IntroductionOverview| 00:03 | Hi, I'm Chris Meyer of Crish Design.
| | 00:05 | We've had a chance to use After Effects
CS5 and we want to share with you some
| | 00:09 | of the significant new features that are in it.
| | 00:11 | As well as some of the little features
they've thrown in which we find really useful.
| | 00:15 | Now not all the features are obvious
and a great example of that is it's now a
| | 00:18 | 64-bit native application.
| | 00:20 | That means if you have a lot of
memory stuffed in your computer, you can
| | 00:24 | finally access all of it.
| | 00:25 | That fortunately gets rid
of all the memory errors.
| | 00:28 | Longer RAM previews, lots of great
stuff, but a couple gotchas as well
| | 00:32 | which we'll discuss.
| | 00:33 | A really great new edition
is the new Roto Brush tool.
| | 00:36 | This helps automate creating mattse.
| | 00:38 | You draw relatively simple
strokes for foreground and background.
| | 00:43 | It finds the edges between them, and
tracks those edges from frame-to-frame.
| | 00:46 | It's going to save you a lot of time.
| | 00:49 | Not pure magic but it is very useful.
| | 00:51 | There's been a lot of great
bundles built into After Effects CS5.
| | 00:55 | In CS4 you may remember we got
mocha, a great motion tracker.
| | 00:59 | In CS5 we get mocha v2, which has a
couple of nice new features, and mocha shape.
| | 01:04 | The abilities to draw Roto shapes in
mocha, have them translated into mattes
| | 01:08 | inside After Effects. Very nice!
| | 01:11 | Other bundled effects include
Color Finesse 3, which has several new
| | 01:15 | features which are really cool,
and perhaps best of all, DigiEffects
| | 01:19 | FreeForm, the ability to take any 2D
layer, warp it in 3D space or extrude
| | 01:23 | other layers through it. Very cool!
| | 01:25 | These are other little effects as well.
| | 01:28 | Apply color look up tables, a biggie
that they just added to After Effects.
| | 01:32 | Some Photoshop adjustment layer
types have been brought in as well.
| | 01:35 | Even the lowly Levels effect got a
really nice user interface update in CS5.
| | 01:42 | There's been some changes in the
way you can now manipulate layers.
| | 01:45 | For those who've never got a hang of
keyframing After Effects, well now there's
| | 01:48 | an Auto-Keyframe mode and I'll show
you the pluses and minuses of that.
| | 01:51 | There are two new blending modes.
| | 01:53 | There's a new Align option to align to
composition rather than just to other layers.
| | 01:58 | 3D text.
| | 01:59 | Now every character can now orient
towards the camera, not just entire words.
| | 02:04 | Remember that there was a plug-in to
bring in RED .r3d footage into After Effects?
| | 02:08 | That's built into After Effects now.
| | 02:10 | Several of the dialog
boxes now have live updates.
| | 02:13 | There have been other improvements
like that which just basically make the
| | 02:15 | program a lot more pleasing to use.
| | 02:18 | So I'm going to go through a lot of
those features, discussing the pluses and
| | 02:22 | minuses and where appropriate give you
some mini-tutorials on how to use them.
| | 02:26 | I hope you'll find it useful.
| | 02:27 | So let's get started!
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1. Native 64-Bit ApplicationSystem requirements| 00:03 | Now the one feature which consumes the
most time and most resources in After
| | 00:07 | Effects CS5 was the one you can't see.
| | 00:10 | It was converting it to be
a 64-bit native application.
| | 00:14 | Now that has a lot of great benefits,
which I'll show you here in a minute, but
| | 00:17 | first I want to tell you
about the warnings and gotchas.
| | 00:20 | First off, you need to be running a 64
- bit operating system to even install
| | 00:25 | After Effects CS5, let alone
run it and take advantage of it.
| | 00:28 | On the Mac side, this is fairly easy.
| | 00:31 | 10.5.7 or later is good with After Effects CS5.
| | 00:35 | So if you're running Leopard and you've
been running software update, you're good.
| | 00:38 | If you have Snow Leopard, you're good.
| | 00:40 | You can assume anything after
Snow Leopard will be good as well.
| | 00:43 | Windows is a little bit trickier.
| | 00:45 | Vista or Windows 7 works.
| | 00:47 | Vista you have to have
Service Pack 1 or later installed.
| | 00:51 | You have to be running a 64-bit version of it.
| | 00:54 | It has to say things like Vista
64 or it won't run After Effects.
| | 00:58 | Additionally, among all the different
versions of Windows it comes in, you need
| | 01:03 | to be running at least Home Premium or better.
| | 01:06 | You can't be using Home
Basic to run After Effects CS5.
| | 01:10 | In reality you don't even really
want Home Premium and I'll show you.
| | 01:14 | The version of Windows you're running
affects how much RAM you can install in
| | 01:19 | your computer and you can see Home
Premium for Windows 7 has a maximum 16 gig of
| | 01:24 | memory that you can access.
| | 01:25 | If you go to Professional, Enterprise
or Ultimate, you can have up to 192 gigs.
| | 01:31 | Same is true in Vista 64.
| | 01:33 | Vista Home Premium? 16 gig limit.
| | 01:36 | If you have the higher ones, Business,
Enterprise or Ultimate, you can install
| | 01:40 | up to 128 gig in your
computer if it will take it.
| | 01:43 | The second big gotcha with After
Effects CS5 comes in the area of effects.
| | 01:49 | Any plug-in effect that you install
into After Effects also needs to be 64-bit
| | 01:55 | native and this requires a rewrite.
| | 01:58 | It's not a two-click update like some
people say, it requires lot of work out of
| | 02:03 | some of the third parties,
particularly if they have custom user interfaces.
| | 02:06 | So not only do we have to wait for
them to update it to be 64-bit compatible,
| | 02:09 | they are probably going to charge you
an upgrade fee because it wasn't trivial
| | 02:12 | for them to do that.
| | 02:14 | So if you have any mission-critical
plug- ins which you can't live without,
| | 02:18 | first make sure that they've updated it
and made a 64-bit native version before
| | 02:24 | you upgrade to CS5 or you'll be caught without.
| | 02:27 | Now the good news is I've talked to a
lot plug-in vendors and I'm pleasantly
| | 02:31 | surprised how far along the many of
them are, so I don't think it's going to be
| | 02:34 | that big of a problem but
it's something to be aware of.
| | 02:36 | The other thing that comes with all
this is that most of Production Premium is
| | 02:41 | also 64-bit native now.
| | 02:43 | That includes Adobe Premiere Pro,
Encore, Adobe Media Encoder, and of course
| | 02:49 | Photoshop 64-bit including on the Mac.
| | 02:52 | So the nice thing is if you upgrade to
CS5, particularly the Production Premium
| | 02:55 | Suite, all of them can take advantage
of the goodies that come along with being
| | 03:00 | a 64-bit native application.
| | 03:02 | I'll show you what some of those
benefits are in the next couple of movies.
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| Buffers and previews| 00:03 | So why go through all this
trouble to go 64-bit native?
| | 00:08 | Well, 64-bit programs do
have better performance.
| | 00:10 | After Effects is faster in several areas.
| | 00:12 | A little later on when I show you
RAM previewing you'll see even reading
| | 00:16 | material off a disc is faster.
| | 00:17 | However, the most important reason is
to get rid of the "unable to allocate
| | 00:22 | image buffer" errors.
| | 00:24 | Have you ever had that when you're
working on a complex project or you're
| | 00:27 | working at a deep render or you have a
really big source, you're trying to get
| | 00:31 | work done, you're trying to get render
done and you're just hit with this auto
| | 00:34 | memory error and you don't know how to solve it?
| | 00:35 | Well, going 64-bit will get rid of
those errors and that was the main
| | 00:40 | motivation to going there.
| | 00:42 | That alone is going to be worth a lot
of people work on large media sizes.
| | 00:46 | But in addition to that you
can stuff more into a project.
| | 00:50 | You can preview more, you can
cache more, you can keep more constant
| | 00:54 | memory while you work.
| | 00:55 | Let's just get an example of what that means.
| | 00:57 | Here I am in After Effects CS4 and
even though this computer has 16 gig of
| | 01:03 | memory inside of it, After Effects is
only using 3 gigs of it and that's typical
| | 01:10 | of a 32-bit application.
| | 01:12 | They'll only use about 2
to 4 gig per application.
| | 01:15 | My project is set to 16
bit per channel color depth.
| | 01:19 | What I have here is a high-def comp,
1920, 1080, 23,976 frame rate, I am set at
| | 01:27 | full resolution, and let's just
go ahead queue up a RAM Preview.
| | 01:32 | Hit zero on the numeric keypad
and it's chewing right along.
| | 01:36 | Oay, nearly 4 seconds to handle.
| | 01:40 | The actor is finally starting to
crouch and move and I'm already out of RAM.
| | 01:45 | I only got 4 seconds and 9
frames into my RAM Preview.
| | 01:49 | I didn't even get to the action
where the explosion starts and the fun
| | 01:52 | stuff starts to happen.
| | 01:54 | This requires things like going down
say Half Resolution and other tricks to be
| | 01:59 | able to view more preview inside CS4.
| | 02:02 | Well, let's go look at the same
footage inside After Effects CS5.
| | 02:07 | Now I'm in After Effects CS5, same computer.
| | 02:10 | About This Mac, 16 gig, but now
when I look at After Effects' Memory
| | 02:16 | Preferences, I see out of that 16
I've reserved 3 for other applications
| | 02:21 | including the system and 13, all of the left
-over RAM, is available for After Effects.
| | 02:27 | Now After Effects is going to use
some of that to load up its tools, its
| | 02:30 | modules, its effects, etcetera.
| | 02:33 | The significant percentage of that is going
to be available for RAM previews. Click OK.
| | 02:37 | I have the same comp as I did before,
1920 by 1080, 23,976 frame rate.
| | 02:45 | As before I'm at 16-bit per
channel color depth. Let's RAM Preview.
| | 02:48 | I'll press zero on the numeric keypad.
| | 02:50 | You might notice that the frames are
loading faster than they were before.
| | 02:55 | 64-bit does bring a performance improvement.
| | 02:58 | I'm already past the 4
second mark where I was in CS4.
| | 03:02 | There is the explosion and the
RAM Preview just keeps loading.
| | 03:06 | Let's see how much we can fit in here.
| | 03:10 | And I know this gets into really geeky
territory when you start getting excited
| | 03:13 | about green bars going across your
screen, but I'm getting excited here.
| | 03:18 | Because I'm past 14 seconds, 15.
| | 03:25 | Keeps loading it off the disc.
| | 03:26 | This is cool because I'm already
past all the action in this section.
| | 03:30 | So I already have basically the whole
scene loaded and there, I've got the
| | 03:35 | entire 30 second clip, high-def
1920x1080, 16-bit per channel, loaded into RAM.
| | 03:44 | And on a computer running 16 gig, which
is not an unreasonable amount of RAM for
| | 03:48 | desktop computer these days.
| | 03:49 | So this is but one scenario.
| | 03:52 | This chart shows just a few other ideas
of amount of RAM installed, frame size,
| | 03:58 | frame rate, bit depth and what sort of
RAM Preview durations you can expect if
| | 04:03 | you're running just After Effects and
you're not using up the RAM with a bunch
| | 04:05 | of other applications.
| | 04:06 | Now as you can see, basically the more
RAM you have in your computer and the
| | 04:10 | larger the frame size you're working
with, the bigger the advantage of working
| | 04:13 | in After Effects CS5
versus the 32-bit native CS4.
| | 04:18 | So in short, when you upgrade to
After Effects CS5, not only do you need a
| | 04:22 | 64-bit operating system, you want as
much of RAM as you can load in there.
| | 04:27 | You'll avoid unable to allocate image
buffer messages, you'll be able to preview
| | 04:31 | more including more compositions, things
for seeing the cache longer, and you'll
| | 04:37 | also be able to allocate more memory
to multiprocessors when you're doing
| | 04:41 | multiprocessor rendering.
| | 04:42 | We will talk about that next.
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| Memory management| 00:03 | Now not just After Effects is 64-
bit native in Creative Suite 5.
| | 00:07 | The other video applications like
Premiere, Encore and Adobe Media Encoder are
| | 00:12 | also 64-bit native and an advantage of
this is they all share the memory and you
| | 00:17 | can manage their memory as one giant pool.
| | 00:19 | For example if I have After Effects 4,
I go to its Preferences > Memory &
| | 00:24 | Multiprocessing, I see that I'm
currently running After Effects, Premiere, and
| | 00:29 | Adobe Media Encoder and Adobe Encore is
currently not running and here's how I
| | 00:33 | divide up my memory.
| | 00:34 | I've got 16 gig in this machine.
| | 00:36 | I decide how much to reserve for other
programs including the operating system itself.
| | 00:42 | 3 is the default and it's a good setting.
| | 00:44 | The remaining pool is divided among
these programs and it'll be dynamically
| | 00:47 | allocated between them as needed.
| | 00:49 | You don't need to manage it.
| | 00:51 | If you are curious to what's going on,
you can go down to the Details panel and
| | 00:55 | you can see what's the minimum
amount of memory that they need.
| | 00:57 | What's the Maximum Allowed Memory under
the current allocation and again Adobe
| | 01:02 | is managing this for you.
| | 01:03 | You don't need to worry about it.
| | 01:05 | And the Current Priority.
| | 01:06 | Currently After Effects has 4
so it gets the highest priority.
| | 01:09 | That's a subtle refinement you'll
usually not even need to worry about.
| | 01:13 | Another subtle refinement comes in the
area of Multiprocessing inside After Effects.
| | 01:18 | When I Render Multiple Frames
Simultaneously, I get the same old issue of how
| | 01:22 | many cores I have, how many do I
reserve for other applications.
| | 01:26 | I typically reserve at least two, so I
can go to the Finder, check e-mail, check
| | 01:30 | websites while I'm rendering, things like that.
| | 01:33 | And you can decide how much
memory to allocate per background CPU.
| | 01:38 | Now when you do have Multiprocessing
enabled on After Effects, what it's doing
| | 01:42 | is launching copies of itself in the background.
| | 01:46 | Each of those copies running in the
background get a copy of your project file
| | 01:49 | on your sources and they're rendering
frames in parallel and throwing them into
| | 01:53 | the final pool which is assembled
either into your render or your RAM Preview.
| | 01:57 | You can decide how much memory each of
those background versions of After Effects get.
| | 02:02 | The default is three quarters of a gig.
| | 02:04 | I personally think at least 1-1 1/2
is the minimum I'm comfortable with.
| | 02:09 | You can see why you might want to stuff all
the RAM you possibly can into your computer.
| | 02:13 | There's been another subtle enhancement
to this feature inside After Effects CS5.
| | 02:18 | Previously the foreground copy of After
Effects just gathered together all the frames.
| | 02:22 | It was the background copies
that did all of the rendering.
| | 02:25 | However, they all take up RAM,
shortening your RAM Preview.
| | 02:29 | In CS5 as your RAM starts to fill up,
the background copies of After Effects
| | 02:35 | shut down, release the RAM, the
foreground copy takes over and does
| | 02:40 | additional rendering.
| | 02:41 | So you get a longer preview out of CS5.
| | 02:43 | That's a nice little touch.
| | 02:45 | All this begs the question, well,
how much RAM should you have installed?
| | 02:49 | Well, Adobe has set up a web
page with recommendations on
| | 02:53 | configurations including RAM.
| | 02:56 | They break up their recommended
configurations based on baseline,
| | 03:00 | high-performance or never worry about memory.
| | 03:03 | The way that After Effects works though
is the frame size that really dictates
| | 03:07 | how much RAM you're going to need.
| | 03:09 | You could be working on small web
video, but if you've got a 20,000 pixel
| | 03:14 | image of the universe in there,
that's going to trip all your RAM and slow
| | 03:16 | down your renderer.
| | 03:17 | So I think of RAM requirements in
terms of how big of a frame I'm working on.
| | 03:22 | I'm working just in standard def or web video?
| | 03:24 | 4 gig is the baseline.
| | 03:27 | I might want to have
more in my machine if I can.
| | 03:28 | If I'm working on high-def, at least 8 gig.
| | 03:32 | I'd feel more comfortable with a 16 gig.
| | 03:35 | And if I was working on film or
other digital cinema formats, I'd really
| | 03:39 | consider having at least
16 gig on my workstation.
| | 03:41 | I'd feel comfortable if I had even more.
| | 03:44 | Now how much you can stuff into your
computer is partially restricted by what
| | 03:49 | operating system you're running.
| | 03:50 | Again, if you're running Windows, the
version of Windows you choose limits how
| | 03:56 | much memory can be accessed in 64-bit
mode, and again you need to have a 64-bit
| | 04:01 | version of an operating
system to run After Effects CS5.
| | 04:05 | The short advice is, avoid the Home editions.
| | 04:08 | The Home editions have limits on
how much memory can be accessed.
| | 04:12 | Professional through
Ultimate has basically no limits.
| | 04:15 | It's how much you can
basically stuff in your computer.
| | 04:17 | It's that way for Windows 7 and
it's the same for Windows Vista.
| | 04:22 | Again the Home versions are limited.
| | 04:24 | Business through Ultimate don't have limits;
| | 04:27 | basically how much can you put in your computer.
| | 04:28 | Now the Mac has a
different set of gotchas to it.
| | 04:32 | In most cases if you've got a MacPro
tower, you put 32 gigs in it and that's
| | 04:36 | the maximum amount of memory that can be
currently accessed by the Mac operating system.
| | 04:41 | There is an exception though.
| | 04:42 | If you're running Snow Leopard OS 10.6,
if you hold down the 6 and the 4 keys
| | 04:47 | when you boot, you'll boot
Snow Leopard into a 64-bit kernel.
| | 04:52 | This will allow it to
access up to 64 gigs in a MacPro.
| | 04:57 | So that's something to keep in mind
if you are working in digital cinema or
| | 04:59 | really difficult jobs.
| | 05:00 | You can get a lot of memory into the Mac.
| | 05:02 | You just have to boot 64-bit kernel mode.
| | 05:05 | Laptops, it comes down to basically
how much memory you can stuff into them.
| | 05:09 | As long as you're not using a Windows
Home edition you can access all the memory
| | 05:13 | you can put into that laptop these days.
| | 05:15 | So that's basically the idea of memory
allocation and how much RAM you might
| | 05:19 | want to put into machine to
really take advantage of CS5.
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2. Roto BrushRoto Brush overview and workflow| 00:03 | The Roto Brush is probably the most
important new feature in After Effects CS5.
| | 00:08 | With Roto Brush you draw just
general brushstrokes, saying here's the
| | 00:12 | foreground, here's the background, and
Roto Brush will automatically detect the
| | 00:16 | edge between that foreground and background.
| | 00:20 | You don't have to carefully draw a mask edge.
| | 00:22 | You don't have to
carefully paint along the edge.
| | 00:24 | It will find the difference between
foreground and background for you.
| | 00:28 | What's really important is that
it does it across multiple frames.
| | 00:32 | You don't need to do this
every single frame yourself.
| | 00:34 | It looks the foreground and
background, does motion prediction following
| | 00:39 | things as it moves from frame-to-
frame and adjusts the map boundaries to
| | 00:43 | follow that motion in the shot.
| | 00:44 | It's pretty easy to make
corrections in case it makes a mistake.
| | 00:46 | Now Roto Brush is not magic.
| | 00:49 | It's not going to give you a
perfect matte the first time.
| | 00:52 | You are going to need to do a little
bit of work and cleaning up edges and
| | 00:55 | correcting the way it doesn't follow,
and you will probably need to clean some
| | 00:59 | stuff up later on post.
| | 01:00 | Add paint strokes or add mask shapes.
| | 01:02 | But it's going to be a lot faster than
having a hand-cut a mask or hand-paint an
| | 01:07 | object every single frame of a long shot.
| | 01:09 | So let me show you how you use Roto Brush.
| | 01:11 | I kind of break the process into three steps.
| | 01:14 | One, come up with a good base reference frame.
| | 01:17 | Really define the foreground and
the background to give Roto Brush good
| | 01:21 | information to work from.
| | 01:22 | Two, propagate that information across
all the frames in the clip, following all
| | 01:27 | the motion that takes place in the clip.
| | 01:30 | Then three, refining that matte,
cleaning up the edges, taking motion blur on
| | 01:34 | edges into account, decontaminating
colors spill around the edges, and other
| | 01:38 | cleanups you need to do.
| | 01:39 | And after you've done that,
you're going to have a lot of fun.
| | 01:42 | So let's dive in!
