1. IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | (Music playing.)
| | 00:05 | Hello and welcome to After Effects
New Features. I'm Chad Perkins
| | 00:10 | and I'm going to be your host throughout this small training
series as we look at the new features in After Effects CS4.
| | 00:15 | This update of After Effects brings many small features.
| | 00:18 | As you'll see through the course of this training series, there
are dozens of them. Many of them are minor improvements but some of
| | 00:23 | them like the new Unified Camera tool
and the new way we work with compositions
| | 00:27 | are just revolutionary. So we're going to cover
those and we'll cover dozens of other new features
| | 00:32 | in this course, After Effects CS4 New Features.
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| After Effects update trends| 00:00 | In this movie I'm going to share with
you a trend I have been noticing in After
| | 00:03 | Effects Updates. Every time there is a
new software update, people are usually
| | 00:07 | complaining about things that they want
to see, if they didn't see or whatever,
| | 00:11 | and sometimes just knowing the cycle of
After Effects can help kind of calm the fears.
| | 00:16 | Basically After Effects updates tend
to alternate. One version of the program
| | 00:21 | might have just big flashy features.
This is definitely the case of After
| | 00:25 | Effects CS3 when they introduced the
Puppet tool and shape layers and the layer
| | 00:29 | styles and Brainstorm, bunch of really
cool big new features. And then there is
| | 00:34 | also the productivity updates.
| | 00:36 | This is definitely the case with After
Effects CS4 with a bunch of productivity
| | 00:40 | enhancements under the hood and a
bunch of small little tweaks to the way you
| | 00:44 | work and that type of thing.
| | 00:46 | So not too much big in flashy but as
you can see by the number of movies in
| | 00:50 | this training series just looking at
the new features, there is a lot of tiny
| | 00:53 | new features here.
| | 00:55 | So just to be aware of going forward,
if you're looking for the super big
| | 00:58 | flashy features and a small number of
them then you'll need to wait till After
| | 01:02 | Effects CS5 for those.
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| Hardware requirements| 00:00 | Usually I don't care too much about the
hardware requirements. I usually try to
| | 00:04 | keep my computers up-to-date. I'm kind
of a tech geek a little bit, but I just
| | 00:07 | want you to be aware that in CS4,
After Effects has upped the ante as far as
| | 00:11 | your system requirements go.
| | 00:13 | What you are seeing on your screen
are the system requirements for After
| | 00:16 | Effects CS3. As you can see here, it
required 1 GB of RAM or if you were working
| | 00:21 | in HD you required 2 GB of RAM.
| | 00:24 | After Effects CS4 however requires 2
GB of RAM as a minimum requirement and
| | 00:29 | let me tell you my little MacBook Pro
laptop ran After Effects CS3 without a
| | 00:34 | problem, but it has a really
hard time running After Effects CS4.
| | 00:38 | So make sure you have the most
possible RAM you can have in your system, and
| | 00:42 | also many of the new effects in After
Effects CS4 have been GPU accelerated, in
| | 00:48 | other words they use your graphics card.
So you want to make sure that you've
| | 00:51 | got a new super powerful graphics card
that will help you a lot as well with
| | 00:54 | After Effects CS4.
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| The new Welcome screen| 00:00 | Almost without exception I despise
welcome screens, but After Effects has just
| | 00:05 | revamped its welcome screen and I
actually think it's pretty cool.
| | 00:07 | Of course we have the requisite
Recent Projects list right here, and we can
| | 00:12 | open our project with this button. We
could also create a New Comp from this
| | 00:16 | button here on the Welcome Screen. And
we can also go to Design Center or click
| | 00:20 | the Video Tutorials button to learn
more about After Effects for free.
| | 00:23 | We could also click Browse Templates to
open up Adobe Bridge and browse to the
| | 00:27 | After Effects Templates there. We could
jump right to the Help or to the New Features.
| | 00:31 | Another feature of the Welcome Screen
is that you can now search through the
| | 00:33 | Tip of the Day. So let's say I'm
looking for a shortcut. I'm going to just
| | 00:36 | type-in shortcut, and now there are 11
tips found that pertain to shortcuts. So
| | 00:41 | click on this right-arrow button to
keep going through these tips that deal
| | 00:45 | with shortcuts.
| | 00:46 | There are several hundred of these Tip
of the Day things and a lot of them are
| | 00:51 | really helpful and not always very
commonly known. So even though it will take
| | 00:55 | some getting used to start using this.
I'm committed as a personal goal to
| | 01:00 | start using the After Effects Welcome
Screen a little bit more because of how
| | 01:03 | much cool it's become in CS4.
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2. 3D EnhancementsThe Unified Camera tool| 00:00 | First off on the new features list is
perhaps one of my favorites. It's the
| | 00:03 | Unified Camera tool. I have here this
Unified Camera tool project, you will
| | 00:07 | find in the Chapter 2 folder if you'd
like to play along with me, I'll using
| | 00:10 | this project I created for After
Effects Essential Training. And in times past
| | 00:14 | we had several camera tools, we had the
Orbit Camera tool, the Track XY Camera
| | 00:19 | tool, and the Track Z Camera tool.
| | 00:21 | As we switch back and forth between
them we could use the C key, if you knew
| | 00:24 | about that shortcut to go back and forth
between these tools, but that's still a pain.
| | 00:28 | So a Unified Camera tool is basically
all three of these tools combined in one
| | 00:33 | and you access them by the three front
buttons on a three-button mouse. Yes,
| | 00:37 | that's right, you will need a three-
button mouse to use this tool effectively.
| | 00:42 | So basically what I can do is use my
left mouse button to rotate around, this
| | 00:47 | replaces the Orbit Camera tool or
basically this accesses the Orbit Camera tool.
| | 00:51 | I could also use the middle mouse
button, I could click down on the wheel to
| | 00:56 | translate this and move this in XY. I
can also zoom in and out by using the
| | 01:01 | right mouse button, by
clicking and dragging up and down.
| | 01:04 | So again, the downside is that you'll
need a three-button mouse. The good side
| | 01:11 | is that it's really awesome.
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| New light wireframes| 00:00 | Another new feature in the world of 3D
is that they have changed the way that
| | 00:03 | light wireframes look. This makes them a
lot easier to tell apart at first glance.
| | 00:08 | What I'm going to do is create a new
light; right-click in the Timeline, go to
| | 00:11 | New > Light, and let's start out creating
a Spot Light, I will call this one Spot.
| | 00:16 | I'm just going to use
keyboard shortcuts for the rest,
| | 00:19 | Command+Option+Shift+L. That would be
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L on the PC, and let's
| | 00:24 | change this to Parallel and create a
Parallel Light. Finally, let's make one
| | 00:32 | more light and we will make it
a Point Light and call it Point.
| | 00:39 | Now what I'm going to do is separate
these, pull them apart just a little bit,
| | 00:46 | and now you can see that the
wireframes of these lights have changed in CS3.
| | 00:50 | They are now more indicative of what
that light is actually doing. Let's go to
| | 00:53 | the top, you would get a
better view of what's going on here.
| | 00:56 | Go to the Top View, let's zoom out,
and here we have a Parallel light and we
| | 01:00 | could tell it's a parallel light
because it has parallel light rays. We also
| | 01:04 | have our spotlight with its cone and
then we have a Point light with its point.
| | 01:08 | So now in After Effects CS4 we could
more readily discern the type of light
| | 01:13 | that we are looking at
because of the new wireframes.
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3. The Composition RevolutionThe Composition Navigator| 00:00 | What is perhaps the biggest change in
Adobe After Effects CS4 is the way that
| | 00:04 | we deal with compositions. We spend so
much time when we are in After Effects
| | 00:08 | dealing with compositions, we nest
compositions, we create pre-compositions and
| | 00:12 | we navigate between them all the
time and so After Effects CS4 completely
| | 00:15 | revolutionizes the way that we do that.
| | 00:18 | In this Chapter, we will be looking all
sorts of stuff as well as some changes
| | 00:21 | in the Composition panel but just some
amazing improvements all around. First
| | 00:25 | of all we will talk about Composition
Navigator. At top of the Composition
| | 00:27 | panel there is this new Composition
Navigator. In this cool little medieval
| | 00:32 | melee scene from After Effects CS4
Essential Training, got little skirmish on
| | 00:35 | the castle ground, see here
these people fighting each other.
| | 00:37 | We essentially have a series of this
Knight composition, which is made up of a
| | 00:42 | layered Knight composition. So we
go back to our castle scene. We could
| | 00:46 | navigate to any one of those
compositions just by clicking on it. We could also
| | 00:52 | go to the Composition panel menu to
get some other options whether we want it
| | 00:57 | to flow from right to left or whether
we want it to flow from left to right or
| | 01:01 | to show it all. By default the
parent composition is on the left and the
| | 01:04 | children compositions are towards the right.
| | 01:06 | In the next movie we will look at a
similar feature in the Timeline panel.
