After Effects CS4 Getting StartedWelcome| 00:00 | (Music playing.)
| | 00:05 | Hello! I'm Chad Perkins and welcome to
Getting Started with After Effects CS4.
| | 00:10 | In this training series we're going to get up and running with what
is undoubtedly one of the greatest computer applications of all time,
| | 00:16 | Adobe After Effects CS4.
| | 00:18 | This course is ideal for those of you just want to jump in,
| | 00:21 | get acquainted with the entire program and get out.
| | 00:24 | In this training series we'll see the entire workflow at a glance.
We'll also learn how to animate and put projects together.
| | 00:30 | This training series is also a great preparation
for After Effects CS4 Essential Training.
| | 00:35 | After Effects is just so fun to use.
So let's jump in and get right to it.
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| Overview of After Effects CS4| 00:00 | Adobe After Effects CS4 is the world
standard application for motion graphics,
| | 00:05 | animation, visual effects and
compositing. In other words, combining separate
| | 00:09 | elements and much more. In this
movie, we are going to take a whirlwind
| | 00:12 | overview of the workflow of After
Effects and I'm also going to how you a few
| | 00:16 | things that can be done in After Effects.
| | 00:18 | The first part of our workflow starts
here on the left side of the interface
| | 00:22 | with the Project panel. The Project
panel is where we import the assets we'll use.
| | 00:26 | Assets is a generic term that
refers to media of all types, graphics,
| | 00:30 | movies, audio, anything. Adobe After
Effects supports a wide range of files for
| | 00:36 | import. Adobe Illustrator files are
supported, Adobe Photoshop files are
| | 00:39 | supported, many types of movie file
formats, image file formats, audio file
| | 00:44 | formats and others are supported in
After Effects. The Project panel is like a
| | 00:48 | storage container. You could import
as much stuff as you want and it really
| | 00:52 | doesn't affect the size of your project as much.
| | 00:55 | You see After Effects maintains links
to the source files on your hard drive.
| | 01:00 | These files that you import are not
actually embedded into the project itself.
| | 01:05 | So the benefit of that is you could
experiment as much as you want, import
| | 01:08 | tons of footage and you don't have
to worry about your project increasing
| | 01:11 | very much. The other side of the coin
is that you need to keep a close eye on
| | 01:15 | where your footage is in your hard
drive. If you move it, rename it or delete it,
| | 01:19 | After Effects will not be able to locate
it and your projects will not work correctly.
| | 01:23 | Once you have imported footage into
your Project panel, then you create what
| | 01:27 | are called compositions. Compositions,
like what you see here with the 3D and
| | 01:31 | color composition, are series of a layers.
Compositions are like mini-projects in
| | 01:37 | After Effects. Once we have items as
layers in a composition, we could animate
| | 01:42 | those layers, we could add effects to
those layers including color correction.
| | 01:46 | And once we are done animating and
compositing and adding effects then we
| | 01:50 | output our compositions into a file
format that other applications can understand.
| | 01:54 | Now, let's take a look at what After
Effects is capable of. In this 3D and
| | 01:58 | color composition, I have composited
many elements. I took a photo of a beach
| | 02:03 | scene and composited with this
Photoshop document of a car and these
| | 02:08 | Illustrator files which are surfboards.
Here are the originals here as an
| | 02:12 | Illustrator file brought in. These look
much like print graphics, but in After
| | 02:16 | Effects, I can take them and I could
apply Photoshop layer styles natively here
| | 02:20 | in After Effects and I could add
lighting and other effects to get them to look
| | 02:24 | more realistic. I have also added a
logo here at the top and also some
| | 02:29 | decorative elements in the background.
| | 02:31 | One of the exciting things about
After Effects is that you can operate in
| | 02:34 | three-dimensional space. So all of
these objects are actually positioned at
| | 02:38 | different places in Z space; in other
words, three-dimensions. When I select
| | 02:43 | the new unified Camera tool in After
Effects CS4, I can click and drag around
| | 02:48 | and you will see that I actually have a
three-dimensional project. Holding the
| | 02:53 | right mouse button down, I could zoom
in and out and you are seeing as I move,
| | 02:59 | the parallax effect, where the 3D
objects overlap one another. This is a very
| | 03:05 | powerful feature with unlimited potential.
| | 03:08 | Another thing that I like to do in
After Effects is use color correction.
| | 03:11 | For example, this is what my original
source files from Photoshop look like, quite
| | 03:16 | different from the final result. I
have also created an adjustment layer
| | 03:20 | similar to what you would find in
Photoshop, so these elements look like they
| | 03:23 | belong together a little bit
more. So here is before and after.
| | 03:28 | Next, we are going to go over this
Hula Girl composition. You notice that I
| | 03:31 | could have many compositions open at
one time. Another great feature of Adobe
| | 03:36 | After Effects is its ability to
animate characters. So I have here this Hula
| | 03:40 | Girl Photoshop file; it's just a
regular photo. I can turn it off and on and
| | 03:45 | that's the layer that we are dealing
with. Typically, bringing a still photo
| | 03:48 | like this to life can be very difficult,
but not with After Effects. There is
| | 03:52 | a tool here in After Effects called
the Puppet tool which makes this job a
| | 03:56 | snap. So with this layer selected in
my composition, I am going to go over to
| | 03:59 | the toolbar, which you will find at the
top of the interface, and select this
| | 04:02 | little pushpin. This is the Puppet tool.
It essentially turns still images into
| | 04:07 | puppets like marionettes.
| | 04:09 | So when I click on this, what I want
to do is I want to click on joints or
| | 04:13 | pivot points that would be there if
the character were being created as a
| | 04:17 | puppet or marionette. As if we were
dangling strings to these points and then
| | 04:22 | once we put those points down, we can
move our cursor over the points that we
| | 04:24 | put down and our cursor changes to a
move icon. And as we move this, you can see
| | 04:31 | that we can make our
character move in very organic ways.
| | 04:40 | Now, another great thing you could
do with this tool is you can hold the
| | 04:42 | Command key down on the Mac or Ctrl key
on the PC, you get this little stopwatch
| | 04:47 | icon indicating that you will have
motion sketch capabilities once you start
| | 04:51 | clicking and dragging with your
mouse. So basically then I can drag in
| | 04:54 | real-time and After Effects will record
my animations. So I just click and drag
| | 04:59 | and she is doing her hula thing there.
| | 05:01 | Once it's all said and done, I could
play this black using the Spacebar key and
| | 05:07 | you could see that the motions are
built-in here. The motions I move with my
| | 05:11 | mouse are already in the file. Finally,
we are going to move over to the Surfer
| | 05:16 | Interview composition and again we
have a video here that was beneficiary of
| | 05:21 | some great color work here in After
Effects. So, let me scroll down to the
| | 05:24 | bottom and show you the original file
without any color correction applied.
| | 05:29 | Then after color correction and with
the other layers this is what we have.
| | 05:33 | Now, let's take a look at the entire
project and we will talk about some of the
| | 05:36 | other After Effects features I used here.
| | 05:40 | (Man 1: Um, my name is Matt Bovard. I've been surfing
for about 19 years and I'm from Newbury Park, California.)
| | 05:46 | Okay, so basically we have an
animated bar down here at the bottom called a
| | 05:50 | lower third, which basically has this
cool surfer's name there, and then we have
| | 05:55 | some text animation that's another
great reason that people use After Effects.
| | 05:58 | Its text animation capabilities are
second to none. I used one of the text
| | 06:02 | animation presets that shifts with
After Effects CS4 to create this ocean wave
| | 06:06 | text. This ocean water here in the
background of our lower third is actually
| | 06:12 | synthetic water made from scratch in
After Effects. Here is what that looks like.
| | 06:18 | If we go to the Effect Controls
panel, which is where we adjust the
| | 06:21 | effects that we have applied, if I take
off the color we have applied, you can see
| | 06:24 | that basically this water is just
some black and white organic designs with
| | 06:29 | some color correction applied and
then combined and composited with other
| | 06:33 | layers and we create a
fairly realistic water effect.
| | 06:36 | Let me actually go up here to the
Tool panel and select the Selection tool
| | 06:39 | again. That's the main tool we use in
After Effects and again, another great
| | 06:43 | reason people use After Effects is for
its motions graphics capabilities.
| | 06:47 | You'll see as we play this back slowly,
we have some animated lines coming on the
| | 06:51 | screen here and then we have some
flowers popping up and rotating and all of
| | 06:57 | those tasks are done very quickly and
easily inside of After Effects and you
| | 07:01 | know, honestly another thing that
they don't tell you in the After Effects
| | 07:03 | documentation is that this program is
just fun. It's so easy to use, it's very
| | 07:08 | easy to experiment and play with.
It's just a very enjoyable, intuitive application.
| | 07:13 | That's why it's the industry champ.
| | 07:15 | So as you can see from color correction
to 3D animation to character animation
| | 07:19 | to motion graphics, all those things
can be done quickly and easily inside of
| | 07:23 | After Effects CS4.
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| Creating new projects and importing assets| 00:00 | In this brief tutorial, we are going to
take a look at how to create new Encore
| | 00:03 | projects and also how to import assets.