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| Creating a base frame| 00:03 | So here I have a shot that I want to root.
| | 00:05 | I'm going to drag the Time Marker
through time and you can see it's a hand-held
| | 00:09 | camera and he is moving.
| | 00:11 | This would take a bit of work to do
with masking or traditional paint.
| | 00:16 | What I want to do is find a frame where
he is best represented, most visible in
| | 00:21 | the frame, like right
around there is pretty good.
| | 00:24 | I don't want to start where he's out of
frame because that's going to be harder
| | 00:27 | to teach Roto Brush what to
keep and what to throw away.
| | 00:30 | I want as much of him in the frame as
possible, and that's a good starting
| | 00:33 | point right about there.
| | 00:35 | Second, all Roto Brush work
takes place in the Layer panel.
| | 00:40 | So you need to double-click your
layer to open up the Layer panel.
| | 00:44 | Now you select the brand new Roto Brush tool.
| | 00:47 | It's up here, with a little
man holding a very large brush.
| | 00:51 | Once you've selected that tool,
your cursor now becomes a green cross.
| | 00:57 | This is basically your brush.
| | 01:00 | To resize your brush, hold Command on
Mac or Ctrl on Windows and drag to make
| | 01:05 | the brush smaller or bigger.
| | 01:08 | Now you don't need to be precise to start with.
| | 01:10 | I usually start with a fairly large
brush when I make my initial strokes.
| | 01:14 | A green circle with a green plus means add
this to the foreground, define my foreground.
| | 01:20 | I'm going to start in his hair and just drag a
rough shape down through his body and release.
| | 01:28 | This pink outline is the segmentation boundary.
| | 01:32 | This is the area that Roto Brush has auto-
detected based on that initial stroke you drew.
| | 01:38 | I had to drew down to his left side,
and you see got a fair amount to the
| | 01:41 | left side of his body.
| | 01:43 | Let's add more area to the right and
basically teach Roto Brush more areas to
| | 01:48 | include in the foreground. Release.
| | 01:51 | Now it's got that area in.
| | 01:54 | Optional but not required is also
teaching Roto Brush what's in the background.
| | 01:59 | To do that you hold down Option or Mac
or Alt on Windows, the green circle turns
| | 02:04 | to a red circle with a minus sign, and
you can make just some general strokes
| | 02:08 | and say, "Roto Brush, this
is background, exclude those."
| | 02:13 | Once you have this very general
drawing done, now you need to go in and start
| | 02:18 | doing some detail work to pick up the
little bits of reflections and highlights
| | 02:22 | and edges of hair the
Roto Brush might have missed.
| | 02:25 | To do that you'd probably want a smaller brush.
| | 02:26 | So I'll hold Command on Mac, Ctrl on
Windows, go down to a smaller brush size,
| | 02:31 | and now just stroking in
these areas I've missed.
| | 02:35 | I tend to start in an area that Roto
Brush has already detected, then drag
| | 02:39 | into my new area to help bridge and
teach what's good and how that connects to
| | 02:44 | the areas around it.
| | 02:46 | Pick up this stray piece of his jacket
through here and teach Roto Brush that area.
| | 02:52 | Now it's important to give
Roto Brush good information.
| | 02:55 | If you accidentally drag outside and
draw a green foreground stroke against the
| | 03:00 | background ,you see Roto Brush
thinks, "well, I have to include that."
| | 03:03 | The best thing to do this point is to undo
and then draw again to make a new stroke.
| | 03:12 | Now if Roto Brush didn't get all of
your intentions on your first stroke, there
| | 03:17 | is no need to undo that.
| | 03:18 | Just keep adding more strokes
until Roto Brush gets it right.
| | 03:22 | And if Roto Brush grabs too much area,
just hold down Option+Alt and teach it
| | 03:27 | what not to include.
| | 03:29 | It's never bad to give
Roto Brush more information;
| | 03:31 | just don't give it wrong information.
| | 03:33 | Okay, let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit.
| | 03:36 | I have a mouse with a scroll wheel so
I'll scroll forward to zoom in a little
| | 03:39 | bit further, hold down the Spacebar to pan
around the image, see how good of an edge I have.
| | 03:44 | I'll go ahead and add some more details here.
| | 03:49 | Teach a little bit more of this
jacket to include. There we go.
| | 03:53 | Even though this is a soft edge,
Roto Brush is doing a pretty good job of
| | 03:57 | differentiating between
foreground and background.
| | 04:00 | It's not so bad there either.
| | 04:05 | I'm working on the base frame.
| | 04:07 | This is the frame that Roto Brush is
going to use to try to find similar areas
| | 04:12 | before and after it in time.
| | 04:13 | This little gold bar here marks what
the base frame is and you might have
| | 04:18 | noticed this pattern of gray arrows
going before and after my base frame.
| | 04:22 | That's how far a Roto Brush is
trying to predict my strokes.
| | 04:25 | So it's really important
that I get this frame good.
| | 04:28 | I'm going to spend a little bit of time,
going around, picking up things like
| | 04:31 | hair around his ears,
anything I want to include.
| | 04:34 | If I need a smaller brush, I'll just
try the smaller brush and say include that
| | 04:39 | little area right there.
| | 04:40 | The side of the head is looking pretty good.
| | 04:44 | You're going to have some rough
areas around here where your pink outline
| | 04:48 | doesn't exactly match the hair.
| | 04:50 | That's not so bad because you'll be
able to really refine these edges with
| | 04:54 | partial transparencies later on.
| | 04:56 | For example this sharp corner by his ear,
well, we can play around the smoothing
| | 05:00 | parameter later on, but I can still
hold Option+Alt and say let's go into that
| | 05:03 | area and help exclude more of it.
| | 05:06 | And that's to teach Roto Brush more of
what's a foreground and what's a background.
| | 05:09 | Now, how is his jacket edge doing?
| | 05:12 | It's looking pretty good, that's looking
good, top of his hair is looking pretty good.
| | 05:18 | Okay, I am going to hold Shift+Forward Slash.
| | 05:21 | Re-center my image.
| | 05:23 | Now I have my base frame.
| | 05:25 | Now again this pink segmentation
boundary shows me the line Roto Brush is
| | 05:30 | drawing between the foreground and background.
| | 05:33 | It's toggled on and off with this new
button down here in the Layer panel called
| | 05:36 | the Toggle Alpha Boundary.
| | 05:37 | When I toggle it off, it actually shows me
my object cut out against the background.
| | 05:43 | An this is a pretty good start.
| | 05:45 | I wouldn't be too worried about how
rough these edges are, because we're going
| | 05:49 | to refine these later on,
but we're off to a good start.
| | 05:52 | I'm going to turn my segmentation
boundary back on because it helps me visualize
| | 05:55 | what's going on and see what areas I
need to add, and lets me see areas beyond
| | 05:59 | my foreground in case I
need to add or subtract them.
| | 06:02 | Okay, now that we have a good base
frame, it's time to propagate that base
| | 06:07 | earlier and later in time.
| | 06:09 | Use what I've taught Roto Brush to go
ahead and automatically generate mattes
| | 06:13 | for surrounding frames.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Propagating the base| 00:03 | Now that we have defined a good base
frame with Roto Brush, Roto Brush is going
| | 00:08 | to use that information to try to
predict what the matte should look like in
| | 00:12 | frames earlier and later in time.
| | 00:15 | It actually uses a form of motion
estimation to determine if an object is moving
| | 00:19 | and to try to follow the edges
as they move from frame to frame.
| | 00:23 | Your job is helping make sure that
Roto Brush stays on the right track as it
| | 00:27 | propagates that information
forward and backwards in time.
| | 00:30 | The best way to work with Roto Brush
is to start with your current frame and
| | 00:34 | then jump ahead or
behind a few frames at a time.
| | 00:38 | Roto Brush will calculate the
intermediate frames and show you this is where it
| | 00:42 | thinks the segmentation boundary
should be now. It's pretty good.
| | 00:45 | We've got a little bit of dust here in
the corner and I'll come and address that
| | 00:48 | a little bit later on.
| | 00:49 | If you're finding that when you jump a
few frames earlier or later from your
| | 00:53 | base frame, the Roto Brush is making big
mistakes, you can go to the Propagation
| | 00:59 | settings for Roto Brush and start to
tweak those and basically teach Roto Brush
| | 01:03 | a better way of following motion.
| | 01:05 | You can start off by saying, well,
where is Roto Brush searching for motion?
| | 01:09 | I'll go ahead and turn on the search region.
| | 01:11 | This yellow area basically says,
"based on the motion in the frame, this is
| | 01:15 | where I'm searching to see
where the edge is moved to."
| | 01:19 | You can go ahead and reduce the
search region, which will make Roto Brush
| | 01:23 | faster, or if there is fast motion, you
might need to increase it, so that Roto
| | 01:27 | Brush looks further for edge movements.
| | 01:31 | Motion Threshold and Motion Damping say,
hey, how much does an edge need to move
| | 01:38 | before Roto Brush has to start
thinking about moving that matte edge?
| | 01:42 | If you have got noisy footage with
film grain in and such, you may get a
| | 01:45 | phenomenon known as edge chatter where a
supposedly stationary edge will seem to
| | 01:50 | vibrate or tear apart because of that
noise, that film grain, is giving you a
| | 01:55 | false sense of movement.
| | 01:57 | Threshold and Damping allow you
to help control what's going on.
| | 02:01 | Roto Brush has a couple of
different ways of looking for edge movement.
| | 02:04 | You can either say well, where do you
think it should have moved to, bias your
| | 02:09 | prediction based on that, or look at
where the most recent adjacent frames edge
| | 02:14 | was, bias your prediction towards that.
| | 02:17 | Balanced tends to work best for most
situations but again, if you've got a
| | 02:21 | problematic frame, you can try these
different settings and see which is
| | 02:24 | giving you better results.
| | 02:26 | Similarly, if you're really having
trouble tracking something, particularly with
| | 02:29 | a lot of motion blur, this Use
Alternate Color method option just changes the
| | 02:35 | algorithm slightly inside of Roto
Brush and gives slightly different results.
| | 02:39 | Again, if you're having trouble, try
the alternate method to see if it gives
| | 02:43 | you a better result.
| | 02:44 | Otherwise you can ignore it.
| | 02:46 | Anyway, that's the technically
correct approach to using Roto Brush.
| | 02:51 | You can just use the brute force
approach of return to your base frame, move
| | 02:55 | forward or backward one frame at a
time, and then correct any mistakes Roto
| | 02:59 | Brush may have made.
| | 03:01 | Now if you have an extended keyboard,
you can use Page Up and Page Down to move
| | 03:04 | forward and backwards.
| | 03:05 | While Roto Brush is active, you can
also use the numbers 1 and 2 above the
| | 03:10 | normal alphanumeric portion of the
keyboard to move forward and later.
| | 03:13 | I'll press 1 to move
backward one frame at a time.
| | 03:16 | I'll press 2 to move forward a frame at a time.
| | 03:19 | So I'm going to step backwards through the
shot and see where Roto Brush makes mistakes.
| | 03:23 | Press 1 again, check my edge carefully,
and I'm seeing it is trying to miss a
| | 03:28 | little bit of his jacket here.
| | 03:29 | So at this frame, I am going to go
ahead and zoom in slightly, pan over to it,
| | 03:33 | and just say, hey Roto Brush,
include that in your search as well.
| | 03:39 | Maybe a little bit of
this very blurry edge here.
| | 03:42 | Once you've made correction strokes
like this, Roto Brush will take that
| | 03:46 | correction and propagate that correction in
the direction these span arrows are pointing.
| | 03:52 | So if they're pointing back away
earlier in time from the base frame, any
| | 03:57 | changes you make here will be
propagated in this direction.
| | 03:59 | If I was to make changes here on the
other side where the arrows are pointing
| | 04:03 | forward from my base frame, any
changes I make will be propagated forward.
| | 04:06 | So I'm going to go ahead and keep
moving back through this and teach Roto
| | 04:12 | Brush any mistakes that it's making so it can
better pick these things up on subsequent frames.
| | 04:19 | And I might want to look across the
whole frame, not just that one area, because
| | 04:23 | it does change like you see this
whole area of noise here in the corner?
| | 04:26 | That's Roto Brush picking up a
piece of lint that it shouldn't.
| | 04:29 | So hold down the Option or Alt key
and say just ignore that little piece.
| | 04:33 | Make sure I didn't miss that-- Oh yeah,
I did miss on that frame. Here we go.
| | 04:40 | And you can just go ahead
and say, "don't pick that up."
| | 04:45 | There, there, there.
| | 04:48 | Now you see it's missing
that lint in subsequent frames.
| | 04:52 | It has learned that little piece
of information that I taught it.
| | 04:55 | I'll go ahead and get rid of that bump there.
| | 04:58 | Any other problems around here?
| | 04:59 | It depends whether or not I really want
to keep this fuzz on the back of his neck.
| | 05:06 | As it comes into the frame, let's
go ahead and try to capture that.
| | 05:09 | And a little bit around his ear there
and you see it's doing a reasonably good
| | 05:13 | job automatically catching
that in subsequent frames.
| | 05:19 | Now, it's picked it up more as it
comes into the frame. Good job!
| | 05:25 | And I'll keep following Roto Brush
earlier in time, fixing these edges along
| | 05:31 | the jacket, etcetera.
| | 05:32 | Now it may seem that this is being a
little bit tedious, having to make these
| | 05:36 | little corrections every
single frame. But trust me.
| | 05:39 | Making these rough strokes is a
lot less time consuming than if I was
| | 05:44 | actually having to correct a mask
outline or draw a new paint stroke from
| | 05:48 | scratch every single frame.
| | 05:50 | Now, during this propagation period,
you really do want to go through every
| | 05:55 | one of these frames and make a
correction on every frame you can to improve
| | 05:59 | your matte outline.
| | 06:01 | I'm not going to make you sit
through me doing all that work now.
| | 06:03 | I'm going to go ahead and correct these frames.
| | 06:05 | We'll jump a little bit ahead in time
and I'll show you how to deal with some
| | 06:07 | other issues in Roto
Brush's propagation as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Propagation gotchas| 00:03 | It's a few minutes later.
| | 00:04 | I am pretty far along propagating my
segmentation boundary throughout the entire clip.
| | 00:09 | I just want to show you a couple of
issues I ran into, so you know how to deal
| | 00:12 | with them when you come across them.
| | 00:14 | Now as I start to move later in time, I
had the issue where his head went out of
| | 00:18 | frame and as his head comes back into
frame, Roto Brush has a hard time figuring
| | 00:23 | out what to do with this boundary.
| | 00:26 | For example, if I step forward one
frame, Page Down or press 2, you will
| | 00:29 | see these little areas pop up that are a gap
between his white hair and smoky background.
| | 00:35 | I can hold down Option or Alt, exclude
that, same for this other side, and go to
| | 00:41 | the next frame, and I've
got the same problem again.
| | 00:44 | I am going to zoom in a little
bit, Option or Alt, exclude that.
| | 00:49 | Go down another frame and now
I've got a little bit more again.
| | 00:52 | I can keep doing that or I can say,
you know really what I have here is a
| | 00:58 | problem with his head reentering the frame.
| | 01:02 | What if we start another base frame
later in time where he is already fully in
| | 01:07 | frame and work backwards from there?
| | 01:08 | Well, here is how to go about it.
| | 01:10 | We'll backup a little later in
time to where he is kind of maxed out,
| | 01:13 | right around there.
| | 01:16 | These grey arrows are the Roto Brush
span, how many frames Roto Brush is
| | 01:22 | trying to predict my most recent brush strokes
to come up with the matte on subsequent frames.
| | 01:27 | It automatically goes 20 frames
out from your last brush stroke.
| | 01:31 | You can trim this area.
| | 01:33 | If I put my cursor here, I get double
arrows and I drag back and say, you know what?
| | 01:38 | Don't extend the span any further than that.
| | 01:40 | I will center my image again, and
you will see the previous frame.
| | 01:44 | I have got a segmentation boundary.
| | 01:46 | The next frame, the boundary
is around the entire frame.
| | 01:49 | I am beyond my span.
| | 01:51 | Roto Brush no longer has information
that it is willing to use to predict.
| | 01:54 | So instead, I want to go to the very
end of this clip where he is back into
| | 02:01 | frame the most, maybe right around there,
and I am going to start a new base frame.
| | 02:06 | You could have more than one base
frame in a project and it is good to start
| | 02:10 | from these representative or
key frames to propagate out from.
| | 02:15 | I will hold down Command or Ctrl, get a
wider brush again, and do this process
| | 02:20 | over that you saw earlier.
| | 02:21 | There is part of my stroke, do the
other part of his body here, go to a smaller
| | 02:28 | brush size, do some cleaning
up, click there, there, there.
| | 02:33 |
| | 02:36 | A little bit through the collar.
| | 02:40 | Speaking of collar, we
need to pick that up. Good.
| | 02:42 | A little bit on his jacket there, and there.
| | 02:48 | And I am going to just rush through this
rather than make you sit through a bunch of tedium.
| | 02:51 | Now that I have made a new base frame,
signified by this new gold bar, you see
| | 02:56 | again I have arrows going before and after in
time, and it is the same deal all over again.
| | 03:01 | Step backwards.
| | 03:03 | Roto Brush will predict from
that base frame back in time.
| | 03:07 | Now you see I have less issue with
the head, because as his head exits the
| | 03:11 | frame, it is much easier for Roto Brush
to predict what is going on than having
| | 03:16 | unseen material enter the frame.
| | 03:18 | That is the reason why I made a base
frame later in time when his head was fully
| | 03:22 | visible, just to make it easier in Roto
Brush to predict what's going on. Okay.
| | 03:27 | Now I got these two spans joined
up and let's go down to the end.
| | 03:30 | Here's another thing about Roto Brush.
| | 03:32 | This green bar is just like your
green cache bar in the Timeline panel.
| | 03:38 | If you jump several frames ahead, not
only does Rotor Brush need to calculate
| | 03:41 | that new frame, it needs to
calculate all of the intermediate frames.
| | 03:45 | So say I just pressed End
to jump to the last frame.
| | 03:49 | You'll see this message
that Roto Brush is propagating.
| | 03:53 | Predicting frame by frame where the matte
should be until it ends up on my last frame.
| | 03:57 | And there we are.
| | 03:59 | We now have a segmentation boundary
that lasts for the entire duration of this
| | 04:04 | clip and it did take less time
than hand masking or hand painting.
| | 04:09 | As I intimated earlier, there are a
couple of ways of looking at this.
| | 04:11 | I can turn off the boundary and just see
the background, either the transparency
| | 04:16 | grid or the background color of the comp.
| | 04:19 | If you are more of a Photoshop type of
person where you are used to having a red
| | 04:22 | alpha overlay, you can look at it that way.
| | 04:24 | You can even change the color of the
overlay and change the opacity, so you can
| | 04:28 | look at the background versus your
cutout or you can just go ahead and look at a
| | 04:33 | black and white matte.
| | 04:35 | And again, this black and white matte at this
stage in the process does look a little rough.
| | 04:40 | Part of it is I am looking at
an intermediate identification.
| | 04:42 | I will go to 100%, just get a clean edge here.
| | 04:46 | But also at this point, I
haven't refined my matte.
| | 04:49 | This is a basic one-pixel
tolerance outline around this guy.
| | 04:53 | In the next movie, I am going to show
you how to refine this matte to create a
| | 04:58 | much cleaner anti-aliased edge that
even takes motion blur into account.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining the matte| 00:03 | I finished creating my segmentation boundary.
| | 00:05 | I have created a couple of base frames,
these gold bars and I've propagated that
| | 00:10 | initial information
throughout the link to this clip.
| | 00:13 | Next I want to refine the matte outline
and there is a few ways of going about it.
| | 00:18 | You might have noticed that this
pink outline, the segmentation boundary,
| | 00:22 | doesn't exactly follow his hair.
| | 00:24 | You can decide how closely or
loosely to follow that hair.
| | 00:28 | That's the smoothing parameter.
| | 00:29 | For example, if I was to take smoothing
down to 0, you can see now we have got
| | 00:33 | some crinkles that follow his hair in
much more detail, particularly as I go
| | 00:38 | from frame to frame.
| | 00:40 | If I decided I didn't want that much
detail, if I want a more feathered outline,
| | 00:43 | I'll go ahead and increase smoothing
to a higher value like 5 and now it just
| | 00:47 | creates a basic smooth boundary.
| | 00:50 | If you want to see what that looks
like, you can turn off the segmentation
| | 00:53 | boundary, the alpha boundary, and look at it.
| | 00:55 | It either gets a checkerboard or
against just a black background.
| | 00:59 | In addition to having a smooth or sharp
outline, you can decide how much feather
| | 01:06 | there is around that outline.
| | 01:08 | Basically, how wide the
anti-aliasing falloff is.
| | 01:11 | Feather only really comes into play
if Smooth has a value other than 0.
| | 01:14 | So let me go to 1 where it's smoothed
out little bit, increase Feather to 100%.
| | 01:19 | Now, you see you have a much more anti-
aliased falloff than if I was to put the
| | 01:23 | Feather down to say 0, which
is not anti-aliased at all.
| | 01:26 | I'll go around 50 for now.
| | 01:28 | Additionally, if you have got problems
either with the edge being eroded away or
| | 01:33 | if you are seeing part of the
background when you shouldn't, you can go ahead
| | 01:35 | and change the Choke percentage.
| | 01:37 | I am just going to go ahead and do
this until I no longer see that white
| | 01:40 | contamination along the edge.
| | 01:41 | Turn around, there.
| | 01:43 | That's a good looking edge.
| | 01:45 | Alpha boundary, black background color.
| | 01:49 | But these are but crude tools.
| | 01:50 | The best tool of all is
the Refine Matte checkbox.
| | 01:54 | As soon as you turn that on, a few things go on.
| | 01:57 | One, the edge is much better smoothed,
particularly taking partial transparency
| | 02:03 | and Motion Blur into account as he moves.
| | 02:06 | You see on these frames, he is moving
less, there is less blur around the edges.
| | 02:15 | And when he is moving more,
there is more of a blurred edge.
| | 02:17 | This is even more obvious when we view
just the black and white alpha channel.
| | 02:22 | Particularly if I go around here
where he is moving particularly fast, you
| | 02:24 | can really see how much blur is going on
as he pulls his head back in this direction.
| | 02:28 | This side of his face is being
blurred in the direction he is moving.
| | 02:31 | Since the collar lines up with the
direction he is moving, it's not as blurred.
| | 02:35 | So it's not an all around blur,
it's not an all around feather.
| | 02:39 | It is indeed a motion-predicted motion blur.
| | 02:42 | Now, right around here, I am seeing
just a little bit of strobing going on.
| | 02:48 | I probably need to use more Motion Blur samples.
| | 02:51 | Go up to number like 16, and get
a much smoother Motion Blur run through there.
| | 02:56 | The Shutter Angle is at 360 right
now, which is higher than the default
| | 02:59 | and higher than normal.
| | 03:01 | The typical film camera emulation
is at 180 degrees of motion blur.
| | 03:05 | But I had it set at 360 because I
really want you to see that effect.
| | 03:08 | I'll go back down to 180.
| | 03:10 | There is a Higher Quality switch.
| | 03:12 | You don't always need it.
| | 03:13 | It does take more calculation time.
| | 03:15 | But if you are finding you have got
some problems with some edges, particularly
| | 03:18 | very blurred edges, Higher Quality
gets you a little bit more detail in those
| | 03:21 | highly blurred edges.
| | 03:23 | I'll turn off my alpha channel,
go back to my image for now.
