1. IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | (Music playing.)
| | 00:06 | Hello and welcome to After Effects
CS4 Beyond the Basics. My name is Chad Perkins.
| | 00:10 | I'm an Adobe Certified Instructor
in After Effects and it's my pleasure
| | 00:13 | to share a program with
you that inspires creativity.
| | 00:16 | In this title, we'll expand on what we
covered in After Effects CS4 Essential
| | 00:20 | Training. We're also taking on topics
and tricks that haven't ever been covered
| | 00:23 | before on lynda.com. For example, I'm
going to show you how to create some
| | 00:27 | common motion graphics elements
like light swooshes and ink spatter.
| | 00:31 | We're also going to dig deeper into
the integration of Photoshop in the After
| | 00:35 | Effects workflow. We'll even learn how
to cut up an image and use After Effects
| | 00:39 | to animate it and bring it to life.
You'll see advanced ways to animate objects
| | 00:44 | and how to use those concepts to
create more realistic animations.
| | 00:48 | We'll also look at more on expressions,
more on playing with time, more on
| | 00:52 | outputting to the right file format
and compression method and a regular
| | 00:56 | smorgasbord of tips and
tricks that you can feast on.
| | 00:59 | So let's get cooking with After
Effects CS4 Beyond the Basics.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you're a premium member of the
lynda.com Online Training Library or if you
| | 00:05 | purchased this training on a disc,
then lucky you, because you have access to
| | 00:10 | the exercise files that accompany this
training. Here's how they're laid out.
| | 00:14 | In each of the folders, here in the
Exercise Files, you'll find the projects
| | 00:20 | all used in that particular chapter.
If you're looking for individual media
| | 00:25 | items, in other words, everything
except for projects, you need to go to the
| | 00:28 | Media folder where media is categorized
according to the type of media that it is.
| | 00:34 | If you're a monthly or annual
subscriber to lynda.com's Online Training
| | 00:38 | Library, then you won't have access to
the exercise files. But that's okay.
| | 00:41 | You could just make your own or you
could just follow along with the video.
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| Detonation films and Greenlayers.com| 00:00 | Now, last but not least, before we jump
into the training, I just want to show
| | 00:04 | you a little bit about the exercise
files that we're going to be looking at.
| | 00:08 | We have some amazing exercise files.
| | 00:11 | First of all, one of the ones that
I'm kind of especially proud of, we are
| | 00:14 | going to be using a lot of photographs
from photographer Angela McEnroe and we
| | 00:18 | also are going to be using footage from
a great company called Detonation Films.
| | 00:23 | You can find their website at
DetonationFilms.com and they offer really cheap
| | 00:28 | and low-budget footage, sometimes
even free, of real video footage of
| | 00:34 | explosions and blood splatter and dust
and all kinds of really cool real world
| | 00:40 | phenomenon. We're going to be playing
a lot with this when we look at blend
| | 00:43 | modes and compositing later
on in this training series.
| | 00:48 | Another great company that we're going
to be privileged to work with footage
| | 00:51 | from is Greenlayers.com. Greenlayers
sells stock video, but the difference is
| | 00:57 | they already key out the background.
So they sell you the video clips that
| | 01:01 | have a transparent background.
So they're really easy to composite into
| | 01:05 | an existing scene, even a photograph.
| | 01:07 | So as we open up Greenlayers.com, the
folder here, we can see that we'll have
| | 01:12 | dancers that come out and walk, and
again this is just transparency behind him.
| | 01:18 | So we can composite him on any
type of background that we want.
| | 01:22 | Another thing that I'm really excited
about for this training series is that
| | 01:24 | I've created this big project just for
After Effects CS4 Beyond the Basics kind
| | 01:30 | of like the end to a little TV show
here and there is some music that goes with.
| | 01:33 | This is currently not playing,
but there is a lot of elements here.
| | 01:36 | In this typical After Effects project,
there is some Detonation Films footage
| | 01:39 | in the background. There is some
Cinema 4D robots, some Illustrator dragons,
| | 01:45 | some shapes from Photoshop and also
some elements, of course, from right here
| | 01:50 | in After Effects. We've got some expressions
and particles and all sorts of great stuff.
| | 01:55 | So we'll be teasing you with that
project a little bit as we go on to this
| | 01:58 | training series, just a lot of great
stuff. Let's go ahead and get to it.
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2. Efficiency-Increasing Tips and TricksUsing this chapter| 00:01 | In this training series, we're going
to be doing some pretty intense stuff.
| | 00:04 | So to start us off, we're going to look
at this chapter on tips and tricks.
| | 00:09 | This is going to be just a series of very
quick little tips and tricks to help you
| | 00:13 | be more efficient in After Effects
and will also help you get more out of
| | 00:17 | this training series. So
let's jump in to get started.
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| Two methods for selecting layers quickly| 00:01 | In this movie, I'm going to show you
two quick ways to select layers. In this
| | 00:04 | project we have 18 layers. That's not too
many layers but it's a lot to contend with.
| | 00:09 | If you want to select layers, one way
you can do that is by typing the number
| | 00:12 | of the layer, which you'll find
right here in the Timeline panel on this
| | 00:16 | column, on the numeric keypad on the
keyboard. So if I type 5, I'll select
| | 00:21 | layer 5. If I type layer 9, I'll
select layer 9 and so on. To select a double
| | 00:26 | digit or a triple digit layer, let's say
layer 15, I'm just going to type 15 quickly.
| | 00:31 | Another way to select layers, if you
don't know the number especially, is to
| | 00:35 | use the Command key on the Mac or the
Ctrl key on the PC and the Up or Down
| | 00:39 | Arrow keys. So if I hold Command+Up
Arrow, I select the lowering number but
| | 00:46 | higher in the Timeline panel, Command+
Down Arrow will select the layer below that.
| | 00:51 | And again, on a PC it would
be Ctrl+Up Arrow and Ctrl+Down Arrow.
| | 00:55 | So again, I can use a numeric keypad to
type the number of the layer or I could
| | 00:59 | use Command+Up Arrow/Down Arrow or Ctrl+
Up Arrow/Down Arrow to select layers as well.
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| Finding a lost CTI| 00:00 | Sometimes, when you're working with a
really long composition or when you're
| | 00:04 | zoomed in really closely into the
Timeline panel, like we're seeing here, or
| | 00:08 | zoomed in at the frame level,
sometimes you lose your current time indicator.
| | 00:11 | Now we know that we could just click
somewhere here in the Time Ruler and have
| | 00:15 | the current time indicator jump to
where we are. But what if we're elsewhere in
| | 00:20 | the composition and we know that the
current time indicator is at a really
| | 00:24 | crucial spot that we don't want to adjust.
| | 00:26 | Now we can see in this little area
over the Time Ruler that this is the area
| | 00:31 | that we are zoomed into and our
current time indicator is way over here.
| | 00:35 | So what if we wanted to jump our view
over to the current time indicator instead
| | 00:39 | of having the current time
indicator jump to where we are.
| | 00:42 | All you have to do is make sure the
Timeline panel is selected. Hit the letter
| | 00:45 | D on the keyboard. As you could see,
our view jumped to where the current time
| | 00:50 | indicator is and the current time
indicator is still in the exact same frame.
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| Jumping to the in/out point of layers| 00:00 | In this video, I'm going to show you
how to quickly jump to the in point or out
| | 00:04 | point of a layer. Now with my Timeline
panel highlighted, as you can see here,
| | 00:09 | I'm going to hit 1 on the numeric
keypad to select the Fire layer, and that's
| | 00:13 | what we want to jump to the in point of.
| | 00:15 | Now just so you can see this project
here, we have a dragon that breathes fire.
| | 00:19 | The fire comes on and it goes away.
If we want to jump to the in point, in
| | 00:23 | other words, the beginning of this
layer, we can just type I on the keyboard.
| | 00:28 | Similarly, if we want to jump to the out
point or the end of this clip, we type O.
| | 00:33 | Oftentimes when editing animation, it's
the introduction of the clip or the end
| | 00:38 | of the clip that is the most crucial.
So it's really beneficial to be able to
| | 00:41 | jump right to the in point of the clip with I,
or the out point of the clip with O.
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| Making the work area match layer duration| 00:00 | In this movie, we're going to be
continuing on with the Dragon Fire project,
| | 00:04 | and what we're going to be looking at
here and also in the next few movies
| | 00:06 | actually is the Work Area, this
little gray bar up here at the top of the
| | 00:11 | Timeline, which we can adjust to
control what area is being previewed. Now Work
| | 00:16 | Area bar is one of the most important parts
of working effectively with After Effects.
| | 00:20 | So here I'm going to show you a tip
about how to make the Work Area bar match a
| | 00:25 | layer's duration. In this case, again
I'm going to be focusing on the Fire
| | 00:28 | layer. So again, I'm going to type 1
on the numeric keypad to select that
| | 00:32 | layer, and let's say all I care about
right now is focusing on this fire and
| | 00:37 | getting it to look better.
| | 00:38 | What I can do is type the letter I to
jump my current time indicator to the
| | 00:43 | beginning or the in point of this layer,
then type B to make the current frame
| | 00:48 | to beginning of the Work Area. Then I
type O to jump to the out point of the
| | 00:54 | layer, and then I type the letter N as
in Nancy to get the end of the Work Area
| | 00:58 | bar to snap to my current time indicator.
| | 01:02 | Now, I'm going to double-click this
Work Area bar to reset it back to the
| | 01:05 | entire duration of the composition. In
case that seemed too quick for you, or
| | 01:10 | too confusing, just type the word IBON.
Yes, a made-up word that we use in
| | 01:14 | After Effects circles, I-B-O-N, to make
the Work Area bar match the duration of
| | 01:19 | the layer. I-B-O-N, and you are done.
| | 01:23 | The Work Area bar now perfectly
matches the duration of the Fire layer.
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| Making the work area the size of multiple layers| 00:01 | In this movie, I'm going to show you
how to make the Work Area the size of
| | 00:03 | multiple layers. Basically, I have this
wizard that shoots out these lightning
| | 00:07 | bolts here, and these lightning bolts
could be seen in these two small layers
| | 00:12 | here, by small I mean short.
| | 00:13 | If I want to focus on these two layers,
both lightning bolts, what I could do
| | 00:20 | to make the Work Area the size of
bolt layers is to select both of them.
| | 00:24 | I could do that using the Shift key or
the Command or Ctrl key. So I'm going to
| | 00:29 | select both lightning
bolt 1 and lightning bolt 2.
| | 00:31 | Then in order to make the Work Area
bar the duration of both layers, in other
| | 00:36 | words, starting with the first clip
and ending with the last clip, what I'm
| | 00:41 | going to do is use the keyboard
shortcut. That's Command+Option+B on the Mac,
| | 00:46 | or Ctrl+Alt+B as in Boy, on the PC.
| | 00:51 | As you can see, that makes the Work Area bar
the size or the duration of all selected layers.
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| Jumping to the beginning or end of the work area| 00:01 | In this movie, we're going to be
continuing on where we left off in the last
| | 00:03 | little tip. Now the Work Area bar has
already been set for us, and what I want
| | 00:07 | to talk about is how to jump to the
beginning and end of the Work Area bar.
| | 00:12 | For me, honestly, until I learned this
shortcut, I didn't really use the Work
| | 00:16 | Area bar very much because it was great
to be able to preview a small area, but
| | 00:20 | not being able to jump to the
beginning of that area that you're focusing on,
| | 00:24 | it didn't really help me too much.
| | 00:26 | So here is the code. We know if we hit
the Home key on the keyboard, we'll jump
| | 00:29 | to the first frame of the comp, and the
End key will jump us to the end of the comp.
| | 00:33 | But if we hold the Shift key,
Shift+Home will jump us to the beginning of
| | 00:38 | the Work Area bar, and Shift+End will
jump us to the end of the Work Area bar.
| | 00:43 | Now, really that might be a little
awkward because the Home and End keys aren't
| | 00:47 | used too much in many other software
programs. So again, that's Shift and the
| | 00:51 | Home key at the same time to get to
the beginning of the Work Area bar, Shift
| | 00:55 | and the End key on your keyboard to
get to the end of the Work Area bar.
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| Trimming a comp to the work area| 00:00 | Now what we're going to talk about
here is how to make the composition
| | 00:04 | the duration of the Work Area bar. Now
at first this may not seem like a super
| | 00:09 | great trick. We know we can go into
the Composition Settings here and we can
| | 00:13 | change the Duration.
| | 00:15 | But if we were to shorten the
composition to let's say 2 seconds, then we'd only
| | 00:19 | take the first 2 seconds of the
composition and shave off the remaining 3
| | 00:23 | seconds. But we don't want just any 2
seconds. We want the exact duration of
| | 00:29 | this Work Area bar. Let's say
where the wizard is spitting out of the
| | 00:33 | lightning and that's all we
want from this composition.
| | 00:36 | What I can do is right-click on the
Work Area bar, after I've set it to the
| | 00:40 | duration that I want it, I could select
Trim Comp to Work Area. Now it looks a
| | 00:46 | little bit different, because it
expanded, because we zoomed in a little bit,
| | 00:49 | but essentially we still just have
these two lightning bolts and that's all
| | 00:52 | that we're seeing in this composition now.
| | 00:54 | By the way, you can also access that
feature from the Composition menu, as you
| | 00:59 | can see here, Trim Comp to Work Area.
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| Visually adjusting the pixel size of a comp| 00:00 | Now we're going to look at how to
visually resize a composition's pixel
| | 00:05 | dimensions. Not its duration, its
actual area. Now what we have here is an old
| | 00:10 | public domain clip. This from the Star
Is Born, a classic wonderful movie from
| | 00:14 | 1937. This is encased in a
composition that is standard NTSC size.
| | 00:20 | In other words, 720 X 480. If we look
at the comp in the Project panel,
| | 00:24 | it's significantly smaller, 336 X 256.
| | 00:28 | Now let's say we're putting this
composition on the web. I don't want all of
| | 00:32 | this extra black space around my clip.
I just want to crop it to this clip.
| | 00:37 | A quick and easy way to do this is by
clicking the Region of interest button down
| | 00:41 | at the bottom of the Composition panel.
Click that to select it, and then click
| | 00:46 | and drag almost like a
marquee around the footage.
| | 00:49 | Now the purpose of the Region of
interest is to make it so that when you render
| | 00:53 | your footage or render your composition,
it renders only a small piece of it.
| | 00:57 | So let's say I had many layers around
this other layer here and maybe there
| | 01:01 | were sparks and a whole bunch of
stuff going on around it. I only wanted to
| | 01:06 | preview what's in here. Now that's
going to speed up my render time a lot
| | 01:09 | because now After Effects won't have to
render this stuff on the outside of the
| | 01:13 | region of interest.
| | 01:14 | But an added benefit of the region is
that once we have a region of interest
| | 01:18 | and it's active, by the way you can
deactivate it by clicking the Region of
| | 01:21 | interest button again, once it's active,
you can go to the Composition panel
| | 01:25 | and select Crop Comp to Region of
Interest. And now our composition is exactly
| | 01:30 | the size that we chose.
| | 01:31 | So essentially this trick is a way
that we can visually resize the pixel
| | 01:36 | dimensions of a composition. Now I do
realize that we could have gone into our
| | 01:40 | Composition Settings, and just made a
composition that was 336 X 256. Likewise
| | 01:46 | we could have just dragged the
footage to the New Composition icon at the
| | 01:48 | bottom of the Project panel.
| | 01:50 | However if I undo this by hitting
Command+Z on the Mac and Ctrl+Z on the PC,
| | 01:55 | what if we had this clip over here on
the left hand side, perhaps in the corner
| | 01:59 | like this. Then cropping the composition
to the Composition Settings would not work.
| | 02:04 | Or let's say we made a large
composition with a lot of layers and we only
| | 02:07 | wanted a small piece of that to be
exported somewhere. So again this trick is a
| | 02:11 | really great tool to export a
piece of a composition for export.
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| Filling time gaps between footage| 00:00 | In this movie we're going to look at a
quick and precise way to fill up gaps
| | 00:04 | between footage. If we look at this
project, we'll skim it real quick, I have
| | 00:08 | four little diamonds here, a green one,
and a blue one, and then a teal one,
| | 00:12 | and then a purple one.
| | 00:13 | You'll notice that the first two are
right next to each other. There is no gap
| | 00:18 | between them. But after the blue one,
there is a gap, and then the teal one and
| | 00:23 | then another gap, and then the purple
one. I don't want these gaps. So here's a
| | 00:27 | quick way to fill up those gaps again quickly
and precisely using only keyboard shortcuts.
| | 00:33 | The first thing I want to do is go
to the end or the outpoint of the last
| | 00:37 | layer. That would be in this case
the blue layer. So I'm going to hit the
| | 00:41 | number 2 on the numeric keypad to
select that layer. Then I'm going to hit the
| | 00:45 | letter O to jump to its outpoint. Then
I'm going to hit the Page Down key to
| | 00:49 | advance one more frame beyond that.
| | 00:51 | Next I'm going to select the teal layer.
I can do that by hitting the number 3
| | 00:55 | on the numeric keypad, or by pressing
Command+Down arrow or Ctrl+Down arrow on
| | 01:00 | the PC. Next to make the teal endpoint,
I'm going to go to my Current Time
| | 01:05 | Indicator. I'm going to
hit the Left bracket key.
| | 01:08 | Now I realize that that's a lot of steps,
but we have one more to go. So we'll
| | 01:12 | go through it again, a little bit more
quickly this time. I'm going to hit O to
| | 01:15 | jump to the outpoint of the teal layer.
Then I'm going to advance it one more
| | 01:20 | frame because we don't want both of these
diamonds on at the same frame. Hit Page Down.
| | 01:24 | Now I'm going to press Command or Ctrl+
Down arrow to select the purple layer.
| | 01:28 | Then I'm going to press the Left
bracket key. That's the key immediately to the
| | 01:32 | right of the letter P on your keyboard
to make the endpoint of the purple layer
| | 01:37 | snap to where the current time indicator is.
| | 01:41 | Now what I'm going to do, just for the
sake of previewing, I'm going to press O
| | 01:45 | to get the outpoint of the purple layer.
Then I'm going to press the letter N
| | 01:48 | as in Nancy to make this the end of
the work area bar. Now we can preview all
| | 01:53 | of the diamonds by hitting 0 on the
numeric keypad or just by pressing the
| | 01:57 | Spacebar and now there are no
gaps between these diamonds.
| | 02:02 | So again, we used the keyboard shortcut
to jump to the end of the first layer,
| | 02:07 | or in other words, the layer at the
beginning of the gap. We advance one more
| | 02:10 | frame beyond that. Then we press the
Left bracket key to make the endpoint of
| | 02:15 | the layer at the end of the gap
snapped to the frame immediately after the
| | 02:20 | layer before the gap.
| | 02:21 | Now once you practice with those
keyboard shortcut steps a few times, you'll
| | 02:24 | get the hang of it and you'll find
that it's not only easier and quicker
| | 02:28 | because there are keyboard shortcuts,
but also it's just a more accurate way,
| | 02:32 | more precise way to fill up
gaps between footage as well.
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| Isolating layers| 00:00 | Next we're going to look at how to
isolate layers. Now in this project here I
| | 00:04 | got a lot going on. I'm at frame 4
seconds and 5 frames in here. We got this
| | 00:09 | video clip and we have a lower third with
a texture on it, some text, some graphics.
| | 00:14 | Let's say I wanted to isolate this
lower third. What I can do is come down here
| | 00:19 | to the Timeline panel. I'm looking at
this lower third background. Thankfully
| | 00:24 | I've named it well. This little
circle right here, there is little column,
| | 00:27 | that's the solo column. That's what I
want to do to this layer so I can see
| | 00:30 | just that layer and nothing else.
| | 00:32 | So I click this Solo button and now we
can see the lower third. If I scrub the
| | 00:36 | Timeline, I'm not seeing any of
the other layers in this project. Now
| | 00:40 | unfortunately I'm also not seeing the
texture. If I unsolo this, I can see
| | 00:44 | there is a texture here. I'm not seeing that.
| | 00:46 | So what I'm going to do is solo the
texture layer as well. So you could
| | 00:50 | actually solo as many layers at a time
as you want contrary to what the name
| | 00:55 | solo might suggest. Now if I preview
this, again we see the layer and the
| | 01:00 | texture I'm previewing here, and
actually I'm getting some audio there. So I'll
| | 01:04 | just do a regular Spacebar
preview and there we have it.
| | 01:09 | Now note that you can't solo layers
that aren't already visible. So if I were
| | 01:14 | to unsolo the texture layer and
actually I take off its visibility, the option
| | 01:18 | to solo the layer, it goes away. So in
order to solo the texture layer as well,
| | 01:23 | I have to turn on the visibility,
then solo. Now of course you'll see all
| | 01:27 | layers again. Just click the solo
layers to unsolo them and then you'll be able
| | 01:30 | to see all layers. Soloing layers
is a great way to isolate pieces of a
| | 01:36 | composition and really just
get in there and perfect them.
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| Cleaning up the Timeline panel| 00:00 | In the last movie we talked about how
to clean up the Composition panel.
| | 00:04 | In other words what we're looking at by
using After Effects' solo feature. In this
| | 00:08 | tutorial I'm going to show you how to
clean up the Timeline using the Shy feature.
| | 00:13 | So first if all you need to make sure
that you're not looking at the modes area
| | 00:17 | or that you do have the switches area
showing. We are going to be talking all
| | 00:21 | about these different modes a little
bit later on in this training series.
| | 00:25 | For now I'll go ahead and click the
Toggle Switches/Modes button until you see
| | 00:29 | these areas of switches.
| | 00:30 | Now what we want to do is make some
of these layers go away in the Timeline
| | 00:35 | panel. It's very cluttered here with
all these different layers. We don't need
| | 00:38 | to see them right now. I just want to
work on the texture layer and the lower
| | 00:41 | third background layer.
| | 00:42 | So these other layers, I can just
click this little Shy icon. It's like a
| | 00:45 | little guy peaking over a wall and so
we want to make him bashful by poke him
| | 00:49 | in the face and getting him out of
the way. So he's hiding behind the wall.
| | 00:53 | That's what we want. That's what makes
these layers shy. So I'm going to make
| | 00:57 | every layer shy except for the lower
third background layer and the texture layer.
| | 01:01 | Now nothing has changed. In order to
activate the shyness as it were, you need
| | 01:06 | to go to the top of the Timeline
panel and click the little guy here, the
| | 01:09 | little shy guy. That makes all the
shy layers disappear from the Timeline
| | 01:13 | panel. Now notice that this is kind
of like the opposite of soloing layers.
| | 01:17 | When we hit layers by soloing other
layers, the layers that were not soloed
| | 01:22 | were still in the Timeline panel but were
hidden from view in the Composition panel.
| | 01:27 | Again Shy is the exact opposite.
The layers are still visible in the
| | 01:32 | Composition panel but are hidden
from view in the Timeline panel. It's
| | 01:36 | basically a way just to clean things
up as you're working. If you're still
| | 01:40 | somewhat new to After Effects, this
might not seem like a great feature but
| | 01:44 | trust me this is a gem for the ages
folks. This is a really really great trick.
| | 01:50 | Once you start having projects with
dozens or hundreds of layers, the Shy
| | 01:54 | feature becomes invaluable.
| | 01:56 | Now to get your layers back, just click
the Shy icon, the master switch here at
| | 02:00 | the top of the Timeline panel to see
all of those layers again. Now you could
| | 02:04 | also make layers Shy on the fly as
well. So let's say these two flower
| | 02:09 | ornaments layers are not shy. Let me
Shy all the other layers. We can click
| | 02:13 | their Shy switches. As long as this
Shy is active, then they will instantly
| | 02:18 | disappear. If we want to, we could just click
and drag their solo column to solo them as well.
| | 02:24 | Now well it's totally possible to
become an After Effects master without using
| | 02:28 | the Solo feature or the Shy feature.
These two features nevertheless really
| | 02:32 | help you to organize your workflow
as you're working in After Effects.
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3. Color CorrectionCreating a reference monitor| 00:00 | Before we go to the next few chapters,
we're going to be looking a lot at
| | 00:03 | changing the color of objects. I
want to show you how to create something
| | 00:06 | called a reference monitor, which
will be very useful in this process.
| | 00:10 | A reference monitor allows you to look
at the original as a reference while
| | 00:15 | you're changing the color.
| | 00:16 | Now let's say for example in this
big project, which we'll be looking at
| | 00:19 | throughout this training series, I have
these robots here and I've applied kind
| | 00:23 | of a green tint to them so that
t would blend in a little bit with
| | 00:26 | the green explosion, the background.
But I might want that to be a little bit
| | 00:30 | more saturated or a little bit less saturated.
| | 00:33 | However, with this composition selected
in the Timeline panel, I'm going to tap
| | 00:36 | the Shift key and hit the Right arrow
key to go to Big Comp. I know that these
| | 00:41 | robots are in the Precomp left stuff
composition. So I'm going to use my arrow
| | 00:45 | keys again to navigate to Precomp left
stuff so that's highlighted and then hit
| | 00:49 | the Return key or Enter key.
| | 00:51 | Now in this Precomp left stuff
composition, which then opens, I have this eddie
| | 00:56 | technology layer. eddie technology
being the name of the robot. What I can do
| | 01:01 | is now go up to the Effect Controls
panel. So let's go ahead and click the
| | 01:05 | little arrow next to the name of all
these effects and close them up and to
| | 01:09 | make this panel a little bit cleaner.
| | 01:10 | The next thing is go back to Tritone.
That's the effect that we're interested
| | 01:12 | in here. This Blend With Original
determines the amount of green tint.
| | 01:18 | It's actually set up backwards. So if we
increase the Blend With Original,
| | 01:21 | it's going to become more chrome,
the original color of these robots.
| | 01:26 | If we take this to the left, they're
going to become tinted more green.
| | 01:30 | The problem is that I'm not really
sure what this is going to look like with
| | 01:34 | the green fire. So a reference monitor
will allow us to see what these robots
| | 01:39 | will look like in the final composition.
Here's how we do this. I'll select the
| | 01:43 | Timeline panel, tap the Shift key and
tap the left arrow two times to go to the
| | 01:49 | Master Comp composition. Then what
I'm going to do is go up here to the
| | 01:54 | Composition panel and click the Lock
icon. That will lock this view. So no
| | 01:58 | matter what else I do, down here in the
Timeline panel, this view will stay the same.
| | 02:03 | So now I'll go back to the Timeline
panel and select it, tap the Shift key once
| | 02:07 | again, tap the right arrow twice, go to
the Precomp left stuff composition kind
| | 02:12 | of a tongue twister there, and go
ahead and hit the Enter key to open up that
| | 02:16 | Comp as before. Now again our view
has not changed that is here in the
| | 02:19 | Composition panel, of course the
Timeline panel has changed as if we are
| | 02:22 | looking at a different composition.
| | 02:23 | So now if I go to the Tritone effect
and I adjust Blend With Original and see
| | 02:29 | what these robots look like with a
little bit more green in them. Or I can take
| | 02:33 | this maybe up a little bit higher,
just type in 85%. In doing that, there is
| | 02:38 | now much less green, or much less of
the Tritone effect. The natural gray tone
| | 02:43 | kind of compliments the background a little bit.
| | 02:44 | Now whatever we decide to do with the
robots, that's not an interesting choice,
| | 02:48 | but the point is that it's really
beneficial be able to see what the final
| | 02:51 | product looks like while you're
working on these separate pieces.
| | 02:54 | Now there is another way that we can
create some whatever reference monitor,
| | 02:57 | just see it before and after. In order
to do this, I'm going to go to the File
| | 03:01 | menu and click Revert. Revert will take
this After Effects project to the last
| | 03:05 | saved version. Everything that I've changed
will be erased which is exactly what I want.
| | 03:10 | So I'm going to zoom in a little bit
more here using the middle mouse wheel,
| | 03:13 | alternatively you could use this zoom
dropdown over here on the left bar in the
| | 03:17 | Composition panel. Also I'm going to
take this Quality dropdown to Auto. Now as
| | 03:21 | we're looking at these robots, I want
to fine tune them, but I want to see a
| | 03:26 | quick before and after of what they
look like, tinted more with green, and
| | 03:30 | tinted less with green.
| | 03:31 | So what I'm going to do is go back into
that composition. I'm going to do that
| | 03:34 | by selecting the Timeline panel,
tapping the Shift key, hitting the Right arrow
| | 03:38 | key on the keyboard twice and going to
Precomp left stuff again and go ahead
| | 03:43 | and click in there.
| | 03:44 | Now what I'm going to do is down at
the bottom of the Composition panel, I'm
| | 03:47 | going to click this Snapshot button. So
it takes snapshots. It's like a little
| | 03:50 | camera. Go ahead and click it. Makes a
cool camera noise. I'm going to select
| | 03:55 | the eddie technology layer again. Go
back to the Effect Controls panel. Again
| | 04:00 | in the Tritone effect, which you can
clean up this Effect Controls panel if you want.
| | 04:03 | There is a lot going on here.
| | 04:04 | Let's take the Blend With Original
value down to 40%. Now if you were paying
| | 04:09 | attention, that might not be too
drastic of a change, but if we use our
| | 04:12 | snapshot, which we can do by coming
here to the bottom of the Composition panel
| | 04:16 | and clicking this little Figure button
which is Show last Snapshot, we click
| | 04:20 | that, we hold it and it shows us the
before. So here's it after the change and
| | 04:24 | before the change. So this way we could
see that actually was a pretty drastic
| | 04:28 | change. Before and after.
| | 04:31 | When you're color correcting,
especially when you're new to color correcting,
| | 04:35 | you have a tendency to overdo things
a little bit. It's just human nature.
| | 04:38 | So these reference monitors kind of keep
you in check and make sure that you have
| | 04:42 | a reference to make sure that you
don't go too crazy with your color adjustments.
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| Performing instant color correction| 00:00 | Before we get into the nitty-gritty of
color correction, I want to show you a
| | 00:04 | few effects you can use to very
quickly color correct footage.
| | 00:07 | Now, I'm going to go over here to the
Effects & Presets panel and I'm going to
| | 00:10 | open up the Color Correction category.
By the way, I have a few third-party
| | 00:14 | effects that I have installed but you
won't have those. Those are the ones that
| | 00:17 | I have purchased on the site but we
are not going to be using them in this
| | 00:20 | training series, or talking about
them at all, so don't worry about that.
| | 00:22 | So, we are going to open up Color
Correction. You will see that the top three here.
| | 00:26 | The first ones, because they
start with letter A and they are organized
| | 00:29 | alphabetically here, are Auto Effects.
So if we apply Auto Color, we are going
| | 00:35 | to basically color correct the White
Balance. What the Auto Color effect does,
| | 00:39 | it looks at the white in your footage
and it will automatically balance the
| | 00:46 | colors so that the white is actually white.
| | 00:49 | So, if we go to the Effects icon next
to Auto Color and see the before and
| | 00:53 | after, the footage kind of looked okay
before, but this was actually tinted a
| | 00:58 | little blue and so the Auto Color
effect recognized that and basically balanced
| | 01:03 | everything out in the entire image to
be fixed, get rid of what they call the
| | 01:07 | Color Cast. So now the white is a
more accurate white and the rest of the
| | 01:12 | colors, we assume, are more accurate as well.
| | 01:14 | Now as with many effects, you can
fade the effect essentially by increasing
| | 01:18 | Blend With Original. As we bump up
this value, then we blend this effect in
| | 01:24 | with the original, basically softening
the intensity of the effect. Take this
| | 01:29 | back to zero for right now,
so we get the full effect.
| | 01:31 | Now if you are playing this over video
and you find that the colors are little
| | 01:35 | wild in the video, maybe as you are
strolling through the Camera view, there is
| | 01:39 | a light that pops-up or something,
then you can increase Temporal Smoothing.
| | 01:43 | That will balance out the Color
Correction over several frames.
| | 01:48 | But if all what it's going to do is
look at every single frame or video
| | 01:51 | individually and color correct them
individually, but if you are playing 30
| | 01:54 | frames a second. That could cause some
jumpiness in the colors. So increasing
| | 01:59 | Temporal Smoothing will smooth that out.
| | 02:01 | Now I'm going to select Auto Color in
the Effects Controls panel and delete it.
| | 02:05 | A couple of other Auto Effects here,
there is Auto Contrast which basically
| | 02:09 | deals with the luminance, just the
brightness values, just only change the
| | 02:13 | color, just working with the
brightness but again we have the same Temporal
| | 02:16 | Smoothing and Blend with the original
parameters as we did with the Auto Color.
| | 02:19 | I'm going to select that and delete it.
| | 02:20 | Auto Levels is probably the best of
the three, but it works on each color
| | 02:27 | channel individually: Red, Green and
Blue. Because of that, it is possible to
| | 02:32 | have a shift in colors. From my
experience, there really isn't too much
| | 02:36 | difference between Auto Color and Auto
Levels usually, although my experience
| | 02:40 | has been that Auto Levels delivers a
little bit better results from time to time.
| | 02:45 | Now one other effect I want to show you,
I'm going to do a search for here in
| | 02:48 | the Effects & Presets panel Search
window is Equalize. Just type equ in and
| | 02:54 | Equalize will pop-up. I'm just going
to drag-and-drop this on to my footage.
| | 02:57 | Now at first it is a little intense
sometimes but what I'm going to do is take
| | 03:00 | down Amount to Equalize to about 50%.
| | 03:03 | Now although this really doesn't do
too much, as far as, Color Correction, it
| | 03:09 | still looks pretty cool. It has a cool
kind of contrasty feel to the footage
| | 03:14 | and it does this without you having to know
too much about how to get this effect manually.
| | 03:19 | Now if you go over to the Effect
Controls panel under the Equalize drop-down,
| | 03:23 | we have a few methods that it uses to
equalize. Now, Photoshop Style and RGB
| | 03:28 | are about the same usually from my
experience. But Brightness is a little
| | 03:32 | different. Brightness just tends to
take and equalize the brightness of the
| | 03:37 | footage. In our case here, we
have a gray desaturated result.
| | 03:40 | Now to show what Equalize is really
doing, I'm going to get a little bit more
| | 03:45 | advanced. So if you are into just a
quick Color Correction, then go ahead and
| | 03:48 | stop the movie now and if you want to
get a little bit more hard-core, then I'm
| | 03:51 | going to show you what this is doing.
I want to click the Reset button so we
| | 03:54 | get the full effect of the Equalize effect
here and I'm going to apply the Levels effect.
| | 04:01 | Now, in a couple of movies down the
road, I'm going to be explaining to you
| | 04:04 | what this Histogram thing is all
about right here, this little chart, as we
| | 04:07 | talk about Levels. But for now just
realize that this is a read out of the
| | 04:12 | brightness values of our image.
| | 04:14 | I am going to take the Levels effect.
I'm going to drag it above the Equalize
| | 04:18 | effect. That means that it's going to
process before the Equalize effect.
| | 04:22 | So this little curve right here, shows us
the brightness values for this footage
| | 04:27 | before the Equalize effect is applied. So in
other words, it's giving us a read out of this image.
| | 04:31 | Now looking at this histogram, it's
basically a chart. The right side over here
| | 04:36 | is basically telling us how much that
we have in the way of highlights. The
| | 04:40 | fact that it's flat indicates that
there is not many bright tones here. The
| | 04:45 | left side indicates the shadows.
The middle represents the mid tones.
| | 04:49 | So this footage is showing a lot of
dark mid tones, not too much in the way of
| | 04:54 | shadows, not a lot in the way of highlights or
bright mid tones but a lot of dark mid tones.
| | 04:59 | Now if I drag this Levels effects,
after the Equalize effect and turn it back
| | 05:03 | on here, we can see that this
histogram is spread out now. So in effect, the
| | 05:09 | brightness values have been equalized.
They have been spread out throughout the
| | 05:14 | entire spectrum so there is more
shadows, there is more highlights, there is
| | 05:18 | more bright mid tones and there is
about the same amount of dark mid tones with
| | 05:22 | some more smooth arc here, rather than
just one single spike. And because of
| | 05:26 | that smoothing out, because of that
equalization, a lot of times we have a
| | 05:29 | really cool final result.
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| Adjusting hue and saturation| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at
adjusting Hue and Saturation. Hue is the
| | 00:05 | value of the color. In other words,
is it a blue, is it a green, is it an
| | 00:09 | orange, what color family is it in? And
we are also going to look at adjusting
| | 00:13 | Saturation, which is the intensity of the color.
| | 00:16 | Now I have here a photo and I'm going
to apply the Hue/Saturation effect,
| | 00:20 | which is in the Color Correction category of
effects. This effect allows us to adjust
| | 00:25 | Hue/Saturation and Lightness. Now
there are a lot of facets to the effect.
| | 00:29 | Let's just start out with Hue.
| | 00:31 | Again, Hue is the basic color family.
If we drag this, increasing the Hue
| | 00:37 | value. It's basically spinning all the
colors on the color wheel. In this case,
| | 00:41 | dragging to the right, kind of warms
the photo up a little bit. So let's click
| | 00:45 | the Effects icon here next to Hue/
Saturation, we can see the before and the after.
| | 00:50 | Definitely more warm, redder tones
and as we go a negative value, we start
| | 00:56 | moving towards green a little bit more.
So we make it even colder. Now, if we
| | 01:01 | go too far, we start getting some
crazy colors here. So that's a little bit
| | 01:05 | wacky unless that's what you are going for.
| | 01:07 | Now, I'm going to leave this at about +
20 or so. Let's go ahead and just type
| | 01:10 | in 20 there and let's go down to
Saturation here. Again, Saturation is the
| | 01:14 | intensity of color. So as we click-and-
drag this value to the right increasing
| | 01:19 | the Saturation, we see these colors
become even more vibrant and intense. As we
| | 01:25 | take this value to a negative number, these
colors become less saturated, less intense.
| | 01:29 | Now finally, as we get to a value of
about negative 50 or so, we are not
| | 01:34 | totally in black and white territory
just yet, but the colors are so faded that
| | 01:37 | it has like this really cool antique
look. This is a great look for doing
| | 01:41 | flashback shots or other shots that
might be in a character's memory. If we
| | 01:46 | take this all the way to negative 100
then we have a complete black and white shot.
| | 01:50 | Now, you don't want to adjust Lightness,
actually let me take this Saturation
| | 01:54 | back to zero, you don't want to adjust
the Master Lightness value when you are
| | 01:59 | working on video or a photo. The reason
why is because as you increase this, it
| | 02:05 | is universally brightening every
single pixel. If we take it to a negative
| | 02:09 | value, it's universally darkening every
pixel. That's usually a very bad thing.
| | 02:15 | Now, it is okay to do if you are
working with flat graphics like Illustrator
| | 02:19 | files. Let me show you really quickly
here, I have a star with a Stroke, just
| | 02:22 | the plain old shape layer, red with
white. In this case, we can adjust
| | 02:27 | Lightness because it's not a
continuous tone image. In other words, there is
| | 02:31 | not subtle gradations of color, just
flat color. So in this case, if we reduce
| | 02:35 | the lightness, then we just have a dark gray
stroke around a dark red star and that's fine.
| | 02:40 | But again, for photos and videos, you
typically don't want to fiddle with the
| | 02:43 | Lightness. Now getting back to Hue/
Saturation here, going back to the Angela
| | 02:46 | layer, if we turn On Colorize, we can
actually just apply one single color to
| | 02:53 | tint this image, but if all of it's
kind of a reddish color, we can change the
| | 02:57 | Hue by going down here to the bottom
of the effect. Once you select Colorize
| | 03:01 | here, then the top of the effect is
grayed out and you can't make any changes.
| | 03:05 | You do everything down
below the Colorize checkbox.
| | 03:08 | So we can move the Hue around a little
bit. We could also saturate that adding
| | 03:13 | more of the color or less of the color,
so maybe it's more of a subtle tint
| | 03:17 | there. But again, even here you don't
want to fiddle with Lightness. There are
| | 03:21 | better ways to adjust Luminance or in
other words Lightness that we'll talk
| | 03:24 | about later in this chapter.
| | 03:25 | Now I'm actually going to deselect
Colorize and actually I'm going to hit Reset
| | 03:30 | on Hue/Saturation just to get back to
square one here. Another one of the often
| | 03:34 | overlooked features of the Hue/
Saturation effects is that we can go into the
| | 03:38 | Channel control dropdown here
and change individual colors.
| | 03:42 | So let's say maybe you want to change
the flesh tones or maybe you want to
| | 03:46 | change the blue background, but you
want to leave everything else the same,
| | 03:49 | let's go to Blues. So now as we adjust
the Blue Hues, then the colors of the
| | 03:55 | skin tone are left pretty much alone.
So if you look at her lips or lipstick,
| | 04:00 | it's pretty much the same color.
| | 04:02 | So if you find that you are editing a
shot and maybe somebody is wearing a red shirt
| | 04:06 | that's just horrible and awful
and you hate it. Then just change the
| | 04:09 | Channel control to Reds and maybe you
can just drop-down the Saturation and
| | 04:13 | desaturate those reds, so it's not as intense.
| | 04:16 | So as you can see, the Hue/Saturation
effect is very simple and easy to use.
| | 04:19 | It's very straight forward, it's
intuitive and it's just a really simple effect
| | 04:23 | to make some great changes. I find
myself going to this effect all the time.
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| Using levels to adjust brightness| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to begin our
look at the ever-popular Levels effect.
| | 00:05 | For most After Effects users,
Levels is the go to effect for adjusting
| | 00:09 | brightness issues. As we'll see in the
next movie, we could also use it for
| | 00:13 | color correcting and compositing as well.
| | 00:15 | I have here a photo of the lovely Marian,
the lead singer of You Yell You Kick,
| | 00:20 | a band that we'll be looking at a
little bit later and what we are going to do
| | 00:23 | is apply the Levels effect to this image.
| | 00:25 | Now, I should probably point out to
you that throughout this chapter we are
| | 00:27 | going to be using images instead of
video, but just so you know these effects
| | 00:31 | work the same on both. Color
correction becomes more difficult as you work on
| | 00:35 | compressed video and we have to
compress those videos pretty good to get them
| | 00:38 | in the exercise files. So we often get
better results when using images for our
| | 00:42 | training on color correction than with video.
| | 00:45 | Now with the Levels effect applied,
let's go over the Effect Controls panel
| | 00:47 | here and we notice we have this thing
called a Histogram. You might have to
| | 00:51 | resize your Effect Controls panel
in order to see the entire histogram.
| | 00:56 | This may seem confusing but it's
actually pretty simple to understand and you
| | 00:59 | need to get this in order to be
able to use Levels effectively.
| | 01:03 | A Histogram is a read out of the
Brightness values in an image. That's telling
| | 01:07 | you that there is more of
that particular Brightness value.
| | 01:10 | So just a quick glance at this
histogram, we see that we have a lot of shadow
| | 01:15 | areas. We have a lot of brighter mid
tones and we really don't have too much in
| | 01:19 | the way of highlights. And if we look
back at our image here in the Composition
| | 01:23 | panel, we can concur with that.
| | 01:24 | Now one of the things you typically
want to do with continuous tone footage, in
| | 01:27 | other words, real life footage is you
want to make sure that there is pure
| | 01:31 | white and pure black.
| | 01:33 | Now, if there is a flat line here or
on the left side of the shadows, that
| | 01:36 | means you are not getting pure
highlights in this case. So what I'm going to do
| | 01:40 | is I'm going to drag this little arrow
over and that's going to make it so that
| | 01:43 | this brightest pixel now becomes pure white.
| | 01:46 | So you want to be really careful that
you don't drag this too far to the left,
| | 01:51 | because now all of these tones become
pure white and you lose all those details
| | 01:55 | in the highlights. You can
see how terrible that looks.
| | 01:57 | Sometimes if you like going for the
apocalyptic explosion, then it's okay for a
| | 02:01 | special effect. Just to make sure, if
you are going to break the rules, you
| | 02:05 | have a real reason why you
are going to break the rules.
| | 02:07 | When I put this highlight triangle back
in the right spot here, the shadows are fine.
| | 02:11 | We have pure blacks. We don't
need to fiddle with that. But we do need to
| | 02:14 | adjust the mid tones. If we drag this
mid tone slighter to the left, we are
| | 02:18 | going to brighten the mid tones. If we
drag it to the right, we are going to
| | 02:23 | darken the mid tones. And here we see
the real benefit of Levels over using
| | 02:27 | let's say for example, the
Lightness in Hue/Saturation.
| | 02:31 | With that Lightness slider in Hue/
Saturation, you remember, every pixel is
| | 02:34 | either universally lightened or
universally darkened. And now as we fill with
| | 02:38 | these mid tones, you can see we can
darken things up quite a bit but this white
| | 02:42 | highlight on this button is still
pure white and likewise if we were to
| | 02:46 | brighten the mid tones, you would
still have pure black in the shadows.
| | 02:50 | Now, what I have just shown you is
probably the way that Levels is used most
| | 02:54 | commonly and again, what most people
use it for is just to take the triangles
| | 02:58 | on the left and right sides, if there
was a flat line and just drag them in.
| | 03:02 | We would do that with the shadows on the
left-hand side but this line isn't flat,
| | 03:05 | there is already shadow detail and if
we did that then we'd be crushing all of
| | 03:08 | these values to pure black, thereby
losing details in the shadows. So we don't
| | 03:13 | want to do that here.
| | 03:14 | But again, as I mentioned in the
beginning of this movie, there is another
| | 03:17 | purpose that people use Levels for, to
color correct and composite. So let's
| | 03:21 | look at that in the next movie.
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| Using levels with individual channels| 00:00 | Now continuing on with where we left
off this photo of Marian from You Yell You Kick,
| | 00:04 | let's go ahead and dig
a little deeper into Levels.
| | 00:07 | Now sometimes, for whatever reason,
the histogram kind of freaks out and
| | 00:10 | you get this box. So I'm actually kind of
glad this worked this way. If that ever
| | 00:14 | happens to you just basically need to
refresh the cache. So just unclick the
| | 00:18 | Effects icons for Levels and bring it
back and it will refresh. And so here you
| | 00:22 | see the before and the after. This is
the original photo before Levels and this
| | 00:26 | is what we did in the last movie with Levels.
| | 00:28 | In this case, I'm actually going to
click the Reset button to reset Levels back
| | 00:32 | to its default. Note that Levels in
its default state is just an info only
| | 00:36 | plug-in. It's not really doing
anything until we actually adjust stuff so now
| | 00:40 | that we have reset it, before
and after look exactly the same.
| | 00:43 | Now, I want you to put your
attention to the top of the effect. Under the
| | 00:45 | Channel drop-down, we are looking at
RGB, in other words, the Composite Color
| | 00:50 | image. Where we adjust the mid tones,
we are adjusting all of the mid tones.
| | 00:54 | What we can do is go to this
Channel drop-down and adjust channels
| | 00:57 | individually. So, if we go to the Red
Channel, we can tweak the Red channel.
| | 01:01 | Now as we drag the mid tone slider
for the Red channel to the right, we are
| | 01:06 | basically removing Red which adds
the opposite color, which is Cyan.
| | 01:10 | Now you can do the same thing with the
Green channel or with the Blue channel
| | 01:14 | and again here, it pays to know a
little bit about color theory. Let's say for
| | 01:17 | example that the opposite of Blue is
Yellow. I want to add a little bit more
| | 01:20 | yellow to this in addition to the Cyan that we
added. So I'm going to subtract some of the Blue.
| | 01:25 | So we can keep going, have this be
very Yellow image, which is just a slight
| | 01:28 | Yellow tint. That's a little bit too
much, but you get the idea that we have
| | 01:32 | some room to play with color here
using these different color channels.
| | 01:36 | I should also point out that you can
not only edit color channels individually
| | 01:40 | but also the Alpha channel. If you have
a piece of footage with featured edges
| | 01:44 | or maybe it's keyed and the edges are
too soft, they are faded maybe. You can
| | 01:48 | play with these triangles underneath
the Alpha channel here to adjust that. You
| | 01:52 | can also fade Opacity by dragging
this to the left, which fades the image.
| | 01:56 | We will talk a little bit more about
what this lower bar does in just a moment.
| | 02:00 | For now, I'm actually going to
select the Levels effect on this image and
| | 02:03 | delete it, getting back to
the original state of the image.
| | 02:06 | Now one of the great advantages to
being able to adjust the Levels of each
| | 02:10 | channel individually is that it aids
us when we are compositing. In other
| | 02:13 | words, we are combining two images
that don't really belong together.
| | 02:17 | So what I have done is I have imported
a photo of me from the big After Effects
| | 02:21 | project here and this certainly doesn't
belong for a lot of reasons but one of
| | 02:26 | the biggest reasons visually that it
doesn't belong is that the colors are way off.
| | 02:30 | This is obviously shot in two very
different lighting conditions. In real
| | 02:35 | life, Marian's skin is probably darker
than mine because, Casper the Ghost's
| | 02:39 | skin is darker than mine, so I'm
just saying Marian's is as well.
| | 02:42 | So, what we are going to do is I'm
going to show you a trick to use Levels on
| | 02:46 | my layer, so that I blend in more
fully with Marian. Here is how this works.
| | 02:51 | I'm going to apply Levels to me here
and what we are going to do is we are
| | 02:55 | going to come down to the bottom of the
Composition panel and look at just the
| | 02:59 | Red channel for all images, for the
entire composition. And then what we are
| | 03:03 | going to do is go back to Levels effect,
in the Effect Controls panel, change
| | 03:06 | the Channel drop-down to Red and then
what I want to do is I want to fiddle
| | 03:11 | with the Red channel Levels so that my
brightness looks like her brightness on
| | 03:16 | this channel and that my shadows and mid
tones look like her shadows and mid tones.
| | 03:21 | And we are going to do this for each
channel separately and by the time you are
| | 03:25 | done, you will have a pretty good
composite. In this case, I could see that her
| | 03:29 | highlights are a lot more bright than
mine. So I need to drag the right side of
| | 03:34 | this upper histogram here, drag that
to the left to make this a little bit
| | 03:39 | brighter overall. Now I also notice
that her black jacket and my black shirt
| | 03:43 | should probably look about the same.
| | 03:45 | Right now, mine is much darker. So we
could play with the mid tones, if we
| | 03:49 | like, until we get that a little bit
brighter dragging this mid tone triangle
| | 03:53 | to the left a little bit more and we
could also come down here to this lower bar.
| | 03:56 | This lower bar controls the
output values. And this actually works a
| | 04:02 | little bit more intuitively than does
the upper three triangles. Basically this
| | 04:06 | right-hand side represents the
highlights again, but it's the output highlights.
| | 04:10 | So if we want to take all white
values and make them darker, they are too
| | 04:14 | bright for whatever reason, we could
just drag this down. And you can see that
| | 04:17 | it's just lowering the value of all the
bright values. Likewise, if we restore
| | 04:22 | that and then drag the Shadows slider
in from the left to the right, then we
| | 04:26 | are lightening all shadows.
| | 04:28 | So that's one way we could make both
of their shadows match. Now it might be
| | 04:32 | seeming like I'm kind of contradicting
myself here, because I have said before
| | 04:34 | throughout this chapter and probably
said a few times more that we shouldn't be
| | 04:37 | brightening the shadows or darkening
the highlights and normally that is true.
| | 04:42 | But you see in this case, we are not
trying to go for a good quality result, we
| | 04:46 | are trying to match two layers. Once we
have composited them, then we can color
| | 04:51 | correct and restore the shadows of both
of them. But priority one at this point
| | 04:56 | is just to get them looking the same.
| | 04:58 | Now we probably could darken this a
little bit more and that looks pretty good
| | 05:02 | there and the next step is to come
back down to the Composition panel and
| | 05:06 | change the channel that we are
viewing to Green. Now you can see there is a
| | 05:10 | little highlight at the bottom and the
top of the Composition panel, it changes
| | 05:13 | to Green instead of Red and you know that
we are looking at only the Green channel.
| | 05:17 | Now, we are going to do the same thing.
Change the Channel drop-down to Green
| | 05:20 | and adjust the Highlight values and the
Shadow values so that they are similar
| | 05:26 | between the two images.
| | 05:27 | Finally, lets go to the Blue channel,
notice that I'm not taking time to get
| | 05:32 | this exactly perfect. But we'll just
get in the ballpark and see how this goes.
| | 05:37 | Bring up the highlights, and in this
case, her jacket is very, very bright.
| | 05:42 | A lot of brightness in the Blue channel.
So what I'm going to do is bring this up
| | 05:46 | quite a bit here, and you don't brighten
this quite so much. That looks about right.
| | 05:51 | So again, I'm looking at our faces
because that's really where the highlights
| | 05:54 | are, and I'll be overdoing it
just a little bit, but good enough.
| | 05:58 | Now, finally let's go down to the
Composition panel, at the bottom here, change
| | 06:02 | this to RGB. That's the Composite view
seeing all the channels and we could see
| | 06:07 | the final result here.
| | 06:08 | Now we are seeing a little bit of the
Blue, Green tint in the black of my shirt
| | 06:13 | that we don't see in Marian's jacket
but overall this looks much better. If we
| | 06:18 | take off the visibility of the Levels
effect by clicking this Effects icon next
| | 06:21 | to Levels, we could see the before and
after. So even though both images are in
| | 06:27 | need of a color correction,
they now match one another.
| | 06:31 | Now if we go to the finished
composition, we can see one that I put a little
| | 06:34 | bit more time and effort into, and the
color cast is gone out of the black and
| | 06:38 | we are getting a little closer there.
| | 06:40 | Skin tones are basically in the
ballpark there and also too you couldt see
| | 06:44 | my pasty whiteness a little bit better.
Her skin looks like it has a little
| | 06:47 | more color to it, which is I'm sure the
way it would be in real life. So we are
| | 06:50 | getting pretty close.
| | 06:51 | In the next movie, we are going to demystify another
luminance adjusting powerhouse, the Curves effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding curves| 00:00 | While Levels is probably the most
common way to adjust brightness, Curves is
| | 00:06 | probably the most powerful. But the
reason why more people don't use it is
| | 00:10 | it's not as intuitive or easy to use as
Levels. But in this tutorial, I'm going
| | 00:14 | to demystify it for you. I'm going to show
you also why you'd want to use it over Levels.
| | 00:20 | I have here this photo I took of the
Space Needle and I took this photo to use
| | 00:24 | it in an HDR series using the Merge
to HDR feature in Photoshop if you know
| | 00:28 | about that and so it's little bit on
the dark side. So I'm going to apply the
| | 00:32 | Curves Effect to the Space Needle here.
And this one of the things that trips
| | 00:36 | people up about Curves right here,
and looking at the Curves Effect in the
| | 00:39 | Effect Controls panel, we have
basically have this diagonal line.
| | 00:42 | Well, the benefit of Curves, we need
to understand about it before we move on
| | 00:46 | here is that Curves allows you to
remap different brightness values to other
| | 00:52 | brightness values. So if you want to
make the highlight shadows and the shadows
| | 00:56 | highlights, you can do that with Curves
although you can't really do that with Levels.
| | 01:00 | Likewise, you can remap pretty much
any level of gray to any other level of gray.
| | 01:04 | Now by default, white is mapped
to white and black is mapped to black,
| | 01:08 | and so this line is always a
diagonal when we begin. The highlights are
| | 01:12 | represented on the right side,
midtones are in the middle and the shadows are
| | 01:16 | on the left, just like with Levels.
| | 01:18 | Now this bottom line represents
the current colors in the image. This
| | 01:22 | horizontal line on the left hand side
represents the colors that we are going
| | 01:25 | to map those colors to. So let's take
for example, this midtone here, this
| | 01:29 | represents midtones and again it's map to
the midtone over here on the left-hand side.
| | 01:35 | If we were to take that up, then the
color that was here is now remapped higher
| | 01:41 | a little bit. In other words, it's
brighter. If we were to take it down, we are
| | 01:45 | going to darken it. So again, what you
really need to understand about Curves
| | 01:49 | is that going upward brightens things
and going downward darkens things. I'll
| | 01:53 | go ahead and click Reset here.
| | 01:55 | One of the most common Curves
adjustment is something called an S curve, and
| | 01:59 | what we do is we go to the right hand
side which represents the highlights of
| | 02:02 | the image and we drag them upwards to
make those highlights brighter. And then
| | 02:06 | we go to the left side of the image,
which represents the shadow areas, and we
| | 02:09 | drag them down to make them darker.
| | 02:11 | So we are kind of make a little S here.
In this way, we have increased the
| | 02:14 | contrast of the image. We can see
the before and the after, still not too
| | 02:18 | spectacular though. So we can click on
this curve on the right hand side and
| | 02:22 | bring that up more. And that's great,
and that really does bring out the
| | 02:25 | contrast but the problem is the
Space Needle is still too dark.
| | 02:29 | So what I can do is now, go over to
other areas in the midtones and click on
| | 02:34 | those areas and bring those up as
well or these shadow areas. Why am I
| | 02:38 | darkening them when I actually want
them to be brighter? So I can click this
| | 02:41 | little point here and move this up
and so now we can see these areas in the
| | 02:45 | Space Needle whereas we couldn't
before. So really, this is why we prefer
| | 02:50 | Curves to Levels. Why? It's more
advanced, gives you far more control that you
| | 02:55 | don't have with Levels.
| | 02:56 | I am going to go ahead and reset this
Curve. I'm actually going to do something
| | 02:59 | else you can do with this effect. You
can't do with Levels. If I drag this
| | 03:04 | down, the highlights on the right
hand side. Basically, what we can do is
| | 03:08 | darken the skies and then we
can brighten the Space Needle.
| | 03:13 | So we were basically brightening the
shadows and darkening the highlights. And
| | 03:19 | we can keep fiddling with this until we
have an overcast sky and a bright Space
| | 03:24 | Needle. So this is what we started
with, a dark Space Needle and a fairly
| | 03:28 | bright sky, and we've switched it around
a little bit. That's a lot of power there.
| | 03:33 | Now one of those claimers that you
don't want to make it so that a part of the
| | 03:36 | curve is high on the left than it is
on the right. We are also going to get
| | 03:40 | posterization. Now that actually looks
kind of cool. But that's a more of an
| | 03:44 | exception in the rule, you see you get
some really weird psychedelic effects
| | 03:47 | that really don't look that awesome,
okay that looks even more awesome.
| | 03:50 | But usually, it doesn't look that good
because of posterizatiion- when a part
| | 03:53 | of the curve on the left is higher
than any part of the curve on the right.
| | 03:57 | I'll take little bit more time
with another example, in the finished
| | 03:59 | composition and we actually
made it look like an overcast day.
| | 04:03 | One of the things that's
characteristic of a sunny day is that we have a lot
| | 04:07 | more contrast, so we have shadows and
we have darker spots and brighter spots,
| | 04:13 | a lot more contrast when the sun is out.
And when the sun is not out, we don't
| | 04:17 | have the same contrast, so not only do
we play with the luminance a little bit,
| | 04:20 | we really change the whole tone of the
shot with Curves and this is absolutely
| | 04:25 | something we could not do with Levels.
| | 04:28 | So to sum it all up you may not want
to use Curves at every chance but it
| | 04:31 | really behooves you to get good at
this effect because there are so much you
| | 04:34 | can do that other effects cannot do.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with the Info panel| 00:00 | Okay, so the last few movies have been
a little mentally demanding so what I
| | 00:04 | want to do is take a little mental
break and just give you a quick little tip here.
| | 00:07 | And that is on how to use the
Info panel. By default it's up in the upper
| | 00:11 | right hand corner of the screen in
After Effects and again, if you don't see it,
| | 00:15 | you can go to the Window
panel and just select Info there.
| | 00:19 | Now while there are Info panels in a
lot of Adobe products, I find that I use
| | 00:22 | the Info panel in After Effects more
than I use it any other Adobe application.
| | 00:27 | The Info panel is constantly trying to
give you info about what's going on and
| | 00:31 | we are doing color correction, so
it's especially important as you put your
| | 00:34 | cursor over a pixel, it gives you
the RGB values and it gives you a color
| | 00:38 | swatch of the color that your cursor is over.
| | 00:40 | You could also see in the Info panel
that it gives you the X and Y coordinates
| | 00:44 | of where your cursor is as well. Now
you could just imagine how handy this is
| | 00:48 | for color correction. Now we know this
is white because we know what human eyes
| | 00:52 | look like. But if I put my cursor over
this, you'll actually see that it's a
| | 00:55 | blue color. You see sometimes, your
eyes trick you into thinking that you are
| | 00:59 | seeing something that you assume is
there when it's not. So the Info panel
| | 01:03 | helps you see what is actually there.
| | 01:06 | So now we can go in there and let's
say apply Hue/Saturation, change the
| | 01:10 | Channel control to Blues and maybe
desaturate the Blues a little bit and
| | 01:17 | perhaps even lighten the Blues. That
might adjust our overall image. And so
| | 01:21 | that did manage to get rid of the blue
in our eyes, it also manage to get rid
| | 01:25 | of some of the blue in the image and
some of that's bad, some of that's good,
| | 01:29 | but here is the before with the blue
eyes, here is the afterwards with the
| | 01:33 | light gray eyes. So it's not perfect
but it's definitely better than it was
| | 01:37 | before. Thanks to the Info panel.
| | 01:39 | Now again, we put our cursor over
something, we also get the Alpha value. 255
| | 01:44 | is completely opaque, so we know that
this layer is completely opaque. Now if
| | 01:48 | we are going to take down the Opacity
of this layer, then as we put our cursor
| | 01:52 | over this layer, you could see the
Alpha value changes to 145 at 57% opacity.
| | 01:57 | So as you can imagine, this is good
sometimes for troubleshooting as well if
| | 02:01 | you have a layer with a lot of varying
decrease of opacity, then you put your
| | 02:05 | cursor over it and the Info panel will
give you a read out on the opacity of
| | 02:08 | that exact pixel as well.
| | 02:10 | So just a little tip, keep that Info
panel out, get used to using it, not only
| | 02:14 | is it helpful for color and position
but a lot of other information as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| A few "rules" about color correction| 00:00 | In this movie, we are going to look
at some basic rules of thumb for color
| | 00:04 | correction. Here we have a photo of
Marian again. This is a little bit
| | 00:07 | different photo and it's been
Photoshopped and this illustrates a common
| | 00:11 | problem that we see in image
editing and sometimes in video as well.
| | 00:16 | It's usually a good idea to keep the
flesh tones as flesh. In this case,
| | 00:22 | her skin has a green tint to it. Now it's
okay if the whole image has a cool green
| | 00:27 | tint to it. I love what's going on the
background. I love these colors. It's great.
| | 00:30 | But her skin looks pale and green.
