IntroductionWelcome| 00:09 | Hi! I'm Chris Meyer of CRISH Design
and welcome to the final project for
| | 00:13 | After Effects Apprentice Third Edition.
| | 00:15 | Throughout this course, you're going
to pull together a wide variety of skills
| | 00:18 | that you've learned in the previous
After Effects Apprentice courses.
| | 00:21 | In doing so, you're going to put together
an opening title for a television program.
| | 00:25 | Let's take a quick preview of what you'll be building.
| | 00:28 | (music playing)
| | 00:54 | To create this, you'll be working with music,
including learning the magic
| | 00:58 | tempos for composing soundtracks and
spotting "hit points" in the final music,
| | 01:02 | mocking up a 3D world, crafting a
camera move through that world, performing 3D
| | 01:07 | tracking, time stretching layers,
typesetting text, applying animation presets,
| | 01:14 | creating shape layers, nesting and
precomposing, creating background elements;
| | 01:20 | including working with the layered
Photoshop files, writing expressions and
| | 01:24 | rendering your composition, including
how to create four-by-three center cut
| | 01:28 | and letterbox versions.
| | 01:29 | We'll also discuss how you deliver a
graphics package for your client that would
| | 01:33 | include lower thirds,
bumpers and a looping background.
| | 01:37 | We'll finish up by giving you a bunch
of additional ideas of how you can take
| | 01:40 | this design to the next level.
| | 01:42 | Throughout this final project, we will
be focusing on real world workflows and
| | 01:47 | how you make creative decisions
keeping your client's requirements in mind.
| | 01:50 | We hope it turns out to be very useful for when
you're creating projects for your own clients.
| | 01:55 | So without further ado, let's dive in and have
some fun creating this opening title in After Effects.
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| Setting up| 00:05 | I will be using After Effects CS6 for this exercise.
| | 00:09 | However, you can perform most of the
actions in CS5 or 5.5 and we've provided
| | 00:14 | exercise files for all three versions.
| | 00:16 | Indeed, if you have access to the exercise files,
open up AEA_Final Project 3e.aep.
| | 00:23 | The 3e indicates that it goes with the Third Edition
of the After Effects Apprentice book.
| | 00:28 | If you have access to that book instead,
go ahead and open up its Lesson 12.aep.
| | 00:33 | Set your Workspace to Standard and go
ahead and Reset Standard to make sure
| | 00:37 | you're back to the same
panel arrangement we have.
| | 00:39 | To optimize things a little bit, I'm
going to close up the bottom of my preview
| | 00:43 | panel because I don't
need access to those options.
| | 00:46 | I will keep the bottom of Info open,
because I will want to see some of
| | 00:50 | the information here.
| | 00:51 | And I'm going to drag my audio panel
down to the middle of Effects & Presets
| | 00:55 | just to create some more space for it.
| | 00:57 | We're going to assume that you're working
through these movies in a linear fashion.
| | 01:01 | But if you jump in the middle, we do
have a folder called Intermediate Comps,
| | 01:04 | which includes compositions at
different stages of this process.
| | 01:08 | Early on in particular, we'll be calling out
which one you can jump to, but it
| | 01:12 | should be obvious later on which comp
you can open up if you just want to watch
| | 01:16 | a certain set of movies from this course.
| | 01:18 | Also, we've saved a folder of Idea Corner comps,
which include some additional
| | 01:22 | ideas you can use to take this particular project
up to the next level, and also
| | 01:26 | a set of Finished Composition
to show the final project.
| | 01:29 | This will vary a little bit from what
you're creating here, because I make some
| | 01:33 | different decisions along the way of
exactly where to put the camera, exactly
| | 01:36 | how to draw a shape layer, but it will
still give you a very good idea of how
| | 01:41 | things should eventually end up.
| | 01:42 | Finally, the book files are almost
identical to this video course's files.
| | 01:45 | The only difference is that the Final
Comp IC has a slightly more sophisticated
| | 01:49 | light that we created in this course,
and we did not bother to create in the book.
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|
1. Roughing Out the SpotCreating the main composition| 00:04 | The first thing we need to do is create
our composition that we're going to be
| | 00:08 | building everything at.
| | 00:09 | I'm going to select the Comps
folder in the project panel to make sure
| | 00:13 | everything I create or
import goes into that folder.
| | 00:15 | Then go to Composition>New Composition.
| | 00:18 | The shortcut is Cmd+N on Mac,
Ctrl+N on Windows.
| | 00:21 | Before you start any project,
| | 00:24 | always make sure you check with
your client and find out what the
| | 00:29 | delivery specifications are.
| | 00:30 | Your life will be much easier if you
start at the end, delivery, and work
| | 00:35 | backwards from there.
| | 00:36 | After Effects has a number of HDTV presets in
the 1080 line or 1920x1080 preset is common.
| | 00:44 | Just to make your life easier for the
sake of working on these exercise files,
| | 00:48 | I'm going to create this at half HD size.
| | 00:50 | I can type in 960 or I can use After
Effects' accessibility to do divide 2,
| | 00:55 | having it do the math for me.
| | 00:57 | Double check the Frame Rate.
| | 00:59 | The After Effects' preset is
set up for 24 frames a second.
| | 01:02 | However, quite often when the
client says 24, they really want 23.976.
| | 01:09 | Again, check this and set it properly
before you start work, otherwise you might
| | 01:15 | have problems with skipped
or repeated frames later.
| | 01:17 | I'm going to set this to 23.976,
since I know that's my delivery specs.
| | 01:23 | Start Timecode of 0 is fine.
| | 01:25 | I've been told that the Duration of the
music file is 25 seconds, so I can type 25.
| | 01:31 | and After Effects will fill in the 0s afterwards.
| | 01:34 | It's not a bad idea to start your
composition longer than you think you'll
| | 01:37 | need, because it's much easier to shorten a
composition than to add time onto it later.
| | 01:42 | The last thing worth checking is
which 3D rendering engine you're using.
| | 01:46 | This comes into play in After Effects CS6
which has added a Ray-traced 3D Renderer.
| | 01:52 | It adds a lot of capabilities but also slows things
down if you don't need those capabilities.
| | 01:57 | In my case, I will not be taking advantage of
Ray-traced 3D in this composition,
| | 02:01 | so I'm going to set this down to Classic 3D.
| | 02:04 | You can always change this setting later.
| | 02:06 | If you're using After Effects CS5.5 or
earlier, the only choice you'll see here
| | 02:10 | is Advanced 3D that equals Classic 3D
in After Effects CS6.
| | 02:16 | Shutter Angle: 180 degrees is typical,
Shutter Phase of negative half the angle
| | 02:21 | is a very good starting point.
I like to start with pretty high Motion Blur settings.
| | 02:25 | We can change all these later and I'll click OK.
And now I'm ready to start work.
| | 02:31 | Well, I just noticed I did one very bad thing;
I left the default name of Comp 1.
| | 02:35 | This is a way to create a mess of a project.
| | 02:38 | I'm going to type Cmd+K on Mac,
or Ctrl+K on Windows to open up the
| | 02:42 | Composition Settings and change this name to
something that makes sense, such as Final Comp.
| | 02:47 | And indeed what I'll do quite often
is I will put a space before the names
| | 02:52 | of any compositions or folders that I want to
float to the top of my list in the project panel.
| | 02:58 | The space sorts before any other character
when you do alphabetical sorting.
| | 03:02 | I'll click OK and now we can get down
to business of spotting our music,
| | 03:07 | which is what we'll do next.
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| The magic tempos| 00:05 | If possible, before we start
animating a job, we love to get the music.
| | 00:11 | The music and the tempo and beats in
that music can give us a nice animation
| | 00:15 | grid for where to place cuts, keyframes, etcetera.
| | 00:18 | Now when a composer creates music
for you in your project, there are some
| | 00:23 | specific tempos or speeds that they
can use that will make your life a lot
| | 00:27 | easier, we call these the magic tempos.
| | 00:30 | And indeed, if you have access to the
exercise files there's a folder called
| | 00:33 | Bonus Content that includes
a PDF called Magic Tempos.
| | 00:37 | In it, we described the philosophy
of how the tempo of music maps
| | 00:43 | to frames inside your animation.
| | 00:45 | And on the second page we give you a
table of what we call the magic tempos,
| | 00:50 | where specific beats per minute, the
tempo that musicians like to think of,
| | 00:54 | mapped to very clean, even frames per beat,
the spacing in frames inbetween the beats.
| | 01:00 | We gave this list to our musician
ahead of time and said, please pick one of
| | 01:05 | these tempos for the music.
| | 01:07 | Now it so happens that the subject of
this project is about heart attacks.
| | 01:11 | So we did a little research to find out
what is the common tempo of a heartbeat.
| | 01:16 | We found it can fall anywhere between 60 and
100 beats per minute, with 72 being common.
| | 01:20 | So the musician had asked us what our
frame rate was, 23.976, and looked for a
| | 01:26 | tempo that was close to this target
tempo of around 72 beats per minute and lo
| | 01:31 | and behold, here's one right here, 71.93.
| | 01:34 | Now the musician knows what
tempo to compose our music at.
| | 01:38 | Even if the composer has not done
composing the music, if you know that
| | 01:43 | they're going to compose at this
tempo ahead of time, you now have a
| | 01:46 | framework for how to space out your
animation timing, namely, 20 frames
| | 01:50 | between each beat of the music.
| | 01:51 | Since we got the music first, I'm
going to go back at After Effects, twirl
| | 01:56 | open Sources, twirl open Music, grab
our soundtrack finalbeat.wav,
| | 02:02 | and add it to the Final Composition.
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| Spotting hit points in music| 00:05 | The next thing to do is to look at the
waveform of this audio file, and spot
| | 00:10 | peaks in that waveform, which indicate
beats and place markers along this layer,
| | 00:15 | so we know where they land.
| | 00:16 | I'll type LL, two L's in quick succession,
which reveal that audio waveform, you
| | 00:21 | can also twirl it open for the layer and give
ourselves some more room so I can see
| | 00:26 | this audio waveform in more
resolution, as tall as possible.
| | 00:29 | And we can indeed see a series of
spikes that indicate loud sections,
| | 00:35 | in this case, beats in the music.
| | 00:37 | I'm going to press the decimal point key
on the numeric keypad and audition this
| | 00:41 | soundtrack, just to get an idea of how
those spikes correspond to what I hear.
| | 00:46 | (music playing)
| | 01:11 | Okay. I think I've got a feel for how this goes.
| | 01:14 | Mainly it starts with that double beat of
the heartbeat, the thump, the thump, the thump.
| | 01:19 | The second beat seems to be stronger
than the first beat in those pair of beats,
| | 01:23 | so I'm going to use that as my main
trigger for action in my animation.
| | 01:26 | I've moved my time indicator to where it
appears to line up with one of those beats.
| | 01:31 | I can press the Plus key to zoom in, to get
better resolution, and minus to zoom back out.
| | 01:35 | Let's audition that.
(music playing)
| | 01:38 | Yes, that is indeed
where one of the beats starts.
| | 01:40 | So I'll select my audio track and
press * on the numeric keypad to place an
| | 01:46 | unnamed marker at that point.
| | 01:47 | Now let's see if the
musician really did what I asked.
| | 01:51 | I said to use a tempo of 20 frames per
beat, so I should be able to hold the
| | 01:56 | Shift Key and press Page Down twice to
jump 10, 20 frames, and lo and behold,
| | 02:02 | there's another beat. Lovely!
| | 02:04 | So all I need to do is press *, go to
Shift, Page Down, Page Down, *, Shift,
| | 02:12 | Page Down, Page Down, and
I'm neatly falling on beats.
| | 02:15 | This makes my life so much easier, so I
don't have to manually spot every beat
| | 02:19 | or guess where they land.
| | 02:20 | I'm going to quickly spot out all the
beats in the soundtrack and we'll come
| | 02:24 | back in a few seconds when I'm done doing that.
| | 02:27 | I'm done spotting all the beats in the
soundtrack and indeed knowing that they
| | 02:31 | were 20 frames apart really helped me
in these areas where it was hard to see
| | 02:36 | exactly where a beat may fall, such as
in through here, and down here where it
| | 02:40 | wasn't clear just by looking at the
waveform which was a stronger beat.
| | 02:44 | But since I know ahead of time that the
real beats are 20 frames apart, it made
| | 02:48 | it easy to place the marker correctly.
| | 02:50 | I'll audition this quickly just for a check.
| | 02:52 | (music playing)
| | 02:55 | The next thing I'd like to do is spot out
where the major events in the music are.
| | 03:00 | Not just plain vanilla beats, but where
an instrument comes in, finishes, maybe
| | 03:05 | a vocal starts, if there were any vocals,
those give me major sectional ideas
| | 03:10 | of maybe where to place major cuts in my animation
or introduce something such as the title.
| | 03:14 | Now there's a few different
things happening in this music.
| | 03:17 | I'm going to go back to the start,
press the decimal point key to audition the
| | 03:21 | whole soundtrack again.
| | 03:22 | (music playing)
| | 03:42 | Okay, there's a few distinguishing features
about the soundtrack.
| | 03:45 | One is where the cymbal
slowly builds to a crescendo.
| | 03:48 | I want to mark where those events start.
| | 03:51 | The first one was around here somewhere.
| | 03:52 | (music playing)
| | 03:53 | Some of those goes right around this beat.
| | 03:57 | (music playing)
| | 03:59 | Yes. I'm going to add a name to this marker.
| | 04:02 | I just need to double-click it and
type in cymbal, or you can just type
| | 04:06 | something short like CYM, if you're
trying to cut down on the amount of space
| | 04:10 | you're using in your timeline.
| | 04:11 | Now again, since I already had a marker
here, I just need to double-click it to
| | 04:14 | add a comment to it.
| | 04:16 | You can also press Option on Mac or
Alt on Windows when you're pressing *
| | 04:20 | in creating a marker to go ahead and go
straight to this dialog and name it immediately.
| | 04:24 | So it's one cymbal roll and there was
another one here somewhere close to the
| | 04:29 | end of the music, where was that?
| | 04:30 | (music playing)
| | 04:31 | Sounds like it was
happening right around here, yes.
| | 04:38 | So I'll double-click that
marker and also type cymbal.
| | 04:42 | Okay, there is a place
here where the music starts.
| | 04:45 | Not just the heartbeats, not just the cymbals,
but instruments come in such as piano.
| | 04:49 | (music playing)
| | 04:50 | That seems like that's the beat, so
I'll double-click that beat, type piano
| | 04:58 | first or maybe piano starts or whatever,
but this is the first piano phrase, the
| | 05:03 | melody in this piece.
| | 05:05 | I've also noticed that this music
follows a pattern where a certain phrase
| | 05:09 | or measure repeats.
| | 05:11 | There's this section.
| | 05:12 | (music playing)
| | 05:15 | And I know it's right around the
halfway point in this tall area of the
| | 05:19 | waveform, it seems to repeat again.
| | 05:21 | Go to this marker, you can hold down
the Shift key while dragging the time
| | 05:24 | indicator, to snap the
markers and audition that.
| | 05:26 | (music playing)
| | 05:27 | Yup, that's where my repeat is.
| | 05:31 | I'll go ahead and click that
marker and say, repeat phrase.
| | 05:36 | I marked my first piano note;
| | 05:38 | let's mark that last piano note,
which happen shortly after this.
| | 05:41 | (music playing)
| | 05:46 | That's the start of that last piano note.
| | 05:48 | So maybe that will be a good place to
start wrapping things up or to introduce
| | 05:53 | my last element, piano last.
| | 05:56 | Finally, after this last cymbal roll,
we have a crash that signifies the end of
| | 06:01 | the music or at least the melodic part,
and then return just to heartbeats.
| | 06:05 | (music playing)
| | 06:06 | So that's a good culmination of
whatever animation I might want to create.
| | 06:12 | I am going to type CRASH;
| | 06:14 | just to remind myself that this was a big event.
| | 06:20 | And now my soundtrack has been spotted.
| | 06:23 | I suggest you get used to doing this,
because it's a great way to start your animations.
| | 06:28 | However, if you want to leap ahead,
inside the project panel, there's a folder
| | 06:32 | called Intermediate Comps and inside
there you'll find one that's called Spotted
| | 06:36 | Music and that already contains
all of the spotting you just did.
| | 06:41 | So if you want to jump ahead, use that
composition, otherwise, I am going to
| | 06:45 | continue with this final
comp that we've been working on.
| | 06:48 | Once my spotting is done, I can twirl
up the waveform or that entire layer.
| | 06:52 | I don't need to wait for that
redraw anymore and now I have these nice
| | 06:55 | markers on my layer.
| | 06:56 | I can hold the Shift key and snap
the time marker to help me locate
| | 07:00 | important animation points.
| | 07:01 | And I'll close up my Intermediate Comps
folder in my Project panel just to keep
| | 07:06 | things clean, same with
the music folder for now.
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| Creating video placeholders| 00:05 | Next, we're going to start roughing
out the arrangement of our 3D world.
| | 00:08 | I'm going to maximize my display here,
so I can see that comp panel at 100%.
| | 00:13 | Rearrange your own display as necessary,
and I'll move my time marker back to the
| | 00:18 | start of the composition.
| | 00:19 | The shortcut key is Home.
| | 00:20 | Now it may be tempting to start
throwing a real footage in here right away
| | 00:24 | and start setting up camera moves.
| | 00:25 | But it's really advisable to slow down,
create a mockup, maybe test a camera
| | 00:31 | move, test arrangement and make sure
your client is happy with that before you
| | 00:35 | jump in with real footage.
| | 00:36 | Now the client told us that they
don't have a big budget for stock footage.
| | 00:41 | So I think I'm going to only spend my
money on 1 HERO high definition shot at
| | 00:46 | the end then maybe make a grid or
array or some other arrangement of cheaper,
| | 00:51 | smaller, standard definition or even web
resolution videos just to fill out my 3D world.
| | 00:57 | So let's start creating some solids
to stand in for our eventual videos.
| | 01:02 | With Final Comps selected.
| | 01:03 | I'll go to Layer>New>Solid
| | 01:06 | the shortcut is Cmd+Y or Ctrl+Y.
A full frame high definition video
| | 01:11 | would be the same size as my composition.
| | 01:13 | We have been working at half size here,
and it's time to think ahead about
| | 01:17 | what I might want to do.
| | 01:19 | Just pieces of video hanging in space
can be a little bit on the boring side.
| | 01:23 | I typically like to add frames or borders
around my video to make them look more
| | 01:27 | interesting, particularly when I'm
constructing a 3D world that contains
| | 01:31 | multiple video panels.
| | 01:32 | So I'm going to add on a little extra space,
like maybe an additional, say 25%
| | 01:38 | times 1.25, just to give myself some
extra room for that frame. I'm going to Tab.
| | 01:44 | I will set to 675.
| | 01:45 | Let's call it 680 pixels.
| | 01:47 | 140 larger than our original solid
and I'll add the same number to my width
| | 01:53 | as well or 1100 total.
| | 01:55 | I'm going to call this my Hero Shot
and I'm going to Color code it initially
| | 02:00 | just to keep track of it.
| | 02:02 | Colors are important, but now, I'm going
to pick something nice and bright like,
| | 02:06 | nice Yellow, initially.
| | 02:08 | I'll click OK in the Color Picker
and OK on the Solid Settings.
| | 02:12 | I'm going to click on My Label next to
my layer in the timeline panel and give
| | 02:17 | it the same a label color, Yellow.
| | 02:20 | That will make it easy to keep track of.
| | 02:22 | So that's my Hero Shot.
| | 02:23 | Now let's create some placeholders
for our less important supporting actors
| | 02:27 | in this composition.
| | 02:28 | I'll go to, again, New>Solid Cmd+Y or Ctrl+Y.
Rough square pixel size
| | 02:34 | for standard def video is somewhere
in the neighborhood of 640x480,
| | 02:37 | sometimes a little bit larger.
| | 02:40 | I'm working on half size, I need to
get on 320x240 and I want to add again a
| | 02:47 | framing device around this, maybe a quarter
again larger, a quarter of 240 is 60.
| | 02:51 | So I'll add 60 to this, 300.
| | 02:53 | Take that up to above 380, then as a
result, again, I'm adding 60 pixels to
| | 02:57 | Height and Width to leave myself room
for a frame and give it a different color,
| | 03:02 | such as Red and I'll call this Extra 1.
| | 03:07 | Click OK and make sure
it's Label color is indeed Red.
| | 03:13 | Well since I have created one,
there's no need to keep typing in numbers.
| | 03:16 | I'm just going to duplicate Extra 1.
| | 03:18 | Select one of the duplicates and this
time hold Cmd+Shift+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Y
| | 03:23 | on Windows to Solid Settings.
| | 03:25 | After Effects will try to rename the
solid for me, it so happens I already have
| | 03:29 | Extra 1, 2, 3 and 4 in this project,
that's why I chose the name Extra 5.
| | 03:33 | But to keep things straight, I'm going
to say Extra 2, my second extra video
| | 03:37 | on this composition.
| | 03:38 | We'll give it a Color such as,
I don't know, let's say Green.
| | 03:42 | Maybe about 120 Hue,
click OK, Extra 2, new Solids.
| | 03:48 | Because I changed some of the settings
from Extra 1 and give it a Green label
| | 03:52 | and let's make two more.
| | 03:54 | Cmd+D or Ctrl+D to Duplicate,
Cmd+Shift+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Y, rename, 3
| | 04:01 | new color Blue, maybe around 240 Hue, click OK.
| | 04:07 | It return for New, change label color to Blue
and one more time Cmd+D or Ctrl+D,
| | 04:14 | select, Cmd+Shift or Ctrl+Shift+Y,
Extra 4, and what other color can I give it?
| | 04:21 | I haven't used orange yet, so let's pick a
nice orange right around, there. Click Orange.
| | 04:26 | So these are my stand-in place keepers
for the frame of the videos
| | 04:33 | I'm eventually going to be creating.
| | 04:35 | Next, let's rearrange them in 3D space.
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| Arranging layers in 3D space| 00:05 | My next step in this creative process
is coming up with some basic arrangement
| | 00:09 | of these layers in 3D space that I might
want to move the camera around.
| | 00:13 | Now one common thing to do is
something like a gallery wall.
| | 00:16 | We have a bunch of pictures on a wall
and then you move the camera, passing,
| | 00:20 | ending up on the final picture
that you want to focus on.
| | 00:23 | To do that, I'm going to need a much
bigger view port in my Final Comp panel
| | 00:28 | and just this 100% view of
my final rendered image.
| | 00:32 | So I'm going to hold on Cmd or Ctrl,
pressing the minus key to zoom down a
| | 00:36 | little bit to give myself some more room to work here.
| | 00:39 | Then press and hold the spacebar
to temporarily get the Hand tool move things over.
| | 00:44 | Let's say I want to do a camera move
from left to right ending up on our final
| | 00:49 | high definition video.
| | 00:50 | I'll start dragging up my layers in space.
| | 00:52 | I'm just trying out some different
arrangements for where I might want
| | 00:58 | to place these videos.
| | 00:59 | I can go ahead and place things randomly by
different arrangements, seeing what you like.
| | 01:04 | I have an engineer's mind I admit, so I
might go for something a little bit more
| | 01:09 | orderly and symmetrical, maybe something
like around that, where I've got a nice
| | 01:15 | rhythm of up-down, up-down final.
| | 01:18 | This is where you can be creative, come
up with whatever arrangement you like.
| | 01:22 | This just happens to be where I'm going
for this project, but feel free to
| | 01:26 | express yourself a bit.
| | 01:28 | One thing I am going to do is I'm going
to leave my Hero shot at its original
| | 01:32 | position centered inside the composition panel.
| | 01:34 | That will make it a really easy for me
to craft the camera move later that ends
| | 01:38 | up centered on the shot full frame.
| | 01:40 | Once I've roughed out an arrangement, I
need to make up my mind about whether or
| | 01:45 | not I want to keep that rough, loose,
random arrangement or give some mathematic
| | 01:49 | precision to that arrangement.
| | 01:51 | There is a Window Align panel in CS6
to help you do this alignment or you can
| | 01:57 | also select all of your layers
down in the timeline panel.
| | 02:00 | Press P to reveal their position
and maybe do a little bit of math.
| | 02:05 | I know, a little bit of math can be
daunting to some people, but it's not bad,
| | 02:10 | and just come up with a number to
place between these things, like I have
| | 02:14 | roughly 500 pixels I'll arrange
between these layers right now.
| | 02:17 | Let's go ahead and pick some numbers
like, to say -1900, -1400, - 900 and 500
| | 02:28 | off of that is -400, taking up
some even spacing in the X dimension.
| | 02:33 | Next, in my case, I want to have a nice
even spacing on the Y dimension to have
| | 02:37 | a little bit of rhythm here.
| | 02:39 | I think maybe going off this center line
of this final Hero comp, I'll go in the
| | 02:43 | same space above and below
might give me a good rhythm.
| | 02:46 | Again, feel free to express yourself the
way you like, this is just what I am up to.
| | 02:51 | Seems like all of my videos are a bit
on the high side right now, so if I drag
| | 02:56 | them down, somewhere around there.
| | 02:57 | Now I'm going to pull out a calculator
and start saying, I'm roughly to 100,
| | 03:01 | roughly 440, the center of my main layer is 270.
| | 03:04 | It looks like the difference
is about 170 plus or minus.
| | 03:08 | Let's just try that.
| | 03:09 | 270-170=100, 270+170=440.
| | 03:16 | So I use that spacing to create a nice
symmetrical rhythm between these layers.
| | 03:24 | Again, feel free to do what you want.
| | 03:26 | Next, I want to put these guys in the
3D space and start to spread them out.
| | 03:30 | So I am going to select all those
layers and enable your 3D layer switch.
| | 03:33 | Once you do so, After Effects is going
to reveal their orientation and rotation
| | 03:37 | parameters as well, we don't really need
to see those right now, so I'll press P
| | 03:41 | once to twirl up the body up, press
P again to reveal this position again.
| | 03:45 | And now let's start playing around
with alternate views, so I can look at my
| | 03:50 | arrangement in multiple
perspectives all at the same time.
| | 03:53 | I'm going to go ahead and
use my Select view layout.
| | 03:56 | In my case, I'd like for wide screen
to maybe do something like four views,
| | 04:01 | maybe four views bottom.
| | 04:03 | Where my main active camera spread out
along the top and then I'm looking at the
| | 04:08 | top, front, and either left to right
views along the bottom of my display.