| | 03:26 | Now, in addition to smoothing out and
automatically motion blurring that matte
| | 03:33 | outline, there is a couple other things it does.
| | 03:35 | One is Reduce Chatter and
I mentioned this earlier.
| | 03:38 | Quite often when you have noisy footage,
film grain, a lot of smoke or dust in
| | 03:42 | the air, what should be a straight, flat,
not moving edge may seem to sizzle a
| | 03:49 | little bit or chatter a little bit, just
because the prediction is thrown off by
| | 03:53 | all that noise or dust or whatever.
| | 03:56 | Reduce Chatter basically damps that
down and says "don't make that edge move."
| | 04:02 | See how much it's moving?
| | 04:03 | If it doesn't cross that
threshold, then keep it where it was.
| | 04:05 | Again, you can adjust this to taste.
| | 04:07 | Depending whether or not you are seeing
edges getting eroded away, then you have
| | 04:12 | got to reduce chatter crank too high.
| | 04:14 | Or whether or not you are noticing that the
edges are indeed sizzling when they shouldn't be.
| | 04:17 | Then reduce chatter as too low.
| | 04:20 | Another great feature
here is Decontaminate Edge.
| | 04:22 | Basically, this says remove colors spill.
| | 04:26 | Just like when you key, background
color will wrap around an object and
| | 04:30 | contaminate the color of your foreground.
| | 04:32 | This is particularly an issue in
motion blurred areas, because those are
| | 04:36 | partially transparent and the color
behind is the background, which you don't
| | 04:39 | necessarily want to see.
| | 04:40 | So, you almost always want to
have Decontaminate Edge turned on.
| | 04:44 | If you need to tweak it out, go
ahead and view exactly what area is
| | 04:49 | being decontaminated.
| | 04:51 | This white area is how far After
Effects' automatically motion estimating
| | 04:56 | needs to be contaminated.
| | 04:57 | You can go ahead and increase
the area being decontaminated.
| | 05:01 | You can play around with the
strength of the decontamination.
| | 05:08 | And then there is this additional
parameter, Extend Where Smooth, and I'll open
| | 05:12 | up this compound wider so you
can see that full wording there.
| | 05:16 | This parameter only affects edges,
which have been moved or stabilized to
| | 05:20 | reduce edge chatter.
| | 05:21 | When it's enabled, it's says
decontaminate the background color a little bit
| | 05:25 | more around these areas, because the
edge is in a different place than we
| | 05:28 | originally predicted.
| | 05:29 | And I'll turn off View map.
| | 05:34 | Now, what's really interesting about
this Refine Matte area is not only is it
| | 05:38 | extraordinarily useful for cleaning
up mattes that Roto Brush creates.
| | 05:42 | It exists as an entirely separate plug-
in you can apply to any layer with a matte.
| | 05:47 | Whether you have created with paint,
mask, keys, whatever, you can slap on that
| | 05:53 | dedicated Refine Matte plug-in that uses
all of these parameters to go ahead and
| | 05:58 | clean up your edges.
| | 05:59 | Do the predictive the motion blur,
do the spill removal, etcetera.
| | 06:03 | It's really a nice touch.
| | 06:05 | It came on free on the back of Roto Brush.
| | 06:06 | Now, before we go, I do have to say not
every piece of footage is going to be as
| | 06:12 | easy to Roto Brush as this piece was.
| | 06:15 | This one was particularly cooperative.
| | 06:17 | Other shots will be more
problematic, particularly when you have arms
| | 06:20 | swinging and legs swinging.
| | 06:21 | When you have to remove
sections between arms and legs.
| | 06:23 | It's going to take some more work.
| | 06:25 | You are going to need to spend some
more time making corrective strokes with
| | 06:29 | Roto Brush to check what
the good and bad areas are.
| | 06:33 | But what's important to note is
you don't rely on Roto Brush alone.
| | 06:38 | You can use other tools to augment Roto Brush.
| | 06:40 | For example, if there were some
problems with this black and white alpha matte,
| | 06:45 | I could use my Paint tools to
go ahead and alter this matte.
| | 06:50 | Paint on just the alpha
channel, paint on just this frame.
| | 06:55 | If I paint with white, I will
then be adding to the alpha channel.
| | 07:02 | If I am painting with black, I'll
then be removing from the alpha channel.
| | 07:06 | You can also use masking and other techniques.
| | 07:10 | So Roto Brush should not be
viewed as either works or doesn't work.
| | 07:14 | It should be viewed as this is going
to do a lot of my work for me and then I
| | 07:19 | can refine my work later on, either
playing awhile with parameters, additional
| | 07:23 | corrective strokes or by using tools
such as Paint to further clean up and
| | 07:27 | finish off the matte.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Application ideas| 00:03 | Now, that you have used Roto Brush to
create yourself a nice matte for your
| | 00:06 | shot, what you are going to do with it?
| | 00:08 | Well, there is a few obvious things.
| | 00:10 | One is background replacement.
| | 00:12 | Say you wanted to set him in different room.
| | 00:14 | You need to do two things.
| | 00:15 | One, you need to do something such as
Roto Brush to separate this foreground
| | 00:20 | from your background.
| | 00:21 | And two, you'll need to track that
background shot and apply that same tracking
| | 00:26 | to your new background, so that it has
the same motion as the old background and
| | 00:30 | all the parallax and perspective works.
| | 00:32 | That's with some traditional
rotoscoping type of application.
| | 00:34 | But additionally, you can get very creative.
| | 00:36 | Once you have separated the foreground from
the background, you can do things with it.
| | 00:40 | In this case, I have my separated foreground.
| | 00:42 | I have done a little bit of color
correction on him to make him a little bit
| | 00:45 | yellow skinned than red skinned.
| | 00:47 | I've taken a duplication of my Roto
Brush layer and I've added the layer style
| | 00:53 | Outer Glow to it, so that he's got
a nice, glow coming from around him.
| | 00:58 | I've taken another copy of the
background and just turned it into a
| | 01:03 | black-and-white image and played with
its levels a little bit, to go ahead and
| | 01:06 | put a colored version of him
over a black-and-white background.
| | 01:10 | Now, we are all familiar with movies
and commercials where, say, the actors are
| | 01:13 | in color or blank-and-white
while the background is different.
| | 01:15 | You need to put a magical glow around someone.
| | 01:18 | This is all good stuff that
you can use Roto Brush for.
| | 01:20 | But you can also think of Roto Brush
as being much more specialized and much
| | 01:24 | more localized in what you do.
| | 01:26 | Let me turn these other guys off for now.
| | 01:28 | I am going to turn off
these black-and-white effects.
| | 01:31 | Let's say that our director says you
know, "he looks just a little too old."
| | 01:37 | "He has a few too many of wrinkles on
his face, particularly around the eyes."
| | 01:40 | "Could you go in and just
smooth out his skin a little bit?"
| | 01:43 | Normally, this would require a lot of
hand masking to create what some people
| | 01:45 | called power windows, based on some
color correction suits, to create a mask
| | 01:50 | just for his face, but that's a
perfect example of using Roto Brush.
| | 01:53 | Let's center him up here.
| | 01:55 | I'll select my Roto Brush tool and just
go ahead and start creating Roto Brush
| | 02:01 | mattes for his face very quickly here.
| | 02:04 | And maybe I do want to
pick his hair around his ear.
| | 02:05 | And a little bit more into this area.
| | 02:09 | A pretty quick Roto Brush matte and it
automatically tracks from frame to frame.
| | 02:17 | Once I have that, I'll turn off my
propagation boundary, I can apply other effects.
| | 02:23 | Now, we've got a few different Blur tools.
| | 02:24 | In addition to normal Fast Blur,
etcetera, we have do have things like Smart
| | 02:28 | Blur that keeps the sharp area sharp and
blurs just the wrinkly areas like his face.
| | 02:33 | Again, I probably want to
back off away from that level.
| | 02:35 | It's a little bit around that direction.
| | 02:39 | And I'd finish of this composite by
feathering the edge and enabling Refine Matte.
| | 02:43 | So, you can use Roto Brush to create
these really quick mattes to go ahead and
| | 02:47 | selectively alter parts of the image.
| | 02:49 | Of course, the other thing you can do
is just use it to create silhouettes.
| | 02:54 | Another fun effect you see is in some
commercials, movies, etcetera is just have
| | 02:59 | silhouettes of people moving in the background.
| | 03:00 | Well, rather than having a hand mask
real footage or try to animate masks to
| | 03:05 | make them look like people, choose
some footage, quickly do a Roto Brush on
| | 03:08 | them, create a black-and-white image,
generous feathers, smooth edges.
| | 03:12 | You have got a nice silhouette.
| | 03:14 | So don't think of Roto Brush just
as "I hated root in the first place."
| | 03:17 | "Why do I want a tool to do more roto?"
| | 03:20 | Think of it as, "all of these tasks
where I just wished I could get a quick
| | 03:23 | matte, now I can do them and now I can
just take these ideas and run with them."
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. mocha and mocha shapemocha tutorial| 00:03 | One of the nicest features in After
Effects CS4 was that it came bundled with
| | 00:07 | mocha for After Effects.
| | 00:09 | Mocha is a great motion tracker from
the company called Imagineer Systems.
| | 00:13 | Well, After Effects CS5 comes
bundled with mocha version 2.
| | 00:17 | However, I know a lot of you're jumping
straight from CS3 to CS5, and frankly,
| | 00:21 | it took me awhile to get into mocha.
| | 00:23 | So before we delve in too far, first
I'd like to give you a quick tutorial
| | 00:27 | on how to do a motion track with mocha, then
we'll discuss the new features like mocha shape.
| | 00:32 | Mocha exists in the same
folder as After Effects.
| | 00:35 | Twirl open the folder and double-
click mocha for After Effects, and start.
| | 00:41 | It has a very different user interface
than After Effects, but really it's not
| | 00:45 | that hard to get used to after a while.
| | 00:47 | I'm going to go up to File > New Project.
| | 00:50 | Choose my clip that I wanted to motion track.
| | 00:54 | If it's an image sequence, just pick the
first one in the sequence. Click Open.
| | 00:59 | Decide where I want to
save my mocha project file to.
| | 01:02 | In this case, I want to go up a couple
levels and save it in the same folder as
| | 01:06 | my After Effects project. There we go.
| | 01:10 | Be careful of the options.
| | 01:11 | It does include by default the number
of frames that was in your sequence, but
| | 01:15 | the frame rate might default
to something you don't like.
| | 01:18 | For example, I note this particular
sequence is a 23.976, not 10 frames a second.
| | 01:24 | If you have interlaced material,
you must separate fields now.
| | 01:29 | You cannot separate fields after
you've gotten past this New Project screen.
| | 01:34 | So if you're working with
interlaced material, heads up.
| | 01:36 | I'll click OK, and here
is my footage inside mocha.
| | 01:40 | It starts with its own Autokey frame mode on.
| | 01:42 | It's very useful in mocha.
| | 01:44 | I would go ahead and leave it on.
| | 01:45 | So I drag through and I make the
decision that I'd like to put some more
| | 01:50 | graffiti on one of these walls.
| | 01:52 | Perhaps,this segment right here.
| | 01:54 | And you'll notice immediately, it
doesn't have too many distinct features.
| | 01:57 | | | 01:57 | But that's okay, because
mocha is not looking for specific point to track.
| | 02:02 | It's looking at the entire surface,
an entire plane it can identify and
| | 02:06 | track throughout a scene.
| | 02:08 | Okay, I'm going to track this wall.
| | 02:09 | Let's pick a frame where it's most
visible, and it seems to be most visible,
| | 02:15 | well frankly right here at the end.
| | 02:16 | That's where I get to see most of that wall.
| | 02:18 | So, I'll start my tracking shape here.
| | 02:21 | Mocha offers traditional Bezier splines,
but also its own X-Spline tool that I
| | 02:26 | actually kind of like
using for this sort of work.
| | 02:28 | Now, I don't need to be very precise.
| | 02:31 | I just need to loosely define this
wall surface that I want to track.
| | 02:36 | I'll go up here, and that
should do it, and close off my mask.
| | 02:42 | X-Splines have tension on their corners.
| | 02:44 | Go down for a very rounded corner
or pull back for a very sharp corner.
| | 02:48 | In this case, I can go ahead and pull
back and get a fairly sharp edge, and
| | 02:51 | you'll see mocha will even zoom in
for me to show me what that looks like.
| | 02:55 | I'm going to turn off that Zoom window
for now because I don't need it. Alright!
| | 03:00 | Now I have this wall surface and part
of my problem is during my track, which I
| | 03:05 | haven't done yet, this man
runs across that wall surface.
| | 03:09 | If you know from traditional tracking, any
obscuration like that will throw off your track.
| | 03:15 | So before I track, I'm going to make
an exclusion mask around him saying,
| | 03:20 | don't track this guy.
| | 03:23 | I can go ahead and make that on the same
layer as I defined my surface to track,
| | 03:27 | but a better workflow is to deselect
and put this exclusion on its own layer.
| | 03:32 | Again, I'll use X-Splines.
| | 03:34 | I'll just do something pretty rough
around him, just to help me mark where to
| | 03:40 | exclude him while he is running.
| | 03:44 | There, there, there,
there and close off my mask.
| | 03:48 | I'll drag my Current Time Indicator
back in time, and see at what point does he
| | 03:54 | really kind of go outside of the
mask, while he is in front of wall.
| | 03:57 | I'll go ahead and change my shape.
| | 03:59 | Since I have Autokey frame mode on, it
automatically places keyframe for me.
| | 04:03 | This is an Autokey frame
mode that works. I like it.
| | 04:08 | I don't need to mask him too tightly,
but I do want to have the maximum amount
| | 04:13 | of that wall from mocha to track.
| | 04:15 | So I don't want to make the exclusion
larger than I need to, but neither am I
| | 04:21 | doing rotoscoping here.
| | 04:22 | I don't need to be overly tight around him.
| | 04:24 | All right, let's just make another
rough keyframe back here earlier in time, to
| | 04:29 | maybe about right there.
| | 04:33 | And I'm sorry that you're having to
watch all this, because watching someone
| | 04:36 | else mask is in the
league of watching paint dry.
| | 04:39 | But this will give you an idea of what
you need to go through to make this work.
| | 04:44 | Pull that down there,
beyond the wall surface there.
| | 04:47 | I don't care about the back of him that much.
| | 04:50 | I get tighter on to his head.
| | 04:51 | By getting a little bit tighter on
him, at least I am giving mocha more
| | 04:56 | information to not
exclude and to enter and track.
| | 05:00 | And go back earlier, and
he is outside of that wall.
| | 05:08 | I don't need to worry about it.
| | 05:09 | And I'm going to do just a little bit
of touch up here in the middle, just a
| | 05:13 | couple extra keyframes to tighten things up.
| | 05:18 | You can select multiple points
and move them at the same time.
| | 05:21 | You could right-click on a point,
select all the points in the spline, and even
| | 05:25 | get a Moving Tool to pick up and
move the whole mask at once as well.
| | 05:28 | I'll go back to my Pick tool, which is
akin to the After Effects Selection tool,
| | 05:33 | and tighten up little bit more on him.
| | 05:34 | Oops, there is his foot.
| | 05:39 | Don't want to miss his foot. There we go.
| | 05:40 | A little tighter on the knee and the
hand here, give mocha more to track.
| | 05:48 | Okay, that's basically all I
need to make this track work.
| | 05:51 | I'm going to go back to my starting frame.
| | 05:54 | I want to track from here backwards to where
I have originally defined this wall surface.
| | 05:58 | I'm going to turn off tracking for my
exclusion layer, so that I'm tracking just
| | 06:05 | my layer that's defined the wall
surface, and say Track Backwards.
| | 06:09 | And mocha will go through and
automatically track this footage.
| | 06:13 | Rather than looking for individual points,
it's trying to track the entire plane
| | 06:19 | that's defined by my first mask outline.
| | 06:23 | And you'll see that even as this guy
goes in front of the layer, mocha does a
| | 06:28 | pretty good job of keeping
this mask where it needs to be.
| | 06:34 | And we come out on the other side intact.
| | 06:42 | And we'll finish up the track with
just a few more frames. And there we go.
| | 06:50 | I'll turn off the visibility of my
exclusion mask for now, so it doesn't
| | 06:53 | distract me, drag through, and pretty good.
| | 06:59 | Notice that mask was initially down the
central line of this dark stripe in the
| | 07:04 | wall, and it stays there throughout.
| | 07:09 | Now that I have tracked something
inside mocha and I have basic underlying
| | 07:12 | tracking data, next I want to make a surface.
| | 07:15 | A four corner surface to
corner pin my new information on to.
| | 07:19 | So, I turn on the surface, and I want to
go ahead and drag these guys into position.
| | 07:24 | Again, let's put my time marker at a
good point here, and say that I'm defining
| | 07:30 | the corners of this wall as being up
there, down here in this dark corner and
| | 07:36 | again, I'm going to use this dark
street down this concrete to kind of define
| | 07:40 | the edge there, come across there.
| | 07:42 | If I'm not sure if I have my Perspective right,
mocha has got another tool for that, Grid.
| | 07:48 | When I have got my grid turned on, I
can see how well it tracks the supposedly
| | 07:53 | fine surface of that wall.
| | 07:55 | And I could increase my grid resolution.
| | 07:57 | And here is one funny thing about mocha.
| | 07:58 | Rather than having a typical scrubber,
by default, you actually drag out a
| | 08:03 | rotation like this to
increase or decrease values.
| | 08:07 | It takes a little bit to getting used
to, but actually it's kind of handy.
| | 08:11 | Okay, now that I've got my grid in
place, I can more intelligently drag my
| | 08:16 | surface to line up with what I
think is a good parallax for this wall.
| | 08:22 | And this graffiti doesn't need to be
perfect, but it gives me a good reference.
| | 08:29 | So that's where I start, drag through
time, and the grid really shows me how
| | 08:35 | well things are tracking or not
tracking during the course of this shot.
| | 08:41 | That's holding up pretty well.
| | 08:43 | If I wanted to really tweak out this
track, there is this whole AdjustTrack
| | 08:47 | tab underneath here.
| | 08:49 | And Imagineer does have a good tutorial
online about how to do an AdjustTrack.
| | 08:53 | But for now, this is a good starting point.
| | 08:56 | I am just wanting to give you a quick lesson.
| | 08:58 | Okay, I have my track. I have my surface.
| | 09:01 | Time to export.
| | 09:02 | Export Tracking Data.
| | 09:04 | Now I'm working with an early version of mocha.
| | 09:07 | You'll probably see different choices
in these, but the one to go for is After
| | 09:11 | Effects Corner Pin (supports motion blur).
| | 09:14 | This is one of the improvements
they've made in version 2, which is bundled
| | 09:17 | with After Effects CS5.
| | 09:19 | Rather than just providing four corners,
they are now tracking the center of the
| | 09:26 | surface, and that motion now is what
can give motion blur inside After Effects.
| | 09:32 | I'll select with motion blur, copy to
my Clipboard, and save my project to be
| | 09:36 | safe, and now let's
toggle over to After Effects.
| | 09:39 | I'm going to go open up my mocha
starter, and here is my same footage again.
| | 09:45 | Okay, I need something to put on to
that wall, and I have measured that it's in
| | 09:50 | the whereabouts some 900 or so pixels
tall, 300-400 wide, and I've actually
| | 09:54 | created a precomp that includes
my graffiti roughly in that shape.
| | 10:00 | This is the precomp I want to slap on that wall.
| | 10:02 | You can prepare artwork however you like.
| | 10:04 | I'll go back to my Tracking Starter,
drag in my wall addition, and now paste my
| | 10:12 | mocha data onto this new surface.
| | 10:16 | Initially, it may not line up.
| | 10:18 | Let's go ahead and move it later in time.
| | 10:21 | That's because the footage layer that
I tracked has different dimensions than
| | 10:26 | the footage layer I'm
corner pining. Quite common.
| | 10:29 | All you need to do is reveal the anchor
point, A is the shortcut, and just scrub
| | 10:35 | your guy, your graffiti, whatever you
want to put on that wall, over into place.
| | 10:40 | I'm going to putting it up a little
bit higher like that, scoot him over a
| | 10:46 | little bit, maybe put him in a blend mode
like Overlay to blend him in that wall better.
| | 10:50 | I'm going to press U to reveal my
keyframes and you'll see I have both Corner
| | 10:55 | Pin data, and also Position, Scale and Rotation.
| | 10:58 | Again, the mocha is placing a plane and
with the Export Motion Blur option, it's
| | 11:03 | giving me Position keyframes so that I
can enable motion blur for this layer.
| | 11:07 | And just very quickly, I want to
switch to switches, turn on Motion Blur for
| | 11:11 | this layer, and turn on Motion Blur for
the overall composition, and you'll see
| | 11:16 | that now my guy is blurred as
we track through this scene.
| | 11:20 | Now press 0, queue up a quick RAM preview here.
| | 11:31 | And that's not too bad of an initial track.
| | 11:33 | I could have refined it further in mocha,
but this is just to give you a rough
| | 11:36 | idea of how to use the program.
| | 11:38 | Now in this particular shot, since this
guy is running in front of my new layer,
| | 11:43 | I'm going to need to do some
rotoscoping work to make him block out or exclude
| | 11:48 | my new graffiti when he runs in front.
| | 11:50 | And there is number of ways of doing that.
| | 11:51 | You can hand mask it, or if you
watched the previous chapter, you can use the
| | 11:55 | new Roto Brush to quickly create a matte
based on this guy and his black suit to
| | 12:00 | have him cut out your new layer
behind, just use it as a track matte.
| | 12:04 | So, that's the basics of how to track in mocha.
| | 12:07 | Now, let's get on to what's new,
mocha shape, and some ways of handling motion blur.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| mocha shape| 00:03 | In the previous movie I showed you
how to create and export a simple
| | 00:07 | motion track from mocha.
| | 00:09 | In this movie I will show you how to
export shape data, a particular outline
| | 00:14 | matte that you want to create that
follows a certain object in your footage.
| | 00:17 | I am going to go ahead and open up our
project created for me by the good guys
| | 00:21 | over at Bandito Brothers.