No matter what you are doing in After
| | 00:35 | Effects when you are making this
alternative reality, you need to make sure
| | 00:38 | that you are especially careful
with things dealing with human beings.
| | 00:42 | Painting, it's the same way. If you
paint a landscape and a tree is little bit off
| | 00:46 | then people can let that go a little bit.
| | 00:49 | But if you are painting the human face,
then something instinctive inside of us
| | 00:53 | knows what the human face is supposed
to look like. We know what human skin is
| | 00:57 | supposed to look like. We know how
things were supposed to move when it's
| | 01:00 | humans moving. So your audience is
going to be much more critical of things
| | 01:04 | you do relating to human beings.
| | 01:07 | If you had a couch stand up and walk,
then people are going to be as critical
| | 01:10 | because the couch doesn't walk so you
can make it walk however you want it to walk.
| | 01:13 | When you are dealing with issues
pertaining to people, you need to make
| | 01:16 | sure that you're very dead on accurate.
In the case of color correction,
| | 01:20 | we want to try to keep these skin tones
as close to skin tones as possible.
| | 01:24 | Now the next thing we've already kind
of covered a little bit if we hop on over
| | 01:27 | to the Space Needle comp. We want to
make sure that as we are brightening and
| | 01:32 | darkening our footage that we are
leaving the highlights bright and the shadows dark.
| | 01:36 | You want to make sure you
stay away from the evil brightness and
| | 01:40 | contrast. Brightness and
contrast is my nemesis.
| | 01:43 | If you bump your brightness just a
little bit or take it down a little bit to
| | 01:46 | darken the image, you are actually
adjusting and shifting the highlights and
| | 01:50 | shadows, which is typically not a good
idea. Again, if you are using this on
| | 01:54 | vector graphics, that's fine. If you
are using this on grayscale images or
| | 01:58 | whatever, that's fine as well, but
don't use this on regular footage with
| | 02:02 | continuous tones. Bad idea.
| | 02:05 | And finally, I want to go over to this
Angela overbright and this photo kind of
| | 02:08 | defies the rules. Really, really,
really bright brights and really, really dark darks,
| | 02:12 | but the balance really works
and hey, I get that. You know, this is a
| | 02:16 | really an art form what we are doing
here in After Effects. So sometimes rules
| | 02:19 | are made to be broken but as with an
art form, make sure that you are breaking
| | 02:24 | rules for a reason.
| | 02:25 | If you are going to have an image
that's a strong contrast or if you are going
| | 02:28 | to have a blue tint or a red tint, make sure
it goes with the story that you are telling.
| | 02:32 | If you want to create a relaxed
atmosphere then you don't want to use a red tint,
| | 02:35 | you want to use a blue tint
probably, or if something really intense is
| | 02:39 | happening, you would probably want to
use a redder tint or warmer tone rather
| | 02:42 | than a cooler tone. Or if you're
doing a remake, let's say Steel Magnolias,
| | 02:46 | then you don't want the contrast that
intense because it's not that intense of
| | 02:50 | a story. It's a soft fluffy story.
| | 02:53 | On the other hand if you are editing an
episode of 24 or something that's very,
| | 02:56 | very intense, then you would want
intense contrasting colors because the story
| | 03:00 | is very intense. So there is just a
few rules about color correction. Again,
| | 03:04 | rules are meant to be broken so use
these at your leisure. It was just a few
| | 03:07 | things that I have noticed that
people could generally benefit from.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using color balance| 00:00 | Color balance is another one of my
favorite color adjusting effects,
| | 00:04 | so we're going to look at that in this movie.
I'm going to apply the Color Balance
| | 00:07 | effect to the Lincoln memorial statue
here. Now at first glance I'd realize
| | 00:11 | that this effect isn't super intuitive,
especially if you are coming over from
| | 00:15 | Photoshop and you are familiar with
this effect over there because it is
| | 00:18 | a little bit of graphic interface in
Photoshop but nevertheless it is pretty
| | 00:22 | straightforward and easy to get a hold
of once you play around with it for a bit.
| | 00:26 | Basically, this effect allows you
to adjust the shadows, midtones, and
| | 00:29 | highlights of the red, green, and blue
balance. So we have Shadow Red, Shadow
| | 00:34 | Green, Shadow Blue, Midtone Red,
Midtone Green, Midtone Blue, Highlight Red,
| | 00:38 | Highlight Green, Highlight Blue. So
let's say we want to warm up this image a
| | 00:42 | little bit. We can go to the Shadow Red Balance
and increase that value to add some red to this.
| | 00:47 | Likewise we could add some red to the
highlights and midtones as well. Now this
| | 00:52 | is looking a little too red so I would
like to add some yellow. However,
| | 00:55 | you will notice that there is no yellow
here. So we actually get yellow by
| | 00:59 | subtracting blue. Again, as we
discussed earlier in this chapter, it really
| | 01:03 | pays to know a little bit about color theory.
| | 01:05 | So the opposite of red is cyan, the
opposite of green is magenta, the opposite
| | 01:09 | of blue is yellow. So if we want to
add some yellow, we simply subtract blue.
| | 01:15 | So I go to Shadow Blue Balance for
example, drag this to the left and this will
| | 01:20 | take blue out of some of the shadow
areas. And that adds a nice yellowish tint,
| | 01:25 | which combine with the red that we've already
added, makes a nice warm kind of sepia tone.
| | 01:29 | It's actually probably a little bit
more red than a sepia tone but something
| | 01:32 | along those lines. We also have this
Preserve Luminosity checkbox that we can
| | 01:36 | click, which will preserve the
original luminosity. So here is the before and
| | 01:40 | the after. That Preserve Luminosity
is a little bit too intense for me.
| | 01:44 | So before and after there.
| | 01:46 | One of the things I really like about
this effect, I'm just going to go ahead
| | 01:48 | and hit the Reset button is that we
could blend multiple colors. So if I wanted
| | 01:53 | to maybe add some blue, let's go
ahead and add a little bit of blue here to
| | 01:57 | Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows. We
could also go ahead and add some green
| | 02:03 | and playing around with this, so you
get some really interesting effects. Check
| | 02:07 | Preserve Luminosity here.
| | 02:08 | So now we have like this really
cool film like look and even though
| | 02:13 | Hue/Saturation is much easier to use,
color balance just generally is better
| | 02:18 | for me for getting that kind of film
quality look. Like when I look at this,
| | 02:22 | this could very easily be a still
frame from a film. So again, here is the
| | 02:27 | original and here is with color balance.
It's just this nice film type look and
| | 02:33 | color, get a lot of possibilities
from balancing all these values here.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a "day for night" effect| 00:00 | A day for night shot is when a shot
is taken during the day and then in
| | 00:05 | postproduction like say here in After
Effects, you take the shot and trying to
| | 00:08 | make it look like it was shot at night.
This is a really popular technique
| | 00:12 | that's use often in TV shows
and also in feature films as well.
| | 00:16 | Now there are several reasons this is
done. Number 1, it's really costly to do
| | 00:21 | a night time shot, it's got to be lit
just right and that usually takes a long
| | 00:24 | time which means money and also usually
it means an extended stay for the crew
| | 00:29 | which can also be time consuming and costly.
| | 00:31 | So let me show you a few tools you
can use, putting together what we've
| | 00:34 | learned so far in this chapter to
create the day for night shot. Basically, we
| | 00:37 | are going to start with this photo of
the US Capital that I took and we are
| | 00:40 | going to have it end up
looking like this, day for night.
| | 00:45 | Okay, let's go ahead and start out by
adding Curves to the US Capital building
| | 00:49 | here in the Start composition. Now
a few things we want to be aware of,
| | 00:53 | obviously we need to make this much
darker, but we also need to make sure that
| | 00:57 | we are tinting it the appropriate color.
| | 00:59 | If we're tinting this for a sunset shot,
we need to make sure the colors are
| | 01:04 | very warm. The orange tone that we
are seeing here on the capital building
| | 01:09 | would be perfect, so we just want to
extenuate that. But we actually want to
| | 01:12 | create a dark nighttime, which usually
has more of a blue tint. So with that in
| | 01:17 | mind, let's go over to Curves here.
| | 01:18 | Now the first thing, I'm going to do
is I'm going to over in this upper right
| | 01:21 | hand corner, this dot represents the
highlights, the brightest point in our
| | 01:26 | image and I want this to be darker
because the whites that are available during
| | 01:30 | bright sunlight like this are going
to be very different than the bright
| | 01:33 | highlights available during
moonlight, even the full moonlight.
| | 01:36 | So, I'm going to grab this point and
drag it down, thereby remapping the
| | 01:41 | brightest tones to a darker value. So
here is the before and after. Then I'm
| | 01:48 | going to drag the middle of the curve
like the midtones, drag these down a lot.
| | 01:53 | And it's a little bit too intense.
| | 01:54 | Now it's looking pretty good, but what
that's done is it actually brought up
| | 01:58 | the intensity of the orangeness of the
US Capital building which is not what we want.
| | 02:03 | So I'm going to go to Hue/
Saturation and I'm going to add a
| | 02:07 | Hue/Saturation here. First thing, we
need to do is go to Channel control in
| | 02:10 | Hue/Saturation, changes to reds.
That's the colors that we want to work on here.
| | 02:15 | I'm going to take down the
saturation of the reds and you might want to
| | 02:20 | even change the hue of this to
maybe be like a blue type color.
| | 02:24 | I am going to take down Saturation,
maybe even take down lightness just a
| | 02:30 | little bit so our capital building is
a little bit darker and there we go.
| | 02:35 | I also might want to go to the blues
here and take down the saturation of the
| | 02:41 | blues, just a little and
also the lightness of the blues.
| | 02:45 | Now again I have always said
stay away from the lightness here in
| | 02:47 | Hue/Saturation but that's mostly when
you are working on the lightness of the
| | 02:51 | entire image, and here also we are
trying to darken the whole image, we don't
| | 02:55 | want the perfectly white highlights. So
it's okay to take down the lightness of
| | 02:59 | individual color channels.
| | 03:01 | Next is go ahead and apply Color
Balance. We need to kind of adjust these
| | 03:04 | colors a little bit. Color Balance is
the tool for the job here. Let's go ahead
| | 03:08 | and increase the Blue Shadow Balance,
so there is more blue in the shadows.
| | 03:13 | That looks much better. Next just go
ahead and check Preserve Luminosity. That
| | 03:17 | darkens things up quite a bit as well.
I'm going to tone down the Shadow Blue
| | 03:21 | Balance on that, not too shabby.
| | 03:23 | Now if you wanted to, you could keep
going with this. We could stack a Levels
| | 03:26 | effect on this if we wanted to and
maybe take down the midtones, if that's the
| | 03:31 | way we wanted to go. One of the things
that I did in my finished example is I
| | 03:34 | turned this into a 3D layer by
clicking this 3D Cube checkbox on the layer in
| | 03:39 | the Timeline panel and then I right-
click in the blank spot, here in the
| | 03:42 | Timeline panel, selected New > Light
and I chose a spotlight and I went ahead
| | 03:48 | and feathered this 100% and click OK.
| | 03:51 | Then I'll go up to the transformed
gizmo on the light and make sure your cursor
| | 03:56 | says Z, click and drag upwards making
the light kind of move outwards a little bit.
| | 04:02 | Now we could play with this light
a lot, we can go in here and select the
| | 04:05 | light, hit the letter T for intensity
and adjust the intensity of the light,
| | 04:10 | if we want to tone that down a little bit.
But over all for this quick little run
| | 04:15 | through of these effects here, we've
produced a fairly realistic night shot of
| | 04:19 | the capital building, just by way of
comparison here is it with the light and
| | 04:23 | effects off. That's our original and
then with the effects and light on.
| | 04:29 | And again here is my finished example,
looks pretty similar to the start
| | 04:33 | example. I did take a little bit
more time to play with it to kind of get
| | 04:35 | things just right. So feel free if
you've access to the Exercise Files to go
| | 04:39 | ahead and see what I did here, I just
used Curves, Hue/Saturation, and Color
| | 04:42 | Balance and of course, a light here.
| | 04:44 | Doing day for night shots in post
production never quite looks exactly right.
| | 04:50 | I mean we can look at these and find
some flaws, things that don't quite look
| | 04:54 | like a nighttime shot but all-in-all,
this is a much cheaper alternative than
| | 04:59 | bringing a film crew in and
actually shooting at night.
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| About bit depth| 00:00 | One of things that you frequently hear
in the world of image editing or video
| | 00:04 | editing is all the stuff about bits.
This is 8 bits, or 10 bits, or 32 bits or
| | 00:10 | whatever, and that could be kind of
confusing. But it's also a very important
| | 00:13 | topic to deal with when
you are looking at color.
| | 00:17 | So, in this movie and also in the next
movie we're going to take a look at Bit Depth.
| | 00:21 | First let's look at what a Bit is.
A Bit is the computer's most basic
| | 00:26 | level of understanding. Basically, what
that means is that a Bit is either a 1 or a 0.
| | 00:32 | That's how a computer thinks in the
background. It's all just 1s or 0s. We see
| | 00:36 | letters, we see interfaces, and buttons,
and menus and all that kind of stuff.
| | 00:41 | The computer only understands really
1s and 0s. So, if we have something that
| | 00:47 | is 8 bits, that can mathematically be
expressed as 28. The 2 comes from the
| | 00:54 | options of 1 or 0. Two choices here.
| | 00:57 | So, if there is 8 bits, then the
possible amount of choices is 256. So, when
| | 01:02 | something is 8 bit, it means there is
256 color possibilities. Now, typically
| | 01:08 | when people talk about an 8-bit
image, they mean 8 bits per channel.
| | 01:14 | In that case, the Red channel would
have 8 bits, the Green channel has 8 bits,
| | 01:17 | and the Blue channels has 8 bits. So,
there is 24 bits in other words. That
| | 01:22 | means there is 256 color possibilities
for Red, 256 for Green and Blue as well.
| | 01:28 | We arrive at the number of colors
possible in RGB, in other words an 8 bit per
| | 01:33 | channel RGB image by multiplying
256X256X256. The end result is 16.7 million
| | 01:43 | colors. So, just be aware moving
forward, as we look a little bit deeper into
| | 01:47 | this, is that when we have a regular
8 bit per channel RGB image, there are
| | 01:51 | 16.7 million color choices, which is
already more than the human eye can see.
| | 01:57 | Now, what about 16 bits? Basically that
can mathematically be expressed as 216.
| | 02:03 | That equals 65,536. So then in a 16 bit
per channel image, we have 65,536 color
| | 02:13 | choices per channel. For the Red
channel, for the Green channel, for the Blue
| | 02:16 | channel. And we arrive at the
final amount of color possibilities by
| | 02:19 | multiplying 65,536 times that, times
that. And that is 281 trillion colors,
| | 02:28 | when we move to 16 bits.
| | 02:31 | By the way we'll talk a little bit
more about 8 bit versus, 16 bit versus, 32
| | 02:34 | bit, in the next movie. But basically
back to discussion here, we have 281
| | 02:39 | trillion colors when working in 16 bit
per channel mode. Now, isn't that enough
| | 02:45 | colors? Seriously, already with 8 bits
per channel it's more than the human eye
| | 02:49 | can see. So, why do we even need to
go up to 16 bits per channel? Let alone
| | 02:53 | what we have now, 32 bits per channel.
| | 02:56 | The thing is that when you have a 24-
bit image and also sometimes that will
| | 03:01 | include an 8-bit alpha channel. In
other words it will be 256 degrees of
| | 03:05 | transparency in the alpha channel, so
it's an extra 8 bits. So that will be 32
| | 03:10 | bits, but it will be 32 bits total.
| | 03:13 | Now, way back in After Effects 7, they
introduced something called high dynamic
| | 03:17 | range images. High dynamic range
images often referred to as HDRI in the 3D
| | 03:23 | world, but referred to as
HDR inside After Effects.
| | 03:26 | These types of images are capable of a
lot more because of their color range.
| | 03:32 | These images have 32 bits per channel.
In other words that's 232 per channel.
| | 03:41 | That is a lot of colors. But there is
something else that happens when we have
| | 03:46 | 32 bits per channel. That's really what this
whole discussion about bits is leading up to.
| | 03:52 | So, we are going to culminate this
discussion in the next movie, when we look
| | 03:56 | at what happens when we use 32 bits
per channel color. It's magic, folks. You
| | 04:01 | don't want to miss this. If this whole
thing seems too technical, then it will
| | 04:05 | seem nontechnical. In the next movie
we'll put it to practical use, and you'll
| | 04:09 | see the glory of HDR color.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using HDR/32-bit float point color| 00:00 | So now that we know little bit about
Bit Depth, we're going to put it to
| | 00:03 | practical use and talk about HDR color.
We have here some generic white text.
| | 00:08 | Currently and by default our After
Effects project is in 8 bits per channel mode.
| | 00:12 | I can tell that by going down to the
bottom of the Project panel and seeing
| | 00:16 | this 8 bpc. Bpc stands for bits per
channel. Now, before we do that, I want to
| | 00:21 | put my cursor over this text. Notice
the Info panel in the upper right hand
| | 00:25 | corner of the screen. This is telling
me that the RGB values for this text is
| | 00:30 | 255, 255, 255. That is pure white.
| | 00:34 | Remember how we said that there are
256 color possibilities for each channel.
| | 00:38 | Well, they actually start counting at 0.
So instead of going from 1 to 256,
| | 00:43 | it actually goes from 0 to 255. So pure
black would be expressed as 000;
| | 00:50 | pure white is 255, 255, 255.
| | 00:54 | However, if we go over here to the
bottom of the Project panel and hold the
| | 00:57 | Option key on the Mac or the Alt key
on the PC and click that one time, we go
| | 01:02 | into 16 bit per channel mode. Note
that this has to done on a project level.
| | 01:07 | You cannot make a layer 16 bits per
channel or a composition 16 bits per
| | 01:11 | channel, only an entire project.
| | 01:14 | So, now as I put my cursor over this
text. We see that up here in the Info
| | 01:18 | panel these numbers are much higher
than the 255, 255, 255 limit we saw moments
| | 01:23 | ago with 8 bits per channel. Now,
before we go on to the glory of 32 bits per
| | 01:28 | channel, I want to add the Fast Blur effect.
| | 01:30 | I'm going to go into the Effects &
Presets panel, open up Blur & Sharpen.
| | 01:34 | And we see these little numbers here.
These little numbers indicate the bit depth
| | 01:38 | that effect is able to operate at.
| | 01:41 | So, some like CC Vector Blur can only
operate at 8 bits per channel. Some like
| | 01:45 | Lens Blur can work at 16 bits per
channel and some like Fast Blur can operate
| | 01:50 | at the full 32 bits per channel.
| | 01:52 | So, we apply the Fast Blur effect.
As we increase the Blurriness here,
| | 01:56 | it's just a generic blur, kind of like
you're squint in your eyes or something.
| | 01:59 | That's nothing to write home about. We are
going to come back to that in just a second.
| | 02:03 | Now, what I want to do is go over the
Project panel, hold the Option key on
| | 02:06 | the Mac or the Alt key on the PC again,
and click one more time to change this
| | 02:11 | to 32 bits per channel mode. Only when
your project is in 32 bits per channel mode
| | 02:16 | can you work with HDR color.
Here is what all the hubbub is about.
| | 02:20 | I'm going to go back to the Character
panel, click open this color swatch and
| | 02:23 | you'll notice that our white now is
set to 2, or maybe on your system that
| | 02:28 | might be set to 1. Now, you would think
because each color channel is 32 bits,
| | 02:34 | this would be a gigantic number.
| | 02:36 | Say, we just have a 1 or 2. Well, the
magic of HDR color, folks, is that
| | 02:40 | it tries to simulate light in the real
world, the way that light behaves, and
| | 02:45 | because of that we can create
something called super white color.
| | 02:49 | When we're in 8 bit, we do have white.
So what, big deal? But if you look in
| | 02:53 | the real world there is different types
of white. If I hold up a piece of paper
| | 02:56 | in front of your face, you might say,
"yeah, okay, that's a white piece of
| | 02:58 | paper". But then if I've shined a
flashlight in your face, you would say,
| | 03:01 | "okay, now that's really white." And
then if you look directly at the sun
| | 03:03 | you would say, "Well, that's far
more white than the flashlight is."
| | 03:07 | So, there are degrees of white
of super whiteness in the real world.
| | 03:12 | The same can be true of shadows as
well. They get super black, but they are
| | 03:15 | little bit less discernible with our
eyes. So, the glory here is that I can
| | 03:20 | create super white color.
| | 03:22 | So I'm going to take this blue color,
let's say to 4. And I'll take Green to 3.
| | 03:28 | This would create this kind of
greenish blue color. We'll go ahead and click OK.
| | 03:33 | It still looks like white here.
| | 03:34 | But now when I go back over to the
Effect Controls panel, I'm using this 32 bit
| | 03:39 | per channel effect that understands
and works at 32 bits per channel and
| | 03:42 | I increase Blurriness, you'd notice that
we don't have that ugly, blur your eye
| | 03:47 | effect anymore. The super white green
and blue is creating this wonderful,
| | 03:53 | beautiful, very life-like halo around our text.
| | 03:58 | Thus, we see the great advantages of
learning bit depth in HDR color. So,
| | 04:02 | you can pull tricks like this glowing
neon stuff out of your hat in a moment's
| | 04:07 | notice. Now this trick is great for
texts, motion graphics, compositing and now
| | 04:11 | in CS4 even shape layers can
operate at 32 bits per channel.
| | 04:15 | So imagine what you can do with glowing
neon shapes flying all over the place.
| | 04:19 | So, it's a handy trick that's
tough to pull off any other way.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Ensuring that comps have video-safe color| 00:00 | Before we end our look at color, I
want to look at something called Broadcast
| | 00:04 | Safe Color. You see when colors are
broadcast, they have to fit within a
| | 00:08 | certain spectrum. If they are too
bright or too saturated, then they appear to
| | 00:14 | glow and buzz on the screen.
It just looks terrible.
| | 00:17 | Nowadays you typically only see this
when you're maybe staying up too late or
| | 00:21 | you are watching a more budget local
channel, or you are maybe watching an ad
| | 00:25 | from a local business or something
like that, they did their own commercial.
| | 00:29 | After Effects is a great way to fix
this. Go to Color Correction, Category of
| | 00:33 | Effects, what we're going to do is
apply the effect called Broadcast Colors.
| | 00:38 | What that's going to do is
automatically fix our colors, so that they fall
| | 00:42 | within the proper specs for video color.
| | 00:46 | Now, you might have noticed that when
we applied this effect and especially
| | 00:49 | when we start changing these settings,
that we see a noticeable difference in
| | 00:53 | our reds. That's just the nature of the
beast. Now, I should probably tell you
| | 00:56 | that, with this footage here of this
little girl, what I have done is I've gone
| | 01:00 | in before I've import this footage,
I've increased the saturations as much as
| | 01:03 | it could possibly go.
| | 01:04 | So, you probably won't have footage
that's this over saturated, this intense
| | 01:09 | usually, but just to bring it into
specs for broadcast, this effect will have
| | 01:14 | to shave off some of the intensity
that's just it's purpose. Just use your
| | 01:19 | Broadcast Locale, either NTSC or Pal
and choose what method you want it to use
| | 01:26 | to fix your footage. Whether you wanted
to reduce the brightness or whether you
| | 01:30 | wanted to saturation.
| | 01:32 | In our case the default of Reduce
Luminance doesn't quite look as good as
| | 01:36 | Reduce Saturation. Now, if you really
know what you're doing, you could go in
| | 01:39 | here and adjust the Maximum Signal.
That might allow you to push just a little
| | 01:44 | bit more color into this, but Adobe
recommends staying with this 110. That is a
| | 01:49 | very safe number to make sure that all
of your colors here are going to fall
| | 01:53 | within the specs that they should.
| | 01:55 | Now, this is all fine and great for
just this one layer. But what if we had an
| | 02:00 | entire composition. We don't want to
apply the same effect and change the
| | 02:03 | settings for every single effect on
every single layer in our composition.
| | 02:07 | So, what we can do is just right-click
in the Timeline, create a new adjustment
| | 02:11 | layer. And adjustment layers affect
everything beneath them. So what I just
| | 02:16 | want to do here is maybe select
Broadcast Colors, we can just hit Command+X or
| | 02:20 | Ctrl+X on the PC to Cut that, select
the adjustment layer, then Command+V on
| | 02:24 | the Mac or Ctrl+V on the PC to paste
that in. And then every layer beneath the
| | 02:30 | adjustment layer will be broadcast safe.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Color Correction in Camera RawWhy use Camera Raw with After Effects?| 00:01 | In this chapter we're going to be
looking at using Adobe Camera Raw for After
| | 00:05 | Effects. First let's look at what Adobe
Camera Raw is. Camera Raw is a plug-in
| | 00:11 | for After Effects. This plug-in
is made for processing RAW images.
| | 00:17 | Now, what is a RAW image? Basically, on
some higher-end cameras, by higher-end
| | 00:24 | I just mean like a few hundred bucks or
more. This is typical on a lot of DSLR
| | 00:28 | cameras, the cameras
with interchangeable lenses.
| | 00:31 | They create a RAW image. This is a
less processed version than what you'd get
| | 00:37 | with a TIF or a JPEG. A RAW image is
often referred to as a Digital Negative,
| | 00:43 | because it's kind of like the
equivalent of a film negative. It's typically not
| | 00:47 | used in its native state, but it is
kind of like a master version of the image.
| | 00:52 | Typically our RAW images have a higher
quality, and that they often can have a
| | 00:57 | wider color space, maybe even 16 bits.
Now it's also important to realize that
| | 01:02 | a RAW image comes in many file formats. It
usually differs based on the camera manufacturer.
| | 01:09 | So let's say for example I have a
Canon camera. Then the RAW format that it
| | 01:13 | puts out is .cr2. Nikon use this .nef
and so on. Adobe came out with a RAW
| | 01:19 | image file format called .DNG, stands
for dot Digital Negative. They are kind
| | 01:24 | of trying to get that out there as a
standard that all cameras can use. Hasn't
| | 01:30 | been super widely adopted yet, but
it's getting more popular out there.
| | 01:34 | So, especially if you're coming from
a video background, you're probably
| | 01:37 | wondering why would I want to use
Camera Raw with After Effects? Well, first of
| | 01:41 | all it's just easy. If you find your
head spinning with Levels and Curves and
| | 01:47 | Color Balance and Hue/Saturation, you
could find that you can do a lot of that
| | 01:50 | kind of stuff right there in
Camera Raw and it's much easier.
| | 01:54 | Another thing is this is going use a
little bit less processing power. We are
| | 01:57 | going to do the Camera Raw editing
before it's imported into After Effects, and
| | 02:01 | then you're done. Camera Raw images are
usually little bit cleaner because they
| | 02:04 | haven't been compressed as much, makes
them a little bit bigger in file size,
| | 02:08 | but their quality is usually better.
That makes them ideal for background plates.
| | 02:12 | Another thing you can do with Camera
Raw that you can't do in After Effects
| | 02:15 | really is do some image processing. If
you're going to get rid of blemishes and
| | 02:20 | a few things like that, there is the
Clone Stamp tool in After Effects, but
| | 02:24 | sometimes it doesn't always
work as easily as you'd like it to.
| | 02:28 | The image processing that you have,
and the healing, and the cloning and that
| | 02:31 | type of thing that you have in Camera Raw is
better than what you'll find in After Effects.
| | 02:35 | Finally Camera Raw is completely
nondestructive. All the changes that you make
| | 02:41 | to RAW images are stored either in the
file or if they can't be saved in the
| | 02:46 | file, then it will create a separate
file. We'll talk about that later in this
| | 02:50 | chapter, called the Sidecar file.
All of your changes are stored in that.
| | 02:54 | So you can't hurt the original. So
it's great to use Adobe Camera Raw on many
| | 02:59 | Levels. If you come from an image
editing background, you'll be really glad to
| | 03:03 | see Camera Raw here and to be able
to use it with the After Effects.
| | 03:06 | If you're coming from a video
background, you haven't played too much with
| | 03:09 | Camera Raw, you're going to love this
stuff. So let's jump into in the next
| | 03:13 | movie. And look at how to
adjust Luminance in Camera Raw.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting luminance in Camera Raw| 00:00 | In this movie, we're going to look at
how to import images into Camera Raw and
| | 00:04 | also how to edit them for luminance.
So I'm here in my Finder window.
| | 00:09 | On Windows you'd be in your Explorer
window. I have my CR2 file. These are raw
| | 00:14 | files and I'm in the Images folder of
the Media folder of the Exercise Files.
| | 00:18 | I'm just going to drag this into After
Effects, just drag-and-drop it on the icon here.
| | 00:24 | You could also just import a CR2 file
or a Camera Raw file in the regular way,
| | 00:28 | the same way you'd import a JPEG or a
Movie file, and then Camera Raw will
| | 00:32 | automatically open. Now, one of the
first things you want to do is come up here
| | 00:36 | to the upper right-hand corner. We
have some great data about the shot here.
| | 00:41 | We'll come to that in just a second.
| | 00:42 | We also have a histogram right above
that, and we have also these two little
| | 00:46 | unassuming triangles in the corners.
Now if we look at this little triangle
| | 00:50 | here on the upper left, this indicates
the Shadow clipping warning. Over here
| | 00:55 | when this one on the right-hand side
is selected, it's going to show you the
| | 00:59 | Highlight clipping warning.
| | 01:00 | Basically, what that means is if you
make your dots too black, it's going to
| | 01:04 | show you by these ugly little blue
marks. If you make your pixels too bright,
| | 01:09 | it'll show you by these ugly
red marks, as we'll soon see.
| | 01:12 | Now getting it back to my camera
stats here, the F-stop is the aperture,
| | 01:17 | basically how much light is being let
into the camera. The smaller the F-stop,
| | 01:21 | the more light gets in. So an F-stop of
1.8 is actually a fairly open aperture.
| | 01:28 | To the right of the F-stop, we have
the Shutter Speed, 1/30 seconds of a
| | 01:31 | second. That's actually really fast,
which means we probably have a very sharp
| | 01:35 | picture, and we do. That's great.
| | 01:37 | The ISO value is 100. Now, this is a
good thing, sometimes. If you have a
| | 01:44 | higher ISO number, it lets in more
light into the camera, but it also
| | 01:47 | introduces noise. So we want this
number to be as low as possible, but
| | 01:51 | sometimes when we do that, our image
tends to be a little bit darker than
| | 01:55 | we want it. So we need to fix this a
little bit. By the way, this little stat
| | 01:59 | over here basically refers to
the size of the lens that was used.
| | 02:02 | So why not go down here to Exposure?
You don't have to click on this little
| | 02:07 | slider thing. I hate clicking on little,
tiny arrows like that. But I prefer
| | 02:10 | just click-and-drag on the name of the
property, or actually anywhere around
| | 02:15 | the name of the property, give
you a little bit leeway here.
| | 02:17 | So if I click on the word Exposure
and drag to the right, you could see the
| | 02:21 | histogram give us a live update of
what's happening, and you could see here in
| | 02:24 | the Image window obviously that
things are brightening up quite a bit.
| | 02:28 | Now as you look back up at our
histogram here, you could see that we have some
| | 02:30 | pixels that are right up against the
edge. Remember, this is pure white. So if
| | 02:35 | we keep bumping up Exposure, when
we're going to get this Highlight clipping
| | 02:39 | warning, this red junk that we're seeing.
| | 02:41 | These red pixels are here, because we
have this right-hand side triangle in
| | 02:45 | this square showing, and it's telling
us that these pixels are getting blown out.
| | 02:49 | We're losing detail in these
highlights because we have things too bright.
| | 02:53 | Now for me sometimes, I really like
this kind of blown out highlight effect.
| | 02:58 | So what we can do is come down here to
Recovery, and drag this to the right, and
| | 03:02 | that allows us to keep the same amount
of Brightness, basically. But it just
| | 03:06 | kind of recovers those areas that were
blown out, and brings those back so that
| | 03:10 | we're getting the details back that we had lost.
| | 03:12 | As we play with Fill Light-- actually
I'm going to take down Exposure just a
| | 03:16 | little bit. I like the way that looks,
but in order so we have some room to
| | 03:19 | play with this histogram on either side
I'm going to take that back down a little bit.
| | 03:21 | As we increase Fill Light, it increases
the brightness of the mid tones and the
| | 03:26 | shadows actually. So you want to be
careful with that, because if I brighten
| | 03:28 | this too much, we basically lose all
shadow detail. As a matter of fact, as I'm
| | 03:32 | fiddling with this, you could look
up at this histogram and see that our
| | 03:35 | shadows disappear. Usually, on a
professional photo set, the fill light is the
| | 03:39 | light that you add in to fill in
the cracks and crevices and shadows.
| | 03:43 | I'm always scared that I'm going to
make my shadows too bright, so I just
| | 03:46 | usually don't even touch that. The
black slider controls the intensity of the
| | 03:50 | shadows. So as we increase blacks,
we're actually crushing these blacks and
| | 03:55 | we get a lot more of that yucky blue,
because again that's the shadow clipping
| | 03:59 | warning. It's telling us that all of
these values, where there is detail in the
| | 04:02 | shadows, are being crushed to pure black.
| | 04:05 | So we want to take that down until
we don't have any more of those bad
| | 04:09 | little blue pixels that are clipping
warnings. Of course, we have the standard
| | 04:13 | Brightness and the standard Contrast as well.
| | 04:16 | Now down below this line, we have
Clarity. For this I'm going to increase
| | 04:19 | Exposure, pop up Recovery until we
get rid of the red, there we go, looking nice.
| | 04:23 | No warnings. Now Clarity is
interesting. It's almost like sharpening, but
| | 04:28 | it's good sharpening. I usually
don't have too good of results when I use
| | 04:32 | sharpening. I get those artifacts a
little bit too soon for my liking. But with
| | 04:36 | this Clarity slider, it's very subtle,
but it really brings out detail without
| | 04:41 | even realizing what's going on.
| | 04:43 | So as I bumped that up gradually,
it's kind of hard to see the difference, but
| | 04:45 | if I were to take this all the way to
the left, we can see that there is a
| | 04:49 | little bit of a difference there. Wuite
a significant difference, actually.
| | 04:51 | But if you look at the details, like on
her jacket, with the Clarity all the way up,
| | 04:55 | they seem very gritty and real.
| | 04:57 | But if I take this down a little
bit, those become softer and not as
| | 05:00 | pronounced. This Clarity slider is yet
another reason why I like to use Camera
| | 05:05 | Raw, in addition to the highlight
clipping warnings and the multi-colored
| | 05:09 | histogram and all these other features,
it really is just this great tool.
| | 05:13 | Now I realize that I'm just kind of
glossing over the surface very briefly
| | 05:17 | here and I'm going to be doing that
throughout this chapter. If you want more
| | 05:20 | information on this subject, Chris
Orwig, an amazing trainer, has some great
| | 05:24 | training right now on Lynda.com.
| | 05:27 | Photoshop CS4 for Photographers:
Camera Raw is a great title, but there is a
| | 05:31 | lot of great Camera Raw stuff out there
from him and other authors as well.
| | 05:34 | So if you want to dig a little bit
deeper, please check out their training.
| | 05:37 | Now once you get all your settings the
way that you like them, you go ahead and
| | 05:40 | click OK. Once you've done that, then
it will import this image into After Effects,
| | 05:45 | just like a regular old image.
| | 05:47 | Now as you can see by the bit depth,
we're working with trillions of colors
| | 05:50 | here and like I mentioned before in
the last movie, a lot of times Camera Raw
| | 05:54 | files can come in 16 bit, which is
basically what this image is. When you have
| | 05:58 | all those extra colors, it basically
gives you more Wiggle room while you're
| | 06:02 | editing. It allows you to make more fine edits.
| | 06:04 | Now in the next movie, we'll look at
how to reopen Camera Raw once you've
| | 06:08 | imported a file and also how
to adjust color in Camera Raw.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting color in Camera Raw| 00:01 | Continuing on where we left off in
the last movie, we now want to look at
| | 00:04 | adjusting color in Camera Raw. However,
in the last movie, we clicked OK in
| | 00:09 | Camera Raw, and that imported this CR2
image, this Raw Camera image, into our
| | 00:14 | After Effects project.
| | 00:16 | So once you've imported a Raw image,
the way to open it back up in Camera Raw
| | 00:20 | is to select it in the Project panel,
and either go to Edit>Edit Original, or
| | 00:26 | use the keyboard shortcut Command+E
or Ctrl+E on the PC. Assuming that you
| | 00:31 | don't have your raw files associated
to be open by some other application on
| | 00:37 | your computer, it will
open back up in Camera Raw.
| | 00:40 | There are few interesting ways to play
with color here. We have Temperature and Tint.
| | 00:44 | As you can see here, because
this interface in Camera Raw is just so
| | 00:48 | amazing, if we drag it to the left,
it's going to be a little bit cooler,
| | 00:52 | little bit more blue. Let me take off
the highlight clipping, so we can see
| | 00:55 | what that's really looking like here.
Likewise, we can drag it to the right to
| | 00:59 | warm it up a little bit and
make it little bit more yellow.
| | 01:02 | If you go really far out to the right
on Temperature, you're going to add a
| | 01:05 | very like antique type look, a little
70s look to it. That's not really what I
| | 01:10 | want for the snow. So I'm going to
take this back to where it was. Also, we
| | 01:13 | could fine-tune the color tint that
we're adding by adjusting Tint, and we can
| | 01:17 | add green or magenta.
| | 01:19 | Down here at the bottom, in this area
below Clarity that we talked about in the
| | 01:22 | last movie, we have Vibrance and
Saturation. Now, Saturation increases the
| | 01:27 | intensity of all colors, Vibrance
does as well, but it's more subtle. It's
| | 01:32 | especially more reverent, I guess, we
could say or more careful about flesh tones.
| | 01:37 | So as we increase the Vibrance here,
her skin tone is not getting as crazy
| | 01:41 | orange as it might get with Saturation.
The colors are much more intense and
| | 01:46 | vibrant, but they're not garish,
as they can get with Saturation.
| | 01:49 | So again, here is Saturation, and look
at her skin tones. They're just awful
| | 01:53 | and super fake. When we increase
Vibrance, it does increase the Vibrance or
| | 01:57 | Saturation, but her skin tones are
still very believable. Now let's take these
| | 02:02 | back to their defaults,
somewhere in that ballpark.
| | 02:05 | Now I want to go back up here to the
top. Right now, and in the last movie
| | 02:08 | also, we've been looking in this Basic
tab. But all of these different tabs at
| | 02:12 | the top are different categories of
settings that you can play with in Camera Raw.
| | 02:17 | So I want to go to this zig-zaggy line
over here, HSL/Grayscale. HSL stands for
| | 02:24 | Hue, Saturation, Luminance. In this tab,
it's like we have a better version of
| | 02:29 | Hue, Saturation. Let's say, for
example, we want to adjust the color of her
| | 02:33 | jacket that's kind of a blue.
| | 02:35 | So if we grab the Blues slider, when
we're looking at the Hue tab here, then we
| | 02:39 | could make it a little bit more cyan,
or we could make it a little bit more
| | 02:43 | purple. Likewise, we can go ahead and click
on Magentas, to change the tone of her mittens.
| | 02:50 | Now the color there is not as intense,
so it's not as drastic of change. But if
| | 02:55 | we take the Magentas slider over the
left, then now we have a purple jacket and
| | 02:59 | purple mittens. So essentially then,
each of these sliders are saying what
| | 03:03 | color do you want this color to be?
| | 03:05 | So for Reds, it's saying what color do
you want the Reds to be? Now you notice
| | 03:08 | that we don't have the same controls
with Hue, Saturation, in other words, you
| | 03:12 | can't make Magentas Greens, but we can move
them and keep it a very believable change.
| | 03:19 | Next, let's go over to the Saturation
tab. Again, it's asking you what do you
| | 03:22 | want the Saturation to be for each of
these color values. So if we want to
| | 03:26 | bring out the intensity at the Purples,
then we can drag Purples to the right.
| | 03:30 | So we've made it more saturated, same
thing with Magentas, we can make those
| | 03:33 | mittens a little bit more
saturated or desaturated, if we wanted to.
| | 03:37 | Finally, we can go over to the
Luminance tab and play with the brightness of
| | 03:41 | each color. So if we want to darken the
Purples a little bit so it's little bit
| | 03:46 | deeper of a purple, we can drag that to
the left; if we want to brighten it up,
| | 03:49 | we can drag it to the right. Same
thing with Magentas or any other color.
| | 03:53 | Now as I mentioned in the last chapter,
I'm a big fan of the Hue, Saturation
| | 03:56 | Effect, but I'm even a bigger fan of
the HSL/Grayscale area here in the Camera Raw.
| | 04:01 | I love how it's more visual.
It's easier to see what you're doing.
| | 04:06 | It's laid out in a little bit more
organized way, and for whatever reason the
| | 04:10 | results just end up, usually looking
better or at least that's been my experience.
| | 04:14 | Another thing we could do in this
HSL/Grayscale tab is click Convert to
| | 04:18 | Grayscale. Then we could adjust how
these colors convert to gray. So let's say
| | 04:24 | the Purples or the Blues, her jacket
was blue, for example, we can make these
| | 04:28 | areas brighter or darker. Basically,
that will play with our conversion to
| | 04:31 | Grayscale, almost like the black and
white effect in Photoshop, if you're
| | 04:34 | familiar with that.
| | 04:35 | Now I should also point out over here
on this tab, we have a Tone Curve, it's
| | 04:39 | like having Curves built into Camera
Raw here. You could use Parametric where
| | 04:44 | you're using the triangles at the
bottom kind of like Levels, or you can go to
| | 04:47 | Point and you could actually have
a curve just like curve. So, that
| | 04:51 | functionality is built into Camera Raw also.
| | 04:53 | Now in the latest version of Camera Raw
5.0, the version that ships with After
| | 04:57 | Effects CS4, we have some new image
editing features here that allow us to do
| | 05:01 | some really cool things that
we can't do in After Effects.
| | 05:04 | As I mentioned in the first movie in
this chapter, that's really one of the
| | 05:07 | things that makes Camera Raw so viable,
and such a great asset to use that with
| | 05:11 | After Effects. So we're going to
look at that in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Editing images using Camera Raw| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at
doing some more advanced image editing
| | 00:04 | using Camera Raw. Now almost
everything we are going to be doing here can be
| | 00:08 | done in Photoshop, but I think you'll
find that it's usually much easier just
| | 00:12 | to do a quick edit like this in Camera Raw.
| | 00:15 | So we are going to import Car by the
Potomac from the Images folder, in the
| | 00:18 | Media folder, in the Exercise Files
folder. I'm just going to drag this to
| | 00:21 | the After Effects icon or alternatively,
you could just import this as a same way
| | 00:24 | you would import any other piece of
footage in After Effects and it will
| | 00:27 | automatically open up in Camera Raw.
| | 00:29 | Look at the footage of this car next to
the Potomac River in Washington DC.
| | 00:32 | I'm actually going to click once to zoom
in here a little bit, and what we are
| | 00:37 | going to do is remove this car. We
are going to do that by using one of the
| | 00:40 | tools up here at the top.
| | 00:41 | Camera Raw 5 introduced a lot of cool
new tools up here. Some of them, we'll
| | 00:46 | just kind of briefly touch on, but
there is a lot of power here. If you just
| | 00:49 | hover your mouse over it, you get
tool tips, you could see that there is a
| | 00:52 | Graduated Filter, and Adjustment Brush,
Red Eye Removal, Spot Removal, you
| | 00:56 | could Straighten images, Crop them and a
few other things here, really powerful stuff.
| | 01:00 | So I'm going to select this Spot
Removal to get rid of this car. What I'm going
| | 01:04 | to do is I'm going to go into the
center of the blemish in this case, the car,
| | 01:07 | I'm going to click-and-drag away
until the circle encompasses the blemish
| | 01:12 | entirely. That looks good.
| | 01:15 | Now once I have done that, it's going
to automatically make another circle up
| | 01:19 | here, and so the red circle, the
initial one we have drawn, determines where
| | 01:23 | the blemish is. The green one
determines where the information will come from
| | 01:29 | to remove the blemish.
| | 01:30 | So you can grab this circle on the right,
and move it around if we don't think
| | 01:33 | Camera Raw has done a good enough job
of guessing. To remove these circles go
| | 01:37 | over to the right side of Camera Raw
and uncheck Show Overlay. So it did a
| | 01:41 | pretty good job. But I'm going to turn
the Overlay back on. I think I'm going
| | 01:45 | to click-and-drag this little screen
circle up just a little bit. That's going
| | 01:49 | to lower the cloned area. That was a
little bit overboard. Probably you need to
| | 01:55 | zoom in a little bit. You do that by
holding the Command key and the Spacebar
| | 01:58 | or the Ctrl key and the Spacebar on the
PC, zoom in just a little bit, and then
| | 02:02 | I think we'll have a little bit
better time making fine changes here, and
| | 02:07 | indeed that was a fine change.
Okay, so that's looking okay.
| | 02:10 | For now we probably could go back and
tweak that little bit, we can play with
| | 02:13 | the radius of the Healed area. You can
actually change the type from Heal or
| | 02:18 | just a basic Clone. We also just the
Opacity there, but I think this looks good
| | 02:23 | for now. I'm not super happy with the
edges this area right here and this area
| | 02:27 | right here, not super believable but
again they are very small blemishes and if
| | 02:31 | you weren't looking for
it, you might not notice.
| | 02:33 | Now another one of the interesting
features here, at the top in Camera Raw is
| | 02:37 | this Targeted Adjustment tool, if you
are familiar with Photoshop a lot of the
| | 02:41 | new effects offer this functionality
which allow you basically just to go into
| | 02:45 | your image, and just click-and-drag
anywhere to make different type of adjustments.
| | 02:49 | So, if I click and hold this down, then
I can choose what I want to adjust.
| | 02:53 | So let's say I want to adjust a color's
hue. We looked at how to do this in the
| | 02:57 | last movie by going to HSL/Grayscale.
But when you are using the Targeted
| | 03:01 | Adjustment tool you can just go in
here, and let's say this color of this
| | 03:05 | grass. I'm not sure if Camera Raw is
going to see this as a yellow or a green
| | 03:08 | whatever, I don't care. So I'm just
going to click-and-drag to the left, and to
| | 03:12 | the right, to change it's Hue.
| | 03:14 | Now you could see these trees in the
background are basically the same hue as
| | 03:18 | this grass, so they are changing as
well. So if I want a more country pasture
| | 03:22 | type field, I can drag this a little
left or if I want a rich vibrant field, I
| | 03:27 | can add some blue, which makes the
grass look a little bit more green.
| | 03:31 | Likewise, I can click on the water, and
change that hue, it's a very faint hue
| | 03:35 | though, it's almost white, so we are
not seeing that much of an intense change.
| | 03:39 | Also notice while I'm clicking-and-
dragging Blues is changing mostly, but there
| | 03:43 | is also some Aquas in here and that's
changing a little bit as well, but not as
| | 03:46 | much as the Blues. That is awesome!
| | 03:49 | We could also change the Target
Adjustment tool to change Saturation. So we can
| | 03:53 | click-and-drag to the left to de-
saturate the grass, drag it to the right to
| | 03:57 | saturate it, same thing with the river
here. We could also do the same thing
| | 04:01 | with Luminance or the Parametric Curve.
So with that curve that we were looking
| | 04:05 | at earlier in the last movie, again
we can make things brighter or darker.
| | 04:09 | So if we click on the river and drag
to the right, we can make the river
| | 04:13 | brighter. We can drag it to the left,
to make the river and all the tones like
| | 04:17 | the river, darker as well.
| | 04:19 | So we have all these adjustments. We
have Red Eye Removal, we have a Spot
| | 04:22 | Healing, stuff that we really don't
have in After Effects. When adjusting
| | 04:26 | Curves or adjusting hue
saturation in After Effects, you can't just
| | 04:29 | click-and-drag on something to change
it, but you can here. So these are some
| | 04:33 | of the many reasons why I say it
really pays to learn Camera Raw and use it
| | 04:36 | with After Effects.
| | 04:37 | Now one other thing that I want to show
you very briefly is the new Adjustment
| | 04:41 | Brush. We are going to click here, and
I'm going to click in these trees over
| | 04:44 | here, I'm going to click-and-drag,
again what that's going to do with add a
| | 04:47 | little point here, and then
we could adjust that point.
| | 04:50 | So we can adjust the exposure for that
pointer, actually the pixels around that
| | 04:54 | point, or just the Brightness, or
Contrast or Saturation for just that point,
| | 04:59 | just that area. So before CS4, all the
adjustments in Camera Raw applied to the
| | 05:04 | entire image. And now that's just
not the case. We can make these little
| | 05:07 | adjustments with the Adjustment Brush,
and we can even adjust the Size, and the
| | 05:11 | Feather, and the Flow and the Density,
all that kind of stuff of these little points,
| | 05:14 | and thereby make more custom
fine-tuned, localized adjustments.
| | 05:20 | Camera Raw really is a wonderful thing!
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding Camera Raw "sidecar" files| 00:00 | As I mentioned in the beginning of
this chapter, Camera Raw is completely
| | 00:04 | non-destructive. So that might lead you
to ask well then how are those changes
| | 00:09 | that we are making being saved? Well,
the way that Camera Raw saves data is by
| | 00:14 | putting it in the Metadata of the file.
| | 00:16 | Now if the file will not store the
Metadata like JPEG will store Metadata for
| | 00:21 | example, but some types of images
like CR2 won't store the type of Metadata
| | 00:25 | that Camera Raw wants to store in it.
| | 00:27 | So what a Camera Raw will do is create
something called a Sidecar file that's
| | 00:31 | this XMP file that we are seeing
here in this folder. XMP is kind of like
| | 00:36 | Adobe's brand of Metadata. If I just
hit the Spacebar here I'm on Mac OS 10.5
| | 00:42 | or higher, if you're on PC, you could
open this up in the Text Editor real quick.
| | 00:45 | Basically, we have all this information,
all the Camera Raw data stored in this
| | 00:50 | text file. So when we open up this girl
in the snow.CR2, it's going to look at
| | 00:55 | girl in the snow.xmp to
see how we've changed it.
| | 00:59 | Now you might remember if I open this
up in Camera Raw here, earlier in this
| | 01:03 | chapter we edited this and made it
brighter. However, if I close out Camera
| | 01:08 | Raw, go back to the exercise files, I'm
going to actually delete this XMP file,
| | 01:13 | so you will not have it in your
exercise files when you go to open this up and
| | 01:18 | adjust this. So if I open it up now
into Camera Raw, we'll see that it's back
| | 01:24 | to its original darker state.
| | 01:27 | So remember this as you transferring
Camera Raw files, you'll also want to
| | 01:31 | transfer the XMP Metadata files, if
you want this CR2 files, or wherever your
| | 01:35 | raw file format is to look the same.
Likewise, if you totally destroy an image
| | 01:40 | in Camera Raw, all you have to do is
delete that XMP file to clear out the
| | 01:44 | Metadata and start fresh.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Blending Layers and CompositingUsing lights to aid compositing| 00:01 | Back in Chapter 3, we looked at
compositing little bit when we talked about the
| | 00:05 | Levels effect. In this chapter we're going
to dig a little bit deeper into compositing.
| | 00:11 | In this movie we're going to look at
how to use lights to help us,= when we're
| | 00:15 | compositing. Throughout this chapter
I'm going to stress one simple concept,
| | 00:19 | and that is, if you get
all the elements that you're trying to
| | 00:22 | composite to have similar attributes, then they
will look more like they belong in the same scene.
| | 00:28 | For the next few movies, we're going
to be using the subway scene I created,
| | 00:31 | that we looked at in After Effects CS4
Essential Training on lynda.com.
| | 00:36 | Let's see if I can give you a little
preview what this looks like.
| | 00:39 | It's me kind of sitting on a subway here,
and then there is trees moving in the
| | 00:43 | background. These are all separate
elements, there is a movie playing that's
| | 00:47 | basically my wife was holding a camera
out the window, and that's where we get
| | 00:51 | these bushes from, and then we have
some green screen footage of me here, then
| | 00:55 | you could see here in the thumbnail on
the Project panel, what that looked like.
| | 00:59 | Me in front of a green screen.
| | 01:00 | Keyed that out and then we have a CG
render of a subway. As you can see at this
| | 01:05 | point it looks pretty fake. So, let's
go ahead and create light. What I'm going
| | 01:09 | to do is go and right-click somewhere
here in a blank area of the Timeline.
| | 01:13 | Alternatively you can go to the Layer
menu at the top and select New > Light.
| | 01:17 | I'm just going to like right-click
somewhere around here, select New > Light.
| | 01:22 | Now, I'm going to create a Spotlight,
and I'm going leave these settings at
| | 01:25 | the defaults for second, go ahead and
click OK. Now, obviously this is not good.
| | 01:30 | This is overdoing it. I'm just kind of
rearranging the order here. I like to have
| | 01:34 | my Cameras on top in my Timeline for whatever
reason. It's just kind of a weird quirk of mine.
| | 01:39 | As I'm going to go over here, put my
cursor over the blue arrow, that's the
| | 01:42 | Z-axis, and click-and-drag up which
will pull the light outward a little bit.
| | 01:48 | Now, I do like this vignetting I'm
getting around the edges. It does seem
| | 01:52 | to pull everything in together,
but it's a little intense.
| | 01:55 | So, I'm going to open up my Lighting
settings here and let's go into the Light
| | 01:59 | Options. I want to increase the Cone
Angle, so it gets a little bit wider and
| | 02:05 | make sure that our Cone
Feather's all the way up at 100%.
| | 02:07 | Now, what I also want to do is tint
this just a little bit. So I'm going to
| | 02:10 | click on the color swatch. I maybe
make this a little bit more of a warm tone,
| | 02:14 | kind of like orangish yellow. Then
take this over to the right just a little bit.
| | 02:19 | So, this tinted with
about that color right there.
| | 02:22 | You don't want to be too intense
because any subtle change that you make would
| | 02:25 | be very intense when it's put in
front of a light. So, I'm going to go ahead
| | 02:29 | and click OK. You see a significant
difference there, even though we change
| | 02:32 | this color swatch very slightly.
| | 02:34 | So, now what we've done is that we've
tinted the entire image with one color.
| | 02:41 | We've kind of brought everything
together because this vignette applies to
| | 02:44 | everything. Now, one of the good
things that I like to do when I have CG
| | 02:48 | Renders, one of the things that I've
noticed, a little trick that I use, is
| | 02:51 | that when you have just kind of random
shadows, it just kind of works.
| | 02:55 | In real life that's the way it is. If
you'll look around the room that you're in
| | 02:58 | right now, you'll see just kind of
random shadows all over the place.
| | 03:02 | That's what makes it look believable.
| | 03:04 | So, in real life this area next to my
body would probably be in shadow, maybe
| | 03:08 | from the bench in font of it, maybe
from my legs or whatever, then there'd also
| | 03:12 | probably be shadows conceivably up here.
| | 03:15 | So the shadows again tie everything
together and make it look more believable
| | 03:19 | as a composite. Next we're going to
add even more to this effect by using
| | 03:22 | something called an adjustment layer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with adjustment layers| 00:00 | Coming up in just a bit, we are going
to look at how to use adjustment layers
| | 00:03 | for compositing. But first let's just talk
about what an adjustment layer is and how it works.
| | 00:07 | Now you can create an adjustment layer
in the same way you created a light.
| | 00:11 | You can go to the Layer menu and select
New > Adjustment Layer, or you could
| | 00:15 | right-click in some blank area of the
Timeline panel and select New > Adjustment Layer.
| | 00:22 | Now if you are familiar with Photoshop,
adjustment layers here work the same way.
| | 00:26 | Basically, anything applied to the
adjustment layer affects everything
| | 00:30 | beneath the layer, in other
words all layers beneath it.
| | 00:32 | So let's say for example, I added the
Tint Effect, do this quick search on that
| | 00:37 | here and apply that to my adjustment
layer. You'll notice that everything that
| | 00:41 | I'm doing to this Tint effect affects
everything beneath the Tint. Let me just
| | 00:47 | switch that up just a little bit here.
| | 00:50 | So everything beneath the adjustment
layer is tinted. Now if I drag this layer
| | 00:55 | beneath the Green Screen Footage. Now
the green screen footage wouldn't be
| | 01:00 | tinted, but all the layers below them
would be. Drag it below the subway that
| | 01:04 | only the background would be tinted red.
| | 01:06 | So again adjustment layers adjust
everything beneath them. Let's start this
| | 01:11 | with a different effect, just so we
get the feel of what these can do here.
| | 01:14 | I'll apply for example, let's Fast Blur.
I blur this. Everything beneath it is
| | 01:21 | blurred. Probably got the hang of it
by now. I'm just going to delete Fast Blur.
| | 01:25 | I want to show you one other
trick that doesn't really have much to do
| | 01:27 | with compositing but it's
kind of a cool trick nonetheless.
| | 01:30 | There is an effect called Transform.
I'm going to apply the Transform effect to
| | 01:35 | the adjustment layer. In our first
blush, this Transform effect seems really
| | 01:39 | pointless, because most of these
values that you're seeing the Transform
| | 01:41 | effect, you get with the regular layer.
So like position, Anchor Point, scale,
| | 01:45 | Rotation, Opacity, all these things
are just regular layer transforms.
| | 01:50 | However, if you apply them to an
adjustment layer sometime you can get out of
| | 01:55 | pre-composing. So let's see for example,
you wanted to do a fade out. You could
| | 02:00 | just create an adjustment layer and
fade out the opacity of the adjustment
| | 02:04 | layer and fade everything out
without having to pre-compose.
| | 02:07 | Likewise, if you wanted to rotate
everything or scale everything, you can do
| | 02:12 | that with an adjustment layer. Now
an adjustment layer as you can imagine
| | 02:17 | because you apply stuff to the
adjustment layer and it effects everything
| | 02:19 | beneath it become very helpful when
compositing. As we mentioned in the last
| | 02:23 | movie, the more we can get every
element in our composition to share the same
| | 02:28 | attributes, the more that it
will look like they belong together.
| | 02:32 | So in the next movie, we'll continue
this discussion looking at how we could
| | 02:34 | use adjustment layer
specifically for compositing.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using adjustment layers in compositing| 00:00 | Continuing where we left off in the
last movie, we have the Subway project here
| | 00:04 | with an adjustment layer already
created for us and we are going to use this
| | 00:08 | adjustment layer to bring all these
elements together with the same color adjustment.
| | 00:12 | So I'm going to apply the Color
Balance effect to this. Not Color Balance
| | 00:17 | (HLS), just regular Color Balance.
