 07:21 | of blur and also increase the
Adaptive Sample Limit. This is how smooth the
| | 07:26 | blur will be, how many independent
frames of blur you will get. When you've got
| | 07:31 | particularly fast moving type, go
ahead and move my keyframes closer and
| | 07:35 | you get some very nice smooth
animations as things drops in.
| | 07:39 | Now in this case I am using one Range
Selector and having all of these Offset
| | 07:43 | properties, Position, Scale, Rotation,
Opacity, Fill Color, all follow this one
| | 07:49 | Range Selection. There are cases
where you may want to have more than one
| | 07:54 | animation going on, more than one selection,
treat one word differently than another word.
| | 07:58 | In that case you can go ahead and
animate an additional property and create a
| | 08:02 | brand-new animator. But quite often
most animations are just adding properties
| | 08:08 | to the one existing animator
hence existing Range Selector.
| | 08:11 | As you get further in these animations,
there are some other cool options for
| | 08:15 | your Range Selectors. For example, a
popular one is Randomize Order. If you
| | 08:21 | have Randomize Order enabled rather
than the characters being offset from left
| | 08:25 | to right, they will be offset in a random order.
| | 08:33 | So I can move my one keyframe and
change the timing of everybody. If you don't
| | 08:38 | like this particular randomization,
for example, you don't like this p being
| | 08:41 | the first character, you can change
to Random Seed until you get particular
| | 08:46 | range which you like. Like you may
like D for Dropping to be your first
| | 08:49 | character on screen. So there is the D and
then the rest of stuff comes in a random order.
| | 08:54 | Now you might have also noticed these
characters tend to come in a very one at
| | 09:00 | a time sort of animation. Another
really useful parameter in here is Shape.
| | 09:05 | We can go ahead and pick different shapes
of how your Range Selector moves through
| | 09:10 | your characters. A particular useful
one is Ramp Up and Ramp Down. That way
| | 09:15 | rather than picking a character at a
time, you can pick a small selection of
| | 09:19 | your characters and move that selection
in a smooth ramp through your type.
| | 09:24 | Let me give an example of that.
| | 09:25 | I want to go back here and turn off
my Start and End and just pick a few
| | 09:29 | characters right now to be inside my
Range Selector. I will turn off Randomize
| | 09:34 | Order so you can better what I am
doing. There we go. We have just a few
| | 09:38 | characters selected. If I change my
Shape to a Ramp, I will get a smooth
| | 09:45 | progression as my characters fall out
of the selection, not one at a time but
| | 09:50 | over a ramp from the beginning to end.
| | 09:52 | In this case I animate my Offset and
I get a really nice cascading animation.
| | 09:58 | This is another one of the secrets to
animation. It's quite often you won't use
| | 10:01 | the shape of the square; you use a
shape of ramp. To do that, Start and End
| | 10:06 | determine the beginning and ending of
the ramp, once the range being smoothly
| | 10:10 | cascaded in and then you will change
the Shape to Ramp Up or Ramp down. Then
| | 10:14 | you animate the Offset parameter to
go ahead and move the selection through
| | 10:18 | your type to get a fun animation.
| | 10:20 | There is also other useful advanced
parameters that you'll explore such as Units.
| | 10:24 | Do you want to see Percentage
or Index or Character at a time? Do you
| | 10:28 | want to see Characters, Characters
Excluding Spaces so there is no pause in
| | 10:31 | between words or animate entire
words or entire lines as one unit?
| | 10:36 | It's a very powerful engine. We have
written all about this in both our books
| | 10:39 | 'After Effects Apprentice' and
'Creating Motion Graphics,' but hopefully
| | 10:42 | this gives you a quick
overview to help you get started.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Expressions| 00:00 | One of the most powerful features
in After Effects is Expressions.
| | 00:03 | An Expression is a small piece of code
that allows the parameter of one layer or
| | 00:08 | one effect to follow another
parameter or another layer or another effect,
| | 00:11 | whatever you choose. It can be thought
as an alternative to keyframing. Rather
| | 00:16 | than having to copy and paste keyframes,
you can just express one parameter to
| | 00:20 | follow another parameter.
| | 00:21 | For example, here I have already
keyframed the blue pulley and now I want to
| | 00:26 | make the red pulley follow along. Well
the first thing you need to do is reveal
| | 00:30 | the parameters you wish to express.
I have already got Scale and Rotation
| | 00:34 | revealed for the blue pulley. I will
select the red pulley, type S to reveal
| | 00:39 | its Scale, then Shift+R to
also add its Rotation value.
| | 00:44 | To enable Expression, I will hold down
the Option key on Mac or Alt key on the
| | 00:48 | Windows and click on the animation
stopwatch. Once I do so, you will see an
| | 00:52 | extra line gets revealed in the
Timeline panel. The Expression for Scale.
| | 00:57 | And After Effects will write a dummy
initial Expression for me, basically saying,
| | 01:01 | follow myself, my own transform value for Scale.
| | 01:05 | Now there is a couple of ways of
making this value follow another value.
| | 01:09 | The handiest is to use the Pick Whip tool.
The Expression Pick Whip allows me to
| | 01:14 | point at what I want to follow. So I
will click on the Pick Whip for my value
| | 01:19 | that I am expressing and drag it to
the value I want to follow and you will
| | 01:23 | see After Effects does some subtle highlighting
as I pick a value that I can express to.
| | 01:28 | So I will go ahead and pick Scale.
When I release the mouse, you will see
| | 01:32 | After Effects writes the Expression
for me. It says in thisComp is a layer
| | 01:38 | named Blue Pulley and we are going to
use its transform value for Scale, very
| | 01:43 | simple. There is two ways to accept an
Expression. One is to press the Enter
| | 01:48 | key on the new numeric keypad, not the
normal keyboard but the numeric keypad.
| | 01:54 | The other way is simply to click
anywhere else in the Timeline panel and there
| | 01:57 | the Expression's been accepted. Now as
I drag the current time indicator through
| | 02:02 | this Timeline, you will see that the
red pulley is scaling up by the same
| | 02:06 | amount as the blue pulley, but you
will notice that the red pulley is not
| | 02:10 | rotating. Only the expressed value is
being copied over. If I want to make
| | 02:14 | Rotation follow along as well, it's
pretty simple. I hold down Option or Alt,
| | 02:19 | click on the stopwatch, use the Pick
Whip and drag to the Rotation parameter of
| | 02:24 | the other layer I want to follow.
| | 02:26 | Press Enter and now you will see that
both layers scale and rotate together.
| | 02:31 | Now you may be thinking I could have
just copied and pasted keyframes,
| | 02:36 | why bother all this Expression stuff?
Well, here is the reason why. If you want to
| | 02:40 | make changes to your Master layer,
your Slave layer, the one that has
| | 02:45 | Expression will follow automatically.
