These are basic training videos, just teaching you the ins and outs of After Effects. The tutorials are from Video Co-pilot, a website that offers free After Effects tutorials.
http://www.videocopilot.net/basic/
2. Effects
This tutorial teaches you how to use effects in the programme, including placing the effects onto footage, adjusting the effects, and the order of the effects.
First I made a new composition using the Girl footage. The first effect I place on is Fast Blur, accessing it either through the drop down at the drop, or the Effects and Presets panel.
I next put the Curves effect on. Curves is a color correction tool for adjusting the red, green, and blue colours of the footage. With the Fast Blur and the Curves I can see how the order of effects changes the look.
You can also have more than one of the same effect on a clip, effectively doubling the effect.
Another type of effect are the generate effects. They are found in the effects drop down under Generate. Generate effects create something new rather than adjust footage. An example of this is the ramp effect.
Ramp creates a gradient that can be set to have any colours and changed from linear to radial.
The glow effect does what it says; makes the footage glow. In the effect control window I can adjust the glow settings. The threshold controls which pixels are made to glow; if the threshold is turned higher then only the brightest pixels will be affected. You can also change the radius of the glow, spreading the glow out.
Hue and Saturation can colorize and tint the footage. With colorize checked the clip is tinted to what colour is set. You can also adjust the saturation which either takes the colour out or amps it up. When it’s turned all the way down the image becomes black and white.
If I chose a red brown for the tint and turn the saturation down slightly it will give the clip a sepia look. If I add a glow on top of that we get a nice effect.
All of these effects are key frame-able, meaning they can be animated. For example the fast blur could be animated to grow over time.
3. Animation
The footage used for this tutorial is the ‘Tino raise’ clip. The tutorial goes through many animation and key frame things you can do to a piece of footage.
If you expend the footage on the timeline its transform options are brought up. These are; Anchor point, Scale, Rotation, Position, and opacity. All of these values can be changed and animated.
The anchor point sits in the middle of the footage and serves as a pivot point. The anchor point can be moved using the Pan behind tool found up in the tool bar.
The first thing we do to the clip is animate the opacity. To make the opacity go from 0 to 100 over 1 second I put two key frames with those values, one at the start of the comp, and one a second in. Once the key frames are on the timeline they can be moved and also copied. The key frames can easily be deleted, getting rid of the animation.
Next in the tutorial I animated the position of the footage, making it slide on screen. This works the same way as animating the opacity, key frames with different values for the position.
Now Key frame animation can be a bit clunky in its movement, meaning once it reaches the position key frame it stops suddenly in its new position. But there’s a way to smooth out the animation by select the key frame and hitting F9. This will turn it into an easy ease key frame which means that the object will ease into its new position. An easy ease key frame is represented by the key frame turning from a diamond shape to an hour glass shape.Next I repeat the same process but now on the rotation, making the clip pivot into position as it slides on.
Next we add motion blur. To add motion blur I turn motion blur on for this composition and check the box for the footage. Any footage is going to have a bit of blur through the movement so applying motion blur is a good way to make motion graphics look more realistic.
If you drag and select multiple key frames you can shrink or grow the space between those key frames by dragging out the end or beginning frame whilst holding Alt. This will pull out all the selected frames and keep the relative distance between them.
Next in the tutorial we drag the cloud picture out into the comp. With two files in the composition we can see how layers work, with the layer on top being above the lower layer. You can also control which layers are visible by checking the small eye icon next to them on the timeline. If the icon is checked the layer is visible. The layer can be soloed, meaning that only that layer will be visible.
One layer can be parented to another, which means the first layer serves as a child to the other. Anything you do to the parent layer, change scale, position, etc. will be done to the child layer as well. Here I parent the cloud image to the Tino clip.
Adjustment layers affect all the layers beneath them. If an effect is applied to an adjustment layer that effect will show on all layers beneath the adjustment layer. This is good for if you’re doing colour correction and you want to adjust the colour on all the layers at the same time. Here we put a fast blur on the adjustment layer and then Curves.
Finally I create a red solid and place it behind the other layers so that it serves as a background. I then move the other two layers side by side and shrink them down, ending the tutorial.
4. Keying and Transparency
So I start with Tino fall in a new composition. The shot features a man falling down in front of a green screen, and so I’m using this to learn the process of green screening, getting After Effects to key out the green and show through to a layer beneath. The effect for this is called Keylight. Once Keylight is applied I need to select the screen colour using and eyedropper, picking the green of the green screen.