Now, creating a new project is simple
| | 00:09 | enough, but the idea behind these
projects can be a little confusing. To create
| | 00:14 | a new project, simply go
to File > New > New Project.
| | 00:18 | Now, an important thing to remember about
After Effects is you could only have one
| | 00:22 | project open at a time. Now you can
have a lot of little mini projects called
| | 00:26 | compositions, actually you can have as
many compositions as you want in your
| | 00:29 | project, but only one master project at
a time. The file extension for an After
| | 00:34 | Effects project is .aep and you could
actually see the name of your current
| | 00:38 | open project here at the top of the interface.
| | 00:41 | Now, next we are going to look at
importing assets. Now, the term assets is
| | 00:46 | also used synonymously with footage,
media, clips, that type of thing.
| | 00:51 | Basically any type of media that you
want to bring in your project, be it a
| | 00:55 | still images, video, audio, graphics,
anything. Now, it may be a little bit
| | 01:00 | confusing because we are going to be
talking about importing and we talked about
| | 01:03 | opening, but here is the deal.
| | 01:04 | There is a difference between opening
a file and importing a file in After
| | 01:08 | Effects language. In After Effects,
if you go to the File menu, the only thing
| | 01:12 | that you open are projects and again,
remember that you can only one have
| | 01:17 | project open at a time. So if I were
to right now click on this, click Open
| | 01:20 | Project, After Effects would ask me,
"What do you want to do with the currently
| | 01:24 | open project," because it's going to
have to close it in order to open up a new one.
| | 01:27 | Notice that Open and Import are
different. So again, we open projects and
| | 01:32 | import media. There are many ways to
import media into your After Effects
| | 01:36 | project. One we just saw, by going to
the File menu and selecting Import > File.
| | 01:40 | You could also the keyboard shortcut,
Command+I on the Mac or Ctrl+I on the PC.
| | 01:45 | You'll also get the same menu by
right-clicking in the Project panel.
| | 01:49 | Perhaps the most efficient way to
import media is to simply double-click in
| | 01:53 | the Project panel. From this dropdown
we could see all the different types of
| | 01:56 | file formats that After Effects is
capable of importing. You can see that it
| | 02:01 | really spans the gamut. Audio files
like WAV are supported, QuickTime movies,
| | 02:07 | still image file formats like PNG,
PICT and even Photoshop files are here,
| | 02:12 | high-end formats like
OpenEXR, MXF and many others.
| | 02:16 | Notice that After Effects Project is
actually one of the file types you could
| | 02:21 | import. That's right. Not only can
you open an After Effects Project, which
| | 02:25 | will actually completely replace your
current working project, but if you want
| | 02:28 | to use all of the media footage, or
animation, or whatever from another
| | 02:32 | project, you can simply import that
project without having to actually open it up.
| | 02:37 | I am going to leave it selected
currently to All Acceptable Files.
| | 02:40 | I am going to select my Media folder
here and notice that we could select
| | 02:43 | Illustrator files, movies, photos and
Photoshop files. Let me go to my Movies
| | 02:48 | folder. In this folder I could
actually select multiple files to import at
| | 02:51 | once. I can select the top one on the
list, Shift-click the bottom on the
| | 02:56 | list to select the entire list, or I
could select items that are next to each
| | 03:00 | other by using the Ctrl key on the
PC or the Command key on the Mac.
| | 03:03 | Once you are done, hit Open and your
assets show up here in the Project panel.
| | 03:07 | Now, if you come up here to the Project
panel and click once to deselect these
| | 03:11 | assets and then click once to select
these assets individually, we will see a
| | 03:15 | lot of information show up about
that particular asset at the top of the
| | 03:18 | Project panel.
| | 03:19 | Here we see the pixel dimensions,
1280x720 in this case. We'll also see the
| | 03:24 | pixel aspect ratio, which is square in
this case. The duration of the clip and
| | 03:28 | how many frames per second. In
addition to the color depth, the codec or in
| | 03:33 | other words the compression method,
and also some information about the audio
| | 03:37 | if there is audio included with the video file.
| | 03:39 | Now, let me show you one other trick
here. If I double-click in the Project
| | 03:41 | panel again, this time I'm going to go
up to my Photoshop files, if I select a
| | 03:47 | Photoshop file, select hula_girl.psd
and click Open. It's not super quick.
| | 03:54 | We have some options here. When you
are importing a Photoshop file, or an
| | 03:57 | Illustrator file, you can choose to
bring in as footage, which basically means
| | 04:01 | it will be just like a regular still image.
| | 04:03 | So all the layers essentially would be
flattened, or you can choose to import
| | 04:06 | this as a composition. When you import
it as a composition, it takes all the
| | 04:11 | layers of your Photoshop document and
makes a brand new composition with all
| | 04:14 | the layers of your Photoshop document
as layers in that composition. This can
| | 04:18 | be a real-time saver.
| | 04:20 | If you do decide to select Footage,
then you can choose to merge all the layers
| | 04:23 | together or you could actually choose
a layer to import. In this case, I am
| | 04:28 | going to select Composition, which
basically brings every single layer in at
| | 04:32 | the size of the entire document,
whereas Composition - Cropped Layers brings
| | 04:36 | every layer in at the size of the layer.
So I will select Composition here and
| | 04:40 | go ahead and hit OK. And now we have
the composition that After Effects created
| | 04:45 | for us upon import of the PSD file,
and also a folder with access to each
| | 04:49 | individual layer in the Photoshop document.
| | 04:53 | Now that you have created a project
and imported media into this project,
| | 04:56 | you are now ready to create compositions,
add these assets that you have imported
| | 05:00 | into those compositions and get to work.
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| Creating and using compositions| 00:00 | In this movie, we are going to take a
look at creating and using compositions
| | 00:04 | in After Effects. First, let's talk
about what compositions are. Compositions,
| | 00:08 | I like to think of them as like
little mini projects. They are basically
| | 00:11 | containers for all of our footage
elements that we import and use in our projects.
| | 00:16 | You can't really animate, change or
manipulate anything that is not in a
| | 00:21 | composition. In the After Effects
interface, compositions show up as tabs down
| | 00:25 | here at the bottom in the Timeline panel.
We view the results of our editing up
| | 00:29 | here in the Composition panel. As you
can see here in the Surfer Interview
| | 00:33 | composition, compositions are
basically made up of layers, just like
| | 00:36 | a Photoshop document.
| | 00:37 | One of the things you will do often as
a user of After Effects, is to create
| | 00:40 | new composition all the time. So
let's practice doing that now. Go to the
| | 00:44 | Project panel and at the bottom of the
Project panel you will see this little
| | 00:47 | icon, looks like a mini film strip.
The tooltip says, Create a new Composition.
| | 00:51 | So go ahead and click it. Now, one
of the first things you want to do
| | 00:54 | is name your composition. In After
Effects, unlike Photoshop, there are no
| | 00:59 | layer thumbnails or previews. So get
in the habit of naming things well.
| | 01:03 | I am just going to call this, Tester
Comp. First thing you want to be aware of
| | 01:08 | in this dialog box is there is a lot
of presets to choose from. If you know
| | 01:12 | your final output medium, there is
probably a preset in here that works for you.
| | 01:16 | If not, don't worry about it. I
will show you how to create your own
| | 01:18 | custom composition momentarily. Now,
let me show you how this preset area is
| | 01:22 | laid out. It's actually organized
pretty well, even though it's a pretty
| | 01:25 | intimidating list at first glance. At
the top of this list, within these first
| | 01:30 | gray lines here, these are standard Web
sizes. 320x240 for a Web video, and for
| | 01:36 | a Web banner, 468x60 pixels.
| | 01:39 | Remember that everything in After Effects
is done in pixels; inches don't matter.
| | 01:43 | Next in this list, we have
presets for NTSC, which is short for
| | 01:47 | National Television Standards Committee,
basically the television standard for
| | 01:52 | North America, Japan and a few other
countries as well. We also have standards
| | 01:56 | for PAL, Phase Alternating Line,
which is the standard in most of Europe
| | 02:00 | and other countries as well.
| | 02:02 | We next go into some enhanced and
higher definition formats. We have a few
| | 02:06 | different types of HDV and also some
different types of HD and finally full
| | 02:12 | HDTV. These bottom four presets are
for dealing with film. For now, we are
| | 02:17 | going to stick with NTSC DV,
towards the top of this list.
| | 02:21 | The NTSC DV preset is 720 pixels wide
by 480 pixels tall. If you want to
| | 02:28 | create a custom size, you can click on
one of these fields here and when you
| | 02:33 | get this icon, the finger with the
horizontal arrow, click and drag to the
| | 02:37 | right or to the left to change the size.
| | 02:40 | If you know exactly what size you
are looking for, click once and then
| | 02:44 | manually type in a number and then tab
away from that field, or you could also
| | 02:48 | click away as well. You can also
select a Pixel Aspect Ratio. Pixels are the
| | 02:53 | little squares on your screen that
make up images in video. On a computer
| | 02:57 | monitor, these little squares are
square. Exactly as wide as they are tall.
| | 03:02 | On a TV screen, this is usually not
the case. Usually it's a little bit more
| | 03:07 | wide or a little bit more tall. For
full screen TV, the aspect ratio is .91,
| | 03:13 | a little bit taller than it is wide.
