IntroductionWelcome| 00:08 | Hi! I'm Chris Meyer of Crish Design and
in this course I want to share with you
| | 00:13 | how to take advantage of some of the cool new
features that have been added to After Effects.
| | 00:18 | Some of those major features that
I'm going to be covering include: Adobe's
| | 00:21 | Live 3D pipeline where entire
project files from Maxon CINEMA 4D can be
| | 00:25 | imported into After Effects as if they were
footage items, without the need for pre-rendering.
| | 00:30 | Once you place them in a composition,
their pixels are rendered on the fly as
| | 00:34 | you jump between frames.
| | 00:35 | You can also extract scene data out
of these project files, including the
| | 00:39 | position of lights and cameras, plus,
replace the original camera move with a
| | 00:43 | new one you create inside After Effects.
| | 00:45 | There are other capabilities as
well, including the ability to access
| | 00:48 | individual CINEMA layers, plus multi-
pass components, such as just the
| | 00:53 | highlights or just the shadows.
| | 00:54 | On the Visual Effects front, Adobe's
Roto Brush has been greatly enhanced with
| | 00:58 | the addition of a new Refine Edge tool.
| | 01:01 | After you're done creating a basic
matte with Roto Brush, Refine Edge then
| | 01:05 | detects the partially transparent
areas where you brush along the matte edge,
| | 01:09 | revealing fine details, such as strands of hair,
as well as motion blurred or out of focus areas.
| | 01:14 | If you've ever tried to mask or key
hair before, you know just how tricky this
| | 01:18 | is and how important this new
feature is going to be to your work.
| | 01:21 | A separate Refine Soft Matte effect has
also been added allowing you to recover
| | 01:25 | more detail for images
you've already cut out or keyed.
| | 01:28 | The Warp Stabilizer has
also been greatly enhanced;
| | 01:30 | it's now called Warp Stabilizer VFX.
| | 01:33 | You can now reveal the underlying
tracking points the Warp Stabilizer creates
| | 01:37 | when analyzing your footage and delete
undesired ones to make sure it doesn't
| | 01:40 | try to stabilize the wrong feature.
| | 01:42 | You can also now reverse the
stabilization, which allows you to add effects that
| | 01:46 | track the original movement in the
footage as well as composite other layers
| | 01:50 | over shot and have them follow
the movement inside that footage.
| | 01:53 | The 3D Camera Tracker has also been
improved, including the ability to choose
| | 01:57 | a point or points and make that the origin of
your 3D roll that 3D Camera Tracker creates.
| | 02:02 | No more arbitrary camera or layer
positions, you get to decide where 000 is.
| | 02:08 | In addition to these big features
there are other important smaller ones as
| | 02:11 | well, including bicubic scaling which
provides better results when scaling up
| | 02:16 | many types of layers, it's
streamlined pixel motion blur effect that can
| | 02:20 | reintroduce motion blur in already
shot or already rendered footage that's
| | 02:24 | exhibiting strobing, and a greatly
enhanced Find command that can help take you
| | 02:29 | directly to the compositions and layers
that have missing fonts or effects, that
| | 02:32 | should save us a lot of time as well.
| | 02:35 | As Adobe continues to add new features
through the Creative Cloud updates, I'll
| | 02:38 | be adding more movies to this
course to help keep you up-to-date.
| | 02:41 | Make sure you watch the very last
chapter inside this course as well;
| | 02:45 | because I'm going to be covering some
of the little tiny features they've
| | 02:47 | added and show you where you can keep up-
to-date with every single change they
| | 02:50 | make to After Effects as they go.
| | 02:52 | Anyway, with all that out of the way, let's
dive in and have some fun, because these
| | 02:56 | are some really cool new
additions to After Effects.
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| | Using the exercise files |
|
1. CINEMA 4D IntegrationCINEMA 4D import| 00:05 | As some of you know I am a huge fan of
the combination of using the 3D program,
| | 00:10 | CINEMA 4D by MAXON with After Effects.
| | 00:13 | In the past they've been very tightly
integrated and now they're even more
| | 00:17 | closely tied together.
| | 00:18 | Namely you can import a CINEMA project
directly into After Effects and treat it
| | 00:22 | like a Footage Layer.
| | 00:23 | Let me show you that, I'm going to
select a folder to import my new footage
| | 00:27 | into, instead of selecting a Footage
File, I'm going to select a C4D project,
| | 00:33 | I'll click Open, it'll appear in my
Project panel as if it was a .mov, you'll
| | 00:38 | see I have its dimensions, it's
frame rate, it is a 32-bit floating-point
| | 00:42 | file and it prefers to be rendered in
linear light mode, and we'll discuss that later.
| | 00:47 | You can then treat this as a normal
footage item and drag it down to the Create
| | 00:51 | a new Composition button at
the bottom of the project panel.
| | 00:54 | Now I have done that already
to create this composition.
| | 00:57 | The scene is rendering a bit dark
initially, but again, I'll discuss that a
| | 01:00 | couple of movies from now.
| | 01:02 | With this layer selected, I'm going to
press F3 to open up the Effect Controls
| | 01:05 | panel and you'll see that what makes
this magic possible is a CINEWARE plugin
| | 01:10 | supplied by MAXON. they can bring in
their project file and render it on the
| | 01:15 | fly as pixels inside After Effects;
even comes with its own Help file.
| | 01:20 | The first thing you want to pay
attention to are the Render Settings, it defaults
| | 01:24 | its software, because software is the
fastest, but frankly it's the one you're
| | 01:28 | going to use the least often.
| | 01:29 | It does allow some alternative Shader
such as Wireframe and Box and those can be
| | 01:34 | cool graphical looks, but you also
notice that some features, such as the entire
| | 01:38 | multi-pass workflow that we'll talk
about later, are disabled when you're using
| | 01:41 | the software renderer.
| | 01:42 | I have personally find myself using Standard
(Draft) or Standard (Final) most of the time.
| | 01:47 | Standard (Draft) is the CINEMA
renderer with some of the slowest options
| | 01:52 | disabled, for example, you'll notice
there is no anti-aliasing, but again, I
| | 01:56 | want to point out, as I click around
the After Effects timeline, these frames
| | 02:01 | are being rendered on the
fly by the CINEWARE plugin.
| | 02:04 | I have not pre-rendered any
movie out of that project.
| | 02:08 | Beyond Standard (Draft) is Standard
(Final) and that gives you the full monty
| | 02:13 | when it comes to features, including
really nice anti-aliasing depending how you
| | 02:17 | have your CINEMA project setup.
| | 02:18 | There's a couple of more options
underneath render settings, pre-calculation has
| | 02:22 | to do with whether or not you have
something that requires prior thought, like a
| | 02:26 | physic system, an explosion, etcetera.
| | 02:28 | Enabling pre-calculation will make
CINEWARE appear more snappy, since CINEMA is
| | 02:32 | no longer pre-calculating all these physics.
| | 02:34 | However, you should never have this
enabled for a final render, because you
| | 02:38 | definitely want it to calculate
particle systems, dynamics, cloth, etcetera.
| | 02:43 | Keep Textures in RAM is another thing
that can speed up your performance, but
| | 02:46 | it will chew up more memory to do so.
| | 02:48 | So the very least at a starting point,
we now have a CINEMA project that someone
| | 02:52 | else can provide you, inside After
Effects, as if it was a footage layer.
| | 02:57 | Note that it is a 2D footage layer, it
needs to be rendered into pixels, it does
| | 03:01 | not have 3D geometry of its own, but
there's a lot of things you can do with
| | 03:05 | this, including extracting its lights
and camera, and that's what we are going
| | 03:09 | to be diving into in the next several movies.
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| CINEMA 4D Lite| 00:05 | If you receive a CINEMA 4D project file
from another artist, you can now render
| | 00:11 | that file on the fly inside After Effects,
even without owning a copy of CINEMA.
| | 00:15 | But what if you want to make some
changes to that file or maybe even create your
| | 00:20 | own file and still don't have access to CINEMA?
| | 00:22 | Well, here is one of the best things
about the new versions of After Effects;
| | 00:26 | it comes with a version of CINEMA 4D Lite.
| | 00:28 | To open up this version of CINEMA,
select your footage file and use Edit > Edit
| | 00:34 | Original, just like you do with
Illustrator files, Photoshop files, etcetera.
| | 00:39 | If you already have a copy of
CINEMA 4D installed, it will open that.
| | 00:42 | If you don't, it will open up this
very special version of CINEMA 4D Lite and
| | 00:47 | now you have a pretty robust version of
CINEMA 4D included with After Effects.
| | 00:53 | Now again the only way to launch this
Lite version is from inside After Effects.
| | 00:57 | Let's say I wanted to make some changes
to this scene, for example maybe I want
| | 01:01 | to change the color of my top light to
be something a bit on the warmer side.
| | 01:07 | I'll do a quick test render of what
that looks like. Maybe I need to change
| | 01:12 | my Render Settings;
| | 01:14 | perhaps I want some more Anti-Aliasing.
| | 01:15 | So I'll go into that option, maybe
change what my Minimum and Max Level is, or
| | 01:21 | what type of filter is being used.
| | 01:22 | I personally like really smooth Anti-
Aliasing, so I might increase that.
| | 01:26 | When I'm done making my changes, I
will cmd or ctrl + s to save my file.
| | 01:31 | It will warn me that this Lite version
is more recent than what I'd previously
| | 01:35 | saved this file in, that's okay with me.
| | 01:37 | Switch back in After Effects and
immediately you will see my changes in my
| | 01:41 | lighting and in my Anti-Aliasing level
are immediately reflected in my After
| | 01:45 | Effects composition.
| | 01:47 | Well what if you don't already have a
project file to start from. No problem.
| | 01:51 | I am going to turn this off for now,
and go to Layer > New > MAXON CINEMA 4D file.
| | 01:57 | We'll create a blank starting project,
I'll just give it a quick name here,
| | 02:02 | starter.c4d and put me directly into
CINEMA 4D where I can start creating my scene.
| | 02:06 | Now of course there are some
limitations to this free version of CINEMA 4D Lite
| | 02:10 | compared to the full version
you might buy directly from MAXON.
| | 02:13 | Most of the features left out are
pretty advanced such as C++ and Python
| | 02:18 | support, using special input devices
such as the 3Dconnexion 3D mouse, morphing
| | 02:23 | camera, Caustics for Lighting, sketch
and tune, hatch and spot halftone shaders,
| | 02:28 | and other things like that.
| | 02:29 | But I recommend you go to the
MAXON website to see the full details.
| | 02:34 | The good news is, is that you can
indeed update CINEMA 4D Lite to a full
| | 02:39 | version of CINEMA 4D.
| | 02:40 | MAXON is recommending that people
who use After Effects would look at the
| | 02:43 | broadcast or studio versions as they
would include the all-important MoGraph
| | 02:47 | module which is great for creating
very cool objects to include in your
| | 02:51 | After Effects scenes.
| | 02:52 | And by the way you do want to make sure
that you do register your copy of CINEMA
| | 02:55 | 4D Lite, because by doing so, you'll
get some additional MoGraph functions,
| | 02:59 | including fracture object, plus
the plain and random effectors.
| | 03:02 | But in short, that's how you can
access the Lite version of CINEMA 4D from
| | 03:06 | inside After Effects.
| | 03:07 | Either select the previously existing
layer and do Edit Original… --cmd or
| | 03:14 | ctrl + e-- or go ahead and create a brand
new CINEMA 4D file from scratch and use
| | 03:18 | that as your starting point.
| | 03:19 | Before I go any further, I am
going to go ahead and delete my starter
| | 03:23 | project from CINEMA, and instead
work with this CINEMA 4D layer that I've
| | 03:27 | already imported.
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| The linear workflow| 00:05 | Okay, before we go any further we
need to talk about a very tweaky but very
| | 00:09 | necessary subject and that involves
color management and linear light workflows.
| | 00:15 | If you have been using a version of
CINEMA 4D that's from release 12 or later,
| | 00:21 | chances are that underneath Edit >
Project Settings the Linear Workflow checkbox
| | 00:27 | has been enabled, because that's the default.
| | 00:30 | What this means is, don't blend colors
the way computers normally blend colors,
| | 00:35 | but blend them using a special Gamma
known as Gamma 1.0 or linear Gamma that
| | 00:39 | more closely matches the
way our eyes process light.
| | 00:42 | A lot of CINEMA artists prefer
blending this way because it gives some more
| | 00:45 | natural visual effects and that's why
it's now the default inside CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:50 | If the Linear Workflow checkbox is
turned on in your CINEMA project, back in
| | 00:55 | After Effects you need to do some prep work.
| | 00:58 | You need to go to your Project Settings
and make sure either Blend Colors Using
| | 01:05 | 1.0 Gamma is enabled.
| | 01:08 | That means After Effects will now use
the same light blending math as CINEMA is
| | 01:12 | using, or if you want to go whole hog
on color management, pick a working space
| | 01:17 | that matches CINEMA, such as
sRGB and Linearize Working Space.
| | 01:22 | That will give you the most realistic
blending of colors, particularly when you
| | 01:25 | start doing multi-pass renders
--I'll talk about that later-- but more
| | 01:29 | importantly will match CINEMA.
| | 01:31 | If you have a problem where your
CINEMA scene does not match your After
| | 01:35 | Effects scene, make sure that you're
using one of these two modes: Linearize
| | 01:40 | Working Space or Blend Colors Using 1.0 Gamma.
| | 01:45 | Now there may also be the case where
you've created a project that does not have
| | 01:49 | Linear workflow enabled.
| | 01:51 | Maybe you or your CINEMA 4D artist
made a conscious decision not to use this
| | 01:55 | mode, or maybe the project originated
from a version prior to release 12, and
| | 02:01 | that's the case with this
particular video wall project. It's very old.
| | 02:05 | It started years ago
before we had linear workflow.
| | 02:09 | I could rebalance my lights using
linear workflow to get the final look that
| | 02:13 | I want, or I can tweak After Effects
a bit to work in the same nonlinear
| | 02:19 | space that CINEMA is.
| | 02:20 | To do that, back in After Effects, I
need to select the layer that I imported
| | 02:25 | from CINEMA 4D, go to this Interpret
Footage dialog, go underneath this Color
| | 02:31 | Management tab and make sure
Interpret As Linear Light has been turned off.
| | 02:36 | The default is On for 32 bpc (bit per channel);
| | 02:39 | I want to make sure it's forced off to
match the CINEMA project which also has
| | 02:44 | Linear Workflow turned off.
| | 02:45 | You only do this if you notice there
is a mismatch between how things look
| | 02:50 | inside After Effects, mainly blown out,
compared to how they render inside
| | 02:56 | CINEMA 4D. In this case the CINEMA render
is much darker than the After Effects render.
| | 03:02 | If the Linear Workflow switch is off in
CINEMA, go back to After Effects, choose
| | 03:06 | your imported project file, Interpret
Footage, Color Management, Interpret
| | 03:11 | Linear Light, off, and now
the two will match again.
| | 03:15 | For the remainder of this particular
chapter, I have already set that particular
| | 03:20 | switch for the files I've already imported.
| | 03:23 | If you're deciding to use our updated
CINEMA 4D After Effects integration files,
| | 03:27 | to play around with the integration
with this new release of After Effects, you
| | 03:31 | will need to do the same thing.
| | 03:32 | go underneath Interpret Footage,
go underneath Color Management,
| | 03:35 | change Interpret to Linear Light.
| | 03:37 | But, in most cases you want to
make sure that CINEMA is set to Linear
| | 03:42 | Workflow and make sure that After Effects is
set to use some Gamma 1.0 Linear Workflow itself.
| | 03:49 | If the two match, things
will work out just fine.
| | 03:52 | If they don't match, go look at these settings.
| | 03:55 | Okay, enough of the tweaky stuff,
let's start having some more fun playing
| | 03:59 | around with this new capability of
live rendering of CINEMA inside
| | 04:03 | After Effects.
