10 Music Video Effects in Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction & Overview: Hey guys, This is Nick and welcome to another Skillshare course where you'll be learning how to make ten visual effect for music videos. We're gonna be seeing how to add a text behind the subject. How to create an exciting wiggle and shake effect. How to add a super zoom effect to spice up your footage. How to add a strobe, adding smoke and atmosphere and tracking it to the camera. Creating this unique echo trail effect. Adding displacement shockwaves to your footage. Motion locking a camera or tracking someone's head. Adding a whip slide transition to change between two different shots as well as freezing frames. I'm so excited for you guys to learn how to make all of these fun effects. So let's get started. 2. Text Behind Subject: I'm so excited for you guys to learn how to make these effects. So the first one that we're gonna start with is adding text behind a subject. Let's go ahead and jump right into Adobe After Effects. Now that we have After Effects open, the first thing you got to do is take the text behind subject clip that you can find down below in the project. And we're just going to take it and drag it into this new composition button. And it's going to make a brand new cop with our clip. I don't want to use the entire thing just because it's going to be too long for this video. So I'm just going to drag this right-click trim comp to work area. Just Soviet have a shorter clip to work with. And the idea here is V1 to add text. And then we want to cut our performer out and pretty much sticking in front so that the text is behind them. Let's go ahead and start making the text. I'm just going to type in. Cool. Because it's very cool. And just scale it up. Make it big. Perfect. And I'm going to go into a line and just center it. We can pretty cool. Maybe even a bit bigger. Perfect. Great. Now all we need to do is take our video and I'm going to rename it by hitting Enter and BG for background. And I'm going to duplicate the clip by pressing Control D. D for duplicate. And once again, I'll just rename this to F, G for foreground. And I'm going to drag it on top of the cool. We got foreground, cool background. Now if you double-click on your foreground, it'll open up the layer. Right here you see this little person with a brush. So this is a roto Brush tool that lets you wrote a scope. Anything you want. So be just want to get him cut out. So if you just take and drag, you'll see that pink gets outlined with what you have. That's gonna be getting cut-out. You can see that it's selected this chair in the background or the floor or something. If you hold Option or Alt and paint, it will actually take those areas out. And obviously the more, the more time you spend on it, the better the results will be. For the sake of the tutorial, I'm gonna try to run through it pretty quickly and fast-forward some parts. But the idea is that you select whatever you want in the foreground. It doesn't even have to be a person. You can have like car, have the text behind a car. There's unlimited ways to use this. For this example, I'm using an artist here. Okay, So perfect. Let me zoom in a bit here on the timeline. And I'll just skip forward a couple of frames and I'll see how this looks. It looks like it's sticking pretty well. So the idea is you're just going to go through this entire clip and you'll adjust anything that feels feels like it's not being connected like as you can see here. The second frame, the selection on the hoodie thing, we're on the jacket. It's getting a little bit different. I'm just going to cut this part out. I don't really care for this little zipper thingy. We will just go to the next frame and you can see, just try to keep it consistent so that the mask doesn't jiggle or chatter while the video is playing. I'm just going to fast forward this next next bit as I'm rotoscoping him out and you'll see in 1 second what it should look like. That should be good for now. And as you can see, when you go back to the composition, you can see that now. You can see that now you have your performer in the front. One thing you might notice is the edges are, are pretty sharp. And the way to fix that is if you go to your Effects and Presets. Now that the effects and presets loaded, what do you need to do is type in soft. And there's an effect called refined soft mat. And if you drag it on top of your FG, your foreground, and take a second and you can see it kind of starts expanding and softening the edges. And I think ten might be a little too high for this example. Let's try something like four. Looking a bit better and you can see especially in the hair, it really, it really helps smooth it out. And then obviously with Frodo, if you want to go in and actually clean up parts like this, all you have to do is go to your layer. Make sure you're in the Roto Brush and refine edge. And then with the Roto Brush you can go in and refine these parts. In my opinion, the refined soft mat really helps with curly hair. Or like, let's say someone's wearing a dress or a sweater. It really helps get those cleaner edges. Now if you go back to the composition, you can see that looks very nice compared to just a sharp edge. That is how you add the text behind. And then always you can stylize it. Like in the example that I did, I went ahead and I got a gradient ramp. Gradient Ramp added on. At the text, got a bit of a bit of depth. Then I duplicated, got rid of the ramp, did stroke, so it's going to character. Let's remove the front color. Add a stroke. Let's make it thick. Literally. That's what the text says. And you can just go ahead and get glow, throwing a glow effect. Let's really expand the radius. And then we can just copy and paste it onto the background as well. And maybe reduce this threshold. Let's make these colors a bit brighter to really make the glow look like electric blue. Yeah, you can see something like that. And now you get this really cool effect. And your character is now in front of it. So you've got an artists performing or let's say you have a car, any, any object in the front. And really helps you separate it with really defined edges as well. So all you gotta do is just clean it up, go frame by frame, and really use the Roto Brush tool to help you get those clean edges. Great. You just learned how to add text behind subjects. Can't wait to see what you'll do with it. And let's see the next effect. 