| | 00:22 | Select the mocha project they gave me,
and chances are if you get a project from
| | 00:27 | somebody else, it will not
be able to locate the footage.
| | 00:31 | It may have a local path on their
drive that has nothing to do with a
| | 00:35 | relative path on your drive. That's okay.
| | 00:36 | Go down to this brown folder icon
and that's how you relocate your clip.
| | 00:42 | I will click on that, go into (FOOTAGE
), Sources, go down to mocha, select the
| | 00:50 | first in my sequence, click OK and Finish.
| | 00:55 | And here is the clip.
| | 00:56 | They have gone ahead and created some
complex outlines for objects like this
| | 01:00 | tire, added metal scrap off to the
right of the screen and then the foreground
| | 01:08 | on the left side of the screen.
| | 01:09 | And this is a very complex shape that
goes over the ground, dirt, rocks, metal.
| | 01:15 | There is a piece of metal here.
| | 01:16 | So they had a lot of work to
do when they created this mask.
| | 01:19 | Now one of the new features in mocha
version 2 is per vertex feathering.
| | 01:25 | That basically says for every vertex,
every mask point you can create, you
| | 01:31 | can decide how wide the feather
should be at that point and there is a few
| | 01:36 | ways of modifying that.
| | 01:38 | You can select your vertex and
choose which tool you want to use.
| | 01:41 | You can use both, which moves the
inner and outer points together, just the
| | 01:47 | inner point or just the so
called outside or edge point.
| | 01:50 | With both, moving one vertex moves a
pair together so they keep the same
| | 01:54 | distance in between them.
| | 01:56 | If I wanted to change the
feather, I pick inner or outer.
| | 01:59 | I will go ahead and pick the inner and
say let's just move that one to have a
| | 02:03 | big feather there or a small
feather, maybe in that order like that.
| | 02:09 | I will move my outer edge point.
| | 02:10 | I will select that one instead, pull
it out a little bit, and get the precise
| | 02:15 | amount of feather that I want.
| | 02:17 | I can also edit feather numerically.
| | 02:19 | Let's say I want to have a bigger inner feather.
| | 02:22 | I will create a larger value there,
click Set, and it will move my points for me.
| | 02:28 | Here I have done it all along the entire path.
| | 02:30 | I can undo and pick just specific points
and set just those points and just they
| | 02:36 | will be offset by my Edge Width set over here.
| | 02:39 | So this is what is meant
by per vertex feathering.
| | 02:41 | You keep it tight edge along this metal,
a much looser edge around this dirt,
| | 02:46 | and custom feather your edges
depending on your source material.
| | 02:50 | Now that I have these three shapes, the
tire, the right shape, the left shape, I
| | 02:56 | want to export mattes for
these into After Effects.
| | 03:00 | If you have the full version of mocha it has
a separate ability to render a matte for you.
| | 03:05 | Mocha for After Effects does not have that
ability, but it does have Export Shape Data.
| | 03:12 | This is data which is pasted into a
special mocha shape plug-in After Effects
| | 03:17 | to create your matte.
| | 03:18 | I will say Export Shape Data. Selected layers?
| | 03:22 | Let's go ahead and do All visible
layers and again I will copy it to Clipboard.
| | 03:26 | I will switch over to After Effects,
open up my mocha starter, and here I have
| | 03:31 | got this guy running again.
| | 03:32 | Now as with any pasting of keyframes
in After Effects, it's important that
| | 03:37 | you move the time indicator to the first
frame that's supposed to get a new keyframe.
| | 03:42 | If I left it down here, my tracking
data is going to start here and just
| | 03:45 | won't match up at all.
| | 03:46 | So I am going to come back here and
select my layer and do a simple paste.
| | 03:51 | And now, press F3 to reveal my effect controls.
| | 03:56 | I have a separate mocha shape plug-in
added to this layer for each shape back
| | 04:01 | in the mocha project.
| | 04:02 | It's been named after the shapes or the
layers that were in the mocha project.
| | 04:08 | And I can turn these individually
on and off and change their opacity.
| | 04:10 | For example, if I want just the Left
Shape, I will turn these other guys off and
| | 04:14 | here's that big broad shape I had.
| | 04:16 | I can keep the per vertex feathering
that I have setup in mocha or turn it off
| | 04:20 | for a hard edged mask.
| | 04:22 | I can see the shape cutout.
| | 04:24 | I can create just a composite of a
white shape on top of my footage or give
| | 04:30 | myself just a high con, a black and
white matte based on those shapes.
| | 04:33 | Let me go back to Shape
Cutout so I can see my footage.
| | 04:36 | Now once we have this there
are a number of things we can do.
| | 04:39 | For example, say the director
came along and looked at this tire.
| | 04:44 | I will put him in Multiply mode.
| | 04:46 | And said, "you know, that tire is too dirty."
| | 04:49 | "Tires are supposed to be black."
| | 04:51 | And you try to explain to him that this
is a dirty, dusty scene and the tire is
| | 04:54 | brown, because it has dust on it.
| | 04:56 | The director says that he
doesn't care, tires are black.
| | 04:59 | So you select the tire.
| | 05:01 | You apply something like
Effect > Color Correction > Levels.
| | 05:07 | Levels has a nice new Histogram.
| | 05:08 | We will talk about that later.
| | 05:09 | You go ahead play around, let's say,
with the black point of the tire, maybe the
| | 05:13 | Gamma and make the director happy,
because now just the tire is darker.
| | 05:18 | Another approach is you
can fake depth of field blur.
| | 05:21 | I am going to put this back to
where it was, turn on all of my shapes,
| | 05:25 | and duplicate my layer.
| | 05:28 | Drag him behind, E for
effects, get rid of those.
| | 05:31 | So I have an unaltered copy of my
footage behind and my shape version in front.
| | 05:36 | Go ahead and say Effect > Blur &
Sharpen and just go ahead and do a Fast Blur
| | 05:41 | for now and blur just the objects that
have been defined with mocha shape to
| | 05:45 | give myself a fake depth of field.
| | 05:48 | Now you go ahead and apply an effect
directly like that, before and after.
| | 05:54 | When you are doing a work like this
I personally have found it better to
| | 05:57 | use mocha shape as atrack matte rather than
applying effects to the mocha shape layer.
| | 06:03 | So I am going to delete that from there.
| | 06:04 | I am going to duplicate my background
one more time and I am going to apply Fast
| | 06:10 | Blur to just that duplicate.
| | 06:13 | So I got a blurred copy of everything
and I am going to use my mocha layer as an
| | 06:19 | alpha matte for my blurred footage.
| | 06:21 | Now I've got what I think is a better
edge or at least a more control between my
| | 06:25 | mocha shape layers, what it's matting,
and my full background layer and I can
| | 06:30 | color correct them individually, etcetera.
| | 06:32 | Now I have got a fake depth of field blur.
| | 06:34 | Again, the mocha shape plug-in is
something new in After Effects CS5.
| | 06:39 | You could buy it standalone before,
but now it's actually bundled with the program.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Motion blur and mocha| 00:03 | One area of potential confusion with
mocha is how it handles motion blur in
| | 00:08 | combination with After Effects.
| | 00:10 | Because the way it does in with motion
tracking data is different than the way
| | 00:13 | it does it with shape d ata.
| | 00:15 | Now here is an example we played
around earlier where I tracked a section of
| | 00:19 | this wall and wanted to put something
fresh on that wall in After Effects and of
| | 00:24 | course, tried to match the
motion blur the best I could.
| | 00:26 | To do that, I selected my layer with a
tracking data, did export, and this menu
| | 00:33 | is going to change probably in the final
shipping version but basically I picked
| | 00:37 | the version that said After
Effects Corner Pin supports motion blur.
| | 00:41 | This adds positional data in addition
to the corner pin data to allow me to get
| | 00:46 | motion blur in After Effects.
| | 00:48 | And there are other options if you're
using Red Giant's Warp plug-in, if you
| | 00:51 | are using the excellent mochaImport script
but I've got just bare bones After Effects.
| | 00:55 | So I'll select that, copy to
clipboard, and you already saw back in After
| | 01:00 | Effects that if I wanted motion blur on
my special graffiti that I've added to
| | 01:04 | this wall, [00:01:04.9 5] a little brown
shape back there, I just need to enable
| | 01:08 | motion blur for that layer.
| | 01:10 | There is the sharp original shot.
| | 01:12 | It doesn't looks very realistic
when the things are flying by.
| | 01:17 | There it is with motion blur enabled.
| | 01:18 | It fits into the scene much better.
| | 01:21 | That's what to do for tracking data.
| | 01:23 | Shape data is different. Go back to mocha.
| | 01:27 | If you've been watching the tutorials
on Imagineer's webs ite, you might have
| | 01:31 | seen that tutorial for the standalone
version of mocha that has a dedicated
| | 01:35 | Motion Blur parameter.
| | 01:37 | Enabling this parameter allows it to
render mattes which have blurred edges.
| | 01:44 | However, mocha with After
Effects does not render mattes.
| | 01:49 | Instead you export shape layers.
| | 01:52 | So you don't pay any
attention to that parameter.
| | 01:54 | Instead you need to do a a bit of
playing around with the shape data.
| | 01:57 | So I going to take my shape here.
| | 01:59 | Instead of making it a motion track,
just for fun, let's use the shape data to
| | 02:02 | create our track matte.
| | 02:03 | I will export, Selected layer, copy to
clipboard, switch to After Effects, get
| | 02:08 | rid of my wall addition for now, don't need it.
| | 02:11 | Pick my original shot, make sure my
time indicator is back at the start of the
| | 02:16 | clip or at least where I started my
motion track, then paste, and now I've got
| | 02:21 | mocha shape data just for that wall segment.
| | 02:25 | Now you might have noticed that it does
not have blurred edges and even enabling
| | 02:31 | motion blur for the layer with mocha
shape is not going to add a blur to it.
| | 02:37 | You need to do a trick and this is a
universal trick which applies to anything
| | 02:42 | you want to add motion blur to in After
Effects, including footage that already
| | 02:46 | rendered say from a 3D program.
| | 02:48 | I will turn it off for now and
I want pre-compose this layer.
| | 02:52 | I want to have the shape data with its
motion and its own pre-comp, so it looks
| | 02:58 | like a fresh piece of footage to After Effects.
| | 03:01 | Layer > Pre-compose.
| | 03:02 | I'll call it mocha shape percomp.
| | 03:06 | I am going to move all attributes back,
which mean to also move my mocha shape
| | 03:12 | effect, and there is no need to open a new comp.
| | 03:15 | I'll stay where I am.
| | 03:16 | Click OK, there we go.
| | 03:18 | Now to add a motion blur to any footage
or pre-comp layer in After Effects, pick
| | 03:25 | Effect > Time > Timewarp.
| | 03:29 | We'll set just a couple of parameters here.
| | 03:31 | We've got o set the Speed to 100 or 100%.
| | 03:35 | You need to Enable Motion Blur, so turn
that on, and set the Shutter Control to
| | 03:41 | Manual rather than Automatic.
| | 03:45 | Now I can say, hey I have 180 degrees of
of motion blur, a typical filmic motion
| | 03:49 | blur for this layer, and now I've got
motion blur on my shape layer. Before, after.
| | 03:57 | V ery cool addition, particularly if I
just had a white track matte here that
| | 04:01 | I'm going to use to matte out another layer.
| | 04:03 | If I zoom in on this,
look closely to these edges.
| | 04:08 | You'll notice that there is some
ghosting or stuttering at these edges.
| | 04:11 | All you need to do is increase the
Shutter Samples to make this look better.
| | 04:15 | I recommend at least 8 samples and if that's
not smooth enough, go all the way up to 16.
| | 04:28 | And now you've got a really smooth edge.
| | 04:30 | It takes longer to render but it's worth it.
| | 04:32 | Just a give you an idea of what that
looks like on normal matte, I'll select my
| | 04:35 | Comp panel, tap Shift key,
go back to the mocha precomp.
| | 04:38 | Let's just look at this as a color
composite, as just that white shape.
| | 04:43 | Tap Shift, go back to my original comp
here, give it a moment to render, and
| | 04:51 | there is my beautiful blurred matte.
| | 04:55 | Without that motion blur trick, just
sharp edge with the default number of
| | 04:59 | samples, kind of stuttery, not a very good edge.
| | 05:05 | Trading off some render time, maybe 12 samples.
| | 05:11 | Beautiful, smooth matte edge that I
can now apply on top of other footage and
| | 05:15 | blend it into my original seen.
| | 05:17 | So that's how you add motion
blur when you're working with mocha.
| | 05:20 | But this trick with Timewarp, its universal.
| | 05:22 | You can use in other things, such as
3D renders that don't have motion blur.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Adobe RepousséRepoussé in Photoshop CS5| 00:03 | A lot of After Effects artists
like us also use Adobe Photoshop.
| | 00:06 | It's a great companion.
| | 00:08 | Therefore, I am going to take a
little detour to show you a new feature in
| | 00:11 | Photoshop CS5, the extended version.
| | 00:15 | It's called Repousse.
| | 00:16 | Repousse is a way of taking text,
shapes, masks, other selections,
| | 00:20 | extruding them with interesting bevels,
texture the sides, save it as a 3D
| | 00:26 | layered Photoshop file, and then you
can import it into After Effects and
| | 00:29 | move your camera around it.
| | 00:30 | Let me show you how that works.
| | 00:32 | I want to create a new file.
| | 00:34 | I am going to use one of
their Film & Video templates.
| | 00:38 | PAL Widescreen Square Pixel is a
good start, click OK, and let's do the
| | 00:43 | typical type extrusion.
| | 00:44 | I am going to pick a big chunky
fonts like Arial Black, big point size to
| | 00:48 | start off, like maybe 120 points,
center my paragraph, pick an interesting
| | 00:53 | color to start with.
| | 00:55 | I am kind of partial towards
things in the red gold phase.
| | 00:58 | So let's go around there to start and type
out a word like Extruded. There is my layer.
| | 01:05 | Once I have my text, I go under the
3D menu, choose Repousse, and say apply
| | 01:10 | that to my text layer.
| | 01:12 | Now it doesn't work on vectors.
| | 01:13 | It actually works on selections.
| | 01:16 | So I need to rasterize my vector-
based text into a pixel-based layer.
| | 01:21 | Go ahead and do that, wait for a moment
and then the Repousse window will open.
| | 01:26 | We'll drag to the side to see what I am doing.
| | 01:29 | I have my 3D gimbal and you can see I can go
ahead and rotate and I've got extruded text.
| | 01:34 | Now initially though this
is frankly kind of boring.
| | 01:37 | It's just square-edged extruded text
and you can go ahead and make it extruded
| | 01:43 | even deeper if you want
really hokey-looking type.
| | 01:46 | I tend to like a little bit
thinner, classier stuff myself.
| | 01:49 | I'll go to something little bit
more extreme here like out around here.
| | 01:54 | You can scale it so it's gets larger or
smaller as it scales back into the distance.
| | 02:00 | It has become bigger blown-out type or
it goes down to a small point in infinity.
| | 02:06 | These are some just typical
3D type tricks you can do.
| | 02:09 | Go back to one for now.
| | 02:13 | You can twist this along
the course of its extrusion.
| | 02:17 | So I am going to go ahead and scrub a
little bit there and you can start to
| | 02:20 | create some pretty interesting shapes
particularly when you take logos and other
| | 02:24 | interesting things and start to extrude
them, twist them, shear them, bend them,
| | 02:30 | and do some other interesting stuff.
| | 02:32 | However, that's a really
funhouse mirrors type of look.
| | 02:37 | Let's go to something a little bit
classier and play around with bevels and faces.
| | 02:43 | This is what I like to use
to make text look classier.
| | 02:45 | Now the typical Repousse look
is a puffed out inflated face.
| | 02:51 | So I am going to pick the inflation
preset, and you'll see I now have these
| | 02:56 | rounded faces on my text, like that.
| | 03:01 | That's Repousse's main
strength is inflating those faces.
| | 03:05 | You can increase the amount of
inflation, get a really drawn out and kind of
| | 03:09 | strange look, or just to something very
subtle like maybe on the order of just a
| | 03:15 | little bit inflation.
| | 03:16 | And the angle affects the
curvature of those faces.
| | 03:19 | If I go for something a little more subtle,
it'll be a little bit flatter of a face.
| | 03:25 | I can go negative and actually have
Repousse pull in the faces of the layers or
| | 03:32 | if I go to another extreme, I get
basically kind of almost a squared off sort of
| | 03:37 | bevel at some extreme here.
| | 03:39 | I like something in between and
frankly the 90 is a good starting point.
| | 03:43 | Now this inflation is one look but you can
create some standard bevel looks as well.
| | 03:48 | For example, I'll just pick this
chunky bevel as another preset.
| | 03:52 | Here's something you have
watch out for with these presets.
| | 03:55 | They haven't designed to look good with
print and print typically has a lot more
| | 04:00 | pixels in it than a video,
exception being perhaps film frames.
| | 04:05 | But if you are working on something
like a standard def file size like I am
| | 04:08 | here, you can see where these presets
create some pretty bad looking faces.
| | 04:12 | Well all you need to do is knock down
the height and width of these bevels.
| | 04:18 | I am going to pull the width down a little bit.
| | 04:21 | As I do so, you can see I get to a much
more reasonable looking extrusion here.
| | 04:29 | I'll go down further here.
| | 04:32 | That's more like what you sort of expect.
| | 04:34 | And the Height is what is
the height of that bevel.
| | 04:36 | You get your pretty typical commands.
| | 04:38 | Front, Back, or Front and Back for the bevel.
| | 04:40 | But what's really nice is this Contour pop-up.
| | 04:43 | You have many, many different shapes that
extrusion, that beveled edge, can take.
| | 04:49 | For example, let's create little bit of
a scalloped sort of look to the edge, so
| | 04:54 | I have multiple levels to it.
| | 04:55 | A little bit of a nice inward
cut bevel, different sort of edges.
| | 05:02 | So these extrusions are really worth
experimenting with to get different looks.
| | 05:07 | And then go ahead and play
around with their different heights.
| | 05:10 | I'll try another preset like this one
that has an little bit of a inset and then
| | 05:15 | a rounded, puffed-out face.
| | 05:17 | You can see that's what the contour looks like.
| | 05:19 | Again the defaults are just way too huge.
| | 05:22 | I will knock the width down to something
much more reasonable like about 10, and
| | 05:26 | then set my Height to taste.
| | 05:28 | Maybe increase the width just a
little bit here, get a little bit more
| | 05:31 | interesting of an edge, make sure
artifacts don't start to creep in. That's nice.
| | 05:37 | And I can still add the
Repousse sort of face to this.
| | 05:40 | Again that depth is way too much.
| | 05:42 | I am going to go down to one or maybe
even say 0.6 to get something a lot more
| | 05:48 | subtle, increase my angle back to 90,
which was a good default, and then pull up
| | 05:53 | the Strength to go ahead and
get that rounded Repousse face.
| | 05:58 | Or pull it down a little bit, which creates
something a bit more interesting in the texture.
| | 06:02 | Speaking of texture, you do have materials.
| | 06:05 | You can apply material presets to
all surfaces, or the faces, sides, and
| | 06:11 | bevels individually.
| | 06:12 | You can go ahead and make your own
materials, as this is Photoshop after all.
| | 06:20 | You can Load Materials,
Save Materials, etcetera.
| | 06:23 | I expect this to become
really popular on Adobe Exchange.
| | 06:26 | And just so we can see what this
is going to look like later on in
| | 06:29 | After Effects, let's go ahead and pick the
sides and just make it one of these textures.
| | 06:34 | Now these defaults are a little bit on
the hideous side but this is just to give
| | 06:38 | you an idea what things are
going to look, a bit of a wood grain.
| | 06:41 | Hideous design but what's a
product demo with at least one piece of
| | 06:45 | hideous typing design?
| | 06:47 | And again I can go ahead and pan around
this text and there is my 3D text. Click OK.
| | 06:54 | Once I have this, I basically have the
Photoshop 3D layer and if you remember in
| | 06:58 | Photoshop CS4 Extended, we got
the ability to import 3D models.
| | 07:04 | You can play around with the texturing and the
render quality by going into a separate window.
| | 07:08 | So I'll go Window > 3D.
| | 07:11 | Here is my scene with all
my various elements to it.
| | 07:14 | Drag this window a bit taller.
| | 07:17 | You have to set up your lighting in Photoshop.
| | 07:20 | You can not re-light
these layers in After Effects.
| | 07:23 | So do your lighting in here and render q uality.
| | 07:26 | Right now it's looking a bit aliased.
| | 07:27 | That's just because I'm in Interactive quality.
| | 07:30 | If I wanted it to make it look better,
I'll go to Ray Traced Draft, wait a
| | 07:38 | second while it renders this out, and
now you see I have a much higher quality.
| | 07:40 | If you're going to print, you
might want to go to Ray Traced Final.
| | 07:45 | It takes a very long time...
| | 07:47 | So we are going to head stick with
Ray Traced Draft or Interactive for now.
| | 07:51 | I did mention lights and you
can set up lights in the scene.
| | 07:53 | There are even light presets back in Repousse.
| | 07:56 | If I went to 3D > Repousse > Edit In Repousse.
| | 08:00 | That's how I get back to that special
window I was in so I can go ahead a treat
| | 08:04 | this bevels, etcetera.
| | 08:05 | I have myself here a fairly
warm scene with this golden red.
| | 08:09 | Let's go ahead and dawn lighting to my
scene, just to add little bit more color.
| | 08:13 | Now that I have my text, I just
export it as a layered Photoshop file.
| | 08:17 | Since this is a brand new file, I'll
do Command+S to Save, save it indeed as
| | 08:23 | Photoshop, go to where my other
projects have been, and save my file, extruded.
| | 08:31 | Maximize Compatibility, life is good.
| | 08:34 | That's the Photoshop end of the equation.
| | 08:37 | In the next movie, I'll show you how
to handle in After Effects, including a
| | 08:40 | gotcha about this render quality issue.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Repoussé in After Effects CS5| 00:03 | I'm back in After Effects CS5 and
I want to import my Repousse layer.
