Masking and Rotoscoping Masterclass (Premiere Pro & After Effects)

1. Introduction: The water, Visual effects can be overwhelming. But every great skill starts with learning the fundamentals. Which is why in this course, I will transform you into a masking and rotoscoping master. Every time you see visual effects in films, commercials, and even the Tiktoks, be sure that there is some level of masking or rotoscoping involved. After all, this is one of the five pillars of mastering visual effects. And in this course, you will learn how to separate elements in your footage to have complete control over what they do. Giving you endless possibilities from creative video and text transitions, to manipulating the real world, to becoming the expert in fixing it in post. This skill will pay you dividends in your editing career. And once we learn the basics, we'll graduate to bigger and better tools that will allow you to do more advanced effects. Become an expert with me and make your imagination the only limitation. Let us begin. 2. What Is Masking & Rotoscoping?: Masking and rotoscoping are two powerful visual effects techniques that can be used to manipulate and composite footage in a video editing software. In this case, after effects. But Premier Pro has its own masking tools two, although we'll cover that in a second. Masking is like using a digital stencil on a video. We can place a digital shape over a part of the video, and then we can change that part of the video whilst leaving the rest untouched. This stencil in question, it is called the mask. So in practice, it will look like this. And don't worry, we'll get into the various ways to do it. Later. We will draw a shape around our object, and now we have a hole. If we put something underneath it, we can see the clip underneath. This is basically a simple mask and it can allow us to hide things in plain sight. For example, if we shoot a video but forgot to remove this bottle in the shot, we can put a shot afterwards that we filmed without the bottle draw around it, boom. Now it's gone. Now you can manipulate all masks by affecting the way the edges look and their sizes. However, there is something more important to note. If we draw a mask of this object here and press play, you will see that the shape stays the same for the whole clip. But the object moves away from the shape, and that's because our camera is moving. So the way to fix this is not moving the camera or by making the mask move throughout these frames. So this is a tracked mask, and if we trace an object for many frames, that is known as rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is often used to create the illusion of an object or person moving independently to the background or to remove unwanted objects from a scene. Both masking and rotoscoping are commonly used in video editing, visual effects, and animation. And can be a bit chal***ging for some beginners, but with practice and this course, you'll master it in many different scenarios. Plus we'll cover many different ways that you can use these techniques with the project tutorials in this course. And you have all the assets so that you can try them yourself. But my goal here is that next time you think of an idea, you will have another tool in your arsenal to make it happen. And maybe just maybe you'll be able to spot some rotoscoping editing mistakes in many popular videos. Or even figure out how to do it so you can apply them to your videos. 3. Tools for Masking & Rotoscoping: Tools for maskin and rotoscoping. So what tools are we going to learn in this course? The most basic tool used for mask in and rotoscoping is the Pen tool or the shaped mask tool. Both available in Premier Pro and Adobe After Effects. But what if you mask an object and it starts moving, then we need to track it. But other tools make this much, much easier. The roto brush tool can quickly isolate objects in the scene using AI, which can be refined and more polished to help mask things out like hair. Then there's make that can collect tracking data at the same time as masking and object out with its advanced planer tracking features. And within the same system you can mask something out. Motion tracking, There's also autotrace, which is a one click trace solution in after effects. Oh, and let's not ignore the fact that we are right now in an AI revolution, which is why I will cover Runway ML, which is literally a one click rotoscoping solution, but it has some downfalls. The reason I'm teaching you all of these tools is that you are fully equipped for any problem you need to solve. Some tools are better than others. Call some situations. Even though I can use mocker and I've done some complicated masks, I often find myself using the penal when it's just a very simple job. But it's my job to make you the best at all of them. Which is why there will be examples for you to follow, replicate, and innovate on for each of these tools. So let's get started. 4. Practical Uses: I want you to firstly understand the actual possibilities and what can you do in practice with masking and rotoscoping. Because you might only know of one or two uses. But did you know that you can replace backgrounds in footage to make it seem like something is somewhere else? Isolate an object and make it do whatever you want it to do. You can do text animations like these. Remove objects from footage. If by mistake you can add objects to footage and composite them in, which is the most common way that they do it in Hollywood and commercials. You can do creative ways to transition to and from shots. You can add or remove shadows from shots to help them b***d in, remove or replace certain colors. You can blur things out, such as someone's face or a number plate. You can add depth of field to a shot to make it look more realistic. You can duplicate your subject in the same scene in a simple way or a more complex way. The list goes on. So let's master these tools so we can get creative. 5. Premiere Pro vs After Effects: One thing to note though, before we carry on, I want to state that even though the pen tool is available on both Premier Pro and after effects, I do recommend to use after effects when you can, because the Pen tool and Premier Pro is not very accurate. Whereas after Effects is much easier and much more precise enough wall. Let's actually master these tools. 6. Pen Tool Introduction: Okay, so I hope you're as excited as I am. Let's get into the pento now. You might be thinking, oh, I want to get into some advanced stuff, but the pento is actually a very good useful tool that I used to this day that you can use in many different scenarios. Before let's get started though, we're going to work on after effects mainly. So let's firstly create a new composition by clicking here or go to Composition, New composition. Let's also create a new solid to work with by right clicking the gray empty space, new solid, and make it whatever color you want. It doesn't matter because we're now going to go to our effects and presets panel and search for gradient, and then drag in the four color gradient. The pental is located in the tool bar on the top left side of the after effects workspace. Or you can select it, use it in G on your keyboard. Now if you're going to use this in Premier Pro, you use P, which makes more sense for pen. However, we can see that the pental icon has a small triangle on the bottom right. Which means that if we click and hold on the icon, we get four more options available. For now, let's just check the pental to create our first mask. Just make sure that whenever you're using the masks, you click on the layer you want to effect, in this case, the solid we created. And the reason we're going to use a four color gradient is so helps us easily see what our mask is doing. So let's create our mask by clicking four times anywhere to make a rough square or whatever shape you want to do. And if you want to close the shape, just click back to our first point. Now that our shape is complete, three things have happened. The first is that our white solid has become the size of the shape. We've officially masked out the solid. You also notice that if we go to our solid layer and click this arrow to reveal the effects and masks, we have a mask menu. And if you open it up, we have mask one. You want to get to this quickly. Just press M once on your keyboard, which will show you the mask part. Or press M twice for showing all the other options. The last thing that you notice is that if you click the layer, these three dots around the mask appears. This allows us to scale the layer, but not the mask, just the layer. Let me show what I mean. If I get the selection two on the Tobar or press V, we can now click and drag these points, which looks like we're scaling the mask. But if we delete the mask, you see that our layer is now small. Which asks the question, what if you want to manipulate the mask? What if you want to change the size, et cetera. 7. How to Manipulate a Mask: So here are some common answers to common questions. What if I want to change the size of the mask or the location of the points? Well, with our panel selected, we can click the points that are the color of our mask. If you have many masks of different colors, you can press M on the keyboard and click the mask you want to change. You will see points go from circle to squares for the selected mask. Now you can just click and drag them and move them around. So what if I want to change the position of what is behind the mask? Well, let me introduce you to the pan behind Tool or wiring the keyboard, select the layer, click and drag anywhere. And you will see that what's inside the mask is going to move around. So say you accidentally miss something, you can just move it around. What if I want to add more points to the mask? With the penal selected, You can hover over the lines without any point and you will see a pen with a plus sign. This means that you can add a point to that line. You can also click and hold the pento icon to get the add vertex tool, but that's just long. What if I want the corners to be round in my mask? Well, there's actually two ways you can do this. The first is by moving your pentool to a point holding Alt or option on your keyboard, which will show you this triangle which simulates the convert vertex tool. Clicking will result in the corner now being rounded and having these lines next to them, which we call handles. This allows you to manipulate the curves. You can rotate them, stretch them. The closer to the point, the less of a curve from that point. If you hold Alt on PC or optional Mac and drag one handle, you will only affect that side of the curve. So now they're treated independently. Lastly, if you hold shift, the handle will go straight. And if you drag it around, it will move in a 45 degree increment so you can get accurate curves or measurements. If you want the point to be straight again, just hold the Alt or Option key and click the point again. The second way, which is quite easy, and I'm doing this a lot recently, is to, before you even start doing a mask, check where it says here to bezier. Which will mean that every time you draw a point, the connection to that point will be rounded, which will make it a lot easier in some masks. Now, one thing to mention is that if I wanted to add curves as I am masking around an object, Let's say for example, this car here, which has, you know, some areas that are straight lines. But then as we get to somewhere like here, we want to do a curve rather than doing the points and then masking out and then later going in and then individually adding the curves. What's more efficient is to actually do the curves as you're going along. Actually clicking and dragging out from a point, you can see a curve starts to form. If I go here and then here you see it's a straight line. But if I now stretch further to the left, we start to make a curve. Now something to note is that wherever this handle at the end point, that's where our next curve is going to come from. You can see that it follows this direction to go around. If I click there, and if I click down here, it follows this direction to go down. The problem is that if I wanted a straight line to go down here, if I also just click here, you see we have a curve that we don't want. One thing that we can do is actually, from what we've learned, we can hold Alt and click a handle to independently move it. And then we can move it back and point it down in the direction that we want to go. Now I can actually click here and we get a straight line. If you follow through the same way, we have no curve here, we have no handles. Now I can draw a straight line. Then I can click Hold for a curve. Then I can zoom in and hold Alt and move this handle. Now I can carry on being straight. Then when I get to here, I can now create a curve. I never want to go down, hold the handle and we can continue and this is how you get very good at using the pental is by practicing going around lows of curves. And in one of the examples, we're going to actually mask out this car to do a very cool transition that looks like this. So congratulations, you can now use the pental. 