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| Scene data| 00:05 | Now that you have your Cinema 4D project
imported as a footage item inside After
| | 00:09 | Effects, and as a layer inside a
composition, there's a few more things you
| | 00:13 | can do to extract information out of
that CINEMA scene and pull it into After
| | 00:16 | Effects, so you can add more
layers directly in AE.
| | 00:19 | One is choosing what camera you want
to use, by default, CINEMA uses its own
| | 00:24 | Active Camera, if your CINEMA 4D scene
has more than one camera, you can select
| | 00:28 | which camera you want to use.
| | 00:30 | But you might want to redo that
camera move from CINEMA, with a brand-new
| | 00:35 | camera from After Effects.
| | 00:36 | I'm going to set this to Standard Draft,
just to speed up my interactivity, and
| | 00:42 | go to Layer > New > Camera.
| | 00:45 | I'll go ahead and make a fairly short
lens camera to get a little bit more
| | 00:50 | exaggeration in my 3D perspective, click OK.
| | 00:53 | By default 3D Cameras in After Effects
do not affect 2D layers and this CINEMA
| | 00:58 | layer is indeed 2D, it's rendering pixels,
it's not quite geometry inside After Effects.
| | 01:03 | But I can go to the CINEWARE Effects >
Project Settings and say, hey, use my
| | 01:09 | Current Active Comp Camera.
| | 01:11 | Now there is a small problem with that.
The coordinate system inside After
| | 01:15 | Effects is a bit different than the
coordinate system inside of CINEMA;
| | 01:19 | in particular, they have different
ideas of where the origin or the center of
| | 01:22 | your composition would be.
| | 01:23 | So if you just choose Comp Camera, you
may find yourself staring, well underneath the
| | 01:27 | floor of your whole scene, quite often
the better option is to use a Centered
| | 01:32 | Comp Camera that will at least aim the
camera right dead along the floor, so you've
| | 01:37 | got a better starting point.
| | 01:39 | From that I can use the normal After
Effects Camera tools to craft a new camera move.
| | 01:43 | I'll go ahead and zoom out a little
bit on the scene, a little bit close to
| | 01:47 | it, maybe tilt it down a little bit,
add a little bit more of a perspective
| | 01:51 | and maybe move the camera over a
little bit, so I am not running out of my
| | 01:55 | seamless background here, that's a
little bit too much, I think I'll go ahead,
| | 01:59 | and go centered here, and then just zoom in
a little bit closer until my set looks good.
| | 02:05 | And if I want I can go ahead and
keyframe the position, and the point of
| | 02:10 | interest for that camera.
| | 02:12 | And you can see by using the short lens,
I'm getting a lot of fun perspective
| | 02:15 | distortion in this scene.
| | 02:16 | Now there's a couple of more ways to go
from here. If you like your new camera
| | 02:21 | move, and you wish that camera move
was back in the CINEMA 4D scene, you can
| | 02:26 | indeed merge your Comp Camera back
into your CINEMA 4D project file.
| | 02:32 | On the other hand, maybe you would like
to bring the camera from CINEMA directly
| | 02:36 | into After Effects to work on it here.
| | 02:38 | And in addition to that you might want
to bring some other things in as well, such
| | 02:42 | as, say, all the lights.
| | 02:43 | Well, underneath Commands where you
have Merge, you also have Extract, which
| | 02:46 | says Extract all that lovely scene data out
of CINEMA and bring it into After Effects.
| | 02:51 | So now I get my 3 lights that were
my original scene. I can use those to
| | 02:57 | illuminate any new 3D
layers I add in After Effects.
| | 03:00 | My Box group, an external compositing
tag that I had applied to tell me where
| | 03:04 | the front of my video wall would be,
I'm going to turn that off for now just so
| | 03:09 | I can see through it and a
couple different cameras.
| | 03:11 | This is the camera that came from CINEMA,
this is the new camera I created in After Effects.
| | 03:16 | If I'm going to use the camera that I
imported from CINEMA, then I indeed want to
| | 03:20 | just use Comp Camera and not the
Centered Comp Camera, because again, they have
| | 03:25 | different coordinate systems.
| | 03:26 | Importing camera from CINEMA:
Comp Camera, creating new camera in After
| | 03:31 | Effects: Centered Comp Camera.
| | 03:34 | Now the downside of the CINEMA Camera
is that it does have a keyframe for every
| | 03:38 | frame of your animation.
| | 03:39 | But if you want to modify it, you
can go ahead and use some After Effects
| | 03:43 | tools, such as the Smoother to
reduce the number of Keyframes and the
| | 03:47 | complexity in that move.
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| Importing a single layer| 00:05 | In our previous movie we were focusing
on all the information you can bring in
| | 00:09 | from a CINEMA 4D scene, including its
Lights, and its Camera, and Camera Animation.
| | 00:15 | Well, in the next couple of movies
we're going to focus on bringing in
| | 00:18 | individual layers and render passes
from our CINEMA 4D scene and indeed, we've
| | 00:22 | already brought in one such object.
| | 00:24 | In the previous movie when we had our
CINEWARE plug-in that was rendering our
| | 00:28 | scene, we chose to extract all of
the scene data from that project.
| | 00:33 | One of the items that came in was a
Box group; a solid that's placed at
| | 00:38 | the base of that wall.
| | 00:39 | Well the reason this was created is
because when we originally designed the
| | 00:42 | CINEMA 4D project, we assigned
something called an external compositing tag to
| | 00:47 | that location in the scene.
| | 00:49 | Let me show you what that is.
| | 00:51 | I'm going to select a CINEMA 4D
project layer, do cmd or ctrl + e to edit
| | 00:55 | original, and let's look at
that video wall a bit closer.
| | 00:58 | To be able to put video on the face of
this wall I need to know where it is in
| | 01:03 | space, and if it's moving.
| | 01:04 | To do so I had a master null object
that was at the base of the face of that
| | 01:10 | wall, and I gave it a Tag, CINEMA 4D
Tag, External Compositing Tag. What this
| | 01:20 | is, is a little placeholder that can
either be a solid of a size and color you
| | 01:24 | define, or if this is unchecked just a
null object, that follows that particular
| | 01:29 | layer around in space.
| | 01:31 | You may notice that I have Cache
enabled for this particular compositing tag.
| | 01:34 | You're only worried about this if you
have a generator such as an array object
| | 01:38 | or MoGraph object that's creating geometry.
| | 01:41 | If you want to capture the position of
all those sub objects being generated,
| | 01:45 | then you need to enable both Cache and Children.
| | 01:48 | In my case I just have simple
already generated polygons, I don't need to
| | 01:52 | worry about either of these settings,
and indeed I want just the one null, I
| | 01:56 | don't want to create a separate null or
solid for every single face inside this object.
| | 02:00 | Now also in my case my box is very
simple polygons. It's already been calculated
| | 02:06 | so they are very easy to render.
| | 02:07 | If however my box is being generated
by an operator inside CINEMA, instead I
| | 02:11 | want to make sure those polygons were
created or baked if you like, so that the
| | 02:17 | CINEWARE plug-in can have access to them,
in that case I would need to go to my
| | 02:21 | CINEMA > Preferences, underneath Files,
and enable Save Polygons for Melange, and
| | 02:27 | also Save Animation for Melange.
| | 02:29 | This says pre-bake any polygons in a
particular operator inside CINEMA might be generating.
| | 02:35 | Not needed for this project, good
practice if you're getting tricky and using
| | 02:38 | operators in CINEMA to create your geometry.
| | 02:40 | And you know, as long as I'm here, I'm
going to return that red top light back
| | 02:46 | to white in the scene, save my
file and return to After Effects.
| | 02:52 | And you see that my pink top light is now gone.
| | 02:56 | Okay, this solid is placed at the base of
this wall. Unfortunately solids default
| | 03:01 | to having their Anchor Points in the
very middle of their faces, not the base,
| | 03:05 | that's not a problem.
| | 03:06 | I'll type A for Anchor Point and
I'll scrub the solid until it's centered
| | 03:09 | on the wall, so I just have a couple of
pixels hanging off the bottom of that layer.
| | 03:14 | Okay, the next thing I'd happen to want
to do for this job is I'd like to replace
| | 03:18 | that solid with a piece of video.
| | 03:20 | So, I'm going to go back to my Project,
into my Sources, into my Movies, pick a
| | 03:24 | Standard piece of video such as say
this baseballscene, we'll cmd + opt on
| | 03:28 | Mac, ctrl + alt on Windows, press Forward
Slash and say Replace the selected layer
| | 03:33 | in my comp, with the selected
layer in my project panel, and bang,
| | 03:37 | there is my baseball scene.
| | 03:40 | Now it's looking a bit under
illuminated because right now it's not being hit
| | 03:44 | very strongly by these lights.
| | 03:45 | If I turned all my lights off, it
would be at its normal full illumination.
| | 03:49 | Since I do want it to interact with the
scene, I'm just going to select my Key
| | 03:53 | Light, press T for Intensity and
scrub it up until I have a reasonable
| | 03:57 | illumination on that piece of video.
| | 03:59 | All right, this is pretty good, but
the problem is, is that I don't see the
| | 04:05 | video wall behind it, or for
that matter, the day of the week.
| | 04:08 | I need another layer that's going
to cut out the face of that wall.
| | 04:12 | Well, that particular item inside
CINEMA is known as an Object Buffer, it's a
| | 04:15 | special render that can be created by
CINEMA that represents just where a face of
| | 04:20 | an object is visible.
| | 04:22 | And again, details like this, and the
external Compositing Tag, are covered in much
| | 04:26 | greater detail in my dedicated course,
on After Effects CINEMA Integration;
| | 04:29 | I'm just giving you the short course here.
| | 04:31 | Well as it turns out, I've already setup
that Object Buffer in this CINEMA project.
| | 04:35 | Go back to my Effects
Control Panel, and what I want is another
| | 04:39 | instance of this project.
| | 04:41 | I've been using this first instance to
render the whole background scene;
| | 04:45 | I need another instance that will
provide me with just this one desired
| | 04:49 | layer: my Object Buffer.
| | 04:51 | So I'm going to select that layer,
duplicate it, press F3 to make sure it is the
| | 04:55 | one that has the CINEWARE plug-in
exposed in Effects Control Panel.
| | 04:58 | It so happens that Object Buffers are
part of what is known as a Multi-Pass render;
| | 05:02 | that's where you can get a lot of
individual properties, such as Specular
| | 05:05 | Highlights, Shadows, etcetera
separately out of the CINEMA layer and I'm going to
| | 05:10 | show that in the next movie.
| | 05:12 | But to get just that particular Object
Buffer, I'm going to enable CINEMA 4D
| | 05:15 | Multi-Pass and choose which layer I
want, my Object Buffer, and click OK.
| | 05:20 | Now this layer becomes a High
Contrast Matte that was my Object Buffer.
| | 05:26 | I'm going to use that as a
Track Matte for the baseball layer.
| | 05:30 | In my composite, and now the baseball
layer has been cut out to show just where
| | 05:35 | the video wall is visible.
| | 05:37 | We're seeing this at Draft quality right now;
| | 05:39 | I can go ahead and set these up to Final
quality to get a nice clean anti-alias render.
| | 05:46 | Now if you want to get other layers
outside of a CINEMA project, there's a
| | 05:50 | separate option to enable CINEMA 4D
layers and set which layer that you want.
| | 05:53 | Now to take advantage of this feature to
break out individual layers, you need to go
| | 05:57 | into your CINEMA project and make sure
you have indeed placed things on separate
| | 06:01 | layers inside CINEMA.
| | 06:03 | I've not done that with
this relatively simple project.
| | 06:05 | But something to keep in mind, for
example, it would be a good idea to keep
| | 06:09 | something like all the names of the
week on separate layers, so you can
| | 06:12 | import them individually and put them in
front of all of the other layers in your project.
| | 06:17 | It would make compositing go a lot easier.
| | 06:19 | So you have a lot of flexibility while
bringing in your entire CINEMA render,
| | 06:23 | or choosing particular properties
of it, such as Lights, Cameras, Object
| | 06:27 | Buffers, etcetera, to bring into your
After Effects project separately.
| | 06:30 | Now again, I'm not pre-rendering any
of this inside CINEMA, all the rendering
| | 06:34 | is happing on the fly inside
After Effects by the CINEWARE plug-in.
| | 06:39 | Okay, that's project
properties, that's single layers.
| | 06:43 | Now let's talk about Multi-Pass
renders. We get to bring in a bunch of
| | 06:46 | individual properties of the whole
render and mix them individually.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with multipass layers| 00:05 | To demonstrate working with Multi-
Pass Renders from CINEMA using this new
| | 00:09 | workflow, I've already imported a
different CINEMA project that I've already set
| | 00:13 | up to allow Multi-Pass Renders;
| | 00:16 | that's where you can choose individual
properties of the Final render, such as
| | 00:20 | just the shadows, just the diffuse
color, just the specular highlights, just
| | 00:24 | reflections, etcetera.
| | 00:25 | And normally have them rendered as
individual movies from CINEMA and again I
| | 00:30 | covered this in my CINEMA 4D
After Effects Integration course.
| | 00:33 | Well, with this new workflow, you can
start to do all this stuff directly in
| | 00:37 | After Effects without that
intermediate render pass.
| | 00:40 | Here's my composition that already has
that Multi-Pass project brought in, press
| | 00:44 | F3 and there's my CINEWARE plug-in
that is rendering this particular set of
| | 00:49 | pixels from that project.
| | 00:51 | I'm going to enable CINEMA 4D Multi-Pass
and you'll notice this section warns you,
| | 00:56 | Linear Workflow.
| | 00:58 | I hope you didn't just skip over that
movie on color management that was earlier
| | 01:02 | in this chapter, because that's very important.
| | 01:03 | When you're blending together
multiple properties in After Effects, you want
| | 01:08 | to be careful about what
color space you're using.
| | 01:10 | If you've created something with CINEMA
4D Release 12 or later, it defaults to a
| | 01:15 | Linear Light Workflow;
| | 01:17 | that's a more natural way of combining light.
| | 01:20 | If you've created your CINEMA project
with the Linear Workflow enabled, you
| | 01:23 | definitely need to also enable the
Linear Workflow inside After Effects.
| | 01:29 | You can do that either by working in
a full color managed mode and enabling
| | 01:33 | linearized working space, or if you
don't want to go the color management route,
| | 01:37 | just enable Blend Colors Using 1.0 Gamma.
| | 01:39 | In this case, where I'm working with
a very old project that was not created
| | 01:44 | using the Linear Workflow inside of
CINEMA, I'm going to use the work around
| | 01:48 | that I showed you a couple movies ago
when we talked about color management.
| | 01:52 | Okay, here's my Multi-Pass layer.