For example, say I changed this keyframe
| | 02:49 | value to two rotations instead
of just one. I will press Enter.
| | 02:54 | Now as I drag my time indicator, you
will notice that both pulleys got the
| | 02:58 | increased rotation, not just the blue
pulley. So it's like doing the copy and
| | 03:03 | paste for me automatically. You write
the Expression once and it will always
| | 03:07 | follow along. Well if you want to
temporarily disable an Expression.
| | 03:11 | Well notice down here in the Timeline panel,
there is this little equal symbol.
| | 03:15 | That equal symbol indicates
that Expression is enabled.
| | 03:18 | If I want to temporarily disable an
Expression I click on this equal sign;
| | 03:24 | it will change to a not equal sign.
That means it's temporarily turned off.
| | 03:28 | As I drag my current time indicator you
will notice that the red pulley is no longer
| | 03:32 | rotating. To turn it back on, just
click on equal again and my Expression would
| | 03:37 | be re-enabled. If I want to delete an
Expression there is a couple of different ways
| | 03:42 | of doing that.
| | 03:43 | I can select the text, hit Delete,
hit Enter and now the Expression is gone.
| | 03:49 | I will undo to get back to where it was.
Now I will turn it back open so you can
| | 03:54 | see my expressed layer. The other way
is to hold down the Option or Alt key and
| | 03:58 | either click on the animation stopwatch
as you did before or click on the equal sign
| | 04:02 | and that will also delete the
Expression. And I will undo to get back to
| | 04:06 | where I was. And by the way you
might have noticed that when a value is
| | 04:09 | expressed its text turns red. If I
disable Expressions, you will go back to
| | 04:14 | your normal color. Enable, the red text
shows you that this parameter is being expressed.
| | 04:19 | There are a few ways of revealing
Expressions in the Timeline. For example,
| | 04:22 | I am going to just quickly add an
Opacity animation to this layer. Type zero
| | 04:30 | here. And twirl it up. Now you may know
that the U key reveals keyframes for a
| | 04:37 | layer. Well, it also reveals
Expressions as well. So as I type U it reveals
| | 04:43 | both my keyframe properties and my
expressed properties for a layer.
| | 04:48 | Say you want to look at just the
Expressions. If you type EE, two Es in quick
| | 04:53 | succession, it will reveal just the
Expressions not the keyframes. So those are
| | 04:58 | the two keyboard shortcuts, I want to
reveal my Opacity again and just set it
| | 05:02 | back so I can see what's going on in my layer.
| | 05:03 | Now the nice thing is that After
Effects will automatically write for me most
| | 05:09 | of the code that I need for most of
my Expressions. But if you do need to
| | 05:12 | modify the code, it's very, very,
simple. It is just a matter of adding some
| | 05:16 | simple math operations on to the end.
| | 05:17 | For example, say that I wanted the red
pulley to rotate twice as fast as the
| | 05:23 | blue pulley. I will select the
Expression, you see it's now highlighted, I will
| | 05:27 | put my cursor at the end of the
Expression and type times two. Notice that I
| | 05:34 | had to use the asterisks key which is
what computers use rather than the letter x.
| | 05:38 | Type, Enter, drag my time indicator
and now you see the red pulley is
| | 05:43 | indeed rotating twice as fast.
| | 05:46 | Say that I want the red pulley to
rotate only half as fast. Instead of times two,
| | 05:50 | I will do divided by two and again
I'm having to use the computer convention
| | 05:55 | of a slash rather than using the divide
symbol. Press Enter and now you will see
| | 06:01 | that the red pulley is only moving half as fast.
| | 06:05 | And you can confirm that in these
values here on the Timeline panel. There are
| | 06:09 | also simple math things that you can do.
Say you want to rotate in the opposite
| | 06:13 | direction. Do times minus one. Enter.
Now you see that the red pulley rotates
| | 06:20 | in the opposite direction of the blue
pulley. Say that you want to offset a
| | 06:23 | value. There is a couple of ways of
doing that. One way would be just to say
| | 06:28 | plus, so say 45 degrees. So it's put
at a slight angle, now as I drag my time
| | 06:33 | indicator, I will rotate the same
amount but the red pulley is offset and
| | 06:38 | again, you can see that now the value is here.
| | 06:40 | You can indeed mix Expressions and
keyframes for underlying values. Let me go
| | 06:47 | ahead, delete my +45 here at the end.
Press enter and turn off Expressions for
| | 06:54 | a second, say that I had this Rotation
value initially set to a value such as
| | 06:58 | 22 degrees. And I want to take that
value and always add it to my Expression.
| | 07:04 | I will select my Expression text and go
+ value. Value says always add Expression
| | 07:13 | or multiply it or whatever by the
original value this parameter had. Press
| | 07:19 | Enter and now you will see that as I
drag the time indicator again, the red
| | 07:25 | pulley is following the blue pulley
but it's being offset by that underlined
| | 07:28 | value and I guess, we will go ahead
and see it and even scrub it to offset,
| | 07:31 | maybe even to say a negative value like -60.
| | 07:35 | So Expressions are not exclusive,
they can be used in conjunction with
| | 07:38 | underlying values or with keyframes.
Now there are times when you will
| | 07:42 | accidentally break an Expression and
for something incorrect, say rather than
| | 07:46 | value, I put in some nonsense word here
like, some, + some. If I Press Enter,
| | 07:53 | I will get this error dialog. Initially
it's a bit scary, but let's go ahead and
| | 07:57 | read through it. It's basically
telling me that there is no such thing as a
| | 08:00 | property called some and that the
Expression has been disabled. The error
| | 08:06 | occurred in the first line of my
Expression in the Comp Pick Whip starter on
| | 08:11 | Layer 2 on this Rotation property. So
it does help me to find my errors. Click
| | 08:15 | OK and you will see down here in
the Timeline panel I have got a little
| | 08:18 | exclamation symbol indicating
there is an error with this Expression.
| | 08:22 | Well, don't panic, just start about
fixing it. You can either undo to get back
| | 08:27 | to where you were and that removes
the word some. We will just go ahead and
| | 08:32 | manually edit it to be correct again.
Error has been cleared. Expression works
| | 08:37 | again, no problem. Now you can do an
awful lot with the Pick Whip but there
| | 08:41 | will come times when it's useful to
type in an Expression of your own. For
| | 08:45 | example, there is a really handy
Expression in After Effects called Wiggle.
| | 08:49 | Wiggle automatically wiggles,
randomizes, however you want to think about it,
| | 08:54 | your chosen parameter. For example
this animation, say we wanted that little
| | 08:58 | Gizmo in the middle there and wiggle
its position so it bounces about the
| | 09:01 | screen. Again to apply Expressions,
first reveal the parameters that you want
| | 09:05 | to work with. P for position, hold
down Option or Alt, click on the stopwatch
| | 09:11 | to enable Expressions and to use the
Wiggle Expression, it is very simple, you
| | 09:15 | type wiggle, open parenthesis, enter
the value for how fast you want to wiggle,
| | 09:22 | in this case say one wiggle per second,
and then enter how much you want to
| | 09:28 | wiggle by, in this case I want to
wiggle by say 50 pixels, 50 close
| | 09:33 | parenthesis. And as before you would
hit Enter, we will just click anywhere
| | 09:37 | else in the Timeline panel.
| | 09:38 | Now as I build up a preview you will
see that the position of my Gizmo is
| | 09:45 | wiggling, moving randomly around the
screen. To edit it, say I want to wiggle
| | 09:49 | by a larger amount, I will just
select my Expression to enable it, change a
| | 09:55 | number like 200 pixels, press Enter.
