IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Chris Meyer: Hi! I'm Chris Meyer.
| | 00:07 | Trish Meyer: And I'm Trish Meyer.
| | 00:08 | Chris: And we'd like to welcome you to the Final
Project for After Effects Apprentice, 2nd Edition.
| | 00:12 | In this course you're going to be
taking advantage of many of the skills you've
| | 00:15 | been learning in the prior Apprentice
lessons to build a 10-second video promo.
| | 00:19 | Before we get started, let's take
a look at what you'll be building.
| | 00:22 | (video playing)
| | 00:34 | First, I'm going to lead you through
designing several of the individual
| | 00:37 | elements used in the final piece,
including building the elements that will
| | 00:41 | become a floor; creating a stylized
video screen, including transitions;
| | 00:47 | importing a layered Illustrator file;
plus animating those layers using the
| | 00:51 | Stroke effect and the wiggle expression.
| | 00:53 | Chris: Then I'll show you how to assemble
these individual elements into a final
| | 00:58 | composition, including timing animations
to music, creating a 3D camera move,
| | 01:04 | working with 3D text, and
arranging 3D lights and shadows.
| | 01:08 | At the end, I'll also show you how to
accommodate a series of potential client
| | 01:12 | changes, share some ideas on rendering
strategies, and work through recreating
| | 01:16 | the Illustrator dial element
using After Effects shape layers.
| | 01:19 | Trish: We hope you've enjoyed the lessons
from After Effects Apprentice and have
| | 01:23 | picked up many new tricks along the way.
| | 01:25 | Now you have a chance to put it
all together, so let's dive in!
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| Using the exercise files| 00:02 | Throughout these After Effects Apprentice
courses, you'll find that Trish and I focus
| | 00:06 | on core concepts of using
and learning After Effects.
| | 00:09 | Not specific tricks that only work
with certain pieces of footage.
| | 00:12 | Therefore, if you don't have any exercise
files, or if you want to use your own footage,
| | 00:16 | you'll still get a lot out of
just watching these videos.
| | 00:19 | That said, studies have shown that the best
way to learn something is to actually do it.
| | 00:24 | Therefore for the optimal learning experience
we suggest you do get access to the exercise files.
| | 00:28 | There are two ways to do that.
| | 00:31 | One is to get a lynda.com premium membership.
| | 00:34 | That will allow you to download the files
for After Effects CS4, CS5, CS5.5 or CS6.
| | 00:41 | These are the same files we're
using when we record these videos.
| | 00:44 | The other approach is to get a copy
of our book After Effects Apprentice.
| | 00:48 | The third edition covers CS5, CS5.5 and CS6.
| | 00:51 | If you're still using After Effects CS4,
then get the second edition of the book.
| | 00:55 | Those files are pretty close to the
ones we use throughout this video course.
| | 00:59 | Whenever there are differences
we'll note them as we teach.
| | 01:02 | Now either way we think it's a good value.
| | 01:04 | If you get the premium membership to lynda,
you could access to exercise files for hundreds
| | 01:08 | of other courses.
| | 01:10 | If you get one of our books, you've got some
additional text explanation for each of the
| | 01:13 | features we discuss and you've got a
desk reference next to you all the time.
| | 01:17 | Now throughout these lessons we're going
to be using a combination of After Effects
| | 01:20 | CS5, CS5.5 and CS6. Don't be thrown off by
any minor differences in the user interface,
| | 01:27 | most of the functionality of After Effects
is identical across all of these versions.
| | 01:32 | If there are differences from version to
version, we'll note it in the little caption that
| | 01:35 | runs along the bottom of the screen.
| | 01:37 | But all that said, we really hope you have a
lot of fun with these courses learning After Effects.
| | 01:42 | It's the application we've been using for
ages now, we have a great time with it, and
| | 01:46 | we hope you get the same
enjoyment out of it that we do.
| | 01:49 |
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1. The FloorBuilding the grid floor| 00:07 | If you have the project files, go
ahead and open AEA_Final Project.
| | 00:12 | If you don't have the project file,
note that many of these elements we'll be
| | 00:16 | creating from scratch.
| | 00:17 | So you might just like to follow along
as best as you can using almost any D1
| | 00:21 | video footage that you'd like to work with.
| | 00:24 | In this chapter we'll be creating the
elements we need for the floor in our final project.
| | 00:30 | That includes a grid as well as this
gradient that you see animating around.
| | 00:35 | The size of the grid will
be 50x50 pixels square.
| | 00:39 | Now you might be wondering,
where did I get this size from?
| | 00:42 | Well, later on when I made the grid to
apply to the video layers, I decided that
| | 00:47 | 50x50 was a good size.
| | 00:49 | So don't feel that you need to know
all the answers when you start out.
| | 00:52 | Remember, every parameter and every
pre-comp can be edited at any time.
| | 00:58 | So I find what's more important is
just roughing out the hierarchy of comps.
| | 01:03 | And then as I assemble the elements
into the Main Comp, I can revisit the
| | 01:07 | pre-comps in order to unify the entire design.
| | 01:11 | So if you've been playing around,
close the Footage panel, close any
| | 01:15 | compositions you've been playing with,
and let's create our first pre-comp.
| | 01:19 | And this will be for the grid.
| | 01:21 | Since I'm making a pre-comp, I'll
select the MyPrecomps folder, I'll select
| | 01:26 | Composition > New Composition and the
size I need is 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels,
| | 01:33 | Square Pixels, 29.97.
| | 01:37 | I'll name this comp Grid Floor.
| | 01:41 | I'll also check that it has the same
duration as the movie, which is 10 seconds.
| | 01:45 | And I'll also set the Background Color to White.
| | 01:49 | You can just click on the swatch,
pick white as your color, and click OK.
| | 01:54 | As a reminder if you're using CS4,
you'll find the Background Color underneath
| | 01:58 | the Composition menu.
| | 02:00 | As you can see, the Grid Floor pre-comp
has been added to the selected folder.
| | 02:04 | Now I need to create a solid
to apply the grid effect to.
| | 02:10 | We'll call this solid grid solid, and
it also should be 2000 by 2000 pixels.
| | 02:17 | If this is not the size you're seeing,
simply click on the Make Comp Size
| | 02:20 | button, and we want to make sure
the color of the solid is black.
| | 02:25 | So if it's not black, simply click on
the swatch, select black. And we'll click
| | 02:29 | OK to create the solid.
| | 02:32 | The reason I set the Solid to be black is
that I want my gridlines to be black also,
| | 02:37 | and you'll see that in just a moment.
| | 02:40 | To apply the grid effect, select
Effect > Generate > Grid, and you'll see the
| | 02:45 | parameters for the Grid effect
in Effect Controls panel.
| | 02:49 | The reason you're now seeing a
grid right now is that I have a white
| | 02:52 | background color and the color of
the grid is white and the grid is also
| | 02:56 | making the solid transparent.
| | 02:59 | You can see that if I turn on the
Transparency Grid and bump up the border, which
| | 03:04 | is the size of the gridlines.
| | 03:06 | So just for demonstration purposes, I'll
leave these lines fairly thick for now.
| | 03:11 | And, by the way, I do have the
magnification set to fit up to 100%, so I can
| | 03:16 | see the entire image.
| | 03:18 | I'll also just quickly change the color
of the grid to something else like red
| | 03:22 | just so I can see it and I can
turn off the Transparency Grid.
| | 03:25 | Now I mentioned earlier that I'd like the
size of the grid to be 50 pixels by 50 pixels.
| | 03:31 | The default is to create a grid based
on these two points, the anchor point
| | 03:37 | and the corner point.
| | 03:39 | The anchor point, you can move around,
determines the center of the grid, and
| | 03:44 | the corner point determines the size.
| | 03:47 | But that makes it tricky to
make a 50x50 pixel square.
| | 03:51 | So let's look at the other options.
| | 03:53 | In the Size From pop-up, I can change it
from Corner Point to either Width slider
| | 03:59 | or Width & Height sliders.
| | 04:01 | The Width & Height makes a lot of sense.
| | 04:03 | I can now determine the width.
| | 04:05 | I've got a very thick border,
so let's bump that down.
| | 04:09 | I can determine the Width and the Height
separately, or I can type in values for both.
| | 04:16 | But if I know that I want the width
and the height to be the same, I can
| | 04:20 | simply select the Width slider that
will gray out the parameter for Height and
| | 04:25 | now by typing in a value such as 50
pixels for the Width, it would also make a
| | 04:30 | Height match the Width.
| | 04:31 | Now unfortunately, I did play around
with the center of my grid, and I'd like to
| | 04:36 | get it back to the center so that I
don't have half a grid on the edges.
| | 04:40 | Since I know my solid is 2000x2000,
the anchor should be right in the center, so
| | 04:46 | I need to make the Anchor 1000x1000.
| | 04:50 | Now I have a nice even increment, and I don't
have any partial grid squares on the edges.
| | 04:55 | I'm going to return the Border size
to the default value of 5 for now.
| | 05:00 | Again, these are values that we
can return to later and tweak when we
| | 05:04 | assemble all the elements.
| | 05:06 | One of the problems when working in 3D
is as you move the camera, you often see
| | 05:11 | the edge of the floor or any background movies.
| | 05:14 | We'll make this floor fade
out softly to transparency.
| | 05:19 | And I'm going to do that by applying a mask.
| | 05:21 | In the Mask Shape tools select the
Ellipse tool, make sure the layer is selected
| | 05:27 | so you don't make a shape layer by
accident. And then we're going to double-click
| | 05:30 | to apply a full-frame mask.
| | 05:34 | The default color for a mask is yellow,
so let me just click on this and make it
| | 05:38 | a different color such as blue just so
you can see it a little more clearly.
| | 05:42 | If you can't see the mask at all, make
sure the Mask Visibility switch is enabled.
| | 05:47 | Now we need to troubleshoot why the
mask is not making the grid transparent.
| | 05:53 | So let's check out which
order things are rendering in.
| | 05:56 | In the timeline, after the black solid is
created, then a mask is applied to the black solid.
| | 06:04 | And only then is the Grid effect being applied.
| | 06:07 | If I toggle off the Grid effect, you
can see the mask is being applied to a
| | 06:11 | black solid and then the grid is being
applied on top of the entire layer, and
| | 06:17 | it's not honoring the Alpha
channel that the mask has created.
| | 06:21 | Fortunately, most effects, like Grid
that are synthetic--if you look at the
| | 06:26 | Final parameter, you'll usually find
ways of compositing the effect on top
| | 06:32 | of the original layer.
| | 06:33 | In this case, we have a Blending mode
pop-up and it includes many of the blending
| | 06:38 | modes you're already familiar with.
| | 06:40 | So if I was to use, say, the Screen mode,
it would screen the red grid on top
| | 06:47 | of the black solid.
| | 06:49 | And this blending mode honors the Alpha channel.
| | 06:51 | The grid is not playing
outside in the transparent areas.
| | 06:55 | But let's go back to the top of the list.
| | 06:57 | None was the default, Normal makes
the red grid render on top of the black
| | 07:04 | solid, but it also plays outside of the
layer's Alpha channel. The next option
| | 07:09 | is the one we're looking for, Stencil Alpha.
| | 07:13 | This does something completely different.
| | 07:15 | Notice the grid is now black.
| | 07:18 | This is the original color of the solid.
| | 07:21 | It's not using the color that
the grid effect is creating.
| | 07:24 | What's happening now is that red grid is
creating an Alpha channel and the solid
| | 07:31 | is playing inside the Alpha
channel that the grid is creating.
| | 07:36 | Now all we have to do is
feather the edge of the mask.
| | 07:39 | Again, we don't want any hard edges to
be visible as the camera moves around.
| | 07:44 | To do that, I'll just twirl down Mask
and I'll set Mask Feather to 100 pixels,
| | 07:50 | and you can turn off the mask if
you like to see the edge more clearly.
| | 07:54 | But we still have a problem with the
where the grid is cut off at the bottom,
| | 07:58 | the top, and the sides.
| | 08:00 | To fix that, just reduce Mask Expansion,
and that will choke or contract the
| | 08:06 | Alpha channel for the mask.
| | 08:08 | Remember that Mask Expansion doesn't
change the shape of the mask itself.
| | 08:13 | It just contracts the Alpha
channel that it's creating.
| | 08:17 | You can see that more clearly if you
toggle on the Alpha channel and play
| | 08:21 | with Mask Expansion.
| | 08:23 | So I think that's it for now for the grid floor.
| | 08:25 | We can come back later and tweak any of
these parameters if we decide to change
| | 08:30 | the width or the size of the lines.
| | 08:32 | In the next movie, we'll create the
gradient that sweeps around the floor.
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| Creating a radar sweep| 00:08 | I've closed the pre-comp
from the previous movie.
| | 00:10 | The next element we're going to make
is this gradient that sweeps around just
| | 00:15 | underneath the floor.
| | 00:16 | There's also a subtle lightning effects going
on that we're also be adding to this gradient.
| | 00:22 | So to get started we'll make another pre-comp.
| | 00:25 | This composition we'll call it Radar and
this size for this comp should be 1200x1200.
| | 00:32 | We arrived at this number
through trial and error.
| | 00:35 | When you are making elements, take a
best guess of what size something like this
| | 00:39 | should be, you can always come
back later and resize the comp.
| | 00:43 | But in general, always make your
elements larger than the final size.
| | 00:47 | It's usually better to scale them
down slightly than have to scale them up,
| | 00:51 | because they're too small.
| | 00:52 | The Pixel Aspect Ratio,
again, is Square Pixels, 29.97.
| | 00:57 | The same duration, 10 seconds as the
previous comp, but for this background
| | 01:02 | color let's pick any color
except white or black.
| | 01:06 | Our gradient will be white to black.
| | 01:08 | So we want to pick a color, just
something maybe in the blue range, just so we
| | 01:13 | can see the gradient on top of this color.
| | 01:16 | To make the gradient, I'm
going to use a Shape layer.
| | 01:19 | I'll select the Rectangle tool and then
double-click. And because I have no layer
| | 01:25 | selected, I'll get a full frame shape layer.
| | 01:28 | Now my settings may look completely
different than what you're seeing.
| | 01:32 | I'm seeing some kind of
gradient, and I'm seeing a stroke.
| | 01:36 | I'll click on the word Stroke,
change that to No Stroke and click OK.
| | 01:41 | Let's click on the word Fill.
| | 01:43 | Well, I am actually getting a Radial Gradient.
| | 01:47 | Your default maybe any
one of these four buttons.
| | 01:50 | So click on a Radial Gradient and click OK.
| | 01:52 | In the Timeline panel, twirl down
Contents > Rectangle 1, and now you see the
| | 01:59 | Rectangle Path, the Stroke--which we
don't need, so we'll delete--the Gradient
| | 02:05 | Fill and the Transformations for Rectangle 1.
| | 02:08 | I'll twirl down the Gradient.
| | 02:11 | The size of the Gradient is controlled
by the Start Point and the End Point.
| | 02:15 | I'm going to leave the Start Point set to 00,
which is actually in the center of the layer.
| | 02:22 | But I'm going to pull the End Point out,
pressing the Shift Key somewhere around 550.
| | 02:29 | That way I'll have a gradient that
stretches almost to the end of my layer.
| | 02:33 | I'll also increase the Highlight Length.
| | 02:35 | This is the next parameter.
| | 02:38 | I'll increase that to 100% so that the
highlight is focused around the End Point.
| | 02:43 | Now let's change the Colors.
| | 02:46 | To change the Colors, you can either
click on Edit Gradient, or you can click on
| | 02:50 | the Gradient swatch in the toolbar.
| | 02:54 | In my case I have two colors from red to white.
| | 02:58 | You may have other colors in the center.
| | 03:00 | If you have any other colors, just drag
them away so you return to just two colors.
| | 03:07 | The gradient we're going to make is a
very simple white to black gradient.
| | 03:11 | The first color--in my case this is red.
And I can see that this is the color
| | 03:15 | that's over on this side of the gradient.
| | 03:18 | I'd like that color to be white.
| | 03:19 | So I'll make that white and I'd
also like this color to be 100% opaque.
| | 03:25 | So I'll just click on the Opacity
tab and check that that's 100%.
| | 03:29 | The second color, I'd like this to be black.
| | 03:34 | Now my color will gradient for white to black.
| | 03:38 | The tab on top for my opacity is
actually set to the correct opacity, 0%.
| | 03:44 | If I increase it, this might be
something more like what you're seeing.
| | 03:48 | A white to black gradient, but in this
case I really do want this to be transparent.
| | 03:53 | So I'm going to leave that back at 0%.
| | 03:55 | Now remember, you can come back
and edit this gradient at any time.
| | 03:59 | For instance, I could move the
Color Stop for the white color.
| | 04:03 | Or, I could select the black color and
change it, so that it's not quite so dark.
| | 04:09 | I could even go to little bit of color.
| | 04:11 | So these are all tweaks you can make later.
| | 04:14 | For now I'll just click OK. And the last
thing we want to do is just rotate the gradient.
| | 04:20 | I'll select the layer, press R for
Rotation, press Home to make sure I'm back at
| | 04:25 | the beginning of the comp, and
turn on the stopwatch for rotation.
| | 04:29 | Now I'll press End to jump to the
end of the comp, and I'll change the
| | 04:33 | rotation to 2 Revolutions.
| | 04:37 | I'll RAM Preview, and that
looks like a pretty good speed.
| | 04:40 | The funny thing about writing
tutorials is that it always looks like you know
| | 04:44 | exactly what you're going to do in advance.
| | 04:46 | But I arrived at this value for
rotation after a little trial and error.
| | 04:51 | After we assembled the main comp, you can
always go back, speed this up, or slow it down.
| | 04:57 | In the next movie, we'll composite some
lighting on top of this rotating gradient.
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| Adding lightning| 00:08 | In the last movie, you made this
animated gradient. In this movie, we will add
| | 00:11 | some more interest by compositing a
lightning movie on top of this layer.
| | 00:16 | In the Sources, twirl down Movies.
You're going to be using the
| | 00:21 | Curly Lightning.mov from Artbeats.
| | 00:26 | What I am most interested in are the white lines
and a little less of the blue smoke.
| | 00:32 | So we'll need to color correct this
so we're not adding too much blue.
| | 00:38 | If you remember the final animation, it
has more of a golden orange tint, and the
| | 00:44 | floor is fairly neutral,
something like a warm gray.
| | 00:47 | So I will return to my Composition
and add the movie to the comp.
| | 00:51 | Now you will notice the movie is only at D1
size, so it's not filling my 1200 square comp.
| | 00:58 | We can fix that by selecting
Layer > Transform > Fit to Comp.
| | 01:04 | If I press S for Scale, you can see I
am scaling the layer by a large amount.
| | 01:08 | I wouldn't normally do this if this was a
real job and not a tutorial. I would have
| | 01:13 | the client buy the high-def footage so
that we wouldn't be blowing out pixels.
| | 01:17 | I think you'll get the idea
if I just scale it up for now.
| | 01:20 | So now we need to composite
this on top of the gradient below.
| | 01:25 | The first thing I will do is set the
Blending mode, and you can pick something
| | 01:29 | like Screen or even Add. And Screen
will composite just the light values on
| | 01:35 | top of the gradient.
| | 01:36 | That helps a little, but we still have
to remove the blue color and then fix the
| | 01:41 | transparency problem.
| | 01:42 | There are lots of ways to
change the color, but I think
| | 01:45 | Color Correction > Tritone
is quick and easy.
| | 01:48 | It changes the blue to a sepia color,
and I can click on this brown and maybe
| | 01:54 | make it a little more desaturated.
| | 01:56 | In fact, if you want to choose the
exact color we used in the book,
| | 02:00 | it's 90 for red, 85 for green and 70 for blue.
| | 02:05 | I will click OK. And the last thing
we need to do is fix the transparency.
| | 02:10 | If I check the transparency for the
gradient by turning off the Lightning movie,
| | 02:15 | you can see the gradient is creating
its own transparency which is reflected in
| | 02:19 | the composition's Alpha channel.
| | 02:21 | I will Option-click.
| | 02:22 | So this shows you clearly what the Alpha
channel for the composition looks like.
| | 02:27 | Now I'd like the lighting to play
only inside the composition's Alpha.
| | 02:32 | Fortunately, there is a
very easy way to do that.
| | 02:35 | Let me go back to RGB, turn back on
the Lightning movie--assuming you still
| | 02:40 | have the modes column visible--check out the
T switch for Preserve Underlying Transparency.
| | 02:46 | When you enable this switch, the
Lightning movie will only be visible inside the
| | 02:51 | Alpha channel of all the layers below.
| | 02:54 | In other words, it's not adding
anything to the Comps Alpha channel, and I will
| | 02:59 | turn back over to transparency.
| | 03:03 | Now you can see why I rotated
the gradient inside the pre-comp.
| | 03:07 | I don't want the lightning to rotate as
well, but if you do want the lightning
| | 03:11 | to rotate, by animating the pre-comp
after it's been nested, you will rotate both
| | 03:17 | of the layers together.
| | 03:18 | So that's it for this chapter. In the
next chapter, we'll create the video
| | 03:23 | screens that are placed on top of the floor.
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2. The Video WallBuilding the video panel| 00:07 | In this chapter you will build the
video panels that appear in our 3D world.
| | 00:12 | Each one of these videos will be
treated in their own pre-comp, and these panels
| | 00:16 | will also be used later to
create reflections in the main comp.
| | 00:20 | You will notice that each video panel
has a grid of 50x50 pixels which exactly
| | 00:25 | matches the floor, and this grid is
applied on top of the video and then a block
| | 00:30 | dissolve transition brings on the video.
| | 00:33 | Because we're using a grid structure,
we'll create each pre-comp as a square
| | 00:37 | pixel comp, even though the videos
inside the comps will be non-square pixels.
| | 00:42 | So let's get started with the first
video panel which is of the skater.
| | 00:46 | I will select the MyPrecomps
folder again and then select
| | 00:50 | Composition > New Composition.
| | 00:52 | I will call this comp Skater. And
for the size, I'd like to make it a
| | 00:57 | multiple of 50 pixels.
| | 00:59 | The closest I can get to with the 720x486
video is a square pixel size of 650x450.
| | 01:08 | Just like the other pre-comps, this
will also be a square pixel comp, a 29.97,
| | 01:12 | but I think the duration could be a
little bit shorter. Let's just make it
| | 01:17 | 5 seconds long. And I will just change
the background color back to black.
| | 01:21 | I will click OK. And in the Sources
folder, inside the Movies subfolder, find
| | 01:27 | the Skater movie and then add it to the pre-comp.
| | 01:31 | Notice I've dragged the movie to
the timeline so that the movie will be
| | 01:35 | centered in the composition.
| | 01:37 | Because the movie is a little taller
than the comp and slightly wider, you can
| | 01:41 | actually move it a little
if you want to recenter it.
| | 01:44 | As you're moving the movie, if you
hold the Command+Shift keys on Mac, or
| | 01:49 | Ctrl+Shift keys on Windows, the
movie will snap to the edges of the comp.
| | 01:54 | I am just going to leave the movie centered
for now. We can always move it later.
| | 01:57 | And now let's add
the Grid Effect to the movie.
| | 02:00 | Now, you might be inclined to select
the movie and apply the Grid Effect.
| | 02:05 | I don't recommend you do that simply
because you may want to recenter the movie
| | 02:09 | later and that would
move the grid. I will undo.
| | 02:13 | So let's select Layer > New > Solid, and
this will be our grid solid. And it's
| | 02:20 | defaulting to the width and height of
the comp, so I don't need to click the
| | 02:23 | Make Comp Size button. I will just click OK.
| | 02:26 | For this example, I don't need to set the
color of the solid to any particular color.
| | 02:30 | I just select Effect > Generate > Grid, and
this is the same effect you saw earlier.
| | 02:38 | For the color of the grid, I
will set the color to black.
| | 02:42 | And because we don't need to do
anything fancy with the Blending mode, we can
| | 02:46 | use the Color parameter to set
it to the color that we need.
| | 02:49 | Now to make a 50 pixel by 50 pixel grid,
I will select Size From and set it to
| | 02:56 | Width slider, just like we did before.
