Add character to your videos with Adobe Character Animator

1. intro: Hi and welcome to this Skillshare class. Add character to your videos with Adobe character animator. In this class, you will learn how to easily add animated characters to your voice-over videos. I'll go through a fun, easy, and painless, step-by-step process using Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition, and Adobe character animator. Much of the process is automated and you don't need to be an artist or animator to follow along. Let's get started. 2. getting started: Now I recorded this video at for k going to be outputting to 2k, which is 1080. I need to shrink this down first. I'm going to select the video. Good a scale and drop that down to 50. Now that's ready to go. We have some audio here with me introducing the example puppets in Adobe character animator will go ahead and play that for you. Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the example of puppets that are ready to use in your own project. The first part of this process, It's going to be editing the audio to get it ready for Adobe character animator. We're going to select the clip can right-click and then go to Edit clip in Adobe Audition. And this is going to load up Adobe Audition for you. 3. preparing audio in Audition: Alright, so here we are in Adobe Audition and we have our strike that audio. The first thing we need to do is to clean this up. Go ahead and play it a little bit. Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the examples. Now fortunately, the audio is recorded pretty well. The levels are pretty good. It wasn't too quiet and wasn't too loud. If you look at the waveform, there's not a lot of noise in-between the speech part. Now it's important to have good audio for Adobe character animator. In case your audio was too quiet, what you can do is go to effects. Under amplitude and compression. You can apply normalization. Now what normalization does is it makes everything a lot louder. Basically, it brings everything to the same level. I wouldn't set it to 100 adversary to maybe like 70 or 80%. You can also set up by decibels and I'd maybe go down to negative six decibels or something. Probably be good. For now, our audio is pretty good, so we don't need a normalize it. So similar to normalization where you can do is add compression to your audio. This is under effects, amplitude and compression dynamics. What a compressor does is it reduces the dynamic range of audio, which is a difference between the loudest parts and the quiet as part of your audio. It makes everything kind of have the same volume. Now what you want to do is you want to turn on the compression. This audio is pretty good. We won't need to do a lot of compression in. I won't really go into too much detail on this video. Since this is, since this is mostly about Adobe character animator, I'm going to do some basic settings. So the ratio to about three. We'll leave the threshold where it is for now and we'll drop the attack down to 0 or as close to series you can. We're not going to apply it just yet. Let's listen to the audio. These are some of the example topics that are ready to use in your own projects. If you click, you'll notice as we turn the compression off and on, it got louder when we turn it off and it got quieter when we turn it on. That's the compression. In effect. It's basically making the loudest parts quieter. And this is really dependent on this threshold level right here. There are some of the example topics that are ready to use in your own projects. If you click, See More, you can download additional puppets. We don't need too much compression on this. I'm going to leave it about 16 dB. That is the volume at which it starts compressing. Think 16 dB is good, Good, a little compression on the top. And then what you want to do is add some makeup gain. What the makeup gain does is it makes, the quieter, it makes the quieter, louder. Just add a little bit and makeup gain. Go back and be character animator. These are some of the example of topics that are ready to use in your own projects. If you click, See More, you can download additional puppets. Not really noticeable. Bokeh ahead and apply. And you'll see what happens. See you now. You'll notice here that there's less peaks and valleys, this waveform. But it seemed like it got chopped off a little bit too much. So I'm gonna go back and redo that. Go back to Dynamics, oppression, bringing the threshold up a little higher. I don't need chopping off so much. Negative ten. Then we'll bring the makeup gain a little bit higher to. That looks better to me. It's brought up the lower parts a little bit and it hasn't chopped off the highest as much. Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the example topics and it's pretty lousy at negative six. That's pretty good. Another thing you might want to do is get rid of some of the noise in-between your speaking part. This audio isn't too bad. But if you did have a lot of noise, some kind of harm in the background, you can use the denoise or to get rid of it. There's a little bit here, a little bit of computer home, we'll try to get rid of that. Select the part between your speaking parts. And then you can go to Effects. Noise reduction reduction, noise reduction and restoration. And we'll go to noise reduction. You also have click pop eliminator. History reduction will just go to a noise reduction for now. And then we'll capture the noise print, which is this selected part right there. Then we can do the noise reduction to a 100% reduced by, I don't want it to reduce it by that much. 16 seems a little high to me, that in half. And then what you wanna do is make sure you select the entire file. Then you can apply. Now, you'll notice the change in the waveform is going to be hard to hear, actually, listen to it, see more. Actually, I did a pretty good job that's almost dead silent between the speaking part. And you'll really notice it on the waveform itself. Let me undo it. And this is before they're a little bump there. This is after totally flattens it out. Getting your audio right is kind of an art and a science. And it's a little beyond the scope of this class, but you can keep going back in and doing noise reduction and normalization and compression to get the audio at the right level and sounding clean. Just be careful not to process it too much because you can start to distort the audio. Alright, so now we'll go ahead and save the audio. Do a Save As I think I may have saved it before. We'll do a Save As these settings are good. Okay, it's going to overwrite, that's fine. It should update that in a W From here. Let's hop back in there. Here we are back in Adobe Premiere, and it looks like the audio extracted, that is, the audio from Adobe Audition looks like it's in there. Excellent. If you click, See More. Sounds good. Alright. Now it's onto character animator. 