Ram Preview again and now you see
| | 10:00 | it's wandering around
by a much larger amount.
| | 10:03 | And again you can wiggle virtually
any parameter. For example, to wiggle
| | 10:06 | Rotation, I will do Shift+R to reveal
Rotation, hold down Alt or Option and
| | 10:12 | type wiggle. Let's wiggle by an
amount of three times a second, 90 degrees.
| | 10:19 | That's going to be pretty crazy. We are
in Preview and you see that not only is
| | 10:23 | the position wiggling, the rotation is
also wiggling as well and that's a lot of fun.
| | 10:29 | The Wiggle Expression is the one that
we use most often. By the way there are
| | 10:32 | some animation presets underneath
the behaviors of the section. That also
| | 10:37 | includes various preset wiggle
Expressions that can be applied directly to
| | 10:41 | layers for you. Now let's say you
cannot remember the code you want to type in
| | 10:46 | for a particular Expression. What
After Effects does is something called the
| | 10:49 | Expression Language and menu that can
help show you some of the most common
| | 10:54 | Expressions that you
might otherwise want to type.
| | 10:56 | In this example, we have already
keyframed the minute hand to go around the
| | 11:01 | style. Say that we want to time a
transition, a radial wipe, so the background
| | 11:06 | is revealed while the minute hand goes
around. In one of our background layers
| | 11:10 | I will apply an Effect > Transition >
Radial Wipe. The problem is Rotation goes
| | 11:17 | from zero to 360 degrees. But
Transitions go from 0% to 100%.
| | 11:25 | We want to match up those two
different parameter ranges using an Expression,
| | 11:30 | but let's say we cannot remember what
Expression does that or exactly how we
| | 11:34 | type it or what its parameters are. Okay,
as always, let's reveal the parameter
| | 11:38 | we want to express in our timeline panel.
I will hold down Option or Alt, click
| | 11:43 | on the stopwatch in the Effect
Controls panel and After Effects will reveal
| | 11:47 | that for me down in the Timeline panel.
| | 11:49 | Then I will use this little handy
Expression language menu to help remind me
| | 11:55 | what are some of the Expression codes I
can enter. In this case, I want to use
| | 11:59 | interpolation, I want to interpolate
one value to another and pick the linear
| | 12:04 | interpolation. What linear does is
say as a master value, T goes from its
| | 12:11 | minimum to its maximum, I want to go
from my own minimum value to my own maximum value.
| | 12:19 | At this point you can start using
the Pick Whip or just typing numbers to
| | 12:22 | replace what you need to. In this case,
I will select the T master value and
| | 12:27 | use the Pick Whip to say follow that
other layer's Rotation. As it goes, from
| | 12:33 | zero to 360, I want my own value to go
from 0 to 100. I will press enter and
| | 12:44 | now as the minute hand rotates
from 0 to 360 degrees, you will see my
| | 12:49 | transition completion is going form 0 to 100%.
| | 12:53 | Linear is another one of those really
handy Expressions worth remembering but
| | 12:57 | if you can't remember it, use the
Expression Language menu to help you out.
| | 13:00 | I know that Expressions can be
intimating to a lot of people, particularly,
| | 13:04 | you know, your right-brain artist types.
Code is scary and it seems non-creative
| | 13:09 | but in reality, Expressions can do a
lot to help you save time and also to help
| | 13:15 | you pull off more difficult animations
like coordinating these two different
| | 13:17 | parameters so that you don't need to
keep pulling out a calculator and figuring
| | 13:21 | these things out for yourself. It's a
great thing. It's worth learning a little bit,
| | 13:24 | just to make your life go easier.
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| 3D Axis Arrows| 00:00 | We have a running joke about 3D. It is
called 3D because everything takes three
| | 00:04 | times as long. Well, moving or
rotating can be one of those examples.
| | 00:08 | Fortunately, there is a set of tools
called Access Arrows to make that
| | 00:10 | a little bit easier in After Effects.
| | 00:13 | For example, here I have a text layer,
Enter a New. And normally in 2D, I just
| | 00:17 | pick it up and I drag it around. But
watch what happens when I enable its 3D
| | 00:22 | Layer Switch. When I turn it on, this
layer suddenly grows a set of arrows in
| | 00:27 | the Composition panel.
| | 00:29 | These are the Access Arrows. They are
color coded, so the RGB, Red, Green, and Blue,
| | 00:36 | equal the X, the Y and the Z dimensions.
If you hover your cursor over one
| | 00:42 | of these arrows to where the access
letter appears such as X, your dragging
| | 00:46 | will be constrained in just
that dimension, such as X. Y.
| | 00:52 | This little blue thing is actually a
Blue Arrow coming straight at you. Z,
| | 00:56 | closer to you and further away. If I
change to one of the Custom view, so you can
| | 01:00 | see it from an angle, you
can see that Z a bit easier.
| | 01:03 | It is dragging towards you and then
further away. I will go back the Active
| | 01:07 | Camera for now. If you want to freely
move this layer, you need to put the
| | 01:11 | cursor close to these Access Arrows,
but not to the point where you see a letter.
| | 01:15 | Just off of it like right there
and now, you can go ahead and freely
| | 01:18 | move it in whatever dimension you like.
| | 01:20 | Now, along with changing the position,
you could also rotate based on these
| | 01:25 | Access Arrows. I will go open to my
Tool panel and select the Rotation tool.
| | 01:29 | Shortcut key is W for Wotate, and now
you will see I've got a little Rotation
| | 01:35 | Icon and again, Y rotation,
X rotation, and Z rotation.
| | 01:47 | Again, if I want to freely rotate in
any dimension, I need to get to where I am close,
| | 01:50 | but not quite where I am seeing
any of the Access Letters, and now I can
| | 01:54 | freely rotate the layer around.
I press V to return to my normal Selection tool,
| | 01:59 | where I can go
ahead and drag the position.
| | 02:01 | Now, you do not need to use the Access
Arrows. You can still reveal parameters
| | 02:05 | on the Timeline, such as P for
Position and R for Rotation and then just
| | 02:10 | directly scrub the values in the
Timeline panel such as the Orientation,
| | 02:15 | Rotation, and your different dimensions.
| | 02:18 | But if you are in interactive type,
these Access Arrows allow you to go
| | 02:21 | ahead and directly grab a layer in
3D and move it around constraining the
| | 02:25 | dimensions as you like or
freely dragging around if you like.
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| 3D Camera Tools| 00:00 | As you start working in 3D space in
After Effects, you need to master a few new skills.
| | 00:03 | One of those skills is how to
manipulate the 3D Camera and another is
| | 00:08 | how to manipulate the 3D views. These
happen to share the same tool and what
| | 00:12 | that tool does changes
depending on what your view is.
| | 00:16 | Along your Tool menu is a Camera tool
and there are several different tools to
| | 00:20 | choose from. The brand new Unified
Camera tool, which was introduced in After
| | 00:24 | Effects CS4, Orbit tool,
Track XY tool, and Track Z tool.
| | 00:30 | If you are in an Active Camera View
and have a 3D Camera in your project,
| | 00:37 | those tools affect the camera's position.