For wide screen, it's 1.21. In other words,
| | 03:18 | a little bit wider than it is tall.
As you can see here, there is a wide
| | 03:22 | variety of pixel aspect ratios to
choose from. Likewise, there is a variety of
| | 03:27 | frame rates. NTSC DV operates at 29.97
frames per second. Film operates at 24
| | 03:34 | frames per second. Some high-definition
video goes up to 60 frames per second,
| | 03:38 | and finally at the bottom of this
Composition Settings dialog box, we need to
| | 03:41 | enter a duration in.
| | 03:43 | The way that the time code reads is
hours, then minutes, then seconds, and
| | 03:48 | finally frames. The number of frames
that comprise a second is based off of
| | 03:52 | your frame rate. Right now, our time
code is saying that we have a five second
| | 03:57 | long composition, if we were to hit OK
and create this composition as is.
| | 04:01 | I'm going to change the preset back to NTSC
DV, leave the duration of five seconds,
| | 04:06 | and click OK. Tester Comp is now a
composition that we can drag objects to.
| | 04:11 | For example, we can open up Graphics,
open up this subfolder, and drag any one of
| | 04:17 | these objects into our Timeline.
| | 04:20 | This Illustrator file is now added to
our composition. At the moment, we can't
| | 04:25 | see it because our background is black,
and the Illustrator file is black. So
| | 04:28 | I am going to go ahead and with this
layer selected, I am going to hit the
| | 04:30 | Delete key to remove it from my
composition. There is another way to create
| | 04:33 | compositions which does come in handy
quite often. I am going to open up the
| | 04:37 | Movies folder here in my Project panel.
I am going to select the Sunrise_Leo_HD image.
| | 04:42 | With it selected in the Project panel,
its dimension show up here at the top of
| | 04:45 | the Project panel. The pixel dimensions
are 1280x720 with square pixels. That
| | 04:50 | doesn't match the Tester Comp at all.
So I am going to drag this piece of
| | 04:53 | footage to the New Comp icon at the
bottom of the Project panel. This creates a
| | 04:58 | new composition with the same
attributes as the video. So now this composition
| | 05:03 | automatically has the same pixel
dimensions, pixel aspect ratio, frame rate,
| | 05:07 | and duration. As we scrub the playhead
to see this video, we see that it looks
| | 05:13 | just right in this window.
| | 05:15 | One other thing I wanted to mention
briefly, is that you could actually have
| | 05:18 | compositions as layers in another
composition. This is referred to as nesting a
| | 05:23 | composition, or in other words, pre-
composing other layers. Let me show you
| | 05:27 | how this works. I am going to go back
to the Surfer Interview composition. We
| | 05:31 | have here as a layer in this composition
another composition called Lower Third.
| | 05:36 | That's this bar down here at
the bottom of the screen.
| | 05:39 | I could open up this nested
composition to see its layers simply by
| | 05:43 | double-clicking it. Now, the Lower
Third composition appears as a tab at the
| | 05:47 | bottom in the Timeline panel. These
three layers were initially regular old
| | 05:51 | layers in the Surfer Interview
composition. But I wanted to animate them as a
| | 05:55 | group. Here is what they look like by
themselves. I have here this dark solid
| | 05:59 | and I have some fractal noise
that's animating on top of that.
| | 06:03 | But it's a little bit faint, so I
duplicated that, and this is the result that
| | 06:06 | I wanted and I wanted to move all
these layers that they appear on at the same
| | 06:11 | time. But it's three separate layers.
So what I did is I precomposed these
| | 06:15 | layers to basically make an asset
composition in this composition, so that way
| | 06:19 | I can animate them as one whole.
| | 06:22 | So now all three of these layers move
as one because they were precomposed,
| | 06:26 | and that's what you need to know
to create and use compositions.
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| Working with the Timeline| 00:00 | Most of the time that you'll be working
in After Effects, you'll be working in
| | 00:03 | the Timeline panel. So we're going to
take this movie and talk a little bit
| | 00:06 | more about this area. First let's talk
about how to add footage from the Project
| | 00:10 | panel to your Timeline.
There are several ways to do this.
| | 00:14 | I can select an object here in the
Project panel, I can drag and drop in the
| | 00:17 | Composition panel, if it's important to
me where this object goes. I'm going to
| | 00:23 | hit Command+Z on the Mac or Ctrl+Z on
the PC to undo that. Now, if where the
| | 00:28 | layer exists in time is more of a
priority to you, then simply select the
| | 00:32 | object in the Project panel, then drag
and drop it over here in the Timeline.
| | 00:37 | You'll get a mini little Current Time
Indicator here, indicating where in time
| | 00:41 | you will drop your layer and then let
go. Your layer's in point will be where
| | 00:46 | you let go of the mouse.
| | 00:47 | Again, I'm going to undo that. I'm
going to re-import this a third time
| | 00:51 | to show you that you could also change
the stacking order of the layers, we'll
| | 00:55 | talk about momentarily, but I can change
that while I'm bringing in my layers as well.
| | 01:00 | So I can have it at the top of
the stack or towards the bottom.
| | 01:03 | Again I'm going to undo that.
| | 01:06 | Often times, I just want to quickly
add assets from the Project panel to my
| | 01:09 | project. I want them to start at the
first frame of my composition. I want them
| | 01:13 | to be centered in my Composition
panel and so there is a great keyboard
| | 01:16 | shortcut for that. Basically, you can
select the object again in the Project panel,
| | 01:20 | and hit Ctrl+ or Command+Forward slash (/).
By the way, forward slash is the one with
| | 01:24 | the question mark on it. So Command+?,
Ctrl+? And that will add that to your
| | 01:29 | project, make it the top layer,
make it start at the first frame of your
| | 01:32 | composition and it will center in
your composition as well. Now I'm going to
| | 01:36 | undo that by hitting Ctrl+Z or Command+Z.
| | 01:38 | One of the most important aspects of a
Timeline obviously is the Timeline, and
| | 01:43 | so being able to move around is very
important. We have our Current Time Indicator
| | 01:47 | here which we can just simply
select and drag. Now Current Time
| | 01:50 | Indicator is quite a mouthful. So
often times it's just abbreviated as CTI.
| | 01:55 | So again you can click and drag the
top of the CTI around to tell you where
| | 01:58 | exactly you are in time, or you can
simply click on the top in this bar here
| | 02:02 | where these numbers are to
jump to a particular point.
| | 02:05 | The best way to get around is by using
keyword shortcuts. You can use the Home key
| | 02:09 | on your keyboard to jump to the
first frame of the composition. The End key
| | 02:13 | on your keyboard will jump you to the
end of your composition. Again, that's not
| | 02:17 | the letter N; it's actually the button
End. And also Page Up will take you back
| | 02:22 | one frame at a time; Page Down
will advance you one frame at a time.
| | 02:26 | If you hold the Shift key down while
you're doing that, it will jump in ten
| | 02:29 | frame increments. So if I hold Shift+Page Up,
I will jump back ten frames at a time.
| | 02:33 | Shift+Page Down advances ten frames at a time.
| | 02:37 | You can also navigate in time by
scrubbing the current time area, which you
| | 02:41 | could find in the upper left hand
corner of the Timeline panel. This display
| | 02:44 | tells you exactly where you are. So
basically it reads from left to right.
| | 02:48 | Hours, then minutes, then seconds, and
finally frames. So currently, my current
| | 02:54 | time display is at six seconds and
two frames. I can click this to scrub in
| | 03:00 | time, to move it left and right as I
hold down my mouse button. I can also
| | 03:03 | single click on it once to open the
Go To Time dialog box, if I know exactly
| | 03:07 | the frame I want to go to, and I
can just type it here and click OK.
| | 03:11 | Now we have here several layers. I
could actually use the wheel on my mouse
| | 03:15 | with this panel selected to scroll up
and down through them, or I could use
| | 03:18 | the scroll bars in the far right-hand
side of the Timeline panel as well.
| | 03:22 | These layers were just like Photoshop;
they are all individual objects stacked
| | 03:26 | on top of one another, and just like a
stack of pancakes as you start piling
| | 03:30 | the stuff up on top of the bottom one,
then you can't quite see the bottom
| | 03:33 | pancake, because you're
looking at the top pancake.
| | 03:36 | So for example, as I'm looking around,
I have this blue flower which is beneath
| | 03:40 | these stripes, and I actually want it
on top of the stripes. So I'm going to
| | 03:43 | scroll down till I find my blue flower
layer. I'm just going to click it and
| | 03:47 | drag upwards in the layer stack and
then let go about here. So now it's the
| | 03:52 | top element.
| | 03:53 | Also similar to Photoshop, we have
these eye icons, which indicate a layer's
| | 03:57 | visibility. So we can click this eye to
remove visibility. Say for example, for
| | 04:01 | the blue flower or for the text. Now
we could also choose to solo a layer,
| | 04:06 | which means that we view only that
layer. If I solo this text layer, which we
| | 04:10 | do by clicking this little space
beneath this circle in the Timeline panel,
| | 04:14 | then we view only the text. You can
also solo multiple layers, contrary to what
| | 04:19 | the name solo might imply.