3. Wiggle & Shake: All right. It looks like you want to know how to add a wiggle or a shake to your footage. Let's jump right into Adobe After Effects to get started. For this next effect, it's gonna be wiggle shake. So I'm gonna take the footage, drop it into the project. Once again, make a new composition. And the idea for this one is that when it is dancer, this is finishing move right here. There's no impact on it. And we want to make it look intense. Not like camping intense. Music video intense. We're gonna right-click and go to new null object. And we can hit Enter and call it wiggles. Because it's gonna be wiggling. With the wiggle selected. You're gonna go to Effect. Expression controls. Slider control. What this does is it gives you a slider and the slider doesn't do anything, but it lets you keyframe values. And this is great when writing expressions, which is exactly what you're gonna do. Let's click this triangle and drop down the slider control. So if you have access to this keyframe option, as well as dropping down the transform to make it wiggle and shake. You've probably seen this before using the wiggle expression. So if you hold option and click the stopwatch next to position, it lets you write an expressions and we're going to type in wiggle, open parenthesis. The first number is the speed. So usually how fast something happens. So I'm just gonna put five comma. And now the second number is the intensity. So usually how many pixels it's going to shift over. And instead of writing a number, we're going to find this expression, pick, whip, click, and drag to the slider and you can see how it highlights it in the box. So let it go and you see it pastes it in. Any number that's on the slider is how much it's going to affect the position. So as you can see, I'm dragging it right now and you can see the null object moving. So you can see if you just hide the footage, you can see that the null object here, because box is now moving a lot. And if you reduce it down, Let's say to 77, you see it's wiggling less. And you can crank it up to 1000 and you can see it's bouncing all over the place. This is how we are going to control how much the screen shakes. The idea here is right before he does this motion. Right here. We're gonna take our footage. We're going to pick, whip it to the wigglier. Now where this null object moves our footage, just gonna move with it. Let's go ahead and keyframe the slider on the control. The slider control. Just to hide everything that's not needed. I'm gonna hit you. It just pulls up the keyframes and just have the keyframes to work with. This is set to 0. We don't want anything to happen here. And let's find the last part. So wherever you want the wiggle to stop at the end. Let's say here, just so it takes a little bit time to slow down. Let's find the part where it's gonna be the most intense. So I think where he crosses his fingers here, that's probably gonna be the most intense so you can take it and start dragging it. So I think maybe this should be good, which is 146. If you play. Give it some time to preview. I'm just going to crop my timeline to this part just so we can preview it faster. You can see it shakes. Now if you want to shake it faster, you can change this five-number to, let's do something like ten. I'm just going to drop down the quality to quarter so we can see everything happening faster. You can see now it's shakes a lot more and it's very intense. Once again, same thing if you just hit you for the keyframe, you can always control how much it takes to, so you can see we can crank it to something like 300 and it's gonna shake even more intense. I think this is too much for for our goal here. So I'm just gonna reduce it down to 130. That looks cool. That looks really cool. The other idea is if you hit the graph, the graph editor and click on slider, you can see that there is no there's no curve to our keyframes is just all very solid. So if you just select all the keyframes, Right-click on them, go to Keyframe Assistant. Easy, Ease. It's going to smooth out the curve of the shake so you can see it slows down a lot smoothly. Another problem that you can see here is we are getting this blackboard are now around her footage because you don't have enough footage. What are the options? You could scale your footage up. Lots of people do that. But you can go into the effects and presets and type in motion and pick out motion tile. Drop it on your footage. You see it says output width and output height. You can start stretching it out and it'll actually stretch out your footage. Let's do 130 for both. If you hit mirror edges, just mirrors it. In most cases, a lot of people won't even notice that. Then even better is if you enable motion blur this little, these little three circles, it helps blend it even more. If you can't find the motion blur, you can just do toggle switches and modes or right-click on these columns and find it. Now if you preview it, look at that. You've got a nice little shake. Take a look at that. You can now wiggle your footage around. In the next one, you'll learn how to add a super zoom. 4. Super Zoom: Looks like you want a super zoom into this video. Alright, jump into Adobe After Effects. And let's learn this thing. Just like in the previous two. We're gonna take our clip, drop it into After Effects, and just throw it into a composition. This is a 4k k clip, and since you're gonna be zooming in on it, I'm gonna make our composition, the traditional 1920 by 1080. Perfect. I'm just going to zoom out just so it fits into our comp. Literally 50%. The idea with this clip is UCs, move in and dancing around. The shot looks pretty good. But you want to add some drama to it. You want to make it nice and dramatic. There's gonna be a couple of different things we're gonna do to this. But the first thing we're gonna do is make a new null object. We're going to take or clip, drag it. Parents had two are null object. And let's find a spot wherever you want to zoom in. I think right here where he jumps into the spotlight is a pretty good section. So I'm going to go to my null, hit P for position, press the key frame, and then hit S for scale, hit that key frame. And then if you hit U on the keyboard, I'll just pull up all the keyframes that you've made. Let's go and get this section where you actually jumps in right here. The goal here is to try to make the Zoom as fast as you can so that the motion blur really blends it in. So we're gonna play around with that a little bit. But I think right here when he lands, Let's zoom in. Yeah, Two 100%. Bam. We're nice and close up. Let's see how fast that Zoom is. Zoom isn't fast enough. So I'm just going to bring these in. Let's see. Cool. Now you see how it's really, really rough. The Zoom is really rough. So we can choose all over keyframes. Right-click Keyframe Assistant, Easy, Ease. Now another part is we're going to choose scale and open up the graph editor. Let's start zooming in and seeing what our key frames actually look like. You see the curve is pretty smooth. Now if you want to make it a little bit more dramatic, if you want the zoom into happen, you get faster. If you select both keyframes, you see how they have these handles. You can control. If you hold shift that way it's just parallel. You can drag one to one end and then take the other and drag it to the other end. And now it's gonna be really extreme. Look at that. That actually might be a little too extreme. Average is going to take that down a notch. Let's just, just a little bit cool. That's looking good. Look at that. That's looking good. We could do the same thing with the positions. This is looking nice. Now the idea here is if once you turn on motion blur, look at that you're getting this cool blurring effect when it's zooming in. I like to add, once it zooms in, I like to add some nice cool, crispy effects. What I mean by that is, what I mean by that is you can take your original clip, duplicate it by hitting Control D or Command D if you're