What I'd like to get is access to the
| | 01:55 | individual qualities that make
up this final composited scene.
| | 01:58 | There's two ways of going about that.
| | 02:00 | One, I can merely go, Add Image Layers,
doing so, we'll isolate a wide variety of
| | 02:08 | possible properties of the render,
Atmospheres, Refractions, Occlusions, Global
| | 02:14 | Illuminations, Caustic, Ambient Line,
Shadows, Speculars, and Diffused Properties
| | 02:19 | and blend them all together
with the proper blending modes.
| | 02:23 | Most lighting is additive, but
some things like shadows use a multiply mode to
| | 02:27 | help darken the overall result.
| | 02:29 | I'm going to Hide my parent column just
to make this a little bit clearer. This is
| | 02:33 | what you get if you have not setup Multi-
Pass rendering ahead of time. However,
| | 02:37 | for this project I have.
| | 02:38 | I'm going to undo, I'm going to
press cmd or ctrl + e to edit this
| | 02:42 | externally in CINEMA 4D Lite, and
underneath Render > Render Settings, inside
| | 02:49 | the Multi-Pass Tab, I've already added
a variety of properties that I wanted to
| | 02:55 | isolate, when I created this Final render.
| | 02:57 | And you can click on the Multi-Pass
button inside CINEMA to add additional
| | 03:01 | properties and you see there is quite a
long list of things that you can isolate.
| | 03:05 | But for me, the Object Buffer which we
used in a prior movie, and the different
| | 03:09 | lighting effects, including Specular
Highlights, Reflections, etcetera, are what
| | 03:13 | was important to me.
| | 03:14 | I'm going to tab back into After
Effects and say, just give me my Defined
| | 03:20 | Multi-Pass layers, not everybody, but
just the ones that I with the CINEMA 4D artist
| | 03:25 | who gave me this file, set up originally.
| | 03:27 | I'll enable that switch, then Add
Image Layers. And now you see I have my
| | 03:32 | chosen set of properties, Reflections,
Shadows, Specular Highlights, Ambient, Diffuse.
| | 03:38 | This is where I can start
playing some real games.
| | 03:41 | For example, maybe I think
my shadows aren't dark enough.
| | 03:43 | I wish I had a little more
heft back here in the background.
| | 03:47 | I'll press T for Opacity and initially
you think you can only reduce the level
| | 03:52 | of the shadows, but if you say Duplicate
this layer, now you have a second pass,
| | 03:58 | you can multiply on top of your first pass,
and create even darker shadows if you want to.
| | 04:02 | You can also tint them to create color
shadows if you wanted, but I'll put that
| | 04:06 | back to full strength and
delete my duplicated Shadow Layer.
| | 04:10 | I can also play around
with my Specular Highlights.
| | 04:12 | If I want to see what they look
like, I can turn them off and on.
| | 04:16 | If I wanted to tighten up my Specular
Hotspot, I might apply something like Effect >
| | 04:21 | Color Correction > Levels, and play with a Gamma;
| | 04:26 | decide if I want a broader Hotspot or a
narrower, tighter Hotspot, let me see my
| | 04:32 | white point here, pull that down, I
can strengthen the Hotspot and play with
| | 04:37 | just how tight it is.
| | 04:39 | I personally love Multi-Pass Renders,
because they give you so much power to
| | 04:45 | control what's going on
after the CINEMA 4D render.
| | 04:48 | And with this new workflow, I don't
even need to render from CINEMA 4D.
| | 04:53 | I can mix things in After Effects on the fly.
| | 04:55 | The down side is, every one of these
properties is an individual CINAWARE
| | 05:03 | plug-in, so things can bog down, particularly
if I was to set every layer up to final quality.
| | 05:08 | Now in this initial implementation of
Multiple Passes brought directly inside
| | 05:12 | After Effects to be rendered on the fly,
you don't quite get everything you have
| | 05:16 | with the standalone CINEMA solution.
| | 05:19 | I'm going to tab back to
CINEMA to show you some things.
| | 05:22 | Inside the Render > Render Settings,
CINEMA itself has the ability to separate out
| | 05:28 | the lights and give you individual
pre-comps for each of your lights in your
| | 05:33 | scene. This gives you the ability to
remix your lights, and even change the
| | 05:38 | color of your lights after the fact.
| | 05:40 | Alas, as of right now, you still would
need to do a separate CINEMA render and
| | 05:45 | get all those individual movies to
remix them inside After Effects, and again,
| | 05:49 | my separate course shows you how to do that.
| | 05:51 | But for this live interaction mode, you
still get quite a few of the properties
| | 05:56 | inside one comp, to go ahead
and play around with and remix.
| | 05:59 | I think this whole workflow opens up a
lot of very interesting possibilities.
| | 06:02 | CINEMA 4D has a lot more 3D capabilities
than those built into After Effects, but
| | 06:07 | After Effects has some really cool
things, such as the 3D Camera Tracker which
| | 06:10 | we're going to talking about later.
| | 06:12 | You could track real footage inside
After Effects, pass the camera back to
| | 06:16 | CINEMA, build a scene, bring that
project back into After Effects, render it on the
| | 06:21 | fly on top of your tracked live
footage, and have a lot of fun combining these
| | 06:25 | two worlds, the real and the virtual.
| | 06:27 | Yes it's possible to think of all the
other things you'd like to have feature-
| | 06:31 | wise in this implementation, but I
think it's a very promising start.
| | 06:34 | I'm really curious to see where this
goes and what people do with this in
| | 06:38 | the meantime.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Roto Brush and Refine EdgeThe Refine Edge tool| 00:04 | Next we're going to look at a
wonderful addition to After Effects called
| | 00:08 | the Refine Edge tool.
| | 00:10 | One of the hardest things to
rotoscope or key are fine strands of hair.
| | 00:16 | I'll RAM preview this original shot, and
you see as this actress turns her head,
| | 00:21 | her hair flies off to the sides, and
also there's various strands sticking up and
| | 00:25 | sticking out to either side.
| | 00:27 | This is normally a great
pain to attempt to key or roto.
| | 00:31 | Now what I did try is using the
ordinary Roto Brush Effect that came with prior
| | 00:36 | versions of After Effects to
create a hard mask around this person.
| | 00:40 | I am going to turn on the Effects,
because Roto Brush is indeed an effect, and
| | 00:44 | you'll see that I have a hard-edged matte.
I'll turn off my backround for now, and
| | 00:48 | you can see the result of Roto Brush.
| | 00:51 | A shortcoming of Roto Brush is it creates what's
called a Binary Matte, either you are outside or
| | 00:56 | you are inside, your
background, or your foreground.
| | 00:59 | Roto Brush does have the ability to
do some nice things with the edges
| | 01:04 | between foreground and backgrounds,
such as add Motion Blur and also
| | 01:08 | decontaminate some Edge Color.
| | 01:09 | This comes in particularly handy when
this actress is turning her head, and her
| | 01:13 | hair is flying off at an angle without
Motion Blur, and width, but it still does
| | 01:19 | not capture all of the strands of her hair.
| | 01:21 | Well this is where the brand-
new Refine Edge Tool comes in.
| | 01:24 | I am going to turn off Motion Blur
and Decontaminate Edge Color for now,
| | 01:29 | double-click the layer to
open it up in its Layer Panel.
| | 01:32 | You need to do this work in the Layer
Panel, same as with Roto Brush, and return
| | 01:37 | it to my base frame.
| | 01:39 | Now before you use the Refine Edge
Tool which is now part of Roto Brush, you
| | 01:44 | must first have performed your normal Roto
Brush work for the entire duration of the clip.
| | 01:50 | You do not do one frame of Roto Brush,
one frame of edge and keep going back
| | 01:54 | and forth that way.
| | 01:56 | Do your entire Roto Brush work, tweak
out your Propagation parameters, make
| | 02:00 | corrective strokes, etcetera,
before you use Refine Edge.
| | 02:03 | Once you have done that you can go to
the Roto Brush Tool and you'll see it now
| | 02:09 | has a second option
called the Refine Edge Tool.
| | 02:12 | Opt or alt + w, switches between the
two, and I'll be using that shortcut a
| | 02:16 | lot during this lesson.
| | 02:17 | With the Roto Brush Tool you've got
your familiar green circle to add to the
| | 02:23 | foreground, and if I hold opt or
alt, red circle to subtract from the
| | 02:27 | foreground or add to the background.
| | 02:31 | By selecting the Refine Edge Tool,
you'll now see that I have a purplish brush
| | 02:36 | outline for the edges. And I'll hold opt
or alt, it'll turn to a very dark blue.
| | 02:41 | So that's one visual clue as
to which tool you are in.
| | 02:44 | I am going to turn on my Propagation
boundary so that I can see it around my
| | 02:48 | entire actress, and more importantly
see the hair that has escaped beyond my
| | 02:53 | Propagation boundary.
| | 02:54 | I have tried to make the Propagation
boundary capture the general helmet of her
| | 02:59 | head, gets some of the larger strands,
but obviously I couldn't get every
| | 03:03 | single small strand.
| | 03:04 | You can resize the Refine Edge Tool by
holding cmd on Mac, ctrl on Windows
| | 03:09 | and dragging, and you want to size it
to be just enough to capture this little
| | 03:13 | band here between where we have soft
things outside of your Propagation boundary,
| | 03:18 | and what's inside your Propagation boundary.
| | 03:20 | Don't make it too large or
you'll be capturing too many colors.
| | 03:23 | The next thing you want to do is
draw a stroke along your Propagation
| | 03:27 | boundary that captures these fine
hairs that are either flying off to the
| | 03:32 | side or gaps created inside.
| | 03:34 | If you try to draw your first stroke
completely in the foreground, you'll
| | 03:38 | receive an error message, your first
Refine Edge Stroke must straddle an
| | 03:41 | off edge, I'll Undo, and you'll get
the same thing if you drew a stroke in the
| | 03:47 | background, and instead I'll draw along this
edge and capture some of these hairs flying away.
| | 03:55 | You don't need to do everything in one
stroke but I'm going to grab a fair amount
| | 03:59 | here, and when I'm done you are going
to see what they refer to as an X-ray
| | 04:03 | view, rather than seeing the color
information you're going to see the resulting
| | 04:06 | alpha channel in the area where you
drew a Refine Edge stroke, and now you can
| | 04:11 | see some of these really fine
details in this woman's hair.
| | 04:15 | I am going to press the Tilde (~) key
to maximize my Layer Panel, so you can
| | 04:19 | see this as large as possible.
| | 04:21 | Now I am going to add a couple of more
strokes to capture bits of her hair that
| | 04:25 | I've missed, little fly-away strand up
there, these hairs coming down the side
| | 04:29 | along here, some of these fly-
away hairs going off to the side here.
| | 04:35 | And through her shoulder to capture
some of these holes that have appeared
| | 04:39 | between her hair and the background.
| | 04:40 | You'll see I'll get little
areas of partial transparency there.
| | 04:45 | You have to be careful that Refine
Edge doesn't go overboard and grab some of
| | 04:49 | your fully opaque background and
tries to make it semi-transparent.
| | 04:53 | Such as what's
happening in the shoulder here.
| | 04:56 | The technique that I constantly use is
that I click the Render switch on and off
| | 05:01 | to make sure that it hasn't made
some of my opaque foreground partially
| | 05:07 | transparent, as it has right through here.
| | 05:10 | If you have a problem where it's making
something transparent that shouldn't be,
| | 05:13 | hold opt or alt, you'll get the
minus or subtraction version of this
| | 05:16 | brush and brush through the area
that's giving you trouble.
| | 05:20 | You'll see that Roto Brush with
Refine Edge Tool has now subtracted that
| | 05:24 | from the area it's calculating, and is
now doing a much better calculation of
| | 05:29 | exactly where the hair is.
| | 05:30 | Now this actress, she has a lot of
spill from her background onto her
| | 05:35 | shoulders, so I really need to pay attention
that I don't accidentally eat away part of her skin.
| | 05:40 | I am going to turn the Render button back on
and now work on the other side of her head.
| | 05:46 | There is a little bit of strand that
flew away there and capture this edge, as
| | 05:50 | well as these gaps, in between the
outer sheath or helmet of her hair and
| | 05:56 | inside closer to her face.
| | 05:57 | I'll drag through here as well --lovely
partial transparency there-- and down
| | 06:05 | through her shoulder.
| | 06:06 | And again be careful of going too far
because if I do that you will see I'll start
| | 06:10 | to get some gray areas on her
shoulder, which should be fully opaque.
| | 06:14 | I'll zoom in to 200%, so
you can see this problem area.
| | 06:18 | I am going to undo my stroke, and be
careful just to grab the area where I
| | 06:25 | have an edge with partial transparency,
that's much better, and I'll go back to 100%.
| | 06:31 | And by the way an alternative to
clicking the Render switch on and off all the
| | 06:35 | time, is to go ahead and
turn off the X-ray view.
| | 06:38 | Now you'll see that the Propagation
boundary is showing a fuzzy pink line
| | 06:41 | instead of a hard pink line that helps
to indicate the areas that are partially
| | 06:45 | transparent and there is your new alpha channel.
| | 06:47 | But I'm going to go back to X-ray
view, because I am not done yet.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Propagating refined edges| 00:05 | Just as with normal Roto Brush after
you've created a good base frame you need
| | 00:10 | to start stepping one frame at a time
away from the base frame in the direction
| | 00:15 | that the propagation arrows point in your span.
| | 00:17 | I'm going to move backwards in time here;
| | 00:19 | because we do have this head turn from her
which I think is going to be problematic.
| | 00:23 | I am going to press Page
Up to go back one frame;
| | 00:28 | again you can use the numeric keys 1
and 2 to do this while in either Roto
| | 00:32 | Brush or Refine Edge.
| | 00:34 | And you'll notice that these Refine
Edge Areas are tracking along with Roto
| | 00:39 | Brush's automatic tracking
of the propagation boundary.
| | 00:42 | It's not perfect, but it's very helpful.
| | 00:44 | I need to watch here to make sure a gap
doesn't open up, I'll press Page Up again
| | 00:49 | and it looks like it's holding up pretty well.
| | 00:51 | I'll keep going back in time until
I start to see any problems appear.
| | 00:57 | So far so good, keeping an eye on that shoulder.
| | 01:04 | Okay here is a problem starting to pop
up, as she is starting to turn her head
| | 01:08 | and the Propagation boundary moves,
Roto Brush is auto-correcting my Refine
| | 01:13 | Matte strokes to be
cantilevered away from her normal outline.