Apply that to the adjustment layer and let's
| | 00:22 | play with these settings a little bit.
| | 00:23 | Now this is definitely an artistic
choice, so definitely don't consider this to
| | 00:27 | be some kind law. I want there to be
kind of like this gritty feel on the
| | 00:31 | subway, so maybe increase that Green
Shadow Balance, maybe the Blue Shadow
| | 00:35 | Balance just a little bit. I'm going
to bring out some of those greens and
| | 00:38 | blues. I don't want to be overwhelming
here, but I kind of want this to look a
| | 00:42 | little cinematic, have kind of like a
movie style green tint. Try checking the
| | 00:47 | Preserve Luminosity checkbox to
change the luminance values here.
| | 00:52 | I am kind of liking the way that's
looking. I'm thinking this is a little bit
| | 00:54 | too intense. So I'm going to take this
back down a little bit on these settings
| | 00:59 | and I'm thinking that's looking pretty good.
| | 01:02 | If we clicked the Eye icon for the
adjustment layer in the Timeline panel, we
| | 01:06 | can see what it looks like before the
effect, before the adjustment and after.
| | 01:10 | Now you can kind of tell when I have
the adjustment layer off, I didn't do that
| | 01:13 | trick that I showed you back in
chapter 3 with Levels where I went in with
| | 01:17 | every single color channel individually
and matched up the luminance values of
| | 01:21 | the channels of each of these
elements in our composite here.
| | 01:24 | Now that would be the best and most
thorough way to go, but in a pinch we add
| | 01:29 | this adjustment layer and giving all of
these elements the same color treatment
| | 01:34 | definitely helps. It makes up for the
lack of channel blending that we would
| | 01:38 | have had with Levels, but
we saved a lot of time here.
| | 01:40 | So you could see the nice vignetting
that we got from the lights and now the
| | 01:44 | consistent color tinting that we are
getting because of the Color Balance
| | 01:47 | effect and again because this adjustment layer,
it's applying to every layer in our composition.
| | 01:52 | So we have been talking a lot about
colors and blending them with lights and
| | 01:56 | adjustment layers. In the next movie,
we are going to look at Motion and using
| | 02:00 | Motion to aid in compositing.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using motion and cameras in compositing| 00:01 | So far in this chapter and actually
in this entire training series, we have
| | 00:04 | been focusing on compositing using
Color Adjustments and this includes Lights
| | 00:09 | as well. But I want to show you in
this movie here that you could also use
| | 00:13 | Cameras and Animation for compositing as well.
| | 00:17 | Now I have here a Camera and if I go
ahead and type E, E, that's E twice, you
| | 00:23 | will see that I have applied a Wiggle
expression, a simple Wiggle expression to
| | 00:27 | the point of interest.
| | 00:28 | We will talk a little bit later on in
this training series about this wiggle
| | 00:31 | expression and how this works, but for
the time being, the only thing I want
| | 00:35 | you to get out of this is that you can
use Motion to aid in compositing, not
| | 00:40 | exactly what I have done here.
| | 00:41 | So without the Camera on, we just have
the regular footage here and as we scrub
| | 00:45 | in time, this dude in the video is
pretty much the only thing that moves.
| | 00:48 | Well also the shadow in the background moves,
but there really isn't anything keyframed here.
| | 00:53 | But as we turn on the Camera, with
the point of interest animated, then we
| | 00:58 | start to see that this kind of moves
shakes a little, kind of like it would in
| | 01:03 | the real world, almost like a little
bump from riding a train would cause.
| | 01:07 | We'll give that just a couple of
seconds to render here and let's go ahead and
| | 01:10 | hit 0 on the numeric keypad again to
preview this. Just a little over a second,
| | 01:15 | not even 2 seconds for this, but you
could see as this is kind of moving around
| | 01:19 | here, it's again kind of like the
jiggle you would experience riding a train.
| | 01:24 | And again, we are utilizing the same
thing we have seen in the entire chapter,
| | 01:27 | where we apply the same thing to all
elements and it makes them seem to come
| | 01:32 | together more. Now, if we want to get
really fancy with this, we could offset
| | 01:36 | all these different layers, the
scenery in the background, the subway layer,
| | 01:39 | the guy reading the paper, we could
make them three layers and offset them in Z
| | 01:43 | position and then as the camera moves
around them, they will give different
| | 01:46 | depth cues because they will be
moving at different distances.
| | 01:50 | Now we are going to see a really
great example of this in our project in
| | 01:53 | chapter 12, but I'm quite happy with
that as it is. So I'm going to move on,
| | 01:57 | show you one other trick here. I have
this Light. I'm going to select the Light
| | 02:00 | layer and hit the letter T, the same way you
would hit T for Opacity on a regular layer.
| | 02:05 | When you are selecting a Light layer,
you hit the letter T and it opens up
| | 02:07 | Intensity. This is essentially the
brightness of the light. What I'm going to
| | 02:11 | do is holding Option key down or the
Alt key on the PC and click that stopwatch
| | 02:16 | and then in this little text area,
I'm going to create a Wiggle expression.
| | 02:19 | Again, we are going to talk in detail
about Wiggle expressions later. Type in
| | 02:22 | Wiggle and then in the parenthesis,
I'm going to type in let's say (3, 10),
| | 02:30 | similar to what we have here with the
camera expression and then instead of
| | 02:34 | hitting Enter, just go ahead and click
outside in a blank area here. That will
| | 02:38 | accept the expression.
| | 02:40 | What this is doing is randomizing the
intensity of this light, almost as if
| | 02:45 | there is lights above the seats in the
subway. They are kind of flickering on
| | 02:49 | and off or maybe bouncing
around with the motion of the train.
| | 02:52 | So let's preview this and see what it
looks like. So now as it plays back, you
| | 02:56 | can see that it's wiggling and
everything seems to be wiggling and also the
| | 03:01 | lights tend to just flicker, just
ever so slightly. It's not a very intense
| | 03:06 | change. It's a very subtle change,
but one that definitely makes a cohesive
| | 03:10 | feel throughout all these elements.
| | 03:12 | So from lines, to adjustment layers, to
cameras and motion, animation, there is
| | 03:16 | a lot you can do to tie multiple
elements in together to create a more
| | 03:20 | believable composite.
| | 03:21 | And we are actually going to shift
gears through the rest of this chapter and
| | 03:24 | we are going to look at using blend
modes, also sometimes called transfer modes
| | 03:28 | to help with compositing as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with blend modes| 00:00 | In this movie, I just want to
introduce you to the concept of blend modes and
| | 00:05 | give you some ideas of what they do.
Now I'm talking about them here in this
| | 00:08 | chapter about compositing because they
really can help with Compositing, but
| | 00:12 | they do all sorts of really cool
designed things as well. They add a lot of
| | 00:16 | pizazz for lack of a
better term to your projects.
| | 00:19 | Now I have here this footage from
greenlayers.com. This is actually probably
| | 00:24 | one of the greatest exercise files I
have ever created of this puppet who pulls
| | 00:29 | out a gun and shoots it and nods
confidently, and then we also have this
| | 00:35 | footage from detonationfilms.com.
| | 00:37 | Now what I'm going to do is I'm just
going to double-click this layer, so we
| | 00:39 | can see it in the Layer panel and it's
basically a gunshot here. I'm going to
| | 00:45 | go back to the Composition panel.
| | 00:47 | Now because of where the layer is
positioned, the black of the detonationfilms'
| | 00:52 | gunshot footage is over the puppet
footage. So we are not seeing the gun here
| | 00:56 | and what we need to do is get
rid of that black background.
| | 00:59 | Now we could use a keying effect to get
rid of this, but the chances are we are
| | 01:04 | going to have a hard time keeping these
fine details, the smoke and the sparks
| | 01:08 | and all of that. So instead, as we'll
talk about how to do later on in this
| | 01:13 | chapter, we simply add a blend mode,
click of a button. The black goes away and
| | 01:18 | now the fire here, the spark blends with the
gun perfectly as if it were in the same scene.
| | 01:25 | So now when we preview this together.
Boom! Puppet man takes a good shot,
| | 01:32 | beautiful. Even this delicate smoke
comes across beautifully with blend modes.
| | 01:37 | So we just save tons of time and
we have a better looking result.
| | 01:42 | Here is another example. We'll look
at later in this chapter, Blending
| | 01:45 | Textures. I have a simple black and
red, green here and then I have another
| | 01:49 | layer with this very interesting pattern,
using the CC Kaleida effect and if I
| | 01:55 | want to put this texture onto this
colored background, again, I could simply
| | 02:01 | change the blend mode in a click of a
button and I have a very interesting
| | 02:05 | background pattern now.
| | 02:06 | So let's check out the next few movies
on blend modes and dig a little deeper
| | 02:10 | into what they can do.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Blending objects with a black background| 00:00 | In this movie, we are going to back up
little bit and have a little bit more of
| | 00:03 | an intro into how to use blend modes.
Blend modes are accessed in the Timeline
| | 00:08 | panel, in this dropdown underneath Mode.
You will need to be in the Modes area
| | 00:12 | of the Timeline panel.
| | 00:13 | You might be seeing the Switches area,
which looks like this, but if you click
| | 00:17 | the Toggle Switches and Modes, you
will switch from Switches to Modes.
| | 00:20 | Now before I show you what these
different modes do, we are working again with
| | 00:23 | this footage from greenlayers.com that
is called Puppet and also this muzzle
| | 00:28 | flash from detonationfilms. Basically,
it's a muzzle shot. This bright spark on
| | 00:33 | a black background, that's
important to keep in mind.
| | 00:35 | As we click this drop-down to open up
all of these blend modes, we'll see that
| | 00:39 | they are mercifully divided into
categories and they are kind of related to
| | 00:43 | each other. They are divided by
these little horizontal lines here. The
| | 00:46 | category we are going to talk about in
this movie is right here, starting with
| | 00:49 | Add and going to Lighter Color. These
modes tend to brighten the final result
| | 00:56 | and to remove pure black in the top
layer, in other words, the layer that you
| | 01:00 | are applying the blend mode
to, black will be removed.
| | 01:04 | So in this case, we have a muzzle
shot, shot in the dark and this works
| | 01:08 | perfectly for that. So we can select a
Screen for example and the black will go
| | 01:12 | away and we have the Muzzle Flash.
| | 01:14 | Screen is a really popular blend mode
in Photoshop for things like highlights
| | 01:19 | and glows. At least that's common in
After Effects is the Add blend mode. This
| | 01:24 | tends to create a more bright result.
Now in this case, we are not really
| | 01:28 | blending this Muzzle Flash on top of
anything, except for the gun a little bit
| | 01:33 | and you can't really see that much of
difference unless you look closely at the guns.
| | 01:36 | So you see Screen, it's a little bit
more faded over in the front of the gun
| | 01:39 | and then you go to Add and it's a
little bit brighter. Now these are a little
| | 01:43 | lightening modes like Color Dodge and
Lighter Color, these are all great. But
| | 01:48 | for my money, I get the best results
from Screen and actually, I usually prefer
| | 01:52 | to use Add, especially for when you
are creating things like motion graphics
| | 01:55 | that you want to pop and have like
these really cool light effects. Add,
| | 01:58 | usually works a little better.
| | 01:59 | Now let's try this with another example.
I'm going to right-click here in the
| | 02:02 | blank area in the Timeline. I'm going
to create a New>Solid, and I'll go ahead
| | 02:06 | and make sure the comp size. It doesn't
matter what color it is. I'm going to click OK.
| | 02:10 | Let's go ahead and apply a Fractal
Noise Effect to this and let's go ahead and
| | 02:15 | change the Fractal type to
Dynamic and let's increase the Contrast.
| | 02:21 | Now the point here isn't to exactly
mimic what I'm doing. The point here is
| | 02:25 | just to get some high contrast, so we
have some dark areas. You might also want
| | 02:29 | to take down the brightness. Again, the
exact texture is really not important here.
| | 02:33 | Now, if we go down to the blend mode
and we change this to Add, so we get rid
| | 02:37 | of the black, then you can see that we
have this highlighted little clouds that
| | 02:41 | appear over our image. So it works
not only for compositing things like the
| | 02:46 | Flashes and the Sparks, but also when
you are trying to blend lighter textures,
| | 02:50 | clouds, fogs, smoke, that type of thing,
things like Fractal Noise are great.
| | 02:54 | So now that you can see what it looks
like composited, you may want to take
| | 02:58 | down the Brightness and the Contrast a
little bit to taste and of course, we
| | 03:03 | could fiddle with this a little bit
more. We probably want to scale it up and
| | 03:06 | take down the complexity and there's
a lot, we could do to make this look a
| | 03:09 | little bit better over our scene. Again,
we are not trying to make this look
| | 03:12 | good or anything, but I just want
to show you what the results are.
| | 03:15 | Many effects like Fractal Noise, like
the Lens layer effect also, become much
| | 03:19 | more effective when we realize that we
can just apply them to other layers and
| | 03:24 | then use blend modes on those
layers to composite them into our scenes.
| | 03:27 | In the next movie, we are going to
look at how to remove light colors and
| | 03:31 | we have a really good example for
that. So, let's go check it out.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Blending objects with a white background| 00:01 | Last winter, I was out walking around,
and I just happen to have my camera with me.
| | 00:04 | And we heard this big crash. And
there is just this massive explosion from
| | 00:10 | one of the houses. And it was just
this amazing thing to behold, as you could
| | 00:14 | see here from the footage I captured.
And actually, I'm totally fooling you. This is
| | 00:18 | all just a doctored footage from a
photo I took. And then also some great
| | 00:23 | footage from detonationfilms.com.
| | 00:26 | As you could see there is the white
background from the Detonation Films
| | 00:30 | footage. And then here is the simple
photo that I took. Now in the same way in
| | 00:35 | the last movie, we got rid of dark
backgrounds or black by using blend modes,
| | 00:40 | we could also get rid of light
backgrounds as well. Again, imagine how
| | 00:45 | difficult this would be to key out, and
still keep those fine semi-transparent
| | 00:50 | textures in the cloud.
| | 00:51 | So if we go this area here, these are
the darkening modes. Starts with Darken,
| | 00:57 | ends with Darker Color, the most
popular one probably being Multiply here. And
| | 01:01 | all of these get rid of white and tend
to darken when blending together. So if
| | 01:05 | we put this explosion here on the top
layer into Multiply mode, it will remove
| | 01:10 | the white and then create a
darkness here in the background.
| | 01:13 | There is also a Levels effect applied.
So to your own liking you can go and
| | 01:17 | adjust the midtones. If you'd like a
lighter smoke or a darker smoke, that's up
| | 01:21 | to you. You can also go in and still
adjust the Transparency, which creates a
| | 01:26 | different effect as well.
| | 01:27 | So you could use both Opacity and blend
modes in conjunction with each other to
| | 01:32 | achieve the results that you are
looking for. So then in the final product
| | 01:35 | here, I just added an adjustment layer
and added a little bit of Blur. So it
| | 01:40 | looked like the cheesy camera just
happened to have on me at the time, didn't
| | 01:42 | look like a professional shoot. Now
this is just a little bit too clean, and
| | 01:47 | then I also added a little bit of noise with
the Noise effect. I added some Levels here.
| | 01:51 | And I have also, as we talked about
earlier in this chapter, I've added a
| | 01:55 | camera with slight animation, a Wiggle
expression. Now if I was really doing
| | 01:59 | this right, what I would have done is
cut up this photo in Photoshop, so that
| | 02:03 | these trees in the foreground, with a
different layer than these houses, and
| | 02:07 | maybe even the trees in the background
because realistically these would move a
| | 02:11 | lot more than these trees in the
background are moving. But everything is
| | 02:14 | moving at the same rate of speed,
which makes it seems less believable.
| | 02:19 | So to minimize on giving away my
digital fakery what I did is I just moved the
| | 02:24 | camera slightly. So I didn't move it
too much and so just made it a little bit
| | 02:28 | easier to believe. But if these
movements would have been a little bit more
| | 02:30 | wild all over the place, it definitely
would have seemed more fake than it is.
| | 02:34 | But in a nutshell that's
how we blend darker tones.
| | 02:37 | You might want to also play with these
Color Dodge and Color Burn especially,
| | 02:43 | they tend to play with the saturation a
little bit and tend to make some extra
| | 02:47 | magic that way. So from experience
Multiply and Color Burn are the most useful
| | 02:52 | blend modes, certainly the ones I use
most commonly in this category. And again
| | 02:56 | with the lightening effects, it's
probably Add, Screen and then also sometimes
| | 03:00 | Color Dodge as well.
| | 03:01 | I should also point out that Lighten
and Darken tend to lighten and darken as
| | 03:06 | the name indicates. But they are a
little bit more subtle of an effect.
| | 03:10 | Next, we are going to look at these
Overlay blend modes, which I think are
| | 03:14 | probably the most helpful blend
modes to be aware of and to utilize.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Blending textures with blend modes| 00:01 | Perhaps the category of blend modes
that I use most frequently are what I call
| | 00:05 | the Overlay blend modes. You could
find them, if you go to the Mode dropdown
| | 00:09 | here, below the Lightening blend modes.
It starts with Overlay, ends with Hard Mix.
| | 00:13 | Now as we've seen previously, these
Lighten blend modes remove black;
| | 00:19 | the Darken blend modes remove white.
But these Overlay blend modes are a little quirky.
| | 00:24 | They remove 50% gray. So the gray
that's perfectly in between white and black,
| | 00:30 | it removes that.
| | 00:32 | And also what these have a tendency
to do is to brighten values that are
| | 00:36 | brighter than 50% gray and darken
values that are darker than 50% gray. I have
| | 00:41 | here this gradient that we saw a couple
movies back and then also this texture
| | 00:45 | created with CC Kaleida and I want to
get this kind of curtain like texture to
| | 00:50 | blend in with this red and black gradient.
| | 00:53 | So what I can do is go to the blend
mode and select Overlay. So you can see the
| | 00:59 | brightness of the texture made the
bright areas brighter, and the dark areas in
| | 01:04 | the texture made these areas darker, added
some darkness to their red and black gradient.
| | 01:08 | So again, the before and after. Now if
we wanted a more subtle effect. We can
| | 01:12 | choose Soft Light. So that's
basically doing the same thing, but not as
| | 01:16 | intensely. If we wanted a more intense
effect, we can do Hard Light. So with
| | 01:20 | Soft Light, the brights aren't quite as
bright and darks aren't quite as dark.
| | 01:24 | With Hard Light it's the opposite. The
brights are brighter, and the darks are darker.
| | 01:27 | Now keep in mind that you could also
go back to this layer, and add a Levels
| | 01:32 | effect, or a Curves effect, or what
have you and bring out the brightness or
| | 01:36 | the darkness or adjust the midtones and
play with this as they are blended together.
| | 01:42 | Now honestly, Overlay and Soft Light
are the two in this category that I use
| | 01:46 | most, but there is also a few other
ones that are really interesting, there is
| | 01:49 | Linear Light, and Vivid Light, and Pin
Light and these might come in handy in
| | 01:54 | different circumstances.
| | 01:55 | Now Hard Mix is a little bit different.
It kind of posterizes and creates a
| | 01:59 | really, like it says, a Hard Mix
between the colors. Let me just show you
| | 02:04 | briefly what I've done here. I've made
up two White Solids. The bottom White
| | 02:08 | Solid, I've applied the Gradient
Overlay, a Layer Style and I made that
| | 02:13 | gradient black to red. And on the top
layer, just made another White Solid and
| | 02:17 | then I started out with the Ramp effect.
There we added CC Kaleida on top of
| | 02:21 | the Ramp effect and then obviously
we've had the Levels that we've been kind of
| | 02:25 | playing around with.
| | 02:25 | But really this effect was made with
the Ramp Effect and then CC Kaleida on top
| | 02:29 | of it blended in, using an Overlay
blend mode to the gradient behind it.
| | 02:33 | So it's kind of a cool background. But
not only the Overlay blend mode good for
| | 02:36 | textures, but when you are just
trying to combine multiple images to have a
| | 02:40 | cool overlaid effect.
| | 02:41 | I find that Overlay works a lot better
than just say reducing the Opacity.
| | 02:45 | So for me, it's like the great
multi-purpose blend mode category.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Comparing layers and frames with Difference| 00:00 | In this movie, we are going to look
at what I call the Difference blending
| | 00:03 | modes. There is only two of
them, Difference and Exclusion.
| | 00:06 | Now we have here another beautiful
photograph from Angela McEnroe and I have
| | 00:11 | also at the top, this Fractal Noise layer,
just a simple grayscale pattern here.
| | 00:15 | Now if I open up my Blend Mode
dropdown, we'll see that below the Overlay
| | 00:20 | modes, there is a Difference, Classic
Difference, and Exclusion. But we are
| | 00:24 | going to be focusing on Difference
here. Basically, Difference creates this
| | 00:27 | really psychedelic effect usually. So
that's the result of blending the Fractal
| | 00:32 | Noise in with the photograph.
| | 00:35 | If we were to use Exclusion, it's
basically the same thing as Difference except
| | 00:38 | blending with a little bit of gray. So
you get a few little psychedelic tones
| | 00:42 | in here, but a lot more gray.
| | 00:44 | Now what I'm going to do is actually
I'm going to turn off this Fractal Noise
| | 00:48 | layer, because for the most part you
probably won't be using that psychedelic
| | 00:52 | look anytime soon. But there is
another great benefit in using the Difference
| | 00:56 | blend mode, and that is to align layers.
| | 00:59 | Now this comes in handy all the time in
any given workflow. Oftentimes I might
| | 01:03 | get footage from a client and they
might come back to me and say okay, well we
| | 01:06 | did it again. After I did all this
work in After Effects with it. And we
| | 01:11 | started again with a slightly
different camera. So the Pixel aspect ratio is
| | 01:14 | little bit different, the size is little bit
different, but I need it to match up exactly.
| | 01:18 | So when I bring in the footage to
replace it, I can't just do a simple swap and
| | 01:22 | replace the footage, I've got to line
them up. So I've another copy of this
| | 01:26 | photo, off center here. And I'm going
to change the blend mode to Difference,
| | 01:32 | gives us that standard psychedelic
look. But when you take a layer in
| | 01:37 | Difference mode and blend it with
itself, once it lines up exactly, it will
| | 01:43 | turn completely black.
| | 01:46 | So I know now that these two layers are
exactly aligned, even if I just use the
| | 01:50 | arrow keys and nudge it 1 pixel in any
direction, you can tell that's it off a
| | 01:54 | little bit. So if you need to be able
to line up a layer or a part of a layer
| | 02:00 | exactly with another object then
you could simply put the copy in the
| | 02:04 | Difference blend mode and as soon as it
turns all black, you know that you have
| | 02:09 | an exact match as far as location goes.
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| Changing the color of an object| 00:00 | The last category of blend modes that
I want to look at, basically deal with
| | 00:03 | taking color or hue or just
saturation or just luminosity of a layer and
| | 00:09 | blending it with the layer beneath it.
| | 00:10 | So I have here this Fractal Noise
textures what you are seeing on screen here.
| | 00:14 | I also have another layer, which are
just some pink squiggles on a black solid,
| | 00:19 | and what I want to do is colorize,
essentially paint this Fractal Noise.
| | 00:24 | So what I can do is select this black
solid layer and below this we have Hue,
| | 00:29 | Saturation, Color, and Luminosity.
These are different blend modes.
| | 00:32 | If we select Hue then only the color
family of the top layer will be blended
| | 00:37 | beneath changing the hue of the color
below it. However, there is only black
| | 00:43 | and white below it so Hue doesn't do
much in this case. Saturation is the same
| | 00:47 | thing. We could increase the
saturation of black and white all day and it's
| | 00:51 | still just going to be black and white.
Saturation is a value of color, not of gray.
| | 00:55 | Now what Luminosity does is it
just takes the brightness of the layer on
| | 00:59 | top and blends it with the brightness of
what's on bottom. Not too exciting in this case.
| | 01:04 | But if I take the results to Color,
what it's done is taking the color of the
| | 01:09 | top layer, it get rids of black because
there's not really any color values, no
| | 01:12 | hues in black. And the top layer, the
colors are blended into this Fractal
| | 01:17 | Noise making it look like we kind of
painted on this Fractal Noise you see that
| | 01:22 | the Color blend mode is really good
with preserving the shadows and the
| | 01:26 | highlights of the layer on bottom. So
that makes it so that it looks like we
| | 01:31 | kind of painted in
crevices and cracks and what not.
| | 01:34 | If the result is a little too intense
for you still, you can cut back down the
| | 01:37 | Opacity, dial that back a little bit
and make this blend in a little bit more.
| | 01:41 | In this case we probably want to make
the blue-pink squiggle on its own layer,
| | 01:46 | and adjust that independently because
green and red are looking a little bit
| | 01:49 | more believable and blue is still
looking a little garish and overdone. I love
| | 01:54 | how especially with these reds, it
looks like there is just real paint wrapping
| | 01:58 | around this texture.
| | 02:00 | But in reality there is nothing to wrap
around, it's just a simple pattern made
| | 02:03 | with Fractal Noise. It's great for
colorizing black and white footage, but not
| | 02:07 | only that. If you had something in a
shot that you weren't pleased with, if
| | 02:11 | your certain color is sticking out to
you, you could colorize it this way.
| | 02:14 | It's not something that you will use
probably in every project that you do but
| | 02:17 | it's a good one to kind of keep in the back of
your mind in case something like this ever comes up.
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|
|
6. Advanced EffectsControlling effects with other layers| 00:00 | We are now going to switch gears a
little bit and look at some advanced
| | 00:03 | features of effects, advanced tips and
tricks. In this movie we are going to
| | 00:07 | look at controlling properties
in one effect with another layer.
| | 00:11 | Now in this composition here, I have
some precomposed footage. It's actually
| | 00:16 | just a simple solid layer with the
Wave World effect applied to it. So that's
| | 00:21 | basically what it looks like. And we
have precomposed it, which you will find
| | 00:24 | that you will have to do often using
layers as controllers for effects.
| | 00:28 | I'm just going to turn off the
visibility of this Precomp. We don't need that
| | 00:32 | visibility on. After Effects can still see it.
| | 00:35 | We also have this blue solid layer.
Now we are going to apply the Card Dance
| | 00:38 | Effect to this blue solid layer. The
Card Dance Effect basically turns any
| | 00:43 | layer into a series of cards. In
order to see in this action, we need to go
| | 00:46 | over here to the Effect Controls
panel for the Card Dance Effect. And let's
| | 00:49 | change Gradient Layer 1 to Precomp
waves. These Gradient Layer 1 and Gradient
| | 00:55 | Layer 2 dropdowns control which other
layers will be the controllers for this
| | 01:00 | effect. Now nothing happens initially.
We have basically only told that we want
| | 01:04 | to control this effect
with this Precomp waves layer.
| | 01:07 | So now what we need to do is come down
here to one of these attributes like X
| | 01:12 | position, Z position, Rotation Scale,
or whatever. And then control it with
| | 01:16 | this Gradient Layer, and I don't want
you to get hung up on Card Dance.
| | 01:19 | My point here isn't to show you this
effect. It's to show you what you can do by
| | 01:24 | using other layers as controllers. So
in this case I'm going to the Z position
| | 01:28 | dropdown and I'm going to change the
source to one of these values. The values
| | 01:33 | with 1s after them refer to Gradient Layer 1,
and the values with 2 refer to Gradient Layer 2.
| | 01:41 | So what I want to do is use the
Intensity, or in other words the luminance of
| | 01:44 | Gradient Layer 1. So I'm going to
select Intensity 1 and now if I go and play
| | 01:49 | this back, you will see that we kind of
have like this pond ripple, these cards
| | 01:53 | are moving a little bit. But the
problem is that we don't have enough cards.
| | 01:56 | And we don't have enough cards
because the cards are too big.
| | 01:59 | We are going to change that in just a
second. But before I do, go and open
| | 02:02 | Camera Position and let's go ahead and
open or adjust X Rotation. And as we do,
| | 02:07 | you will see that this is actually a
series of 3D cards. That looks pretty
| | 02:13 | awesome. And as we move this, you will
see that they are actually moving in Z
| | 02:18 | space based on the brightness or
luminance of the pond ripple we have in the
| | 02:22 | pond Precomp waves.
| | 02:24 | Notice this more clearly, I'm going to
go up to Rows and Columns, this controls
| | 02:27 | the number of rows of cards and also
the number of columns of cards. So I'm
| | 02:32 | going to take both of these numbers to
about 50 or 60. I want this to be clear
| | 02:36 | in detail so I can see what's going on.
But if you take it up too far, you are
| | 02:40 | going to slow down your system
depending on the machine you are on. If your
| | 02:43 | system can hack 100 rows and 100 columns
then by all means, do it, it would look better.
| | 02:47 | But now as I move this around, you
will see that we have this 3D pond ripple
| | 02:53 | created by the Card Dance Effect
using the Precomp waves as the controller
| | 02:58 | layer. It's pretty awesome. Now this
effect also allows you to use other maps
| | 03:03 | like this Precomp waves layer to
control all the properties, like Scale. So I'm
| | 03:08 | going to open up X Scale and change
the source to Intensity 1, change Y Scale
| | 03:13 | source to Intensity 1. So now they are
going to be scaling according to their
| | 03:18 | brightness as well. And also this
isn't really part of the trick here.
| | 03:22 | But I'm going to go to the Camera
System dropdown and change Camera System to
| | 03:25 | the Comp Camera. And that way I could
use the composition camera with this new
| | 03:30 | Unified Camera tool to click in
here and move this around or I could
| | 03:34 | right-click and zoom in and out. Or I
could use the middle mouse button and
| | 03:40 | move up and down. Actually this is
opening my spotlight. And I could click the
| | 03:43 | left mouse button to rotate around and
see these a little bit better. So you
| | 03:48 | could see the areas where the pond
ripples were dark making the cards a little
| | 03:52 | bit smaller and the bright area where the
gradient is makes the cards a little bit bigger.
| | 03:58 | So again, we can preview this. We have
this very interesting effect here. All
| | 04:05 | these different cards moving and
scaling in 3D based on the brightness of
| | 04:12 | another layer. Now that's just for the
Card Dance effect but if you use other
| | 04:15 | effects like Foam and Shatter. They
also can take in and utilize other layers
| | 04:21 | as controllers. Remember again if you
have a black and white layer like this
| | 04:26 | Precomp waves, you might need to
precompose it in order for After Effects to
| | 04:31 | use it as a controller.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Bringing photos to life with displacement| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to kind of
build on what we learned in the last
| | 00:04 | movie where we learned to how to use
layers as controllers. And we are going to
| | 00:08 | use a Displacement Map to take a photo,
this photo actually and bring it to
| | 00:13 | life like this. So it makes it seem
like we are kind of panning through the
| | 00:16 | camera but in actuality this is just a
simple photo that's being displaced with
| | 00:21 | a map that we'll make.
| | 00:22 | So our journey here actually begins in
Photoshop. We are going to start with
| | 00:26 | the Angela in the snow.jpg and I'm
going to first double-click the background
| | 00:31 | to unlock it. And let's go ahead and
call this layer Angela. And next I'll drag
| | 00:36 | this layer to then create a new layer
icon at the bottom of the Layers panel.
| | 00:40 | And I want my Angela layer to be on top,
so I'm going to drag that on top, even
| | 00:43 | though they are both the same thing
right now. Double-click Angela copy and I'm
| | 00:47 | going to call this layer DIS Angela. This
will be the Displacement Map that we make.
| | 00:52 | Now what I'm going to do is I'm going
to paint over this DIS Angela layer, so
| | 00:56 | I'm going to take the Opacity of this
layer, just click on the word Opacity and
| | 01:00 | drag it to the left, make that layer
about 28% or so, 27% is fine. And then I'm
| | 01:05 | going to click this little padlock
icon to lock the layer. That way we can't
| | 01:09 | make any changes on it, paint on it
accidentally, or what have you. Then I'm
| | 01:12 | going to select this DIS Angela layer.
I'm going to hit the letter D as in
| | 01:16 | David on the keyboard, and then I'm
going to push Option+Delete on the Mac or
| | 01:20 | Alt+Backspace on the PC to fill
this background layer with black.
| | 01:25 | You see what we are going to do here is
we are going to use the color black in
| | 01:29 | After Effects to tell the Displacement
Map effect which we are going to use,
| | 01:33 | which pixels are in the background
and white will tell After Effects which
| | 01:38 | pixels are in the foreground. So now
our Displacement Map is pure black,
| | 01:43 | everything is the background.
| | 01:44 | Next, I'm going to select the Brush
tool. I'm going to right-click on my
| | 01:47 | document and I'll select this 19-pixel
brush. Go ahead and click outside and
| | 01:53 | this is a little bit too small, so I'm
going to increase the size of that brush
| | 01:57 | using the right bracket key. And I'm
also going to decrease the hardness of the
| | 02:02 | brush by holding Shift+Left bracket key.
| | 02:05 | So if you are just using the bracket
keys, next to letter P on your keyboard,
| | 02:10 | the left bracket key will decrease
the size and the right bracket key will
| | 02:13 | increase the size. And adding Shift to
the mix will respectively decrease and
| | 02:18 | increase the hardness.
| | 02:19 | I am also going to make sure my Opacity
is really low here. We won't make very
| | 02:22 | subtle changes. Next, I'm going to
press the letter X on my keyboard to flip
| | 02:27 | the foreground and background color, so
that white is my new foreground color.
| | 02:31 | So I'm going to click on the girl's
nose here, I'm going to keep clicking and
| | 02:34 | clicking and clicking and clicking
until this becomes pure white. She looks a
| | 02:38 | little bit like Rudolph with the white nose.
| | 02:41 | The reason why we are doing that is
because, for me at least, that gives me a
| | 02:44 | reference that this is the brightest
point. This is probably the point that's
| | 02:48 | closest to the camera. So again, the
brighter we make things, the closer they
| | 02:52 | are going to appear towards the camera.
| | 02:54 | So we want all this background stuff
to be in the background and this white
| | 02:59 | nose is going to be the foremost
foreground thing. So I might want a little bit
| | 03:03 | of white on some of these background
trees here. Just to make them come up a
| | 03:09 | little bit from the distance. Again,
as you can see this is nowhere near the
| | 03:13 | brightness of her nose, so these will
still very much be in the background but
| | 03:17 | not completely totally in the
background. They will appear to be a little bit
| | 03:22 | in front of these trees
behind them, which is good.
| | 03:25 | And then we want to just kind of
paint over. Actually I'm going to use the
| | 03:28 | right bracket key to make this little
bit bigger. But we are kind of want to
| | 03:30 | paint her and again the whiter she is
with paint, the more in the foreground
| | 03:36 | she is going to be. And as we are
working with this, you might look at her
| | 03:38 | scarf, for example, and her scarf will
probably be more white than say her neck
| | 03:43 | because it's in front of her neck.
| | 03:45 | In this case you might want to turn off
the visibility of the Angela layer just
| | 03:49 | to check your Displacement Map and make
sure everything is okay. I'm not going
| | 03:52 | to take the time to paint this entire
Displacement Map. I already have one as
| | 03:56 | set out for you here, Angela in the snow.psd.
| | 03:59 | So here is kind of like what the final
product would look like, I made a little
| | 04:02 | bit of white paint you probably can't
see it on your screen but I made a little
| | 04:05 | bit of white paint on the bottom so
the ground would appear to be closer than
| | 04:09 | the background trees. Obviously, I
have a little bit of white with the trees
| | 04:13 | here and notice that her neck is
a little bit darker than her chin.
| | 04:19 | So that her neck kind of goes back
a little bit. Her nose is still the
| | 04:22 | brightest spot on the face, it's kind
of subtle but you can see that's the
| | 04:25 | brightest point and then her hand
also comes out a little bit more than the
| | 04:30 | area of her jacket back there. And this
shoulder is a little bit brighter than
| | 04:34 | this part of her chest. And so
everything is kind of aligned up so that the
| | 04:38 | brightest points are in the foreground.
| | 04:40 | Next thing you want to do is save this,
then hop on over to After Effects. And
| | 04:46 | when you go to the Project panel, you
can double-click to import. Go into the
| | 04:49 | PSDs folder, if that's where you
choose to save it or wherever you save your
| | 04:52 | document there. And make sure you want
to save it as a PSD file. Select the PSD
| | 04:56 | file and then import it as Composition.
Not as Composition Cropped layers, in
| | 05:00 | this case you want to import as a Composition.
| | 05:03 | This is because the Displacement Map
effect that we are going to use looks at
| | 05:06 | the pixel boundaries of both the
Displacement Map and the layer. So if your
| | 05:11 | Displacement Map is slightly off in
pixels from your regular layer, they will
| | 05:16 | not match up when you are displacing
them. So choose Composition to be safe.
| | 05:21 | Next you want to click Open, I have
already done that so I'm just going to go
| | 05:24 | ahead and hit Cancel here. What that
will do is it will create a composition
| | 05:27 | for you and it will also make a folder
with the two layers in that PSD file, in
| | 05:32 | that folder. Now if your Opacity was
turned down in your PSD file, you will
| | 05:36 | want to take the Angela layer and take
the Opacity back up to 100%. You could
| | 05:40 | also take off the Visibility of the
DIS Angela layer, the displacement layer,
| | 05:43 | as we don't need that anymore. Next,
you want to apply a new instance to this
| | 05:46 | Displacement Map effect and turn off
the old one that I have already animated,
| | 05:49 | just so I can set this up
and show you how it goes.
| | 05:52 | The first thing you want to do here is
take the Displacement Map and change it
| | 05:55 | from Angela, which basically means
that this layer is just displacing itself.
| | 05:58 | Change it to DIS Angela, the
Displacement Map that we created. And actually, we
| | 06:03 | are going to resize so we could see
what this is all saying. Use For Horizontal
| | 06:06 | Displacement, we are going to use the
Luminance, in other words the brightness
| | 06:09 | of the Displacement Map. So we'll go
ahead and click on Luminance and we'll
| | 06:12 | skip this Max Horizontal Displacement for now.
| | 06:14 | Go to Use For Vertical Displacement,
well, we don't want to move this thing up
| | 06:17 | and down. We just want to move it left
and right. So I'm going take Vertical
| | 06:20 | Displacement off. Now I'm going to Max
Vertical Displacement to 0. And just as
| | 06:26 | an option you can check, Wrap pixels
around. What this wrap pixels around
| | 06:30 | option will do is-- let's say we are
displacing this to the right. All the
| | 06:34 | pixels are moving to the right. Well along
the left edge there is going to be a hole there.
| | 06:38 | So what this is going to do is wrap
the pixels from the right edge back over
| | 06:42 | along the left edge. So it's less of
a hole there. That's not a permanent
| | 06:45 | perfect solution but it will
get the job done in a pinch.
| | 06:48 | So what we are going to do now is grab
this Max Horizontal Displacement value
| | 06:53 | and as we drag it to the right and
left, you can see that we have actually
| | 06:58 | brought this image to life. We didn't
have to cut it up in Photoshop, we didn't
| | 07:03 | have to do anything much to it other
than just paint that Displacement Map.
| | 07:06 | We are getting some pretty realistic
distortions here, look at her hair, the way
| | 07:09 | her head tilts and moves. Now beware
if you go too crazy you are going to get
| | 07:14 | some weird artifacts and it's just not
going to look quite right even if you
| | 07:17 | don't get any weird artifacts, you will
start bending things in a weird way.
| | 07:22 | It doesn't look too pleasing,
so be careful about that.
| | 07:24 | Now if you find that your map is a
little messed up, what you can do is go back
| | 07:28 | to Photoshop and maybe paint some or
make some changes. Then go back to After
| | 07:33 | Effects, and in your Project panel
open up the folder, right-click on one of
| | 07:37 | the layers. So you can't right-click
on the folder, you can't right-click on
| | 07:40 | the comp, right-click on one of the PSD
layers in the folder and select Reload
| | 07:45 | Footage once you have saved
your changes in Photoshop.
| | 07:48 | So all this left now, I'm just going
to go ahead and delete this Displacement
| | 07:52 | Map 2 and turn on my original
Displacement Map. I animated this from positive
| | 07:58 | 43 and then I hit the End to go to
end of my composition. And animate it to
| | 08:03 | negative 60. So once we play that, we
have again a fairly believable result.
| | 08:09 | I'm going to hit 0 on the numeric
keypad to do a RAM preview. And once it's
| | 08:13 | done, again we have this
fairly realistic move here.
| | 08:15 | Again, we have her scarf in front of
her neck which looks cool, even our chin
| | 08:19 | is in front of her neck just based on
how much they are moving. The hand is in
| | 08:23 | front of the rest of the jacket. These
folds on her coat are turning in a very
| | 08:27 | organic, realistic way. The
background is moving, the background trees are
| | 08:31 | moving more than this tree
because we made it a little bit lighter.
| | 08:34 | So we have a nice result here and if we
were making a bunch of quick cuts in a
| | 08:38 | video that this was going to be a part
of then it would look very believable
| | 08:41 | like we went out and took a photo or
a still life or that cool Matrix type
| | 08:45 | effect where we kind of moving the
camera in 3D space while life is frozen.
| | 08:50 | I have also always wanted to use this
in a documentary, adding this to the
| | 08:54 | Ken Burns effect. Kind of a cool trick
to keep in your arsenal. Keep that at
| | 08:57 | the back of your mind as
you are doing your work.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding the importance of effect order| 00:00 | The order in which effects are applied
dramatically influences the final result
| | 00:06 | that you get. In this project I have
just a simple orange solid and I have a
| | 00:09 | few effects that I have applied.
Let's say we apply a Twirl Effect, I have
| | 00:13 | already gone ahead and applied this. I
turn it on by clicking the fx icon here.
| | 00:17 | And it kind of swirls around a little
bit. I'm going to turn the Visibility
| | 00:21 | back off. And we also have a Ramp
effect, which is simple black to white
| | 00:24 | gradient. But the order in which we
apply these effects really determines what
| | 00:29 | the final result looks like.
| | 00:30 | If we apply Twirl first and then Ramp,
that's how this works. The effect on top
| | 00:35 | is applied first and the effects at the
bottom of this are applied afterwards.
| | 00:40 | Then basically the layer is Twirled and
then the Ramp effect is applied. If we
| | 00:45 | grab the Ramp effect and drag it and
put it on top, then it will be a much
| | 00:50 | different result. Because then we have
basically this Ramp effect and we are twirling the Ramp.
| | 00:56 | So if I open up Twirl and adjust this
a little bit so we could see kind of
| | 00:59 | what's going on more. I hold the
Shift key to make this happen a little bit
| | 01:02 | faster. It's taking this gradient and
wrapping this around, which again has a
| | 01:07 | much different result than Twirling
it and then adding Ramp afterwards.
| | 01:12 | Let's apply another effect, I'm going
to take off Ramp and I'll apply the Grid
| | 01:16 | effect. Now Grid completely replaces
whatever it's applied to. So even though
| | 01:20 | we have applied Twirl or even Ramp,
it doesn't matter, it only sees Grid.
| | 01:25 | Because Grid replaces everything.
| | 01:27 | However, if we place Grid initially in
the stack then basically what's going to
| | 01:32 | happen as we apply Twirl afterwards
and so we are twirling the Grid. We could
| | 01:37 | also apply a Ramp after the Twirl or we can
just remove Twirl and have a Ramp over the Grid.
| | 01:42 | So you can see we can keep stacking
effects on top of each other to get really
| | 01:46 | interesting results. But the order in
which they are stacked up here in the
| | 01:51 | Effect Controls panel makes a big
difference. So if you are not getting what
| | 01:54 | you are looking for, try rearranging
the effects in the Effect Controls panel.
| | 01:58 | And again, remember it's kind of
backwards. The ones that you apply first,
| | 02:02 | apply at the top. And those are the
ones that After Effects is going to apply
| | 02:05 | first in the render order and then
the ones below it are going to come afterwards.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating animation presets| 00:00 | From my experience in the After
Effects world, one of the most
| | 00:02 | under-appreciated features is the
ability to create animation presets and
| | 00:06 | that's what we are going
to look at in this movie.
| | 00:07 | I have created this kind of weird
psychedelic pattern from a few effects.
| | 00:13 | Let me show you where I'm going here. I have
this Cell Pattern effect. I should take off
| | 00:16 | the visibility of all those effects.
I have plain solid. I have the Cell
| | 00:19 | Pattern effect, add to that the Colorama
effect and I use the Mossy color preset
| | 00:25 | in the Output Cycle area to give it
that color. And then finally, I have a
| | 00:29 | four-color gradient that gives it
just a little variation and color at the
| | 00:32 | edges. After I select the layer,
I'll hit the letter U. I see that I have
| | 00:36 | actually animated the evolution
property of the Cell Pattern effect. I have two
| | 00:40 | keyframes here. And I have also added
the Wiggle expression to 4 color points
| | 00:45 | and the 4 color gradient.
| | 00:46 | Now what we are going to do with this
animation preset is save this information
| | 00:50 | so that we can recall it any time. Let
me show you how this works, I'm going to
| | 00:54 | go back up to the Effect Controls panel.
I'm going to select the top effect,
| | 00:57 | Cell Pattern, hold the Shift key for
color gradient and that will select all
| | 01:01 | the effects in between. You can also
hold the Command key or the Ctrl key on
| | 01:05 | the PC to select effects that are not
selected. So if we didn't want to save
| | 01:08 | Colorama, we could just go
ahead and Command or Ctrl-click it.
| | 01:12 | But I actually do want to save this
result with all these effects. So with
| | 01:15 | these effects selected, I'm going to
go to the Animation menu at the top and
| | 01:18 | select Save Animation Preset. Next, I'm
going to navigate to the Presets folder
| | 01:24 | in the After Effects folder. I'm going
to call this chads weird pattern and go
| | 01:30 | ahead and click Save there. Now it's
created an .ffx file. That is the file
| | 01:35 | extension for After Effects animation
presets. You can reuse those at any time
| | 01:40 | they are cross-platformed. You can
trade them to your buddies that use PCs or Macs.
| | 01:44 | It doesn't matter.
| | 01:45 | And this is how you recall them, I'm
going to click and make a new comp here.
| | 01:49 | And what I use to create this was an
NTSC DV preset but with a square pixel
| | 01:54 | aspect ratio, so that's what I have here.
I'm going to click OK. And I'll just
| | 01:58 | make a new solid, Command+Y or Ctrl+Y
on the Mac. Make sure it's comp size but
| | 02:02 | doesn't matter what color. And then
with this layer selected, go up to the
| | 02:05 | Animation menu and select Apply
Animation Preset. Navigate to the FFX file you
| | 02:10 | just made, click Open, and there you
have it. The same exact preset you just
| | 02:15 | created applied, your keyframes are
still intact, your expressions even are
| | 02:20 | still intact, everything was saved.
| | 02:22 | So this is a really great way for you
motion graphics designers, if that's what
| | 02:25 | you do or whatever else you do to be
able to create a library of your own full
| | 02:30 | of presets and patterns, backgrounds,
maybe you got some lightning or gunfire
| | 02:35 | particles, whatever. You can create them and
then save them for later use using Animation Presets.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Making ParticlesWhat are particles?| 00:01 | A Particle System is basically where
the computer takes one image, typically a
| | 00:05 | tiny object, maybe a circle or square,
or a star, an airplane, or anything, and
| | 00:10 | clones it many times, sometimes
hundreds or thousand of times. The way these
| | 00:15 | tiny objects behave during the
animation, the way they move, or grow, or get
| | 00:19 | colorized, or do other things, it causes
them to create interesting visual effects.
| | 00:24 | Now you don't manipulate each tiny
little piece. You actually just manipulate
| | 00:29 | the particle generator and the
transformations the particles undergo during
| | 00:33 | the animation. This gives you the
ability to generate nearly an infinite number
| | 00:38 | of complex effects. Now Particle
Systems are great for creating things like
| | 00:42 | explosions, sparkles, or water smoke,
weather effects, animated backgrounds, anything.
| | 00:48 | Now we're going to look at some video
footage from Detonation Films. This is
| | 00:52 | real world footage, but this is kind
of like the reference material. This is
| | 00:56 | the type of stuff that we're trying to
emulate when we're using Particle Systems.
| | 01:01 | Say for example, this explosion,
the initial explosion, that would be a
| | 01:05 | particle, and then also the sparks
would be different particles, and then the
| | 01:10 | smoke trails would be particles as well.
Here we have these muzzle flashes. All
| | 01:14 | the components of these muzzle flashes
would also be considered particles. The
| | 01:19 | sparks, the initial burst, the smoke.
Same thing with the explosion here.
| | 01:23 | The fire would be a system of particles.
The smoke would be another system of
| | 01:27 | particles. The little speckles or
sparkles, those are particles as well. Smoke,
| | 01:31 | rain, snow, anything where there is
tons of something going on. You don't want
| | 01:37 | to animate every single little component.
That's when we call in Particles in After Effects.
| | 01:42 | Now Particles is a huge topic. We
can easily take up an entire lynda.com
| | 01:46 | training series in just Particles in
After Effects. So my point here in this
| | 01:51 | chapter is just to kind of get you
started to show you what's out there in After
| | 01:55 | Effects, when you are
looking to create some particles.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating sparkles with CC Particle Systems II| 00:01 | In this movie we're going to start our
journey by looking at creating sparkles
| | 00:04 | with an effect called CC Particle
Systems II. We're going to start from scratch here.
| | 00:09 | So go ahead and create new
composition. Let's make it 720 X 480 with
| | 00:14 | square pixels, 29.97 frames per second and
a duration of 4 seconds. I'll click OK here.
| | 00:20 | Next to make a solid I'm just going to
use the keyboard shortcut Command+Y on
| | 00:23 | the Mac or Ctrl+Y on the PC to do that.
My solid here is green, but it doesn't
| | 00:28 | matter what color you make it. I'm
going to go ahead and click OK, making sure
| | 00:30 | that it's comp size.
| | 00:32 | Let's go over to the Effects and
Presets panel, do a search on CC part.
| | 00:36 | As soon as you say CC part, you can see CC
Particle Systems II and that's the effect we
| | 00:41 | want to apply. So I'm just going to
drag and drop this on to my solid layer.
| | 00:46 | Now the reason why we're talking about
this effect now is twofold. Number one,
| | 00:50 | we haven't really covered CC Particle
Systems II in any training that I've done
| | 00:54 | on lynda.com so far. So it's kind of
some new territory to get into and that's
| | 00:58 | kind of fun. Also because this is a
good indication of what typical particle
| | 01:02 | effects are like. Whether using them
in After Effects or 3DS Max, or another
| | 01:07 | program, or from another third party
After Effects plug-in, or whatever.
| | 01:10 | There is a lot of concepts here with this effect
that are common to many particle systems.
| | 01:15 | If we go ahead and hit the Spacebar,
we'll see what we see with many particle
| | 01:20 | effects and that is it is auto animated.
Basically what that means is that from
| | 01:23 | Frame 0, it's already spitting stuff
out. There is physics built in. So all
| | 01:28 | this stuff is done for us.
We don't have to keyframe it.
| | 01:30 | Now, let's go over here to the Effect
Controls panel and start playing around
| | 01:33 | with this a little bit. Let's first
open up Particle. People that are new to
| | 01:37 | Particle Systems often get discouraged
when they see the default results for a
| | 01:41 | particle system. So if I'm dragging my
current time indicator around and look
| | 01:44 | at this and it kind of looks like hair, or
sparks, something that is just not super great.
| | 01:50 | So what we can do is play around with
the Particle Type in the particle area.
| | 01:54 | So by default it's a line. In other
words it's shooting out a bunch of lines.
| | 01:57 | But you can change this to star. So
it's shooting out a bunch of stars. We can
| | 02:01 | also change this to shaded sphere, a
faded sphere. As you can see already
| | 02:06 | the power here as we just even just
change the shape. Again what's cool,
| | 02:11 | we don't have to keyframe any of this
stuff. It's already spitting out all these
| | 02:15 | things for us. Again we don't animate
the individual pieces. We control the
| | 02:20 | emitter, the thing that's
spitting out the particles.
| | 02:23 | Now oftentimes with Particle Systems,
they refer to these little particles that
| | 02:27 | are being spit out, whatever it is,
as kind of like people. Like they have a
| | 02:32 | birth and a death. So here in the
particle area we have a Birth Size and a
| | 02:36 | Death Size. So basically when the
particle is born what size is it and when it dies,
| | 02:41 | when it's fading out, at the end of
its particle life, how big is it at that point.
| | 02:46 | So you'll notice that the Birth Size
is considerably smaller than the Death Size.
| | 02:50 | So basically what that's telling
us is it's going to start small and then
| | 02:53 | get bigger as it fades out. We could
play around with the variation in size.
| | 02:59 | We also can adjust the Opacity here. Now
we're having these Fade Out as they're
| | 03:03 | being born, but we can also have
these Fade In, so that they start out
| | 03:08 | transparent and become
opaque as they come to life.
| | 03:11 | Now what I'm going to do for my sparkles,
because that's really what we're here
| | 03:14 | doing is making sparkles. I'm going
to change this to Star and I'm going to
| | 03:18 | have the Opacity Map set to Oscillate.
So they're not going to fade in or out.
| | 03:22 | They're going to do both all the time,
so they are doing constantly kind of
| | 03:26 | twinkling, which is going
to be good for sparkles.
| | 03:29 | By the way, please don't think that
I'm the authority, the God figure of
| | 03:34 | creating sparkles. There is no book
about what sparkles and pixie dust
| | 03:38 | and stuff like that looks like. So this
is just kind of my own interpretation.
| | 03:41 | Feel free to play around with
this however you'd like.
| | 03:43 | Now there is a Birth Color. In other
words what color the particle is born as
| | 03:47 | and what color it dies as, the Death
Color. So we might go ahead and click on
| | 03:51 | these color swatches. And maybe we
want these to be born as maybe pink or
| | 03:55 | something and maybe their Death Color
is like blue perhaps. That looks kind of
| | 04:01 | pretty princess sparkly. That looks good.
| | 04:03 | Let's go to the top here. I'm going to
close our particle. At the top we have
| | 04:06 | Birth Rate. This is basically how many
particles are born. So if we take down the
| | 04:12 | Birth Rate, we'll have less particles
because they're not being born as much.
| | 04:17 | So if I hit the Home key and preview
this again, we just have some random
| | 04:22 | sparkles, just kind of spitting out
there. It's not super thick and full like
| | 04:27 | it would be if we took the
Birth Rate up really high.
| | 04:30 | Keep in mind as well that the more
particles you have in your scene here,
| | 04:34 | the slower it's going to render. So I'm
going to take this back down a little bit.
| | 04:37 | I kind of like more sparse
particles like that. That looks good.
| | 04:41 | We also have Longevity. In other words,
how long in seconds these particles
| | 04:45 | last before dying. So if we take this
to be really really short here, maybe
| | 04:50 | like two-tenths of a second, they just
kind of like shoot out from one point
| | 04:55 | like that. That's another interesting
effect. Again we could have these just
| | 04:59 | last forever in which case they only
turn blue as they're leaving the screen
| | 05:03 | because it takes them so long to die.
| | 05:05 | Let's open up Producer. And the
Producer is the actual emitter, the thing
| | 05:09 | that's shooting out the particles. We
could change the X size of the emitter.
| | 05:14 | Maybe we don't want it emitting from a
point. Maybe we want it emitting from
| | 05:17 | like a whole area like this. We could
also increase the Y, the vertical size.
| | 05:21 | Just now we have kind of like this
cool star field type thing that's moving
| | 05:25 | around really weird. I'm just
going to right-click on Radius Y and
| | 05:29 | Radius X and Reset them.
| | 05:31 | Basically we can also move this
position around, if we take the Effect Control
| | 05:36 | point, say we move it over here and we
can set a keyframe for Position, move in
| | 05:40 | time, change the value, and then move
in time and change the value. You can see
| | 05:46 | how it can create this
awesome trail of sparkles here.
| | 05:50 | Now I'm not really happy with how
this is spitting out in kind of a really
| | 05:54 | random way. So what we can do is open
up Physics and change the Physics.
| | 05:58 | So right now they're animating in an
explosive way we could change this to a
| | 06:02 | Fractal Explosive, also to a Twirl,
to a Twirly, Vortex, which is kind of
| | 06:08 | interesting. Look at that. It's more of
in a straight line but it's also a
| | 06:12 | little too vortexian. It's like
spitting out and twirling little bit too much
| | 06:16 | for my taste. I might want to change
that to Fire, in which case it points
| | 06:20 | upwards constantly. But that's
still kind of cool for sparkles.
| | 06:24 | Now in this category, we also have
Velocity. How fast they're getting spit out
| | 06:29 | and we also have things like Gravity,
so we can increase the Gravity, or
| | 06:33 | decrease the Gravity. Let's take this
down really far here. Let's take it
| | 06:40 | just down to 0. The Gravity just doesn't
seem to work on these particles at all.
| | 06:45 | They are just going to stay put. We
could also increase the Resistance, which
| | 06:49 | means that how thick the air is
essentially, how likely they're to just kind of
| | 06:52 | stand the same spot. So now as they
spit out, they kind of don't go anywhere
| | 06:57 | which also creates an interesting effect.
| | 06:58 | The last thing I want to talk about
here is we can also change the direction
| | 07:02 | these particles are being spit out in,
which you can see more if you change in the
| | 07:06 | Direction or set the Animation to
Direction. It's kind of moving around in a
| | 07:10 | different way there. That's kind of
cool. I'll take this back to Fire for the
| | 07:14 | time being and I'll take Resistance back
down to something a little decent there, 5 or so.
| | 07:21 | I want to add Fast Blur to this. One
of the coolest things about particles is
| | 07:26 | you could just keep stacking effects on
top of them. So if we blur this, you'll
| | 07:30 | see that the result is much different
than what we initially saw. So now
| | 07:35 | it actually can kind of has a watery look
to it rather than the princess sparkles
| | 07:39 | look that we had earlier.
| | 07:41 | Now this is a lot to take in I realize.
There are just infinite possibilities
| | 07:45 | for any particle system. I'm going to
delete these effects. I've created some
| | 07:48 | animation presets for you, if you have
access to the exercise files. If not,
| | 07:52 | you just watch and I'll show you
what I've created for you here.
| | 07:55 | With this Solid selected and the effects
still here, I'm going to go to the Animation
| | 07:58 | menu at the top of the screen and I'd
just like to apply Animation Preset.
| | 08:01 | Now I've created this Animation
Presets folder for you in the Media folder of
| | 08:06 | the Exercise Files folder. There are
just a few things I want to show you.
| | 08:09 | I have this Building Cubes preset. So if
you play this, it's kind of interesting,
| | 08:13 | you see these cubes kind of being
built. It's just kind of sticking there,
| | 08:18 | which I think is like a really
interesting look. It could be for backgrounds or
| | 08:22 | what have you, if there is like a city being
built and you're watching from space or something.
| | 08:26 | The way I created this was by
changing the shape to cubes and then I also
| | 08:31 | increased the Resistance a lot and
also increased the Velocity. So they're
| | 08:34 | being spit out really fast, but
they're not moving too far because the
| | 08:38 | resistance is high. I'm going to delete that.
| | 08:40 | Let's go to Animation > Apply
Animation Preset again and here's one that's Fire.
| | 08:44 | Now if I preview this, this is
some fire that I made in CC Particle
| | 08:48 | Systems II. Actually, let's go ahead and
give that a second to render. We'll come
| | 08:52 | back when it's ready to play back.
| | 08:54 | So now back to that render,
as we play this back,
| | 08:56 | you can see this fire
kind of go on. Looks pretty cool.
| | 08:59 | Let's actually see what we did here.
We have the CC Particle Systems II
| | 09:03 | effect at the top. Let me turn off
these other effects so we can see what's going on here.
| | 09:07 | So you see that we have all of
these cubes that are being spit out.
| | 09:10 | So we know how to do that, and then I applied
Fast Blur to that, and then the Roughen
| | 09:14 | Edges Effect, and then Turbulent
Displace, and then a Glow, and Levels, and
| | 09:20 | Hue/Saturation. So with all these
always effects together, we have this kind of
| | 09:24 | cool fiery effect. Now it's
definitely not photo realistic fire, but if you
| | 09:28 | needed fire in a pinch, this
would bail you out. It's kind of cool.
| | 09:30 | Now I'm going to select all these effects
and delete those. Next I'm going top hit
| | 09:34 | the Home key. Let's go up to the
Animation menu, select Apply Animation Preset
| | 09:37 | and select Princess Sparkles. These
Princess Sparkles are these cute little
| | 09:41 | sparkles that change colors here. So
it looks good. Go back to Animation and
| | 09:46 | apply Animation Preset. We have a
few typical things here. We have some
| | 09:50 | Snowfall. Again I'm going to hit the
Home key. Finally we have fire sprinkler.
| | 09:57 | So if I go and preview this, you
could see what this one looks like.
| | 10:01 | Fire sprinkler at the top
kind of spitting out water.
| | 10:03 | Now one other thing I want to point out
too with this. If I do a search on
| | 10:08 | the Cycore Particle effects, there are
other effects like CC Particle World,
| | 10:13 | for example, also created by Cycore.
This one is like CC Particle Systems II,
| | 10:20 | but it's more advanced in that is
actually a three-dimensional particle
| | 10:25 | system. So when these particles blow
up, you can actually rotate this in 3D
| | 10:30 | space. So it becomes even more powerful.
| | 10:32 | So after you have start feeling
comfortable with the CC Particle Systems II,
| | 10:36 | graduate to CC Particle
World where the real power it is.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating snow with Foam| 00:00 | Now we are going to look at another
powerful After Effects particle system and
| | 00:04 | that is Foam. So I'm going to go search
for the Foam effect. I'm going to apply
| | 00:09 | it to this layer called Foam. Now the Foam
layer is just a black solid. I'm going
| | 00:15 | to turn it back on here. So this is
what it looks like without Foam.
| | 00:18 | Once we apply it, it removes the
layer and replaces it with Foam.
| | 00:21 | As the name implies, Foams just makes
a bunch of bubbles. But the cool thing
| | 00:26 | that we see with Foam that we didn't
see in the last movie with CC Particle
| | 00:30 | Systems II is that Foam allows you to
replace the particle with another layer
| | 00:35 | of your choice. There is also a lot
of really cool physics here as well.
| | 00:40 | Now, first thing what I'll do is go up
to the top here and change the view from
| | 00:44 | Draft, which are these really ugly
aliased bubbles here to Rendered. So now
| | 00:49 | things are looking a little bit better
there, but still we need to make some
| | 00:52 | changes if we are going to make this into
snow, which is our eventual destination here.
| | 00:56 | Now we are seeing a lot of the same
features that we saw with CC Particle
| | 01:00 | Systems II. We have a Producer Point.
That's this point in the middle here.
| | 01:04 | If we drag this out, it will circle
with the plus in it, basically where the
| | 01:08 | bubbles are emanating from. And just
like CC Particles Systems II, we have an X
| | 01:13 | Size, in other words, its width. And its
Y Size, which basically means its height.
| | 01:17 | Instead of having a property called
Birth Rate, we have a property called
| | 01:21 | Production Rate, same thing though.