| | 04:13 | I might need to do a little bit
of zooming to fit everybody in.
| | 04:16 | For example, these are just
showing me my Hero frame initially.
| | 04:19 | So I'll press C to bring up the Camera
tool and if I have a three button mouse,
| | 04:25 | I will either right-click to get the
Z Track tool or press the center mouse
| | 04:32 | button to get the XY Track tool
and help center up my layers.
| | 04:37 | Use a combination of those until
I've got them nicely centered in my
| | 04:41 | rendered view port.
| | 04:43 | If you don't have a three button
mouse, you can just press C to toggle
| | 04:46 | through these tools.
| | 04:47 | Here's my Z track, pulled back so
that I can see all the layers and toggle
| | 04:53 | around pressing C, until I get my XY track,
and center them up that way.
| | 04:58 | And I try to give these guys a little bit
more room just so I can render more images.
| | 05:03 | There we go.
| | 05:05 | Whenever you're done using any tool,
press V to return to the Selection tool.
| | 05:09 | It's the one you use most often,
and it'll keep you out of trouble.
| | 05:13 | The last thing I might do is go ahead
and stagger these extra videos in Z space.
| | 05:17 | Again, just to create variety
as the camera pans past these.
| | 05:21 | I could put them all in the same Z dimension
so they really were like they were
| | 05:24 | on the gallery wall, but I like to
take advantage of Z space and multi-planing
| | 05:28 | just to add more visual interest to my projects.
| | 05:31 | So I'll go ahead and start selecting
these layers and push some of them back
| | 05:36 | and pull some of them a bit forward.
| | 05:39 | Try out some different arrangements.
| | 05:41 | Again, I could always change these later.
| | 05:44 | That's looking maybe like a little too wide.
| | 05:47 | Let's maybe get them a
little closer to each other here.
| | 05:51 | That's not so bad around there.
| | 05:53 | Then once I have roughly an arrangement
that I like, again, I turn my eye back
| | 05:59 | to my timeline panel.
| | 06:01 | Look at the numbers and
see what they are telling me.
| | 06:03 | This is my closer value. I was out here.
| | 06:06 | I'm just going to pick a nice even number
like say + or -150 in the Z dimension.
| | 06:12 | Again, this is not any magic formula.
| | 06:15 | This is me exercising a little bit of
trial and error to see what looks good
| | 06:20 | initially and I can always
tweak these values later.
| | 06:22 | So now I have my initial arrangement
of my layers in 3D space.
| | 06:27 | The next step is trying out some camera
moves around these arrangements of
| | 06:30 | layers to see how my gallery wall or whatever
arrangement you've created is working out.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Roughing out a camera move| 00:05 | By now, hopefully you've arranged
your placeholder layers in what you think
| | 00:09 | might be a pleasing arrangement
to move a camera around.
| | 00:12 | In this movie, let's go ahead
and craft a camera move.
| | 00:15 | Now again, your arrangement may be different
than mine, so your camera move may be different.
| | 00:19 | But I'll show you the mental process
I go through in creating a move like this.
| | 00:23 | The first think I want to do is I want
to maximize my act of camera display,
| | 00:27 | so, I see how this thing is going to render.
| | 00:29 | I'll go ahead and set it to fit up-to 100%
and in the event it is some strange
| | 00:34 | percentage like 63.7%, where
I might see some alias lines.
| | 00:39 | I'll go into the After Affects Preferences
for Previews and set my Zoom Quality
| | 00:44 | to be More Accurate.
| | 00:46 | This will anti-alias the display in the
active camera, even if I might enter an
| | 00:51 | odd number like 63%, and I'll click OK.
| | 00:53 | Now I mentioned in the previous movie
that I purposely left this HERO still at
| | 00:58 | its default position, which happens
to be centered in the composition.
| | 01:04 | It so happens, when I create brand
new cameras, they also default to being
| | 01:08 | centered in the composition.
| | 01:10 | And that will end up with a very
nice framing of my final video.
| | 01:14 | So let's go up to Layer>New>Camera,
the Camera Type defaults to whatever
| | 01:21 | you set it to last.
| | 01:22 | I normally prefer Two-Node Cameras,
because they allow me to steer the point of
| | 01:27 | interest, what the camera is looking at.
| | 01:29 | But in this case, I'm just contemplating
a very simple pull back, pan, push-in move,
| | 01:33 | and for that all I need is a One-Node camera,
it would be much easier to handle
| | 01:38 | since I'll just be moving the back of the camera,
instead of trying to pan it, tilt it and aim it.
| | 01:44 | So I'll choose One-Node Camera.
| | 01:46 | For presets we typically like for motion graphics work
shorter lenses, which give a wider angle of view
[00:01:513.66]
and therefore more exaggerated to 3D effects,
| | 01:57 | more multi-planing, etcetera.
| | 01:58 | I'll choose that and I'm going to leave the
Depth of Field blur off for now and click OK.
| | 02:05 | You notice none of my layers jumped
in position, that's because new cameras
| | 02:08 | default again centered in the composition
placed where a layer add Z=0, where we
| | 02:14 | left our HERO layer will be visually 100%.
| | 02:16 | Let me twirl up other layers here, so
I can see my markers for my soundtrack.
| | 02:24 | You can also rearrange your layers if
you want to, to put the camera closer to
| | 02:27 | your soundtrack, and start
planning out my camera move.
| | 02:30 | Well, quite often, a good place to start keyframing
is where you plan to end up, your final pose.
| | 02:39 | I mentioned when I was spotting this
music that this final cymbal crash might be
| | 02:43 | a really good place to end my
camera move, centered on my HERO.
| | 02:46 | I'm going to press the decimal point key
just to preview that. (music playing)
| | 02:51 | Yeah, that's my nice final hit.
| | 02:53 | So with camera selected, I'll press P to reveal position
and enable keyframing for the position value.
| | 03:00 | Now by default, After Effects bundles together
the X, Y and Z position values into one keyframe.
| | 03:06 | But again, I'm doing a type of movement
here where I tend to pull back in Z, pan in X,
| | 03:11 | push forward in Z. I maybe better
off separating my dimensions,
| | 03:19 | so I can keyframe X, Y and Z independently.
| | 03:22 | Maybe easier to go ahead and do my eases,
and keep constant velocities
| | 03:26 | without worrying about them all
being bundled into one value.
| | 03:28 | So to separate dimensions' four Position,
I can right-click on it and choose Separate Dimensions.
| | 03:36 | Now I have independent X, Y and Z values
for position and retained my keyframe
| | 03:42 | I set for all three values.
| | 03:45 | Okay, that's my good starting pose.
| | 03:46 | Now I want to go ahead and drag my
music up by my camera, so I can see them
| | 03:51 | right next to each other.
| | 03:52 | I also see that my camera is kind of off screen
here on my top view, no problem.
| | 03:57 | I'll press C to change the camera tools
and just rearrange that display to where
| | 04:02 | I can see everyone clearly.
| | 04:04 | My right view, I can't see things quite
as well, so I'll go ahead and pull back
| | 04:10 | and reposition, so I could see all my
layers that view as well,
| | 04:13 | and press V to return to Selection tool.
| | 04:15 | Okay, I have my ending pose.
Let's think about my starting pose.
| | 04:19 | We marked this beat right around 101 that indicates
where the cymbal first appears in the music.
| | 04:27 | And again, you can hold the Shift Key while dragging
the time indicator to snap to those markers.
| | 04:31 | I'll preview that again.
(music playing)
| | 04:36 | Lovely place to start a camera move,
maybe a pull back to reveal my world.
| | 04:41 | Okay, let's move my camera over here
towards center around, say these three layers.
| | 04:46 | I can go ahead and move it by eye
or I can be mathematical about this,
| | 04:52 | select that green extra layer, press P to reveal its
position and see that it is an X Position of -1420.
| | 04:58 | I'll enter that for the camera
to make sure it's nicely centered.
| | 05:04 | Okay, do I want to be centered in
between these three layers or maybe a little
| | 05:09 | higher so as I pull back I am going
to see layers 1 and 3 more clearly?
| | 05:14 | I think I'm going to prefer being up
like this, to where they are a little bit
| | 05:20 | more featured, little bit of a HERO.
| | 05:22 | I can always drift down on my center line later.
| | 05:25 | So I'm going to set Extra 1,
type P to see its Position.
| | 05:28 | And I see that it is on a Y Position of 100.
| | 05:33 | Okay, we will enter that for the camera here.
| | 05:36 | And again, these are just my
set of choices to start off with.
| | 05:39 | You can go ahead and make your own move.
| | 05:41 | Lastly, I think I'd like to start
pushed in to where I don't even see even video.
| | 05:45 | I just see my background, which we'll be
constructing later, and maybe pull back
| | 05:49 | to reveal a much richer world with videos in it.
| | 05:51 | No problem, I'll just scrub the camera
inward until I can no longer see those videos.
| | 05:58 | So that will be my starting camera position.
| | 06:00 | And now, that I've decided where I am
going to start and end, it's time to
| | 06:04 | decide how I'm going to move
in between those two points.
| | 06:07 | All right, that's where the cymbal starts.
(misic playing)
| | 06:09 | An actual melody starts here.
| | 06:14 | Again, I can drag the time indicator.
| | 06:16 | I can hold the Shift Key to snap or
I can take advantage of the keyboard
| | 06:20 | shortcut in After Effects where the K key
jumps to visible markers and keyframes later in time.
| | 06:26 | The J key will jump to visible keyframes
and markers earlier in time,
| | 06:32 | and now I'm right on that marker.
| | 06:33 | I want to pull back to
where I can see my entire world.
| | 06:36 | So let's go ahead and starts scrubbing that Z value,
| | 06:40 | until I can see a nice arrangement of layers.
| | 06:42 | You can hold down the Shift Key
and scrub to pull things back faster.
| | 06:46 | Okay, that's not a bad arrangement of
layers, but I want to make sure all my
| | 06:51 | viewers can see my world.
| | 06:52 | So I'll make sure my Active Camera
view is selected and press the apostrophe key
| | 06:56 | to see my action and title safe areas for
16x9 widescreen but also for 4x3 center cut.
| | 07:05 | Quite often, high-def wide screen versions
have their left and right sides
| | 07:09 | chopped off to create a
standard definition 4x3 version.
| | 07:14 | So I still want to see things of interest
inside this 4x3 action-safe areas.
| | 07:19 | That's going to cause me to pull back
my camera further than I otherwise would
| | 07:23 | have, just to make sure even standard
def viewers see something interesting
| | 07:28 | when the camera pulls back.
| | 07:30 | Scrubbing the Z value automatically
creates a keyframe at this time, because I
| | 07:35 | previously enabled keyframing for that value.
| | 07:37 | Okay, while we're back here, let's go
ahead and center up our camera on our
| | 07:41 | world, so we end up centered on our
high definition video here at the end.
| | 07:45 | Our ending Y Position is 270 pixels, fine.
| | 07:48 | I'll enter that here;
| | 07:49 | 270, and there's my centered up world.
| | 07:53 | Okay, continuing the theme of symmetry.
| | 07:55 | I see I have one, two and three beats
for my pull back from being pushed in on
| | 08:02 | the world to back to seeing all the layers.
| | 08:04 | Let's go ahead and try the same
timing for my push into my HERO video.
| | 08:08 | So I'll go here, hold Shift to snap
to the CRASH marker, and press J to jump
| | 08:14 | one, two, three, beats earlier in time.
| | 08:18 | And let's go ahead and keep our same
Z position looking at the whole world.
| | 08:23 | That Z position was roughly -1870.
| | 08:27 | I often correct my keyframe values to
be whole numbers, not because they render
| | 08:33 | any better, just because they're
easier to remember, there we go.
| | 08:38 | Now we have a move like this.
| | 08:40 | We pull back on the world, pan across it,
you can see the multi-planing of my
| | 08:46 | layers being spaced out differently in
Z where the foreground layers, the green
| | 08:50 | and orange ones appear to move faster
than the background ones, the red and blue
| | 08:55 | one, and even the yellow HERO.
| | 08:58 | And then we end up by pushing in,
centered on our final HERO frame.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining the camera move| 00:05 | We have our basic Camera Move Key framed.
| | 00:07 | Now let's go about testing and refining it.
| | 00:10 | I almost never leave keyframes linear.
| | 00:13 | Sometimes I'll do it for a particular
bouncy effect, but quite often, it doesn't
| | 00:17 | look very smooth or professional.
| | 00:18 | I'm going to go ahead and select all
of those keyframes and choose
| | 00:23 | Animation>Keyframe Assistant>Easy Ease
| | 00:26 | just to add some nice, smooth accelerations
and decelerations to my camera move.
| | 00:32 | Okay. Let's do a quick RAM Preview
of this initial move.
| | 00:35 | I'll press 0 on the numeric keypad
and calculate that Ram Preview.
| | 00:39 | It will go fast because solids
take almost no time to render.
| | 00:44 | (music playing)
| | 01:09 | Not bad, but to be honest, I'm
not all together thrilled with it.
| | 01:13 | I like the multi-planing here, but
those video layers are just so too
| | 01:17 | disconnected from each other.
| | 01:18 | I wish they overlapped more, because
that will give me more of a sense of
| | 01:22 | mystery as they uncovered and
revealed sections of each other.
| | 01:25 | Here's a couple of ways I could go about that.
| | 01:27 | I could go about maybe rearranging them in Z space,
moving everybody closer together
| | 01:31 | or I think my real problem is
they're just not big enough,
| | 01:35 | they are too small,
I'm not really enjoying them.
| | 01:37 | Now the camera does pull back quite a
distance here making those videos smaller
| | 01:42 | than they were in 2D.
| | 01:44 | And I can double-check that by taking
one of those layers, duplicating it,
| | 01:48 | turning off the 3D switch and
resetting the transform parameters.
| | 01:53 | That's how big a layer is in 2D.
| | 01:56 | If I never go beyond that size in 3D,
it will remain perfectly sharp.
| | 02:01 | I'll turn that off for now,
just so I can remember that size.
| | 02:04 | So I can get by with scaling up the size
of these other layers, and see if that
| | 02:09 | helps make them overlap.
| | 02:10 | I'll press S for Scale, and
start scrubbing the scale value.
| | 02:17 | That's kind of a nice overlap right around there.
| | 02:19 | I still have my multi-planing, but now
they're covering and uncovering each other,
| | 02:27 | which I think creates even more
visual interest in the movement.
| | 02:30 | They also took the green and orange video
off the same bottom line as the yellow video.
| | 02:35 | So that's more interest, just to make
sure I'm not scaling them up too much,
| | 02:40 | I'll turn on my 2D check layer. That's fine,
it's still bigger than 3D layers.
| | 02:45 | At the end of the day, they're not
being scaled effectively over 100%,
| | 02:48 | everything will look fine.
| | 02:49 | I'm going to go ahead and delete that
layer for now to just keep things clean.
| | 02:53 | My only problem now is back at this
initial pose, I can see the videos
| | 02:58 | and my idea was I want those to be out of the
camera's view just to add mystery,
| | 03:02 | so we'll pull back and reveal them.
| | 03:04 | No problem, I'll just go ahead and
push the camera in closer, until they are
| | 03:09 | just out of frame, say somewhere around there.
| | 03:12 | I mentioned I like nice clean values,
I'm just going to type in -200 to make it
| | 03:16 | easier to remember later on.
| | 03:18 | I think these two values were
different too, -1870 versus 1868.
| | 03:23 | I'll double-click it and type in -1870, just
so there's no slight drift during that move.
| | 03:32 | Okay. Let's RAM Preview one more time.
| | 03:38 | (music playing)
| | 03:58 | Okay, I'm fairly pleased with that initial move.
| | 04:01 | If your client is the type who likes
to be kept apprized of your progress,
| | 04:04 | you could send this off to them and say, here is
just an initial idea of what's going to go on.
| | 04:09 | Imagine those colors replaced with real videos.
| | 04:12 | If your client lacks imagination,
maybe you don't want to send them solid
| | 04:15 | colored videos right now, because they
may wonder what the heck you're up to
| | 04:18 | and what they are paying you for.
| | 04:20 | But we now have a good foundation to start with,
now we can start thinking about
| | 04:24 | creating real elements to replace our placeholders.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Marking the camera's timing| 00:05 | I have a Camera Move that I'm
pleased with using Placeholder layers.
| | 00:10 | I can now start replacing those
placeholders with nice framed videos.
| | 00:14 | But before I do so, I'm
going to do a little bookkeeping.
| | 00:17 | It's nice to know just exactly what
I'm seeing in those other video layers.
| | 00:22 | There's no point trying to find videos that are
longer than I need during the course of this move.
| | 00:27 | I might also want to time the actions
on those videos to match when those
| | 00:32 | videos are prominently on screen.
| | 00:34 | So the next thing I am going to do is
just place some more markers in this
| | 00:39 | composition to remind myself when
these videos appear and disappear.
| | 00:43 | Now we know initially at 101,
at this marked beat for the cymbal,
| | 00:49 | none other video layers are visible.
| | 00:50 | On an extended keyboard, I'm going to
press Page Down until those videos first
| | 00:56 | start to appear in my 16x9 display.
| | 00:59 | If you don't have an extended keyboard,
on the Mac you're going to hold Command
| | 01:03 | and press the left and right arrow keys
to go ahead and step forward and
| | 01:07 | backwards one frame at a time.
| | 01:09 | Now even though you're outside the
action safe area at this point,
| | 01:11 | you really don't know how
the viewer has set up their TV.
| | 01:14 | Is the bezel cutting off part of the image?
| | 01:17 | Have they changed the zoom setting for their TV,
so they will see the full image
| | 01:21 | right up to the very edges of your image area?
| | 01:23 | I'm going to play safe and mark this
as the first frame that even just a
| | 01:28 | slightest part of my extra videos are visible.
| | 01:31 | I don't want to mark an
individual video layer at this point.
| | 01:34 | I want to put markers
for the entire composition.
| | 01:36 | So to do so, I'm going to press F2 to
deselect all of the layers in this composition.
| | 01:42 | When no layers are selected, creating
a marker will create a marker for the
| | 01:47 | whole composition, not just the layer.
| | 01:49 | Now in this case, I know I also want to
add comments to these markers to remind
| | 01:53 | me which videos are starting and ending.
| | 01:55 | So I'm going to hold the Option key on Mac,
Alt key on Windows, press the Asterisk key,
| | 02:00 | now I'll get my composition marker dialog
with the common field immediately.
| | 02:03 | I'm going to say E1+E3, Enter.
| | 02:07 | They enter the screen at this point in time.
| | 02:10 | Let's keeping moving along until we see
some additional activity, oh,
| | 02:14 | there it's the frame where my bottom video,
E2 first becomes visible.
| | 02:19 | Press F2 again to make sure no layers are selected.
| | 02:22 | Opt+ or Alt+* and say E2, Enter.
| | 02:27 | All right, let's keep moving along here.
| | 02:31 | Up there is my fourth extra video
entering the frame right there,
| | 02:36 | F2 to deselect, Opt+ or Alt+*, E4, Enter.
| | 02:41 | Keep moving along and look for, either when
the hero appears, or the extra videos disappear.
| | 02:49 | Hero just sneaks into view there.
| | 02:52 | So I'll create a marker for there, "H",
the hero, enters and keep moving along here,
| | 03:01 | and noting when the videos go off screen
and I no longer need to worry about them being visible.
| | 03:06 | This is the last useful frame for Extra Video One.
| | 03:09 | So I'll say E1 gone, keep moving along,
there's the last frame for E2 before it is gone,
| | 03:25 | move a little further here in time
until Extra Video Three, the blue one is gone
| | 03:37 | and finally Extra Video Four is gone.
| | 03:42 | Now I've marked out all the important
parts of my music and the important
| | 03:47 | actions during my Camera Move.
| | 03:50 | I could have entered those comments
along my Camera layer as well,
| | 03:54 | but this will make it easier for me to find these
markers even if I happen to have scrolled
| | 03:59 | my timeline panel to the point where I
can no longer see the Camera layer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Building the Hero Shot and TitlePlacing the background| 00:05 | If you're jumping straight into
this movie and you have access to the
| | 00:08 | exercise files, you can go ahead and
pick up the action from Intermediate
| | 00:13 | Comps, O3 Camera Move.
| | 00:14 | This has the music are already spotted,
has our Placeholder layers already set
| | 00:19 | up in place and has a Camera
Move already created for you.
| | 00:22 | However, I am going to continue with our final comp
composition that we've already been building.
| | 00:27 | Before I start replacing these Placeholders
with the actual content, I think
| | 00:31 | I'd like to have a background in this
composition just to have something more
| | 00:34 | interesting to look at and I
can see my layers in context.
| | 00:38 | When working in 3D environments like this,
you can either put a 2D background
| | 00:42 | behind your 3D layers that way it
will always stay in the same position and
| | 00:46 | always fill the frame, or you can place
a very large image far back in space so
| | 00:51 | that it moves along with the rest
of your layers in your Camera Move.
| | 00:53 | For projects such as this, I prefer
things that have some animation and some
| | 00:57 | color and some motion in the background,
but I don't want to be too interesting.
| | 01:01 | I don't want it to distract from my foreground action.
| | 01:03 | We've included such a file in your Sources Folder.
| | 01:07 | I'll twirl up an Intermediate Comps,
just to clean things up and go into
| | 01:11 | Sources, Movies, and we have this file Liquid Abstract.
| | 01:16 | I actually created this using a very
old DV Camera, shooting ripples of water.
| | 01:21 | I shot it very out focus and then used
various effects and plug-ins in After Effects
| | 01:25 | to colorize it and to further blur it.
| | 01:28 | So it's a nice, amorphous, interesting
but not too interesting background.
| | 01:32 | I'm going to go ahead and drag it below
| | 01:35 | all of our other layers in our composition
and now it will always fill the
| | 01:39 | active camera frame regardless of where the camera is.
| | 01:42 | When something is pretty abstract and
out of focus, you may not notice that it's
| | 01:48 | not moving along with the Camera Move.
| | 01:50 | But it doesn't take all that much to go
ahead and put in the 3D Space and place
| | 01:54 | it back there in your world.
| | 01:55 | I'm going to enable this 3D layer Switch.
| | 01:58 | As soon as I do so, you'll see that
it jumps to the same position that our
| | 02:02 | hero shot was at, basically centered in the
composition right where that end Camera Move is.
| | 02:07 | What I need to do next is make it
large enough to fill up my background
| | 02:11 | throughout the entire Camera Move.
| | 02:13 | And the details of the following instructions
may change based on your own
| | 02:16 | arrangement of layers and your personal taste.
| | 02:18 | Well I'll just show you what
I go through when I do this.
| | 02:21 | First I want to type P to reveal its position
and place it far back in Z space.
| | 02:26 | I want it to be a part of my world, but to
act like something on a distant horizon.
| | 02:31 | So I have some of multi-planing
movement but it won't be distracting.
| | 02:35 | It won't move as much as the foreground layers.
| | 02:37 | I'm going to hold Shift while I'm
scrubbing to push it back faster.
| | 02:40 | And I have got it somewhere back here
in space and see how that layer moves
| | 02:45 | relative to my other layers during the Camera Move.
| | 02:48 | And you'll see it's moving a lot more slowly.
| | 02:51 | So I think I like something about
that far back of my composition.
| | 02:56 | Again you can change this to your taste.
| | 02:58 | Personally, I think I'd like a little
bit less of motion so I'm going to push it
| | 03:02 | even further back so it has
less movement as my camera moves.
| | 03:06 | My next problem is that it doesn't fill the frame.
| | 03:12 | Well that's okay, I can go ahead and scale it up.
| | 03:14 | I'm going to hold the Shift key and
Press "S" to add it, the Scale Parameter,
| | 03:18 | to my timeline and start
scrubbing it up until it fills the frame.
| | 03:23 | Now what I need to do is make sure that it
fills the frame throughout the entire Camera Move.
| | 03:28 | I see it early on here that it's not
filling the left side of the frame.
| | 03:32 | So I'll drag it over to fill that part of the frame.
| | 03:38 | And it looks it works there,
let's see if it does at the end of the move.
[00:03:413
Oh looks like I don't have quite enough
to fill the right side of the frame during
| | 03:47 | the end of the Camera Move.
| | 03:49 | So I'll scale up a little bit larger,
move it over a little bit
| | 03:56 | and see how that does throughout my move.
| | 03:59 | Okay, that looks like it's going to be plenty big enough.
| | 04:01 | As a matter of fact, I can probably
even make it a little bit smaller,
| | 04:05 | so I don't want to blow up those pixels
too much and lose too much resolution.
| | 04:09 | Scoot it over, that works for the
right edge, and that works for the left edge.
| | 04:18 | So now I have a 2D layer that I have
placed far back in 3D Space to act as my
| | 04:23 | background for this entire world that I'm creating.
| | 04:26 | I am probably blowing it up a bit at
the end of the day, so I didn't need to
| | 04:31 | make it large enough to fill this
entire frame throughout the Camera Move.
| | 04:34 | But since it's already a nice, soft,
amorphous background on the first place,
| | 04:37 | I don't think image degradation is
going to be all that much of a problem.
| | 04:40 | Let's cue up quick RAM preview to see it in context.
| | 04:47 | It still renders pretty fast, since they are just
simple solids from my placeholders.
| | 04:53 | And try that.