| | 01:17 | So I am going to need to be careful
that this doesn't get pulled so far up that
| | 01:21 | we miss out on our partially
transparent areas, matter of fact I see a little
| | 01:25 | green peeking through here, so I'll
drag back this area again and now I'll get
| | 01:29 | some of my partial transparency back again.
| | 01:30 | I'll press Page Down to make sure I
don't have any strange gaps in my frames
| | 01:35 | here, and go a little bit earlier in time.
| | 01:40 | Again, my Refine Matte stroke has
been pulled upward by the changing
| | 01:43 | Propagation boundary, no problem I'll
just add to it and there is some more
| | 01:47 | partial transparency.
| | 01:48 | I am focusing on the left side now;
| | 01:50 | I can go back and look at
the right side later on.
| | 01:52 | Page Up again, oh definitely need a fill
on this area and I need to look for where
| | 02:00 | some of this hair is flying around
through here, and there I picked up a
| | 02:05 | couple of strands that
otherwise might have been missing.
| | 02:08 | That helps, make sure I didn't
miss some from an earlier frame;
| | 02:12 | yeah they are flying out a little bit right
in through here as well, so let's grab those.
| | 02:17 | Now Roto Brush and the Refine Edge Tool is highly
automated and is doing a lot of my work for me.
| | 02:22 | But as with the normal Roto Brush
Tool, you need to remain vigilant.
| | 02:26 | For example, you see parts of this
shoulder are becoming partially transparent
| | 02:30 | again, and that would be a bad thing,
we don't want parts of her shoulder
| | 02:34 | disappearing, and I'll compare
with render off, and on again.
| | 02:37 | So I am going to hold opt or alt,
make a corrective stroke right in that area
| | 02:41 | and put her shoulder back together,
little bit earlier in time, still looking
| | 02:46 | pretty good, earlier.
| | 02:49 | I am going back and forth and I see I
am missing some flyway hairs here that I want
| | 02:56 | to make sure I grab. There we go.
| | 02:59 | Earlier, still grabbing those
hairs and keep progressing back through
| | 03:05 | time, making sure I am not
missing anything, such as this extra gap
| | 03:10 | opening up in here.
| | 03:12 | Again I have a problem with a little bit
of a hole appearing where her shoulder
| | 03:16 | should be, right there.
| | 03:18 | A lot of that is caused by the
color spill from the background.
| | 03:22 | I can try making very small corrective
strokes, I'll cmd or ctrl, make my
| | 03:27 | brush smaller, then hold opt or alt
and drag through there to correct that
| | 03:31 | shoulder area, but you'll see that quite
often Roto Brush and the Refine Edge
| | 03:36 | Tool gets over trained and removes all of the
partial transparency in that part of her hair.
| | 03:41 | With just like any other tool in
After Effects, don't try to do everything
| | 03:44 | with just one tool.
| | 03:46 | I'll undo, to get back to where I
have my nice partial transparency, and if
| | 03:50 | necessary I can go use something
such as the normal Paintbrush Tool.
| | 03:55 | Drag it up here where you can
see it better, change its mode to Alpha
| | 04:00 | Channel only, making sure I'm painting
in white which will fill in or make the
| | 04:04 | Alpha Channel opaque.
| | 04:05 | And if I wanted to I could go ahead and
add a few corrective strokes to the Alpha
| | 04:11 | Channel itself to fill in
that part of her shoulder.
| | 04:14 | I could also do the same thing if
I need to cut a hole through her.
| | 04:18 | I'll switch to black for the Alpha
Channel, which means remove and if necessary
| | 04:22 | cut some additional holes in
the Alpha, you get the idea.
| | 04:26 | Change my View, back to Roto Brush &
Refine Edge, go back to my X-ray view and
| | 04:31 | I'll switch back to my Refine Edge Tool.
| | 04:34 | And just to make sure I am not missing
anything I am going to go back to my base
| | 04:38 | frame and step forward and make sure I
don't have any issues on the right side
| | 04:42 | of her head with the Refine Edge
Tool mistaking colored glints in her hair as
| | 04:47 | actually being transparent areas.
| | 04:49 | Again, this original image has a lot of
spill and you'll see some of the green
| | 04:54 | and blues from the background
are being reflected in her hair.
| | 04:56 | Since those colors are so similar to
the background, there is a chance Refine
| | 05:00 | Edge might think that they are the background.
| | 05:02 | I'll turn Render back on, I'll press
Tilde (~) to go back to full screen, and
| | 05:07 | I'll just make sure that areas like this
aren't getting eroded when they shouldn't be.
| | 05:11 | I can turn the X-ray off and just
double-check what's in those areas.
| | 05:16 | For example this is a blond hair
that should not be transparent.
| | 05:21 | So I'm going to go back to my base
frame which looks pretty good, I can use
| | 05:29 | opt or alt + x to
toggle this X-ray off and on.
| | 05:32 | So what I am going to do is hold down
the opt or alt key to my Subtract
| | 05:36 | Refine Matte Tool and say, bad Roto Brush.
| | 05:39 | Don't cut that out, leave that fully opaque.
| | 05:43 | I'll step forward a frame, you'll see
there is now this hole where Roto Brush is
| | 05:47 | no longer considering, it should even
be processing in that area, opt or
| | 05:52 | alt + x. Let's say that's a strand as well
that I need to keep opaque so I'll hold
| | 05:57 | down the opt key, carefully remove
that strand of hair and then step forward
| | 06:05 | in time and make sure we are not
accidentally cutting holes in her head, because
| | 06:10 | who needs extra holes in their head.
| | 06:15 | And I can move on from there.
| | 06:16 | So now you have a basic idea of how to
setup your base frame for Refine Edge
| | 06:22 | and how to propagate those movements
earlier and later in time, including some
| | 06:26 | ideas for corrective strokes.
| | 06:28 | In the next couple movies I am
going to talk about some of the fine tuning
| | 06:32 | you can do with the Refine Edge Tool as
well as how some parameters have changed
| | 06:36 | for Roto Brush itself.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Fine-tuning with Refine Edge Matte options| 00:05 | Now that we've used the Refine Edge
Tool to create this nice soft matte edge
| | 00:12 | that takes into account the fine
filaments of her hair, let's improve the
| | 00:16 | resulting matte a little bit.
| | 00:17 | I'll press the Tilde (~) key to go back
to my normal display, but I am going to
| | 00:21 | go up to 100% to make
sure I can see fine details.
| | 00:25 | I'm also going to switch to viewing the
alpha channel, because that is perhaps an
| | 00:29 | easier way to see exactly what's
going on in these fine details.
| | 00:34 | Now the new combined Roto Brush and
Refine Edge Effect has several master toggle
| | 00:39 | switches to turn things off and on.
| | 00:40 | For example, you can turn off the Refine
Edge portion of this effect in one fell swoop.
| | 00:46 | Now we have just her normal binary
Roto Brush Matte and here we have our
| | 00:51 | beautiful Refined Matte that
takes into account of her hair.
| | 00:54 | We can also turn off groups of parameters.
| | 00:57 | The Roto Brush refinements
and the Refine Edge refinements;
| | 01:00 | which we haven't done anything with yet.
| | 01:02 | In the next movie I am going to talk
about how some of these names have changed
| | 01:06 | for the Roto Brush refinements, but for
now let's keep focusing on Refine Edge.
| | 01:10 | The first Refine Edge parameters
is actually Base Refine Edge Radius.
| | 01:14 | This allows you to set a base width
for Refine Edge that goes all the way
| | 01:19 | around your Roto Brush Propagation boundary
without you having to manually draw a stroke.
| | 01:23 | This will be particularly handy if you
have someone in say, a furry coat,
| | 01:27 | footage that was shot blurry or out
of focus, something where there is going
| | 01:31 | to be some degree of semi-transparency all
around the edge of your object and you
| | 01:35 | don't want to have to be bothered painting a
Refine Edge stroke around that entire edge.
| | 01:40 | This will come in even more handy
when you use the related Refine Soft Matte
| | 01:44 | effect to adjust the transparency
created by other techniques such as Key Light
| | 01:48 | and I'll show that a couple of movies later.
| | 01:50 | But when you're doing normal Roto Brush
work and you're using the Refine Edge
| | 01:54 | Tool, quite often you'll just leave
this to 0 and then just carefully draw the
| | 01:58 | edge where you want it.
| | 01:59 | Now let's go and look at these
other fine tune parameters.
| | 02:02 | Smooth, Feather, Contrast,
Shift Edge, and Chatter Reduction.
| | 02:07 | Feather and Smooth are two different
ways of removing detail in this edge.
| | 02:12 | Normally you'd like to have all the detail.
| | 02:16 | But if you have particularly noisy
video or other artifacts, you might need to
| | 02:19 | get rid of some of that noise.
| | 02:22 | Feather is akin to blurring
the resulting Alpha Channel.
| | 02:25 | Then I'm going to increase my Feather
parameter and as I do so you'll see some of
| | 02:31 | the details of the fine strands
of the hair start to disappear.
| | 02:34 | We still have this detail down in the
shoulder areas outside the Refine Edge Effect.
| | 02:41 | This is the hard Roto Brush Matte,
normally I would keep feather close to zero
| | 02:46 | unless I know that I have an issue
with something that's out of focus along
| | 02:50 | the edges and I am getting a lot of noise
contaminating and really grunging up those edges.
| | 02:55 | An alternative to Feather is Smooth.
| | 02:59 | Rather than just blur things it attempts
to clump together areas of transparency
| | 03:03 | or semi-transparency.
| | 03:05 | As I increase Smooth to some large
value, you'll see I get a very different
| | 03:09 | effect, something that looks more like a reduce
noise or reduce detail than a Gaussian Blur.
| | 03:14 | Again if you have a problem with
noisy footage, creating little pin pricks
| | 03:17 | and holes along the edges of your matte,
Smooth is an alternative way to fill those in.
| | 03:23 | But my two favorite parameters
are Contrast and Shift Edge.
| | 03:27 | A problem I've had with my earlier
explorations of the Refine Edge Tool is
| | 03:32 | partial transparencies in the gaps
between hair, then background, then hair again.
| | 03:38 | I'm going to zoom in to 200% to show
this area in a bit more detail.
| | 03:43 | Now right through here I would
actually expect the alpha channel to be
| | 03:49 | transparent, so I can see through the
gap between this outside strand of hair
| | 03:53 | and the body of her hair.
| | 03:55 | However the Refine Edge Tool is looking at
this as partial transparency. There may be
| | 03:59 | some wispy hairs back there. There
may be some confusion between the background
| | 04:03 | color and the color spill onto her hair.
| | 04:06 | To improve this gap, you could try
making a very small brush and holding opt
| | 04:10 | or alt and trying to paint
out these transparent areas.
| | 04:16 | But quite often the result is, you grab a hair
bulk and you fill it in instead of getting a hole.
| | 04:21 | I've had unsatisfactory results trying to
get too detailed with the Refine Edge Tool.
| | 04:26 | So instead I am going to go to the
Contrast parameter and boost the contrast
| | 04:33 | to make that area between the strand of her
hair on the bulk of her hair more transparent.
| | 04:39 | Now in doing so you'll notice that her
hair unfortunately has thinned out as
| | 04:43 | well, and no longer has quite the heft to it
that it previously had in the alpha channel.
| | 04:47 | That's where Shift Edge comes in handy.
| | 04:50 | It takes the areas that are
opaque and bulks them back up again.
| | 04:54 | So I can go ahead and have some nice solidity
where her hairs actually are in this scene.
| | 05:02 | And here is where the fine
tune switch comes in handy;
| | 05:04 | this was before and after,
a much better defined edge.
| | 05:09 | And If I look at this in Context over a
background, this is my final composite
| | 05:15 | where I can actually see the strand of
her hair, or if I just turned it off,
| | 05:19 | there is a bit of haziness into this
area, that makes it hard to see for the
| | 05:24 | background, see what's going on.
| | 05:25 | You see particular over here on the left
side where she is against this wooden beam.
| | 05:29 | By default I am getting this hazy
sort of alpha channel through this area,
| | 05:33 | but with my Contrast and Shift Edge refinements
now I am getting some details back in her hair.
| | 05:40 | Chatter Reduction is something that
used to be very important for Roto Brush
| | 05:43 | when it was on its own, it basically said
if an edge is not moving, but you see it
| | 05:48 | moving, it's chattering and therefore
you want to reduce that amount of chatter.
| | 05:53 | Well with hair quite often you will
have fine hairs moving every single frame.
| | 05:56 | So quite often you don't need Chatter Reduction.
| | 05:59 | However if you do have an edge
that's supposed to be completely the same, from
| | 06:02 | frame-to-frame and you see it's
moving a little bit, try the different
| | 06:06 | Chatter Reduction settings.
| | 06:07 | Then finally Roto Brush has this normal
Use Motion Blur and Decontaminate Edge
| | 06:12 | Color, which comes in very handy, you
see how her hair now looks much more
| | 06:16 | realistic than it did with it off.
| | 06:19 | Still need to do some touch up on the
shoulder, but I'll do that with a separate
| | 06:23 | color spill plug in.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Other Roto Brush changes| 00:05 | Now the Refine Edge Tool actually
has been added onto Roto Brush.
| | 00:10 | If I widen this up a little bit, you'll see
this is now called Roto Brush and Refine Edge.
| | 00:15 | A few things have changed between prior
versions of just Roto Brush and this new
| | 00:19 | Roto Brush & Refine Edge combined effect.
| | 00:22 | If you open up an older project,
which had Roto Brush applied, it will be
| | 00:26 | converted to Roto Brush & Refine Edge.
| | 00:29 | However, be careful about taking a
later version of After Effects and trying
| | 00:33 | to do File > Save As > CS6, because it will delete
this effect from the project, save back as CS6.
| | 00:42 | You won't get just the Roto Brush parameters.
| | 00:45 | So this is one place where you
have to be very careful about
| | 00:48 | backwards compatibility.
| | 00:49 | Secondly, some of these parameters have
changed names between CS6 and the newer
| | 00:54 | versions of After Effects.
| | 00:55 | For example, what is now called the
Feather Parameter was previously called
| | 01:00 | the Smooth Parameter.
| | 01:02 | They both imply the same thing that
you're basically blurring out or smoothing
| | 01:06 | out the resulting alpha channel.
| | 01:08 | The difference is, is that Feather is a different
algorithm than smooth as used by Refine Edge.
| | 01:15 | So they've changed the old smooth
parameter to the name of Feather to better
| | 01:18 | reflect what it's really doing, it's
blurring the resulting alpha channel.
| | 01:22 | One other change is, is that this
parameter has been multiplied roughly by 2.7
| | 01:28 | or so compared to the old values.
| | 01:30 | You remember that the default for
smooth used to be 2, now it's 5 or in other
| | 01:35 | words close to 2.7 times its old default value.
| | 01:38 | What is now called Contrast is
what used to be called Feather.
| | 01:44 | The old Feather Parameter didn't
actually do any blurring instead it kind of
| | 01:48 | changed the gamma of the
semitransparent edges to your alpha channel.