on a Mac. And let's solo this clip just so we can only see it by hitting this little circle here. And in the Effects and Presets, I'm going to type in luma, luma Key. And what that does is lets you separate the bright parts of the image from the dark parts of the image. You see it says key out darker. That's exactly what we want. So we can take our threshold and start cranking it and look at that. We want the cool, bright parts of the jacket, so check that out. That's looking pretty fresh. And what we want to do with that is you want to make it look like a bloom. Like it zooms in and you're in this mood. If you un-solo it, you can see that nothing is happening. And that's because our blend mode is set to normal. It doesn't stack in any way with the original footage. But if you set it to add, you can see it makes it really bright or screen. It also makes it bright. Effects and presets. You can just get any kind of blur. I'll use Fast Blur. Throw it on Repeat Edge Pixels. And once you start increasing the blur radius, you can really see that it's adding this glow effect. The way that I like to stack mine is I hit T for opacity. And on the first one I set it to 90. I like working in sets of numbers, so I like 906030. That's the way that I've kind of been experimenting and it works for me. And you can see what the box blur. The first set. We're going to just do it very, very slightly, like a box blur of ten. And then duplicate it one more time. Hit T, set it to 16, and increase the blur by a bit more. Then you can do the same thing as a t, 30906030 and then 30, you can really blur out. Just kind of gives it more of a halo around the entire thing. You can really see it's spicing up this effect. Then another good idea that you could also do is create a new adjustment layer. And you can just throw on exposure on it. You can bring it down to make it darker. Let's take this adjustment layer and put it right under all of our extra Oliver extra filters of the ad added on. And the idea here is we're just going to mask out or performer. I'm holding option and control to select it from the middle. And under our master actually going to do subtract that view are separating our musician from the background. And all you have to do is just feather the mask and look at that. Now, it's looking a lot more intense. This is the original. Here's with all the effects you see really gives it a nice look. The idea here is we're gonna take it and we're going to animate this. So it only shows up when the zoom is happening. What you could do is, let's say he performs for the zoo man. He does his little move. Cool. And then maybe here if you want to zoom out, if I could just hit the two keyframe buttons, then move over a couple of frames. Take our original keyframe, copy it, control C or Command C on a Mac, and then Control V or Command V. You can see it gets pasted. So if we have a zoom in and zoom out, perfect. Now we've got a key frame. The opacity on all these layers. On all of our extra copies of the original footage with the blur. Just click the stopwatches on the opacity. Go to where it's still zoomed in, hit those key frames. And then once it zoomed out, drag them all to 0. And then same thing before everything starts. For the adjustment layer, you can do the same thing for the exposure. You can hit the stopwatch once zoomed in on the exposure, hit U to pull up the key frames and set the exposure to 0. Hit the keyframe here, set it back to 0. So pretty much things are only happening. Went to zoomed in. Select all these keyframes. Right-click Keyframe Assistant. Easy, Ease to introduce that smooth, that smoothness to them. Now, let's take a look at what we made. Let's take a look at this art. Let's look at this art that we made. You can see zooming in. Effects are starting to get applied. And then one thing you notice is when it's zooming in, there's some missing part of the top here. And we can fix it the same way we did before with motion tile. Take that, throw it on the super zoom. Extend the the width and height by like a 110. Mirror the edges. Bam, you can't even tell anymore. All right, so one decade later after my computer decided to render it, you can see here the effect, you've got the super zoom in. We got some extra effects going on. And video is looking clean that you can super zoom on any footage you want. In the next video, you're gonna learn how to add a strobe effect. 5. Strobe: It looks like you want to learn how to add a strobe effect to really spice up the lighting in your scene. Let's jump into Adobe After Effects and get started. All right, for this text effect, you already know, take the clip, throw it into After Effects. Take that, drag it into a new comp. And let's find a good part of this video that you want to use. So since this is a strobe effect, I want the light to be in the shot, so that's perfect. Great. What we're gonna do is we're going to just select that part that we want with the light. Right-click trim comp to work area. Since this is the active area, we're gonna be working with. This strobe effect. We're going to use some of the similar concepts that we've just explored in the previous effect. Where we are going to start piling on a couple of different things to really play with the effect of it. Let's go ahead and start building out our look. I'm going to use a framework and focus right here. And I'm going to duplicate the effect. Let's call this first one BG for background, the top one. Let's do strobe. One. We're going to take our luma Key, throw it on, and let's solo the strobe layer so we can only see what's happening with it. So as you can see, let's go ahead and choose only the brightest parts, like, actually only the brightest parts like this. And put a fast box blur on it. And let's start building this out. Let's un-solo. Change the blending mode to screen. And wow, it's really getting bright. So Repeat Edge Pixels. Start blurring this a bit. This is looking good. Hit T for opacity. Students 90. Great. Let's duplicate this. T 60. Extend this out a bit more. Cool. Duplicate this T 30. Expand the blur even more for that halo effect. All right, that's looking kind of nice. Then another extra thing that we could do is take our background, duplicate it, bring it to the top. Let's solo it. Let us take the glow. Put it on top. Let's see what it's gonna do. You see it starting to colorize some of this. This could be pretty cool if we take our glow radius and expand it a lot. A lot. For this one we have to do like 300. You can then change the blending mode to screen and reduce the opacity to something like 20. This is going to give it an overall bloom on the entire shot. Another cool concept that you could do is add fake flares. And to do that you can take the background, duplicate it. Let's call this flare. And since the light reflect in the camera there upside down. So if you just hit R for rotation and flip it a 180 degrees, you can then take the loop, the luma key, key out the dark part right here. So only, only literally the brightest ports are here. We can even crank it just so it's mostly the light. Then you can take camera lens blur, throw that on. Blur it. Decent amount. Let's see him. 59 looks good. Un-solo it. Let's change that to