For example, I will type P to reveal the
| | 00:42 | camera's position and Shift+A to
also reveal its point of interest and
| | 00:47 | I will select the Track Z tool.
| | 00:50 | Now, as I drag around the window,
you'll see that the Z values for positioning
| | 00:53 | on the point of interest are changing.
I switch to the Track XY tool. You will
| | 01:00 | now change the X and Y values for the
camera's point of interest and position,
| | 01:05 | and I change it to the Orbit tool,
it will now start to orbit the camera around
| | 01:10 | our 3D object in this view.
| | 01:12 | It is important to know that in your
normal 2-point camera where you have
| | 01:15 | position and point of interest, the
Orbit tool is actually moving at the back
| | 01:19 | of the camera, its position value,
it's not rotating the camera. That only
| | 01:24 | happens if you happen to
turn off this 2-point camera.
| | 01:26 | Okay. That's what happens when you
are in an Active Camera view. What of those
| | 01:32 | tools do change if you change your views?
For example, if I want to go to a Top
| | 01:37 | view to better rearrange where my layers are
and what my camera's relation with those layers,
| | 01:41 | you will see that After Effects
defaults give me a very closer view to my layers.
| | 01:45 | If I want to back off and see
more of my scene, I can switch to the
| | 01:50 | Track Z tool, and drag it to pull back,
and switch to the Track XY tool to go
| | 01:56 | ahead and center it in my view.
| | 01:59 | The Orbit tool has nothing to do in
this view because I am not moving the
| | 02:04 | camera. I am just moving my view on
these layers, and indeed as I change to the
| | 02:09 | Track XY tool, you will see that none
of the camera's parameters are changing.
| | 02:14 | Only my view on the layers are changing.
| | 02:18 | Let's go ahead and switch to another
view, such as the Left view, and again
| | 02:22 | After Effects defaults to seeing them
too close. I will switch to my Track Z tool,
| | 02:26 | back off a little bit, switch to
Track XY, re-center my view, not editing
| | 02:36 | the camera, just editing my view. Same
thing applies if I use one of the Custom Views.
| | 02:41 | Again, I can use these tools to
change how my view is looking at my overall
| | 02:44 | objects. Now, you may notice that
there are some handy shortcut keys to move
| | 02:48 | between these tools. C as in C for
Camera toggles between them. So I can
| | 02:54 | quickly go between say a Track Z
Camera and Orbit tool, and Track XY.
| | 03:02 | New in After Effects CS4 is a Unified
Camera tool. This is for people who have
| | 03:08 | three-button mice. Basically the three
buttons take over these three tools.
| | 03:14 | I will switch to Unified Camera tool,
click on my left mouse button, that becomes
| | 03:19 | my orbit, click on my right button
becomes my Track Z and click on my middle
| | 03:25 | button and that becomes my Track XY.
It is a very handy addition in After
| | 03:30 | Effects CS4 if you have a three-button
mouse. I will switch back to my Active
| | 03:34 | Camera and now I will use this tool to
actually move my camera's position in
| | 03:37 | the whole composition.
| | 03:38 | When you are done, remember to press V.
V is the shortcut to return to the
| | 03:44 | ordinary Selection tool. This way,
you can actually pick up layers and move
| | 03:48 | them and not worry about accidentally
orbiting or tracking your camera around the scene.
| | 03:53 | So that's a quick overview of the
Camera tools. Very handy, particularly for
| | 03:57 | getting alternate views on your 3D space.
But remember, it's only changing the
| | 04:01 | camera if you happen to be in a
Camera View like Active Camera.
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| Tracker Controls| 00:00 | If you want use the Motion Tracker and
Stabilizer un After Effects, you need to
| | 00:03 | do two things. One, get a good track
point. Two, set good track options.
| | 00:09 | The first thing you want to do is open up
the Tracker panel. You can do that a couple of ways.
| | 00:13 | You can up a Window > Tracker or you
can change your workspace to one that's
| | 00:18 | been created specially for motion
tracking. Now you don't do your tracking in
| | 00:22 | the Composition panel; you need to do
it in a Layer panel. Just take the layer
| | 00:26 | that you want to track and double-
click it to open up its Layer panel and you
| | 00:30 | see that the tracker controls now
become active. You can either track motion or
| | 00:36 | stabilize motion. Let's do a track.
| | 00:39 | After I click one of these buttons
I get a Track Point. The inside of this is
| | 00:44 | the feature region. It defines what
actually want to follow up in this image.
| | 00:48 | The outside square is a search region.
How far and wide I look to try to find
| | 00:54 | that feature that I am tracking from
frame to frame. As you move the cursor
| | 00:58 | over the track point boxes, you
will see a few different icons appear.
| | 01:01 | These reflect different ways of moving
the Track Point. For example, if I move
| | 01:06 | my cursor in between the boxes you will
see a four-way arrow here at the edge.
| | 01:11 | That means I am going to move the
Track Point as a whole. And as I move the
| | 01:14 | track point the center, the
feature region is magnified. There we go.
| | 01:21 | If I want to resize a box rather
then use I can go ahead and move it to
| | 01:25 | particular corner and you will see the
all four corner move symmetrically or
| | 01:29 | move it along an edge and you will
see that I moved with box as whole as
| | 01:33 | opposed to corners. I will go ahead and
move my feature region inside and then
| | 01:40 | move my search region on the outside.
| | 01:42 | If you need to further tweak your Track
Point, hold down the Command key on Mac
| | 01:47 | or Ctrl key on Windows and drag at
individual corner to get it exactly
| | 01:51 | where you want it to be.
| | 01:53 | The size of these boxes is just as
important as the position of them. You want
| | 01:57 | to go ahead and make the feature region
just big enough to enclose the feature
| | 02:03 | you are tracking, but not too big. You
don't want to pick extraneous features
| | 02:08 | like submit from the background.
| | 02:09 | The search region needs to big enough
to follow the movement of the particular
| | 02:14 | feature I am tracking from frame to
frame, but not so big that it takes up the
| | 02:17 | whole frame. The bigger the search
region, the longer your tracking is going to
| | 02:21 | take and the larger the chances going
to accidentally pick up a wrong feature
| | 02:25 | somewhere else inside this region.
| | 02:27 | So I am going to go ahead and bias
it in the direction that I know my
| | 02:30 | wildebeest is moving which is from left
to right and then make it as big enough
| | 02:34 | to capture that movement from frame to frame.
| | 02:37 | After I decided what feature it is I am
going to track, in this case the horns
| | 02:41 | of the wildebeest. Next comes deciding
where I am going to attach the new layer
| | 02:47 | that I am going to have follow this
tracked layer. That's where this little Plus
| | 02:51 | icon, the attach point comes from. This
says this is where the anchor point of
| | 02:56 | my new layer is going to go. In this
case I am making above a text bubble to
| | 02:59 | follow this wildebeest. So just for laughs,
I am going the attach point down by
| | 03:03 | the wildebeest's mouth. I am tracking
his horns, but the new layer is going to
| | 03:07 | be attached down here in
relation to the layer that I am tracking.