| | 01:52 | Feather wasn't really a good name for
what it really did, so they changed it to
| | 01:56 | the more accurate Contrast.
| | 01:57 | You notice too that the values have
been inverted, whereas the old so called
| | 02:01 | Feather parameter used to default
to 20%, well that equals 80% contrast.
| | 02:06 | A 100% contrast is no "feather at all".
| | 02:11 | What used to be called Choke is now
called Shift Edge and this parameter
| | 02:15 | probably makes more sense.
| | 02:16 | Those of us, who have used the old
Matte tools such as a Simple Choker, are
| | 02:22 | probably more familiar with what
choking means, but what it's really doing is
| | 02:26 | shifting the alpha channel's edge in or out.
| | 02:28 | The other change is to reduce chatter which
used to default to 50%, now defaults to 0%.
| | 02:34 | Now if you are having problems with
your edges moving when they should not
| | 02:38 | be moving, particularly in areas
outside of where you've painted with the
| | 02:42 | Refine Edge Tool, definitely use Reduce
Chatter to cut down on these noisy or jumpy areas.
| | 02:48 | But be aware that that default has changed.
| | 02:51 | So unfortunately if you've memorized
some of your favorite parameters for Roto
| | 02:54 | Brush, you're going to need to
retrain your brain as to what they mean now.
| | 02:58 | However, these are now better
aligned with the names of the Refine Edge
| | 03:02 | Parameters as well as some
more parameters in Photoshop.
| | 03:05 | And in the long run I think you'll
find the new names simply make more sense.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refine Soft Matte| 00:05 | You may remember that when Roto Brush
was added to After Effects, you also got a
| | 00:09 | brand-new effect called Matte > Refine Matte.
| | 00:13 | This was the edge cleanup portion of
the Roto Brush Effect, the ability to
| | 00:17 | decontaminate edge color, to
Motion Blur, moving edges, etcetera.
| | 00:20 | And you could apply it after anything
that created an alpha channel including
| | 00:24 | keyed footage, etcetera.
| | 00:25 | Well that effect has now been renamed
Refine Hard Matte to take into account the
| | 00:31 | binary overall nature of the underlying matte.
| | 00:34 | All the parameter name changes, I
discussed in the last movie, apply to
| | 00:37 | this effect as well.
| | 00:38 | Well with the addition of the Refine
Edge Tool, we now have a new effect called
| | 00:43 | Refine Soft Matte and this is the edge
correction section of the Refine Edge Tool,
| | 00:49 | in other words a much better tool for
dealing with partially transparent areas.
| | 00:53 | For example here I have a keyed scene
and it's not a bad key, however it does
| | 01:00 | run into trouble when there's a
lot of fast movement and Motion Blur.
| | 01:03 | Even though we do have partial
transparency on some of these motion blurred
| | 01:07 | areas, if I turn the Key Light
Effect off, you'll see that the Motion
| | 01:11 | Blur along the hands, etcetera has some
much longer trail that I am seeing in
| | 01:16 | the final keyed result.
| | 01:17 | You'll also see that the edges have
got choked in a little bit to create a
| | 01:21 | good key all around this footage.
| | 01:22 | Well, I can further clean up those
edges, now using Refine Soft Matte.
| | 01:26 | So up to Matte>Refine Soft Matte
and I need to make some adjustments.
| | 01:32 | Most effects and other techniques for
creating an alpha channel do leave you
| | 01:37 | color beyond the edges of your alpha channel.
| | 01:41 | It just so happens, the keylight does not.
| | 01:44 | Well, there is a couple of
ways of getting around that.
| | 01:47 | One is you can change the View pop up
from Final Result to Intermediate Result.
| | 01:52 | The good news is that keeps the color
beyond the alpha channel, the bad news
| | 01:57 | is, is that removes the color despill
portion of Keylight, so it's kind of a mixed bag.
| | 02:02 | We also have this option called
Unpremultiply Result but frankly, I've had some
| | 02:07 | mixed results using that particular choice.
| | 02:11 | So, I am going to leave that off for now.
| | 02:14 | If you're using a king effect other
than Keylight, which blows away the color
| | 02:17 | information, you can go ahead and use
the Channel > Set Channels effect, and
| | 02:23 | instead take your original Red, Green,
and Blue from your underlying Source
| | 02:29 | Layer --don't touch your alpha channel--
and place that before Refine Soft Matte.
| | 02:36 | Again you'd lose any of your color
spill built into the effect, but this gives
| | 02:40 | you color information for
Refine Soft Matte to work with.
| | 02:43 | But I am going to delete this and use
the Intermediate Result from Keylight.
| | 02:48 | You can immediately see that we have
much longer, better Motion Blur trails around
| | 02:53 | things such as the hand.
| | 02:54 | I'll turn off all the effects.
| | 02:57 | You see the underlying
footage and now the treated footage.
| | 03:00 | This is a much better edge
treatment tacked onto our keyer.
| | 03:04 | Most of these parameters will
look familiar, Smooth, Feather, Contrast,
| | 03:09 | Shift Edge, and Chatter Reduction are
exactly the same as for the new combined
| | 03:14 | Roto Brush and Refined Edges effect.
| | 03:16 | You'll see that you do get some
Decontaminate Edge Color and calculation of Motion Blur.
| | 03:21 | Don't know if I necessarily need even
more in this particular example, but it's
| | 03:25 | something to try depending on your
footage, because there you get to choose what
| | 03:28 | the actual shutter angle is, etcetera.
| | 03:30 | But my keyed and refined footage has
pretty good transparency to begin with and
| | 03:36 | you can also decontaminate some edge color.
| | 03:38 | With it turned off, you'll see I have
got green in these motion blurred areas;
| | 03:42 | with it turned on, now I have
nice natural color in those areas.
| | 03:46 | It doesn't quite creep all the way
into areas such as this person's shirt, but it
| | 03:50 | does well for the partially
transparent areas as opposed to the opaque areas.
| | 03:56 | Since you don't actually get to use
the Refine Edge Tool to define the areas
| | 04:02 | that are partially transparent,
instead you have a fixed radius that goes all
| | 04:06 | the way around your object.
| | 04:08 | If it's too small, you'll see that
I'm starting to cut into Motion Blurred
| | 04:13 | sections, but you don't want to make it too
big because you might introduce some artifacts.
| | 04:18 | I am going to pick a happy medium
where I filled in the opaque areas of the
| | 04:23 | actors and have nice motion blur trails.
| | 04:26 | And if you want a visual confirmation of
what's going on, you can view that edge
| | 04:29 | region, looks like I've captured
all those motion blurred areas.
| | 04:32 | I'll turn that back off again.
| | 04:34 | Again you can see how much better this
is than just using keying on its own.
| | 04:38 | You may need to do some despill, I'll
go to Effect > Keying > Spill Suppressor, the
| | 04:44 | one built into After Effects
is fair not fantastic.
| | 04:47 | I use the same key that the color keyer
used, pulled a little bit too much
| | 04:52 | out of his shirt, so I'll back it off
until I have a good intermediate mix,
| | 04:57 | this is his original shirt color,
this is after, a little bit more out of
| | 05:01 | there, right around there.
| | 05:03 | And thanks to the addition of Refine Soft Matte.
| | 05:06 | I have a much better end
result and key than I did before.
| | 05:10 | So, it's another tool to keep in mind
when you're working with particularly
| | 05:14 | tricky footage, or cases where
something may already have been hand-masked, but
| | 05:17 | didn't do a great job on blurred edges.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Warp Stabilizer VFX and the 3D Camera TrackerShowing and deleting points| 00:05 | After Effects' Warp Stabilizer and 3D
Camera Tracker are based on a similar concept.
| | 00:11 | Analyze points moving in a scene, try
to use those points to reverse engineer
| | 00:16 | where the camera originally was in the
scene, and either stabilize or smooth out the
| | 00:21 | camera's movements or give you a 3D
Camera in After Effects so you can add new
| | 00:26 | objects to the scene.
| | 00:27 | Well, Warp Stabilizer has been upgraded
to Warp Stabilizer VFX or Visual Effects.
| | 00:32 | It has more capabilities, including
some features that originally came with 3D
| | 00:35 | Camera Tracker and some other
tricks I'd also like to show you.
| | 00:38 | But first let's show you what it
borrowed from 3D Camera Tracker.
| | 00:42 | I have in this particular
composition a piece of footage that includes a
| | 00:48 | hand-held shot of a person using a
laptop computer, and it has a little bit of
| | 00:53 | wobble and wander to it.
| | 00:55 | If I used the Warp Stabilizer to go
ahead and lock off the motion in this shot
| | 01:02 | and otherwise use it at its defaults, some
strange things kind of happen to the result.
| | 01:07 | You'll notice that this whole footage
is really warped in a very strange way.
| | 01:11 | Well the reason this is going on is
because this scene has a mixture of objects
| | 01:16 | that are indeed solid and should not
be warping and objects that are indeed
| | 01:21 | moving and changing shape.
| | 01:23 | But for Warp Stabilizer to do its
magic, it assumes that the objects are
| | 01:27 | somewhat stable in their shape.
| | 01:29 | The problem is, is that it's tracking
this user's arm as if it was a wall.
| | 01:35 | And when that wall is bending around
and changing perspective, well it thinks
| | 01:38 | that the camera is doing that,
not that the person is doing that.
| | 01:41 | So what we need to do is tell Warp
Stabilizer not to track the person, just
| | 01:47 | track the stable objects,
like the laptop and the wall.
| | 01:51 | Well you can preprocess your footage
by doing things like masking out the
| | 01:54 | offending objects in your scene or you
can take advantage of some new features
| | 01:59 | in Warp Stabilizer VFX.
| | 02:01 | One thing that it grew from the 3D
Camera Tracker is it can now show you the
| | 02:05 | underlying track points that it used to go
ahead and decide where the camera was in this shot.
| | 02:11 | To do so it temporarily reverts back to
the original unstabilized shot to show
| | 02:16 | you what's happening through time.
| | 02:18 | Once you see all those points you can
see how they're just dancing around the
| | 02:21 | guy's shirt collar and all these
other problems with hands, etcetera.
| | 02:25 | You can go ahead and delete offending points.
| | 02:28 | This logo burn-in is also a problem,
because it's not moving with the camera;
| | 02:32 | it should not be
misinterpreted as a straight wall.
| | 02:34 | Anyway, now that I can see where my
offending track points are, I can delete
| | 02:39 | them and tell Warp Stabilizer not to
take them into account and it tries to
| | 02:43 | stabilize this shot.
| | 02:44 | So what I can do is drag around
and lasso some of these points.
| | 02:47 | I'll grab ones on the body first here
and the logo, and then I'll grab the
| | 02:55 | ones around the hand and start deleting
those as well and I'll grab this hand as well.
| | 03:02 | There we go that one needs to go as well.
| | 03:08 | In addition to the ability to delete
points, both Warp Stabilizer and the 3D
| | 03:14 | Camera Tracker have this new feature
called Auto-delete Points Across Time.
| | 03:19 | Both the 3D Camera Tracker and Warp
Stabilizer will pick up a point, carry for
| | 03:23 | as many frames as it is confident that
that is still the same point and then
| | 03:27 | perhaps drop that point because
something obscured it, like a person walking in
| | 03:30 | front of the scene, pick up
later, or go develop new points.
| | 03:34 | Well, if Warp Stabilizer and 3D Camera
Tracker now know that you've deleted a
| | 03:39 | point that it was using for multiple
frames, it will delete that point across
| | 03:43 | all of those frames.
| | 03:44 | Little bit of a labor saving when trying to
clean up points particularly in 3D Camera Tracker.
| | 03:49 | However, as I mentioned, Warp Stabilizer
is constantly regenerating new track points.
| | 03:55 | I'm going to go somewhere here in time
where there is new points to get rid of,
| | 03:58 | and I'm going to delete those as well.
| | 04:03 | I don't need to be precise.
| | 04:05 | I don't need to get every
single little point that's wrong.
| | 04:08 | What I want to do is just weigh
things in favor of Warp Stabilizer having
| | 04:14 | enough good points that it will generate a
better track and therefore a better stabilization.
| | 04:21 | I'll go a bit later in time, to a few
more points I've created, right around
| | 04:27 | there, maybe I can get rid of those
guys, these guys around his shirt and his
| | 04:32 | chin which have been particularly annoying.
| | 04:36 | More of these clustered
around the fingers and hands.
| | 04:38 | Get these as well and keep moving
through time to where I need to remove
| | 04:50 | more groups of points.
| | 04:51 | And again I don't need
to be completely thorough.
| | 04:55 | I can go ahead and grab these many through here.
| | 05:01 | Just grab enough to tilt the balance,
because it still has all these good
| | 05:06 | points over here to track.
| | 05:07 | Get rid of some of these on this shirt as well.
| | 05:10 | A little bit later in time, get
rid of some more points, gone.
| | 05:17 | Let me try to get that one; gone.
| | 05:24 | Offending hand and sleeve, gone and go to
the end and get a few more around the hands.
| | 05:30 | And this should be enough to tell Warp
Stabilizer who is the good points and
| | 05:37 | who is the bad ones.
| | 05:38 | A couple here and that should be
the majority of our bad points.
| | 05:47 | We've got a few jigglies in here to get rid of.
| | 05:50 | But that's a big improvement on balance.
| | 05:53 | That's the last that I'll do.
| | 05:56 | I'm going to turn off Show Track Points,
so I go back to seeing my stabilized
| | 06:00 | shot, RAM Preview, and now you'll see
for example that his computer screen is
| | 06:08 | keeping a nice steady shape, it's not
being warped crazily as if the whole thing
| | 06:13 | was made out of rubber.
| | 06:14 | And you can also see the rest of the
scene staying pretty stable as well.
| | 06:18 | So that's the case, where being
able to see the track points with Warp
| | 06:21 | Stabilizer, is a real large
advantage in being able to clean up and
| | 06:25 | improve the quality of your
stabilization, whether you're going for No Motion,
| | 06:29 | which is the most drastic case of
all or just trying to smooth out the
| | 06:34 | camera's motion.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| The Reverse Stabilization setting| 00:05 | The common visual effects trick is
the desire to add something into a scene
| | 00:09 | where the camera is moving and to
retain the camera's original motion.
| | 00:14 | Moving cameras look a lot more
interesting than locked off cameras in many cases.
| | 00:18 | Well there is ways of doing that.
| | 00:20 | You could use mocha which comes with
After Effects, you can use After Effects'
| | 00:23 | 3D Camera Tracker, you can use your
other traditional trackers, or now you can
| | 00:28 | use Warp Stabilizer VFX to do something similar.
| | 00:32 | Let me show you that workflow.
| | 00:34 | I've already used Warp Stabilizer to go
ahead and analyze the motion in this scene.
| | 00:40 | By default it tries to smooth
out the original camera's motion.
| | 00:42 | But what I need to do is this.
| | 00:45 | I need to completely stop any of
the camera's motion, add my additional
| | 00:50 | elements, maybe effects, etcetera,
then reintroduce the camera's motion
| | 00:56 | back into the scene, ah!