| | 00:07 | So I do a normal import, File > Import
> File, and I pick my file that I just
| | 00:16 | exported from Photoshop, my PSD file.
| | 00:18 | I must open it as a Composition.
| | 00:21 | Not as Footage, but Composition. Click Open.
| | 00:24 | It will take a while to process.
| | 00:31 | And I want to make sure that this
checkbox, Live Photoshop 3D, is enabled.
| | 00:36 | This is what will allow me to do camera
moves around these layers in After Effects.
| | 00:41 | Click OK and here is my
composition with my Repousse layer.
| | 00:45 | Repousse is render intensive.
| | 00:47 | It will take a while to
show up, but there it is.
| | 00:52 | Okay, we have a lot of layers here.
| | 00:55 | Let's sort through them.
| | 00:56 | First off, since I created my template
with a background layer, a background is
| | 01:01 | going to come in the After Effects.
| | 01:02 | Well I don't need it.
| | 01:02 | I'll just delete that for
now. I've got a camera.
| | 01:05 | That's a basic camera that was in
Photoshop and now I have two layers, Extruded
| | 01:11 | and Extruded Controller.
| | 01:13 | Controller is the layer that I want
to animate to move this layer around.
| | 01:19 | I'll take its Transform properties,
and go ahead and move things like its
| | 01:23 | Position, its Scale, its
Rotation, to do all of my movements.
| | 01:31 | These, however, are just a
dummy layer, a null object.
| | 01:35 | You can even turn off
their video switch for now.
| | 01:38 | All the rendering is happening in this
extruded layer and I'll type E and you'll
| | 01:41 | see there's a Live Photoshop 3D
plug-in applied to this layer.
| | 01:45 | I'll type F3 to open up the Effect
Controls panel and you'll see here's my
| | 01:50 | Photoshop 3D plug-in and these red
numbers are telling me that all these values
| | 01:54 | have been expressed.
| | 01:56 | Expressions are tying them to
the Extruded Controller layer.
| | 02:00 | Adobe reasons that you probably don't
want to or may not be able to find all
| | 02:04 | these parameters inside of plug-in,
so they gave you this other layer with
| | 02:08 | normal Transform which you can animate instead.
| | 02:11 | And, of course, you have your camera.
| | 02:13 | I'll type c to bring up my
universal Camera tool and just do my camera
| | 02:18 | moves around this layer.
| | 02:19 | Now you might have noticed this text
is looking pretty chunky and pretty
| | 02:24 | aliased, not elegant at all.
| | 02:27 | That's because I saved it using
that draft mode back in Photoshop.
| | 02:31 | I'd really prefer this to be ray traced.
| | 02:34 | It would render much more cleanly.
| | 02:35 | Unfortunately, the Live Photoshop 3D
effect does not have a render quality
| | 02:40 | switch in After Effects.
| | 02:42 | I felt this was a big oversight in CS4, and
unfortunately it's still with us here in CS5.
| | 02:48 | The way to remedy this is to select
the layer with the Photoshop 3D effect
| | 02:54 | and do Edit > Original.
| | 02:56 | Command+D on Mac, Ctrl+D
on Windows, edit external.
| | 02:59 | I'll go back in Photoshop and
open up my Photoshop 3D layer.
| | 03:05 | Here I can go ahead and change
the quality to Ray Traced Draft.
| | 03:09 | It'll take a moment to
render but it looks much better.
| | 03:15 | I'll save it, then I'll
toggle back to After Effects.
| | 03:19 | Once I'm in After Effects, it'll
take a moment to pick up that the file's
| | 03:22 | changed, render the ray
traced file, but here's the payoff.
| | 03:28 | That looks much nicer and you can even
see some nice shadows, some nice shading,
| | 03:33 | going on here from my
lights set up in Photoshop.
| | 03:37 | If I add lights in After Effects,
unfortunately it's not going to affect
| | 03:40 | the outcome but the lighting in Photoshop
does render pretty nicely in After Effects.
| | 03:44 | Here is the problem with Ray Traced mode.
| | 03:46 | Now my responsiveness has
gone way out the window.
| | 03:49 | I'm dragging my mouse and nothing's
happening and it literally takes this long
| | 03:54 | for it to render my new position.
| | 03:55 | That is not very interactive at all.
| | 03:59 | So here's the workaround.
| | 04:00 | Remember this quality switch in After
Effects, which weyouprobably haven't
| | 04:04 | touched in years because you've
done everything at best quality?
| | 04:08 | Well, if you have a Repousse layer
that's been saved as Ray Traced, temporarily
| | 04:13 | put this down to Draft Quality.
| | 04:15 | It'll take it a moment to change, but
once it does, you'll find the layer is
| | 04:23 | much more interactive.
| | 04:24 | So keep it in Draft Quality while
you're setting up your camera movements, your
| | 04:29 | position moves, your scales, any
animation and then when it comes time to
| | 04:34 | render, either switch the quality back
to Best at that moment or when you queue
| | 04:41 | up a render, tell it to render best
quality so it'll reach in and change that
| | 04:45 | switch just during the render.
| | 04:47 | And that's the secret to using Repousse.
| | 04:50 | Now frankly, this is no
replacement for using something like Zaxwerks
| | 04:53 | Invigorator or a real 3D program.
| | 04:56 | But if you work at a place where
they buy you the Adobe Suite such as
| | 04:59 | Production Premium and nothing else,
no other third-party software, at least
| | 05:04 | you now have some really nice
extrusion tools to extrude type logos and other
| | 05:09 | shapes that you draw.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. New EffectsWarping with FreeForm| 00:03 | One of the things we all love about After
Effects is that it comes with so many effects.
| | 00:08 | Well, CS5 is no different.
| | 00:10 | In this chapter, I'll discuss the new
effects which come with After Effects CS5
| | 00:15 | and then in the next chapter, I'll talk
about some previously existing effects
| | 00:18 | which got really nice updates.
| | 00:20 | Now the most important new effect
has got to be Digieffects FreeForm.
| | 00:24 | Some of you might remember
the old Forge FreeForm effect.
| | 00:27 | It was a way of taking any 2D
layer and warping it in 3D space.
| | 00:32 | You can even extrude other objects
like text through your 2D layer to create
| | 00:37 | | | 00:37 | something with 3D depth to it.
| | 00:39 | Well it's been updated.
| | 00:40 | It has been made 64-bit effect and
it's kind of fun to play around with.
| | 00:43 | So let's talk about that one first.
| | 00:45 | The first thing that we're going to do
is play around with warping this 2D layer.
| | 00:49 | Now I've already setup a 3D camera move.
| | 00:52 | I'll go into my Top view and you'll
see my camera lights are already setup in
| | 00:56 | the scene, but you won't see my layer yet.
| | 00:59 | The reason is these layers must be 2D layers.
| | 01:03 | Whenever you apply a 3D effect such as
FreeForm, Sphere, Invigorator, etcetera,
| | 01:11 | it must be applied to 2D layers.
| | 01:14 | The reason is that the effect is
going to do the 3D distortions.
| | 01:18 | You don't want a second copy of 3D on
top of it by also making a 3D layer.
| | 01:22 | The second thing is you'll notice I'm
going to be working at half resolution
| | 01:26 | during this tutorial.
| | 01:27 | The reason is that FreeForm is a very
powerful plug-in, but it also requires
| | 01:31 | a lot of CPU power.
| | 01:33 | So you tend to work at a lower resolution just
so you can work more quickly and interactively.
| | 01:36 | I am going to apply Effect >
Digieffects > FreeForm and you can see that my
| | 01:43 | layer is already popped into 3D space
and now reflects the camera move around it.
| | 01:50 | I did not enable the 3D
layer switch to this layer.
| | 01:53 | It just automatically reacts to my
camera because FreeForm itself is a 3D effect.
| | 01:59 | When the effect is selected, you're going
to see there's a grid placed over your layer.
| | 02:04 | This grid basically defines where
you're editing or warping points, the points
| | 02:09 | you get to pull on, exist on the layer.
| | 02:11 | They're not connected to how it renders.
| | 02:14 | That's actually done down in 3D Mesh
Quality where you set the Mesh Subdivision
| | 02:19 | to decide how smoothly your
work is going to take place.
| | 02:22 | The grid is all about giving you control points.
| | 02:24 | And speaking of control points, I'm
going to move this up to 4 just to give
| | 02:27 | myself a few more points to warp.
| | 02:29 | The Editing Controls section determines
how you get to pull these points around.
| | 02:33 | For example, when Manipulation is set to
X,Y,Z, you can grab a point and move it
| | 02:38 | out, left, right, wherever you want it to be.
| | 02:42 | If you want to just carefully pull
things out in Z space to give things depth,
| | 02:47 | make some things closer to you, some
things further away, you might want to
| | 02:50 | restrict this to just Z only.
| | 02:52 | When I do that, I can say all right, I'm
going to pull this character forward in
| | 02:57 | space so that he protrudes a little
bit and I'm going to go ahead and let it
| | 03:04 | recede a little bit where his jacket is
and where his head would actually fall
| | 03:08 | off and I'm going to push this wizard,
this mage in the background, further away
| | 03:15 | so I've got a little bit more of a 3D
perspective on that portion of the scene.
| | 03:21 | And I'll push this back there and like that.
| | 03:27 | And now when I move my camera around,
I now it actually has some depth and
| | 03:31 | dimension the way that I pulled this
particular layer out, and back again.
| | 03:36 | Of course, your warping is not
restricted strictly to 3D space.
| | 03:41 | If I was to put this back to say X,Y,Z
in any dimension, you can go ahead and
| | 03:45 | use this as a normal warping plug-in
to go ahead and do things like bend the
| | 03:48 | rock perspective down a little bit,
just to change how this is designed.
| | 03:52 | Maybe you can pull this corner up a
little bit to bring in that corner of the
| | 03:58 | room, and do other normal warpages to a layer.
| | 04:01 | Big difference with FreeForm is you can
warp in the X, Y and Z, bring things to
| | 04:06 | close to you or further away.
| | 04:08 | Once you've setup your warp, you'll
want to start to refine how well it renders
| | 04:12 | and again that's in the 3D Mesh Quality section.
| | 04:16 | Mesh Subdivision controls how smoothly
this is rendered, how many pieces it's
| | 04:22 | broken into, and how those
are interpolated in between.
| | 04:24 | 30 is a very low number.
| | 04:27 | It's good for interactivity while you're
deciding how you want to bend your layer around.
| | 04:31 | But when it comes time to actually
render this layer, you want to increase it to
| | 04:35 | at least 100, maybe even higher
to get a higher quality rendering.
| | 04:38 | If you are just curious to what your
wireframe looks like, that's what my warped
| | 04:43 | wireframe looks like.
| | 04:44 | 30, it's kind of rough, but at
something like a 100, we start to get some
| | 04:48 | smoothing to my bends as
we mover around in space.
| | 04:50 | There you get a better idea what's
going on and you'll see that this layer is
| | 04:57 | actually starting to pull
away and warp away from my grid.
| | 05:00 | Again the grid is just control points.
| | 05:02 | It's not the exact shape your
layer is going to render into.
| | 05:05 | They're just points you're pulling on
and then the Mesh Quality decides how it's
| | 05:09 | going to interpolate in
between those control points.
| | 05:12 | I'll return it to full quality for now.
| | 05:15 | Antialiasing determines how
smoothly it's going to render.
| | 05:17 | None is very fast and interactive but
again when you do a final render, you'll
| | 05:21 | probably want to increase the quality.
| | 05:23 | You notice, for example, this
aliased edge appears kind of rough.
| | 05:26 | I'll increase to Low Antialiasing and that
edge smooths up considerably right in there.
| | 05:31 | So you want to go to at least low
quality and there's some additional image
| | 05:34 | filtering as well to further smooth that out.
| | 05:36 | You have some additional
controls over how this will render.
| | 05:39 | For example, the Surface
Controls decides some basic shading.
| | 05:43 | Diffuse, Specular, and what
they refer to as Roughness.
| | 05:47 | You will notice that here's a bit of
what I refer to as glare in this image.
| | 05:50 | If you're used to working with 3D
layers in After Effects you may be familiar
| | 05:53 | with the metal parameter.
| | 05:55 | It determines whether these specular
hotspots are based on the layer's color or
| | 06:00 | on the light's color.
| | 06:01 | With FreeForm, they're
based on the light's color.
| | 06:03 | So my white light is going
to create some white glare.
| | 06:07 | You can play around a little bit
with your Diffuse and Specular settings.
| | 06:09 | I might knock down my Specular a little
bit, might bring in my Diffuse a little
| | 06:13 | bit, and work and try to balance
those out to get a look that I like.
| | 06:17 | Roughness also affects how much the
layer picks up and reflects lights.
| | 06:21 | Finally Backside Controls determines what
do you do with the backside of this layer.
| | 06:26 | If the camera was to go all the way
around it, or if you were tumble it, or
| | 06:29 | if you were even to fold this layer over on
top of itself, what would you see on the back?
| | 06:34 | You can pick any other layer
in the comp to be on the back.
| | 06:37 | Just make sure it has the aspect
ratio as the layer FreeForm's applied to.
| | 06:41 | And that's just a rough guide of how to
quickly do some mesh distortions with FreeForm.
| | 06:45 | Of course, you can take this much further.
| | 06:47 | Have a lot more resolution in the grid,
make a lot of finer control in exactly
| | 06:52 | what points you bring out, like, maybe I
want to bring out his face a little bit
| | 06:56 | more here, give him a little bit more
prominent chin, bring out his forehead a
| | 07:00 | little bit and you can keep going to town.
| | 07:02 | With a lot of work you can even do
things like bend this over into shapes, curl
| | 07:07 | it on top of itself, etcetera.
| | 07:10 | Another use for FreeForm is to give
it a displacement map where one layer's
| | 07:14 | alpha channel or luminance can be used
to displace or cause bumps in the layer
| | 07:19 | the FreeForm's applied to and I'll
talk about that in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Displacement with FreeForm| 00:03 | In this movie I'll show you how
to use Digieffect's FreeForm as a
| | 00:06 | 3D displacement map.
| | 00:08 | You can actually extrude
layers in 3D using FreeForm.
| | 00:11 | This is one my favorite
applications of this effect.
| | 00:14 | Now as before the layer you are treating
needs to be a 2D layer, 3D Layer switch
| | 00:19 | turned off, because the effect
FreeForm is going to be what adds the actual
| | 00:24 | 3Dness, the perspective distortion.
| | 00:26 | When you are doing displacement mapping,
it's just like any other compound effect.
| | 00:30 | You need to use a second layer to
provide your displacement map, and just like
| | 00:35 | with any other compound effect, you need
to do some work on this layer ahead of time.
| | 00:40 | It needs to be the same size as the
layer you are going to be displacing,
| | 00:42 | the FreeForm layer.
| | 00:45 | Your text or any other object
already needs to be in place, and any other
| | 00:50 | animation effects must have been
done in a comp prior to this comp.
| | 00:55 | That's why I've set this up in a
separate pre-comp were I've given it its
| | 01:00 | position, added a Fast Blur effect.
| | 01:03 | Very sharp edge don't work well for
extrusion or for compound blur or for any
| | 01:08 | other compound effects.
| | 01:09 | We're going to have a smooth transition.
| | 01:10 | I put it in its proper location and I
can even add animation to it in this
| | 01:14 | pre-comp if I wanted to.
| | 01:16 | Then all my actual work need to
take place up in my final comp.
| | 01:20 | I'll turn that off for now
since I don't need to see it.
| | 01:23 | I just want to see its final effect.
| | 01:24 | I've selected my layer to distort
and again I will apply FreeForm.
| | 01:29 | And in After Effects, your most recent
effect is always at the top of the list.
| | 01:32 | So it looks familiar to the arrangement before.
| | 01:35 | There is my grid, but in this case, I'm not
going to be pulling any points out manually.
| | 01:40 | So I don't care what the
resolution of this grid is.
| | 01:44 | This is going to be all about setting
up a displacement map and having a really
| | 01:47 | high-quality mesh to see details in that map.
| | 01:50 | I'll go over to my Effect Controls panel,
twirl down Displacement Controls, and
| | 01:55 | pick my displacement map layer.
| | 01:57 | In this case, I want my Paladin map
that has the text of the word Paladin to
| | 02:01 | be my displacement.
| | 02:02 | And you'll start to see something
going on here, but the defaults don't
| | 02:06 | immediately show things very well.
| | 02:09 | You can pick an individual color channel
or an Alpha channel or overall Luminance.
| | 02:14 | I've done some work ahead of time to
make this a black-and-white text layer, so
| | 02:17 | I'm going to use Luminance.
| | 02:20 | This additional option Use Alpha as Mask
is a nice ability to trim layers if you
| | 02:24 | want to, so you can see just your text,
but in this case I'm using a full frame
| | 02:28 | black-and-white map.
| | 02:29 | And finally Displacement Height.
| | 02:31 | How much you want to bump out that
layer by, and it's an animatable parameter.
| | 02:36 | So you can have it extrude
over tim,e which is kind of cool.
| | 02:39 | I am going to leave it at 20 for now.
| | 02:41 | We will bump it up later on.
| | 02:42 | Once you've set up your displacement
layer, now you really need to work with
| | 02:46 | the 3D mesh itself.
| | 02:47 | Let's go ahead turn on just the
wireframe so we can see what's going on.
| | 02:52 | With low Mesh Subdivision, there is not
enough detail or resolution is this mesh
| | 02:58 | to really see what's going on in the type.
| | 03:00 | So you're going to really, really,
really need to increase this number.
| | 03:04 | Like 100 is just barely
starting to show some rounded type.
| | 03:07 | I need to start thinking about like
200 or even 300 to really start to
| | 03:13 | nicely defined that text.
| | 03:15 | But the higher the Mesh Subdivision, the
slower or less responsive the effect is going to be.
| | 03:20 | So while I am just experimenting, I am
going to knock it down to something more
| | 03:22 | acceptable like 200, and I can
increase it later right before I go to render.
| | 03:25 | At this point, I can go ahead and
increase my Displacement Height and get a
| | 03:30 | better idea of the texts pushing out.
| | 03:32 | Okay, now I flip back to full render
quality and now you'll see my text has
| | 03:38 | indeed been extruded through this layer.
| | 03:41 | I'll go to an extreme camera move, and
you can really see some honest to God 3D
| | 03:46 | depth to that type, particularly
when I get completely on edge here.
| | 03:49 | Turn on my alpha, you can see the text has
actually been extruded away from the layer.
| | 03:54 | So it is an honest 3D effect, in
that it does create actual deaths.
| | 03:58 | Put this back to some place where we
can see it a little bit more clearly.
| | 04:02 | You'll also notice though that my
text is a bit on the aliased side.
| | 04:05 | So this is just like in the previous
movie, and I am going to need to go into
| | 04:09 | my 3D Mesh Quality and turn on some antialiasing,
at least Low, to get rid of some of that edge.
| | 04:16 | Not quite enough.
| | 04:17 | I am going to need a play game between
increasing Antialiasing and increasing my
| | 04:23 | Mesh Subdivision to get a
smoother render. There we go.
| | 04:27 | Now that I've gone up to 300, you can
really start seeing this type a lot more cleanly.
| | 04:32 | So render quality makes a big
difference in how good your displacement looks.
| | 04:38 | You leave it to defaults, it won't
even seem like the effects working at all.
| | 04:41 | Now FreeForm is a very render intensive effect.
| | 04:44 | It is doing some heavy-duty processing.
| | 04:46 | So I went ahead and created a
version earlier for you look at.
| | 04:49 | I will RAM Preview, and you see that I
have animated the text to pop out one
| | 04:53 | character at a time, fading up
and it creates a nice 3D effect.
| | 04:58 | I've gone ahead and put my Mesh up
to 300 and I cranked up Antialiasing.
| | 05:01 | I might even go a little higher on
Antialiasing because I am seeing a little
| | 05:04 | rippling down here on his cloak.
| | 05:06 | Now this did take some time to render.
| | 05:09 | If I left Multiprocessing off, this 90
frame comp took on the order of about
| | 05:15 | five minutes to render.
| | 05:17 | This is a real case of where you want
to go to After Effects > Preferences, and
| | 05:21 | Memory & Multiprocessing, and enable
Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously.
| | 05:26 | In this case, I like to leave
about 2 cores for the rest of my Mac.
| | 05:31 | I'll have 6 CPUs dedicated to After Effects.
| | 05:33 | I'll have multiple copies of FreeForm
rendering in the background, cranking out
| | 05:36 | frames in parallels.
| | 05:38 | My previews and renders will
happen lot faster, making FreeForm more
| | 05:41 | enjoyable to work with.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Apply Color LUT| 00:03 | A color look up table is a
small file that translates colors.
| | 00:08 | It's basically used to adjust for how
a device may display colors, how it may
| | 00:12 | capture colors, or the intent
of an artist like a colorist.
| | 00:16 | For example, a color look up table for
a specific projector may say, hey, this
| | 00:21 | projector tends to broadcast reds a
bit stronger than it should, so let's go
| | 00:25 | through a table and reduce the amount
of reds from what you're feeding me to
| | 00:28 | compensate for what the projector does.
| | 00:30 | At another extreme, a colorist may say,
"I want my grays to be cool, I want my
| | 00:35 | highlights to be warm, I want my
purples to have a bit more red in them."
| | 00:39 | A color look up table can be used to
embody those modifications and those
| | 00:43 | adjustments as well.
| | 00:45 | Well, After Effect CS5 has just added
an Apply color look up table effect.
| | 00:50 | Let me show you quickly how to use it.
| | 00:52 | Let's say I'm working on a film and a
colorist has already been deciding what
| | 00:55 | color cast to add to different scenes.
| | 00:58 | So in this particular scene a colorist
has already developed a particular look
| | 01:02 | that they want and exported a color
look up table of his particular treatment.
| | 01:07 | I'll select my file and select Effect
> Utility > Apply Color Look Up Table.
| | 01:14 | It will immediately open a file dialog,
where I get to select that particular
| | 01:18 | color treatment that the colorist saved off.