(misic playing)
| | 05:13 | Okay, that's nice and dreamlike. We'll go with that.
| | 05:15 | Okay, it's time to turn our attention
to replacing these placeholders with actual content.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| 3D tracking the hero shot| 00:05 | Next, let's work at our Hero Shot.
| | 00:07 | The final video we're going to be looking at
at the conclusion of our opening,
| | 00:11 | as well as the composition where
we may also put our opening title.
| | 00:15 | To do this I'm going to go ahead
and create a new composition.
| | 00:17 | I'm going to select my Comps folder ahead of time
to make sure my Comp works into that folder.
| | 00:23 | And you can either use
Composition>New Composition,
| | 00:26 | or click on the Create a New Composition button
at the bottom of the Project panel.
| | 00:30 | I'm going to name this Comp, Hero + Title,
our budget allowed for high
| | 00:35 | definition video for our final hero shots.
| | 00:37 | I'm going to keep the same dimensions
as my final Comp here, Frame Rate at
| | 00:40 | 23976, same as my final, a Duration of 25,
same as my Final. And I'll click OK.
| | 00:46 | And I am going to change this
composition back to a View of 1 View.
| | 00:50 | Doing so does not alter my view from my
Final Comp, they do remember their View
| | 00:54 | Settings independent of each other.
| | 00:56 | For my hero video, I've selected
this piece of footage from a surgery.
| | 01:00 | As I drag my current time indicator
through it, there are several people inside
| | 01:05 | an operating room with a monitor in the
background and other interesting tools.
| | 01:07 | It's a very wobbly move, so it looks almost
like it was a hand-held Camera Move,
| | 01:12 | or at least the camera is hand-held and
then the operator zoomed into this move.
| | 01:17 | Since we do have camera movement in this scene,
what maybe neat is to place
| | 01:22 | the title in a way that it seems like it's part of the room.
| | 01:25 | So the camera movement is reflected in the title as well.
| | 01:28 | You can try to animate a camera's movement
by hand to more or less match what's
| | 01:33 | happening with the camera in this scene.
| | 01:34 | Or if you have access to After Effects CS6,
you can take advantage of a brand
| | 01:38 | new tool called the 3D Camera Tracker.
| | 01:41 | What the 3D Camera Tracker does
is analyze different points in a scene and
| | 01:46 | then tries to reverse engineer or reconstruct
where the camera was that shot this scene.
| | 01:51 | Now frankly, this is not an ideal scene
to use 3D Camera Tracker on.
| | 01:57 | It's best to use it if you have a bunch
of stationary objects that After Effects
| | 02:01 | knows it can pull a reliable position from.
| | 02:03 | Here, our actors are moving which
are creating a kind of some unstable
| | 02:07 | references for this camera to look at.
| | 02:09 | But for quick and dirty motion graphic
shot like this, it's still a useful tool.
| | 02:13 | And I'll show you how to use it.
| | 02:15 | If you don't have After Effects CS6,
don't worry, at the start of the next movie,
| | 02:18 | I'll show you how to Copy and Paste
keyframes we've already created for you.
| | 02:22 | I'm going to select my clip and
go to Animation>Track Camera.
| | 02:27 | This will cause After Effects to automatically
analyze every frame of this scene
| | 02:32 | for a series of tracking points,
areas of high contrast that it can follow for
| | 02:36 | some segment of time to try to reconstruct the
multi-planing and motion happening in this scene.
| | 02:41 | You'll see it's progress is being updated
here in the Effects Control panel.
| | 02:46 | And after it's done calculating a bunch
of points in the scene, then it tries
| | 02:50 | to take that data and reverse engineer
where the camera was.
| | 02:53 | This Solving Camera Step can take a little bit of time.
| | 02:56 | The nice thing about the 3D Camera Tracker in
After Effects is you don't have to wait on it.
| | 03:00 | You can go to another composition,
continue your work there.
| | 03:03 | You can go ahead and create a new
composition if you want to and when you're
| | 03:08 | done return to the composition the After Effects
was working in to see whether or not the
| | 03:11 | tracker is finished, and now it is.
| | 03:13 | I'm going to go ahead and open up my
Effects Control panel, since the
| | 03:17 | 3D Camera Tracker Effect needs to be
selected for me to see its user interface,
| | 03:20 | these tracking points.
| | 03:21 | You might notice a series of
very small little dots on the scene.
| | 03:27 | Those are the dots that After Effects
followed or tracked throughout this scene.
| | 03:31 | Their relative size indicates how far away from the
camera After Effects thought those points were.
| | 03:36 | And they're all very tiny, smaller
than you would expect from After Effects.
| | 03:40 | And I am noticing here early in the
shot, there's one large tracking point on
| | 03:45 | the side of this woman's head, which is much larger
than the other points, and it shouldn't be.
| | 03:49 | She's further away.
| | 03:51 | I suspect this is a rogue data point.
Something that's incorrect.
| | 03:55 | So I'm going to select it and delete it
causing After Effects to re-solve the camera.
| | 04:01 | Getting rid of bad data points,
tracking points that you can tell are wandering
| | 04:05 | around on a surface that should
otherwise be stationary will help improve the
| | 04:09 | accuracy of After Effect's track.
| | 04:11 | Let's see what happens just by deleting that one
bad point after it is done re-solving the camera.
| | 04:17 | Now this looks much more like what I
would expect, a nice assortment of track
| | 04:22 | points of different sizes, being
larger where an object is closer and being
| | 04:27 | smaller where an object is further away.
| | 04:29 | Some of these still look inaccurate
like this track points should not be this
| | 04:33 | much larger than the track
points already on the monitor.
| | 04:35 | And you can spend some time deleting
additional rogue points if you want to.
| | 04:39 | But frankly, for this quick and dirty Motion Graphics
application, this track is already good enough.
| | 04:45 | I would like to have my title
floating out in front of these actors.
| | 04:50 | So maybe using a point on this nearest
actor would be a good starting point.
| | 04:54 | Now this target you see is After
Effects trying to pick three points and
| | 04:58 | triangulate them to create a planar
surface saying, "Here is a nice flat
| | 05:02 | surface you can place an object on."
| | 05:04 | Well, I'm not interested in really
mapping something on to this actor.
| | 05:07 | I just want to pick a point, like this
one on his shoulder and say,
| | 05:11 | "This will be a starting point for where
I'm going to place my text."
| | 05:15 | When I've chosen such a point, I can
right-click on it and say, "Create Text and
| | 05:20 | Camera, Solid and Camera or Null and Camera."
| | 05:23 | I'm actually going to create a Null
and Camera because having a nice, null
| | 05:28 | object is something I can
anchor other objects on to later.
| | 05:31 | This will give me the freedom to go
ahead and develop my text independently
| | 05:35 | in 2D and then once I'm happy with it
attach it to the Null so we'll pick up
| | 05:40 | this 3D Camera Movement.
| | 05:41 | I'll select this Option, and in my
timeline panel, you will now see I have a
| | 05:45 | track null and a 3D camera.
| | 05:48 | It's important to understand that
with the 3D Camera Tracker,
| | 05:51 | the null itself does not move.
| | 05:53 | I press "U" and there's no keyframes.
| | 05:57 | What moves is the camera.
| | 05:58 | I'll select it and press "U" and
you'll see that its position, orientation,
| | 06:03 | etcetera, is being animated throughout this
shot to follow the camera's original movement.
| | 06:09 | And you see this little red square from my null.
| | 06:11 | You'll see how it moves further away or
closer to you during the course of the shot.
| | 06:17 | Perfect! That's what I need to go ahead
and add my text into this world.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Time stretching| 00:05 | The previous movie used the only CS6 specific
feature that's required by this entire final project.
| | 00:11 | And that is the ability to track a camera's motion.
| | 00:15 | If you don't have CS6 but you do have
access to the exercise files, open up
| | 00:19 | Intermediate Comps and you can either
work with our Tracked Hero composition or
| | 00:23 | select the Track Null and the 3D Tracker Camera,
copy them and paste them
| | 00:29 | into your own Hero + Title composition.
| | 00:31 | I'll close this for now.
| | 00:34 | So we have a nice shot here and we've
tracked its motion but it's not long
| | 00:39 | enough to fill our entire composition.
| | 00:41 | Well, there's a couple of things we
can do to help solve this problem.
| | 00:45 | One, is we may not need it to be
visible for the entire composition.
| | 00:49 | I'm going to go back to the Final Comp
and remember we went ahead and placed
| | 00:53 | these markers that indicated when
various pieces of video came into the frame
| | 00:59 | and are out of the frame.
| | 01:00 | In my case, with my own particular
arrangement of layers, my own camera move,
| | 01:04 | that time when Hero enters is at 05:16.
| | 01:07 | This time may change depending on how
you've arranged your layers and how you
| | 01:11 | animated your camera but this is the
number that works for me. I'll click OK.
| | 01:15 | I'll go to Hero + Title, go to 5.16,
press Enter, and that's the first frame
| | 01:22 | where I even need to see these layers.
| | 01:24 | So I'll select the 3D tracker camera
and surgery.mov and press the left bracket
| | 01:30 | to justify their in-times to start at this new time.
| | 01:34 | I don't need to move the Track Null
because it's not animating anyway
| | 01:38 | and it already fills the entire
length of my composition.
| | 01:40 | I'm going to type B to begin my work
area at this point and next I need to turn
| | 01:46 | my attention to how to take this video
and stretch it out to the very end of the comp
| | 01:50 | because my hero is indeed
visible to the last frame of my composition.
| | 01:54 | Well, to do that, I'm going to press
End to move my current time indicator to
| | 01:58 | the end of this composition and I've
got a couple of different ways to go.
| | 02:02 | It just so happens there's a really
nice keyboard shortcut in After Effects to
| | 02:05 | stretch selected layers to make sure the
duration last from the current endpoint
| | 02:10 | to where the current time indicator is.
| | 02:11 | The keyboard shortcut is Cmd+Opt on Mac
or Ctrl+Alt on Windows,
| | 02:17 | then press the comma key and, bang, they'll
stretch out to go ahead and fill this entire length.
| | 02:23 | If you want to see exactly what that
stretch value is, you can go ahead and
| | 02:27 | expand the in, out, duration, and
search columns or right-click and choose just
| | 02:31 | to view the stretch column.
| | 02:33 | So I'm stretching this by just over 208%
or just under half speed to fill this required duration.
| | 02:40 | I'll go ahead and close these other column headers.
| | 02:44 | Let's see how this works.
| | 02:46 | I'm going to press the Zero key on my
numeric keypad to RAM preview my work
| | 02:50 | area, get frame to start at the
beginning of my layers and I'm going to wait
| | 02:55 | till I see this at full speed but I
suspect this is going to be a little bit on
| | 02:59 | the stuttery side, let's see how this looks.
| | 03:01 | Here is the full speed playback and
now you can really see some staggering to
| | 03:07 | the motion particularly when he turns his head.
| | 03:12 | I'm not really pleased with that stuttery motion.
| | 03:14 | Well in After Effects, you have a
couple of different options to smooth out the
| | 03:19 | motion of a time stretched layer.
| | 03:20 | And they reside underneath the Frame Blending Switch.
| | 03:24 | The camera does not have a Frame Blending Switch
because it's not really footage.
| | 03:28 | It's just interpolating its position
between keyframes so it's already good.
| | 03:31 | But I'll go ahead and enable Frame Blending
in the Frame Mix mode for the
| | 03:36 | Surgery layer and to make sure I see
the results inside the comp panel,
| | 03:41 | I will also enable Frame Blending for this composition.
| | 03:44 | Setting the switch for a layer means
that's how it's going to render but if you
| | 03:48 | want to preview it, you need to also
enable the switch in the timeline panel.
| | 03:51 | Let's go ahead and RAM preview that, see how it looks.
| | 03:59 | That's an improvement but when he
turned his head, his eyes were a bit blurry
| | 04:04 | and that's because Frame Mix mode blends
together adjacent frames to smooth out the motion.
| | 04:10 | We can create a bit of a ghosting effect and that
what's making me lose some resolution right here.
| | 04:15 | So I'm going to try the other Frame
Blending option of Pixel Motion mode.
| | 04:20 | I'll click it one more time until the
slash turns into a solid slash going the
| | 04:25 | other direction and we'll RAM preview that.
| | 04:30 | It will take longer to calculate.
| | 04:31 | I looked at this previously so in my
case I'm reloading this from my hard drive.
| | 04:36 | And it looks already to me as if this
motion is going to be a lot smoother.
| | 04:41 | Let's go ahead and play it back at full speed now.
| | 04:45 | And yes, everything has a much more liquid,
more fluid quality to it and it
| | 04:50 | doesn't feel like it's staggered or stuttering or echoey.
| | 04:53 | I'm also keeping some better resolution
here when he turns his head.
| | 04:57 | I'm not quite getting that blurring as
adjacent frames are being mixed together.
| | 05:00 | Pixel Motion actually creates brand new pixels that guess,
| | 05:04 | this is where that pixel probably would be if
we really had footage at this point in time.
| | 05:10 | Pixel Motion mode isn't perfect.
| | 05:13 | Occasionally, you'll see some artifacts,
particularly along the TV screen there
| | 05:17 | in the background, but frankly by the
time I have a nice title here, hopefully
| | 05:22 | my viewers' attention will be on the
foreground, not little artifacts in the background.
| | 05:26 | So I think this is going to be acceptable.
| | 05:28 | Now that we have our main piece of footage
tracked and stretched, let's put a
| | 05:34 | title on this scene and that's what
we'll do in the next couple of movies.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating the main title| 00:05 | Next, I want to add our main title
over this final Hero shot.
| | 00:09 | Now the camera move is constantly
pushing in on this shot.
| | 00:14 | So to make sure that my title is visible
at the end, hasn't gone outside of the frame,
| | 00:19 | I'm going to press End on my keyboard.
| | 00:21 | This is the closest we're going to zoom in
during the length of this entire shot.
| | 00:26 | I have my Action and Title Safe Areas turned on.
| | 00:29 | I need to make sure that my title's
final resting area is inside the Title Safe line,
| | 00:33 | you can press apostrophe to toggle that off
and on and now I'm going to
| | 00:37 | double-click the Text tool to
create a new blank text layer.
| | 00:41 | Doing so opens up the Character
and Paragraph panels automatically.
| | 00:46 | I think I want to center my text and
I'm going to make sure that I'm starting
| | 00:50 | with the Center Text option but this
is something I can always change later.
| | 00:52 | The client has told me that the title
of the show is "Surviving a heart attack."
| | 00:58 | Heart attack sounds like it's the main words.
| | 01:00 | Let's set those first.
| | 01:01 | I'm going to type heart, press the
Return on the main part of my keyboard,
| | 01:05 | not the enter key, to start a
second line and then type attack.
| | 01:08 | Now I can press enter to accept the line of the text
and I'll even press V to return to my Selection tool.
| | 01:14 | I want this text to move in 3D space
following the camera that I've created for
| | 01:19 | this composition, so I will enable
the 3D layer switch for my text layer.
| | 01:24 | And next I want to attach it to this
null that's already tracking the camera's
| | 01:28 | movement throughout this shot.
| | 01:31 | You'll see that the text at its default position
in the center of the roll already has some movement
| | 01:35 | but it may not exactly relate to this foreground actor.
| | 01:38 | So I'm going to press Shift+F4 to reveal the parent panel
and for the Heart Attack layer,
| | 01:44 | I can either set its pop-up to Track Null 1
or use its pick whip tool to attach it to Track Null 1.
| | 01:52 | Before I release the Mouse button,
I need to make a decision here.
| | 01:56 | Normally, parenting remembers the current offset
between the layer's initial point and the null's initial point.
| | 02:04 | Since my Heart Attack layer is pushed
back in space, I really don't want to
| | 02:08 | remember this offset, I want
to jump to where that null is.
| | 02:11 | So this is a nice little feature they've added
in After Effects, if I press the
| | 02:15 | Shift key while parenting, any offset
between the child and parent, the text and
| | 02:19 | the null in this case will be zeroed out.
| | 02:21 | When I release my Mouse button, my text
jumps to where the Null is, if I press P,
| | 02:26 | I can verify that its offset is 0.0.0.
| | 02:29 | If you're using a version of After Effects
before CS6 that does not support
| | 02:33 | Shift parenting, just zero these values out.
| | 02:36 | Okay, now that I see how my title is
going to be at the very end of this frame,
| | 02:40 | I can actually start typesetting it
because I'm seeing it in context.
| | 02:43 | I think I'm going to make my initial
color white, there's also a little swatch
| | 02:48 | you can click on to immediately set to white.
| | 02:50 | I don't think I like the full Italic,
I'm going take that off and you can choose
| | 02:55 | whatever font you have installed to set this title.
| | 02:58 | I am kind of limited to what was
installed with After Effects,
| | 03:02 | I'm going to assume you are, too, so I'm going to
go ahead and use this Myriad Pro Semibold.
| | 03:06 | I think my title could be a little bit larger in size
and I think I need to
| | 03:11 | change the space between my lines of text,
so they sit closer on top of each other, maybe like that.
| | 03:16 | It might be a bit too big, maybe
somewhere around there and change its spacing.
| | 03:21 | Now it might be nice if the bar in the T and
the K lined up with each other
| | 03:26 | so I think I'm going to play you
some games here with kerning.
| | 03:29 | I double-click the layer which
makes the Text tool active again.
| | 03:32 | I'm going to place my cursor in between characters
that could stand to be tightened up,
| | 03:36 | like this A and C. Hold Option on Mac,
Alt on Windows and use the
| | 03:40 | left arrow to tighten these up a little bit.
| | 03:42 | That could frankly use a little tightening as well.
| | 03:45 | The A could tuck more into this T.
I'm going to keep an eye to also align the
| | 03:50 | bars in the T and K just to make it look
a little nicer, up in the center again.
| | 03:54 | Finally, I need to offset the position
of this Heart Attack title so it sits
| | 03:58 | where I want at the very end of this composition.
| | 04:01 | In this case, I think I like it centered,
down here at the very bottom of the frame.
| | 04:05 | So I'm going to scrub the X and Y positions
to make it sit here on my Title Safe line
| | 04:12 | and pretty much centered on my composition.
| | 04:15 | Now that I see it in context,
I do see they could be larger.
| | 04:19 | So let's go ahead and make this some
larger type, get my spacing correct and
| | 04:25 | then press V and drag it back up
again to sit on this Title Safe line.
| | 04:30 | Something else I might do just to
improve the multiplaning experience,
| | 04:35 | to make it appear just on a different
plane than this actor's shoulder.
| | 04:37 | So I might go ahead and pull it towards me in z space,
just so it's a little bit in front of the actor.
| | 04:45 | And let's get it back up in top of that
Title Safe line, somewhere around there
| | 04:49 | looks like a good starting point for me.
| | 04:51 | Of course, you can set this to your personal taste.
| | 04:53 | I will drag it over here, be a little bit more centered.
| | 04:56 | Get it away from this item he's holding.
| | 04:58 | Let's see how that looks throughout the composition.
| | 05:00 | Okay, it's pushing forward,
along with the camera movement.
| | 05:05 | It's still large enough at the beginning of the move
and ends nice and bold. I like that.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating the subtitle| 00:05 | Now that we have our main title set,
let's go ahead and set our little subtitle
| | 00:10 | 'Surviving A' and place it above our main title.
| | 00:13 | Now you can indeed mix and match fonts,
different sizes, etcetera, in one text layer.
| | 00:19 | But to maximize my control over
arranging these two layers,
| | 00:22 | I think I'm going to create a brand new text layer.
| | 00:26 | I'll make sure nothing is selected in my
composition by pressing F2,
| | 00:30 | then double-click my Text tool
to start a brand new text layer.
| | 00:33 | Type 'Surviving A' and press Enter.
| | 00:38 | I don't think I really like it being
in the same font as 'Heart Attack'.
| | 00:42 | I might set a different font
just to de-emphasize it a bit more.
| | 00:45 | Make sure you don't turn your titles
into ransom notes by using too many fonts,
| | 00:50 | but this is a case we're going to something
contrasting like maybe an italic font
| | 00:54 | might help add some interest to this title.
| | 00:57 | Now again, you can use whatever font you want to.
| | 00:59 | I'm limited to what ships with After Effects
just because I want to make sure you have it, too.
| | 01:03 | A nice little italic font is Adobe Garamond Pro
and I'll set it from regular to italic and that's not too bad.
| | 01:11 | I think it could probably stand to be
a little bit smaller as well,
| | 01:16 | but we'll play with that more once we get
it positioned in context.
| | 01:19 | I need to treat it the same as my
main title, so I will enable its 3D layer switch
| | 01:24 | and I want to place this subtitle on
the same plane as main title Heart Attack.
| | 01:30 | I could parent Surviving A to our Track
Null and enter the same offset as Heart
| | 01:35 | Attack to get a good starting point or
another approach would be to go ahead and
| | 01:39 | just parent Surviving A to the Heart Attack layer.
| | 01:42 | I grab my little pick whip for parenting.
| | 01:45 | I'm going to add the Shift key in
After Effects CS6 that will zero out any
| | 01:49 | offset between the two layers, so
initially it had the same position.
| | 01:53 | I'll type P to reveal the position of
the text layer and if you're in After
| | 01:57 | Effects CS5 or earlier, you can zero
this out as the starting point and then
| | 02:01 | I'll start placing my Surviving A
layer in relationship to Heart Attack.
| | 02:06 | Well, it's already looking a little
too large to me, so I think I'll make a
| | 02:10 | little bit smaller of a font size, maybe little
more tightly tracked like that
| | 02:14 | and, I'm going to type V to return to my Selection
tool and work further on arranging these two.
| | 02:21 | I think putting that G in the space between
A and R works really well as a good
| | 02:26 | way to fit the descender in here and
get the text close to each other, might
| | 02:30 | still be a little bit small though,
let's make it a little bit larger, maybe
| | 02:34 | around there, hold it up a little bit,
position it where it sits nicely,
| | 02:39 | trying to get this G nicely in this gap, but
also trying to put the S in line with this bar in the H,
| | 02:44 | so they all work together nicely.
| | 02:47 | Yeah, I think I like something around there.
| | 02:49 | I'm going to drag my current time indicator,
through my timeline and indeed the
| | 02:53 | text is following of the camera movement
in this shot which is what I wanted.
| | 02:56 | But I am having a little bit of trouble
reading the text against the background.
| | 03:01 | These blown out areas are too close to the text color
and kind of reducing my readability a little bit.
| | 03:08 | I could add a stroke to the text but
an easier way would be just to add a
| | 03:12 | drop shadow to it, so I'll select Heart Attack
and apply Effect>Perspective>Drop Shadow.
| | 03:19 | I don't actually want the shadow
to drop in a particular direction.
| | 03:21 | I just want a nice soft black halo behind it.
| | 03:24 | So I'll set the Distance down to zero
and scrub up the softness until I see that
| | 03:29 | halo appear behind the text.
| | 03:30 | I'll increase the opacity to make it a
bit darker and get a look that I like,
| | 03:37 | which I think is going to be somewhere around there.
| | 03:40 | I'll copy this Drop Shadow effect,
select Surviving A, and paste.
| | 03:45 | And now, my text is a lot more readable
throughout this shot.
| | 03:50 | So we have our text in place, but I suspect
we can make it a little bit more exciting.
| | 03:55 | So let's work on that in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the title| 00:05 | I press the Zero on the numeric keypad to RAM preview
my main title and Hero footage composition.
| | 00:11 | I have to say that even though things
are nicely arranged and indeed following
| | 00:16 | the camera movement in the scene, it's a bit boring.
| | 00:19 | I think I need to add some excitement to this,
maybe some impact for when HEART ATTACK
| | 00:23 | comes on the screen.
| | 00:24 | Well, when I want to add impact and
excitement, quite often I'll start by trying
| | 00:29 | to synchronize things to music.
| | 00:30 | So I'm going to go back to the Final Comp composition,
select our final Beat Wave soundtrack and copy it.
| | 00:39 | I'm also going to note where the camera
move happened in this final composition.
| | 00:45 | It starts one marker before the cymbal marker
and ends on the cymbal crash.
| | 00:51 | I suspect that coordinating to that
camera move would be a good first step
| | 00:56 | to also time our title, it would be particularly nice
if it landed right here at this major crash.
| | 01:01 | So I'll return to my Hero + Title composition
and paste the soundtrack into this comp,
| | 01:06 | all my markers came across as well.
| | 01:09 | I don't want to accidentally double up my soundtrack.
| | 01:13 | I don't want it playing in this pre-comp
and in the final comp as well
| | 01:17 | because it may overload and distort.
| | 01:19 | So with my soundtrack layer still selected,
I am going to go to layer and choose Guide layer.
| | 01:25 | That says only preview in this composition
but don't render and don't play downstream
| | 01:31 | in any other comps I might nest this one into.
| | 01:34 | And we said right around here, the marker
before cymbal would be a good starting point,
| | 01:39 | so that's start of the camera move.
| | 01:41 | I put my current time indicator here
because that's where I probably want to
| | 01:44 | start keyframing my text animations.
| | 01:46 | You can go ahead and create your own
text animations, or if you're in a bit of hurry,
| | 01:51 | you can use one of the presets supplied
by Adobe as a starting point. Let's do that.
| | 01:56 | I am going to switch back to the Effects & Presets panel
and choose Browse Presets.
| | 02:04 | This will open up Adobe Bridge.
| | 02:06 | If this is the first time you've used
it on this particular session,
| | 02:10 | it will take a little while to open and to build
the database off all these presets,
| | 02:14 | but eventually you'll see an assortment of folders
that correspond to all the different groups of presets.
| | 02:19 | I want the Text Preset, so I'll double-click 'that folder
and again I have many subfolders
| | 02:23 | of different classifications or types of animations.
| | 02:28 | Since we're already in 3D in this composition,
it might be fun to have a 3D text
| | 02:32 | animation as well, so let's go explore this folder.
| | 02:35 | I'll double-click it and you'll see
that I have many different presets.
| | 02:40 | I can go ahead and click on and preview
to see if I like their movement.
| | 02:44 | Now there are some pretty fancy ones in here,
but I suspect that a subject is weighty
| | 02:50 | as a Heart Attack might want something
a bit slower and more elegant,
| | 02:56 | such as maybe this Flydown Behind Camera,
that's a nice simple move that
| | 03:01 | still has some impact where the text comes from out
of sight to being in sight in the center of our attention.
| | 03:06 | Yeah, I like this one.
| | 03:07 | I think I'm going to use this preset, but you
of course can choose another one to your taste.
| | 03:12 | To apply a text animation preset to an
already selected text layer,
| | 03:18 | just double click it and it will be applied to that layer.
| | 03:21 | The animation will start at the position
of the current time indicator,
| | 03:25 | I'll bring that comp forward and press U to reveal its
keyframes and that's how it animates onto the screen.
| | 03:32 | Okay, that's a good starting point.
| | 03:34 | I have this other subtitle 'Surviving A',
let's go ahead and give that an animation preset as well.
| | 03:40 | I'll select that text layer, I'll switch back
into Adobe Bridge and since that is a subtitle,
| | 03:45 | I might explore giving it a less exciting
or less attention-grabbing preset.
| | 03:50 | I want my focus to be on the word Heart Attack.
| | 03:53 | I still want surviving a to come in, in
an interesting manner, so I'm looking at
| | 03:59 | these different Animate In presets.
| | 04:02 | Oh, here we go, these have some promise,
just a simple, elegant Fade Up Per Caracter,
| | 04:07 | I think I'm going to go with this one.