| | 04:21 | Another thing you might find yourself
doing often in the Timeline panel is
| | 04:24 | moving layers in time. So let me hit
the Home key, and as I preview this
| | 04:28 | animation, let's just scrub it here, we
have text that fades in before the lower
| | 04:34 | third that's supposed to be
behind it comes on the screen.
| | 04:36 | So what I want to do is I want to
click this layer and drag it to the right,
| | 04:41 | and what that does is that it makes
it start later in time. So it actually
| | 04:45 | doesn't appear until later on in my
Timeline. The last idea I want to share
| | 04:50 | with you and a couple of tips here is
how to select layers. Most edits only
| | 04:54 | take place on layers that are selected
so it's very important that you have
| | 04:58 | the correct layer selected.
| | 04:59 | Now you could go here in the Timeline
and just click a layer to select it, but
| | 05:02 | sometimes these compositions get
pretty big and that might not always be very
| | 05:06 | convenient. One of the things that
helps is to simply type the number of the
| | 05:10 | layer. So if want to select layer one
on my keyboard, I can click the number
| | 05:14 | one and I select layer one. For
double and triple digit layers, I can simply
| | 05:18 | type numbers quickly. So if I type
1-2, then layer 12 is selected. I can
| | 05:23 | also use the keyboard shortcut,
Command or Ctrl and Up and Down arrow.
| | 05:27 | So I'm on a Mac, so I'm doing Command+Up
Arrow to move up in the layer stack or
| | 05:32 | Command+Down Arrow, and again on a PC
it would be Ctrl+Up Arrow or Ctrl+Down Arrow.
| | 05:36 | That's the basics of how to get around the Timeline.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animation essentials| 00:00 | In this movie we're going to look at
the very basics of animation. Thankfully,
| | 00:05 | in After Effects animating one property
is the same as animating any property.
| | 00:09 | So the same way that we animate an
object's scale, for example, in other words,
| | 00:13 | making it bigger and smaller, is the
same way that we might animate an object's glow.
| | 00:18 | For this example we're going to use
transparency, or in other words opacity.
| | 00:21 | So I'm going to come down to my
Timeline and select this layer and in this
| | 00:24 | example I'm going to be using the
Opacity parameter. So if that's not showing,
| | 00:29 | just simply hit the letter T on
your keyboard with the layer selected.
| | 00:32 | Next to all animatable properties,
you will see this little stopwatch.
| | 00:37 | This little stopwatch is your key to
animation. To animate in After Effects,
| | 00:41 | we follow three simple steps. The first
step is click this stopwatch. Once this
| | 00:47 | stopwatch is selected, that tells
After Effects that we want to animate this
| | 00:52 | property. It also tells After Effects
to remember the current value at the
| | 00:57 | current time.
| | 00:59 | A diamond shape has been created for us
that stores that data information that
| | 01:03 | basically says that at frame zero
this value or the opacity for this layer
| | 01:09 | will be 100%. So that's
step one, click the stopwatch.
| | 01:13 | Step two is that we move in time. Step
three, change the value. I'll take this
| | 01:21 | down to zero. Notice that another
diamond-shaped keyframe has been created for you.
| | 01:27 | Keyframes are the name of these
diamond-shaped objects that remember a
| | 01:31 | value at a particular time.
| | 01:33 | For now if I scrub the Current Time
Indicator, we notice that this starts at
| | 01:38 | completely opaque, 100% opacity, and
then gets completely transparent, 0% opacity.
| | 01:44 | That's all it takes to animate.
Click the stopwatch, move in time,
| | 01:48 | change the value.
| | 01:50 | Also, if you want to delete one of
these keyframes, you can just select it and
| | 01:53 | then hit the Delete key on your
keyboard. Here are some more tricks for this.
| | 01:56 | I'm going to move my Current Time
Indicator in between these two keyframes.
| | 02:00 | If you want this fade out to happen
over a longer period of time, make the
| | 02:04 | keyframes farther apart.
| | 02:06 | I can select this keyframe. By the way,
selected keyframes are gold in color;
| | 02:10 | deselected keyframes are gray in color.
I selected a keyframe and move it in
| | 02:15 | time, which basically tells After
Effects to make this same animation happen
| | 02:19 | over a longer period of time. So it
goes slower. The opposite is also true.
| | 02:23 | If we drag these two keyframes much
closer to each other, then the fade out
| | 02:27 | happens much more rapidly.
| | 02:28 | We can also click and drag to create
a marquee that will encompass multiple
| | 02:33 | keyframes and then move those
multiple keyframes, actually moving our entire
| | 02:38 | animation. Now in this case, there is
a lower third that pops up behind the
| | 02:42 | screen. Might be a little hard to see
since it's dark blue. So I'll make the
| | 02:45 | background transparent by clicking this
button at the bottom of the Composition
| | 02:49 | panel. I actually want this to fade in,
not fade out, when this lower third
| | 02:54 | comes onto the scene.
| | 02:55 | One of the way to do this is to click
the stopwatch again. If you click the
| | 02:59 | stopwatch again, it will completely
remove all keyframes you've applied.
| | 03:04 | Be very careful with this. So we could
click the stopwatch, remove all keyframes,
| | 03:09 | and just start all over again. We actually
don't have to do that. I already have
| | 03:12 | a keyframe that represents this layer
at 100% opacity and another keyframe
| | 03:17 | that represents this layer at 0%
opacity. But this is in a wrong place.
| | 03:20 | So what I can do is just click and drag,
and have these to trade places.
| | 03:24 | So I can have it start to fade on right
about here, and then with 100% opacity,
| | 03:31 | a few frames later. Notice
that this automatically works.
| | 03:37 | And that's how to animate any property
in After Effects. It's just that easy.
| | 03:41 | After Effects automatically figures out
what goes in between the keyframes for you.
| | 03:47 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Previewing animations| 00:00 | In this movie we're going to take a
look at how to preview your animations.
| | 00:03 | The simple way to do this is simply to
select a composition and hit the spacebar.
| | 00:07 | Now you might notice when you
playback your animation for the first time,
| | 00:10 | depending on the complexity of your
project, that it's a little bit slow at first.
| | 00:13 | You also might notice this
little green line that trails your
| | 00:17 | Current Time Indicator as you're previewing.
| | 00:20 | The reason for both of these things
is because that After Effects is loading
| | 00:23 | these frames into RAM. It's basically
caching them, so you can preview them
| | 00:27 | faster. You can actually hit the
spacebar to pause the previewing and then
| | 00:32 | drag the Current Time Indicator back
to where the area is already green and
| | 00:35 | once you hit the Spacebar to preview
again, you'll notice that it actually goes
| | 00:40 | in almost real-time, at least much
faster than it was while it was trying to
| | 00:44 | load those frames into RAM.
| | 00:46 | Now another way to preview, is to
hit zero on the numeric keypad.
| | 00:51 | This creates what's called a RAM preview.
There are some subtle difference between
| | 00:56 | the two. When you preview something
by using the Spacebar, the priority for
| | 01:00 | After Effects is trying to show you
as much of your composition as possible.
| | 01:04 | So if you have a 60-second long
composition, but you only have 30 seconds of
| | 01:09 | RAM that you can use to playback,
then it will skip frames if it needs to,
| | 01:13 | to playback the entire 60 seconds if it can.
| | 01:15 | With RAM previews, the emphasis is on
playing back in real-time. So if it can
| | 01:20 | only load ten seconds of that
composition into RAM to play that back in
| | 01:24 | real-time, then that's all it's going
to show you. An added benefit of RAM
| | 01:27 | previews is that it also previews audio,
which you will not get with the spacebar.
| | 01:32 | If you want to preview just the audio,
hit the period key on the numeric keypad.
| | 01:37 | There is also a Preview panel here,
which can be expanded, and has
| | 01:41 | several options for previewing. The
familiar play triangle icon here actually
| | 01:46 | does the same thing as the
Spacebar. It plays and it pauses.
| | 01:50 | If you want to do a RAM preview using a
button here in the Preview panel, click
| | 01:54 | on this button on the right side.