8. Mask Settings Explained: If you remember about pressing M twice on the keyboard, we get mask options and there are 123456 things we need to learn. The first is the mask mode. This here determines what the mask actually does. Add means you only see what's within the mask. Subtract means you're seeing everything that's not within the mask. None is if you're working with masks, but you need to be able to see the rest of the layer. There are other modes that only come into play once you add multiple masks onto a layer. Intersect works by only showing the part of the mask that intersects with another mask and these are the main ones that you will be using. Next mask modes is the invert button, which is a quick way to invert your selection. Now it's not the same as subtract because you can have one mask here, put another mask here. And this mask can subtract what's inside this mask. Whereas invert will just invert the selection. There's also a mask path where as a shape, it allows us to change the bounding box, something you will probably rarely ever do. And also to reset the mask shape to either a rectangle or ellipse. But the more useful thing to note here is that we can key frame the shape of the mask. We can click the stopwatch and record the shape of the mask at a point in time. We can see a diamond here which has recorded the shape at this time. Then we can move a few frames forward, drag the mask to any point. And if you click Play, you can see that the mask is moving around the layer. Now, not only can we change where the mask is, but we can also change the shape of the mask by clicking the points so that they turn hollow and dragging them around. And now you see that if you press play, the mask literally changes shape. This is very, very useful when you want to mask something that is moving along some frames. A quick, practical way that we'll get to in the examples is to make a mask transition that looks like this. I don't know about you, but I can really think of many, many applications of this mask feathering. Mask feathering enough to fix is a useful tool to help smooth out the edges of a mask. In many cases, you'll find that when you do a mask, the edges are a bit too sharp and it's quite obvious what you're doing. This also allows you to b***d things in when you're doing a mask. If you're taking something out or putting something in to make it b***d in with the scene, by adding a feather to the mask, the edges become softer and more b***ded in. In this setting, a higher feather radius will result in a softer edge and vice versa. But remember that mask feather tool that we saw earlier when we clicked and hold on the pen tool icon? Well, if we select it and drag out from any point in the mask, we can manually control the feathering at different points in the mask shape. So we can have areas with more feathering than others within the same mask. This will become useful when you want one area to be smoother than another one without affecting the whole mask opacity. This allows you to change how apparent to the mask is. Maybe you want the mask to appear halfway through a clip. You can do it by key framing. An increase in opacity expansion. Now expansion allows you to extend or contract the boundary of the mask. Maybe you drew it too tight, maybe you need to take up more space. And if you add some feathering and you end up seeing more than you want to, you can change the expansion so that you can see less. So now we know how to mask with the penile, how to manipulate the mask, and how to change how it looks. Let's quickly learn how to use the shape tools and then get into some fun, practical examples. 9. Shape Tool Explained: Now, just like the pen tool, you can use the shape tool to do masks with accurate shape like ellipses, rectangles, et cetera. The same principles apply, except here some useful tips when dealing with shapes are the following. In this clip we're going to mask out this clock so that we can add equal effect to it. So let's click on the layer you want to add the shape masks to. We can click the rectangle tool to bring up a rectangular mask. However, if we click and hold it, we can see a variety of different shapes. So let's select the ellipse shape. If you click and drag this, you can see our ellipse. However, it doesn't maintain the shape. So if we hold shift as we drag, it keeps the circular proportions. But I want this circle to appear where the clock is. So we can actually press and hold the spacebar to move the mask to the right location, which is the clock here. Now we can let go of space and shift to get it to fit just right. But before we fix this mask, if you want to draw this circle from the center, then what you would have to do is hold control and drag it out. Which drags it out from the center aligning point. So now you know how to draw a shape mask. This is how you make adjustments to it. If you click on our mask layer, we see the square points that we can manipulate, just like with the pentel. But to do so, we need to hold shift and click them. Now they show us the handles that were used to make them, which we can drag and play with. Remembering that if we hold shift, we can move them in a straight line without affecting the other. And if we hold al to option, we can move them anywhere without affecting the other. Now let's say our shape wasn't perfect. We wanted to add another point. You can go to the pinole or press G on your keyboard. Then go up to the line until you see a plus symbol and then click to add another point. Just like with the pental, we can manipulate these points in these settings to help b***d our masking using feathering, expansion, et cetera. And that's pretty much it. Shape tools just help us get shapes much easier. They're also very good when you're doing text animations because you want the lines to be very straight like with a rectangle. And they can just save you some time. So now you know how to use the Pen tool and the Shape tool. What do you do when your object starts moving? Let's find out. 10. Tracking a Mask: So what do you do when you've drawn a mask? But then you press play and then your subject just runs away from the mask. Well, you need to track it now to track a simple shape or pen tool mask, it's actually pretty easy. But because it's pretty easy, it has its limitations. So download this video asset so that you can follow along. Let's draw a mask around this subject here. And then when we're done, we can press M on the layer with the mask. Make sure to move the playhead to the beginning of the clip. And then right click on the mask and click Track mask. This will show up with the tracker window for which you can select the track method that you want to follow. And then you can select the direction of where it's going to track, whether forwards or backwards. In terms of method, I suggest position scale and rotation. In most cases, if your track fails, try some of the other ones. There's also actually a face tracking, if you do a circle around someone's face, which will actually go right into depth in the motion tracking module of the five pillars of the effect. Once you have selected your track method, you can click on the Track Forward button to start tracking, or backwards if your playhead is somewhere else. And once the tracking is complete, you'll see key frames on the track. You can click these arrows here to open up and move around and change independently if something goes wrong. And that's it. Your mask will now follow the track point in your footage. Now this is the basic form of tracking rotoscoping, but it has many, many limitations. The first being that the points aren't accurately tracked. You can sometimes have things jump around and if something happens, you have to independently frame by frame change the point because they are registered on a frame by frame basis. However, the advanced methods of rotoscoping like the roto brush and the Moca are very clever in that if you change something like say your point goes off a bit and you change it, it now updates all the other points using an algorithm that that point doesn't need to be captured or that you're capturing the wrong point. So it can save you tons of time. So this I recommend for very simple tracks and for some situations and not others. But let's have fun and learn how to use this with the examples that you can still have a good time with. And these examples are going to increase in difficulty as you go along. 11. Intro to Pen Tool Examples: So here are some fun, practical examples using the pen and the shape tool that you can do that increase in difficulty as you go along. Make sure to download all the assets to get going and to upload your projects to the discord or the community page for everybody else to see your progress and maybe get featured in a react episode. Try to incorporate your own style, or even better, go and film your own footage to practice with and I'll react to the most interesting ones. Doing the whole process yourself from film to editing is the best way for you to get much better at these techniques. So let's get going. 