4. getting started in Character Animator: Here we are in Adobe character animator. First thing we wanna do is go to File and New Project. And we'll go ahead and save this project. And it opens the interface. Now what we want to do is go back to the home screen because they're going to use one of these example puppets. Now all these example of puppets are already set up and rigged. They're really easy to use in your own projects if you want, you can go to see more. You can download additional puppets. All these puppets and all these puppets. They're all free to use. However, we want. No credit needed. I'll go back to here for now. I'm gonna select this red monster and click on him. And here we are back in the character animator. And we have our red monster in our scene right here with red monster. Now what we want to do, well, you'll notice that if you turn the mic on, It's already animating. You can see see His, see him talking. And if you turn on your webcam, you could actually have it animating according to your, your, your video. But since we have recorded audio, we're just going to turn that off for now. Since we already have our own audio, we're going to import that. So in this project window here, we're going to double-click. Then import our audio that was processed. In addition. We'll drag that to the timeline. Here we have our audio. Hello and welcome to. Like I said, this is gonna be pretty simple and easy. So we go to Timeline. Compute lip sync, take from seemed audio. Select, make sure you have the audio selected. There we go. Now if we play it, you'll see Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. You'll see that the character has already animating to our audio and it didn't really have to do too much. He does seem a little life lifts though. It's kind of just sitting there with his mouth moving. We can also do is go to Timeline. You can compute, you can compute the head movement from speech. Also. Compute. Here we go. I'll play that some of the example puppets that are ready to use in your own projects. And as you can see, there's already quite a lot done that was automated through character animator. 5. add nuance to your character animation: Now we're going to add a little bit of custom animation to our animation. We're going to do now is we select the red monster. You go over here to Properties. You'll have all these behaviors that you can animate. I'll do is select red moss or here in the timeline. And you'll see this red button, red circle. And these are all things that are Gambia recorded for right now the lip-sync is okay. So we'll turn that off. Click that. We're not going to work with the triggers just yet. Transform. We're going to leave that for now. The face. We're not using the camera input. And all this stuff is already an automated for us for the most part. For now, we're just going to use the eye gaze. You open that up. Right now it's set to camera input. But if we set it to, you can set it to mouse and touch. And there's also keyboard input. With that. Wherever you click, he looks a little bit more realism. And if you wanted to look at specific things, so you have that setup to mouse and touch. Now what you want to do is go to the beginning of your animation. And we're going to record a take of us controlling the Eyegaze. Went back to the beginning, again, hit record. Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the example topics that are ready to use in your own projects. If you click, See More, you can download additional puppets. And all these puppets are free to use however you want in your projects. Let's get started. There we go. We recorded our take a bus controlling the Eyegaze. I will just play a little bit, just hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the, that's pretty cool. Since we're done with that, we'll turn that off. And now we're going to record some of the triggers which are special animation setup. Close that, oops, sorry. Close the eye gaze and its open up the triggers. And we'll turn on the red dot. If you go over here, you'll see all these triggers. You can click on them and they'll do this little short animation. You can press the keys 1234. Just like we did before with the Eyegaze. We'll go back to the beginning and we'll record it take this is just an example. So the triggers I'm using controls are gonna be a little bit nonsensical. But just to give you a sense of how they work, Let's go. Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the example puppets that are ready to use in your own projects. If you click, See More, you can download additional puppets. All these puppets are free to use however you want in your projects. Let's get started. Like that. We have our triggers recorded. Go ahead and turn that off since we're recording and we can watch what we did. Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the example of topics that are pretty simple. We have this timeline here and you can see all the triggers on the timeline. You can manually edit these. And welcome to Adobe character animator. And you can add some n. That was me right-clicking. Then you can also move them around if you want. Character animator. And there we go. We've automated the lip sync and the head movements. And then we've animated ourselves the Eyegaze and some of these little triggers. 