| | 00:58 | Now that's the trick,
reintroducing the motion or as it's known,
| | 01:01 | reversing stabilization.
| | 01:03 | Well doing that is a multi-step process.
| | 01:06 | With Warp Stabilizer VFX, and make sure that
the Advanced Section is twirled open, go
| | 01:12 | to Objective, it is no longer to
Stabilize, but to reverse the stabilization.
| | 01:18 | The first step is picking
Reversible Stabilization.
| | 01:21 | That says, No Motion, Stabilize Only and
now you have a locked off shot that you
| | 01:30 | can start modifying with
effects applied to this layer.
| | 01:34 | For example, paint is actually an effect.
| | 01:38 | I am going to choose the Clone Tool,
double-click the footage to open it up
| | 01:44 | in the Layer panel;
| | 01:45 | all painting must be done in the Layer panel.
| | 01:48 | Press shift + / to center my shot
here and say hey, let's just for laughs
| | 01:53 | clone this menu bar.
| | 01:54 | I am going hold opt to say that's my
clone source, go elsewhere in the frame
| | 02:00 | and paint in my new menu bar
partially across the screen.
| | 02:06 | Since it's a locked off shot, that
menu bar will stay right in that position.
| | 02:10 | Let's say I want do something else
particularly silly like add effects, how
| | 02:16 | about Generate > Audio Waveform; make it
look like he is transcribing something he
| | 02:22 | is actually listening to.
| | 02:24 | I wanted to composite
this on top of the original.
| | 02:26 | I want to drag my FX points up into the
corners he is looking at, such as there
| | 02:33 | and may be out here, assign it to an
audio track I already have in this project.
| | 02:39 | in this case I have
something from the Lunar Rover;
| | 02:41 | I'll turn on that speaker and audition that.
| | 02:43 | (audio playing)
| | 02:47 | Go to somewhere where we have some
audio and maybe come up with a more pleasing
| | 02:51 | color, maybe based on colors already
in this footage for my audio waveform,
| | 02:58 | might work better if it was green and
if it was dragged down say maybe to align
| | 03:03 | with our new menu bar, like right around there.
| | 03:08 | Again, locked off shot, it
looks like it stays where it should.
| | 03:12 | Now here is the important and
not very intuitive last step.
| | 03:16 | The last thing you need to do
is reverse the stabilization.
| | 03:19 | And to do that you take your current
Warp Stabilizer VFX, which already has all
| | 03:24 | the analysis data already in it,
duplicate it, which is cmd + d on Mac or
| | 03:29 | ctrl + d on Windows, drag the duplicate
to the bottom of your Effects stack, so
| | 03:34 | it's after everything else that you've
already done, then change the Objective
| | 03:41 | to Reverse Stabilization.
| | 03:43 | Since it's working off of the same
analysis data, you can just use that data
| | 03:48 | differently, and now I am
back into a framed shot again.
| | 03:52 | Let's go back to original composition,
spend a moment queuing up a RAM preview
| | 03:57 | and you'll see that our painted menu bar,
our audio waveform effect, etcetera, now
| | 04:03 | track along with the original
camera movement in this shot.
| | 04:06 | (audio playing)
| | 04:15 | I might want to do some other tweaks
like maybe rotate that clone stroke a
| | 04:19 | little bit to get a little bit better
perspective, etcetera, but you get the point.
| | 04:23 | Again, this is something you can do
with other tools like mocha, 3D Camera
| | 04:27 | Tracker to create 3D world, etcetera,
but Warp Stabilizer gives you another way
| | 04:32 | of approaching this type of shot,
particularly if you want to add something to
| | 04:36 | the scene that requires effects.
| | 04:37 | Lock it off, apply your effects, then
reverse the lock off to go back to the
| | 04:42 | original camera movement.
| | 04:43 | And by the way in order to get a
really good locked off shot, I did what I
| | 04:48 | showed you in the previous movie of
deleting all the points around his arms and
| | 04:52 | hands, so I had a nice accurate stabilization.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying motion to a target| 00:05 | In the previous movie I showed you how
to apply effects to a clip and retain the
| | 00:10 | original camera motion.
| | 00:12 | In this movie I am going to show you a
different way of adding layers on top of
| | 00:16 | another layer and still retain
the original camera's movement.
| | 00:19 | In this particular case I have kind
of a shaky camera move following this
| | 00:27 | elephant as it walks across the scene.
| | 00:29 | I have already applied Warp Stabilizer
VFX and its default settings just to save
| | 00:34 | us a little bit of
analysis time and I'll turn it on.
| | 00:37 | And as you now know, if you had
trouble with getting a good stabilization,
| | 00:41 | you could show the track points,
but you'll see works of ignoring the
| | 00:46 | foreground motion, the elephant, no track points
on him and instead following background motion.
| | 00:52 | Anyway, let's say I want this text to
appear to be really in this scene rather than
| | 00:58 | just plopped on top of it.
| | 01:00 | Well, in the Advanced Section there are
two more objective options you'll find
| | 01:04 | interesting, Apply Motion to Target
and Apply Motion to Target Over Original.
| | 01:10 | Over Original does the compositing within
one layer, so I am going to use that one.
| | 01:15 | I choose that. I choose my Target later
to be my text and I temporarily get two
| | 01:21 | copies of the text, one is my original
copy which I can now turn off and the
| | 01:26 | second is my copy that's been
composited into the scene by Warp Stabilizer VFX.
| | 01:32 | You'll see it has turned its
Stabilization to No Motion, that's because
| | 01:36 | underneath the hood it's not
stabilizing the shot, but instead applying the
| | 01:41 | original camera's motion to this new layer.
| | 01:44 | I'll RAM preview this and you'll see
that the text now appears to be part of the
| | 01:51 | original scene and picks up
the original camera movement.
| | 01:54 | If you want to change its
position, it's a bit non-intuitive.
| | 01:57 | You have to go back to your original
layer, type P and start scrubbing it on
| | 02:02 | that original layer to put
it where you want it to be
| | 02:06 | to begin with, maybe right around there.
| | 02:09 | Let's RAM preview that maybe that's a
little bit more of the positioning that I want.
| | 02:14 | So that's another nice trick you can
now perform with Warp Stabilizer VFX.
| | 02:17 | You can now perform what used to
be motion tracker type of composites
| | 02:21 | inside this one plug-in.
| | 02:23 | Let's explore that other option.
| | 02:26 | I am going to select my stabilized footage and
change the objective to Apply a Motion to Target.
| | 02:31 | When I do so, I don't get a composite,
I just get the camera's movement applied
| | 02:38 | to the original layer.
| | 02:40 | But it has now been composited onto
this second layer and notice that it's the
| | 02:43 | layer with Warp Stabilizer
VFX that turns it on and off.
| | 02:47 | What if I do want it back over the
scene, but I just wanted them a separate
| | 02:51 | layer so I could blending modes,
and other cute tricks like that. No problem!
| | 02:55 | I'll duplicate my original footage
--cmd or ctrl + d-- remove Warp Stabilizer
| | 02:59 | from the copy underneath, so I now
have a composite and now I have my moving
| | 03:06 | footage composited on top of my untreated scene.
| | 03:09 | Now I'm free to go ahead and press a 4
to bring up Blending Modes, maybe use a
| | 03:14 | little bit of an Add Mode, back off
the transparency a little bit to get a
| | 03:19 | little bit more interesting of a
composite so it blends in and now I have an
| | 03:23 | even more interesting composite by using
them as two separate layers rather than
| | 03:27 | having the effect composite
everything within one layer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Preserving scale while stabilizing| 00:05 | Let's talk about another nice
addition to Warp Stabilizer VFX.
| | 00:09 | When Warp Stabilizer gets its tiny
little claws on pieces of footage, it really
| | 00:13 | doesn't know much about your
camera move, is it a smooth push-in or
| | 00:17 | walk-through or fly-through or you
just kind of jerky going back and forth as
| | 00:22 | you are looking at a scene.
| | 00:23 | Take this walk-through of a forest
which I am going to RAM preview with Warp
| | 00:27 | Stabilizer currently turned off.
| | 00:28 | You will notice that there is a bit of
left-right rotation as this person is
| | 00:33 | walking through these trees.
| | 00:35 | Well Warp Stabilizer at pretty much
its default settings --all I did was
| | 00:40 | increased Smoothness to 100%--
stabilized a shot like this.
| | 00:44 | It has removed a lot of that left-right
rotation, but you notice a little lunge, right
| | 00:52 | there is a lunge in this shot.
| | 00:54 | This is Warp Stabilizer not being quite sure
on how to correct or stabilize this footage.
| | 00:59 | So it's using a combination of
rotation, position, warpage, and scale.
| | 01:05 | That's what's resulting in this little
lunge in the shot right through there.
| | 01:10 | To better see what Warp Stabilizer is
actually doing underneath the hood, change
| | 01:14 | Borders > Framing to Stabilize Only.
| | 01:19 | Now you get to see from the black
borders around this footage and I'll turn
| | 01:23 | on the transparency grid, so you can better
see it, what exactly is happening with the shot.
| | 01:28 | You will see the Warp Stabilizer
initially has scaled it down quite a bit, but
| | 01:33 | during this portion of the walk-through,
it feels compelled to scale the footage
| | 01:37 | up to better fill the screen.
| | 01:39 | That accounts for that lunge we are seeing
with this shot and you will see that when
| | 01:44 | we do have Stabilize, Crop,
and Auto-scale turned on;
| | 01:47 | Warp Stabilizer needs to scale this shot up
by 117.6% to always keep it filling the frame.
| | 01:54 | Okay, enough of the problem.
| | 01:55 | How do you solve it?
| | 01:57 | Well, Warp Stabilizer VFX has a brand-
new little checkbox called Preserve Scale.
| | 02:03 | When you have footage that is a fly-
through, a walk-through such as this shot,
| | 02:07 | etcetera, and you're noticing some
problems in the resulting stabilization, try
| | 02:12 | enabling Preserve Scale.
| | 02:14 | This tells Warp Stabilizer not to use
scale as one of the tools in its arsenal
| | 02:19 | to attempt to stabilize a shot.
| | 02:21 | I am going to queue up this RAM
preview, it will take a few seconds to
| | 02:25 | calculate, and here is playback at
normal speed and you might notice that that
| | 02:30 | lunge is no longer there, used to be
right there and now it is a smoother move
| | 02:35 | throughout this scene.
| | 02:36 | Let's go back and look at Stabilize
Only through this problematic area of the
| | 02:43 | shot and you will notice now by
studying the borders that there is no radical
| | 02:48 | change in the scale of this shot.
| | 02:50 | Warp Stabilizer is indeed changing the
position and rotation of this shot, it
| | 02:55 | has to rotate it quite a bit here at
the end to account for the camera being
| | 02:59 | rotated, but no more drastic moves or
lunges towards you as you stabilize.
| | 03:05 | I'll go back to Stabilize, Crop, and
Auto-scale and you will notice that Warp
| | 03:09 | Stabilizer doesn't even need to
scale this shot up quite as much.
| | 03:12 | It's not overcompensating for that
near flyby this tree going by the camera.
| | 03:15 | So it's another nice little trick inside
this upgraded version of Warp Stabilizer.
| | 03:21 | If you've got a fly-through, walk-
through or similar traveling in one direction
| | 03:25 | shot, and if you are noticing
problems try enabling Preserve Scale.
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| Defining the ground plane| 00:05 | The 3D Camera Tracker has received
many of the upgrades that Warp Stabilizer
| | 00:09 | VFX did, but it also received one small
but really important little new feature
| | 00:14 | I want to show you.
| | 00:15 | In this particular composition I have a
forest walk that has already been tracked
| | 00:20 | with a 3D Camera Tracker.
| | 00:21 | I'll press F3 to open up the Effects
Control panel and here you can see all of
| | 00:26 | my various track points.
| | 00:28 | Again, just as with Warp Stabilizer VFX,
if something has points for causing my
| | 00:33 | track to go bad and I can tell that if
I see them wandering when they should be
| | 00:36 | stationary, I could select them,
delete them and the 3D Camera Tracker will
| | 00:42 | allow me to automatically
delete those points across time.
| | 00:45 | In other words if the 3D camera tracker
detects that it is used that same track
| | 00:49 | point for multiple frames or
disappeared maybe because it was obscured by
| | 00:54 | another object then reappeared later,
it would know to delete that as well.
| | 00:57 | And just like with Warp Stabilizer
don't rely on this auto-delete happening.
| | 01:02 | Scan through your project and make
sure you got rid of the offending object
| | 01:05 | throughout your entire clip.
| | 01:06 | But let me get on to this new feature.
| | 01:09 | Now one of the frustrating things
about using the 3D Camera Tracker is it did
| | 01:13 | not know where the ground was.
| | 01:15 | I mean you know where the ground is,
you can look at a piece of footage like
| | 01:19 | this and say, this is
where the ground should be.
| | 01:22 | These points are on the ground or very,
very close to the ground, because they
| | 01:26 | are going to be offset by leaves, etcetera.
| | 01:28 | But previously with a 3D Camera Tracker,
if I was then to right-click on this
| | 01:31 | nice little plane and say Create Null
and Camera, choose my resulting track null
| | 01:38 | and press P for Position, you'll see
it has an X, Y and Z value that's just
| | 01:42 | somewhere an arbitrary space,
particularly Y being our altitude, it's hardly
| | 01:47 | zero which would be the ground, it's
somewhere well below us at 1226.
| | 01:52 | Okay, there is a better way now.
| | 01:54 | I am going to turn the visibility off
on those for now, so I can keep track of
| | 01:59 | them, go back go my 3D Camera Tracker
effect, choose those same three points,
| | 02:03 | right-click again and this time
say Set Ground Plane and Origin.
| | 02:09 | The 3D Camera Tracker still cannot tell
on its own where the ground is, but you
| | 02:13 | can tell it where the ground is and it
will use that information going forward.
| | 02:17 | So I'll say Set Ground Plane and Origin,
it will give me a warning since I've
| | 02:22 | already created a camera and already created
points using a different value for the origin.
| | 02:28 | It's going to warn me that
those are going to be invalid.
| | 02:30 | In other words this is something you
want to do first in your project, set
| | 02:35 | the ground plane before you define a
camera and before you start defining
| | 02:40 | solids, nulls, text, etcetera.
| | 02:44 | But since I am just playing around here,
I don't care about the values that that
| | 02:48 | previous null and camera
were at, so I'll say OK.
| | 02:50 | Now that I have this plane which is on
the ground, right-click and say Create
| | 02:57 | Null and Camera, the resulting
null has a position of 0, 0, 0.
| | 03:05 | It's correctly set where my ground
plane is based on my selected points.
| | 03:10 | That's going to make things such as
the camera data make a lot more sense.
| | 03:14 | In this case the camera is at a -Y
which is above the ground, it's also at a
| | 03:21 | greatly -Z which is towards us,
back away from that point in space.
| | 03:26 | So again, take advantage of
this new feature in After Effects.