12. Censor an Object: Have you ever made a video? And something shouldn't have really been recorded. For example, a number plate or somebody's face if they don't want to be recognized. And using the same masking techniques, we can actually censor those objects. It's pretty simple. So download the two clips, the businessman walking, and the car ride. We can drag the clip to this where it says create new composition. And we make a new composition with the clip. So the idea here is I want this guy's face to appear fine, but I want these two guys to have a blurred face. The first step is to actually duplicate this clip. And we do pressing controller command D, which duplicates our clip. Then we can add the effect Gaussian blur, which would actually blur the clip. If we increase the blurriness here, or we can add the mosaic effect in stylized mosaic, we can drag that on top, and then we can just change the settings and just make them the same. In this scenario, I'm going to use the Mosaic effect, but let's turn it off for now. And let's actually do the masking. So we want to essentially get the pentel and I want to draw a mask around this gas face. So we're going to do a rough mask around. Fix some of the points. If we have to, we can zoom in and press and hold the scroll wall button. Or holding space and dragging with click and drag. And then I'm actually at the same time going to do it for her face here. Something like this doesn't have to be perfect. And then I'm going to click on that top player and press M, which brings up our mask. I'm going to move the play head to the beginning of the clip. Right click on mask one and hit Track mask. And if you go to tracking now you can do position scale rotation. But since we're doing faces, and on this version 2023 of after effects, there is a face tracking that has outline only. And for this case we can actually click this one. And then we can click Track forward. And this will actually do a pretty decent job at tracking face of the person. And then once that's done, we just do the same thing for the other mask. So click mask two face tracking and we can start. So now if we scrub through the timeline, we can check and we can see that the mask did a very good job at tracking their faces. So now all we have to do is go back to our Mosaic effect and click the FX button again. And you can see that our faces have now been blood. Now if you find that, in some cases, for example, the one on the right, it's too small. You can click on the mask, the yellow one here. You can close this arrow, open it again, and then you can actually increase the mask expansion so that it really covers his face like so. And the opposite, if you find that maybe at some point it's showing too much or not shown enough. You can also add a key frame to the mask expansion. Move a few frames and make it smaller if needed. Also, if you're going through this preview and you want to see what it looks like without these lines, you can just press this button here where it says Toggle Mask and Shape Path Visibility. And you can actually scrub through without the mask outline. So now we have our effect. Now you can do the same thing for different objects. So now I'm going to leave it up to you to try and do the same thing with this car ride by actually trying to mask out the number plate and then blurring it out. So you can practice tracking a mask, and that's pretty much it. Another easy one. 13. Mask Slams: Object slams. So a slam is, I don't know if it's the right term, but it's essentially a transition where you have an object that is masked out, coming into the frame, and when it lands in the frame, the rest of the scene appears. It's a very cool transition to keep things flowing. You can deal with people, so let's just get into it. So let's drag in shot to our composition by dragging it into here. And now we have our composition made and we have this first shot of these two cars driving past. And then I want us to add shot B and we're going to put that on top. And this shot is just a car driving judge. So the first thing we're going to do is actually I want this car to go in the direction to the right instead of the left. And to do that I just right click here, transform and then flip horizontal. Boom. Now the cars flipped, and let me just hide this layer for now. I want this shot to appear like this. The cars are coming through room's room and then now the car is going to slide in. So I know I want this slam to happen around here so I can enable the layer. Now I want to cut this shot here, so I'm going to just press Alt or option a Mac. And the left square bracket. And you can see it cuts the clip. It goes from these two shots here to this shot there. And you can see these two come through. I actually want this to happen around here. I'm going to just cut this like that and then move it back just like so, so I get the red car. In order to do this effect, we're going to have to firstly create a frame hold. So take the shot here and actually freeze it in time. And to do that, we first have to duplicate our shot. Then we can click Time Freeze Frame on Premier Pro. You can just right click on it and do Add frame hold segment. And it's the same thing. So now we have a frame hold segment here. But you can see this frame hold segment starts after the clip. So let's move it five frames beforehand. So you press control command and the left arrow, 12345. And now we can drag this like that. Go to the end of it, one frame before and press out and right square brackets or option if you're on Mac. And now we see we have our clip a frame hold and then the car comes in. So now what we do is we mask out this car, so we're going to use the pentel for it. If it was a more complicated shot, we can use one of the other methods. But we can just very roughly mask out this car. And you can see that here because we have some curved edges. I'm clicking, I'm holding, and I'm dragging out. You can see here, dragging out, You can see it like that. Bom, I'm just moving these points here. I mean, it doesn't have to be very accurate because on, you're going to be there for five frames. You can see that once you close the mask, the car appears here. And so now our clip looks like this. So next I'm going to press M twice in the layer to bring up the mask options. And I'm going to add some feathering. Just maybe like 15, so it looks like this. And now we're going to add some key frames. I'm going to press P on the keyboard, which brings up the position. And I want to go to the last frame, And I want to press the stopwatch which registers this final position as the end. Now I'm going to go right to the beginning. You can move it anywhere you want, but I'm going to move it to the left, because that makes more sense, because now the car is going to slide in and then it's going to start moving to the right. So I'm just going to drag this into this out of frame. So now we have this. You see the car slides in, and here is our transition, but it looks a little bit too static. One thing you can do is actually right click on this last keyframe and do easy ease in. It slows down as it comes in, but it's still a bit too jittery for my liking. So we're going to add motion blow by clicking this button here, which enables motion blow. If you don't have this, you can click down here where it says toggle switches and modes and look, now we have motion blow. Our clip looks like that. Now if you wanted to, you could extend this further. If you didn't like how long it took, it was too quick for you, so I could increase the speed. You could also play around with a key frame, so maybe you can click on the graph editor and have the speed be faster by dragging this backward. So you get something like this, but it's up to you. I kept it simple by clicking here, making it easy. Ease in. And this one you can make it easy. Ease out if you want to. And now we have a really cool mask slam, and you can apply this to any clip. One thing if you wanted to, I could make this quicker. Then I could add a shake to this final frame to make it look like really slammed, like, boom, like crashed into the frame. Now, I'm going to increase the scale here on the first key frame. I'm going to move it up into the right. Move one frame. Move it back and down one more frame. And we can right click and reset it. And reset the scale. Because I've flipped, this happens. I just unlink this one, make this one -100 We get something like this. Let's just take motion blow now we get a cool looking effect. Now if you're wondering how you would do this in Premier Pro, it's the same process except on our clip here, we just go to the beginning. Right click, insert, frame hold segment. Just like you see, it adds a frame hold in between our clips and it also cuts the bottom one. Let's just cut this one down. Delete this one here. Re, extend it. Bring this one back. Now we're left with a frozen shot. And then our clip, the same thing here. We can now click this button here to mask our car. Remembering that Premier Pro masking tools are inferior compared to after effects, boom, boom, whatever. Add some feathering. If you want to change the position, you don't do it through the Motion tab. Instead you want to right click, nest your sequence first, and then add an effect transform. Then you want to change the shutter angle to 180 degrees. Add a key frame to the position. Move that key frame to the end, because that's a final position. Then you want to go to the beginning, move that backwards, and you can see if we play, this effect takes place just like that. And then we can also right click on the final key frame, temporary interpolation, and make it ease in. Just eases in. Just like soil practices, some of the clips that are included in this video, try to get creative with them and send them on the discord to have a chance to enter into a react onto the next one. 14. Microphone Removal: So if you ever wanted to get crisp sounding audio, but you didn't want the microphone to be in the frame like this. This is how you do it. You firstly have to record a scene without the microphone in frame, and this is called a clean plate. Then you can happily record your entire video just making sure that you don't pass in front of the microphone like this. But what's very important when doing this type of shot is that you have controlled lighting. You don't have lighting changing anywhere. Also, you're not going in front of the lighting or the shadows happening around the microphone, otherwise it won't really work. And then once you've filmed your clean plate, and you've filmed the talking head segment with the microphone. If you want to remove it, you have to put the clean plate underneath the other shot. You want to freeze frame it. You can do this in premiere by right clicking and adding ad frame hold. Or you can do this in after effects by going to time freeze frame. And you can drag it out as long as you want. Then on the clip of you talking, you then get the penile and you draw a mask around the microphone. Add some feathering to make the b***ding smoother and that's the effect done. You can now talk and have the video free of a microphone. Now the times that this is very important is when you're in a big room, for example, and it's a lot of echo and you really need to have the microphone nice and close to the person so that it sounds good. You can do that no problem just making sure that the lighting is controlled that you don't pass your hand in front of the microphone and you should be good. 15. Color Grading with Masks: Now although masking is great for visual effects, it can also be used for color grading. Now, one way to use masking is by masking out a subject's face. Same thing as before. We can draw a mask, track it, and then we can apply the effect lumetric color to maybe increase the brightness of a subject. Well, something that actually do a lot is to draw a mask from the bottom of the frame up, which covers the ground or the road, and darken it than ads in contrast. And what this does is it draws your eyes into a subject. All right, so if you guys download the following footage, the guy with the suit and DB 77. This is actually a really cool shot that I got on a trip to Germany. But I'm just going to show you some really cool techniques that you can use masking for when doing color grading. So for example, if we also do a very basic color grade where, you know, maybe adds saturation, some contrast, Nothing too crazy, you know, play about with these ones here. Here's just a little color correction here. Before I was about to add a lot, I wanted to really target the car and draw your eyes towards it. There is a really cool thing that we can do with Lumetri color. And you can do this also in after effects by adding adjustment layer with lumetri color. Say we just take Lumetri color, do control C, control V, which duplicate our layer. But then we just reset it by clicking here where it says reset effect. If we open up the bottom one, we can now see that we have masking options. Now in this shot here, we're pulling back away from the car, and I actually want this floor to be darker and more contrasty, to really drive our eyes towards it. Let me show you how you do that. Basically what we're going to do is start at the end here and I want to draw a mask. I'm going to just draw a four point polygon square. And I'm going to just draw it from here. I'm going to drag that here. Drag that there, maybe. Then I'm just going to zoom out, make this small at the end, it looks like