screen. And let's reduce the opacity to 40. That's going to do is the motion you're going to see. It's gonna be pretty much reflecting where this light is. It's going to be going in the opposite direction. And it's really going to help add that kind of like a lens flare almost look to it. Now v wanted to make it all strobe. To make it strobe. If you're going to go ahead and precomp all of this, everything but the background. And let's call this lights. Then you see how it doesn't look the same as just did. And that's because V1 to check this collapse transformations language is basically just using all of the modes. Still. Because if you uncheck it, you see how it gives you a different look. Now this lets you control all of the lights with just a single opacity slider. You see, you see that you can change the intensity of all of the effect without effecting, without bringing over 60% are over 30% or over 20% on these. Now it's gonna be an easy wiggle expression where you just do option and type in wiggle. And let's put something really fast. So 24, the speed for intensity, Let's go with 200 because you want to make sure that it's covering and going all the way to 0. I'm going all the way to do it all the way to a 100. I'm going to change the resolution to quarter just so we can actually see it. See it happen faster. You see how it's only getting to 28. I'm not seeing 0 too often. So what you could do is actually play around and do like let's say negative 30. Ever getting more values between 0100. Let's preview this. You can see now you've got this Strobe Effect. And it's really giving you this lens flare Look as well. It's looking really nice. If you just solo the original, you can see the difference, not dynamic and dynamic. Awesome. Your footage is now looking way more dynamic. In the next video, you're going to learn how to add smoke and atmosphere to spice it up even more. Let's jump into that in the next video. 6. Smoke & Atmosphere : All right, it looks like you want to really spice up the footage. I really like using this. And even if you're just doing it slightly, even if you're just adding a little bit of it, it really helps bring your footage out. So let's open up Adobe After Effects and get started. You guys should remember this by heart. Now, take your clip, throw it into the project, make a new composition. And let's take a look at this. So I'm going to use right here where the camera starts moving more intensely. So I'm going to just crop to this part here. What do you want to do for this scene is, all right, it looks pretty cool, right? He's moving around. He's being active, doing some dance moves, but something just still feels boring about it. So if you want to add more atmosphere, some sparks, all without using any plug-ins. What we wanna do first is track a camera. I'm going to pre-compose or footage. And let's move all attributes into the composition. And let's call this background to track. Great. When you open it, you should have a background. And what we would like to do is v don't want the computer to pick up on his movement. V just want the background. What I'm going to do is I'm just gonna do a really rough mask. And before I do that, let me check on auto bezier because I don't like drawing curves. I want the curves to be auto drawn for me. There we go. The mass, Tim. Let's do M to open up our masks, select none. Let's key-frame our mask path. Because V1 to go through and just get a general area of where he's moving and cut it out because if you don't want the computer to pick up on his motion, but v want as much of the actual background as we could possibly get. This looks like he's Stan staying in these borders. I'm just going to move this a bit here. You can see his shirt comes out a bit, so I'm just going to move this out. This is a pretty decent heads kind of getting to it. I'm just going to move this a bit. Perfect. Just expand this. Expand this out. Expand this out. Okay, that should be good. Now, if you change this to Subtract, we've pretty much cut about. And then this gives the computer more info about what to track. Since we got rid of things we don't want to track. If you select your background to track comp back in the original. So I can move between comps by hitting tab. So you see this is where we drew our mask. And then if you hit Tab, you can go back to where that comp is sitting. So let's choose our background to track. Go to tracker, and you can just click track camera. And let's change this to full resolution. We just got to wait for this to finish. Once this blue line disappears, you'll be all set. Perfect, another 50 years later and good. Now what we have to do is hit Create camera and bam, it created our camera. If you have 0 points, if you want to have some sort of reference of where things should be placed, we can actually right-click on a point and create a null. And when you hit P while having the null selected, it will give you the coordinates of where that point is located. This is great. We can now go back to our background and for the mask, choose none and go back. And bam, we have a 3D coordinate of where we can place things in space. Now what can we do with it? That's the main question. If you open up or assets here, I've provided a smoke sample. You can take it and just drag it directly into the comp. You can just do that. Let's make it 3D. If you hit toggle switches and modes, or right-click on the columns and choose. It would be called I don't know what it'd be called. Hashtags. I don't know. You would just play around until you find that. If you had 3D. Let's change the blending mode to screen. You can now see that it moves in 3D space. Especially if you zoom out, you can see when the camera rotates and gets closer, it's actually moving in the space with us. That's pretty dope. Let's go ahead and hit P. And I'm just going to start moving it a bit farther away because when the camera does get close, gets really close. Perfect. We can hit S to scale it up. You can change the opacity. Hit T. Let's change it to 60. You can duplicate it. Offset the time on it. Hit S, changed the horizontal, maybe add other elements. But here you can see that we've added the smoke. Let's change the depth on this as well. In the position we can just move it. Hit S to scale it up. Let's make sure it's connected. Scale it up. Now you can see we have smoke that moves with the camera. You could do that with any elements. So you can add smoke, you can find clips of particles and stuff. I'm going to make the opacity here a bit lower. T. You can even change the colors of the smoke. So if you go to tint, Let's tint white to, let's say orange. Orange. You know, you can now see that this smoke is orange. So actually, let's make this one blue. Now it could be cool. Then let's make this one orange tint on this and make this one orange. Look at that. You are now getting cool dimensional smoke going through clip, adding depth. And then the cool part, if you make a new solid, Make Comp Size, and type in part of coal, you can get Particle World. Throw it on. The best part is this particle world. Let me just solo the particles and solo the camera. You can see that the particles also react to the camera. The cool part about this is you can take