6. exporting from Character Animator: Now that we have our character animated, now we want to bring it back into Premiere. We're going to export, go to File. Export. In which you want to do is video with alpha. What this is gonna do, it's gonna give you a transparent background. So we'll save our scene. Red monster movie. We'll start the Adobe Media Encoder. Here we are in Adobe Media Encoder. Let's go ahead and press make sure it's saved in the right spot. Go ahead and press Play. And it will export your video. Like I said, it was with an Alpha. You have the black background here. 7. bringing your character into Premiere: All right, So here I am. Back in Premier. We're going to import the character into our project. Red scene or the scene red monster. Import that. And let's go ahead and drop that into our timeline. You'll notice that it came with the audio track. Since we have it sync to that. Since it's the same audience shouldn't matter, but just in case we'll, we'll use the Import Audio. This unlink this audio. Go ahead and get rid of that for now. Let's play it. See how it looks. Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the example puppets that are ready to use. There we go. We've got the puppet in there. It's transparent on top of the video we had before the audio extinct and it's all animated. That's pretty cool. That was fairly easy to do. 8. add effects in Premiere: This a little bit more we can do in Premiere with our animation. If you'd like, you can have character and move around. To do that. We would go over here to our effects controls and under motion, you want to key frame the position. Start at the beginning. Keyframe here. Let's go to the n, and this is just for demonstration purposes. We'll just have the character move to the right and a keyframe is already set. You'll see that animation come through. Let's say you want to have the character come in at a certain time. You may want to do is you're going to edit the character separate from the audio. May want to unlink the audio for now. Go here to Effects and video transitions. You can use a dissolve costs us off. Let's choose the crosses all. Hello and welcome to. And there we go. We have the character animating in. Going to have the character animate out. Also. Towards the end. I like to use actually these immersive videos. I think they're supposed to be for VR, but they actually look really cool on a regular video to this light rays on the end inhabit kind of fade out. It looks at nice actually. Like leaks. That looks a little color. There we go. We've got some, some effects, some transitions. Something else you may want to do to sort of customize the character a little bit. It is a fact the color over here under Effects and go to Lumetri Color. And you can play around with the shadow and highlight. And then we can go down to Color Wheel a match, just the shadows and highlights, mid-tones. Now we have a little bit of more unique character. We're still using the example puppets, but it's a little bit, little bit tweaked. And you know, you could, of course you can go ahead and try these other settings. There's all these effects here. Go ahead and have fun with it. 9. audio effects in Premiere: One last thing we're gonna do with the video I'm gonna show you is since I'm kinda like until audio is if you go over here to the audio workspace, select our audio. I reset the audio to save your workspace. And then we have the audio track mixer. If you hit that right there, brings up all the effects. If you press Play, use in your, you will see that the audio is on this, this track right here appear all these audio effects. If you want, you can add some. We'll do is we'll add a little reverb, convolution reverb to projects, and then adds that, that effect to it. Just a little extreme was turned down a little bit. If you click, See More, you can download additional puppets. Me, we'll try something else. Hello flangers, see how that sounds. I want to put some plans you're on that. All these puppets are free to use however you want in your projects. Let's get started. If you click here, you get all the different settings. Change. The modulation rate. Will be character animator. These are some of the example puppets that are ready to use in your own projects. If you click, See More, you can download additional puppets. After that sounds pretty cool. I like that. It's got to mix. It sounds kind of like an alien or something. There you go. We've animated it, we brought it back into Premiere. We applied some audio effects to it and apply it some, some color effect to it. Now all we need to do is export this video. Let's trim this audio first. All right. 10. exporting final video: Now we're going to export our final video. Let's go back to the editing workspace. What you want to do is select your scene and then go to File Export Media. For the format. We want to set that to H.264. They have a preset for YouTube, the YouTube 1080 t full HD. So we'll set it to that. Make sure your output is how you want it. Everything else should be okay. We'll go ahead and cue that. It's in your queue and you can press play. After that's encoded here it is. My Folder. Probably organized this better. There we go. Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the example puppets that are ready to use in your own projects. If you click, See More, you can download additional puppets. All these puppets are free to use however you want in your projects. Let's get started. All right, pretty cool. That's it. Have fun. Experiment a little bit. Get in there. Play around with the character of the different triggers, and play around with the audio settings in Premiere. The next step would probably be to create your own animations, your own characters. They have a puppet maker, which is, which is also nice to play around with. Have fun, make some videos and I'll see you next time. 11. example red monster animation: Hello and welcome to Adobe character animator. These are some of the example topics that are ready to use in your own projects. If you click, See More, you can download additional puppets. All these puppets are free to use however you want in your projects. Let's get started.