So I'll double-click it;
| | 04:12 | just apply to my text layer.
| | 04:13 | I've got that panel forward, press U
and there's its keyframes.
| | 04:17 | Oh, look what I did here;
| | 04:19 | I moved my current time indicator because
I was previewing the other text animation.
| | 04:23 | Therefore it was in the wrong place
to start my 'Surviving A' animation.
| | 04:28 | No problem, I will press the J key to
go back to the prior marker or keyframe,
| | 04:34 | select these two keyframes that just got
pasted in, slide them back and hold the
| | 04:38 | Shift key to snap them to the current location.
| | 04:40 | Now that we have these in place,
I'm going to shorten up my work area to maybe
| | 04:45 | begin at this Beat, type B to begin
and end around here, N to end
| | 04:52 | and let's RAM preview that and see how that works.
| | 04:57 | There's my slow movement in, my text animates in
and let's see how that sounds
| | 05:03 | in relationship to the music.
(music playing)
| | 05:12 | I wasn't entirely pleased with that to be honest
and my real moment of excitement here
| | 05:16 | is this crash in the music, so the very least, I want
to move those keyframes to line up with that crash.
| | 05:22 | I've noticed that my second keyframe
from my Heart Attack layer is an easy ease in,
| | 05:26 | which usually makes things slower
and more elegant, but I think I'd like
| | 05:31 | some impact on this for it to land hard
to really grab the viewers' attention.
| | 05:34 | So I'm going to convert that back to a linear keyframe.
| | 05:37 | I am going to hold Command on Mac, Ctrl on
Windows, click on it once to make it linear.
| | 05:42 | On the other hand, you could consider making
the subtitle something slower and more elegant.
| | 05:46 | You could choose that one and make it a
Easy Ease Keyframe just to come in to it more softly.
| | 05:54 | I'm going to leave in the same for now, but
it is an option you might want to consider.
| | 05:59 | Let's try that.
(music playing)
| | 06:09 | I like that end timing but it starts coming
on too soon, to be honest.
| | 06:13 | It's not really lining up with the music.
| | 06:15 | Instead, I think I'm going to line up this musical event
here where the cymbal roll starts.
| | 06:19 | By making it shorter, it will make the
resulting animation faster and tied in
| | 06:25 | more tightly with the music, let's preview that.
| | 06:34 | (music playing)
| | 06:46 | I like that better.
| | 06:47 | However, right when that cymbal starts, I'm not seeing
an animation appear for another frame or two.
| | 06:54 | So something I might consider doing
is cheating these keyframes back just a
| | 06:58 | little bit to actually start to
see them when the cymbal roll starts.
| | 07:06 | (music playing)
| | 07:11 | Yeah, that feels more tightly tied in to the
music for me, so I'm going to go with that.
| | 07:16 | Since I don't need my text layers
before these keyframes, I can go ahead and
| | 07:20 | trim them just to give myself a
better visual cue what's going on.
| | 07:23 | I move my current time
indicator to their first keyframe.
| | 07:26 | I hold down Option on Mac, Alt on Windows,
press the left square bracket and
| | 07:31 | we'll trim them to start right at that point in time.
| | 07:33 | In some cases, that might also speed up your rendering.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Replacing the hero's placeholder| 00:05 | Okay, here is the payoff and the
reason we created placeholders first.
| | 00:10 | Go back to your project panel, select
the Hero + Tile comp you've been creating,
| | 00:15 | bring forward your Final Comp, select
that Hero shot that is currently just a
| | 00:22 | solid placeholder, then hold Cmd+Opt on Mac
or Ctrl+Alt on Windows
| | 00:26 | and press the forward slash key,
that replaces the selected layer in the
| | 00:31 | timeline with the selected layer in the project panel.
| | 00:34 | And you'll see that the yellow layer has
been replaced with our end video and title.
| | 00:39 | If I drag my current time indicator
through here, you'll see it's picked up the
| | 00:44 | camera's animation and we land
perfectly centered on that piece of video.
| | 00:50 | I think I'll just do a quick RAM preview here,
B to start my work area before
| | 00:55 | the Hero enters and to end it just
after that, I'll keep a RAM preview
| | 01:00 | and I might jump a little bit forward in time
so you don't have to watch this whole render,
| | 01:04 | we'll just see when it's done.
| | 01:05 | (music playing)
| | 01:18 | Pretty nice and if you want to see it in full resolution,
I'll go to 1 View, preview again.
| | 01:23 | (music playing)
| | 01:36 | Okay, it's coming together nicely.
| | 01:38 | Now that we have one video done, we can turn
our attention to the other supporting videos.
| | 01:42 | Before you go any further, I would save
your work again, or even better, I would go to
| | 01:45 | File>Increment and Save just to start
a brand new version number so that
| | 01:51 | if you want to go back in time after
you've completed this move, you can do that
| | 01:55 | without having to undo a bunch of work.
| | 01:57 | It'll increment the name of my project to number two.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Creating Video Frames Using Shape LayersFraming the hero| 00:05 | I'm going to continue on with the Final Comp
and HERO +Title that I've created so far.
| | 00:10 | If you're just jumping in at this point
in the course and you have access to the
| | 00:14 | exercise files, go into Intermediate
Comps and you can use 08a_Title Animated
| | 00:20 | and 08b_Hero Precomp Placed,
and that will catch up to where I am.
| | 00:25 | These will look slightly different than
the ones I've built so far, because I've
| | 00:28 | made some different choices for parameters,
etcetera, but we're trying to get
| | 00:31 | you to focus on concepts
rather than doing exactly what I do.
| | 00:34 | Now back in this Final Comp, as my
placeholders pan by and my HERO video comes
| | 00:40 | into the scene, I remember that I was
going to frame this HERO video.
| | 00:45 | It does look a bit on the naked side
hanging out by itself with nothing around it,
| | 00:48 | just a piece of video hanging in space.
| | 00:51 | So to do that, I'm going to back to my Hero +Title Comp,
and then open up its composition settings.
| | 00:56 | Shortcut is Command key on Mac, Ctrl key on Windows.
| | 01:00 | I had made my placeholders 140 pixels larger
in both dimensions to leave room for the frame.
| | 01:05 | So I'm going to make this comp 1100x680 and click OK.
| | 01:12 | There's no need for Title/Action Safe anymore,
so I'll toggle this off with apostrophe,
| | 01:16 | double-check that my background is indeed transparent.
| | 01:20 | And finally, I'm going to make sure
I have no other layers selected in my
| | 01:24 | composition before I continue working here.
| | 01:27 | I'm going to create a shape layer that
will act as my frame, and to make sure
| | 01:31 | that you're creating a shape rather
than drawing a mask on an existing layer,
| | 01:35 | make sure nobody is selected by pressing F2.
| | 01:37 | I'm going choose Pen tool, make sure
the RotoBezier option is turned off.
| | 01:42 | I actually want to create some squared off corners initially.
| | 01:45 | I'm going to make sure that my Stroke
is set to None for now.
| | 01:51 | Change my Fill Type to a Radial Gradient.
| | 01:54 | Set the Opacity to something like kind of see-through.
| | 01:58 | 70% is okay, you might even want
to go lighter like even say 50%.
| | 02:03 | And then drag to a point in time somewhere
in this composition where I could see a
| | 02:07 | fair amount of my video, because I'm
going to use this video for inspiration
| | 02:11 | when choosing the colors of my frame.
| | 02:12 | I'm going to click on this Fill Color Swatch
to open up the Gradient Editor,
| | 02:17 | make sure that my two opacity stops
are set to 100% and what colors shall we use?
| | 02:24 | For my first Color Stop, let's go ahead
and pick the green from this surgeon's cap.
| | 02:31 | That's kind of a weak green, so I think I'll make it a
little darker and more saturated, somewhere around there.
| | 02:37 | And then for the second stop, another rich color is
actually this blue blanket that's over the patient.
| | 02:43 | You can pick something down in this region
to get a nice blue gradient.
| | 02:47 | Again, maybe go a little bit more saturated, because my
frame is going to be translucent, so I can see through it.
| | 02:54 | I might want to have more saturated
colors initially so they hold up when I'd
| | 02:58 | back off their opacity. Now I'll click OK.
| | 03:00 | Now I want to create a frame around this video.
| | 03:03 | And instead of just being a very boring
rectangular frame, I think I'm going to
| | 03:07 | create some little cut ins and cut
outs just to add some interest to it.
| | 03:10 | You don't have to do exactly what I'm doing.
| | 03:13 | I just want to lead you through a general procedure
to how I might approach this.
| | 03:16 | Go ahead and change it as you like to your taste.
| | 03:19 | Now I'll click in the upper left corner
to start my shape layer, move a little
| | 03:23 | bit further along in my frame, and then
I'm going to hold down the Shift key to
| | 03:28 | make sure I'm drawing a straight line.
| | 03:28 | When I click again, I will now get a
straight line between my two points.
| | 03:33 | I'm going to create a little notch here,
so I'm going to come down a little bit,
| | 03:37 | Shift+Click, don't drag your mouse at
this point, you'll create Bezier handles,
| | 03:41 | I want squared off corners initially,
go out here, Shift+Click.
| | 03:46 | Make sure I get nice right angles
around my frame edges.
| | 03:52 | Okay, I think I'm going to come down here
a little ways, cut in a little bit for a notch,
| | 03:57 | maybe extend down to -- maybe
even all the way down to here with that idea
| | 04:02 | and start coming around the bottom of my frame.
| | 04:06 | I'll Shift+Click, Shift+Click, Shift+Click,
Shift+Click, I can always edit these
| | 04:12 | points later, as well, I'm just
making some decisions as I go here.
| | 04:16 | And I'll click there, then make a
little cutout notch right to this area.
| | 04:20 | Click, still holding the Shift key everytime I click,
to make sure these vertices are lined up.
| | 04:25 | When I close the mask by clicking on my
last vertex, there's a good chance that
| | 04:30 | this point and the point before don't align.
| | 04:33 | So I might need to take this last point that's selected,
and nudge it to the right or left a little bit,
| | 04:39 | until I see that the mask path is nice
and perfectlystraight in between them.
| | 04:44 | Okay, that's the outside of my frame.
| | 04:47 | Now I need to cut out the inside of my frame.
| | 04:49 | I'm going to make sure that my shape
layer is still selected, because I want my
| | 04:53 | new path to be part of the same layer
and I'm going to start picking a zone
| | 04:59 | in between the video and my outer
frame to define the inner frame.
| | 05:03 | And to make things interesting, I'll Shift+Click here
| | 05:06 | I might even overlap the video
in some areas to create the illusion of
| | 05:11 | support tabs that somehow this glass LCD frame behind
is attached to my frame at these overlapping tabs.
| | 05:20 | Here, get a little deeper into here,
then maybe take advantage of those cutouts
| | 05:25 | to go up in here, a little higher, here,
maybe the overlapping tab again down to here.
| | 05:32 | I'm Shift+Clicking to keep things aligned,
down to there, here, make my tab there as well.
| | 05:41 | Let's make a little bit of a wider tab,
just to make it more interesting.
| | 05:45 | The bottom of the frame is a little
less interesting in the shot anyway.
| | 05:49 | And just break things up a little bit
with my patterning. Come down to here.
| | 05:54 | I think I'll go ahead and overlap my
video there as well, just to change things
| | 05:58 | to where my tabs are, Shift+Click, Shift+Click,
and close my path, and I realize
| | 06:04 | I did end up in a different place I started,
so I'm going to use my cursor keys
| | 06:08 | to nudge that first point, back up
to line up with my last point.
| | 06:12 | Now that I've drawn the paths that
define the outside and inside of my frame,
| | 06:17 | in the next movie, I'm going to subtract
one from the other to create a hollow in
| | 06:21 | the middle and do some additional
treatments to make this frame look nice,
| | 06:24 | like a piece of translucent plastic or glass.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining the frame| 00:05 | I've created a new shape layer and created
two separate paths or shape groups
| | 00:11 | inside the same shape layer,
one defining the outside of my frame,
| | 00:16 | one defining the inside, time to start using
these paths to create my actual cutout.
| | 00:21 | Now After Effects creates a new shape group everytime
you start drawing another path on the same layer.
| | 00:29 | I actually want both of those paths
to be part of the same group.
| | 00:33 | That way I can subtract one from the other.
| | 00:35 | Now that I'm done drawing my paths,
I'm going to select V to return to my Section tool
| | 00:40 | and with my Hero Title timeline tab selected,
I'm going to press the tilde (~) key
| | 00:45 | to take up my entire display.
| | 00:47 | Shape layers have a lot of parameters
and sometimes you might temporarily need
| | 00:51 | the additional real estate to see what you're doing.
| | 00:54 | I'll take my Path from Shape 2, that was my
inner path, and drag it below my Path from Shape 1.
| | 01:01 | And I'm going to rename these groups
to help me keep things straight.
| | 01:05 | This is hero frame, this path is the outer path,
and this path is the inner path.
| | 01:15 | And I can even delete this extraneous Shape group 2.
| | 01:19 | And I might even rename my entire shape layer
to hero video frame and press tilde key again
| | 01:26 | to return to my normal display.
| | 01:28 | Things look as they did before with my two paths.
They're only part of the same shape group now.
| | 01:32 | Now let's go ahead and subtract
the inner path from the outer path.
| | 01:36 | To do that, I'm going to select the Hero Frame Shape
group and add an operator of Merge Paths.
| | 01:45 | I'm going to make sure it's immediately
below these two paths in my shape group.
| | 01:50 | I'll twirl it open, see its options a
little bit better and say, subtract the
| | 01:55 | path immediately above you from the
paths above, and now I have my frame.
| | 01:59 | And I'll Toggle Transparency,
so you can see what's going on.
| | 02:02 | So that's nice beginning to my frame,
now when I look at it, it is looking a
| | 02:07 | little bit on the squared off side, to be honest.
So I think I'm going to round those corners a little bit.
| | 02:12 | With the Hero Frame Group still selected,
I'm going to go Add and this time
| | 02:16 | choose Round Corners, make sure it's
after Merge Paths, turn off by Mask and
| | 02:22 | Shape Path Visibility, so I
can better see what I'm doing.
| | 02:25 | Now you're going to start to see
some of this rounding taking place.
| | 02:28 | You can turn on the Transparency Grid
if you want to as well, and I'm going
| | 02:32 | to play around with the rounding
parameter to get the amount of rounding that
| | 02:34 | I want to my edges.
| | 02:37 | You can obviously go quite
extreme here to get very stylized looks.
| | 02:40 | I just want a little bit of rounding as
if this is a nice soft edge plastic bezel.
| | 02:45 | That's looking better.
| | 02:47 | Allthough I've noticed, I'm only seeing the blue color,
I'm not seeing the green
| | 02:51 | that was suposed to be the inside of my gradient.
| | 02:52 | That's because by default, the gradient
doesn't stretch very far across this layer.
| | 02:57 | I need to change that.
| | 02:58 | Make sure your shape group is selected
and that you're on the Selection tool.
| | 03:04 | When you've done those two things, you'll
see this user interface items for the gradient.
| | 03:09 | Drag that second point out until you
start to get some of that green shading or
| | 03:13 | whatever color you chose,
appearing across the part of your frame.
| | 03:17 | I think I'll turn off the Transparency Grid for now,
to see how that looks against dark space.
| | 03:22 | That's pretty good.
| | 03:24 | And flat frames aren't too interesting to me.
| | 03:27 | I'm going to go ahead and use a Layer Style
to Bevel this particular frame.
| | 03:32 | Now that's giving it a little bit of fake 3D,
and I'll twirl this down, maybe
| | 03:36 | have a little bit wider Bevel Depth,
but in my case maybe even back off the
| | 03:41 | strength of the Bevel, just to make it a soft rounding,
rather than something quite solid and extreme.
| | 03:46 | I just want a little bit of softness to this edge.
| | 03:49 | And again, these are parameters you can adjust to taste.
| | 03:53 | Another possibility is to actually use
the Shape layer as a starting point to
| | 03:57 | take advantage of the Ray-traced 3D renderer
and create some of this actually
| | 04:01 | extruded and actually translucent and has index
refraction and all those niceties, it will look very nice.
| | 04:08 | It does take a long time to render, so
I'm going to avoid that for the sake of
| | 04:12 | this demo, just so we can move more quickly.
| | 04:14 | Certainly considered an option you
can go back to later, to make this frame
| | 04:17 | look more interesting. Okay.
| | 04:18 | This is our work in the pre-comp, how
does it look in our final composition?
| | 04:22 | Well, you'll see that that frame has immediately
appeared as part of our final render.
| | 04:31 | My tabs are outside of my Action Safe Areas.
| | 04:35 | I might reduce the depths of those tabs,
just to make them less obvious in the
| | 04:41 | final zoom in, and I might tweak the color to differentiate
a little bit further from the background.
| | 04:46 | Feel free to tweak the Color, Bevel and even Shape
of your frame, until you get something that you like.
| | 04:52 | Save your project.
| | 04:53 | And then in the next movie, we'll start working
on frames for the additional videos.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Framing the extra videos| 00:05 | During the break between movies, we
spent a little bit of time refining our
| | 00:08 | beveled frame and dragged the gradient
in to come out a little bit further.
| | 00:13 | I darkened up the blue to give us more
contrast to the brighter than expected
| | 00:16 | background layer, and I've also tweaked the
Bevel & Emboss settings a little bit down here.
| | 00:22 | And I'm using the soften parameter
rather than the depth parameter to add a
| | 00:26 | little bit of softness to my rounding.
| | 00:28 | So now I have a Hero frame that I'm happy with.
| | 00:30 | If you want to catch up with me, you can go
into Intermediate Comps and use 09_Hero Frame.
| | 00:36 | But I'm going to continue on
to the one I've created here.
| | 00:39 | Next we need to make frames
for all this little extra videos.
| | 00:43 | You may remember that we created those
placeholder solids at a size of 380x300 pixels.
| | 00:49 | So let's go ahead and select our comps folder,
make a New Composition, enter those dimensions,
| | 00:53 | 380 Wide, 300 Tall, name this Extra Video 1,
make sure my Frame Rate is correct,
| | 01:02 | 23.976, 25 Duration and click OK.
| | 01:07 | I don't really need my Action and Title
Safe Grids for these extra videos,
| | 01:10 | so I can either press the apostrophe key to
toggle them off or they are underneath
| | 01:15 | this Grids and Guides option,
I'll turn off, Title/Action Safe.
| | 01:18 | Our first video that we want to use for
one of our fillers is this jogging movie.
| | 01:23 | Our client gave us budgetary constraints,
so we just chose smaller videos from
| | 01:27 | our stock footage house for these extra videos.
| | 01:29 | I noticed that this has a fairly short duration of 10:09,
I'm hoping for maybe up to 25 seconds.
| | 01:36 | Now it does have a higher frame rate of 29.97.
| | 01:39 | So I'm going to go into my Interpret Footage
settings for the selected clip and slow it down to 23.976.
| | 01:49 | That's the same frame rate as my Final Comp
and it will also give me a slower,
| | 01:54 | more dream like motion, which kind of fits
the mood of this music and this piece so far.
| | 01:59 | I'll click OK and drag this into my New Composition.
| | 02:02 | It fills just the center of my comp, that's fine.
I'm going to build a frame around the outside.
| | 02:07 | The duration isn't quite long enough,
but I can tweak that later on when
| | 02:11 | I compare it to the camera's movements.
| | 02:13 | Okay, let's build a frame and you've
been through this before in the previous
| | 02:16 | couple of movies so I'm going
to go through this fairly fast.
| | 02:19 | I'm going to fit this up a bit larger
so I can see what I'm doing.
| | 02:23 | Make sure no layer is selected.
I don't want to mask this layer.
| | 02:27 | I want to create a brand new shape layer
that's somewhat pretty bright so I can
| | 02:31 | see my action, choose my Pen tool, no RotoBezier,
it will remember my Stroke
| | 02:37 | and Fill from my previous settings and I can just go
up in this corner and start clicking out my frame.
| | 02:43 | I'll click, Shift+Click to make it's a straight line
and start creating my outer frame.
| | 02:49 | And I'm not going to give you quite
the running commentary on this that I did
| | 02:53 | before since you've already seen me do this.
| | 02:55 | So it's no longer quite so strange and you
shouldn't be wondering what the heck I'm up to.
| | 03:01 | I'll just go and click this out fairly quickly,
again, holding the Shift Key and
| | 03:05 | not dragging the mouse when I click,
and we have nice sharp aligned corners,
| | 03:11 | here maybe cut into frame a
little bit here, down to this edge.
| | 03:16 | Make sure you don't go too far outside
that border there, but it will draw the
| | 03:20 | shape layer there, so it's not too bad.
| | 03:23 | And maybe do a little bit of notching right into here.
| | 03:29 | There, there, close my path, and
I think they're actually aligned.
| | 03:32 | I don't know how much movement
I need to do to line this up.
| | 03:36 | I think they're pretty good.
| | 03:37 | Okay, that was the outer path.
| | 03:39 | Make sure the shape layer is still selected,
so I'm going to add to the same layer
| | 03:43 | and let's start defining our inner path of our frame.
| | 03:46 | Click, Shift+Click the little tab to
support the videos and I'm holding on to it,
| | 03:52 | back up that line more or less.
| | 03:56 | Maybe I'll follow the contours here through this area.
| | 04:01 | Grab a piece of this video down through here,
come out, give myself a bit of clearance to this area.
| | 04:09 | Create maybe a fairly narrow
but deep tab through that section.
| | 04:15 | Come down to the edge of my video, come
straight through here, and maybe create
| | 04:20 | one more support tab to this area.
| | 04:24 | Shift+Click, Shift+Click, click to close
and nudge that last point necessary to
| | 04:30 | line them up, so I don't have a bent line to those points.
| | 04:33 | Once I'm done, I'll go back to my Selection tool
with my Extra Video 1 timeline panel selected.
| | 04:40 | Press the tilde (~) key to take up the whole display
and bring my paths into the same shape group.
| | 04:45 | I'd drag my second group's path underneath
my first group's path, I'll rename it
| | 04:51 | Inner, Outer, delete Shape group 2,
don't need that anymore.
| | 04:58 | This is now called Extra Video Frame, press the tilde key
again, okay, that's looking pretty good so far.
| | 05:07 | I'm going to turn off the Mask Visibility and turn on
my Transparency Grid, so I can see what's going on.
| | 05:13 | I do need to cut out my inner path from
my outer path, and to do that, I'm just
| | 05:18 | going to go ahead and copy and paste
whatever we've done in my previous frame.
| | 05:22 | I needed the Merge Paths operator, a
Cmd+ or Ctrl+click on my round corners
| | 05:27 | operator as well, and Cmd+ or Ctrl+click on my
Bevel & Emboss layer Style and copy all of those.
| | 05:33 | Go to my Extra Video, make sure my
shape group is selected and paste.
| | 05:39 | I'm going to make sure my Merged Paths and Round
Corners are placed below my inner and outer paths.
| | 05:46 | I've got my nice cutout there.
| | 05:48 | Since I do have a smaller frame here,
I probably want less of a bevel and less rounding.
| | 05:55 | Make sure everything is proportional so
I cut down my rounding here to match the
| | 05:59 | scale of my smaller videos, go down
to my layer Style, Bevel & Emboss.
| | 06:06 | Maybe cut down on the size of that as
well and cut down on the softening,
| | 06:10 | just to harden that up a little bit.
| | 06:12 | And finally, make sure my shape group
is selected, I have my Selection tool,
| | 06:17 | I get my Gradient Editor and pull out my
second gradient stop till I get a little
| | 06:23 | bit of my green gradient also appearing a
long the edges of my frame.
| | 06:28 | Okay. I have a frame for one of my extra videos.
| | 06:32 | I eventually need four of these.
| | 06:34 | I could create three more unique frames,
or I can do a little bit of cheating to
| | 06:40 | reuse this frame, but in a way
that the viewer may not realize
| | 06:44 | that it's just the same frame repurposed.
| | 06:46 | That's what I'm going to show you in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating variations| 00:05 | I've decided that rather than creating
unique frames for each of my extra
| | 00:09 | videos, I'm going to save some
time by reusing this one master frame.
| | 00:14 | The first thing I'm going to do is select this one
frame I've made and give it its own composition.
| | 00:19 | That way, it'll be easier to find and edit
and have changes to it rippled
| | 00:23 | throughout the rest of my project.
| | 00:25 | The problem is, I didn't think of this
ahead of time, but that's no problem.
| | 00:28 | I'm going to right-click on extra frame,
and choose Pre-compose.
| | 00:31 | Pre-compose is your ability to go
back in time and create a comp chain you
| | 00:37 | should have created if you knew
ahead of time what you were doing.
| | 00:40 | So I'll go to Pre-compose, give this
a new name like Extra Frame Master.
| | 00:46 | Let's go ahead and open up that New Comp
so we can look at it and click OK.
| | 00:51 | Now if I tap the Shift Key, you'll see
that that Extra Frame Master is used in
| | 00:56 | Extra Video 1 and still looks the
same as it did before. Perfect!
| | 01:01 | I'm going to twirl up this Intermediate Comps
folder just to save some space.
| | 01:06 | Now let's go ahead and create extra video
Pre-comps for my remaining pieces of video.
| | 01:11 | I had four of these I wanted to create,
so I'm going to duplicate this three
| | 01:15 | times, one, two, three, After Effects
will automatically add incremental numbers
| | 01:21 | to the end of duplicates to let you know
what you're doing.
| | 01:23 | Let's open up Extra Video 2.
| | 01:26 | It looks exactly the same as
Extra Video 1, but it's not a problem.
| | 01:30 | I'm going to select my
Extra Frame Master Pre-comp.
| | 01:33 | Type R for rotation and flip it around 180 degrees.
| | 01:38 | And now I have a different looking frame even
though it's based off my one original frame.
| | 01:43 | We need to replace this video as well.
| | 01:45 | Think of replacing with this movie a
Stress Test and I quickly glanced and
| | 01:50 | noticed that it's 25 frames a second.
| | 01:52 | These days when you can get stock
footage from international websites,
| | 01:56 | you may be getting things created in a different
country than your country with different frame rates.
| | 02:00 | No problem, I'll open up the
Interpret Footage Settings for this particular
| | 02:03 | piece of footage and conform its
rate to 23.976, our final delivery rate.
| | 02:10 | This is not so much different than 25
that I'm going to notice a big difference,
| | 02:14 | but by conforming the frame rate,
I'm going to get a one for one frame match
| | 02:18 | from input to output and I won't have any
stuttering or staggered motion. I'll click OK.