it, right, drag it. So there's some time that the particles existed. Could go into producer or physics. Let's make this a vortex, or let's do fire. The producer. We can make the radius on the x, y, and z bigger spatially and the z. Then let's bring the position down. And let's right-click time, times stretch. Let's slow it down by literally ten times. Let's bring this out. Cool. And then for the actual particle, Let's choose something like theta sphere. That looks pretty cool. You could even do something cool like emotion square or even better, motion polygon. So these cool little triangles. We could try polygon. That looks pretty nuts. That looks pretty crazy. So let's make the colors of this. Let's just do gray and gray. Now, if you take a look, you've got these crazy things flying around. We could change the mode to add. You could change it to screen. Let's do add the extras. You could do depth cue and let's do fade. Now it fades the ones that are far away. And if you play it, it would literally track to the cameras. So now you've got these crazy particles flying around. You've got the colors effecting the smoke floating around. Lots of different elements are all interacting with the scene. So let's set this to quarter. You can preview it faster. You can see the camera's moving and they are following. The particles are going along with the camera motion. The best part, obviously, you can always wrote a scope. The guy out haven't been happening in the front and the back. You can even do something like tinting the actual footage here. He's in black and white, everything else is in color. Lots of different ways to make this work. Lots of cool ways to play around with this. Wasn't that pretty simple yet. It adds so much more depth to your videos. I bet you'll be using this one a lot. In the next one, you're going to learn how to add an ICO trail. 7. Echo Trail: In this video, you're gonna be adding echo trails to your footage to really spice things up. Let's get started. Open up Adobe After Effects. Just like you learned before, we're gonna take our clip called Echo trail, drop it into a new project. Once again, drop it into a new comp. And here we have the footage that we are going to be playing with. Once again, the footage is a little bit long, so I'm just going to take a certain section of it. Probably just somewhere with lots of motion, like something like this as good. And I'm going to right-click trim comp to work area. And we have the footage that we are working with. Now there's only two parts to this, and they're pretty simple. One is we're gonna be reusing the same technique of rotoscoping to apply the person in front. Then we're also going to be applying an echo effect to create the echo trail that's gonna be going behind the dancer. Let's go ahead and duplicate our footage by hitting Control D or Command D on a Mac. Let's call r bottom one, Echo. And let's call the top one row. You can rename by hitting Enter on the keyboard. I'm going to go through and roto the person. Yes, we should definitely set the resolution of folds so we can actually wrote a folk quality. I'm gonna do a pretty rough job here because I want to be able to just fast forward and show you guys the result of that we're going for so that you don't have to watch me do this whole procedure. I'm just going to be showing just the top section. Alright? So up to here should be good for this example. If you solo the rotor layer, you can see that we have the dancer separated. Now, he actual part where we get to play around is if you go to your Effects and Presets and type in echo, you can see there's an echo effect. So go ahead and apply to the bottom layer. As you can see, it starts to brighten it. And that's because our echo operator is set to add. And what you could do is you could do a composite in front for the number of echoes. I'm going to just play with it and maybe set it to six. And maybe let's see a composite and back. It looks a composite is in back is looking pretty good. We can actually take this echo layer, cut it, and paste it on top of our Roboto. You can see that Vr getting this cool repeating. Let's go ahead and change it to composite in front. There we go. Similar to other erato rotoscoping videos. If you just go ahead and type in soft, refined soft mat and apply it right after the Roto Brush Tool. It's going to help you clean up those edges. And right now it's probably gonna be pretty high. It's at the ten. Once it does it's thing, I'm going to drop it down to four. And the additional edge radius always depends on how big your footages. If you're working with something that's a fork, quality footage, you would have to bring that number higher if you're working with 112010 ADP footage, you can bring that number lower. It's always based on your use case. The fun part here is we can animate the where the whole echo effect happens. If I just go ahead and turn off the Roto Brush refined soft mat and the echo. I could just play through until apart where I think it could be cool. So let's say right here, she does this elbow move. So we can go ahead and animate the equal time by hitting the stopwatch. And if you hit your layer and hit U on the keyboard, it'll bring it up here. It could be good. Up to here, maybe because you've got this elbow motion. This looks good here. So let's hit the stopwatch. During this entire part of the sequence, you're gonna have the echo effect. Then let's do it. When she brings her arm down, it could complete. So you can just set this to 0. And then same thing for the star. Let's say when the hands start coming out like this, maybe that's when I'll start. You can hit Enter. And if you select all of your keyframes and go to the Graph Editor, you can see that the animation is pretty rough. There's no smoothness to it. If you select all the keyframes, right-click on one of them. Go to keyframe assistant. Easy, ease. And if you see now it's a lot smoother. Let's go ahead and turn all of our effects on. Preview what this looks like. Awesome. You can see it animates in. You get to see the echo effect, and then it animates back out. You can use this on any type of footage. Once again, it doesn't have to be a person dancing. It can be anything from a car moving. It could be somebody throwing something. Literally unlimited ways to use this effect. You can always play around with the echo. So you can always add more echo. You can add less echo, you can add a decay so that I'll show what the decay does. Let's pick out this frame would be a good example. If you lower the decay, you'll see that it starts fading away the extra copies, just give it a second. There you go. You see that it starts fading away the extra copy, so almost makes it even looks like a motion blur. Lots of ways you can use it. You can increase the number of echoes. Very cool effect. And if you use it nicely in your music videos, Ill look really, really stylish that you're echoing everywhere. Look in perfect. Next video, you'll be learning how to add a displacement shock wave. Again, another one of my favorites. 