this. Then I'm going to want to track this because obviously the camera moves. So I'm going to just want to track this backwards. Now, you can do it with just doing the track mask path and you can try that. We can see how it works. Sometimes it does a good job, sometimes it doesn't. Otherwise, you can just do it yourself with the key frames. So you can see that I actually did a really bad job. Let's just do it manually ourselves. So we're just going to basically add a key frame at the end. We're going to go back to the beginning, then we're going to click on it and just move it down. Something like this. It should do pretty good job. We might have to fix it at some point, just making sure that everything is being registered. And once we've done our mask, we can now go to basic corrections and actually just drop the exposure just a little bit, drop the exposure, add some contrast. And you can see when we take the mask off, it looks, it looks darker at the bottom compared to how it was before. Just drawing our eyes towards the center. Now, the line here is a little bit sharp and I don't like that, so I'm just going to add some feathering. Just going to add some feathering like this. If it comes up from the edges, it's because the mask is too close. So you can just fix that by adding a little bit of expansion. I'm playing around with that. You can see now our eyes are being drawn towards the car. And then let's actually just delete this mask here. And then what we're going to do is actually get an ellipse mask. And I'm going to just circle around the car something like this. And I'm going to invert it and add a lot of feathering. Then I'm just going to fix the exposure in the contrast just to lower the exposure a little bit, but not too much. I don't want it to be too obvious, but what we want to do is essentially create a vignette around the car. And don't forget that once you do this, you also want to track the mask because they will change with the car. We can just do that by adding the key frames. What you can also do is actually take this one control C, control V, and invert it. Now we're highlighting the actual car. Rather than the exposure going down. We want to make the exposure go up, maybe increase saturation. You can even go to the creative tab, but not just a little bit of sharpening. Something like ten, which now is going to make the center sharper and more of the focus. This what's going to look like before any corrections. This is after the corrections. Now you can obviously spend some time to really get a good mask around the car if you want to. And to b***d things forward. Because in this case there is a little bit, there's a bit of lightness going around, the car, looks like a halo. But yeah, it's a really cool whether you can incorporate masking into color grading. Now, another way that you can do this is with faces. If you drag in the man with suit file and we drag it into the new item, I'm just going to fix my window here. That's a really nice shot of a man right here. And what you can actually do is incorporating the same principles. If you're just going to add some contrast, some saturation, just fix the colors a little bit at the beginning initially. Then what we can do is you can actually control C, control V, reset this, Get a mask, and now we're going to actually draw it around his face. The focus of the subject here is the face which is really important. An important part. Our eyes are very accustomed to following things that are bright. If you want his face to be the focus and we want to make it brighter, what we can do is actually once we have the mask around his face, we can go and increase the exposure. Just go to creative to increase the sharpening a little bit, 1020. Nothing too crazy. Now you can see that if we turn it off on and off, it's a bit crazy. So what we can do is actually add some feathering, something like 50. So now it doesn't look too crazy, but now his face is now lit up. So now what we have to do is actually track it. We can try the tracker here. I think you'll probably do a much better job than before. Oh, I did a pretty good job actually. You can see that that's before and that's after. And you can see our eyes are now drawn to his face a lot more. But you can now do the complete opposite now that that's tracked. So you can control C, control V. You can take this one here, invert it, and now we can go to the settings. We can reset the exposure and actually drop the exposure just a tad. Just a tat. Just do maybe like -0.5 Again, play with a feathering. Maybe make this feathering a bit more. That's a bit much actually do. -0.3 and now you can see that his face is lit up. So this is what it looked like before and that's what it looks like after we track a mask around his face. Yeah, that's how you can do it. And I try to apply this with some of your videos. Try and make sure to really use the mask to make areas of the shot. That being said, let's get on to the next one. 16. Mask Wipe: Wipe transitions. This is a very cool transition to do when a shot is passing through something, maybe a pillar, maybe a tree. Making it a very seamless transition and you can get very creative with it. But it does require a shot to be used where something is being passed forward. So download the mask wipe Acts, you have mask wipe A and B. We can drag the first one in to create a new composition file just for this practice. And then underneath it we can drag the other one. So A should be on top of B because we're going to go from A to B. So A is a shot of a drone that goes like this and B is another shot of the drone as it's coming through like so here is our clip and you can see that what's good about this shot is that we are passing through something, this tree, when you're filming your shots, you want to try and pass through something where there it's a person, a pillar, tons of examples out there that you can use this effect with. In this case, I'm going to use this tree. Now, I'm actually going to move this effect a little bit further back so that the effect happens sooner. And underneath it, I'm just going to move my second clip. This is how we do the effect. We're going to go to the first frame where we see past our object, in this case the tree. And now we're going to get the pentel, a mask holding the mouse wheel button. I'm going to just click around. I'm going to start doing a mask. I'm going to put a point here and a point down here. Make sure that you have clicked on your layer. Then I'm going to add two more points before we actually close it off here. Now you can see that we've actually taken out the rest of the clip. We press M on our layer and click where it says inverted. Now the most important part, and a lot of people forget this, is to actually click mask paths. Let's click it here. And now we're going to move a few frames. Hold shift, and click one of the points here to drag it there. Do the same thing here. And then this other point we're going to move it down. And so essentially we're going to try and do our best to track our tree. Now I'm moving in big points and then I'm going to go in between them to try and fix them. You can see that if we move back a few frames, we have a gap here. So I can simply just go here and do that. And you can see it fills up the ******. So I'm going to move a few frames here and do this, a few frames. Do that here now. Don't worry if you end up going past the tree a bit, we're going to fix that in a second. But ideally, you want to get to the point where you have shown the whole clip. So now we just check it, make sure that none of the frames are visible. So if this happens, we can just go maybe here and try to fix it. And I'm really using the mouse will click to go through my clip, check closely. It's very important to do that. I'm going to go through all the frames. Now one issue you might find is that if you go to the first point and you move back, you will see that we have the mask here just before our initial point. We're just going to go back one frame and move the mask out of the way. Now it actually starts and carries on. Now another thing to note is that our clip hasn't covered underneath, so we've got to move our clip a little bit beforehand and we're starting to see the effect. Now if you have your clip selected and you're going through it and you can see the mask and it's getting annoyed or it's making it hard to see. You can just click here where it says Total Mask and Shape Path Visibility. Now it's gone and you can see how it's looking. I say it looks pretty good. Now one thing to note is that this line is much sharper than the original line. And so if you're seeing this as you press Play, it looks like something's happening. It takes you a little bit away from it. So one thing that we can do is click on a layer and press M twice. And that gives us our options. And now we can actually increase the feathering. It looks roughly the same. Now this also gives the illusion of motion blow, it gives the illusion that it's moving. You can see before the feathering and now after the feathering, and now you can see we have a nice smooth transition. There you go. How cool was that? Onto the next one. 17. Clock Tower Transition: Okay, so our next task is to do this clock tower transition. So let's actually drag in the clock tower video from the downloads, drag it into the new composition, and you can see our clip is basically an orbit short of a clock tower. And so essentially I want to mask this out so that I can zoom through it. So I want the effect to take place, I guess around here. So we're going to get our pentel. We're going to now zoom in. It's important to zoom in because if you work from very far away, you have very little room for accuracy as opposed to if you were to zoom in and you get a lot more accuracy. Let's actually start by doing some points here. Click here. Now if I click hold and drag to the left, I can get a nice curve going. And I just drag it up like this. Now if I want to follow through with this curve, I can click here just like so. And I can get lucky and then maybe move this like that. But in most cases I might actually have to hold old click and drag this handle like here. Now I can click, drag down and now I have the mask. Now say for example, I did this and the angle was like this. If asked to just click down here, we get this weird curve situation. Instead, if we did have this situation where the handle was at an angle, we just press drag this straight, move this back if you want to. Now we can click here and we have a perfect mask. Now let's actually invert the mask by clicking our layer. And pressing M on the keyboard And click Invert, we can have a look at how our mask is looking. Doesn't look too bad, to be honest, I think it looks all right. Press M twice on our keyboard to bring up the options and let's add a little bit of Feather. Maybe just five for now. And I want to see what it looks like, but this masking lines are getting in the way. So I'll just click here and I can see how it looks like. I think it looks pretty good. We want our mask to only appear for a few frames, but if we move back, you can see that it's there for all these frames. So instead what we're going to do first is actually duplicate this layer. Delete the mask from the bottom layer. Now the bottom layer we're going to press out and the right square bracket. And then drag this into this frame. And this one we're going to press 0 and the left square bracket option if you use Mac. And now you can see that we go from having the clock to the first frame without the clock. Now let's keep in mind that we have the bottom layer being the original footage, such that if I was to drag it underneath, it shows. And we can actually do some cool stuff with it by adding some effects, but we'll get to that later. Let's firstly track the motion of this mask by going to the mask. Click track mask because it's not a complicated shape, but