If we increase, it's going to make more
| | 01:25 | bubbles and if we decrease, it's going
to make less bubbles. If we open up the
| | 01:28 | Bubbles area, we'll see some basic
attributes here, like the Size of the
| | 01:33 | bubbles, and the Strength of the bubbles.
If we open up the Physics area, we'll
| | 01:36 | see some basic properties of physics,
but we'll also see some bubbly unique
| | 01:41 | properties like Wobble Amount,
and Repulsion and Stickiness.
| | 01:46 | These are things that aren't common in
most Particle Systems, so it's one of the
| | 01:50 | things I really like about Foam is you
have that extra control. Now if we are
| | 01:53 | making snow, which we are eventually,
we don't really need Turbulence,
| | 01:58 | so I'm going to take this to 0. We don't
want our snow to Wobble, so I'm going to take
| | 02:02 | this to 0. We don't want them to repel,
so I'm going to take down Repulsion to 0.
| | 02:06 | And we don't want the snow to be
sticky really, so I'm going to take
| | 02:09 | Stickiness to 0 as well.
| | 02:11 | Viscosity is basically the thickness
of the air, so if you are going to make
| | 02:15 | bubbles underwater, we would want to
turn up the Viscosity, because they would
| | 02:19 | be moving more slowly, even though you
can't have bubbles under water. But if you
| | 02:22 | want to have these particles that
were moving slowly like they are moving
| | 02:26 | through some kind of like sludge or tar
or something, you want to bump up Viscosity.
| | 02:30 | So you may want to take that all the
way down since we have light snowfall but
| | 02:34 | I'm just going to leave that as it is
for the time being. Close up Physics.
| | 02:37 | And also since we are making snow,
let's actually go ahead and increase the
| | 02:41 | Producer X Size all the way to .45.
I'll make it the width of the layer.
| | 02:47 | And let's make the Producer Point off
screen, just a little bit above the top of
| | 02:51 | the screen, so the snow will fall.
| | 02:54 | And actually, if you really want the
snow to fall, we should probably back into
| | 02:56 | Physics and take the Wind Direction to
about 180. That will point it downwards.
| | 03:03 | There we go. So it's starting to look
like bubbles. They are acting like snow a
| | 03:08 | little bit. Now one of the things I
like about Foam is that we have an Initial
| | 03:13 | Speed and Direction, and a Wind
Speed and Direction, two separate things.
| | 03:17 | So we can maybe take the Initial Speed
up to .5 and make that Direction 180 and
| | 03:22 | so it's basically going to do what the
wind was doing, pushing it downwards.
| | 03:25 | But then we can also have the wind come
in here. Maybe the Wind Direction is 90
| | 03:30 | degrees. So maybe the bubbles initially
shoot out downwards, but then the wind
| | 03:35 | carries them afterwards over to the
side and that's actually the way snow
| | 03:39 | would work. It falls straight down,
but the wind oftentimes easily blows it
| | 03:43 | away because of its lightness.
| | 03:45 | Now we have a few other tweaks to make
here but before we go too much further,
| | 03:48 | let's go ahead and open up the
Rendering category. This is where we can change
| | 03:52 | the texture of our bubbles. In the
Bubble Texture dropdown, we have it set by
| | 03:56 | default to Default Bubble. We could
change this to Amber Bock, and a few other
| | 03:59 | preset patterns for bubbles.
| | 04:01 | But what I want to do is use my own
user defined Bubble Texture. So I'm going
| | 04:07 | to take the Bubble Texture to User
Defined. Next, we are going to take the
| | 04:12 | Bubble Texture layer dropdown to
snowflake. Now just so you know, I have
| | 04:18 | created this snowflake layer in
Photoshop. It's basically just a single paint
| | 04:22 | stroke with a feather edged brush,
with a white paint. And that's all this on
| | 04:26 | this layer, just this
white little paint stroke here.
| | 04:29 | So now we are using that paint stroke
as the bubbles, instead of the bubbles,
| | 04:35 | and so instantly this looks a lot
more like snow. Now I'll probably want to
| | 04:40 | bump up the Production Rate, so that
there is more snow. That looks more snowy.
| | 04:44 | At this point I might also want to change
the Size, maybe decrease that just a little bit.
| | 04:48 | Now one of the things that's really
not working for me here is, if we hit the Home key,
| | 04:52 | I hit the Spacebar to preview this,
it takes a while for the snow to fall.
| | 04:57 | In real life, you probably wouldn't be
filming something and it would be not
| | 05:01 | snowy at all, and then be completely
snowy, or start to snow. So what we would
| | 05:05 | want to do is start this later in the
process. So what I'm going to do is grab
| | 05:10 | this layer and move it to the left.
Now make sure you don't grab the edge,
| | 05:14 | because that will trim the clip.
Instead grab the clip somewhere inside and
| | 05:18 | drag it to the left so the beginning
of the particle system is before the
| | 05:21 | beginning of the composition.
| | 05:23 | So now when we are at the beginning of
the composition, we already have some snow falling.
| | 05:27 | And what I'll do then is grab
the end of this layer-- So then what
| | 05:31 | I'll do is grab the very end of this
layer and drag it to the right, which will
| | 05:35 | lengthen the duration of the layer.
Now there will be ample snowfall and
| | 05:39 | it will continue. Now there is a lot we
can do at this point. We can fiddle around
| | 05:44 | a little bit more with Size Variance and we
can also play around with Size a little bit more.
| | 05:50 | We can adjust the Zoom to again
increase the size. We can also adjust the
| | 05:55 | Life Span, how many frames these snow
particles are allowed to live for, and so
| | 05:59 | on and so forth. There is a lot we
could do to tweak this. We can also do some
| | 06:03 | other tweaking outside of these controls.
For example, I could select the layer
| | 06:07 | Foam and duplicate it. And now in the
duplicate, adjust the Random Seed value.
| | 06:12 | That will give us kind of
some more depth in our snow.
| | 06:16 | We could also go to the bottom layer
of Foam and apply a little Fast Blur to
| | 06:21 | that Foam and that will give us some
more depth to what's going on. So we'll
| | 06:26 | have some bubbles or snow particles
that are a little sharp and then we'll have
| | 06:30 | some a little bit more blurry and that
kind of adds again to the depth of the snow.
| | 06:35 | Now another thing I want to point out
about Foam real quick is that the lager
| | 06:38 | that you use for the particles, can
also be a movie, not just a still image,
| | 06:43 | in which case the particles
would be a movie that plays back.
| | 06:47 | Now I have seen this used for sparkles,
where you have a movie that has a sparkle
| | 06:51 | that changes color and so the Foam
particles change colors. I have also seen
| | 06:54 | this used to make an army. Let's say
you had a video clip of a soldier or
| | 06:59 | something and if you put that as the
Bubble Texture in Foam you are going to
| | 07:03 | have an army of these soldiers.
| | 07:06 | So think of stars or butterflies or
ants or anything that you would want a huge
| | 07:10 | swarm of, Foam is a great
candidate to make that happen.
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| Creating a cyclone with Particle Playground| 00:00 | Now we're going to look at what is
probably the most advanced particle system
| | 00:05 | in After Effects, and that is particle
playground. Now, I typically don't use
| | 00:09 | particle playground very often because it is
really complex and it's very slow to render.
| | 00:14 | There are a couple of things that
particle playground does very well that other
| | 00:18 | particle systems in After Effects don't
do. So that's what we're going to focus
| | 00:21 | on here. As a matter of fact, this is
the result that we're going to create.
| | 00:24 | We have this cool footage from
Greenlayers.com, this woman casting the spell.
| | 00:29 | So we're going to make this crazy, green smoke
that moves along this crazy insane magical path.
| | 00:36 | So let's go over to the Start
composition, and by default, this is what a
| | 00:41 | particle playground looks like when
it's applied. So let's go ahead and solo
| | 00:44 | that top layer, the Particles layer,
and we'll play this back. Now, I've done a
| | 00:48 | few things just to kind of get as going.
I animate the position of this layer
| | 00:53 | so that it matches the candle of the
subject from the Greenlayers.com footage.
| | 00:58 | So we'll get that in the right place in
just a moment. If you select the layer
| | 01:01 | you'll also see that I've created a
mask for you that the particles are going
| | 01:05 | to follow. So let's go ahead and solo
that layer again and look a little bit at
| | 01:09 | particle playground, go to
the Effect Controls panel.
| | 01:12 | Now particle playground has four
different particle systems built into it, the
| | 01:17 | Cannon, the Grid, the Layer Exploder
and the Particle Exploder. For more
| | 01:22 | information about this effect and all
the other effects in After Effects, you
| | 01:26 | can check out the After Effects'
Effects Training Series on Lynda.com.
| | 01:30 | In this movie we're just going to
focus on the Cannon particle emitter. The
| | 01:34 | cannon shoots out a series of particles
in a stream. If we move the direction,
| | 01:40 | you can see how this is spitting out
particles in different directions here.
| | 01:44 | So the first thing I'm going to do is
click the Effect Control Point for a
| | 01:47 | position here and move the cannon
inside where the mask is. Now, as you can see
| | 01:53 | here, the particles do not respect the
mask whatsoever. So go down to the Wall
| | 01:59 | category and change the
Boundary from None to the Mask.
| | 02:04 | Now, the mask that particle playground
can use must be on the layer, it cannot
| | 02:08 | use a mask from another layer. However,
as you can see, once you select a mask
| | 02:13 | to use as a boundary, then these
particles bump around the mask and don't go
| | 02:19 | outside of it, which is really cool.
| | 02:21 | So you can create things like tornadoes
and cyclones and you could do all kinds
| | 02:25 | of crazy stuff. You can have them just
bounce off the wall, ricochet off the
| | 02:28 | floor, whatever you want them to do.
Now, I'm going to close up the Wall.
| | 02:32 | We are done with what's out there. Let's
go ahead and click on Color, we want this
| | 02:35 | to be like a darker green here.
| | 02:38 | We could also increase the Particle
Radius and the Particles Per Second is
| | 02:44 | basically the birth rate, so you can
increase how many particles there are. Now
| | 02:48 | these particles are just kind of
hanging out here, we don't want that. So we
| | 02:51 | could open up Gravity and take the
direction of the gravity to 0, which will
| | 02:55 | make them float upwards.
| | 02:58 | So now our smoke is basically in the
right spot. It's behaving correctly.
| | 03:03 | It looks really ugly though. So let's go
ahead and add Fast Blur and increase the
| | 03:07 | blur on that. Now we have a nice
little smoky texture and smoke that respects
| | 03:12 | the boundaries of the mask.
| | 03:15 | So for all intents and purposes, we
are done here for the tutorial, if you'd
| | 03:19 | like to perfect this, then you could
go and add on extra Color Correction
| | 03:23 | effects such as Levels or Glow to
make this kind of stick out a little bit more.
| | 03:28 | Then I'll take down the Glow
Threshold to make this more glowy. Then we
| | 03:33 | have this final result where
the smoke follows that trail.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Creating Common Motion Graphics ElementsCreating staggered video with photos| 00:00 | In this tutorial we are going to
look at a common effect that I see often
| | 00:03 | especially at the beginning of reality
shows, where instead of having video of
| | 00:08 | the characters in the show, they will
just have a series of photographs, kind
| | 00:12 | of staggered together. And basically
what I have done is I have started with
| | 00:15 | some photos of myself, and I have taken
them into Photoshop. And I have removed
| | 00:20 | the background and then brought them
into After Effects. We'll talk more about
| | 00:23 | Photoshop later on in this training
series. I'll show you how to do that.
| | 00:26 | Now I have these photos here of myself
and actually what I'm going to do is I'm
| | 00:30 | going to solo these. So here's the
photo I just showed you in Photoshop, and
| | 00:35 | basically what I done is I have added
some color correction to this. And so
| | 00:39 | what we are going to do is we are
going to stagger these different photos of
| | 00:42 | me, so that it animates
together as if it were video.
| | 00:47 | So we'll start with the first one
here, and actually I have to Shy these
| | 00:49 | layers, you can click the Shy button
to just see these upper torso shots, and
| | 00:53 | I'm going to move the Work Area here.
I kind of already created these markers
| | 00:58 | here to show you where the photo should
start and stop. So what I'm going to do
| | 01:03 | is I'm going to put my cursor at this
first one and I'm going to click and drag
| | 01:08 | the beginning of this one over to the
beginning of the work area. And I want
| | 01:13 | the next one to work at the 2 marker.
| | 01:15 | Actually, I can click this big mountain
here to zoom in a little bit, and what
| | 01:19 | I want to do here again is in this
layer here where the 2 marker is, so I'm
| | 01:25 | going to type 2 on the main area of
the keyboard to jump my Current Time
| | 01:28 | Indicator there. Then what I'm going to
do is I'm going to hit the Page Up key
| | 01:33 | to go backwards one frame. Remember
that I want the next clip to start at the
| | 01:38 | marker, so I want this clip to
end the frame before the marker.
| | 01:42 | So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to hold the Option key down or that will
| | 01:44 | be the Alt key on the PC and the right
bracket key, that will trim this layer
| | 01:50 | so that it ends at the current frame.
Next, I'm going to hit the Page Down key
| | 01:54 | or the 2 key on the main area of the
keyboard to go forward one frame. Then I'm
| | 01:58 | going to select the layer below, just
type 12 on the keyboard. Now the first
| | 02:03 | layer animates in, it kind of pops in
like this and notice how with this final
| | 02:07 | animation it kind of blinks like.
| | 02:09 | But then for the other layers they
are not animated, they are just still
| | 02:14 | images. Now if we hold the Option key
or the Alt key down, it's going to trim
| | 02:18 | it, but if we just hit the bracket key,
it's going to jump it in time. So it
| | 02:24 | actually moved the layer instead of
trimmed it. So next, I'm going to hit the
| | 02:28 | number 3 on the main area of the
keyboard to go to the next marker here. Again,
| | 02:32 | Page Up will move you back one frame.
Option+right bracket will trim the clip,
| | 02:38 | Page Down will advance you to the next
frame, Command or Ctrl+down arrow will
| | 02:43 | select the layer below. Left bracket
will make it start at the current time.
| | 02:48 | Hit the number 4 in the main area of
the keyboard to jump to the next marker,
| | 02:51 | go back a frame, trim it. Advance a
frame, select the next layer, hit the left
| | 02:57 | bracket key, make it start at the
current time. And then we could just leave
| | 03:01 | this frame out for the
duration of the composition.
| | 03:04 | So if we move in time, let's go to the
5 second mark here, hit N to make the
| | 03:08 | Work Area end there. Now what I'll do
is zoom out here at 50% and let's play
| | 03:12 | back the final result.
| | 03:14 | Okay, so I pop up and I'm wiggling a
little bit because the composition that's
| | 03:19 | in there is wiggling. But you can see
that there is this kind of fun animated
| | 03:22 | corky photo thing. And again, you will
see this often at the beginning of a lot
| | 03:27 | of TV shows especially I have noticed
it's popular in reality TV shows, but
| | 03:31 | it's kind of a cool little trick to know about.
| | 03:33 | I should also point out this way easier
to produce, it's much quicker to get in
| | 03:37 | there with some snapshots that look
great rather than trying to setup a big old
| | 03:41 | video shoot. And also the results are
much cleaner and because they are so much smaller
| | 03:47 | because they are just photos,
it's much easier and quicker in postproduction as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating ink spatter| 00:00 | Now we are going to look at how to
create the very popular Ink Spatter effect.
| | 00:05 | Now granted there are a host of
ways to get the job done here, where we
| | 00:08 | could really flick ink on a piece of
paper and scan it and trace it or whatever
| | 00:13 | we want to do there. We could go into
Illustrator where there are some stock
| | 00:17 | ink spatters, but what I want to show
you here is how to create it from scratch
| | 00:20 | in After Effects.
| | 00:22 | The way I'm going to show you how to
use it uses the Particle System we looked
| | 00:25 | at earlier, CC Particle Systems II.
So I'm going to apply this to this blue
| | 00:29 | solid that we have. It's important to
get the right color solid, because the
| | 00:33 | trick that we are going to use here
actually makes the Ink Spatter the color
| | 00:37 | of the layer it's applied to.
| | 00:38 | So let's open up Particle down at the
bottom. We'll change the Particle Type to
| | 00:43 | either Lens, Convex, or Lens Concave.
They seem to have similar results here.
| | 00:47 | And as you can see here it picked up
the blue color from the solid. Now it's
| | 00:50 | starting to look a little ink spattery already.
| | 00:52 | Let's just change a few things. For the
Opacity Map, we want to change it from
| | 00:56 | Fade Out, which kind of makes it partial
transparent here and they would become
| | 01:00 | more transparent as they get away. Ink
doesn't do that. So let's change this to
| | 01:03 | Constant and then let's bump
up the Max Opacity to 100%.
| | 01:08 | Now with a lot of particles, they start
small and they get bigger as they grow.
| | 01:11 | Hence, they have the default Birth
Size being much smaller than the default
| | 01:15 | Death Size. But with Ink Spatter, it's
typically different. You would flick a
| | 01:18 | big thing of ink down the ground and
then there would be tiny little dots
| | 01:22 | around that. So we actually want the
Birth Size to be substantially larger than
| | 01:28 | the Death Size. I'm going to take
the Death Size down a little bit there.
| | 01:30 | Now there is way too much Ink Spatter
here so I'm going to decrease Birth Rate
| | 01:35 | and I'm also going to open up Physics.
I definitely don't want there to be any
| | 01:38 | Gravity because by default if I play
this now it's spitting the ink downwards.
| | 01:43 | I actually want it to kind of look
like it's splatting. So I'm going to take
| | 01:45 | Gravity down to 0. So now it appears
to just be a spitting out in the center,
| | 01:51 | which is great. That's what we want.
| | 01:52 | I am going to increase Resistance, so
that those ink particles stay close.
| | 01:59 | We could also adjust the Velocity to
determine how far apart those Ink Spatters
| | 02:03 | are spread out. Now even though our
Birth Rate's a comparatively low in
| | 02:07 | number, it's still too much.
There's still too much ink on the screen.
| | 02:10 | So I'm going to lower this to maybe .3,
somewhere around there. And also I might want
| | 02:15 | to take up Birth Size a little bit.
| | 02:18 | Now you could feel free to tweak these
settings to your heart's content.
| | 02:21 | You may want a little bit more Size
Variation there. Again you might want to take
| | 02:25 | down the Birth Rate just a little bit
more. It's up to you. And then as you
| | 02:31 | get some good settings, then move your
Current Time Indicator around and look
| | 02:35 | for a frame that looks
like good Ink Spatter to you.
| | 02:39 | Actually, you might want to reduce
the Velocity, bring those particles in a
| | 02:42 | little bit more. And once you have
found a good frame of Ink Spatter, then what
| | 02:49 | you can do is solo that layer and then
go to Composition > Save Frame As > File
| | 02:56 | because the problem is, and this is
what most Particles Systems are set up to do,
| | 03:00 | they are not really set up to
freeze frame. So even though we might be
| | 03:04 | happy with this single frame of Ink
Spatter as we play this in our comp,
| | 03:08 | it's going to continually move.
| | 03:10 | So you want to find a frame that
looks good in and of itself, then go to
| | 03:14 | Composition, again, Save Frame As > File.
That will add this to the Render Wueue here.
| | 03:20 | And the Output Module is set to
Photoshop. Click the word Photoshop.
| | 03:24 | Now you could set this to be a Photoshop
file if you want. I chose a TIFF. And you
| | 03:28 | want to make sure that if you are
choosing a TIFF that it says RGB + Alpha.
| | 03:32 | You want this black transparency here.
| | 03:35 | If the Channels were set to just RGB,
then when you brought this Ink Spatter in
| | 03:39 | it would be the color of the Ink
Spatter with the black background and
| | 03:42 | you don't want that. So leave that set to
RGB + Alpha. And I'm going to go back up
| | 03:46 | here to Post-Render Action. This is
what you want After Effects to do with this
| | 03:50 | file once it's done rendering. And by
default it's set to None, but I actually
| | 03:55 | want to import this into my
current project so I can use it.
| | 03:59 | So I'll click OK here and then click on
Output To and figure out where to save it.
| | 04:05 | Now I have already gone ahead and
output a single frame of Ink Spatter and
| | 04:09 | have also imported this into my Timeline.
We'll now take off the visibility of
| | 04:15 | the blue Ink Spatter we made and show
you the white Ink Spatter that I made.
| | 04:19 | Now once it's an independent layer,
we can move in time here and nothing
| | 04:24 | changes. We can scale this and move
this and put this maybe in a corner or
| | 04:27 | maybe get other frames of Ink Spatter
that we made. We can also add the Minimax
| | 04:33 | effect. We'll do a search for that in
Effects & Presets panel and then apply
| | 04:37 | that to our Ink Spatter. Change the
Operation to Minimum, and then as we
| | 04:44 | increase this, you will see that
it erodes the edges of the layer.
| | 04:48 | Well, if we start with the layer somewhere,
in a Radius around 48 for me, in this case.
| | 04:53 | Now actually I want to change
the Channel to Alpha. We click the
| | 04:56 | stopwatch for Radius and move out in
time a few frames and then animate this to 0,
| | 05:01 | and you will see as we play this
back that the ink strokes kind of splat on, like that.
| | 05:07 | (Splat!) And yes, the
sound effects really do help.
| | 05:11 | But you want to make sure you don't
have too many frames that are showing of this
| | 05:15 | because that's not super-attractive.
But the whole action takes place so fast
| | 05:19 | that maybe if you add a little
Blur during those first few frames,
| | 05:22 | it wouldn't really tell that what's going
on here. But it kind of splats on and
| | 05:26 | these last little circles come on last, which
kind of makes it feel more like real Ink Spatter.
| | 05:33 | Now there is a few more things that we
can do with this going forward.
| | 05:36 | That's pretty much it for the tutorial.
But if you want to take this to the next step,
| | 05:38 | number one, you could apply
the Roughen Edges effect, one of my favorites.
| | 05:43 | Apply Roughen Edges, maybe
take down the Border a little bit, maybe
| | 05:48 | take down the Scale a little bit. And
you could just basically add some grunge
| | 05:52 | to the edge of these little ink spatters to
make them look a little bit more realistic.
| | 05:57 | Anyway, you have to play with these
settings in order to get them where you
| | 06:01 | want them, but having a little bit of a
rough edge around some of this makes it
| | 06:05 | look a little bit more believable. As
you can see the downside of this is that
| | 06:09 | it does take some fiddling with in
order to get it to look good. I'm not really
| | 06:13 | super happy with these settings or
rather the box, but you could play with this
| | 06:15 | a little bit more and get
better results I'm sure.
| | 06:17 | Another thing that you can do is to
select the Ink Spatter layer that we have
| | 06:22 | isolated and rendered, then go up to
the Layer menu at the top and select
| | 06:27 | Auto-trace. This will create a mask
around all of the ink spatter. From there
| | 06:34 | you could do a whole bunch of stuff.
If you have this as a separate mask then
| | 06:38 | you could go in and animate mask
expansion for each of the different masks that
| | 06:42 | it creates and that would
look better than Minimax.
| | 06:45 | If you animate the mask expansion to
expand all of these different masks,
| | 06:50 | it would make it look like each one of
them is splatted on, whenever you animated it to.
| | 06:55 | And you don't have that kind of control
with Minimax and Minimax doesn't look as good
| | 06:58 | as that. Also by having a mask around
your ink spatter, if it was a solid layer,
| | 07:04 | you could export this to Flash and have
it remain a vector. Once you have created
| | 07:08 | masks with this, you could also copy
and paste the masks into Adobe Illustrator
| | 07:12 | and once there there you could apply
the Crystallize tool or the Pucker and
| | 07:17 | Bloateffect to kind of give
it more of an ink spatter look.
| | 07:21 | So I'm sure there is many more ways to
do this, but here are a bunch of ideas
| | 07:24 | just to get you started on creating ink spatter.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating watery textures| 00:01 | At some point in your motion graphics
career you will probably be asked to make
| | 00:04 | a watery type texture. So in this
movie, I'm going to show you a couple of
| | 00:07 | different ways to do that.
| | 00:08 | First, we'll start up by making some
water with the Fractal Noise effect.
| | 00:12 | So I'm going to go to the Effects &
Presets panel and do a search on Fractal Noise
| | 00:16 | and apply that here to my solid.
| | 00:18 | Now if you want more information on the
effects that we are going to be looking
| | 00:22 | at in this movie, we are going to be
looking Fractal Noise, and also Wave
| | 00:25 | World, and Caustics. Check out the
After Effects Effects training series on
| | 00:29 | www.lynda.com. In this movie, I'm
just going to give you some formulated
| | 00:32 | recipes to get you thinking creatively.
| | 00:35 | So the Fractal Noise effect in the
Effects Controls panel, take the Fractal
| | 00:38 | Type dropdown to Swirly. Next, take the
Noise Type to Spline. Now, we're going
| | 00:45 | to skip Contrast and Brightness, we'll
come back to them in just a second, take
| | 00:48 | the Overflow dropdown to Wrap Back.
| | 00:51 | Now, what Wrap Back does is that it
makes it so that once things become too bright,
| | 00:56 | they don't just push to white.
They actually wrap back, going back and
| | 01:02 | becoming darker. As you can see this
can create really interesting visual
| | 01:07 | patterns. But it's also really great
especially when you're making water,
| | 01:10 | because it really helps when you are making
these little caustic edges that we see in water.
| | 01:15 | So, leave Overflow set to Wrap Back,
take Contrast to about 127, take
| | 01:21 | Brightness to about 102. And again,
as I said before, there are no hard and
| | 01:27 | fast rules about how to make water
with Fractal Noise. So these are just my
| | 01:30 | settings, my recipe that I've created,
so feel free to tweak this as you please.
| | 01:34 | Open up the Transform area next,
uncheck Uniform Scaling and for Scale Width,
| | 01:40 | take this down to about 74 or so.
Scale Height, take that down to about 36.
| | 01:47 | Next, take Complexity to 3.2. Now
it's starting to look like water, looking
| | 01:52 | pretty good. Open up Sub Settings, take Sub
Influence up to 92, and Sub Scaling up to 71.
| | 02:02 | Now, this is about our final water
texture, but if you wanted to play with this
| | 02:06 | more, let's say you want to take down
Sub Influence, Sub Scaling. If you wanted
| | 02:10 | the water to be less turbulent, a
little bit more smooth, you could increase
| | 02:14 | the Scale Width. And then you have some
pretty decent looking water. Of course
| | 02:18 | we need to colorize this.
| | 02:19 | So, let's go ahead and apply the
Tritone effect. The Caustics and Highlights,
| | 02:24 | I'm going to leave at White. Go ahead
and change the Midtones to a nice watery
| | 02:28 | blue, looking pretty good there.
What I'm going to do is also change the
| | 02:32 | Shadows color, but I'm going to use the
Midtones color as a base. So, I'm going
| | 02:36 | to click the eyedropper for Shadows and
then click on the color swatch for Midtones.
| | 02:41 | Next, click on color swatch for Shadows.
Get the color picker here and then we
| | 02:46 | can make this darker as we so choose.
I'm kind of not liking these little
| | 02:51 | pockets of midtones that we're getting.
So, what I'm going to do is go back up
| | 02:55 | to the top and adjust the Contrast a
little bit further until we get rid of
| | 02:58 | those, and that's looking pretty good there.
| | 03:01 | Now, if you want to animate this, I'd
recommend, even though you could use
| | 03:06 | Evolution, which works pretty good,
one of the things that I found that works
| | 03:09 | good this particular setting is to
animate Sub Offset, particularly the X axis
| | 03:14 | of the Sub Offset. So you can see that
kind of looks like, it creates like this
| | 03:17 | nice rolling water effect. So, you'd
probably want to animate this a little bit
| | 03:21 | and then also animate Evolution just a
little bit to bring this water to life.
| | 03:25 | But you could use this water as just a
texture background of course, you could
| | 03:29 | also use it with a track matte in text,
you could also use it for background
| | 03:34 | elements, you could use it with the
Corner Pin effect to warp this and put this
| | 03:37 | maybe like in a pool or in a
background or something. Definitely a lot of
| | 03:41 | possibilities here.
| | 03:42 | Let's look at another way to make
water with the Caustics effect. I have here
| | 03:45 | this Caustics comp with two layers in
it. I have the Precomp Wave World layer
| | 03:52 | here, which is actually a
precomposition of a solid with the Wave World effect
| | 03:55 | applied to it. And this kind of has
like this nice look, like somebody is
| | 04:00 | dragging their finger in this gray sludge.
| | 04:04 | Well, the Caustics effect is going to
take this gray sludge and make it look
| | 04:07 | like water. So, I'll take off the
visibility of the Precomp Wave World layer
| | 04:11 | and let's turn on the Medium Gray-
Royal Blue Solid. And let's apply the
| | 04:15 | Caustics effects, caus, there we go.
Apply that and take the Water Surface
| | 04:21 | dropdown from None to Precomp Wave World. And
now we have some pretty decent looking water.
| | 04:28 | Again, like somebody is running
their fingers through this. It looks
| | 04:32 | spectacular. But before we preview this
and show you really what this is doing
| | 04:35 | here, I want to change the color on this.
I'm going to apply the Levels effect
| | 04:39 | and I'm going to brighten the Highlights,
ever so gently. And I'm also going to
| | 04:45 | darken the Shadows, again a little
subtly. And also I'm going to drag the
| | 04:50 | Midtone slider to the right darkening
everything overall. And that's a little
| | 04:55 | plastic, so I might want to
ease up on that just a little bit.
| | 04:58 | Finally, I want to apply some Hue/
Saturation. It's a little bit too saturated,
| | 05:04 | so I'll take Saturation down. There we go.
That's looking pretty good. You can
| | 05:08 | also change the Hue if you want. We
make this a little bit more greenish.
| | 05:12 | And now we click the Home key and do
a Ram Preview. Okay, there we go.
| | 05:19 | Again, as we preview this, we can see
these beautiful ripples in the water,
| | 05:22 | they are so realistic. Watch this
little ripple right here. It goes down and
| | 05:27 | then bounces off the edge and comes
back again off of this bottom edge of the
| | 05:33 | imaginary pool. So we have some just
beautiful ripples here and this might even
| | 05:38 | look better if all the colors were
changed because this looks a little bit more
| | 05:41 | like paint than water.
| | 05:43 | But nevertheless it is a beautiful
watery ripple reflection type thing we got
| | 05:48 | going on here. It's an amazing
combination using Wave Worlds and Caustics together.
| | 05:52 | So all in all we have two different
ways to create cool water effects in After
| | 05:57 | Effects with Fractal Noise and with Caustics.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating clouds and fog| 00:01 | In this movie, we're going to make a
cloud and some fog from scratch in After
| | 00:04 | Effects. We'll make both with a very
versatile Fractal Noise Effect. Now,
| | 00:09 | let's start with making a cloud first
and so we'll start in the Clouds comp.
| | 00:12 | Now what we're going to do is with
the Cloud layer selected, I'm going to
| | 00:16 | select the Pen tool and I'm going to
click-and-drag, and click-and-drag, and
| | 00:21 | click-and-drag, basically making kind
of like a cloudy type shape here.
| | 00:27 | It's definitely not a perfect type cloud
shape, but what is a perfect cloud really?
| | 00:33 | If you want to, you can go back to the
regular Selection tool and grab on these
| | 00:37 | anchor points and tweak them as you see
fit. Of course, we'll talk about masks
| | 00:42 | and using the Pen tool later on in
this training series. Once you've got a
| | 00:46 | somewhat cloudy type shape, go ahead and
apply the Fractal Noise effect to this layer.
| | 00:51 | Now, you may have noticed previously
when using the Fractal Noise effect,
| | 00:54 | the default settings for Fractal Noise do
look like clouds already. So we don't
| | 01:00 | have much to do. So, I'm going to
take the Noise type from Soft Linear to
| | 01:04 | Spline, make it a little bit smoother
there and Contrast, maybe I'll take down
| | 01:08 | just a wee bit, and Brightness
maybe I'll take up just a wee-bit there.
| | 01:14 | You may also want to dial back the
complexity just a little bit. Let me take it
| | 01:18 | down to 5 or so. Now, one of the things
that's preventing this from looking decent
| | 01:23 | are the edges. So, I've to do some
things to fix the edges. First of all,
| | 01:28 | what we'll do is we'll select Cloud layer,
hit the letter F for Feather and
| | 01:32 | we'll feather the edge of the mask.
| | 01:35 | It'll soften the edge of this cloud a
little bit and give us a little bit more
| | 01:39 | believability. And we'll also select
the cloud layer, hit the letter T for
| | 01:43 | Opacity and take down the opacity of the cloud.
| | 01:47 | Now, I know we talked earlier in this
training series about blend modes,
| | 01:50 | but I find that if we use, let's say for
example Screen, we get a result that's way
| | 01:55 | too bright. Of course if you were going
for cartoony clouds, that would be fantastic.
| | 02:00 | In this case, I'm trying to create
clouds that are as photo believable as
| | 02:03 | possible. So, I'm going to go back
to Normal and take down the opacity.
| | 02:07 | Now, you might also want to add some
Fast Blur to smooth things out here.
| | 02:12 | Again, there are no hard and fast rules
for making clouds in After Effects. So,
| | 02:18 | as we add a little bit of Fast Blur,
it smooth things out, it looks pretty nice there.
| | 02:21 | We'd also add Roughen Edges to
bring some edges of the cloud in and
| | 02:25 | actually, I probably want to turn off
Fast Blur for the moment and take up
| | 02:30 | Roughen Edges before Fast Blur. So,
it'll actually blur the edges as well.
| | 02:34 | I'll take the Edge Type to Rusty and
I'm also going to increase the Scale.
| | 02:40 | I'm getting some fairly cloudy edges here. I
may want to increase the border a little bit.
| | 02:46 | You can't get carried away with this
stuff. If you do it too much, it's going to
| | 02:49 | start looking really fake. So, I'm
going to take mine to about 15-20, somewhere
| | 02:54 | in that general ballpark and then
I'm going to turn back on my Fast Blur.
| | 02:59 | Maybe now I'll dial it back a
little bit. It's a little bit too strong.
| | 03:03 | Then click outside the mask to de-
select it. Fairly decent looking cloud.
| | 03:08 | I want to take down the Opacity of it a little
bit. But all in all, not too shabby of a cloud.
| | 03:14 | Now, let's hop over to the Fog comp
and make some fog. Fog is even easier to
| | 03:19 | make with Fractal Noise than clouds are.
| | 03:22 | So we have this car pointed at us with
these headlights here. So we're going to
| | 03:26 | apply this fog to make it even creepier.
So I'll select the Fog layer and apply
| | 03:31 | the Fractal Noise effect to the Fog layer.
| | 03:34 | I've already taken down the opacity of
the layers and I've already put it in
| | 03:39 | Screen mode as well just so we could
see what's going on as we're adjusting the
| | 03:43 | Fractal Noise. Now again, we really
don't have too much to do here and there
| | 03:48 | are no hard and fast rules about making fog.
| | 03:50 | So what I'm going to do is open up
Transform, un-check Uniform Scaling and
| | 03:55 | increase the Scale Width. Now, if you
want an overall general sense of fog,
| | 04:01 | this might be a good kind of shape
for you. You may want to increase the
| | 04:05 | Contrast if you'd like.
| | 04:07 | You might also want to take down the
Complexity so there's not as much detail
| | 04:11 | in the fog, which is looking pretty
fake at this point. So, if we take down the
| | 04:14 | Complexity there, to me that looks a
little better. Let's also take down the
| | 04:17 | Brightness, so there's less of the fog.
| | 04:20 | Now, you might want to make more of a
wispy fog. You might want to take Scale
| | 04:24 | Width up and just increase that a lot.
So it's like this wide again wispy fog
| | 04:29 | and we might increase Contrast here,
decrease the Brightness, we have these
| | 04:33 | nice wispy little fog lines
in between us and the car.
| | 04:38 | If you really want to get cool here,
we could animate this and the way
| | 04:42 | I'd recommend animating this is checking
Perspective Offset and then animating the
| | 04:47 | X axis of Offset Turbulence. What
that's going to do is give you kind of a
| | 04:51 | layered fog movement as if there is
wind blowing the fog by. That's going to
| | 04:58 | create a very beautiful result.
| | 05:01 | So there are a couple of quick ways to
create some nice and easy clouds and fog.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Looping animated textures| 00:00 | In this movie, we're going to look
at how to create a seamlessly looping
| | 00:04 | animated texture. So many times when
I'm making some cool textured background,
| | 00:09 | let's see with Fractal Noise or Cell
Pattern, I just wanted to keep going
| | 00:12 | endlessly in the background
while other stuff comes up on screen.
| | 00:16 | This is great too if you are doing
something for a trade-show or a convention,
| | 00:19 | you just want like something kind of
cool in the background while text comes up
| | 00:23 | on screen or something. You don't
want to sit there and actually make an
| | 00:26 | animated composition that's several
hours long. What you can do is just make a
| | 00:31 | small composition that's maybe a few
seconds long and then put that into a
| | 00:34 | bigger composition. You'll have to
learn how to loop that seamlessly and again,
| | 00:37 | that's what I'm talking about here.
| | 00:39 | So then, I have this texture here that
I've animated, looks really cool. I'm
| | 00:43 | happy with it, some kind of like
alien light-force thing or something. But
| | 00:48 | you'll notice as it gets to the end of
the composition, like right now starts
| | 00:51 | over again, there is this huge jump
and it looks really, really, really
| | 00:55 | unattractive. So here is the last
frame and here is the first frame. So it
| | 00:59 | makes it jump from there to there,
and it just doesn't look very pleasing.
| | 01:04 | So here is the way that we can make
this loop seamlessly. This only works for
| | 01:09 | certain effects. So like I mentioned
Fractal Noise and Cell Pattern it will
| | 01:13 | work on, and there are a couple others.
But for most effects you will need an
| | 01:17 | Evolution Property and these Evolution Options.
| | 01:20 | Be aware that the new effect,
Turbulent Noise, which is really cool. It's
| | 01:26 | supposed to be a higher-end version of
Fractal Noise. It does have Evolution
| | 01:31 | Options but you cannot loop this effect.
So that's why in my training I still
| | 01:36 | prefer to use Fractal Noise instead of
Turbulent Noise, because I love nascent looping.
| | 01:41 | So, going back to Fractal Noise here,
you'll notice my Evolution Property
| | 01:44 | animates from 00, so 0x evolutions in 0
degrees, just nothing essentially to 1x
| | 01:51 | evolution and 33 extra degrees.
| | 01:54 | Well, what you need to do in order to
make this happen is do a couple of things
| | 01:57 | actually. First we're going to turn on
Cycle Evolution. Next we need to make
| | 02:02 | sure that this number, Cycle (In
Revolutions) is equal to the number of full
| | 02:07 | complete revolutions that Evolution will do.
| | 02:10 | Now technically, they don't have to be
the exact same number, but they do have
| | 02:14 | to be divisible and now I'm not going
to take time to figure out the math here.
| | 02:17 | By the way, we are not going to animate
cycle. I'm going to hit the End key and
| | 02:21 | then I'm going to change this to 1x revolution.
| | 02:24 | So, I'm going to get rid of those
extra degrees there. So, we have one full
| | 02:28 | cycle and from the beginning of our
comp to the end of the comp, we have one
| | 02:32 | full revolution of evolution.
| | 02:34 | Now, I'm going to do a ram preview
of that while I'm talking to you about
| | 02:38 | another issue here. Now this is
going to be an almost seamless repetition
| | 02:44 | except that it's going to be one
frame shy of a perfectly seamless loop.
| | 02:51 | So what we're going to need to do
is actually go back and fill with the
| | 02:55 | evolution keyframe we just set by
manually moving it one frame beyond the end
| | 03:01 | of the composition. But let's just go
ahead and preview what we have so far
| | 03:06 | before we make that change. Get another
couple of seconds of rendering here of
| | 03:11 | our cool alien light thing, okay, here we go.
| | 03:15 | So, it's going, it's going and when
it loops, it's good. There's not a huge
| | 03:20 | jump from the last frame to the first
frame. However, if you notice, I hit the
| | 03:25 | End key and the Home key, and there is
no difference visually. So basically,
| | 03:30 | we're getting a repeating frame in there.
| | 03:32 | So what I need to do is select the layer,
type the letter U and then I need to
| | 03:37 | grab this keyframe and drag it
one frame over beyond the end of the
| | 03:43 | composition. This will make it so that
the last frame of the composition is one
| | 03:48 | frame in the sequence before the
first frame in the sequence. So then we'll
| | 03:53 | have a complete perfect loop. Let's
preview this just to make sure, okay.
| | 03:57 | So now as we play that back, we
notice no change, no pause, even a slight
| | 04:04 | pause, it's just a beautiful seamless loop
the way Mother Nature intended loops to be.
| | 04:10 | Now, this Comp 1 is three seconds long.
I'm not going to make four hours of
| | 04:15 | this, but what I can do is go over to
the big old comp that's 20 seconds long.
| | 04:20 | Not that big, but it's bigger than what
we had. I can take this composition and
| | 04:24 | add this to the big old comp. And then
I could hit Command+D or Ctrl+D on the
| | 04:28 | Mac, and I could make these so
that they stack up next to each other.
| | 04:33 | Now, you probably want to use the
trick I taught you in Chapter 2, where you
| | 04:35 | jump to the outpoint, go to the next
frame and then select the next layer and
| | 04:41 | make sure the first frame is there,
so that way you don't have any gas or
| | 04:44 | overlapping frames, but if you'll notice,
these two segments just continuously
| | 04:50 | loop perfectly from one to the next.
| | 04:53 | So, we could have hours of this clip,
this little three second clip many, many
| | 04:58 | times in a row and it will never be a
noticeable jump, it will appear to be
| | 05:02 | just a seamless beautiful loop.
| | 05:05 | So again you could use this for
practically anything, during credits or whether
| | 05:08 | you have a DVD menu background or
maybe you have some credits rolling or
| | 05:12 | whatever, save yourself some work,
and also some rendering time. Instead of
| | 05:16 | having several hours of this, just
have a few seconds that you duplicate.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating the slow motion matrix effect| 00:00 | This movie is going to be less of a
tutorial and more of a kind of case study
| | 00:05 | on a concept and idea about creating
this kind of paused slow-motion effect
| | 00:09 | made popular in the movie The Matrix, which
was revolutionary in the visual effects world.
| | 00:15 | So, there's some of the simple
incomplete example here of this concept.
| | 00:19 | So I'm going to select my composition.
Let's do a quick little preview of this.
| | 00:22 | We have this 3D render of a car. It blows up,
pauses, rotates and then continues to explode.
| | 00:29 | So, let's go through it a little bit slower
with the car. Blows up and pauses and then
| | 00:33 | rotates and then continues to explode.
Now, we still need to finish this off,
| | 00:38 | because the car hasn't completed exploding.
I'll show you how to do that just a moment.
| | 00:42 | But there's a couple different tricks
I used here to pause the footage in the
| | 00:45 | background, the explosion from
detonationfilms and then also the still image layer.
| | 00:50 | A couple of different techniques
here. For the explosion, what I did is
| | 00:53 | I used the Time Warp Effect.
| | 00:55 | The Time Warp Effect has this
property called Speed, which allows you to
| | 00:58 | control the speed of your footage. So,
I animated it from 100, which means
| | 01:03 | you're basically playing the clip at
regular speed, to 0, which means the clip is frozen,
| | 01:08 | and for the explosion I kept
it at 0. When it was time for the
| | 01:12 | explosion and go back to life, I animated it
from 0 to 100%, so it continues to explode.
| | 01:18 | Now, for the SUV, I've used an effect
called Shatter. Let me tell you what I've
| | 01:23 | done here. I've taken Gravity
Inclination from 0 to 90 degrees. By default,
| | 01:29 | the Gravity Inclination is at 0 and then
you use the Gravity Direction Property to
| | 01:34 | determining which direction
it'll be pulled by gravity.
| | 01:36 | But if you take Gravity Inclination
to 90 like I have, then it will render
| | 01:40 | Gravity Direction, in effect
it won't do anything and instead will
| | 01:44 | blow up directly towards the viewer,
which is what I wanted. To create the stop
| | 01:48 | in the motion, what I've done is
I've animated Viscosity and Gravity.
| | 01:52 | While the car is blowing up, I have
Viscosity set to 0.1 and Gravity set to 3,
| | 01:58 | which are pretty average results
creating a normal blowup. But as I go past here,
| | 02:03 | when I want to freeze, I increased
Viscosity to 1. That makes the air
| | 02:07 | very thick. So, the pieces just kind of
stop moving and then I also changed the
| | 02:12 | Gravity to 0, which means
they kind of float there.
| | 02:16 | So, if you don't do both of these things,
then the trick won't work. Now,
| | 02:19 | it's up to us to resume the explosion after
the 3D camera turn here. So, it blows up,
| | 02:26 | rotates and then it continue exploding.
| | 02:30 | So, what you need to do is go over
to the number 2 marker here in the
| | 02:32 | composition, which is where the
explosion starts blowing up again and we need
| | 02:36 | to animate Force 2. Force 1 is the
default explosive force in Shatter and
| | 02:42 | Force 2 is kind of like a non-necessary secondary
force you can use for occasions just like this.
| | 02:48 | So, the first thing I want to do is I'm
going to select the SUV side layer and
| | 02:51 | type the letter U to see its
keyframes and we need to get Viscosity back to
| | 02:56 | where it was. So, I'm going to click
this little icon here to set a keyframe
| | 03:02 | for Viscosity at the current frame
and that will use the same value as over
| | 03:06 | here under the 1 comp marker.
| | 03:09 | We don't want any interpolation
happening during this time. So, if we have a
| | 03:13 | keyframe value of 1 here and a
keyframe value of 1 over here, then nothing
| | 03:17 | happens in between. So then, I want
this to be close to the 2 marker here,
| | 03:23 | probably right on the 2 marker and then
couple of frames after that, I want to
| | 03:27 | take Viscosity back to 0.1, its original value.
| | 03:32 | Now, we're not done yet, because what
we need to do is go back to Force 2 and
| | 03:37 | it doesn't have any radius. So, what
we're going to do is we're going to click
| | 03:39 | the stopwatch for Radius at 0 and move
out a few frames and increase the radius.
| | 03:45 | Now, let's see our results here. Go out
in time little bit, our pieces continue
| | 03:50 | to blow up and everything looks good.
Now, what we might want to do is also
| | 03:55 | change Gravity. So, we could come over
here and do the same thing we did with
| | 03:59 | Viscosity where we clicked this little
diamond forcing a keyframe with the same
| | 04:03 | value, a value of 0 over here and then
move in time and take Gravity back to its
| | 04:08 | original value of 3.
| | 04:10 | You may also need to adjust the depth
parameter to taste, but I think that
| | 04:14 | we're fairly good here. So, if we move
out in time, then our pieces continue to blow up.
| | 04:19 | We can tweak this as desired,
but I think we're getting the basic
| | 04:24 | result here. So, let's go ahead and hit
the Home key and preview the final result.
| | 04:28 | Let me actually deselect this layer as
well, there we go. Let's try this. Okay,
| | 04:32 | so we've our car, it blows up, moves
and then continues to explode. Now,
| | 04:39 | we could play with the physics a little
bit more here. I'm not sure I totally like
| | 04:42 | the end result as far as the pieces
kind of blowing off into space. These would
| | 04:46 | be probably little bit more intense.
| | 04:48 | Maybe we can even turn up the Strength,
the Force 2, to make those blow up a
| | 04:51 | little bit more intensely. But you get
the idea that we've got a pretty nice
| | 04:55 | result here. Now you might have also
noticed that as this is blowing up,
| | 05:00 | we're getting this ugly result here because
the SUV layer actually only goes out to here.
| | 05:05 | It's not the full size of our
composition so we're only getting part of
| | 05:09 | the shatter pieces.
| | 05:10 | If we needed to fix that, we could
add the Grow Bounce effect before the
| | 05:14 | Shatter effect, so that the layer's
boundaries would not limit the Shatter effect.
| | 05:19 | Of course with a case study,
there's a lot you can do to improve the
| | 05:22 | situation, but my intention here just
to show you a couple of different tricks
| | 05:25 | using Time Warp and Shatter to
achieve this kind of stop motion and then
| | 05:30 | back in motion again effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Turning a layer into 3D cards| 00:01 | Back in Chapter 6, we looked at an
effect called Card Dance, which turned your
| | 00:05 | layer into a series of 2D cards that
can be moved in 3D space. In this movie,
| | 00:11 | I'm going to show you how to create
this popular 3D Postcards Effect with 2D
| | 00:15 | cards that can move in 3D space
with a similar effect called Card Wipe.
| | 00:20 | From my experience, Card Wipe is a lot
easier to use than Card Dance as well.
| | 00:24 | Let's just start out with the basics
though. Let's go to the Simple Card Wipe
| | 00:27 | composition and apply the Card Wipe
Effect to the Magenta Solid. Now, the Card
| | 00:34 | Wipe Effect is meant to be used as a transition,
a transition from one layer to another layer.
| | 00:40 | With its default settings you can't
really tell what it's doing. So, open up
| | 00:43 | Camera Position and increase or adjust
Y Rotation and you could see that we're
| | 00:49 | actually creating these 2D cards that
flip in 3D space. I've another layer here
| | 00:56 | on my composition, which is the Lime
Green Solid. I could change the Back
| | 00:59 | layer, in other words, the back of the
cards from Magenta Solid to Lime Green Solid.
| | 01:04 | I can also animate and adjust
Transition Completion. So, at 0%, the layer is
| | 01:10 | completely whole and then as I
increase Transition Completion, the cards flip
| | 01:14 | over to reveal whatever is on the other
side. So, this is how you would use it
| | 01:18 | in the traditional sense as it
transitions from one clip to the next.
| | 01:22 | But there's so much more you can do
with this effect than just a transition.
| | 01:26 | If I go down to the Bottom properties,
Position Jitter and Rotation Jitter, we
| | 01:31 | have two properties for every dimension.
For X Jitter for example, we have a
| | 01:36 | Mount and Speed. Now, if I hit the
Home key and hit the Spacebar and preview
| | 01:41 | this, you'll see there's no animation, we've set
no keyframes, this effect is not auto animated.
| | 01:45 | However, once you increase the Amount,
let's say for example, Z Jitter Amount,
| | 01:51 | then what we're starting to see is
randomization in the Z Position. Even though
| | 01:56 | we haven't set any keyframes yet, once
you increase Amount, then the properties
| | 02:02 | will auto animate using the Speed parameter.
| | 02:04 | So, now if I go back and hit the
Spacebar, we can see the Z Position auto
| | 02:10 | animating or jittering. The Amount is
how much towards you and farther away
| | 02:15 | from you in the Z-axis can it go and
the Speed refers to how fast it goes.
| | 02:21 | If you just want to randomize their
position in Z space, we could take Z Jitter
| | 02:25 | speed down to 0 and the cards
will stay where they are at.
| | 02:29 | Now, there's a lot of cool uses for
these cards, because they're in 3D.
| | 02:35 | Let's go over to the Card Wipe Photos comp.
I've created this Photos.psd layer.
| | 02:39 | This is a compilation of photos that my
wife and I have taken at various zoos and
| | 02:45 | aquariums and museums in the Seattle area.
| | 02:48 | I am going to go ahead and apply the
Card Wipe Effect to this layer. We see it
| | 02:52 | flipping. But what are the things I'm
going to do, if you notice here, I've set
| | 02:55 | up this grid with these photos, six
down and six across. So, I'm going to
| | 03:00 | change my rows and columns value, so
here's the number of rows, we can make it
| | 03:04 | a lot of rows or just a few rows.
| | 03:06 | I'm going to change these rows and
column settings to match how many cards or I
| | 03:11 | have or how many photos I have in my
grid. So, that's 6 for rows and 6 for
| | 03:16 | columns. Now, you'll notice once we've
done that that each one of these images
| | 03:21 | matches up to a different card.
| | 03:24 | So, that's like we now have created
this series of 3D postcards. Now, let's say
| | 03:30 | I take my Transition Completion to 0, I
actually don't want to transition these
| | 03:33 | at all. I just want them to be floating
postcards in space. We could then go to
| | 03:38 | Position Jitter, let's increase Z Jitter amount,
so they kind of come at you and farther away.
| | 03:44 | We could also animate them a little bit
along the X-axis from left or right and
| | 03:50 | along the Y-axis up and down. We could
also go up and up Rotation Jitter if we
| | 03:54 | want and animate their rotation
jittering on the X-axis, the Y-axis or the
| | 04:01 | Z-axis or all of them. Now, even though
I haven't animated anything, all these
| | 04:07 | properties are good to go.
| | 04:08 | So, if I play this back, we have all
this craziness happening in 3D space with
| | 04:13 | little to know effort on our part. Now,
in the next composition, I'm going to
| | 04:16 | set this up a little bit more. What
are the benefits of Card Wipe along with
| | 04:20 | Shatter and a few other effects is that
there's a camera system dropdown, so we
| | 04:24 | not only get to use these camera position
values, but we can change this Comp Camera.
| | 04:29 | In that case, we'll use the
composition's camera. So, once we do that, the
| | 04:33 | Camera Settings are grayed out here,
because we just moved the camera and the
| | 04:36 | cards will follow suit. Hit the Home
key and preview this and then we have
| | 04:39 | these cards that kind of assemble and
gather together here. But again, since
| | 04:44 | we're using the Comp Camera, I can
select the Camera layer, select one of the
| | 04:48 | camera tools and just click and drag and Card
Wipe is just as fully 3D effect, very cool!
| | 04:57 | I can also right-click using the new
Unified Camera tool, right-click and drag
| | 05:02 | up and down to zoom in and out, use
the middle mouse button to pan around and
| | 05:07 | again the left mouse button to kind
of spin around a little bit. Now if we
| | 05:11 | select the Photos.psd layer, I've
already animated some of these properties for
| | 05:15 | you and you'll notice that Back layer has
been set to this Animal Discoveries comp.
| | 05:20 | I've got a little logo here, if I turn
this on and solo it. I've got a little
| | 05:24 | Animal Discoveries layer. I think
that's kind of moves around like a little bit
| | 05:27 | here, kind of verbally. So, I'll turn
this layer off and so, I've set it so
| | 05:33 | that the back of these cards is
this Animal Discoveries layer.
| | 05:37 | So, what we can do is go over here to
where in these cards gather together and
| | 05:41 | once the cards are kind of close
together, let's say about there, we'll go over
| | 05:44 | to Transition Completion, let's take
this down to 0, click this stopwatch for
| | 05:49 | Transition Completion and move out a
little bit and then increase Transition
| | 05:53 | Completion to 100%.
| | 05:54 | So, basically what will happen is
these 3D cards will be in 3D space, the
| | 06:00 | camera kind of moves around them a
little bit and then they rotate, come
| | 06:04 | together and once they come together,
they flip to end of their logo. It to be
| | 06:09 | used for like a intro to a TV show or
some other video presentation, it's kind
| | 06:12 | of a cool effect, so let's hit the Home key
and do a RAM preview of the final result here.
| | 06:18 | So, the cards gather, flip around and
there you go. Actually the flipping was
| | 06:24 | way too quick. I was zoomed into my
timeline a lot more than I thought I was,
| | 06:29 | so hit the U key for Transition
Completion here and let's go ahead and pull
| | 06:33 | this out, so there's little bit more
time that it takes to flip and preview
| | 06:38 | that one more time.
| | 06:40 | The 3D postcards come together and flip to
reveal a logo. It's a very, very cool effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a lightsaber| 00:00 | In this movie we're going to look at
making the ever-popular light saber.
| | 00:03 | We've talked about how to do this briefly in
After Effects CS4 Essential Training,
| | 00:07 | but we are going look at more detail here.
| | 00:09 | I am going to start by applying the
Beam effect, which is really going to be
| | 00:13 | what gets us the results here to the
light saber fight footage. You'll notice
| | 00:17 | that by default Beam completely
replaces whatever layer it's applied to.
| | 00:21 | We could check Composite On Original here
and now we have the Beam on the layer
| | 00:26 | with the footage. I really prefer not
to do that though. I'm going to delete
| | 00:29 | the Beam effect. What I prefer to do
always if I can help it is to apply the
| | 00:33 | effect to a separate layer.
| | 00:35 | So, I've created a Black Solid layer
here. Although, it doesn't matter what
| | 00:38 | color, because again, once you apply
Beam to it. If you apply the Beam to Black
| | 00:41 | Solid, it completely
replaces that layer with the Beam.
| | 00:44 | But now we have two separate
independent layers that we can move around as we
| | 00:48 | please, use blend modes, a whole bunch
of other things. So I really prefer to
| | 00:51 | do it this way. So here we have me
and Paavo, great guy and we're having a
| | 00:55 | little friendly sword fight. You
know how that goes. I'm going to
| | 00:58 | click-and-drag the left effect control
point over to the bottom of the light
| | 01:02 | saber here, and the right one which is
the ending point, if you look over here
| | 01:07 | in the Effect Controls panel, you
could see that value moving around. Put the
| | 01:10 | ending point at the tip of the light
saber, and let's go ahead and increase the
| | 01:14 | Length all the way to 100%.
| | 01:17 | So, the length of the light saber goes
from the top to the bottom. And what I'm
| | 01:20 | going to do is get rid of the effects
control points here. I'm going to click
| | 01:23 | to deselect the effect, so I'm going
to click here in a blank area in Effect
| | 01:28 | Controls panel. Now, this seems to be a
little off, so what you can do is hold
| | 01:32 | down the Command key on the Mac or the
Ctrl key on the PC and click-and-drag,
| | 01:37 | let's say the left value, the X value
for the Starting Point, and also the
| | 01:42 | Ending Point, just to line those up to get
those, so that they're a little bit more accurate.
| | 01:46 | And I also want to raise the Starting
Point, so we'd adjust the Y axis, the
| | 01:51 | second value here. It looks like
we're doing pretty good. We may want to
| | 01:55 | increase the Ending Thickness,
because right now it's kind of a little bit
| | 01:58 | closer to the camera than the Starting
Thickness is, so it should be a little
| | 02:01 | bit bigger here at the top to make
it look like it's coming out at us.
| | 02:05 | We've fairly decent looking light
saber at this point, but let's improve it.
| | 02:08 | Now, there's an Inside Color and an
Outside Color. The Inside Color is this
| | 02:12 | kind of like bright pink and then the
Outside glow is red. Now, obviously if
| | 02:16 | you're familiar with Star Wars, you
know that the color of your light saber, it
| | 02:19 | tells a lot about the person. It's
almost like the Star Wars version of a
| | 02:22 | horoscope. Let's go to the Effects &
Presets and instead of changing the color
| | 02:26 | here, which would require us to change
the Inside Color and Outside Color, I'm
| | 02:30 | happy with the bright
inside and the colored outside.
| | 02:33 | So, what I'm going to do is apply the
Hue/Saturation effect and now all we've
| | 02:36 | to do is move the Master Hue and that
will change the color of our light saber,
| | 02:41 | whether we want it to be green or
whether we want to be blue here. Or it could
| | 02:45 | be Samuel L. Jackson's character, it
can be purple if you would like. I'm just
| | 02:48 | going to leave mine set to blue for
the time being. And one more thing we can
| | 02:53 | do here to make this look extra,
extra cool is apply the Glow effect.
| | 02:59 | We do that and we now have a better
light saber. If you want to make the core a
| | 03:05 | little brighter, we can click the
Inside Color. I'll just take this little bit
| | 03:08 | closer to white, which brightens up
again the core of the light saber. We've
| | 03:12 | some additional values here. We
could play with Glow. We can decrease the
| | 03:16 | Threshold so more of the light saber
is glowing, and we can drag it to the
| | 03:20 | right so that less of
the light saber is glowing.
| | 03:23 | I kind of like the default value
somewhere around 60 or so. We could also
| | 03:27 | increase the Glow Radius to make this
glow little bit brighter. The more you
| | 03:31 | spread out the glow, the less it's
concentrated directly on the light saber
| | 03:35 | itself. So I won't take that up too
much. So again, somewhere around the
| | 03:40 | default value of 10 is pretty good in this case.
| | 03:42 | Now here is one of the big challenges
I'm going leave you with. As we play this
| | 03:46 | footage, you'll notice that Paavo and I
actually have a light saber fight which
| | 03:50 | is really cool. So what you'd want to
do then, at that point is that as I move
| | 03:54 | my light saber, then you'd want to
animate my Starting Point so it matches the
| | 03:59 | red marker here, at the beginning of
my light saber. And we'll want to click
| | 04:03 | the Ending Point and click that at the
end of the light saber. And there we go.
| | 04:08 | And you'd rotoscope this, animating it
frame by frame by frame, which is really
| | 04:12 | time consuming and really beyond the
scope of this tutorial. But that's what
| | 04:16 | you'd want do if you want to bring this to life.
| | 04:18 | Now alternatively you could also
-- actually let me go down here to
| | 04:20 | Switches/Modes in the Timeline panel.