And set the Width value to 50, and that
| | 03:01 | will set the width and the height to 50 pixels.
| | 03:05 | However, I am having a little problem
here because I am seeing half a grid on
| | 03:09 | the top and all around the sides.
| | 03:11 | The reason for that is that the grid
is being drawn from the center outwards.
| | 03:16 | That's based on the value for anchor which
is the first parameter in the Grid Effect.
| | 03:20 | But this is easy to fix.
| | 03:22 | I will just change Anchor to 0, 0 for X
and Y, and that will place the anchor at
| | 03:29 | the top left-hand corner of the
comp and then the grid will be created
| | 03:33 | horizontally and vertically
from that anchor point.
| | 03:36 | Of course, we don't want the
grid to be quite this obvious.
| | 03:40 | I'd like it to be thinner.
| | 03:42 | So let's change the Border value to,
say 2, and if that's still too opaque for
| | 03:47 | you, you have an Opacity slider here,
so you can knock down the opacity.
| | 03:54 | Or you could also set the feather values.
| | 03:55 | If I twirl down Feather and change the
Width and Height to 1, that will ever so
| | 04:02 | slightly soften the line and
make it a little less obvious.
| | 04:06 | So feel free to tweak out the Grid
Effect to taste, although do leave the
| | 04:10 | Width at 50 pixels.
| | 04:12 | If you see anything you like as you
work through the tutorial, you can save it
| | 04:16 | as a preset as you go along.
| | 04:18 | In the next movie, we'll add the block
dissolve to make this video transition on.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Block Dissolve effect| 00:07 | In the last movie, we created our
Skater comp, added the Skater movie, and then
| | 00:12 | created a solid and
applied the Grid Effect to it.
| | 00:16 | Now, we'd like to apply a Block Dissolve
that will animate on the movie.
| | 00:20 | We'll apply the Block Dissolve
to a separate layer.
| | 00:23 | We don't want to apply it to the
movie itself because we want the
| | 00:27 | Block Dissolve to exactly line up with the
grid, and the grid has a relationship with
| | 00:32 | the size of the comp, not the size of the movie.
| | 00:35 | So I am going to apply the Block Dissolve
to an Adjustment layer.
| | 00:38 | I will select Layer > New > Adjustment layer,
and that will create a container layer--
| | 00:45 | an empty layer at the top of the composition.
| | 00:49 | Any effects I apply to the adjustment
layer will apply to all the layers below.
| | 00:53 | But to be more accurate, it applies
an effect to a copy of a composite
| | 00:58 | of all the layers below.
| | 01:00 | The effect I will apply is
Effect > Transition > Block Dissolve.
| | 01:05 | It's the very first transition.
| | 01:07 | The first parameter, Transition Completion,
is what you would use to transition on
| | 01:13 | a layer, so you would start
at 100% and then animate to 0%.
| | 01:17 | I will just set it to the midway point
just so we can see what we're doing as
| | 01:22 | we set up the effect.
| | 01:23 | I will increase the Block Width and
the Block Height for now, and you will
| | 01:28 | notice the default settings create a
very blurry out of focus Block Dissolve.
| | 01:33 | That's because of this option here
called Soft Edges, so let's turn that off.
| | 01:37 | Now, I see hard edges for the Block Dissolve.
| | 01:41 | Now, all we need to do is
line up the blocks with the grid.
| | 01:44 | Fortunately, that's very easy because
the Block Width and Height are in pixels.
| | 01:49 | So if I set the Width to 50 and the
Height to 50, don't add any feather, and
| | 01:56 | turn on Soft Edges, I will now have a
hard edge Block Dissolve that exactly
| | 02:00 | matches the Grid Effect.
| | 02:02 | To animate on the Block Dissolve,
I will return to time 0 and set the
| | 02:06 | Transition Completion to 100%.
| | 02:10 | Turn on the stopwatch, and then I will
press U to see the keyframes in the timeline.
| | 02:15 | So with time 0, Transition Complete is
at 100, and then I am just going to move
| | 02:20 | it to where I'd like my second keyframe to be.
| | 02:22 | Now, you will have to trust me on this,
but I know that if I set my second
| | 02:26 | keyframe to 1 second and 12 frames, it
will exactly line up with the musical beat.
| | 02:32 | So at this time, I will
change Transition Completion to 0.
| | 02:37 | If I RAM Preview, the movie transitions on.
| | 02:40 | Well, I think it might look better if it
didn't completely transition on 100%.
| | 02:45 | Perhaps some of these blocks couldn't remain
transparent, and they are actually transparent.
| | 02:51 | So, as the transition is on, you
will see the background in our 3D world.
| | 02:57 | So let's go to our second keyframe and
adjust it. I will press the Command key
| | 03:01 | on Mac, Ctrl key on Windows,
and slowly increase the value.
| | 03:05 | I don't think I like these three
blocks to be transparent, so let me back
| | 03:10 | that off a little bit.
| | 03:11 | I think that should look
pretty good around 8 or 9%.
| | 03:15 | The last thing we need to do is move
the grid on top so that it's not affected
| | 03:20 | by the Adjustment layer.
| | 03:22 | But if you move the Grid Solid above
the Adjustment layer, now the grid will be
| | 03:27 | visible as the block transition comes on.
| | 03:31 | So that's it for the Block Dissolve.
| | 03:33 | In the next movie, we will liven up
the skater by adding the cartoon effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Stylizing the footage| 00:08 | So now we have our skater movie with
the grid effect and the block dissolve.
| | 00:13 | In this movie we'll deploy the cartoon
effect to the movie and also look at how
| | 00:17 | the CC Composite effect works.
| | 00:20 | Just so you can see the movie a little
clearer, I can either turn off the top two
| | 00:24 | layers, or I can solo the skater layer.
| | 00:27 | And I'll select a Skater movie
and apply Effect > Stylize > Cartoon.
| | 00:33 | I am going to use the default settings,
go ahead and play with the parameters
| | 00:38 | and get the look that you'd like.
| | 00:40 | Once you've a look that you are happy
with, the next step is to apply another
| | 00:44 | effect, and that's Effects > Channel > CC Composite.
| | 00:48 | What CC composite does is allow you to
composite the original movie on top of
| | 00:55 | the effected movie using various blending modes.
| | 00:58 | The default setting is
not what we are looking for.
| | 01:01 | What it's doing is compositing the
original image on top of the Cartoon
| | 01:06 | Effect using 100% opacity.
| | 01:09 | Of course, you can use the Opacity
parameter to blend between the cartoon image
| | 01:14 | and the original image.
| | 01:16 | But you also have all these
blending modes to choose from.
| | 01:19 | Feel free to apply any of these blending
modes, but I am going to use Color Dodge.
| | 01:24 | What Color Dodge does is brighten up
all the midtones, but it also keeps the
| | 01:30 | dark lines that the Cartoon Effect created.
| | 01:32 | Of course, depending on how to you
set up cartoon, you may want to pick a
| | 01:36 | different blending mode, or maybe you
don't even need CC Composite at all.
| | 01:41 | If the effect is little bright, you can
use the Opacity value to mix between the
| | 01:46 | cartoon effect and the
original on top with Color Dodge.
| | 01:51 | Don't forget to disable the solo switch,
so you can see the grid and
| | 01:55 | block dissolve again.
| | 01:57 | In the next movie, I'll show you how
we duplicated this Pre-Comp and then
| | 02:00 | created the other versions for
the Glider and the Windsurfer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Duplicating precomps| 00:07 | If you remember, in the final animation
we actually had three video screens, the
| | 00:12 | Skater, the Glider, and the Windsurfer.
| | 00:16 | Now that we have done all this work
with the Skater movie, it's very simple to
| | 00:20 | create duplicate comps for
the other two video panels.
| | 00:23 | I will bring the Project panel forward.
| | 00:25 | We've actually provided in the Finished
Comps folder, inside the Precomps folder, all the
| | 00:31 | duplicate comps that you will need.
| | 00:32 | For instance, here is the Skater_
finished comp and the Reflection, the Glider
| | 00:38 | and the Glider Reflection, the
Windsurfer and the Windsurfer Refection.
| | 00:43 | But if you are creating these elements
with your own footage or just curious how
| | 00:48 | we created these duplicate comps,
let me show you how easy that is.
| | 00:51 | I will return to the Skater comp that's in
the MyPrecomps folder, and I will duplicate it.
| | 00:57 | You can use the shortcut Command+D
on Mac, Ctrl+D on Windows, or use
| | 01:02 | Edit > Duplicate and that
creates a duplicate called Skater 2.
| | 01:06 | I will double-click to open it--and
this is an exact duplicate of the skater
| | 01:11 | com--and all we really need to do is just
replace the skater movie with a different movie.
| | 01:16 | Now remember, we did apply effects to this.
| | 01:18 | Press E for Effects. We have
Cartoon and CC Composite.
| | 01:22 | So we don't want to just delete
this layer and add a new movie.
| | 01:26 | We need to replace the Skater
movie but retain all the effects.
| | 01:30 | To do that I'll select the Skater
layer, and then I'll choose the movie I
| | 01:35 | want to use instead.
| | 01:36 | Let's say, it's going to be the Glider movie.
| | 01:38 | I will select Glider in the Project panel.
| | 01:41 | I will press the Option key on Mac,
Alt key on Windows, and drag and drop the
| | 01:46 | Glider movie just anywhere in the comp
and it will replace the Skater movie.
| | 01:51 | I can press E for Effects, and
you can see the effects applied.
| | 01:55 | If you are having trouble with this, by
the way, and you end up with the Glider
| | 01:58 | movie sitting on top, it might be
because your timing is just a little off.
| | 02:03 | Again, select the Skater layer,
find the Windsurfer movie.
| | 02:03 | What I mean by that is when you
select a layer to replace and you press the
| | 02:08 | Option key--let's say I go back to the
Skater--you need to drag and drop, and
| | 02:13 | only after you see it being
replaced, you release the Option key.
| | 02:17 | So remember, don't release the
Option or Alt key and release the mouse at
| | 02:21 | exactly the same time. Let me undo.
| | 02:23 | We will go back to the Glider.
| | 02:25 | I will press Command+K and we will rename this.
| | 02:29 | Let's called it MyGlider and click OK.
| | 02:33 | Now of course, at this point you might
want to tweak your Cartoon Effect and
| | 02:38 | make any other adjustments, because
each piece of footage will look different
| | 02:41 | and will react a little differently
to whatever effects you are using.
| | 02:45 | But let's just move on.
| | 02:48 | I can now create another pre-comp in
exactly the same way, Command+D to
| | 02:52 | Duplicate, open Skater 2, and this
will be called MyWindsurfer, just
| | 02:58 | to differentiate it.
| | 03:05 | Press the Option or Alt key and drop it in
and then release the Option or Alt key.
| | 03:11 | And again, it tweaks the Cartoon Effect
or whatever effects you are using.
| | 03:15 | And remember, you can also adjust
the layer, resize it, and so on.
| | 03:19 | When you are done, you should have
three video panel pre-comps that you can use
| | 03:24 | when assembling the main composition.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. The DialImporting Illustrator files| 00:07 | The next element we'll create is the
animated dial that appears on the left-hand
| | 00:12 | side of the Video panels in
the first half of the animation.
| | 00:16 | The two inner dials use an expression
to wiggle the rotation, and I also animate
| | 00:21 | it on the tick marks around
the outside of each circle.
| | 00:24 | We are not expecting you to create
anything in Illustrator, so if you don't
| | 00:28 | have it that's fine.
| | 00:30 | We did want to include some Illustrator
layered files so you can see how you
| | 00:33 | would work with them, because it's
quite common for a motion graphics designer
| | 00:37 | to work with Illustrator files that are
supplied by a client or another graphic designer.
| | 00:42 | So for now I am going to select the
MyPrecomps folder, press Command+I to
| | 00:47 | import, and then I am going to navigate to
the Sources folder and select the Dial.ai file.
| | 00:54 | You'll notice there is a pop-up at
the bottom that says Import As Footage,
| | 00:59 | Composition or Composition - Retain layer Sizes.
| | 01:02 | The terminology inside this
dialog has changed in recent versions.
| | 01:07 | But generally it means that if you
import as footage--any layers in the
| | 01:11 | Illustrator file are flattened or
merged--and you'll only get one piece of
| | 01:16 | footage inside After Effects.
| | 01:18 | The next option, Composition, will
import the layers, create a composition, but
| | 01:23 | each layer will be the same size
as of the Illustrator artboard.
| | 01:28 | In this case we are going to import
it as Composition - Retain layer Sizes.
| | 01:32 | This means that every layer will only be
as big as it needs to be and the anchor
| | 01:37 | point will be in the center of every layer.
| | 01:40 | So we'll select that, we'll click Open,
and in the Project panel you'll see a
| | 01:45 | composition called Dial and
also a folder called Dial layers.
| | 01:50 | These are the individual layers,
and these match the layer names
| | 01:53 | inside Illustrator.
| | 01:55 | If I double-click the Comp, at first you
might see only some white text on black.
| | 02:01 | That's because our background color is black
and all of the other elements are also black.
| | 02:06 | I'll toggle on the Transparency Grid,
and now you can see that the white text
| | 02:10 | appears on a black stroked circle. And I
have also two more layers which we call
| | 02:16 | the outer ring and the inner ring.
| | 02:19 | In the timeline, you can see these as
inner ring, outer ring, and event names.
| | 02:24 | layer number four, the Guides layer,
is not actually doing anything, so you
| | 02:28 | can delete that. I have a tendency in
Illustrator of putting all the guides
| | 02:32 | on a separate layer.
| | 02:33 | For some reason I find it easier to
toggle on and off the visibility and lock
| | 02:38 | the guides from the layer panel.
| | 02:39 | Now when you import a layered
Illustrator file, you have to remember that
| | 02:44 | Illustrator only defines the width
and the height of the composition, but
| | 02:49 | you have to open the Composition Settings
in order to check all the other parameters.
| | 02:54 | The width and height of the
composition is determined by the width and height
| | 02:58 | of the artboard inside Illustrator, and
the Pixel Aspect Ratio will always be Square.
| | 03:04 | there is a Frame Rate, Resolution and
Duration and Background Color, these
| | 03:09 | parameters are all set by the
last composition you created.
| | 03:13 | So check that your frame rate is 29.97.
| | 03:17 | I think 5 seconds is fine. We are only
using it at the first half of the animation.
| | 03:21 | But I do want the background color to be
black because that way I always have to
| | 03:25 | have the Transparency Grid on.
| | 03:27 | So I'll just make that white, click OK,
and we'll click OK. And now we have the
| | 03:32 | option whether or not you
turn on the Transparency Grid.
| | 03:36 | Remember that the background color
will not be visible when you nest it in
| | 03:40 | the next composition.
| | 03:41 | If the Illustrator files are looking a
little crunchy, that's probably because
| | 03:46 | the magnification is set to fit up to 100%.
| | 03:50 | If you set magnification to 100%, the
layer should look much sharper, because
| | 03:55 | now they're not using nearest neighbor.
| | 03:57 | I'll toggle the Switches and modes column,
so now I'm looking at the Switches and
| | 04:02 | remind you that the Quality switch is
very important for Illustrator layers.
| | 04:07 | Only when Illustrator layers are in best
quality will you see any anti-aliasing.
| | 04:12 | Feel free to toggle those to draft,
just so you can see the difference.
| | 04:16 | Now it doesn't matter
what magnification you're at.
| | 04:19 | You have no anti-aliasing when
you're in Draft Quality mode.
| | 04:24 | Fortunately, best quality is the default,
so you shouldn't have to worry about
| | 04:28 | the quality setting.
| | 04:29 | To the left of the Quality switch, is
to Continuously Rasterize switch, and this
| | 04:34 | is important for vector
layers like Illustrator files.
| | 04:38 | Normally when this switch is turned
off, the Illustrator vector files are
| | 04:43 | imported placed in the comp
and rasterized into pixels.
| | 04:47 | Right now we haven't done
anything with this layer, so we only
| | 04:51 | have transformations.
| | 04:53 | But if we were to apply masks and
effects, the rendering order would be masks,
| | 04:58 | then effects, then transformations.
| | 05:01 | But when you enable the Continuously
Rasterize switch, any transformations are
| | 05:06 | rendered first and then the masks
are applied and then the effects.
| | 05:11 | In this particular case it's not
important whether or not you continuously
| | 05:15 | rasterize, so I'll just turn that off for now.
| | 05:18 | But no matter whether that switch is
enabled or not, remember that you're always
| | 05:22 | seeing pixels in the composition.
| | 05:24 | So in the next movie we are going to
copy the paths for the inner and outer ring
| | 05:29 | and paste them to the respective layers.
| | 05:32 | That way we'll be able to animate on
the tick marks using the stroke effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with paths and masks| 00:07 | For this element we'd like to animate
on these little tick marks over time.
| | 00:12 | This is not as straightforward as it looks.
| | 00:14 | While the tick marks are individual
paths inside Illustrator, inside After Effects
| | 00:19 | they all appear on one layer.
| | 00:21 | So let's go get the paths from
Illustrator and we will paste them on top of the
| | 00:25 | pixels that you see here.
| | 00:27 | The easiest way to do that is to
select the inner ring layer and then
| | 00:31 | select Edit > Edit Original.
| | 00:34 | This will open Adobe Illustrator for you,
and that was quick since I already had
| | 00:39 | it opened in the background.
| | 00:40 | So these are the layers I am working with.
| | 00:43 | Make sure you can see the layer panel
so you can examine the individual layers.
| | 00:47 | And let's concentrate on the
first layer for now, the inner ring.
| | 00:51 | When I twirl down the inner ring layer,
you can see the layer is composed of
| | 00:55 | multiple paths, and the last one is the circle.
| | 00:59 | Notice as you select layers inside
Illustrator, the artwork on those layers is
| | 01:04 | not actually selected.
| | 01:05 | So if I just click on inner ring and copy,
I'm not actually copying any objects.
| | 01:11 | To select an object that's on a layer,
you can click on the right-hand side of
| | 01:14 | the layer panel or on any
of these little buttons.
| | 01:17 | Of course, you can Shift-click
to select multiple items.
| | 01:21 | To select all of the paths on
this layer, I can either click on the
| | 01:24 | right-hand side, click on the button,
I can Alt-click or Option-click on the
| | 01:29 | name of the layer itself.
| | 01:31 | Now you will see that all of the objects on
this layer are selected, so now we can copy.
| | 01:36 | Edit > Copy. I will return to After Effects,
make sure the layer is still selected
| | 01:44 | inside After Effects.
| | 01:45 | Now I can select Edit > Paste.
| | 01:49 | And if at first you don't see anything,
just click on the Masks Visibility button
| | 01:54 | at the bottom left-hand
corner of the Comp panel.
| | 01:56 | I'm not sure what color your masks
are appearing, but mine are in blue.
| | 02:00 | But if you find your color is maybe
yellow or is not very helpful, simply twirl
| | 02:05 | down Masks, click on the color,
and you can pick any color you like.
| | 02:09 | It's really not important.
| | 02:11 | When I pasted the masks, I got
everything from Mask 1 to Mask 11.
| | 02:15 | Sometimes it's a little hard to figure
out which one is which, except I can tell
| | 02:21 | that the circle is Mask number one,
and that's because it has a mode pop-up.
| | 02:26 | Only masks that are closed
will have this mode pop-up.
| | 02:30 | And I will set it to None so it
doesn't actually create any transparency.
| | 02:35 | I will just zoom in here a little bit.
| | 02:38 | And as you click through Mask 2, Mask 3,
Mask 4, it's very hard to see which one
| | 02:45 | is actually selected.
| | 02:46 | You will notice the difference between
a mask that's not selected and a mask
| | 02:50 | that is selected. And yes, it's very subtle.
| | 02:54 | In this case, it's not actually important
that I can tell which mask is which.
| | 02:58 | But when you are working on another
job, this might be really critical.
| | 03:02 | So let me show you a few tips.
| | 03:04 | The first thing you might want to try is
making those mask points a little bit bigger.
| | 03:08 | Under After Effects > Preferences >
General you can increase the Path Point Size,
| | 03:13 | let's say we make it 8 or 10,
something like that.
| | 03:18 | Nowadays, the points are a little bit
bigger so you can see them a little easier.
| | 03:22 | Another thing you might want to try is just
changing the color on some of the mask points.
| | 03:26 | Like that's a blue one. The
next one I could make orange.
| | 03:30 | So if I spent the time and gave each
one a color, at least I will be able to
| | 03:34 | tell which one is which.
| | 03:35 | Here is an even simpler way.
| | 03:38 | Go to the layer menu and toggle on an
Option under Mask to Hide Locked Masks.
| | 03:45 | What this means is that if you
lock a mask, it will be hidden.
| | 03:48 | You will notice there is a Lock button here.
| | 03:51 | As you toggle this on and off,
you can see which one is which.
| | 03:59 | So I can see that's the circle.
| | 04:00 | I can even name it circle.
| | 04:02 | Again, this level of detail is not
important for this job, but it might be
| | 04:07 | depending on what you are doing.
| | 04:09 | The only thing we are concerned about
is the order in which the masks appear,
| | 04:14 | and that's because when we start
animating it, this circle will wipe on
| | 04:18 | first, followed by Mask 2.
| | 04:21 | And Mask 2 is the mask
that appears at 12 o'clock.
| | 04:25 | So when I animate it, the sequence
will start with the circle and then start
| | 04:30 | animating around clockwise from 12 o'clock.
| | 04:33 | If that's not the order you want, you
can either reorder your masks now or do it
| | 04:37 | later after you have set up the
animation with the Stroke effect,
| | 04:40 | and that's what we'll do
in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the Stroke effect| 00:07 | In the previous movie we copied the
paths from Illustrator and applied them to
| | 00:12 | the same layer in After Effects,
and they appear as masks.
| | 00:16 | The next step is to apply the Stroke effect.
| | 00:19 | You will find that under Effect > Generate > Stroke.
| | 00:23 | The default settings applies a white
color stroke with a 2-pixel border, and it
| | 00:28 | only applies it to the first path that it sees.
| | 00:31 | Now we would like to apply the stroke to all
of these paths and animate them sequentially.
| | 00:36 | So make sure you toggle on All Masks,
and let's select a different color--
| | 00:41 | something we can see, like a bright red.
| | 00:44 | That should make this
Stroke Effect easier to see.
| | 00:46 | You can also toggle off Mask Visibility
if you'd like to see the layer more clearly.
| | 00:51 | So let's review what the
Stroke effect is actually doing.
| | 00:55 | It's rendering a stroke using the
masks, and it's placing the stroke on top
| | 01:00 | of the original layer.
| | 01:02 | If you reduce your Brush Size, you can
see that the black stroke is underneath.
| | 01:06 | But the Stroke Effect allows you to
regenerate that stroke using whatever color
| | 01:11 | you want, whatever width, and it
also allows you to animate it.
| | 01:15 | So one thing we will need to do is to
get rid of the underlying pixels, and you
| | 01:20 | do that by changing the Paint Style
from On Original Image to On Transparent.
| | 01:27 | Now the original black pixels disappear,
but when I increase the Brush Size
| | 01:33 | I only see the line that the
Stroke effect is generating.
| | 01:36 | So we will set the Size to 2 for now,
and let's look at how to animate it.
| | 01:40 | There are two parameters that
you can animate, Start and End.
| | 01:44 | So go ahead and scrub those
just so you can see how they work.
| | 01:48 | You will notice the Start will wipe off
the stroke, and it would also wipe it on
| | 01:53 | if I go from 100 back to 0, but
it wipes it on counter-clockwise.
| | 01:57 | If we scrub the End parameter from
100 to 0, it wipes off the strokes, and if
| | 02:03 | I go from 0 to 100, it wipes on the circle
clockwise and then the little tick marks.
| | 02:12 | So that looks like what I like to do.
| | 02:12 | So let's turn on the Stopwatch for
End, set our first keyframe to 0.
| | 02:17 | Notice I'm at time 0, so let's move a
few seconds in, maybe a couple of seconds.
| | 02:22 | And we will set the End parameter to 100%.
| | 02:27 | When I RAM Preview, there is my animation.
| | 02:29 | So let's do that again with the outer ring.
| | 02:33 | We will select it, select Edit > Edit
Original, and that will open Illustrator and
| | 02:40 | then we will select all
the art that's on that layer.
| | 02:43 | Now we can copy, Edit > Copy. We'll
jump back to After Effects, Command+Tab.
| | 02:50 | The outer ring layer is still selected.
| | 02:53 | Edit > Paste, and that will paste the masks.
| | 02:57 | I will press M so you can see them.
| | 02:58 | But we don't need to make any
changes unless you want to reorder them.
| | 03:02 | The only mask I need to check is
that the first mask is the circle.
| | 03:06 | So we will Toggle On our Visibility,
and let's see which one this is.
| | 03:10 | Yeah, that looks like it's the circle.
| | 03:13 | So we will twirl that up.
| | 03:14 | Since we have already set up the Stroke
effect, you can just copy it either from
| | 03:19 | the timeline or from the Effect Controls panel.
| | 03:24 | Press Edit > Copy, select the
outer ring, and Edit > Paste.
| | 03:30 | That should give us exactly the same animation.
| | 03:33 | And you can see I made a classic mistake.
| | 03:35 | I didn't check where the current time
marker was when I pasted those keyframes.
| | 03:39 | Fortunately, this is easy to fix.
| | 03:41 | I will press Home, click on the word
End to select both keyframes, and when I
| | 03:47 | drag them back I will add the Shift
key and they will just snap to the
| | 03:51 | beginning of the comp.
| | 03:53 | So right now we're just getting the basics down.
| | 03:55 | What you might call the bones of the animation.
| | 03:57 | Once we nest this in the main
composition, you can revisit this animation,
| | 04:02 | change the speed, maybe
stagger them on, and so on.
| | 04:05 | In the next movie, we will add
some color to the outer ring.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tinting the event names| 00:07 | In the last couple of movies you
needed to access Illustrator in order to
| | 00:11 | animate these dials.
| | 00:13 | If you don't have Illustrator, click
forward the Project panel and you could open
| | 00:17 | this composition Dial*starter and
then you can use this comp going forward.
| | 00:22 | Here we've already apply the masks and
animated them with the Stroke effect.
| | 00:27 | If you're following along,
just ignore that little tip.
| | 00:30 | I'll close that comp and return
to this comp we were working with.
| | 00:33 | In this movie we're going to apply some
color to the Effect names in the outer ring.
| | 00:39 | In Illustrator, this is composed of
white text, and it sits on top of a
| | 00:44 | black stroke circle.
| | 00:46 | So select the layer, event names, and
let me show you two effects that are very
| | 00:50 | handy for applying color to Illustrator layers.
| | 00:53 | My go-to effect is Generate > Fill.
| | 00:57 | If your Illustrator layer is just one
color, the Fill effect is wonderful
| | 01:01 | because all it does is take a color and
fills the Alpha channel with that color.
| | 01:06 | And the opacity value blends between
transparency and whatever color you have
| | 01:12 | in the Fill effect.
| | 01:13 | So this is a great effect which is
replacing the color of a simple object.
| | 01:17 | For instance, when I have those black
lines for both the outer and inner ring,
| | 01:21 | if I didn't want to animate them and I
just wanted to make them red, I could
| | 01:25 | have simply applied the Fill effect.
| | 01:28 | However, it doesn't work for the
event names because it wants to fill the
| | 01:32 | entire Alpha channel.
| | 01:33 | Instead, let's try the Tint effect.
| | 01:36 | We'll find that under an
Effect > Color Corrections > Tint.
| | 01:40 | What's nice about the Tint effect
is it allows you to apply two colors.
| | 01:45 | One to everything that's black and
another color to everything that's white.
| | 01:50 | So let's say I wanted to make the
black maybe a dark red and I wanted to
| | 01:55 | make the white color--
| | 01:56 | let's just make it a bright
yellow so you can see it.
| | 01:59 | So quite often I will create elements
in Illustrator that are black and white
| | 02:03 | and then just apply the Tint effect in
After Effects, and that way I can even
| | 02:07 | use the Eyedropper to eye dropper from
different colors, perhaps in the background movie.
| | 02:12 | So let's just set this up.
| | 02:14 | I think I'd like something maybe
like a pale orange for my white text.
| | 02:18 | I think I'll leave the background
set to black for now.