| | 03:11 | Now hand in hand with setting up a
good Track Point is choosing good Track
| | 03:16 | Options. I will click on this button
to open up the dialog and there are two
| | 03:20 | things in particular that I need to
focus on. One is the channel what am I
| | 03:24 | going to be tracking and in this case
where the wildebeest is considerably
| | 03:28 | darker than the sky behind, I will go
ahead and choose a Luminance. I am going
| | 03:32 | to look for this feature based
on how bright or how dark it is.
| | 03:35 | However, if I am in a situation where
the feature where I am tracking is the
| | 03:39 | same brightness as the background, but
a different color then instead I might
| | 03:43 | choose to track RGB or to track
Saturation, but again this wildebeest is dark
| | 03:48 | against medium brightness, Luminance
is my better pick. The other thing you
| | 03:53 | need up in your Options is
what to do from frames to frame.
| | 03:55 | Now you do want to track Subpixel
Positioning. There is no need to track fields
| | 04:00 | in this footage because it's not
drastic movement from field to field. But I do
| | 04:03 | need to worry about whether to adapt
my feature. If the size or shape of my
| | 04:09 | track feature is changing a lot from
frame to frame, I want to turn on Adapt
| | 04:14 | Feature on every frame. If it's not
changing a lot from a frame to frame,
| | 04:18 | I will turn it off.
| | 04:20 | Now when After Effects finds the
feature in the next frame, it assigns to it a
| | 04:24 | Confidence reading of how closely it
matched its previous picks on what the
| | 04:29 | feature is supposed to be. This pop-up
allows you to decide what to do if its
| | 04:34 | Confidence becomes too low. In other
words that the feature is changed too much.
| | 04:37 | You can go ahead and continue
tracking no matter what. You can stop
| | 04:42 | tracking which gives you the
opportunity to set up a new feature region.
| | 04:45 | You can say well, just Extrapolate Motion,
keep going in the same direction. Well,
| | 04:50 | the option I use most often is Adapt
Feature that basically says if the feature
| | 04:54 | is changing a little bit from frame to
frame until it gets say 20% different
| | 04:59 | from where it was originally then
instead see how this feature looks on this
| | 05:03 | frame and now make that the
reference that your tracking and click OK.
| | 05:08 | So those are the two major things to setting
up a track: your Track Point and you options.
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| Shape Layers| 00:00 | Shape layers are one of the
significant new features that were added to
| | 00:02 | After Effects back in version CS3. Shape
layers are a way of bringing the vector
| | 00:08 | drawing tools of Illustrator into
After Effects and allowing you to animate them.
| | 00:12 | Here we would like to give you a quick
overview of how to create and edit shape layers.
| | 00:16 | Now those of you who are familiar with
After Effects may remember the Mask tool
| | 00:19 | and the Pen tool. These tools now
double up to create shape layers.
| | 00:25 | For example, I will just draw out a quick
rectangle here. If you already have a
| | 00:29 | layer selected, these tools can either
create a new shape that will be added to
| | 00:33 | the existing shape layer or they can
mask that shape layer. Now which they do
| | 00:37 | is determined by these two buttons,
either create a shape or create a mask.
| | 00:42 | But again, if you have got nothing
selected, you are creating a shape layer.
| | 00:45 | I am going to delete this layer for now.
There are also additional buttons along
| | 00:48 | the top Tool menu about your Fill
Options. In this case, I am going to go and
| | 00:52 | do a Solid Color Fill and a Fill with
say 65% Opacity. Fill Color, I will go
| | 01:00 | ahead and pick something of more in
the blue range. Stroke Options, Solid
| | 01:04 | Color, the Gradient Stroke or no
stroke at all. I will select Solid Color and
| | 01:10 | also what the color of that stroke is
going to be. I want to go ahead and pick
| | 01:13 | something in the goldish range,
just for something different here.
| | 01:16 | And finally you can pick ahead of time
how wide your stroke will be. I will
| | 01:20 | set it to about 3 pixels for now. Any of
these parameters can be edited after the fact.
| | 01:28 | You can use this Shape tool
menu to decide what general type of shape
| | 01:31 | you are going to draw: a Rectangle, a
Rounded Rec, an Ellipse, a Polygon or a Star.
| | 01:36 | I am going to start with the
Star tool just because it has the most
| | 01:39 | options, so it will give us the idea of
some of the things we can do with shape layers.
| | 01:43 | Once I have selected the tool, I just click
and start dragging out my shape in the Comp panel.
| | 01:49 | Now before I release my mouse, I do
have some control over the initial shape.
| | 01:54 | I can rotate it or change its scale.
If I add the Shift key there is no rotation,
| | 01:59 | it will be straight up and down. If I
add the Spacebar before I release the mouse,
| | 02:03 | I can change what its initial
position is going to be, and I can also
| | 02:07 | use the Cursor key to control things
like how many points my star has and how
| | 02:12 | much it's rounded. Very much of
strong outer rounding, so it could have a
| | 02:16 | clover look or strong outer rounding
to create these interesting intermediate shapes.
| | 02:20 | Now I am going to go back to something
that's more of a sharp edged star. Hover
| | 02:23 | these by mouse and you see down in the
Timeline panel I have a brand new shape
| | 02:27 | layer. Now shape layers are built out
of series of operators and the order of
| | 02:33 | these operators has a big impact on
what the final shape looks like. The
| | 02:37 | contents of my shape layer currently
create a shaped group called Polystar.
| | 02:42 | It's called a Polystar because it can
either be a star or a polygon. I will
| | 02:48 | switch it back to star for now.
| | 02:49 | Even though, I am done drawing my shape.
I have got control here over things
| | 02:54 | such as how many points my star has,
where its offset in the window, how much
| | 03:00 | it's rotated and some very fun
parameters like the Inner Radius and Outer
| | 03:03 | Radius, and here is where we can really
start to customize what our shape looks
| | 03:07 | like. The Rounding parameters are
particularly interesting as you start to
| | 03:10 | create some very interesting flower
like non-standard shapes, not just a
| | 03:15 | straight sharp edged star. You can
see we can have a lot of fun there.
| | 03:21 | In addition to the Polystar Path, I
have got Stroke and Fill operators and
| | 03:25 | these can be reordered for Fill over
Stroke or Stroke over Fill. Now many other
| | 03:30 | shape operators I can add as well
including additional shape paths, additional
| | 03:35 | fills and strokes and also all sorts
of Shapes operators like Pucker & Bloat,
| | 03:39 | Twist, Trim Paths, Wiggle Paths, all sorts
of fun stuff to modify a shape after the fact.
| | 03:45 | Now when I have a shape layer still
selected I can go ahead and drag out a
| | 03:48 | second shape and add it to this layer.