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| The Composition Mini-Flowchart| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to look at a
similar feature to what we saw in last
| | 00:03 | movie the Composition Navigator. So
this one in the Timeline panel and this is
| | 00:07 | Mini Flow and this is little button
right here, if you click it, it will come
| | 00:10 | over the little mini flowchart.
| | 00:11 | Now you notice that we have nine
instances of this precomp in this composition.
| | 00:16 | Those don't show up as nine separate
elements here, it just shows up as one
| | 00:20 | element with a nine here, letting you
know that it's been nested nine times. If
| | 00:24 | we add more composition then it
would pan-out in a mini flowchart.
| | 00:28 | Now this composition right here is a
precomp. We are not seeing all of the
| | 00:31 | compositions here that comprise this
composition. So what we could do is click
| | 00:35 | on this button and see it further
down the chain. To jump to one of these
| | 00:38 | compositions even though this one is
two compositions deep, I simply click on
| | 00:42 | it and I'm there.
| | 00:42 | Now if you have been following along in
this chapter, you're probably thinking,
| | 00:45 | holy cow! These are amazing time savers,
though we are not even scratching the surface yet.
| | 00:49 | In the next movie I'm going to show
you shortcuts for these shortcuts.
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| Navigating comps quickly| 00:00 | In this movie, I'm going to give you
some keyboard shortcuts to help you
| | 00:02 | navigate through series of
compositions at breakneck speed.
| | 00:07 | Now we have talked about this Mini Flow
here in the Timeline panel. But one of
| | 00:10 | the shortcuts you can use to access it
is to simply tap the Shift key. If you
| | 00:14 | tap the Shift key then the Mini Flow
will come up. Now to do this again you
| | 00:17 | need to have the Timeline panel active
or the Composition panel. But if you hit
| | 00:21 | the Shift key in one of these panels
you will get the Comp Mini Flow, then you
| | 00:25 | could use the arrow keys on your
keyboard to navigate through different
| | 00:28 | compositions and then once you have
highlighted the one that you want to
| | 00:32 | activate you could see that it's
active here with this little orange circle
| | 00:36 | around it. You can hit the Enter key
and you are automatically taken to that composition.
| | 00:40 | Now if I want to go back to the
composition I was just in, I could again hit
| | 00:43 | the Shift key and use my arrows again
or I could use the keyboard shortcut
| | 00:48 | Shift+Escape to jump back to the
last composition I was looking at.
| | 00:53 | So again Shift and Arrow keys to
navigate through your compositions and Shift
| | 00:58 | and Escape to jump back to the last
composition you are in. Those two keyboard
| | 01:02 | shortcuts are huge time savers.
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| Changing comp settings from the Project panel| 00:00 | This is just a quick tip. Often in
times I want to change composition settings,
| | 00:04 | I love doing that. I've memorized the
keyboard shortcut Command+K or Ctrl+K on
| | 00:08 | the PC to do that.
| | 00:09 | You could also come to the flyout
menu of the Timeline panel and come to
| | 00:12 | Composition Settings. But Adobe has
added a new way to do that in After Effects
| | 00:16 | CS4, just come to a composition in the
Project panel and right click it and the
| | 00:21 | first option right where your
mouse is will be Composition Settings.
| | 00:24 | So now you can actually access
Composition Settings from the Project panel.
| | 00:28 | This is a great time saver if you want
to make adjustments to multiple comps at once.
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| Opening nested comps| 00:00 | In previous versions of After
Effects if you double-clicked on a layer
| | 00:02 | including these in compositions, it
will open up in the Layer panel. In order
| | 00:06 | to open up a nested composition you
have to hold down the Option key on the Mac
| | 00:10 | or the Alt key on the PC and
double-click the layer to open it up.
| | 00:13 | Well because opening up nested
composition is far more common than opening up
| | 00:17 | layers in the Layer panel, they have
change it so that if you just double-click
| | 00:21 | in a nested composition, it will open
up that composition. So no need to hold
| | 00:25 | the Alt key or the Option key. If you
do hold the Alt or Option key and then
| | 00:28 | double-click a layer, it
will open up in the Layer panel.
| | 00:30 | But now it's so much easier, all you
have to do is double click the nested comp
| | 00:33 | to open it up.
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| Panning with the mouse| 00:00 | After Effects CS4 adds a new way to
pan around the compositions in the
| | 00:03 | Composition panel, no matter which
tool is selected. What you do is you click
| | 00:07 | the middle mouse button if it's
wheel you can click the wheel and it will
| | 00:11 | temporarily toggle the Hand tool and
then you can move things around and let go.
| | 00:15 | So this way you can click objects with
the regular Selection tool and then you
| | 00:19 | can just pan around without having to
change tools using that middle mouse button.
| | 00:23 | This is yet another one of those super
small features that will save you a lot
| | 00:26 | of time in the long run.
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| The Auto Resolution setting| 00:00 | After Effects CS4 fixes something that
used to drive me nuts in After Effects and
| | 00:04 | that is this Resolution dropdown here.
Right now, we are zoomed at a 100%; we
| | 00:08 | were seeing this composition of 100%.
If I take this down to 50%, that means
| | 00:13 | that we are only seeing half of the pixels.
| | 00:16 | However, this Resolution dropdown is
still set to Full. So, it's rendering all
| | 00:20 | of the pixels even though we are only
seeing half of them. So, every time you
| | 00:23 | came over here to the left side and
change the Magnification pop up, you will
| | 00:26 | also have to go over here and change
the Quality pop up. So, you have to change
| | 00:29 | this to half. If we are working in HD,
maybe we zoomed out further and we have
| | 00:33 | to adjust this again.
| | 00:35 | This is especially entertaining
because you can zip around as far as
| | 00:38 | Magnification goes with your mouse
wheel. But then every time you change the
| | 00:42 | Magnification with your mouse wheel,
you have to go down here and change this
| | 00:44 | Resolution dropdown.
| | 00:45 | Well, now they have added this Auto,
and when you see the Resolution here in
| | 00:49 | parenthesis, you will know you are in
Auto mode and now, when I change to 50%,
| | 00:53 | it automatically changes to half or if
I change to a Third, it automatically
| | 00:57 | changes to a third and so on.
| | 00:59 | And so now, I can zoom with my wheel
mouse and it automatically changes both
| | 01:02 | magnification and the resolution. So
that way, I don't have to worry about
| | 01:05 | After Effects rendering
pixels, I'm not even seeing.
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4. What's New in Effects3D tracking with Mocha| 00:00 | One of the things that Adobe does
with After Effects that just I love.
| | 00:03 | They include all these third-party
plug-ins with After Effects. Now, in After
| | 00:08 | Effects CS4, it still comes with the
plug-ins that it's come with for a while.
| | 00:13 | It comes with the Color Finesse, it
comes with Keylight, it comes with the
| | 00:15 | Cycore suite of plug-ins. But in
addition, it also comes with Mocha for After
| | 00:20 | Effects. Mocha is a third-party
tracking solution. Now, we know that After
| | 00:24 | Effects has its own tracking solution,
but Mocha is better adapted to handle
| | 00:28 | things like tracking in perspective and
I find it also handles just regular old
| | 00:33 | tracking jobs better as well. As you
can see here from looking at this interface,
| | 00:37 | it's definitely not an Adobe
interface; it's a little complicated
| | 00:41 | and confusing, not super intuitive.
We'll be looking at Mocha in depth in a
| | 00:45 | later training series for After Effects
due out later in 2008. For now, let me
| | 00:48 | just show you the basics. I'm going to
create an X-spline and this is the way
| | 00:54 | we track here in Mocha. I'm going to
click around to track point; in this case,
| | 00:57 | this little dot on my hand. So, I'm
just going to click, click, click and then
| | 01:02 | once I have done clicking, I'm going to
right-click to close that up and I can
| | 01:05 | adjust these points as necessary. Now,
noticeably absent here is any search
| | 01:11 | region, feature region, all that stuff
is not necessary in Mocha and I don't
| | 01:15 | even really have to put that much
effort into setting up my tracking area. So,
| | 01:19 | I'm just going to go ahead and move
forward. So, I'm going to click this button
| | 01:21 | right here to essentially track forwards.
In Mocha language, this would be the
| | 01:25 | Analyze Forwards button or the
equivalent of that in After Effects. I'm going
| | 01:29 | to click it here and look at that thing
go. It's doing a great job of tracking,
| | 01:34 | even though the footage is grainy,
it's compressed, I'm moving my hand around a lot,
| | 01:38 | there is motion blur, etcetera,
etcetera. It's doing a fine job of keeping
| | 01:43 | track of my hand. And then to send this
back to After Effects, I come down here
| | 01:47 | to the Export Tracking Data button and
then we can export this as a text file
| | 01:53 | with Corner Pin Data or just regular
Transform Data. We can save it as a text
| | 01:57 | file to use later or click Copy to
Clipboard to copy this text to the clipboard
| | 02:01 | and then we can go back to After
Effects and select a layer, paste it in and
| | 02:05 | the keyframes will be pasted onto that
layer. Now, obviously, Mocha gets much
| | 02:09 | deeper than that but even still, it's
great to have an additional helper when
| | 02:13 | it comes to tracking, that tracks so
much more accurately. You know, I have
| | 02:16 | done this same project for After
Effects before and you have to keep stopping
| | 02:20 | and readjusting and going back and
fixing and with Mocha, it just did it right
| | 02:25 | the first time. Really, one of the
great new features of After Effects CS4.