| | 03:29 | Choose what you want your ground
plane to be, maybe pick a whole bunch of
| | 03:33 | points to define it, right-click and
set your ground plane and origin before
| | 03:38 | you go do anything else.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Improved Layer HandlingBicubic scaling| 00:05 | In the previous chapters we covered the
big marquee features added to After Effects.
| | 00:10 | However, there has been a bunch of very
nice important small features added as well.
| | 00:15 | The first one I want to cover
involves the scaling and quality of layers.
| | 00:20 | Now it's long been a problem with After
Effects that scaling over 100% results
| | 00:25 | in some pretty bad image degradation.
| | 00:27 | The is because After Effects has long
used an algorithm called Bilinear Scaling,
| | 00:32 | works great for scaling things down
but not so much for scaling things up.
| | 00:36 | I've scaled this standard def piece of
footage to fill a high-definition frame
| | 00:40 | and I am going to view it at 100%.
| | 00:42 | And you can see that some of these
numbers are looking pretty crunchy and
| | 00:46 | pretty messy in here.
| | 00:47 | And just to compare before and after,
I'll go back to 100% where things are very
| | 00:52 | nice and crisp and sharp, but when I
transform, fit it to the Comp Width to fill
| | 01:00 | out my screen, it looks pretty bad.
| | 01:02 | Well now there is a new scaling algorithm.
| | 01:05 | If you click on the Quality switch for
layer, you'll now go to a mode called
| | 01:10 | Bicubic Scaling and in many cases, but
not all cases, it will improve the visual
| | 01:17 | quality of your layers.
| | 01:18 | Let's go ahead and take a snapshot of
this layer using Bicubic Scaling, then
| | 01:23 | click through draft and back to our
normal best quality and Bilinear Scaling.
| | 01:28 | This is old Bilinear Method, this is
the new Bicubic Method and you can see not
| | 01:33 | only are some of the numbers better
formed, particularly things such as this 8
| | 01:37 | over here, there is a bit of
sharpening going on with the image as well.
| | 01:42 | And it's this sharpening that can
be a dual-edged sword, sometimes it
| | 01:45 | helps, sometimes it hurts.
| | 01:47 | Let's go look at another layer.
| | 01:49 | Here is a nice piece of stock footage,
very cleanly shot of a baseball game;
| | 01:54 | lots of nice detail in the uniforms
and even the faces of the athletes.
| | 02:01 | I am going to scale it up to fit my Comp
Width again, hold down the Spacebar and
| | 02:08 | pan over to where I can see for example,
the batter's face and switch between
| | 02:13 | the different modes.
| | 02:14 | This is the normal Bilinear
Scaling, it's still the default.
| | 02:18 | But you'll notice you have got some
keyboard shortcuts to switch to Bicubic.
| | 02:21 | You can go to Quality > Bicubic and
the shortcut is opt + shift + b on Mac,
| | 02:28 | alt + shift + b on Windows.
| | 02:30 | Think of b as for Bilinear and
Bicubic or as for best quality, just normal
| | 02:37 | opt or alt + b will
switch back to Bilinear Mode.
| | 02:40 | When I go to Bicubic, you'll see some
details in the batter's face, the mask of
| | 02:46 | the umpire, the mask of the
catcher, etcetera, get a bit sharper.
| | 02:51 | I'll press opt or alt +
b to go back to Bilinear;
| | 02:54 | you see everything is a bit soft,
opt or alt + shift + b and Bicubic
| | 03:00 | really sharpens up the faces.
| | 03:01 | I'm really noticing in this
catcher now, Bilinear, Bicubic.
| | 03:04 | Now just because this mode looks better
for a lot of footage, doesn't mean you
| | 03:11 | should use it all the time.
| | 03:13 | For example if you have a nice soft
abstract background such as this one, there
| | 03:19 | really is no advantage in
attempting to sharpen this piece of footage.
| | 03:23 | I'll just go ahead and copy and paste,
scale values, and Return, view at 100%, pan
| | 03:33 | around the screen and look at this,
this is Bilinear, opt or alt
| | 03:38 | + shift + b, Bicubic.
| | 03:39 | I am not really buying myself anything
switching between the two different modes.
| | 03:43 | If anything, sharpening it with the
Bicubic, is bringing a little bit of
| | 03:49 | unwanted noise out of the image, I might
even stay with Bilinear just to keep this
| | 03:54 | looking a bit smoother.
| | 03:55 | Also Bicubic takes longer to compute, so
don't use it for layers that don't need it.
| | 04:00 | I'll show you another example of the
downside of this sharpening that can happen
| | 04:03 | with Bicubic Scaling.
| | 04:05 | I'll go-ahead and scale this
snowboarder up to fill the screen, pan around to
| | 04:12 | get a better look at him.
| | 04:14 | You see that there was a lot of
noise or grain in this original footage.
| | 04:18 | If I switched to Bicubic Scaling,
again opt or alt + shift + b is your
| | 04:23 | shortcut, you'll see it just brings
out that noise that was in the shot,
| | 04:26 | doesn't necessarily improve it and we
are not really gaining anything by seeing
| | 04:30 | the skater any sharper.
| | 04:31 | Opt or alt + b takes us back
to Bilinear, a little bit smoother,
| | 04:36 | opt or alt + shift + b, takes
us back to Bicubic, I think actually it
| | 04:41 | takes this image down in quality.
| | 04:42 | So, use Bicubic wisely, it will indeed
improve some layers, such as this code
| | 04:48 | rage we had earlier and now you can
start scaling up your standard def layers,
| | 04:52 | the high-def size and doing other scale-
ups beyond 110% without as much concern
| | 04:56 | for quality that you used to have.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Pixel Motion Blur| 00:05 | Another nice addition to After
Effects is the ability to add Motion Blur to
| | 00:09 | already shot or already rendered footage.
| | 00:11 | Now here is a little shot of a
hummingbird, shot with a Canon 5D and
| | 00:16 | unfortunately the shutter speed was too
fast, it was set at 1/300 of a second,
| | 00:19 | when it should probably have been say 1/50
or 1/60 of a second to get more of a
| | 00:25 | motion-blurred filmic look.
| | 00:26 | As a result, the wings on the humming
bird look quite strobed and are a little
| | 00:30 | bit jarring to watch.
| | 00:32 | And if we were to single frame through
this looks like the Timeline panel and
| | 00:36 | use Page Up and Page Down, you can see
the wings do indeed move a fair amount
| | 00:40 | from frame-to-frame, sometimes they
looks still, sometimes they look blurred and
| | 00:45 | this is what creates a very
jarring final image when it's at motion.
| | 00:48 | Well let's pick a place where the
hummingbird is making a particular move such
| | 00:52 | as right here where it lunges into the feeder.
| | 00:56 | To smooth out this movement you can now use
a brand-new effect called Pixel Motion Blur.
| | 01:02 | I can never remember what category
it's in, so I'll just search inside the
| | 01:06 | Effects Control panel.
| | 01:07 | And there it is, underneath time,
not underneath blur, Pixel Motion Blur.
| | 01:12 | I will add this to my layer and now you
see how the hummingbird has been changed
| | 01:16 | and distorted a little bit to
give some natural blur to the image.
| | 01:19 | I will go Page Up for one frame earlier;
| | 01:22 | Page Down for one frame later and now I
get a much more fluid movement blurred
| | 01:27 | as the hummingbird lunges into the feeder.
| | 01:30 | Now that his head stopped moving you can
see that portion of him is sharp again.
| | 01:35 | Let's go ahead and queue up a RAM
preview of this, you will notice
| | 01:39 | it's not necessarily the fastest effect
in the world, so again don't apply to
| | 01:42 | every piece of footage;
| | 01:43 | only use it when you need it.
| | 01:45 | But once we have this playing back at
full speed and I will jump here in a
| | 01:49 | moment, you'll notice that the
final result is much smoother.
| | 01:53 | And here we are playing back at full speed
with the new pixel motion blurred footage.
| | 01:58 | And you'll notice that it is a lot more
fluid and a little bit easier to watch.
| | 02:02 | I might even go for a little bit more blur
in this just to smooth it out even more.
| | 02:06 | Now just for reference this seven
second clip took a few minutes to render, so
| | 02:10 | again it's not an effect you apply
lightly, but it can really make some
| | 02:13 | footage more watchable.
| | 02:14 | Now that we have looked at this, let's
go study Pixel Motion Blur's parameters.
| | 02:18 | They are pretty simple, Shutter Angle, 180
degrees is the typical filmic look of a half
| | 02:25 | duty shutter on a film camera.
| | 02:27 | If you want more blur you can crank
this up to particularly high numbers to
| | 02:30 | such as 720, you create a
very blurred looking image.
| | 02:33 | Then I go back to the filmic 180.
| | 02:36 | Shutter Samples is how many
intermediate points in time After Effects is going
| | 02:40 | to create to attempt to smooth out this image.
| | 02:43 | For example, if I was to go down to
Shutter Samples of only say two, now we are
| | 02:47 | going to see a lot more ghosting and
more artifacts as it attempts to blur out
| | 02:53 | this hummingbird, not quite as nice
looking, particularly in here you see a
| | 02:56 | ghost of its back as it moves forward.
| | 02:58 | But with more Shutter Samples
now it looks a bit smoother.
| | 03:02 | You can go even higher to smooth it out
even more, if you're still noticing strobing
| | 03:06 |
go for a higher value.
| | 03:07 | But keep in mind the more
shutter samples takes longer to render.
| | 03:11 | Finally is Vector Detail, this is
actually derived from the time work and pixel
| | 03:16 | motion portions of After Effects that
does what some people call optical flow.
| | 03:20 | It takes pixels from the frame before and
after and tries to calculate where those
| | 03:25 | pixels would have been at
intermediate points in time.
| | 03:29 | The more vector detail, the tighter a
mesh and pixels that are calculated.
| | 03:33 | So if I'm having trouble with some
distortion in the looks of this hummingbird
| | 03:37 | and let's find a frame a little bit
earlier in time where things may be looking a
| | 03:41 | bit odd or stretched.
| | 03:42 | Such as when he first lunges into the feeder.
| | 03:44 | There we got some problems
with the ghost of the wing there.
| | 03:51 | You can try increasing Vector Detail
to get a cleaner render of the image.
| | 03:57 | Again, it's not a parameter that you
just blindly increase to see if it looks
| | 04:01 | better because one it's going to take
longer to render and two, it can introduce
| | 04:05 | artifacts of its own.
| | 04:06 | But you can see where it has cleaned up
the render of this single frame, compared to
| | 04:10 | the default value which is now looking
a little bit distorted by comparison.
| | 04:15 | And again you really should look at
these things at speed rather than looking at
| | 04:19 | one frame at a time, a lot of sins you
see on individual frames are forgiven by
| | 04:24 | the eye when everything is
put together in full motion.
| | 04:27 | Now Pixel Motion Blur is not an
entirely new effect, there's been
| | 04:31 | third-party solutions;
| | 04:32 | there's been a solution inside After Effects.
| | 04:34 | You could go to Effect > Time > Time Warp,
change the Speed to 100%, enable Motion
| | 04:45 | Blur and change the shutter control
from automatic to manual and you will get a
| | 04:52 | very similar effect to using
the pixel motion blur effect.
| | 04:54 | The nice thing about Pixel Motion Blur
is this is now in one simple effect inside
| | 04:58 | of this big effect you had set up by hand.
| | 05:00 | So another way of rescuing
poorly shot footage in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Layer snapping| 00:05 | I love seemingly simple little additions
to the program that's going to make my
| | 00:10 | life much easier and save me a lot of time.
| | 00:12 | And one of those new features is Snapping.
| | 00:16 | Now previously in After Effects you
had very limited ability to snap layers
| | 00:19 | around, for example if I start
picking up and moving this layer then I add
| | 00:24 | cmd on Mac or ctrl on Windows and
the Shift key, layers would snap into the
| | 00:29 | corners of the composition or snap to
the center of the composition and that was
| | 00:34 | pretty much it, I will Undo.
| | 00:36 | There is a rather limited Align panel
which does allow you to align layers to
| | 00:41 | each other or to the composition
and also to distribute the layers.
| | 00:45 | So, if I was to move this layer off to
one side, move this layer up a little
| | 00:49 | bit, select all three layers, I can say,
okay align their tops to each other and
| | 00:56 | distribute their centers among each other.
| | 00:58 | But, again that was about it.
| | 01:00 | I will undo to get back to where I was.
| | 01:03 | Let's start with this layer on the right.
| | 01:06 | First I am going to place my cursor
near the point, that I want to become my
| | 01:10 | magnet or my corner or my pivot for
Snapping, it could be any of these layer
| | 01:15 | handles, it could be any anchor
point or the center of the layer.
| | 01:18 | I am going to pick this handle on the left side.
| | 01:21 | Next, add cmd on the Mac, ctrl on
Windows, no need for the Shift key, click.
| | 01:26 | As I start to move the layer, you will
see a box has appeared around that handle.
| | 01:32 | That means this is now my
center point or magnet for Snapping.
| | 01:36 | If I get close to another layer,
it will snap to that layer.
| | 01:39 | It will snap two similar points on that
layer, such as the middle of this side,
| | 01:44 | it will slide alongside of the layer
and snap to the corner and it will do a
| | 01:52 | similar thing on other sides to this layer.
| | 01:54 | The other thing it will do is also
snap to the middle of that layer.
| | 01:57 | So that opens up some pretty
fun possibilities. I will undo.
| | 02:01 | Snapping also interacts with masks, I
will select my Pen Tool, I have turned on
| | 02:07 | RotoBezier just to make life easy, I
will quickly make a circle around this
| | 02:12 | guy's head, press V to return to my
selection tool and now these new layer
| | 02:19 | handles and the vertices for my
mask all become valid snap points.
| | 02:25 | I will hold cmd again and I will
click close to this particular mask vertices.
| | 02:29 | And you will see now that that little
box is centered around not the handle on
| | 02:33 | the side of the layer, but that mask
vertex and that mask vertex can now be used
| | 02:39 | to snap to all these various points in a layer.
| | 02:43 | Similarly another layer --hold cmd
or ctrl-- can snap to not only the handles
| | 02:50 | the layer, but also the masked
vertices for that layer and again the center.
| | 02:55 | Okay, this is all nice trivia so
far, but what can you do with this?
| | 02:59 | Well, a common thing to try to do in
3D is to build a box or other structures
| | 03:04 | out of multiple layers.
| | 03:05 | So let's do that using Snapping.
| | 03:07 | This trick used to be particularly
hard in 3D because it was hard to see
| | 03:12 | what you were doing particular when you're
at perspective, so just from Custom View 1.
| | 03:17 | However, now with Snapping, it is
much easier to go ahead and say snap to
| | 03:24 | the side of that layer.
| | 03:25 | Now the other very cool thing is
you can snap the anchor point as well.
| | 03:30 | I am going to change to the Pan
Behind tool, the shortcut is the Y key, I'm
| | 03:35 | going to start dragging the anchor
point, add the cmd key and you'll see
| | 03:40 | that my anchor point now
snaps to the edges of this layer.
| | 03:44 | The nice thing about Snapping to the
edge is if I type R to reveal rotation
| | 03:50 | and then start rotating this layer, it will
perfectly pivot on that edge of the layer.