| | 02:21 | Again, don't sweat these colors too much.
| | 02:24 | You'll be changing them in a later step.
| | 02:27 | In the next movie, we'll apply the wiggle
expression to the outer and inner ring.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Wiggling the rings| 00:07 | Before we leave this Pre-comp, let's
add some automatic animation to the inner
| | 00:11 | and outer ring, and we'll do that
by using the wiggle expression.
| | 00:16 | We want these layers to animate in 3D.
| | 00:18 | So let's select all the layers
and press R for Rotation.
| | 00:22 | Right now we only have access to
rotating these layers in 2D space.
| | 00:27 | So that's the only animation
they're capable of doing. I'll undo.
| | 00:31 | We'll toggle on the 3D switch for each
of these layers and now we have access to
| | 00:36 | X, Y, and Z Rotation.
| | 00:39 | If you need to remind yourself what
each one does, go ahead scrub the X
| | 00:43 | Rotation, the Y Rotation,
and then the Z Rotation.
| | 00:48 | What we're going to do is apply
the wiggle expression to orientation.
| | 00:52 | But first we'll set up the pose so that
each of the dials has a nice interesting
| | 00:58 | relationship to each other.
| | 01:00 | For the inner ring I could set the Y
Rotation as something like +60, and for the
| | 01:05 | outer ring I'll set the X Rotation to -60.
| | 01:08 | So they're going to start off with this
pose and then the wiggle expression will
| | 01:14 | animate them plus and minus
their starting orientation.
| | 01:17 | So make sure you can see
the dials as you're working.
| | 01:20 | So anywhere after two seconds should
work, and let's start the expression.
| | 01:24 | To do that I'll press the Option key on
Mac, Alt key on Windows, and click the
| | 01:29 | stopwatch for orientation.
| | 01:31 | If you remember from the Expressions
lesson the default expression simply says
| | 01:37 | do whatever I'm currently doing.
| | 01:39 | The composition panel also goes blank,
because it's waiting for some instructions.
| | 01:43 | The expression should already be selected.
| | 01:46 | So let's replace it with the word wiggle.
| | 01:49 | Wiggle. And then type open parenthesis.
| | 01:54 | Remember that you need two values for the
wiggle expression the first value is frequency.
| | 01:59 | In other words how many times
you want to wiggle per second?
| | 02:02 | This particular animation is
not supposed to be the hero.
| | 02:06 | So we don't want to be too distracting.
| | 02:08 | So I think something like
once per second will be fine.
| | 02:11 | Next, type a comma, and the
second value is the magnitude.
| | 02:16 | In other words, the maximum number
of degrees the layer should rotate.
| | 02:20 | Let's just type 25 and that
should wiggle plus or minus 25 degrees.
| | 02:26 | Close the parentheses.
| | 02:27 | That's the expression done. And to
reply the expressions just press the Enter
| | 02:32 | key on the keypad or click anywhere
outside the expression field. We'll RAM preview.
| | 02:37 | It might look a little fast as it's buffering.
| | 02:40 | But it's not too manic when
it's playing back in real time.
| | 02:45 | Now since I've applied the expression to
the Orientation parameter, it's wiggling
| | 02:51 | the X, Y, and Z. If you only want
to wiggle on one axis, you can apply
| | 02:56 | expression just to the X, Y, or Z Rotation.
| | 03:01 | If you like that effect, go ahead
and apply to the outer ring as well.
| | 03:05 | Option or Alt-click on Orientation, and
we will replace the default expression
| | 03:10 | with wiggle (1, 25), press
Enter, and RAM preview again.
| | 03:22 | So I think we are done
with this pre-comp for now.
| | 03:24 | Don't forget to save
you're project before moving on.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Creating the Main CompositionStarting a new composition| 00:07 | Now that Trish has shown you how to
build pre-comps with our various components
| | 00:11 | in it, I'm going to show you how to
take these components and create some main
| | 00:14 | compositions to build our final promo.
| | 00:17 | I'm going to take a peek
at what our goal is here.
| | 00:19 | Our final composition is 10 seconds
long, and it looks like I have a division
| | 00:24 | here at the 4-second mark.
| | 00:26 | So I am going to create two different
main comps, one that covers the first four
| | 00:30 | seconds of the final, and a second that
covers the remaining six seconds of it.
| | 00:34 | I'll close this comp for now,
choose my Comps folder, and go to
| | 00:38 | Composition > New Composition.
| | 00:40 | If you like, you can also click on this
Create a New Comp button down the bottom
| | 00:44 | of the project panel.
| | 00:46 | New Comp, I am going to choose the size
of NTSC Widescreen Square Pixel, we can
| | 00:52 | always render to an
anamorphic pixel format later on.
| | 00:56 | Even though I only need four seconds, I'm
going to set a duration of five seconds
| | 01:00 | just to make sure I have a little bit of
extra handle, in case we decide to do a
| | 01:03 | transition later between our two final comps.
| | 01:06 | Finally, I'm going to give it a
good name such as Main Comp 1.
| | 01:10 | Since the look of our Final Composition's
supposed to be over black, I'm going
| | 01:15 | to change the background color of this
comp to black, just by dragging down this way.
| | 01:19 | Note that if you have an earlier
version of After Effects, background color
| | 01:23 | actually exists as a separate menu
item underneath the Composition menu.
| | 01:27 | In more recent versions, it's part
of the Composition Settings dialog.
| | 01:31 | Once you've made these settings,
click OK. And this is our blank canvas to
| | 01:35 | assemble our components to make our first comp.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Spotting music| 00:07 | Next, I want to bring a copy of our final
soundtrack into our Main Comp so we can
| | 00:11 | edit and animate in time to that music.
| | 00:14 | We like the synergy you can realize by
having your visuals match your audio.
| | 00:18 | Now to save you time, inside the Final
Comp, we've already spotted the music out
| | 00:22 | for you. And we discussed how to
spot music in a previous After Effects
| | 00:26 | Apprentice lesson, the one on type of music.
| | 00:28 | But let me show you briefly
what we go through to spot music.
| | 00:31 | I am going to select the audio layer
and type LL, two Ls in quick succession to
| | 00:37 | reveal its waveform;
| | 00:38 | you can also just keep twirling
down until you reveal it this way.
| | 00:41 | I am going to type to simplify my display.
| | 00:44 | I am going to drag this panel a little
bit taller so I can see the waveform in
| | 00:48 | more detail and press the
Plus key to zoom in a bit.
| | 00:52 | As we've mentioned in the previous
After Effects lesson, spikes in the audio
| | 00:55 | waveform usually indicate
beats and the onset of notes.
| | 01:00 | Those are good first guesses of where
you might want to place keyframes, where
| | 01:05 | you might want to cut between video, et cetera.
| | 01:07 | Since the waveform does take up a lot
of real state in the Timeline panel and
| | 01:11 | can't take a little bit of time to
draw, we like to set layer markers to
| | 01:15 | indicate where those beats are.
| | 01:16 | Now we are familiar enough with
spotting music, we can almost just look at the
| | 01:19 | waveform without listening to it
and place a lot of these markers.
| | 01:22 | But I am going to preview portions of
this audio, and I want you to watch the
| | 01:26 | relationship between the current time
indicator and this red line and the audio waveform.
| | 01:31 | To preview just the audio alone, I am
going to press the decimal point key on
| | 01:36 | the numeric keypad.
| | 01:38 | (music playing)
| | 01:42 | Now this opening is just a bit of a
sound effect of thunder, but I am really
| | 01:46 | trying to get those strongest beats,
you know the thump-pa, thump-pa of like a
| | 01:50 | kick drum, snare drum in a typical song.
| | 01:53 | (music playing)
| | 01:58 | In addition to those strong main beats,
I'm also interested in picking up some
| | 02:03 | of the stronger beats that fall in between.
| | 02:05 | You'll find with most music that when
you have a basic kick drum or kick snare
| | 02:10 | pattern, quite often you can take the
time between those two, divide it by two
| | 02:14 | and you'll find an intermediate beat.
| | 02:16 | Then you can find that time interval, divide
it by two again and maybe even another beat.
| | 02:20 | And you see that core responses on the
spikes in waveform here and down here.
| | 02:25 | I'll preview it again so you can
see the relationship between the time
| | 02:28 | indicator and the waveform.
| | 02:30 | (music playing)
| | 02:35 | Now we didn't mark all these little
beats, but you could certainly mark more
| | 02:38 | of them if you wanted to, for example,
this is a very valid beat right here.
| | 02:41 | (music playing)
| | 02:43 | Although one after it is
obviously much stronger.
| | 02:46 | And if you listen closely, there is a
cadence of small beats da-da-da-da that
| | 02:49 | fall at regular intervals
between these strong beats.
| | 02:52 | (music playing)
| | 02:55 | Let's look at the rest of this song.
| | 02:58 | This is that indicator where I expect to start
part two, I'll press period again to preview.
| | 03:06 | (music playing)
| | 03:15 | So I have my strong beats marked.
| | 03:17 | I have a couple of the more
interesting in-between beats marked. Then of
| | 03:21 | course, I have marked major sectional
parts, the end, the middle of this song
| | 03:26 | where I might expect to start another
composition or another edit. I'll zoom
| | 03:30 | back up by pressing the minus key and,
of course, the very first beat where the
| | 03:33 | music really picks up.
| | 03:37 | (music playing)
| | 03:43 | Once I've identified interesting
parts in the soundtrack and the audio
| | 03:47 | waveform, it's just a matter of placing
the current time indicator over one of
| | 03:51 | those spikes and pressing the asterisk key
on the numeric keypad to place a marker.
| | 03:55 | I'll move the current time indicator to good
in between beats such as this one right here.
| | 04:00 | Make sure my layer is selected, so
After Effects knows what layer to add my
| | 04:05 | marker to, then press the
asterisk key, and there is my new marker.
| | 04:09 | If I wanted to add a comment to it, so
just in between, then double-click the
| | 04:13 | marker to open up its
dialog and type in my comment.
| | 04:18 | You'll see how just little bit of
text can quickly fill in your Timeline;
| | 04:21 | you'll tend to want to keep these short.
| | 04:23 | Or you can go ahead and move the
current time indicator to some new point,
| | 04:27 | holdout option on Mac, Alt on Windows,
press asterisk and you get this
| | 04:31 | dialog right away, and I'll Cancel for now.
| | 04:34 | To delete a marker, hold down Command
on Mac or Ctrl on Windows. You'll get
| | 04:39 | these little scissors icon.
Click and the marker is gone.
| | 04:42 | Anyway, once I have my music spotted,
I can twirl up my waveform to save some
| | 04:48 | real estate. I want to copy this layer,
close my Final Comp, go back to my
| | 04:53 | Main Comp and paste.
| | 04:55 | And there you see I have my soundtrack.
| | 04:57 | Now one thing you need to watch out for
is having your soundtrack in Pre Comps
| | 05:01 | in addition to Final Comps.
| | 05:03 | If you have multiple copies of your
audio file, it will add together, become
| | 05:07 | very loud, and potentially distort.
| | 05:09 | You can either just be very careful
about turning off the audio switches for any
| | 05:14 | layers that you don't want to hear
audio from, or to be extra safe, you can
| | 05:18 | select the layer and go to Layer > Guide layer.
| | 05:22 | That says only use this layer while
inside this composition, don't use this
| | 05:30 | layer further up the chain should
you nest this into another composition.
| | 05:34 | So if I have an audio track that I am
using just for timing purposes in a
| | 05:38 | pre-comp, I'll make it a Guide layer to make
sure it does not accidentally appear in
| | 05:42 | a later comp that has the final soundtrack.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building the floor| 00:06 | Next, let's build the floor in
this 3D world we are about to create.
| | 00:10 | Trish showed you how to make the two
elements that will make up our floor:
| | 00:13 | the Grid Floor layer, as
well as the Radar circle layer.
| | 00:17 | I am going to drag in Radar first. You
see it's quite a big layer, and that can
| | 00:20 | make it a little bit tricky to figure
out how to center it in the composition.
| | 00:23 | If you are having difficulty centering
a layer in the comp, just drag it down to
| | 00:26 | the Timeline panel and it
will automatically be centered.
| | 00:30 | By default, new layers you
add to comps start at Time 0.
| | 00:34 | I want this Radar pre-comp to be part
of a floor in the 3D world, so I need to
| | 00:38 | enable the 3D layer switch for the Radar layer.
| | 00:42 | Right now the radar is facing me
straight on as if it was a wall.
| | 00:46 | I need to make it a floor.
| | 00:47 | So I am going twirl open its
transformations and play around with its
| | 00:50 | Orientation, or Rotation, to
get it where I want it to be.
| | 00:53 | Now normally I use the Orientation
parameter to pose the layer in the X, Y, and
| | 00:59 | Z rotation parameters to animate the layer.
| | 01:02 | We are not actually going
to be animating our floor;
| | 01:05 | we are going to leave it in place.
| | 01:06 | So you are safe using either Orientation
or Rotation to put it in this proper place.
| | 01:11 | Now remember with 3D layers,
R, G, B equals X, Y, Z.
| | 01:20 | So to lay this floor flat, I need
to rotate it along its Red or X axis.
| | 01:26 | I'll start to scrub the X parameter
and lay the floor down perfectly flat.
| | 01:32 | The easiest way to do that is jut to type in
90 degrees, plus or minus 90 both work fine.
| | 01:41 | Since this is just a 2D composition,
when you look at it edge on, it will
| | 01:45 | disappear because it has no
thickness, but that's okay.
| | 01:48 | We want our floor to be at
the bottom of the composition.
| | 01:50 | To do that, you can either grab one of
its arrows and drag it down, or frankly, I
| | 01:54 | just go ahead and scrub position values.
| | 01:56 | Y is the height in a composition.
| | 01:57 | I'll start scrubbing this until I get
the floor roughly where I want it to be,
| | 02:03 | right around 400 works nicely.
| | 02:06 | It does not need to be a precise number,
but I like to use nice round numbers so
| | 02:10 | I can remember them in case I need
to use those values for other layers.
| | 02:14 | As I scrub the current time indicator
along my composition, I see that a lot of
| | 02:19 | my radar is being cropped off by the
edges of my new comp. That's because it's a
| | 02:25 | bit too close to me.
| | 02:27 | It's okay to push it back further in space.
| | 02:29 | Well, to do that, I can just scrub
its Z parameter to push it further away.
| | 02:35 | Now I can see these layer
outlines as I start to position it.
| | 02:37 | I think somewhere around here should work well.
| | 02:43 | Again, I'll scrub the current time
indicator and now I see that the radar is
| | 02:47 | mostly visible for my entire composition.
| | 02:49 | I'll press 0 in the numeric keypad to
do a quick RAM preview, it's queuing up.
| | 02:56 | (video playing)
| | 03:06 | Okay, that's good.
| | 03:08 | Since I might want to reuse this
position for other layers I want to place on the
| | 03:12 | floor, I am going to select
and copy just to be safe.
| | 03:16 | Otherwise, I control the layer to save
myself some room inside my Timeline panel.
| | 03:20 | Now that the Radar layer is in place,
we can add the Grid Floor on top of it.
| | 03:23 | I'll select my Grid Floor layer. And
this time I am going to use the keyboard
| | 03:26 | shortcut, Command+Forward slash on
Mac, or Ctrl+Forward slash on windows.
| | 03:31 | That, too, will add at center to the
composition, starting at the beginning of the comp.
| | 03:36 | Again, it starts off as a 2D layer
facing us, I'll enable its 3D layer switch,
| | 03:42 | turn it on there, twirl open its
Transform properties, rotate either its X
| | 03:48 | Rotation or X Orientation to get its
lay down flat. Enter -90, just like we
| | 03:54 | had for our radar floor. And now I need to lower
down into the same position as the radar layer.
| | 04:00 | Don't make the beginner mistake of
just saying, "Well, I'll eyeball it," because
| | 04:04 | you might get close but you might be off.
That's kind of hard to see what's going on here.
| | 04:09 | The far better thing to do is either to
remember what value you entered for the
| | 04:13 | position for this radar layer, or even better:
| | 04:16 | you may remembered I copied the position--
well, I'll just select this layer and
| | 04:20 | paste it and now you have exactly
the same position value, both in Y--
| | 04:25 | the height--and in Z, how far
it's pushed back in space.
| | 04:29 | Now this black grid is a bit hard
to see right now against its black
| | 04:33 | composition background.
| | 04:35 | If you are having difficulty visualizing
it, toggle on the Transparency Grid, and
| | 04:39 | now you get a better idea of what's going on.
| | 04:41 | I see that my grid source
is maybe a little bit close;
| | 04:44 | I might want it to tail
off a bit further into space.
| | 04:46 | No problem, I'll just scrub it a
little bit further back in the composition,
| | 04:50 | maybe somewhere around, say,
400 in the Z dimension.
| | 04:54 | Now since the Grid Floor and the Radar
layer are supposed to stay together, if I
| | 04:59 | wanted to, I cold even parent,
say, the Radar to the Grid Floor.
| | 05:04 | In that way, whenever I move the Grid
Floor, the Radar layer will come with it.
| | 05:08 | I am going to turn off my
Transparency Grid for now.
| | 05:11 | And black grid does disappear,
but that's not a problem.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding a video panel| 00:07 | Now that we have our floor in place,
let's put something on top of it.
| | 00:10 | So let's just say this Skater panel layer.
| | 00:13 | Again I am going to use the shortcut
Command+Forward slash on Mac, Ctrl+Forward slash on Windows,
| | 00:17 | to add to the composition.
| | 00:18 | If your Current Time Indicator is at
the very start of the comp, it may be
| | 00:21 | difficult to see the layer clearly
because the block dissolve hasn't
| | 00:24 | really brought it on yet.
| | 00:26 | Go ahead and scrub that Current Time
Indicator a little bit later until you
| | 00:29 | see the entire layer.
| | 00:30 | Again, it enables 3D layer switch.
| | 00:33 | Since we do want the wall to stay
upright there's no need to flip its
| | 00:37 | X dimension, but I do need to change its
height so that it sits nicely on that floor.
| | 00:41 | I am going to type P to reveal its position
and Shift+A to also reveal its Anchor Point.
| | 00:47 | The Position parameter actually tells
you where the Anchor Point of a layer is.
| | 00:52 | Anchor Points default to
the very middle of layers.
| | 00:55 | If I want the bottom of this layer to
sit on the floor this might require a
| | 00:59 | little bit of math to see what the
correct position is, or you can move the
| | 01:02 | Anchor Point to a more convenient
position to make your math easier.
| | 01:06 | To do that I'm going to right-click on
the Anchor Point value, choose Edit Value
| | 01:12 | and say, "Show me the Units as
a percentage of this source."
| | 01:16 | Now that I have this I can say, "Well,
keep the X centered inside layer but put
| | 01:21 | the Y at the very bottom of the layer,
100% of the Y value of this source."
| | 01:28 | When I do so, now you'll see the layers
has redrawn with the Anchor Point at the
| | 01:33 | very base of that layer.
| | 01:34 | Once I have done this, now it makes it
very easy for me to say my Grid Floor's
| | 01:38 | Y position is at 400.
| | 01:41 | Let's go ahead and set the position of
my Skater panel also to 400, and now it'll
| | 01:47 | sit precisely on my floor.
| | 01:49 | If you're having trouble visualizing that,
feel free try one of the alternate camera views.
| | 01:54 | Right now I am looking from the default
camera, which is the Active Camera, in
| | 01:57 | which you can choose a Custom View 1
to view your wall from the side. And now
| | 02:01 | you get a better idea of how
that wall is sitting on your floor.
| | 02:05 | Now just like we pushed the radar and
the gridlines further back in space, it
| | 02:10 | looks like I might want to do the same
with this wall, because right now it's a
| | 02:14 | bit crowded towards the
front of the composition.
| | 02:17 | So I'll go back to Custom View 1, and
I can either grab its Z axis arrow and
| | 02:21 | slide it manually back in the world.
| | 02:24 | Maybe I want those grid lines like
right around there, or go ahead and scrub
| | 02:30 | its value down here in the Timeline panel,
which is, frankly, the way I prefer to work.
| | 02:34 | I think I would like it to be one
of those gridlines, looks like right
| | 02:36 | around there is good, typing a precise
value position of 500, and it lines up with
| | 02:41 | one of those grids.
| | 02:42 | However, I am noticing that it's straddling
one of the gridlines going in this dimension.
| | 02:47 | So I think I am going to slightly scrub
it to X value until one of those block
| | 02:51 | dissolve holes is nicely
centered on one of our grid squares.
| | 02:55 | Now change back to the Active Camera, so
I get another perspective on this, then
| | 02:59 | you need to scrub it this way a little
bit, like right around there.
| | 03:04 | By putting the Skater panel further
back in Z, you'll see we made it smaller, and
| | 03:08 | now I have the entire thing
framed inside our display.
| | 03:11 | And to make sure it is framed, I am going
to bring up the title and action safe areas.
| | 03:17 | And indeed, I am seeing that
the entire panel is inside action safe.
| | 03:21 | It won't be cropped off by the bezel of the TV.
| | 03:24 | I can turn this off, or I can also
use the keyboard shortcut of pressing
| | 03:27 | the apostrophe key.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a reflection| 00:07 | To help visually sell that this is a 3D
world, it would be nice if I could see a
| | 00:12 | reflection of this panel on our floor.
| | 00:14 | If I switch to some of the alternate
views like Custom View 1, you can see that
| | 00:18 | it's just not visible as if the
floors aren't reflecting at all.
| | 00:21 | Every version of After Effects up
through CS5.5 unfortunately does not natively
| | 00:25 | support reflections.
| | 00:27 | There are a few different plug-ins
available that allow you to fake reflections
| | 00:30 | or you can manually build a reflection.
| | 00:32 | Let me show you how to do that.
| | 00:34 | First off, you need to take your Skater
layer and duplicate it to create your reflection.
| | 00:39 | Next, you need to rotate this
reflection copy down into place.
| | 00:43 | I will press R, rotation, and Scrub its X
Rotation, or orientation, to put it down
| | 00:50 | at plus or minus 180 degrees, so it can
act as a reflection. Type in 180.
| | 00:56 | Again, this is where placing your
anchor point at the very bottom of the layer
| | 01:00 | made life a lot easier.
| | 01:02 | When I scrub through X Rotation value,
it rotated right around this hinge at the
| | 01:05 | very bottom of the layer.
| | 01:07 | That's a reflection.
| | 01:09 | But it looks a little unrealistic right now.
| | 01:12 | So let's refine it a little bit.
| | 01:14 | Select that second layer and pre-compose it.
| | 01:17 | You can either right-click on it
and choose Pre-compose or use the Layer
| | 01:22 | menu item, Pre-compose.
| | 01:25 | Give it a good name like Skater
Reflection and choose the first option,
| | 01:32 | Leave all attributes.
| | 01:34 | We already have it in place. We already have
it rotated. We don't want to lose any of that.
| | 01:38 | We just need to send the layer
itself back to our brand-new composition.
| | 01:43 | I will go ahead and open-up that new comp.
| | 01:45 | Click OK, and here's a comp that is exactly
sized time and dimension-wise to fit our layer.
| | 01:52 | It appears right-side up here,
because rotation happened in the Main Comp.
| | 01:57 | To make this reflection more
realistic, I need to do a couple things.
| | 02:00 | One: I want its transparency to fall
off so that it further gets away from that
| | 02:05 | hinge point the less visible it is.
| | 02:07 | And second: quite often reflections
tend to get a little bit blurrier or hazier
| | 02:11 | the further away they are from the source.
| | 02:14 | To make both of these happen, I need a
control layer, a gradient that goes from
| | 02:18 | one edge to the other to
control transparency and blur.
| | 02:22 | To create a gradient, I will make sure
no layers are selected, make sure the
| | 02:26 | Rectangle tool is selected, then double-
click on that tool, and I'll get a Shape
| | 02:31 | layer exactly sized to match this composition.
| | 02:34 | It so happens that the last Shape
layer created didn't use a gradient.
| | 02:39 | If you are seeing something else, hold
down the Option key on Mac, or Alt key on
| | 02:43 | Windows, and click on this icon until
you get the type of layer you want.
| | 02:46 | That's a radial gradient, that's no
fill at all, that's a solid fill, that's a
| | 02:52 | linear gradient, and that's what you
need in this case to go from one color to
| | 02:55 | another from one edge to another.
| | 02:57 | It looks like Stroke also
defaulted off, which is perfect.
| | 02:59 | That's what I need.
| | 03:01 | Again, if you're seeing a stroke hold
on Option on Mac, or Alt on Windows, and
| | 03:05 | click through the available options until
you get this red line saying no stroke at all.
| | 03:11 | When I select the Shape group inside
this layer that has my gradient, I get an
| | 03:17 | extra set of little dots that
determine the start and end of my gradient.
| | 03:21 | So I will drag this one up the top and drag
the other dot down to the bottom of my layer.
| | 03:29 | And if I'm now confident, I place
those exactly where I want them to be.
| | 03:32 | I can twirl open my Shape group, twirl
open Gradient Fill, and numerically set these.
| | 03:37 | And I see that I am a pixel off here.
| | 03:39 | So I am going to enter 0 for that,
just to make sure it's squared up.
| | 03:43 | Next, I want to edit the gradient.
| | 03:45 | I can either make sure the layer is
selected and click on the Gradient Color
| | 03:49 | swatch up here on top of Timeline
panel or click on the words Edit Gradients
| | 03:53 | down here in the Timeline panel.
| | 03:54 | There's a Edit Gradient.
| | 03:56 | I just need a simple white shape
that falls off in transparency.
| | 04:00 | So I will make sure that my color
stops are set to white and make sure my
| | 04:07 | Opacity stops go from 100% to 0%.
| | 04:13 | And for now I am going to make sure that my
midpoint is indeed in the middle of that gradient.
| | 04:18 | I can always tweak this later to
adjust how my gradient falls off.
| | 04:22 | Then I will click OK.
| | 04:24 | Now that I have my gradient, I am going
to temporarily twirl it up to free up some
| | 04:27 | room in my timeline and turn off its
visibility so it doesn't get in the way.
| | 04:31 | Now that I can see the entire layer, I am
going to play around with the blur settings.