8. Displacement Shockwave: In this video, you're going to learn how to add the displacement shockwave effect. It's one of my favorites. I really like using this. There's many different ways you could do it. So let's get started. Open up Adobe After Effects. Up next ve got one of my personal favorite effects, and that's gonna be a displacement shockwave. Take our clip throat into after-effects, of course, create a new composition. And let's take a look there dancing, they're having a good time. And once again, you can crop our clip to however much time that you want to see it. The idea here is when they're doing this like our motion thing, we'll have it blast out this shock wave effect that is going to disrupt the space and time. The way we are gonna make it as pretty simple. We're gonna make a new solid. Let's make it bigger than our actual video. And you're going to see why it is important to make it bigger than your actual video. Let's make the color white. Hit, Okay, hit Okay. Now if you right-click on it, we're going to pre-compose it. Sure, leave all attributes in the displacement and let's call this, this placement map. Hit enter. Now if you open it up, you see that all the app is just squared over h squared. The idea that we have here is since it's a square, we can go ahead and choose our ellipse tool. With the solid selected, if you just double-click, it creates a circle. Now before we start animating anything, we're going to go into our effects and presets and type in roughen edges. Once you apply it, you won't see too much of a difference, but you can see that the edges are getting weirdly morphed. I guess. If you just crank up the border size, you'll really see the effect take place. It's really starting to morph how our circle is looking. Really making it look like an iris. Like an iris or just like this weird Shockwave. If you want to make the edges a bit more sharp, you can always take the complexity and you can start bringing it up. And it really starts adding more detail and makes it look really cool. But you don't have to make it too high. Because what we are gonna do is you're going to end up blurring this at the end of the day to kind of help blend the displacement in our video. The idea now is V1 to animate this displacement going from the center to the end and disappearing. The easy way to do it is if you go ahead and you see mask one and you have the mask expansion. If we start dragging the mask expansion to the, to the point where we don't see it. You can hit the stopwatch. Let's go maybe 20 frames. 20 frames should be good. And just start cranking it up to the point where it's touching the edges. That looks great. Now, all VC is, it goes up. But we also needed to disappear. The great way to do it is if you click on your mask and then you hit Control D or Command D. If you're on a Mac. Instead of add, you're gonna do Subtract. Now you won't see anything at the moment. And that is because it's the exact same mask being subtracted. But all you have to do is just start by selecting your keyframes on mask to start offsetting it by a couple of frames, you're going to start seeing that there's this pattern happening. And if you offset it by a little bit more and maybe a little bit more, you can see that comes out of nowhere, drags around and then disappears. That's an easy way for us to create this cool ring, the school displacement ring. Now, the cool part is we can go ahead and type in Fast Blur. Drag it on, repeat edge pixels, and you can see it extends it. Let's just blur it slightly. It doesn't have to be too crazy. Five pixels seems good. Now if you go back to our actual video, you can now time to where that effect happens. Right here. Lets us do. Right here. They start moving their hands out. And I think this is where the displacement could come in and they'll move their hands out. Perfect. And then in here they do it again so that you can actually go into our displacement, comp, duplicate our solid, and just move it over so you can see it happens once and then twice. Now you see once, twice. Perfect. Now, you just see a white solid at the moment, it's not really changing anything. This is where the fun part happens, is if you right-click, go to New Adjustment Layer, and let's rename it by hitting Enter and typing in this placement and dragging it under the displacement map. If you wanted to just affect our footage. Under the effects and presets, you can type in displacement. Let's find displacement map. Take it, drag it onto our brand new layer. Let me made under the effects here, you can choose the displacement map, the one that we created, this white, white, and black ring here. Let's really make sure that everything is good by making a new solid that is black. That there's no Alpha layer, all you're seeing is just the black and the white. So the white solid is the ring and the black solid is just a black background that is in the background. Now you can hide your displacement map. Don't need to see it anymore. And you can actually start to see here that there's a displacement happening here. And that's because it was already preset to use red for horizontal and green for vertical. You can keep it at those or you can change it to luminance. I'll just change it to luminance. And if you start bringing your numbers, you can really start to see that there is a displacement happening. Perfect. A good idea would be, as you can see here, that it starts displacing it as soon as our displacement map clip enters the frame. Because it starts displacing all the pixels. What you could do is you get ahead either wrap pixels around, which doesn't always work as you can see here. We could do is, you can see here it's at a second, four frames. So I'm just going to move this back to the beginning of the video and take our two-way clips and move it to a second one for frames that it's timed perfectly. There we go. Now all you could do is you could take your clip. You can maybe scale it up just a little bit and move it over so that it fits the frame. When you watch it, look at that, you get this crazy displacement effect. When they're moving their arms. You're getting this super crazy time, time warping effect. And if you want to smooth out the edges of when it's happening, all you need to do is go into the displacement map that you created. And you can just start blurring it even more. So you can see the example here. You blur it more, it becomes not as intense and a little bit more smooth. You blurt less, you see more of those details. If you get rid of the blurred completely, you can really see those edges. You can really play around with the blur. I usually try to keep the, some kind of blurring on it because I don't want the edges to be super sharp. I still want to feel like time and space are getting warped around. No, I don't want it to feel like it's a edge that you can really sharply seen. As always with any of these effects, you can just play around, you can stack them. You can stack the echo effect and the strobe effect and the super zoom along with this and really create some really unique visual effects for your music videos. Again, this was pretty simple to do, yet it looks really, really great and there's unlimited ways you can use this. Next video, you're going to learn how to motion lock your footage. 