there is an opportunity for it to go wrong. We're going to just go first tracking forward one frame at a time, making sure that this is position scale and rotation. And then we're going to go, it looks like it's working really well. So now I'm going to just press play and see how that goes. It's starting to move off from here, So I'm just going to fix it. I'm going to just press shift here. Fix it like so. And I think that's enough frames because we only need it for a few frames. Now I'm just going to have to fix some of these frames individually, which is the limitation of this tool, which is that if a registered frame goes off, you have to really fix them individually. Because if you fix one, it's not going to fix the other ones. This is why we like to play with the other tools such as maker wrote a brush. So now I could be a perfectness and do this quickly. But I thought I might just use a very useful tool in our mask options which is the mask expansion tool. I'm just going to increase this by ten pixels. It's a bit much. Let's make this five. Make this two, yeah, and add some feathering of like five. Okay, so now we have our clock tower and then we have a hole. So now we want to actually put in the next shot. You can put whatever you want. I just use another shot from another example, which is going to be this car shot here. I'm going to just move that underneath. So it starts when this one goes in. And you can actually see the shot underneath. And you can see we have a bit too much feathering going on here. So we can go to our mask, press M twice, then we lower this ferring down to two. So it's not too crazy. So now you can spend more time with it. I'm going to leave it as it is. We can add some effects to the shot underneath. If I drag this out like this, you can see that we're seeing the shot underneath the mask. Well, if I actually do so, maybe drag it in, 12345, I can add any effect that I want to help transition this clip out. So I could easily, if I wanted to make it simple, click on the stopwatch and then key frame a change in the opacity which is quite basic. Or something that I could do is add the V R digital glitch effect. I can key frame some interesting glitches and then drop the opacity, which is what we're going to do. Just to add a little bit of spice to our clip, I've added V R glitch. I'm going to key frame the muster amplitude, Press U on the keyboard to show that I'm going to move that new key frame 12 frames forward and make the amplitude zero. Now it's going to go from zero up to the max, and then it's going to go down to zero. But at the same time I'm going to press on my keyboard, add a key frame on the opacity. Press you to bring up all the key frames because our opacity here is at 100. Let's move that back to right here in the middle and drop it to zero. Now what's going to happen is it's going to glitch and then disappear. Now I can actually make the change in opacity much quicker. So it just does some disappearance like so now we have our transition here. Pretty basic. But just so we get the point, now we're going to need to do the actual zooming transition. And the best way to do that is that we have three clips here and the clip underneath we can actually precompose these two first and then zoom in. To do that, we can select both of them. Right click, Precompose movable attributes to new composition. Then I can press for position. Click the stopwatch for scale, click the stopwatch, press U. Now we can actually move back a few frames. Move these points, go past the transition to here. And then we can increase the scale and move the position such that we actually go through hole. So it's going to zoom in and bring us through to the next shot. Then after we've gone through, we can just cut this out so I can press Alt right square bracket, so it looks like this. Now this looks pretty boring. In fact, I'm need to add another key frame here to just get it more centered. What we can actually do is select all of these right click keyframe assistant, easy to make everything smoother. You can also play around with the time and if we want to, so I can maybe move this backwards if I wanted to. And also there's just one thing missing. It looks a bit sharp here as we're going through. It looks a bit distracting, I would say. One thing that we can do is actually just add motion blur. So we can check this box here for motion blur. If you don't have this, you just press here where it says toggle switches and modes. If you have this clicker now you can do motion blur. Now our shot looks like this. You're going through it. Now say for example, you wanted to change the transition. You don't want it to be a glitch anymore. You want it to be something else where you can, you can just go back to the clip, delete this effect, add wherever effect you want. There are tons of effects that you can use. For example, we can delete the digital glitch effect and add a displacement map effect. Make both of these zero. The displacement map layer is the bottom layer. We can add a key from to the horizontal displacement, Move a few frames increase until it gets all crazy looking. Press U on our keyboard, we can move the key frames forward. As it goes forward, it gets to the opacity drop. It does something like this, it disappears. Then we can go back to our main comp, and you can see what that looks like. A, since our zooming is starting a little soon, we can actually double click on it. When we double click on it, it takes us to where we just double clicked. I can actually move this transition back. Move this back. Now we have our call transition. Now if you wanted to get fancy, you can play around with the zoom in. You can make it not so smooth. And actually try and add some key frames to have the velocity increase as we go, or vice versa, but it's up to you. With that being said, this is the final effect. Boom. 18. Object Removal: Object removal. Now this one's going to make you the king of fix it in post. Whereby you may have accidentally filmed something that shouldn't be there or you need to get rid of something. So we're going to use our new masking technique combined with the Content Aware fill options that we have in Adobe after Effects to get rid of some stuff. But I'll also show you how to do this when Content Aware fill doesn't work or you can simply do it by creating your own clean plate. So let's get going. After Effects has a beautiful way for you to remove objects in your scene using Content Aware fill, which is this one here. If you don't have it, you can go to Window Content Aware fill, and now you should see it here. So how does it work? Let's firstly drag in our apartment shot from the object removal content bin. And you can see that we have here a shot in the room and I want to remove this clock. So the way that content Aware fill works is you firstly have to give it something to fill. So let's do that. Now that we know how to mask, we're going to click on our layer, get the pen tool, We're going to zoom in to cover the clock. You can do it like that or you can use the Shape tool, whatever you want. I'm just doing this rough for you guys. However, we have the clock masked out and everything's gone, so let's flip that by pressing M on the keyboard and clicking inverted. Now if I was to press Play, you can see that it doesn't exactly track our shot. And furthermore, you can see that at the end the clock is smaller than at the beginning. We're going to have to go right to the beginning. We're going to right click on a mask and click track mask. Then we want to make sure we take position scale and rotation. Scale is the most important one here. Now we can press play. You can see here that our mask is being tracked. Now, I would have probably made a more perfect mask if I spent more time on it. Let's stop it right here. As you can see that the mask is starting to go out, so I'm going to just go back a few frames to when that started. Then I'm going to move this higher up and then continue. All right, so now we can play it through and we can see that we have a mask. It does jump here afterwards, but that's okay for now. What we want to now do is now that we have a hole to fill, we can go to Content Aware Fill and we have a few options. We have Object Surface and Edge B***d. Now object is what you're going to use 90% of the time it uses AI. It's the best one to generally use to remove things. Surface is if you want to remove text from a surface, like a van on the side of a screen. And I'll show you what Edge B***d does really quickly because it's the easiest one that you can use the fastest. But it gives you the worst results. So if you click Edge B***d here, alpha expansion, it just really expands the mask. If you want to get more out of it, you can do that. Sometimes if your initial one doesn't work and the range you can do, the entire duration of work area, work area is dictated by this marker here. So if you want to do only a small section, you can do it like so if you have a long clip and you only want to contain a ware field for a small part of it, then just do it for a small part of it. So for this I'm only going to do it for the first 3 seconds and then I'm going to cut it out just for the sake of this video. So I'm going to just do generate fill layer and you can see is starting to analyze. If you can't see it, you might just need to drag this down. Okay? And as you can see, it's completely gone. So if you just go through the frames, you can see a little bit of ghosting around it. And this is just with Edge b***d. Now, Edge b***d is the easiest one to use, and in this case, it actually works. But for more complicated backgrounds, you may want to use Object and then you can change the lighting conditions. I would always start with Edge B***d just to see if it's good enough. If it is, then fantastic. If not, object will most likely do the best job. However, just for your understanding, if I turn off the bottom layer, you can see that what we have with this layer is just the cover up of the mask. And then if you go to the end, you can see our mask is back. So what we can actually do it is now delete this mask. So we can see that before it, we have the clock gone and now it comes back. So now what you can do here is you can actually press T for opacity. And you can actually lower the opacity to make the clock appear. And then maybe add some kind of effects to it. So let's do that very simply. Go into click Opacity, Add the key frame, go to the end, make this zero. So now the clock comes into frame and we can have a clock reveal. However, if we wanted to add a specific effect to our clock, then what we will do is we will duplicate the mask layer. So we will bring back our mask. We will duplicate our mask layer. We'll name this clock by itself. We name this background. We can press M on Clock by itself and uncheck invert. And if we isolate this layer by pressing this button here, we can see that this is now just the clock. And what we have here is we have the fill, we have the clock, and we have the background with the hole. You actually want to bring in the mask of the clock above. So we're going to drag this down and we're going to delete our opacity effect and set it back to 100. So now what we have is we have just the mask of the clock by itself. Underneath it we have the fill layer, and then we have the background. So now what we can do with the clock by itself is we can actually press T on the opacity, set the key frame to 100, bring it to the end of the fill layer, set this back to zero. So now we have no clock and then the clock appears, right? So we're now inverting this. But now what we're doing is we're also going to now add the effect, turbu***t displacement. And now we can add like a really cool effect. Maybe set the opposite from the center, increase the size, or maybe lower the size, something like this. What we can do is we can press the clock on the evolution, move a few frames, and