I will pick Rounded Rectangle for now,
| | 03:52 | drag it out and as I mentioned
before you can go ahead and use the Cursor
| | 03:55 | controls to change things
the rounding of the layers.
| | 03:59 | By default, After Effects will create a
second independent shape group for this
| | 04:05 | new shape I just drew and I can turn
groups on and off individually. Now what's
| | 04:10 | important is individual shape groups
can have things like their own fill and
| | 04:13 | stroke. For example, I will select my
Rectangle Path and change the Fill Color
| | 04:18 | of just that particular group.
| | 04:20 | You notice that it changes while my
original group stays the same. You can also
| | 04:26 | drag shape operators in between
shape groups. For example, I can put my
| | 04:30 | Rectangle Path as part of my Polystar
group. Now you see they get the same
| | 04:36 | stroke and fill because they are inside
the same group. I will drag it back out
| | 04:40 | so it could have its own group.
| | 04:42 | Each shape group has its own Transform
Parameters. These decide how much it's
| | 04:48 | offset. For example, I can go ahead and
center up the rectangle and by the same
| | 04:52 | token center up a Polystar. There we go.
In addition to the transform for the
| | 04:59 | whole group, the parametric shapes
such as Polystar also have their own
| | 05:03 | Position offsets. I will make sure
those are all nice and centered for now. Good.
| | 05:08 | Now in addition to the normal things
such as Scale and Position and Rotation
| | 05:15 | there is also some additional
parameters inside the transform for the group,
| | 05:18 | such as ability to skew it. Notice I
can go ahead and create slanted or leaning
| | 05:22 | rectangle and other similar shapes.
| | 05:24 | You will also notice there are
stopwatches near most of the parameters for
| | 05:28 | shape layer. Virtually every parameter
of a shape can be animated and that's
| | 05:33 | where the real fun comes in having
vector shapes inside After Effects. I will
| | 05:37 | turn off the shape layers and I will
make sure I deselect it otherwise I will
| | 05:41 | just be adding more shape paths to the
shape layer. But in this case, I want to
| | 05:45 | create a brand new shape layer so I
need to make sure no one is selected.
| | 05:49 | I will select the Pen tool and this
will allow me to create a freeform path.
| | 05:53 | I can go ahead and select a different
Fill Color and Stroke Color for this new
| | 05:58 | shape. There we go. Something of that
range. Start clicking and dragging with
| | 06:04 | the mouse and you will see my new
shape layer will start to be filled in with
| | 06:08 | this freeform path. Then click on the
first point to close. I will twirl open
| | 06:13 | my new shape layer and you will see
again it has a shape group, Shape 1. It has
| | 06:18 | a path that does not have any
parameters. It's just a freeform path that I drew,
| | 06:22 | but it has Stroke and Fills before,
it has a Transform section and I can
| | 06:26 | add more shape operators to it.
| | 06:28 | I will select V to go back to my
normal Selection tool. There are a few ways
| | 06:32 | for changing the shape after the path.
If I have got a rectangle around the
| | 06:35 | whole thing, I can go ahead and scale
entire shape around its anchor point.
| | 06:41 | I can even do some rotations with it.
Again, a rounded shape anchor and I can
| | 06:47 | select individual points inside and
edit the Bezier Paths for the shapes and
| | 06:51 | again I can edit these pen
paths just like I did mask paths.
| | 06:55 | Hold the G key for example to go ahead
and break and make a discontinuous point
| | 06:59 | to get a sharp corner in my shape. You
can combine a freeform pen shapes with
| | 07:04 | parametric shapes on the same shape
layer and again have fun either having them
| | 07:08 | inside their own groups or dragging
them in between groups to go ahead and
| | 07:11 | change how they interact with
each other and how they intersect.
| | 07:13 | So it's a basic of creating shapes.
There is not a lot of magic to it. There is
| | 07:18 | a just a lot of parameters and
virtually any of these parameters can be changed
| | 07:21 | after the fact. So don't get hung up
too much on creating a shape; spend more
| | 07:25 | time exploring all the things you can
do to a modify shape after the fact.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Render Queue| 00:00 | After you have created a
composition in After Effects, the process of
| | 00:02 | outputting to a file is known as
rendering and we are going to discuss
| | 00:06 | the After Effects Render Queue in this
movie. To render a composition, either
| | 00:10 | select it in the Project panel or
bring it its tab forward in either the
| | 00:15 | Timeline or Composition panels and
select Composition > Add to Render Queue.
| | 00:20 | The shortcut is Command+M on Mac or
Ctrl+M on Windows. The Render Queue by
| | 00:25 | default docks into the Timeline panel.
You can go ahead and dock it into the
| | 00:29 | Composition panel or some people will
prefer to undock it and make it its own
| | 00:33 | floating window. But we will
keep it in the Timeline for now.
| | 00:36 | By default After Effects will create
a file name based on the composition's name.
| | 00:40 | You can change this name by
clicking on the Output To text, which will
| | 00:43 | open up a normal output dialog
depending on your operating system, and you can
| | 00:47 | go ahead and rename it such as map
output and save it where you want on your
| | 00:52 | drive. You can also have After Effects
ask you for a name every time you add a
| | 00:57 | composition to the Render Queue.
To do that, go under Preferences > Output and
| | 01:03 | disable Use Default Filename and Folder.
| | 01:06 | When After Effects renders a file
it's actually performing two steps
| | 01:09 | internally. The first step is that it
takes all the information for a given
| | 01:14 | frame and renders it to an internal
file or internal buffer and it uses the
| | 01:19 | settings inside the Render Settings
dialog to decide how to render that frame.
| | 01:25 | After the frame has been rendered,
After Effects then looks at the output
| | 01:28 | module to decide how to save that
file to disk, what file format to use,
| | 01:33 | what codec to use, etcetera.
| | 01:35 | So let's go ahead and look at the
settings for both of those. You can create a
| | 01:38 | series of templates for both Render Settings
and for the output module in After Effects.
| | 01:41 | And we will discuss that more
here in a minute. To see what templates
| | 01:44 | are available, click on the arrow next
to Render Settings and you will get
| | 01:47 | a list of the current templates.
| | 01:49 | Before you render you can select a
different template, for example DV Settings.
| | 01:54 | If you would like to choose a
different template to be your default template
| | 01:58 | next time you render, first hold down
Command on Mac or Ctrl on Windows, then
| | 02:04 | click on this arrow and pick a new
template and now that will be your new
| | 02:08 | default template for Render
Settings or for the output module.
| | 02:12 | To edit the Render Settings just click
on the name of the template. The Render
| | 02:15 | Settings dialog has a lot of switches.