9. Motion Lock: In this video, you're going to learn how to motion lock your footage. You've probably seen it in lots of ads for Beats, apple, as well as different music videos. So let's open up Adobe After Effects and get started. All right, you already know the drill. Take your clip, throw it into the project. Then that into a new composition. The idea for this is that you can see the camera's going all over the place, but v1 it to be tracked to her face. That her face is in the middle of the frame. This is pretty simple to do. So all we have to do is double-click on our footage so that it opens it in this layer panel. And find a frame where you can even start with. Here. I just want all the elements to be pretty sharp. The idea here is that we're gonna track to different parts of the face. So I'll probably use the corner of the eye and probably another corner of the eye. You can hit Track Motion. You can see they give you a 0.1. So I'm gonna take this and spread it out. What these bounding boxes are. The first one is the area that you want to track. The second one is the search area where it's gonna be looking for this. So if your footage is moving really, really fast, you'd want to make it bigger. But if your footage and moving really slow, you can make it smaller and it'll just work faster. I'll select this. And now you can see that there's two options at the bottom here to check rotation and scale. And we do want rotation. Ensure, Let's do scale as well. Bigger searching areas, and I'll just put it right here. Then once that looks good, all you have to do is there's these playful and play it backwards. So let's play it backwards to go to the beginning of the clip. And then once that is done, we're going to track all the way to the end of the clip. Now let's track forwards. You can see that during this tracking, the points kind of shifted too much. I'm going to go back to where they started to shift. And I'm just gonna start making the search area a bit bigger and the track area. So I think here it's still fine, but I'm going to make this area a bit bigger. Same thing with here. I'm just going to align it back to this corner. Let's keep tracking this forward. Once again, we're getting some shifting in the track. So let's find the point where it's happening. For this I shifting. We're getting some more shifting here. Up to here should be good. Just don't want to keep stretching out this tutorial for there then further than needed. Now the next part that's important is to make sure that the track tape is actually stabilize. Edit Target. And for the target, it should be the video layer that you're on currently. And you can hit, Apply over x and y. Hit Okay. Now if you take a look at stabilize to the face, but it's kind of at an angle. What we want to do is right-click just in general and choose New Null Object and take your footage and parented to the null object. Here, if you hit R, you can actually rotate it. Perfect. You can position it more in the center. You can scale it up a bit. Perfect. Now if you play through, you can see that the face is now tract to the middle. You can see we can actually scale it up just a bit more, just so that it's in frame the entire time. Perfect. And one of the issues that you might notice is that our video doesn't fully fill the edges. What you could do is you could keep scaling it up or you can go to the Effects and tape them motion, grab the motion tile and apply it to your video layer. And what this does is it actually extends the footage past its boundary. Then if you just click Mirror edges, it'll mirror it. And it kinda helps you get away with that effect, especially when you add some motion blur, which we will do in a second after v, go ahead and clean up some of the key frames. Because sometimes what the tracking as you saw, it loses its points. Often, especially if the motion is happening pretty quickly. If you just hit you. You can close the tracker. We just want to see anchor point, position, scale and rotation. And the idea here is, let's say anchor point. And you can click the graph editor and you can see the curve. So this looks pretty smooth. Let's take a look at scale. You can see here we're getting a couple of issues with the scale. Let's take a look at where it's happening. Right here. You see it's kind of like an abrupt jump. What we can actually do is we could take those extreme keyframes and just delete them. You can see now, let's get rid of these extreme ones too. And this one. And now it's less jarring of a scale and a little bit more smooth. Same thing here. There's one extreme point to extreme points. And you can just go in and do that with your footage. And same thing with rotation. You see like a jarring rotation. Let's see if anything is happening to anchor points. Now. You can see there's a jarring rotation. So we could just bringing that down. That kind of helps you clean it up a bit. And if you want to be even more extreme, you can start taking some, some more keyframes out. Like for instance, you could take these out and then you can start smoothing these by clicking Easy Ease. And you can actually start smoothing these keyframes out. That's another option that you could do. It depending on how, how in detail you want to go to clean up the frames. And then the next step is just to apply the motion blur. So make sure it's selected here and select it here. And pretty much your track is complete. This is looking pretty good. And if you want to make it even more extreme, you can go and create a new adjustment layer and grab radial blur. You can crank that higher. Let's do 20. Then all you have to do is grab the Ellipse tool, drawing around the face. I'm holding option and control at the same time. The face. Then do Subtract so that it does everything outside of the circle. And you can increase the feather. This kind of makes it even more extreme. And obviously if you bring out the feather even more, you'll blend those edges a bit better. And this kind of makes the effect even more extreme with the tracking. You can also go ahead and grab exposure and expose it down. This will add a vignette. Maybe the blurring is too much. Let's try ten. Yeah, if you don't want to go too crazy, I think ten looks pretty good. There we go. That is how you do the motion lock effect. As you could see, this was pretty simple. I can't wait to see what you guys are gonna do with this motion lock effect. In the next one, we're going to learn how to do the whip slide a transition. I personally really liked that one. I'll see you in the next video. 