then maybe do one turn. I press U on the keyboard, it brings up all the key frames. And I just move these to match the beginning and the end, just like so now it's going to do some kind of warp effect. I want the displacement amount to drop to zero. So I'm going to do a keyframe here. I'm going to press you twice to bring up the new key frame that we've added. Now, bring that keyframe to the end and make the amount zero. So now it's going to do a bunch of warp, warp doubly things, and then it's going to go to zero. No, I'm going to increase the amount at the beginning a bit more. And you can see now we have an effect that looks like this. Okay, Now we do see this outline and that's because we have the clock by itself at the top. So I'm just going to now cut the clock by pressing out right square bracket and then just moving this in and then that layer at the bottom. We don't need this mask anymore. So we can now change this mask to none. So now it's going to go from Warp to normal. I want it to be a bit smoother. I'm going to select all the keyframes here. Keyframe assistant, easy, ease. And now we're left with a shot that looks like this. There you go, Judge. All right, so here is an example of a video where I made a mistake, and this is how we used masking to fix a mistake. So if you look at our clip here, this is a stop motion of thing disappearing from here, which is supposed to appear somewhere else. However, there's two issues here. The first is that you can actually see me in the screen reflection. And the second issue is that there was a bottle that was supposed to be here that was also supposed to disappear and appear somewhere else. Judge, what we did is we actually recorded this whole new clip, which is a shot of the screen and the bottle, and then I drag there on top of the stop motion. And the simple way to bring it in is just by masking out the bottle and the screen together. We can go into our clip effect controls, go to your opacity. Click the pentel to draw a free bezier. Then it's actually nicer if we zoom in. So we can do this, and if you press H, we can actually bring the handle, go back to the pentel or click on your keyboard. And then you can just do a mask around here. Try and make it a little bit random, not too straight. So that when it comes to b***ding, it'll b***d in much smoother. And you can see that even just by doing that, if we reset, we can see that our bottle has now magically appeared in our clip. So I'll stop motion now. Looks like this. However, the final shot, I need to have the bottle gone, but keep the screen so I'm going to just extend this further and then cut it. And here I'm just going to fix the mask on the Keble follow selection tool, I'm going to select these points here and just drag them in to basically get rid of the bottle. And then we can just fix this here. We can check how aligned it looks. It looks pretty good. What's good about this shot is that the lighting is pretty good. But you can see, if you look very closely, you can see this line here from the shadow of the bottle and the plant and everything. So what we can easily do is just add a little bit of feathering, make that 20 so that the lighting is gone, and that's just because of the mask. But in most cases, this really only works when you have consistent lighting, which is why it's so important to do that. Now we've fixed a mistake that we made in shooting with just a simple mask bomb. 19. Watch Spin Transition: Watch spin transition. Now this one is a little bit techy because there are a few things that we need to keep in mind when doing this effect. But I think it looks pretty cool. So let's get into it. All right, so let's try to do this Watch spin transition. So let's take our watch transition a footage, drag that into a new composition to make a new composition, let's also drag the second shot underneath it. So the idea with this transition is we're going to zoom into this person's watch is going to spin, disappear. And then we're going to be left with the clip underneath of all of these guys going crazy. Now, these guys here, this shot here is slightly smaller, so we're just going to increase the size of this one and fits the frame tonight, it matches with the other one. The first thing we're going to do is actually figure out where we want the effect to start. Let's start 1 second. In here we're going to essentially mask out this, what should be a nice, easy technique to do. The first thing that I want to do is actually use a shape tool. This time I want to press and hold the ellipse tool here. I'm now going to click from here and drag out, and you can see the shot underneath already. But I'm just going to hold Spacebar to move this around and try and get a rough shape. Now I'm going to just click here where it says inverted on the mask. And now I'm going to press V on my keyboard. And I'm going to just hold shift on this point here. And I'm just going to move them around so that they are aligned better with the watch. I'm going to also move these handles. I'm going to hold hold and move it independently. The same with this one. To hold Alt and move it independently. I'm zooming in and pressing and hold in the mouse button to just check that error thing is roughly aligned now. It is quite far away. Doesn't have to be purpose, but once we zoom in, we will see through it. The next thing I want to do is now track this for the frames that we're going to zoom in forward. Let's just track it for 1 second. Let's actually right click on the mask. Click track mask. And when it says the method, let's make it position scale, rotation. We can now press track forward, so it's going to track and we can keep an eye on it and make sure that nothing goes wrong. It's quite an easy one to track, to be honest. Not much movement is going on. Slight movement here, but it seems to be holding up. And it's been 1 second. So we can now press Space Bar to stop. Now we can cut out the rest of the clip by pressing Alt or Option on Mac and the right square bracket. And if I move through the frames, we have a nice mask, but before it we don't want the mask to appear. So what we need to do is actually go to the first point here, Press control shift D, which will split our clip and move it up. Then we go to the beginning and we can actually delete our mask. Now it goes from having no mask to having a mask because we're going to do an effect on this watch. I want to keep this mask of the watch itself. So I'm actually going to duplicate this one. I'm going to call this one watch face. Let's call this one watch mask. Let's put this one original watch. Let's go to the Watch face. Press M on our keyboard and uncheck inverted. Now if I want to isolate a layer, I can click in this box here next to this ball. Which solar is out a layer. And you can see if I solar out, I see a watch. The effect I want to do is I want to make this watch face rotate as we zoom in. And then the face is going to slide out the way. There's two things I need to do. The first thing is I need to actually move the watch mask above so that when we move the watch, the watch will move underneath it, which look pretty cool. The next thing that I want to do is if I was to do a rotation by pressing R on the keyboard and rotator, look what happens. The watch moves away. It doesn't actually move inside the watch how I want it. And you can see that is moving around a certain point. If we zoom out, you can see that it's actually moving around this point here. Now this is called an anchor point. If I just control Z to reset everything, I want to move this anchor point to the middle of the watch there so that the watch spins around this anchor point. I can go here, which is the pan behind in brackets, Anchor Point Tool or Y on the keyboard, and we get a new cursor with that logo. I can click the Anchor Point and drag it to the middle. Let's try and drag it to the middle here. Let's test out the spin by going to rotation, or hitting R on the keyboard and try spin it. You see it looks okay. It looks all right. The only problem here is the perspective. What we're going to do is we want the watch to rotate very quickly and then slide out. Let's add a key frame to the beginning of this clip here for the rotation, move a few frames, we can turn this around. As many times as we want on the rotation setting. The right number is a degrees indicated by a degree symbol. When we do a full 360 degree rotation, the left number increases to one to show that we have passed one full rotation. I know I want to go two rotations. I want to just press two here. We can see that our watch is already spinning, but there's a problem. Number one, it looks quite bad because there's no motion blur, which we can activate by clicking here to show motion blur. If you don't have this, you can click Total Stages of Modes and we start to see motion blur. Then the other thing is that even once we increase it like this, we start to see gaps around it. So what we have to do is actually press for scale press to bring our key frames go forward. Maybe like one frame and increase the scale slightly. You see it covers the watch. I'm going to go to the rotation, right click, keyframe assistant *** out, which is going to slowly increase the speed of the watch. And I'm going to move this forward so that it's spinning for a while. And then it's going to slide out, is what it looks like so far. Now actually I want this to, just for ease of use, I'm going to add another turn. I'm going to make it three and move this forward so that we have enough time to do our transition. It's looking good. Now about here, I want the watch to slide out. So I'm going to click on the watch face and click to bring up position, add a key frame, move a few frames and then have it slide out. Then I'm going to select both of these. Right click key from assistant. Easy ease, I watch. And I'm going to spin and then slide out Spin and then slide out. Okay, that's pretty much the transition done. Spin and slide out. One last thing, before we transition into the watch. I want it to look somewhat magical. I'm going to add a glow to the watch face, so I just search glow. Now you can use whatever you want. I'm just going to use the standard stylized glow. I'm now going to drop the radius down to two, increase the intensity slightly, and drop the threshold until I see the glow. Something like this. I'm going to keyframe this intensity. Click our watch face, press U and move the glow intensity right to the end. And then make the intensity zero as we go through, the intensity increases as it comes out. Maybe delay this by adding a key from a system. Easy ease out. Let's change the colors to a B colors. Let's make the, let's make both colors white. And you can see to go Now we want to transition into the watch, but we're going to use something that we learned already, which is to take our anchor point tool, move our anchor point towards the watch. Move a few frames, wrap until the end here, and then zoom in. Just like that, to avoid having to painfully move your cursor and zoom in at a time as you can see through here, without using the anchor point. Now just by zooming in, we have made it through. This does happen pretty quickly. So we can actually extend this. Then we can select all of these key frames. Right click, easy ease. Now we have a pretty cool looking transition. And then the last thing that we need to do is if we like this kind of style where everything's in focus, then sure, no problem. However, I like motion blow, so I'm going to just click here where it says motion blow. And now our entire transition will have motion blow. And then now the clip underneath, I'm just going to move it backwards. So as soon as we go through, he has thrown the ball. So it looks something like this. And here we have our effect. I hope you enjoy this one. This was a really nice one to do. Onto the next one. 20. Basic Text Matte: In this video, I want to show