There are also additional options in this
| | 01:57 | panel, such as looping options and the
option to preview this in full screen.
| | 02:02 | I'm going to minimize this back again,
so you can see more of our project here.
| | 02:07 | Another really important feature for
previewing is the work area bar. The work
| | 02:11 | area bar is kind of like this chameleon
in the interface. It kind of blends in,
| | 02:15 | it's difficult to see. Basically, it's these
yellow bars right here, so we can click
| | 02:19 | and drag the beginning and click and
drag the end, and we can also click in
| | 02:25 | the middle to move the work area
around. Now if I were to hit 0 on the
| | 02:29 | numeric keypad, even though there is
a distance between the Current Time
| | 02:32 | Indicator and the work area bar, it
would automatically just jump to the
| | 02:36 | work area bar, because only
that area is being previewed.
| | 02:39 | This is particularly handy when there
is a certain area you're trying to focus on,
| | 02:43 | and you can also use keyboard shortcuts
to adjust the work area bar. For example,
| | 02:48 | if I hit the letter B as in boy,
it automatically jumps to beginning
| | 02:51 | of the work area bar to my Current Time
Indicator. The letter N as in Nancy is
| | 02:56 | the shortcut for setting the end of
the work area bar. If you want to restore
| | 03:00 | the work area bar back to the full
length of the composition, just double-click it.
| | 03:04 | Now that's pretty much all you need to
know to get started with previewing your
| | 03:08 | animations. However, I just want to
point out again that RAM is such a crucial
| | 03:12 | part of After Effects. I mentioned this
green area and about how After Effects loads
| | 03:17 | these frames into RAM, so it can play
them back in real-time. So the more RAM
| | 03:21 | you have, the more After Effects
can give you in terms of previews.
| | 03:25 | From my experience, that's been the
most important component of my computer to
| | 03:29 | get the most out of After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating transforms| 00:00 | Most of the time that you are working
in After Effects, you are going to be
| | 00:02 | working with the 5 basic transforms.
You could see these 5 basic transforms by
| | 00:07 | selecting a layer in the Timeline
panel, clicking this disclosure triangle
| | 00:10 | here, and now you could see these 5
basic transforms. Anchor Point, Position,
| | 00:15 | Scale, Rotation and Opacity. If when
you first open this up, you can't see them all.
| | 00:20 | You're just seeing Transform. Just
click the triangle next to Transform to
| | 00:23 | open that up. And again, these 5 basic
properties you will probably animate
| | 00:27 | more than any others,
depending on your workflow of course.
| | 00:30 | A handy way to access these is by
using the keyboard shortcut TRAPS and TRAPS
| | 00:36 | is actually an acronym, each letter
representing one of the 5 basic transforms.
| | 00:40 | T is the first letter. That's the only
one that's harder to remember because it
| | 00:42 | stands for Opacity, which actually
starts with an O. All the other letters
| | 00:46 | where R-A-P-S are short for one of the
other transform's first letter. So if I
| | 00:51 | were to hit T, I would see just Opacity.
R shows me Rotation. A, Anchor point.
| | 00:57 | P, Position and S, Scale. Notice that
when you press one of those keyboard
| | 01:01 | shortcuts, the existing property
disappears and is replaced with a new
| | 01:04 | property. If you want to see multiple
properties, hold the Shift key. So in
| | 01:08 | this case if I were to hit Shift+P,
I would see Position. Shift+A, Anchor
| | 01:12 | Point, and so on. In this case we want
to animate Position, so I am going to
| | 01:16 | hit the letter P, which actually hides
Position because it was showing, and so
| | 01:19 | I'll hit P again to reveal it.
| | 01:21 | Now I want this lower third to come
from the right side of the screen and
| | 01:25 | animate towards the left. So I am
actually going to set these keyframes
| | 01:29 | backwards. I know because of this
marker here, this is where I want the lower
| | 01:32 | third animation to end. I wanted to be
on screen at this frame. So rather than
| | 01:37 | dragging this offscreen, and then
clicking the stopwatch to set a keyframe,
| | 01:41 | and then moving in time and then
changing it back to the first frame,
| | 01:44 | it's already where I want to be at the end.
So I am going to get here with my Current
| | 01:47 | Time Indicator and click
the stopwatch for Position.
| | 01:50 | I am actually going to go back in time
to the beginning of the animation,
| | 01:53 | and I'll drag this layer to where I want
it to go. Simply click and drag. Now if
| | 01:58 | you are using your mouse for this,
sometimes you have a tendency to get a
| | 02:01 | little wobbly. So you might want to
hold the Shift key down to make sure that
| | 02:04 | you are going in a straight line. So
basically now we have told After Effects
| | 02:09 | that we want the bar to be at this
particular position for this frame and at
| | 02:14 | this next keyframe we want you over
there. And the animation is created for us.
| | 02:19 | Hit the Spacebar to preview.
Looks pretty good.
| | 02:24 | Now you might be wondering what
these values are. The left value is the X
| | 02:30 | value, the X position, in other words,
left to right. The second value, the one
| | 02:35 | on the right is the Y value, in other words
where is it at up and down. These numbers are
| | 02:40 | calculated based on where the anchor
point of the layer is in relation to the
| | 02:44 | upper left-hand corner. Now I realize that
probably sounds like a bunch of gibberish.
| | 02:48 | Let me explain myself a little bit better
here. As we go out in time here to the
| | 02:51 | final resting place of the lower third,
we see that it's 480 pixels
| | 02:55 | over from the upper left-hand corner,
or at least its anchor point is. The
| | 03:00 | anchor point is this little object
right here that has the circle with a little
| | 03:03 | crosshairs through it. It's 480 pixels
over from the left edge and 360 pixels
| | 03:09 | down from the top. Let's talk a little
bit more about this anchor point. I am
| | 03:13 | going to go and select this blue
flower. As I select the blue flower,
| | 03:17 | you will see it's anchor point here in the
center. The anchor point is actually the
| | 03:21 | center of all transformations for a layer.
| | 03:24 | So if I were to hit R, and click and
scrub on this value to rotate this, it's
| | 03:30 | going to rotate around the anchor point.
Or if we were to scale, click and drag
| | 03:36 | up and down, it's going to get bigger
and smaller based on that anchor point.
| | 03:40 | In this case that's not what we want.
We want this flower to rotate around
| | 03:44 | itself from it's center. So the way we
can fix that is not actually by hitting
| | 03:48 | the letter A as you might think and
adjusting the Anchor point this way,
| | 03:51 | that's kind of non-intuitive. It
actually seemingly adjusts the layer,
| | 03:55 | while the anchor point is stationary. So
what we want to do actually is go to this tool,
| | 04:00 | which is called the Pan Behind
tool in the toolbar at the top. Select it,
| | 04:04 | and then use this to move the anchor
point where you want it. In this case to the
| | 04:09 | center of the flower. Now as were go
back to Rotation, and move this around,
| | 04:14 | then we could see that the object
rotates around that anchor point.
| | 04:18 | And here is how Rotation works. As
we click and drag the second value to
| | 04:23 | the right, stay away from this 0x. We
will talk about that in just a second.
| | 04:26 | As I click and drag to the right, we get
a positive value, plus 100. Basically
| | 04:29 | what this means, this is rotating
clockwise. If we drag this to a negative
| | 04:34 | value or drag it to the left, it's
going to be rotating counterclockwise. Now
| | 04:39 | if we were to keep going, right until
about 359 degrees, everything is all
| | 04:49 | hunky-dory, but once we get to 360,
something interesting happens. This number
| | 04:53 | goes to 0, and the number on the left
changes to 1x. Basically the number on
| | 04:59 | the left is the amount of complete revolutions,
so obviously this is only for animation.
| | 05:04 | If we were to add additional values to
the right-hand side, it would mean that
| | 05:07 | this object is going to rotate one complete
revolution, plus an additional 45 degrees.
| | 05:13 | I am actually going to take this
back to 0, click in that field and
| | 05:16 | type 0, hit the Tab key to type 0 again,
and then I will click the stopwatch
| | 05:20 | for Rotation to set a keyframe for this
property. I will then hit the End key,
| | 05:24 | and I will add a little bit of rotation.
I want this to subtly rotate over
| | 05:29 | the course of my animation.
| | 05:30 | Let's hit the Home key and preview what
we have so far. There's the lower third,
| | 05:36 | and then the flower starts spinning
slowly and elegantly, which is actually
| | 05:39 | what I am looking for. I am not quite
done with this flower yet. I kind
| | 05:42 | of want it to pop up like it's blooming.
And so to do that we are going to use
| | 05:45 | these Scale property. So I am going to
select this layer and hit the letter S
| | 05:49 | for Scale. If I have the Rotation
property open still, sometimes it helps to
| | 05:53 | use the keyframes of other properties
as kind of like a guide for where you
| | 05:57 | want to set keyframes for other properties.
| | 05:59 | I am going to click on my Current
Time Indicator right here when the flower
| | 06:02 | starts animating. And I am going to
click the stopwatch for Scale. Now kind of
| | 06:06 | like with the lower third, our
flower is already in the prime scale.
| | 06:11 | We actually want to scale up to this
current value but I have already clicked the
| | 06:14 | stopwatch. That's no problem. I can
just simply click and drag this keyframe
| | 06:19 | away, and the data stored in this
keyframe, in other words 380%, is
| | 06:24 | stored in this keyframe. So now I
can take the Scale value to 0 and the
| | 06:29 | animation is already created.