| | 01:21 | After Effect supports the .3dl format and
also the .cube format for look up tables.
| | 01:27 | Click Open, and immediately I have now
the color cast that colorist had designed.
| | 01:32 | Something a bit more red, a bit more magenta.
| | 01:34 | This was before and after.
| | 01:37 | Took a lot of yellow out of the scene.
| | 01:39 | So that's one way of applying color
look up tables, is to quickly apply a color
| | 01:42 | treatment someone else has designed for you.
| | 01:45 | Another common use for color look
up tables is to get an idea of what a
| | 01:49 | scene may look like through a
particular projection device or through a
| | 01:53 | particular film stock.
| | 01:54 | And when you do that, you might want to
apply it to an adjustment layer instead
| | 01:57 | | | 01:57 | of to a specific clip.
| | 01:59 | So I am going to delete the effect here.
| | 02:00 | I'm going to add Layer > New > Adjustment Layer.
| | 02:04 | This will be an adjustment to all of
the layers below in the composition.
| | 02:09 | So I'm going to have a complex
composition, many different elements, then see
| | 02:13 | what a particular look up
table would do to the final result.
| | 02:16 | There's my adjustment layer, apply
Effect > Color LUT, I immediately get this
| | 02:21 | dialog and I'll pick this particular
look up table which shows me what this
| | 02:25 | scene would look like
printed on a particular film stock.
| | 02:29 | Click Open and I see that this film
stock may shift this color to be very yellow
| | 02:33 | and brighten things up.
| | 02:34 | I might want to adjust the work that
I'm doing, keeping in mind this is what it
| | 02:39 | will look like in a film stock.
| | 02:40 | If I want to see before, I turn off my
adjustment layer, see after, I turn on
| | 02:45 | my adjustment layer.
| | 02:46 | I see also that this particular look
up table brings down the highlights and
| | 02:49 | does other adjustments to the scene.
| | 02:51 | This is particularly handy if you've
got a look up table that describes what a
| | 02:54 | projector does, or a particular
mobile or hand-held device does.
| | 02:58 | You can adjust your colors in After
Effects, taking into account how it's going
| | 03:03 | to look on that other device.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refine Matte| 00:03 | Back when I was demonstrating the new
Roto Brush tool in After Effect CS5, I
| | 00:07 | mentioned the Refine Matte section.
| | 00:09 | This gives you a lot of additional
power to clean up the edges of a matte.
| | 00:12 | It basically does a motion
estimation to see where the edges are moving
| | 00:16 | from frame-to-frame.
| | 00:18 | And then it will try to reduce
chatter, noise, buzz, jitter in the edges.
| | 00:23 | It can apply a motion blur to those
matted edges, rather than being a hard edged
| | 00:28 | matte, even when something is moving
very quickly and is very blurred, and it
| | 00:32 | can decontaminate
background color from those edges.
| | 00:35 | So if you have anything bleeding in
from the background or bleeding through a
| | 00:38 | motion blurred section, you could
remove that color contamination so you have a
| | 00:42 | more pure composite.
| | 00:44 | As it turns out, Refine Matte is
not limited just to Roto Brush.
| | 00:48 | It's a standalone effect as well that
you can apply to any matte you create.
| | 00:53 | For example, let me bring up
this simple green screen example.
| | 00:57 | Earlier in the shot this was pretty
easy to key because the character's not
| | 01:00 | moving at all, but as we get further
into this shot where there is a lot of
| | 01:03 | action, you can see there is a lot
of motion blur and a lot of activity
| | 01:08 | happening in this shot.
| | 01:09 | This would normally make it harder
to get a good key, because you'd be
| | 01:12 | worried about how do you deal with
these motion blurred areas, how do you
| | 01:15 | deal with these edges?
| | 01:16 | You want this to be blurrier, and this,
so just a simple feather amount is
| | 01:20 | not going to cut it.
| | 01:21 | Let's go ahead and key this and
then play around Refine Matte.
| | 01:24 | I bring up the old Keylight effect,
which is still bundled with After Effects.
| | 01:29 | It's a great keyed.
| | 01:29 | Drag it on to my footage, take my
Eyedropper and pick some green close to this action.
| | 01:36 | Now Keylight does give me a
pretty good start to the image.
| | 01:40 | But as I turn on Toggle
Transparency, you see I've got some problems.
| | 01:43 | The Key is not yet perfect.
| | 01:44 | I got some partial transparency in
those motion blur areas like his face.
| | 01:48 | I would need to do a lot more work to
help refine this key and make it look good.
| | 01:53 | Let's go ahead and add to this Refine Matte.
| | 01:56 | Drag that on, on top and bang!
| | 02:01 | See how much better my matte is automatically?
| | 02:04 | And not only that, look how it's
retaining the motion blurred sections around
| | 02:09 | these arms, around the head.
| | 02:11 | The key did a good job to begin
with, but if I was to turn off Refine
| | 02:14 | Matte's | | 02:14 | Motion Blur you
can see there is some problems, some
| | 02:16 | hard edges here and there.
| | 02:17 | Using the Motion Blur section of
Refine Matte helps preserve the partial
| | 02:22 | transparency we want in
those motion blurred areas.
| | 02:26 | The other issue I have is with
color contamination of the edges.
| | 02:28 | This was shot against the
green background after all.
| | 02:31 | Let me pull this wider so you
can read these names a bit better.
| | 02:34 | If I turn off Decontaminate Edge Colors,
you'll see I've got some problems with
| | 02:39 | black and other colors creeping
into these motion blurred edges.
| | 02:44 | When I say go ahead and decontaminate,
now I've got nice partially transparent
| | 02:48 | skin tones where his hand is moving fast
instead of getting other colors such as
| | 02:53 | black or green from the background mixed in.
| | 02:56 | Now back in the Roto Brush section I went to
these parameters in a little bit more detail.
| | 03:01 | I'm not going to repeat myself here,
but let me tell you it's just really nice
| | 03:04 | to be able to simply spread or
choke my matte, decide the amount of
| | 03:09 | feathering, how soft I want to make it,
reduce the edge chatter in case I've
| | 03:14 | got a very noisy key or I have got a
lot of film grain that's causing edges to
| | 03:19 | be appeared to be chewed up.
| | 03:19 | You can just do a lot with Refine
Matte effect after any matte, be it keyed,
| | 03:25 | hand masked, rotoscoped by
traditional means, whatever.
| | 03:29 | So this is another wonder
addition to the arsenal.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Vibrance| 00:03 | The last three brand-new effects I
want to show you all came from Photoshop.
| | 00:07 | There are underneath the Photoshop's
adjustment layers, and they are Vibrance,
| | 00:12 | Black & White and Selective Color.
| | 00:16 | The reason these were added to
After Effects CS5 was to provide more
| | 00:19 | compatibility with layered Photoshop files.
| | 00:22 | For example, if you added Vibrance to
an adjustment layer to a Photoshop file,
| | 00:26 | save the layered file and imported the
layered file into After Effects, you'd
| | 00:30 | want Vibrance to appear as an
effect on this adjustment layer.
| | 00:33 | So that's why they added these effects.
| | 00:35 | The nice thing is that they have made
these independent standalone effects that
| | 00:39 | you can apply to any clip in After
Effects, not just Photoshop layers.
| | 00:44 | So let's go through what each of
these do starting with Vibrance.
| | 00:47 | I'm back in After Effects CS5, I have
got a piece of footage here with some nice
| | 00:52 | colors in it, and I'll apply
Effect > Color Correction > Vibrance.
| | 00:58 | Vibrance is basically an
alternative to Saturation.
| | 01:02 | It's very similar to increasing and
decreasing Saturation, but it's a more
| | 01:06 | subtle, more refined effect.
| | 01:09 | For example, if I also take this
scene and take Saturation up to 100%, I'd
| | 01:13 | have very garish colors.
| | 01:15 | Let's take a snapshot of what that
looks like, take Saturation back down to 0,
| | 01:22 | and now put Vibrance up to 100.
| | 01:25 | I have a more saturated image, but
you'll see it's a lot more subtle and a lot
| | 01:29 | more pleasing, and a lot less garish.
| | 01:31 | I'm going to repair my snapshot.
| | 01:33 | This is what Saturation looked like.
| | 01:35 | Suddenly looks little bit ugly to be honest.
| | 01:38 | And that's what maximum Vibrance
looks like, so it's a lot more subtle.
| | 01:41 | Let's go to other extreme.
| | 01:42 | If I take Saturation all the way down
to minus 100, it's one way of creating a
| | 01:48 | black and white image and
I'll take a snapshot of that.
| | 01:51 | Now, let's do the same
thing with Vibrance, minus 100.
| | 01:56 | You'll see I still have some slight tinting.
| | 01:59 | This is like a hand tinted black and
white postcard as opposed to just say
| | 02:03 | black and white image.
| | 02:04 | And again, it's more subtle, more
refined, and I personally like it more.
| | 02:09 | And that's why personally I've been
reaching for Vibrance more often than I've
| | 02:12 | been reaching for Saturation.
| | 02:14 | I've been using it in the Camera Raw
dialog when I import files, and now that's
| | 02:17 | a part of After Effects, I plan to
start using Vibrance instead of Saturation
| | 02:21 | in those cases where I want to increase or
reduce the amount of saturation in a shot.
| | 02:26 | So it's a nice little addition and will
help add some class to your treatments.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Black & White| 00:03 | In the previous movie, when I was
talking about the brand-new Vibrance effect, I
| | 00:07 | mentioned that many users use Saturation,
crank it down to minus 100, and that's
| | 00:12 | a quick way of creating a black and white image.
| | 00:14 | Well, it's quick and easy, but it's not
necessarily the best or most refined way
| | 00:18 | to create a black and white image.
| | 00:19 | Well, now we have a new effect to do that.
| | 00:21 | Delete Vibrance, and I'll apply
Effect > Color Correction > Black & White.
| | 00:26 | This is another effect borrowed from
Photoshop, and I really glad they brought
| | 00:30 | it into After Effects.
| | 00:31 | It gives you individual control over not
only the red, green and blue components
| | 00:36 | of an image, but also the
yellows, the cyans, and the magentas.
| | 00:41 | People who are more involved in the
print world are more used to those colors,
| | 00:45 | and if you want to see how they relate,
basically red plus blue is magenta, blue
| | 00:51 | plus green is cyan, green plus red is yellow.
| | 00:56 | So it's a way of dealing with the
intermediate colors instead of just
| | 00:59 | dealing with the primaries.
| | 01:02 | It gives you a default mix which kind
of creates a luminance mix to this image,
| | 01:06 | which you can really get in and then fine-tune.
| | 01:07 | For example, with the standard RGB
color mixer, you might only have access to
| | 01:11 | the reds, greens, and blues.
| | 01:13 | If I want to play around with the red
component of this rock, you see red brings
| | 01:17 | down virtually all the rocks together,
or increases all the rocks together.
| | 01:21 | But if I use the adjacent color like
magentas, you'll see I have control now
| | 01:24 | over just shadowed areas, which are
related to red as opposed to bringing down
| | 01:29 | all the reds together. Vry handy.
| | 01:32 | Similarly, we have some blue tint up in the sky.
| | 01:34 | I'll turn the effect off for now
to remind you what this looked like.
| | 01:38 | And you might be tempted just to say
let's alter the blue content of that sky.
| | 01:41 | Well, if I pulled it out, you'll see
that actually what I can consider to be my
| | 01:45 | sky is staying white, not really
adjusting it the way I wanted to.
| | 01:49 | Well, skies are actually
closer to cyan in color.
| | 01:53 | If I pull cyan out, you'll now see that
I'm increasing the ingredient up in the
| | 01:56 | high part of the sky.
| | 01:58 | This is where it started, and now I'm
actually affecting that falloff from the
| | 02:02 | sky from the blue sky to the white horizon.
| | 02:05 | So it gives you much more subtle way
of mixing individual color components to
| | 02:09 | create that ideal black &
white image from your source.
| | 02:12 | It also has a handy little tint command,
this appears in another effects, where
| | 02:15 | you can just quickly tint footage as well.
| | 02:17 | It creates your idealized black/
white version, then give it a color tint.
| | 02:20 | Nice little effect!
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| Selective Color| 00:03 | The last of the Photoshop derived
effects I'll be discussing is Selective
| | 00:06 | Color, and to understand what
Selective Color is doing, you really need to
| | 00:10 | understand your color wheel.
| | 00:12 | You do have your RGB, which you're
familiar with, but printers, people who work
| | 00:17 | in process color, look at the
intermediates, the cyans, magentas, and yellows.
| | 00:22 | And you see yellow is the combination
of red and green, cyan is the combination
| | 00:26 | of green and blue, magenta is
the combination of blue and red.
| | 00:29 | This is not true in normal
artists' attractive colors.
| | 00:32 | This is RGB color space.
| | 00:33 | So you need to fix this
particular color wheel in your mind.
| | 00:36 | You also need to pay attention
to your complementary colors.
| | 00:39 | What colors are across from
each other in the RGB color wheel?
| | 00:43 | For example, cyan is across from red.
| | 00:47 | That means increasing the amount of
cyan in an image may reduce the apparent
| | 00:52 | amount of redness in an image.
| | 00:55 | Decreasing cyan will make red appear
to be more prominent, because they are
| | 00:59 | across from each other in this RGB color wheel.
| | 01:02 | Okay, let's go and look at this in practice.
| | 01:04 | Here is my footage, and I'll apply
Effect > Color Correction > Selective Color.
| | 01:09 | It's important to pay attention to the
Color pop-up, because it tells you what
| | 01:13 | channel you're working on.
| | 01:15 | Let's go ahead and start with the red channel.
| | 01:17 | By reducing the amount of cyan, the
complementary color to red, the redness of
| | 01:23 | an image appears to increase.
| | 01:25 | I am basically removing the cyan color
contamination from the red channel, and
| | 01:31 | that's allowing the reds to come
through in a much more pure form.
| | 01:35 | Magenta is more related to red.
| | 01:37 | So it's going to have more of a subtle
tinting effect, making the image appear
| | 01:40 | more yellow or even more red
/ pinkish/magenta in tone.
| | 01:43 | Not only do you have access to the red,
green and blue primaries, you can go
| | 01:49 | ahead and adjust the process colors of
yellow, cyan and magenta, and this effect
| | 01:54 | even gives you access to
whites, neutral grays, and blacks.
| | 01:58 | Basically highlights mid-tones and
shadows, and the same principles apply.
| | 02:03 | See this shadowy area down here?
| | 02:05 | If I was to decrease the cyan in the
blacks, the shadows, the result is it
| | 02:11 | becomes very red in the shadows.
| | 02:13 | There is no "cyan"
contaminating them, making them darker.
| | 02:18 | On the other hand, if I want to make
those shadows deeper, I want to increase
| | 02:22 | that complimentary color
and really drive them down.
| | 02:24 | So the shadows are no longer red.
| | 02:26 | They actually pushed towards a middle gray.
| | 02:29 | So, it's a different way of
thinking about color, this idea of color
| | 02:33 | contamination and working
with complimentary colors.
| | 02:36 | But it does give you a nice tool to subtly
tweak out different colors in your images.
| | 02:41 | And again not just the primaries, but
the process colors as well the highlights,
| | 02:45 | mid-tones, and shadows
as well. Powerful effect.
| | 02:49 | It will take a little practice to get
used to it, but it's another nice tool to
| | 02:52 | have in our arsenal.
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|
|
6. Updated EffectsColor Finesse 3| 00:03 | After Effects CS5 also contains a few
updated effects, including Color Finesse.
| | 00:08 | Color Finesses is up to version 3
now and it has several really nice
| | 00:11 | new features in it.
| | 00:13 | The first thing I'm going to do is
change my project settings up to 32 bits per
| | 00:17 | channel, or floating-point.
| | 00:19 | Color Finesse does work in 32-bit
floating-point color and I want to show some
| | 00:23 | of the advantages of that.
| | 00:23 | So I am going to hold down the Option
key on Mac, Alt key on Windows, click once
| | 00:28 | to go to 16 bit, and
click again to go to 32 bit.
| | 00:30 | The advantage of this is, as I drag my
cursor over areas like this window, you
| | 00:36 | can see in my Info display up
here that I have values over one.
| | 00:40 | In other words, just more than 100% bright.
| | 00:42 | It's over bright and therefore there
may be some missing detail where this
| | 00:46 | light comes through this this window and also
in this pool of light down here on the floor.
| | 00:50 | We are going to use these
Color Finesse to recover that.
| | 00:53 | Secondly, you'll notice that this
image is are looking a bit squished.
| | 00:56 | Well, it was shot 2:1
anamorphic on a Red camera.
| | 00:59 | And another little improvement in
Color Finesse 3 is better handling of
| | 01:03 | non-square pixels, including anamorphic.
| | 01:05 | Now, for the sake of this display,
I'll go ahead and toggle my Pixel
| | 01:09 | Aspect Ratio correction.
| | 01:10 | That's how this scene supposed to look.
| | 01:12 | We'll compare that with how it
looks now inside Color Finesse.
| | 01:15 | I'll set my clip and apply Effect >
Synthetic Aperture > Color Finesse 3.
| | 01:21 | In the Effects Control panel, you'll
initially see just a stripped down version.
| | 01:25 | Click on Full Interface to
actually open up Color Finesse.
| | 01:31 | Now, you will see there is
my nice footage, destretched.
| | 01:35 | The anamorphic pixels have been taken
into account and it's displayed correctly
| | 01:38 | inside Color Finesse.
| | 01:40 | So that's step number 1.
| | 01:40 | Okay, let's go through some of these
other new features they have added.
| | 01:45 | Underneath the HSL, Hue Saturation
Lightness tab, you will Color Finesse now
| | 01:49 | has a Vibrance slider.
| | 01:51 | Vibrance appears in
things like Camera Raw dialogs.
| | 01:54 | I showed in an earlier movie where there
is now a Vibrance effect in After Effects.
| | 01:58 | Well now you have it in Color Finesse as well.
| | 02:00 | And in short, it's a more subtle,
more refined version of saturation.
| | 02:05 | It gives you a nicer sort of
desaturated look without going to black-and-white.
| | 02:09 | It gives you a saturated look without
going posterized or going to garish colors.
| | 02:13 | And just for comparison, I'll zero that
out, play with Saturation, and you can
| | 02:19 | see where it just goes to much
garish blown-out colors or completely to a
| | 02:24 | black-and-white image.
| | 02:25 | I'll return that to 100%.
| | 02:27 | So Vibrance is a nice addition for
more subtle, more refined corrections.
| | 02:31 | And not only can you control Vibrance
for the entire image, you can also focus
| | 02:35 | it for the highlights, the
midtowns and the shadows.
| | 02:38 | You can control those individually.
| | 02:40 | So maybe I want some saturated highlights,
but the shadows a little less saturated.
| | 02:47 | Okay, I also mentioned we have got
problems with these over-bright areas up here
| | 02:51 | in the window and the
pool of light on the floor.
| | 02:54 | Let's go underneath the Levels tab in
Color Finesse 3 and see that we have a
| | 02:58 | brand-new Highlight Recovery slider.
| | 03:02 | Increasing this Highlight Recovery
helps pull down these over-bright areas
| | 03:08 | and gives me some detail back in those
areas without affecting the rest of the image.
| | 03:12 | It affects just the highlights, the
brighter areas, and keeps the rest the same.
| | 03:16 | You can see as I keep cranking up
Highlight Recovery, it's leaving the shadows
| | 03:21 | and the mid ranges the same.
| | 03:22 | It's just changing what's
happening on that window.
| | 03:25 | By increasing it, you will see I
am getting a lot more detail in the
| | 03:29 | smoke around window.
| | 03:31 | Then the pool of light on the floor,
it's going from just being a solid
| | 03:34 | blown-out pool to something where I
actually get to see some of the dirt and
| | 03:38 | individual rocks and the
individual particles on that floor again.
| | 03:40 | So Highlight Recovery is really
useful in 32-bit floating-point mode in
| | 03:46 | conjunction with footage
that retains over-brights.
| | 03:48 | So, more changes have taken
place underneath the Curves tab.
| | 03:52 | Now, you may be familiar that you had
individual curves for the red, green, and
| | 03:57 | blue color channels before.
| | 03:59 | Well, now you have got curves for HSL
as well, Hue, Saturation, and Lightness.
| | 04:05 | It's initially a little bit
disorienting because we are not used to seeing to
| | 04:08 | functions, but it's very handy.
| | 04:10 | For example, there is a lot
of blues in the highlights.
| | 04:13 | So I can see a blue spike here and
I can kind of perceive some blue in
| | 04:15 | this light up here.
| | 04:16 | If I want to affect the lightness of
just the blues, I can reach in at the
| | 04:20 | curves, say pull just the blues down
in their lightness, and flatten out the
| | 04:26 | curves so that the reds don't get affected.
| | 04:29 | That's before and after.
| | 04:31 | And you see just by doing that, I have
also recovered even more detail from the
| | 04:35 | smoky blue areas around the window.
| | 04:37 | Same with Saturation.
| | 04:38 | You can look at this and say, you know
there is some kind of yellows here but
| | 04:41 | maybe I want a stylized look where
the yellows are even more saturated.
| | 04:45 | Select just them and pump up the
saturation in the yellows, but pull down
| | 04:49 | the curves so that the reds are not
affected and maybe the green and blues
| | 04:52 | aren't affected as well. And hue shifts.
| | 04:55 | You can select the lead, pick a color,
and shift the color of just a certain hue.
| | 05:00 | For example, maybe the
yellows are not to your liking.
| | 05:02 | Maybe you want to go ahead and make
the yellows a bit more green, or make the
| | 05:05 | yellows a bit more red or magenta.
| | 05:08 | Again, you can focus individual colors
and drag them around in the HSL curves.
| | 05:11 | So that's another nice
addition in Color Finesse 3.
| | 05:15 | Finally, there is a new Export command
in Color Finesse that ties into another
| | 05:19 | effect inside After Effects.
| | 05:20 | I can go File > Export, and
export LUTs, color look up tables.
| | 05:26 | for example, exporting to an Autodesk
3D LUT Smoke format would give me a 3DL
| | 05:32 | format file that can be read by After Effects.