you how using what we've learned with masks, you can create very simple text animations. Now I will cover this in more detail in another course because there's just so much that you can learn with text animations. However, a simple way to do it is by making a text as I have done here. And then rather than doing a mask of the text, for example, if you were to do a mask like this and try to get the text to come out of the mask, it wouldn't really work because when you try to move text with a mask, it moves the mask as well. So what we have to do is actually create a matt. A matt is basically a mask from a shape. So what we have to do first is create a shape. I'm going to just click here and search rectangle tool. Then I'm going to just drag the rectangle on top of my text layer. Then I'm going to go to where it says here track mats. Now if you don't have track Matt, you can just click here where it says Toggle switches and modes. You might have it like this. Click it again so you can see track Matt. I'm going to click on the text layer and make the mat the shape layer. Now you see our text is back. However, if I now move the position, you can see that we have our text disappears when we move outside of the shape. Now this works. Even move the text up down around, but you can see we're bound by that rectangle that we created. Now there's millions of possibilities for you to do something with this. But a simple text animation is to just make the text come up from the bottom and land, which you can do by simply pressing the keyframe button. Move that to the end, because that's our final destination. Then we can drop this down, I'll say about a, a little more than a quarter way through. We can move this up, but we want to go past the center point, which you can see from there. And then we get something that looks like this. You see it goes up and then it lands. And I can maybe move this down a bit, so it's more exaggerated. Then we can select all of these. Right click, easy ease when we get a nice animation. Only thing that's missing now is motion blow, which we can bring back by clicking Talk such as the modes click in motion blow, we see we have a very simple transition. You can play around with the timing if you want. You can do the same thing but going to the side. You can actually start from the side and move the text in, p***ty of opportunities to do something with this. And you can also change the shape to whatever you want. 21. Rotobrush Tool Introduction: So the basic pen tool and tracking features will only get you so far. In fact, not very far at all. What happens when you have tons of sharp edges, hair, and millions of different curves that you need to track for a lot of different frames. That's going to take you ages to do and anybody got time for that? We're going to use one of arterias best tool, roto brush, two point. Oh, now you're probably wondering two point. Oh, where's 1.02 0.0 Just basically is the old roto brush tool with an updated algorithm that uses AI to help get much better. Rotoscopesrotobrush 2.02 allows you to easily select elements in a frame, cut them out, so that you can apply various effects to it. And this tool makes it very easy to get multiple subjects and cut things out. But there are a few quirks that make it a little bit harder to use for some beginners. And there are some things that I can show you to speed up the process. So how do you use the tool? Well, let's firstly double click on the layer you want to work with. To bring up the layer window in here, we're able to actually brush out what we need. So let's click on the roto brush 2.0 tool. Now if we actually click and hold it, you'll see the refined edge tool as well, but more on that later. Let's draw a path within the object you want to select. Then let go, and we can see some purple lines around it. This indicates our mask. But a few things to note. If roto brush, select something you don't want in it, you can just hold Alt or option. Click and drag the pain it out. Then roto brush will know exactly not to select that. And it will update it for all the other frames. And the frames that are being roto brush can be seen by this green timeline down here. As it pre renders, this thing will get more green so that you can see how it's going. Alternatively, if roto brush doesn't select something that you want to be selected, you can just draw it on. Now you end up playing a game between telling roto brush, yes, I want this in. No, I don't want this in. Yes, yes, actually. So a little bit of patience is involved. Now, if you find that your brush is too big or too small, then simply hold control or command and left click and drag up to increase the size or down to decrease it. So the next step is to play your video to view your selection. Or you can go frame by frame by pressing control or command. And the right arrow, left arrow to go backwards obviously. And this is just to make sure that everything is roughly accurate, that what you're getting is correct. So you can fix various different frames. And when you fix one thing in one frame, it will update it for the other frames, which is something that the old roto brush didn't used to do a useful tool in this whole process to scroll in with the mouse and either click the mouse wheel to drag around the frame, or you can hold Spacebar and left click and drag to do the same thing. Now if you want to see how your rotoscope is looking, you can press this red rectangle with a blue person called Alpha Overlay to show what is being rotoscope. Everything that's not selected is in red. If you press this again, it will only show you the rotoscope on a black background, which will help you see how it's looking. Now you can add some adjustments to the Matt. Matt is essentially another word for your mask by playing with the feather, which adds a blur to the edge. Contrast, which b***ds dark and light parts of the edge. Shift edge to move the edge in or out, and reduce chatter. To reduce chatter, which just basically smoothens out the edges. So the final step is to hit Freeze. Look at kit, which will render and bake in the rotoscope into your footage so that you can play it without your software lagging. Because it needs to pre render the rotoscope every single time. So you find that your computer is starting to do this, then you definitely want to click Freeze. 22. Refine Edge Tool Explained: Now remember that refined edge tool, what it does is help you get more accurate edges that are hard to rotoscope. For example, hair smoke and complicated lines such as a horizon of mountains when you're trying to do a scar replacement. So before you use this tool, do your original rotoscope. And then we can click and hold on the roto brush tool and select refined edge tool. Then we can draw around edges that are going to be more difficult to rotoscope. For example, the hair in this person here, which you can download from the acids down below. And once you do that, we get this x ray looking outline, which will show us in black what is going to be cut out and white what is going to be kept in with gray in the middle for things that are a bit more fine. And using our trip with the alpha overlay, we can see how it's looking. It's good to go through the frames to check that it's working properly and adding areas that need refining if needed. Then after we hit Freeze, we can see that our shot looks like it was recorded on a black background. Which looks way better. So chuck away your green screen 'cause you're gonna need that. 23. Troubleshooting Rotobrush 2: So now that you know how the roto brush tool works, let's go through some issues that you're probably going to run into common issues with roto brush coupon and how to fix them. The first issue is motion blur. It's a bit of a techy thing, but when we do some rotoscoping, we accidentally cut out the original motion blur from our footage, which makes them look very jittery. So we can easily bring this back in by checking use motion blur in our roto brush panel. Now this will add some processing power, but once you freeze it, it's going to be okay. Also, if you find that this doesn't do enough of a job, you can add pixel motion blur or CC force motion blur which can help to frame misma. You may have encountered this message at the beginning here that says frame mismatch, which tells you that you need to set your composition to the same frame rate as your original footage. Do that, just go to composition settings and change this frame rate to the frame rate of your clip. If you don't know, you can check it out in the project panel. Can easily see the frame rate of a clip by clicking on it. And you can see it right here. It says 39.97 frames per second here. Or if you don't mind changing the speed of your shot, you can right click on your footage to interpret footage and choose the frame rate of your composition. This will slow down higher framerate footage, but you can just speed it up later or re arrange it by dragging across it so that it's the same timing, three contaminated edges. If your subject was on a colored background or had a colored light shining on it, you may get contaminated edges which can make it look like you did. Rotors go something out, but it's easy to fix with the decontaminated edges color button. And you can play with these settings to help b***der edges in. The fourth and final issue is slow performance. Now the roto brush tool is a very, very taxing effect on your system. So you're going to have to know that, especially when you're doing the preview and it's very likely to be slow. This was my PC when filming this tutorial. So firstly, you can cut out only the section you need to roto brush by cutting the clip with control shift. This avoids roto brush rendering for all the frames. You can actually also change that on the green time line by dragging this into a smaller space. You can also try to keep the quality to standard as the best quality does take up a lot of processing power. You can also check enable classic controls which will give you the roto brush 2.0 A algorithm. But with the old controls. Another thing you can try is just unchecked, fine tune to see a very, very rough matt, which will speed it up as you go and check the frames. Just know that once you re enable this, the roto brush will get nicer. And don't forget to re check it before you hit Freeze because ultimately the one thing that's going to speed up the whole rotoscoping issue. The last thing you want to do is go for editing the whole project without hitting Freeze. That's the worst thing you can do. Lastly, I have to note that four K footage will make it much slower because there's a lot more frames that need to be rotoscoped rendered, et cetera. So my suggestion is to probably use proxies. You can go to file proxies movie, which will render out a proxy that you can edit in. Alright, enough of troublesome stuff. Let's get into some fun projects. 24. Text Behind Subject: Text in background effect. This is a classic, classic, useful roto brush where you essentially select out your subject, then you want to put a text behind it, maybe to introduce something. Say you've arrived in a country or you want to give them a name title tool. It looks pretty cool when the subject is on top of the text, it's very simple. The first you need to do is download the assets below. Then you want to duplicate the layer by clicking control or command D. Then you want to double click on the top layer, Get the roto brush selection tool, and you want to draw out your subject. Once your subject has been selected, you want to do any refinements if needed, especially with hair, if they have long hair. And then maybe play with the feathering if needed. But once you're done, you can just hit Freeze. Now if we turn off the bottom layer, you can see that we have a rotoscope subject. So what you have to do now is just add the text. So we can simply drag in some text, put some text here, put it in between the subject and the background, and now we have the text there. Now we can also do some key framing to the position so that it comes into frame or whatever. And there we go, easy effect. 