It will go from 0 to 380%.
| | 06:34 | Notice that you could animate all 5
transformations. So we have Rotation
| | 06:39 | going, we have Scale going, they are
all completely independent of one another.
| | 06:43 | So now as we preview this, let's
actually hit the Home key and preview this,
| | 06:47 | the lower third animates on,
the flower blooms and starts twirling.
| | 06:51 | Now remember that Opacity works in the
same way. And Opacity is actually a good
| | 06:56 | tool to use to blend objects together,
so they look like they are supposed to
| | 07:00 | be in the same scene. I might select
this lower third, hit the letter T for
| | 07:04 | Opacity, and click and drag the
Opacity down, making this layer a little bit
| | 07:08 | more transparent. This allows you to
see the layers beneath them and it might
| | 07:12 | make for a more cohesive environment.
| | 07:15 | These five basic transforms are very
versatile, and again, you will probably
| | 07:19 | animate these 5 properties more
than any others in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating characters| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at
one way to animate characters inside of
| | 00:03 | After Effects. Now most of the time
when you animate characters, you probably
| | 00:07 | have a layered Photoshop or Illustrator
files, such as this wizard here, and we
| | 00:11 | can adjust something like his hat
because it's on a separate layer to bring
| | 00:14 | this character to life. But in this
video I want to show you another tool for
| | 00:18 | animating characters and that is
called the Puppet tool. I am going to go over
| | 00:21 | this Hula Girl composition here.
| | 00:23 | Now basically what the Puppet tool
tries to do is it takes a still image and
| | 00:28 | applies these deformation points, so
that you can apply them at certain points
| | 00:32 | of the image and then control the
image like a puppet. Here's how to do this.
| | 00:36 | First I am going to select the layer
that I am going to use the Puppet Pins on.
| | 00:39 | Next I am going to go up to the
toolbar at the top and over here on the far
| | 00:42 | right hand side of the tools, we have
the Puppet Pin tool. I am going to go
| | 00:46 | ahead and select that. I am going to
go ahead and apply pins to this object.
| | 00:50 | I am going to apply them to places
where I'd want to control if I were like a
| | 00:54 | puppet master. So I might put one on
her head, one on the elbows here. Now in
| | 01:00 | this case, this is all one layer and
the hands are basically attached to the
| | 01:03 | head, so not into much that we can do
there. If her hands were separate from
| | 01:06 | her head, we would probably put pins
in her hands as well. Maybe one on
| | 01:09 | her chest, and one at the bottom of her torso.
| | 01:12 | Now what's phenomenal about the Puppet
tool is that when you put your cursor
| | 01:15 | back over one of these Puppet Pin
points, you get a little move icon. And you
| | 01:19 | could then click and drag and move
portions of your object around. Now if you
| | 01:25 | notice while I am moving around her
waist, you can see movement up at the top
| | 01:31 | by her neck. Now this is the way
things really work in the real world.
| | 01:35 | It's very difficult to move your arm, and
not have your shoulder be adjusted in some way.
| | 01:39 | As I click this button in her torso,
you will notice how her arms move a
| | 01:44 | little bit, her head is kind of giving
a little shake, and you could see that
| | 01:49 | in her waist also.
| | 01:50 | Another great feature of the Puppet
tool is that we can hold the Ctrl key on
| | 01:54 | the PC or the Command key on the Mac
and get this little stop watch. If we
| | 01:58 | then hold down the Ctrl or Command key
and move this, then basically we can
| | 02:03 | sketch out the motions. So I am moving
my mouse left and right, back and forth,
| | 02:08 | and After Effects actually remembers
that motion. So now when I preview this
| | 02:11 | animation, you could see that she has
a little shake in there, all my motions
| | 02:17 | are automatically picked up and animated
by After Effects with very, very little
| | 02:21 | effort on my part, even with the mouse.
Not too shabby. Now for further
| | 02:26 | exploration, if you hold down the
mouse button, you'll see there is an
| | 02:29 | additional tools, the Puppet Overlap
tool, which controls how the different
| | 02:32 | pieces of a mesh, or in other words
a layer that has the Puppet Pin applied,
| | 02:36 | how a mesh will overlap itself, and
also the Starch tool. So if there is
| | 02:39 | pieces of your layer that are moving
that shouldn't be, you can use the Puppet
| | 02:43 | Starch tool pins to anchor them down.
| | 02:45 | So as you can see, this is a great
alternative to the traditional style of
| | 02:51 | animating characters in After Effects,
where you have to take a layered Photoshop
| | 02:53 | file and laboriously animate each
little piece. Now we can take one still
| | 02:57 | flat image and just use the
Puppet tool to bring it to life.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating text| 00:00 | The text animation capabilities in
After Effects are second to none. They are
| | 00:03 | extremely powerful. In this movie I
am going to give you a brief glance at
| | 00:07 | how to get started with text animation.
I have some text here, the Matt Bovard
| | 00:12 | text. And I want to adjust and add some
animation. Right now as I drag my CTI,
| | 00:17 | you will see there is no animation for
this text. So here is how we create text
| | 00:21 | animation, and if this is a little bit
too complex for you, that's totally understandable,
| | 00:25 | but stick with me, because
I am going to show you some
| | 00:27 | automated ways to do this a little bit
later towards the end of the movie. So
| | 00:30 | I am going to open up here in my
Timeline panel, open up the layer and we see
| | 00:34 | text here. In this may be closed up
like this, that's fine. I am going to come
| | 00:38 | over to the right where it says Animate,
and there is a little circle with a
| | 00:41 | triangle on it. So I am going to
click that and first we need to select
| | 00:45 | a property to animate. In this case I'm
going to select Scale. Once we do that,
| | 00:50 | an object called an animator is created.
Now within this animator there are
| | 00:55 | two key objects. The first is the Scale
property, which we added. The second is
| | 01:00 | a Range selector, which determines
which of these characters are affected by
| | 01:04 | the scale adjustment.
| | 01:06 | By default, as we increase the scale,
all characters get larger. I am actually
| | 01:10 | going to zoom in here using the wheel
on my mouse, so I could get up a bit more
| | 01:14 | close to this text. That's better.
So again, you'll see that the scale
| | 01:18 | adjustment applies to all the characters.
If we open up the Range Selector,
| | 01:22 | we see that the range starts at 0 and
ends at 100%. So all these characters are
| | 01:27 | getting adjusted. But if we adjust
the Start percentage, then not all
| | 01:31 | characters will be adjusted. Likewise,
we could adjust the End value to change
| | 01:38 | what happens on the right-hand side
of our text, or with the Range Selector
| | 01:42 | selected, we can manually grab and
adjust these vertical bars to adjust the
| | 01:48 | range selection. Now let's say we
only have a couple of characters that are
| | 01:52 | getting the adjustment
here, these two letter Ts.
| | 01:55 | One of the things that we can do is
adjust the Offset value. The Offset value
| | 01:59 | basically just takes the amount of the
range and shifts it around. So basically
| | 02:03 | we have a range that was going to be 2
or 3 characters wide and as we cycle
| | 02:07 | through our characters, you could see
the result it has on the text. Now at
| | 02:10 | this point we can go to the Add
flyout menu. Now notice that we have this
| | 02:13 | original Animate menu, which is what
we used to create this initial Scale
| | 02:18 | animator, and we also have Add. The
difference between the two is that if we
| | 02:22 | select a property or even another
selector, it's going to add it to the current
| | 02:27 | animator. So you can see from this
Add menu under Property, all these
| | 02:31 | different properties that we can
animate. So if we wanted these characters to
| | 02:34 | rotate a little bit while they are
scaling up, we could add a Rotation property
| | 02:38 | to the same animator and range selector.
| | 02:41 | If we were to select that same
Rotation property from the Animate flyout,
| | 02:44 | we would create an entirely new animator
with it's own range selector. See, it can
| | 02:50 | get quite complicated, but again like I
promised, there is an easier way to do this.
| | 02:54 | I am going to select this animator.
I am going to hit Delete to remove it.
| | 02:57 | So now our text, as we
scrub it, is just plain old text.
| | 03:00 | I am going to select this text layer,
and I am going to go over to the Effects
| | 03:05 | and Presets panel, and close up the
Hue search here. I am now going to the
| | 03:10 | flyout menu of the Effects and Presets
panel. From here I am going to select
| | 03:14 | Browse Presets. This will open Adobe
Bridge into the Presets folder that ships
| | 03:18 | with After Effects. From this directory,
let's open up the folder called Text.
| | 03:25 | This opens up all the text presets or
at least the text preset categories that
| | 03:29 | ships with After Effects. So if we
wanted our text to animate in, we could open
| | 03:33 | up the Animate In folder and see all
of the different presets. Click once on
| | 03:38 | it to preview it in Bridge.
| | 03:42 | Looks pretty snazzy.
| | 03:45 | Very cool. Now I am going to go back using this left
arrow key at the upper left-hand corner of the Bridge
| | 03:50 | interface. I am actually going to open
up Organic. I am looking for one called
| | 03:54 | Ocean Tide. We are doing a piece on surfing,
might as well use a preset called Ocean Tide.
| | 03:59 | Now to apply it, all you have to do
is make sure that in After Effects our
| | 04:03 | layer was selected, which our text
layer was, and just double-click to apply it.
| | 04:09 | Now when we go back to After Effects
and hit the Spacebar, and look at that,
| | 04:13 | the preset is automatically applied to our text.
| | 04:17 | Now we have obviously only
scratched the surface when it comes to text
| | 04:20 | animation in After Effects. It would
take many hours to show you what After
| | 04:24 | Effects text animation is really
capable of, but for now feel free to play
| | 04:28 | with more animators, and range selectors,
and properties, and also the presets
| | 04:32 | that ship with After Effects as well.