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| The Cartoon effect| 00:00 | The Cartoon effect is a new effect
in After Effects CS4. The point of the
| | 00:04 | effect I believe is to recreate the
common trend that you see where video looks
| | 00:08 | like a cartoon. There is a popular
series of commercials from a financial
| | 00:12 | institution that used this effect.
There is a movie with Keanu Reeves called
| | 00:15 | the A Scanner Darkly that had a
similar thing. So, I think that's what the
| | 00:18 | Cartoon effect is going for. But my
initial reaction to it is it falls a little
| | 00:22 | sort of the mark.
| | 00:24 | I have here some footage of a Komodo
dragon as you preview this, and it's head
| | 00:28 | turns. It's kind of noisy and grainy.
Another one of the purposes of the
| | 00:31 | Cartoon effect is that we can smooth
out some of this noise a little bit. So,
| | 00:35 | as I apply the Cartoon effect to this
footage, you can see what it's doing;
| | 00:39 | it's darkening the edges creating black
lines as if these were hand drawn, and
| | 00:43 | as I scrub my Timeline with this
effect, you can see that the noise is very
| | 00:47 | jittery around these edges. In my
opinion, this jitter that you are seeing
| | 00:51 | around these edges kind of mitigates
the coolness of the effect because a real
| | 00:54 | hand drawn animation wouldn't have a
bunch of extra junk on every frame around
| | 00:59 | all of these extra pixels.
| | 01:01 | So, going over to the Settings here, we
have Fill & Edges, we can also do just
| | 01:04 | Fill and we could also see just the
Edges. Let's go back to Fill & Edges and so
| | 01:10 | as with this effect, there is a Fill
area where you want just the Fill when you
| | 01:13 | are using the Fill, the rendered drop-
down. There is also some Edge settings
| | 01:16 | and some more Advanced settings as well.
| | 01:18 | Let me show you a few of the things I
came up with when using this effect. Here
| | 01:21 | is the first one that I came up with.
This is similar to the default settings
| | 01:25 | but I smoothed it out a little bit to
look more like a comic book type drawing.
| | 01:30 | Let's see a ramp preview and see what
this looks like. Okay, so as we preview
| | 01:35 | this, we see that we have a pretty cool
comic-booky type effect, but again, we
| | 01:40 | are getting a lot of jitter here,
which is making this effect much less cool.
| | 01:45 | But perhaps you can go in there with
some other blur and get rid of that. So,
| | 01:49 | pretty cool little effect.
| | 01:51 | As we take off Cartoon 1, turn on to
Cartoon 2. Here's just Fill and you can
| | 01:57 | see that I have used this to kind of
create a painterly effect. As you can see,
| | 02:01 | you could also use this effect to
smooth out noise. So, that's one benefit of
| | 02:05 | it and finally, we have Cartoon 3 and
I have a little bit of levels here. The
| | 02:09 | cool thing with this setting, I guess,
is that we can create what looks like
| | 02:12 | vintage style film. Let's preview this.
As you play this back, you can see that
| | 02:18 | it has this 1930s news feature quality about it.
| | 02:24 | So, that's what the Cartoon effect does.
For me, it reminds me like all the bad
| | 02:29 | Photoshop filters of yesteryear
combined into one After Effects effect. So, I
| | 02:34 | haven't quite caught the vision yet.
But that's not to say that some with a
| | 02:37 | little bit more creativity and time,
than I have, can make something really
| | 02:41 | cool with this effect.
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| Turbulent Noise| 00:00 | Turbulent Noise is another new effect
in After Effects CS4. I have here an
| | 00:04 | untitled After Effects project, I'm
going to click the New Composition button,
| | 00:07 | make a comp of the NTSC DV Preset, and
click OK. I'm going to hit Command+Y or
| | 00:12 | Ctrl+Y on the PC to make a new Solid of
the Comp Size, and I'm going to go into
| | 00:17 | the Noise and Grain category of
Effects and apply Turbulent Noise.
| | 00:20 | Now Turbulent Noise is almost
identical to Fractal Noise. As a matter of fact
| | 00:26 | probably a while playing out this
effect before you search any difference
| | 00:29 | between the two. Basically from where
this effect came about, is that there are
| | 00:33 | some After Effects gurus to complaining
that Fractal Noise was not quite up to
| | 00:38 | par quality-wise. So Turbulent Noise
is kind of like a higher quality Fractal
| | 00:43 | Noise. We will take Fractal Type to
let's say Dynamic Twist and we start to
| | 00:47 | increasing the Contrast a little bit
here. We see that these lines are little
| | 00:51 | bit more organic.
| | 00:54 | We could increase the Contrast here a
little bit and take the Noise Type to
| | 00:58 | Spline, get even more smooth result,
and again we're seeing that this is a
| | 01:03 | little bit more a high-quality than
what we would see with Fractal Noise. Let
| | 01:07 | me scale that a little bit. These lines
are just smoother and it's just a more
| | 01:12 | advanced level of noise that we are using here.
| | 01:14 | The big downside to Turbulent Noise,
however, the thing that really limits its
| | 01:18 | usefulness is that it doesn't have any
looping options. Probably, half the time
| | 01:23 | I'm using Fractal Noise is to create a
looping background and without looping
| | 01:27 | options, Turbulent Noise just is
slightly less useful. But in the future when I
| | 01:32 | don't need my noise to loop, I will
definitely be using Turbulent Noise, as the
| | 01:35 | quality is just spectacular.
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| Bilateral Blur| 00:00 | And now for yet another effect, the
Bilateral Blur effect. Now, this effect is
| | 00:04 | actually cool. I have this Bilateral
Blur project, you could find in the
| | 00:07 | Chapter 04 folder if you would like
to follow along. And there is an effect
| | 00:10 | called Smart Blur that After Effects
already has, and basically, it attempts to
| | 00:16 | blur objects, blur
surfaces and leave the edges flat.
| | 00:20 | This effect definitely has its place;
it creates this kind of vector-looking
| | 00:23 | stuff. It also helps to smooth out a
video noise. It probably creates that
| | 00:28 | cartoon look better than the Cartoon
effect even does, but the thing is that
| | 00:31 | these edges are a little bit too hard.
| | 00:33 | So, what the Bilateral Blur effect
does or attempts to do is, I go ahead and
| | 00:38 | try to apply it here and there we go.
I'm going to turn off the Smart Blur
| | 00:42 | effect, so we can see just the
Bilateral Blur effect. For whatever reason, it
| | 00:46 | makes this image monochromatic. So, if
you want to restore color, you need to
| | 00:50 | click the Colorize button.
| | 00:51 | Now, with the color returned to it,
you could see a little bit better what's
| | 00:54 | going on here. It kind of does the
same thing as Smart Blur where it attempts
| | 00:58 | to blur flat objects and keep edges
such as this post right here intact; it
| | 01:04 | still does blur things just a little
bit. So, it's great for creating these
| | 01:07 | kind of foggy, hazy type effects,
also for gloss and things like that.
| | 01:12 | Basically, we have just two parameters:
Radius and Threshold. Radius determines
| | 01:16 | the amount of blur essentially. So, as
I take this down to 20, we will see less
| | 01:21 | blur in our image there and as we take
this up to maybe 100, we will see that
| | 01:26 | everything gets more hazy and blurred up.
I'm just going to right click on this
| | 01:30 | and reset it.
| | 01:31 | Threshold determines what gets the
blur applied to it, so as I take this down
| | 01:35 | to 5, we will see that much less stuff
gets blurred. As we take this up to 100
| | 01:42 | then we will see that many more
pixels have blur applied to them.
| | 01:46 | Now, what's really interesting is
this right here; we have a lot of blur
| | 01:51 | applied obviously in our shot, but you
could still see the details of the boat.
| | 01:55 | It looks like a very realistic haze,
even this post right here has very defined
| | 01:59 | edges, for how much blur we have.
| | 02:01 | Contrast that with a little bit of Fast
Blur and you could see that even with a
| | 02:05 | little bit of Fast Blur,
everything is blurred universally.
| | 02:08 | So, Bilateral Blur is a cool way to
apply this haze, fog type of thing maybe
| | 02:12 | for dreamlike sequences or something
like that but kind of a cool little effect.