| | 02:23 | I have a Stress Test, my new
video selected in the Project panel.
| | 02:28 | Jogging, my old video selected in the
Timeline panel, hold Cmd+Opt+/
| | 02:32 | or Ctrl+Alt+/ and After Effects
will replace my video for me.
| | 02:37 | And there's my new video layer in that frame.
| | 02:40 | Open up Extra Video 3, I need to
create a different variation this time,
| | 02:45 | so I think I'm going to use scale for this variation.
| | 02:48 | Press S, turn off the aspect ratio lock or Constraint
Proportions and scale it just in the X dimension.
| | 02:56 | And there's my new variation there.
| | 02:59 | Select the jogging video.
| | 03:00 | Select my next target to replace it
with perhaps this physical therapy video,
| | 03:05 | it's already at 23.976, no problems.
| | 03:09 | Cmd+Opt+/ or Ctrl+Alt+/,
the video has been replaced.
| | 03:14 | I see this new video is longer, so I'll
just drag out its layer bar longer, so I
| | 03:19 | have more video to play with later on.
| | 03:21 | Open up Extra Video 4, same routine,
select my Pre-comp layer, press S for scale,
| | 03:27 | turn off Constraint Proportions.
| | 03:30 | This time I'm going to flip it vertically
in the Y dimension and I have yet
| | 03:35 | another variation on my frame.
| | 03:37 | Select the jogging layer to replace, select -- oh,
what's left here, blood pressure.
| | 03:42 | At 23.976, Cmd+Opt+/ or Ctrl+Alt+/
to replace that video into nice long
| | 03:49 | video that can drag out and
almost covers my entire 25 seconds.
| | 03:54 | Now that we've equated unique compositions
for each of our extra videos, in the
| | 03:58 | next movie, we'll go about replacing our
placeholder solids with these Pre-comps
| | 04:02 | and do a little bit more tweaking
on that extra video frame.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Assembling the main comp| 00:05 | Now that I've created these four Extra Video Pre-comps
with framed pieces of video already in them,
| | 00:12 | I'll just swap them in for our placeholders
in our Final Composition.
| | 00:15 | I'm going to scan somewhere here in time
where I can see all my placeholders,
| | 00:20 | twirl up the camera just to save
some space on the timeline.
| | 00:23 | Select my Extra 1 placeholder, select
Extra Video 1 pre-comp in the project panel
| | 00:28 | and just like replacing footage,
I am going to hold Cmd+Opt+/ on Mac
| | 00:32 | or Ctrl+Alt+/ on Windows to replace that
placeholder with my composition.
| | 00:38 | Now you're seeing the method to my
madness, why I build things this way?.
| | 00:42 | Do the same thing for Extra 2, same thing for Extra 3
and same thing for Extra 4.
| | 00:51 | And now I've swapped in all these pre-comps
that I've built for my placeholder solids.
| | 00:57 | As I scan through this to see how it looks,
I have to admit I'm not as thrilled
| | 01:05 | with that extra video frame as I was originally.
| | 01:07 | I'm going to turn off my Title and Action Safe
just to not obscure my view here.
| | 01:12 | Yeah, I wish this overlapped a bit more here
and that little tab is looking a little bit wimpy.
| | 01:17 | Now if I had made four separate frames,
I might have to edit all four frames
| | 01:21 | individually but since I've made one
master frame, I can edit that one master
| | 01:26 | and changes will ripple through my composition.
| | 01:28 | Remember, this extra frame master,
I'll tap the Shift key, is used by each of
| | 01:34 | this extra video comps, which
all then feed into one final comp.
| | 01:40 | So how can I make edits to my master frame
pre-comp and see the results in the final comp?
| | 01:47 | Well, to do that I'm going to use a trick
called Edit This/ Look At That.
| | 01:51 | To view one thing but edit another,
you need to lock the item that you intend to view.
| | 01:59 | So I'll toggle the viewer lock for my Main Comp.
| | 02:02 | Now I need a second view to be able to
make my changes to my pre-comp.
| | 02:08 | So I'll add a New Viewer, which is a second comp panel.
| | 02:12 | And in this second viewer,
I will open up the Extra Frame Master.
| | 02:18 | And I'll go ahead and change the space
proportionally, so I can see a little bit
| | 02:23 | more of my final comp on the left.
| | 02:25 | I'll select my Extra Video Frame layer,
turn on the Mask and Shape Path
| | 02:29 | Visibility, twirl open my Shape layer,
Contents, Shape Group.
| | 02:34 | That gives me access to the vertices in
the shape layer and I can start editing them.
| | 02:39 | I'm going to start scooting that line
over to the left and see over here in
| | 02:46 | my master comp that are now altering the way
that frame looks in all of those nested videos.
| | 02:54 | Maybe that's enough.
| | 02:55 | I thought this tab was too small, so I'll select
that vertex and Shift+Click on the second one.
| | 03:00 | Use the right arrow, makes that a little
bit wider, but I don't like this either.
| | 03:07 | So I'm going to move that over to fatten up
a bit and maybe alter these higher just
| | 03:14 | to create a little less obvious of a notch.
| | 03:16 | This makes really easy to see what I'm
doing without having to jump back and
| | 03:20 | forth between different comp panels.
| | 03:22 | Okay, I think I'm liking that shape a
little bit better and I think I might
| | 03:26 | shorten this down a little bit, a
little less obtrusive, yeah, there we go.
| | 03:30 | And finally I think I'm going to
make this tab larger as well.
| | 03:37 | Great! Once I'm done using these two views
side by side I can unlock my Main Viewer,
| | 03:43 | close my second viewer, go back, look
at my Final Comp and we did double-click
| | 03:50 | on my work area bar to be able
to view my entire composition.
| | 03:54 | Then go ahead and press 0 on the
numeric keypad or use this button in the
| | 03:58 | previous panel to RAM Preview my entire work.
| | 04:01 | It's going to take a few seconds to render
this whole thing, so I'm going to go ahead
| | 04:06 | and jump ahead to after this render is done,
so you can enjoy where we are so far in this project.
| | 04:12 | (music playing)
| | 04:36 | Well, that was a nice payoff for all of our work.
| | 04:38 | And you can see how nicely that flowed
by starting with a bunch of placeholders,
| | 04:44 | then getting an arrangement of layers
and camera move that we liked,
| | 04:47 | before working on the final elements we're going to use.
| | 04:49 | Now that we've gone this far, let's start dressing
this up a bit more before we show it to the client.
| | 04:54 | In the next few movies, let's work on making
that background look more interesting.
| | 04:57 | But first, don't forget to
File>Increment and Save your project.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Dressing Up the BackgroundAdding background text| 00:05 | In the next few movies, we're going to strive to make
this background look a little bit more interesting.
| | 00:10 | I don't want it to be so interesting
that distracts from our video,
| | 00:14 | particularly the Hero here at the end,
but it is looking a little bit empty
| | 00:17 | right now and I do want to make this world
complex enough that the viewer may
| | 00:21 | want to see this again and again.
| | 00:23 | But one thing we had done for us is we
asked our intern to create a bunch of
| | 00:28 | text layers that might represent results
you get from a test on your heart.
| | 00:31 | Say, EKG or blood test or something like that.
| | 00:33 | They gave us the layered Photoshop file.
| | 00:35 | So I'm going to go to my Stills folder
to make sure I import anything new into
| | 00:40 | that folder, do a Cmd+I on Mac,
Ctrl+I on Windows, navigate to the Stills
| | 00:46 | folder in your exercise files, sources folder
and select Lab Results.psd.
| | 00:53 | Click open in the second dialog that opens,
make sure Import Kind is set to Composition.
| | 00:59 | This will allow each layer in that file
to be opened as its own individual layer
| | 01:03 | inside After Effects and click OK.
| | 01:06 | Down in the Stills folder, you'll have
a composition called Lab Results and a
| | 01:10 | folder with each of these
individual Lab Results' layers.
| | 01:14 | Double-click the composition
named Lab Results to open it.
| | 01:17 | Initially, it looks like there's nothing
there but that's because the person who
| | 01:21 | created these titles created
them with the color black.
| | 01:23 | Once I turned on my transparency grid,
now I can see that there's something there.
| | 01:27 | As long as my intern did actually
create these using the Text tool in Photoshop
| | 01:33 | and did not flatten the file,
I have access to that original text.
| | 01:39 | Do Cmd+A or Ctrl+A to select all, go
to layer and say Convert To Editable Text.
| | 01:45 | You can only do this with Photoshop Text layers
not Illustrator Text layers unfortunately.
| | 01:50 | When I do so, you'll see they all get the T icon
to indicate that they are indeed After Effects text layers.
| | 01:57 | But the first thing I want to do is
make their color white instead of black so
| | 02:01 | I'm going to make sure my character
panel is forward and with all the text
| | 02:05 | layers selected, click on the Set to white Swatch,
and now I have white layers
| | 02:09 | that will make it easier to put
over objects in my background.
| | 02:12 | Press F2 to deselect all, solo these
individual layers to see what they look
| | 02:16 | like since they're now editable After Effect layers.
| | 02:20 | I can change the font or change what they actually say.
| | 02:23 | I'm going to double check here and
I see that they are in Myriad Pro-Semibold
| | 02:28 | which is the same font I use for opening title.
| | 02:30 | So that's nice and harmonious.
| | 02:32 | Next, I'm going to select and copy our
first text layer, go to final comp,
| | 02:37 | go to the very beginning where we
have nothing to look at and paste.
| | 02:42 | Initially, it's a 2D layer, I'll enable
the 3D layer switch and to see this
| | 02:47 | thing in 3D space, I'm going
to go back to 4 views-Bottom.
| | 02:52 | Now I can see that that new text layer
from Photoshop has jumped to the
| | 02:56 | same default position that our Hero video
came in, our background came in at, etcetera.
| | 03:01 | I'm going to select my active camera view,
make sure that I can see my title
| | 03:05 | on action safe grids, I can position
it so it is in a safe area so that all
| | 03:10 | viewers, wide-screen and 4X3 will be
able to see it, select my Results 1 layer,
| | 03:15 | press P to reveal its position
and either start to scrub its position
| | 03:20 | values to get somewhere where I can see it or pick
it up inside one of these viewers and drag it over.
| | 03:27 | There's roughly where it's in the camera's view.
It is a way too large.
| | 03:31 | I'll start pushing it back in space, in Z.
I'm now beyond what I can see in this
| | 03:38 | viewer and for that matter the right viewer as well,
so I am going to press C to
| | 03:43 | bring up the camera tools, toggle around
to track Z and back off a little bit here
| | 03:47 | until I can see all my layers and my camera.
| | 03:51 | I'll do the same over here as well and
I might pan things little bit in this
| | 03:55 | direction, just so they're nicely enclosed
in my viewable area.
| | 03:59 | I'll press V to return back to my Selection tool.
| | 04:03 | Okay, now I can start working on tucking
this guy up where I want him to be in space.
| | 04:08 | Might push him back a little bit further in Z
to make him a little bit smaller,
| | 04:12 | you can scale him as well, I need to widen
this panel, to see exactly what I'm up to
| | 04:16 | and remember quite often, High-Def
content is cut off to an inner 4X3 area
| | 04:23 | for standard def versions of broadcast.
| | 04:24 | Normally, the inner bounding box is
the title safe area for a television.
| | 04:31 | However, truth be told, with so many
nice flat screens these days, you can
| | 04:36 | usually cheat your text out into the
action safe and have it still be readable,
| | 04:41 | but just in case my client is picky
about these things, I'm going to make sure
| | 04:45 | it's sitting inside the title safe area.
| | 04:49 | Now that I have it back here in space, I'll drag my
current time indicator through my composition.
| | 04:54 | I can see not only as it peeking
nicely behind this video frames.
| | 04:59 | I can also see that it's multi-planing
nicely because it's further back in Z,
| | 05:03 | therefore, not moving quite as much.
| | 05:04 | So I could see it even at the end of this display.
| | 05:07 | So that's pretty nice.
| | 05:11 | You have four of these layers total,
feel free to select the other results
| | 05:15 | layers and spread them around 3D space
in your comp, so they peek in and out
| | 05:20 | from behind these extra videos as the
camera pans through these movements.
| | 05:24 | You can go ahead and do that on your own
and to your own personal taste,
| | 05:28 | but before we do that, I'm going to do a
little bit more tweaking on this layer just
| | 05:32 | to make it fit in better with the design.
| | 05:35 | It's really sharp and readable right now
and it's supposed to be a background element.
| | 05:38 | Things in the background should be
softer, blurrier, maybe not as opaque.
| | 05:41 | So I'm going to go ahead and
give it a little bit of treatment.
| | 05:45 | I'm going to add a blur to it.
| | 05:47 | Box blur is a very versatile blur, you
get many different looks out of it
| | 05:51 | and I'm going to try just a very small
blur radius, even just one softens it up
| | 05:56 | little bit, you can go far more if you want to.
| | 05:59 | I think just right around 1.0,
it's not a bad starting point.
| | 06:02 | Two, I'm going to reduce the opacity
of this layer, it's just too much in my face,
| | 06:07 | it's supposed to be a background element
that's just kind of floating
| | 06:11 | around back there as part of my world.
| | 06:15 | Thirdly, well I do have this transparent
white text but it's still looking a little bit boring.
| | 06:22 | It'd be nicer if it interacted more with
the colors of my interesting background
| | 06:27 | and to get layers to interact with each other,
I go to modes and in this case,
| | 06:31 | try something such as Add, Screen, or Color Dodge.
| | 06:36 | That will give it more of an interaction
with the colors of the background underneath.
| | 06:39 | Now you see particularly when coupled with a blur
is much more of a glowing sort of appearance
| | 06:44 | and I like that.
| | 06:45 | Now that I am in Add mode, I can go ahead
and knock down the opacity even more,
| | 06:50 | maybe somewhere around here,
I can tweak that later and once I've placed my
| | 06:55 | other text layers throughout the background,
I can go ahead and copy and paste
| | 07:00 | these parameters to those other layers
to give them all the same look.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating wiggly lines| 00:05 | In between movies, we went ahead
and arranged our different Vital Signs layers
| | 00:10 | throughout our 3D world to create some interest
as the camera moves through this animation.
| | 00:16 | You can see them peek in and out
in between at those various layers.
| | 00:20 | Again, the arrangement is up to you,
if you want to see what we did, you can go
| | 00:25 | down into the Intermediate Comps folder,
open up 11_Wallpaper and you can
| | 00:28 | explore what we did by typing "UU"
to Us in quick succession to see everything
| | 00:33 | that was changed including the transform values,
but I'm going to continue on with our own final comp.
| | 00:39 | We have some text with some lab results in them.
| | 00:42 | Another common element you might see in
a medical situation such as this
| | 00:46 | would be EKG or other sorts of vital sign traces.
| | 00:50 | Similar to what you see on this
display here in one of our extra videos.
| | 00:54 | I'll go up to 1 View temporarily, so
you can see that at a higher resolution.
| | 00:59 | We can simulate that type of display using shape layers.
| | 01:03 | Now you're not going to know immediately
how to create every single element.
| | 01:07 | There will be times when you need to do
a little bit of research and development.
| | 01:11 | So go ahead and search your Comps folder
and let's just make ourselves
| | 01:15 | a brand new composition just to experiment
with what might work for shape layers.
| | 01:18 | I'm going to call this "Vital Signs Test."
| | 01:23 | I need to make it pretty wide,
our final render here is 960 half HD.
| | 01:29 | Since I'm going to be panning past it,
I have a feeling that I might want to say
| | 01:33 | twice that resolution just to make
sure I have enough pixels not to get too blurry
| | 01:37 | as the camera moves around.
| | 01:39 | So I'm just going to type in
2000 pixels as a starting number.
| | 01:42 | You can always change that later,
but I don't think I need anything very tall.
| | 01:46 | I certainly don't want our vital signs traces
to be as tall as these individual videos.
| | 01:50 | So I certainly don't want to
be any taller and say 200 pixels.
| | 01:54 | These are just guesstimates, you can go ahead
and play around and change these numbers later.
| | 01:58 | We're just trying out ideas here.
| | 02:00 | When I press Enter, you can see we
have a very long skinny composition.
| | 02:05 | I'll tap the apostrophe key to turn off Safe Areas.
| | 02:08 | Go down just one view for now,
and if you need to, create as much room as you can
| | 02:13 | for your comp panels so you can see what you're doing.
| | 02:17 | I just happen to be at a nice 50% view here,
that's pretty good. Okay.
| | 02:21 | What we want to do is draw a line through
this composition, then we want to
| | 02:28 | animate that line to create our fake Vital Signs displays.
| | 02:32 | Shape layers are good not only at creating shapes
but also in creating lines.
| | 02:38 | I'm going to select my Pen tool,
and I actually need the opposite of what I had
| | 02:41 | before for my Fill And Stroke settings.
| | 02:43 | I don't want to fill but I do want to stroke
to draw along my line.
| | 02:48 | So I'm going to hold down Option on Mac,
or Alt on Windows and click on the
| | 02:52 | swatch until I see that red no slash go through it.
| | 02:55 | That can often be faster than going into the
Fill dialog and manually selecting No Fill.
| | 03:01 | Then for Stroke options, again, I hold Option or Alt
and click until I see a nice solid color for my stroke.
| | 03:09 | Click on the swatch and change the color
to taste, white is a good starting point,
| | 03:13 | that's what we use for our text.
| | 03:15 | And go ahead and set the Stroke Width to some
moderate value, two, three, four pixels will be okay.
| | 03:23 | One might be a bit of a hair line.
| | 03:25 | I'm going to use two for starting point
and again, we could always edit this later.
| | 03:29 | All right, we don't have any layers in this Comp yet,
so I don't need to worry about deselecting layers.
| | 03:33 | I'm going to place my Pen tool at the far left edge
of my comp, click once, that's my first point.
| | 03:40 | Go to the right edge, hold down the
Shift key to make sure I'm drawing a
| | 03:44 | straight like, click again and there is my Stroke Path.
| | 03:49 | I'm going to go ahead and return to the
Section tools, so I don't accidentally
| | 03:52 | edit that line and here we have a white line.
| | 03:55 | Well, you could draw an EKG path or
some other Vital Sign trace manually
| | 04:02 | and in one of the idea corners, we will
actually go through that procedure, but shape
| | 04:07 | layers have shape operators,
which allow you to distort outlines.
| | 04:11 | Let's see if one of those will
create a nice Vital Signs trace for us.
| | 04:14 | For my Shape layer 1, I'm going to twirl
it open until I get to its shape group.
| | 04:21 | Select its shape group, Shape 1 and add shape operator.
| | 04:25 | There happens to be one called Wiggle Paths.
| | 04:29 | It sounds like a perfect thing to create a
randomized line rather than a straight line.
| | 04:34 | I'll select that, I can see a little bit of
deflection here, but let's go ahead
| | 04:38 | and twirl that open, and start increasing the size
until we start to see some random lines being drawn.
| | 04:46 | I don't like the squared off corners,
so I'm going to change the points to smooth,
| | 04:49 | and I think I'd like a little bit more details,
more wiggles to this.
| | 04:54 | So I'll just crank up the Wiggle's parameter
until I get -- well, the maximum,
| | 04:58 | a lot of detail throughout this path.
| | 05:01 | Again, this very long composition is
going to be in the background of our final comp,
| | 05:06 | and we're only going to be seeing
a small part of it at a time.
| | 05:10 | If you were to press the spacebar to
start a standard preview, you'll see the
| | 05:14 | wiggle paths by default, wiggles, it's all set to the path.
| | 05:18 | This is kind of fun and interesting but frankly,
not a lot of Vital Signs displays look like this.
| | 05:23 | Instead they tend to be a static path and only a portion
of that path is drawn on or revealed over time.
| | 05:31 | To do that with wiggle path, if you just set
the wiggles per second down to the zero,
| | 05:35 | you will now have a static path that does not animate.
| | 05:42 | Next trick is animating it on.
| | 05:44 | You could use a mask to go ahead
and reveal part of the line.
| | 05:49 | That's not a bad idea because you could have
a feathered mask to have a very soft-edged trace.
| | 05:54 | However, there's also another shape operator
that comes in handy for tricks like this.
| | 05:57 | I'm going to twirl up wiggle paths for now,
make sure my shape group is selected,
| | 06:01 | make sure I can see my add operator.
| | 06:04 | If you can, you always have one at the
very top here right next to your Fill and
| | 06:08 | Stroke swatches and say let's add Trim Paths.
| | 06:13 | That will allow me to reveal
only a small portion of my path.
| | 06:16 | I'm making sure it's in my shape group
underneath Wiggle Paths.
| | 06:20 | If necessary, you can drag shape operators
around in the timeline panel to rearrange your order.
| | 06:25 | I'm going to twirl open Trim Paths
and start scrubbing the end until only a
| | 06:31 | small portion of my Vital Signs display is revealed,
like around there.
| | 06:36 | To animate this little window down along our path,
you can use the offset parameter.
| | 06:43 | This basically moves the start and end points
simultaneously so you have a
| | 06:48 | moving window without having to animate
both the start and end individually.
| | 06:53 | That's pretty cool.
| | 06:55 | Okay, let's set that back to zero, you can manually
set it to zero or here is a trick in After Effects.
| | 07:00 | If you right-click on any parameter
the menu that appears will have a Reset option,
| | 07:04 | press Home to make sure my current time
indicator is at the start of the comp,
| | 07:09 | enable key-framing for offset, press End
and set it to some number of rotations.
| | 07:16 | Let's say maybe four full cycles of the offset.
| | 07:21 | I don't know if that's going to work for
speed, but we can always edit this later.
| | 07:25 | I'll enter that, press 0 in numeric keypad
to do a quick RAM preview.
| | 07:28 | This renders pretty quickly and that's a pretty cool speed.
| | 07:35 | I could maybe stand at being a little slower
but I have to see it in context
| | 07:39 | with the camera move, before if I really know.
| | 07:41 | Anyway, this is a good starting point.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding vital signs to our world| 00:05 | Now that we have created a nice
prototype for our Vital Signs display,
| | 00:10 | let's place one of them in our 3D
world and see how it works out.
| | 00:13 | I'm going to select my Shape layer,
I think I'm going to temporarily turn off
| | 00:16 | Trim Paths, so I get to see the entire trace
for the entire duration of the
| | 00:21 | composition, copy, go to my Final Comp and Paste.
| | 00:28 | Then I might rearrange my layers here
to place it at the very top of my stack.
| | 00:32 | Now I have my Vital Signs trace going
throughout my comp, toggle back to switches.
| | 00:37 | It's 2D layer initially.
I'll make it a 3D layer.
| | 00:41 | Again, it jumps to the center of the
composition world which is over here
| | 00:44 | where our Hero video is, I'm going to push it back in Z,
and you'll see it start to appear here now.
| | 00:50 | It appeared roughly around where our text was
and look at it at various parts in our world.
| | 00:56 | It needs to be centered up so I
can see it during the camera move.
| | 01:00 | So I am going to center it roughly in our world.
| | 01:02 | It looks like I might need to scale it up too.
| | 01:04 | So I'm going to press S for Scale, and
Shift P for position to make it easy to
| | 01:08 | just scrub it's position if I so desire.
| | 01:11 | I am going to scale it up to where I
can see it at the start of my camera move,
| | 01:17 | and then as the camera pulls back, I'm
going to make sure I still see it,
| | 01:21 | and I pull back so much I don't see it anymore.
| | 01:23 | So let's go ahead and scale it up a
little bit more like around there, go later
| | 01:28 | in the camera move and
falling off the right side as well.
| | 01:33 | So it looks like, I need to scale it up larger
and maybe work on recentering it
| | 01:39 | in the X dimension, so it never goes off screen.
| | 01:45 | Let's go back here at the start, let
the camera pull back all the way,
| | 01:49 | stays inside the shot there and it
stays inside the shot there. Good.
| | 01:55 | I might place this initial one
say roughly centered in my world.
| | 01:59 | So it's kind of following the center
line of my little extra videos here.
| | 02:03 | I'm going to twirl the layer up and
twirl it down again until I see its
| | 02:07 | contents, twirl open the shape group,
re-enable the Trim Paths animation, go
| | 02:12 | back to Home and it would be nice if the
viewer got to see my EKG from the very beginning.
| | 02:18 | So I'm going to twirl open Trim Paths
and scrub the starting offset.
| | 02:22 | So it just appears on screen at that first frame.
| | 02:26 | So now, at the very start of the music, it will come
on screen and give the viewer something to look at.
| | 02:32 | Let's do a quick RAM Preview and see
how that works out and let's play it.
| | 02:39 | (music playing)
| | 02:45 | That's pretty cool.
| | 02:46 | So I scrub through the rest of my timeline,
I see that my little trace does
| | 02:51 | peak out behind the videos every now and then.
It gives a little bit of visual interest.
| | 02:59 | It goes off the end there and reappears here
right before our push in to our final video.
| | 03:05 | Nice. Well, now that I have a vital sign
display that I like, I can go ahead and reuse it
| | 03:10 | and make more of them in this composition,
just like I have a bunch of
| | 03:13 | different pieces of video throughout this composition.
| | 03:15 | The nice thing about Wiggle Paths is
that every time you duplicate a layer it's applied to,
| | 03:21 | you get a different random pattern of that path.
| | 03:24 | So you see, I now have two quite different traces.
That's nice.
| | 03:28 | So I'll select my Shape layer there,
drag it up to another position,
| | 03:34 | that's a little bit different and maybe
push it back further in space.
| | 03:38 | I think I need to go back to my
camera tool here and pull back a little bit more,
| | 03:41 | so I can see all of my layers,
same here, just rearrange things a little
| | 03:46 | bit further so I have a nice display
and I might want to experiment with giving
| | 03:51 | these other guys some different positions.
| | 03:53 | I'll press V to return to selection,
push this one say further back in space,
| | 03:58 | pull it up a little bit higher, some
around here in my world,
| | 04:03 | make sure it doesn't go off the edge of the screen.