Now straight away the effect can have some issues; the green could still be slightly visible, the character could be slightly transparent etc. A good way to check this is to change the view window so that transparent areas are checked rather than black. To try and minimize these flaws I increase the screen gain of the effect and play around with the increasing the clip black and decreasing the clip white in the screen matte settings, until I’m happy with the keying.
While the green is now keyed out we’re left with all these lights and bits of all around the footage where the green screen runs out. I get rid of this using a mask, by using the pen tool and just drawing out the shape within the green screen using points. A mask is basically a shape made of bright yellow lines and whatever is outside the shape is cut out.
My new mask can be adjusted in the mask settings; it can be feathered, shrunk or grown, or re-positioned. All of these properties are also key frame-able, meaning I could animate the shape of the mask points to change.
Now I add a stock explosion to the comp and place it underneath the Tino fall. I then sync it up so that the explosion starts as he begins to hall back and also scale up the explosion. Now the explosion is behind the figure and seemingly throws him back.
Next I put a paint splatter into the comp so I can learn about transfer modes. Transfer modes are different ways for a layer to blend with the layers beneath it and are found in other programs like Photoshop. The transfer modes screen renders all the black on the layer transparent, while multiply makes all the white transparent. There are a wide range of transfer modes that all do different effects. I don’t have the paint clip available so I skip to a bit later where I add a grunge texture, setting the transfer mode to multiply, I can see that only the darker areas of the texture are showing, creating and interesting effect.
Now we move on to the track matte function, which allows you to add transparency to a layer that doesn’t already have a transparent track. For example the Tino Fall that is an entirely solid and opaque piece of footage. So to start I need to add an ink drop into the comp that has been matted to be black and white. Next I need to use the track matte function to set the ink drop as the transparency source for the Tino clip. Now I didn’t have the ink drop clip to use so I had to just watch this part, but I understand it and demonstrate that later one when using mattes on the Tino clip.
So I would go into the track matte and change it from No Track Matte, to Luma Matte. And this means that is black is transparent and white shows through to the layer beneath. So the Tino footage is now only what we see through the smoke, with a transparent background.
I can colour correct the drop footage to make the Tino showing through more visible by using curves to brighten it. The brighter the whites the more clearly the Tino will show. Luma inverted matte will cut out the white areas in the drop from the Tino footage
Developing this inverted matte look I want to replace the green screen Tino with the cloud still. Now we have the cloud still with the drop shape cut out of it. So if I place the girl footage under the clouds I can see it showing through the drop shape.
Next in the tutorial I want to delete everything except the clouds and add the Tino footage back in. I then go through the same process as before to green screen the footage; keylight and masks etc. Now with the clouds unearth the Tino footage I can set the clouds track matte to use the Tino shape as it’s transparency by setting the track matte to Alpha Matte on the clouds. Keying the Tino clip means it now has an alpha channel, it’s not solid. And so I can use its alpha as a transparency source for the cloud layer.
Using this technique I can create an effect similar to the Ipod adverts, by creating a black solid under Tino and setting that to alpha matte I create a black silhouette figure. I then add a purple background and a vignette around the video by creating a new black solid, using the ellipse tool to cut it out to just rounded edges, and then feathering out that mask.
5. Motion Tracking
So the first step in the tutorial is to take the LA footage and stabilize it. First open up the footage within the comp by double clicking, then I open the tracker panel and choose track motion and set the track type to: stabilize.
A tracking point will appear on the footage; a little cross with a square around it. The trackers need to be placed onto a point of high contrast on the footage so that the programme can follow it from frame to frame. The square that can be expanded from the tracking point is the search area. The search is the area that the tracker will look for the tracking point over the course of the footage. If the footage is very shaky then the search area must be quite large for the tracker to find the same point each frame. However if the search area is to large then there’s more risk of losing the contrast point.
I check rotation to track the rotation of the footage as well as movement and a second tracker appears that’s linked to the first. I put that over another point of contrast to track and then I’m ready to analyse.
I then analyse forward, the tracker analyzing the movement of the footage over the frames. If the tracking is okay then I can apply it. Making sure it’s applied to the X and Y.
The motion is now stabilized, however there are black edges that appear over the clip due to the image offset. The solution for this is to just scale up the screen so the black edges aren’t visible.
With the stabilization section of the tutorial done, it’s time to move onto sign replacement. Starting in a new comp, the aim is to replace the letters on the GAP sign. To do this I need to track the motion of the sign.