Click the fx icon here in the Timeline to
| | 04:24 | turn off all effects. And actually, I
just turn off visibility of the Black
| | 04:27 | Solid here. But we've these little
red points and so if you wanted to, you
| | 04:30 | could use the Tracking system in After
Effects. Or you could use, say, Mocha
| | 04:34 | for AE or something to track those red
points, and then paste the tracking data
| | 04:38 | into the Beam effect.
| | 04:41 | But regardless, this tutorial is about
how to create a light saber and I think
| | 04:46 | we did a pretty good job of that.
You are now ready to defend the galaxy,
| | 04:50 | or at least doctor footage
to make it look like you are.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making "whips" of light| 00:01 | In this movie we're going to look at
creating these cool whips of light that
| | 00:04 | you see oftentimes in motion
graphics, especially when it comes to like
| | 00:07 | motivational or sales type stuff, things
where you really want to wow and dazzle people.
| | 00:12 | So we've this little motion graphics
background here with some Fractal Noise,
| | 00:15 | and this whip of light comes in.
There are some sparkles from CC Particles
| | 00:19 | Systems II, which we looked at
earlier in this title, and some text and whatnot.
| | 00:23 | But this light whip is what
we are going to be making here.
| | 00:26 | So let's go over with the Start
composition and we have a single black solid,
| | 00:32 | and I've put it in the Add blend mode
so we're not seeing the actual solid
| | 00:36 | itself, but it is here, trust me. And
if we go over to Effects & Presets panel,
| | 00:41 | let's do a search for the Vegas
effect. Go ahead and apply that.
| | 00:45 | Now the purpose of the Vegas effect is
to kind of create that old styled Vegas
| | 00:50 | marquee look where lights are kind
going around in the circle. There is
| | 00:54 | actually a lot of parameters here, so
you can do a lot of other effects as well.
| | 00:58 | Now Vegas works its magic by putting a
stroke around either the contours of the
| | 01:02 | image or around a mask. Now we're
going to use a mask. So go ahead and select
| | 01:08 | the layer and then pick one of the
Mask tools, or you could use the Pen tool,
| | 01:13 | if you are familiar with that. If you
are not familiar with those, we'll cover
| | 01:16 | those later in this chapter
so you'll know what to do.
| | 01:18 | But I could just click here and drag
maybe an ellipse. I don't want the entire
| | 01:24 | ellipse to be in the shot, I kind of
want just like the outer ring to be in our shot.
| | 01:30 | And if you want to move the
ellipse around while you are dragging it,
| | 01:33 | you could just hold the Spacebar to do that.
So basically, I want this bottom lip
| | 01:37 | of the ellipse to be the path that my
light whip is going to travel. So I can
| | 01:43 | move this around as I please. So then
the whip of light will traverse this path
| | 01:49 | through our shot here, right through the bottom.
| | 01:52 | So now that we have a whip, we can go
back to the Vegas effect, change the
| | 01:55 | Stroke dropdown to Mask/Path. Now my
only complaint about Vegas is that the
| | 02:00 | default Color is yellow, which is also
the default Color of Mask, and the Width
| | 02:05 | is really small. So by default, you'll
have a hard time usually seeing where
| | 02:09 | the Stroke is on the Mask. So I'm
going to take up the Width quite a bit here
| | 02:15 | and I'm still not seeing anything,
because I forgot that in the Mask/Path area
| | 02:18 | we need to choose the actual path from
the Path dropdown. So we need to select
| | 02:21 | Mask 1 and here we have these streaks of light.
| | 02:26 | And again you can kind of see the Vegas
style marquee lights here because these
| | 02:30 | lights actually go all the way around
the path. Now these have an extra bit of
| | 02:34 | glow to them, if I un-Shy the layers
here. We'll see that, this adjustment
| | 02:39 | layer is actually on top of the Vegas
layer, the Whip layer that we are using.
| | 02:44 | And so the colors are little bit
different here. If I just solo this layer,
| | 02:49 | you'll see what Vegas typically looks
like. But the adjustment layer with the
| | 02:52 | Glow is just so awesome
looking. I got to keep that on.
| | 02:55 | Now what I'm going to do here is come
down to my options and adjust some of them.
| | 03:00 | Width is probably little bit too
big now. I can take this down to about
| | 03:03 | 10 or so. I really don't want a trail
of lights here. We just want one long
| | 03:07 | light. So I'm going to take the
Segments from 32 to 1. Now you see, we have one
| | 03:13 | longer Segment here, looks pretty good.
| | 03:16 | And the way that we adjust where this
Segment is, where the light is, along the
| | 03:20 | path, is by adjusting Rotation. So we
just bring this to life with Rotation.
| | 03:25 | So if I start here maybe and then adjust
it to animate downwards, then we are
| | 03:30 | going to animate it, coming into our
scene, and then going out of our scene.
| | 03:34 | There is also some Opacity options
where we could adjust the Start and End
| | 03:39 | point Opacity, but I kind of like the
default settings for this effect because
| | 03:42 | we have this nice lowered Opacity tail
that appears too fade out, looks really cool.
| | 03:47 | Now you might also want to
change the Length here. So if we drag this
| | 03:50 | down at the left, make a smaller number, we
are going to have a smaller whip of light.
| | 03:55 | It's actually still probably a little
bit too long because it's still taking up
| | 03:58 | our entire shot in one fell swoop.
So that looks to be a little better.
| | 04:05 | So starting at the 1 marker, let's go
ahead and start this whip of light off
| | 04:09 | screen, I still see a little bit of it
there, let's take it off a little bit more.
| | 04:14 | I'm using a value of about -100
or so but it's going to completely vary
| | 04:18 | based on how big your Mask
is and where it's positioned.
| | 04:21 | I actually want to back up my Current
Time Indicator a little bit because this
| | 04:25 | 1 marker is where I want the whip of
light to collide with my sparkles. So I'm
| | 04:30 | going back up a little bit and set a
keyframe for Rotation. Then I'm going to
| | 04:35 | go back to my marker by hitting the 1
on the main area of the keyboard, and
| | 04:39 | I'll take my Rotation and move this
down until it looks like it's about
| | 04:44 | colliding with the sparkles and the glow there.
| | 04:46 | And then we can move in time to when
the text is on the screen. Here we've
| | 04:50 | SALES. It kind of looks like a
sales presentation, then I can move that
| | 04:54 | completely off screen. Now what you
might want to do as well is just have one
| | 04:58 | keyframe from the beginning of the whip
to the end of the whip, but if you want
| | 05:02 | to keyframe in the middle there, you
could slow things down or speed things up
| | 05:04 | as it's going through the text. And that's
essentially the trick, to create a whip of light.
| | 05:10 | There is another couple of ways you can
do this. For one, you could just simply
| | 05:14 | create a line in After Effects or a
regular path and then distort it with the
| | 05:19 | Distort Effects. Now one of the ways
that I use to create these background
| | 05:23 | elements-- let's actually look at that
real quick. I made some Fractal Noise
| | 05:26 | and then stretched it out. And I made
the Width really big here and the Scale
| | 05:31 | Width values in the Fractal
Noise. And then I added a Mask.
| | 05:34 | So it was just these few lines,
and then I brought them back to this
| | 05:37 | composition and then bent them with the
Warp effect. So you could actually use
| | 05:41 | that same technique on a piece of
Fractal Noise and then warp it and bend it
| | 05:46 | until you get kind of like a whip of
light look. And again as you could see
| | 05:49 | here, I have applied a liberal dose
of the Glow effect all over the place,
| | 05:54 | which really makes this come alive and
look more like a burning ball of light.
| | 05:58 | So again, it is the blurs and the
blend modes and the glows that's really
| | 06:03 | making this come to life.
| | 06:04 | I will hit the Home key and preview our
final result. So to preview this, there
| | 06:11 | is the final result little whip of
light comes in and the text animates on it
| | 06:15 | at the same time and the sparkles, all
at the same time. And we've a background
| | 06:18 | moving around. It creates a really cool look.
| | 06:21 | These little whips of lights are
really useful to lead the viewer's eye to
| | 06:25 | something that's important. We have a
lot going on here in our shot. But this
| | 06:29 | whip of light tells the viewer
exactly where their focus should be. And for
| | 06:33 | that very reason it's great for things
like titles or text that you really want
| | 06:36 | to draw the user's attention to. Fun
little trick with a lot of room to play around.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making silhouettes in After Effects| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at
creating the popular silhouette look in
| | 00:04 | After Effects. This look is perhaps
most recognizable from the original iPod
| | 00:09 | commercials. But we also see it all
over the place when used with vector art
| | 00:12 | and all kinds of things. So this
will be an introduction to that trick.
| | 00:15 | I have some great footage here of this
cute little girl spazzing out, rocking
| | 00:19 | and rolling. And so what we are going
to do is actually apply to her the Curves effect
| | 00:25 | and again there are many ways to
do this but to me this is the easiest.
| | 00:29 | And then in Curves just grab the right
hand point and we know that as we drag
| | 00:35 | this down, we are making the
brightest of the image much darker than
| | 00:38 | it initially was and this
bottom left hand corner is black.
| | 00:42 | So if we drag the upper right hand
corner, down all the way to the bottom then
| | 00:46 | we'll have a flat line at the bottom,
which will give us pure black. We'll put
| | 00:51 | our cursor over here and you could
see in the Info panel in the upper right
| | 00:53 | hand corner of the screen up here that
we are seeing 0, 0, 0 for R, G, and B,
| | 00:58 | which means that we have a pure black
image. And now when we preview this,
| | 01:02 | we could see her dancing against a pink
background just like she was in her own
| | 01:07 | little iPod commercial.
| | 01:08 | Now if we want to take this to the next
step, we could select the layer and hit
| | 01:11 | Command+D to duplicate it. And then
we can actually move this out in time,
| | 01:18 | maybe extend the end a little bit there.
So we have multiple dancers and then
| | 01:22 | we could move one of the dancers over
to the side, maybe we could even scale
| | 01:25 | this one down a little bit so she is
kind of like a background dancer. And we
| | 01:29 | could select that layer again, hit
Command+D to duplicate that. Move it over to
| | 01:34 | the other side as background dancers
are want to do. And then again move this
| | 01:39 | a little bit more in time and change that there.
| | 01:44 | Now I have also added some Opacity
keyframes, so that this fades out at the end
| | 01:48 | so what we'll want to do is select
these two layers, hit T for Opacity.
| | 01:52 | So now what I want to do is click and drag
a little marquee around these keyframes
| | 01:56 | and then click and drag one of them to
the right to move it over so that they
| | 02:00 | line up with the layer beneath them
here. I'll want to do that with these as well.
| | 02:04 | Click and drag to marquee and
then once you have selected, move them over.
| | 02:08 | There we go. Now if we hit the Home key,
we can preview our final product.
| | 02:13 | (Music playing.)
| | 02:22 | iSpaz. Beautiful.
| | 02:24 | Now a couple other things you can do
here. We could alternatively, let's see.
| | 02:28 | We'll select this layer. Maybe we'll add
the Ramp Effect. Another thing that's
| | 02:32 | very common is not just to use live
action footage and create a silhouette with it,
| | 02:36 | but use still images and oftentimes
you will have a whole gradient over
| | 02:40 | that footage, maybe we could adjust
this Ramp so it's a little bit more blended
| | 02:45 | or whatever. But we often see the
still images maybe like buildings, graffiti
| | 02:49 | that have like this ramp in it just like of the
lot of cool silhouettes used in bumpers all the time.
| | 02:53 | It's a simple trick but it's pretty
iconic and it's great when you are working
| | 02:57 | maybe say for a certain brand that
needs to have a lot of color identity and
| | 03:01 | on top of that it just looks cool.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a background of animated bars| 00:00 | So often when I'm working on a project,
I find that I just need some kind of
| | 00:04 | background texture, just something moving on
the background that just looks kind of cool.
| | 00:07 | So let's go ahead and apply Fractal
Noise here. We are going to start from
| | 00:11 | scratch. And this is a very simple
texture. I would want to take the Noise Type
| | 00:16 | to Block and already this is a really
cool pattern as is. I mean with Fractal
| | 00:21 | Noise you could pretty much just
anything you throw at it and it's going to look
| | 00:24 | kind of cool depending on
how you colorize it and stuff.
| | 00:27 | Let's go ahead and take the
Complexity to 2 and let's open up Transform and
| | 00:32 | uncheck Uniform Scaling. Now really
the only two key ingredients here is that
| | 00:38 | you take the Noise Type to Block and
then you do what we are doing now with the
| | 00:42 | scale controls. You don't necessarily
have to adjust Complexity and you can
| | 00:47 | adjust many other properties
to create an even better result.
| | 00:50 | Let's go ahead and scale Height really
big. Now the slider only goes up to 600
| | 00:55 | but we can actually take this number
much higher. So click in that number and
| | 00:58 | type in 5000, take down the Scale
Width a little bit and come down here to
| | 01:04 | Offset Turbulence. We get this seam
right here that's not very attractive.
| | 01:08 | So we can adjust Offset Turbulence,
which is kind of like the equivalent of a
| | 01:12 | position control for the Fractal Noise
Effect. So we have the X Position and
| | 01:17 | the Y Position, so we are going to take
the Y Position and drag it to the left
| | 01:21 | to raise that line up until we have now
seamless bars, which look pretty cool.
| | 01:27 | And again, feel free to add
Contrast, brightness to taste.
| | 01:31 | Now obviously, what we have to do now
is colorize it. I want to show you kind
| | 01:35 | of a cool way to colorize it. Again I'm
giving you this technique, it helps at
| | 01:40 | some time you are in pinch and you just
have to pull something out of your hat
| | 01:43 | real quick. This is kind
of a quick way to do it.
| | 01:45 | Also if you need to find a color scheme
to go with it real quick as well, here
| | 01:48 | is an accompanying trick. On the web,
you can go to kuler.adobe.com and Kuler
| | 01:55 | has all of these awesome color
swatches that people have loaded. These great
| | 02:00 | little themes from 3 to 5 color
swatches usually where people can upload these
| | 02:05 | color combinations.
| | 02:07 | So there is loads here. We are looking
through 331-340 out of 12,503 different
| | 02:15 | color combinations. So there is a lot
going on here. I'm going to pick this
| | 02:18 | franky color combination, which
looks pretty cool. If you want to see it
| | 02:22 | bigger, you can click on it. And if
you want to edit it, you can go back or
| | 02:27 | click it again, and then click this
little icon right here. If you want to
| | 02:32 | change it, you can go to the color
wheel. You actually get the RGB values and
| | 02:36 | copy and paste them if you want. You
can adjust the sliders. A lot you can do
| | 02:39 | here to play with color.
| | 02:41 | In this case I want to use these three
colors on the ends and the one in the
| | 02:46 | middle to colorize my Fractal Noise bars.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going
| | 02:50 | to go back to After Effects, I'm going
to apply the Tritone Effect and then we
| | 02:55 | have three colors here that we need to
use. So I'm going to actually move After
| | 02:59 | Effects out of the way and I could just
use these eyedroppers to sample colors
| | 03:05 | from here. If you want to you can
even click the color swatch, open up the
| | 03:09 | color picker and use that eyedropper.
And you could actually get a dynamic view
| | 03:13 | of what that looks like.
| | 03:14 | So I'm going to use this far right color,
the brightest one for the highlights
| | 03:18 | and then it automatically goes back
to Firefox you can do that or your web
| | 03:21 | browser. I'm going to go to After
Effects, click OK. Open up Midtones, do the
| | 03:25 | same thing. Pick the center color,
go back to After Effects, click OK and
| | 03:31 | finally click on the Shadows Color
Swatch. Click on the eyedropper, click on
| | 03:36 | the dark color swatch, go back to
After Effects. And click OK. And maximize
| | 03:41 | After Effects, and there we go.
We have a really nice color scheme.
| | 03:45 | All you have to do now to bring these
bars to life is to animate the evolution
| | 03:49 | property. And instantly we have a
really cool background with a very nice color
| | 03:53 | scheme and we were bailed out of a pinch,
thanks to the ease of Fractal Noise and Kuler.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating an "army"| 00:01 | In this movie we are going to take
some sweet footage from greenlayers.com,
| | 00:04 | this cool military guy here. And we are
going to create an army out of him. Now
| | 00:09 | I realize that probably didn't sound
like all that much because basically just
| | 00:13 | duplicate the guy many times, right.
| | 00:15 | Well, there is a few tricks here that
maybe you haven't thought of that I want
| | 00:18 | to go through with you. Now this clip
right here, the movie clip, this is the
| | 00:22 | footage that we are going to be
dealing with, again from greenlayers.com.
| | 00:25 | And let's just preview this clip and see
what we got here. We kind of go in the
| | 00:28 | slow motion but basically this guy is
stepping here, he turns from the side to
| | 00:32 | face you, he steps, and he salutes,
and then he puts his arm down.
| | 00:36 | That's pretty much the clip right there.
| | 00:38 | Now what I'm going to do is I'm going
to duplicate this clip and create a row
| | 00:41 | of these guys. But it's important that
we use him facing forward and not one of
| | 00:47 | the profile frames, because he is
thinner in his profile than he is facing you.
| | 00:53 | So we don't want to use this as a guide then
have our figures a little bit too close together.
| | 00:57 | So let's go to about here, select the
layer and then hit Command+D on your
| | 01:03 | keyboard if you are on a Mac or
Ctrl+D on the PC, and duplicate this five times.
| | 01:07 | One, two, three, four, five.
That makes a total of six layers. Then drag
| | 01:14 | the top copy over to the left and put
him proportionately on the left where
| | 01:19 | this guy is on the right, about the
same amount of space away from the edge.
| | 01:25 | Next, select all the military guys,
click the top layer, Shift-click the bottom
| | 01:29 | military guys, so all six are
selected. Then go over to the Align panel.
| | 01:33 | You can get the Align panel out from the
Window menu, if it's not showing here.
| | 01:37 | And let's go ahead and do a vertical
center alignment which will make sure that I
| | 01:42 | didn't mess this guy up around as I
was dragging him and that they have the
| | 01:44 | same vertical position.
| | 01:46 | Next, just go down to Distribute Layers
area and click this button, horizontal
| | 01:50 | center distribution, which will evenly
distribute these guys from the far right
| | 01:55 | to the far left. So now this is pretty
cool. We got six guys here, all stepping
| | 01:59 | in unison, our little mini army or
at least a mini mob at this point.
| | 02:04 | Now what we want to do is start adding
some random variations to these.
| | 02:08 | They look too fake because they are all
doing the exact same thing. They look the
| | 02:12 | exact same way. Now one of the biggest
dead giveaways is the face. But we are
| | 02:18 | not going to take the time to adjust
that. Although, you could go in with maybe
| | 02:21 | Liquefy or some other tool and kind
of play with those facial structures a
| | 02:24 | little bit so they are
six unique looking characters.
| | 02:27 | But here is a couple of things we can
do. I'm going to select the second clip over.
| | 02:31 | That will be this guy right here,
located right here, second layer up.
| | 02:35 | And we are going to add Hue/Saturation
to this guy and we'll play with the Hue
| | 02:39 | just a little bit. You see if you do
it too much, it turns this into that
| | 02:43 | girl from Willy Wonka that ate
the blueberry stuff. We don't want that.
| | 02:46 | So just a little bit more red in his face. You
might want to do that to a couple other guys as well.
| | 02:52 | Just randomly pick a few guys and turn
their skin a little bit different color,
| | 02:56 | so it's not all exactly the same.
Maybe we change the Saturation. I've kind of been
| | 03:01 | doing it to every other guy here, so
let's just go one layer up and apply some
| | 03:05 | more color correction to the guy next
to him, this guy right here. And again,
| | 03:10 | we can desaturate him,
making him kind of pale whitish.
| | 03:14 | Now that we have played with their
color little bit let's add a Levels
| | 03:17 | adjustment to a few of these guys to
adjust their brightness. Let's start with
| | 03:21 | the top layer, which is the guy on
the far left here. Apply Levels and
| | 03:25 | you could drag the center slider around
to make his uniform little bit darker or
| | 03:29 | lighter. Just slightly lighter is good.
Slightly different. Well, let's just go
| | 03:34 | ahead and randomly apply Levels,
darkening uniforms, and also again randomly
| | 03:41 | lighten then as well. It's looking pretty good.
| | 03:45 | Now let's go through and randomly add
some variation to their sizes. So you can
| | 03:50 | go in to their Scale properties, unlink
them, maybe make some guys like a little
| | 03:54 | bit wider, or more narrow. You got to
be careful with this. Only a couple of
| | 03:57 | degrees is legal before it starts
looking kind of cartoony. But we have
| | 04:01 | that ability to go in and let's make
this guy a little bit taller. There we go.
| | 04:05 | I have to readjust that accordingly and
make one guy just universally smaller.
| | 04:12 | Maybe 73% here and bring him down
so his feet line up. And let's go in here
| | 04:20 | and make this guy universally bigger.
Make the guy next to him a little bit
| | 04:24 | shorter. Let's make the guy in the
middle a little bit taller and we'll call it
| | 04:30 | a day in that department.
| | 04:32 | Now one last variation here, it's
probably most important but thankfully it's
| | 04:36 | also the fastest. Now we want to vary
them in time. So right now they are all
| | 04:42 | perfectly in sync which totally gives
this away. So what we want to do is grab
| | 04:46 | this clip and drag this to the left,
so that they are all kind of starting at
| | 04:49 | different times. Now they are soldiers
so we don't want them to be too off or
| | 04:54 | it's going to be super fake and hocky
and obvious. So you want to be careful
| | 04:58 | with that. But if they are all off a
few frames then see how it's just going
| | 05:01 | to stagger there? It just makes it look a
little bit more human and believable. Very good.
| | 05:06 | Now, okay, so the hard stuff is over.
Now lets pre-compose these guys. Go ahead
| | 05:11 | and select the top layer of the army
guy and then Shift-click the bottom one,
| | 05:16 | and pre-compose these layers by using
the keyboard shortcut Command+Shift+C on
| | 05:22 | the Mac or Ctrl+Shift+C on the PC.
I'm going to call this PRECOMP bunch of
| | 05:29 | dudes and now we have this one layer of
guys that we can move around as one whole.
| | 05:36 | And you can see the power of this. I'm
going to hit Command+D and duplicate the
| | 05:40 | PRECOMP and now when we move the PRECOMP,
we can select the layer beneath, hit the
| | 05:44 | S for the Scale property and then
shrink this down so we actually have now
| | 05:49 | another row of guys. We could even add
Levels to these guys and make them all
| | 05:55 | darker so they appear to kind of go
in the background a little bit more.
| | 05:59 | And do that again. Duplicate that layer
and on this back layer of Levels,
| | 06:04 | make them even darker. And scale them down
even more. Now obviously, if we had more
| | 06:09 | time here, we could go in and
randomize these things. It doesn't look super
| | 06:12 | great how all their skin tones kind of
match the guy behind them, because that
| | 06:15 | probably wouldn't be the way they would
line up in the military. But for the
| | 06:19 | purpose of this tutorial,
that looks pretty good.
| | 06:20 | Now what I want to do is add a final
touch here. We could obviously keep
| | 06:25 | duplicating this and make a much bigger
army, than just the 18 military guys we
| | 06:29 | have right now. But what I want to do
is show you something else. I'm going to
| | 06:32 | put all these layers into 3D and then
we can create a new camera. We can
| | 06:37 | go to the Layer menu > New Camera.
Click OK here. Then I'll select all of
| | 06:42 | these layers and hit the letter P for Position.
| | 06:46 | Now let's offset them in Z space.
Grab Z position, first for the front guys here.
| | 06:51 | Take this to a negative number.
I'm going to use about -80 or so. And for
| | 06:56 | the next layer, we could probably just
leave them where they are. Maybe take it
| | 06:59 | to about -20 or so. And for the last row,
we can move that up in space, to about +30 or so.
| | 07:07 | Now if we grab the Camera layer and
select the Unified Camera tool, then you
| | 07:12 | could see that we can move around here
and we have this 3D army of guys. And
| | 07:18 | again, these aren't still images. This
is actually movie footage. So we could
| | 07:21 | zoom our camera around here and we
could pan around them, especially their legs,
| | 07:26 | while they are doing
their exercises or whatever.
| | 07:28 | And we can click with the right-click,
if you have a 3-button mouse, and zoom
| | 07:33 | in with our camera. You can also use
the middle mouse button to move the camera down.
| | 07:38 | And if you are just looking at
their feet, you can't really see their
| | 07:40 | faces. It's even more believable.
It's really a great look and again as we
| | 07:45 | preview this, seeing them all move, not
quite in unison, it's just a really cool thing.
| | 07:52 | So feel free to animate this and take
this to the next level on your own time
| | 07:56 | and also look for other ways that you
can randomize these characters to make it
| | 08:01 | more believable that you
actually have footage of an entire army.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Advanced AnimationAdjusting speed in the Graph Editor| 00:00 | In the next few chapters we're
going to start looking at some advanced
| | 00:03 | animation techniques, and in my mind,
this is one of the best parts of After
| | 00:07 | Effects. This is where After Effects
really starts to come to life because it
| | 00:10 | allows you, once you know these
advanced animation techniques, to bring things
| | 00:14 | to life in a much more
organic and realistic way.
| | 00:17 | In this movie and in the next movie as
well, we're going to look at the Graph Editor,
| | 00:21 | which is really where advanced
animation takes place, especially when
| | 00:24 | you're not using expressions. There
are really two types of adjustments we do
| | 00:28 | in the Graph Editor, speed and value.
In this movie we're going to focus on speed;
| | 00:32 | in the next movie we'll focus on value.
| | 00:35 | I have here this jet that I've animated.
It starts from the bottom right-hand
| | 00:38 | corner and flies off to the upper left-
hand corner. It's kind of cool.
| | 00:43 | It's a Thunderbird jet, courtesy of the
United State Air Force. So it flies up and
| | 00:48 | then at the very end, it kind of looks
like it's going to spin and do one of
| | 00:50 | those cool flashy maneuvers in the sky.
| | 00:53 | So what we want to do is make this
animation have a little bit more life to it.
| | 00:57 | It kind of just has a constant speed.
It's kind of boring. Ideally, what I'd
| | 01:01 | like it to do is start slower and then
go faster, as it starts to go into this
| | 01:05 | roll at the end. So let's go ahead
and open up the Graph Editor by clicking
| | 01:08 | this button here in the Timeline panel.
| | 01:11 | Now, by default, we can't see anything,
so let's go ahead and click Position to
| | 01:16 | select it, and then we could see its
velocity curve. Actually, you want to
| | 01:20 | double-check and make sure its
velocity curve, as it might not be. So go to
| | 01:23 | this little button right here, then
choose Graph Type and Options dropdown, and
| | 01:28 | select Edit Speed Graph, if
it's not selected already.
| | 01:31 | Now, this graph tells us the speed of
our object. If you have a horizontal
| | 01:36 | line, like we do here, it means that
the speed is constant over time. There are
| | 01:41 | no changes in the speed. One of the
toughest things you get used to about the
| | 01:45 | graph editors, especially when you're
working with the speed graph, is it's
| | 01:49 | hard not to get confused with position,
because we see the position changing.
| | 01:54 | We see it going from the bottom
right to the upper left, but its speed is
| | 01:59 | constant over time.
| | 02:01 | Typically, this means, boring
animation. So here is how we're going to fix this.
| | 02:07 | What I'm going to do is I'm
going to grab this left dot, and these two
| | 02:11 | dots represent the keyframes. Again,
the first one is the bottom right of the
| | 02:15 | airplane when it's down here, and the
second one in the upper left, when it
| | 02:18 | gets to its final destination.
| | 02:20 | As you could tell about the graph right
here, on the left-hand side, it's just
| | 02:23 | telling us how fast the plane is going.
It's going about 300 pixels per second
| | 02:28 | right now. Well, I actually want this
to start slower. So I'm going to click
| | 02:32 | this first keyframe and bring it down.
| | 02:36 | Now again, we're not changing the
value of the keyframe. Now, as I'm
| | 02:41 | clicking-and-dragging this, you
might be saying, well, if you look at the
| | 02:44 | position over here. It seems like
you're changing the value of the keyframe.
| | 02:47 | But I'm really not. If I hit the Home
key, where I'm over this keyframe that
| | 02:52 | I'm changing, you'll see there is no
change in the value. What it's doing is
| | 02:56 | it's changing the
interpolation between keyframes.
| | 03:00 | So where it starts and stops, and even
when it starts and stops, it's not being
| | 03:04 | altered in any way, shape or form.
It's only the path in between that is
| | 03:09 | changing. So now, by dragging this
keyframe down, we've slowed down the
| | 03:14 | beginning of this animation. So
instead of starting at 300 pixels per second,
| | 03:18 | it now starts at 0 pixels per
second and quickly picks up speed.
| | 03:23 | As I mentioned, the more horizontal the
line is, the less of a change there is
| | 03:27 | in speed; the more vertical the line is,
the more drastic the change in speed.
| | 03:32 | So let's go ahead and hit the Home key
and we'll do a RAM preview of this by
| | 03:37 | hitting 0 on the numeric keypad and
give that just a couple of seconds to
| | 03:41 | render out here and we'll
preview and see what we've got.
| | 03:45 | It's pretty good, little bit more
interesting. It starts slower and then speeds up.
| | 03:49 | I want to get more intense here.
So what I'm going to do is I want to
| | 03:52 | click-and-drag on this handle for this
keyframe, I'm going to drag this to the
| | 03:57 | right, which increases the
influence of the keyframe.
| | 04:02 | By increasing the influence of this
handle, we're basically saying we want to
| | 04:06 | delay the time before it gets to the
next value. So again, it's steep if we
| | 04:12 | keep it to the left and it's slower if
we get to the right. So basically it's
| | 04:16 | going to start out a little bit more
slowly. Then as you could see here, it's
| | 04:19 | going to ramp up and then we have
this little hump thing we've got to worry
| | 04:23 | about. Because it's going to go faster
and then kind of slow down as it rests
| | 04:26 | to this eventual resting spot down here.
| | 04:28 | So, let's go ahead and preview that
right now and see what we got, and it's
| | 04:34 | going and then it speeds up right about
then, and then it's going to slow down
| | 04:40 | at the end, which is bad, but, okay.
It's definitely starting out slow and it's
| | 04:45 | staying slower for longer, which is okay.
| | 04:48 | Now one of the things you could use as
a helper while you're working here is by
| | 04:52 | looking at these dots on the motion path.
This only works for position. But it
| | 04:56 | still can be a helper nonetheless. The
closer these little dots are, it means
| | 05:01 | that the animation is going slow right here.
These dots represent the individual frames.
| | 05:05 | So as these dots are closer together,
that's telling us that the jet has a
| | 05:09 | shorter distance to go from frame to
frame. Now later on in the animation up
| | 05:14 | here, we could see these dots. In other
words, the frames are farther apart.
| | 05:18 | So the jet has farther to go from frame to
frame. So this indicates the animation
| | 05:22 | is going faster in this area of the animation.
| | 05:25 | So you could kind of visually see,
where it's going slow, where it's going a
| | 05:30 | little bit faster and where it's really
starting to pick up some speed. Now one
| | 05:34 | of things we could do too is go here
to the right-hand keyframe and drag this
| | 05:38 | upwards to increase the velocity there.
| | 05:41 | In this case now, it's gradually
increasing speed throughout the animation.
| | 05:44 | So hit the Home key and preview that, and
there isn't any real burst of speed like
| | 05:50 | we were kind of initially looking
for, but all the same, it's going to
| | 05:53 | increasingly go faster throughout
the animation. It's not too shabby.
| | 05:59 | Now if we want to start really,
really slow, and then have a big burst of
| | 06:04 | speed, we want to drag this influence
handle, so we have a more flat line here
| | 06:09 | on the left-hand side, and then we want
to have a super big spike, somewhere in here.
| | 06:14 | Again, I could drag this right-
hand keyframe up a little bit if I need to.
| | 06:19 | You also notice how the graph
automatically readjusts itself once you drag the
| | 06:23 | keyframe upwards. Initially, we're
looking at 0 to 300 pixels per second. Now,
| | 06:28 | we're looking at 0 to 1,000 pixels a
second. That's that you don't have to keep
| | 06:31 | scrolling up forever, so
you can see your entire graph.
| | 06:35 | Okay. So let's hit the Home key and
preview the result of this curve. We know
| | 06:40 | it's going to start out and go slow for
a long time, probably slower than it's
| | 06:43 | realistic in this instance, but then
it's going to rear up really fast. So it's
| | 06:47 | going to start slow, boom, starts taking off.
| | 06:51 | So, you can see the difference that it
makes when you have these Curves. I've
| | 06:55 | seen a lot of animators use millions of
little keyframes, and that's really not
| | 06:59 | the best way to do things. If we had
several keyframes, throughout the process
| | 07:03 | of this animation and we wanted to
change them, that'll be really tedious. But
| | 07:07 | if you just have these Curves that
you're playing with, you could just grab
| | 07:10 | them and change a lot in the animation,
just by tugging on one of these handles.
| | 07:14 | Practically, all advanced animations
programs, even in the 3D world, work with
| | 07:18 | these types of Curves. That's just how
advanced animation is done. Let's look at
| | 07:23 | one other example of a common use for
this Graph Editor here. Turn on the Ball
| | 07:28 | layer. We have a simple ball animation here.
It's a bouncing ball, your standard fare.
| | 07:35 | I've created three keyframes here, if
we select the ball layer and hit the
| | 07:38 | letter U, you'll see those, and boy,
talk about a boring animation. I've not
| | 07:43 | done anything magical with these
keyframes as you can blame me to, and it just
| | 07:47 | goes up and down and back up again.
| | 07:50 | Now I realize that this is kind of
clich?. You see bouncing balls in every
| | 07:54 | animation test ever, right? The
reason is because if you could make a ball
| | 08:00 | realistically bounce, then you've got
some animation skills. So trust me, this
| | 08:04 | skill is a good one to have. Let's go
into the Graph Editor and click that
| | 08:08 | position property so we
can see what's going on here.
| | 08:11 | We have two different horizontal
lines. We have one horizontal line that
| | 08:15 | indicates the speed of the ball falling,
and then a separate speed, which is
| | 08:20 | actually a little bit slower than the
first because you could tell it's lower
| | 08:23 | with the ball going back up again.
| | 08:25 | So here's how we animate a bouncing ball.
What we need to do is click on these
| | 08:31 | keyframes in the center, and we want
them to be a spike like this. The reason
| | 08:37 | why is because when you bounce a ball,
it starts out slow when it's falling, it
| | 08:41 | gets a lot of speed as it falls, as it
gets close to the ground. It bounces,
| | 08:45 | and as it's bouncing as it's coming
back up, it has a big spike of speed, and
| | 08:50 | then it slows down as it gets
to the top of the crust again.
| | 08:53 | So again, we wanted to go basically
slow and then really fast and then slow
| | 08:58 | again, and this kind of spike look is
exactly what we were looking for. We want
| | 09:02 | to start out slow and then really fast
as it bounces and then slow again. Now
| | 09:07 | this isn't perfect, because all I've
done is just kind of willy-nilly, dragged
| | 09:10 | to this center point up, but
let's see what we've got so far.
| | 09:12 | It's not going as fast as it needs to,
looking okay, but let's go ahead and
| | 09:17 | drag these points up much farther. So
let's go to maybe 500 pixels a second, or
| | 09:22 | maybe 1,000 pixels a second. It is
going to get a little bit fast, but I'm not
| | 09:27 | driving, here we go, boom! So now it's
starting to look a little bit more believable.
| | 09:31 | Now you'll notice this. As it's
bouncing, watch the ball, it bounces up, and
| | 09:39 | then it all of a sudden, as it's going
slower, gets faster at the end. So it's
| | 09:44 | going slow and then there is kind of
like this weird pull of motion at the last
| | 09:48 | second. But if we look at the speed
curve, we could see where that's happening.
| | 09:51 | It kind of ramps up again at the end
and we don't really want that. So I'm
| | 09:55 | going to grab this keyframe and drag it
downwards. I'll do the same thing with
| | 09:59 | the beginning. If we want a more
intense spike, we can grab the influence
| | 10:03 | handles on the left and right sides
and drag these in if we so choose,
| | 10:08 | definitely a lot of Wiggle
room for playing around with.
| | 10:11 | But as you could see, we're getting a
little closer here. Let's try taking this
| | 10:15 | spike one last time, a little bit
farther here. This is a really intense spike,
| | 10:20 | but now, it's starting to look more
organic and realistic here. Let me center
| | 10:25 | this so we can see what's
going on a little bit better.
| | 10:28 | It's starting to be a little bit more
realistic of a bounce. Probably, even
| | 10:32 | make this look a little bit better by
turning on Motion Blur for the comp and
| | 10:35 | then for the layer and let's preview
how that looks. That's looking good!
| | 10:41 | Now one last word of advice on this
subject. Maybe it's just my opinion, but I
| | 10:46 | prefer to overdo things a little bit
rather than underdo things. So, in other
| | 10:51 | words, if we're bouncing this ball
animation, I would have it go little bit too
| | 10:54 | fast, then a little bit too slow.
| | 10:57 | The reason why is it's tough to get
things to animate very quickly, and often
| | 11:02 | animators, even really big bucks
animators, the ones that work in Hollywood on
| | 11:06 | big CGI things for Hollywood feature
films and stuff, they tend to animate a
| | 11:11 | little bit too slowly. As animators we're
used to laboriously going over frame by
| | 11:17 | frame, 30 seconds in one frame, going
over every single little frame of our work.
| | 11:22 | But in real life, if you're going to
swat a fly, you're probably moving a lot
| | 11:26 | faster than 30 frames a second. It's
almost like an instant. So for my money,
| | 11:30 | it's almost better to exaggerate
motion, to have them go a little bit faster
| | 11:35 | than you might think they need to go.
| | 11:37 | But the one thing I can tell you, folks,
is you need to get good at this Graph
| | 11:41 | Editor if you're going to be an
animator. I could also tell you that you're
| | 11:44 | going to want to know Disney's
principles of animation that we're going to
| | 11:46 | cover in the next chapter, so you
know how to apply all these Graph Editor
| | 11:50 | skills that we're learning.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting value in the Graph Editor| 00:00 | Not only can you adjust speed in the
graph editor, but you could also adjust
| | 00:04 | values for any property as well. I'm also
going to show you why you'd want to do that.
| | 00:09 | Now our example you might remember from
the last chapter, we created this cool
| | 00:14 | light whip that came in and this
text kind of came on, but I wasn't really
| | 00:18 | happy with the way the light whip
animated. Just kind of lackluster.
| | 00:22 | A uniform speed here, kind of boring.
| | 00:25 | So what we're going to do is spice
things up a little bit. What I wanted to do
| | 00:29 | is I wanted to come in here and whip in,
and then once the text starts on, right there,
| | 00:34 | I want the light whip to hit it and go
really slowly through it and then continue on.
| | 00:42 | This is a real challenge, if you're
just trying to edit the speed using the
| | 00:46 | graph editor. But it's not too tough
if you're using the value side of the
| | 00:49 | graph editor. Now I'll show you that
this can be done with any property, not
| | 00:52 | just the standard transform like
position and scale and rotation like stuff.
| | 00:56 | We're going to be using the rotation
property in the Vegas effect.
| | 01:00 | That's really what we have animated here.
Now unlike what we saw with editing speed in
| | 01:04 | the graph editor in the last movie,
we actually are going to change values here.
| | 01:09 | That's the whole
purpose that we're doing this.
| | 01:12 | So paste in and know what our values are.
We're starting at a positive value of
| | 01:15 | 282 degrees with rotation and then
animating to a negative 70 degrees.
| | 01:20 | That being said, let's go ahead and open up
the Graph Editor and make sure under
| | 01:25 | this dropdown here that we're seeing the Edit
Value Graph is checked, not Edit Speed Graph.
| | 01:30 | And then select Rotation property for
the Vegas effect and we could see here,
| | 01:34 | there is a linear animation. It's
going straight from our value of 282 to
| | 01:39 | negative 70. So what I'm going to do
here is I'm going to click and drag my
| | 01:43 | Current Time Indicator until the time
that I want it to animate and stop right
| | 01:49 | there and this frame right here again
is where I want the light whip to stop,
| | 01:54 | and then go slowly for a time.
| | 01:56 | In order to do that, we need to
change the value here. We could do this by
| | 02:00 | changing the value here. But it's
easier to do it with this line right here
| | 02:03 | actually. So what we're going to do is
create a new keyframe by going to the
| | 02:07 | Pen tool and then clicking on the
line where the current time indicator is.
| | 02:12 | Now I'm going to hit the letter V on
my keyboard to go back to the Selection tool.
| | 02:16 | Even if we go back to the
regular Editor Timeline, you see again,
| | 02:19 | we've made a new keyframe. Now what I'm
going to do is click and drag this keyframe
| | 02:23 | upwards, because it's not at the right
spot. So I'm going to drag this upwards
| | 02:29 | changing the value until the
beginning of this light whip gets in the right spot.
| | 02:34 | Now because of what we're looking
in terms of resolution here,
| | 02:38 | the low-res preview that you get while
you're dragging is not even close to accurate.
| | 02:42 | So even though this is about the right
value, I let go and then it snaps to the
| | 02:47 | right spot. Whereas before when I'm
just dragging for a preview, I let go right here,
| | 02:51 | it's way up in the upper left
hand corner of the screen. So you might
| | 02:53 | want to be careful about that.
| | 02:55 | Now what I want to do is change the
curvature of this line here. So far we just
| | 02:59 | had linear keyframes and we're just
changing the value, no big deal. But in
| | 03:03 | order to get the effect that we're
looking for, where it just kind of pauses or
| | 03:06 | goes really slowly across the word
Inspire while it's kind of being built here,
| | 03:11 | we need to call in help of Curves.
| | 03:13 | So what we could do is go back to the
Graph Editor and change the Interpolation
| | 03:19 | of this keyframe, or while it's
selected here, we can simply click for example
| | 03:22 | Easy Ease, or if you want to get
really specific what we're doing is changing
| | 03:27 | this to Easy Ease Out. We just want
to deal with this right side of the
| | 03:30 | keyframe. Now just as with this speed
editor, a horizontal line means no change.
| | 03:36 | So if we want this to kind of go
slowly here, we'll want this line for those
| | 03:41 | frames to be more horizontal. Now
sometimes this kind of thing happens where
| | 03:47 | you move the handle and everything
just kind of freaks out. So you could hit
| | 03:51 | Command+Z or Ctrl+Z on the PC to undo it,
and if you try it again and the same
| | 03:56 | thing happens, what you could do is go
up to the Pen tool and hold the Alt key
| | 04:01 | or the Option key on the Mac, and
you'll get this little arrow called the
| | 04:05 | Convert Anchor Point tool, and then you
can drag and then have a little bit more
| | 04:10 | control individually over these handles.
| | 04:13 | Once they're broken, you'll find that
you could adjust them independently,
| | 04:16 | which is really what you want to do.
I'll go ahead and hit the letter V on the
| | 04:19 | keyboard to switch back to the regular
Selection tool. So now again you can see
| | 04:23 | what we're doing here. From the first
two keyframes, nothing much has really
| | 04:27 | changed, and we could move this little handle
here to make sure really nothing has changed.
| | 04:31 | But then as it hits the text, it slows
down and then after the text comes on,
| | 04:38 | it goes away very quickly. Now before
we actually do a preview of this,
| | 04:42 | I'm going to back up in frames and make
sure that by the time this text is on,
| | 04:46 | right about there, maybe here,
that the light whip is actually connecting
| | 04:50 | with the text. So what I might need
to do is call on the help of this last
| | 04:55 | keyframe to adjust this frame.
| | 04:57 | Maybe I could just drag this to the
left a little bit more. Let's go ahead
| | 05:02 | and preview this and see what we've got.
So as we preview it, the light whip
| | 05:06 | comes in and it hits the text, it slows
down, but it doesn't slow down enough
| | 05:12 | and it doesn't disappear fast enough.
So what we need to do is go over to this
| | 05:16 | keyframe and select Easy Ease In.
| | 05:19 | So that way we have a handle to adjust
this side of the curve. So I'm going to
| | 05:23 | pull the direction handle on the
second keyframe to the left and now maybe
| | 05:27 | I'll go back to this top direction
handle and pull these out and that's
| | 05:32 | exactly what we're looking for right
about there, a curve that looks like this.
| | 05:36 | Now let's go ahead and preview this one
more time. So now our light whip comes in,
| | 05:42 | it hits the text, it slows down
considerably, and then flashes away as soon
| | 05:48 | as the text comes on. So it goes
fairly quick here. Actually we probably want
| | 05:53 | to even speed that up, but it comes in
and then it slows down. Look at that.
| | 05:58 | Frame by frame, it's going really slow
through that text. Almost just hits it,
| | 06:02 | and almost pauses, but just goes very,
very slowly, and as soon as the text
| | 06:06 | comes on, boom, it's just gone.
| | 06:09 | So again, just as with the speed graph,
a horizontal line needs not that much
| | 06:13 | changed. So the way we got it to go
slowly through these few frames is by
| | 06:17 | having a more horizontal line. Then
we wanted to get rid of the light whip
| | 06:21 | really quick and so we have this more
vertical line, which says hey, get the
| | 06:25 | heck out of here in quick style. And
so here we see the benefit of using the
| | 06:30 | graph editor for adjusting values.
Instead of sitting here and manually
| | 06:34 | changing all the keyframes here,
we just turned a couple curves here and then
| | 06:38 | have After Effects do all
the really hard work for us.
| | 06:42 | This is all totally non-destructive as
well. We could go in here if we wanted to
| | 06:46 | change anything in this curve. If we
had a bunch of keyframes here we would be stuck,
| | 06:49 | but because we're using Curves,
we could just tug on one of these
| | 06:52 | handles to make our changes. And if you
really, really, really mess up, you can
| | 06:56 | go back to the Graph Editor and hold
the Command key down or Ctrl key on the Mac
| | 07:00 | and take these back to these
diamond shapes. In other words, linear
| | 07:05 | interpolation and then you'll have
these straight lines again and you can
| | 07:09 | start all over again with
the Curves if you would like.
| | 07:10 | Now if you're feeling a little
overwhelmed and confused after the last couple
| | 07:15 | movies on the graph editor, that's
totally normal. This is not one of those
| | 07:18 | types of things like the Puppet tool
that you watch a tutorial on for five
| | 07:22 | minutes and you just get it.
| | 07:23 | It's one of those things that takes a
long time of practice. So think of it
| | 07:26 | more like a painting where you're
getting a big skill, rather than one single
| | 07:31 | tool or helper. What I really hope you
get out of these two movies is that the
| | 07:36 | graph editor is worth mastering.
It makes your animations more full of life,
| | 07:41 | than any other practical means in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating with the puppet tools| 00:00 | Okay, the last couple of movies were
a little bit challenging to the old brain.
| | 00:04 | So we're going to lighten
things up a little bit and talk about some
| | 00:07 | of the additional puppet tools. In
After Effects CS4 Essential Training,
| | 00:10 | we looked at the puppet Pin tool,
which we used to deform 2D layers.
| | 00:14 | In this we're going to look at the
Puppet Overlap and the Puppet Starch tools.
| | 00:18 | Now in this first example, we have a
little robot here named Herbie. I've used
| | 00:21 | him a lot in my training throughout the
year. It's a little robot I made in 3ds Max.
| | 00:25 | He's getting a old though, so
we're going to retire him. In this movie,
| | 00:29 | I replaced him with Eddie Technology, a new robot
that I have made in another 3D program, Cinema 4D.
| | 00:35 | So we're going to retire Herbie here.
So we have this dance party for him.
| | 00:38 | Now let's preview that and see what it
looks like. Nice. So we're going to send
| | 00:47 | Herbie out in style. Now as we scrub
this animation, we could see that when his
| | 00:51 | hands overlap, I want his hands to go
in front of him. But one hand actually
| | 00:56 | goes behind his body and another
one goes in front and also if you look
| | 01:00 | really closely, sometimes his hands
actually cuts through the body layer.
| | 01:04 | There are a few extra pixels there.
| | 01:05 | Now this really isn't After Effects'
fault, because when I deformed the puppet pins,
| | 01:09 | it's basically a 2D layer folding
over itself. So what we need to do to
| | 01:15 | control how this 2D layer overlaps
itself is to apply overlap pins.
| | 01:19 | So I'm going to go back to the first frame,
and I'm going to select the robot layer,
| | 01:24 | and I'm going to select the Puppet Overlap tool,
which will allow me to create overlap pins.
| | 01:28 | Now when you're creating overlap pins,
they kind of give you a guide here,
| | 01:31 | these little yellow Xs, these are where
you put the deform pins. Now you can't
| | 01:36 | adjust him from here while you're
creating overlap pins. This is just kind of
| | 01:39 | for reference. But I want to put some
at his hands. Notice that the overlap pins
| | 01:44 | are blue to distinguish them from the
deform pins. Now when you create a pin
| | 01:49 | and it's selected, you can go up to the top on
the Options bar and you have a couple choices.
| | 01:54 | You have the In Front value and the
Extent. So if I take the only Extent,
| | 01:58 | it controls how much of the object is
being influenced by this overlap pin.
| | 02:03 | Since we want to influence the whole torso,
I have taken it up to about 80 or so.
| | 02:09 | You wanted the same thing on the arms.
Select the overlap pin for the arms.
| | 02:12 | Again, take it to about 80, so the arm
is covered, but not too much more than that.
| | 02:17 | Now the In Front value is what
determines what is in front and it's actually
| | 02:22 | pretty easy. Whatever overlap pin has
a higher value, that part of the object
| | 02:27 | will be in front. So in this case I
want Herbie's right arm, the one on our
| | 02:32 | left side to be in front the most. So
I've got to take the In Front value to,
| | 02:37 | let's say 75. Now this could be one or
two or whatever, but since the default
| | 02:41 | value is 50. I usually do
things kind of relative to that.
| | 02:45 | So let's go up to 75. You could make
it 51 if you like. And then I'm going to
| | 02:49 | select his left hand, which is the one
on our right, and take that to anything
| | 02:52 | below 75. I'm just going to use 50 and
if we want both of these arms to be in
| | 02:58 | front of the torso, so in order for
the torso to be behind both hands, that
| | 03:04 | needs to have a lower In Front value
than any of the hands. So this hand has a
| | 03:08 | value of 75 and his left hand has a
value of 50. So as long as again this
| | 03:15 | torso point is below 50, then it will be fine.
| | 03:19 | Right now it's set to 32, so we'll just
leave it there. That's fine. So now I'm
| | 03:22 | going to hit the letter V to get the
selection tool. I always like having that
| | 03:25 | tool selected. So in case I click
somewhere on accident, it doesn't mess me up.
| | 03:29 | And I'm going to deselect the layer
and now we can preview this and see what
| | 03:33 | it looks like with the
arms overlapping correctly.
| | 03:37 | (Dance music plays.)
| | 03:43 | So now as we play this back, we could
see Herbie more fully shaking his money
| | 03:48 | maker and it just looks cooler
because his hands overlap. And again, notice
| | 03:52 | how his right hand is in front of his
left hand and his left hand is in front
| | 03:57 | of his torso. That's exactly how we
set those up based on their In Front
| | 04:01 | values. If I wanted his left hand in front,
then I need to make it something above 75%.
| | 04:08 | So with that we'll thank Herbie for
sharing his dance talents with us and we'll
| | 04:12 | go over to the Starch pins comp. Now
what we're going to do is I'm going to hit
| | 04:16 | the Home key and I'm going to select
the Head Beard layer. There are a few
| | 04:19 | layers here, there are some Eye layers,
and a Mustache layer, and the Hat layer.
| | 04:23 | But I want to play around
with here is the beard right here of the
| | 04:27 | wizard, which is actually attached to
his face. Now let me show you the problem
| | 04:30 | before we get to the puppet
Starch tool and the solution there.
| | 04:33 | I am going to click on his beard with
the Puppet Pin tool. Maybe put one on
| | 04:37 | his beard and one on his mustache,
one over by his ear there. Maybe one by
| | 04:43 | his forehead, and as I then go and
grab the one on his beard and move this
| | 04:47 | around, we see that his eyes are
moving a lot, his nose is moving a lot,
| | 04:52 | the back of his hair is just going crazy
there, and so we want to make it so that
| | 04:57 | we can move his beard as if it was
blowing in the wind or maybe he is talking
| | 05:00 | or something. And so the Puppet Starch tool
is the perfect candidate for the job here.
| | 05:04 | I'm going to undo that with Command+Z.
Then I'm going to go to the Tools panel,
| | 05:09 | and select the Puppet Starch tool,
and I'm going to place a couple of pins here.
| | 05:13 | One by his forehead, the back of his
head, and probably this crazy hair back here.
| | 05:17 | Now just as with the overlap pins,
we have an Extent value here to determine
| | 05:21 | how far the reach of that pin is. So
I want to select the Starch pins and
| | 05:26 | increase the Extent. So a lot of this
stuff is covered. And actually I want to
| | 05:31 | make sure the back of his head is
covered too. So I'm going to select the back
| | 05:33 | of his hair, and increase Extent
until that's covered also. Now with each
| | 05:37 | starch pin, notice that they're red as
well. Just like the deformed pins are
| | 05:41 | yellow and overlap pins are
blue, starch pins are red.
| | 05:43 | We also have an amount and that
allows us to control how much stiffness is
| | 05:49 | used for each pin. If we take this down
to a low value, and the default is 15%,
| | 05:53 | which is actually fairly low. Then
this will move still a little bit, but not as much.
| | 05:58 | But if we really crank this
amount value, then these pixels aren't
| | 06:02 | going anywhere. That's kind of what I
want here. Also notice that as I increase
| | 06:07 | the amount value for a starch pin, the
polygon around it become more opaque.
| | 06:13 | So now I could go switch back to the
Puppet Pin tool and now watch as I move
| | 06:18 | these pins around, the head is not
moving in any way, shape, or form. The back
| | 06:23 | of the hair is not moving. Everything
has been anchored down. So the starch
| | 06:28 | pins give you the capability to lock
pixels down and make sure that while
| | 06:32 | you're deforming the layer with the
deform tools, that other pixels you don't
| | 06:35 | want to move don't move. Or maybe that
they move less than they normally would.
| | 06:40 | So there you have it, folks. Using
the puppet overlap pins with the puppet
| | 06:44 | starch pins make the Puppet tools a
complete suite of animation goodness.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Extending and shortening entire animations| 00:00 | Now, sometimes when you create an
animation, you get everything setup perfect,
| | 00:04 | your keyframes are exactly the way you
want them. A lot of times you might need
| | 00:07 | to lengthen or shorten the entire
animation. There is actually a great fix for
| | 00:12 | that using something called roving keyframes.
That's what we're going to look at in this movie.
| | 00:16 | So we've created this animation here
of a wedding ring going down the toilet,
| | 00:21 | but you'll notice that the toilet
flushes a little before the wedding ring gets
| | 00:25 | started. It'd be really simple if I
could just move all these keyframes over,
| | 00:30 | which I can do by just clicking-and-dragging
a marquee around them and just moving them around.
| | 00:33 | That's actually not what I want to do,
I want to keep the keyframes at their
| | 00:38 | relative distance from each other, but
just make this happen over more frames.
| | 00:43 | So the way that we're going to fix
this is by clicking-and-dragging a marquee
| | 00:46 | around the inside keyframes.
| | 00:49 | So we know that this trick doesn't
work with just a couple of keyframes;
| | 00:52 | you need to group like this so you can
select the keyframes in between the first
| | 00:56 | and last ones. Once you've selected, right-
click on them and select Rove Across Time.
| | 01:03 | Now once they become roving keyframes,
you won't want to access individual
| | 01:07 | keyframes, but you don't have to.
What I can do is click-and-drag, because I
| | 01:10 | want this to start when the toilet
starts flushing. So when I click this first
| | 01:15 | keyframe and drag this over to the
left, notice how all the keyframes,
| | 01:20 | they don't drag over, they extend proportionately.
| | 01:24 | So, now the keyframes still keep their
relative distance from each other,
| | 01:27 | as you can see on the motion path, but
they also take longer to go to the same place.
| | 01:33 | Hit the Home key and let's preview this
animation and see what our final results look like.
| | 01:39 | Takes just a couple seconds there and
there we have it. The ring starts going at
| | 01:43 | the same time the old toilet does. Now
if you want to have these keyframes stop
| | 01:49 | roving, just click-and-drag a marquee
around them again, right-click and then
| | 01:53 | deselect Rove Across Time and
they turn back into regular keyframes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating temporarily roving keyframes| 00:00 | In the last movie, we looked at
creating roving keyframes. In this movie I'm
| | 00:04 | going to show you how to do
that, but only do it temporarily.
| | 00:06 | To do that, just go ahead and click-and-
drag to select all the keyframes of the
| | 00:11 | given property here, or you could
just click on the name of the property to
| | 00:15 | select all of its keyframes, and
this includes the first and last ones.
| | 00:19 | Then hold down the Option key on
the Mac, the Alt key on the PC and
| | 00:22 | click-and-drag one of the end ones, and
you see that we haven't really changed
| | 00:27 | the keyframes at all, but they resize
proportionately in time. As soon as you
| | 00:33 | let go off the mouse and Alt/Option key,
then your animation still remains
| | 00:39 | the same keyframeness. It doesn't turn
into roving keyframes as we saw in the last movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. The Principles of AnimationIntroducing this chapter| 00:00 | In this chapter, we're going to look
at the basic principles of animation.
| | 00:05 | If you like to do more reading on these
principles, there is this cool entry in
| | 00:08 | Wikipedia on the basic principles of
animation. And we can easily do an entire
| | 00:13 | title on just these principles. So if
you'd really want to dig deeper,
| | 00:16 | you're going to want to pick up this
book, The Illusion of Life. This book is
| | 00:21 | considered the bible of animation,
written by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston,
| | 00:26 | two of Walt Disney's animators.
| | 00:29 | But before we jump into this chapter,
I really want to stress you that no
| | 00:32 | matter what you do in After Effects,
if you animate text or graphics, you are
| | 00:36 | still going to want to know these
concepts. They will really enhance your final
| | 00:41 | product and give you a very
competitive edge. Think of the skills in this
| | 00:45 | chapter as the art behind the keyframes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating anticipation| 00:00 | The principle that I think is most
helpful for motion graphic artist character
| | 00:05 | animators, you name it, is
anticipation. Let's preview what we have so far.
| | 00:10 | We've got this text and it just flies
off screen. This is really what we want
| | 00:15 | to happen. We want text and it's
flying off screen. So I'm going to refer to
| | 00:18 | this as the action. The main point of
the animation is this text flying off screen.
| | 00:24 | That is the action.
| | 00:26 | So the principle of anticipation says
that before you have the action, there is
| | 00:31 | something that leads up to that action,
something that draws you in, and then
| | 00:36 | that way you have stronger emphasis
on the action itself. So in this movie,
| | 00:41 | we're going to use what we've learned about the
graph editor to make a little anticipation here.
| | 00:46 | So, I'm going to open up the Graph
Editor and I'm going to select the position
| | 00:51 | property. I'm going to make sure
first that we are looking at the value graph.
| | 00:55 | Now we know that red is X and
green is Y, and we're moving this from
| | 01:01 | side to side, in other words, the X direction.
| | 01:03 | So really I'm concerned with the red
line here. We could see that it starts
| | 01:07 | here and then it goes over here. But
again, we're talking about anticipation,
| | 01:12 | so we want to create some action
before the text leaves. The way I'm going to
| | 01:17 | do that is by clicking with the Pen
tool on this red line here. I'm going to
| | 01:22 | click about here or so and then click
somewhere in between. So I'm actually
| | 01:27 | creating two keyframes.
| | 01:29 | Next, I'll hit the later V to get
the Selection tool and with the center
| | 01:33 | keyframe selected, I'm going to drag
down a little bit. The reason why I'm
| | 01:39 | dragging down is because a higher X
value takes the word, or whatever the layer is,
| | 01:45 | away from the left edge. A lower X
value brings it closer to the left edge.
| | 01:52 | So before it heads off from the right
of the screen, I want it to cock back a
| | 01:55 | little bit to the left of
screen and then go to the right.
| | 01:59 | So if you look at this, it's exactly
what we've done. It goes back to the left
| | 02:03 | and then shoots off to the right. Now
let's actually go ahead and hit the Home
| | 02:07 | key and do a RAM Preview of this, so we
could see what it's doing here. I think
| | 02:11 | it's a little weak. It needs to back up
a little bit farther, which means that
| | 02:16 | we need to drag this down a little
bit more and it probably could start a
| | 02:20 | little bit sooner. Now let's try that again.
| | 02:26 | It backs back, I like how long it takes,
but ideally I would like to back up,
| | 02:31 | and then slow down and then fly all
the way up. So in other words, I think we
| | 02:36 | need to adjust the velocity a little bit.
So let's come down here at the bottom
| | 02:38 | of the Timeline panel and
select Edit Speed Graph.
| | 02:42 | Maybe we want to resize this a little
bit so we could see what's going on here,
| | 02:46 | since we've got a lot going on. So
what I could is I can click these handles
| | 02:50 | and I can move these around to adjust
the influence here. Actually, what I want
| | 02:56 | to do is create a better ramp to this
spike. When this is going fast, I kind
| | 03:02 | of, want this to be a smooth ramp up
to the speed, so let's go ahead and hit
| | 03:06 | the Home key and preview that.