I'm probably going to need to increase its scale.
| | 04:08 | Let's turn off Trim Paths temporarily
to make sure I'm not losing any of this.
| | 04:12 | That's again pretty close to the edge there.
| | 04:15 | Yeah, I'm going to need to increase
its scale, Shift+S, increase scale a
| | 04:21 | little bit, so it doesn't go off the screen,
check the end of my camera move,
| | 04:25 | stays on the screen, that's nice.
| | 04:28 | And now I've got a second EKG pass
animating throughout my video.
| | 04:33 | It's kind of boring that they're both going the same speed.
| | 04:37 | So I think I'm going to jump to the end, twirl down
Trim Paths and give myself a different speed.
| | 04:44 | Like maybe just three cycles during the entire animation.
| | 04:48 | And now, it will be progressing at a
different speed and appearing at different
| | 04:52 | times in my video, in my final active camera
that my first Vital Signs was.
| | 04:58 | So you have the basic idea.
| | 05:00 | Go ahead and duplicate that Vital Signs layers
a few more times and create a
| | 05:04 | few more variations and arrange it as you like
to fill in the background of your composition.
| | 05:09 | Again, we're not trying to distract too much,
but we are trying to make it
| | 05:12 | interesting enough for the viewer so that they'll
want to see your opening title again and again.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Synchronizing effects to music| 00:05 | In the end, I've decided to go ahead
and create five copies of my Vital Signs
| | 00:09 | shape layer animation and I arranged
them in 3D space interspersed in and out of
| | 00:15 | my different lab results' text.
| | 00:17 | I also renamed them Vitals Signs, one,
two, three, four, and five so I could
| | 00:21 | keep track at them in the Timeline panel.
| | 00:23 | We are just starting to get
pretty full and pretty busy now.
| | 00:26 | Let's see what this animation looks like so far.
| | 00:28 | I'll switch back to 1 View temporarily,
put my cursor over the Comp panel and
| | 00:32 | type the Tilde key so you can see this
as a full resolution.
| | 00:35 | (music playing)
| | 01:01 | That's pretty nice.
| | 01:02 | I'm going to press Tilde to go back to my
normal display, and return to 4 Views-Bottom.
| | 01:08 | However, one problem is that those
Vital Signs are a bit too obvious right now.
| | 01:14 | I could blur them and reduce their opacity
to go ahead and match the Lab Results layers.
| | 01:19 | But you know what would it be even better?
| | 01:21 | What if the amount of the blur for
these signs was timed to the music?
| | 01:25 | Well, we could keyframe that based
on all of these markers, or we can use
| | 01:30 | some automated functions in After Effects
to help do this blurring in response to music for us.
| | 01:37 | I am going to deselect my layers, and
the first thing I'm going to do is ask
| | 01:41 | After Effects to use a Keyframe Assistant and
covert the audio levels to a set of keyframes.
| | 01:47 | By doing that, we'll have some values
that we could either paste over to blur
| | 01:51 | for our layers or even better use to drive
expressions to help us automate that blur.
| | 01:56 | So I Convert Audio To Keyframes, I will
get a new layer called Audio Amplitude.
| | 02:02 | It is a null object.
| | 02:03 | You see this red box in the Comp panel.
| | 02:07 | I'll turn off Visibility for now because I don't need that
and I'll type "U" to reveal all of its keyframe parameters.
| | 02:14 | This gives me separate streams of keyframes
for the left channel, the right channel
| | 02:19 | and an average on both channels.
| | 02:22 | And I see these values are bumping
between close to zero and I think I saw
| | 02:26 | things even in the 40s at one point there.
| | 02:29 | I don't really need all of this detail,
I mean you could animate things
| | 02:32 | separately to left and right but just
to clean up my display, I'm going to go
| | 02:35 | ahead and delete left and right
since I'm running out of real estate here.
| | 02:38 | But one thing I think I would like is
maybe some control, a master control over
| | 02:44 | how much I'm going to blur by.
| | 02:46 | To do that, I'm going add Effect>Expression Controls,
these are dummy controls
| | 02:52 | just user interface items, they don't render any pixels
that you can then wire into your expressions.
| | 02:57 | I am going to set a slider control and
change its name to "Maximum Blur". Okay.
| | 03:04 | Now let's pick one of these
Vital Sign layers that's visible.
| | 03:08 | And again, I think I'll go to 1 View
so I can see things in more detail,
| | 03:12 | and more resolution and start
setting up a blur for it.
| | 03:15 | I'll do Effect>Blur & Sharpen>Box Blur,
come to like this because it's so flexible,
| | 03:20 | test its blur look.
| | 03:22 | That's kind of nice, but one nice thing about blurs i
s they tend to have these blur dimensions.
| | 03:28 | If I blur just in one dimension such
as vertical up and down.
| | 03:32 | I can see my shape a lot more clearly.
| | 03:34 | It's blurred but it isn't just
the cloud of pixels at this point.
| | 03:38 | It's something where I can make up the waveform
and it looks more interesting. Okay, that's cool.
| | 03:43 | Now before I create an expression, I need to see
everything I want to wire that expression to.
| | 03:48 | I want to wire it to the Audio Amplitude
and I want to wire it to this Maximum Blur slider.
| | 03:54 | Okay, the next thing I want to do is control
the blur radius, the depths of blur.
| | 03:59 | So hold down Option on Mac, Alt on Windows,
click on the stopwatch and now an
| | 04:04 | expression for it will be revealed
down here in the Timeline panel.
| | 04:08 | I want to use something known as
a Linear Interpolation Expression.
| | 04:11 | We cover this back in the Expressions Course.
| | 04:14 | You can get at it underneath
this expression language menu.
| | 04:17 | I find this is one of those expressions
I use so often, it's worth memorizing.
| | 04:20 | It says I will make a linear interoperation,
basically convert one series of
| | 04:26 | numbers to another, and I need to
enter five values inside a parenthesis.
| | 04:31 | What my master is, the range of my master,
say 0 to 100 and then the range
| | 04:36 | I'd like to end up going to,
0 to whatever my maximum blur is.
| | 04:39 | Well, I'm following that amplitude for both channels.
| | 04:43 | So I'll drag to that slider, type a
comma to separate my numbers,
| | 04:48 | and I don't really know what the real
maximum of both channels is.
| | 04:51 | I'm going to say it goes from zero at a minimum
to let's say 100 as a maximum and comma again.
| | 04:58 | And by the way, you might have trouble
typing in your expressions because you're
| | 05:01 | running out of room in the timeline panel.
| | 05:03 | If you accidentally click off you
might getting an expression error.
| | 05:07 | Don't worry, just click back on the expression,
move your cursor to where you were and keep typing.
| | 05:12 | Anyway, as both channels amplitude
goes from 0 to 100, I want my blur to go
| | 05:18 | from 0, to whatever this maximum blur slider says,
that's why I created it in the first place.
| | 05:27 | Now I'll type a closing parenthesis,
type Enter and now I have an expression.
| | 05:32 | My blur went away that's because my
Maximum Blur slider defaulted to zero.
| | 05:37 | As I increase it, you'll see the blur on
my nice little Vital Sign display changes as well.
| | 05:44 | Let's drag the current time indicator through here
to get an idea what these blurs look like.
| | 05:51 | That's not a bad blur early on.
| | 05:54 | Later on in here, where is my guy
from Vital Signs two? There he is.
| | 05:59 | That might be too much blur for later on.
| | 06:02 | I can always keyframe the maximum blur amount
to have more maximum blur early,
| | 06:07 | when there's just the heartbeat,
and less maximum blur later, when the music is louder.
| | 06:13 | But we'll just try this value for now.
| | 06:15 | Once you've created one combination of
an effect and an expression, you can copy the effect,
| | 06:21 | and we'll go ahead and copy
any attached expression as well.
| | 06:25 | I'll select Vital Sign 1, and paste, and
then pick my other ones and paste those as well.
| | 06:31 | And now, all of my Vital Signs are being
blurred in response to the music's amplitude.
| | 06:37 | Great!
| | 06:39 | The last thing I think I want to do though is
I still want to knock down their opacity
| | 06:42 | and maybe use an add mode
like I did on these other results layers.
| | 06:45 | That's not a problem.
| | 06:47 | I twirl these guys up so they're easier to read,
reveal the opacity for all of them
| | 06:51 | by pressing T, scrub them down to where
they blend in nicely with the background,
| | 06:56 | somewhere around there and finally,
toggle switches and modes and put them in Add mode.
| | 07:02 | And once I've done, so I might want to
tweak my opacity a little bit,
| | 07:07 | but that actually looks pretty good.
| | 07:12 | Now that I've done these changes, let's
go ahead and RAM Preview one more time.
| | 07:15 | I put my cursor over to Comp panel
to say this is panel I want to see.
| | 07:19 | Press the Tilde key to zoom up to maximum display
and RAM Preview to see how my expression is working.
| | 07:24 | I don't think I'm going to
bother to preview the whole thing.
| | 07:27 | I just want to get an idea
of whether or not I like it.
| | 07:31 | (music playing)
| | 07:31 | You know, I have to say I'm quite
pleased with how this is coming along.
| | 07:56 | I think we're getting a really close to the
point where we can show the client a proof.
| | 08:00 | But first, let's make a few more tweaks
just to go ahead and clean some things up
| | 08:04 | and then we'll render that proof for the client.
| | 08:06 | I'll tap the Tilde key one last time
to go back to my normal display,
| | 08:10 | and of course remember to Increment and Save.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Finalizing the ProofUsing motion blur| 00:05 | We're almost ready to deliver a proof to our client.
| | 00:07 | Let's watch it one more time to see
if there is any tweaks we'd like to make
| | 00:11 | before sending them this first proof.
| | 00:13 | With my cursor hovering over the Comp panel,
I'll press the tilde (~) key to
| | 00:17 | maximize its display, and I've
already rendered a preview for you.
| | 00:20 | Let's go ahead and look at it.
| | 00:22 | (music playing)
| | 00:46 | It's pretty good, but there are a couple of things
I'd like to improve before having the client look at this.
| | 00:52 | One problem I noticed is during this
camera pull back, there was a bit of
| | 00:57 | stuttering in the motion of this video
frames coming on screen.
| | 01:00 | Also, at this point when the camera is
so close to them, they are being scaled up
| | 01:04 | to be larger than their original size,and I'm a little bit
worried about the image quality at that point.
| | 01:09 | To cure that, I'm going to enable Motion Blur
for these layers that are causing me concern.
| | 01:14 | I'm going to twirl up some of my other
layers just to clean up my display here,
| | 01:19 | bring my switches column forward;
| | 01:21 | shortcut is F4, and enable the Motion Blur switch
for all of these videos.
| | 01:27 | To do that, I just need to drag down
the Motion Blur Switch column.
| | 01:32 | This means they will render with Motion Blur,
but I won't see the Motion Blur
| | 01:37 | until I enable the master switch in the timeline as well.
| | 01:40 | And now you'll see a little bit of extra blur
on them as the camera pulls back.
| | 01:47 | Another thing I think the Motion Blur
will help are my vital signs traces.
| | 01:51 | The start and end is exhibiting a bit of a hard clip.
| | 01:54 | I think it will look nicer if we had a feathered
start and end to it.
| | 01:58 | Now normally shape layers don't
allow you to feather them.
| | 02:01 | You could try applying feathered masks
and animating those across the vital signs.
| | 02:04 | But another possibility is just enabling
Motion Blur for those vital signs displays.
| | 02:10 | By doing so you're blurring of the drawing
of this line, as the line disappears and reappears.
| | 02:16 | This is without motion blur and with motion blur
and I do think that improves its look.
| | 02:22 | You might also consider blurring other layers
like the background, during the camera pull back.
| | 02:27 | It's so blurry in the first place.
I'm not really seeing a benefit there.
| | 02:31 | You can also try it with the medical
results text, but again, they are so
| | 02:36 | far back and they are moving relatively slowly,
I'm not really seeing a benefit there.
| | 02:40 | And indeed, since I want to keep After Effects
responsive while I'm working,
| | 02:44 | I'm going to turn off the Master Motion Blur Switch,
just while I'm previewing the comp.
| | 02:49 | But since I've enabled the Motion Blur Switch
for these layers, they will render with blur.
| | 02:53 | I'll turn that off.
| | 02:54 | Just drag thorough here briefly, to see if
there is anything else that might need blur.
| | 02:59 | Oh yeah, that text has a bit of a slam down as well,
that will probably benefit from motion blur as well.
| | 03:05 | So I reopen my Hero Title Comp, and
enable Motion Blur for that Heart Attack layer.
| | 03:12 | And now, we'll just add a little bit of
extra blur as those characters fall back.
| | 03:18 | Speaking of blur, it maybe fun if this
Heart Attack title also automatically blurred
| | 03:22 | in time with the music, similar to what we're doing
with the EKG traces earlier in this composition.
| | 03:28 | So since I've already done the work
on making these EKG traces blur,
| | 03:34 | I can borrow that work and apply to the main title.
| | 03:37 | I'm going to select my Audio Amplitude
layer which already has keyframes that
| | 03:40 | represent the loudness of this layer
for each frame of the composition.
| | 03:44 | And already has a maximum blur slider applied
hat I can use to control my blur in this other comp.
| | 03:49 | So I'll select the Audio Amplitude layer, copy it,
go to Hero +Title and paste.
| | 03:54 | It's based on the same soundtrack,
so I know my keyframes will line up.
| | 03:58 | Then I'll go back to one of my Vital Signs layers,
press F3 to bring forward the Effect Controls panel.
| | 04:05 | Select its Box Blur effect, which it already
has an expression applied to follow
| | 04:11 | the Both Channels and maximum Blur
sliders for audio amplitude, copy, go back to
| | 04:17 | Hero +Title, select Heart Attack and paste.
| | 04:22 | And a little bit further here, where
the Heart Attack tittle comes on and rest,
| | 04:26 | we'll see that it is indeed being
blurred in response to the music.
| | 04:29 | Now that blur in time to the music does
cause me some issues with readability,
| | 04:35 | so I think I'm actually going to keyframe the blur amount.
| | 04:38 | I'm going to select the Audio Amplitude layer,
which has my Master Maximum Blur slider,
| | 04:41 | Enable Keyframing for it and start at 0,
so it will not be blurred initially.
| | 04:48 | Then I'm going to go to this last heart beat
in my soundtrack, which I marked around here,
| | 04:52 | and increase the maximum blur to
represent how much blur I want on that beat.
| | 04:58 | I think right around there should be interesting,
back up the frame before, and after.
| | 05:05 | Yeah, I think that might be a cool effect through here.
| | 05:09 | It will be clean when it hits, so I can read it,
but then we are going to build
| | 05:14 | some tension on successive heart beats.
| | 05:17 | Okay, that's a cool effect.
| | 05:19 | Let's go ahead and RAM Preview that and let's see
if it adds to our production value in the way that I hope.
| | 05:25 | (music playing)
| | 05:45 | I think that adds nice tension to the piece,
so we'll use that.
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| Adding drop shadows| 00:05 | Next, I'd like to work on the appearance
and timing of these various video
| | 00:09 | frames earlier in this composition.
| | 00:10 | One, I notice it's a little bit hard to distinguish
between them as they overlap.
| | 00:15 | I'm going to turn off my Action/Title Safe Areas
because I've already arranged
| | 00:18 | my layers just to give myself
a clear view of my composition.
| | 00:24 | I think a bit of drop shadow would help me
make these stand out against each other.
| | 00:27 | There are a couple of approaches I could take.
| | 00:30 | One approach would be just applying a
drop shadow inside this Final Comp,
| | 00:35 | so I'm going to select one of my extra videos,
such as this Stress Test video here and
| | 00:39 | apply Effect>Perspective>Drop Shadow.
| | 00:44 | Just like I did with the text,
I'm going to set the distance down to 0
| | 00:49 | to center the blur and increase the softness,
until I get a little bit of overlap on the layers behind.
| | 00:54 | It's bit on the weak side, so I'm
going to increase the darkness just to help
| | 00:58 | make it stand out a little bit better
and then my differences in size will
| | 01:02 | become a little bit more apparent.
| | 01:05 | That's one approach I could
apply to the whole layer here.
| | 01:09 | Another idea would be to cut it from here,
go back to my Extra Video Frame Master
| | 01:15 | and apply the drop shadow to the master here.
| | 01:19 | That way it will also cast a shadow
on top of the inset video.
| | 01:22 | The problem is that the drop shadow will
extend beyond the edges of these frames.
| | 01:27 | So I would have to increase my comp size
to do this, maybe to the order of say
| | 01:31 | 420 to 340, so that my alpha channel is
not clipped off by the edge of my comp,
| | 01:40 | and then the drop shadow for that
frame would overlap the video as well.
| | 01:44 | But I'm not sure that's a necessary step.
| | 01:46 | I'm going to cut it from here, go back
to my Final Comp, select all of my videos
| | 01:52 | and paste my drop shadow effect under them,
just to get this little bit of
| | 01:55 | distinction to help them stand out against each other.
| | 01:57 | Now the reason that I'm using the
drop shadow effect here instead of
| | 02:02 | Layer>Layer Styles>Drop Shadow, is that Layer
Styles don't play nicely with 3D space,
| | 02:08 | they cause the rendering order to break,
and layers don't interact as well.
| | 02:11 | I'll go ahead and use Layer Styles in a 2D comp,
such as when I was building the main title.
| | 02:16 | But in 3D space, I'll fall back
on After Effect's Normal Effects.
| | 02:20 | Okay, there's our drop shadows.
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| Improving the video timing| 00:05 | Another very minor detail that bothered me,
because I noticed these things,
| | 00:09 | is just the timing of when some of
these videos come on and off.
| | 00:13 | For example, this frame on the right, where
the nurse is taking the blood pressure of a patient.
| | 00:17 | For a good deal of the time that she
comes on screen, we don't get a very
| | 00:22 | attractive look of her, we just see her
back instead of seeing more of her face
| | 00:26 | and her actually putting the cuff on the patient.
| | 00:28 | So I think I'm going to slide the timing
of that video so we see her in a more
| | 00:33 | attractive light when she comes on screen.
| | 00:35 | I've moved it to a representative frame
shortly after she comes on screen and
| | 00:39 | I'm going to slide her layer bar to change
her timing so that's she's starting
| | 00:43 | to turn forward as she comes on the screen.
Let's see how that looks.
| | 00:50 | We'll pull back, even though in that
pull back, I wouldn't mind her being a
| | 00:56 | little further around like that.
| | 00:57 | Let's make sure I've not hurt my
timing later on in this composition.
| | 01:03 | I want to make sure I don't run out of
video while her frame is still on screen
| | 01:09 | and looks like we're safe.
| | 01:10 | We still see some image, this last frame
that that video is visible, so we're safe.
| | 01:14 | My danger would have been if I had
dragged it so far that the video would
| | 01:20 | have finished playing and then suddenly
we would have a blank area,
| | 01:23 | but we've got enough, I'll undo.
I think that's a mild improvement there.
| | 01:27 | The other thing which is very minor,
but which bothers me a little bit,
| | 01:32 | is we don't get to see a lot of this last pose
of this physical therapist
| | 01:36 | helping the range of motion on this patient.
| | 01:38 | By the time the camera has done
panning to that person, that video frame is
| | 01:42 | almost entirely off screen.
| | 01:44 | So I think I'd like to slide things in time,
so we get a little bit more of that shot.
| | 01:49 | Let me test to see where is the last frame of the
master comp, I want to see that video,
| | 01:54 | right around there.
| | 01:55 | Let's start sliding its layer bar to
the point to where we run out of video.
| | 02:01 | It is right around there, so I'll back up a little bit
| | 02:07 | and now we could see much more of that therapist
on screen after that camera pan is finished.
| | 02:14 | Now let's make sure we haven't
screwed up the start of our video.
| | 02:17 | Here's where we pull back and reveal these frames.
| | 02:25 | The camera pan is hitting that pillar a bit soon,
so I may have slid the video too much.
| | 02:30 | I think I would like to see a
little bit less that pillar until we've
| | 02:35 | established this girl on screen
and the therapist talking to her.
| | 02:40 | Here's the pull back, we could see that patient,
then we land, then we start our pan.
| | 02:44 | I think this can be a little bit less
annoying and we still get to see a bit
| | 02:51 | more of the therapist at the end of the video.
| | 02:53 | The other videos are pretty good to me.
| | 02:55 | The Stress Test is the same pose, locked
on camera throughout, and actually I do
| | 02:59 | like the timing for when
these joggers come on screen.
| | 03:01 | They do come around and make a turn and
give me the maximum ability to view them.
| | 03:06 | So I'm pretty happy with the jogger footage.
| | 03:08 | We could try sliding it to see if that
help us any, but I'm not sure it does,
| | 03:17 | maybe right around there, no big improvement,
probably we don't need to tweak that anymore.
| | 03:28 | Okay, now that I've made these touchups,
now I'm ready to render a proof for the client.
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|
|
6. Delivering the ResultsSetting up the main render| 00:05 | Next is actually rendering a proof for
the client, but first, let's just take a
| | 00:09 | quick look at all those changes we put in
and make sure we do not introduce
| | 00:13 | some unexpected problems.
I'll maximize my screen and RAM Preview.
| | 00:17 | (music playing)
| | 00:43 | Let's say we deem that to be
acceptable for our proofs to send the client.
| | 00:46 | To render this comp, we go to
Composition>Add to Render Queue.
| | 00:50 | The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+M on Windows
and it used to be Cmd+M on Mac
| | 00:56 | but recent versions have made
it Cmd+Ctrl+M on Mac.
| | 01:00 | This extra key was added, so it would
not conflict with the standard Apple OS
| | 01:04 | command to minimize a frame.
| | 01:07 | I've already added this to the Render Queue
for you, but I want to show you some
| | 01:09 | of the steps I would go through to set this up.
| | 01:12 | First off for Render Settings, I'm going to go into there.
| | 01:14 | I'm going to change the Color Depth to 16-bits per channel.
| | 01:18 | I have been working at 8-bits per channel
just to speed things up while I'm previewing,
| | 01:22 | but these days when you deliver
High Def video, you really
| | 01:24 | should consider rendering at a higher depth like 16-bit,
it will be a cleaner image, less banding, etcetera.
| | 01:30 | If the client wants me to deliver this to 23.976,
under no condition do I want to field render.
| | 01:37 | The film like rates of 23.976 or 24
do not have fields.
| | 01:41 | On the other hand, if the client insists
that this must be delivered at 29.97,
| | 01:46 | even though they like the filmic motion of 23.976,
you need to add Pull Down during the Render.
| | 01:52 | You do indeed Enable Field Rendering.
| | 01:54 | All High Definition is Upper Field First
and then you pick a Pull Down phase.
| | 01:59 | This is what effectively converts 24 frames a second
to 30, or 23.976 to 29.97.
| | 02:06 | Now you see that it's sampling the comp at 23.976,
but actually creating a file at 29.97.
| | 02:12 | On the other hand if you're delivering for the web
or mobile device, you absolutely do not field render,
| | 02:19 | and we'll use the Comp Frame Rates for my final delivery.
| | 02:21 | Okay, now let's choose an Output Module.
| | 02:23 | The default of Lossless uses the old Apple Animation codec.
| | 02:28 | However, you should ask your client what codec they require.
| | 02:32 | One downfall of the Animation codec is it
does not support 16-bit per channel color.
| | 02:36 | I'm going to render 16-bit per channel regardless,
just for the processing side of finer resolution,
| | 02:41 | but I may not be able to deliver it.
| | 02:43 | Your client may want delivery in an
Apple ProRes format, such 422 (HQ)
| | 02:49 | and that will indeed let me choose trillions of colors,
which means I can deliver my high fidelity color.
| | 02:55 | Be careful if they ask you for a codec
such as Sony's HDV.
| | 03:00 | Let's say we built this comp 1920x1080,
that's a fine size to deliver, say in H264, etcetera,
| | 03:08 | but the HDV codec is actually anamorphic,
it does not use square pixels.
| | 03:14 | So you would need to do some
modifications to do an HDV delivery.
| | 03:18 | In the case of HDV, the pixels are
squeezed by a ratio of 1.33333,
| | 03:27 | so you would need to squish your comp horizontally
by that ratio for a proper HDV delivery.
| | 03:33 | Now I'm working half resolution here,
but the real HDV size is 1440,
| | 03:38 | twice that number by 1080.
| | 03:40 | So again, start with your client's
delivery requirements and work backwards.
| | 03:45 | It's much better than having them have
to re-render your work, or
| | 03:48 | for to not import properly into their editing system.
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| 4:3 strategies| 00:05 | Okay, I promised I would talk
about center cut and letter boxing.
| | 00:09 | Quite often you still need to create
4x3 versions of your content for standard def TV,
| | 00:14 | so I'm going to add another Output Module and open up
| | 00:19 | my Output Module Settings to modify
how I save this file to disk.
| | 00:22 | Again, choose a codec that matches
whatever your client likes,
| | 00:26 | but you will need to Resize your video.
| | 00:28 | Let's say I'm delivering to
an NTSC standard to 486 lines.
| | 00:33 | With my Locked Aspect Ratio switch turned on,
I'll say, okay, squish this down to 486,
| | 00:40 | I will tab and it will automatically calculate
the right Width for me as well.
| | 00:42 | The problem is that NTSC video also is not square pixels.
| | 00:48 | The delivered pixels are 11/10s wider
than you worked at on your computer.
| | 00:53 | So I'm going to turn off Lock Aspect Ratio,
select Resize, cursor to the right and say,
| | 00:58 | x11/10, that is the correct NTSC Pixel Aspect Ratio.
| | 01:07 | Tab, it says I should actually be
rendering at 950, 486 to get 486 lines,
| | 01:13 | but to stretch it, to take into account
non-square pixels, fine!
| | 01:17 | But if I am going to center cut this,
I need to cut off the left and right sides
| | 01:22 | of the video, so we just have 4x3
center piece of the video remaining.
| | 01:27 | NTSC delivery is 720, so I have 950 pixels
minus 720 which equals 230,
| | 01:35 | that's how many pixels I need to cut off.
| | 01:38 | I'll cut half of them off the left side,
that's 115 and half of them off the right,
| | 01:44 | and now I've reached my 720,
46 delivery size, 4x3 aspect ratio
| | 01:51 | with the correct non-square pixel stretch,
so that's one approach.
| | 01:54 | Another approach is to letterbox the
video to the point where the full 16x9 video
| | 01:59 | is fit inside a 4x3 frame with black
padded at the top and bottom.
| | 02:05 | To do that, we need a slightly different approach.
| | 02:08 | Again, choose the codec your client requests.
| | 02:11 | I still need to resize my video.
| | 02:13 | I need to get my current width to 960
to fit down inside a 720 width
| | 02:19 | taking into account that that 720 width
is also non-square pixels.
| | 02:21 | I know that's a bit of a headache.
| | 02:23 | I'll leave my Lock Aspect Ratio switched on for now.