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| Improvements to Fractal Noise| 00:00 | This is going to be a quick one. I'm going
to create a new Comp and I'm going to
| | 00:03 | create a new Solid and I'm going to
apply Fractal Noise, good old standby
| | 00:09 | Fractal Noise. Now, one of the things
they have done to Fractal Noise might not
| | 00:13 | be super obvious right upfront. The
Fractal Noise has always ran a little bit
| | 00:29 | slow, especially for how often
it's used in After Effects circle.
| | 00:33 | But one of the things they have done
to Fractal Noise is they have sped it up
| | 00:43 | with GPU acceleration. Basically, what
that means if your video-card handles
| | 00:49 | it, I don't think with my screen
recording software that my computer will be
| | 00:53 | able to handle it. Well,
little bit; there we go.
| | 00:55 | You can see how fast now as I'm
scrubbing Evolution, I'm giving a real-time
| | 00:59 | update here in my window. As I go to
my Settings here, we just have Adaptive
| | 01:04 | Resolution. It doesn't show that. Okay,
I'm not going to show that dropdown
| | 01:30 | because I'm not using the GPU
acceleration, something my computer can handle
| | 01:34 | it. So, I'll backup a little bit.
| | 01:35 | I will just go back to the part
where I was playing with this Evolution
| | 01:41 | parameter, like where l was adjusting
that and I will say that part over again.
| | 01:45 | So, you could see as I adjust this
Evolution parameter, that things are just
| | 01:51 | much faster. A lot of these settings as
you would adjust them, if your graphics
| | 01:55 | card can handle it, you
will adjust them in real-time.
| | 01:57 | I should also point out that this
little behind the scenes speed bump was also
| | 02:21 | given to Turbulent Noise, which we
looked at earlier in this chapter. So, it's
| | 02:36 | just another small
upgrade that's really helpful.
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|
|
5. Animation and Timeline ImprovementsSearching the Timeline panel| 00:00 | Another one of the bigger new
features in After Effects CS4 that people are
| | 00:03 | talking about is this Timeline search ability.
| | 00:06 | I have here this project that we make
in After Effects CS4 Essential training.
| | 00:09 | It will be out in October 2008 and
with a preview here, we've got a dragon
| | 00:13 | breathing fire here. There is a glowing
background and we have used the Puppet
| | 00:17 | tool to animate the Dragon and I can go
in here now in the Timeline panel and I
| | 00:22 | can search anything.
| | 00:23 | If I type in, wiggle, and actually
that is not working. Let me click this
| | 00:28 | little X right here to close out
those search results. This does not work
| | 00:31 | because I actually had a layer
selected. So, I'm going to click outside to
| | 00:34 | de-select this layer, so we will do a
search for the entire Timeline. Now, I
| | 00:38 | will type in wiggle and no sooner do I
type w-i-g, then my wiggle expression
| | 00:43 | comes up here.
| | 00:44 | If you are used to a Mac, this is very
much like a Spotlight Search where you
| | 00:47 | start typing letters, and as soon as you
type in the letters, the results just pop up.
| | 00:51 | Or I can close this out and search
for position and everything that matches
| | 00:55 | position will show up here. So, there's
a couple of different positions for the
| | 00:59 | Shape layer and for these different
layers here. I can close that out.
| | 01:03 | And let's say, I go over to this
Dragon composition and we have this dragon
| | 01:06 | animating and I have got ten different
layers here. I know that on a couple of
| | 01:10 | them I have applied the Puppet tool but
I'm not sure which one. I can just come
| | 01:14 | in here in the Timeline panel search
and just type in p-u-p and by the time I
| | 01:18 | type that in, I'm seeing all the
results for the Puppet tool, basically these
| | 01:22 | two layers; the body and the tail.
| | 01:24 | So, it's a great way to locate anything
you are looking for in your composition
| | 01:27 | whether it would be expressions or
puppets you animate or whatever it might be.
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| Seperate Dimensions| 00:00 | After Effects CS4 gives you the
ability to split up X, Y, and Z position into
| | 00:04 | separate properties. I have here this
bouncing ball. Let me see a couple of
| | 00:09 | bounces anyways, but let's say, I
wanted to move this ball over to the right
| | 00:12 | like it was bouncing down some stairs,
or let's say, I wanted to add on top of
| | 00:16 | that, the ball bouncing
down some stairs towards me.
| | 00:19 | With position as one simple property,
we could have some problems there. But we
| | 00:24 | would have more control over the
layer by going to the Graph Editor and by
| | 00:28 | selecting the Position property and
then clicking this button which will
| | 00:30 | separate the dimensions X, Y, Z into
separate properties. Right now, we are
| | 00:35 | only seeing X and Y but we can make
this a three layer and also see Z position
| | 00:40 | as a separate property.
| | 00:41 | So, as you can see, we can keyframe X
and Y position, now even keyframe Z at
| | 00:45 | all. This gives us much more control
over the way that we animate layers, or at
| | 00:49 | least, the position of layers. One
thing to be aware of those, if I get back
| | 00:53 | out of the Graph Editor here, you might
notice that my keyframes have changed a
| | 00:57 | little bit and even if I go back to
the beginning and preview this, my
| | 01:01 | animation definitely isn't what it once
was. So, there's a little bit of trade
| | 01:04 | off here; you lose, you've gone into
the Graph Editor and if fine-tune your
| | 01:08 | keyframes, you'll lose some of that,
but you do get more control over the keyframes.
| | 01:12 | So, what you could also do is if you
know that ahead of time you are going to
| | 01:16 | be dividing these into separate
dimensions, you could also just divide them
| | 01:20 | first and then animate them in
the Graph Editor after the effect.
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| The Center in View command| 00:00 | Often times when I'm working in 3D,
I'll just totally misplace a layer. I don't
| | 00:03 | know where it goes, it just goes off
into space somehow maybe because of the
| | 00:06 | anchor points or 3D or some, I don't know,
whatever, but it just completely disappears.
| | 00:11 | And so, After Effects CS4 introduces
this Center in View command. So, I have
| | 00:15 | this Shape layer, which is off
somewhere in 3D space. So, I can just right
| | 00:18 | click on it, go to Transform and
select Center in View, and viola! It then
| | 00:24 | centers in view so we see our object.
| | 00:27 | This is especially useful when you
are dealing with 3D files in Photoshop
| | 00:30 | Extended. Often times, for whatever
reason, when you bring in 3D files from
| | 00:33 | Photoshop Extended, which is probably
going to be a popular part of the After
| | 00:37 | Effects workflow now, when you bring
those in, most of the times they are all
| | 00:41 | screwy, they are just weird; they are
just in weird spots and they are harder
| | 00:43 | to find and so, this Center in
View command is really helpful.
| | 00:46 | I'm actually going to undo this
really quick, and there is actually great
| | 00:49 | keyboard shortcuts for this; we
select an object that you can't find or you
| | 00:52 | want to Center in View, hit the
Command key on a Mac and the Home key or the
| | 00:57 | Ctrl key and the Home key on the PC. So,
Command and Home or Ctrl and Home and
| | 01:03 | part of being, there is you object.
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| Flipping layers faster| 00:00 | So, here we have another project from
After Effects CS4 Essential Training and
| | 00:03 | what we are going to talk about here is
flipping. Now, in times past, you could
| | 00:07 | flip by going to Scale and unlinking
these layers and ticking one of these
| | 00:13 | values to a negative, so -100 along
the X-axis, for example, would flip this
| | 00:18 | wizard to the opposite direction.
| | 00:20 | But Adobe thankfully has decided that
that's just too many steps. So, I'm going
| | 00:22 | to undo that til we get our link back
and now all we have to do to flip a layer
| | 00:26 | is right click on it, go to
Transform and select Flip Horizontal or Flip
| | 00:32 | Vertical. It's Flip Horizontal. I'll
undo that. Right click, Transform > Flip
| | 00:39 | Vertical and now, we have an upside
down wizard. So, there you have it two
| | 00:43 | quick new easy ways to flip a
layer horizontally or vertically.
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| Motion blur shutter angle/phase visualization| 00:00 | This tool feature takes longer to say
than actually does to demonstrate, and
| | 00:03 | it's Motion Blur Shutter Angle and
Shutter Phase Visualization. Basically we
| | 00:08 | have this project, we looked at a
little bit earlier in this chapter, where we
| | 00:10 | basically have just a simple dancing
ball here, and add some Motion Blur so if
| | 00:14 | we pause this here you'll see that
there is a quite a bit of Motion Blur on
| | 00:18 | some frames.
| | 00:19 | Now if we zoom into the Timeline here,
we'll see this little gray bar, this
| | 00:25 | little gray bar, this vertical gray bar
indicates the amount of Motion Blur we
| | 00:28 | have. We can change the amount of
Motion Blur by adjusting the Shutter Angle
| | 00:32 | and Shutter Phase values in the
Composition Settings dialog box. So if I hit
| | 00:36 | Command K on the Mac or Ctrl+K on the PC,
I'll open up the Composition Settings dialog box.
| | 00:41 | Next, I need to go to the Advanced tab,
and then I need to increase or play
| | 00:46 | around with it. Say, for example, the
Shutter Angle. So let's increase the
| | 00:49 | Shutter Angle quite a bit, click OK.
| | 00:52 | Now this gray bar you'll notice gets
larger as well, indicating that we have
| | 00:56 | more Motion Blur, hit Command K to get
Composition Settings again or Ctrl+K on
| | 01:00 | the PC, take this down to
a smaller value, click OK.
| | 01:05 | Notice that we have a smaller amount
of Motion Blur. Also you notice in the
| | 01:08 | Composition panel, the Motion Blur is
much tighter to the actual object than
| | 01:12 | it was before.
| | 01:13 | So it's a simple trick, but if you
like to customize Motion Blur by adjusting
| | 01:16 | Shutter Angle and Shutter Phase, then
this trick is great for visualizing that.