So it backs up and then shoots off.
| | 03:11 | Now we have a smoother ramp up to go
fast, but what I'd like to do is have it
| | 03:21 | hang right there, as it's all the
way to the left. I want to hang there a
| | 03:25 | little bit more and then go over to the
right. So we can play with the velocity
| | 03:31 | curve here. We can move these points
over a little bit to make that happen.
| | 03:36 | An easier way to do this might be to go
over back to the value graph and move
| | 03:42 | this keyframe over to the right.
| | 03:45 | So as it goes down, it's going to go
slowly down and then quickly ramp up.
| | 03:50 | So let's go ahead and hit the Home key
and preview that. So there we go.
| | 03:57 | So it backs up slowly and then goes,
and maybe this is a little bit too much.
| | 04:03 | We don't want to go to the left all that
much; we just want to cock back a little
| | 04:07 | bit and then shoot off.
| | 04:09 | Now with our animation, there is just
so much more personality and character to
| | 04:13 | this text. It seems like a small thing,
but we've really drawn attention to the
| | 04:19 | text flying off to the right of the screen,
by this little bit of anticipation.
| | 04:24 | So next time we're animating
something flying off screen, or a character
| | 04:28 | hitting a bat or anything, try to
look at what you can do before the main action
| | 04:32 | to lead viewers into that
action, to build up anticipation.
| | 04:38 | I think you'll be amazed at what difference
this principle makes in the quality of your animation.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating follow-through| 00:01 | Whereas anticipation covers what
happens leading up to the action,
| | 00:05 | follow through talks about what happens
after the action is over. In our case here,
| | 00:10 | this is using the big After Effects
Beyond the Basics project I created,
| | 00:13 | we have all the stuff spitting up from
the inside here. We have dragons, robots
| | 00:18 | and guitars, all kinds of cool things,
and I have me. That's the figure popping
| | 00:23 | up right there. And because I'm kind of
like the central figure here and there
| | 00:27 | is only one of me, I'm in the
center, I decide to give a little bit of
| | 00:31 | extra something-something when I'm coming up.
| | 00:33 | So I pop out and instead of just
popping out and staying there what I have
| | 00:38 | done is I have wiggled this a little
bit. It kind of bounces. So it's only a
| | 00:43 | few frames. It's very subtle, but I get
wider and thinner and kind of bounce out.
| | 00:48 | So let's play that again, kind of
looks like that. Boink! Little bounciness,
| | 00:54 | and what that does is that tends to
exaggerate what just took place. So even
| | 01:01 | though we have the opposite of
anticipation, really the effect is the same,
| | 01:05 | to draw more attention to the action taking place.
| | 01:09 | So if you have some type of
anticipation and you have the main action and
| | 01:14 | then follow through, your animation
is going to seem all the more intense.
| | 01:19 | Oftentimes if you are watching the old
Chuck Jones Looney Toons cartoons,
| | 01:23 | they will have somebody that's going to be
playing baseball for example and before
| | 01:27 | they through the ball, they don't
throw it. They wind up forever, they throw
| | 01:31 | the ball and then they spin around and
maybe they spin around so much that they
| | 01:34 | dig themselves into the pitcher's
mound or something. But that is a great
| | 01:38 | example of how to use both anticipation
and follow through after the action is over.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Being conscious of object weight| 00:00 | The concept of weight basically is
exactly what it sounds like. We need to make
| | 00:04 | sure as animators that we're giving
weight to our subjects. For example, I have
| | 00:10 | this little ball animated here and
it just falls and it's so unrealistic.
| | 00:15 | There is no realistic weight to it in
any way, shape or form. We have no idea
| | 00:19 | what that circle is supposed to be.
| | 00:22 | Now I'm going to turn on the w/weight_
HEAVY layer so we could see a difference here.
| | 00:27 | And if I hit the Home key and
I preview this, we could see a big
| | 00:30 | difference. What's interesting, if I
just advance one frame at a time with the
| | 00:34 | Page Down key, is that the one that's
heavier on the right that we just turned on
| | 00:39 | actually falls slower at first, and
then it accelerates and gain speed much
| | 00:46 | more quickly, and it just kind of hits
there and just kind of makes a big thud
| | 00:50 | and stays there. And so we get the
sense that the second one is much heavier.
| | 00:55 | Again folks, these are just pixels.
So they don't have any kind of idea
| | 01:00 | themselves of how heavy they should
be or how thick they should be.
| | 01:04 | We as animators need to convey to the audience
the substance of what we are bringing to life.
| | 01:09 | Looking at one more example. Turn on
the w/weight_LIGHT layer. Hit the Home key
| | 01:14 | and we'll preview this. This one
takes a lot longer to fall and then has a
| | 01:18 | nice natural bounce at the end. So
definitely if we go through this little bit
| | 01:23 | more slowly, the heavy one hits the
ground and this one still falling,
| | 01:28 | although it does hit the ground faster
than the original one because it does
| | 01:31 | accelerate. Then it bounces
and it just seem airy and light.
| | 01:36 | So you could tell obviously these two
circles on the right have so much more
| | 01:40 | life and character and personality to
them and are so much more interesting
| | 01:44 | and engaging because of it, than this one.
It really doesn't have any life or weight to it.
| | 01:49 | Now obviously if you are a character
animator you could see the importance here.
| | 01:52 | If you have a super big fat guy that's
walking, you need to make sure that he
| | 01:55 | is kind of really heavy in his walk
cycle, so that he feels like a heavy
| | 01:59 | character. But even if you aren't a
character animator, chances are at some
| | 02:02 | point in your career you will animate
something like a feather or water pouring
| | 02:06 | or something, and you will need to be
able to communicate the weight of that substance.
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| Squashing and stretching objects| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at
the principle of squash and stretch.
| | 00:04 | Here we have a simple example with a ball
falling and it doesn't change in any way,
| | 00:09 | shape or form. And then if I hit the
Home key and turn on the Squash and
| | 00:13 | Stretch layer and we preview this,
the orange one does kind of have a little
| | 00:18 | bounce to it. At the end it squashes
and then stretches and again, the reason
| | 00:25 | why this principle is called squash
and stretch is that it has to squash,
| | 00:29 | but then it also has to stretch
in order to maintain its volume.
| | 00:33 | So again, this is a pretty cheesy
example with some circles, but you get the concept,
| | 00:38 | that as soon as it hits the
ground it squashes and it just seems a
| | 00:42 | little bit more realistic. Now if
you're working in 3D, this concept is all the
| | 00:47 | more important, because as you're
animating muscles moving around, this concept
| | 00:52 | comes into play a lot more often.
| | 00:54 | But just the same, if you're doing any
kind of character animation, somebody is
| | 00:57 | falling over, especially something
cartoony, kind of zany, this concept can come
| | 01:01 | up a lot as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exaggerating animation| 00:00 | This next principle is actually a fun one.
This is exaggerating action. We have some
| | 00:04 | great art here from my buddy Will
Kendrick and this time around we've also got
| | 00:08 | some great footage from Detonation Films.
| | 00:11 | The concept of exaggerating action
is exactly what it sounds like.
| | 00:15 | Just exaggerate the main action. With
anticipation we've talked about setting up the
| | 00:19 | main action, preparing for it,
creating anticipation for it, and then also
| | 00:23 | with follow through, we've talked
about what to happen afterwards.
| | 00:26 | But with exaggeration we make the action
a bigger deal than it would normally be.
| | 00:31 | Let's take a look at an example of
this in action. Here in this example,
| | 00:35 | we have a dragon that's kind of roaring
and letting go of his dragony fury there.
| | 00:42 | You can see him doing that. Roar, very
good. But what we are going to do is I'm
| | 00:47 | going to hit Shift+Home to jump to the
beginning of the work area, actually you
| | 00:50 | need to select the timeline first, turn
on this Dragon Fire layer. And now when
| | 00:57 | we preview this, he will breathe fire.
That's actual fire from Detonation
| | 01:02 | Films, which is really cool. And now
he looks much much angrier with the real fire
| | 01:09 | spewing forth from his mouth.
| | 01:12 | Now that obviously adds a bigger
touch, it packs a bigger oomph to our
| | 01:17 | animation that just having his mouth
open alone, but that's not enough.
| | 01:21 | Let's go ahead and exaggerate it
more by adding some extra smoke.
| | 01:24 | So now if we preview this final result,
no one is going to miss this dragon
| | 01:29 | opening his mouth. We've got a lot of
stuff going on here, a bunch of smoke,
| | 01:33 | a bunch of fire, and it just makes
everything seems so much more intense.
| | 01:38 | One of the reasons I like this
principle so much is that it really is up to you
| | 01:42 | how you choose to exaggerate your action.
You may make your character's eyes a
| | 01:46 | little bit larger, if they're trying
to gain sympathy from someone else.
| | 01:50 | If it's a villain you might exaggerate
the eyebrows, make them darker or larger,
| | 01:55 | and of course, it could be a color
choice, or it could be an animation,
| | 01:58 | a motion choice. But through all of
this the principle is consistent.
| | 02:03 | Use exaggeration to make your action more obvious,
apparent and to engage the viewer more fully.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating smooth arcs| 00:00 | This last animation principle is just a
quick tip that applies to all animators
| | 00:05 | in After Effects. The principle says
that animation happens in a smooth arc,
| | 00:11 | a trajectory, rather than in straight lines.
| | 00:14 | In the last couple of chapters we
occasionally looked to this project, we have
| | 00:18 | these smooth lines coming in. And
imagine if in this project instead of having
| | 00:23 | the smooth arcing line, we instead had
this jagged flat line. Motion generally
| | 00:28 | happens in a smooth arc, again,
rather than in straight lines.
| | 00:32 | Even if you were standing there and
you were looking at your arms and you moved
| | 00:36 | your arms straight down and then
straight to your sides, it would seem like that
| | 00:41 | would be a straight line, but it's not.
If you had a pencil in your hand and
| | 00:45 | you drew a line, or if you looked at
say DaVinci's Vitruvian Man for example,
| | 00:49 | you'd see that that line that it creates is
actually a curve, an arc, and not a straight line.
| | 00:56 | Now sometimes with mechanical,
technical, robotic type things, movement does
| | 01:01 | happen in a straight line, but even
then it's very rare. So again, most of the
| | 01:06 | times when you want to animate
anything, whether it's arms or whether it's
| | 01:09 | light whips, or whatever it is, then
animation typically wants to happens and
| | 01:13 | should happen, looks more realistic,
when it happens in a smooth arcing motion.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
11. Working with Photoshop FilesThe importance of using Photoshop| 00:00 | The next couple of chapters are
going to be really exciting, albeit
| | 00:04 | a little unconventional as well. We are
going to look a little bit more closely
| | 00:09 | at the relationship between Photoshop
and After Effects. Just a little bit of
| | 00:13 | Photoshop knowledge goes a
long way in After Effects.
| | 00:17 | Here's an example I made up a few
years ago. It was actually a challenge to
| | 00:20 | myself to see if I could make
something super terrible and horrible in
| | 00:24 | Photoshop and make it look kind of
cool in After Effects. So I've got
| | 00:27 | rectangular marquee selections and
I've filled them with white in Photoshop.
| | 00:31 | I got the Smudge tool, which nobody ever
uses, and just kind of like smudged these
| | 00:36 | edges and I was like okay, that looks pretty
cheesy. What could I do with it in After Effects?
| | 00:40 | So I've brought it in After Effects,
added a glow, duplicated it, and put it in
| | 00:44 | 3D Space, and now if you move around
here in 3D Space, it's like this is some
| | 00:49 | kind of like cool Transformers energon
cube or something. Again, couldn't have been
| | 00:54 | done without Photoshop, but a little
bit of Photoshop knowledge went a long way
| | 00:58 | to making this cool trick in After Effects.
| | 01:01 | Now I've made up this little chart
here that talks about Photoshop features
| | 01:06 | that After Effects supports. For
example, layers in Photoshop, if you bring
| | 01:09 | over the PSD file, the Photoshop
document, After Effects will recognize the
| | 01:13 | Photoshop layers. It will recognize
the visibility of the layers, opacity,
| | 01:17 | blend modes, Alpha channels, layer
masks, adjustment layers, all this stuff,
| | 01:20 | and I actually add to this list
vanishing point and if you've Photoshop CS4
| | 01:25 | Extended, 3D layers which
we'll cover later in this chapter.
| | 01:29 | And there is a strong relationship
between Photoshop and After Effects for a reason,
| | 01:33 | because stuff that you do in
Photoshop can really enhance the work
| | 01:39 | you do in After Effects.
| | 01:41 | Now this is not going to be
comprehensive Photoshop training, or even Photoshop
| | 01:45 | training at all. For that you want to
check out the Online Training Library on
| | 01:49 | lynda.com, so check that out if you want
to actually get deeper in Photoshop.
| | 01:52 | We are going to focus on the relationship
between Photoshop and After Effects here
| | 01:56 | in these next couple of chapters.
| | 01:58 | Now a lot of people ask a lot of
questions. How can I bring a photo to life is
| | 02:02 | a question that I get often. Well, the
answer to this question, as well as so
| | 02:07 | many other questions in After
Effects, doesn't lie in After Effects.
| | 02:10 | It actually lies in Photoshop.
| | 02:12 | So in the next chapter, we are going
to take this photo and from start to
| | 02:17 | finish in Photoshop, and After Effects,
we are going to bring this to life and
| | 02:21 | create some animation. So we've some
lights flickering up here in the top if I
| | 02:26 | scrub this, and obviously this guy here
hits the pool cue and the ball moves.
| | 02:32 | The table appears to be rotating three
dimensionally. The girl appears to be
| | 02:35 | rotating three dimensionally, as if we
had a video of her, and everything seems
| | 02:39 | to be ordered in 3D space, even
though this is all just a photo.
| | 02:43 | So all this kind of stuff that we are
going to be talking about in the next few
| | 02:46 | chapters, a lot of exciting
new stuff, so let's get started.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up new PSD files for After Effects| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at
setting up new Photoshop files that you
| | 00:05 | know you are going to take over to
After Effects. Now this subject probably
| | 00:08 | seems like the easiest thing in the
world to do, but there is actually a lot
| | 00:12 | more here than meets the eye.
| | 00:14 | When you create a new Photoshop
document, which you can do by going to File >
| | 00:18 | New, you've a choice to change the
Preset. Now if you pick one of the Film &
| | 00:23 | Video presets, or if you go down here
and click the Advanced tab, open this up,
| | 00:28 | you'll be able to change the Pixel
Aspect Ratio. This is important because
| | 00:32 | After Effects will recognize the
Pixel Aspect Ratio that you set up in your
| | 00:36 | Photoshop document.
| | 00:37 | I am going to go ahead and hit Cancel
here. I've already set up a few Photoshop
| | 00:42 | documents I want to show you and
what I've done is I've created a perfect
| | 00:45 | black circle in each one. Now please
forgive the boringness of these exercise files,
| | 00:50 | but unless you're using a
perfect circle, I find it hard to tell to tell
| | 00:54 | exactly what's going on
with the Pixel Aspect Ratio.
| | 00:57 | So in this case, I set up a full
screen Pixel Aspect Ratio. I made a perfect circle.
| | 01:01 | It looks great. In this case, I
set up a widescreen pixel aspect ratio
| | 01:06 | that made a perfect circle. Now notice what
happens in this example, I've created a
| | 01:10 | full screen document and made a perfect
circle, but watch when I go to the View menu,
| | 01:15 | go to Pixel Aspect Ratio, and
then change the Pixel Aspect Ratio from
| | 01:20 | full screen, 0.91, to Widescreen 1.21.
It actually stretches the circle.
| | 01:26 | Now as we'll see in a moment, this
distortion will also carry over into After
| | 01:31 | Effects. So you want to make sure
that you get the right Pixel Aspect Ratio
| | 01:35 | before you start creating your
document. I've also created a square pixel
| | 01:39 | aspect ratio document, made a circle
here. No big surprises in this case
| | 01:43 | though, because Photoshop documents
by default are square pixels anyways.
| | 01:47 | So before we go over in After Effects,
just want to sum this up. We've two
| | 01:50 | perfect circles here, and then
obviously the perfect circle with the square
| | 01:53 | pixel aspect ration, and then we have
the stretch circle that we made before we
| | 01:58 | changed the final Pixel Aspect Ratio.
| | 02:00 | Now let's hover over to After Effects.
I've already set this project for you,
| | 02:04 | now I've made new compositions for each
of these Photoshop files. As you could
| | 02:08 | see here when I select these files in
the Project panel, the Pixel Aspect Ratio
| | 02:12 | shows up here in parenthesis. So
they're totally recognized by After Effects.
| | 02:15 | That's not something I
did. It was already there.
| | 02:16 | However, when we create new
compositions with these, they seem kind of
| | 02:21 | stretched out, specially this one. Look
at that wide screen one, it looks like
| | 02:25 | a squashed oval, and the one that we
stretched out doesn't look nearly as
| | 02:30 | stretched out, and of course, the square
pixel aspect ration one, looks just fine.
| | 02:35 | So what's the deal? Why does the full
screen circle look perfect in Photoshop,
| | 02:41 | but when we bring it into After
Effects make a composition out of it, and now
| | 02:44 | it's stretched a little bit? Well, the
deal is this folks and this might help
| | 02:48 | you as you're preparing your work in
After Effects even if you never use
| | 02:51 | Photoshop. Back in Photoshop whenever
you created document with a non-square
| | 02:56 | pixel aspect ratio, so anything
other than 1.0, so here's your 0.91, 1.21
| | 03:00 | definitely qualify here. Whenever you
create one of those documents, then if
| | 03:04 | you go to the View menu, Pixel Aspect
Ratio Correction is automatically turned on.
| | 03:10 | So this is trying to simulate the way
it will look when you play this back in a
| | 03:14 | non-square monitor. In After Effects,
we're not seeing that same pixel aspect
| | 03:20 | ratio correction. If you want to
see that go down to the bottom of the
| | 03:24 | Composition panel and click this button,
Toggle Pixel Aspect Ratio Correction.
| | 03:29 | Now it will look like when you
play this back on a video monitor,
| | 03:33 | and you'll also notice that this looks
remarkably like what they look like back in Photoshop.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing at document size vs. layer size| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at
how to import Photoshop documents, and
| | 00:04 | also Illustrator documents as a
Composition. Now there's actually two different
| | 00:08 | ways to do this. I'm going to double-
click in the Project panel, go to the
| | 00:11 | Graphics folder in the Media Folder
of the exercise files, and I'm going to
| | 00:16 | select Knight w layered r forearm.
We can import it as footage or as a
| | 00:21 | composition or as a composition with
cropped layers. When we import things as
| | 00:26 | a Composition, again, either Photoshop
or Illustrator documents, they both act
| | 00:30 | the same, every layer comes in at
the size of the entire document.
| | 00:35 | When we import things as Composition-
Cropped Layers, then every layer comes in
| | 00:40 | at the size of it's own layer. So
first let's look at Composition-Cropped Layers.
| | 00:44 | I'm going to go ahead and hit
Open here. Now let's double-click the
| | 00:47 | Composition it created for us and as
I select these different layers, let me
| | 00:52 | zoom out just a touch. If I select the
helmet, we can see that the boundaries
| | 00:56 | around the helmet layer are
about the size of the helmet.
| | 01:00 | We select the shield and the same thing.
The boundaries are around the shield.
| | 01:04 | Now the advantage of importing this
way is that we already have the anchor
| | 01:08 | point in the center of the layer.
Often times when transforming a layer,
| | 01:11 | the center is a good spot to have the
anchor point. Now, I'm going to create a new
| | 01:16 | project. I'm just going to hit Command+
Option+N or Ctrl+Alt+N on a PC. Don't save.
| | 01:20 | I'm going to double-click in the
Project panel again. This time I'm going
| | 01:24 | to import the same file, but I'm
going to select Composition instead of
| | 01:27 | Composition-Cropped Layers.
| | 01:28 | Why that imported, I'm going to double
-click the Composition I created and
| | 01:32 | now you'll notice if I select the helmet,
it looks like the size of the entire
| | 01:37 | layer, because it is. Same thing with
the shield and the right forearm, right hand.
| | 01:41 | Every single layer is the size of
the entire document. Now as far as I'm
| | 01:46 | concerned, the Composition-Cropped
Layers comes in handy much more often.
| | 01:49 | However, when importing Photoshop files
with displacement maps or with other
| | 01:54 | layers that you will use to control
Effects, it's often good to import them at
| | 02:00 | document size. In other words
just as a regular Composition,
| | 02:03 | not Composition-Cropped Layers. Again I'm
going to create a new project here and
| | 02:07 | I'm going to double-click to Import in
the Project panel. I'm going to go to
| | 02:10 | the Media folder, and I'm going to go
to the PSDs folder. I'm going to open up
| | 02:14 | Angela in the snow.
| | 02:16 | You looked at this file earlier in this
training series, when we were talking
| | 02:20 | about creating Displacement Maps, and
if you accidentally select Footage when
| | 02:23 | you are importing, you still have the
option to change it to Composition or
| | 02:26 | Composition-Cropped Layers here so.
I want to change the Import Kind to
| | 02:29 | Composition and I'm not worried about
these other options. I'm going to go
| | 02:32 | ahead and hit OK. I'm going to just
double-click this comp to open it up and
| | 02:36 | again, when you are using maps here to
control effects, you want to make sure
| | 02:41 | that your layer size of the
Displacement Map and of the layer that it is
| | 02:45 | displacing are exactly the same. If
when we were making this Displacement Map,
| | 02:50 | if the paint didn't go all the way to
the edge, and then we imported this at
| | 02:54 | the size of the layer, in other words
with Composition-Cropped Layers, then the
| | 02:58 | effect would stretch this map to fit the layer.
| | 03:03 | So in other words, the displacement map
and the layer to be displaced would not
| | 03:07 | match up. So as long as you import
things as a composition, not with cropped
| | 03:11 | layers, then your map will
perfectly match the layer it's displacing.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting layer styles| 00:01 | Kind of as a quick tip addendum to what
we covered in the last movie, I want to
| | 00:05 | show you a little bit about the
issues pertaining to importing a Photoshop
| | 00:09 | document that already has layers
styles in it. Whenever you import a
| | 00:12 | Composition, you have this option to
import editable Layer Styles or to merge
| | 00:16 | those Layer Styles into footage.
| | 00:18 | Now the description is right here at
the bottom, but this might not be as clear
| | 00:22 | as it could be. But here is the deal,
folks. If you import a psd file with
| | 00:26 | Editable Layer Styles, then the
Photoshop Layer Styles that you created in
| | 00:30 | Photoshop will remain editable in After
Effects. So your Bevel/Emboss, your Drop
| | 00:37 | Shadow, your inner/outer glow, that
type of thing, they'll all be editable,
| | 00:40 | adjustable and amenable, and all of
that here within After Effects. And because
| | 00:44 | it's a straight transfer, there is
really not any editing or adjusting that
| | 00:48 | goes on in that process and still they
look exactly the same as they do in Photoshop.
| | 00:53 | The problem with this is that if you
are going to put those layers with the
| | 00:58 | layers styles on them, into 3D space
and you want them to intersect with
| | 01:03 | another, in other words you want one
of them to go in front of or behind
| | 01:07 | another layer, they won't do that. So
if you're doing very, very simple and
| | 01:12 | basic 3D, then this option is probably
the best choice. But if you're going to
| | 01:17 | be doing any kind of 3D, you might want to
consider merging the layers styles into Footage.
| | 01:22 | This is kind of like when you're in
Photoshop and you merge the layer styles
| | 01:26 | into itself, so that they're basically
collapsed, no longer editable, this is
| | 01:30 | the same type thing in After Effects.
And because this essentially makes a
| | 01:33 | regular flat layer, in other words
there's no drop shadows, just pixels that
| | 01:37 | look like a drop shadow, you can't
adjust the drop shadow anymore, then you can
| | 01:40 | fully use then 3D, the same way you'd
be using any other 3D layer. But again,
| | 01:45 | the downside is you can't edit
those layer styles, and also they have a
| | 01:48 | tendency to not transfer over as well.
| | 01:51 | Usually it looks pretty good. So
let's say you just had a drop shadow that
| | 01:54 | would probably looks exactly the same.
If you have a lot of Effects in that
| | 01:57 | layer styles, just if you're using a
lot of blend modes with the Effects in
| | 02:01 | that layer style, then I find they
don't carry over super accurately. Merging
| | 02:06 | layer styles in other words doesn't
always faithfully reproduce the same
| | 02:10 | effect. Now what I prefer to do is
because layer styles in After Effects are
| | 02:16 | the same ones in Photoshop, if I'm
making something in Photoshop, and I know
| | 02:19 | it's going over to After Effects, then
I just won't apply any layer styles at all
| | 02:22 | and I'll apply them here in After
Effects. Of course, you still have the
| | 02:26 | 3D problem. Then you don't have to
worry about which option to choose here.
| | 02:30 | So this is a little quick tip about
importing Photoshop documents with layer styles.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making Photoshop text editable| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look
at converting text from Photoshop into
| | 00:04 | editable text in After Effects. I
should point out for those of you that have
| | 00:08 | the exercise files that you might not
have the font that I'm using on your
| | 00:11 | system. That's okay. Use whatever
font you'd like. Usually I try to convert
| | 00:15 | those fonts, so that you don't have
any font issues, but in this case we have
| | 00:18 | to use live editable text.
| | 00:21 | So when I created this document in
Photoshop, if I go over to the Layers panel,
| | 00:24 | this SPIES text right here is actually
live editable text, you can tell by the
| | 00:28 | icon here. But when I import this over
into After Effects, you could see that
| | 00:32 | it's no longer editable. It's just
a simple layer of pixels. To make it
| | 00:36 | editable, you must select the layer,
then go to the Layer menu at the top of
| | 00:40 | the interface, and then towards the
bottom of the Layer menu, select Convert to
| | 00:44 | Editable Text. At that point, the
Layers icon, the thumbnail will change to a T,
| | 00:49 | indicating that this
is in fact editable text.
| | 00:52 | Now I could select my Type tool, go
in here, and change this to whatever I want.
| | 00:57 | Just going to undo that, but that
is how you convert text from Photoshop
| | 01:02 | into editable text in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing Vanishing Point files| 00:00 | In this movie we're going to explore a
feature that Photoshop and After Effects
| | 00:04 | can use together called Vanishing Point.
Actually truth be told, I have a love/hate
| | 00:08 | relationship with Vanishing Point.
But I'll tell you one thing, it's getting
| | 00:12 | better. If you use Vanishing Point in
CS3, they haven't really advertised it
| | 00:15 | too much but from my experience in CS4,
the feature works much, much better.
| | 00:21 | In this movie I'm going to show you how
to use the feature. We're also going to
| | 00:23 | talk about some of the big
limitations here as well.
| | 00:25 | I will start with Vanishing Point START
.psd in Photoshop. I'm going to go to
| | 00:30 | Filter > Vanishing Point. Now the
purpose of Vanishing Point is to create these
| | 00:37 | grids. These grids tell Photoshop where
the 3D plains in our image lie. It will
| | 00:44 | then convert our photo to 3D objects.
| | 00:47 | I must start from scratch here, I want
to just show you a final product, but
| | 00:52 | here's how we do this from scratch.
I'm going to create a grid by using this
| | 00:56 | tool here. There is a single solid
grid plain. I'm going to click in the four
| | 01:00 | corners of the grid. I'm going to click
here, sort on the left-hand side, over
| | 01:05 | here, I'm not super-concerned about
this right now because we're going to go
| | 01:08 | back and adjust this later,
and that looks pretty good.
| | 01:11 | So what I might want to do now is use
these Navigation tools at the bottom-left
| | 01:14 | to zoom all the way out so we can see
what this looks like. Now if you get a
| | 01:18 | red grid or a yellow grid that means
that is an invalid grid, and you want to
| | 01:23 | adjust it until you get a blue grid here.
| | 01:26 | Now I'm going to over here to this
right edge here, now I'm going to go to the
| | 01:30 | middle point on the right edge and
I'm going to hold the Command key or the
| | 01:33 | Ctrl key on the PC. And what that will
do is allow me to create another grid
| | 01:38 | that comes out from that grid. Then
if I come down to this point on the
| | 01:43 | right-hand side, then hold the Option
key, I can move this grid in 3D space by
| | 01:49 | clicking-and-dragging up and down.
| | 01:51 | Now it's cool if I move it back to
the right perspective. Now once I have
| | 01:55 | rotated this grid using the Option or
Alt key then it's actually changed in 3D
| | 02:01 | space, so if I pull it out, I'm
actually pulling it away in 3D space. Kind of
| | 02:05 | makes it easier to gauge how to line
this up when we move this in the correct spot.
| | 02:13 | So now that looks about right
and then if I pull this away, just goes
| | 02:17 | right down the perspective line.
| | 02:19 | Now what's cool about this is you can
get really detailed. If I zoom in here at
| | 02:23 | the right-hand side, which you can
do by using the keyboard shortcut
| | 02:25 | Command+Spacebar or Ctrl+Spacebar on
the PC, then you can go and you see we
| | 02:30 | have this lip here on this building.
Command or Ctrl+Drag out another grid and
| | 02:35 | Option, Alt+Drag until it looks about
right for the perspective, and then we
| | 02:41 | can create another plain here. And so
basically continue on making lips and
| | 02:47 | edges and all that type of stuff.
| | 02:48 | Now I'm going to go ahead and cancel
this and go over to Vanishing Point
| | 02:52 | FINISH, open up my Layers panel and I'm
going to select the background here and
| | 02:58 | select the Filter > Vanishing Point.
And here is a complete example, it's been
| | 03:03 | a little bit more time width,
just to give an idea of what I did.
| | 03:06 | Now once you've got your grids where
you want them, you can go to this fly-out
| | 03:09 | menu in the upper left-hand corner of
the Vanishing Point interface and you
| | 03:13 | have a lot of really cool options here
to export this. First of all, you could
| | 03:16 | return the 3D Layer to Photoshop, so
you could actually create a 3D model lot
| | 03:19 | of this by using Photoshop.
| | 03:21 | Essentially it will be a series of flat
plains but they will be mapped with the
| | 03:26 | textures from your photo. You can also
export this to a variety of 3D formats,
| | 03:31 | but what we are concerned about here is
exporting this for After Effects.
| | 03:36 | This will create a .VPE file, which is short
for Vanishing Point Exchange. So when I
| | 03:41 | click on this, I may navigate to the
Media folder in the Exercise Files. ?
| | 03:45 | Now going to go to Other Assets, and I'm
going to call this Vanishing Point, and
| | 03:50 | then I'm going to click Save.
| | 03:51 | Now, let's go back over into After
Effects and when you import a VPE file for a
| | 03:58 | Vanishing Point, you have to right-
click, select Import > Vanishing Point, it
| | 04:03 | will not show up as a regular
file in the Import file dialog box.
| | 04:06 | So let's go ahead and click on
Vanishing Point, then I'm going to go back to
| | 04:10 | the Media folder and the Exercise
Files folder, Other Assets, Vanishing
| | 04:15 | Point.vpe and click Open.
| | 04:18 | Now lot of stuff has been done for you
automatically here, if I double-click
| | 04:21 | this composition again we'll see
the composition has been made for us.
| | 04:25 | It's already made a no object and parented
all of the layers with that no object and
| | 04:29 | there is also a 3D camera placed in
the scene. We could select that layer,
| | 04:34 | select the Unified Camera tool and
just go to town. You can click and drag
| | 04:37 | around, to pan around our photo of the
Lincoln Memorial. We can again with the
| | 04:42 | Unified Camera tool click the right
button on a mouse to zoom in and out or the
| | 04:46 | middle mouse button to move up and down.
| | 04:49 | So essentially we've added some 3Dness
to the photo that we had. Now I think
| | 04:54 | these features are specially great for
any film-makers or maybe directors that
| | 04:59 | need some good B roll footage and you
don't have necessarily time to go out to
| | 05:03 | Washington DC and shoot a video of the
Lincoln Memorial. You could just simply
| | 05:08 | take a photo and then just pan around it,
just a little bit like so, and if you
| | 05:12 | get a small shot that was very, very
brief and you're only painting around it
| | 05:15 | just a couple of seconds, you could easily
create a shot that looked really nice with this.
| | 05:21 | However, as you probably have been
noticing as we moving this around, there are
| | 05:24 | a lot of limitations. First of all,
this top plain in the upper left-hand
| | 05:28 | corner shows this extra corner at the
top that's really not very attractive.
| | 05:33 | But that's part of what Vanishing
Point does it applies textures to flat
| | 05:37 | rectangular plains. It doesn't really
have the ability to create round edges.
| | 05:42 | That's one of the things
you've got to work around.
| | 05:44 | Also one of the beasts I have with it,
if I zoom into 100% here, just go to the
| | 05:48 | drop-down, change this to 100%, you'll
notice that the quality of the textures
| | 05:52 | degrade significantly when the image is
brought into Vanishing Point. If we go
| | 05:57 | back into Photoshop and I'm just going
to cancel out of Vanishing Point here,
| | 06:01 | here is our START image, this is what
we started with, notice the textures and
| | 06:04 | all of the states here and their logos.
There is a lot of ornate work here,
| | 06:08 | beautiful. But if we got Vanishing
Point FINISH, the after results, we can see
| | 06:12 | that it's been degraded, blurred. It's even
pixelated, blocky, not looking too awesome.
| | 06:17 | Also you'll notice that only the stuff
that we put the grids around, in other
| | 06:21 | words, the building itself
were part of this Vanishing Point.
| | 06:25 | If we go to Layers for example and we
turn off the Background layer visibility
| | 06:30 | we'd see that where we didn't put the
grids was not turned into anything, so
| | 06:34 | when we brought that over into After
Effects, there is no sky background.
| | 06:38 | Now the good news is there are
workarounds for these problems. Number one, to
| | 06:43 | get around these edges, we could have
carefully placed our grids a little bit
| | 06:47 | better, we could have included this
little part of this edge in this grid as
| | 06:52 | opposed to this grid when we
wouldn't have had that corner there. To have
| | 06:55 | higher resolution images, we could
have started with a much larger image than
| | 06:59 | we needed and they just had a really,
really big composition and then we could
| | 07:03 | have zoomed it a little bit closer and
had some better resolution on our textures.
| | 07:08 | And also to fix the background issue
and to fix a lot of other issues with
| | 07:11 | Vanishing Point actually, we
probably need to do a little bit of
| | 07:14 | pre-Photoshopping in Photoshop. In
other words, we probably need to cut up the
| | 07:17 | image a little bit and separate the
textures, separate the objects from each
| | 07:21 | other on different layers and then added
Vanishing Point to the layers that we needed it on.
| | 07:25 | But all in all only I think the results
are great. Look how basically moving in
| | 07:28 | real-time almost here with this 3D
model in After Effects, which is a pretty
| | 07:33 | cool thing. And if you've used
Vanishing Point in CS3, you might have noticed
| | 07:37 | at least for me, 99% of the time I
imported Vanishing Point files into After
| | 07:42 | Effects, they looked terrible. The
camera was completely off. It just looked
| | 07:45 | really bad, but our camera here was
perfectly in sync with where it should have
| | 07:49 | been in the image and everything just
kind of imported and works really well.
| | 07:54 | It's not the best example but is a very
realistic example of what you'll encounter.
| | 07:58 | So again, don't let these
limitations holding you back from trying out
| | 08:02 | and experimenting with Vanishing Point.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with Live 3D objects from Photoshop| 00:00 | Perhaps one of the best new features
in After Effects CS4 is its ability to
| | 00:03 | understand 3D objects inside PSD files.
Let's look at this. Here's a 3D ring
| | 00:08 | kind of like a Lord of the Rings type
ring that we have in Photoshop. As you can see
| | 00:12 | it's fully three-dimensional,
rounded edges, the whole bit, and by the way,
| | 00:17 | this ring was made from scratch in
Photoshop. If you want more information on
| | 00:21 | how to do that, you could check out my
Photoshop CS4 Extended for 3D title on lynda.com.
| | 00:26 | What we are going to do now is import
this exact Photoshop document into After
| | 00:30 | Effects. So let's double-click in the
Project panel to import this the regular way.
| | 00:34 | Then let's navigate to the PSDs
folder, the Media folder, the Exercise
| | 00:37 | Files, and we're going to
open up the one ring.psd.
| | 00:41 | We're going to open this up as a
Composition or Composition - Cropped Layers,
| | 00:45 | either one would be fine. Now this is
important, when this dialog box pops up
| | 00:49 | and you have the option to enable Live
Photoshop 3D, it's checked by default,
| | 00:53 | but you might have unchecked it. So
make sure that this is checked and then
| | 00:57 | click OK. It will make a composition
for you automatically, go ahead and
| | 01:00 | double-click that to open it. And
it's actually done a lot of stuff for us.
| | 01:04 | It's set up a null object to be the
controller for the 3D ring layer that we're
| | 01:09 | saying here. That's also created a Comp Camera.
| | 01:12 | It's little hard to see what's going on
with all these guides, so I'm going to
| | 01:15 | hide the guides by hitting Command+
Colon or Ctrl+Colon. There we go.
| | 01:19 | This little red out line represents the
null object. I don't want to see that
| | 01:24 | either, so I'm just going to take off
the visibility of the ring controller.
| | 01:28 | Now what is done, if we select this
ring layer and go to the Effect Controls
| | 01:31 | panels, is it's added an
effect called Live Photoshop 3D.
| | 01:35 | Now in most cases, you probably won't
ever need to fiddle with this effect,
| | 01:39 | it's so good to know though that it is
applied as an effect. However, sometimes
| | 01:42 | you may want to use it, if you have
created some type of animation like maybe
| | 01:47 | camera animation in the original
Photoshop file, you may choose to use the
| | 01:52 | Photoshop Camera instead of the
Comp Camera here in After Effects.
| | 01:57 | Now of course the 3D capabilities and
the animation capabilities are far beyond
| | 02:01 | what you have in Photoshop, so it
makes more sense to animate things and move
| | 02:06 | them in 3D, here in After Effects.
| | 02:08 | You'll also notice we have an Object
Transform, we can open up here and we have
| | 02:14 | Position, Orientation and Scale, but
all of these properties are red indicating
| | 02:18 | that they are connected via an expression or
rather that they are driven by an expression.
| | 02:23 | Now what's really going on here is that
they are being controlled by this null
| | 02:27 | object, and Adobe recommends if you
are going to transform the 3D objects,
| | 02:30 | let's say you are going to scale it
down or something then you do that to the
| | 02:34 | null object and not to
the actual 3D object itself.
| | 02:39 | So in other words, let's say we want
to scale this down a little bit. I would
| | 02:41 | scale the null object. I'll stick this
down to maybe like 80% or something.
| | 02:45 | So I scale down the null object
and not the actual ring itself.
| | 02:51 | Now one of the things that just drives
me absolutely nuts is that, this doesn't
| | 02:54 | really work all that gray, I mean, I
have a fairly simple 3D object here, but
| | 02:59 | even then if I try to get the Unified
Camera tool and move this around, we
| | 03:04 | could see that it's not moving in real-
time and then it updates slowly, once
| | 03:08 | I've let go of my mouse, and you could
see that that happens regardless of my
| | 03:12 | 3D settings. I come down here to
Fast Previews, changed from my Adaptive
| | 03:15 | Resolution, let's say OpenGL - Always
On, and then if I click the Camera tool
| | 03:20 | and try to move it around it still
doesn't move in real-time. So I'm going to
| | 03:24 | take this back to Adaptive Resolution here.
| | 03:27 | Now again to me this is one of the
most frustrating things, I mean this is a
| | 03:29 | very simple small model. You could
imagine if we had an actual model with tons
| | 03:34 | of materials and all sorts of stuff going
on then, they'd render even slower than that.
| | 03:38 | Now there is a cool trick here, if you
go the 3D objects, in this case the ring
| | 03:42 | layer, you go to the Draft settings,
typically I don't play with these Draft
| | 03:45 | settings too much because my computer
usually renders things pretty quickly but
| | 03:49 | if we click this and put this into
Draft mode, it'll degrade the quality
| | 03:53 | definitely of our ring, but from there
we can just click-and-drag and move and
| | 03:58 | rotate this ring around as a 3D
object. In real-time although, a severely
| | 04:03 | degraded image quality, but still we
can move around and tell what's going on.
| | 04:07 | So there are some of the issues
relating to importing 3D objects from Photoshop
| | 04:13 | files, and again there are a lot of
limitations here if we have a material on
| | 04:17 | our object or if our object is very
complex then it renders so slowly that it's
| | 04:23 | almost better to go back into a 3D
program and try to animate something there.
| | 04:27 | But at least you have that
functionality here in After Effects.
| | 04:30 | And I also should point out that if
we had a really simple model with no
| | 04:33 | textures applied to it, let's say
like a sphere or a pyramid or a cube,
| | 04:38 | then those type of things render
very, very fast in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating precomps in Photoshop| 00:00 | Now this is an interesting technique
that I'm not sure everyone is aware of.
| | 00:04 | When you create your Photoshop document
with the intent of taking it over into
| | 00:09 | After Effects, you actually control how it's
imported, at least for Precomps here in Photoshop.
| | 00:14 | I will show you what I'm talking
about. I have this example here, and I
| | 00:17 | basically have three layers essentially.
I have the SUV, I have the reflection,
| | 00:23 | and then I also have this background
group. And the group consists of eight
| | 00:27 | layers, making up the background.
| | 00:30 | Now I got the background where I
want it. I'm done with it. I may want to do
| | 00:34 | something to it later, but for right now,
I want them all compartmentalized,
| | 00:37 | all eight layers, into this one background
folder. You can create those folders by
| | 00:42 | clicking this little folder icon, right
here at the bottom of the Layers panel
| | 00:45 | in Photoshop that creates a new Group
folder, and you could just drag-and-drop
| | 00:49 | layers in there, if you so choose. I'm
just going to undo those two actions.
| | 00:54 | Now watch what happens when we import
this exact same file over into After
| | 00:59 | Effects. I'm going to double-click the
Project panel, I'm going to go over to
| | 01:02 | my Exercise Files, then I'm go to the
Media folder, PSDs, and I'm going to
| | 01:08 | select SUV with background. And
actually, I want this to be a Composition -
| | 01:13 | Cropped Layers, and these settings
don't really matter. So I'm going to go
| | 01:16 | ahead and click OK here. And I'm going
to double-click the composition it made
| | 01:20 | for me. And you'll notice here that
we have three layers just as we did in
| | 01:25 | Photoshop, the SUV,
reflection and the background layer.
| | 01:29 | But notice that the background group
in Photoshop has been automatically
| | 01:34 | converted to a composition. So we can
double-click this composition and open up
| | 01:39 | and get to the original eight layers
that made up our background. So it's good
| | 01:44 | to know that they are not flattened,
but they are organized for us. So again,
| | 01:48 | if layers are put into a group in Photoshop,
when you bring that PSD into After Effects,
| | 01:53 | they will be automatically pre-composed for you.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating shape layers from Photoshop shapes| 00:01 | In this movie, we're going to look at
an unusual trick, but one that I think is
| | 00:04 | quite helpful nonetheless. What we
are going to do is look at shapes in
| | 00:09 | Photoshop. Photoshop comes with this
huge library, actual several libraries
| | 00:13 | of different shapes. Well, what we
can do is take those, copy them in
| | 00:17 | Photoshop, and then paste them in
After Effects. We could paste them as masks
| | 00:22 | or as shape layers.
| | 00:23 | So I'm going to go to File > New here
in Photoshop. Let's just go ahead and
| | 00:27 | create a document, the default
Photoshop size and click OK. Next is go ahead,
| | 00:32 | and click this Custom Shape tool.
You'll find that down here if you hold your
| | 00:35 | mouse down underneath the Rectangle
tool, by default comes the Custom Shape tool.
| | 00:39 | Once you have that selected, then you can
come up here at the top and click this
| | 00:42 | drop-down and have
access to all the shapes here.
| | 00:45 | Now you may not be seeing all the
shapes I currently have open that I'm
| | 00:49 | scrolling through so just go ahead and
go to the fly-out menu, and select one
| | 00:52 | of the libraries of shapes to choose
from. I just went ahead and selected All,
| | 00:56 | so this is actually all the shapes
that Photoshop comes with by default.
| | 01:01 | Now if you go to the Adobe website,
you could find literally hundreds of
| | 01:05 | additional shapes the other people,
other members of the Photoshop community
| | 01:09 | have uploaded that you can use for
free in your design. So this applies to
| | 01:13 | those shapes as well.
| | 01:14 | Now, I'm going to look for a single
solid shape here, this airplane or car will
| | 01:19 | do nicely. I think I'm going to choose
the car. And once you've selected your
| | 01:23 | shape, just come down here, and
actually before you that, make sure that this
| | 01:25 | button in the upper left-hand corner of
the Options Bar is selected. We do not
| | 01:29 | want to create shape layers, we do
not want to create pixels. You need to
| | 01:32 | create a work path for this to work.
| | 01:34 | So I'm going to click-and-drag and
make my car, and we can stretch this as we
| | 01:38 | please. If you want to make sure
that the proportions are the same as the
| | 01:42 | original shape, we can hold the Shift
key, and once you've made it, go ahead
| | 01:46 | and click on this Path Selection tool,
then click the path to enable it.
| | 01:51 | Then go to the Edit menu, and select
Copy, so we've copied the path.
| | 01:56 | Now let's go back to After Effects. As
you can see I have a fresh project here,
| | 02:00 | so let's go ahead and create a new
composition, basically just NTSC DV is fine.
| | 02:05 | I'm using Square Pixels also,
and I'm going to click OK.
| | 02:09 | Now, it's important to realize that
what we have stored in our Clipboard is
| | 02:13 | actually vector data. So we can go
ahead and right-click, make a New > Solid
| | 02:18 | layer. Let's go ahead and make it a
bright color like this Orange. That works,
| | 02:22 | and then if you past it by hitting
Command+V or Ctrl+V on the PC, you're going
| | 02:27 | to paste that mask in. What that's
done is created a mask on this layer.
| | 02:32 | Now I'm going to show you how to make
a shape layer with this Copy Data.
| | 02:35 | I'm going to select this layer and hit
the Delete key to get rid of it. And now
| | 02:39 | what I'm going to do is I'm going to
select the Pen tool, make sure no layers
| | 02:42 | selected, and then just click
somewhere, just make a point.
| | 02:45 | Then after you've made the point, go
ahead and open up the shape layer, open up
| | 02:49 | Contents, open up Shape, open up Path 1,
and then select Path. Then with Path
| | 02:56 | selected hit Command+V to paste. And now we've
created a shape layer. You go out to 100% here.
| | 03:05 | Now first I realized that this may
seem like we've just created another mask.
| | 03:08 | But once you have this shape as a shape
layer to view all sorts of really cool
| | 03:12 | things with it. We could go and add
all these different path operators, or we
| | 03:15 | could add Pucker and Bloat for example,
and we can change the shape of our car,
| | 03:20 | bloat it, pucker it. Let me undo that.
You could also add a Repeater and add
| | 03:26 | multiple cars. So there is a lot we can do.
| | 03:29 | And we can do even more because of the
vast library of shapes available to us
| | 03:34 | in Photoshop that as demonstrated, we can bring
into After Effects as either masks or shape layers.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exporting After Effects frames as layered Photoshop files| 00:01 | Another great trick that's very useful
and somewhat obscure is the ability to
| | 00:05 | export a layered Photoshop file from
After Effects. Now we know in the render
| | 00:11 | queue you could just render something
out as a PSD file, no big deal. But that
| | 00:14 | flattens everything into one layer. But
so many times in the past, when I have
| | 00:17 | been working on something, let's say I
make something for an indie film when
| | 00:21 | I'm doing something in post production,
I could do some cool thing like this
| | 00:25 | Shatter Effect here, blow stuff up, and
there are no capabilities like that in Photoshop.
| | 00:30 | So if I want to make a poster of this
explosion, I would have a hard time doing
| | 00:34 | that in just Photoshop. So whether I want
to take this and make a 2D print out of
| | 00:39 | this or whether I'm using it for
storyboards, or some other type of art, I can
| | 00:43 | export this exact frame as a layered
Photoshop file, shatter explosion
| | 00:48 | everything, by going to the
Composition menu at the top of the screen,
| | 00:51 | after of course selecting the Composition in the
Timeline panel. Save Frame As > Photoshop Layers.
| | 00:57 | Now once you select that option
there is really not that much else to it,
| | 01:00 | because it's going to render things of
the same size with all of the layers.
| | 01:04 | Now you will probably get a warning,
especially in this case, letting you know
| | 01:07 | that all of the maybe Track Mattes or
Blending modes that you use in After
| | 01:11 | Effects aren't necessarily in Photoshop.
So it might not look exactly the same.
| | 01:15 | Let's step over to Photoshop and see
what the final result is. I exported this
| | 01:19 | out as Layered PSD.psd, and you'll
notice here that even though Shatter is not
| | 01:25 | in effect in Photoshop, we have these
shattered pieces, because we exported just that frame.
| | 01:30 | We have the frame from the
Detonation Films explosion as well as the
| | 01:34 | reflection, the bottom and the
background. Now if you are really observant,
| | 01:38 | you might have noticed that back in After
Effects we only have three layers here
| | 01:41 | whereas we have five layers in
Photoshop. The reason is if I go back to After
| | 01:47 | Effects here, we have some layers Shy.
So whether the layers are Shy or not,
| | 01:51 | they still get exported back over to Photoshop.
| | 01:56 | Now knowing this you might want to take
this a little bit further. If you do a
| | 01:59 | lot of 2D design with Photoshop
there are lot of cool tricks like Fractal
| | 02:03 | Noise, and Shatter and Explosion, Card
Wipe, and Foam, and a bunch of really
| | 02:09 | awesome effects like this that you
won't find anything like in Photoshop.
| | 02:14 | At one point in my life I worked for a
couple of years doing 2D print design,
| | 02:17 | and I knew After Effects. So I use
After Effects and my print design all the time,
| | 02:21 | just because After
Effects stuff look so cool.
| | 02:23 | So again, whether it for 2D art or for
storyboards or what have you, it really
| | 02:28 | pays to know this trick to export
layered Photoshop documents from After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
12. Project: Animating Elements from a PhotoSetting up the project| 00:00 | In this chapter, we're going to look at
a way sweet project. We're going to go
| | 00:05 | from start to finish. We're going to
use this project with Photoshop and After
| | 00:11 | Effects together at their finest. What
we're going to do is we're going to take
| | 00:14 | this photo of the band You Yell You
Kick and we are going to cut it up in
| | 00:18 | Photoshop and then we're going to
bring it here into After Effects.
| | 00:22 | We're going to animate it, color adjust
it, and do some really cool tricks with it.
| | 00:26 | We've got some glowing lights here,
we have them hit the ball, we have
| | 00:30 | Marian, the singer here displaced,
we have the pool table displaced, making it
| | 00:34 | look like this is an actual three-
dimensional pool table. Here's a lot of
| | 00:38 | really great things going on here. From
start to finish we are going to go from
| | 00:42 | the photo to the After Effects project.
Now a quick word of thanks to the band,
| | 00:46 | You Yell You Kick. You can find more
information about them at their MySpace page,
| | 00:49 | myspace.com/YouYellYouKick.
| | 00:53 | So with that, let's jump into
Photoshop and get started on this project.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cutting out the pieces| 00:01 | The first step in our project is to
import the file we're going to be working with.
| | 00:04 | When you open this up in Camera
Raw from Photoshop, go to the File menu
| | 00:09 | and select Open in Photoshop. Once
you're done playing with these settings,
| | 00:12 | I just kind of left him alone, click Open Image.
| | 00:15 | Now from here we have the biggest step,
perhaps the most important step, and
| | 00:20 | perhaps the most time-consuming
step of all and that is to select each
| | 00:25 | individual piece that you want to
separate. Now the more effort that you put
| | 00:29 | into this, the more pieces that you
separate, the better this will look when
| | 00:32 | animated in After Effects.
| | 00:34 | Now again, this is not going to be
Photoshop Training 101 so if you
| | 00:38 | need some Photoshop training, then
definitely go check out lynda.com and check
| | 00:42 | out some of the great Photoshop
training there. But what I do want to tell you
| | 00:46 | is what steps you'll need to take.
What we need to do is select each
| | 00:50 | individual, person in character here.
| | 00:51 | I'm going to start with Marian, the
girl in the front, and again you can use
| | 00:54 | any combination of selection tools.
What I usually like to do is get the Quick
| | 00:59 | Selection tool and just make a quick
selection just to kind of get started.
| | 01:04 | Maybe her face like a little bit or something.
| | 01:06 | Then what I'll do is hit the letter Q
to enter Quick Mask Mode. Now this is
| | 01:10 | definitely not the most common way to
select things, it's the way that I prefer
| | 01:15 | to do things. Hit the letter B for the
Brush tool and then you can paint with
| | 01:20 | pure black and pure white. If you paint
with white, you'll erase the mask, and
| | 01:26 | if I hit the letter X to swap my
foreground and background color, so I'm
| | 01:29 | painting with black, then
I'm actually painting the mask.
| | 01:32 | So what I recommend doing, I want to
paint with white here, and I'm going to
| | 01:35 | hit the Right Bracket key to make my
brush size little bigger. I want to zoom
| | 01:38 | in and we can just paint the selection
here. So, I'm going to paint this.
| | 01:46 | I'm not going to do all the people here
and all of the things that I want to
| | 01:49 | isolate, because that would take
forever. But I'm just going to give you a
| | 01:53 | rough idea of what I'm looking for, and
then you on your own can take the time
| | 01:58 | that you like to take with your project.
| | 02:00 | Now one of the most important things
here as we go around, let's say Marian's
| | 02:04 | hair here, it gets pretty wispy. If I
paint outside the mask, you just see
| | 02:09 | what's going on, and this is a great
principle to know about working with this
| | 02:15 | type of thing. You can spend all day,
literally all day, trying to go in and
| | 02:20 | select every little tiny hair and get
every little detail just exactly perfect.
| | 02:25 | But the thing is, folks, time is money,
so you've got to learn the best way to
| | 02:30 | use that time effectively. I'll tell
you that although you do want a clean
| | 02:34 | selection, this is not a good use of
time to sit here and get all the details
| | 02:39 | in our hair. From far away, in After
Effects when it's animated, you're not
| | 02:42 | going to be able to tell.
| | 02:43 | So, the best thing to do is probably
draw a hair edge like shape and we'll just
| | 02:50 | fill in the holes and deal with that
later. Now, of course, you want this to be
| | 02:54 | smooth, so we can go back and kind of
fix it up a little bit. But again, don't
| | 02:58 | spend too much time. There is a balance
between how much time that you want to
| | 03:02 | spend and how good the project needs to be.
| | 03:04 | Now you want to be really careful
with the edges. I selected this really
| | 03:09 | quickly with that Quick Selection tool,
which seems really great, but then when
| | 03:13 | you actually go in and look a little
bit more closely at the selection edges,
| | 03:17 | they're pretty awful. So I just
use that to kind of get started.
| | 03:20 | What I can do is click once and let go,
and then if I hold the Shift key down,
| | 03:25 | and then click again, I'll draw a
straight line, and sometimes those straight
| | 03:31 | lines can make things look really
clean for you. Obviously too, they can make
| | 03:34 | things look really robotic because
there is a slight curve to this arm, but if
| | 03:37 | you're finding that you have like a
really jagged edge around something,
| | 03:41 | sometimes just Shift-clicking with the Brush
tool can make that selection cleaner for you.
| | 03:46 | Now again, I don't want to get too deep
into Photoshop concepts and ideas.
| | 03:50 | I've pretty much told you what you need to
know from an After Effects users' point
| | 03:53 | of view, and what I've done is I've
created this Marian Selected.psd file.
| | 03:58 | Once you've made a selection, you
go to the Select menu and select Save
| | 04:01 | Selection. What that will do is it will
store the selection as an Alpha channel
| | 04:06 | inside of Photoshop. So if I go to
the Window menu, and then open up the
| | 04:11 | Channels panel, then you will see the
Marian selection down here at the bottom.
| | 04:16 | I could then click the left-most button
at the bottom of the Channels panel to
| | 04:20 | reload this selection to be able to use it.
| | 04:23 | I'm going to click on RGB Composite,
so I have all these channels to use.
| | 04:26 | Actually if you look at this outside
border here, you could see these marching
| | 04:30 | ants around it, and that tells us
that the background is selected and not
| | 04:34 | Marian. So we want to invert the
selection. We could do that by hitting
| | 04:38 | Command+Shift+I or Ctrl+Shift+I on the
PC or going to Select menu and selecting
| | 04:43 | Inverse. So now Marian is
selected and that's what we want.
| | 04:46 | Next, I'm going to go to the Layers
panel, make sure the layer is selected, and
| | 04:49 | I'm going to go to the Layer menu at
the top of the screen, New > Layer Via
| | 04:54 | Cut. This is very important. What
this is going to do is extract Marian, or
| | 04:59 | rather extract the
selection from the background.
| | 05:02 | So if I take the visibility off of this
layer, we could see it's actually cut a
| | 05:05 | hole in the background. Now Marian, if
we turn off the background, is a layer
| | 05:10 | onto herself. This is really the key ingredient
for bringing this photo to life in After Effects.
| | 05:16 | By the way, let me undo a couple steps
here. Before you make a new layer via
| | 05:21 | cut, you could also select a
Selection tool and then click the Refine Edge
| | 05:27 | button as long as your selection is active.
| | 05:28 | So again those two requirements are:
you must have an active selection, number
| | 05:31 | one, and number two, you must have a
Selection tool selected. Then you could
| | 05:35 | click this Refine Edge button and you
could go in and customize the selection.
| | 05:39 | I took off the Feather. I increased the
Contrast. I took down Smooth a little bit.
| | 05:44 | So we could kind of fiddle with this
selection until you get it just right for
| | 05:49 | your liking. Now I'm going to go ahead
and cancel that and go back to Edit >
| | 05:53 | Redo Layer Via Cut, and what happens
is when you cut out a layer, we have of
| | 05:58 | all this background whiteness.
| | 05:59 | So what we're going to do is break and
cut the movie short here, and go in and
| | 06:05 | I'm going to cut up the lights and then
each of the band members, and the pool
| | 06:09 | table, and a few pool balls, but
I'm going to leave the stool and the
| | 06:13 | background pretty much
intact other than the lights.
| | 06:16 | Although you were free to cut this up
as much as you want. So we'll cut out all
| | 06:20 | of these different objects before the next movie,
and then we'll talk about filling in these holes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Filling in the holes| 00:01 | So I finished cutting out all of the
characters and you could see I've isolated
| | 00:05 | all of the different cue balls and
sticks and all of these different
| | 00:10 | miscellaneous things that we have going
on here onto their own separate layers.
| | 00:14 | So what we are going to look in this
step is how to fill in these holes.
| | 00:18 | Now this can be a very time consuming
process, perhaps the most time consuming
| | 00:22 | process out of this whole project. But
again, just like selecting, the quality
| | 00:27 | of you work here is going to determine the
quality of the final product in After Effects.
| | 00:31 | Now again, there is a lot here. It
takes several hours so I'm not going to do it,
| | 00:35 | obviously, in the course of this movie,
but I'm just going to give you some
| | 00:37 | hints to get started. First of all,
I'm going to start with the pool table.
| | 00:41 | This is the easy part here.
| | 00:42 | Let's go ahead and fill in on the pool
table where these pool balls are.
| | 00:47 | That way, let's say we have the red ball
and let's say in After Effects, we want to
| | 00:51 | animate this red ball and move it
around a little bit to give it some depth.
| | 00:54 | We need to be able to move this ball and
have it look like the pool table is still
| | 00:59 | intact here, not this big gapping hole.
So I'm going to undo that, take off the
| | 01:03 | visibility of the red ball
and select the pool table again.
| | 01:06 | Now there is a couple of tricks here
and again, I'm not going to spend a lot of
| | 01:09 | time on all of these but I just want to
give you some tips as you are working.
| | 01:13 | I'm going to click in, with the Quick
Selection tool, in this white area to select
| | 01:18 | that space. We are going to be using
the Clone tool to sample data from the
| | 01:22 | rest of the pool table and then paste it
here into this area where the red ball was.
| | 01:27 | The reason why I'm making a selection
that's kind of like a mask, a protector, so
| | 01:31 | I don't accidentally paste over the
real good texture that we already have here.
| | 01:36 | Like the only thing I want to
mess up is the area inside this cue ball.
| | 01:40 | So I'm going to hit the letter S for
the Clone Stamp tool and I'm going to hit
| | 01:43 | the right bracket to make
this a little bit bigger.
| | 01:45 | I am going to hold down the Option
key on the Mac, the Alt key on the PC to
| | 01:49 | sample some pixels from over here on
the pool table and then just go ahead and
| | 01:53 | click and drag inside the pool table.