Just to calculate this properly,
| | 02:27 | I know that 720 pixels wide, but those have
been stretched by a ratio of 11 times 10,
| | 02:34 | to bring it down to NTSC size I need
to scale it down to 655x368 square pixels.
| | 02:41 | You never do anything in odd pixel numbers
when you deliver video, and you see
| | 02:45 | After Effects automatically rounded
that down to 654 for me.
| | 02:48 | Now that I have this at the proper size,
I'm going to turn off my Lock Aspect Ratio switch
| | 02:53 | and set this back to 720 to take into account
the non-square pixels that NTSC video requires.
| | 03:00 | So now we have the full 16x9 image
scaled down to fit inside a 724x486 video,
| | 03:06 | taking into account non-square pixels.
| | 03:09 | Next, I need to pad out black at the top and bottom.
| | 03:12 | I need to deliver 486 lines, not 368,
I'm going to be rendering.
| | 03:19 | That means I have 118 pixels I need to add, okay?
| | 03:23 | I'll divide that by two for the top,
59 pixels and add 59 pixels to the bottom.
| | 03:31 | The problem with this dialog is
that it thinks it's cropping, not adding,
| | 03:35 | you'll notice that my size went down.
That's no problem. To add rather than crop,
| | 03:39 | just make these negative numbers and
that will be a reverse crop which adds pixels.
| | 03:46 | And now you see I've reached my 720x486 goal,
scale down to 654 x 368 square pixels,
| | 03:53 | brought it back up to 720 to accommodate
the non-square pixels of NTSC,
| | 03:57 | then reverse cropped, added pixels to the top and bottom
and that would be my letterbox delivery.
| | 04:05 | So now my client has their High Def version
and alternate 4x3 versions,
| | 04:09 | so they can choose which one works best for this content.
| | 04:12 | It's the little things like that helps you
make your client's life easier
| | 04:16 | and makes you more valuable to them.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Delivering a package| 00:05 | When you're delivering something
such as an opening title for a client,
| | 00:08 | quite often just the opening title is not enough.
| | 00:11 | They may need other elements that
complement that opening title,
| | 00:14 | and we refer to this as a package, a set of
graphics that your editor or client can use
| | 00:19 | throughout a program that
have a unifying visual theme.
| | 00:23 | Inside the Comps_Finished folder is a
folder called Package that gives an idea
| | 00:27 | of what some of these elements may be.
| | 00:29 | A real common element is a Lower Third Design.
| | 00:32 | Elements of a Lower Third typically
include text using fonts that complement
| | 00:37 | each other and match the opening title,
and which have been nicely sized for
| | 00:40 | readability and for artistic balance.
| | 00:43 | And some sort of bar or other element that
helps it stand off against the background.
| | 00:48 | And hopefully that bar element also
ties into elements in your opening title.
| | 00:52 | In this case I've chosen same colors,
same type of translucency and beveling
| | 00:56 | that we used inside the frames for our videos.
| | 01:02 | The client can then duplicate this Comp
and use it as a template whenever they
| | 01:05 | need to change a name, such as
Bruce Light and change his title.
| | 01:11 | We tend to lock the layers that the
client should not be editing so they
| | 01:15 | can't get themselves into trouble.
| | 01:16 | What we've happened to have done in
this particular one as well
| | 01:19 | is we've added some animation for them,
some text animations and some other elements.
| | 01:23 | I'll just preview that quickly.
| | 01:27 | So that's something more interesting
than just a bar hanging there in space.
| | 01:32 | Notice that I've been careful to observe 4x3
title safe areas as well, because at this point
| | 01:36 | the client has not made a decision on
whether they want to letter box this or
| | 01:41 | center cut it when they create the 4x3.
| | 01:43 | Quite often the client may need
variations on this bar as well.
| | 01:46 | For example, this is a two-line Lower Third,
but the client may also need a
| | 01:50 | three-line Lower Third, so you might need to
make another version where the bar is taller,
| | 01:55 | and I'll twirl open the Contents of the Shape layer
that I used, make it a taller item,
| | 02:01 | shift it up a little bit in space, take the text,
move it up as well.
| | 02:08 | And then give them a third line they
can put underneath for any additional text
| | 02:14 | they may need to describe the person being interviewed.
| | 02:16 | And this part can probably be a little
bit taller, a little bit higher in the frame,
| | 02:20 | just to give myself more room
in between the text elements.
| | 02:26 | Give that to them as a template, they
can reuse it as often as they need, and it
| | 02:29 | ties in nicely to your opening title.
| | 02:32 | Another common element is a looping background.
| | 02:35 | Quite often the client may need to put
picture and picture inserts,
| | 02:40 | tables of text, and other elements that
don't completely fill the frame.
| | 02:43 | If you can give them a nice
background that again ties into your
| | 02:47 | opening title background, they can add these elements
without them sticking out like a sore thumb.
| | 02:52 | This is an edited version of the background
plates we used in our opening title,
| | 02:56 | with our Abstract background, our Vital Signs traces.
| | 02:59 | This time I pasted them all down into one
Shape layer, but they exist as separate shape groups.
| | 03:06 | And I've added an additional pattern of dots,
little circles that blink on and off.
| | 03:11 | I'll show you how to make that in
a chapter later on in this course.
| | 03:15 | It can be provided with or without music.
| | 03:17 | In this case I asked the musician to
come up with a musical loop, something that
| | 03:22 | fits in the exact number of seconds long
at my current frame rate, and which can
| | 03:25 | be laid end-to-end seamlessly, and
again, the editor can then lay this in as
| | 03:29 | often as they need, and this is
what our looping background looks like.
| | 03:32 | (music playing)
| | 03:58 | There's a slight hitch in After Effects'
own preview of this composition,
| | 04:02 | but when I lay it end-to-end in an editor, it's seamless.
| | 04:05 | I've made sure that all of our Vital
Signs traces are off the screen at the
| | 04:10 | start and end of this loop, so they will
indeed be seamless without a visual pop.
| | 04:15 | And additional elements you may be asked for
are things called sweepers, bumpers, etcetera.
| | 04:21 | Elements that will help your client
come out of your program and go into a commercial,
| | 04:24 | or come out of a commercial
or other chapter head and start a new section.
| | 04:29 | To construct this, I just used elements
that we already had in our main title,
| | 04:33 | a bit of the music that I've edited down,
our Abstract background, the Vital Signs,
| | 04:38 | and the text for our lab results, a simplified camera move,
and the simplified version of the opening title.
| | 04:45 | You see as it comes in, the text slams
down into position and I have the frame fade away,
| | 04:50 | the camera move ends, and then we're on
full frame video and then the title fades out.
| | 04:57 | The client can go ahead and replace
this first clip with whatever clip they're
| | 05:01 | using for the next section of their
program after the commercial break
| | 05:05 | and re-render this scene, so they have a
really nice transition, and they can also
| | 05:09 | change the text, such as treating HEART ATTACKS.
| | 05:19 | Again, I've locked all the layers, so
they should not be touching and only left
| | 05:24 | unlocked what they can replace;
| | 05:26 | example, the video clip that goes in the
background and the text layers so they can edit.
| | 05:30 | In the looping background I left things unlocked,
just so they could create variations on the theme.
| | 05:35 | They could maybe have a version without the Vital Signs
or a version without these animating dots,
| | 05:40 | or just the background all by itself.
| | 05:43 | Beyond your opening title and package elements, s
uch as Thirds, Looping Background,
| | 05:47 | and Bumpers, Sweepers, etcetera,
quite often your client will also
| | 05:52 | ask you to deliver the project file.
| | 05:54 | This is where keeping things organized
in compositions, carefully naming things,
| | 05:59 | adding comments to your layers, and
just general cleanliness and thinking ahead
| | 06:03 | will really benefit your client.
| | 06:05 | There's also a few nice commands underneath
File, such as Remove Unused Footage.
| | 06:10 | That will take out any elements that you're not using
so the client doesn't get files they don't need;
| | 06:15 | and Collect Files, which will create
a brand-new project and folder that
| | 06:19 | duplicates all of the sources that
you're using inside this project file
| | 06:23 | into a brand-new set of assets you
can then hand off to the client.
| | 06:27 | So this package aspect is another
very important thing to understand
| | 06:31 | and to deliver to your client so that
you can give them more value.
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|
|
7. Idea CornersAnimated circle grid| 00:05 | You've spent a couple of hours so far
building this Opening Title Animation.
| | 00:09 | In reality, on a real job, we'd probably
spend a few days and go through a few
| | 00:13 | proofs and iterations with the client.
| | 00:15 | In particular, I would spend at least
another day seeing how I could massage
| | 00:19 | and improve the design I already have.
| | 00:21 | In this final chapter I'd like to go through some
of the ideas I might employ to help dress this up.
| | 00:26 | To begin with, we do have a fairly
interesting background going on here,
| | 00:30 | nice animated shapes.
| | 00:32 | We do have our Vital Signs traces, we
do have our text, but I do think it could
| | 00:36 | have even a bit more going on in the
background, a bit more of an interesting
| | 00:39 | animated wallpaper feel.
| | 00:41 | Now the subject of this is HEART ATTACKS.
| | 00:44 | We have lab results and life sign displays,
I think maybe something technical,
| | 00:51 | maybe circles as sort of represented
molecules or blood cells might be a nice
| | 00:55 | thing to add to that background.
| | 00:57 | So I'm going to down and select my
background layer, Layer>Pre-compose it,
| | 01:05 | leave all the attributes in my Final Comp.
| | 01:07 | I've spent some time positioning it in 3D
and scaling it up, I don't want to lose
| | 01:11 | any of that work and this will give me
just a copy of my video in its own comp
| | 01:15 | that's then brought into this Final Comp,
and I'll call it background precomp.
| | 01:20 | I'll Open the New Composition since I need to do
some work there, and here is my background layer.
| | 01:25 | Whenever I want to add a graphical element to a layer,
my favorite tool in After Effects are Shape layers.
| | 01:32 | I'm going to make sure
no layers are currently selected.
| | 01:35 | If a layer is selected, I'd be masking
it instead of making a new layer,
| | 01:39 | and choose the Ellipse tool to create
my little circles for my molecules.
| | 01:43 | I'll start to drag out my shape in the middle.
| | 01:48 | To make it a perfect circle,
I'll add the Shift key while I'm dragging
| | 01:51 | and pick the size of about one circle
inside this composition.
| | 01:55 | Okay, one circle is kind of boring,
I'd like to have this full of circles.
| | 01:59 | I could randomly place a bunch of circles
or I could use the Repeater shape operator
| | 02:04 | to help fill out a grid of these circles.
| | 02:06 | So with my Shape Group selected, I'll add a Repeater.
| | 02:12 | The default of Repeaters will give me 3 Copies
heading off to the right in the X dimension.
| | 02:19 | Well, frankly, that spacing looks
a little bit large to me, so I'm going to
| | 02:23 | scrub it down to create something a little bit tighter.
| | 02:26 | I think I like that pattern a bit better.
| | 02:28 | Now I want to fill out an entire row with these circles,
so I'll increase the number of Copies.
| | 02:34 | Okay, that got me some copies off to the
right side, but I need some to the left as well.
| | 02:38 | Well, to do that I'll scrub the Offset
to the left so that my first dot is
| | 02:43 | actually closer to the left edge
of my composition, then I'll increase the
| | 02:46 | Copies until I go off the right side as well.
| | 02:48 | That gives me a nice row, now I need to repeat
this row to fill up my entire composition.
| | 02:55 | I'll go ahead and add a second Repeater,
change its Transform properties.
| | 03:03 | So rather than repeating in the X dimension,
we'll repeat in the Y dimension,
| | 03:08 | and I'll make it repeat by the same number
of pixels as we had above, 50.
| | 03:12 | That's one of the reasons I like to round
my values off to something really
| | 03:16 | easy to remember, like multiples of
ten or multiples of two or something,
| | 03:19 | because that makes it much easier to repeat
those patterns and remember those numbers later on.
| | 03:25 | I have three rows.
| | 03:26 | To make multiple rows I'll scrub my Offset
until the first row is at the very top of my comp
| | 03:32 | and then repeat my Copies down the screen.
| | 03:34 | Now it looks like my dots aren't quite
centered in this composition,
| | 03:40 | so I will need to center my original ellipse.
| | 03:42 | To do that, I'll go down to the Transform Properties
for the entire Shape Group,
| | 03:47 | not the Transforms in the Repeater,
but the Transforms for the Ellipse Group.
| | 03:53 | And in there all I need to do is zero
out its initial position and now my first
| | 04:00 | shape will be centered to my comp,
which means all the repeats
| | 04:03 | will key off of that centered shape.
| | 04:05 | And by the way, your initial shape is still alive.
I can go ahead and make it smaller.
| | 04:11 | I do think maybe I like that pattern
a little bit better of tiny dots;
| | 04:14 | or I can it make very large dots, an
interesting fish scale sort to look,
| | 04:16 | but not appropriate for this particular project.
| | 04:19 | I can go ahead and choose a smaller Size,
or I can even choose how I Fill them.
| | 04:24 | I might Option or Alt+Click on the Fill Color
and have no Fill and instead just
| | 04:30 | have say a little white stroke, so
I have nice little white circles.
| | 04:34 | I think I'm liking that a bit better.
| | 04:37 | Yeah, that's closer to my molecule or blood cell
sort of look that I was hoping for, not those big dots.
| | 04:43 | Okay, I have a bunch of circles,
but they're just sitting there.
| | 04:46 | I'd like for these to animate on and off.
| | 04:49 | Well, a Repeater can do a lot of things,
but it's not very good at randomizing stuff like Opacity.
| | 04:54 | I can create a ramp of Opacity but it
doesn't give me that random blinking look
| | 04:58 | that I think will look interesting.
| | 04:59 | So instead of further altering the Shape Group
parameters, I'm going to add a Transition to this layer;
| | 05:04 | Effect>Transition>Block Dissolve, which
makes blocks of the image appear or disappear.
| | 05:12 | I'll scrub it to Transition Completion
of about 50%, about halfway through,
| | 05:16 | and I just have little pieces of
my Os being dissolved away.
| | 05:20 | I think I need a larger block size.
| | 05:22 | A good starting point would be the spacings that
I used to space out the grids of those circles.
| | 05:28 | Now I've got something that's a bit closer
to what I want, but I still have
| | 05:32 | these little soft edges appearing
for some of these circles.
| | 05:35 | If I turned off the Soft Edges Parameter,
now I have a nice hard grid
| | 05:40 | that's going to bring the dots on and off.
| | 05:43 | Animating Transition Completion
just goes from all off to all on,
| | 05:48 | I want a random pattern, and whenever
I need to randomize a parameter
| | 05:51 | in After Effects I rely on the expression known as wiggle.
| | 05:54 | It was one of the essential expressions we
taught you back in the course on Expressions.
| | 05:58 | To enable Expressions, I'll hold
Option on Mac or Alt on Windows
| | 06:03 | and click on the stopwatch next to the
parameter I want to randomize.
| | 06:07 | It will appear in the Timeline panel
ready for expressions.
| | 06:11 | So I'll type wiggle, open parenthesis,
decide how fast I want it to wiggle.
| | 06:17 | Let's use one wiggle a second for starters,
and how much I want to wiggle by.
| | 06:21 | Well, let's try plus or minus 50% so it goes
from all off to all on and see how that looks.
| | 06:28 | I'll hit Enter and do a quick RAM Preview
to see what I think.
| | 06:35 | Well, I see that this is going from
all the circles being off to virtually
| | 06:38 | all of them being on, which is not exactly what I wanted.
| | 06:41 | I wanted to have some circles around all
the time, so I think I'll turn down the
| | 06:46 | amount of wiggle to just plus or minus 40%,
so I'll go between 10% and 90%
| | 06:52 | for the final range of my Transition Completion.
| | 06:54 | Next I think I want to change the wiggle speed
maybe to be timed to my music.
| | 06:58 | Now my music was at a pace of 20 frames per beat
and my composition had a frame rate
| | 07:07 | of 24 frames per second, or to be specific, 23.976.
| | 07:13 | That might be a good starting point
so that I'm wiggling at a pace that matches
| | 07:17 | the timings of the beats of my music.
I'll press Enter, try that out quickly.
| | 07:26 | Just queue up a few seconds with the RAM Preview,
playback at full speed.
| | 07:34 | Yeah, I think I like that pattern.
| | 07:36 | Okay, my last step is I want to blend it in to the
backgrounds so they don't stand out quite as much.
| | 07:41 | I'm going to treat them the same as I treated the text
and the Vital Signs traces elsewhere in the composition.
| | 07:46 | So I'll toggle Switches and modes
to show me Blending modes;
| | 07:49 | F4 is the shortcut to toggle
between Switches and modes.
| | 07:54 | Put it into Add mode as I had done with those
other elements, press T for Opacity,
| | 08:01 | and cut it down until it just
blends in nicely with the background.
| | 08:05 | And maybe just give it a touch of Blur;
| | 08:07 | Blur and Sharpen, I've been using Box Blur,
let's keep that up, and just give a
| | 08:12 | little bit of Blur to soften their appearance,
maybe right around there.
| | 08:17 | That's looking a little bit fat.
| | 08:19 | I could reduce the size of the Stroke
or reduce the Blur Radius.
| | 08:23 | Now I have a nice soft pattern of circles
filling up my background,
| | 08:29 | making things look a little bit
more interesting in our world.
| | 08:32 | Now that I see this in context, I'm thinking
those circles might be a little bit large,
| | 08:36 | no problem, I'll go back to the background precomp,
twirl open my Shape Group,
| | 08:42 | go the Ellipse Size, and cut that down a little bit to
be smaller circle,maybe some around there.
| | 08:48 | I think that looks more appropriate in the Final Comp.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Constant vital signs| 00:05 | One of the main principles of art
is repetition, but with variation.
| | 00:10 | Right now I have five identical copies
of those Vital Signs traces;
| | 00:15 | I mean they are going at different speeds
and they are randomized a little bit
| | 00:19 | in their shape, but we have five pretty similar
lines of vital signs going across our composition.
| | 00:24 | What if we made one of them say be a
bit different than the other ones,
| | 00:28 | maybe a different length or do a different pattern?
| | 00:30 | I'm going to pick one that's fairly
visible throughout the composition,
| | 00:33 | such as this second one from the top, Vital
Signs 2 and treat it a little bit differently.
| | 00:39 | I'm going to twirl open its Shape Group
and maybe rather than have it travel
| | 00:45 | across the screen, it might be interesting
to go ahead and have it on all the time.
| | 00:50 | I'll turn off the Trim Paths, so we have a tracery
going across the entire composition,
| | 00:54 | that's always present, no matter where
the camera move is during our composition.
| | 01:01 | It looks a bit soft later on when it's
being blurred and timed to the music,
| | 01:05 | but it's particularly obvious
here earlier on in our animation.
| | 01:08 | I'm going to solo that layer so we get
a better idea of what's going on,
| | 01:12 | and temporarily increase its Opacity to 100%
so we can see it more clearly.
| | 01:17 | There it is with its blur.
| | 01:19 | Well, the problem with turning off the
Trim Paths is that it's not animating anymore.
| | 01:24 | Well, if you remember when we first
built this Shape layer,
| | 01:31 | the Wiggle Paths that we used to wiggle
that line did automatically animate.
| | 01:36 | We set the speed down to 0 because we
did our animation with Trim Paths,
| | 01:40 | but now we need that animation back again.
| | 01:42 | So to pick a good speed for this, I think
I'm going to use the same principles
| | 01:45 | I did before of our music tempo being 20 frames
and our comp speed being 24 frames a second.
| | 01:52 | Press Enter, and now I get a Wiggles/Second of .8333.
| | 01:57 | Let's do a quick RAM Preview, see how that looks.
| | 02:04 | (music playing)
| | 02:15 | Yeah, I think that's interesting.
| | 02:16 | Let's put its Opacity back down to
where the other layers were.
| | 02:19 | The other layers had a 33% Opacity,
so I'll copy and paste that back to this Vital Signs.
| | 02:24 | I'll turn off its solo switch and now we see it
in context with all of my other Vital Signs layers.
| | 02:29 | That's just a simple adjustment to add
a little bit more visual interest and
| | 02:33 | also frankly to keep one of those Vital
Signs visible for my entire animation.
| | 02:38 | Now that I look at this I might even
turn down my maximum blur a little bit so
| | 02:43 | they're not getting blurred quite as much
while the music is loud and I can see
| | 02:47 | the Vital Signs a bit more clearly.
| | 02:49 | So that's another slight improvement.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Randomized lab results| 00:05 | For our next improvement I think
I'd like to add a little bit of animation
| | 00:09 | and interest to these lab result
displays that are part of the background.
| | 00:12 | Right now it's just static text and static numbers.
| | 00:16 | Since we have animated Vital Signs and now
an animated element in our background layer,
| | 00:20 | I think it would be particularly cool if those values
in the Vital Signs animated as well.
| | 00:25 | Therefore, I'd like to replace those static numbers
in the background with animating numbers.
| | 00:31 | Well, there's a few ways of going about that.
| | 00:33 | You might be tempted to initially to
take one of your Lab Results layers and
| | 00:37 | attempt to Layer>Pre-compose it.
| | 00:41 | The problem with this is that text layers
don't necessarily follow the same rules as other layers.
| | 00:46 | This will not let me leave all attributes
in the Final Comp, it's going to
| | 00:49 | insist that I move all attributes into the new
composition, including its position and 3D space.
| | 00:54 | That's going to make things messy, because
then I'll need to have the camera back there, etcetera.
| | 00:59 | So instead of pre-composing my text layer,
I'm going to go ahead and just create
| | 01:03 | a brand-new comp with the text already in it,
then I can swap that comp back
| | 01:07 | and place this text layer later on.
| | 01:09 | You may remember that earlier on we did have
this composition of all of the Lab Results.
| | 01:14 | That was a result of us importing a
layered Photoshop file as a composition.
| | 01:22 | That means this composition is already at the size
that I'll need to swap in for the text layers later on.
| | 01:28 | So I could start with just one layer in here
and duplicate this comp and continue to work with it.
| | 01:33 | I'll pick one layer of Lab Results, I'm going
to note the font and the size that I use;
| | 01:39 | Myriad Pro, Semi-Bold, 48 points, White color, and I'm
going to get rid of the numbers for one these results.
| | 01:47 | Now it is possible to use a text layer
and expressions to randomize the text
| | 01:53 | or numbers displayed by that text layer.
It's a tricky expression.
| | 01:57 | Instead, I'm going to fall back on a
very old school effect called Text>Numbers.
| | 02:05 | Numbers is a great old way of creating numeric values
that can indeed be keyframed or randomized.
| | 02:10 | I'm going to change the Font to Myriad Pro,
change the Style to Semi-Bold.
| | 02:18 | I think I'll go ahead and Right Justify
just so I can keep decimal points lined up.
| | 02:24 | Okay, this looks good.
| | 02:26 | The default color is Red, which is not our color.
I'll change it to White.
| | 02:29 | The default point Size is 36, and I'll make it 48,
and you will need to have some knowledge
| | 02:35 | or forethought as to how many digits
you want and what you want their range to be.
| | 02:41 | I want Random numbers, which means
this is going to randomize over time.
| | 02:46 | I don't need any Decimal Places for
this particular value, and I asked the
| | 02:49 | person who created this layer for
me originally, what would be a good
| | 02:52 | minimum/maximum value for
something such as the sodium reading.
| | 02:56 | They say a good maximum might
be say 160, so I'll choose that.
| | 03:00 | I'm even going to rename this particular
effect Sodium so I know its value relates
| | 03:06 | to the Sodium line in my final text.
| | 03:08 | Well, my final problem is that I see my numbers,
but I don't see the text underneath.
| | 03:13 | To change that I need to enable Composite On Original.
| | 03:17 | Now this effect will draw its result
on top of the existing text layer.
| | 03:21 | I scrub it into position.
| | 03:24 | Actually I'm going to have it overlap my text
so I can make sure I've got my Y Height the same.
| | 03:29 | That looks good.
| | 03:30 | And then I'll scrub it back here in space
until this X position looks correct.
| | 03:35 | And I'll randomize in every frame.
| | 03:38 | The default is Proportional Spacing;
if I turn that off, the kerning can go a little bit wonky.
| | 03:44 | You might prefer that look.
| | 03:45 | I think that option of turning Proportional Spacing
off actually works better with this particular font,
| | 03:49 | although some of the kerning is a bit strange.
| | 03:53 | If you find the spacing is too random,
you can turn Proportional Spacing on
| | 03:57 | and change the tracking to taste to make it look good.
| | 04:01 | That's a little bit tight.