I first create a new solid layer, setting it to be the colour of the sign. Next we select the footage ad open it up and also bring up the Tracker window. Under track type I chose perspective corner pin. This brings up four little trackers that are linked together in the shape of a square.
I arrange the trackers so that one is on each corner of the sign so the overall tracking square matches the signs shape.
You don’t have to track the point your trying to calculate. Taking track point four in the bottom right as an example. Now that’s in the correct place for tracking the sign, but what if that point was obscured or somehow untrackable? Well what you can do is move the tracking area to another trackable point of contrast in the footage, here the cross in the building right next to it, but keep the track point in the signs corner. So the tracking is happening at the cross, but the data is being applied to the point in the signs corner. You must make sure the point you move the tracking area to is on the same plane as the sing to not mess up the tracking.
With the tracking complete and analysed I want to apply it to the green solid I created from the signs colour. Now the solid is cut and fixed to the signs shape and movement. So to add my own text I need to pre-compose the solid, which means taking the solid and turning it into its own comp. I want to make sure that leave all attributes is checked so that all the tracking data will stay here and not be moved into the solids own comp.
In the new comp I add the text I want on the sign and then go back to my original comp to see that the text is now on the sign. The final touch is to add a bit of blur to the sign to blend it with the footage and a bit of glow to match the original sign.
With that finished I move onto a different section of the tutorial with different footage to work from.
To start I want to open Sam Tino Hill in a new composition and double click the clip to motion track. Then click track motion and position the tracker over the man’s ear. After analyzing forward we have tracked the ear. Now we have tracking data, and we want to apply it to a null object. To create a new Null Object you go to Layer, New, Null Object. A null object is a square within the comp that doesn’t appear when you render; it’s a view port helper and a layer where you can store information for other things.
So if we go back to the clip and into the tracker controls and click edit target, we can choose for the tracking data to be applied to the Null.
I then apply the data to the null and now as I move through the video I can see the Null object is attached to the ear.
Now I can use this is I can create something and parent it to the null so that it goes where the null goes. This created thing will then follow the ear. So in the tutorial I create a thinking box by using the pen tool to shape one from a white solid layer. I then type some text to go within the box. After both of these are parented to the Null they follow the man’s head as he walks.
You can also do this with a lens flare, having the center point of the lens flare follow the null. I first create a black solid and generate a lens flare on it, then set the layer mode to screen so that the black is transparent.
Then open the position settings of the null by selecting it and pressing P. Then open the Flare center settings in the timeline by going into the black solid, opening effects, and then lens flare. So I can to Alt click on the flare center and this will open up a line of code as well as a few buttons beneath it. I want to press the spiral shaped button and pick whip to the position of the Null Object.
This links the Flare Center values to the position of the Null. Now the Flare follows the man’s head.
A different way to do this is to select the key frames in the Null position and actually copy and paste them to the Flare Center.
6. Time Remapping
So we begin by opening a new comp using the Tino fall clip. The first thing we do is create a slow motion effect by stretching the clips length out. I right click on the footage in the timeline, go to Time, and then Time Stretch.
This opens up a window where you can select how you want to stretch the clip. The clip starts out at 100, so if a put in a stretch factor of 200 I’m doubling the length of the clip. If I set it to 50 I would half the length of the clip.
When you stretch out the time to slow motion in After Effects what it does is repeat every other frame, so you have a 1,2,2,1,2,2 pattern going on. This can make the motion look a bit clunky, so a way around this is to blend the frames.
So to do this I want to check the little frame blending box for this layer, and turn on frame blending for the comp. This blends frame 1 and 2 together at 50 percentage opacity to create a new frame. This sort of softens the repeating frame by blending it with the next frame and making it more unique. This softens the clunkiness but still looks a little strange but creates an interesting effect.
A way to extend this is to use pixel motion. Pixel motion blends frames based on the motion and so creates unique frames to replace the repeated ones. Now this does create strange warping on this new frames but it smooth’s out the motion really well.
Now I’m going to do a speed ramp, this is the “speed up, slow down” effect seen in films like 300. Again I right click on the clip and select Enable Time Remapping.
This opens the time remapping option down in the timeline, which you can key frame just like the position, opacity, etc. In the Time remapping I can set key frames at points in the clip and then move them around, moving around the time they were set at as well.
So here I set key frames at the start and end of the clip. I then set one just when the man has started falling. If I move this key frame closer to the start the clip will get to this part quicker, and then drag out the time getting to the end, so a burst of fast motion and then slow motion. This is a speed ramp.