If you need to, just click a bunch of
| | 01:56 | times rather than clicking and dragging to
fill up this space inside of this pool ball.
| | 02:02 | Now I'm going to press Command+D or
Ctrl+D on the PC to de-select that and then
| | 02:08 | I'm going to clone around the edges to
fill in those edges because they kind of
| | 02:12 | like a glow because the ball is a little
bit out of focus, so we could patch that up.
| | 02:17 | Now if I zoom out, you can see that
we have a pretty ugly red ball looking
| | 02:23 | spot here on the pool table and that's
totally fine because we are going to fix
| | 02:27 | it easily with the Patch tool.
| | 02:29 | So up here at the top in the toolbar,
in the same category as the Spot Healing
| | 02:33 | Brush tool that looks like a band-aid,
just click and hold the button down to select
| | 02:36 | the Patch tool. And the Patch tool is great to
use in conjunction with the Clone Stamp tool.
| | 02:41 | The Clone Stamp tool actually copies
and paste actual pixels, but what the
| | 02:44 | Patch tool will do is fix these
pixels. After you've have been cloning for a while,
| | 02:50 | you tend to get what I call
Clone Stamp mush where there is kind of this
| | 02:54 | lack of texture as we are
seeing here with this red ball.
| | 02:57 | So we are come in here with the Patch
tool, kind of like a Lasso tool and click
| | 03:00 | and drag around this area, creating a
selection. Then inside the selection,
| | 03:04 | click and drag to an area with good
texture and you can kind of get a live
| | 03:09 | update here on our original selection area
to see what's that is going to look like.
| | 03:12 | Once you find a good area of some nice
texture, let go and it will blend that
| | 03:18 | texture in with the color and
lightening information of our original selection
| | 03:23 | and if I hit Command+D or Ctrl+D to de-
select, you can see that our little spot
| | 03:27 | is completely gone and it looks
like the red ball was never there.
| | 03:31 | So you'll want to do that with the rest
of the spots on the pool table and one of
| | 03:36 | the things I'm willing to do also is
reconstruct this pool table. This is where
| | 03:41 | your inner artist can come out
because you will need to kind of repaint,
| | 03:46 | reconstruct a lot of this scene in order for it
to look believable once we move the characters.
| | 03:52 | Now reconstructing the inside of the
pool table isn't that hard as we have seen
| | 03:56 | but reconstructing the edges is a
little bit more challenging. Let's zoom into
| | 03:59 | the back here and I'm again going to
hit the letter S for the Clone Stamp tool
| | 04:03 | and I'm going to sample this pool table.
| | 04:06 | I am just going to go ahead and again,
I cross right on this line right here,
| | 04:09 | hold the Option key, Alt key on the PC
and click to sample and then thankfully,
| | 04:14 | in CS4, they have a new default setting.
So we are getting this little overlay
| | 04:17 | here that lets us know as a guide
kind of, where that's going to go,
| | 04:21 | how we should line up that paint.
| | 04:23 | So right now, I could see it right here
in my cursor it's a little bit too low
| | 04:26 | and I put it right about there and it
looks like it's about the right spot.
| | 04:31 | So now I can click and drag and click and
drag, it looks like I might have gotten
| | 04:36 | a little off there and I'm basically
reconstructing this pool table little bit by
| | 04:41 | little bit. It's essentially what you
have to do for this trick to work because
| | 04:45 | when we move the band members, we need to be
able to have the pool table underneath them.
| | 04:50 | So we need to basically rebuild all
the pool table. Now you don't have to
| | 04:54 | rebuild everything. You don't have to
rebuild like this corner of the pool
| | 04:57 | table and the right-hand corner of
the pool table over here because the way
| | 05:02 | that characters are, if we turn on
YYYK 4, the band is called You Yell You Kick,
| | 05:06 | so I name the guys in the background,
YYYK 1, 2, 3, and 4 from left to right
| | 05:12 | and then Marian is pretty easy to
spot because she is the pretty girl in
| | 05:15 | the front here. So she
gets her own name. Sorry guys.
| | 05:19 | So basically if we turn on YYYK 4, the
guy in the far right here and Marian,
| | 05:25 | then we see that corner is completely
covered by these two people. So we'll
| | 05:29 | probably never ever see the corner of
that pool table. So there is no need to
| | 05:33 | go through all that effort of reconstructing it.
| | 05:36 | Now another thing we are going to need
to reconstruct a lot is this background
| | 05:38 | here and turn off Marian as well. We
are going to need to fill this background
| | 05:42 | in with data and the background is
actually probably one of the easier parts
| | 05:46 | to fill in. It might be little
challenging if you are not sure what to do though.
| | 05:49 | Another trick that I like to use if
you have like a little strip like this of
| | 05:52 | a pattern that you need to replicate a
lot and basically all the background
| | 05:57 | here, behind this guy, would need to be
this wood paneling. So what we could do is
| | 06:00 | zoom in and select the Rectangular
Marquee tool and click and drag and make a
| | 06:06 | thin selection here. Then we can press
letter V for the Move tool. Then hold
| | 06:11 | down the Option on the Mac or the Alt key
on the PC and that will copy this texture.
| | 06:17 | So we can move this texture over
and we can keep doing that until we've
| | 06:22 | extended the length of the guy that
we need to fill in the background of.
| | 06:28 | And I realize this doesn't look perfect but
if you just have a starting texture like this,
| | 06:32 | it's way easy to go back and
fix something than to rebuild this wood
| | 06:37 | paneling from nothing.
| | 06:38 | So now that we have something there,
I can press S for the Clone Stamp tool,
| | 06:42 | and sample the edge of the wood
paneling and then kind of paste over these
| | 06:47 | edges that don't look all that great.
| | 06:48 | So see that? We have basically like a
much better looking texture here and
| | 06:54 | of course we could do that with the wood
paneling in the middle as well. It didn't
| | 06:57 | really take too much to fix up these
little tiny blemishes, much easier than
| | 07:01 | painting this whole thing by hand again.
| | 07:03 | Same thing with the green texture in
the back here. We can keep clicking and
| | 07:07 | then if we lose that texture again,
because we have cloned so many times, again
| | 07:11 | we could hit the letter J for the
Patch tool, click to drag a selection and
| | 07:16 | then move it to an area of the
background with more texture, let go of the mouse
| | 07:19 | and then we have this nice
texture that looks like it was there
| | 07:22 | in the background there the whole time.
| | 07:24 | Now one of the most important things
to realize about this project, because
| | 07:27 | it is very time consuming, it's important
to realize that you don't have to make
| | 07:31 | everything super perfect. We are not
going to be seeing this wood paneling very
| | 07:35 | much at all. If we just move this
character right here on the far right hand side,
| | 07:38 | the YYYK 4 guy. We might move him
the left a little bit and to the right
| | 07:43 | a little bit. We just might get a
little bit of that texture. We don't need all
| | 07:46 | of it. So just remember that
you don't have to do everything.
| | 07:48 | Now let me show you one of the
tricks and then I'm going to show you the
| | 07:51 | finished product. Over here, we have
the light that we cut out in the upper
| | 07:55 | left-hand corner and we are going to
probably move the lights a lot but we need
| | 08:00 | to have this background wood windowsill
filled in because if we just move the
| | 08:05 | lights a little bit, we are going to
see that and notice that absence right there.
| | 08:09 | So we need to rebuild that
from scratch but as you can see from the
| | 08:11 | right hand side here, it's
pretty ornate. So what do we do?
| | 08:15 | Well, here is another trick. I'm going
to turn off the visibility of the guy on
| | 08:18 | the right-hand side, select the
background layer and I'm going to select the
| | 08:21 | Rectangular Marquee tool and I'm
going to click and drag a selection area
| | 08:26 | around that really pretty ornate corner.
Then what I'm going to do is I'm going
| | 08:30 | to go to the Layer menu at the top of
the screen and select Layer > New > Layer
| | 08:34 | via Copy. We don't want to cut, we
don't want to cut a hole here because we
| | 08:37 | want this windowsill corner
staying there. We just want another one.
| | 08:40 | So I copied it and now we have a
separate layer here and what I'm going to do
| | 08:44 | is I'm going to select this layer and
hit Command+T or Ctrl+T on the PC to
| | 08:48 | enter Free Transform mode. And then
what I'm going to do is grab the right hand
| | 08:52 | side of the box and drag it to the left.
Alternatively, I can undo that and
| | 08:57 | then right-click and select Flip
Horizontal and now it's facing the other direction.
| | 09:02 | So now we can move it over and
basically move this around until we get it in the
| | 09:07 | approximate spot here and it's hard to
tell since we haven't done the rest of this.
| | 09:11 | We might want to just skew a
little for perspective. Something around
| | 09:14 | that looks pretty good. We could hit
Enter to accept it and now we have this
| | 09:18 | ornate corner and then we go back in
again and just polish this up with the
| | 09:22 | Clone Stamp tool and just kind of
polish up that grain around those edges.
| | 09:27 | So you can see that we do have some
toning work to do. This is definitely dark
| | 09:31 | over here because of the shadow under
the light and this is much lighter but
| | 09:35 | you can see that we have reconstructed
something that was really ornate in a
| | 09:38 | very short amount of time because we
took data from another part of the image.
| | 09:41 | You might want to do the same thing
here with the television set. What's behind
| | 09:45 | his head? I don't know but it probably
looks like this area over here, so we
| | 09:47 | could sample from this area and paint
it over here. Same thing with the bench
| | 09:54 | over here. We could sample the bench
and then paint where the bench is.
| | 09:59 | That's a little off but you get the idea.
| | 10:01 | Now let me show you the final product
here. I already went through and fixed
| | 10:04 | all the cloning stuff and show you what
the end example looks like in this YYYK Cut
| | 10:08 | Up FINISH.psd file. So here is the
final product but you will notice if we take
| | 10:13 | off the layers here, what's going on.
This guy right here, YYYK 3 guy, he was
| | 10:19 | the hardest to build because he was
the most hidden and his garb was the most
| | 10:25 | complex. He had a striped shirt and a vest and
he had his arm up here and he was mostly covered.
| | 10:31 | So he was the biggest challenge and if
you notice here, I did a real terrible job.
| | 10:35 | This is not something I'm super
proud of, but at the same time if I was
| | 10:41 | doing this for a client, this is
exactly what I would do because chances are,
| | 10:44 | you would not see his texture all that
much. It looks good as is and I'll just
| | 10:49 | move her in front of him, so I don't
have to see that much of those nasty
| | 10:53 | textures from him but at the same time
if you just see it for a brief minute,
| | 10:56 | he is in the back, you
probably wouldn't even notice.
| | 10:59 | I took the data from his chest right
here, from his arm and then I took the
| | 11:03 | data from the left side of his vest to
the right side of his vest and again,
| | 11:07 | I know this looks disgusting when we
are zoomed in on it. But because time is money,
| | 11:11 | sometimes you got to fake
things like that and as you do this more often,
| | 11:14 | you'll realize where you can cut
corners and not have it look terrible.
| | 11:18 | So if I zoom out again, let me show
you this whole image in a glance, we have
| | 11:22 | Marian by herself, we have the red
ball in its own layer, the purple ball in
| | 11:25 | its own layer and the cue ball, and
now if could just take all these layers off,
| | 11:30 | there is the finger tip because
remember we are going to make this pool stick
| | 11:33 | shoot underneath his index finger. So
we can turn that on and off as a separate thing.
| | 11:39 | You will notice that I have also
filled in the white areas on his hand where
| | 11:42 | the finger was. The cue stick is also
a separate entity now. I completed the
| | 11:48 | cue stick with cloning. Same thing
with the 8-ball, the orange striped ball,
| | 11:52 | the green striped ball. These are now
independent. They are painted fully, so
| | 11:55 | we can move them around as we please.
And we have the YYYK guy on the left side
| | 11:59 | and you could see him. It's not the
best clone job but it's something you
| | 12:02 | probably wouldn't notice if you just
moved him a little bit from left to the right.
| | 12:05 | It's pretty good.
| | 12:06 | Then we have this guy, number 2, the
bench is filled in behind him and we also
| | 12:10 | have the guy number 3 in the back underneath
the pool table. We take off Marian.
| | 12:14 | You can see the pool table is pretty much
complete. Again, I didn't really go to all
| | 12:17 | the trouble of re-sculpting the pool
hole here. If we had to, we would
| | 12:20 | just copy and flip the pocket on the
left-hand side and put it on the right-hand side
| | 12:24 | just like we did here in the
upper left-hand corner, the image with this
| | 12:27 | windowsill and then there
is the lights in the back.
| | 12:30 | You will notice I also took down the
neon sign. I wasn't sure what logo that was,
| | 12:33 | although I was pretty sure we
didn't have the rights to show it and it was
| | 12:36 | kind of getting in the way and it was
really a complex thing as you can see
| | 12:40 | over here at the top of the screen.
That was a really complex logo and I didn't
| | 12:44 | feel like rebuilding it. Again, time is
money. It was easier just to paint the
| | 12:48 | green over that area and clone it out and act
like it was never there than try to reconstruct it.
| | 12:52 | Same thing with the television set.
There was a kind of a glare here and rather
| | 12:56 | than trying to recreate the glare,
which I guess wouldn't have been too
| | 12:58 | difficult. I didn't want to have to
deal with that. So I just made it all black.
| | 13:02 | Another thing we'll see when we
go back in to After Effects is we'll
| | 13:06 | probably darken all these stuff. So
even a lot of these blemishes that look
| | 13:09 | really terrible now, won't be so
significant when we are animating.
| | 13:13 | Practice makes perfect. You really got
to get in there and work with the Clone
| | 13:16 | Stamp tool, the Patch tool, and a lot
of this was just the Brush tool.
| | 13:19 | A lot of this, I just didn't want a white
background, so I just painted it with black
| | 13:23 | and if you saw a little bit of that black,
you probably wouldn't notice it was there.
| | 13:27 | But having a background that is this
filled in and having a pool table that's
| | 13:30 | also this filled in will give us a
lot more leeway when we are playing with
| | 13:36 | this and animating in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating displacement maps| 00:00 | All right, so at this point, the
tough work, the laborious labor-intensive stuff
| | 00:05 | is pretty much in the past and
behind us. In this optional step, we're
| | 00:09 | going to look at creating displacement
maps. Now I realize that earlier on in
| | 00:13 | this training series, we've already
looked at creating displacement map. So
| | 00:16 | we'll go through this rather quickly but
nonetheless, I want to show you what I
| | 00:19 | was going to do here.
| | 00:20 | Like I mentioned, displacement maps
are optional. In this document, I have
| | 00:23 | created a few starter displacement
layers for you, the DIS Marian and DIS pool
| | 00:27 | table. The reason why I'm contemplating
displacing these layers is because they
| | 00:32 | appear to jump 3D planes. See the
guys here in the back, they appear to be
| | 00:37 | flat like cards. So we can move them in front
and behind one another and it's no big deal.
| | 00:44 | But Marian here, her legs are behind
the pool table and her hand is one of the
| | 00:49 | things closest to the camera. And again,
the same thing with the pool table;
| | 00:53 | the pool table is in the back of the
shot kind of but it's also kind of in
| | 00:56 | the very front of the shot.
| | 00:58 | So these are the type of things that
I usually use displacement maps on.
| | 01:01 | Now when we get over to After Effects,
we might decide that hey, we don't need
| | 01:03 | these displacement maps. They're not
working for us, but it may be kind of fun
| | 01:06 | to have them. So we're going
to look at making them here.
| | 01:09 | Let's start with Marian. I don't need
these other layers on right now. So I'm
| | 01:12 | going to select the Marian layer.
Take her Opacity down to about 30-40%,
| | 01:17 | somewhere around there and lock the
layer by clicking the padlock at the top of
| | 01:20 | the Layers panel with the layer selected.
| | 01:22 | I am going to select the DIS Marian
layer, then I'm going to hit the letter D
| | 01:25 | and the letter X to make sure I'm
painting with pure white. Then I'm going to
| | 01:28 | hit the number 1 on my keyboard
to paint with 10% opacity brush.
| | 01:33 | Actually, in this case, I want to
paint with a pure white rafter back.
| | 01:36 | So I might hit 5 to change my Opacity to 50.
Paint with that really quickly, so I
| | 01:42 | know I have pure white. As I mentioned earlier
in this training, that's what I would like to do.
| | 01:46 | Right after that is nowhere my front
most object is by painting it pure white.
| | 01:51 | Then I could dial that back and then
maybe push 1 on the keyboard to get 10%
| | 01:55 | opacity brush and then everything else I
could paint a little bit more manually.
| | 01:59 | But I would like to know where the
brightest part of my image is. So we'll
| | 02:03 | paint this a little bit and I want her
forearm to be a little bit behind her
| | 02:07 | hand so it will be almost white but
not quite. And then this part of her arm
| | 02:12 | will be a little bit behind her
forearm. So we'll paint that brighter.
| | 02:16 | Again, the farther we get back with her,
the darker we want that paint to be
| | 02:20 | and her hand will be a little bit in
front of her legs. So we'll make that a
| | 02:23 | little bit brighter. And her hair is
going to come out a little bit more than
| | 02:27 | her neck. So we want to lighten that
up a little bit, lighten up her face and
| | 02:32 | hit the left bracket key to reduce
the size of our brush and paint her nose
| | 02:36 | just a little bit, so
it's a little bit brighter.
| | 02:38 | It's always a good idea to take off the
visibility of the layer and check your map.
| | 02:41 | As you can see, this is kind of a
mingled mess; we have some dark areas
| | 02:45 | around the elbow. We definitely don't
want those dark because we want this to
| | 02:48 | be more in the front, and we also don't
want big dark gaps next to her shoulder
| | 02:52 | because sometimes with the paint
strokes, you kind of get big gaps like that.
| | 02:56 | You got to be careful.
| | 02:57 | So this looks like bit more filled in
there. And I want the area where her neck
| | 03:02 | is to be darker than her chin but
that's pure black; we don't want it to be
| | 03:06 | that far behind. So we can lighten
that up a little bit, lighten up her face,
| | 03:09 | kind of balance those tones a little
bit more, a little brightness to her hair
| | 03:14 | on the edge and maybe a little bit more
brightness to her hand, forearm area here. Here we go.
| | 03:19 | Even though it looks pretty mingled,
I think that's going to make a fairly
| | 03:22 | decent displacement map. Again, we
could always change it later but for now,
| | 03:25 | it's pretty good. Let's go to the
pool table now. I'll do the same thing,
| | 03:29 | select the pool table layer, take the
Opacity down to about 30-40% somewhere
| | 03:33 | around there and lock it down and
then select the DIS pool table layer, the
| | 03:37 | layer we're going to be
using for displacement map.
| | 03:39 | Next, I'm going to hit G on the
keyboard for the Gradient tool. Click up here
| | 03:43 | in the Options bar, upper left-hand
corner to go to our Gradient Editor.
| | 03:47 | I'm just going to click this one, third from
the right, which is the black and white gradient.
| | 03:51 | Then I'm going to start at almost the
top of the pool table and click and drag
| | 03:56 | down, straight down almost to the
bottom of the pool table and then let that go.
| | 04:00 | And what's we have done there, we
should have a gradient that goes from
| | 04:03 | pure black at the top of the pool
table or the part of the pool table we want
| | 04:06 | to be farthest away from us, and then
pure white down at the bottom of the
| | 04:11 | screen, the part of the pool
table we want closest to us.
| | 04:13 | That's all we're going to displace here
but if you want to go crazy with this,
| | 04:16 | if you like that displaced look where
things are kind of have realistic and
| | 04:20 | brought to life, you could go into the
individual guys in the band and displace
| | 04:24 | them also, and have all of them
displace in their own spheres where there each
| | 04:28 | one of them is kind of moving
realistically. It's a great look. We're just not
| | 04:32 | going to take this to that level.
| | 04:34 | If you are interested I have created
this YYYK Displace FINISH file where you
| | 04:38 | can see a displacement map that I took
a little bit more time with and also a
| | 04:42 | pool table displacement map that I
take a little bit more time with as well,
| | 04:45 | just so you could see a little bit
more skillfully crafted before and after.
| | 04:50 | And now the real fun begins. We get to see the
benefit of what we've done in Photoshop in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing the PSD into After Effects| 00:00 | All right, in this quick movie,
we're just going to import the Photoshop
| | 00:04 | document we have been creating. But I
just want to make sure we're on the same
| | 00:06 | page as far as how we are importing this.
| | 00:08 | I am going to the YYYK Photoshop
Project folder and we're going to select the
| | 00:14 | YYYK Displace FINISH.psd. Remember,
since we have displacement maps, best idea
| | 00:20 | to import this as Composition where
things work out properly. You don't want to
| | 00:25 | choose Composition-Cropped Layers and you
definitely don't want to choose Footage.
| | 00:27 | So choose Composition, go ahead and
open this up. There are no Layer Option
| | 00:32 | choices here, we don't have Live 3D and
we don't have any Layer Styles. So knock
| | 00:36 | yourself out in choosing those options
and whatever you like to do. Go ahead and
| | 00:39 | click OK, and then you'll notice when
we have this selected in the Project
| | 00:43 | panel that the pixel dimensions are in
1944x1296 which is even larger than HD.
| | 00:49 | One thing I'd like to do when I'm
working in Photoshop, especially if I have
| | 00:52 | access to a really big high quality
photo is I'd like to keep it at big size.
| | 00:57 | Sometimes when you are animating things
in After Effects, you are moving things
| | 00:59 | around in 3D, you are zooming in close
to them, whatever. I think it's a good
| | 01:02 | idea to have them at a really big size.
That way we can have the camera zoom in,
| | 01:07 | have them get much larger than they
normally would be and the quality will not be degraded.
| | 01:12 | Now we probably wouldn't output at that
size. We probably create another comp.
| | 01:16 | Maybe an NTSC DV size composition and
then put this master composition inside
| | 01:22 | that composition and export from there.
But if you have access to bigger source
| | 01:26 | material and your computer's
processing speed and power can handle that,
| | 01:29 | then by all means use that. It's a good idea.
| | 01:32 | As we open this up, we got to remember
to take off the visibility of the DIS
| | 01:36 | layers, the DIS Marian and DIS pool
table layers, and also to take the opacity
| | 01:42 | of the Marian layer back up to 100%.
Hit T on the keyboard to access that shortcut.
| | 01:47 | Select the pool table, hit T and do
the same thing, drag that to the right,
| | 01:51 | brought that back up to 100% and from
here we're good to go, and in the next step,
| | 01:55 | we're going to actually displace these layers
using the displacement maps that we've created.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Displacing the layers| 00:00 | So now we are going to displace a
couple of our layers here. I always love this part.
| | 00:05 | Let's go over to and select that
pool table layer. Apply the Displacement
| | 00:09 | Map effect to it and I'm going to go
over here in the Effect Controls panel.
| | 00:14 | For the top down, I'm going to take
Displacement Map layer, the drop-down to
| | 00:18 | DIS pool table. I'm going to Use For
Horizontal Displacement to Luminance.
| | 00:23 | I'm going to change Use For Vertical
Displacement to Off. Take Max Vertical
| | 00:28 | Displacement to zero. We are ready to rock.
| | 00:31 | I am going to hit the Home key,
make sure I'm at the first frame of the
| | 00:33 | animation and then going to increase
Max Horizontal Displacement to 20. Click
| | 00:39 | the Stopwatch, hit the End key, take Max
Horizontal Displacement to negative 20.
| | 00:46 | Now if we preview this, we have a
pretty sweet animation of our pool table
| | 00:53 | moving in 3D and once this renders here,
it's not playing in real time as you
| | 00:59 | can see here. Once it finishes playing
through this, you can see that it moves
| | 01:03 | in a very realistic 3-
dimensional way, very cool, I love that.
| | 01:09 | Now, let's go to the top of our layers
stack and select the Marian layer and
| | 01:14 | turn that layer's visibility on. Go
ahead and apply Displacement Map to that
| | 01:18 | one and again, let's take the
Displacement Map layer from Marian to DIS Marian.
| | 01:24 | Let's take Use For Horizontal
Displacement to Luminance, Use For Vertical
| | 01:29 | Displacement to Off and Max Vertical
Displacement to zero, same as before.
| | 01:34 | But you will notice as I move the Max
Horizontal Displacement value that we are
| | 01:40 | seeing some problems with our
displacement, at least in my case here. Perhaps
| | 01:44 | you didn't make the same mistakes with
your Displacement Map that I made with mine.
| | 01:49 | So as I move this around, I
could see that her forehead and chin
| | 01:54 | particularly are a little bit off.
| | 01:56 | Now eventually, if you distort this
like crazy, it's going to look terrible.
| | 01:59 | There is no Displacement Map in the
world that's going to look perfect
| | 02:02 | completely at every single value. But
all the same, we are not getting the same
| | 02:07 | amount of value with her chin and
forehead, they are a little bit too dark,
| | 02:13 | more than the rest of her face is.
| | 02:15 | Now I'm really happy with her hand and
her arm, looks pretty good. It distorts
| | 02:20 | a little bit weird right here but
that's okay and her body is displacing really well.
| | 02:27 | Her hand pops-out a little bit
and there is a little bit of a bubble
| | 02:31 | right here, right below her hand that
I'm not liking, but since it's over a
| | 02:34 | black dress, we are still going to
correct like this and darken it even more.
| | 02:37 | I think it's going to be
fine for our purposes here.
| | 02:40 | So the next step then is to fix the
displacement map and reload that back into After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Reloading altered footage| 00:01 | So we need to fix our Displacement
Map for Marian here. I have added this
| | 00:04 | Displacement Map and I have kind of
given an extreme value so we can see what's
| | 00:08 | going on. What's happening is that her
chin is pulling in the same direction as
| | 00:13 | her knee and that means we have
probably made the Displacement Map where her
| | 00:16 | chin is a little bit too dark.
| | 00:18 | Again, this is a common problem that
we have when we are displacing objects
| | 00:24 | where on the layer, you will have one
object that supposed to be in front of
| | 00:28 | another object and so we have the dark
dress or the map would be painted dark
| | 00:33 | and her arm would be painted
light for the Displacement Map.
| | 00:36 | So you need to go and remedy that
situation. So her forehead, her chin, her
| | 00:41 | forearm and also there is this kind of
like weird bump right here underneath
| | 00:45 | her hand, as we move this around, it
appears as if there is kind of like a lump
| | 00:50 | in her leg or something like that.
So I think the map might be off there.
| | 00:53 | So I'm going to leave this set at
negative 30 so we get intense reference.
| | 00:58 | I am going to go back to the
Project panel, open up the folder with the
| | 01:02 | Photoshop layers here and on any layer,
go to the Edit menu and select Edit
| | 01:06 | Original. We could also use the
keyboard shortcut Command+E on the Mac or
| | 01:09 | Ctrl+E on the PC. The document will
then open up in Photoshop and we can really
| | 01:16 | see the problem here without even
having After Effects as a reference.
| | 01:19 | We see that her chin and neck are way
too dark here and we could also see the
| | 01:24 | dark areas of her forearm, that her
forehead is little too dark. And we could
| | 01:28 | also see if we turn on the Marian layer,
underneath her hand there is this kind
| | 01:31 | of light paint splotch and that is what's
creating that artificial bulge under her hand.
| | 01:38 | So first, let's fix up the major
problems. So I'm going to hit B for the Brush tool.
| | 01:40 | We have got 10% Opacity brush, so
it's nice and gradual and I also have a
| | 01:46 | soft feathered edge to that brush and
I'm painting with white. So, first I'm
| | 01:50 | going to lighten up the inside of her
forearm and then I want to lighten up her
| | 01:54 | neck a little bit, pretty much her
whole head and forehead. I'll turn on the
| | 01:58 | Marian layer while I'm doing this. Top
of her head is a little dark as well.
| | 02:02 | So we'll bring this out and her chin, I
think that should pretty much do it, a
| | 02:06 | little bit more lightness on her neck,
a little bit more on the right side face
| | 02:11 | and hair there and then I also want to
hit the letter X to paint with black and
| | 02:17 | I'm going to make that area where her
hand is, right underneath that area, a
| | 02:21 | little bit darker so that
blends in with the rest of the dress.
| | 02:23 | Now it looks pretty good there. So
I'm going to hit Command+S on the Mac or
| | 02:28 | Ctrl+S on the PC to save that, which
is a necessary step for those changes to
| | 02:32 | show up in After Effects. Then when I
go back over into After Effects, I want
| | 02:36 | to -- Oh! It automatically did that
for me, I didn't have to do anything.
| | 02:39 | But typically what you have to do is right-
click and select Reload Footage on one
| | 02:44 | of the layers inside of this folder,
not the composition, not the folder, you
| | 02:48 | actually have to select one of the
Photoshop layers and select Reload Footage there.
| | 02:53 | And like we just saw, sometimes it
automatically corrects itself and reloads
| | 02:57 | for you but my experience is that
more often than not you actually have to
| | 03:01 | manually reload the footage. But now we
see that even though we have an extreme
| | 03:05 | value for the displacement that she is
still looking really good here. Her chin
| | 03:08 | and forehead are only slightly off. Her
forearm is also looking much better as well.
| | 03:13 | So now we can go ahead and animate
this and we'll start out with a positive
| | 03:16 | value, because that's what we did with
the pool table and it looks like I can
| | 03:20 | go to about positive 14 or so and then
I'll hit the End key to go to the end of
| | 03:25 | my composition, take this to a
negative number and we could probably go to
| | 03:29 | about negative 20 or so, maybe negative
22 and that still looks good. I really
| | 03:35 | like the changes that we made there.
It's definitely a big improvement.
| | 03:38 | So now I'm going to hit the Home key
and preview this and we could see what the
| | 03:41 | pool table and Marian look like
displaced together. I'm feeling this is going
| | 03:46 | to be very cool. So let's go ahead and
preview those and see what they look like.
| | 03:50 | So now as we play this footage
rendered back, we can see both Marian and the
| | 03:55 | pool table moving in what appears to
be 3D, really it's just displaced.
| | 03:59 | But wow! Isn't that an amazing look? It
really looks like she is sitting on a pool
| | 04:03 | table and we have a virtual camera and
we are just kind of panning around her
| | 04:07 | and she is just kind of like
standing still. That just looks amazing.
| | 04:10 | I'm feeling once we add the other guys in
the band to this it's going to look even
| | 04:14 | more impressive and so let's get to that.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Positioning layers in 3D| 00:01 | So, now we get to position these
layers in 3-D space, but before we position
| | 00:05 | them in 3-D space basically by changing
the Z position, we need to create the Z
| | 00:10 | position by making these layers 3-dimensional.
| | 00:12 | So, I'm going to click one of these
layers to select it in the Timeline panel,
| | 00:16 | making sure that's active, and I'm
going to press Command+A or Ctrl+A on the PC
| | 00:20 | to select all the layers, then come
over here underneath of 3-D cube, and click
| | 00:24 | once in the 3-D cube and all
selected layers will become 3-D layers.
| | 00:28 | Now there are a couple of different
ways that we can approach this. We could
| | 00:32 | select, let's say one layer at a time,
and we could click-and-drag in the
| | 00:36 | Composition panel on the blue arrow,
and drag that left or right to move these
| | 00:42 | layer in 3-D space. Likewise we could
select the layer in the Timeline panel,
| | 00:47 | hit the letter P for position, and
then adjust the Z position that way.
| | 00:51 | And either way; no matter which method
you choose, I recommend leaving position
| | 00:54 | open for the different layers, so we
could tell exactly what the values are
| | 00:58 | both relative and absolute
in comparison to one another.
| | 01:02 | Now, we can also, let's say we go to a
4 view here, down at the bottom of the
| | 01:06 | Composition panel, change this to 4
Views. Now we can go to the Top view, which
| | 01:10 | is by default up here in the upper left
-hand corner, and then we could select
| | 01:14 | the layers one at a time, and
then move them here in the top layer.
| | 01:18 | So really this is a top view of what
our layers look like. And the Marian layer
| | 01:22 | right now is in front of all the others.
So it looks kind of below it here in
| | 01:26 | the Top view, but it's closer to the camera,
which would be down here looking upwards.
| | 01:31 | So essentially, it just seems like we
have one layer here upfront, and then all
| | 01:36 | of the other layers on one plain back
that way. So, say for example, I selected
| | 01:40 | the Background layer. I could come
over here with the blue arrow and
| | 01:43 | click-and-drag on that Background
layer. Then I could look over here at the
| | 01:47 | Active Camera to see what that's looking like.
| | 01:50 | Now, likewise you could just drag it
on the Z-axis here, on one of the Side
| | 01:54 | views, this is the right view here.
Now realize it first, that when you are
| | 01:58 | used to working with all these
pretty colors, and things looking kind of
| | 02:01 | normal, and then you go to one of these
views where it's just a bunch of weird
| | 02:03 | sticky lines, then it might seem
little abstract at first, but once you start
| | 02:08 | playing in 3-dimensional space these
views are absolutely necessary. Especially
| | 02:13 | once you start bringing cameras and
lights into the mix and you are moving
| | 02:17 | around the 3-D scene, you've got to be
able to look at these Top and Side views
| | 02:21 | to get a better idea of where
everything is positioned in 3-D space.
| | 02:25 | For now, I'm just going to take the 4
Views drop-down back to 1 View, and I'm
| | 02:29 | going to manually adjust these
properties here. You will notice that as we
| | 02:34 | reduce or make the Z position negative, we are
actually bringing things closer to the camera.
| | 02:40 | So what we want to do is, the things
like Marian here and the pool table, we
| | 02:44 | want to give those a negative value so
they come closer to us, and things like
| | 02:48 | the background, we'll hit P for
position. We want to give those positive
| | 02:51 | values, so those scale backwards.
| | 02:54 | What you might want to do also, if you
start increasing the Z position of that
| | 02:58 | background and it gets really far away
back there. Now you might also want to
| | 03:02 | scale that up a little bit, so it's
still big, it's still covering the entire
| | 03:06 | background, but it's just a little farther back.
| | 03:09 | Now of course you want to be prudent
with this though, you don't want to move
| | 03:12 | it too far back as then, the farther
back you move it, the more dramatically
| | 03:16 | it's going to move around, once
we have our 3-D layers in place.
| | 03:21 | So this is probably a little bit too
much, I'll probably just scale this down a
| | 03:24 | little bit, keeping in mind that we are
going to crop-off probably the edges of
| | 03:27 | this as we put this into another
composition. And I'll go into here, and let's
| | 03:32 | say the You Yell You Kick 3 (YYYK 3)
guy, and maybe give him a positive value
| | 03:37 | so he goes back as well.
| | 03:39 | But again, you want to balance this
Z position, against the Background Z
| | 03:42 | position. Select the layer and hit P.
So we have 1467 here and 233, so I think,
| | 03:48 | we are going to move this guy
back even a little bit more.
| | 03:52 | Be careful also as you are moving
layers in Z space, because if we change this
| | 03:56 | view to the Top view, and zoom out, we
have this guy here, and then if we click
| | 04:01 | on the Background, the Background is
actually way over here, beyond what we
| | 04:05 | could see in the Top view.
| | 04:06 | And if we were to select this, You
Yell You Kick (YYYK) guy and move him back
| | 04:11 | behind the Background, like this, then
we would not be able to see it anymore.
| | 04:16 | So if I take this into a 4 View
situation and we'll select the You Yell You
| | 04:23 | Kick 3 (YYYK 3) guy, and then you'll
notice that as I -- let's change this view
| | 04:28 | to an Active View so we could see
what's going on. Active Camera and then as we
| | 04:33 | zoom out, let's say, look at this side
here, this Right View. This is the You
| | 04:37 | Yell You Kick 3 (YYYK 3) guy in the back,
and you notice that as I'm looking in
| | 04:41 | my Active Camera view to see what's
going on. As I move this back farther, it's
| | 04:45 | getting back to the Background. But
once I go pass the Background, then he is
| | 04:49 | behind the Background.
| | 04:51 | So remember that once layers are 3-D,
they can cross through or in other words,
| | 04:56 | intersect other 3-D layers. So if
you've got a layer that's disappeared, then
| | 05:01 | this is what you want to do. You want
to come to one of these boring Side or
| | 05:05 | Top views, so that you can
see exactly where the layer is.
| | 05:09 | Now let's go in and click on the pool
table for example, and I hit the letter P
| | 05:14 | and adjust the pool table to come
forward a little bit, as we do that you'll
| | 05:18 | notice that a lot of these balls might
disappear, because they were in front
| | 05:22 | and now the pool table has moved in
front. So you probably want to adjust the
| | 05:25 | 3-D depth of those, although
we're not going to do that right now.
| | 05:30 | Now, we are going to off camera, so
not like right now in this training where
| | 05:34 | we are going to go and offset the Z
position to all these different layers.
| | 05:38 | But once we've done that what we can do
is go to the Layer menu, create a new
| | 05:44 | camera. I'm just going to use the
default settings, click OK. And with this
| | 05:48 | camera selected, we can click on the
Unified Camera tool, new in After Effects
| | 05:52 | CS4, and we see how far away
this guy is back in the back.
| | 05:57 | But as we move this around, you could
really see the depth of what we got going
| | 06:02 | on here. The lights are really good.
They are giving a sense of depth to this
| | 06:06 | whole project. This is obviously way
to intense for what we want to create.
| | 06:12 | You get a sense of how cool this
project is, once you put it in 3-D.
| | 06:15 | Now one thing that you might want to
consider, there are a couple of issues
| | 06:19 | here, all of these guys have their
hands on top of a pool table, except for the
| | 06:25 | guy that's way back here. But they
are also standing behind the pool table.
| | 06:30 | That presents a real issue.
| | 06:32 | If we really want to take the time to
fix this problem, we have to go back to
| | 06:35 | Photoshop and then -- this sounds
really graphic, but we have to cut their arms
| | 06:40 | off, so that their arms and their
bodies could exist in different 3-D planes.
| | 06:46 | In other words that their hand could
be in front of the pool table, and their
| | 06:49 | body can be behind it.
| | 06:50 | Now we didn't take this project to
that level of depth, so we'll have to be
| | 06:54 | tricky about keeping these guys with
the pool table, so that they don't look
| | 07:00 | like they are too far or removed from
it. So that's way it still looks like
| | 07:04 | their hands are in front and
their bodies are behind it.
| | 07:06 | Now we could go in and animate this
camera, and maybe even like fly it into the
| | 07:12 | scene as we zoomed in a little bit
closer, some great effects that way, but I'm
| | 07:16 | going to show you another way to control
3D layers using something called a Null Object.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using a null object| 00:00 | So instead of using a camera, we are
going to use what I consider to be a much
| | 00:04 | easier way to animate 3D scenes and
that is with a Null Object. First let's
| | 00:09 | create a null object. You do this the
same way you create any other type of
| | 00:13 | layer. You go to the Layer menu or right
-click in the Timeline panel. I got to
| | 00:17 | have that selected first,
Layer > New > Null Object.
| | 00:22 | Now a null object is what you are
seeing here, this little red square, is
| | 00:26 | basically nothing. I mean the word
null means nothing, so a null object is
| | 00:31 | literally a nothing object. But
because they are nothing, they are used to
| | 00:36 | control other layers and what's really
cool is that if all of these layers are
| | 00:41 | parented to this null, the null is a
parent of all these layers, then when we
| | 00:45 | move the null, all of the layers will
move around this null object and keep in
| | 00:50 | mind that parenting controls four
attributes that is Position, Anchor Point,
| | 00:55 | Rotation and Scale.
| | 00:57 | So the Position, Anchor Point,
Rotation and Scale of these null, become the
| | 01:01 | common Position, Anchor Point, Rotation
and Scale of all of the layers. So the
| | 01:06 | changes we make to the position,
anchor point, rotation and scale of the null
| | 01:10 | object, also accordingly adjust every
other layer. So let's go ahead and hit
| | 01:15 | Command+A or Ctrl+A on the PC to
select all layers. Actually I'm going to
| | 01:19 | Command-click or Ctrl-click the null
object and then take one of the pick whips
| | 01:25 | from anyone of the layers and drag it
to the null object and then all layers
| | 01:31 | will be parented to the null.
| | 01:32 | Now in order for us to move in 3D
space, we need to have the layers in 3D
| | 01:37 | space, but we also need the null to
exist in 3D space, so I'm going to click
| | 01:41 | the cube here. Now you'll notice that
there is a visibility icon for the null
| | 01:44 | object. That's just this little square
here. By the way it doesn't do us any
| | 01:47 | good in this instance, so I'm just
going to turn-off the Visibility to get that
| | 01:50 | out of our way. Note that visibility does not
affect the parenting relationship in anyway.
| | 01:56 | So I'm going to select the null object,
hit the letter R to reveal its Rotation
| | 01:59 | properties. Now watch this. As I adjust
rotation, we see that all of the layers
| | 02:06 | are rotating around the null object.
So you can see as I mentioned, it's so
| | 02:11 | much easier to animate a project or an
entire scene rather using a null object
| | 02:16 | than it is with the camera. Of course,
cameras are much more powerful but they
| | 02:20 | are much more converse in having a
point of interest and a focal range and all
| | 02:24 | these different attributes
you need to keep track of.
| | 02:27 | So in this case, I'm going to animate
this, starting at a positive number here,
| | 02:31 | +10 or so. Let me lessen out at +6,
click the stopwatch for Y Rotation, hit the
| | 02:38 | N key to go to the end to the comp and
then take this to a negative number and
| | 02:42 | we'll pane to pretend camera round,
actually we are just moving the null object
| | 02:46 | to basically move through our scene.
| | 02:48 | We could also select the null, hit P
for position, then hit Home key, click the
| | 02:53 | stopwatch for Position and then hit the
End key and create another keyframe for
| | 02:58 | position which basically look like we
are zooming out a little bit, so that way
| | 03:02 | we are rotating the virtual
camera and zooming in as well.
| | 03:06 | So let's hit the Home key and preview
our animation so far. So as this null
| | 03:11 | object moves around, everything just
seems to work and flow right. We have
| | 03:15 | Marian displacing, the pool table
displacing, the whole thing just really moves
| | 03:20 | well in 3D. There are some parts where
this guy appears to slide too much, here
| | 03:24 | on the left hand side and again we
could remedy that by cutting up his arms,
| | 03:28 | separating it from his body in
Photoshop, so that we can put them on two
| | 03:32 | different 3D planes, but I think
this is a pretty cool scene as it is.
| | 03:36 | I like this background motion, you
could definitely see the difference in 3D
| | 03:39 | depth between Marian and the guy
standing behind her, and our Clone Job works
| | 03:44 | pretty good, even though remember, I
reconstructed his shirt and that vase in
| | 03:48 | his hand. But when it is moving by
quickly like that, you can't really tell.
| | 03:53 | Also all the stuff we did to the
background, it's looking really good.
| | 03:56 | We are seeing the depth cues from the lights,
look how the lights pass over all those
| | 04:00 | background objects, and they appear
just kind of hovering and floating in space
| | 04:04 | in front of it. So a lot of
really cool 3D stuff going on here.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the layers| 00:00 | Now our project is looking pretty
good at this point, but if we wanted to
| | 00:03 | further bring it to life, we could
animate various objects in the scene.
| | 00:08 | We could even combine some live video
footage with this to make it seem even more
| | 00:12 | realistic and believable.
| | 00:13 | In this case though, what we are going
to do is we are going to animate this
| | 00:16 | guy here, YYYK guy number 2, as we'll
call him. We are going to animate him
| | 00:21 | using the pool stick to hit the cue
ball here. So the way that we are going to
| | 00:24 | do this is by animating the guy
using the Puppet tool and we are going to
| | 00:27 | animate the cue stick
using just simple position.
| | 00:30 | So first let's select YYYK2 and let's
go ahead and select the Puppet tool in
| | 00:36 | the toolbar up at the top here. Let's
go ahead anchor down his hand with the
| | 00:39 | Puppet Pin and maybe his shoulder and
maybe his neck, maybe his torso, and also
| | 00:46 | probably down here on his legs. And
then of course, we need one on his hand to
| | 00:52 | move the hand. This is the only one
we are going to be animating here.
| | 00:54 | Now let's move out in time a little bit,
just a few frames here. We went out
| | 00:59 | about 10 frames. That's probably good.
Or maybe a little bit more, about 20 frames.
| | 01:02 | And I'm going to grab that hand and
move it back along the same axis as the cue stick,
| | 01:09 | and then I'm also going to move
out again in time. This time to about a
| | 01:14 | second and 20 frames and then click
and drag his hand again on the axis and
| | 01:21 | move it down the line a little bit
as if he already has hit the ball.
| | 01:26 | And you want to make sure this lines
up with the axis of the cue stick.
| | 01:29 | So mine are a little bit high here.
Bring that down. Good, now let's back up a
| | 01:34 | little bit and we have him, as we
scrub this, we see him backing up his hand
| | 01:38 | and then boom, moving it
forward and hitting the ball.
| | 01:42 | Now what we might want to do is come
back to this keyframe, maybe we could just
| | 01:45 | select this layer, hit the letter U to
select all the keyframes, hit the letter J
| | 01:49 | to back up to this keyframe and then
right-click on it and select Keyframe
| | 01:53 | Assistant > Easy Ease Out. That way
it will go a little bit slow when it's
| | 01:57 | leaving, but then it will speed up as
he goes to hit the ball and in order for
| | 02:03 | this to really look great, we'll have
to of course go into the Graph Editor
| | 02:07 | and play with those curves a little
bit to make sure that it actually looks
| | 02:11 | realistic as he's hitting that pool cue.
| | 02:13 | For now, let's go ahead and close up
that layer, go to the cue stick, hit the
| | 02:17 | Home key to get to the first frame and
actually what I'll do is select the guy
| | 02:21 | layer and hit the letter U to reveal
his keyframe so you can use those as a reference.
| | 02:25 | Actually, you might want to even close up this.
I just need to have these as the reference.
| | 02:29 | So I'm going to select the cue stick
and I'm going to hit the letter P for
| | 02:33 | Position and click the stopwatch for
Position and then let's move out in time
| | 02:38 | to where this other keyframe is. If
this keyframe was showing here, then when
| | 02:41 | we press K it would jump to the next keyframe.
| | 02:44 | Let's go ahead and move this cue stick
rather. I actually need the Selection
| | 02:47 | tool for this. Let's move it back in
the upper left, so it look like it's still
| | 02:52 | in his hand there. You may want to
zoom in a little closer just to make sure
| | 02:56 | you got this in the right spot.
| | 02:57 | Next, just go to the next keyframe
over here, using the Puppet keyframe as a
| | 03:02 | reference and then we'll move the cue
stick to still be in his hand and to make
| | 03:08 | sure that they stay lined up, I'm
going to right-click on the second keyframe
| | 03:11 | and use Easy Ease Out on that
keyframe as well, so they stay matched up.
| | 03:15 | Now I'm going to hit the letter N to
set the end of the work area, hit Home and
| | 03:19 | then press 0 on the numeric keypad to
do a RAM preview of our animation thus far.
| | 03:23 | So now as we play this back, you could
see him cut back and then go to hit the ball.
| | 03:28 | Now there are a few problems
with this. Number 1, I think the biggest
| | 03:31 | problem is that he is hitting really
slowly here which looks kind of weird, and
| | 03:35 | maybe he's just setting up the
shot though, so that's feasible.
| | 03:37 | Another big problem is that at one
point just a couple of frames here,
| | 03:42 | this index finger, which is a separate
layer, it should be in front of that cue stick.
| | 03:47 | It actually goes behind it for
a second. So what we need to do is go
| | 03:51 | back to our fingertip, hit P for
Position, go to one of those offending frames
| | 03:56 | and adjust the Z position until it is
in front of the cue stick for all of
| | 04:03 | these frames and it looks
like that just about did it.
| | 04:05 | Now to speed this up, I'm going to
select the cue stick layer, press U and
| | 04:10 | the YYYK layer and press U, so we can
look at our keyframes here and let's drag
| | 04:16 | those two keyframes so that they are
closer, so it takes less time to hit the ball
| | 04:20 | and that way it will speed up that
animation, and then once we get to this
| | 04:25 | point where the ball is hit by the
pool stick or the cue stick, then what we
| | 04:30 | need to do is move the cue ball.
| | 04:32 | Now it actually starts back here, so
what we need to do is go up to the cue ball
| | 04:37 | and select it, and move it, so
that it is closer to where he's going to
| | 04:43 | hit it there and then we could go over
to this next keyframe and make sure that
| | 04:47 | they make contact. We may want to
bring that up just a little bit there and
| | 04:51 | then at that point, at this keyframe,
we can click the stopwatch for the cue ball,
| | 04:55 | click the stopwatch for position
and then we could move out in time and
| | 05:00 | make the cue ball move or
whatever as if he'd hit it.
| | 05:03 | Again we have the same problem that
it's going to be covered up by the pool
| | 05:07 | table as we move it. So what we want
to do is adjust the Z position of that
| | 05:11 | until he is in front of the pool table
and stays in front of the pool table.
| | 05:15 | Now if we really want to get creative
here, we could move this cue ball
| | 05:18 | along the X-axis here and move it like
behind Marian's arm or something and
| | 05:23 | have it come fly out at the camera.
Maybe the band's logo could then be on the cue ball,
| | 05:28 | if we wanted to do that. I'm
just going to undo that for now.
| | 05:31 | Now again there is a lot we could do
here, but let's just see what our final
| | 05:34 | results are thus far. Play it back, he
hits the ball and it moves. Now it's a
| | 05:39 | little robotic and it looks like
it's going to like sawing into his index
| | 05:43 | finger here a little bit. We might
want to play with maybe anchor point
| | 05:46 | rotation of this cue stick. It looks
like his hand and the cue stick might be
| | 05:50 | off just a little bit. Obviously we
could improve the timing of this and
| | 05:54 | the speed of the ball but I love how we've
really just brought this to life, very cool stuff.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Enhancing color| 00:00 | So the final, but definitely not least
important step we're going to do here is
| | 00:05 | to correct it for color. Now let's
start by adding some life to these lights here.
| | 00:09 | Now let's go ahead and select
the Lights layer, and let's go ahead and
| | 00:13 | apply the Glow effect to the lights layer.
| | 00:16 | That automatically makes our lights
look alive here, and let's take the Glow
| | 00:21 | Threshold down to 40 and the Glow
Radius up to 20. Now let's go ahead and
| | 00:27 | animate them. We're going to apply
a Wiggle expression. Go ahead and
| | 00:30 | Option-click or Alt-click on the PC,
the Glow Threshold stopwatch and that'll
| | 00:35 | automatically take you down to the
Timeline panel. There you'll have text that
| | 00:38 | is selected. Go ahead and replace it
with this text. Wiggle (5,10) hit again.
| | 00:45 | We'll cover what the Wiggle expression
does and how to use it more fully later
| | 00:49 | on in this training series.
| | 00:50 | But for now click away from the text
to accept it and now as we preview this,
| | 00:54 | we can kind of just skim it here,
and we could see as we go from frame to
| | 00:58 | frame, these lights are flickering, as
if they were old lights in a pool hall.
| | 01:01 | They're just kind of flickering or
barely on. I really love this look. Again,
| | 01:06 | anything you can do to bring your
scene to life makes it look less like a
| | 01:10 | photo and more like video
or a special effect shot.
| | 01:13 | Now what are the problems is they're
both on the same layer. They are both
| | 01:17 | going to flicker and glow in the
exact same way, which might not look too
| | 01:21 | believable. So what we could do is mask
off one of these lights, duplicate the layer,
| | 01:27 | and then mask off the other
light on the duplicate, and that way you
| | 01:30 | have two independent layers that can
have two different expressions and
| | 01:34 | therefore flicker independently.
| | 01:36 | For what I'm trying to go for, that
works for me though. So I'm going to close
| | 01:38 | up the Lights layer and I'm going to
right click in this area in the timeline
| | 01:43 | to the left of the source name of the layer
and it's kind of like a blank no-man's zone
| | 01:48 | of the timeline panel. I'm going to
right click here and go to New Adjustment Layer.
| | 01:53 | First let's start out with a little hue
/saturation. This is a little bit too
| | 01:58 | saturated for me. I kind of want to
have a little bit more vintage look to it.
| | 02:02 | I think the art of the shot, the nature
of what they are doing, their clothes.
| | 02:06 | It kind of is not a very saturated
type look. It has a more of like a vintage
| | 02:11 | look and feel. So we'll help that
along by taking down this Master Saturation
| | 02:14 | value to about negative 25 or so.
| | 02:16 | Next, let's apply Levels. And let's go
ahead and drag the right triangle right
| | 02:21 | in the histogram to the left, until it
gets to that first little speckle right there.
| | 02:25 | Now we'll brighten our highlights,
and our little Midtone slider.
| | 02:29 | Let's go ahead and drag that to the right.
So we darken this considerably. Now here's
| | 02:34 | where the rules definitely stop
applying if we've been using any rules so far.
| | 02:38 | Because this is all to taste.
| | 02:40 | Another aspect of color correction is
that the band has kind of a light skin
| | 02:44 | here and the background is darker.
So the more we darken the midtones,
| | 02:49 | the more that's the band member seem to pop,
and really they are the focus here,
| | 02:53 | not this background.
| | 02:54 | And it's very busy, a lot of noisy
stuff in the background, the windowsill,
| | 02:57 | the TV, the bench, and so as we adjust for
color here, we can make the band seem
| | 03:02 | even more prominent, which is again
what we're really going for. The last thing
| | 03:06 | I'm going to do here I think is apply
Color Balance, and going to go ahead and
| | 03:11 | apply that to our adjustment layer, and my
intention here is to make this a little bit colder.
| | 03:16 | Usually when you're in a pool hall or
something like that, it's a little bit darker,
| | 03:20 | a little bit more cool color.
So if I want to remove some red from the
| | 03:24 | shadows - woo, instantly that just
looks so cool. Maybe a little bit of red
| | 03:28 | from the highlights so her skin tone
is little bit more washed out. The same
| | 03:32 | thing with the midtones here. We also
might want to go back and add some green
| | 03:37 | and blue to the highlights and the midtones.
| | 03:40 | You might want to also play with Preserve
Luminosity and see where that gets you.
| | 03:43 | I want to add a little bit more blue
and green to the midtones. I think that
| | 03:49 | just about does it. However, I'm not
really liking the fact that our cool warm
| | 03:54 | lights have been affected by this
adjustment layer. So what we can do, and this
| | 03:57 | is really seemingly unconventional,
what we're going to do is grab the lights
| | 04:01 | layer and drag it on top
of the adjustment layer.
| | 04:04 | Now normally you would not be able to
get away with that. But with 3D layers,
| | 04:09 | the stacking order doesn't matter so
much as the z position. So now where our
| | 04:14 | lights glow in their full glory, but
this is a little bit too bright. We need
| | 04:18 | to add a little bit more contrast to
this, so it matches the rest of the scene.
| | 04:21 | So let's go ahead and apply a Levels
effect to our light layer and then we
| | 04:25 | increase the highlights and increase
the shadows and darken the midtones.
| | 04:30 | So now we have the same level of
contrast, but we don't have the same bluish
| | 04:34 | green tint applied to the lights that
we have in the rest of our scene, which
| | 04:38 | is exactly what we wanted. And again,
we can further adjust this as we see fit.
| | 04:41 | We can add hue/saturation here,
and maybe take down the Master Saturation
| | 04:45 | so they don't stick out quite as much.
And we could even adjust the Master Hue
| | 04:50 | so that we are a little bit more gold,
rather than pure warm tones, since there
| | 04:54 | isn't really anything that's warm in this image
anymore, other than her skin tones right here.
| | 04:59 | But for the most part, it's a little
bit toned down and now our lights are
| | 05:01 | little bit toned down. But they
don't have the green and blue tint that
| | 05:05 | everything else seems to. Now if we
want to finish this project off what we
| | 05:09 | could do is create a new composition.
I don't know, whatever our export size is.
| | 05:13 | Let's say NTSC DV. This has Square
Pixels. So for now let's just keep this as
| | 05:17 | Square Pixels for the Pixel Aspect Ratio,
and click OK, and then drag the YYYK
| | 05:23 | fixed composition into the new comp we
just created as a layer, and then we can
| | 05:29 | press the S key for the scale
property and scale this down.
| | 05:33 | This will also help crop out any ugly
edges that we have going on here as well.
| | 05:37 | Let me zoom in to 100%. Let's go crazy.
And I'll resize the Composition panel
| | 05:44 | window as soon as this frame has
finished rendering here. Resize this so we
| | 05:48 | could see this entire comp in all of
it's glory, and let's go ahead and do a
| | 05:52 | RAM preview of our final project.
| | 05:55 | Okay, so I'm just going to stop
rendering here. It's not going to render the
| | 05:59 | full animation, the full composition,
because we have so much stuff going on here.
| | 06:02 | But let's just play back what we
have so far. We have this nice movement.
| | 06:05 | He hits the ball, and that just looks
fantastic. We have our lights flickering
| | 06:10 | up here in a very realistic way.
I love the way that looks. Our color
| | 06:14 | correction is spectacular.
| | 06:15 | This is just a really great project.
Thanks to Photoshop and After Effects together.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
13. Advanced 3DCreating depth of field| 00:01 | Depth of Field is a camera feature
where objects are blurred based on their
| | 00:05 | distance from the camera. This is so
commonly seen in TV shows and movies that
| | 00:10 | our eyes have just become adapted to it.
We use Depth of Field to control where
| | 00:15 | the viewers are looking. Let's say we
have this subway scene here. Everything
| | 00:19 | pretty much looks the same as far as
blur is concerned. But what if, for
| | 00:24 | example, we blur the background, the subway?
| | 00:26 | Then that would put more attention
on our subject, or perhaps maybe this
| | 00:31 | person is just an extra in the movie.
He has nothing to do with the plot
| | 00:35 | whatsoever. Maybe there is some kind
of clue to a murder or something like
| | 00:38 | that written on the subway wall, in
which case we might want to blur the guy
| | 00:42 | and keep the subway sharp.
| | 00:44 | Thankfully, Adobe has actually made
this quite easy for you to play with Depth
| | 00:49 | of Field here in After Effects.
I have this camera here and I'm going to
| | 00:52 | double-click it to open its settings.
As we'll see momentarily, we could just
| | 00:57 | as easily do this in the Timeline panel,
but I think it's a little bit easier
| | 01:00 | to do it this way, so I'm just going to go
ahead and enable Depth of Field and click OK.
| | 01:04 | Then I can open up my Camera Settings,
open up Camera Options, and here we have
| | 01:09 | Depth of Field. So this is where we
could have gone to turn it on as well.
| | 01:12 | The focus distance is perhaps the most
important component of creating depth of field.
| | 01:16 | The Focus Distance is the distance
from the camera that pixels will remain sharp.
| | 01:21 | Now as we start playing around with this,
we'll have a hard time seeing what is
| | 01:26 | getting blurry and what doesn't get
blurry. It doesn't help that as we scrub,
| | 01:30 | we don't get a live update really of
the blur being added. So here's a great trick.
| | 01:35 | If we take the Active Camera
view to one of the side views, let's say
| | 01:39 | the Right view, and let me zoom out just a
little bit, and here we have this camera.
| | 01:43 | As we adjust Focus Distance, we
could see this vertical line right here
| | 01:48 | adjusting. Well, this vertical line
is the Focus Distance. This is where
| | 01:52 | objects will be sharp. So this right
here, again, we're looking at a side
| | 01:56 | representation of our 3D scene.
This vertical plane right here is the
| | 02:01 | character. Then here is the subway in the back,
and then also the scenery in the background.
| | 02:07 | So, again this is the side view. So if
we wanted the character to be in focus,
| | 02:12 | then we would adjust the Focus Distance
to be right where the character is.
| | 02:16 | Now let's change the view from Right, back to
Active Camera, and zoom in little bit closer here.
| | 02:21 | If we take the Depth of Field off and
then on again, we're still not seeing
| | 02:25 | much of a difference. So what we're
going to do is increase the Blur Level to a
| | 02:29 | ridiculous amount, just for the
purposes of this example so that as you're
| | 02:33 | looking at this movie, you can tell
what's going on here. We also might want to
| | 02:37 | increase the Aperture, which increases the blur.
| | 02:40 | Now I realize that sounds a little bit
wonky if you have a camera background.
| | 02:45 | With video cameras and also with
still cameras, the aperture typically is
| | 02:49 | mainly used to control the amount of
light coming in. So typically, if you open
| | 02:53 | up the Aperture, you're letting more
light in that changes the exposure.
| | 02:57 | In this case, it's not like that.
Apertures on cameras also have a kind of
| | 03:02 | secondary feature, where they control
the Depth of Field. Here in After Effects,
| | 03:07 | that's the only thing Aperture
affects is the Depth of Field. But now
| | 03:11 | with Aperture and Blur Level really
high, even watching this tutorial online
| | 03:15 | you still should be able to see how
it's blurred our background and that
| | 03:19 | instantly draws our eyes to the
character and not the subway background.
| | 03:23 | If we take Depth of Field off, you
could see a big difference in clarity
| | 03:26 | between the before and the after.
Of course, we could even make this more crazy
| | 03:31 | and ridiculous if you wanted to, but
at that point it starts to look kind of fake.
| | 03:34 | So I'm just going to leave
this set to about 300-ish and leave my
| | 03:40 | Aperture to about 90 pixels or so.
| | 03:42 | Now this kind of works like the human
eye a little bit as well. I mean, if we
| | 03:45 | had our focus on this guy, then I don't know
if the background would necessarily be blurry,
| | 03:49 | but it wouldn't be really in sharp focus.
It'd be in our peripheral vision.
| | 03:54 | Well, same thing, if we focused on the
subway, then the character would be in
| | 03:57 | our peripheral vision and not be super
clear. So we could emulate that here as well.
| | 04:01 | Let's go back to the Right camera view,
increase the Focus Distance to go
| | 04:06 | farther out, and so again this
vertical line right here represents the subway.
| | 04:11 | So if we keep the Focus Distance here,
then when we go back, we'll see the
| | 04:15 | subway in focus and the guy out of
focus. This is exactly what's happening here.
| | 04:20 | So, again, blurry guy and super
sharp subway. Keep in mind that Focus
| | 04:25 | Distance is an animatable parameter.
| | 04:28 | So you could animate two different
things being in focus, maybe just showing a
| | 04:32 | regular scene and then there is
somebody hidden off to the distance, and then
| | 04:35 | you change the Focus Distance, you animate it.
| | 04:37 | So then all of a sudden, the viewers
can see that there is something hidden
| | 04:41 | off in the shadows in the distance or
what have you. That's how you create
| | 04:44 | Depth of Field in After Effects.