I'll change the tracking out a little bit. There we go.
| | 04:05 | Now normally these numbers will randomize
for every frame of your composition.
| | 04:11 | If you want to slow them down, you can
use an effect called Posterize Time
| | 04:16 | or you can just change the frame rate of this comp.
| | 04:18 | I'll type Cmd+K or Ctrl+K
to open up the Composition Settings.
| | 04:23 | I'll set the Frame Rate down to something a little slow,
like our .8333 that we used
| | 04:27 | for our wiggle speed earlier on.
| | 04:29 | And most important of all when you're
doing strange frame rates is you need to
| | 04:34 | go underneath the Advanced tab and
enable Preserve frame rate, that way you will
| | 04:39 | keep this pre-comps frame rate
even in the later composition.
| | 04:43 | If you do not enable this, it will take
on the frame rate of your Final Comp and
| | 04:48 | then you'll have these crazy fast animating numbers.
| | 04:51 | I'll click OK, do a quick RAM Preview
to see how I like that.
| | 04:55 | That's feeling a bit slow for me, so I'm going
to go back to my Composition Settings.
| | 05:02 | I see it rounded .8333 up to 1 anyway;
| | 05:04 | 1 is the minimum frame rate allowed in After Effects.
| | 05:08 | Let's take .8333 times, let's say four times as fast,
let's see how that looks.
| | 05:17 | Yeah, I think I like that pacing.
| | 05:20 | So now that I've created one text layer,
I can go to my next text layer,
| | 05:26 | tab over its old value, go to my Numbers Effect,
duplicate it, create a new copy for Glucose,
| | 05:36 | change its Value range; maybe Glucose would
have a maximum of only say 100,
| | 05:41 | and scrub it down into position.
| | 05:43 | Again, I might need to move it over or even
use guides to see what is a good Y Height.
| | 05:49 | Once I've got that, I can put it back
to the same X position as it was before,
| | 05:54 | and things should more or less line up.
| | 05:57 | RAM Preview and now we've got
a couple of numbers changing.
| | 06:03 | You can continue to do this for all of
your values and create four comps
| | 06:07 | for each of your Lab Results layers and then swap
that back in for the Lab Results in your Final Comp.
| | 06:13 | And I'll give you a little hint, if you don't
feel like doing all that work yourself,
| | 06:17 | if you dive into the Idea Corner folder,
you'll find compositions that already
| | 06:21 | have all of these ideas built for you.
| | 06:25 | In my final version I also decided to go down
to a thinner version of Myriad Pro,
| | 06:29 | just Regular, so it wouldn't look quite
as heavy and dominant in the background.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rounded videos| 00:05 | When you are trying to create a unified design,
it's really important to identify
| | 00:09 | what are your major elements
of your design and make sure you
| | 00:14 | stay true to those elements
throughout all of your work.
| | 00:17 | In this case, we've created some
nice rounded edges on our video frames.
| | 00:20 | We've created some nice rounded circles
on the background, but our video insets
| | 00:26 | have squared off rectangular edges.
| | 00:29 | To tie those in better with a design,
it maybe better if those corners were
| | 00:33 | indeed rounded, so I am going to go
to one of my video pre-comps, choose my
| | 00:39 | Jogging layer, change to the Rounded
Rectangle tool to create rounded edges,
| | 00:45 | and carefully line up my Mask tool with the
upper left corner and drag out
| | 00:51 | until I carefully enclosed this entire video.
| | 00:54 | Now important thing with Mask shapes is
that once you release your mouse,
| | 00:59 | you're stuck with those points.
| | 01:00 | You can edit those points but it's
not as easy as just changing a roundness
| | 01:04 | parameter for a shape layer.
| | 01:06 | So before you release your mouse, use
your up and down cursor keys to change
| | 01:12 | the amount of rounding that you have.
| | 01:14 | I am going to use the down cursor to
reduce the amount of rounding until
| | 01:18 | it seems to better compliment my video frame,
maybe around there, then release the mouse
| | 01:23 | to ensure that your mask is indeed
going exactly to the edges of the video,
| | 01:28 | I am going to twirl-open the Mask Parameters,
click on the mask path shape,
| | 01:32 | change my pop-up from the normal pixels
to % of source and make sure
| | 01:39 | my left and top start at 0%,
my right and bottom go to 100%.
| | 01:46 | That will adjust my Mask to be exactly centered on my video.
Another design element I had going is a bit of softness.
| | 01:52 | I've added a little bit of soft bevel to this frame.
I've added a Drop Shadow on the later composition.
| | 01:57 | I might want to slightly feather the Mask
around this video, so I just try a small amount,
| | 02:04 | it's kind of hard to see with a Mask visibility turned on,
| | 02:08 | so I'll turn that off and then change my Feather
so I've got just a slightly softened look.
| | 02:15 | Now the problem with Mask Feather is
that it is centered along your Mask edge
| | 02:20 | which means it is half feathered in
and half feathered out, and as a result,
| | 02:24 | half of my feather is getting
chopped off by the size of the video.
| | 02:28 | To counteract that I am going to go ahead
and bring in my Mask expansion ever so slightly,
| | 02:32 | -1 or -2 pixels so that my Feather
goes cleanly to my edge and maybe
| | 02:37 | even reduce my Feather amount to taste,
maybe somewhere around say 2.0 pixels.
| | 02:42 | Once I have a Mask that I like, there
is no need to go manually recreate it for
| | 02:46 | my other layers, I'll just select it, copy it, go to
my extra videos and just select paste to those as well.
| | 02:56 | That will save me a lot of time.
| | 02:59 | Now for my final Hero video, it is a considerably
larger piece of video and
| | 03:05 | just pasting the exact same parameters to it may not
look right, for example the Mask size is too small.
| | 03:11 | So I'll need to recreate the Mask
for this layer from scratch.
| | 03:15 | I'll go up to the edges, drag on my Mask
to be pretty closely to the edges of my
| | 03:20 | original video, give it maybe a little
bit more rounding to match this larger video frame,
| | 03:26 | twirl-open the Mask, Shape, % of source,
make sure I go out to the
| | 03:32 | edges of my video, 0 and 100, give it
just a little bit of Feather of say 2 or 3 pixels
| | 03:38 | and a little bit of negative mask expansion
to shrink it in,
| | 03:42 | so that my Feather cleanly goes out
to the edges of that video.
| | 03:45 | Now on the Final Comp, these elements
have rounded edges
| | 03:49 | and just tie in the design of it better,
make it more cohesive.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Color matching| 00:05 | Another important design consideration
when you're using multiple pieces of video
| | 00:09 | is to give them all roughly the same
color look, particularly when you're
| | 00:12 | using stock footage that might
have come from different sources.
| | 00:15 | As you can see here, some of these
videos are darker than the others.
| | 00:19 | These two are darker than these two
and some have different color tints.
| | 00:26 | These are bit on the warm side,
these are bit on the cool side
| | 00:30 | and this final video has a bit of a yellowish tint
and is bit on the dark side itself.
| | 00:35 | So let's pick a video that we particularly like
or color-correct one video to match
| | 00:41 | with the client wants and use that as our guide
to correct the other videos to tie everybody together.
| | 00:46 | Now I kind of like the colorization of this first video.
| | 00:51 | I like the brightness, the greens and
blues aren't too far often the greens
| | 00:54 | and blues are already existing
elsewhere in this project, so I think I'm going
| | 00:58 | to use that as my rough visual guide to alter
these other videos and try to get them to match.
| | 01:03 | This maybe another case where I take
advantage of edit this, look at that,
| | 01:07 | so I can edit one video and then check it
in context in my final composition.
| | 01:11 | So I'm going to lock this Comp down,
add a new Comp Viewer,
| | 01:17 | and in the second Comp Viewer,
open up my extra videos.
| | 01:20 | I decided that Extra Video 1 is my guide,
so I'm going to leave that one alone
| | 01:25 | instead move on to Video 2 and see how I can improve it.
| | 01:29 | Well, Video 2 is noticeably brighter than Video 1.
| | 01:32 | So the first thing I'll do is I'll add Color Correction, Levels,
| | 01:37 | check out its Histogram to make sure it's
maximizing the bright and dark areas.
| | 01:41 | It's lacking a little bit of black, so I'll bring up
my input black point to maximize its contrast,
| | 01:47 | and then play with the gamma
to give it a balance that matches a bit better.
| | 01:50 | Notice with edit this look at that,
the one I am editing one Comp,
| | 01:54 | I need to release the mouse
before my second locked Comp is updated.
| | 01:58 | This is giving me a little closer to
a balance that matches the first video.
| | 02:04 | I could even reduce the Output White a
little bit to make it a little bit darker.
| | 02:08 | That's getting a little bit dull.
| | 02:10 | I'll put it back to its original setting,
maybe a little less contrasty,
| | 02:16 | that's a little bit better of a match.
| | 02:19 | The second issue is that it's a very warm video.
| | 02:21 | It has a very orangish tint to the background whites
and to this display in the foreground.
| | 02:26 | I think I need to cool it down a little bit to match
my background and my guide video better.
| | 02:31 | So with it still selected, I'll go to Effect>Color Correction,
| | 02:35 | and for starting point, I might even use something
very simple like the Photo Filter effect.
| | 02:41 | This gives me a series of preset
gels to help colorize my video.
| | 02:45 | I don't need it to be even warmer than it is.
I want it to cool down a little bit.
| | 02:49 | That takes a little bit closer, might
be a bit too cold in the whites,
| | 02:55 | let's try this other one.
| | 02:56 | Now that's giving me an interesting tint,
let's try this other cooling filter.
| | 03:00 | Now that's a way too blue.
| | 03:02 | I think I like that filter and kind of adjust its amount
to get the sort of balance that I like.
| | 03:09 | And I think that's better than the original video.
Maybe a little bit less cooling.
| | 03:14 | Okay, let's move on to Extra Video 3.
| | 03:19 | This video is a little bit under-lit, it's a little bit
on the dark side and it's particularly cool.
| | 03:25 | Let's go back in time to where we can
see it compared to our original video.
| | 03:29 | Select it, apply Color Correction>Levels.
| | 03:34 | Full range, I don't need to improve its contrast,
but I might improve its gamma
| | 03:37 | a little bit to brighten it up a little bit
so I can see back in that room a bit better.
| | 03:43 | That's nice.
That's a bit of an improvement.
| | 03:45 | And in this case, I might want to warm it up
a little bit by using a photo filter
| | 03:50 | and trying one of the warming presets.
Warming filter 85 is pretty good. That's similar.
| | 03:59 | I'm not really happy with that, I think I'll go back to 85,
| | 04:02 | maybe increase its strength a little bit
and now I'm closer in match than I was before.
| | 04:08 | Yeah, that's much better.
| | 04:10 | Okay, we move on to Extra Video 4.
| | 04:14 | It, too, is also under-lit and a bit on the cool side
so I could even copy and paste
| | 04:18 | the effects I applied to the prior video,
which happens to be supplied by Artbeats,
| | 04:24 | apply them to the second video,
also supplied by Artbeats.
| | 04:27 | They are from the same stock footage house
so they have a similar esthetic.
| | 04:31 | I'll paste. Closer but if anything
I'm a little too washed out now.
| | 04:35 | Let's make it not quite as washed out, maybe improve
the white point a little bit in this particular look.
| | 04:41 | And I have my warming filter, now add just
touch a warming to maybe about that point.
| | 04:47 | Before and after, I think that's pretty good.
It's an improvement.
| | 04:52 | Now let's move on to our final video, the Hero video.
| | 04:56 | We need to move to a point where it's visible
and since the viewer is going to
| | 05:02 | be really focusing on this in the end,
I think I can even get rid of my second
| | 05:06 | video frame here and just focus
on my main Hero video in isolation.
| | 05:10 | It's a little bit on the dark side and it
has this yellowish cast I'm not very fond of.
| | 05:15 | So I'll apply Color Correction>Levels again.
| | 05:20 | I see I can improve its white point a little bit
to make a little bit brighter, maybe around there.
| | 05:25 | And then I need some way of getting
rid of that yellow cast in the mid tones.
| | 05:28 | I could use Auto Color.
| | 05:31 | There are some interesting cycore effects,
but one of my favorite tools to add
| | 05:35 | or subtract specific color tints
is Selective Color. I'll choose that.
| | 05:40 | I want to change my neutrals, my mid-tone grays,
and I need to pull some yellow out of it.
| | 05:47 | Now I'm getting to a much more neutral white there.
| | 05:50 | I don't want to get too cold but I think
that's a nice improvement. Before and after.
| | 05:56 | Go back to my Final Comp and I like that a bit better.
| | 06:00 | As long as I'm here playing around with this Final Comp,
the last thing I think I'm going to do
| | 06:06 | is these little bits of the video frame
are bothering me just a little bit.
| | 06:11 | I think I'll just fade them out at the end.
| | 06:13 | So go to Hero + Title, in which we have the crash,
which is when the camera move is in at its full zoom,
| | 06:20 | select my Hero video frame layer, press T for opacity
| | 06:24 | and key-frame it, so it's gone within two,
let's say even four beats.
| | 06:31 | That will be a nice gentle fade out.
| | 06:35 | So in the Final Comp, that frame is no longer visible
and won't be distracting the viewer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| 3D lighting| 00:05 | Although we've placed all the elements
of the opening title in 3D space,
| | 00:09 | we are yet to use 3D light in the scene.
| | 00:11 | As result a lot of the lighting is all
pretty flat because all of these layers
| | 00:16 | keep their original illumination.
| | 00:18 | There is no fall off, there is no shadows, etcetera.
| | 00:20 | That's not a bad way to go, because it
means you can see all of your sources
| | 00:24 | and you don't need to spend
potentially a long time setting up
| | 00:28 | and correcting the lighting in your scene.
| | 00:30 | However, I do like the drama the
3D lights can add, particularly for
| | 00:33 | vignetting effect, which will bring the
viewer's attention to the center of the
| | 00:37 | frame and darken the corners,
so they don't look at that quite as much.
| | 00:42 | So let's walk through how would you add
a 3D light to this particular composition.
| | 00:46 | I'm going to twirl up some of my layers
just to clean things up
| | 00:51 | and add a Layer>New>Light.
| | 00:54 | A spotlight is the most versatile one,
because you have a Cone Angle and Cone Feather,
| | 00:58 | which gives you a lot of control
over vignetting of the corners.
| | 01:01 | I almost always start with the Color of white
and I quite often set my Intensity to higher than 100%.
| | 01:07 | If you don't have a perfect angle
between the light, layer, and camera,
| | 01:10 | an Intensity of 100% would actually under light your scene.
So I tend to start around 120, 125%.
| | 01:16 | I'm going to leave light Fall Off off for now,
in addition to Cast Shadows.
| | 01:21 | First, I'll get a basic vignetting
that I like and then I'll work on adding
| | 01:26 | these parameters as well. I'll click OK.
| | 01:28 | And my extra videos immediately went dark,
it's probably a problem with my light position.
| | 01:33 | So I'll go back to my 4 Views and I see
that my light is indeed off to the side
| | 01:39 | and really close to some of these layers.
| | 01:42 | I think it will better for me to parent my light
to my camera so that as the camera
| | 01:47 | moves across the scene, the light moves with it.
| | 01:50 | So I'll press Shift+F4 to bring open the Parenting Column,
Select my camera as my parent,
| | 01:57 | Type P to reveal the position of the light
and Shift+A to reveal it's point of interest.
| | 02:04 | I want to zero out offsets between my light
and my camera so they're both
| | 02:09 | aimed the same way in X and Y, and this way
they're also aimed straight at the scene.
| | 02:15 | I am also going to set the back of my light,
to be it where the back of the camera is.
| | 02:21 | Now you can see where the light is in relation
to the camera and now I have an evenly lit scene.
| | 02:26 | I'll go back to 1 View, so I can see
my active camera view more clearly,
| | 02:29 | then type AA to reveal the light's 3D parameters.
| | 02:34 | I can play around with things such as
the Cone Angle and Cone Feather
| | 02:40 | to design how much of vignetting
I want in this particular scene.
| | 02:44 | I might want just a little bit of darkening
of the edges to bring the attention to the center.
| | 02:48 | This is without the light, this is with the light.
| | 02:51 | You can see where it really transfers
where the viewer is are looking.
| | 02:55 | Instead of all round, this brings them towards
the center of where the camera is also aimed.
| | 03:00 | That really helps when the title animates on.
| | 03:04 | Without, with.
You really see where our attention is now.
| | 03:08 | Now look at this early on in my project as well,
yes, I do think I like the drama,
| | 03:14 | a little bit of 3D lighting adds to the scene.
| | 03:18 | Okay. Next, let's play with Light Fall Off.
This was introduced in After Effects CS5.5.
| | 03:24 | If you have CS5, I'm afraid you won't have
this parameter, but if you have 5.5 or later,
| | 03:27 | it gives you the ability to decide how much
illumination the foreground layers get,
| | 03:31 | versus the background.
| | 03:33 | I'll set the Fall Off to Smooth,
this is the most controllable, let's me decide
| | 03:38 | when the light starts falling off
and where it stops falling off.
| | 03:42 | Again, immediately things go dark.
| | 03:44 | The light is only extending from 500 to 1000 pixels
out from my current light position
| | 03:49 | and that's not enough.
| | 03:50 | So I'm going to scrub up the radius until
the light's start point reaches those video layers.
| | 03:58 | Now we've got some nice illumination
on those foreground video elements.
| | 04:04 | Next, I need to bump the Fall Off distance
to reach the back layer
| | 04:09 | and then I can decide how much I want
to light that back layer.
| | 04:12 | I'm going to hold the Shift Key down
to scrub by larger increments
| | 04:19 | and I can decide what to do.
| | 04:21 | If I have a bit of Fall Off, you can
see I can under illuminate the background
| | 04:26 | which makes the videos and font pop even more,
or I can go ahead and extend my Fall Off distance
| | 04:31 | so the background gets illuminated brightly as well.
| | 04:34 | I think I'm going to compromise in
between these two, just to knock down
| | 04:38 | the background a little bit and help transfer
more of my attention to the foreground.
| | 04:45 | Again, this is without lighting,
this is with lighting.
| | 04:48 | This helps further focus the viewer's attention
onto what we want them to be looking at,
| | 04:53 | the foreground layers and eventually the opening title.
| | 04:57 | Lastly, there are shadows, and
shadows can be a bit tricky to set up.
| | 05:01 | I went ahead and cheated and just
used a Drop Shadow Effect
| | 05:04 | to have the foreground videos cast
shadows on the background etcetera.
| | 05:07 | Let's try doing that with actual lighting.
| | 05:10 | I'm going to go down to my Video layers,
Type E to reveal their effects.
| | 05:16 | I see they all have a drop shadow.
I am going to turn off their effects for now.
| | 05:20 | If I decide, I don't need those effects later,
I'll delete them, but this just
| | 05:23 | gives me a temporary switch while I'm
deciding how things are working out.
| | 05:26 | I need to set my lights to cast shadows, but I also
need to set all those video layers to cast shadows.
| | 05:33 | I'll select one of them, Type AA
and it reveals 3D parameters.
| | 05:39 | I can click on casts shadows to toggle it,
then copy and paste that parameter to other layers,
| | 05:44 | or I can use the shortcut of Opt+Shift+C on MAC
Alt+Shift+C on Windows for casts.
| | 05:50 | And that will toggle it off and on.
| | 05:51 | I'll select my other video layers, and type
Opt+Shift+C or Alt+Shift+C
| | 05:57 | so they cast shadows as well.
| | 05:59 | Next, is fine tuning how that shadow looks.
| | 06:02 | Initially, I have a shadow darkness of 60.
| | 06:04 | I'm going to put that up to 100 to see
what's going on, and a Shadow Diffusion of 0.
| | 06:09 | That means I'll initially have very sharp shadows.
| | 06:11 | I'm not seeing a big difference
here of with and without shadows.
| | 06:16 | It's not giving me the effect that I want.
| | 06:18 | Well, here's an important thing
about lights and shadows
| | 06:21 | and it has to do with the shadow's size.
| | 06:25 | When the camera is at the same location
as the light, any shadow cast by a layer
| | 06:30 | will be the same size as the layer itself.
| | 06:33 | If you want your shadow to be larger
than the layer casting the shadow,
| | 06:38 | then the light needs to be further away
from the scene than the camera is.
| | 06:43 | To make that happen, I'm going to type
Shift+P to bring up the position of the light.
| | 06:48 | I'll start scrubbing it, so it's
further back in space compared to the camera,
| | 06:54 | my shadows will start to grow in size,
and now I can see the shadows appearing
| | 06:59 | on the background as well as in between the layers.
| | 07:02 | So let's fine tune a look of maybe around there,
I'll go to one view again
| | 07:07 | just to see with more detail what I'm doing.
| | 07:10 | That's kind of interesting, maybe around there.
| | 07:12 | Then I'll start adding Shadow Diffusion to
soften that shadow, make it bloom out a little bit.
| | 07:18 | This will add to your render times,
but it's better than a hard edge shadow.
| | 07:23 | And then the last thing I might do is
reduce the shadow darkness,
| | 07:26 | so it's not a completely inky black dark shadow,
maybe somewhere around -- there is a good effect.
| | 07:33 | So again, without shadows, with shadows,
without 3D light, with 3D light.
| | 07:41 | It takes a little bit to set up,
but it does add drama to your scene.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| A realistic EKG| 00:05 | This last idea corner is probably the
most fiddly to execute, but it may be
| | 00:10 | necessary if you have a client
that really cares about accuracy.
| | 00:12 | You know these vital sign traces
we have in the background?
| | 00:16 | Well, they really are
just randomly wiggled lines.
| | 00:19 | They're not really based on actual
vital signs from a real human being.
| | 00:23 | If your client happens to have a doctor as an advisor,
they may say these aren't realistic;
| | 00:28 | they don't represent what you should be seeing.
| | 00:30 | So you may find yourself having to go back
and trace an actual EKG or other vital signs chart.
| | 00:37 | Well, if you have access to the exercise files,
we have provided such a chart in the Sources folder.
| | 00:43 | Twirl open Sources, Stills and we've given you,
thanks to iStockphoto, a very high resolution EKG chart.
| | 00:52 | You could spend sometime masking this down
and animating a mask across it
| | 00:56 | or you can create a Shape layer
that follows these traceries.
| | 01:00 | I'll show you how to do that.
| | 01:01 | I'll drag the still image EKG chart onto
the New Composition icon.
| | 01:06 | It will create a comp that size.
| | 01:09 | You see that we have a very low resolution,
because it is a very large piece of footage.
| | 01:13 | I'm going to zoom-in until I'm really
focusing on just a couple of these traces.
| | 01:20 | Now you might be looking at this
and saying, this is going to be a
| | 01:24 | monumental drawing job to trace out all
of these traces and all of these individual wiggles.
| | 01:32 | Well, with Shape Layers again,
you can cheat just a little bit.
| | 01:36 | I'm going to create one of these traces
and then use the Repeater and Shape Layers
| | 01:41 | to repeat that one trace for the rest of the chart.
| | 01:44 | It won't show the individual variations
from cycle to cycle, but it will be a
| | 01:49 | lot closer than just using the random wiggle paths.
| | 01:53 | Make sure the chart is not selected,
since I want to create a Shape Layer,
| | 01:57 | choose the Pen tool, pick a Color,
that's going to be highly visible,
| | 02:01 | let me see, yeah, green may be pretty good here
or maybe something like bright blue,
| | 02:06 | just to contrast with the black and
with the red and the white already here.
| | 02:10 | I'm going to zoom into high resolution
and work on tracing one of these cycles.
| | 02:16 | I'll start my Pen Path, maybe zoom-in a little bit,
add a second point,
| | 02:23 | and make sure that you can see that Pen icon
before you start drawing another point.
| | 02:29 | If you don't see it, you're editing your existing point;
you're not drawing a new point.
| | 02:33 | I'll undo, get far enough away and draw an additional point.
| | 02:39 | This spike is going to be bit of a challenge,
go ahead and draw up to there,
| | 02:46 | and draw through here, and drag out my tension onto
my Bezier handles enough to get around that peak.
| | 02:52 | There's a little bit of a bend here in the middle,
and we'll come down to this portion.
| | 03:00 | Oops. I didn't see my icon, that's why
I didn't draw a new point, there we go.
| | 03:05 | Lift him over, pull him down a little bit,
shorten that handle, make sure my last point is selected
| | 03:17 | and just keep dragging out my points
| | 03:22 | to get a good approximation of this curve.
| | 03:26 | A little flat area there, and then the
trace starts coming back up again,
| | 03:34 | pull that down a little bit, there we go.
| | 03:39 | Here's that flat area.
| | 03:40 | I know watching someone else mask is just barely
more interesting than watching paint dry.
| | 03:46 | But fortunately, I'm only doing one of these.
| | 03:54 | Here we go and then we start coming
back up again, back to this flat area,
| | 03:59 | it should then match back up with this original point.
| | 04:03 | And I'll return to my Selection tool, V is the shortcut.
| | 04:06 | Now that I have one cycle traced out,
I'm going to use a Shape Operator to repeat that cycle.
| | 04:13 | I'll make sure my Shape Group is selected
and add our dear friend the Repeater.
| | 04:20 | You see it has already created a
couple more copies of this trace.
| | 04:23 | But they don't line up.
That's not a problem.
| | 04:25 | I'll twirl down the Repeater, twirl
down its own Transform Settings
| | 04:30 | and change how much we're offset in X,
until these lines started to line up.
| | 04:37 | You may get a misalignment here,
between your first and last points.
| | 04:43 | That's not a problem. Go back to your Shape Path
and drag on individual points
| | 04:50 | until you see your repeat is now seamless.
| | 04:54 | And as I mentioned, there are going to
be some variations from cycle to cycle,
| | 04:58 | but on average it's not too bad.
| | 05:01 | I'll create some additional repeats to
go ahead and reach across this entire chart,
| | 05:10 | then hold down the Cmd key on Mac,
Ctrl key on Windows, and scrub out X offset
| | 05:14 | by a small value, until we average
the same duration as all those other cycles.
| | 05:22 | I'll press the Z key to temporarily get zoom,
and zoom back in on these cycles.
| | 05:28 | Make sure everything is lined up;
| | 05:29 | I'll select my Shape Path and if necessary
tweak that first point
| | 05:35 | and maybe even the second point behind it,
to get my paths to line up nicely.
| | 05:42 | And now, we have a much more realistic EKG path.
| | 05:47 | The next trick is actually drawing it on and off.
| | 05:50 | And this is very similar to how you
drew on your randomly wiggled paths.
| | 05:54 | With the Shape Group selected, add Trim Paths.
| | 05:59 | Make sure Trim Path is after the Repeater,
because you want your trim
| | 06:04 | to go along the entire trace, not just to one of them,
| | 06:08 | twirl it open and start trimming the end.
| | 06:10 | And initially we'll go, wait a second,
it is just trimming each cycle individually and in unison.
| | 06:17 | That's not what you want.
| | 06:18 | Well, fortunately Trim Paths has an additional option
of whether or not to trim multiple shapes simultaneously,
| | 06:25 | which is what we were doing, or as one big group.
| | 06:28 | And when I do that, you see the Trim Paths
traces on my entire compound repeated path.
| | 06:36 | And now, my offset will drive my
trace throughout this repeated shape.
| | 06:42 | I'll turn off the background for now,
so you can see this in better detail. Lovely!
| | 06:50 | And that is a lot less work than trying to draw
every one of those pulses and cycles individually.
| | 06:57 | I'm not going to make you sit here
and watch me do the rest of these.
| | 07:02 | It's a project you can do if you want
to practice your pen drawing skills.
| | 07:06 | And again, up inside the Idea Corner folder,
underneath EKG chart, we have actually done this for you.
| | 07:14 | And we animated the offset parameter
to have those march across your chart, pretty cool!
| | 07:21 | After Effects is a wonderful toolbox,
but quite often, some assembly is required
| | 07:27 | to add together different elements,
like a little bit of a Shape Path,
| | 07:30 | a little bit of a Repeater, etcetera,
to get the final desired result.
| | Collapse this transcript |
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