| | 04:36 | I will do the transparency part of this
adjustment later, but right on I want to
| | 04:39 | see the entire layer while
I am making my adjustments.
| | 04:41 | I will choose to Skater layer. And if you
have After Effects CS5.5 like I do, add
| | 04:47 | Effect > Blur & Sharpen > Camera Lens Blur.
| | 04:51 | If you have an earlier version of
After Effects, you want to choose just the
| | 04:55 | ordinary Lens Blur effect instead.
| | 04:57 | The two of them are similar, but
Camera Lens Blur is more powerful, and it
| | 05:00 | replaced Lens Blur in CS5.5.
| | 05:03 | You might be tempted to go ahead and
use Compound Blur, but frankly it doesn't
| | 05:07 | look anywhere near as good as Lens Blur does.
| | 05:10 | So I am going to choose this one instead.
| | 05:13 | There's Camera Lens Blur.
| | 05:14 | I am going to make sure I Repeat my
Edge Pixels so I don't get any sort of
| | 05:18 | artifacting at the edges like I have there.
| | 05:21 | I am going to choose my Blur Map.
| | 05:23 | In this case my Shape layer and choose what
Property of that layer to use. Luminance,
| | 05:29 | or in this case I am going to
choose the Alpha, because that's how I
| | 05:32 | constructed my ramp.
| | 05:34 | Now right now I'm blurry at
the bottom and sharp at the top.
| | 05:38 | This bottom edge is what's closest to
my panel in my original composition so
| | 05:43 | that's kind of opposite of what I want.
| | 05:44 | I want to it be sharp here and blurry here.
| | 05:47 | So instead I'll say Invert
My Blur Map, and that's better.
| | 05:52 | I am going to increase blur radius to
get the amount of blur that I like, and I
| | 05:57 | can see that lovely hexagon blur of
Edge Blur, and you just don't get that--
| | 06:02 | the Compound Blur, the Lens
Blur effect is much nicer.
| | 06:04 | And I'm gonna head and choose a radius of around,
say, 10, 11, 12--whatever looks good to you.
| | 06:10 | Now that I have my Gradient Blur,
let's go ahead and fade off this layer.
| | 06:15 | To do that, it's pretty simple. I
will just toggle Switches modes.
| | 06:18 | For the Skater layer, set this Track Matte
to use the Alpha of the Shape layer above.
| | 06:24 | And now it will fade off from
being very visible to being invisible.
| | 06:27 | I will go back to my Main Comp, and you
can see now the reflection fades away as
| | 06:32 | it gets further away from the main layer.
| | 06:34 | Now that reflection looks a bit strong to me.
| | 06:36 | I guess you could say that was a nicely
waxed floor, but again anything that's
| | 06:40 | too perfect can look maybe not realistic.
| | 06:43 | There's a couple of ways
of making it less perfect.
| | 06:44 | One way is just to make it less opaque.
| | 06:46 | I will press T to reveal opacity and
fade out a little bit so that my reflection
| | 06:51 | is imperfect, somewhere right
around there is pretty good.
| | 06:56 | If you feel like you still have too
much reflection, another trick is to go back
| | 06:59 | into your Skater reflection, pick your
Shape layer, open up the Gradient Editor,
| | 07:04 | and play around with the opacity and
midpoint for that falloff to make it
| | 07:09 | persist longer or to fade out faster.
| | 07:12 | I am going to pick something right
around in that area to make it disappear more
| | 07:15 | quickly and have a more subtle reflection.
| | 07:18 | The last thing I am going to do is
parent reflection to the Skater so that if I
| | 07:23 | decide to reposition the Skater its
reflection will come along with it.
| | 07:26 | And to do that, I can just use this pick whip
to connect one to the other. And there we go!
| | 07:32 | Switch back to Active Camera, and that's
what a reflected layer looks like.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding the dial| 00:07 | The next thing I want to do while
building our 3D world is to add another
| | 00:10 | element that Trish showed
you how to create earlier.
| | 00:11 | I am going to back to the Project panel,
choose the Dial layer, and drag it into
| | 00:17 | the center of this composition.
| | 00:18 | Now you might remember, your Dial
layer was indeed a 3D composition.
| | 00:23 | I'll look at it from one of the custom views.
| | 00:25 | But currently in the Main Comp
it's flattened it to being a 2D layer.
| | 00:31 | 3D pre-comps do need a little bit of
extra management to make them look right in
| | 00:35 | a final 3D composition.
| | 00:37 | Drag your Current Time Indicator to
where you make sure you see all your
| | 00:40 | dials, all the elements have been
built on, and for now let's go ahead and
| | 00:44 | solo just that Dial layer.
| | 00:46 | I'll also return back to switches
so I can see my 3D layer switch.
| | 00:51 | Now right now this is a 2D layer. I
need to enable his 3D layer switch to
| | 00:56 | make it a 3D layer.
| | 00:57 | However, we solved the problem.
| | 00:59 | I'll press R to reveal rotation.
| | 01:01 | As I rotate it you'll see
that it's just a flat layer.
| | 01:06 | But that's not right. You made a 3D
composition. Why is it just 2D here?
| | 01:11 | Well, whenever you nest a 3D composition
into another 3D composition, most of the
| | 01:18 | time you want to enable the collapse
transformation switch for that pre-comp.
| | 01:22 | What that does is, in essence, bring all
the layers in that pre-comp forward into
| | 01:29 | the current composition.
| | 01:30 | Then when they are in this composition,
they can pick up the camera, the
| | 01:34 | lighting, basically all the 3D-ness of this comp.
| | 01:37 | So I will enable that switch for this
layer. You'll see the Dial has changed, and
| | 01:41 | now as I rotate around, you'll see
that we do indeed have our 3D widget.
| | 01:46 | It's no longer a piece of flat 2D artwork.
| | 01:48 | That's far more desirable.
| | 01:49 | I zero this out, turn off Solo for
now and it's part of our world, including
| | 01:55 | intersecting with the floor.
| | 01:56 | Now that I have the Dial in the same
composition as my video, I can see that the
| | 02:00 | colors that I chose weren't exactly
right to go along with this video, you'll
| | 02:04 | probably want to edit those.
| | 02:06 | Well, let me show you a trick for doing
that. It's called edit this. Look at that.
| | 02:11 | What do we want to edit is the Dial
layer's effects that give it its color.
| | 02:16 | For example, the event names
layer has a tint effect applied.
| | 02:20 | I'll press F3 to open up
its Effect Controls panel.
| | 02:25 | I want to edit its tint while
looking at the final composition.
| | 02:30 | To do that I'll go back to the
Dial comp, bring the Effects Control
| | 02:33 | panel forward, lock it so that it
remains forward, then bring my main
| | 02:39 | comp back forward again.
| | 02:41 | By doing so, I can make changes to
the Tint effect back in the pre-comp, and
| | 02:45 | that'd be reflected in this final composition.
| | 02:47 | For example, let's pick color, based
on, say, the dirt in the video, like that.
| | 02:53 | That might be bit on the dull side.
Let's pick a brighter area like this or
| | 02:59 | even like this area.
| | 03:01 | Ah, that matches much better. I like that.
| | 03:03 | When you're done, turn off the Lock icon.
| | 03:06 | I'll go back to my Dial layer, pick one
of the rings, look at its stroke color,
| | 03:11 | lock the Effect Controls panel for
this stroke, go back to my Main Comp, and
| | 03:16 | decide what color I want that ring to be.
| | 03:17 | Maybe I'll also pick up
some color from this comp.
| | 03:20 | Now we have some nice whites, off whites
inside the board and his tennis shoes
| | 03:25 | and his helmet. Let's use those.
| | 03:27 | And I pick a color from, say, his shoe here,
use that for one ring, unlock it when
| | 03:33 | I am done, go back to the Dial comp,
pick the other ring, lock the Effects
| | 03:38 | Control for that stroke, go back to my
Main Comp, and eyedropper a different color,
| | 03:43 | like maybe this yellow outside the deck of
this board. And there is my second color.
| | 03:48 | And again unlock when you are done.
| | 03:51 | So now I have some colors for the Dial
that are better matched for this video.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Arranging the frame| 00:07 | Now that we have all of our elements
in this composition, let's arrange this
| | 00:10 | frame a little bit better and
maybe create a good ending pose.
| | 00:13 | To do so, again I am going to turn on
the Title/Action Safe, the shortcut is
| | 00:17 | the apostrophe key.
| | 00:18 | Let's explain these grids little bit better.
| | 00:21 | The outer grid is known as Action Safe.
| | 00:24 | This is a grid that says, some TV bezels may
cut off as much as this portion of your image.
| | 00:31 | In reality most HDTVs today don't cut
off as much, but it's good to be safe.
| | 00:35 | So don't put anything you expect the
viewer to see outside of this outer grid.
| | 00:40 | Inset is the Title Safe.
| | 00:43 | This kind of goes back to old
days with CRT screens that tended to
| | 00:47 | distort towards the edges.
| | 00:49 | So the idea was to keep your text
inside the Title Safe, just to make sure it
| | 00:53 | could be read clearly.
| | 00:54 | Again, this is not an issue on flatscreen TVs.
| | 00:56 | But you are going to find some
disc duplicators that still care about
| | 01:01 | obeying these safe areas.
| | 01:03 | So go ahead and make sure you keep
your text inside Title Safe anyway.
| | 01:07 | When you're working in a widescreen
composition, these inset bars are known as
| | 01:11 | the 4x3 Center Cut, Action, and Title Safe.
| | 01:15 | A lot of people still have standard
definition TVs, and a lot of cable channels
| | 01:19 | and satellite channels are
still broadcast in standard def.
| | 01:22 | What many of them do is they just take
the height of screen and chop off the
| | 01:26 | left and right sides to create
the 4x3 standard def screen.
| | 01:30 | Therefore, you also want to observe the
Action and Title safe for the 4x3 inset
| | 01:36 | just to make sure those standard def
TVs still see what you intend them to see.
| | 01:40 | With that in mind, let's get
these layers arranged a bit better.
| | 01:43 | First off, my video panel is
centered and it doesn't need be.
| | 01:47 | For one thing I need to make room for this dial.
| | 01:49 | So I am going to select the Skater layer,
press P for its Position, see if I can
| | 01:54 | get away with scooting
it off a bit to the right.
| | 01:56 | I want to see where I have some
really interesting Skater action here, like
| | 02:01 | right around here, and I want to make
sure that really cool action stays inside
| | 02:07 | the Center Cut Action Safe part of the screen.
| | 02:11 | The most I could cheat them off to
the side would then be about that much.
| | 02:15 | But that pushes them off quite a bit.
| | 02:17 | Let's pick one of these grid. Maybe
around there or even around say there.
| | 02:22 | Right around 510, 515 in the X dimension.
| | 02:25 | Okay, let's tame this dial.
| | 02:27 | It's obviously too big. It's in front of
the screen, but it's a secondary element.
| | 02:30 | So I want to put it behind the screen.
| | 02:32 | To help visualize and move things more
easily, I am going to take advantage of
| | 02:36 | multiple views in 3D.
| | 02:37 | I am going to first set this composition
to fit up to 100% so it automatically
| | 02:42 | re-scales the image, depending on
how much room I give the Comp panel.
| | 02:45 | Then I will go to 2 Views > Horizontal.
| | 02:48 | I will keep my Right View, Active Camera
so that's what I am actually going to see.
| | 02:53 | And take advantage of this
Left View to do some rearranging.
| | 02:56 | For example, let's look at it just
from the front, and let's go ahead and take
| | 03:00 | this dial--press S for Scale, P for
Position--scale it down a little bit.
| | 03:07 | Maybe--I don't know 75% or so.
Let's try that for now.
| | 03:11 | And position it in Y so that is above our floor.
| | 03:15 | So at least that high.
| | 03:17 | I might want it to float off floor a little bit.
| | 03:19 | So let's go ahead and put it up may around here.
| | 03:21 | Now I want to put it off to the
side and behind the video wall.
| | 03:24 | I am going to switch this view to top.
Make sure I can see all my layers at once.
| | 03:31 | And to do so, I will just save View,
look at all layers, and take my Dial layer
| | 03:36 | and move it back behind the video wall.
| | 03:39 | Now you might find that you have
some trouble selecting the dialer.
| | 03:42 | You actually accidentally
pick the floor and move it.
| | 03:45 | If you are having that issue, go ahead
and lock the Grid Floor and the Radar
| | 03:52 | layers so that you don't move them accidentally.
| | 03:54 | That will make it much easier to
select the dial and move just that.
| | 03:58 | So I am going to drag it off back
here in space to where it's behind.
| | 04:02 | Since it's not important to read, I
don't need to pay as much attention to the
| | 04:06 | Action on Title Safe.
| | 04:08 | It's just something I want the
viewer to see, but not necessarily read.
| | 04:11 | So I am going to pick the layer and
position somewhere around, say here, to create
| | 04:16 | a nice balanced layer.
| | 04:17 | Note that you can also scrub the
values directly down here in the timeline
| | 04:21 | panel as well, if you want.
| | 04:22 | I might scooch it off a bit more to
the side here and pull it a little bit
| | 04:28 | closer forward. Maybe around there.
| | 04:31 | If I want to, I could
even rotate it a little bit.
| | 04:32 | So I am going type Shift+R, give a little
bit rotation so that faces me and give a
| | 04:37 | little more jaunty of an angle.
| | 04:39 | There!
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. The Camera MoveSetting up the final pose| 00:07 | Now that we have a good end pose that
we are happy with, let's add an animated
| | 00:11 | camera around our scene.
| | 00:13 | Now since I am going to be playing
around with the camera, I might lose this
| | 00:15 | pose. And I want to remember what it
looks like, so I'll make sure this display's
| | 00:18 | forward and go ahead and save a
snapshot of that particular display.
| | 00:25 | That will make it easier for me to
come back to this reference frame.
| | 00:27 | Next I'll go to Layer > New > Camera.
| | 00:31 | Shorter camera lens presets have
more exaggerated 3D-ness to them.
| | 00:36 | It will exaggerate the space between layers.
| | 00:38 | Small movements will seem larger, so
when creating motion graphics we often go
| | 00:42 | to a shorter preset just to make our life
easier, just to get more bang for our buck.
| | 00:46 | So I'll pick the 28-millimeter preset, and
I'll make sure that I have a two-node camera.
| | 00:52 | Older version of After Effects default
to a two-node camera where you have a
| | 00:56 | separate position and point of
interest where the camera is being aimed.
| | 01:01 | Newer versions of After Effects have
added a type pop-up directly in the Camera
| | 01:05 | Settings dialog, and this defaults to
whatever you use for the last camera you made.
| | 01:09 | It could be one node. It could be two node.
| | 01:11 | Make sure it's two node
for this particular project.
| | 01:14 | I'll click OK, and notice how
my scene jumped further back.
| | 01:18 | That's because the default comp camera--
the one After Effects uses if no camera
| | 01:22 | has been created--matches
the 50-millimeter preset.
| | 01:26 | But since I chose a 28-millimeter
preset, I am getting a more exaggerated
| | 01:29 | perspective in my scene, and that's why
things appear to be moving further away.
| | 01:33 | So let's push the camera in a little
bit closer and maybe change its height
| | 01:37 | a little bit as well.
| | 01:38 | I'm going to press P to reveal its position
and Shift+A to reveal its point of interest.
| | 01:44 | I can pick up and move the camera
directly in one of the views, or I can go
| | 01:48 | ahead and just scrub its values
directly here in the Timeline panel.
| | 01:52 | So I'll scrub its Z to push it in
closer to my scene. And I am seeing quite a
| | 02:00 | bit of floor here. I think I am
going to go ahead and change his height a
| | 02:02 | little bit as well.
| | 02:03 | Rather than continuing to switch this
left view between different views, I am
| | 02:07 | going to go to the 4 View layout.
Now I can see multiple views at once.
| | 02:12 | I always keep the one at Active Camera
so I can see where I am going to render,
| | 02:15 | but now I have these other perspectives
on this scene: top, front and right.
| | 02:20 | The default again to whatever was the
last positioning or zoom you had set up.
| | 02:24 | It may not be appropriate for the comp
you are working on now, a really great
| | 02:27 | command to be familiar with.
| | 02:29 | So choose a view and use
View > Look at All layers.
| | 02:33 | And that will automatically zoom
things back and center them so you can
| | 02:36 | see everybody at once.
| | 02:38 | You can, of course, also use the camera
tools to customize my layout in these views.
| | 02:42 | I am going to press C, which toggles
through the different camera tools.
| | 02:47 | This icon indicates you are
using the unified camera tool.
| | 02:50 | That works best if you
have a three-button mouse.
| | 02:53 | I need to make sure it's programmed
to take advantage of the middle mouse
| | 02:56 | button. The left mouse button will
act as an orbit. I'll undo. The right
| | 03:01 | mouse button will act as a zoom. I'll
undo again. And the middle mouse button
| | 03:05 | will give me my X-Y pan.
| | 03:08 | Your mouse may not be set up to do the
X-Y pan, so go into the Preferences for
| | 03:12 | your mouse--in this case it's Kensington,
so I need to open up MouseWorks and I
| | 03:18 | need to program that middle
button to be the middle click.
| | 03:24 | As it turns out, I've already set up an
After Effects preset for myself to sense
| | 03:28 | that Scroll Wheel button to be my middle click.
| | 03:31 | I'll close, go back to this display,
| | 03:34 | press my middle mouse button.
Now I get my X-Y pan. Great.
| | 03:39 | Now I can use those mouse buttons to
customize my layout in these views.
| | 03:43 | I use the middle mouse button to X-Y
pan it, I am going to use the right mouse
| | 03:47 | button to zoom in, and I'll press V
to return back to my Selection tool.
| | 03:52 | I am going to press the middle mouse
button, pull things down a little bit here
| | 03:59 | to get a little bit lower in the
composition, compare my previous snapshot to
| | 04:03 | where I am now. I see I was pushed in a
little bit differently and a little bit
| | 04:06 | higher in the frame.
| | 04:07 | Let's go ahead and use the right
mouse button to zoom in a little bit.
| | 04:11 | And I actually think I prefer this
framing compared to my original snapshot.
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| Keyframing the camera| 00:07 | So here is my final pose. I then
want to use variation in this to create
| | 00:10 | something a bit more jaunty.
| | 00:12 | Now the middle and right mouse buttons the
track X, Y and track Z tools work just as expected.
| | 00:17 | However, if I use the left mouse button
to get the orbit camera tool, I notice
| | 00:21 | that the Skater kind of spins
off the screen way too fast.
| | 00:25 | The reason that's happening is a point
of interest is set pretty close to the
| | 00:29 | camera. That's what giving me
this exaggerated movement.
| | 00:32 | So in this case, we're going to undo. Press
V to return to the Selection tool.
| | 00:37 | Move the point of interest to be more in
line with video screen. I will press the
| | 00:40 | Shift key to keep on even keel here.
| | 00:43 | Put it right around my video wall.
| | 00:46 | Proceed to go back to Unified Camera tool.
| | 00:49 | And now when I use the Orbit tool, I
am getting a much more predictable,
| | 00:53 | controllable pane of my scene. Now undo.
| | 00:56 | Okay, this is my end pose. I am happy with it.
| | 00:59 | Let's pick a good time in the
music to end up on this pose.
| | 01:03 | I'll scroll down in the timeline to my music.
| | 01:06 | I see that I have already marked lots
of beats, including this major beat here,
| | 01:10 | which is where I might cut to my next video.
| | 01:12 | (music playing)
| | 01:16 | I like where there's a strong beat but
also way the sound decays, so that might
| | 01:19 | be nice to use this to
ease into a final position.
| | 01:23 | I will go to my next beat later in
time and set keyframes for point of
| | 01:30 | interest and position.
| | 01:31 | Later on I'll ease into those
keyframes so the beat seems to trigger a
| | 01:36 | deceleration in the camera move.
| | 01:39 | Okay, let's set the initial pose.
| | 01:40 | Now if I went to home again--because I
have the Block Dissolve transition and I
| | 01:44 | am really get to see a lot of the
video that makes it harder to frame.
| | 01:47 | I am going to temporarily move a little
bit later in time like somewhere around
| | 01:51 | here where I see more of the video wall,
| | 01:53 | set up my pose, then move those
keyframes back earlier in time.
| | 01:56 | You can go ahead work in the After
Camera View with your three button mouse, and
| | 02:01 | say, maybe I will left click to orbit a
little bit something little jaunty there.
| | 02:07 | Right-click and zoom back a little bit,
to get a little bit more of pose like
| | 02:11 | that, middle-click maybe to pull up
little bit on the scene, and adjust that way,
| | 02:16 | or you can press V to go to your
Selection tool and pull the camera directly in
| | 02:21 | these individual views.
| | 02:23 | And again, if you are having trouble
seeing all layers, select one of the views
| | 02:26 | and say, "Look at all layers."
| | 02:28 | Now it's much easier to grab the camera
and reposition it the way that you like.
| | 02:33 | Select this one, look at all layers, the
side of camera more face on, more pulled
| | 02:40 | off a little bit more of an angle like that.
| | 02:42 | Or again I can press C to return back to the
Camera tools and use those to adjust my view.
| | 02:47 | For example, I will use the right
mouse button to zoom further back.
| | 02:53 | The middle-mouse button to pull down a
little bit so I have more head room for
| | 02:57 | the camera back to the Selection tool
| | 03:01 | I think I like a view somewhere
around there for my beginning pose.
| | 03:05 | I will select those keyframes, move
them back to the very start of comp.
| | 03:09 | Put my ending keyframes.
| | 03:12 | Right-click, Animation Assistant > Easy Ease In.
| | 03:16 | So I will start with a dynamic
move and then ease into my final pose.
| | 03:21 | Make sure my Active Camera is selected--
| | 03:24 | later versions of After Effects tend to
always preview your active camera.
| | 03:27 | Makes a life little bit easier. And
press zero to cue up a RAM preview.
| | 03:33 | You will take a view seconds to go
ahead and calculate this, but I will use
| | 03:36 | this to be able to study my scene in slow
motion and see if I am getting the effect I like.
| | 03:39 | (music playing)
| | 03:46 | That's pretty cool.
| | 03:50 | Let's go back to 1 View so I can
see it even bigger, preview that, just
| | 03:53 | having to repreview it.
| | 03:54 | So this is now at full resolution.
| | 03:57 | If you find previews are taking too long,
you can hold the shift key then press 0
| | 04:01 | on the numeric keypad to skip every
other frame during a RAM preview.
| | 04:05 | But I will just cut ahead in
time to where the preview is done.
| | 04:09 | (music playing)
| | 04:19 | Pretty cool. I am pretty happy with that.
| | 04:20 | I will press apostrophe to
get rid of my Action Title Safe.
| | 04:24 | See that my wall is not quite on a
grid line. You can optionally move it
| | 04:29 | forward if you want to.
| | 04:31 | I might pull it forward like that to
where it looks a little bit cleaner and
| | 04:34 | nudge it over against looks nice to the grid.
| | 04:37 | Now that I have my frame arranged and a
nice camera move in the next chapter,
| | 04:41 | let's add some animated
text to this composition.
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|
|
6. Creating a TitleAdding a text layer| 00:07 | Time to add some text to this composition.
| | 00:10 | To make sure that the appropriate
panels are open, change your workspace to the
| | 00:14 | Text workspace preset.
| | 00:16 | If the Character and Paragraph panels
do not appear, go back to the Text pop-up
| | 00:20 | and choose Reset Text.
| | 00:22 | Now I'll click Yes.
| | 00:24 | I'm going to resize my Comp panel
slightly to make sure I'm viewing this at 100%.
| | 00:28 | I've gone back to 1 View, and I'm going
to temporarily turn off the camera, so I
| | 00:33 | can see my set face on with
no perspective distortion.
| | 00:36 | I'm going to make sure that Paragraph
is to centered text. That'll make it easy
| | 00:41 | for me to arrange my text in this
window, and I don't know what fonts you
| | 00:45 | may be currently using.
| | 00:46 | So I'm going to go ahead and choose Reset
Character to get this back to its defaults.
| | 00:50 | Now the problem with creating lessons like
this is we don't know what fonts you have.
| | 00:55 | So we have to pick fonts that
come bundled with After Effects.
| | 00:58 | So we're going to pick
the nice, safe Myriad Pro.
| | 01:02 | Not the most inspiring font,
but at least we know you have it.
| | 01:05 | Feel free to pick your own font.
| | 01:06 | I'm going to use the regular way to sort out.
| | 01:08 | Of course you can always change this later.
| | 01:11 | I know I am going to need a larger type
than 36, which tends not to be very big.
| | 01:14 | 72 or so is a good headline size
for a standard definition composition.
| | 01:19 | But again, you can change these things later.
| | 01:21 | My text is currently white. That's great.
| | 01:24 | Let's go ahead and start typing using this.
| | 01:25 | I'll go up to Layer > New > Text layer.