Most of them give you an opportunity to
| | 02:19 | override settings that are already in
your composition. Now the first two are
| | 02:23 | Quality and Resolution. In almost all
cases you want to go ahead and leave
| | 02:27 | those at the defaults. So Best Quality
and Full Resolution. The only time you
| | 02:32 | would set those to anything else is if
you are trying to create a really fast
| | 02:34 | low-resolution proof.
| | 02:36 | Usually you want After Effects working
at the Best Quality all the time. After
| | 02:39 | Effects has the ability to cache
frames that you have already previewed to
| | 02:42 | disk, you can go ahead and use that
disk cache during the render if you like.
| | 02:46 | After Effects also has an accelerated
OpenGL Renderer, we tend to leave this
| | 02:50 | off and use the Full Quality software
renderer. Some other switches that may be
| | 02:54 | of interest to you include the Effects
switch. If you are the type of person
| | 02:58 | who temporarily turns off an effect
just to speed up rendering and you might
| | 03:02 | have forgotten to turn it back on when
you did go to Render, you can go ahead
| | 03:05 | and change the Effect pop-up to all on.
Again if you need to do a high-speed
| | 03:09 | render you might set it to all off. We
tend to leave it at current settings.
| | 03:13 | Color Depth, quite often when we are
working on a project we will use the
| | 03:16 | Project Settings of 8-bits per
channel which is of reasonable quality and
| | 03:19 | renders faster but when you do your
final render and you are trying to get that
| | 03:23 | last bit of extra quality out of it
you might want to up this to 16-bits per
| | 03:26 | channel, 32-bits per channel is a
special floating point mode and it can change
| | 03:31 | how some images look, if you are going
to use floating point, you really should
| | 03:35 | be working in this mode all the way
throughout your project and not set it just
| | 03:39 | at the render stage because it
may alter how some things look.
| | 03:42 | Frame Blending and Motion Blur are some
of the effects, you may be turning them
| | 03:46 | off temporarily just to work faster
but then you might want to turn them on
| | 03:49 | when it comes time to actually render.
Same thing for Motion Blur. Field
| | 03:54 | Rendering is very important. Some
video formats do have interlacing or fields
| | 04:00 | in it to get smoother motion. DV for
example, defaults to Lower Field First. If
| | 04:06 | you are doing something that's
progressive scan such as output for the web or a
| | 04:09 | film rate stuff or HD you want to
turn the Fill Renderer off. If you are
| | 04:14 | rendering to a Hi-def format with
fields such as HDV, you want to pick Upper
| | 04:18 | Field First and something other NTSC
and PAL professional formats also maybe
| | 04:23 | lower or upper depending upon
the card that you are using.
| | 04:25 | 3:2 Pulldown refers to a special
trick where you may be working on a
| | 04:30 | composition beside a film like rate,
like 23.976 frames per seconds, but you
| | 04:35 | need to layoff a tape that actually had
a video rate of 29.97 frames a second.
| | 04:40 | To do that you set your field order,
DV is Lower Field First and enable 3:2
| | 04:45 | Pulldown. This will then spread out
the rendered frames across all the video
| | 04:49 | fields to get the final frame rate
that you need but still contain that film
| | 04:54 | like motion. These different
characters indicate different bases of the
| | 04:58 | pulldown, this really only applies if
you are trying to match back to a film edit,
| | 05:02 | if you are just doing a video work,
pick the first one they are all the same.
| | 05:06 | Time span is particularly important.
A lot of the After Effects templates
| | 05:09 | default to Work Area Only and you
may preview just a small part of your
| | 05:13 | composition that you are working on.
However, quite often when you render you
| | 05:17 | want to render the entire length of
the composition. So you want to pay
| | 05:21 | particular attention to this pop-up
and maybe even create some templates for
| | 05:24 | yourself that uses that as the default.
| | 05:27 | If you want to render a very specific
area of your composition you can select
| | 05:30 | Custom here or click on this Custom
button and enter the exact range you want.
| | 05:35 | For example you might want to start
your render at 2 seconds and you might want
| | 05:39 | to render just say 3 seconds of your
composition. After Effects will then
| | 05:43 | automatically fill in the numbers
that you need to make that happen.
| | 05:47 | When you are done, click OK. Once
After Effects has used your Render Settings
| | 05:52 | to render out each individual frame of
your composition, then it has to know
| | 05:55 | how to save it to disk. That's where
the Output Module comes in. Now once again
| | 05:59 | you have a large number of templates
you can choose from, we will go ahead and
| | 06:02 | pick one of the NTSC templates for now.
Just as with Render Settings, hold down
| | 06:07 | Command or Ctrl and select a new
template to go ahead and make that your new
| | 06:11 | render default. For example, if you
are doing live DV work you may pick DV as
| | 06:15 | being your default template and then
if you want to edit the Output Module
| | 06:19 | click on the text for the template's name.
| | 06:20 | The most important choice is what
format you want to save the file to.
| | 06:25 | QuickTime movie is very common, if you
are creating content for the web you may
| | 06:29 | pick FLV, another common interchange is
to go ahead and pick an Individual File
| | 06:34 | Sequence for example, PNG sequences
are very popular for doing high quality
| | 06:39 | renders you can hand off to almost anybody.
| | 06:42 | After you have chosen a format you
then want to make sure you click on the
| | 06:46 | Format Options, the buttons hiding off
here to the side. Here is where you can
| | 06:50 | set up additional parameters about
your render. For example, if instead of
| | 06:54 | rendering to DV you want to go ahead
and render to the Animation codec, you
| | 06:58 | want to make sure you drag your
quality all the way to Best, for it to be a
| | 07:01 | lossless render.
| | 07:03 | After you have chosen your format
then you need to worry about what color
| | 07:06 | information you need to render that file.
Just the RGB Color Channels, just the
| | 07:11 | Alpha Channel or Transparency
or a combination of RGB + Alpha.
| | 07:16 | Not all codecs support RGB + Alpha.
For example videotape does not have an
| | 07:21 | Alpha Channel. So if you have chosen DV,
something specific to like an AJA or a
| | 07:25 | Black Magic card, you will not be able
to pick this option. If you are picking something
| | 07:30 | you want to hand off to an editor
later on, that they are supposed to
| | 07:32 | composite over the video edit, then you
do an RGB+Alpha so that they will have
| | 07:36 | the Transparency information.
| | 07:38 | After you have chosen that you will see
that this pop up has changed to Milliona
| | 07:42 | of Colors+. That means it's going to
be 8-bit quality, millions of colors and
| | 07:46 | the + means there is an Alpha
Channel. Some other formats such as a PNG
| | 07:51 | sequence involves trillions of colors,
16-bits per channel while some other
| | 07:55 | high end formats like Open EXR will
even allow you to save floating point images.
| | 08:00 | If you are saving off a channel you
need to decide how the Alpha is going to be
| | 08:04 | matted on to the color information.