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| Creating stained glass shadows| 00:00 | I created this 3D scene here with this
photo of stained glass window, arranged
| | 00:06 | in 3D space, the 3D line,
casting a shadow onto this solid here.
| | 00:10 | The problem is that the shadow is black
and that's a dead giveaway that this
| | 00:14 | is a digital hoax, because in real
life the stained glass would create a
| | 00:18 | beautiful colored shadow and not a
blank shadow. Well, you could actually
| | 00:22 | change that in After Effects.
| | 00:23 | So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to select the stained glass layer,
| | 00:26 | I'm going to open up its properties, go to
the Material Options, and again,
| | 00:30 | this has to be a 3D layer, this will not
work on a 2D layer, and then the property
| | 00:35 | we're concerned with is Light Transmission.
| | 00:37 | So as we increase Light Transmission,
it's like the angels are singing. Because
| | 00:45 | now we have a colored shadow instead of
just a plain black shadow. As you can see,
| | 00:50 | the results are
spectacular with very little work.
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| Changing an object's material type| 00:00 | In this tutorial, we are going to look
at the material options for 3D objects.
| | 00:05 | These properties basically control the
way that they respond when lights hit them.
| | 00:10 | Now our example here is simple,
we have a blue solid and a regular light.
| | 00:15 | And the reason why we are using such a
plain example is because this way it's
| | 00:19 | easy to see what's going on. If you
had like an actual photo or video clip
| | 00:23 | here, it's little bit more difficult to
tell what these properties are actually doing.
| | 00:27 | So the way that we get to our material
options is by opening up the layer, this
| | 00:32 | little arrow here and then opening up
Material Options. Let's skip down to
| | 00:37 | Ambient. Ambient basically controls
the level of ambient reflectivity of the
| | 00:41 | layer. Since we don't have any ambient
lights in our scene, this isn't really
| | 00:45 | applicable right now.
| | 00:46 | Diffuse is basically the overall color
of the object and so we could see how
| | 00:52 | this is responding to the light overall.
Take this back to its default value,
| | 00:57 | just right-click on Diffuse and
select Reset. We also have the Specular
| | 01:01 | property and I think these next three
are perhaps the most important. These
| | 01:05 | control the pin-point highlights from
the light. So as I increase the Specular
| | 01:10 | value, we are getting a stronger
highlight in this dimension and as I take this
| | 01:15 | down to zero, the Specular
highlight becomes weak and more diffused.
| | 01:19 | Now, I'm going to take this back up to
100%, as we talk about Shininess here.
| | 01:25 | Shininess essentially controls the size
of the Specular highlight. So Specular
| | 01:30 | controls the intensity of the Specular
highlight, Shininess controls the size
| | 01:34 | of it. So, if we have a low Shininess
value, the Specular highlight is actually
| | 01:37 | very big, because it's not a very
shiny object, it's a dull object.
| | 01:41 | So if you are creating a virtual set
that maybe had some carpet in it, then you
| | 01:45 | probably want to take the Shininess
down to zero. If you were creating a
| | 01:49 | plastic cup or something that was
glass on the other hand, then you probably
| | 01:52 | want to increase the Shininess value.
I'm going to take this down a little bit
| | 01:55 | so we have a bigger highlight area and we
could see what's going on when we talk about Metal.
| | 02:00 | Metal basically is a weird property.
The way that Metal works in real life is
| | 02:05 | that metallic things when light hits
them, they tend to be the color of the
| | 02:10 | object and not the color of the light.
So with Metal at its default value of
| | 02:14 | 100%, our Blue Solid is blue under a
white light. But if we take down Metal,
| | 02:20 | let's take it to zero. Then it becomes
more white because that's the color of
| | 02:24 | the light. So the less metal something
is, the more color that it picks up from
| | 02:29 | the light shining on it. The larger
the Metal value, the more than the
| | 02:33 | highlights are its own color.
| | 02:36 | Now these properties taken together
might seem like small things. But if you
| | 02:40 | are in the process of creating
something synthetic, whether it's a virtual
| | 02:44 | world or a simple texture or background
or whatever, it really pays to know how
| | 02:49 | light interacts with different objects
in the real world. So that way you can
| | 02:53 | simulate that with these material
options. I might also point out that you will
| | 02:57 | see the same material options in a lot of the
3D effects such as Shatter in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Orienting objects to a camera| 00:00 | In this movie, we are going to look at
automatically orienting objects to face
| | 00:04 | the camera. I have here this project
that we looked at before and I'm going to
| | 00:09 | create a New Camera and I'll just
accept the default settings here.
| | 00:13 | Now notice as we select the Unified
Camera tool and as we move around this
| | 00:18 | here, we could actually move to the
side of these band members, essentially
| | 00:23 | looking at their flat edges. But we'll get a
different result if we turn on Auto-Orientation.
| | 00:27 | To do that, I'm going to select all of
these layers. First, I'm going to select
| | 00:31 | the Marian layer then Shift-click the
bottom layer. I'm going to right-click on them,
| | 00:35 | select Transform, Auto-Orient,
then change Auto-Orientation from Off to
| | 00:41 | Orient Towards Camera. Now what will
happen is when I move my camera around,
| | 00:46 | these objects, these people in the band,
will constantly be looking at the camera.
| | 00:51 | Now I didn't change the orientation of
the background. They are acting as if I
| | 00:56 | have a regular camera and I'm panning
around them. The band members however are
| | 00:59 | constantly pointing at the camera no
matter what I do. They are not moving in
| | 01:04 | position, they are automatically
changing their orientation or rotation I guess
| | 01:09 | you could say. They are constantly
pointing at the camera and that's why
| | 01:12 | you are getting some of this
intersection because the band members are pointing
| | 01:16 | at the camera and the background is not and
so again they intersect in either direction.
| | 01:22 | So that's why sometimes these band
members get cut off like that. Now I have
| | 01:25 | seen this done with like planets, so if
you had a camera that you are piloting
| | 01:29 | through planets and you had Auto-
Orientation on, the planets would look more
| | 01:33 | volumetric and spherical as they rotated
pass the camera or the camera passed it.
| | 01:38 | Now in many circumstances, you wouldn't
want to use Auto-Orientation but there
| | 01:41 | are many times when you just want
everything looking at the camera and always
| | 01:46 | looking at the camera and that's how you do it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a virtual set| 00:01 | Now there are a lot of limitations
with the 3D in After Effects because it's
| | 00:04 | basically just flat layers that you
can move in 3D space. But that being said
| | 00:09 | there is a lot you can
do with these flat layers.
| | 00:11 | Let's say you want to make a virtual
set, maybe a tunnel, a hallway, a room,
| | 00:15 | something like that. You could select a
layer and I'll just put all of these in
| | 00:19 | 3D right now and let's say I hit the
letter R for Rotation, and I'll take Y
| | 00:23 | Rotation to 90 degrees. I then grab
this on the Z-axis and move this to the
| | 00:28 | left side of the screen. I can do the
same thing with this Blue Solid. I'll put
| | 00:32 | this on top here, so we could see it.
| | 00:35 | Rotate this, same thing. Y-axis, 90
degrees and I move this over to the right side.
| | 00:41 | Now we have created two walls in
this virtual set here. I'll pick one of
| | 00:46 | the yellow solids, hit R for Rotation,
do the same thing for X Rotation here,
| | 00:51 | take this to 90 degrees and we can
make this kind of like a floor. And same
| | 00:56 | thing with the other one here, R for
rotation, on X Rotation take this to 90
| | 01:00 | degrees, and take this up and
make this kind of like a ceiling.
| | 01:05 | Now of course, you would want to
stretch these out a little bit. But you could
| | 01:07 | see, we have created two walls and
ceiling and a floor. If we created a camera
| | 01:13 | here, just right-click, New Camera,
click OK. Select the Camera, select the
| | 01:19 | Unified Camera tool, we move this
around and you could see that we have this
| | 01:23 | kind of mini-tunnel here. Obviously,
there is some refinement that we need to
| | 01:27 | play around with in this case, but we
could zoom in and out of our virtual room.
| | 01:31 | And imagine the quality this would have.
If we had textures that were the right
| | 01:34 | size and dimensions and maybe you had
a textures for a wall or a carpet or
| | 01:39 | asphalt for the floor. And so we can
create these cool tunnels with solids but
| | 01:45 | it goes even deeper than that. I
created this haunted house over here out of
| | 01:50 | pure solid layers. I wanted to see how
complicated I could create an object out
| | 01:55 | of just flat solid layers. And if you
look here in my Timeline panel, there is
| | 02:00 | quite a lot of just plain flat
solid layers, over 100 actually.
| | 02:06 | If I select the camera here, select the
Unified Camera tool, I move this around
| | 02:10 | just a little bit. It takes a wilder
render, because it is a kind of a beefy
| | 02:14 | monster with all that's going on here.
But you can see that it is actually a
| | 02:19 | real 3D house, these windows sills,
the stairs, it is all 3-dimensional and
| | 02:25 | really just created with a bunch of
flat solid layers arranged in 3D space.
| | 02:31 | So the next time you are in a pinch,
and maybe you are making an indie that you
| | 02:35 | can just shoot a scene or something,
don't be afraid to experiment with solids.
| | 02:39 | I bet that solids can bail you out of
more situations that you realize. And if
| | 02:44 | you are using textured solid, in other
words, like images that you import, all
| | 02:48 | the better. Whether it's virtual
sets or fake 3D objects like this,
| | 02:53 | there really is no end to what you
can create with 3-dimensional objects in
| | 02:59 | After Effects with a little bit of creativity.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Locating missing 3D layers| 00:00 | Here in another quick tip here. When
you're playing around with 3D, oftentimes,
| | 00:03 | at least when I started playing around
3D in After Effects, I oftentimes found
| | 00:07 | that I hit the wrong button or
something and my 3D layer would be just be gone,
| | 00:10 | it would just disappear.
| | 00:11 | Then you have to go through all these
different 3-D views and scroll through
| | 00:15 | your composition, outside the
boundaries trying to find these lost layers.
| | 00:19 | There's actually a great feature to
help you instantly recover missing footage.
| | 00:23 | Just not for 3D layers, but for
any layer that you might be missing.
| | 00:27 | I got this 3D layer ring of rings. This
is a live 3D layer from Photoshop. So,
| | 00:32 | we don't actually adjust the 3D object,
we adjust the null. So, because this 3D
| | 00:37 | object is missing we know that the null is
the one that's screwed up. That we got to fix.
| | 00:41 | So, we got to right-click on the layer
in question, the layer that's missing,
| | 00:45 | go to Transform and select Center In
View. Once you do that, wherever the layer
| | 00:52 | is it'll magically snap
to the center of the view.
| | 00:54 | Now, it might not be at the right scale
or the right closeness to the camera or
| | 00:59 | what have you, it might be too far
away, or in this case a little bit too close,
| | 01:03 | but nonetheless, it will snap to view, so
you will be able to see it and recognize it.
| | 01:08 | I find that this feature is
particularly helpful when dealing with 3D files,
| | 01:12 | Vanishing Point files or what
have you from Photoshop CS3.
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| Working in 3D with precomps| 00:00 | When you're working in 3D and when
you're working with Precomps there are some
| | 00:04 | issues you might need to be
aware of that aren't super-intuitive.
| | 00:07 | We have this YYYK Fixed composition.
This is where the bulk of our stuff is
| | 00:13 | going down. We got all their 3D layers
here. So, if we were to use a camera,
| | 00:17 | we would be able to obviously pilot
through this in 3D and all that jazz.
| | 00:22 | What I have done is I've created a
Master Comp that's smaller and then place
| | 00:26 | the YYYK Fixed composition as a layer,
a precomposed layer, here in the Master Comp.
| | 00:33 | So, then you might think because
this YYYK Fixed comp is in 3D, that all
| | 00:39 | we have to do to access that is to
create a new camera and move it around.
| | 00:45 | But as click the Unified Camera
tool and move this around, nothing is
| | 00:48 | happening. Now, as we know, cameras
and lights only apply to 3D layers.
| | 00:53 | Okay then, so we'll take this composition,
click this icon and turn into a 3D layer.
| | 00:58 | So, now as we move our Camera around
everything should workout, right? Nope,
| | 01:02 | it still sees it as a solitary flat layer.
Well, what we've got to do is deselect
| | 01:08 | the 3D layer and select this option,
the Collapse Transformations button right
| | 01:12 | underneath this star here, click that
and then we'll be able to access the 3D
| | 01:17 | attributes from the
Precomp here in this composition.
| | 01:21 | Now, here is another sweet trick. If
we turn this into a 3D layer, so we have both.
| | 01:26 | We have Collapse Transformations
and we have the 3D layer, then we select
| | 01:30 | this Precomp and hit the letter S
for scale, we can adjust its Z scale.
| | 01:35 | Now, typically this is a useless
attribute, right? So, we have like a Solid for
| | 01:40 | example and then we tried to scale it
along the Z-axis. That would basically
| | 01:45 | make it thicker. But that doesn't work
in After Effects. You can't make a layer
| | 01:48 | thicker. But if you have a Precomp that
is made of a composition of 3D layers,
| | 01:55 | then when you the Z scale,
because there is actually some depth here,
| | 02:00 | Marian is in front of the background.
| | 02:03 | So, there is some 3D depth in this
composition. As we increase the Scale,
| | 02:06 | look at that. We actually are increasing
the scale in the Z dimension of this
| | 02:14 | composition. So, we are actually
bringing the layers closer together and
| | 02:18 | farther apart by adjusting
the scale of the Precomp.
| | 02:21 | So, this is also a great trick if
you've gone to a lot of work setting up all of
| | 02:26 | your layers in 3D space and then you
want all of them to be closer together,
| | 02:29 | or all of them to be universally farther
apart, you can just precompose them and
| | 02:34 | then scale the Z axis of
the precomposed composition.
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| Faking 3D volume| 00:01 | After Effects users always seem to be
wondering how to create volumetric 3D
| | 00:05 | without using 3D file. So, I'm going to
show you two methods in this movie.
| | 00:09 | The first method is to simply duplicate a
layer a bunch of times in Z space. So,
| | 00:14 | what I've done here is I've created
some text. I have three layers that are just
| | 00:19 | the white fill, and then another
three layers that are just the red stroke.
| | 00:23 | What I've done is I've offset each of
these 1 pixel in Z space. If I grab this
| | 00:29 | Null that these are all parented
to and I hit R to reveal the Rotation
| | 00:34 | properties and I rotate them in the
Y-axis, you will see that from this
| | 00:38 | distance they look three-dimensional.
It looks a little bit thick here, looks
| | 00:43 | still pretty good from here.
| | 00:44 | But if I take down the Z position,
hit P for Position and adjust the Z
| | 00:50 | position, take that down, make that
more negative, then we can see the trick in action,
| | 00:55 | we could see all the different
layers here, because they are offset an
| | 00:59 | entire pixel from one another.
| | 01:01 | However, if we were to make this a
little bit closer, so that these were maybe
| | 01:07 | at 10th of a pixel apart, then it
wouldn't be so easy to spot our foolery.
| | 01:12 | But this is one trick that people often
use for faking three-dimensional layers.
| | 01:17 | Another trick is by interestingly
enough using the Shatter effect. I'm going to
| | 01:22 | apply the Shatter effect to the Royal
Blue Solid. I've a shape here on top.
| | 01:26 | Let's say we want this the storm cloud
and lightening bolt to be three-dimensional.
| | 01:31 | I'm going to take off the visibility
of this for the time being. I'm going to
| | 01:34 | apply Shatter to this Blue Solid.
There we go. When we first apply Shatter,
| | 01:39 | of course we get this weird
wireframe representation here.
| | 01:43 | So, what we want to do is change the
view from Wireframe+Forces to Rendered,
| | 01:49 | then open up the Shape area and change
the pattern from Bricks to Custom, then
| | 01:56 | under Custom Shatter Map change the
dropdown from None to the storm cloud layer.
| | 02:01 | If I hit the Home key, open up Camera
Position and move around Y rotation,
| | 02:06 | we'll see that it's actually created a
three-dimensional cloud and lightening bolt.
| | 02:10 | We could even get a thicker
cloud and lightening bolt by increasing the
| | 02:15 | extrusion depth parameter.
| | 02:17 | Now, we have this big old massive cloud
and lightening bolt. What a cool trick!
| | 02:22 | But there is a problem here. If we play
this back, then our lightening bolt and
| | 02:28 | cloud will still shatter by the Shatter effect.
| | 02:31 | So, what we need to do is the change
the view at the top of Shatter from
| | 02:35 | Rendered to Wireframe+Forces. So, we
could see the force, which is this blue
| | 02:39 | sphere here. What we need to do is
open up Force 1, which controls the
| | 02:43 | properties of this force, then
decrease the value of depth or increase it,
| | 02:50 | so that it's not touching the three-
dimensional object here. As long as the force
| | 02:57 | never comes in contact with a
3D object, it will never shatter.
| | 03:01 | So, now we could take this back to
Rendered safely, hit the Spacebar and there
| | 03:06 | is no shattering taking place. One
another note here. You could change the
| | 03:11 | Camera System from Camera Position
to Comp Camera. This will allow you to
| | 03:16 | create a new camera in your
composition and to be able to control this
| | 03:21 | explosion with your comps camera. So
I'll take this Comp Camera and I'll go ahead
| | 03:26 | and right-click and
create a new camera. Click OK.
| | 03:29 | Now, as I pilot my camera around with
the camera controls, I'm zooming in and
| | 03:35 | out of in around our 3D shatter
object which is great for compositing and
| | 03:41 | situations like that where you need to
be able to look behind an object with
| | 03:45 | your comps camera. So, just a couple of
tricks for creating or faking 3D volume.
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| Changing the camera lens| 00:01 | In this movie I'm going to show you
how to play with the cameras in After
| | 00:03 | Effects to create real Camera Lens Distortion.
| | 00:06 | Now I have my camera here and the
first thing I'm going to do is open up the
| | 00:10 | Transform and for Position I'm actually
going to back this camera up a little bit,
| | 00:15 | so we have a little bit of leeway here.
| | 00:19 | The scene that we are looking at here by
the way is just a series of green solids,
| | 00:22 | tossed about and positioned in 3-D space.
Now you'll notice there is no option
| | 00:27 | to change the lens size. If we double-
click the Camera layer itself, we'll see
| | 00:32 | that there is actually sizes for the
lenses here at the top of drop-down.
| | 00:36 | Now the reason why they have these
here is because if you are doing
| | 00:40 | compositing, then you can accurately
match After Effects cameras with real
| | 00:45 | world film cameras, or in theory that's
the way it should work. I heard from a
| | 00:49 | lot of different people that have more
experience with production cameras than
| | 00:52 | I do that these truly don't
match out in After Effects.
| | 00:55 | So I think of this kind of like a
relative reference. But that doesn't mean
| | 01:00 | that we can't use these and create
some really cool camera distortion with them.
| | 01:04 | Now, if I click on something
like 35 millimeter here, this is pretty
| | 01:07 | standard I click OK, and we are just
seem to be zoomed in a little bit closer.
| | 01:11 | However, if I go over to the Zoom, the
Zoom aspect is actually different than
| | 01:16 | the Position and Point of Interest.
| | 01:18 | Zoom actually influences the size of
the camera lens. If I double-click the
| | 01:23 | Camera and we change this to 35 here,
and we adjust anyone of these properties,
| | 01:28 | either the Zoom or the Angle of View,
we'll notice that the Preset changes.
| | 01:33 | So technically even though we don't have
access to the Camera Size, we can adjust
| | 01:38 | zoom and that will influence
the distortion from the camera.
| | 01:42 | So if I back off here, then you can
kind of see that we have a little bit in
| | 01:47 | terms of change, but if I zoom in like
crazy here, let's zoom in a lot, again,
| | 01:53 | it seems like we are just basically
using Z position to zoom in. However, if we
| | 01:58 | increase the Zoom a lot, it's going
to seem like we are just animating or
| | 02:02 | adjusting the Z position, but we are not.
| | 02:05 | Let's go over to Position here and
let's back out, and really what we've done
| | 02:10 | is to minimize the depth. So the
pieces that were kind of far apart on the
| | 02:15 | Z-axis don't seem like they are that
far apart anymore. This is similar to what
| | 02:19 | you'd find in a larger camera lens.
| | 02:22 | Let's go to the opposite way though.
Let's create like a wide angle fisheye
| | 02:25 | type look, and take this zoom down a lot.
Now again, at first it seems like we
| | 02:31 | just kind of zoomed far out, but here
is the magic folks, if we then go back in
| | 02:36 | and increase the Position value until
we are close, it won't be too long before
| | 02:41 | we start seeing some crazy distortion, see that.
| | 02:46 | Now as it starts getting closer to the
camera, it starts to distort and kind of
| | 02:50 | get this crazy fisheye look. We are
going to exaggerate that even more.
| | 02:53 | Take down Zoom even farther and then again,
increase the Position, and look how
| | 02:59 | those seems just be flying at
you there. It's a very cool look.
| | 03:03 | So if there is some kind of explosion,
or something is flying through space,
| | 03:07 | don't hesitate to play around with
these camera angles and especially the Zoom
| | 03:11 | parameter here in the Timeline panel,
because you can create some really funky looks,
| | 03:16 | as things appear to be stretching
towards the camera. I've always loved
| | 03:19 | this weird fisheye distortion.
| | 03:21 | I realize it's a very stylized look,
but nevertheless, if you are doing some
| | 03:25 | kind of cool visual effects
shot, this might come in handy.
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|
|
14. Mastering Masks and Shape LayersBlending masks with mask modes| 00:01 | In this chapter we are going to look
at some of the fantastic, although not
| | 00:04 | always immediately
apparent, capabilities of masks.
| | 00:08 | In this movie here on mask modes we are
going to start out with this great footage
| | 00:12 | of Paavo and as you can see, an
amazing unicyclist, and we are going to take
| | 00:16 | this footage and play with
some masks applied to it.
| | 00:19 | Now in After Effects CS4 Essential
Training, we talked about these mask modes.
| | 00:24 | If we open up a layer and open up
its masks we can see that we have these
| | 00:28 | different modes to play with.
| | 00:29 | Now we talked about Add and we talked
about Subtract. But there is four other
| | 00:34 | modes here, Intersect, Lighten, Darken,
and Difference. And as you can see,
| | 00:40 | as I scroll through those, they don't
really make too much of a difference.
| | 00:44 | Well, here is the deal, folks. These
last four mask modes are meant to be used
| | 00:49 | in conjunction with other modes. So
let's say I put this one into Add mode.
| | 00:53 | This next mask, I'm going to put into
Difference mode. As you can see, it cut
| | 00:58 | a hole in the area where
these two masks overlap.
| | 01:02 | Well, now what we could do is go into
this Mask 1 area and take down the Mask
| | 01:06 | Opacity and so we start to change the
Opacity of that area that was removed by
| | 01:13 | Difference. Let's take Mask 2 and put
that into Difference mode and then maybe
| | 01:17 | let's lower the Mask Opacity of that
one. Just have it be very, very low.
| | 01:24 | So it's making a very subtle difference
here. Now we could go on and play with
| | 01:28 | these and continue adjusting Mask
Opacity as we see fit and in the process
| | 01:33 | creating these really interesting
patterns by these overlapping masks.
| | 01:38 | Let me give you one example of what
you can do with this. In the Stair Jump
| | 01:42 | DONE Composition, I did a little
color correction here and I played around
| | 01:46 | with the mask blend modes and their
opacities, and I have also animated the
| | 01:51 | mask modes, just their
position as they move around.
| | 01:53 | So now as we see the final result,
you could see how beautiful results are,
| | 01:57 | when these masks in different mask
modes with different mask opacities overlap
| | 02:01 | each other. It's a very cool effect.
| | 02:04 | You see this type of look a lot when
you are doing like extreme sports type stuff,
| | 02:08 | X games, stuff on ESPN and that
type of thing. Spectacular result but
| | 02:13 | very easy to achieve with mask modes and
playing around a little bit with mask opacity.
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| Creating Bezier paths with the Pen tool| 00:00 | In the next couple of movies, we're
going to take a look at the elusive Pen tool.
| | 00:04 | We use the Pen tool to create
custom shapes. In this chapter, we'll be
| | 00:08 | talking about creating masks and lot
of those masks will just be the simple
| | 00:11 | shapes here, stars and
ellipses and rectangles and what not.
| | 00:15 | But if you really want to get in and
create a custom shape, you'll need to be
| | 00:20 | able to use the Pen tool to create
your own Bezier path. So that's what we're
| | 00:22 | going to do here. We're going to use a
very simple Magenta solid, just to make
| | 00:28 | sure that we can see what we're
doing, quickly, clearly and easily.
| | 00:31 | So I'm going to select the Pen tool here,
and with the layer selected, I'm just
| | 00:36 | going to click and let go, click and
let go, click and let go, click and let go.
| | 00:42 | You could see as I'm just clicking
here, not clicking-and-dragging,
| | 00:44 | we're just clicking with the mouse and
letting it go, I'm creating simple shapes;
| | 00:48 | these are simple lines
connected by corner points.
| | 00:52 | It's great for creating quick soppy
masks, or for creating accurate masks on
| | 00:56 | things like stairs or other hard-edged
surfaces. Once you're all done with the
| | 01:00 | mask, you can go back to the original
point and you'll get this little O icon
| | 01:04 | next to your Pen tool, indicating that
you're going to complete the circuit,
| | 01:07 | you're going to close the mask.
| | 01:09 | Once you do that, you then have a
complete mask, and then you can use the mask
| | 01:13 | modes to add or subtract. Now, this is
the most simple and basic way to use the
| | 01:20 | Pen tool. I'm going to select that
mask and hit Delete. You might need to hit
| | 01:23 | Delete a couple times to get rid of that, but
there's another way that we can use the Pen tool.
| | 01:28 | If I click once to set a point, I
create just a regular corner point as
| | 01:31 | mentioned before, but I'm going to come
over here. I'm going to click and hold
| | 01:34 | my mouse down and drag. However, if I
come over here and for the next point,
| | 01:40 | click-and-drag down, that clicking-and-
dragging motion creates a curved path.
| | 01:46 | This is where the Pen tool starts to
get a little bit more complicated. We drew
| | 01:51 | just one simple line, just two points,
and yet we have all kinds of stuff
| | 01:55 | happening all over the screen. Well,
what this line is basically control
| | 02:00 | handles for this curve.
| | 02:03 | Now if you want to create just simple
straight lines with the Pen tool, then
| | 02:08 | just click and let go as we covered
before. But again, if you want to really
| | 02:13 | master this tool, you need to be able
to learn these curves and you need to be
| | 02:17 | able to understand these direction
handles. So, that's the next step in this process,
| | 02:21 | is really mastering those curves and handles.
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| Adjusting handles and corner points| 00:00 | In this movie, we're going to
continue on where we left off in the last
| | 00:03 | segment and we're going to complete
our discussion of the Pen tool by talking
| | 00:06 | about handles and corner points.
I actually have the same mask here.
| | 00:10 | If you select the solid layer or the mask
itself in the Timeline, you'll see it here
| | 00:14 | in the Composition panel.
| | 00:16 | Right now, the mask is currently
selected, so we're seeing it. But we're not
| | 00:20 | seeing those crazy handles we saw in
the last movie, because this point is not
| | 00:23 | selected. So if we click on that point,
then we'll see these handles. Now what
| | 00:27 | we might need do is click away from it
to deselect it and then click back on it
| | 00:31 | to reselect it, so only it is selected.
| | 00:34 | By the way, if you want to continue
onward with this path, you could simply
| | 00:38 | select this anchor point, this corner
point here, and then select the Pen tool
| | 00:42 | and click-and-drag and it continues
the path. Now I'll go back and select the
| | 00:46 | Regular Selection tool up here in the
toolbar at the top of the interface and
| | 00:50 | click on one of these points to select it.
| | 00:52 | Now, what happens is when you have a
curved point or when you have one point
| | 00:57 | that has at least one curved side
coming out of a side of that point, then
| | 01:01 | you will get a direction handle
that will control that curve.
| | 01:05 | So if I pull this curve out, you could
see that we're increasing the tension on
| | 01:09 | that curve. If I move it left or right,
we're changing the direction on both
| | 01:14 | sides of the curve. So keep in mind
as you're playing around with the curve
| | 01:19 | that both the direction and the size
of those handles makes it difference,
| | 01:25 | as far as what those Curves look like.
| | 01:28 | Now in this case we have a curve coming
out of both sides of the anchor point,
| | 01:32 | so we have two handles here. So this
is considered a smooth anchor point.
| | 01:36 | I'm going to take, under the Pen tool,
you'll find the Convert Vertex tool.
| | 01:41 | So I'm going to select that and come
over here to this curve point here.
| | 01:44 | Now if you click on this with the
Convert Vertex tool, what it's going to do is
| | 01:47 | it's going to convert it from a smooth
point where there is curves coming on
| | 01:50 | each side to a corner point, where
there is a corner and there are no curves
| | 01:55 | coming out of either side.
| | 01:57 | Again, as you remember from the last
movie, when you don't have any curves,
| | 02:00 | you don't have any handles to play with.
Now let's say we started with a corner point.
| | 02:04 | What I could do is come over
here with the Convert Anchor Point tool and
| | 02:07 | click-and-drag on it to drag out handles.
| | 02:11 | So that's what happens if you click on
a smooth point or a corner point. If you
| | 02:15 | click on one of the handles, you'll
notice that it will break it so much that
| | 02:21 | you can't adjust these curves independently.
This is how you can create things like hearts.
| | 02:27 | Let me show you what I'm talking about
here. I'm going to select this mask and
| | 02:30 | then delete it, delete it a couple
times there. I'm going to go back and select
| | 02:34 | the Pen tool and I'll click on the
bottom up here, click on the top over here,
| | 02:40 | come down for that point, come up for
that point, and then come back down for
| | 02:45 | the original point.
| | 02:46 | So now let's tweak this a little bit
and select the Selection tool and come
| | 02:50 | down here and this has actually
become a corner point. But what you may want
| | 02:55 | to do is go back to the Convert Vertex
tool and click-and-drag on it. You get
| | 02:59 | two different handles here, and then
with the Convert Vertex tool break those
| | 03:03 | handles, so you can control them
independently. So we have more of a curve
| | 03:08 | coming out of the inside here.
| | 03:10 | Now a general rule for these handles,
because when I first started playing around
| | 03:14 | with this when I was learning
Illustrator, I was kind of like well,
| | 03:16 | how do you know where those lines are
supposed to be? The general rule of thumb is that
| | 03:21 | they are supposed to be about a
third of the way along the path.
| | 03:26 | So, select the Selection tool. That
would probably be about good right there.
| | 03:30 | Of course, rules are made to be broken,
and you might need to get a custom
| | 03:34 | shape if you're rotoscoping something,
you might need to create a custom shape
| | 03:38 | with the Pen tool that you need to
tweak these handles in such a way that that
| | 03:42 | rule is completely broken.
| | 03:43 | But that's just a general rule of thumb.
So if I have a small handle on this side,
| | 03:48 | and a really big handle on this side,
I'll often have a curve that is not
| | 03:53 | really smooth and flowing and not
kind of balanced looking. So, again that's
| | 03:57 | sometimes that's what you want,
but just be careful about that.
| | 04:00 | Now in this case, as we play with out
heart here, what we can do is click on
| | 04:03 | this corner point here and let's say
we decide we want more a curvature and
| | 04:07 | these angles down at the bottom here.
I can select the Convert Vertex tool,
| | 04:11 | click-and-drag out so I get these
curve handles. But I don't want a round
| | 04:14 | bottom here. I just want some curvature.
| | 04:17 | So I can click on the Convert Vertex
tool again and break these handles,
| | 04:21 | so we can create some kind of smooth, more
artistic, little hearts here, and again
| | 04:26 | we can play with these little handles
until we get this nice, smooth result.
| | 04:31 | Now, obviously, there is a lot more to
mask making than just creating pretty
| | 04:35 | little hearts. Again, we often times
create masks to isolate objects or to
| | 04:39 | remove backgrounds, rotoscope,
visual effects. I mean, really the list is
| | 04:44 | endless. Sometimes, for motion graphics,
we really do want simple shapes like this.
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| Creating shape layers from custom shapes| 00:00 | So now that we know how to use a Pen
tool, it definitely it takes a while to
| | 00:03 | master, but we know the basics, so
we can access this kind of cool unique trick.
| | 00:08 | We can use the Pen tool to
create custom shape layers. Now if we have
| | 00:14 | footage selected, when we click on
something with the Pen tool, then we're
| | 00:18 | going to create a mask, right? But
I'm going to undo that a couple times.
| | 00:22 | If we have nothing selected when we
use the Pen tool, we're actually going to
| | 00:27 | create a brand-new shape layer and
then we have access to all the features of
| | 00:34 | the shape layer. Let me show you what
I'm talking about here. I'm going to
| | 00:36 | actually delete that shape layer and
we're going to practice with this.
| | 00:40 | I'm going to zoom in a little bit more than
100%. There is some great footage from
| | 00:44 | GreenLayers.com, by the way.
We looked at it a little bit earlier.
| | 00:47 | I'm just going to make a rough outline
here, just kind of click-and-drag.
| | 00:50 | I've got a straight line so I'm going to
click, and then click, click-and-drag a
| | 00:55 | little bit smooth over corner, I can
drag a little bit, and so on and so forth
| | 01:00 | until we cover this military guy with
a mask. I'll make a little curve there
| | 01:08 | for his shoulder. We're just trying to
get like a rough idea of this so far.
| | 01:13 | This is actually a production task. We
knew what we're doing. It probably takes
| | 01:17 | our time a little bit more.
| | 01:19 | Another tip is you probably want to use
as few points as possible when you are
| | 01:24 | creating your Bezier paths. A couple
of reasons for that. Number one, it's
| | 01:28 | going to be easier to edit later on,
and number two, it's going to render a
| | 01:33 | little bit faster, because
there is less data to process there.
| | 01:36 | Now I shouldn't have probably had a
fill on my shape layer, because that makes
| | 01:42 | it kind of rough to see what's going on,
by having that fill there, but we are
| | 01:46 | just going to keep going. Here we go,
almost done, and I realize that I totally
| | 01:52 | botched a lot of places here, but that's okay.
| | 01:55 | We can go back in and we can select
our Selection tool, grab one of these
| | 01:59 | points and just move it on around.
Really great benefit to these shape layers,
| | 02:03 | I tell you, it's just fantastic to be
able to go back and have the control over
| | 02:08 | this, like it was just a simple mask,
but then to come down here and have all
| | 02:13 | of the benefits of shape layers.
| | 02:15 | So we can go in and add different
things like a Twist or something like that to this.
| | 02:19 | Let me zoom out a little bit so
we could see what's going on here.
| | 02:23 | We open up Twist and now this military
guy, we can move him around with Twist,
| | 02:28 | distort him with Twist. So he is
dancing and saluting, saluting and dancing.
| | 02:32 | Another thing I want to show you that
you could do here with this, if I have
| | 02:36 | this same shape layer selected, let's
go ahead and select the path. Then I go
| | 02:41 | back here with the Pen tool again, I'm
just going to click randomly in here,
| | 02:45 | this little spot where there is a whole,
where he is saluting. I can't see it,
| | 02:50 | so I'm just going to make an
approximate mask that we can adjust later. But if
| | 02:54 | you did it correctly, the path should
be blue or should be the same color as
| | 02:57 | your shape color, and then you could
see we have Shape 1 and Shape 2 here.
| | 03:01 | Well, what I can do is add a Merge
Paths operator, down at the bottom, open up
| | 03:08 | Merge Paths and change the mode, just
like a mask modes to subtract. Now that
| | 03:12 | actually got rid of our data, but if we
reverse the order of our masks, so I'm
| | 03:16 | going to drag Shape 2 below Shape 1,
then we could see the desired result here.
| | 03:20 | We have a little whole cut in our mask,
and again, we could go in with the
| | 03:24 | Selection tool, if we zoom in closely here.
| | 03:27 | Let me actually open up Shape 2 and
select the path itself so I could see these
| | 03:34 | points. Then we can move them
around until we have a more approximate
| | 03:39 | silhouette of this military guy. If
your path gets deselected again, you can go
| | 03:43 | over here to Timeline panel and click
on path for that shape, and then you
| | 03:47 | could get access to the anchor points
and Bezier handles the same way you would
| | 03:50 | with the Bezier path when we were
looking at masks in the last couple of movies.
| | 03:55 | So now we have a fairly complex shape
that we created from scratch, and we've
| | 03:59 | also cut a hole out of that, which is
pretty cool, and we have all the power of
| | 04:03 | shape layers here with these path operators.
| | 04:06 | Now I thought shape layers are really
awesome when we just had to stick to
| | 04:10 | these basic shapes or so I thought,
but in reality, we can make our own custom
| | 04:15 | shape layers out of whatever we want. It's
really a phenomenal feature of After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Auto-trace to create masks| 00:00 | Another great way to create masks is
just to have After Effects do it for you.
| | 00:05 | There's a great feature called Auto-
trace that will have After Effects go in
| | 00:08 | and look at the contours of a layer
and automatically make a mask for you.
| | 00:13 | So I have here again this greenlayers.
com footage and as it plays, you could
| | 00:17 | see this military guy again saluting.
And what we can do is select this layer,
| | 00:22 | then go over to the Layer menu at the
top and go down to the bottom of the
| | 00:25 | Layer menu, and if you are not dizzy
yet go ahead and select Auto-trace and
| | 00:29 | what we can do is have After Effects
automatically trace the contours of this layer.
| | 00:35 | Now we can have it do it for the
Current Frame and it will create one mask that
| | 00:40 | will remain for the entire duration
of the composition. Now be careful with this;
| | 00:44 | if this is accidentally selected,
you don't want to be selected.
| | 00:47 | What this will do is, first of all, take
a long time to auto-trace and secondly,
| | 00:51 | it will create a new mask for every single frame.
| | 00:55 | Now especially applied when we
wouldn't want to do this, if you're doing this
| | 00:58 | Auto-trace feature on a still image.
But in our case, here we have a movie clip
| | 01:03 | and we want every single frame to be
traced so yeah, we do want the Work Area.
| | 01:07 | Now you can change the Channel, and
most of the times, I just use the Alpha
| | 01:11 | channel so it will create a mask
around the transparency of the object.
| | 01:15 | But keep in mind, you could also
create a mask around just a Red channel or a
| | 01:19 | Green channel, Blue channel or the
Luminance, and basically, it will use the
| | 01:23 | luminance of those channels to
determine where the edge is. And you can control
| | 01:27 | the Threshold parameter. Use the
Threshold parameter to determine how much
| | 01:31 | something is traced.
| | 01:33 | Now there's a few other important
parameters here. Number one, there's Invert;
| | 01:36 | maybe you want to create a whole and
make a mask around the background, you
| | 01:40 | could select Invert.
| | 01:41 | If you find that your mask is getting
traced a little bit too precisely, then
| | 01:46 | you can blur, blur the pixels before
auto -tracing. You basically won't see
| | 01:51 | that blur; that happens behind the
scene. So it's basically blurring it to
| | 01:55 | soften edges so you get a more smooth mask.
| | 01:59 | This is great if you might have some
noise in your image and maybe the noise
| | 02:03 | pixels on the edge are causing the
mask to be traced, like the Auto-trace is
| | 02:08 | tracing the noise, which you wouldn't
want. So you can increase that blur or
| | 02:12 | maybe if you have some jagged edges,
that is just the nature of your footage,
| | 02:16 | you could also blur it.
| | 02:18 | The Minimum Area refers to the
smallest feature that will be traced, and the
| | 02:22 | Corner Roundness refers to the
roundness of your mask. As you bump up this
| | 02:27 | value more, then you are
going to have smoother Curves.
| | 02:30 | Don't forget about Preview, of course,
we could see what the final result will
| | 02:33 | be, so you could make changes to these
settings here while you are looking at
| | 02:36 | the final result here in the
Composition panel. Also, beware of this setting,
| | 02:40 | Apply to new layer. If you have this
deselected then this will apply all of the
| | 02:45 | mask to this layer. If you select
Apply to new layer, it will create a brand
| | 02:48 | new solid layer and create the mask there if
you want to keep things little bit more orderly.
| | 02:53 | For now I'm going to go ahead and click
OK to use these settings. So now if we
| | 02:56 | have take off the visibility of the
bottom layer and just look at the solid
| | 03:00 | that has been created for us, play this
back and look at that. Every single one
| | 03:05 | of these frames is basically a series
of masks automatically traced for us by
| | 03:11 | After Effects. Every single frame. Look at that.
| | 03:14 | Now one of the best advantages here
for those who've used Adobe Flash is you
| | 03:17 | could export this as a SWF file and
the file size will be ridiculously small.
| | 03:24 | So this is a great kind of work around
to get footage out of After Effects and
| | 03:29 | into Flash with the file size as being
really small. Solid layers with vector
| | 03:34 | masks will do that.
| | 03:36 | If you want more details on that, I
create a one-hour long lecture for
| | 03:40 | lynda.com about Flash and After Effects
integration. I talked a lot about that
| | 03:44 | extensively. Now a few other things
that you could do is there are a lot of
| | 03:48 | effects that use masks to do their magic.
| | 03:51 | So say, for example, the Scribble effect.
So in this case, I added the Scribble
| | 03:55 | effect and that didn't really change
too much and just change the color a
| | 03:58 | little bit. But the final result has
this drawn-on figure that looks like we
| | 04:03 | hand-scribbled it. Very cool effect.
That is the Scribble effect again.
| | 04:07 | We also have the Stroke effect, and in
this case, I put a little bit more to it
| | 04:11 | but not too much more. I added the
Stroke effect, which basically strokes the mask.
| | 04:16 | Then I added the CC Radial Fast
Blur and then the Glow effect and then
| | 04:21 | once it's all done, we have this weird
alien military guy. There's like this
| | 04:25 | cool spooky glow behind him as he is saluting.
| | 04:30 | So whether a still image or whether
a movie file, being able to have After
| | 04:35 | Effect automatically trace every single
frame can give you some very interesting results.
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| Working with RotoBezier paths| 00:00 | Now there is another type of mask out
there called RotoBezier. If you were to
| | 00:04 | get select the Pen tool here and check
RotoBezier, you'll create a different
| | 00:11 | type of shape, not quite Bezier. This
is based on something called B-splines
| | 00:16 | and if you are familiar with high-end
compositing programs or 3-D programs, then you've
| | 00:21 | probably worked with these before.
| | 00:23 | Now, I'm going to click and click,
here we go, and so I click and click and
| | 00:28 | there is a straight line, but watch
when I click the next line. I'm just going
| | 00:30 | to click it and let go and still it
made a curve. I'm going to click and let
| | 00:35 | go, click and let go, click and let go,
click and let go and it's still making
| | 00:39 | all kinds of curves.
| | 00:42 | If we select these points with the
Selection tool, we won't see the typical
| | 00:46 | handles. We could still move these
around and make changes but we are not
| | 00:51 | seeing any direction handles or control.
| | 00:54 | So, for those of you that want to make
kind of simple, round organic shapes in
| | 00:58 | your brand new Bezier curves, you can
try these RotoBezier curves but there is
| | 01:02 | a lot more to them than meets the eye,
for those of you that want to take this
| | 01:06 | a step further. I've created this
simple text. It looks like it says Roto in an
| | 01:10 | outline, but what I'm going to do is
clicked on the Selection tool and go over
| | 01:14 | these control points.
| | 01:16 | And I'm going to hold the Command+
Option keys on the MAC or the Ctrl+Alt keys
| | 01:21 | on the PC and as I do that, you will
see me get this icon. That allows me to
| | 01:26 | adjust the tension of the individual
control points, so I could basically drag
| | 01:31 | right and left and make them
corner points or more smooth points.
| | 01:36 | You will also notice in the Info
panel on the right hand side of my screen
| | 01:39 | here, as I'm doing that it's telling
me the tension of these points. A corner
| | 01:43 | point is considered to have 100% tension,
and a smooth point can be considered
| | 01:48 | to have 0% tension.
| | 01:49 | So, basically I can go in here and
control these in a little bit easier of a
| | 01:54 | way than you could with Bezier
handles, just a little bit more smooth and
| | 01:59 | organic. Now, I actually like having
Bezier Path. I like seeing what I'm doing,
| | 02:06 | but I can't really see the value in
wanting to have this kind of control, where
| | 02:11 | you just click-and-drag and you make
things smoother or more tense just by
| | 02:15 | clicking-and-dragging.
| | 02:15 | And again, as I mentioned, I prefer
Bezier handles, but a lot of people prefer
| | 02:20 | this RotoBezier method because it
apparently animates better. Now I might be
| | 02:25 | being a grumpy old man about this, but
I like my Bezier curves, it took me a
| | 02:29 | long time to understand how they work
but now that I get how they work, then
| | 02:32 | they just make sense to me and I find
that I use them easily, just to get in
| | 02:36 | there and get the job done.
| | 02:37 | But if you find that Bezier Paths
aren't doing it for you, maybe you are just
| | 02:41 | learning them and they are not very
intuitive for or maybe you are experienced
| | 02:44 | with them but you don't like the way
that they animate or the control that you
| | 02:48 | have over them, then you might
want to give RotoBezier Path a try.
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| "Tweening" mask shapes| 00:01 | In this movie, we are going to start
looking at advanced mask animation. Now,
| | 00:04 | previously in this chapter, we've
looked at some basic mask animation,
| | 00:07 | basically moving masks around back and
forth. But I want to show you something
| | 00:11 | more advanced in this movie. I'm going
to open up this Orange Solid, this is
| | 00:15 | where our fish is and this is just an
Orange Solid with a fish shaped mask on it.
| | 00:20 | And I'm going to open up Masks.
Open up Mask 1 and I could click this
| | 00:24 | stopwatch for Mask Path. And then I
can double-click the path if I wanted to
| | 00:29 | and I could move it around, if I so chose,
make the fish appear to swim or what have you.
| | 00:34 | But even cooler, if I move out in time,
I can click anyone of these individual
| | 00:39 | points and actually move the points.
I'll move out in time more and
| | 00:45 | maybe make him say a little bit more
actually. Let's go back here and make it a
| | 00:50 | little bit smaller or something.
Maybe like he is like flapping his fin
| | 00:54 | or whatever, but if I go back in time, you can
see that it's actually animating those values.
| | 01:00 | So in this sense we can create a tween,
tween being an old animation term for
| | 01:05 | basically interpolating, going
between two shapes. In Flash, this is also
| | 01:10 | referred to as shape tweening. But
there is another cool trick I want to show you.
| | 01:14 | I'm going to move out in time a
little bit farther here and I'm going to
| | 01:18 | go over to Photoshop and I'm going to
select this little bird shape that I made,
| | 01:23 | it's one of the shapes that comes
with Photoshop, if you'd like to make it,
| | 01:26 | and I'm going to select Edit > Copy.
| | 01:29 | Now, I'm going to go back to After
Effects. Now, if I select the Orange Solid
| | 01:34 | layer and I hit Command+V on the Mac or
Ctrl+V on the PC to paste this, it will
| | 01:39 | just create a new mask. So now we have
Mask 2 with this bird, but I'm going to
| | 01:44 | undo that, Command+Z or Ctrl+Z. I'm
actually going to select Mask Path, so not
| | 01:50 | the layer itself, the actual path.
| | 01:53 | If I select the Mask Path and then
paste it again, you will see that the fish
| | 01:57 | disappeared. The reason why it
disappeared is because the fish will now morph
| | 02:04 | into the bird. Now you could imagine
the cool possibilities here just being
| | 02:09 | able to paste shapes. They don't have
to be from Photoshop, they could be from
| | 02:12 | Illustrator or anywhere else
where you've got Vector Paths.
| | 02:15 | So, this is just a great trick with
infinite potential, but obviously we have
| | 02:20 | some unpleasantness in the
interpolation here. There is a feature in
| | 02:24 | After Effects called Smart Mask Interpolation,
and that's going to help us fix this problem.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Advanced mask shape animation| 00:00 | So, now we are continuing on with the
dilemma that we created in the last movie
| | 00:04 | as we tried to morph this fish into
this bird shape. So here is how we are
| | 00:09 | going to fix this. Go to the Window
menu and open up Mask Interpolation,
| | 00:13 | formerly called Smart Mask Interpolation,
although I still think it's very smart.
| | 00:17 | And what we are going to do is use
this panel to help us have a more advanced
| | 00:23 | interpolation between the two shapes.
Now, one of our big problems is if we go
| | 00:28 | over here to where there is the fishy,
and we select the Mask Path, if we look
| | 00:32 | in the Info panel, we'll see that
there is 21 Vertices. Each one of these
| | 00:36 | little anchor points here is a vertex or
in plural that's referred to as vertices.
| | 00:41 | And as we go to the bird and then
select Mask Path again, you could see we have
| | 00:45 | 63 Vertices, so exactly three times as
many vertices with the bird as with the fish.
| | 00:51 | So, how does it get from point A
to point B, when there is a different
| | 00:56 | number of vertices? Now this Mask
Interpolation panel is actually very complex.
| | 01:00 | There is a lot of options here,
although I should mention, it's very helpful,
| | 01:03 | if you just hang your cursor over one
of the parameters, you'll get a little
| | 01:06 | tool-tip that will tell you,
what that particular parameter does.
| | 01:09 | In the case of Use Linear Vertex Path
for example, it makes sure that the path
| | 01:14 | that each vertices travels, as it's
going from its source to its destination,
| | 01:18 | will be a straight line.
| | 01:20 | If you uncheck this, it gives the
permission for this shape to rotate in Curve.
| | 01:26 | In our case, it actually made the
fish rotate as it became the bird and it
| | 01:31 | looks really tacky, not good at all. So
we are going to leave this checked, but
| | 01:34 | we also have the Bending Resistance and
the Quality. What I'm really concerned
| | 01:38 | with is this bottom area down
here where it says Matching Method.
| | 01:42 | These two options are pretty helpful.
Use 1:1 Vertex Matches. This basically
| | 01:46 | means that the first vertex created
with the first shape, will go and translate
| | 01:51 | automatically to the first vertex
created for the second shape. The second
| | 01:55 | vertex will match to the second
vertex and the third to the third, and the
| | 01:58 | fourth to the fourth and so on.
| | 01:59 | Since we have three times as many
vertices for the bird as the fish, that's not
| | 02:02 | going to help us, so I'm going to
leave this unchecked. And you can also just
| | 02:05 | have the first vertices match. But in
our case these are both pasted shapes and
| | 02:09 | I'm not even sure where the
first vertex is on any of these.
| | 02:13 | And we could right-click on one of
these vertices and go up to a Mask and Shape
| | 02:17 | Path and select Set First Vertex for
both of these. But that's still not going
| | 02:20 | to give us the results that we want.
| | 02:21 | So what I'm going to do is I'm going to
change the Matching Method to Polyline.
| | 02:26 | And I'm just going to click on the word,
Mask Path, to select all the keyframes
| | 02:30 | and then I'm going to click Apply
and then I'm going to wait patiently.
| | 02:35 | Actually not that patiently, because
it's already done. As I go back in time,
| | 02:39 | we'll see now a very much improved
interpolation between Mr. Fish and Mr. Bird.
| | 02:47 | So as I drop this down, let's deselect
this and do the RAM Preview. The fish
| | 02:52 | swims a little bit then becomes the bird.
And while we could go back and tweak
| | 02:58 | some of our settings, pretty
impressive how this fish becomes this bird.
| | 03:04 | Now if you want to, you can just hit
Command+Z or Ctrl+Z on the PC to undo
| | 03:09 | that and it doesn't undo each keyframe
at a time. It does the whole Smart
| | 03:14 | Mask operation. So, now we can go and
make this a little bit smoother, let's
| | 03:17 | say we take Bending Resistance down to
like 10% or something and then we can
| | 03:22 | comeback down here with all those
keyframes selected and we can hit Apply one
| | 03:27 | more time and now our results will
probably be a little bit smoother.
| | 03:30 | Oh! Yeah, I'm liking that. And there
we have it. A much better result than we
| | 03:37 | had without using the Mask Interpolation panel.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting motion paths to masks| 00:00 | Now we are going to look at
converting a motion path into a mask. So I have
| | 00:05 | here this arrow that's kind of
flying around there and what's cool about
| | 00:10 | knowing Bezier paths is that it
comes in handy all over the place.
| | 00:15 | Motion paths are one example, so we
have this motion path and again these
| | 00:18 | little tiny dots are also the
individual frames. And we can go up here with our
| | 00:23 | Pen tool and add keyframes to this path
and then go back and get the Selection tool
| | 00:28 | and just move these around,
stretch these out, oops, make that path active
| | 00:33 | again, click on Position.
| | 00:34 | We can move these handles around and
really create a very complex wacky motion path.
| | 00:41 | Tweak it. Play with it as we so
choose. And then if we want to convert it
| | 00:48 | to a mask, all we have to do is
click on Position to select all of the
| | 00:52 | keyframes and then hit Command+C or
Ctrl+C to Copy. Then I'm going to make a
| | 00:58 | new layer, just make a new solid layer
and this is kind of weird, but what I'm
| | 01:02 | going to do is I need to make an empty mask.
| | 01:05 | So I'm going to go to Layer > Mask and
Shape Path or this can be just Mask, and
| | 01:11 | create a new mask. Now it creates a mask
that is the size of the entire layer and
| | 01:17 | I'm going to open up this layer. Open
up Masks, open up Mask 1 and click on
| | 01:24 | Mask Path. Then I'll paste by hitting
Command+V or Ctrl+V on the PC, and our
| | 01:32 | mask is basically the result of our motion path.
| | 01:36 | Now that's a cool trick but when would
you ever want to use that? Now let me
| | 01:39 | show you. I'm going to drag this layer
beneath the shape layer with the arrow
| | 01:44 | on it and I'm going to apply the
Stroke effect to this solid layer, actually
| | 01:50 | not Brush Strokes, there we go. Just
regular Stroke, there we go. And so we
| | 01:54 | apply this to Mask 1, maybe I want to
make the Brush Size a little bit bigger.
| | 01:59 | Let's come down here to Paint Style,
we don't want to paint on the original
| | 02:01 | image, because we don't the solid in the picture.
We are going to take this to On Transparent.
| | 02:06 | Let's also adjust the Spacing a little
bit, increase that value because that
| | 02:09 | will give us like these cool little
dots which are little bit finer than just
| | 02:13 | solid lines. And then what we can do is
animate the End property to follow this
| | 02:19 | arrow. So as the arrow starts out,
let's go back to the first frame here and
| | 02:24 | we'll click on the stopwatch for End,
make it 0. And then once the arrow is
| | 02:29 | done, we'll click on or change the
value to 100%. And as we preview this, we
| | 02:35 | have this arrow that travels and
this little trail that goes behind it.
| | 02:43 | Take a little cheap Indiana Jones type
effect as the plane is moving across the map.
| | 02:47 | But remember that because we have
converted the motion path to a mask, we
| | 02:53 | can now do to it anything we would
normally do to a mask. So just like so many
| | 02:58 | other tricks in this training
series, there is just a lot of room for
| | 03:01 | creatively playing here.
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| Creating a mask instantly| 00:01 | In this quick tip, I'm going to show
you how to create a mask instantly and
| | 00:04 | also a little trick for using that
to create a vignette very quickly.
| | 00:09 | So, I have here our You Yell You Kick
Project, loving that. And I'm going to
| | 00:14 | right-click and make a new black solid.
Click OK. Now you know that if we click
| | 00:22 | one of these Shape tools and we have a
layer selected and we click-and-drag
| | 00:27 | with our shape, we'll
actually make a mask on that layer.
| | 00:30 | However, if I simply double-click one
of the shapes here in the Tools panel,
| | 00:35 | it will make a mask of that shape that
completely fills the composition. Now in
| | 00:40 | the case of an ellipse here, this is
really to our advantage because then what
| | 00:44 | we could do is change the mask
mode from Add to Subtract.
| | 00:49 | And then that cuts a hole and we have
this cool little oval cutout. We could
| | 00:53 | then select the layer. Type the
letter F. That will get us straight to Mask
| | 00:58 | Feather and we could increase Mask
Feather creating, if we deselect this, an
| | 01:05 | instant vignette. So before, after.
| | 01:09 | So just a quick tip to
instantly add a mask to a layer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
15. Playing with TimeStretching time| 00:00 | In this chapter, we are going to look
at playing around with times, slowing
| | 00:04 | down and speeding up footage and
some other time tricks as well.
| | 00:08 | First, let's just look at the basics,
slowing down and speeding up footage.
| | 00:12 | What I'm going to do is come down here
at the Timeline panel, right-click and
| | 00:16 | select Columns > Stretch. And then now,
we can just click and drag on this
| | 00:22 | stretch value to speed up or slow down
our footage. This great footage, by the way,
| | 00:26 | comes to us from courtesy of
greenlayers.com. I'm going to take this
| | 00:30 | footage down to 50%, just click on
that value if you don't want to scrub and
| | 00:36 | just type in the value. So I'm going
to take the Stretch Factor here to 50%.
| | 00:41 | Now think of the stretch value as kind
of like the duration value. So if the
| | 00:45 | stretch value is taken to 50%. That
means the clip's going to be half as long
| | 00:49 | and yet, still the entire clip is
going to play. So when we play this clip back,
| | 00:53 | it will be at twice the speed.
Likewise, if we were to increase this to,
| | 00:59 | let's say 200%, then we are going to be
playing the clip twice the slow because
| | 01:05 | the clip takes 200% longer or in other
words, 200% as long as it originally did.
| | 01:10 | Now here is the problem, folks, and you
could see this even as the frames are
| | 01:13 | rendered. We know that these little
green marks indicate frames that are
| | 01:16 | rendered into RAM. Then these blank
gray spots are places where the frames
| | 01:21 | don't need to be rendered into RAM
because they are just copies. They are just
| | 01:25 | duplicates of the rendered frames.
| | 01:27 | So we have one frame that's rendered
and then a copy and then a real frame,
| | 01:31 | then a copy and a real frame and then
a copy, so on and so forth. So half of
| | 01:37 | these frames are just duplicates. Well,
that's not an intelligent way to copy
| | 01:41 | frames to stretch them out. So if you
are looking for a very quick, very simple way
| | 01:46 | to slow down or speed up footage, then
check out this Stretch column in the Timeline panel.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making smooth slow-motion shots| 00:01 | So continuing our discussion here, we are going
to talk about making better slow motion shots.
| | 00:05 | Now, probably the ideal way to do this
is if you have access to your footage,
| | 00:10 | you are in the production team,
basically you want to over-crank, you want to
| | 00:13 | shoot more frames than you need and
that way when you create slow motion shots,
| | 00:17 | you have real slow motion.
| | 00:20 | But sometimes, as post-production
artists, we are not involved in the
| | 00:24 | production process. So we don't have
any say in how it was shot; we have to fake it.
| | 00:28 | One of the best ways in After
Effects to do that is with the Time Warp effect.
| | 00:32 | So I'm going to apply the Time
Warp effect to this footage here, from
| | 00:35 | greenlayers.com, and
essentially we have this speed control.
| | 00:41 | Now it's a little confusing because the
speed control works the opposite as the
| | 00:45 | stretch control we saw in the last movie.
So with stretching we saw before,
| | 00:49 | if you take this down to 50%, then the
clip goes twice as fast. Here in the Time
| | 00:54 | Warp effect, if we have a speed value of 50,
then the clip is going to go half as slow.
| | 01:00 | I actually think the speed value here
is little bit more intuitive. That make
| | 01:04 | sense to me that if the speed is 50%,
then it's going to play half the speed.
| | 01:08 | If you want to speed this clip up,
you'd take it to something over 100.
| | 01:12 | But here is the magic of the Time Warp effect.
| | 01:15 | Now to really understand what's going
on here, let me actually go out to a
| | 01:18 | couple seconds, maybe three or four
seconds, so we have our subject here, our actor.
| | 01:23 | And if we take the Method from
Pixel Motion to Whole Frames, we see what
| | 01:29 | we saw in the last movie with stretch.
| | 01:31 | So in other words, the frames are
duplicated. So we have a real frame and then
| | 01:35 | a copy and then a real frame and then a
copy, real frame, copy, so on and so forth.
| | 01:40 | Now the next method takes a little
longer to render but it's a little bit
| | 01:43 | smoother. It's called Frame Mix and
what that does is, and you can see this here,
| | 01:48 | it blends the opacity of the
two frames together. So every frame is
| | 01:53 | essentially a real frame but what it's
doing is it's taking the two frames that
| | 01:57 | have been stretched apart and fading
the opacity between them, so there is a
| | 02:01 | little bit better of a blend.
| | 02:03 | But as you can see here, this doesn't
quite work out all that gray in every
| | 02:07 | circumstance. So it kind of looks like
he has like a weird stutter effect as we
| | 02:11 | kind of scrub through this here. So the
best method to slow footage down is to
| | 02:16 | change this method, or actually just leave
it at Pixel Motion, which is the default.
| | 02:21 |
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