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| Shortcut for setting opacity and light intensity| 00:00 | We have added a couple of new handy
shortcuts for changing light and layer
| | 00:04 | opacity. Actually, for light layers,
it's called intensity but it's the same
| | 00:07 | type of thing. So, I'm in this
shortcuts project and I have this green screen
| | 00:11 | layer, the top one, I'm
going to be using for Opacity.
| | 00:13 | Now, we often hit Layer T, we can
adjust this, but often times, when we adjust
| | 00:18 | Opacity, even that takes too long. So,
what we can do is simply select the
| | 00:22 | layer and then use the keyboard
shortcut; Ctrl+Option+Plus or Minus on the
| | 00:28 | numeric keypad or Ctrl+Alt+Plus or
Minus on the numeric keypad on the PC.
| | 00:33 | So again, Mac users, it's not the
Command key, it's the Ctrl key and the Option
| | 00:37 | key. So, once I do that then I can
just bump this on the numeric keypad. To
| | 00:43 | jump in 10-degree increments, I can
also hold down the Shift key, make things
| | 00:46 | go faster. Hit the T key, I'll take
this back up to 100%. I can also go over to
| | 00:51 | the Light layer and same thing. What
I'm going to do is hit the T key, so we
| | 00:53 | can see the intensity of the light
already, just so we can see the difference
| | 00:57 | as we're making it.
| | 00:58 | So, again Ctrl+Option+Plus or Minus
for me, and if you are on a PC that would
| | 01:03 | be Ctrl+Alt+Plus or Minus. And so,
you can see this number going down every
| | 01:07 | time I'm hitting the Minus key here.
So again, just a quick way to adjust
| | 01:11 | properties; don't even have to open
anything up or use your mouse at all.
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|
6. Changes to Text, Masks, and Shape LayersConverting text to masks or shape layers| 00:00 | In the olden days of After Effects if
you wanted to convert text, let's say,
| | 00:03 | for example, you're moving After
Effects project to somebody and maybe they
| | 00:05 | don't have the font that you are
looking for, or you want to be able to perform
| | 00:08 | effects with text, and you would
often want to convert them. So you convert
| | 00:12 | them to outlines and again in the old
days we convert them to masks. In After
| | 00:15 | Effects CS3 we convert text to shape
layers. Well, there are benefits and
| | 00:19 | disadvantages to both. So basically
what they have done is they have given us a choice.
| | 00:23 | So if we select a text layer,
you can go to the Layer menu and at the
| | 00:26 | bottom you can choose to Create Masks
from Text and this will create a brand
| | 00:30 | new layer with a solid color, probably
white, with masks around the text.
| | 00:35 | And if you select the layer and go back to
Layer here, you could also create shapes
| | 00:39 | from text and it will create shape
layers, which will allow your text to pretty
| | 00:44 | much stay the same as far as color-wise
and each one of the characters will be
| | 00:48 | a separate shape on the shape layer.
Now I actually love this new feature and
| | 00:53 | let me tell you why. Let's go over here
to the layer with the masks on it, for
| | 00:56 | example. Many effects like Stroke or
Vegas use masks in their effect. So let's
| | 01:03 | say if we want to use Vegas to create
an outline around our text, Shape layers
| | 01:08 | wouldn't cut it. So in that sense it's
great to be able to convert your text to
| | 01:11 | masks. However, Shape layers have
special powers that masks do not. So when we
| | 01:17 | convert our text to shape layers, we
can go in here and Add Path operators
| | 01:20 | essentially to our text. So we can go
and add something like Pucker & Bloat and
| | 01:25 | we could open that up and take that
maybe to -30 or so. So we could add these
| | 01:29 | cool path operators that normally only
apply to shape layers and we can apply
| | 01:33 | them now to text. We also add let's say
a Repeater Path operator. Now we could
| | 01:38 | have a series of repetitions of this
text. So basically in CS4 you have the
| | 01:43 | choice to convert your text to masks
or to shapes. It's just another one of
| | 01:48 | those small features that
has some great potential.
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| The Wiggle Transform path operation| 00:00 | If you like working with text, you
are going to love this new feature.
| | 00:03 | They added a new path operand here for
Shape Layers. I'm going to open this up and
| | 00:06 | under Contents, previously we had Wiggle
Paths. This is very different though.
| | 00:11 | Let's select Wiggle Paths to
just see what we had before in CS3.
| | 00:15 | Wiggle Paths wiggled the outline of
the object. How'd you like coming in here and
| | 00:20 | opening this up and taking the Points to
Smooth? Which I think create a better
| | 00:24 | result and if we clicked away, you
could see that basically our path edge is
| | 00:28 | wiggling. I'm going to select
Wiggle Paths and delete that.
| | 00:30 | Now we have Wiggle Transform. So if
we open up Wiggle Transform we'll see that
| | 00:37 | underneath it there is a Transform
category. Now you've got to be using the
| | 00:41 | Transform underneath Wiggle Transform.
There are many different transforms in
| | 00:46 | Shape layers. For example, there's
one down here for the main layer.
| | 00:49 | There's also one for every single character
individually. So you've got to make sure
| | 00:53 | that when you are adjusting this
transform it's the one underneath inset from
| | 00:57 | Wiggle Transform.
| | 00:58 | But basically as we adjust any property,
let's say, for example, Y position.
| | 01:03 | You will see that a lot of characters
start adjusting randomly when we adjust one
| | 01:08 | value. That's because Wiggle Transform
wiggles or randomizes these values.
| | 01:14 | If we increase Scale for example,
as we preview this you'll see these
| | 01:17 | characters randomly jump around on the
Y-axis, in other words up and down, and
| | 01:22 | also randomly scale up and down.
| | 01:24 | We can continue to add as many
properties as we want to this. We could add
| | 01:27 | Rotation, we can adjust the Anchor
Point or the X position, and we play this back,
| | 01:33 | we see that we get some pretty animated
lively text without much effort whatsoever.
| | 01:38 | We also come up here to the main Wiggle
Transform area and adjust things like
| | 01:43 | the Wiggles/Second. So we might want to get
this to go a little bit slower, take it up to
| | 01:47 | 1.0 Wiggle/Second. And it's kind of a
more soft bob, a leisurely bob, or we can
| | 01:53 | take up Wiggles/Second somewhere
really high, let's say 24 and then we have
| | 01:57 | this really cool awesome, spazoid effect.
| | 02:00 | And that is the Wiggle Transform path operator.
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| HDR shape layers| 00:00 | Shape layers in After Effects CS4 now
support HDR color. So I show you this I
| | 00:05 | have a really weak looking Shape
Layers project with a few spirals spinning
| | 00:10 | around here. They are white, plain and
boring. So what I'm going to do is I'm
| | 00:13 | going to hold the Option key or the
Alt key on the PC while I click this bits
| | 00:16 | per channel changer, down here at
the bottom of the Project panel and I'm
| | 00:21 | looking for 32 bpc, 32 bits per channel.
| | 00:25 | I'm then going to click the Fill swatch
for the Shape Layer, and now I'm going
| | 00:29 | to make sure that the R is set to 3,
Green is set to 2, and Blue is set to 1.
| | 00:33 | This will give us a cool orange color,
and click OK. Next I'm going to select
| | 00:40 | the 32-bit effect, which is Fast Blur,
and I'm going to apply it to my Shape Layer.
| | 00:44 | Now if this were a regular 8 bits per
channel project and we were to blur this,
| | 00:50 | then it would look like a little wisp
of smoke here then I'm going to take this
| | 00:54 | back to 0. But because we are in
HDR mode or in other words 32 bits per
| | 00:59 | channel, when we add some Blurriness
here we get some great intensity because
| | 01:05 | of the HDR values when we input the
color that we are going to use for the
| | 01:08 | Fill, we use super white colors where
one is white and anything above white is
| | 01:14 | super white. So we start to have light to
behave the way that light does in the real world.
| | 01:19 | So we could come in here with offset
and offset this project and I have some
| | 01:23 | real cool, very realistic flames or
glowing light or whatever we want to create
| | 01:29 | because this will act more like light
as in the real world. Thanks to the HDR
| | 01:32 | color that's now supported by Shape layers.
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| Mask vertex counter| 00:00 | After Effect CS4 will now count for you
the vertices in a selected mask. I have
| | 00:05 | here a layer from the converted text we
looked at earlier in this chapter. If I
| | 00:08 | click it, there is a bunch of masks
and the Info panel is really where the
| | 00:12 | trick happens, but you see when I
have this layer selected, I don't get any
| | 00:16 | information about masks whatsoever.
| | 00:18 | But If I hit the letter M then I could
see all the different various mask paths
| | 00:22 | here in this layer. If I select a
certain mask path then it will tell me that
| | 00:27 | for this mask, for the letter A, I
have 16 Vertices. This mask also called A
| | 00:32 | has 4 Vertices and the F mask has 26
Vertices. This feature is really good,
| | 00:37 | especially for those that are doing
character animations with layers with masks.
| | 00:41 | It's a good idea to keep your vertex
count with masks consistently when you are
| | 00:45 | animating them. And I'm sure it has
many other utility training purposes as
| | 00:48 | well. So now After Effects CS4 has the
ability to show you the vertex count for
| | 00:54 | selected masks in the Info panel.