7. 3D Integration
This tutorial deals with creating 3D layers in After Effects, as well as cameras, lights, and other 3D techniques.
To set up, I drag few clips into a new composition and trim the comp so that the clips last within it by right clicking on the timeline selection and clicking; trim comp to work area. I then turn all the layers into 3D layers by checking each 3D box so that a little cube icon appears next to them.
With the layers now 3D coloured arrows now appear coming out of the anchor point in different directions. The red arrow is for the X axis, the green for the Y axis, and the blue for the Z. By grabbing these arrows I can move the layer along that axis in 3D space e.g. X moves it up.
Next I make a new camera. In the composition we see through the camera and can use it to push in or out and orbit around the 3D layers. To demonstrate this I arrange all the layers so they are offset in space, all on different planes of the Z axis.
To help with this I can change the view window perspective to top, meaning instead of seeing what the camera sees I can get a bird’s eye view of the comp.
Just like anything I can animate the camera movement by opening the settings in the timeline and key framing them. Now the movement is a little sudden and clunky so like before I’ll use easy ease key frames to smooth out the animation.
Next I want to create a light for the comp by going to ‘layer’ in the toolbar, new, and light. A window opens with the settings for my new light. I can have it as a point light which means light emanates from one point, Spot which focuses the light into a beam that lights up one spot, and a few others. You can also choose the colour of the light, its intensity, and weather it casts shadows or not. For this tutorial I want to choose a point type light and set it to cast shadows. At any point this window can be opened to adjust the light settings by double clicking the light in the timeline.
My light now appears in the composition as a little spiked ball with coloured arrows. Like other 3D layers the light can be moved around using the coloured arrows.
Now the light affects the 3D layers in my comp, throwing light onto them and tinting them to whatever colour the light is. While my light is set to cast shadows each layer also needs to be told to react to that in order for shadows to be cast. I can select all the layers at once and press “a” twice to bring up the material options. Then, still with all the layers selected, I turn cast shadows on.
For this next section I shut off all the layers except two, one in the foreground and one in the back. I then go down to my camera options in the timeline and turn Depth of Field on.
This simulates the effect of depth of field that you would get from a real camera, the foreground or background being out of focus or pulling focus from one to the other. You can adjust the Aperture and Focus Distance to change from one plane to the other. You could even key frame that change to create a focus pull animation.
So I switch depth of field off and create a new solid, and then apply the effect CC Particle World to the solid. This renders a particle system and creates a fountain of little lines in the comp. These particles also exist in 3D space and are aware of the camera, so the camera can be used to orbit around them or push in or out. You don’t check the 3D icon for this, the effect is already set to respond to cameras.
After Effects renders based on layer order, rather than which is closer in terms of 3D space. This particle system, whilst behind the clip 3 dimensionally, is shown to be on top of it. This is because After Effects isn’t a true 3D programme, so sometimes you need to play about with it and cheat a little to get the full effect you want.
8. Title
So with this tutorial I explore titles in After Effects, type, font, animation etc. The first part is to create a new composition and just use the text tool to type something in. The character panel for font is very similar to programme like Photoshop. I can select a font, change the width of the text, and select the tracking of the text. You also have your standard, faux bold, faux italic, all caps etc.
You can also add a stroke to the text, a coloured outline to all the letters. Next to the box for the texts colour is a second, hollow box that controls the stroke colour. The stroke thickness can also be adjusted as well as weather the stroke is under the fill or over it. A little square with a line through it next to the colours switches the stroke or fill off depending on which is selected.
Animations to apply to the text are found in the Effects in Presets panel, under Presets-Text. The preset animation will begin wherever the time indicator is on the layer when it’s applied. By opening Adobe Bridge you can browse the Presets and get a little window that previews them. Then double click to apply it to your text. The animation now appears on the layers timeline as a set of Key frames, and I can reverse the animation by simply swapping round the key frames.
Now the basics of text and font are done I’m next going to create a title animation. I create a new composition with a duration of 10 seconds. The tutorial calls for me to create to layers of text and arrange them next to a round star logo. As the logo wasn’t included with the tutorial footage I created a red solid circle with the ellipsis tool.
I then take these three elements and pre-compose them so that they can all be easily animated at once, and I call this pre-comp “logo”.
In my original comp I use the ramp effect on a black solid to create a gradient background.