After Effects defaults to Premultiplied,
| | 08:09 | which means some of the background
color is mixed in to the edges. In reality,
| | 08:13 | most of the time we prefer to have a
Straight Alpha channel. It's a higher
| | 08:17 | quality format, it fills out the color
channels beyond the edges of the Alpha
| | 08:21 | Channel to make sure you get a nice,
clean matte at the end and the editing
| | 08:25 | systems like Final Cut Pro
etcetera expect a Straight Alpha channel.
| | 08:29 | Here are also some additional what are
known as post render actions, such as
| | 08:33 | whether or not you want to embed the
project file into your rendered movie,
| | 08:37 | whether or not you want to save
additional metadata that might have come from
| | 08:40 | your camera with your rendered movie,
and whether or not you want to import the
| | 08:43 | rendered file back in After Effects, etcetera.
| | 08:45 | There are two other interesting parts
of the Output Module that make it very,
| | 08:49 | very flexible. The Stretch and the
Crop. Stretch gives you the ability to
| | 08:54 | rescale the file. For example, if you
wanted to make a smaller web version of
| | 08:58 | this file you may go ahead and enter a
smaller frame size, which is only 240
| | 09:02 | pixels wide. One important gotcha
though is that if you have Field Rendered
| | 09:07 | your final file, you never ever, ever,
ever want to change the height. This
| | 09:13 | will damage the fields that you have
rendered. So you only want to change the
| | 09:16 | height when you have done a
progressive scan renderer and have no fields.
| | 09:20 | Because I have gone ahead and set this
to Lower Field First, I am going to put
| | 09:22 | that back up to my 480 pixels high.
But something that does come in handy,
| | 09:26 | let's say you need to create an
anamorphic wide screen version of this. that's
| | 09:31 | normally 720 pixels wide rather than
the square pixels comp was using, I can go
| | 09:35 | ahead and do that right here in the
Stretch module. The Crop module comes in
| | 09:39 | handy if you need to crop off areas.
For example, if you want to crop areas
| | 09:43 | outside your action safe to create a
nice web version or if you need to go
| | 09:48 | between the formats. For example in
NTSC DV is only 480 lines tall but D1, the
| | 09:56 | professional video format is 486 lines
tall. You enter positive numbers to crop
| | 10:03 | off pixels or negative
numbers to pad or to add pixels on.
| | 10:07 | Again, if you are interlacing or
Field Rendering, you really need to pay
| | 10:11 | attention on what you are doing.
Fields always come in pairs. So if you have
| | 10:16 | field rendered information you want to
enter only even numbers in the top and
| | 10:21 | bottom values. If I want to pad 480
lines out to 486 I will put -4, two pairs
| | 10:30 | of lines at the top and -2 one pair of
lines at the bottom and now I have got
| | 10:36 | 486 line height and nice D1 output.
| | 10:40 | Don't forget the audio, a lot of
templates in After Effects have the audio
| | 10:44 | output turned off, but if you are
relying off the tape as audio you want to go
| | 10:48 | ahead and pick the right sample rate.
Professional video formats such as
| | 10:52 | professional DV and D1 all use 48K as
the audio sample rate. Consumer DV uses
| | 10:57 | 32K. So again it depends on where you
are going with this. 16-bit stereo is the
| | 11:02 | most common audio format option as well.
| | 11:04 | I will click OK. Now one of the
wonderful things about the Render Queue in
| | 11:09 | After Effects is that after it has
rendered a frame it can go ahead and write
| | 11:14 | that same frame to disk multiple times
to different formats. So in this case,
| | 11:20 | if I want to create a normal video
output but say also wanted to create a web
| | 11:24 | video output from the same file, I go
ahead and click on + to add a new output
| | 11:29 | module and then go ahead
and change its settings.
| | 11:33 | For example, I might pick FLV, which is
a common web video format. In this case
| | 11:39 | since I have not chosen FLV before
in this computer, After Effects will
| | 11:42 | automatically open the Format Options
for FLV for me, where I get to do things
| | 11:47 | such as whether or not I need an
Alpha Channel saved with my rendered file.
| | 11:50 | After I have done that After Effects
will remember those settings and if I need
| | 11:54 | to change them just click on Format
Options and you will get the same dialog again.
| | 11:57 | Give the file its own name such as map
web version and now I can go ahead and
| | 12:04 | save multiple files to disk from one
render in After Effects. That's a big time
| | 12:09 | savings. If I want to double check my
work I can just twirl down next to Render
| | 12:14 | Settings or Output Module and double
check all my settings. The really nice
| | 12:17 | thing about the Output Module is even
after I have finished rendering it will
| | 12:22 | remember the file path of where I saved
this on disk. So I can find it after I
| | 12:26 | have rendered it. Very nice. If I have
changed either the Render Settings or
| | 12:30 | the Output Module, I can go ahead and
save those settings to make it easy to
| | 12:34 | use them later on. I will just go ahead
and click on the arrow next to them and
| | 12:37 | choose Make Template. This will open
up a Templates dialog, where I can go
| | 12:42 | ahead and give a name to my new
settings such as DV special render settings.
| | 12:49 | I can go ahead and edit it further if I
want to. In the same dialog, I can also
| | 12:53 | pick what I want to be my defaults
for movie, defaults for rendering out a
| | 12:56 | single frame, etcetera. I have got the
same options for the Output Modules, or
| | 13:01 | again I can say Make Template, give it
a new name, DV web special, edit it if I
| | 13:10 | need to, change my defaults if I need to.
In addition to be able to open up the
| | 13:15 | Template dialog from the Render Queue
you can also do it underneath the Edit Settings.
| | 13:19 | Edit > Templates and that will
get you to the same place where you can
| | 13:23 | go ahead and change your
defaults or create new templates.
| | 13:27 | Click OK, you can go ahead and queue
up several compositions to render.
| | 13:31 | For example, I can just drag in almost
straight into the Render Queue, give it a
| | 13:35 | name such as display render, click OK
and After Effects will render all of
| | 13:40 | these as a batch. You can go ahead
and walk off somewhere else and do some
| | 13:43 | other work while After Effects works
for your. When you are ready to go, click
| | 13:47 | the Render button. If you need to pause
the render for any reason, click on the
| | 13:51 | Pause button. If you want to stop a render,
there is a really nice hidden trick
| | 13:56 | inside After Effects. If you hold down
the Option key on the Mac or Alt key on
| | 14:00 | Windows and click on Stop, it will go
ahead and create a duplicate of the
| | 14:06 | composition that you stopped with all
of your same render settings including
| | 14:09 | your own file.
| | 14:11 | This is very important because it
allows you to re-render with the exact same
| | 14:14 | settings. Otherwise After Effects will
create the new entry in the Render Queue
| | 14:18 | that only has the remaining portion of
your render not the entire length.
| | 14:22 | Quite often you want to re-render the entire
movie. So remember Option or Alt+Stop
| | 14:27 | allows you to go ahead and re-
render the whole thing over from scratch.
| | 14:30 | While After Effects is rendering,
you will get to see some important
| | 14:32 | information such as what frame and
what field is it on while it is rendering,
| | 14:36 | how much time has elapsed. After it has
done a few frames, so it will even give you
| | 14:39 | an estimate how much time is remaining
and if you are very curious to see exact
| | 14:42 | what's going on in every frame you can
go ahead and twirl down next to Current
| | 14:45 | Render and it will give you exact
details of what's going on at each frame as
| | 14:50 | it is rendering those frames. And that's
a quick overview of the Render Queue in
| | 14:54 | After Effects. It's very flexible and
very powerful and really makes it a lot
| | 14:58 | easier when you need to render many
variations of the same comp or
| | 15:01 | render a bunch of different
compositions all at the same time.
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