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| Line join controls for text| 00:00 | Another new feature in After Effects
CS4 is Line Joins for text. Now I have a
| | 00:06 | good solid stroke on here so we can
see what's going on. Basically what Line
| | 00:09 | Joins are is what happens when two
edges of text meet. So now we have some
| | 00:15 | control over that.
| | 00:17 | So I can go to the Character panel fly
out menu here, and under the Line Join I
| | 00:21 | could change this from the default Miter;
which basically makes a point here to
| | 00:25 | Round, which makes a round edge and
also if I go to Line Join I could changes
| | 00:29 | to Bevel which creates a flat edge.
| | 00:32 | Now if we had a more pronounced stroke
here, those would be even more obvious,
| | 00:37 | and for most users, this probably won't
even be that big of a deal. But if you
| | 00:40 | work with text a lot, so as if you
come from a professional print background
| | 00:44 | like Adobe Illustrator InDesign, this can
be a very useful when tweaking your text.
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7. New Integration Features3D layers from Photoshop!| 00:00 | One of the most powerful features in
After Effects CS4 and perhaps my personal
| | 00:05 | favorite feature is the ability to
bring in three objects from Photoshop
| | 00:09 | Extended. Now if you do any work in 3D
or if you do any work in Photoshop, you
| | 00:14 | have absolutely got to check out the
new features in Photoshop CS4 Extended.
| | 00:18 | What I'm going to do is I'm going to
take you and show you how to create a 3D
| | 00:21 | object from scratch in Photoshop that
we will then import and manipulate in
| | 00:25 | After Effects. We don't do any work in
Photoshop; you can just skip ahead the
| | 00:29 | latter half of this movie. What I'm
going to do is go to the File menu and
| | 00:33 | select New, keep in mind, it is going
to be a pretty simple 3D object, but it
| | 00:37 | can be pretty cool nonetheless.
| | 00:39 | From the Preset dropdown, going to go
to Film & Video. I'm going to check the
| | 00:43 | size and make it sure it NTSC DV, I'm
going to click OK. I'm then going to
| | 00:47 | press Option+Delete on the Mac or Alt+
Backspace on the PC to fill this layer
| | 00:52 | with black and then I'm going to create
a new layer by clicking this button at
| | 00:56 | the bottom the Layers panel.
| | 00:57 | Then I'm going to go to the
Rectangular Marquee Tool and I'm going to make a
| | 01:02 | series of selections. I'm going to
click and drag here then I'm going to hold
| | 01:05 | the Shift key and make another few boxes.
That's all we are going to be doing,
| | 01:09 | it's kind of creating a mock virtual
city. So pretend that these little squares
| | 01:13 | or rectangles are like buildings,
don't let him go off the edge like this or
| | 01:17 | touch the edge, make sure
they are all inside the edge.
| | 01:20 | Now we are going to make some across
the street again, making sure that you are
| | 01:23 | always holding down that Shift key and
after a few more of these. Again this is
| | 01:30 | probably not as good as we could do
for you, taking our time but good enough.
| | 01:35 | Let's just go ahead and click Refine
Edge, now what you do is make sure that
| | 01:40 | you increase this Feather value,
so we have some soft edges.
| | 01:44 | What we are going to be doing is
making a 3D cityscape out of this creation
| | 01:50 | that we are making. If we didn't have
any Feather to the edges, then the edges
| | 01:54 | of the buildings would be very flat.
But by adding some Feather they will have
| | 01:57 | some smoother, rounded edges to
our buildings. It looks pretty cool.
| | 02:01 | So we can go ahead and click OK and
I'm going to hit the letter X as in
| | 02:06 | Xylophone because apparently X is
always for Xylophone. And with my new blink
| | 02:10 | layer selected I'm going to hit Option+
Delete again or Alt+Backspace on the PC
| | 02:14 | to fill these with white. Then I'm
going to hit Command+D or Ctrl+D on the PC
| | 02:20 | to deselect that. And then I'm going
to hit Command+E to merge those together;
| | 02:25 | that would be Ctrl+E on the PC.
| | 02:29 | Then with this layer selected I'm
going to go to the 3D menu, New Mesh From
| | 02:34 | Grayscale > Plane and in just a few
seconds Photoshop is going to convert what
| | 02:40 | we just made in to a 3D cityscape.
I'm going to come down here to the Tools
| | 02:46 | panel and select this tool the 3D
Rotate Tool to now click and drag and move
| | 02:51 | around our 3D cityscape. Now our
little buildings here are a little bit more
| | 02:57 | rounded than I would like, so maybe we
should have taken down that Feather a
| | 03:00 | little bit less. But still good
enough and if we want to we can flip this
| | 03:03 | upside down and maybe make teeth or something.
| | 03:07 | Anyways I'm going to rotate this back,
orient this back like a city should be
| | 03:12 | oriented and another thing we could do
in Photoshop Extended is actually paint
| | 03:16 | directly on 3D objects. So I can
select the Paint Brush, click the Foreground
| | 03:21 | Tool maybe pick red just because
that's insane and I could click and paint on
| | 03:25 | this and you could see I painted
directly on my 3D object. No need to open up
| | 03:34 | some special mode or whatever, notice
that we had kind of a spray paint and we
| | 03:38 | got some extra paint on the edges
just as if we would have used spray paint
| | 03:42 | here, fantastic.
| | 03:44 | Now what I'm going to do is I'm
going to save this file out in our Stills
| | 03:47 | folder in the Media folder of our
Exercise Files. I will call this 3D city.
| | 03:52 | Next I go back to After Effects,
double click in the Project panel to import
| | 03:57 | and click on 3D city and hit Open.
When this dialog box pops up make sure the
| | 04:04 | Import Kind is set to Composition and
make sure Live Photoshop 3D is checked
| | 04:09 | and click OK.
| | 04:14 | Once this imports, double click 3D city,
click off to open it up and actually
| | 04:18 | lets take this back to 1 View if your
4 Views comes up. And now we can click
| | 04:24 | the Camera layer, click the Unified
Camera Tool, we talked about earlier in
| | 04:28 | this training series and move this
around and look at that. We now have native
| | 04:34 | 3D object import abilities through
Photoshop Extended in After Effects.
| | 04:40 | We don't need any extra plug-ins or
what have you all of this now takes place
| | 04:45 | natively inside of After Effects. Now
as you can tell because this is the first
| | 04:50 | time After Effects has ever been able
to import 3D objects natively, it really
| | 04:54 | pays to know the features
of Photoshop CS4 Extended.
| | 05:00 | Also be aware that no object was
created for you, if you prefer to use the
| | 05:05 | Controller to control the 3D object
that way. It's already in 3D space so we
| | 05:11 | can use this to move our city around
if we prefer that method. So either way
| | 05:17 | these methods are here, the materials
we added by painting on the 3D object
| | 05:20 | came over intact, it's really opened
a huge door of possibilities in After Effects.
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| Exporting After Effects projects to Flash using XFL| 00:00 | So there is a new file format in town,
the XFL file format, which improves the
| | 00:04 | integration between After Effects and Flash.
| | 00:08 | For a while now in After Effects
you've been able to output to the SWF file
| | 00:10 | format, S-W-F. With the XFL file format,
it's more like a project file format.
| | 00:16 | So look at this project here. We have
got some complicated stuff going on, we
| | 00:18 | have got some expressions, and some
fire breathing dragon. We can go to the
| | 00:21 | File menu, select Export > Adobe
Flash Professional XFL. Notice that SWF
| | 00:27 | files are for the Flash Players. It's
an output file format, but the XFL file
| | 00:32 | format is a working file format, it's a
project file format. And if we go over
| | 00:36 | to Flash, we can open up that XFL file
format, which I have already saved for
| | 00:41 | you. Then as we play this back, we
can see that all of our stuff from After
| | 00:45 | Effects came over pretty good.
| | 00:47 | Now as you can see here, there are some
compression artifacts because this was
| | 00:50 | converted to FLV, but we can adjust
all these objects independently. There is
| | 00:55 | the fire. We can take out the
visibility of the dragon, or of the knight. So
| | 01:00 | this way we have more control when
working between After Effects and Flash.
| | 01:03 | Even the wiggle expression that I put
on the color of the background still came
| | 01:08 | over just fine as well. So the XFL
file format opens up the doors to new
| | 01:12 | possibilities when using
After Effects and Flash together.