| | 03:56 | Now making things like boxes are a lot easier.
| | 03:59 | I will press V to return to the
Selection Tool, click near the edge of this
| | 04:03 | other layer, add cmd to enable
Snapping, snap to that side of the layer,
| | 04:08 | press Y to go to the Pan Behind tool,
start dragging the anchor point, add
| | 04:13 | cmd to enable Snapping, put it right
on the edge, press R for rotation and
| | 04:18 | then rotate this layer to form a side of a box
or I can even make it a zigzag box if I want to.
| | 04:24 | For now I am going to leave it
coming straight out to the side.
| | 04:27 | Not only does Snapping work in 3D,
Snapping recognizes the depth of Ray-traced
| | 04:33 | 3D layers in After Effects.
| | 04:34 | I am going to press V to return to the
Selection tool, pick my middle layer,
| | 04:40 | expose its Geometry Options and since it
is an otherwise flat piece of artwork, I
| | 04:46 | can go ahead and curve this layer, basically
bow it back in space or bow it forward in space.
| | 04:52 | I will bow it back, add
segments to round it out a little bit.
| | 04:57 | Then choose this layer, add the
cmd key to enable Snapping.
| | 05:04 | I can snap to the volumetric
box that surrounds this 3D layer.
| | 05:10 | I can put it in the volumetric center
of that whole layer, I can attach it to
| | 05:14 | the back surface of that box.
| | 05:16 | I can snap to individual corners, etcetera.
| | 05:18 | So now you can see where this Snapping
tool makes it much easier to start building
| | 05:26 | these geometric constructs.
| | 05:27 | Now I will rotate this up
to 90 degrees, 360 - 90 is 270.
| | 05:31 | To create this wonderful U- shape object,
press C for the Unified Camera Tool,
| | 05:38 | orbit around so you can see my final
shape here and maybe zoom in a little bit,
| | 05:44 | so you can see it in greater detail, and play
through it because these are all animating layers.
| | 05:54 | Now if you like this Snapping tool so
much, you wish it was on all the time, no
| | 05:58 | problem, go back to the Selection Tool,
shortcut is V, and there is now a little
| | 06:03 | check box to enable Snapping all the time.
| | 06:06 | If you enable Snapping, now whenever
you click and drag a near point, you will
| | 06:11 | see it gets that little square around it
indicating that it's magnetic and can
| | 06:14 | connect to another layer.
| | 06:16 | Oh, this makes life in 3D so much easier.
| | 06:20 | And if you don't want that behavior,
hold cmd or ctrl and it will take away
| | 06:24 | that magnetic behavior for
completely free movement.
| | 06:29 | This barely scratches the surface of
what you can do with Snapping, for example
| | 06:34 | if you had per character 3D text every
single character would have a bounding
| | 06:39 | box that you could then snap other layers to.
| | 06:41 | There is a lot of possibilities now and
it's going to make arranging layers and
| | 06:45 | in particular building 3D objects
much, much easier in After Effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Missing footage, fonts, and effects| 00:05 | For several versions now After
Effects has had the ability to find missing
| | 00:09 | footage inside a project file.
| | 00:12 | Fortunately, I have all my footage found
in this one so nothing appears in this list.
| | 00:16 | However the new version of After Effects
has gotten a lot smarter, not only can it
| | 00:20 | find missing footage, we can
find missing fonts and effects.
| | 00:24 | And if you've ever had a missing font or
effect before, you know what a pain it has
| | 00:28 | been to go find that in your project file.
| | 00:30 | I am going to go ahead and open up a
special version of this project file that I
| | 00:35 | saved for you, called After Effects missing.
| | 00:37 | Once it's open, I get this dreaded message.
| | 00:40 | This project contains a
reference to a missing effect.
| | 00:42 | It doesn't tell you what comp that
effect may be used in, what layer in that
| | 00:47 | comp may use that effect,
you just know it's missing.
| | 00:51 | And this usually starts a long
process of hunting through a project.
| | 00:54 | Okay, we have an effect missing.
| | 00:57 | Keep going and we have a font
missing and again it's the same issue,
| | 01:02 | previously with After Effects you
never knew what comp or what layer in that
| | 01:07 | comp had the missing font.
| | 01:10 | Okay, let's keep going, finally the old-
fashioned message After Effects warning:
| | 01:14 | 14 files are missing.
| | 01:16 | Well, footage has always been easy to
replace, so let's start with that, then
| | 01:19 | get to the more difficult cases.
| | 01:21 | If I go to my quick search bar at
the top of my Project panel and just
| | 01:25 | start typing missing, many versions
of After Effects will now show you all
| | 01:30 | of your missing footage items with color
bars where a thumbnail of the footage should appear.
| | 01:36 | If I double-click any one of these, such
as my Big Morongo still, search for it
| | 01:42 | in the proper folder which is
the stills folder, select it.
| | 01:46 | Not only will After Effects relink
this missing footage item, it will search
| | 01:49 | for any other missing footage in the same
directory structure and link those together as well.
| | 01:53 | Fantastic!
| | 01:55 | Okay, that's my footage.
| | 01:57 | The next trick is that missing font.
| | 02:00 | So let me type missing again.
| | 02:01 | And you see I have some pre-sorted
options, Missing Effects, Fonts, and Footage.
| | 02:06 | Let's choose fonts.
| | 02:08 | What After Effects will now do is show
me all the compositions in this project
| | 02:13 | file that have missing
fonts somewhere inside there.
| | 02:18 | Not only that if I double-click the
comp in this state of missing fonts being
| | 02:24 | in the quick search dialog, After
Effects will load the words Missing Fonts into
| | 02:28 | the quick search box for the timeline
of this comp and reveal only the layers
| | 02:34 | that have missing fonts.
| | 02:36 | I had previously opened the character
panel ahead of time, but I can tell that
| | 02:40 | Blue Island is my missing font for this
layer, it's surrounded by brackets which
| | 02:45 | indicates it's not been properly loaded.
That's a shame; Blue Island is kind of a
| | 02:48 | funky font I enjoy.
| | 02:50 | But a similarly useful font for this is Trajan.
| | 02:54 | Now I'll just replace that font with Trajan.
| | 02:57 | Okay, I have one other problem.
| | 02:58 | I am going to delete my previous missing search
to get back to my normal view of all of my sources.
| | 03:04 | And I need to clear my search down here
in the quick search box for my timeline
| | 03:09 | as well, so I will clear that out.
| | 03:11 | And I need to deselect all
my layers in my composition;
| | 03:14 | otherwise After Effects is going to restrict
its search, and that's not going to be very helpful.
| | 03:18 | So I am going to press F2 to deselect my layers.
| | 03:21 | Okay, let's go look for that missing
effect, again in the Quick Search box, for
| | 03:25 | the project panel, I will type missing,
choose Effects and I'll be shown a list
| | 03:30 | of what comps had Missing Effects.
| | 03:33 | If I double-click the comp that has a
missing effect, Missing Effects will be
| | 03:37 | loaded into the quick search box for
the Timeline panel and I'll be shown what
| | 03:42 | layer has what effect missing in it.
| | 03:45 | This Code Rage layer is missing XMult which
is a way to unmultiply black out of a layer.
| | 03:50 | These enhanced find missing commands
will save a lot of time for anyone who's
| | 03:56 | ever gotten a project from somebody
else where you did not have the same fonts
| | 04:00 | or effects, or even if you have loaded
an old archive and don't have the same
| | 04:04 | effects installed in this version of After
Effects or maybe don't have the same fonts enabled.
| | 04:08 | So, again another one of those
seemingly little features, don't change what
| | 04:13 | you see on screen, but boy, are they
going to make your life a lot easier in
| | 04:17 | the long run.
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|
ConclusionAnd there's more...| 00:05 | In the previous chapters, I showed
you the real big features that have been
| | 00:09 | added to After Effects.
| | 00:10 | However, there's lots of small
features that got added along the way as well.
| | 00:13 | I will run through a few of them of them here.
| | 00:16 | One that's going to trip some of
us up is the Comp Mini-Flowchart.
| | 00:19 | If you have nested compositions,
before you could place your cursor somewhere,
| | 00:22 | such over the Comp panel, tap the Shift
key and you would get a Mini-Flowchart.
| | 00:27 | But you are not getting it anymore,
that's because it's moved it to the Tab key.
| | 00:32 | The Shift key is used by the
operating system for many functions, that was
| | 00:36 | getting in the way of Affects
Effects trying to open this very handy
| | 00:39 | little Mini-Flowchart.
| | 00:40 | So, if you want to use the Mini-
Flowchart in the future, get used to hitting
| | 00:45 | Tab instead of Shift.
| | 00:47 | Speaking of pressing the Shift
key, there has also been an addition to the
| | 00:51 | Shift Parenting feature.
| | 00:52 | I am going to press shift + F4
to open up the Parenting panel.
| | 00:57 | A nice recent addition to After Effects,
is when you try to parent one layer to
| | 01:00 | another, you had a couple of options,
you could hold the Shift key to move the
| | 01:05 | child directly to the position of the
parent, I will do that now, you see one
| | 01:10 | goes on top of the other and I will
undo and a feature has been there for ages
| | 01:15 | is you could hold opt on Mac or alt
on Windows to do what was referred to as
| | 01:19 | jump parenting, move the child over to
the location of the parent and bring its
| | 01:24 | animation along with it.
| | 01:25 | Well Adobe has tweaked what happens
when you shift parent a child that
| | 01:30 | happens to have keyframes.
| | 01:32 | I have created this very
simple composition to demonstrate.
| | 01:35 | I have a parent layer and a child
layer, the child is just animating up the
| | 01:39 | screen rotating and scaling down.
| | 01:43 | If I was to just normally parent the
child to the parent layer, nothing changes.
| | 01:49 | The child still stays where it was
and moves up the screen, I will undo.
| | 01:53 | But now if I hold down the Shift key
while parenting and let go, you will
| | 01:58 | see that the child has moved to
exactly where the parent was, that's the
| | 02:02 | shift parenting behavior we got recently, but
its animation will continue on from that point.
| | 02:09 | The position of your current time
indicator is really important when you do this
| | 02:13 | parenting, I will undo, move my
current time indicator down here to my second
| | 02:17 | keyframe and do the same thing again.
| | 02:20 | I will shift parent the child to this
parent layer and when I let go, the child
| | 02:25 | is now ending up centered on the parent.
| | 02:30 | If I go back to the beginning, you will
see that the child's animation has been
| | 02:34 | offset so that it eventually lands on
where the parent is as opposed to takes
| | 02:38 | off from where the parent is.
| | 02:40 | So if you take advantage of this new
shift parenting behavior, be really
| | 02:44 | conscious of where your
current time indicator is.
| | 02:46 | Let's look at a few new preferences.
| | 02:49 | Quite often things are added to the
General category and in this case at the
| | 02:54 | very bottom you've got a lot of
new options for what happens when you
| | 02:57 | double-click a layer.
| | 02:58 | Previously, the logic used to change a
little bit from between versions about
| | 03:02 | what happens if you double-clicked a
footage layer, a precomp layer, a layer
| | 03:06 | that had paint applied, etcetera.
| | 03:08 | Well, now rather than trying to keep up
with After Effects' ever-changing logic,
| | 03:12 | you get to decide exactly what
it does in different versions.
| | 03:16 | We personally like consistency so we
might set these in a way that they always
| | 03:20 | did the same thing, but again
it's your personal preference.
| | 03:23 | Speaking of preferences the Memory &
Multiprocessing preferences also changed.
| | 03:28 | Underneath Multiprocessing, when you
enable Render Multiple Frames, you have a
| | 03:32 | new option, whether or not this only
works for the Render Queue or Render
| | 03:36 | Queue and RAM Preview.
| | 03:38 | Right now it defaults to not using
Multiprocessing for RAM Previews.
| | 03:41 | That's because you may be doing a very
short little preview and it may take a
| | 03:46 | long time to load the project
before you got any frames at all.
| | 03:50 | So again, set this as you desire.
| | 03:52 | Inside this dialog, they have also
changed the different options that you have
| | 03:55 | for how much memory you can assign
to each CPU during Multiprocessing.
| | 04:00 | By the way, I would almost always
set that to be at least one if not two
| | 04:04 | processors reserved for other functions.
| | 04:06 | And if I wasn't working very large
sources, I'd get by with less memory, but if
| | 04:12 | you are working in high def or even
digital cinema, you are going to need more
| | 04:16 | memory per processor, click OK.
| | 04:17 | There are some new menu commands as well.
| | 04:20 | A lot of menu commands have been
grouped underneath the new Dependencies
| | 04:24 | submenu, your Collect Files, Consolidate
Footage, Remove Footage and Reduce Project.
| | 04:29 | Well, the Find Missing effects fonts
and footage commands that we demonstrated
| | 04:34 | earlier have also moved to be
underneath this catchall dependency subcategory.
| | 04:40 | Underneath Edit > Purge has a new command
to Purge all of your memory as well as
| | 04:47 | your disk cache at the same time.
| | 04:49 | So if you have been having some
trouble with your RAM preview caches not
| | 04:53 | showing you the frames you'd expect, this
is one troubleshooting measure to clean that up.
| | 04:57 | And Composition has a new Render
option, Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue.
| | 05:02 | Adobe is trying to push you to do more
in Adobe Media Encoder as opposed to the
| | 05:06 | traditional Render Queue in After Effects.
| | 05:09 | And to help encourage you along they have
been removing some options from the Render Queue.
| | 05:13 | For example, there's no longer
choices to directly render to H.264, MPEG-2, or
| | 05:18 | Windows Media WMV formats, you have
to use Adobe Media Encoder for those.
| | 05:23 | Now mind you, if you do a QuickTime
wrapper, you can still get at things like
| | 05:28 | H.264 and that's what I personally use.
| | 05:30 | But it's worth spending a little bit of
time to learn Adobe Media Encoder because
| | 05:33 | Adobe is definitely encouraging
you to go that way in the future.
| | 05:37 | Adobe has also played around
with some of the importers.
| | 05:40 | They've updated the DPX and OpenEXR
importers for much better performance.
| | 05:44 | This just scratches the surface of all
the things they have been adding to After
| | 05:48 | Effects and with Creative Cloud
expect the program to be updated on a more
| | 05:52 | regular basis than just every year or
whenever you happen to buy an upgrade.
| | 05:57 | You might be seeing upgrades as
often as every several months.
| | 06:00 | If you want to keep up on the upgrades,
if you go to Help > After Effects Help,
| | 06:05 | you will find that what's new is one of the
very first topics you encounter in Help.
| | 06:09 | Even if you don't open it from inside
After Effects and here I have the CS6 help
| | 06:13 | opened, you could still go to
| | 06:16 | helps.adobe.com/after-effects/topics.html and
see what's new in the latest upgrades.
| | 06:24 | In short, this has been quite a
significant update cycle for After Effects, a
| | 06:28 | lot of new visual effects features and a
lot of things that I think are going to
| | 06:32 | make our lives a lot easier.
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