| | 05:35 | What this means is that any operator can
create a really cool color treatment in
| | 05:39 | Color Finesse and export a look up
table to be used by other people on other
| | 05:44 | systems including not After Effects, or
to have a very simple file you can apply
| | 05:48 | with the new Apply Color LUT effect to
any piece of footage in After Effects and
| | 05:52 | not apply the full Color Finesse effect.
| | 05:55 | Just apply the results,
crystallized in this color look up table.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Levels| 00:03 | Another nice updated effect in
After Effects CS5 is the Levels effect.
| | 00:07 | I mean who doesn't use Levels all the time?
| | 00:09 | I'll set my footage and apply
Effects > Color Correction > Levels and
| | 00:15 | immediately you'll notice we have
a lot more colorful of a Histogram.
| | 00:19 | To explain these colors, let's
go back to our RGB color wheel.
| | 00:23 | You see that when we take the primary
colors, red, green, and blue, and mix them
| | 00:28 | all together we get white.
| | 00:30 | If we mix just red and green, we get yellow.
| | 00:33 | Just green and blue, we get cyan.
| | 00:36 | Just blue and red, we get magenta.
| | 00:39 | Once you memorize those relationships,
the Histogram makes lot more sense.
| | 00:44 | Any area that's white in the
Histogram is where red, green and blue are all
| | 00:50 | present in equal strength.
| | 00:52 | If we I see something like a bit of
magenta, that's telling me that both red and
| | 00:56 | blue are both equally
present there in equal strengths.
| | 01:00 | The white area below show that there is
green mixed it in at a lower level and
| | 01:04 | here we can see where red is little bit
stronger or blue is little bit stronger.
| | 01:07 | Same with the yellow area here.
| | 01:08 | Red plus green equally mixed
or the green is more prominent.
| | 01:13 | So in this image, we are seeing that the
blues are really prominent in the highlights.
| | 01:17 | That's the blue sky.
| | 01:19 | But we also have some nice dark blues
down here in the dark blue water, and
| | 01:23 | then we have got some cyan, which is blue and
red mixed together in those shadows as well.
| | 01:28 | So it's useful information when
we trying to dissect this file.
| | 01:31 | By the way, if you find this to be too
psychedelic, just click on it and it will
| | 01:35 | change back to the old luminance
-based display you are used to.
| | 01:38 | But I am finding this gives me a lot
of information particularly when used in
| | 01:41 | conjunction with other effects.
| | 01:44 | I use Levels all the time not just to
process footage, but also to tell me
| | 01:49 | what's going on with another effect
and to help me learn another effect.
| | 01:53 | So, let's apply something like
Effect > Color Correction > Color Balance.
| | 01:59 | Drag it before Levels.
| | 02:02 | Now, when I make adjustments in Color
Balance, I can see more clearly what's going on.
| | 02:06 | For example, see this bit of green
component somewhere between midtones and shadows?
| | 02:11 | Reducing the green shadow balance moves
those green spikes down to the left to
| | 02:16 | the darker colors in the Histogram.
| | 02:17 | Increasing the green shadow balance
moves that peak of green colors up through
| | 02:22 | the Histogram to brighter levels.
| | 02:24 | So it really helps with a visual
feedback to see what's going on in an effect.
| | 02:29 | This is particularly useful with
a brand-new selected color effect.
| | 02:32 | If you are trying to understand just
what all these adjustments mean, apply
| | 02:36 | Effect > Color Correction > Levels
after it, and now as you say, okay let's go
| | 02:42 | to the red channel and let's boost the
cyans, you can see that it's decreasing
| | 02:47 | the red in the image.
| | 02:48 | If I decrease the cyans, it's making
the reds more prominent in the image.
| | 02:52 | It will really helps you get a visual
connection for what's going on besides
| | 02:57 | just trying to look at an
image and decide for it.
| | 02:58 | You can see in the Histogram how
you are really affecting that image.
| | 03:02 | Remember the magenta was a
complementary color to green?
| | 03:06 | Well, if I decrease the magenta,
you'll see the green spikes in Histogram
| | 03:11 | increase because it's a
complementary color and vice versa.
| | 03:14 | Push the greens down.
| | 03:15 | So, Levels is a very handy diagnostic effect.
| | 03:19 | You can also use it just to help you
figure out what's going on in an image.
| | 03:22 | Let's go ahead and open up this really
brightly blown-out film clutter shot.
| | 03:28 | So, as I step through, you can see
each frame is changing quite a bit.
| | 03:33 | Well, if you really want understand
what's going on in this shot, apply Levels
| | 03:37 | and watch the Histogram.
| | 03:38 | Right now when the frame is mostly
white, you see that almost all of these
| | 03:41 | spikes are pushed to the
right to the highlights.
| | 03:44 | Blue is not as strong as green and red, green
and red are mixing to show this yellow spike.
| | 03:49 | I step forward the frame.
| | 03:51 | And as I step through by pressing the
Page Down button, you really get an idea
| | 03:55 | of how this color
components are mixing in the shot.
| | 03:59 | The blues is weaker than the green, the
green is weaker than the red, green and
| | 04:02 | red mix together to
create the yellow in the shot.
| | 04:05 | It's very useful for helping you
understand what color components make up the
| | 04:09 | final image you are seeing.
| | 04:10 | Now the one down side of the new Levels
effect is that unfortunately it has the
| | 04:15 | same bug as the old Levels effect.
| | 04:18 | You notice as I have been stepping
through these frames, the screen cache bar is
| | 04:22 | showing me what frames have
already been cached in the memory.
| | 04:26 | If I were to back up, press Page Up,
and move to frame that's already been
| | 04:30 | cached, you'll notice that
the Histogram is not updating.
| | 04:38 | The reason is After Effects is saying
hey, I've already cached this frame.
| | 04:43 | There is no need to recalculate it.
| | 04:45 | I'll save some time.
| | 04:46 | We'll part of that time savings is it
does not bother to redraw the histogram.
| | 04:51 | So whenever you go into new frames,
you will get an updated Histogram to show
| | 04:55 | you what's going on, but whenever you
go to the an old frame, you won't get
| | 04:59 | an updated Histogram.
| | 05:00 | And a quick fix for that is just
to toggle Levels off and on again.
| | 05:04 | Basically clear out your cache to now
see what's truly going on in the shot as
| | 05:08 | you step through it.
| | 05:09 | It's been there forever, it's
still there with new Levels.
| | 05:12 | Well, we can't have everything, can we?
| | 05:13 | But otherwise it's a nice
update to the Histogram in Levels.
| | 05:16 | If you have been working in the
Camera Raw dialog in particular, you
| | 05:19 | have already seen this.
| | 05:20 | It's a nice new tool that they put in.
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|
|
7. New Layer Manipulation OptionsAuto-keyframe mode| 00:03 | After Effect CS5 also includes
several new ways of manipulating layers.
| | 00:08 | Some are just some nice
enhancements, some are a bit larger.
| | 00:11 | For example, it mow has an Auto-Keyframe mode.
| | 00:14 | How many of you have been intimidated by
all those little keyframing stopwatches
| | 00:17 | in After Effects or started removing a
layer and realized you forgot to enable
| | 00:21 | keyframing and it didn't
remember anything that you did?
| | 00:24 | Well there is an Auto-Keyframe mode
now in After Effects, but there are some
| | 00:28 | gotchas to using it.
| | 00:29 | So let's take a look at it.
| | 00:31 | Here I have a layer in After Effects
and I've enabled its 3D Layer switch.
| | 00:36 | One of the challenges with 3D layers
is that there is many different ways
| | 00:39 | of defining rotation.
| | 00:41 | If I press R to reveal the parameters,
you'll see there's an Orientation
| | 00:45 | parameter with three different numbers,
and three different Rotation parameters,
| | 00:49 | x, y, and z. All have an animation stopwatch.
| | 00:54 | Now there is a Rotate tool in After Effects.
| | 00:56 | W for a "rotate" is the shortcut, I'm
not making this up, and you can go ahead
| | 01:02 | and orient the object in 3D space.
| | 01:04 | But what parameters change Orientation or
Rotation is affected by yet another popup.
| | 01:10 | For example, if I undo and change Set
to Rotation instead of Orientation, now a
| | 01:17 | different set of values get altered
down in the Timeline panel as I try to
| | 01:22 | orient this layer, the
way that I want t pose it.
| | 01:24 | So you can see how easy it is for an
After Effects user, particularly one
| | 01:28 | without much experience, to become confused.
| | 01:30 | Which of those stopwatches do
you enable to keyframe this move?
| | 01:34 | There's four of them.
| | 01:35 | Now what numbers you are
editing depends on yet another popup.
| | 01:39 | And what happens quite often is people say,
"here is one pose, I'm happy with that."
| | 01:42 | Let's go a bit later in time, and I'm
going to go ahead and make another pose.
| | 01:47 | Hit End to end my workspace, RAM
Preview and I forgot to enable keyframing, and
| | 01:53 | it's just to my end pose.
| | 01:54 | It didn't remember anything.
| | 01:56 | And that's what Auto-Keyframe
mode is designed to help prevent.
| | 02:00 | It's a new icon down in the
Timeline panel, right here.
| | 02:03 | You click it, it turns red, and it has the
nickname the Big Red Button, or BRB for short.
| | 02:09 | Once you've enabled the Auto-Keyframe
switch, you no longer need to worry about
| | 02:14 | enabling keyframing for individual parameters.
| | 02:18 | Instead, you just go ahead, pose your
layer the way that you like, go later in
| | 02:23 | time, change to the other pose that
you like, press N for my work area, RAM
| | 02:28 | Preview, and now it's remembered my
rotational move without me having to do much
| | 02:33 | or to think much really.
| | 02:34 | I just enabled the Big Red Button
and let After Effects do the work.
| | 02:38 | Okay, that said, there are a couple
of gotchas to using Auto-Keyframe mode.
| | 02:42 | I'm going to Undo to get back to where I was.
| | 02:44 | The wrong way to use Auto-Keyframe mode
is to pose, then enable, then go later
| | 02:53 | in time, and pose again.
| | 02:54 | You'll notice I only have
keyframes for that second point in time.
| | 02:59 | I don't have keyframes for
the earlier point in time.
| | 03:02 | That's because when you enable Auto-
Keyframe mode, it does not create any
| | 03:07 | keyframes at that point.
| | 03:09 | It does not take a snapshot of
the current state of the layer.
| | 03:14 | So instead the correct workflow is
first enable Auto-Keyframe mode, then pose.
| | 03:23 | And once you do that, it
will create the keyframes.
| | 03:26 | Now I can go later in time, create my
second pose, and now it's remembered
| | 03:31 | keyframes for both of my positions,
not just the second set of positions.
| | 03:36 | So Auto-Keyframe mode only
works after you've enabled it.
| | 03:40 | It seems to make sense but
it's an easy thing to miss.
| | 03:42 | There is one other thing to
know about Auto-Keyframe mode.
| | 03:46 | It's not per composition, it's per project.
| | 03:50 | So I was to go on and open up another
comp and start working there, the Big Red
| | 03:55 | Button is still enabled.
| | 03:57 | And you might just start arranging
objects in a layer, not wanting to
| | 04:01 | keyframe, but actually be creating keyframes
because the Auto-Keyframe mode has been enabled.
| | 04:07 | Therefore the other thing to
remember about Auto-Keyframe mode is when
| | 04:11 | you're done, turn it off.
| | 04:14 | That way it won't effect what you
go on to do in other compositions.
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| Per-character orientation| 00:03 | Text has received a couple of
improvements in After Effects CS5, primarily in
| | 00:07 | the area of per-character 3D and
how it orients towards the camera.
| | 00:11 | Right here, I have some 3D text which flies
in and lands in relationship to the camera.
| | 00:17 | I am going to go ahead and
select Enable Per-character 3D.
| | 00:22 | This is what allows the characters to
individually spin, move, etcetera in 3D space.
| | 00:27 | And I want to play around now
with the Auto-Orient parameter.
| | 00:30 | By default, Layer > Transform
> Auto-Orient defaults to off.
| | 00:38 | So basically the text does
not care where the camera is.
| | 00:42 | I can move the camera around;
| | 00:44 | the text will not change to look at the camera.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to right-click, bring up
Transform > Auto-Orient again, and I'll
| | 00:51 | choose the option Orient Towards Camera.
| | 00:54 | When I do that, the entire line of text
rotates as one unit towards the camera.
| | 01:00 | As I move the camera around, you can see
that the text is orienting towards that
| | 01:04 | new camera position.
| | 01:06 | The new option that they added in
the After Effects CS5, Transform >
| | 01:11 | Auto-Orient, is down here.
| | 01:11 | Orient Each Character Independently.
| | 01:16 | If you have a text layer and if the
Per -character 3D has been enabled, which
| | 01:20 | it has, that's what the two little boxes
mean, Per-character 3D, other than normal 3D.
| | 01:27 | Now each individual character will
orient itself towards the camera.
| | 01:32 | And as I move the camera through the text,
you can see now that the lines aren't orienting.
| | 01:37 | It's the characters which are orienting.
| | 01:38 | I'll back off to this position.
| | 01:41 | Now when I animate it into position,
you will see that each character continues
| | 01:45 | to look at the camera.
| | 01:46 | So it's a nice little enhancement.
| | 01:48 | You can use this in conjunction with other
options you already had for text in After Effects.
| | 01:54 | For example, I'm going to twirl open more
options and look at Anchor Point Grouping.
| | 01:59 | A layer or, in this case, a
character rotates around its anchor point.
| | 02:04 | Anchor Point Grouping says, do you
want to group together multiple items and
| | 02:09 | treat it as a one unit rather than
treating each character individually?
| | 02:12 | Right now, I've got an Anchor Point
per Character but if I was to go to
| | 02:16 | Anchor Point per Word, now you see each
individual word is orienting towards the camera.
| | 02:23 | To pull that off, I have Per-character
3D enabled, I open up Auto-Orient and
| | 02:27 | enabled each character independently.
| | 02:30 | And then I change Anchor
Point Grouping to per Word.
| | 02:34 | | | 02:34 | And that's how I got
each word to orient towards my camera.
| | 02:37 | And if you went as far as to saying
Align, back to where we were, where the
| | 02:41 | whole line of text is
orienting towards the camera.
| | 02:43 | That's just a nice little additional
piece of flexibility they've put into CS5.
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| Non-breaking words| 00:03 | The other option they have put in for
text in After Effects CS5 is the ability
| | 00:07 | to choose which words always
stick together on a paragraph.
| | 00:11 | Now in this example I created
what's known as paragraph text.
| | 00:14 | I defined a box, started typing my
words and they auto wrapped to always
| | 00:20 | be inside that box.
| | 00:22 | That's paragraph text.
| | 00:24 | But as a result the breaks between lines may
happen at places that I don't want it to happen.
| | 00:28 | What if I wanted to keep certain
words together like "be" and "careful"?
| | 00:33 | I want to keep those on the same line.
| | 00:35 | Well now there is a new option
over in the Character palette.
| | 00:39 | You select the Options
arrow and choose No Break.
| | 00:44 | Now it will reflow to keep those guys
on the same line if at all possible, and
| | 00:49 | then reflow later characters
to fit inside the paragraph box.
| | 00:52 | So it's another small but useful
addition that they put into CS5.
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| Align to comp| 00:03 | Another new layer manipulation feature in
After Effects CS5 has to do with the Align panel.
| | 00:07 | I'm going to open up a Window > Align.
| | 00:11 | I have opened up here to be in the
same frame as my Info panel so it's easy
| | 00:13 | to see what's going.
| | 00:15 | Previously the Align palette
always aligned layers to each other.
| | 00:18 | Well, the new feature in CS5 is
ability to also align to the composition's
| | 00:23 | boundaries, not just other layers.
| | 00:25 | For example, in this heads-up display,
the layout is a little bit messy and
| | 00:29 | let's say I want to rearrange things
and justify things more towards the edges
| | 00:33 | and to the center of the comp, etcetera.
| | 00:35 | I am going to choose this element, go
to my Align palette, and now you see I
| | 00:39 | have a popup that's either
Composition or Selection.
| | 00:42 | Now since I only have one layer
selected, my only option is Composition.
| | 00:48 | And let's say I wanted to go over to
the left side of the comp, right along the
| | 00:52 | wall there, and along the bottom as well,
which it already is, or I can put it
| | 00:56 | along the top if I wanted to.
| | 00:58 | Just simple clicks in the Align palette.
| | 01:00 | If I select multiple layers like I have
a few different user interface elements
| | 01:04 | that I all want to be centered, n ow I
can either align to each other, align to
| | 01:09 | selection, or say align to composition.
| | 01:13 | In this case when I had multiple
layers selected, it defaulted to Selection
| | 01:17 | ,which is the old behavior.
| | 01:19 | The new behavior you need to pick, Composition.
| | 01:22 | Oh, let's go ahead and center and now
I have centered all of those elements.
| | 01:28 | I can continue to go ahead and select
additional elements, and say oh, I'll go
| | 01:32 | ahead and justify you guys to the
right side, maybe pick one more element and
| | 01:36 | say, you know, snap
yourself up to the very top there.
| | 01:38 | So, in short, the Align panel
has gone a little bit more useful.
| | 01:41 | Now for what it is worth, you did have
this capability in After Effects before,
| | 01:46 | but it required some hidden command keys.
| | 01:47 | If I start moving a layer and then
I hold down Command+Shift on Mac or
| | 01:53 | Ctrl+Shift on Windows that also makes
it snappy, to snap to the top, to the
| | 01:58 | edges, into the corners, etcetera.
| | 02:01 | So you don't need the Align palette
to easily align things to edges of
| | 02:04 | composition but if you have a group of
layers selected, it does make it a lot
| | 02:08 | easier to distribute things in this way.
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| Subtract mode| 00:03 | I love blending modes.
| | 00:05 | They're one of my favorite motion
graphics design tools and a lot of my tricks
| | 00:08 | are based around using modes.
| | 00:10 | Well After Effects CS5 got two brand new modes.
| | 00:13 | The first one is Subtract.
| | 00:15 | Here I have some footage of some
gears and on top I have footage of this
| | 00:20 | abstract black-and-white graph, like that.
| | 00:24 | And I want to blend them together using modes.
| | 00:26 | I can either click on the Toggle
Switches / Modes button here at the bottom or
| | 00:29 | press F4 which is the keyboard
shortcut and blend them together.
| | 00:34 | Previously we had a mode called Difference.
| | 00:38 | Difference is kind of like Subtract,
in that it subtracts the pixel values of
| | 00:43 | one layer from another layer but it's
an absolute value, and creates these
| | 00:47 | strange intermediate grays.
| | 00:49 | Rather than things just going to black,
we will get these color wraparounds it,
| | 00:53 | a bit psychedelic but quite often
they really aren't all that pleasing.
| | 00:57 | On After Effects CS5, they've added a
new one called Subtract and Subtract does
| | 01:03 | exactly what you expect it to do.
| | 01:05 | It subtracts the pixel values of the
layer on top, in this case, the white
| | 01:09 | lines against the black background,
white being high value pixels, black being
| | 01:14 | low value pixels, and subtracts those values
from the gear, creating nice black lines underneath.
| | 01:20 | This is how you expect Subtract to work.
| | 01:22 | And a really nice thing about
Subtract is that it even works in 32-bit
| | 01:26 | floating-point mode.
| | 01:27 | You can end up with values less than one
as you subtract one layer from another.
| | 01:31 | For example, if I go over here and hold
down the Option on Mac or Alt on Windows
| | 01:34 | to toggle into floating-point mode, and
hover my cursor over this really black
| | 01:39 | area, look in the upper
right corner for the RGB values.
| | 01:42 | You see they have actually gone negative
and the nice thing about that is that I
| | 01:47 | then bring on another layer on top in
Add mode or Screen mode, it can add those
| | 01:51 | negative values and bring
them back positive again.
| | 01:53 | I haven't lost them forever.
| | 01:54 | So it's a nice little blending mode
that basically works the way you thought
| | 01:58 | Difference was going to work, and you
can use it in place of Difference when you
| | 02:01 | are trying to do things like Difference matting.
| | 02:03 | Again just to remind you,
Difference or Classic Difference creates a
| | 02:06 | psychedelic look, values wraparound,
and they are greater than zero rather than
| | 02:10 | going down below zero.
| | 02:12 | Classic Difference just handles
the blacks little bit differently.
| | 02:14 | You can't really see it most of the time.
| | 02:15 | It's out time we got Subtract.
| | 02:17 | Glad they put that in there.