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| Dynamic Link video from Premiere Pro| 00:00 | Dynamic link has been around for a
while now. Basically it allows you to take
| | 00:04 | After Effects work, bring it in to Premiere,
and then when you make changes in After Effects,
| | 00:09 | it automatically updates in Premiere Pro.
| | 00:12 | So what they have done in CS4, is added
the ability to create dynamic link from
| | 00:15 | Premiere to After Effects, at least
for the way I like to work, this makes a
| | 00:20 | lot more sense. Let's say you are doing
some video editing in Premiere Pro, and
| | 00:23 | you realize that that certain shot
needs a special effect shot. What you could
| | 00:27 | do now is right click on a clip in
Premiere Pro, and select Replace With After
| | 00:32 | Effects Composition. Then you could
save the project somewhere, I will save
| | 00:37 | this in Chapter 07, call it Dynamic
Link, and now this is just a regular
| | 00:42 | composition in After Effects.
| | 00:44 | So I can open it up. Let's go to
Composition here, maybe add Keylight or some
| | 00:52 | other effect that's in After Effects
and not in Premiere, and pull a very, very
| | 00:58 | quick cheesy key here. This is a
terrible key, but let's just keep it like that
| | 01:03 | for now, and then we go over back
to Premiere Pro, we could see that
| | 01:08 | instantaneously there is an update. We
didn't have to save in After Effects or
| | 01:12 | anything, but our footage
here in Premiere Pro was updated.
| | 01:17 | If you are video editor that uses
Adobe Premiere Pro, this is an amazing feature.
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| Importing Speech Search data| 00:00 | Another one of the great new features
of After Effects CS4 is actually a new
| | 00:03 | feature of Premiere Pro CS4. I have
here this Talking Computer clip I have
| | 00:08 | imported into Premiere Pro, which
is what we are in right now, and it's
| | 00:12 | basically some text I create using a
cool feature of my Mac that allows the
| | 00:16 | computer to read text that I have created.
So this is what the audio clip sounds like...
| | 00:20 | (Speaker: Greetings. This is computer-generated
text for Premiere Pro. I can type things
| | 00:27 | (Speaker: and my Apple computer will read them.)
| | 00:29 | So what Premiere Pro allows me to do
is bring in audio files or video files
| | 00:34 | with an audio track. So then what I could
do is go to the Window menu and open
| | 00:37 | up the Metadata panel, a new panel in
Premiere Pro and also in After Effects
| | 00:41 | and Encore, we will look at
little later in this training series.
| | 00:43 | What I can do with an audio file
selected is click this Transcribe button at
| | 00:47 | the bottom of Metadata panel and so
then Premiere will attempt to recognize the text.
| | 00:52 | And you could see the results here.
Now some of this you might have to change.
| | 00:57 | For example, Premiere, for whatever
reason, Premiere Pro recognized it
| | 01:01 | as creamy. So I had to change it from
creamy to Premiere and now that will
| | 01:04 | happen, but this thing is
about 70% to 80% accurate.
| | 01:08 | To change things that Premiere Pro
reads wrong, you could select the text and
| | 01:11 | hit the Enter key and then highlight it
and just replace whatever word you want
| | 01:15 | to replace it with.
| | 01:16 | Cool thing about this is if I click on
some of these texts, you can see that
| | 01:19 | the time code in and Duration change
and so I could see the time code in and
| | 01:24 | the Duration for every single piece of
dialog. Even down to the audio sample level.
| | 01:30 | For sure it would a great feature
in After Effects right? Well folks, it
| | 01:34 | gets better because After Effects can
actually read and understand this data.
| | 01:37 | Let's go back to After Effects and
I'm going to double click to import a
| | 01:41 | rendered version of this. You will
find this in the Chapter 07 folder speech
| | 01:44 | search metadata.mov and I'm going to
drag this down to New Composition icon to
| | 01:49 | make a comp out of it.
| | 01:50 | Now typically metadata stuff is like
who made the file or other information
| | 01:56 | like that about it but this type of
metadata actually is tempo, in other words
| | 01:59 | it takes place in time. And so After
Effects actually interprets this metadata
| | 02:03 | a little differently than other types of
metadata, which is really cool. But we
| | 02:07 | are not seeing any difference here in
our Timeline, which is where it would be
| | 02:09 | really cool to have it show up. So what
we need to do is go to the Preferences
| | 02:13 | of After Effects and on the Mac you
can go to After Effects > Preferences.
| | 02:17 | On Windows, you go to the Edit menu and
select Preferences. And we can go to Media
| | 02:21 | & Disk Cache. At the bottom of Media
& Disk Cache, these preferences here,
| | 02:26 | select Create Layer Markers From
Footage XMP Metadata. Then we click OK.
| | 02:32 | We will see that nothing happens to the
existing comp but if we re-import this
| | 02:37 | with this option selected and then
make a new comp out of it, we will see,
| | 02:41 | as we zoom in, all of the words of
dialog as spoken and they come over as
| | 02:47 | layer markers and then all the texts
comes over as comments in those layer
| | 02:51 | markers. So if you want to sync your
motion graphics to what somebody is
| | 02:56 | saying, then you can use this
feature to do that very easily.
| | 02:59 | And I should also point out that
scripts and expressions can also access these
| | 03:03 | words. So maybe every time somebody
says computer or every time somebody says a
| | 03:08 | certain word, something happens on
screen. So again technically, the new
| | 03:13 | feature is in Premiere Pro but After
Effects definitely takes liberal advantage
| | 03:18 | of it as well.
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| Improving mobile device workflows| 00:00 | For those of you that make video
content for cell phones and other mobile
| | 00:03 | devices, they have added a great new
feature to Device Central CS4 that allows
| | 00:07 | it to integrate better with After Effects.
| | 00:10 | From right here in the Welcome screen
under Create New Mobile you could select
| | 00:13 | After Effects file. Now by default
nothing happens but what you need to do is
| | 00:19 | go over to the Online Library and load
up some profiles. In this Online Library
| | 00:26 | category you could find a list of cell
phone manufacturers. Click the triangle
| | 00:32 | next to their name to reveal models
that they make. If you double-click one of
| | 00:36 | them, they will be added to your Local
Library. And then when you find a mobile
| | 00:40 | device in your Local Library you would
like to make a composition out of, just
| | 00:43 | select on left hand side of Local
Library area and then you will get a preview
| | 00:47 | over here. It tells you the pixel
dimensions, the frame rate, the pixel aspect
| | 00:51 | ratio, the type of file format that
it supports and you can get a little
| | 00:55 | preview of the actual display if it has one.
| | 00:58 | As soon as you click Create, you go
over here to After Effects and it creates a
| | 01:03 | folder called Device Central Comps
and here is the composition that matches
| | 01:07 | this phone. It's even called Nokia
3120, after this cell phone that we are
| | 01:11 | putting it on to.
| | 01:12 | So you can imagine how helpful this is.
In After Effects CS3 where we output
| | 01:16 | video, we can see what it would look
on a cell phone but there is a bunch of
| | 01:19 | trial and error but now we can just
start with a correct composition that
| | 01:23 | matches with what this phone can view.
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|
8. New Rendering FeaturesRendering F4V files| 00:00 | There is a new file format that
After Effects can export to, F4V.
| | 00:05 | I'll show you that I have this Galaxy project
open that you will find in the Chapter 08
| | 00:08 | folder and essentially this is a
little project that you will be making in
| | 00:12 | After Effects CS4 Essential Training.
| | 00:14 | And so I'm going to do is I'm going to
add this to the Render Queue. I have the
| | 00:17 | composition selected, go to Composition menu,
select Add To Render Queue and let's
| | 00:21 | go ahead and resize our interface
little bit so that we can see what's going on
| | 00:24 | Click on Lossless for Output Module and in
the Format dropdown we can change this to F4V.
| | 00:30 | Now FLV and F4V are both video for Flash.
Now for a long time we have been able
| | 00:36 | to output to FLV. F4V is a
newer format that is a better means of
| | 00:41 | compression. In other words you're
going to get a better-looking final result
| | 00:44 | at smaller file sizes.
| | 00:46 | The problem with F4V if you are going
to output this to the web and make this
| | 00:49 | globally available, is that it is
not as common yet as FLV is. The latest
| | 00:55 | version of the Flash Player do support
F4V but they haven't been out that long.
| | 00:59 | So if you are going for compatibility,
still stick to FLV, but if you are going
| | 01:03 | for quality and compression, choose F4V.
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| Easy output to multiple formats| 00:00 | In this movie we are going to continue
where we left off in the last movie,
| | 00:03 | we had the Galaxy project open here in
the Render Queue. In times past there's
| | 00:07 | little secret if you want to output
the multiple formats at once, you would
| | 00:11 | select the Output Module, and hit
Command or Ctrl+D to duplicate it.
| | 00:14 | So what they have done is, taking that
from a little known secret, to something
| | 00:18 | that's pretty intuitive and easy to use.
| | 00:19 | So just come over here to this Plus
button, click it, and now you have another
| | 00:23 | Output Module. So we can Click
Lossless for one and maybe output to F4V for
| | 00:27 | the Web, as we have talked about in the
last movie. I will just go and Click OK
| | 00:31 | here, and OK here, and then Click
Lossless on the next one. Maybe you want to
| | 00:35 | Output this to a high quality QuickTime
movie with the animation Codec, and click OK.
| | 00:39 | So now we can quickly and easily Output
this to multiple formats at once. If we
| | 00:44 | decide to change our mind later, we
can click the minus icon in anyone of
| | 00:47 | these. Let's say we are not going to
Output, after all you just click this
| | 00:50 | minus icon and it goes away.