10. Whip Slide Transition: In this video, you're going to learn how to do the whip slide transition. I really like this. It's pretty simple. So let's jump right in. All right, For this next effect, we're actually going to take two videos. So let's go ahead and grab strobe. And let's grab whip slide, and drop these in. The same resolution, which is perfect. So let's take strobe. And we're only gonna need the first two seconds. And let's throw or website on top. The idea for this is V1 and transition quickly from one shot to the other. Motion blur. And we want it to look really effective. The idea here is that we're actually going to have two of this clip. We're going to take motion tile and throw it on our clip. This whip slide, one that's at the top is the one that we're transitioning to. If you put your output width. So I'll just slide this over so you can see if you move the output width to 300, it actually doubles your clip and let's hit mirror edges. You can see that it's double the width. The idea now is to just take it and move it over to the side just to where we don't see it just outside of the frame. Then vary in a ticket and we're going to parent it to the we're gonna take the stroke, the bottom one. And we're going to parent it to the top. We're going to hit P on our top clip. Let's go to two seconds in going to keyframe for the position. I'm going to go maybe 15 frames. You want something pretty quick? We're gonna go 15 frames. And then we're going to reset this to, you can literally just right-click and hit reset. There we go. Resets it to the beginning. Now the most important part is the actual keyframe motion. So if you go to the position and you click the graph editor, you're gonna see that there's a button here called Separate Dimensions. And this will let us control just the x position, which is what we want, which is just the horizontal movement on y position. You can just uncheck that. You can delete those keyframes. And under exposition, we can just zoom in slightly. And if you grab these, you see how they have these handles. We're just going to move these handles like this to make this S-curve shape. Let's take a look at how fast the motion is happening. Yeah, that's perfect. The speed of the motion is great. I'm liking the speed. Now the only thing you need to do is turn on. The motion blur. You're gonna notice is that there's a gap. Turn on motion blur on both clips. You're going to notice that there's a gap, black gap between the two clips. So what you can do is you can take the motion tile, throw it on the bottom clip as well, mirror the edges and you're going to extend it by something like 150. Now it blend it a bit better. That's it. So this one is really simple. This effect is really simple and really effective. You can use it. You don't have to only use it horizontally. You can also do the same thing vertically. You can apply it in different ways. Then once again, you can layer it with a different effects. So you could do the echo on top and then transition to this. There's lots of interesting ways you can use this. Look at that you're a website expert. Now you can use this transition anywhere you want, and it's pretty simple. In this next video, you're going to learn how to do the freeze-frame effect. 11. Freeze Frame: Welcome to the freeze-frame effect, the tenth one in our list. So once again, let's jump right into Adobe After Effects. Now we are approaching our very last effect, which is going to be freeze-frame. So take the freeze-frame, throw it into the after-effects, and add it into a new column. The idea here is, once again, I'm just going to crop the video a bit. Is this last frame where she's sitting. You're going to freeze it. And then we're going to have her dancing in front of herself. So it's going to be very cool looking and you can use it in many different ways. First thing that we want to do is you'll want to duplicate layers. Then we also want to right-click new null object. And let's rename this by pressing Enter and call this tracker. Because you can see that this clip, the camera is moving so V1 or be able to track the motion. So a double-click on the bottom layer. We're going to do Track Motion. For the first, we're gonna make it pretty big. We're just going to track this corner here. Very nice edge, really easy to see. And then for the second we're going to go ahead and go to the slump, hit rotation and scale. Scale it up. Perfect, and choose this edge of the lamp. The idea is you want to choose points that don't get covered by the actor and points that don't go out of frame. We're just going to hit Next. All right, Perfect. Looks like the track is done. It looks pretty solid. All we need to do is hit Edit Target. Make sure our tracker selected, hit Okay, Apply over x and y. We have our track. Now the idea is that we want to freeze frame. We could do is we can double-click the very last frame that you want to use here. I'm going to take the Roto Brush and pretty much roto out. Great. Now since I just want to be able to just only use this frame, I can just right-click and do pre-compose, move all attributes. And let's call this frozen frame. Hit Enter, and then right-click time freeze-frame. If you follow it, you'll see that it's just a frozen frame. Now, we want to be able to add it to the tracker. So we just kind of click this and drag over to the tracker. You can see now that she is just sitting on that couch the entire time. Now you can pretty much use the same technique we used before, where you take your background footage, bring it to the very top. Let's call this row. And now you just got a roto out the rest of the motion. You can double-click on Roto. Take a roto brush and just draw out the person. You don't have to just see me throwing. You've pretty much seen how it works. You just go frame by frame and just make sure the person is selected. Right here. Perfect. You don't even have to do the whole hand since She's only sitting down here. And then where do you can also do is you could either increase the feather or you could go ahead and choose refined soft mat. Throw that on with some small value like to perfect. And that really helps with the edges here you can see him really helps blend the edges. That's the idea. You'd basically go frame-by-frame, like in the previous sections of this video. Right here. Roto Brush. And you'll just go frame by frame and Frodo out and make sure that the road is clean like here. You can see that it is actually missing. Let's get this edge here. And you'd pretty much do that for a video. That's how you use the freeze-frame effect. You can also animate it in if you'd like. Lots of different ways to use it. Then same thing here again with the frozen frame, you can also apply refined soft mat to it as well. If you go here, we could just, if you actually open up the comp and apply or refined soft mat. Again with something like maybe four for this one. Go nicely blended. That's pretty much it. Look at that. You just learned it. The tenth and last effect congrats. I'll see you in the conclusion video where I'll tell you about the assignment. How does a minute, and how you can try it with your own footage. We're using the one that I provided. 12. Conclusion & Assignment: Look at that, you're an expert now you've got ten different effects up your sleeve that you can use it any way you want. You can mix and match them, you can combine them. Unlimited possibilities for your assignment. I've provided all of the footage that you saw me using in this course. You can use it and play with it by yourself. You can follow along with the video, follow it step-by-step. Or if you really want to get creative, you can use your own footage or other footage you've found online. Now, after you've done following along and using this footage, you can submit your project down below so I can take a look at it. Other people can take a look at it and we can review it. So I'm very excited to see what you guys will make. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next video.