| | 04:38 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying effects| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to take a
look at one of the most exciting aspects
| | 00:04 | of After Effects in my opinion, and that
is the effects. Now there are about two
| | 00:09 | hundred or so effects in After Effects,
but obviously we are going to only
| | 00:12 | lightly scratch the surface here in
this movie, but all the same I think you
| | 00:16 | will see by the end of this movie
how cool effects can really be.
| | 00:20 | Take for example this project. I am
doing this surfer like project and I have
| | 00:23 | got some water kind of moving along
here in this lower third. And it looks like
| | 00:28 | pretty believable water, but this is
actually water that I created from scratch
| | 00:32 | here in After Effects. As we look at
the Lower Third composition a little bit
| | 00:36 | more closely, we can see these different layers.
| | 00:39 | Basically this is blue solid with a
couple little layers of this water on top of it.
| | 00:44 | As we open up those compositions,
we could see a little more closely
| | 00:48 | that this is all the water is. If we select
the layer, and go the Effect Controls
| | 00:53 | panel, which is where we adjust
effects, then we can see that there are two
| | 00:58 | effects applied here. An effect called
Fractal Noise and an effect called Colorama.
| | 01:02 | If we click the fx icon here
next to Colorama in the Effect Controls panel,
| | 01:07 | it will take off the visibility
of this effect. Boy, it looks a lot loss
| | 01:12 | attractive doesn't it, without the
colorizing? So basically we add Fractal Noise,
| | 01:15 | which is a cool pattern generator,
add Colorama to colorize it,
| | 01:19 | and then once we blend it all together,
it looks pretty good. Actually we need
| | 01:23 | to turn Colorama back on here. And
then it looks pretty good in our final result.
| | 01:27 | Now as I mentioned kind of like the
eye icon for layers, this fx icon
| | 01:32 | controls the visibility for an effect.
If you want to remove the visibility for
| | 01:35 | all effects at once, you can come
down here into the Timeline and with the
| | 01:39 | Switches area showing, click this
fx icon. And now we see the content of
| | 01:43 | our original layer. I will turn those back on.
| | 01:46 | In this we just want to start from
scratch. So I am going to turn off the
| | 01:49 | visibility of this layer, or right-click
somewhere in a blank area of the Timeline.
| | 01:53 | Select New > Solid. Solids are
used often with effects. Essentially
| | 01:59 | what a solid is, it's just a
huge area of color, just a flat area of
| | 02:03 | pixels; that's all it is.
| | 02:04 | Often times we use solids with effects
because effects have to be applied to a
| | 02:08 | layer. You can't just apply an effect
to your Timeline. It has to actually to
| | 02:12 | go to a layer, but if you will apply,
let's say an effect that creates like a
| | 02:16 | fog type of result, you don't want to
apply it to a layer even if you want the
| | 02:20 | fog to exist in the layer, because it
will completely replace the content of
| | 02:24 | the layer it is applied to.
| | 02:25 | So these solids are basically kind of
these dummy layers that we could dump a
| | 02:28 | bunch of effects on and not have
to worry about messing anything up.
| | 02:32 | So I'm going to click OK here and we could
apply effects in a couple of different
| | 02:35 | ways. We can select the layer and go
the Effect menu at the top of the screen,
| | 02:39 | and select an effect from one of these
categories. Now this method really isn't
| | 02:43 | my preference. Reason being is that
there are so many effects that you have to
| | 02:47 | remember which category each effect is in.
| | 02:50 | A much better way to do this is to go
to the Effects and Presets panel and
| | 02:53 | then in this Search field, click and
type the name of an effect. You can see,
| | 02:58 | as soon I start typing, I am going to
type 'turb.' Turbulent Noise is what we are
| | 03:03 | looking for. I am going to select
Turbulent Noise here and you could see
| | 03:05 | I didn't even had to type out Turbulent
Noise. I typed in t-u-r-b and it shows me
| | 03:10 | the results of all effects that have
t-u-r-b in a row anywhere in their name.
| | 03:15 | Now that we have access to this
effect, we could apply it a couple of
| | 03:18 | different ways. We can drag and drop it
into the Composition panel, we can drag
| | 03:22 | and drop it on to a layer in the
Timeline panel or, my personal preference, we
| | 03:26 | could select the layer in the Timeline
panel and just double click it here in
| | 03:29 | the Effects and Presets panel. Again,
the workflow is that we apply effects in
| | 03:33 | the Effects and Presets panel and then
edit the effect in the Effects Controls
| | 03:37 | panel, typically docked in the
left-hand side of the interface.
| | 03:41 | Turbulent Noise and a similar effect
called Fractal Noise are extremely
| | 03:44 | versatile effects because they can
create these random grayscale patterns.
| | 03:48 | This is what created the water we
looked at earlier. Here we are going to use
| | 03:51 | Turbulent Noise to create a fiery
effect. So I am going to change the Fractal
| | 03:55 | type to Dynamic Twist and I am going
to increase the contrast a lot. Now I am
| | 04:02 | going to take down the brightness
of the effect. Looking pretty good.
| | 04:07 | Next I am going to open up the
Transform area. These transforms are similar to
| | 04:11 | what you see in the layer transforms.
I am going to un-check Uniform Scaling,
| | 04:15 | so that we can scale width and
height independently. I am next going to
| | 04:19 | increase the height of this fire. It
is starting to look a little fiery here.
| | 04:24 | There is too much detail in this fire
for me, so I am going to come down to
| | 04:27 | Complexity slider and drag into the
left to reduce the complexity. That looks better.
| | 04:33 | To bring this effect to life, we adjust
the Evolution parameter. Click and drag
| | 04:38 | this to the right to bring this fire
to life. One thing you need to keep in
| | 04:44 | mind about Turbulent Noise and
Fractal Noise is that these are grayscale
| | 04:49 | pattern generators, so this doesn't
look too much like fire because it is
| | 04:52 | black and white.
| | 04:53 | So what we need to do is come back to
the Effects and Presets panel and add
| | 04:56 | an additional effect on top of this
effect. That's one of the things that
| | 05:00 | really adds the power of effects in
After Effects is you can just keeping piling
| | 05:03 | one after another. So I am going to
select Colorama, drag and drop to apply, or
| | 05:11 | any of the other methods we covered
before, and I am going to open up the
| | 05:14 | Output Cycle area. And under Output
Cycle, I could choose Use Preset Palette,
| | 05:20 | and from this dropdown, select a preset to use.
Of course, in this case I'm going to use Fire.
| | 05:24 | Hey, there we go. There is our fire. So
now as I move this Evolution parameter,
| | 05:29 | we start to really see this fire take
shape. Another powerful effect we will
| | 05:34 | look at briefly is the Shatter effect.
In the Effects and Preset panel, I will
| | 05:38 | do a search for Shatter. If I apply
Shatter to this, I first need to go over to
| | 05:42 | Shatter in the Effects Controls panel.
The view by default is just this working
| | 05:46 | view, it's not super attractive. So
we want to change the view from the
| | 05:49 | Wireframe and Forces, to Rendered.
| | 05:51 | And as we move out in time, we will
see that our fire is actually blowing up.
| | 05:58 | You could apply this to any layer. As
you could see it's already animated for
| | 06:02 | you. So you just hit the spacebar, and
these pieces go flying. I'll back up here
| | 06:06 | just a little bit. One of great things
about this effect as well, is if I open
| | 06:10 | up Camera Position and adjust Y Rotation,
you will see that this is actually a
| | 06:15 | three-dimensional effect.
These bricks are real 3D bricks.
| | 06:22 | Now that's all I wanted to show you with
effects, but let me show you one other
| | 06:24 | thing about the Effects and Presets
panel. If we come over here, notice that we
| | 06:27 | cannot see any other effects until
we get rid of the search results. So
| | 06:31 | click this X to see all of the
categories of effects here, and just keep in
| | 06:36 | mind that these categories are very
descriptive of what these effects do.
| | 06:40 | If you are looking for something to
distort or manipulate an image, open up
| | 06:43 | Distort and you could see all the
different effects here for adjusting,
| | 06:46 | manipulating, transforming, warping
and that type of thing to a layer.
| | 06:51 | Same thing with color correction. There's
even audio effects, there is effects to
| | 06:55 | create simulations, like we see with
Shatter here that tend to mimic things
| | 06:59 | that happen in the real world. So feel
free to play and explore, experiment,
| | 07:04 | and to discover what's her,
in the world of effects.
| | 07:11 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Correcting color with effects| 00:00 | This tutorial will be an introduction
to color correction in After Effects.
| | 00:04 | In After Effects we color correct using
effects. In this example I am going to
| | 00:08 | select this background, which is
actually the sky here, as I remove the
| | 00:10 | visibility. That's what we are going to
be working with. So we are going to the
| | 00:14 | Effects and Presets panel, and do
a search for Hue, looking for the
| | 00:18 | Hue/Saturation effect.