That makes sure that my cursor is centered
| | 01:32 | in my panel, and I'll type the name of
this segment, which is Dirtboard Devil.
| | 01:39 | Something that relates to what he's writing.
| | 01:41 | I'll press Enter to accept the text.
| | 01:43 | Now as I mentioned before, Myriad
Pro is not the most inspiring font.
| | 01:46 | You might want to go ahead and try a
heavier way like semi-bold or something like
| | 01:49 | that, and again feel free
to choose a different font.
| | 01:52 | For the sake of those following along
using the apprentice book, I'll set this
| | 01:55 | back to Regular because
that's what we used there.
| | 01:57 | The readability is okay, but I wouldn't
mind making sure that it stood out like
| | 02:01 | as the bright parts of the video.
| | 02:03 | So I am going to add a very small
stroke, not to make it obvious, but just to
| | 02:07 | give it some differentiation
from whatever images behind.
| | 02:09 | I'll click on the Stroke Color swatch--
currently has a line through it,
| | 02:14 | indicating it's inactive--and
I'll set its color to black.
| | 02:18 | I'll make a fairly thin
stroke like 1 or 2 pixels.
| | 02:22 | Important for me, I want to make sure
that all Fills are over of all Strokes,
| | 02:27 | and Strokes are over Fills.
| | 02:27 | It kind of thins out the text;
it doesn't make it look very good.
| | 02:32 | All Fills Over All Strokes makes sure
that the Fill is always forward, no matter
| | 02:36 | how the characters are overlapping.
| | 02:37 | So there's the words.
| | 02:39 | Since we've been creating a 3D world,
and we like our text to act like its part
| | 02:43 | of this world, I need to put it in 3D as well.
| | 02:46 | So it's just a matter of setting the
3D layer switch for the text layer.
| | 02:50 | Next, let's put it down in a
good position to make sense.
| | 02:53 | I'm going to press V to switch from a
Text tool, back to the Suction tool, and I
| | 02:58 | can either drag the Y axis arrow
directly here in the Comp panel, or press P and
| | 03:05 | edit it numerically down in the Timeline panel.
| | 03:07 | I know that I have been putting
other layers like the Skater at 400 Y.
| | 03:10 | That's where the floor is.
| | 03:12 | I could just numerically enter 400,
to make sure it's sitting right on the
| | 03:16 | floor, or scrub it to maybe pull
just little bit off the floor--make sure
| | 03:20 | it doesn't intersect.
| | 03:21 | If my title happened to have
characters with descenders like G, P, Q,
| | 03:26 | et cetera, those descenders would be
going through the floor, and I might need
| | 03:30 | to raise my text higher to make sure
nothing is intersecting with the floor
| | 03:33 | inside this composition.
| | 03:35 | Since this title does refer to what
the character inside the video is doing,
| | 03:39 | I want to make sure it has the same X
position as the video, so that the text is
| | 03:43 | centered relative to my Video panel.
| | 03:45 | To do that, I go down and check out the
Skaters, X Position 513, and type that
| | 03:51 | in for the X position
for my text, 513, centered.
| | 03:56 | They don't seem to line up right
now because they're separated in Z.
| | 04:00 | The text is considerably for that panel,
and the closer you bring the text to
| | 04:04 | you, the more it'll seem to go off the
right edge of the screen, since it is
| | 04:08 | offset slightly right from center.
| | 04:09 | I actually want to put this text a
little bit further back in my scene.
| | 04:13 | Now I scrub the value here 'til it
starts to look appropriate, and this is the
| | 04:16 | case where I might want to indeed look
at it from an alternate view, such as, say,
| | 04:20 | one of the custom views.
| | 04:22 | See how that lies in there
relative to the composition.
| | 04:24 | Might put it right on the Grid line
again, like right maybe around there or so.
| | 04:29 | Or I could go back to my Active Camera
view and turn the Camera back on to see
| | 04:34 | how the text sets relative to the
Camera. And that works pretty well.
| | 04:38 | I do have a problem here at the end where
it is going outside of my action and title
| | 04:44 | safe for my four to three center cut.
| | 04:47 | But remember I was planning to cut-away
form this composition by 4 seconds.
| | 04:51 | Since we've had a lot of time to read
it there, I think it can get away with it
| | 04:55 | sliding out of screen, because I
am going to be leading into the next
| | 04:57 | composition after this.
| | 04:59 | If this concerns you, you go
ahead and slide it further back.
| | 05:02 | Make it smaller or otherwise reposition it.
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| Using text animation presets| 00:07 | Next, I want to animate this text.
| | 00:10 | You can go ahead and create your own
custom text animation if you want to, or
| | 00:13 | you can apply a preset and then
customize to preset to switch your needs.
| | 00:17 | We're going to go down that latter path.
| | 00:19 | Then whenever you apply an animation preset,
its keyframes start at the current time.
| | 00:23 | So I'm going to set this back to the
very beginning of the composition, and then
| | 00:27 | it goes for my animation Presets.
| | 00:29 | You can twirl it open, twirl open
Presets, twirl open Text, and start looking
| | 00:35 | at these according to name, or you can take
advantage of browsing the presets inside
| | 00:40 | Adobe Bridge, and I'll select that.
| | 00:44 | I'm in the Presets folder, I'll
open up Text, and I happen to have two
| | 00:48 | different 3D text folders.
| | 00:50 | 3D Text is one that comes with After Effects;
| | 00:52 | 3D Text 2 is another set of presets available
on the Adobe Exchange web site for After Effects.
| | 00:59 | Since you may not have this folder,
let's go and explore the 3D Text folder.
| | 01:02 | I'll double-click to open it, start
selecting these different presets to see
| | 01:06 | which animation I like. It's not bad.
| | 01:15 | I have a form I'm interacting with, so
I'm a little careful of what I do there.
| | 01:19 | Ah, that would go through the floor.
| | 01:23 | That's getting more interesting. That's fun!
| | 01:28 | And I might go through the floor again.
That's leaving the screen.
| | 01:34 | Some other fun ideas here.
| | 01:36 | Oh, now that footer is
getting more interesting.
| | 01:40 | Yeah, the footers are a candidate.
| | 01:43 | Don't need to flutter out. Okay.
| | 01:51 | Now that's' fun. That gives me a random
movement, and those have some rotation,
| | 01:55 | which does add something to it.
| | 01:57 | I am not doing anything with lines.
I don't need lines throwing down.
| | 02:01 | Hmm, this 3D spike is interesting.
| | 02:05 | And you keep trying out these different presets.
| | 02:08 | Decide which one you think is
going to be appropriate for this
| | 02:11 | particular animation.
| | 02:16 | Don't need it to leave, this is fun, this is
fun, but I think I'm going to go with this one.
| | 02:24 | Again, feel free to choose
whatever one you prefer.
| | 02:28 | Since I've already selected my Text
layer and I've already put the current time
| | 02:31 | indicator at the very beginning of my
composition, all I need to is double-click
| | 02:35 | this preset, and now it'll be
applied to my selected text.
| | 02:39 | I'm going to press the spacebar now,
just to get the spacebar preview so
| | 02:43 | that all of my other guys to be visible. And
there's my text falling down into position.
| | 02:54 | Yeah, I think it's going to work for me.
| | 02:57 | So that's what the preset has given me,
but presets should be thought of just
| | 03:01 | as starting points.
| | 03:02 | In the next movie, we'll customize this
to better suit our scene.
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| Customizing the preset| 00:07 | We have our text animation preset, but
we have a couple of issues with it that
| | 00:11 | give me a little bit of concern.
| | 00:13 | I am going to turn the Camera move back
off for now so I can see better what's
| | 00:16 | going on. And I am also going to
turn off the Title/Action Safe Grid.
| | 00:19 | The shortcut for that is
pressing the Apostrophe key.
| | 00:22 | Now as my text tumbles in, I see some
of it is going below the grid floor.
| | 00:28 | That's not ideal.
| | 00:30 | So let's dive into this preset, I'll
twirl up transform, twirl down text and
| | 00:35 | let's raise that position up.
| | 00:36 | There are few different things you
can do, underneath More Options you do
| | 00:39 | have some control over the Anchor
Point Grouping, but let's explore tapping
| | 00:43 | down in the Animator.
| | 00:45 | A couple of ways of fixing this would
be scrubbing the Y position for the text,
| | 00:49 | so it does not go below the floor.
| | 00:52 | If I want to make sure that I am
doing this right, other than seeing any
| | 00:55 | perspective let's see this
straight on from the Front.
| | 00:59 | That line is my floor and I can better
idea of what's going on there, so that
| | 01:02 | will keep me about where my text is.
| | 01:05 | I see that the Anchor Point
is part of this text animation.
| | 01:08 | Now there is also another possibility, but
how my text is being offset, and yes it is.
| | 01:13 | So I can either set the Anchor Point
back to 0, or just delete that parameter
| | 01:19 | from my text animation.
| | 01:21 | Now when they fly in, my
text will stay above the floor.
| | 01:26 | While you are in here, you can
feel free to change other parameters.
| | 01:29 | For example, if you want to make this
more dramatic, you might want to set the
| | 01:32 | scale to be even larger.
| | 01:34 | I'll scrub this to get a
feeling for how I like this.
| | 01:37 | Straight on this looks pretty huge, but
I'll go back again to my Active Camera,
| | 01:42 | and I'll turn my camera animation back
on to see this in context. I think I can
| | 01:47 | go even larger here.
| | 01:48 | It might be fun to go even may
be even as big as 800% just to create
| | 01:51 | something really dramatic.
| | 01:54 | And you can play with other parameters as
well, such as maybe increasing the blur.
| | 01:57 | Speaking of blur, since this text is
flying in at pretty good speed, it might be
| | 02:02 | useful to enable Motion Blur.
| | 02:04 | Motion Blur makes a lot of the
text animation presets look better.
| | 02:07 | To do that, I need to enable the Motion
Blur switch for the text layer itself, and
| | 02:13 | then to see it previewed in the Comp
panel, I need to turn on the Motion Blur
| | 02:17 | switch for composition, and now I have my blur.
| | 02:21 | I'll go back to start again, press
space. Yeah, I've got a little bit more
| | 02:26 | movement here and a little bit more
exaggerated blur as things settle into place.
| | 02:32 | So I think that's another improvement.
| | 02:34 | Finally, let's work on the timing
and get this timed with the music.
| | 02:39 | But the first thing I noticed is that I
am not seeing hardly any characters at
| | 02:43 | all until I am a few frames into animation.
| | 02:45 | So I am going to select my Text layer,
press the Asterisk key on the numeric
| | 02:50 | keypad to drop a marker to remind me
that's about when the text appears.
| | 02:55 | Then I am going to scroll down to where
my soundtrack is along with its markers,
| | 03:01 | start to seeing what might be a good
marker to time this text animation to.
| | 03:05 | I am going to press Decimal Point
key on numeric keypad.
| | 03:08 | (music playing)
| | 03:12 | That's interesting, we have a beat
here in isolation, but that musical swell
| | 03:17 | doesn't start 'til here.
| | 03:18 | I'll preview that so you can hear it.
(music playing)
| | 03:24 | And really it's a crescendo right around here.
(music playing)
| | 03:27 | Somewhere between here it's
hitting a good crescendo. So again.
| | 03:32 | Yeah, I think I'll use the start of
that musical swell to time the start of my
| | 03:38 | animation appearing.
| | 03:39 | I have my Current Time Indicator set on
that marker. I'll go to my Text layer,
| | 03:44 | drag it until it first appears in
time with that event in the music.
| | 03:52 | I am going to pres U to reveal the
keyframes in isolation. And I mentioned I
| | 03:55 | wanted to end this somewhere around
this ending swell in the music, right
| | 04:02 | around here or here.
(music playing)
| | 04:05 | I think I like that harsh sound right there,
| | 04:07 | Particularly since this already has an
Ease In interpolation applied. Let's go
| | 04:11 | ahead and RAM Preview and see how we like this.
| | 04:15 | (video playing)
| | 04:19 | You'll notice that's previewing a lot
faster, that's because when I previewed
| | 04:22 | earlier all of the independent layers
and pre-comps that made this up have
| | 04:26 | already been cached and save to RAM.
| | 04:29 | Therefore, all After Effects needs to
calculate are the new layers, namely the
| | 04:32 | text layer, to create this preview for me.
| | 04:36 | Settling into position
and then here is the ending.
| | 04:46 | (music playing)
| | 04:55 | Frankly, I think that text is ending a
little bit late. It's taking me away
| | 04:59 | from watching what's happening with
the video. Instead, I am watching what's
| | 05:02 | happening with the text.
| | 05:03 | So let's move this back up to the previous beat.
| | 05:06 | After I start dragging, I'll add the
Shift key to make it snap to that next
| | 05:10 | marker and try that.
| | 05:15 | (music playing)
| | 05:25 | That's better because the text drama
is ending about the time that the video
| | 05:30 | drama is really hitting.
| | 05:31 | I could move this back even further in time.
| | 05:34 | If you're free to experiment. On a
real job we test and test and test and
| | 05:38 | preview and preview and preview over and
over again until we are happy with the timing.
| | 05:42 | And I would encourage you to do the same.
| | 05:45 | But I am not going to make you sit for
20 minutes with me trying out different
| | 05:47 | previews, so we'll settle with this for now.
| | 05:49 | Okay, now that we have our text
animation in place, next let's add some more
| | 05:54 | class to this scene by
adding lights and shadows.
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|
7. Lighting and ShadowsAdding a Spot light| 00:07 | One of my favorite things to do in 3D
compositions is to add a 3D light, because
| | 00:11 | interplay of light and particularly
shadows can really help raise the
| | 00:14 | production value of the scene.
| | 00:16 | So with my Main Comp selected, let's
go ahead and add a Layer > New > Light.
| | 00:21 | The Light Settings dialog remembers the
last light you edited, so you don't know
| | 00:25 | what this is going to be at.
| | 00:26 | I am going to create a Spot light, and indeed
my Light Type has been set to Spot. That's good.
| | 00:33 | I usually start with the color of white
and maybe bend the light very slightly
| | 00:37 | to warm up or cold down the scene.
| | 00:40 | I find the lights quite often tend to
under-illuminate scenes, just because it's
| | 00:43 | hard to perfect the angle from the
light to the layer back to the camera.
| | 00:47 | So I'll often start with an Intensity above 100,
like 120, 125, just to help the illumination.
| | 00:55 | Let's have a basic Cone Angle of 90. You
can edit this later. And a Cone Feather
| | 00:59 | of 50 since I like nice vignetting in my scenes.
| | 01:02 | A new feature in After Effects CS5.5
is a light falloff parameter.
| | 01:08 | Rather than feather, which is what
happens around the edges of a light,
| | 01:11 | falloff has to do with distance, how does the
light get weaker the further objects are away.
| | 01:17 | In this case, I want everyone to be
illuminated pretty brightly, so I am going to
| | 01:20 | leave Falloff set to None.
| | 01:22 | However, something that is
important is I do want to cast shadows.
| | 01:26 | If shadows aren't working, this is
one of the things you need to check to
| | 01:29 | make sure it's enabled.
| | 01:31 | I almost never use Shadows of 100%. They're
just too dense and too dark. I want it to
| | 01:36 | be a fairly subtle improvement to the
scene rather than being very obvious.
| | 01:40 | So I'll set this to 40 and set Shadow
Diffusion to a fairly high number like 20
| | 01:44 | to give me nice soft shadows.
| | 01:47 | Again, you can change these later.
| | 01:48 | I'll click OK, and there is my light.
| | 01:52 | You will notice immediately that my
floor has become a lot less illuminated.
| | 01:57 | To see that floor, I would need to put the
light up above the floor aiming down at it.
| | 02:01 | However, I want to be able to cast
shadows from layers onto the layers behind.
| | 02:07 | So I suspect I am going to
have a fairly low lighting angle.
| | 02:10 | You could add another light just to
come down on the floor to illuminate it or
| | 02:14 | a really good trick is to choose the
Radar layer, type AA to reveal its 3D
| | 02:20 | specific parameters and say just don't
accept lights, keep your original illumination.
| | 02:27 | Notice that I am still accepting
shadows, I am just not accepting the light
| | 02:30 | itself. I'll twirl that back up for now.
| | 02:32 | Now the next thing I am going to do
to make my light easier to position and
| | 02:36 | control is to set this Point of
Interest to a good focal point.
| | 02:40 | In this case, I'm particularly concerned
about the text and casting shadows from
| | 02:44 | the text under the video layer behind.
| | 02:46 | I can go ahead and set up multiple
views and start playing around with choosing
| | 02:53 | the side view, picking a good place to
put the light like right here on the text
| | 02:57 | layer, or I can cheat. I can take the
text layer, type P to reveal its position,
| | 03:04 | copy it, go to my light, type P to
reveal its position and Shift+A to reveal its
| | 03:10 | Point of Interest, this
point I was manipulating.
| | 03:13 | Select that parameter to target it and
paste, and now my Point of Interest is
| | 03:18 | centered on that text and bright at its
feet. It's going to make it easier for
| | 03:22 | me to go ahead and swivel this slide around
later to reposition how my shadows fall.
| | 03:26 | And speaking of shadows,
let's tackle those in the next movie.
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| Casting shadows| 00:07 | Shadows are one of the most render-
intensive things inside a 3D world in
| | 00:12 | After Effects. Therefore, layers
default to not casting shadows just to make
| | 00:17 | rendering snappier.
| | 00:18 | And indeed, you don't want to just
blindly turn on shadows for every
| | 00:22 | single layer. You should think
about what layers are really need to be
| | 00:25 | casting the shadows.
| | 00:26 | Now you remember for the light, I've
already set it to go ahead and cast
| | 00:31 | shadows. That's good.
| | 00:33 | And by default, all layers
receive shadows. That's also good.
| | 00:36 | So now let's focus.
| | 00:38 | I want my Text layer to cast shadows on
this gritty wall behind, and the gritty
| | 00:43 | wall is in front of the Dial layer, so I
do want the video wall to Cast Shadows
| | 00:46 | back there, so two of my
layers need to Cast Shadows.
| | 00:50 | I'll select my Text layer, type AA
to reveal its Material Options, and
| | 00:55 | enable Cast Shadows.
| | 00:58 | The shortcut is Option+Shift+C on Mac,
toggles with on and off or Alt+Shift+C on Windows.
| | 01:05 | I'll twirl that up to clean it up,
select the Skater layer, and use that
| | 01:09 | shortcut--Option+Shift or Alt+Shift+C--
and now you'll see a slight shadow is cast
| | 01:15 | back here upon my dial layer.
| | 01:17 | Let's look at this something more useful,
like maybe a Custom View, so I get two
| | 01:22 | alternate views of my scene to see
how my shadow in a play is working.
| | 01:25 | I'll select my light, start moving it
around until I get a nice shadow pattern.
| | 01:32 | It's kind of hard to put it where I
want from the active camera view, but it'd
| | 01:35 | be a lot easier from this Custom View,
so that I have a more exaggerated
| | 01:39 | perspective on my scene.
| | 01:42 | Let's arrange it so the text
is kind of interesting here.
| | 01:45 | I'm going to the end of my Text
animation and pick a shadow position that I like.
| | 01:50 | Think of tying to get that D to fit
down of that space right around here, got a
| | 01:57 | little bit of shadow falling back on
my dial here. That's nice. And move to
| | 02:01 | a couple of different points
and times--see how things look.
| | 02:05 | And if I like to set my light, type AA
and play with those parameters a bit more.
| | 02:10 | Of course, I want to increase the cone
angle. It doesn't really buy me anything.
| | 02:15 | Or I can reduce it to
vignette my scene a little bit.
| | 02:18 | I think I will put it right around where it was.
| | 02:21 | Light bump up that shadow darkness a
little bit though, just get a little bit
| | 02:24 | drama out of that, somewhere around there.
| | 02:27 | I'll go back down to 1 View, look at
a couple of different points and time.
| | 02:35 | Now the point where the text is trying to
fly in, you will see it is slower to render.
| | 02:40 | It will take a little while to
render, and now I've got some nice
| | 02:43 | interplay taking place.
| | 02:50 | And a little bit of shadow starts to appear on the
dial just as it gets toward the end of our animation.
| | 02:54 | So we have all the components in
place for our main composition.
| | 02:57 | However, I think I can improve upon it
and soak even more, refine it a little bit.
| | 03:01 | So that's what we're going to
focus on in the next chapter.
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|
|
8. Further PolishImproving consistency| 00:07 | I took advantage of the break between
movies to go ahead and preview this composition.
| | 00:11 | Let's see what I looks like so far.
| | 00:14 | (video playing)
| | 00:23 | I am pretty happy with the
animation and the elements that I have.
| | 00:26 | However, it could use another level of
refinement, and this is where you really
| | 00:30 | earn your money as a motion graphic artist.
| | 00:31 | It's not just saying I've got the
camera move done, I've got all the layers
| | 00:35 | there, I must be finished.
| | 00:36 | No, you look at something critically
and go, how can I unify the things better?
| | 00:41 | How can I improve for
the look of my final piece?
| | 00:44 | In this particular case I'm looking
at this end frame, and I really like the
| | 00:48 | subtle lines that Trish created on that video.
| | 00:51 | However, I am noticing the same lines
are much heavier on the floor and stroke
| | 00:55 | is much heavier on the text.
| | 00:56 | I think I'd like to unify
the look between all of those.
| | 00:59 | Well, the text is easy. I just select
my Dirtboard Devil double layer, go open
| | 01:04 | to the Character panel and
scrub down the size of that stroke.
| | 01:08 | 1 is a much more refined look. You
could even do to something fractional
| | 01:13 | like 0.5 if you want to.
| | 01:14 | I think I'll pick something in between like
maybe 0.8. Yeah, that's a fairly good look.
| | 01:19 | Next, lets' refine the grid floor. And to
be able to do this in context, I'm going
| | 01:23 | to use a trick you saw earlier.
| | 01:26 | You can double-click Grid Floor to
open it or press the Shift key to bring up the
| | 01:30 | Comp Mini Navigator and
select the Grid Floor layer.
| | 01:34 | Select the grid solid, press F3 to
open up its Effects Controls and then lock
| | 01:39 | that Effects Control panel so that
when you return to the Main Comp you still
| | 01:42 | have access to its parameters.
| | 01:44 | Now I'll play with smaller Border
sizes, and maybe about 2. And now that's
| | 01:50 | getting me much closer to that fine
line that's inside the video. You can make
| | 01:55 | the border even smaller or don't
overlook this Feather parameter.
| | 01:59 | It's another way of softening those
lines, so they are not quite as hard-edged,
| | 02:03 | and you'll notice that they
look very soft in this video.
| | 02:05 | So let's go ahead and try one and one
on those. That's an improvement.
| | 02:10 | It's pretty close. That's
what two and two looks like.
| | 02:12 | That's an even more subtle
line that matches a video.
| | 02:15 | So now I feel that I have my text and
my floor better styled to match my video
| | 02:21 | and they all tie-in together much better.
| | 02:23 | Now in fact, I think on that text I'll
go ahead and go back down to 0.5, now
| | 02:26 | that I see this very fine outline
on the floor, 0.5 or maybe 0.6.
| | 02:31 | And yeah, I like how that looks.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding a 2D background| 00:07 | I like how my 3D world looks, but
frankly, my world is looking a bit empty,
| | 00:12 | particularly here at the very start of
the composition, because there is a lot
| | 00:15 | of black space and very little going on.
| | 00:17 | I could try to create a very large
background in 3D that pans along with the
| | 00:22 | camera, but frankly that will take
quite a large layer, and it might take a
| | 00:25 | little while to render.
| | 00:27 | Another trick many people use is
they'll just go ahead and put 2D backgrounds
| | 00:32 | behind their 3D worlds.
| | 00:33 | If it's fairly indistinct and don't
have a lot of recognizable objects or a lot
| | 00:38 | of perspective, you can get away with it.
| | 00:40 | So in this case, I am going to go back
to my Project panel, and since I already
| | 00:44 | have the sound of thunder in my sound
track, I went ahead and found some more
| | 00:49 | lightning for my background.
| | 00:51 | I have this horizontal lightning
movie that I've also picked up.
| | 00:54 | I'll go up to 100%, play through
so you can see what it looks like.
| | 00:57 | And that's a lot of fun. Very active lighting.
| | 01:02 | Nice wide horizontal look to it. Might
work well in a widescreen composition.
| | 01:06 | So I am going to go back to my Main
Comp, select my Horizontal Lightning, and
| | 01:11 | drag it to the very bottom here,
so it goes behind all of my layers.
| | 01:15 | I'll drag it so I can start to see some
lightning, there we go. And here is my problem.
| | 01:21 | It's a piece of 4x3 video, and I'm
creating a widescreen composition.
| | 01:25 | Well, there is a couple of ways
of making it fill out your screen.
| | 01:28 | One is to where I click, choose
Transform and say Fit to Comp Width.
| | 01:34 | That's where I am falling short.
| | 01:35 | And this will scale it up by the
precise amount needed to match the width
| | 01:39 | of this composition, and we'll also
scale up the height accordingly by the
| | 01:43 | exact same amounts.
| | 01:44 | Normally, I don't like scaling over 100%,
but for indistinct backgrounds like
| | 01:49 | this, you can get away with it.
| | 01:51 | Now if you are worried that you're
scaling up too much, and if it is something
| | 01:55 | fairly indistinct like lightning where
you cannot tell that the Aspect Ratio may
| | 01:59 | not be quite right, you can get away
with saying Transform just Fit to Comp.
| | 02:05 | This will keep it 100% in the height and
just stretch the width as necessary to fit.
| | 02:11 | This results in a slightly sharper background.
| | 02:14 | However, if you have anything recognizable
back there, something that's supposed
| | 02:17 | to be a circle--people's heads, cars
whatever--you're going to tell them the
| | 02:21 | Aspect Ratio is wrong.
| | 02:23 | Lightning, I can get away with.
| | 02:24 | Okay, there is my lightning, but it's
blue and the rest of my world is kind of
| | 02:30 | this red dirt color.
| | 02:31 | I could go for this contrasting color, or I
could go ahead and make things blend together.
| | 02:35 | I am going to go for the blending approach.
| | 02:37 | So with my horizontal
lightning selected, I'll choose
| | 02:40 | Effect > Color Correction > Tritone.
| | 02:43 | Tritone keeps your black and white
points intact and changes just the midrange
| | 02:47 | colors, and now eyedropper--a
nice bright color from my video.
| | 02:53 | And now I have lightning that
matches in with the rest of my world.
| | 02:57 | Now this lightning is a bit bright.
| | 02:59 | You'll notice that even when nothing is going
on, I still have a fairly bright background.
| | 03:03 | So I am going to follow this with Effect >
Color Correction > Levels and bring up my
| | 03:09 | black point to knock that out.
| | 03:11 | And again, if you're using an older
version of After Effects, you might see only
| | 03:15 | a black and white histogram.
| | 03:17 | This is one of the little improvements
they made in a later version where you
| | 03:20 | actually got R, G, and B separately
displayed in the levels histogram, kind of nice.
| | 03:27 | And you go ahead and bring it up to
make your world black in the background.
| | 03:31 | If you feel like you are just back
to where you started, with black and
| | 03:34 | nothing back there, you can go ahead
and back this off a little bit to get
| | 03:37 | a little bit of a haze.
| | 03:39 | Then play with the Gamma to go ahead
and create a blend between lights and
| | 03:43 | darks that you want.
| | 03:44 | I am going a little bit later to where
lightning is present and use Gamma to
| | 03:49 | dial in the look that I like.
| | 03:51 | How much glow in essence
is thrown in that lightning.
| | 03:53 | Let's go ahead and look at a
couple of different frames here.
| | 03:55 | There is another good lightning hit, like there.
| | 04:00 | I don't want my core to get too soft.
| | 04:02 | So I am going to bring down my white
point, to make the core more solid, then
| | 04:07 | play around with the Gamma to
get the amount of glow that I want.
| | 04:11 | I think that looks pretty good. That was
before and after, much more intense now.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tying up loose ends| 00:07 | Okay, time to do some final polishing to this
composition so we can move on to the next comp.
| | 00:12 | One thing I am not paying attention
to at all is the timing of this
| | 00:15 | lightning versus the soundtrack.
| | 00:17 | Notice that nothing is present early
on, but I remember that my soundtrack
| | 00:21 | started with a sound of thunder.