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| Divide mode| 00:03 | The other new blending mode they added
in After Effects CS5 is Divide and Divide
| | 00:07 | needs a little more explaining.
| | 00:09 | I have left myself in 32-
bit floating-point mode.
| | 00:12 | And when I do that, the Info panel
displays values from zero to one.
| | 00:16 | Black is zero so you can see as I am in
this very dark area, my pixel values are
| | 00:21 | close to zero, white is one.
| | 00:24 | So as I move my cursor around these
bright areas, the pixel values are near one.
| | 00:29 | That's important part of math to
remember when working with Divide mode.
| | 00:33 | By the way, you make the Info
panel display zero to one in any mode.
| | 00:36 | You just need to change it to a
decimal but I am leaving it on Auto
| | 00:39 | Color Display for now.
| | 00:41 | Okay, let's take a gray solid.
| | 00:45 | Its value is 50 percent or 0.5.
| | 00:47 | Well when you take a value and divide
it by 0.5, it has the same effect as
| | 00:57 | multiplying it by two.
| | 00:59 | Dividing any number by a value less
than one will give you a result that's
| | 01:04 | larger than the original number.
| | 01:07 | So, in short, Divide mode
tends to brighten the result.
| | 01:11 | I'll put my gray solid into Divide mode and
you will see that my gears are a lot brighter.
| | 01:19 | Before, I drop around the gear, I am
getting these green values around 0.57.
| | 01:26 | After, I am getting green values that
are in the area of 1.13-1.14, double the
| | 01:32 | value it was before.
| | 01:33 | If you want to really see this in
action, I am going to select my gray
| | 01:36 | solid, type Command+Shift+Y on Mac, Ctrl+
Shift +Y on Windows to open up the Solid Settings.
| | 01:43 | You'll notice another
improvement in CS5 is this live preview.
| | 01:46 | At long last, you can alter the colors
of solids in CS5 and see what happens
| | 01:51 | without having to close the dialog.
| | 01:53 | As I move my solid towards white, you
will see we revert to our original colors.
| | 01:59 | Again white has a value of one.
| | 02:03 | Dividing anything by one
gives the original value.
| | 02:06 | But as I pull my color towards black
and go to a much smaller value for my
| | 02:12 | divided layer, you will see I blow out
the result until eventually I get to a
| | 02:17 | mathematical impossibility, divide by zero.
| | 02:19 | Fortunately After Effects doesn't give an error.
| | 02:21 | It just gives a very, very
bright layer as a result.
| | 02:26 | And this may seem a bit counterintuitive.
| | 02:28 | Basically everything gets brighter
in a way not quite like Add mode.
| | 02:33 | Why would you use this?
| | 02:34 | Well actually it does have
several uses in composting.
| | 02:38 | Let me show you one of them.
| | 02:39 | I am going to open up this layer
which has a strong blue cast to it.
| | 02:45 | You know it's a blue sky but obviously
the blue is really colorizing what should
| | 02:49 | be white or gray smoke.
| | 02:51 | Let's say that I want to remove that color cast.
| | 02:54 | I will go Layer > New > Solid.
| | 02:57 | I am going to eyedropper my
solid to be the color of this tint.
| | 03:03 | Basically I am thinking the brightest
part of this smoke should probably be white.
| | 03:06 | I am going to eyedropper
that as my color for my solid.
| | 03:11 | Now when I put this tinted solid on top
into Divide mode, it removes that color
| | 03:18 | cast from the final image. Before and after.
| | 03:23 | So advanced compositors use
Divide mode to remove color casts.
| | 03:27 | They get to define what color is being
removed, and remember you can type T to
| | 03:33 | reveal Opacity and fade out that
layer on top to affect how much color cast
| | 03:38 | removal is taking place.
| | 03:41 | So Divide may not be immediately
intuitive but it actually is a very useful mode.
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|
|
8. Other EnhancementsRED settings| 00:03 | In this final chapter I want to
discuss a few other useful user interface
| | 00:06 | improvements that they have gone
ahead and put in After Effect CS5.
| | 00:10 | One has to do with handling of RED footage.
| | 00:13 | Now those hardcore RED users probably
know that RED released a beta plug-in for
| | 00:18 | After Effect CS4 and for Premiere CS4 that
allows you to read R3D files. Couple problems.
| | 00:26 | You did have to manually install it.
| | 00:27 | It was a beta, and it only supported RED
up through build 18, at least as of the
| | 00:33 | time I'm recording this video.
| | 00:34 | Well, as of this time, people already
have builds 20 and 21 in their camera so
| | 00:38 | this is already old.
| | 00:40 | But the good news is they've built
this into After Effects CS5 and the even
| | 00:44 | better news is it already supports
latest builds with the RED camera.
| | 00:48 | So let's go and play with it.
| | 00:48 | I am back at After Effects.
| | 00:51 | I have selected a piece of RED footage R3D.
| | 00:54 | RED Code file, floating Point, raw files.
| | 00:57 | So I am in 32-bit mode so I can
get everything out of this file.
| | 01:01 | I've got it selected.
| | 01:03 | I am going to open up its
Interpret Footage settings.
| | 01:05 | They add a little button down here in a
recent version, by the way, to go ahead
| | 01:09 | and directly open Interpret Footage.
| | 01:11 | I've got it open, I click on the magic
More Options button at the bottom and
| | 01:15 | here I am in my R3D Source Settings dialog.
| | 01:18 | We have got a preview of the shot.
| | 01:20 | I can scrub through it in time.
| | 01:22 | I can change many, many
different things about this shot.
| | 01:24 | I can change the ISO after the fact.
| | 01:27 | I can change the white balance,
the color temperature after the fact.
| | 01:32 | Tint, saturation, exposure, individual
color channels, brightness, contrast,
| | 01:37 | gamma curve even, decoding such as the
Debayer Detail, Chroma Denoise, I might
| | 01:42 | slip that up to minimum for this
this particular shot, etcetera.
| | 01:46 | But there is a gotcha with working in
these colors and RED's color science
| | 01:51 | versus After Effect color science.
| | 01:53 | Let me show it to you.
| | 01:54 | I'll cancel out for now to
get back to where I started.
| | 01:58 | Here's a composition that includes
our shot we were just looking at.
| | 02:01 | This may look familiar when I talked
about Color Finesse a few movies ago.
| | 02:05 | I suspect there's some over-brights
going on around this window and this pool
| | 02:09 | of light on the floor.
| | 02:11 | The problem is the way that After
Effects handles any raw footage is that it
| | 02:17 | converts to a 0 to 1 value
before After Effects processes it.
| | 02:22 | It happens at the Interpret Footage level.
| | 02:24 | So you can see even I got this really
bright window, over my Info Panel, I'm not
| | 02:28 | going to any values higher than 1.
| | 02:30 | I cannot recover those highlights.
| | 02:32 | I want to go ahead and take a snapshot
of this to remember what it looked like,
| | 02:36 | and let's go back and play
around with some exposure settings.
| | 02:40 | Open Interpret Footage, open More Options.
| | 02:44 | The way I typically recover more
detail from raw shots is in the raw dialog,
| | 02:49 | I'll knock it down one or two stops,
let's say -2 to be really extreme and then
| | 02:56 | in After Effects, I'll apply Effect >
Color Correction > Exposure, and bring my
| | 03:03 | stops back up in After Effects.
| | 03:05 | I can use Exposure, I can use Levels, any
way that I want to recover those levels.
| | 03:09 | But the problem is exposure in After
Effects is different than exposure in RED,
| | 03:16 | at least as at the time I am recording this.
| | 03:18 | I hit 2 to go two stops back up again.
| | 03:21 | I didn't get back to the same shot.
| | 03:23 | I'll compare my snapshot.
| | 03:25 | That was the original footage.
| | 03:27 | This is the result after knocking it
down 2 stops from the RED dialog and
| | 03:31 | bringing it back up 2 stops
here with the Exposure settings.
| | 03:35 | So there are some tricks you can't do
because RED's colors science is different
| | 03:39 | from After Effects' color science.
| | 03:41 | On the other hand, if you don't care
how the raw footage looked and you are
| | 03:45 | intending to color correct things in After
Effects anyway, this is a good way to go.
| | 03:49 | By reducing my my exposure a couple
stops in the RED dialog and bringing them
| | 03:54 | back in After Effects, I have
access to these over-brights now.
| | 03:58 | You'll see that I am
getting a values higher than 1.
| | 04:00 | I can play around with these over-
brights and use Levels, Curves, Color Finesse,
| | 04:05 | whatever I want to recover these details.
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| 3D camera enhancements| 00:03 | After Effect CS5 also includes a
few small but nice improvements in how
| | 00:07 | you handle 3D cameras.
| | 00:09 | I am going to double-click my camera to
open up my Camera Settings dialog, drag
| | 00:12 | it down here out of sight a little bit.
| | 00:14 | And the first thing you might
notice is this Preview checkbox.
| | 00:18 | Basically this means that changes
in this dialog are finally live.
| | 00:22 | You'll see the results
straight in the Comp panel.
| | 00:24 | So if I go ahead and choose a different
camera preset like 35mm, or 50, or 28,
| | 00:32 | I'll immediately see the results right
here in the Comp panel without having to
| | 00:38 | close the dialog first.
| | 00:40 | I can even scrub the Zoom value which is
tied into Angle Of View, and see the results.
| | 00:44 | The other thing that they have done is
they've moved the camera type, One Node
| | 00:48 | or Two Node, whether or not you have a
point of interest basically, directly
| | 00:53 | into the Camera Settings dialog.
| | 00:55 | You no longer need to into the Auto-
Orient dialog to choose whether or not you
| | 00:59 | have a One Node camera, when you are
doing everything from the camera back, or
| | 01:02 | Two Node where you have a point
of interest you are looking at.
| | 01:05 | So that's a couple of little things there.
| | 01:06 | Next, I want to press to C to
select the Unified Camera tool.
| | 01:10 | It's the one that looks like a Camera icon.
| | 01:12 | When I am in this mode, using the
left-mouse button orbits, using the
| | 01:17 | middle-mouse button moves in the X-Y
dimension, and using the right-mouse
| | 01:22 | button zooms in and out.
| | 01:25 | This is not new to CS5 but but I
wanted to remind you that it was there.
| | 01:29 | The other thing they have done is
they've created a few nice keyboard shortcuts
| | 01:32 | for what used to be menu commands.
| | 01:34 | For example, if I go ahead and select
just the drum kit off to the right, and
| | 01:40 | press the F key, the camera will now
move to look at the selected layer.
| | 01:46 | If I select more than one layer, so
just the bongo and guitar player both off
| | 01:49 | to the left, and press F, the camera will
now move to center and look at those objects.
| | 01:55 | This was available as a View menu command,
Look at Selected Layers, and they had
| | 02:01 | probably the most indecipherable
keyboard shortcut possible. But now F does it.
| | 02:06 | Here is also a menu command for Look at All
Layers and again here is a keyboard shortcut.
| | 02:11 | Well, Command and Shift on Mac or Ctrl+
Shift in Windows and press F and now it
| | 02:18 | will change the camera's
position to look at all the layers.
| | 02:21 | So that's a couple
convenient keyboard shortcuts.
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| MacBook shortcuts| 00:03 | This next feature is aimed at users who
own newer generation MacBook Pro laptops.
| | 00:09 | As you probably know, After Effects
takes huge advantage of the numeric keypad
| | 00:13 | on extended keyboards.
| | 00:14 | For example, pressing 0 on the
numeric keypad to start a RAM Preview.
| | 00:18 | Most laptops don't have numeric keypads,
so they duplicate those keys function
| | 00:22 | on top of the normal keyboard.
| | 00:24 | You just need to hold down
the Function key to access them.
| | 00:26 | Well for some reason newer generation
MacBook Pros don't have these duplicated
| | 00:32 | functions, leaving After Effects
users without a way to access those keys.
| | 00:36 | Well, After Effects CS5 has a fix for you.
| | 00:39 | Basically if you hold down the Control
key and press the equivalent on the alpha
| | 00:45 | numeric keyboard, you'll get the same functions.
| | 00:47 | For example if you are wanting to
press 0 on the numeric keypad to initiate
| | 00:51 | the RAM Preview, hold down Control
and press 0 on the normal keyboard, to
| | 00:56 | initiate the RAM Preview.
| | 00:58 | If you are used to tapping the Asterisk
key on the numeric keypad to place the
| | 01:01 | marker, hold down Control and press 8.
| | 01:03 | 8 is the key with the Asterisk is on top.
| | 01:06 | And that will place a marker.
| | 01:08 | Here is a table that shows you all of
the new shortcuts, and as I mentioned,
| | 01:11 | just basically hold Control down and
press the button that would otherwise make
| | 01:14 | sense on your normal keyboard.
| | 01:16 | This is going to be a big boon for
laptop warriors who really missed those
| | 01:19 | duplicated functions.
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| A few more features| 00:03 | I am going to wrap up by just going
over a few more user interface enhancements
| | 00:07 | and other little features they
have included AfterEffects CS5.
| | 00:10 | There is literally dozens of these.
| | 00:12 | Here is just a few of my favorites.
| | 00:14 | One is just a little small things have a nice.
| | 00:16 | I like to color code things, and now you
finally see color coded tabs inside the
| | 00:22 | Comp and Timeline panels.
| | 00:24 | You could always color code layers.
| | 00:26 | I would do that quite
often to group things together.
| | 00:28 | And inside the Project panel you always
had these color code labels as well, but
| | 00:33 | they were never actually
reflected out here in the work area.
| | 00:35 | Well now you can go ahead and change
the color of your comps in your Project
| | 00:40 | panel and it will be
reflected out in the user interface.
| | 00:42 | Just a little organizational thing.
| | 00:44 | Keeping with the color theme they
have made a little bit of a change in how
| | 00:47 | mask colors are drawn.
| | 00:50 | Now normally if I draw a mask
shape I get a yellow mask outline.
| | 00:54 | Yellow works with some footage.
| | 00:56 | It's not visible with other footage.
| | 00:58 | You could always change the color of
that, but problem was before is whenever
| | 01:02 | you drew a new mask it
would revert to the old color.
| | 01:05 | Well now it remembers your new color.
| | 01:07 | So if you are drawing multiple mask
shapes on a layer that say was yellow, you
| | 01:13 | can now set the color once and it'll remember
your new color whenever you draw a new mask.
| | 01:16 | Just a little thing but it's kind of nice.
| | 01:19 | Another common complaint that's been
addressed in this release is sometimes that
| | 01:23 | things such as motion path handles and
other little points can be hard to see or
| | 01:29 | pickup or distinguish in a busy composition.
| | 01:31 | Well they have added a preference now
underneath Preferences > General where you
| | 01:36 | can go ahead and set how big those points are.
| | 01:38 | I mean if want something extreme like 15
pixels, now I have humongous handles to
| | 01:43 | drag, humongous vertex's to go
ahead and grab and move around.
| | 01:47 | That might be overstating it a
bit in size, but five was small.
| | 01:52 | I would go to maybe even something like
seven just to make things a little bit
| | 01:56 | more noticeable and a little bit
easier to pick up and move around.
| | 01:59 | Particularly as you go to really high-
resolution displays where the individual
| | 02:03 | pixels are really small.
| | 02:05 | Another change has to do with
way that RAM Previews occur.
| | 02:08 | You probably knew that you'd go ahead
and initiate a RAM Preview and if you held
| | 02:12 | down to Shift key when you press 0 on
the numeric keypad or click this button,
| | 02:16 | you got the Shift+RAM Preview Options
where you could say skip frames or work at
| | 02:21 | a different frame rate.
| | 02:22 | Go down to half res or something like that.
| | 02:24 | Well they have made one more
modification for people who do a lot of roto work.
| | 02:28 | If you hold down Option on Mac or Alt
on Windows and now it's calculating just
| | 02:34 | the five prior frames leading
up to my Current Time Indicator.
| | 02:38 | That's great, if you just try see how
a mask outline or root outline or a key
| | 02:42 | is working if you got any sort of
chatter problems, rather than having to
| | 02:45 | preview the whole thing.
| | 02:47 | You can change the default from five
frames, but the preference is not here
| | 02:52 | in the Preview panel.
| | 02:54 | You actually need to go to the normal
After Effects > Preferences, go underneath
| | 02:58 | Previews and in this brand-new
section called Alternate RAM Preview you can
| | 03:03 | decide how many frames get previewed
when you hold down the Option or Alt key.
| | 03:07 | So this helps people who need to do
little checks as they work frame by
| | 03:11 | frame through a project.
| | 03:13 | Speaking of previews they've made
another nice little change that people have
| | 03:16 | been asking for ages.
| | 03:17 | Now say you had something that you
couldn't display at full resolution
| | 03:21 | inside your panel here.
| | 03:22 | As you went down to a lower resolution,
like here I am only at 18%, you get
| | 03:27 | these really rough aliased previews.
| | 03:30 | This particularly showed up if you ever
had to do a pixel aspect ratio correction.
| | 03:34 | You got a really rough nearest neighbor
version of what was going on just so the
| | 03:38 | program could respond faster.
| | 03:40 | People wanted those to be anti
- aliased, so they looked good.
| | 03:43 | Well now underneath After Effects >
Preferences > Previews there is now a
| | 03:48 | Viewer Quality setting.
| | 03:49 | The default is Faster, which is that
nearest neighbor, crunchy look you have got
| | 03:53 | whenever you scaled it down or
whenever you did a PAR correction.
| | 03:57 | But now you can say make it more
accurate all the time or more accurate except
| | 04:01 | for when you're doing a RAM Preview.
| | 04:02 | Again if you want a little of
performance but otherwise when you stop previewing
| | 04:06 | you'll always want to see things anti-aliased.
| | 04:07 | That's a nice improvement.
| | 04:09 | They have all put a Viewer
Quality popup in for Color Management.
| | 04:13 | Me, I always like see things
how they're really going to look.
| | 04:16 | So I tend to put these things at More
Accurate, leave it there, I'll live with
| | 04:20 | the extra render time.
| | 04:22 | I just want to see things as
accurately as possible in my Comp panel
| | 04:25 | whenever I'm working.
| | 04:27 | Last tiny little feature that I love in CS5?
| | 04:29 | More tooltips in the graph editor!
| | 04:31 | Go ahead and press U to reveal my keyframes.
| | 04:35 | Previously you'd get a tooltip when
ever you put the cursor over a graph, but
| | 04:40 | you wouldn't get it over keyframes.
| | 04:43 | Well now in AfterEffects CS5 you'll
see tooltips on key frames as well.
| | 04:47 | That makes a lot easier for you to see
what's going on particularly when you
| | 04:51 | want to edit these keyframes.
| | 04:52 | Just a little oversight from previous
versions that have been addressed in CS5.
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ConclusionFinal analysis| 00:03 | So that's an overview of what we feel are the
important new features in After Effects CS5.
| | 00:09 | That's not the end of the list.
| | 00:09 | There are other features.
| | 00:12 | For example, I showed how you
could take in Red footage natively.
| | 00:14 | Well, you can also take in
Panasonic AVC-Intra footage.
| | 00:17 | If you are in 32-bit mode, it even will even
refill over-brights to allow you to recover them.
| | 00:21 | Nice little touches like
that are throughout the program.
| | 00:23 | One of the other interesting areas are in
online services that Adobe has been cooking up.
| | 00:29 | Now a lot has been made of Adobe Story,
the new scriptwriting software that they
| | 00:32 | have been coming up with,
that's an online service.
| | 00:35 | After Effects CS5 even has a
Go To Story command in its menu.
| | 00:41 | On top of that there is Acrobat.com,
which is sort of an online text editor
| | 00:45 | where you can invite other people to
come see your text, make comments on it,
| | 00:48 | co-author it, etcetera.
| | 00:50 | And another one you probably haven't
heard of yet is CS Review, the new piece of
| | 00:55 | | | 00:55 | client review
software that Adobe is working on.
| | 00:57 | Again, completely online,
which is looking very promising.
| | 01:02 | We'll see how that goes.
| | 01:03 | The cool thing about these Online
Services is that they are going to be all made
| | 01:06 | available After Effects users.
| | 01:08 | They will be subscription-based, but my
understanding is that they're going to
| | 01:12 | be free at least initially to After
Effects users, for say like the first year
| | 01:16 | or something like that.
| | 01:17 | Now in addition to the new features,
unfortunately we've been losing features
| | 01:23 | with each new release as well and
CS5 has dropped a couple features.
| | 01:27 | We're getting CS Review, we lost Clip Notes.
| | 01:30 | So if you've been using Clip Notes to
do PDFs that had your movies embedded in
| | 01:34 | them, sorry, that's out of After Effects now.
| | 01:36 | Good old Vector Paint has also died.
| | 01:39 | I am going to miss its wiggly paths.
| | 01:41 | Paint still can't randomize
paths like Vector Paint can.
| | 01:45 | You can still open old Vector Paint
projects and render them, but don't try to
| | 01:49 | start a new project with Vector
Paint as you are not going to see all the
| | 01:52 | user-interface elements.
| | 01:53 | It was too hard for them to port over.
| | 01:57 | Okay now that we've been through all
the features, of course, the question on
| | 02:00 | everyone's mind is "should I
upgrade to After Effects CS5?"
| | 02:04 | And it depends on your individual circumstance.
| | 02:06 | I know from our perspective, we see a
lot of features After Effects that we wish
| | 02:11 | had gotten upgraded in this release.
| | 02:14 | Text could still be enhanced, masking
could be enhanced, 3D could be enhanced,
| | 02:18 | the Puppet tool could be enhanced,
shaper layers could be enhanced,
| | 02:21 | expressions could be enhanced.
| | 02:23 | None of those got major upgrades inside
CS5, just some little things like 3D text.
| | 02:29 | On the other hand, 64-bit is
just simply going to be essential.
| | 02:33 | If you've ever gotten a "could not
allocate object buffer" message before,
| | 02:39 | you need to upgrade.
| | 02:41 | If you do a lot of rotoscoping type of work,
Roto Brush is a really handy tool to save time.
| | 02:46 | We don't do a lot of roto, but my mind
is already working on different projects
| | 02:51 | and different treatments I would now
take on, because it'd be so easy to create
| | 02:55 | traveling mattes using that new tool.
| | 02:58 | So it's a bit of a balance.
| | 02:59 | I'd say if you're doing higher end
film work, if you are doing visual effects
| | 03:03 | oriented work with lot of roto, if
you are working with large file formats,
| | 03:07 | if you need color lookup tables and things
like that, then CS5 is an obvious upgrade for you.
| | 03:12 | If you're working on mainly standard
def footage, you are not doing a lot of
| | 03:16 | visual effects, you not doing a lot
stuff like rotoscoping, you've been looking
| | 03:20 | for maybe some new plug-ins, well
you do get FreeForm inside CS5, but not
| | 03:26 | anything really big you know like shape layers.
| | 03:28 | And if you got an old computer
something that does not have a 64-bit operating
| | 03:33 | system, you probably don't want
upgrade to CS5 until you've upgraded your
| | 03:38 | operating system, you are working on
larger formats, and now you need the
| | 03:42 | power that CS5 gives you.
| | 03:44 | Because that's what CS5 is about.
| | 03:46 | They made it 64-bit, they made it be
able to take larger file formats, they made
| | 03:50 | it faster, they are really focusing
on performance in this release, and
| | 03:55 | performance is one heck of a feature.
| | 03:57 | So that's the balance.
| | 03:59 | You have to decide.
| | 04:00 | In the meantime, I hope this information
was useful and allows you to get faster
| | 04:04 | jumpstart in using CS5,
if and when you do upgrade.
| | 04:08 | Take care, see you later!
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