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| Adding rendered footage to a project| 00:00 | Often times when I'm working on a
project I find myself rendering something
| | 00:03 | out, and then only later I realize I
actually want to use that in the current project.
| | 00:08 | At that point I have to go digging around my
hard drive to find out where I rendered it to.
| | 00:12 | Well, there is a cool new feature that
allows you to add rendered footage to
| | 00:16 | your project very quickly and easily.
I have already rendered out this Galaxy
| | 00:19 | Final clip, basically this Galaxy
projects we have been working at in this
| | 00:23 | Chapter here, I have already rendered
it out as an MP4 file, and already in the
| | 00:28 | time that I have been recording this
movie, I have already forgotten where I put it.
| | 00:31 | So notice this footage is already
rendered, you come over here to status, it
| | 00:34 | says done, that means this has
already been rendered. So you can click on
| | 00:37 | Output Module here, and drag this into
my Project panel, and once I let it go,
| | 00:42 | I can see this clip, the MP4 clip
that's rendered, pop into my Project panel.
| | 00:47 | So this is great when you are doing
intermedia renders, like you do in
| | 00:49 | pre-renders, if you have a few layers
that are running really slow, where we
| | 00:52 | have a lot of effects on, and
particles or whatever, you can do an intermedia
| | 00:55 | render here. And if you forget where
they are, again, just drag Output Module
| | 00:58 | into the Project panel, and then
rendered footage will show up there.
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|
|
9. Technical ImprovementsUsing 4:3 guides in 16:9 projects| 00:01 | After Effects now lets you preview
4:3 guides with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
| | 00:06 | So I have here this footage that's
imported, and as you can see here from the
| | 00:10 | project panel, it's 1.21, that's the
pixel aspect ratio, so it's a wide screen
| | 00:14 | project or a white screen
composition I should say.
| | 00:17 | And when I come down here to this
little icon to show the Title/Action Safe
| | 00:21 | areas, I now have what's called the
Center cut areas. So we have a regular
| | 00:25 | Title/Action Safe for this 16:9 project.
But then we also have this 4:3 guide,
| | 00:31 | so if our project was cropped down,
then this is what we would be seeing. So
| | 00:35 | this is the Action Safe, it's out of
line and then the Title Safe for the full
| | 00:40 | screen project.
| | 00:40 | You can keep that in mind as you
are working maybe with high definition
| | 00:43 | project, that might get cropped down,
that you only want to keep the most
| | 00:46 | important areas inside this Center area.
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| Exporting to XML| 00:01 | You can now export to an XML project.
This Kid Rocking project you can find in
| | 00:05 | the Chapter 09 folder. Go to the File
menu and select Save A Copy As XML. That
| | 00:10 | will create a file extension called
.aepx. Essentially this is a XML-based
| | 00:17 | After Effects project.
| | 00:18 | Now XML, in case you're not familiar
with it, it is a programming language
| | 00:21 | where you can basically set up groups
of data. So what you can do if you are a
| | 00:26 | developer, and actually XML is one of
the easier programming languages. You go
| | 00:31 | to my Finder here and go to the aepx
project that we just created, and then
| | 00:34 | actually what I'm going to do, and it
is interestingly enough, right-click on
| | 00:38 | this and I'm opening it with a text
editing program. In my case I'm going to
| | 00:42 | use the Apple application TextEdit.
| | 00:47 | And here is this After Effects project
opened up in a Text Editor. So we are
| | 00:51 | actually seeing the code here. Now most
of these, such as this area right here,
| | 00:56 | is very much gibberish. What I can do
is do a search for string. There are
| | 01:02 | editable data areas called strings.
| | 01:05 | You can see here, we have a string and
it's Rocking out front, it's also the
| | 01:10 | name of this composition.
| | 01:11 | So using these XML based projects, we
can go in here and adjust After Effects
| | 01:16 | projects without even
opening them up in After Effects.
| | 01:20 | We can change the names of objects in
After Effects project. We can also change
| | 01:24 | the source of footage items and
automate several other tasks as well.
| | 01:29 | For more information on how to use
this XML project format, consult After
| | 01:32 | Effects' Help. There are some great
tips there, but make sure that you don't
| | 01:37 | use this as your primary project file
format. Even if you do, use XML. Adobe
| | 01:42 | still recommends that you use the regular
.aep project file format for your projects.
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| The XMP Metadata panel| 00:01 | Lately Adobe has become increasingly
interested in metadata when working with
| | 00:05 | video. Metadata is additional
information about a file that is typically stored
| | 00:10 | within that file. So, for example,
stored within a video file you might have
| | 00:14 | such information as the shot,
location of the shot, the director, maybe the
| | 00:19 | director of photography, and Adobe
has set this up so that this information
| | 00:23 | stays with the file throughout the workflow.
| | 00:25 | So let's say you captured the video in
a location or either in a Premiere. When
| | 00:30 | you bring it over in After Effects
for your visual effects work or motion
| | 00:32 | graphics or whatever you are doing,
that metadata will still stay with that
| | 00:36 | file. And so now in CS4, After
Effects and most of the applications in the
| | 00:41 | Production Premium Suite now come with
this Metadata panel. You can access it
| | 00:45 | through the Window menu here, Metadata
right there. I already have mine showing
| | 00:49 | here and what I can do is select a
file such as this movie file and I could
| | 00:54 | open up a category like Dublin Core
and I can type in something like Chad
| | 00:59 | Perkins for Contributor and then under
Description, I could put some type of
| | 01:03 | description and then all of this
Metadata is not only a good reference but it's
| | 01:07 | also searchable as well.
| | 01:09 | After Effects is also unique because it
has two categories. You can create XMP
| | 01:14 | Metadata. XMP by the way is Adobe's
brand of metadata. You can create metadata
| | 01:18 | for the entire Project or you can
create metadata for individual files as well.
| | 01:23 | So a yet another way that Adobe
gives you to organize your projects.
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| Improved multicore processor settings| 00:01 | After Effects CS4 also adds a little
tweak to the multicore processor settings.
| | 00:06 | This is actually going to help. I'm
going to my Preferences. On the Mac it's
| | 00:08 | under the After Effects menu; under PC
it's under the Edit menu. So I'm going
| | 00:12 | to go to After Effects > Preferences,
and then go to Memory & Multiprocessing.
| | 00:15 | Now in previous versions, this was a
little bit more esoteric and weird. It was
| | 00:21 | hard to figure out and if you have a
multicore processor, you can use them to
| | 00:25 | Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously.
But what you might not have realized is
| | 00:29 | that it uses 500 MB per CPU when you do this.
| | 00:32 | Now you could specify how much RAM is
used for every CPU; adjust the RAM so it
| | 00:39 | gives you a longer RAM Preview or
faster rendering. And also set how many CPUs
| | 00:44 | to leave for other applications.
There's also this really handy description of
| | 00:47 | what's going on here, down below. So
it's a simple new feature but it helps you
| | 00:51 | get more out of your
system when using After Effects.
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| Improved pixel aspect ratio| 00:01 | If you've been working with video
for a while, you know that the pixel
| | 00:03 | aspect ratio of full-screen video is 0.
9 and wide screen is 1.2. Well, when you
| | 00:09 | bring in that same footage-- I have
imported this track the hand clip you'll
| | 00:12 | find in the Video folder in the Media
folder's exercise files. You can see the
| | 00:16 | pixel aspect ratio here is 0.91. So,
for a long time, we've been using 0.9 in
| | 00:21 | the After Effects world and in reality
it's 0.9091. So now it's upgraded to
| | 00:27 | 0.91, so that's the pixel aspect ratio
you'll see when you bring in full-screen
| | 00:32 | video and wide screen will be 1.21.
| | 00:35 | Also, when you open up all projects
where you have video clips that you are
| | 00:39 | using that all pixels aspect ratio,
After Effects will automatically update it for you.
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| The Interpret Footage button| 00:00 | Power users of After Effects often use
the Interpret Footage dialog box to solve
| | 00:04 | technical issues. To get there in times
past, you had to right-click on footage
| | 00:08 | and go to Interpret Footage > Main.
Adobe started figuring that people
| | 00:12 | used this quite a bit.
| | 00:13 | So, now you can just select footage
in the Project panel and click this new
| | 00:16 | button at the bottom left-hand
corner of the Project panel to open the
| | 00:19 | Interpret Footage dialog box straightaway.
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|
ConclusionGoodbye| 00:00 | Well, folks, that concludes
After Effects CS4 New Features.
| | 00:04 | Again, I'm Chad Perkins, thank you so
much for watching and stay tuned for much
| | 00:08 | more awesome After Effects Training for CS4
from lynda.com out in the coming weeks and months.
| | 00:15 | We'll see you then. Goodbye!
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