(music playing)
| | 00:23 | So it would be really good if I had a lightning
bolt hit while that thunder is rolling out.
| | 00:29 | So let's go ahead and click on the
Background layer and start scrubbing it until
| | 00:33 | we get a little bit of
illumination to start this frame.
| | 00:37 | Now one option could be starting with
this low bolt going across the scene.
| | 00:41 | So that's an option. Let's go and hear
that with the music. Click RAM Preview.
| | 00:47 | So I go in a couple of
frames here and hit the spacebar.
| | 00:55 | I like that a lot. I think
that has lot of potential.
| | 00:57 | I am going to go head and mark that as
one option for where you align lightning.
| | 01:02 | But let's go ahead and look for
some other possibilities as well.
| | 01:05 | I might go ahead and wait 'til we have
a really big strike like this one come
| | 01:09 | across for that initial lightning bolt.
| | 01:11 | Let's go ahead and mark that
one and RAM preview that quickly.
| | 01:16 | (music playing)
| | 01:20 | Don't like that as much, but I notice
that I have a really big bolt later in time.
| | 01:24 | So I am going to go ahead and hold
Command or Ctrl, delete that marker, slide
| | 01:29 | back to this really big horizontal
bolt, mark that again now hitting the
| | 01:35 | asterisk key on the keypad to mark selected
layer, and let's do quick RAM preview of this.
| | 01:43 | (music playing)
| | 01:47 | That's another option that I might
like even the more. It has a really strong
| | 01:51 | start, and then it gets to smaller
bolts when I have other things starting to
| | 01:55 | happen in the scene, such as
my text animation coming in.
| | 01:59 | Okay, I have improved my timing there.
Let's go ahead and clean this up and
| | 02:03 | arrange these layers in a
way that makes more sense.
| | 02:05 | Quite often I like to have my soundtrack
either at the very top or the very
| | 02:09 | bottom of my composition.
| | 02:11 | Since I am pretty much done it with
for now, I want to put it at the bottom.
| | 02:14 | Next, I would like to put my cameras and
lights at the top of the composition so
| | 02:18 | I know where they are, and all the
action of my layers happens in between, the
| | 02:22 | text, the dial, the dial is
actually behind the Skater.
| | 02:27 | So just to keep that clear I might go
ahead and put that layer back there,
| | 02:31 | doesn't change the render, but gives
me a mental picture of what's going on
| | 02:34 | visually in the scene.
| | 02:36 | I have my Skater reflection
above the floor and radar.
| | 02:40 | The one other thing I might do this is
since I have these 3D layers on top this
| | 02:43 | 3D lightning layer--let's pick a
Blending mode to allow that 3D layer to better
| | 02:49 | interact with the background.
| | 02:51 | Let's do that I'll toggle Switches modes,
focus on the Radar layer and pick up
| | 02:56 | Blending mode such as Add. That's
interesting, it might actually be too bright.
| | 03:01 | If you want to back off
from Add, try Screen instead.
| | 03:05 | That's a little bit more subtle of
an interaction, or if you like intense
| | 03:09 | colors, try Color Dodge.
| | 03:11 | Now you actually get some color
interaction that's a bit much for me.
| | 03:15 | So I think I am going to go back to
Screen mode just get some nice interaction.
| | 03:20 | Again, this was normal
where there was no interaction.
| | 03:25 | And screen which now unifies ruled a bit
more and everyone is interacting off of
| | 03:29 | each other in the scene.
| | 03:30 | Now you don't want to lose all the work
you have done so far, so make sure you
| | 03:33 | don't forget to File > Save and
something else you might want to do.
| | 03:38 | It's also File Increment and Save. This will keep
the file you just saved intact by itself
| | 03:44 | and create a brand-new version of your
project file that has a 2 appended to
| | 03:48 | the end of the name.
| | 03:49 | This way you can continue working with
this brand-new version of the project and
| | 03:53 | if you don't like the direction you
went in, you can always go back to your
| | 03:56 | earlier version of the project we
saved just a couple of seconds ago.
| | 03:58 | The last comment I will make is this
red lightning is looking a bit intense now
| | 04:03 | compared to the more
natural red dirt in the video.
| | 04:06 | So I think I will tone that down just a hair.
| | 04:07 | I will select the
horizontal lighting background.
| | 04:09 | And you can do a couple of different things.
| | 04:12 | One, sometimes just reordering effects
makes a big difference in how things look.
| | 04:16 | Now you see we have a much reduced
corona and also a much less saturated color.
| | 04:21 | The other approach would be to keep
things intact, keep the amount of the glow
| | 04:24 | that we liked earlier and apply one
more effect such as Color Correction, Hue,
| | 04:29 | Saturation, and just pull back that
saturation a little bit, and now that
| | 04:34 | lightning glow is much more in line
with the color of the dirt behind it.
| | 04:38 | Okay, that's Main Comp 1. Time to turn
our attention to Main Comp 2 and putting
| | 04:42 | everything together in a final composition.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Finishing the CompsOverview of Main Comp 2| 00:07 | Main Comp 1 is intended to serve as
the first half of this promo that you
| | 00:11 | have been building.
| | 00:12 | Main Comp 2 will have many of the same
elements; therefore, we are not going
| | 00:16 | to make you rebuild the whole thing from
scratch. But we have left you a few steps left to do.
| | 00:20 | First off, let's see where we are heading.
| | 00:22 | The final project is saved
down here in the Finished Movie.
| | 00:24 | I'll double-click that to open up in
the Footage panel, press 0 on numeric
| | 00:28 | keypad to RAM preview it.
It takes just second to load.
| | 00:34 | (video playing)
| | 00:44 | You will see that part 2 has two video
panels on it as opposed to one, and that
| | 00:49 | the two rotate as a unit to transition
between the two videos and also to reveal
| | 00:54 | the final bit of text.
| | 00:56 | So let us see what we have built so
far and what's left for you to do.
| | 00:59 | I am going to go back to the Comps
folder and open up Main Comp 2*starter.
| | 01:04 | We have left you a lot of notes
to show you what's doing what.
| | 01:06 | Here is the music soundtrack
that's already been spotted for you.
| | 01:10 | Here is our Camera move, I am going
to press U to reveal its keyframes as
| | 01:15 | expressions, and you will see it's a little bit
more complex from what you did in Main Comp 1.
| | 01:19 | To get a better idea of what's going
on, I am going to switch quickly to 4 Views,
| | 01:23 | and to make editing 3D more interactive,
I am going to switch Fast Previews from Off.
| | 01:29 | This is what I normally prefer
because it has the highest quality
| | 01:31 | to OpenGL-Interactive.
| | 01:33 | That will allow our 3D elements to
be moved around much more quickly.
| | 01:37 | Once I do so, and move the current time
indicator, you can follow the Camera move.
| | 01:42 | It comes into this initial pose,
holds for a while--and in fact, you see the
| | 01:47 | whole keyframe icon here exiting this keyframe--
| | 01:51 | holds and then has one more
move to finish off the animation.
| | 01:56 | To make sure that the camera moves
are not completely boring, we did add a
| | 02:00 | very slight wiggle, two pixels at a rate
of twice a second--which is added under
| | 02:05 | these keyframes and, therefore, gives us a
little bit of jitter during that whole position.
| | 02:09 | We have got three different titles,
our ending Tonite, and the titles for the
| | 02:14 | two different videos. And here's the
video walls with the reflections that you
| | 02:18 | are used to building.
| | 02:20 | We also have the exact same Grid Floor,
Radar, and 2D Background elements that
| | 02:24 | you are used to earlier.
| | 02:26 | I will switch from modes back to
switches so you can see which layers have their
| | 02:30 | 3D layer switch enabled and which ones
don't. One more point, you remember when
| | 02:35 | we were talking about spotting this
audio, that we say we are going to divide the
| | 02:38 | final promo into two different scenes,
before and after marker number 2 here,
| | 02:43 | right around 4 seconds.
| | 02:44 | We built Main Comp 2 to have some
additional video present before that point in
| | 02:50 | time just to give the editors some
handle in case they want to do a cross fade
| | 02:54 | or some other transition between our parts.
| | 02:56 | In general, if you are creating elements,
it's a good idea to always create a
| | 02:59 | little bit more time than you think
you will need just to allow you to do a
| | 03:02 | little bit of a slip edit, a little bit of
a retiming--bit of a transition later on.
| | 03:07 | Okay, that's the lay of the land.
| | 03:09 | Our focus is how do we take these two
different video walls for the Glider and
| | 03:14 | for the Windsurfer and do that fancy
swivel transition so we go from revealing
| | 03:18 | one to revealing the other.
| | 03:19 | That's what we'll do in
the next couple of movies.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Grouping layers| 00:07 | We have opened up Main Comp 2*starter, and
in the previous movie we set it to 4 Views.
| | 00:12 | Feel free to set it to something
different such as 2 Views - Horizontal, or if you
| | 00:15 | like, you can even go all the way down to
one 1 View and just switch your 3D View
| | 00:19 | pop-up to change what you are
looking at any given moment.
| | 00:22 | I'm going to work in 2 Views
Horizontal right now.
| | 00:24 | I will make my Right View my Active Camera,
my Left View the View from the top of my world.
| | 00:30 | These two video walls form
two faces of an imaginary cube.
| | 00:36 | Ideally, I want to spin this
imaginary cube on its imaginary center.
| | 00:40 | I am going to select the Glider
layer, which is one video wall, then hold
| | 00:44 | down Command on Mac, or Ctrl on Windows, to
click on Windsurfer and select that as well.
| | 00:48 | What I can start to do with this
composition, I placed the anchor points for
| | 00:53 | both of those video walls on their
corners to make it easy for me to align them
| | 00:58 | to the exact same point.
| | 00:59 | I can use this positional information
to help me determine where to put another
| | 01:03 | layer to rotate these layers around.
| | 01:05 | Whenever you want to treat a group
of layers as if there are one unit, an
| | 01:08 | excellent tool is Layer > New > Null Object,
and there it is initially in 2D in the
| | 01:15 | middle of my viewers.
| | 01:16 | I am going to go ahead and select Layer
> Solid Settings, because Nulls really
| | 01:21 | are just a variation on solid. And rename
this Null Parent so I can keep track of it.
| | 01:26 | I'm going to enable its 3D layer
switch, and then I am going to press P to
| | 01:31 | reveal its position.
| | 01:33 | If you cannot see it immediately in your
Top view, there is a chance it's off-screen.
| | 01:38 | You can do a couple of different things
such as do a view, Look at All layers.
| | 01:42 | You can go ahead and press C to bring a
Camera tools and zoom in or out on the
| | 01:47 | slide to make it visible, or you can
just scrub it back in Z space to put it
| | 01:52 | closer to an area in-between those
two video walls, like around there.
| | 01:56 | I am going to press V to
return back to the Selection tool.
| | 01:59 | Next, I need to determine a
good position for this Null object.
| | 02:03 | I am going to select one of the video
layers the Glider layer, press P to reveal
| | 02:07 | its position, copy it, and temporarily
paste it to the position of Null object.
| | 02:13 | So these are all starting from the same point.
| | 02:15 | Now I need to offset it half of the
size of the video wall in X and half
| | 02:20 | dimension in Z. Well, you may remember
when Trish showed you how to create those
| | 02:24 | video walls that their dimension is 650
pixels wide and if you forgot that, you
| | 02:29 | can just go ahead and select Glider
over here in the Project panel and look at
| | 02:33 | its dimension here at the top of the panel 650.
| | 02:37 | Okay, once we know that, we can
actually let After Effects do the math for us.
| | 02:41 | For the X position, we want to take that
initial X in that corner and move back
| | 02:47 | to the left, 650 pixels divided
by 2--half the width of that layer.
| | 02:53 | I press Enter and After Effects has
automatically done the math for me to decide
| | 02:58 | that should be 425 pixels.
| | 03:00 | Same for the Z dimension.
| | 03:02 | So I want to push back in space.
| | 03:03 | I need to remind myself which direction to go.
| | 03:06 | Let me see. Scrubbing it, I need
it to go in the positive direction.
| | 03:09 | So I need to add half the width of this
panel to get this back in right position.
| | 03:13 | I will undo, move my cursor to the
right, and say +650 pixels, which is the
| | 03:19 | width, divided by 2, press Enter, 825.
| | 03:22 | Now I am exactly in the middle of this
wall, and the middle of that wall, the
| | 03:28 | middle of our imaginary cube.
| | 03:29 | The next trick is selecting all of the
layers that need to be parented to that Null.
| | 03:34 | I want to select all of text layers
since I want them to move as units.
| | 03:37 | I am going to select the Glider
layer and one of the video walls.
| | 03:41 | I don't mean to select Glider Reflection,
because it's already been parented to
| | 03:45 | the main Glider layer. So it's fine.
| | 03:47 | But I do need to hold Command or Ctrl
and also select the Windsurfer layer to
| | 03:51 | make sure that comes along.
| | 03:52 | You can use the Pick Whip tool to drag
up to the Null object, or you can use the
| | 03:57 | pop-up for anyone of the selected
layers, pick Null Parent, and they all will
| | 04:01 | receive that parent.
| | 04:03 | To keep things straight, I might even
drag Null Parent down here closer to these
| | 04:06 | layers just to group
things together a bit better.
| | 04:09 | Now if I press R for Null Parent to
reveal its Orientation and Rotation. If I
| | 04:14 | rotate it in Y, the axis that goes
vertically through it. You will see that all
| | 04:18 | those elements now move
as a group. That's great.
| | 04:22 | In next movie we will use this Null to
go ahead and animate the rotation of all
| | 04:26 | those elements in time with the music.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the swivel| 00:07 | Now that I'm done arranging and parenting
my layers, I no longer need these two views.
| | 00:11 | I'm going to go back to 1 View,
make sure it's set to Active Camera.
| | 00:16 | And actually, now that I am done
arranging the frame, I'm also going to
| | 00:19 | press the apostrophe key to toggle off the
action and title safe just to clean things up.
| | 00:24 | Let's decide when to time this
animation move for these layers.
| | 00:29 | For reference, I'm going to look
at the camera, press U to reveal its
| | 00:32 | keyframes, and I'm going to drag the
current time indicator back to one of the
| | 00:36 | beats in the soundtrack and listen
a little bit to get a feel for what's
| | 00:40 | happening at what time in the music.
| | 00:41 | I'm going to press the Decimal Point key
on the numeric keypad to preview just the audio.
| | 00:47 | (audio playing)
| | 00:53 | So for my first move, the camera
does land here and the music pretty much
| | 01:00 | calms down from here on.
(audio playing)
| | 01:01 | So I probably want to make my move in
between the camera move animating or maybe
| | 01:07 | even overlap at a little bit.
| | 01:09 | And by the time the music is calmed
down, so we can go ahead and focus on
| | 01:12 | that video wall layer.
| | 01:13 | I'm going to press the J key on the
keyboard to jump back to the next keyframe
| | 01:19 | or marker earlier in time.
| | 01:21 | The J and K keys provide ways of
navigating very quickly between the important
| | 01:25 | points inside your composition.
| | 01:27 | I'm going to enable keyframing
for Y Rotation for the Null Parent.
| | 01:30 | Remember, Orientation is just good for posing.
| | 01:33 | Don't keyframe that.
| | 01:34 | I'm going to keyframe the
actual Rotation parameter.
| | 01:37 | I'm going to press K now to jump to
the next marker in my soundtrack and see
| | 01:42 | which one I want to scrub this.
| | 01:44 | Yeah, that direction.
| | 01:45 | Positive, I'll enter 90x to exactly
rotate around by the correct amount.
| | 01:50 | So this move now goes
from this pose to this pose.
| | 01:57 | Okay, how shall we end this?
| | 01:58 | We do want to hold on this for a little
while so we can see our title build and
| | 02:03 | we can see our video action.
| | 02:05 | So, some point after here is probably
when we want to do our next swivel move,
| | 02:11 | maybe somewhere around the
ending of the soundtrack.
| | 02:13 | So I'll put the current time indicator
back a couple beats earlier and press
| | 02:16 | the Decimal key again and listen.
(audio playing)
| | 02:24 | It's a good decisive bang here.
| | 02:27 | I think I'm going to use that as my
motivator to kick around the rotation of
| | 02:31 | all those elements.
| | 02:32 | A good starting point is to
place a keyframe right on that beat.
| | 02:36 | However, you can toy around later
with moving these keyframes a little bit
| | 02:39 | earlier or a little bit later in
time to anticipate or lag the action.
| | 02:43 | Later in time, we'll show that
it reacts to the sound event.
| | 02:46 | Earlier in time may help build
anticipation towards the sound event.
| | 02:50 | I'm going to try it a
little bit earlier for now.
| | 02:52 | Again, you can tweak these things later.
| | 02:54 | Now when am I going to end my move?
(audio playing)
| | 02:59 | When I listen to that lightning,
I'm hearing two phases to it.
| | 03:02 | I'm hearing a boom, then a second woom later on.
| | 03:05 | (audio playing)
| | 03:09 | Let's look at that waveform.
| | 03:11 | I'll select that layer, press LL to
reveal its waveform. And I indeed see one
| | 03:16 | big bang here, a little bit more body here.
| | 03:19 | I'd say that might be the ending of
that second part of the lighting hit.
| | 03:23 | (audio playing)
| | 03:25 | That pretty much decays from there.
| | 03:26 | So I think I'm going to make that
a position of my second keyframe.
| | 03:31 | Enter 180 degrees to rotate by another 90.
Now we'll see the back side of that video
| | 03:36 | layer with the paraglider going away from
us and our final text, "Tonight at 8 pm."
| | 03:42 | And if the null object is just getting in my
way, I just need to turn off its video switch.
| | 03:46 | I no longer see the red square that
signifies it, but it will still work and
| | 03:50 | everybody will still render
fine since they're parented to it.
| | 03:53 | Let's preview that and see how it works.
| | 03:55 | You'll notice I've already set up my
work area to be just the second half where
| | 03:59 | I want to play comp 2 from 4 seconds onwards.
| | 04:02 | Remember, you can go ahead and place
your current time indicator anywhere and
| | 04:05 | press B to begin the work area there.
| | 04:09 | I'll go to this marker at 4 and press B there.
| | 04:13 | I'm going to press 0 on the numeric
keypad to initiate a RAM preview and since
| | 04:18 | it is 3D and since there is motion blur,
it is going to take a little while to
| | 04:22 | render this preview.
| | 04:23 | However, I used this time of
calculating to see if anything is obviously
| | 04:28 | wrong with my animation.
| | 04:32 | So far it looks good;
| | 04:33 | I just have the text in the ground,
I just have the layer building,
| | 04:36 | reflections look good.
| | 04:38 | Might move this whole cube to line
up better with the grid on the floor.
| | 04:42 | This one I can do later on.
| | 04:45 | Here's the big swivel.
| | 04:47 | You can see that this big
movement is taking longer to calculate.
| | 04:51 | (video playing)
| | 04:54 | I saw something here I didn't like, right there.
| | 04:58 | You can see that the motion
blur on this letter is strobed.
| | 05:01 | You can see multiple copies
rather than one smooth individual blur.
| | 05:06 | That can be a problem with motion blur.
| | 05:08 | The faster things are moving, the
higher the chance they're going to strobe.
| | 05:11 | Well, I can fix that.
| | 05:12 | I'll go up to the Composition Settings,
click on the Advanced tab and go edit
| | 05:18 | the Motion Blur settings.
| | 05:20 | The Adaptive Sample Limit applies to 2D
layers, but Samples Per Frame applies to
| | 05:26 | 3D layers, which is what this text is.
| | 05:29 | So let's try 24, don't press Enter yet
because it'll just close this dialog,
| | 05:33 | but since later versions of After Effects
have this Live Preview, I can see the result.
| | 05:38 | That is an improvement
over 16, but it's not perfect.
| | 05:43 | What if we go up to 32? Yeah, there we go!
| | 05:48 | That's nice and smooth.
| | 05:49 | I no longer see the individual strobing.
| | 05:51 | I'll click OK to remember that setting,
but I'll temporarily turn off Motion
| | 05:56 | Blur for the composition so
that I can preview a bit faster.
| | 06:00 | So I still have Motion Blur turned
on for those components layers and
| | 06:03 | they'll render with blur, but I'm getting a
bit impatient waiting for these long previews.
| | 06:07 | And indeed, I'm not going to make
you wait through this long RAM preview.
| | 06:11 | I'm going to cut to the end here so you can
see what it looks like after it's all built.
| | 06:15 | (video playing)
| | 06:30 | That's pretty good.
I'm fairly happy with that.
| | 06:32 | I can see two areas for improvement though.
| | 06:34 | One is that that rotation is a bit sudden.
| | 06:37 | Sometimes sudden works,
particularly, if you're trying to do extreme
| | 06:40 | movements to grab the user's attention,
but in this case, I'm trying to give
| | 06:43 | the impression of the 3D world and
that there's real mass and volume and
| | 06:47 | weight to these objects.
| | 06:49 | To do that, I want to actually add some
acceleration and deceleration to those
| | 06:52 | keyframe moves to get more of an
impression of mass and a little bit more of an
| | 06:56 | impression of elegance to be honest.
| | 06:58 | So I'm going to select the Rotation keyframes.
| | 07:00 | I can either just Command-click or Ctrl-click
on them to change them to Auto Bezier.
| | 07:04 | That'll give me a little bit of ease
in and ease out, or I can press F9 on the
| | 07:09 | keyboard to just turn
them to Easy Ease keyframes.
| | 07:12 | Now you might have noticed that this video
panel moved a little bit when I did this.
| | 07:16 | Easy Ease keyframes do hold their position
in between two keyframes of the same value.
| | 07:22 | However, if I Command-click to turn
them into Auto Bezier, you'll see that I do
| | 07:25 | have a little bit of problem
with overshooting and coming back.
| | 07:31 | You may remember from an early After
Effects lesson that when you had two
| | 07:33 | keyframes with the same value, you
may get this overshooting behavior.
| | 07:37 | In that case, you need to select the
offending keyframe that happens earlier in time.
| | 07:42 | I'll right-click and I'll
toggle the whole keyframe.
| | 07:45 | That will make sure that I hold this
value in between those two keyframes and
| | 07:50 | then continue with my animation.
| | 07:52 | But in this case, I'm going to go
ahead and select the Rotation keyframes,
| | 07:55 | right-click, Keyframe Assistant, and
Easy Ease them to create a very elegant
| | 08:00 | movement and give the
impression of a lot of mass.
| | 08:02 | The second thing is I did mention that I
have a wiggle expression applied to the
| | 08:06 | camera, but I didn't see any
wiggling during this hold.
| | 08:09 | This is because I actually disabled
the wiggle expression for this layer.
| | 08:12 | To enable it, I click on this Equal
sign and that will be turned back on
| | 08:17 | again. And now we'll get some slight jitter
in the movement in between those two keyframes.
| | 08:23 | I'll queue up another RAM preview, and again,
I won't make you sit with the whole thing.
| | 08:26 | (video playing)
| | 08:42 | Subtle improvements, but
improvements nonetheless.
| | 08:45 | Okay, now that we finished the second
half of our promo, let's put them all
| | 08:49 | together in a final composition.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Assembling the final comp| 00:07 | We built the first half of our promo
and the second half as well. Time to put
| | 00:12 | them together in the final composition.
| | 00:15 | We have started a Final Comp for you
that includes a spotted copy of the music;
| | 00:19 | we just need to add our
component comps to this Final Comp.
| | 00:22 | So I'll take Main Comp 1, drag
it down here to the timeline.
| | 00:26 | You remember that we only need it for
four seconds, but we gave ourselves some
| | 00:29 | handle to extend out to five seconds.
| | 00:32 | I notice that its Speaker icon is
turned on, and that makes me nervous that I
| | 00:36 | might be doubling up my soundtrack.
| | 00:38 | However, if I press LL to reveal the
waveform, I see no waveform is present.
| | 00:43 | If I press the Shift key to bring up the
Comp mini navigator and go back to Main
| | 00:47 | Comp 1, you remember that we set the
Guide layer switch for this soundtrack,
| | 00:53 | Layer > Guide layer, which means it
only renders in its own comp and doesn't
| | 00:58 | render further down the chain.
| | 01:00 | So we are safe there.
| | 01:01 | I will go back to my Final Comp
and drag in Main Comp 2.
| | 01:05 | I don't need to drag it to start later
in time since I pre-trimmed Main Comp 2
| | 01:10 | to add the video exactly in
time where I need it to be.
| | 01:13 | I just need to drag it down here.
| | 01:15 | I do, however, want to do a little
bit of trimming around this particular
| | 01:18 | transition point in time.
| | 01:20 | I'll select Main Comp 2, put my current
time indicator right at the cut point,
| | 01:25 | press Option on Mac, Alt on Windows,
and press the left square bracket
| | 01:30 | to tell that comp to start here, then I'll page up
one frame earlier in time, select Main Comp 1,
| | 01:36 | hold Option or Alt and press the right
square bracket to end Comp 1 there.
| | 01:41 | So now I have a hard cut
between those two layers.
| | 01:44 | Again, I see that the Speaker
icon is turned on for Main Comp 2.
| | 01:48 | I could get it complaisant and say, "I
bet it's alright," or press LL and realize,
| | 01:53 | oops. It does have it's audio
turned on inside the Pre Comp.
| | 01:57 | So I can either go back to Main Comp 2
and turn SportsBeat into a Guide layer or
| | 02:06 | in the Final Comp, I can just turn off
its audio switch and mute the audio from
| | 02:12 | that comp or from both
the comps to be extra safe.
| | 02:15 | Okay, I have got my two comps in place.
| | 02:16 | Let's go ahead and do a RAM preview of
the final result and see if we like it.
| | 02:20 | Again, I'll just cross fade straight to
the end so you don't have to sit through
| | 02:23 | the entire RAM preview render.
| | 02:26 | (video playing)
| | 02:46 | That's pretty good, I think.
| | 02:47 | I notice one thing I forgot was I did
not reenable Motion Blur on Main Comp 2,
[00:02:5493]
but that's okay.
| | 02:56 | It will render with Motion Blur, and I can
double-check that in my Render Settings.
| | 03:00 | By the way, there is a sidebar at
the end of this lesson on render
| | 03:03 | strategies for projects such as this
where you might need to deliver in multiple
| | 03:07 | formats, but otherwise, I think we've
got something that we can show the client.
| | 03:10 | That means we should be able to
take the rest of them right off, right?