The logo comp is then changed to 3D so I can do some camera animations with it. Next I make a new camera and also a new null object. Now the null needs to be switched to 3D and the camera parented to it. This means the Null will serve as my camera controller. By pulling the coloured arrows or changing the settings in the timeline I can move the Null through 3D space and the camera will copy the movement.
So now I want to add some particles. On a new solid I apply CC Particle World, and a fountain of little particles appears in the comp. Particle world has many settings and adjustments. The birth rate controls the amount of particles that the effect creates and Longevity controls how long the particles last before fading away.
Under the producer settings you can adjust the position and radius of the particles. So if you expand the Radius X the particle birth are becomes wider, the Y radius will make it taller.
In the physics you can control the type of animation, the velocity, and the gravity. For now I keep the animation type on Explosive, meaning the particles just burst out from the birth point. I also want to set the gravity and velocity so that the particles won’t move and will just hang in space.
The last section I need to go to is the Particle settings. Here I can choose the type of particle that is rendered; different shapes like Line, star, cube etc. I can also control the colour of the particles from birth to death as well as their opacity over life. For the tutorial I chose lens convex type. Now with lens convex most of the particle settings are greyed out as this type doesn’t have much room for adjustment. For the colour it takes the colour of the solid the effect was applied to and uses that for the particles.
Next I add a glow to the particles, bringing up the intensity and lowering the threshold so that more of the pixels will glow. I also want to set Composite Original to “On Top”, which means the original particles will be rendered above the glow effect. Finally I change the B colour to red, giving the particles a red outer glow.
So that the text stands out from the background I need to add a drop shadow effect to it. So I go into the Logo comp by alt clicking, chose the first text layer, and find the drop shadow effect in the Effects/Presets panel. I set the background to transparent rather than black so I can see what I’m doing and then adjust the effect. I set the distance to 0 so the shadow is directly behind the text, the opacity to 100 so it’s solid and bold, and amp the softness up to about 8. I duplicate the effect on the layer to make the shadow even darker, and then select both of those effects at once and copy and paste them onto my second text layer. I also did this to my round shape but changed te colour of the shadow to red so it was more of a glow. This was in an effort to replicate the look of the original logo used in the tutorial. Work on the logo comp done, I go back into my main composition.
The particles fade into existence as the first few are born. So to make it so that particles are immediately on screen as the comp begins I get the point where the particles are born and offset the layer so that particles are produced before the comp starts. So now I animate camera movement with the Null object. I animated the null on the X axis so that my logo slides in from the left. I then easy ease the key frames so the movement is smooth.
I also want to increase the field of the particles at this point so that they appear at the beginning of the pan.
Next I want the logo to rotate down, leaving a path for the camera to push past it, but I wan the center of the rotation to be the middle of the round logo. So I take the pan behind tool and move the logos pivot point to the middle of the round shape. So now I can rotate on the Z axis to rotate around the round shape. I want the camera to pan onto the logo, hold for a moment, then the logo to rotate down to 90 degrees, and then the camera to zoom forward past it. I achieve this through key frames on the null object and the Orientation of the logo, using easy ease on all the key frames.
So that the camera is zooming forward to something I copy some text from the logo pre comp and make it into a new layer. I then push that back on the Z axis so it’s behind the logo and the camera moves in on it. So that we can’t see the second layer of text behind the first I animate the opacity during the transition, so that it fades in as the camera goes to it.
Now we want to add motion blur to the piece, however particle world doesn’t allow for motion blur. So the way around this is to create a new adjustment layer and apply the effect CC Force Motion Blur to it. This will force a motion blur effect onto everything beneath the adjustment layer.
To add life and motion to the particles I change the animation type from Explosive to Vortex and give them a slight velocity.
Next, after a pause on the second title, we want to transition to another title in a new and interesting way. What I want is for the camera to move around the text specifically. Now the way to do this is to put it on the same plane as the null object. So I change my view to top so I can get a bird’s eye view of the comp and move the text so it’s right with the Null by moving it on the Z axis. This will leave the text a bit smaller but I can just scale it up.
I can now animate the camera spinning around the text by rotating the Null on the Y axis. Just as the rotation finishes I want the text to vanish so I just drag the end of the layer to the place I want it to end. Now we need another title to be on this side of the text so that the camera rotates around to hide the first layer and now show the second. So I duplicate the text and rotate it on its Y axis and move it around a little, as well as trim it so it begins just as t would start becoming visible. I also want to fade out the first layer during the movement through key frames.
PHOENIX'S MEDIA 