| | 00:20 | Now Hue/Saturation along with many
other effects such as Levels, Curves,
| | 00:23 | Color Balance and so on, you can find in
Photoshop as well. So I am going to double-
| | 00:28 | click to apply this. We are going to
adjust the Hue value to change the overall
| | 00:32 | hue or color of the sky. We want to
make it a more rich blue for example.
| | 00:38 | We could also increase the Saturation,
perhaps decrease the Lightness and our sky
| | 00:46 | is much more blue.
| | 00:47 | It is always a good idea to click this
Effects icon next to a color correcting
| | 00:51 | effect, just to compare the before
with the after. Next I am going to select
| | 00:55 | the beach layer. I am going to apply
Hue/Saturation to that layer as well. Now
| | 01:03 | we don't want to adjust the
overall hue because if we did that,
| | 01:06 | then everything would get colored,
well, silly colors. That doesn't look right.
| | 01:10 | So I am going to click the Reset
button to get back to square one.
| | 01:13 | So I am going to go to Channel Control, this
Channel Control drop down here at the top
| | 01:16 | of the effect. I am going to change
the Channel from Master to Cyans. And when
| | 01:22 | we adjust the cyan hue, you will see
that the sand stays the same color,
| | 01:27 | and we have individual control over the ocean.
| | 01:30 | If we take this to the left, we are
going to make it more green. If we take to
| | 01:34 | the right, we can make it more blue. In
this way we can make it fit better with
| | 01:38 | our new sky. And again, we can increase
the Saturation, and here is the before
| | 01:46 | and the after. Now when I created this
composition, I brought in many elements
| | 01:51 | from different places. This car,
these surfboards, the beach, and I want to
| | 01:56 | make them look like they are one
cohesive whole. Rather then apply effects to
| | 02:01 | each individual layer, I could apply
an adjustment layer and that will affect
| | 02:06 | all layers beneath it.
| | 02:07 | So I'm going to go to the top of my
interface and I am going to right-click in
| | 02:10 | the blank area of the Timeline here.
I am going to select New > Adjustment Layer.
| | 02:15 | Now so far nothing has happened.
We actually need to apply effects to
| | 02:20 | this layer to see any results. So I am
going to apply an old familiar Photoshop
| | 02:24 | favorite, Curves. Now as I click in
this curve to adjust the highlights on the
| | 02:30 | right side of the graph, or make the
shadows darker by dragging down a point on
| | 02:36 | the left side of the graph, you
could see that everything is adjusted.
| | 02:40 | So again, here is the before, and the
after. Sometimes it's a good idea when
| | 02:46 | trying to composite multiple elements
from different sources together in the
| | 02:49 | same composition to apply color
adjustments to the top, so that way they all
| | 02:53 | have a unique color treatment applied
to them. So for this I am going to go to
| | 02:57 | Effects and Presets and apply Color Balance.
| | 03:03 | Let me just close up Curves here.
Using Color Balance we could adjust how the
| | 03:07 | channels work, the red, green and blue
channels work, with shadows, midtones
| | 03:11 | and highlights. If wanted a cool orange
sunset light glow to this beach scene,
| | 03:17 | then I would need to add red and yellow.
But since there is no yellow, I can
| | 03:22 | get yellow by removing blue.
| | 03:25 | So for the Shadows, I will increase Red
and decrease Blue. I will do the same
| | 03:32 | thing with Midtones and Highlights. Now
at this point I might need to adjust as
| | 03:43 | necessary. This is probably too much
yellow here. So I could go in here and
| | 03:47 | tweak these a little bit more, but
all these pieces are starting to have a
| | 03:51 | similar look and feel. Now if you want
to experiment more with color correction
| | 03:56 | in After Effects, go over here to the
Effects and Presets panel. I am going to
| | 03:59 | close out these search results here,
and open up the Color Correction category.
| | 04:04 | In this category you will find a wealth
of effects to play around with, as you
| | 04:08 | are looking to adjust the look
and feel of your compositions.
| | 04:14 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exporting video| 00:00 | So you finally finished all of your
work in After Effects and now it's time to
| | 00:03 | export. To get your work in After
Effects into a format that other
| | 00:08 | applications and devices can understand.
Now there are actually three different
| | 00:12 | ways to do this in After Effects CS4,
but before you select one of them,
| | 00:16 | the very first thing you need to do
is select a composition to render.
| | 00:19 | I actually have four different
compositions open here and I have many more
| | 00:24 | pre-compositions as well. So either
in the Project panel, or the in the
| | 00:28 | Timeline panel, you need to select a
composition to render. This is key. Now
| | 00:34 | with the composition selected, the
first one I want to show you here, the first
| | 00:37 | way to export, is by going to File > Export.
Here you could export to Premier Pro,
| | 00:43 | you can export to Flash in the new
XFL file format. You could also export
| | 00:48 | to the Flash Player creating a SWF file.
You could export to Adobe Clip Notes,
| | 00:52 | which actually embeds your video into
a PDF document so that it can passed
| | 00:56 | around for review.
| | 00:57 | And there are many other types of file
formats here as well. A more powerful way
| | 01:02 | of exporting is by selecting your
composition and by going to the Composition
| | 01:05 | menu, and selecting Add To Render
Queue. We will come back to this in just a
| | 01:10 | moment. The third way of exporting is
new to After Effects CS4 and that is
| | 01:14 | Add To Abode Media Encoder Queue. The
Abode Media Encoder attempts to output
| | 01:19 | media for several devices using
one application that serves the entire
| | 01:23 | Production Premium suite.
| | 01:25 | For now I am going to select Add To
Render Queue. With my cursor over the
| | 01:28 | Render Queue, I am going to hit the tilde`
key on the keyboard. That is a little
| | 01:32 | squiggle that's above the Tab key, to
the left of the number one on the main
| | 01:35 | area of your keyboard. Now the Render
Queue is just what it sounds like. It is
| | 01:39 | a queue for rendering. You can
actually add every composition in your project
| | 01:42 | to the Render Queue and then when you
are ready, click the Render button to
| | 01:45 | render all compositions
queued in the Render Queue.
| | 01:48 | Now we have three basic options; first
let's talk about the Output To. This is
| | 01:53 | pretty easy. Click on the hot text
here and then you can decide a name for
| | 01:57 | your project and where to save it.
I'm going to hit Cancel for now. Next to
| | 02:01 | Render settings, click Best Settings.
Here you can specify the quality for your
| | 02:05 | render and also the resolution. If
you decide you want a low resolution
| | 02:08 | preview just for testing, you can take
the resolution drop down to half or less.
| | 02:13 | For now I am going to leave this set to Full.
| | 02:15 | The rest of the options in this dialog
box are fairly self explanatory. I just
| | 02:19 | want to point out one here, the Time
Span area. You can choose to render the
| | 02:23 | entire length of the composition or the
work area only. You can also customize
| | 02:28 | the Time Span that you're outputting.
Perhaps you just want to render the first
| | 02:31 | couple of seconds. So you could select
the start time as all zeros, and then
| | 02:35 | two seconds as the end time.
| | 02:37 | I am going to go ahead and hit
Cancel here, and Cancel here. Finally and
| | 02:41 | perhaps most importantly, is the Output
Module. Click on the word Lossless to
| | 02:45 | open the Output Module Settings dialog
box. Before you do anything else in this
| | 02:49 | dialog box, you need to select a format.
As you can see there are many types of
| | 02:54 | video formats to choose from when exporting.
There's also image sequences, and just
| | 02:59 | plain audio. For now I am
going to select QuickTime Movie.
| | 03:03 | Once you select a format, it's
equally as important to click on the Format
| | 03:06 | Options dialog box to get access to
the type of compression for your video.
| | 03:11 | The type of compression, found here at
the top, has the biggest role to play in
| | 03:15 | the size and quality of your final output.
Be aware also that if you want to output
| | 03:21 | transparency with your video, or in
other words an alpha channel, you will need
| | 03:24 | to come here actually into the
Color area interestingly enough.
| | 03:27 | And you see there's Million of Colors
and Millions of Colors+. The plus is
| | 03:31 | actually the alpha channel. So I can
click OK, and you can see that my channels
| | 03:34 | are set to RGB and Alpha, indicating that
an alpha channel will be output along
| | 03:39 | with my video. Also be sure that Audio
Output is checked, if you are outputting
| | 03:44 | a composition with audio. Sometimes
this box is un-checked when you actually
| | 03:48 | do want to output audio.
| | 03:49 | And if you are outputting to a certain
type of media, you can go to the Format
| | 03:53 | dropdown, and select H.264. Once that
is selected, I am going to select Format
| | 03:57 | Options. When outputting to H.264,
there are many options for devices. 3GPP,
| | 04:03 | which is the standard for cell phones,
Apple iPod, Sony PSP, an even the NTSC
| | 04:08 | and Pal DV standards.
| | 04:10 | We'll also come down here to these
tabs in the center of this dialog box and
| | 04:14 | adjust video and audio and other
options for this file. I am going to go ahead
| | 04:19 | and hit Cancel here, and Cancel here,
and when you are all done and you have
| | 04:23 | got all of your files queued up in the
Render Queue and ready to go, simply hit
| | 04:27 | Render and you are done.
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