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. Client ChangesAdding a transition| 00:07 | Never assume the client won't have changes.
| | 00:11 | They may legitimately have different
opinions than you about how things should
| | 00:14 | work, or they might just want to have
to put their fingerprint on something so
| | 00:19 | they can say they are the ones
who've guided it to its final brilliance.
| | 00:23 | Either way, always schedule for client changes.
| | 00:26 | And you might even want to put it in
the contract how many round of changes
| | 00:30 | they get, just to focus them so they get
their changes done earlier rather than later.
| | 00:34 | Anyway, our client has seen this final
video and has a list of changes that we
| | 00:39 | are going to implement in this chapter.
| | 00:41 | Let's preview again our final work just
to remind ourselves what we are doing.
| | 00:45 | (music playing)
| | 00:55 | Okay, their first comment was the
music had a nice gradual swell in through
| | 01:01 | here, and the dirt border is going through a nice
gradual arc, but then there's a very sudden cut.
| | 01:07 | They'd like to see that transition
smoothed out a little bit.
| | 01:11 | Well, now we are happy. We build
ourselves some handle where we have extra video
| | 01:15 | at the start of Comp 2 and
extra video at the end of Comp 1.
| | 01:18 | We have some extra material to build
a transition, and that's why you need
| | 01:22 | to build handles whenever you're creating
elements that'll be edited together later.
| | 01:27 | Anyway, let's listen to this music and
get some thoughts here about how we might
| | 01:30 | put a transition in here.
| | 01:32 | I am going to start a couple of beats
before the cut and listen to how it builds.
| | 01:36 | (music playing)
| | 01:42 | So even though there is a strong beat
here on marker 2, in reality the music is
| | 01:47 | peaking on this marker.
| | 01:50 | So a transition between this beat and where
we previously had our cut might be a way to go.
| | 01:56 | Of course, you can try other ideas
later, like putting it after this big
| | 02:00 | beat, whatever. But let's just run
through the process of doing a transition
| | 02:04 | from this beat to this beat.
| | 02:06 | I'll select our Main Comp layer 1,
and I am going to use something in
| | 02:10 | Effect > Transition to help
reveal Comp 2 underneath.
| | 02:15 | You could just start off with an opacity fade
and see how that works, but there's other ideas.
| | 02:20 | Block Dissolve would echo what
you're doing with the few panels already;
| | 02:24 | Card Wipe has a 3D element to it
where individual scores flip over.
| | 02:28 | But something I've played around
with earlier which I found also to be
| | 02:31 | interesting is believe it or not CC Jaws,
it's part of the Cycore Effects that
| | 02:35 | come bundled with After Effects.
| | 02:37 | You won't get this with the trial version,
but it will appear with the full installs.
| | 02:41 | Let's play with this just to add a
little bit more impact to the transition.
| | 02:44 | So there is CC Jaws.
| | 02:47 | Most transitions have a
Completion parameter that you scrub to
| | 02:51 | effected transition.
| | 02:52 | Right now, I have no layer underneath this layer.
| | 02:56 | That's why it's just
revealing the comp's background color.
| | 02:59 | So I need to make sure that I select
Comp 2 and trim it by holding on Option or
| | 03:04 | Alt, pressing the left square bracket
| | 03:06 | so that I have material
underneath this point of Comp 1.
| | 03:11 | Now when I make a transition,
I'm revealing Comp 2.
| | 03:16 | This sawtooth look isn't cutting it
for me to be honest, but they do have
| | 03:20 | some other options.
| | 03:21 | They have Robo Jaw which is different.
| | 03:25 | That's kind of interesting.
| | 03:27 | What else do we have here though?
| | 03:29 | Block, and a Block would echo what we
are already doing with our Block Dissolve
| | 03:33 | and the grid pattern on the floor.
| | 03:36 | So that might be a candidate. And what else?
| | 03:40 | Waves, no, it's a bit too soft.
| | 03:43 | I have a very hard edge look here.
Let's go back to Block.
| | 03:46 | Block has a Width parameter and I might
to try to set it up to match some of the
| | 03:50 | block patterns in the video behind.
| | 03:52 | So I am going to scrub this a little
bit until I have something that more or
| | 03:57 | less matches say two blocks in my
background, and you can indeed offset where
| | 04:03 | this is centered so that during the
transition it more or less equals with two
| | 04:09 | blocks of that background video are.
| | 04:10 | So that ties in nicely.
| | 04:13 | That's kind of odd.
| | 04:14 | What happens if we reduce
the height a little bit?
| | 04:19 | Yeah, I have something a little bit
closer to two blocks and height here as well.
| | 04:24 | So I think I am going to
stick with something around here.
| | 04:27 | Okay, next is actually
keyframing the transition.
| | 04:29 | I'll go back to this beat, this
marker in the music, enable keyframing for
| | 04:35 | Completion, put it down to 0
so that we see all of Comp 1.
| | 04:40 | Press the K key to jump to the next
marker and move Completion up to 100%.
| | 04:47 | Now I drag through here,
I can see my transition.
| | 04:51 | Let's set up a little bit of
a work area to preview here.
| | 04:53 | I am going to press B to begin my
work area at this point and go to a beat
| | 04:58 | later and press N to end my work area there,
and press 0 on numeric keypad to RAM Preview.
| | 05:05 | (music playing)
| | 05:12 | Honestly, I don't like
the direction of that wipe.
| | 05:15 | The way that it's opening up to
reveal the underlying layer is removing the
| | 05:19 | skater from the image.
| | 05:21 | No, that's not what I want.
| | 05:22 | I want to look at the
skater during the transition.
| | 05:24 | So let me place the current time
indicator in the middle of transition and move
| | 05:28 | the direction of the transition. Oh!
| | 05:30 | Here we go! This is different.
| | 05:31 | Let's try 180 degrees.
| | 05:36 | By doing that, that still
hasn't given me the desired look.
| | 05:42 | Well, you know in addition to
transitioning off the layer, you can also
| | 05:45 | transition on a layer.
| | 05:47 | So let's temporarily turn off Jaws on
Comp 1, put it below Comp 2, and try the
| | 05:53 | same effect on Comp 2.
| | 05:55 | CC Jaws, at a Height of 9%, a Width of
around 8 or 8.3, and I'll set Shape to Block.
| | 06:05 | Transition actually runs in the
opposite direction when we are revealing
| | 06:08 | the underlying layer.
| | 06:09 | So I am going to start at 100% Completion,
place the keyframe, K to jump to next
| | 06:15 | marker, then put Completion down to 0%.
| | 06:19 | Now during the transition, I'm closing in on
layer 1, and I get to see my skater a bit longer.
| | 06:26 | I think I am going to like this
one better. Let's RAM Preview.
| | 06:28 | (music playing)
| | 06:36 | I like that a lot better, because the
teeth closing really emphasized that beat
| | 06:40 | and adds a bit of tension to actually
have the jaws close in this person, hit
| | 06:44 | the beat, then move on to the next video.
| | 06:47 | Okay, that's the transition for our client.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Keyframing the camera| 00:07 | Our next client change is they felt
that our camera shake was just too subtle.
| | 00:12 | They couldn't even see it, to be honest.
| | 00:14 | They like the idea there being a
camera shake, kind of an earthquake feel as
| | 00:17 | tension builds, so they are wondering if
we can increase the amount of shake as
| | 00:21 | we get closer to this final crescendo
and lightning burst. We can do that.
| | 00:28 | Let's go back to Main Comp 2.
| | 00:29 | I'll press the Shift key to bring up my
Comp mini navigator, go back to Comp 2,
| | 00:34 | and you may remember we used an
expression to wiggle the camera.
| | 00:38 | But we did have a very
small amount, only 2 pixels.
| | 00:41 | So the first thing we do
want to do is increase that.
| | 00:43 | Second, the client asked
for it to ramp up over time.
| | 00:46 | To do that we are going to need to use
an expression control to give ourselves
| | 00:50 | the user interface that we can keyframe.
| | 00:53 | Now the problem with cameras and
lights is you can't add effects to them,
| | 00:58 | including expression controls.
| | 01:00 | That's kind of a shame, because this
is something that you'd want to do.
| | 01:03 | So let's pick another layer
to apply our controller to.
| | 01:05 | We can create a new Null object, or I
think I am just going to borrow this Null
| | 01:11 | Parent since it already
has some keyframes anyway.
| | 01:15 | It might give me some
additional clues for timing.
| | 01:17 | So I am going to pick a Null Parent,
add Effect > Expression Controls > Slider Control.
| | 01:23 | That's all I need to edit one parameter.
| | 01:24 | I am going to select it and
rename it camera shake amount.
| | 01:31 | Then I am going to go down to my wiggle
expression, carefully select just that 2
| | 01:37 | for the amount, then use the pick-
whip to connect it to the slider.
| | 01:41 | Not the name, but the slider for that effect.
| | 01:44 | After Effects automatically wrote that
in this comp is a layer called the Null
| | 01:48 | Parent which has an effect called
camera shake amount, use its slider.
| | 01:53 | I will press Enter.
| | 01:54 | Okay, how shall I ramp this up?
| | 01:56 | I think I'll start where
the camera hits this position.
| | 02:00 | So I'll enable keyframing with an
amount of 0 and I want to hit a peak right
| | 02:07 | here at the end when we have that final
explosion, and let's pick a fairly large
| | 02:12 | amount here, like maybe--
maybe as much as 40 or 50.
| | 02:17 | Let's try 40 initially.
| | 02:19 | We can always edit this later.
| | 02:21 | I'll press 0 to initiate a RAM preview,
and let's see how that works out.
| | 02:26 | RAM preview goes pretty fast through here.
| | 02:28 | It will slow down when I have got a
lot of motion blur, but that's okay.
| | 02:32 | This gives me more time to study the
animation and see if there is anything I
| | 02:37 | need to change, anything else I want to do.
| | 02:40 | I'll go ahead and crossfade after the
preview is done, instead of making you wait.
| | 02:43 | (video playing)
There we go!
| | 02:56 | There we go!
I think that gets them what they wanted.
| | 02:58 | It starts off steady, but then it
starts to build more and more tension and at
| | 03:02 | the end of this transition you
see that it is shaking quite a bit.
| | 03:05 | I can ask them later in the next proof
if they want even more shake, but this
| | 03:08 | gets the idea across.
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| Adding a filmic glow| 00:07 | Okay, we are partway through our
client change list, and I just realized I
| | 00:10 | haven't saved in a while.
| | 00:11 | So let's go ahead and make
sure we save our current project.
| | 00:15 | And indeed I might go ahead and
Increment and Save again just so I can have a
| | 00:19 | version to go back to in case I don't
like the changes I make from here forward.
| | 00:24 | Now, I am up to Final Project 3.
| | 00:25 | I will go back to the Final Comp and
another comment that our client had is he
| | 00:31 | felt everything looked a little too--well
clean and video and graphic--and they
| | 00:36 | wish they had a bit
more of a hot, intense glow.
| | 00:39 | What they're describing is more of
a filmic look, which usually means
| | 00:43 | overexposed and saturated.
| | 00:44 | Well, we can do that. And there's a
trick we taught you a little while
| | 00:47 | back called Filmic Glow.
| | 00:48 | Let's run through that again.
| | 00:50 | Filmic Glow works really well when you
already have an edited together series of layers.
| | 00:55 | You just go up to Layer > New > Adjustment layer.
| | 01:00 | It's over your entire composition,
including all of the layers below,
| | 01:03 | including your transition. That's great!
| | 01:06 | Now let's add an effect.
| | 01:07 | I usually use blurs for filmic glow,
both Box Blur. And one of the Lens Blurs
| | 01:12 | are good candidates.
| | 01:13 | I am going to start with Box Blur
since box shapes are a theme that we're
| | 01:18 | running throughout this video.
| | 01:19 | I will select that, set a Blending mode
such as Overlay--my usual starting point.
| | 01:25 | You see how intense things got already.
| | 01:27 | Then start increasing the blur radius.
| | 01:32 | This is where the glow part comes in,
from sharp to still sharp, but now some
| | 01:37 | shadows and highlights going on.
| | 01:40 | When Iterations are set to 1, that
blur has a boxy pattern, which kind of
| | 01:45 | echoes our grid look.
| | 01:47 | You can even turn the mode off
for now to see how boxy it is.
| | 01:50 | I will go back to Overlay.
| | 01:53 | Higher Iterations give smoother blurs.
| | 01:56 | About 3 is similar to a Gaussian Blur
and now we just have a soft glow, 0,
| | 02:02 | and a little bit of value.
| | 02:03 | So that's another part.
Just get a little bit of that in there.
| | 02:07 | Then very high iterations
just give a very puffed out look.
| | 02:11 | It also takes longer to render.
| | 02:13 | Since I am trying to go for this boxy
theme here, I am going to go back down to
| | 02:16 | 1 Iteration and then pick a blur
radius that seems to match something like a
| | 02:23 | half, third, maybe even a quarter
of the size of those grid elements.
| | 02:28 | Now, this is a very intense look and
there are a couple ways of backing this off.
| | 02:33 | One is, you can just press T to reveal
the opacity for this layer and fade the
| | 02:37 | hold of the effect in and out.
| | 02:40 | I might go for something around, say
here, and check how it looks at other
| | 02:45 | points of my composition.
| | 02:47 | This is without; this is with.
| | 02:50 | Yeah, that does add some contrast; it
does kind of adds an intensity to it.
| | 02:53 | Let's go back earlier in time here in
this first comp, without, with, and I do
| | 03:00 | think that's making an improvement.
| | 03:02 | If you think this is making everything
look too dark, we've shown you some ways
| | 03:05 | you can take this further.
| | 03:06 | For example, you could duplicate this
adjustment layer, put the top copy into
| | 03:10 | something like Add or Screen, get some
intensity, and even add different blur
| | 03:16 | amounts and softnesses to treat your
highlights separately from your shadows.
| | 03:23 | Press T and blend in
those highlights separately.
| | 03:27 | Really blown out, soft look, maybe
somewhere around there to balance off.
| | 03:31 | And there are other tricks you can do
by applying additional color correction
| | 03:33 | effects, levels to change the Gamma, et cetera.
| | 03:36 | But compared to before and after, I
think we've accomplished the client's goal
| | 03:43 | of making this look hotter, more
intense, more saturated, more "filmic".
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| Increasing the motion blur| 00:07 | The next client comment was that they
really liked the motion blur on the text
| | 00:12 | during these transitions, and
they'd like to see even more blur.
| | 00:16 | Okay, how do you go about doing that?
| | 00:18 | Well, the one thing you don't do is
try to change it in your Final Comp.
| | 00:23 | You may think you can go up to
Composition > Composition Settings > Advanced,
| | 00:28 | and say crank up a ton of blur, click OK.
| | 00:31 | But you will see it really has no effect.
| | 00:35 | The setting for this comp only
affects layers animated in this comp.
| | 00:40 | Now, while it's true that composition
settings frame rate would ripple down to
| | 00:45 | all the pre-comps, the
Motion Blur settings don't.
| | 00:48 | So you're going to need to
tackle this in the pre-comps.
| | 00:51 | So I will cancel out of here.
| | 00:53 | We are looking at Comp 2 right now
anyway, so let's bring that one forward.
| | 00:56 | Open up Composition > Composition Settings,
go underneath the Advanced tab and
| | 01:01 | work with the Motion Blur settings.
| | 01:03 | Now, we already increased the samples
per frame in this comp, but we forgot to
| | 01:07 | make the same setting back in the first comp.
| | 01:09 | We probably want to have similar
settings in the two comps to unify our look,
| | 01:13 | and I particularly want to make sure
that I have enough samples per frame that I
| | 01:16 | don't scrub particularly as I
increase the amount of Shutter Angle.
| | 01:20 | Let's go ahead and double the
Shutter Angle up to 360 degrees.
| | 01:23 | That's twice what a normal
film camera would deliver.
| | 01:26 | Don't hit Return or click OK.
| | 01:28 | You'd close this dialog.
| | 01:30 | More recent versions of After Effects
have a Live Preview button, so you can see
| | 01:34 | these changes more quickly.
| | 01:35 | So I will click off to accept the
value. And there's double the blur where
| | 01:39 | things are really becoming more blurred out.
| | 01:41 | I think that is interesting.
| | 01:42 | I will turn off the
preview for before and after.
| | 01:46 | So I think that is more
interesting, more indistinct look.
| | 01:50 | Now, I am going to click OK, move to a
place such as this rotation of the cube.
| | 01:56 | I am going to see that this indeed now
has introduced quite a bit of blur as well.
| | 02:01 | I am going to check my type to make sure
there is no strobing, and there is some
| | 02:04 | faint strobing going on right around here.
| | 02:06 | It may go by so fast no
one is ever going to notice.
| | 02:11 | But you can go ahead and be
careful by saying Composition
| | 02:14 | Settings > Advanced > Samples Per Frame, and
bumping that up just a little bit more. Let's try 40.
| | 02:23 | A little bit smoother. Not quite there yet.
Let's try 48.
| | 02:26 | I am not immediately going to the
maximum value because the higher this is,
| | 02:31 | the longer it will take to render.
| | 02:33 | Now, that looks smooth.
| | 02:34 | I don't know how this looks with you
viewing a compressed version of this movie,
| | 02:38 | but it looks fine on my
uncompressed screen right now.
| | 02:41 | The last tweak to keep in mind is Shutter Phase.
| | 02:44 | In reality, Motion Blur tends to
be centered around the current time.
| | 02:50 | The ideal Shutter Phase setting is
negative half of your Shutter Angle.
| | 02:55 | My Shutter Angle is 360. I
am going to set this to -180.
| | 03:00 | As soon as I accept that, you will see
my blurred characters shift a little bit
| | 03:05 | to indicate a different area and time.
| | 03:06 | This will actually give you a more
realistic look particularly around keyframes.
| | 03:09 | So, remember these settings:
360, -180, 48, 128.
| | 03:16 | Go apply the same settings to Main Comp 1.
| | 03:19 | Let's pick an area early on.
| | 03:22 | When there's a heavy text animation
going on, Command+K, or Ctrl+K, to open up
| | 03:26 | the Composition Settings > Advanced > 360, -180,
48 for very smooth blur, 128, same number, click OK.
| | 03:44 | So now we've increased the amount of
Motion Blur to an exaggerated amount, so
| | 03:48 | the client will get that overhyped
look they seem to be interested in.
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| Retiming a video source| 00:07 | Another item that was on our client's
list is they are not entirely happy with
| | 00:11 | the relation between this video--my
update is really slow, so I am going to turn
| | 00:15 | off Motion Blur for now to speed it up.
| | 00:18 | And the music, they just felt
that they were a bit disconnected.
| | 00:21 | Let's go ahead and RAM
Preview a little bit of this.
| | 00:23 | Then say this beat before the
Dirtboarder has taken off, I will press B to set
| | 00:28 | the beginning of the work area and
I will end it one beat after, there.
| | 00:33 | Let's do a RAM Preview.
| | 00:40 | (music playing)
| | 00:44 | Okay, I can see the client's point there.
| | 00:48 | The point where the Dirtboarder lands
has nothing to do with the music, and the
| | 00:52 | crescendo of the music
doesn't match his flight path.
| | 00:55 | So let's improve that timing.
| | 00:56 | I am going to double-click
the Skater comp to open it.
| | 01:00 | The same source is used for Skater and
Skater reflections, so any changes here
| | 01:05 | will be reflected back there.
| | 01:07 | I see I currently have my audio
track turned off, so I can't hear it.
| | 01:10 | I turned it back on and actually
set it to be a guide layer so I don't
| | 01:15 | accidentally render it in a later comp.
| | 01:18 | Let's do a little spotting here.
| | 01:19 | What's going on with the music?
(music playing)
| | 01:27 | It doesn't start to raise
towards this peak until here.
| | 01:32 | I am going to call that start.
| | 01:34 | I am just double-clicking
these markers to set them.
| | 01:38 | Where does it peak?
(music playing)
| | 01:41 | Peaks here and falls off
pretty quickly after that.
| | 01:45 | Okay, let's go spot what the Skater is doing.
| | 01:49 | This Dirtboarder is taking off right
there, and it's not the frame where the
| | 01:56 | front wheel starts to leave the hillside.
| | 01:58 | So I am going to hold Option on Mac,
Alt on Windows, press the asterisk key in
| | 02:01 | numeric keypad, let's hit a
comment of lift for liftoff.
| | 02:08 | The middle of their flight path seems
to be about right around here. They start
| | 02:15 | falling after this frame.
| | 02:17 | Option+Asterisk or Alt+Asterisk,
peak, let's see when they land. Boom!
| | 02:24 | That's where he hits ground,
and then he absorbs the hit.
| | 02:26 | So I am going to save that as land.
| | 02:30 | Now, let's try some relative
timings between the music and the video.
| | 02:35 | One idea is to line their peaks.
| | 02:40 | Up in my current time indicator here,
press B to shorten out my preview, with it
| | 02:44 | here later in time, press End to end my preview.
| | 02:47 | Let's try that timing.
| | 02:50 | Slide pulls out loose in
background, but renders much faster.
| | 02:55 | (music playing)
| | 03:00 | That works much better. I like that!
| | 03:02 | However, we don't have any video here
at the head which is a small problem.
| | 03:07 | Well, this is what time remapping is for,
| | 03:09 | the ability to speed up and slow
down your video over time. Okay.
| | 03:14 | Let's look at this video.
| | 03:15 | Let's start until we start to see these
little dirt puffs, or dust puffs appear on here.
| | 03:20 | I really worry about in being up to full speed.
| | 03:24 | So I am going to say I want to
reach full speed at this point in time.
| | 03:28 | I have the layer selected, I will go
to Time > Enable Time Remapping, a new
| | 03:35 | parameter appears in Timeline panel,
set the keyframe saying I do want these
| | 03:40 | frames to lineup, but I need to move
the first frame back earlier in time to
| | 03:46 | last through my whole composition
and trim my video to do the same thing.
| | 03:50 | So now it will be slower and faster here.
| | 03:56 | I don't like sudden speed
changes at linear keyframes.
| | 04:00 | So I am going to select my Time Remap
parameter, go into the Graph Editor, and
| | 04:05 | start seeing how I can smooth out this curve.
| | 04:07 | It is currently showing me Auto Select.
| | 04:11 | I think I'd like to see the speed
graph, so I can see what I am doing to
| | 04:14 | approach in even speed. Ah!
| | 04:17 | I can really see the jump and my speeds here.
| | 04:20 | I am going to hold Option on Mac, Alt
on Windows, to get the Change Direction
| | 04:23 | tool, click on the keyframe, raise it
up so I am going 1 second per second
| | 04:29 | at this point in time.
| | 04:31 | I don't care how slow I am going at the
start, because that's buried in my transition.
| | 04:35 | So I will take it all the way it down
to 0 and lower the Influence handle down
| | 04:40 | to 0, so I have the maximum amount of
ease in to play with back here. Okay.
| | 04:45 | Let's see how far I can extend this
Influence handle and not make things go wonky.
| | 04:50 | If I drag too far, you will see I will
actually be going backwards in time through here,
| | 04:55 | not what I want.
| | 04:57 | I need to adjust this handle to
where I never go backwards in time.
| | 05:01 | It looks like that's going to be
about the maximum ease I can get.
| | 05:05 | A handle doesn't look flat here.
| | 05:07 | I am going to adjust it, so that
I am going 1 second per second.
| | 05:12 | Again, see how far I can push this.
Not too far. Right around there.
| | 05:18 | Leave the Graph Editor,
drag my current Time Indicator.
| | 05:22 | He is buried most of the time back
here earlier in time, and then he is up to
| | 05:27 | full speed by the time he is
really moving down this hill.
| | 05:31 | Let's go ahead and RAM Preview this.
| | 05:39 | (music playing)
| | 05:47 | That actually works pretty well.
| | 05:49 | It just looks like he is not merely
moving as fast, like he is just starting
| | 05:52 | here, then picking up speed.
| | 05:54 | So I think I can get away with this.
| | 05:55 | Now, if you notice any strobing in the
motion back here, you could go ahead and
| | 06:01 | enable Frame Blending for this layer.
| | 06:03 | Remember, one click is frame mixed
mode where adjacent frames are cross-faded
| | 06:08 | together, and two clicks is Pixel Motion mode.
| | 06:11 | For the sake of rendering speed, and
to cut down on artifacts, you do want to
| | 06:15 | try Frame Mix mode first.
| | 06:18 | Be careful that when you get to areas
like this, you are not seeing multiple
| | 06:22 | copies of the board, the background, et cetera.
| | 06:24 | In that case, you might need to try
Pixel Motion mode and see if you have any
| | 06:28 | artifacts during this move.
| | 06:30 | But actually, this looks like
it's going to be pretty clean.
| | 06:35 | So I am going to go ahead and use
Pixel Motion Frame Blending mode to
| | 06:39 | smooth out my motion particularly when I am
going below 100% speed before this keyframe.
| | 06:45 | Okay, we've retimed this
video back in the Source Comp.
| | 06:47 | Let's see how it looks in the Final.
| | 06:49 | I will go ahead and RAM Preview this
segment, because it's right through this
| | 06:52 | transition at the very peak of this flight.
| | 06:54 | Press 0 on numeric keypad. I do have Motion
Blur turned off right now, but that's fine.
| | 07:03 | I'll wait 'til it get to the next beat,
and I will press the spacebar just to
| | 07:06 | stop the preview and start playback.
| | 07:10 | (music playing)
| | 07:13 | Yeah, I do think that works
better all the way around.
| | 07:16 | There is a lot of drama between his
flights matching the music, and the jaws
| | 07:20 | closing just as he lands.
| | 07:21 | Let's go ahead and run with that.
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|
|
11. Render StrategiesExploring render settings| 00:07 | Let's talk about rendering and a few
different scenarios you might need to consider.
| | 00:12 | Now you probably already know how to render.
| | 00:13 | We've mentioned it at the very end
of the original Pre-Roll lesson for
| | 00:17 | After Effects Apprentice.
| | 00:18 | But if you have a Composition open you
can choose Composition > Make Movie, the
| | 00:24 | shortcut for edges has been
Ctrl+M on Windows, Command+M on Mac.
| | 00:28 | Newest versions of After Effects require
you to press Command+M, or Ctrl+M on Mac,
| | 00:33 | so it does not interfere with
the system's minimize command.
| | 00:36 | Once you've added something to the
Render Queue--and I'll dock this up in the
| | 00:41 | same frame as the Comp
panel so I can see it better.
| | 00:44 | You can have a composition
with multiple output modules.
| | 00:47 | So let's talk about your Render
settings and different output modules you
| | 00:50 | might want to create.
| | 00:52 | The default templates used for
rendering and for output are set underneath
| | 00:55 | Edit > Templates, you click on
the name to edit your template.
| | 01:00 | Now in this case I've made a few changes
from the typical best settings template.
| | 01:05 | One, I've set the color depth
up to 16-bits per channel.
| | 01:10 | I've been working at 8-bits per channel,
because it does preview a lot faster,
| | 01:14 | but for that final bit of quality, to
get a rid of possible blending and color
| | 01:17 | corrections and gradients et cetera, I
recommend that you always render at
| | 01:20 | 16-bits per channel.
| | 01:22 | By setting it here you don't have to
remember to set it in the Project settings.
| | 01:26 | Another thing that's very important
is whether or not to field render.
| | 01:29 | Increasingly, people are
rendering progressive scanned videos.
| | 01:34 | In other words, the
Field Renderer is turned off.
| | 01:36 | If your destination is the web, you
need to have Field Rendering turned off.
| | 01:41 | Most hi-def content these days
is 24, 30, 60P for progressive.
| | 01:46 | You might have requirement of I for
Interlaced, then check with your client to
| | 01:50 | seek what they want.
| | 01:51 | But quite often you're going to
be leaving this Off these days.
| | 01:53 | Now you might remember we're
turning Motion Blur on and off quite a bit
| | 01:57 | depending on our render times.
| | 02:00 | This is where the default of On
for Checked layers is very important.
| | 02:03 | If you leave it at Current Settings,
it's going to look at that Composition
| | 02:06 | switch and possibly not render Motion Blur.
| | 02:08 | This way all the layers that have it
turned on will get Motion Blur, regardless
| | 02:12 | of how you are previewing.
| | 02:14 | The other thing that's easy
to overlook is the time span.
| | 02:17 | You may remember that in final
composition we've been previewing with the work
| | 02:21 | area just that transition we created,
but for the final render we want to do
| | 02:25 | the Length of Comp.
| | 02:27 | So it's really important that you set up your
templates to use Length of Comp as your default.
| | 02:32 | The other settings tend to make sense.
| | 02:34 | Make sure you always render in Best quality.
| | 02:35 | I'll click OK.
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| Outputting for archiving| 00:07 | Now we've created several different output
modules depending on the different scenarios.
| | 00:12 | One, say that you want an archived
absolute best quality of your final render.
| | 00:17 | A lot of people argue over their
favorite codecs, but one approach that a lot of
| | 00:21 | people like is to use a ping, or PNG sequence.
| | 00:25 | I'll open up that Module, Format > PNG Sequence.
| | 00:29 | Since we did render at 16-bits per
channel, you can set the color depth
| | 00:34 | to Trillions of Color.
| | 00:36 | Millions of Color is just 8-bit
color depth, Trillions is 16-bit.
| | 00:40 | The QuickTime animation codec
is restricted to 8-bit color.
| | 00:44 | That's why people like to use PNG.
It's a lossless option that can save 16-bits.
| | 00:48 | There are other choices high-end shots
particularly like OpenEXR Sequences, but
| | 00:54 | PNGs are something that are pretty
universal; otherwise, for our master that
| | 00:58 | we're going to archive, we're not
doing any resizing or any cropping.
| | 01:01 | I'll cancel just to make sure I
don't accidentally make changes.
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| Outputting anamorphic widescreen DV| 00:07 | Now let's say we also need to deliver
something standard-def video, and for the
| | 00:10 | sake of argument let's say it has to
use for DV codec, because they'd have some
| | 00:13 | special considerations.
| | 00:15 | I'll click on the name of
the template to edit it.
| | 00:18 | The DV format can only support a
rendered file size of 720x480 for NTSC DV.
| | 00:25 | So what you need to do is squeeze
your square pixel, widescreen comp down
| | 00:32 | into those dimensions.
| | 00:34 | That's what the Resize part of the
Output Module Settings does for you.
| | 00:38 | In this case we're
squeezing the 872 down to 720.
| | 00:41 | Always leave Resize
Quality at the default of High.
| | 00:44 | It's a bit dangerous to resize the
height at this point--particularly if
| | 00:48 | you're field rendering--you never want to
change the height at this point in the render.
| | 00:52 | But in this case, since we created it at the
normal D1 size of 486 tall, 486 out is perfect.
| | 00:59 | Then in this case the client has
asked us for a DV codec render, DV25 NTSC
| | 01:06 | underneath Format Options.
| | 01:08 | So we need to get from the 486 lines
of your typical D1 standard-def render
| | 01:14 | down to the 480 of DV.
| | 01:16 | Without dragging usually with a ton of
history of why things are the way they
| | 01:20 | are, the way to do that is to use the
Crop part of the Output model Settings.
| | 01:24 | crop four pixels off the top--not
three, but four--and two off the bottom.
| | 01:29 | Again, if you're field rendering, you
never want to crop an odd number of pixels,
| | 01:33 | because it would change your field order.
| | 01:36 | Fortunately again, most renders
these days are progressive scan.
| | 01:40 | Don't forget to include an audio output,
most professional formats and even DV
| | 01:44 | are 48K sample rate.
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| Creating a 4:3 center-cut version| 00:07 | What if a client also says that they want a
4x3 center-cut of your wide screen version?
| | 00:13 | Let me show you how to do that.
| | 00:15 | First thing I am going to do
is add another Output Module.
| | 00:19 | Choose a template to begin with,
like QuickTime DV NTSC, click on it and
| | 00:24 | let's edit its settings.
| | 00:25 | The first I need to do is to Resize my
square pixel composition to provide the
| | 00:33 | non-square pixels required by DV or D1 NTSC.
| | 00:38 | And turn off the Lock Aspect Ratio and
the proper pixel aspect ratio for D1 or
| | 00:45 | DV NTSC is to scale to eleven-tenths.
| | 00:49 | So I am going to bring up the calculator
here, take 872 pixels times 11 divided by 10
| | 00:57 | equals 9595.2, best to round it up to
an even number, so later on you can trim
| | 01:04 | things equally off the Left and Right sides.
| | 01:07 | I am going to enter 960 pixels here. That's
going to give me an 11 to 10 aspect ratio.
| | 01:13 | Next, I need crop this down to
the requirements of the DV output.
| | 01:16 | Now to get 486 lines down to 480, you already
know, crop 4 from the top, 2 from the bottom.
| | 01:24 | For center-cut, we want to chop off
large portions of the Left and Right sides
| | 01:29 | of the screen and keep just the central portion
of it, getting down to our 4 by 3 aspect ratio.
| | 01:35 | So we need to take 960 pixels minus our 720 targets
divided by 2, for Left and Right sides.
| | 01:47 | We need to take 120 pixels off of each side.
| | 01:50 | 120 off the Left, 120 off the Right.
| | 01:55 | We now have 720x480 output, and you
know there is a little warning down here
| | 01:59 | that we had a Settings Mismatch--went away
because now we've hit our target of DV NTSC Output.
| | 02:06 | So again to review, first we had to
take into account non-square pixels,
| | 02:11 | make it eleven-tenths wide.
| | 02:13 | Second, we had to crop to get rid of
the access of the wide screen, get down
| | 02:17 | to the 4x3 center-cut.
| | 02:20 | Okay.
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| Outputting for web| 00:07 | Finally, your client may ask you for a
small web version, such as half size,
| | 00:11 | particularly with high-def video.
| | 00:13 | It's very common to deliver 960 wide,
rather than a 1920 wide final render.
| | 00:18 | So from the Output Module there,
After Effects gives you several different
| | 00:21 | options: Flash video, the newer flavor of it,
that's based on the H.264 Codec or H.264 itself.
| | 00:29 | H.264 has become a very common web
format, but again, check with your
| | 00:34 | client, see what they want.
| | 00:37 | Depending on which variant you
choose, After Effects does provide some
| | 00:40 | additional format options for the Encoder.
| | 00:43 | I'll cancel out of there.
| | 00:46 | If your client is asking for say a
half-size video, again, this is where the
| | 00:50 | Resize dialog comes in handy.
| | 00:52 | In this case I kept Lock Aspects Ratio
on, and I set up half of the dimensions
| | 00:57 | for the Width, and automatically I was
given half dimensions for the Height.
| | 01:00 | Just your client may ask you for
different target size depending on the layout
| | 01:05 | of, say, the web page. Maybe there are
columns or say 620 pixels across. By keeping
| | 01:10 | the Lock Aspect on, well, may
think will give you the correct height.
| | 01:13 | If I want the full size, I don't crop.
| | 01:16 | However, if you are creating web,
then here is something to keep in mind.
| | 01:19 | It is assumed that television bezels
crop off the sounds action safe area,
| | 01:24 | 5% on the left, right, top, and bottom.
| | 01:28 | If you don't crop video and deliver it
for the web, the viewer is actually going
| | 01:33 | to see more content than
they would have on television.
| | 01:36 | That could be good. That could be bad.
There could be some gunk there from bad
| | 01:40 | transfer, things you expect to be
hidden by the TV bezel, et cetera.
| | 01:44 | It's usually not a bad idea to also go
ahead and crop at least a couple percent,
| | 01:50 | if not 5% from all these dimensions to
replicate on the web the same experience
| | 01:55 | someone is going to see on TV.
| | 01:57 | On the other hand, if you're making
this for web only, don't crop and show
| | 02:00 | the full composition.
| | 02:02 | After Effects is angry with me because
I have been playing with numbers and I
| | 02:05 | have created settings that are not
compatible with the VP6 codec, and it isn't
| | 02:09 | even telling me how to correct that.
| | 02:10 | I will Cancel anyway.
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| Exploring components for editors| 00:07 | Now the advantage of having
with Multiple Output Modules for one
| | 00:11 | composition is it only
needs to render the frame once.
| | 00:15 | And then you can write
that frame multiple times.
| | 00:18 | This is far more efficient than rendering
multiple copies of the same composition.
| | 00:22 | However, say you're
handing this over to an editor.
| | 00:25 | Rather than giving him your Final Comp,
they may ask for your components in case
| | 00:29 | we want to re-edit it later
or create their own transition.
| | 00:32 | In this case, we've cued up Comp 1 and
Comp 2 and rendering it either to the
| | 00:37 | codec that the editor requested or to the
Lossless preset to get the maximum quality.
| | 00:42 | Our Main Comp 1 was a short composition anyway.
We'll handle at the end.
| | 00:47 | We do indeed want to
render that whole composition.
| | 00:49 | But you might remember, Main Comp 2 was
longer than the content that was in it.
| | 00:53 | And in that case, we had set up a work
area that matched the actual content that
| | 00:59 | was supposed to go to the editor.
| | 01:00 | So this is a case where you do indeed want to
make sure you have Work Area Only turned on.
| | 01:06 | This is because we're delivering
just a specific element out of this
| | 01:08 | composition, rather than an entire Final Comp.
| | 01:12 | The final thing your editor may want
is, indeed, an Audio Only pass, and that
| | 01:16 | prefix even gives you a preset for Audio Only.
| | 01:18 | Double check it to make sure it's the
sample rate that's needed, usually 48K for
| | 01:22 | professional video work.
| | 01:24 | If you were rendering as 1 Mega Comp,
you could even had an Output Module and
| | 01:29 | change that one to a suitable preset.
| | 01:30 | I can double-click it to verify
settings, AIFF format, 48K,
| | 01:37 | 16-bit Audio/Stereo, Okay.
| | 01:40 | So After Effects is actually a
very flexible tool when it comes to
| | 01:46 | rendering your Final Project.
| | 01:47 | The main thing I want to get across is
you don't need to render your composition
| | 01:51 | every time you have a different format.
| | 01:53 | You can often output to multiple
formats from one rendered composition, which
| | 01:58 | is a huge time saver
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|
|
12. Bonus: Creating the Ring inside After EffectsCreating the inner ring| 00:07 | Earlier in this lesson, Trish showed you
how to import the Dial artwork which was
| | 00:12 | created in Adobe Illustrator as a composition.
| | 00:17 | We do that for expediency, but also
because quite often clients will supply to
| | 00:21 | you their logo or other pieces of
artwork as Illustrator files, and we want to
| | 00:25 | give you some experience in handling them.
| | 00:27 | However, you could also create this
element directly inside After Effects using
| | 00:31 | Shape and Text layers.
| | 00:32 | So let's see how'd you do that.
| | 00:34 | This composition size is 600x600.
| | 00:36 | So I'll create a brand-new comp with the same
dimensions and a good duration of 10 seconds.
| | 00:41 | I'll click OK, Transparency Grid is
already on, and that's going to be handy for
| | 00:46 | seeing what we create.
| | 00:47 | Let's look that inner dial first.
| | 00:49 | I am going to select it, right-click on
it, Reveal layer Source in Project.
| | 00:54 | And I see that its outer dimension is 248 pixels.
| | 00:57 | So we are going to say that
ring is 240 pixels in diameter.
| | 01:01 | I'll go back to my comp. I have No
layer selected. I'll go up to my Shape tools
| | 01:07 | and indeed select the Ellipse tool.
| | 01:10 | I don't need any fill, and
the red slash indicates No Fill.
| | 01:14 | If necessary, hold down Option for Mac,
or Alt on Windows, and click on it to
| | 01:19 | toggle through the different fill
modes until you get to that red stripe.
| | 01:23 | Similarly, we do want a stroke and again,
you can hold Option or Alt and toggle
| | 01:27 | through the different modes for that.
| | 01:29 | I don't know what size is going to work yet.
| | 01:31 | So I am going to enter ten pixels as
a starting point, and black is a good
| | 01:36 | color for the stroke.
| | 01:37 | I am going to press the apostrophe
key to temporarily bring up the Action
| | 01:41 | and Title Safe, because that gives me a
centre cross-hair to help me center this circle.
| | 01:46 | I could also look at the Info panel in
the upper-right corner and make sure I am
| | 01:49 | at half of this comps dimensions, 300x300.
| | 01:54 | I'll click and start dragging.
| | 01:55 | I'll add the Shift key to
make it a perfect circle.
| | 01:59 | Then I'll add the Command key on Mac, or
Ctrl key on Windows, to center it around
| | 02:03 | where I was drawing.
| | 02:04 | I want to drag it out to the size that
roughly looks correct, release the mouse,
| | 02:09 | press V to return back to the Selection
tool and look at my contents in my Shape
| | 02:14 | layer down here in the Timeline panel.
| | 02:16 | I'll twirl open Ellipse in the Ellipse Path.
| | 02:18 | I see my size is a bit large.
| | 02:20 | So I'll set it to 240 pixels
like we described previously.
| | 02:24 | I see that my stroke width
might be a large too. No problem.
| | 02:28 | With the Shape layer selected, I'll
just scrub that down until it looks good.
| | 02:33 | Next, I need to add the series of tick
marks to go around the inside of that circle.
| | 02:38 | I'd see I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9, 10 of these. Okay, no problem.
| | 02:45 | I'll go back to the Shape layer and kind of add
those tick marks to a couple of different ways.
| | 02:49 | The way that we showed in the Shape
layer lesson was to use the Pen tool to draw
| | 02:53 | very short little tick marks,
and that would work fine.
| | 02:58 | However, an alternate way is to select
our Ellipse group and add a rectangle.
| | 03:04 | I am going to twirl it open, set its
width to 0, and set its height to the
| | 03:12 | length of tick mark that I want, and
again, I want just the stroke and no fill.
| | 03:17 | Set it around here for starting point,
then scrub its position until it connects
| | 03:24 | nicely with my ellipse.
| | 03:26 | I am going to press the apostrophe key
to turn off the Action Title Safe just to
| | 03:30 | help clean up the display.
| | 03:31 | Okay, I have one tick mark,
but I want ten of them.
| | 03:34 | Well, how do we do that?
| | 03:36 | We'll use the Repeater.
| | 03:37 | I want to repeat this rectangular path.
| | 03:40 | I don't need to repeat the Ellipse path.
| | 03:43 | So I am going to drag the rectangle
before the ellipse, add the Repeater and
| | 03:49 | drag the Repeater before the
ellipse, but after the rectangle.
| | 03:53 | I'll twirl open its parameters, its
transforms, I don't need a position offset,
| | 04:00 | but I do need a Rotation offset.
| | 04:02 | There is 360 degrees around the circle.
| | 04:04 | There are ten tick marks.
That's 36 degrees apart.
| | 04:08 | Press Enter and you see my tick
marks are starting to get spaced out.
| | 04:12 | I just need to increase my copies to 10
and now they go all the way around my circle.
| | 04:17 | You might also remember that Trish used the
Stroke effect to reveal this piece of artwork.
| | 04:23 | Well, there is a couple of different ways
of revealing artwork in shape layers as well.
| | 04:27 | I twirl these up to clean things up for now.
| | 04:28 | I am going to add the Trim Paths operator.
| | 04:32 | It defaults to after my shape paths.
As I scrub the end, you'll see things
| | 04:38 | draw off and draw on.
| | 04:42 | Trim paths will initially treat
each of these as individual paths drawn
| | 04:46 | simultaneously or individually,
which is kind of fun as well.
| | 04:51 | You can also get other effects by
using Merge Paths to say merge after the
| | 04:56 | repeat, then add in the Ellipse
path, then trim that whole unit.
| | 05:00 | But anyway, you see how this can work.
| | 05:03 | I'll twirl this up for now and
rename that shape layer, inner circle.
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| Creating the outer ring| 00:07 | Now that you've seen that, creating
this outer circle is pretty darn easy.
| | 00:12 | I go back to my Comp, I'm going to
double-click its size, right-click > Reveal
| | 00:17 | Layer Source in Project. 415 is
probably an inset quite a ways here.
| | 00:23 | Actually, I'm looking at my Info panel.
I'm seeing that my Y is 97 there and 121 there.
| | 00:32 | Let's say that circle is roughly
360 pixels diameter--and again we can
| | 00:35 | adjust these things later, because shape
layers are so easy to edit inside After Effects.
| | 00:40 | I go back to my Comp, make sure nothing
is selected, because I want to start a
| | 00:44 | brand-new shape group. And let's
go ahead and create this quickly.
| | 00:48 | Apostrophe, ellipse, center out my
cross-hair, drag, add the Shift key, add the
| | 00:55 | Command or Ctrl key, drag it
out until it looks pretty good.
| | 01:00 | Twirl it open. Look at its size.
| | 01:03 | Let's say that I want 360, so
let's enter a smaller value.
| | 01:06 | By the way, these are easy
to edit or animate later on.
| | 01:09 | You can also edit or animate the
transform for the entire layer.
| | 01:12 | Let's add the tick marks and these
titles. Go ahead and use that Pen tool.
| | 01:15 | I am going to select the pen.
I'll click once here at the top.
| | 01:19 | Again, I'm referencing my Info panel
to make sure I'm nice and centered.
| | 01:22 | I am going to move up a little bit,
hold the Shift key to make sure I'm drawing
| | 01:26 | straight line, and click again.
| | 01:28 | Now that I'm done I'll press P,
and I'm back to my Selection tool.
| | 01:32 | After Effects likes to create a new
shape groups whenever I draw in the Comp
| | 01:36 | panel, but that's okay.
| | 01:38 | If I like I can take that path and
drag it down into the Ellipse group and
| | 01:43 | delete this spurious group.
| | 01:45 | Now to create more tick marks, it's the
same deal. I'll go back for reference.
| | 01:49 | I counted these earlier.
There are 36 of these ticks around that circle.
| | 01:55 | Come back here, Add > Repeater, drag it
after the path, twirl it open, 36 copies,
| | 02:04 | transforms, no position offset, but I do
want 360 divided by 36 equals 10 degrees
| | 02:11 | of rotation per tick mark. Pretty cool!
| | 02:14 | If I wanted to edit the path, no problem.
| | 02:17 | I just go ahead and select one of its
points, carefully drag it, shorter or
| | 02:22 | longer, off to an angle, whatever I want.
| | 02:25 | And now you can see why it's good to create
this artwork directly inside After Effects.
| | 02:30 | You have a lot of flexibility than
having to go back to Illustrator or go
| | 02:33 | back to the original artist
and ask for modifications.
| | 02:36 | But anyway, I'm going to press the
Shift key to constraint movements, get the
| | 02:39 | length of slash that I want,
twirl up the Repeater, add Trim Paths.
| | 02:45 | It landed after my Shape groups.
| | 02:48 | We'll go ahead and do all shapes Individually
and then animate this group on.
| | 02:56 | A lot of fun, huh?
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| Creating the text ring| 00:07 | Finally, let's do that text ring.
And how big was that?
| | 00:11 | The event names were just
under 600 pixels around.
| | 00:15 | I will make it a size of, say, 560 or
something like that, and again I can
| | 00:19 | adjust these things later.
| | 00:20 | I will come back, twirl up my Shape
group, rename this one outer circle, press
| | 00:26 | F2 to deselect so I can start a brand-new
shape group. Ellipse tool, same ritual.
| | 00:33 | Click-drag, add Shift, add Command or Ctrl,
drag it out to about the size that I want,
| | 00:39 | which was somewhere
around here, pretty large.
| | 00:42 | V to return to my Selection tool,
increase the stroke, because I need a fairly
| | 00:48 | wide band to fit text into.
| | 00:49 | Now the next trick is adding that text.
| | 00:53 | Unfortunately, I cannot add
text directly to a shape layer.
| | 00:57 | Also, unfortunately I cannot copy any
ellipse path and paste it into a mask
| | 01:03 | path on another layer.
| | 01:04 | So I am going to be careful to what I do next.
| | 01:06 | I am going to create a Layer > New > Text.
| | 01:10 | So I have a starting text layer.
| | 01:12 | We need white type. That's fine.
Fairly small size. Of course, we can edit all
| | 01:16 | these things later. And next,
we need to paste in our text.
| | 01:19 | I happen to have a document
that has all of the words.
| | 01:23 | I will select all, copy, go back to
After Effects, double-click my text layer to
| | 01:28 | make sure I have selected it and
paste. And I'll press Enter to accept.
| | 01:33 | A little bit hard to see it
here against transparency grid.
| | 01:35 | I will turn that off for now.
| | 01:36 | Now you can see all of my words.
| | 01:40 | Next, I need to create a mask path on
this text layer that matches that ring I
| | 01:46 | created with the Shape layer. No problem.
| | 01:49 | I can use the same tool.
| | 01:50 | I will go back to the Ellipse tool.
| | 01:52 | When you have an ordinary layer selected,
the Ellipse tool creates a mask on that layer;
| | 01:58 | it does not create a shape.
| | 01:59 | I will center my crosshairs again.
| | 02:01 | 300, 300 is the middle of this
composition. Click and start dragging. Use the
| | 02:07 | same modifier keys of Shift to make it a
perfect circle, then Command or Ctrl to center it.
| | 02:12 | I am going to drag out my Mask Path to
what looks like it's going to be a good
| | 02:17 | baseline against that shape layer that I created,
and I can tweak these later on if I need to.
| | 02:23 | Next, twirl open Text, go to Path Options,
say Follow this mask path that I just
| | 02:28 | created, and then fit up to 100%
so you can see things better here.
| | 02:32 | Give me a little bit more room to work with.
| | 02:35 | The text right now is upside
down and inside my mask path.
| | 02:39 | So I need to reverse my path
so that my text is outside.
| | 02:43 | I need to enable Force Alignment so that
my text goes all the way around my path.
| | 02:49 | I see even when I do that it's a little bit
tight on top of that last pipe symbol there.
| | 02:54 | So I am going to go ahead and
carefully scrub first margin to get a little
| | 02:59 | bit of separation here.
| | 03:00 | I am going to turn off the Mask Path
for now. Better see what I'm doing.
| | 03:06 | And put it somewhere around there.
| | 03:09 | Looks like I might have managed
to miss that last pipe anyway.
| | 03:11 | No problem, I will double-click the
Text layer. I'll right cursor to go the end
| | 03:16 | of the text and add in my
pipe character. There we go.
| | 03:21 | Enter to accept. Scrub my first
margin to have a good starting point.
| | 03:25 | If I need to I can change the
ellipse size, rescale the path, et cetera, to
| | 03:30 | better center things up.
| | 03:31 | But actually I'm pretty close.
| | 03:33 | I twirl up the layers to clean them up,
and I might even pre-compose these so that
| | 03:38 | they're their own group and I can
animate them easily as one piece.
| | 03:42 | Pre-compose, move all attributes, outer text
ring, no need to open up the new composition.
| | 03:49 | And by the way, I could use text
animators to animate on the text, Trim Path
| | 03:52 | operator to animate on the ring. There we go!
| | 03:56 | So yes, you can re-create a lot of
what you do in Illustrator directly
| | 04:00 | inside After Effects.
| | 04:01 | And we do like to create as many elements
as we can directly inside After Effects,
| | 04:05 | because they're much more flexible when
it comes time later on to edit or animate them.
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