25. Graphic Behind Subject: Al right, because I'm not going to show you how to place really cool looking overlays behind your subject. I'm going to be using the liquid distortion pack from Cine Pax, which you can check out in the link below. But in this story, we're going to be using these two here to make sure you download these two and this hip hop artist footage. And once you've done so, let's drag it into this button here to create a new composition. Seda here is very simple. We're going to rotoscope out our subject and then we're going to add in the effect behind it. Then do some really cool stuff to make it look visually appealing. This is great if you're doing music videos or just montages on Instagram or whatever. So let's get started. So the first thing we're going to do is actually do the roto brush. So we're going to go up here and click our roto brush button. Before we do so, let's just duplicate our click because we're going to need the background later. Let's rename this one to roto subject. And the bottom layer to background double click, the roto brush subject. I'm just going to change the size of this by holding control and my left click and dragging down. Then I'm just going to draw around him, try and get something somewhat accurate. It will be quite an interesting one because the background kind of b***ds in with the subject, so we might not even get very good roto brush. Yeah, it's going to be fun. So just take your time with it. I'm going to rush a little bit just for the sake of the tutorial, but essentially you want to just try and be as accurate as possible. He does move a lot in this video, so it will be quite difficult. And don't forget to zoom in and press and hold the middle button on your scroll wheel or hold the space to go around the subject. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. But being accurate, just make sure that you don't make any mistakes and nothing bleeds through. Alright. So as I'm going through it just to check that it did a very good job. You see in most cases there are some small gaps but 'cause he's moving pretty fast, I think it's okay. And once you're done, you can just hit Freeze. All right, so now we have our subject roto brush out. You can always check it by pressing this button here twice, and it looks okay. I might add some feathering of like ten. And then that's it. I got back to my composition now, because otherwise I'll stay inside the roto layer. And I have my roto brush subject and I have the background. So now let's drag in one of the spiral effects. Let's drag this one, and let's actually put it in between the roto brush subject and the background. You can see that this spiral is very big. So you can actually right click it. You go to transform and we do fit to comp, and now it's going to fit to the same size of the composition. Now this looks like a like '90s music video, but what we're going to do now is actually take the background, duplicate it, let's take our spiral and actually turn it off. We go to our background and let's call it Effects Background, because this background is now going to be affected by the spiral. I'm going to search blob for blob. Drag that into effects background, and you can see the background is now getting all blobbed up. But if we open up where it says blobbin blob layer, let's change it to the spiral. You can see now the background has become the spiral, and now a background looks distorted and it looks kind of cool. And what you can do now is you can actually add some other effects like a tint effect. So we can add tint, you can just make it green blue, whatever. You can have it come up. We can also add glows to it, So maybe add some kind of glow to make it look cool. There's so many things that you can do with it. My advice is to actually make it come up with the music so there's like a beat to the music. It will come up, let's say it comes up a few frames, like this, boom, like that. Then what I want is for the effect to actually change. So what I'm going to do now is actually do control shift D on the effects background. It's now called effects background two. I'm going to now drag in a different one from the Sinica, I'm going to drag that in, make it only start when that second one starts by bringing it there, I just drag that, that starts here. And then this effect background two, we've got to effect controls, we got to globalize. And now change it to the star spiral. And then I'm just going to turn the spiral off. Now you can see it goes from the blue one to this star spiral. So you can do some really cool stuff with it. So now it looks pretty cool with it coming into the frame and changing. But then what you can do is you can also add some camera shakes or some camera punch ins. Now you can get a preset. A very good preset is the Boris effect Sapphire plug ins. They have really good camera shakes, but if you don't have a plug in, this is how you make it yourself. You're going to go right click new and add an adjustment layer and you can add the transform effect. We're going to go right to where the first one comes up. We're going to go move one frame. Before that, we're going to click on the stopwatch and the position scale and rotation. Move to that frame. Now we're going to zoom in actually to his face and add a little bit of a tilt like this. Then move maybe a few frames forward and then just reset it. Now as soon as the clip comes on, it's going to pulse in and then slowly zoom out. You see it's going to look at this seem, but I like motion blur, so I'm going to just check here where it says motion blur. You see it looks pretty cool. You see it has a nice little pulse effect. Now, I'm going to do the same thing, the next one pops up, but I can just actually copy the settings by pressing you on the adjustment layer or which brings up a key frames. You see boom like that. I'm going to select all of these. Control C, go to where the next one starts. Move one frame, back control V. Now the same thing happens here. There you go. We can actually also key frame the glow parameters of the second one. Maybe have the globe come in. So I'm going to click the stop watch right next to the glow threshold, is that move to the end and just drop it to 100, so it goes away. So it's going to go boom, glow and then go down. It's a pretty crazy looking effect, but you can do this with so many different overlays. This is the effect that we have. You can also change the color of the second one by adding that tint. You can even add a key frame to the tint. So we press the, stop watching the keyframe there, go to the end. Just drop it to zero. Does some crazy stuff like this. Yeah, this is how you add motion graphics to the background of a subject. But that being said, let's get on to the next example. 26. Sky Replacement: Sky replacement. This is a staple in visual effects. You can make a boring shot that looks like this into something that looks like this. Much more dynamic, much cooler. Can maybe even make something go from daylight to nighttime. Oh, just using the roto brush 2.0 tool. So download the sky shot assets into the composition layer so that we can begin. So essentially this is the clip we are going to start with. It's a nice little drone shot going through these fields deserts. And I think this shot is great, but the sky is a little bit boring. So we're going to replace the sky. Now, in many cases, you will find it super easy to do this by going up here, selecting the effect extract, dragging it on, selecting the color like blue here, and literally just extracting the blue from the sky. And now all you have to do is put on a sky, maybe you have to duplicate this, get rid of the extract effect and just do a very basic mask around here so it doesn't clip into the footage. Like so you will get a pretty decent effect and then you could just drag in your sky and you pretty much are there, right? No one's gonna notice. However we like to be precise. So I want you guys to actually be able to have the skills to do this properly. So let's delete everything. But I wanted you to know this just in case you need to do something very quickly. So I gave you guys two skies. We have this sky here and this sky there. So pick and choose whatever you want to do. If you're trying to figure out which one will look good, you can just do a very rough mask like this just to see if you were to drag it on. If it will match. I'm gonna go with this one. I like this one. So what we're going to do is actually rotoscope our shot. So we're going to get the roto brush tool, double click on it. And then we're going to just select everything that is the foreground. Should do a pretty good job. But the hardest thing here is going to be the horizon, because it needs to be very accurate. And if we're using just the rod to brush tool, it won't be as accurate. So once you selected as much as we can, we're now going to go to the refined edge tool and make this slightly bigger. And we're going to go over the entire horizon with our refined edge tool. We can already see is doing a very good job at masking out even the bits that are further away slightly grade out. So we're going to do this and we are going to do this for the entire footage. You might need to check because in this short we go past the hill, so we need to make sure that it's actually doing the right amount of rotoscoping. And we're going to do this for the entire clip, and a good way to check is by double clicking where it says Total Alpha overlay. And we can see that it's looking okay. It's not terrible. I might just go back here and go over it with my refine edge just so it's nicely refined. And with the magic of editing, we now have a rotoscope sky, which looks pretty good. So if we go to our main composition, now you can see we now have our rotoscope sky. You can also add some feathering if you want to. I'm going to leave it like that for now. So now, just one important thing before we actually add our sky in, and that is that we need to motion track our footage because the camera is moving. And if you're going to add a sky into it, it needs to move with the camera. And it's very simple, All we have to do is take our sky shot, duplicate it with control D or command you use the bottom one and we just delete the road. To brush layer, we're going to right click track and stabilize track camera and just let it track. And in the meantime, let us delete our sky layer because we're going to add it in in a different way. So with our camera solved, we should have some tracking points. If you can't see them, just go to track point size and increase the size of them. Now you will see that we actually don't have many on the sky itself, which is a little bit annoying. This sometimes will happen where the camera will only track the fore ground points but not the background points. And we really need to track the background of this scene. No, an accurate track. So what we're going to have to do now is delete the camera tracker, create a simple mask of just this background bit only. So we have this and let's just make sure that it's just this part there. Then we're going to precompose this movable attributes to a new composition, and then we're just going to Track the camera. Again, track the camera. And this will basically tell after effects to only find points in this specific area rather than just the whole clip itself. It's a nice little workaround. Magically, it works. We now have points from the actual mountains, so I'm going to just select these ones, the ones there and that one. Then we're going to write, Click and Create Solid and Camera. You can now delete this composition that we created. You can turn on our sky shop. And if I just scrub through it, you will see that we have a solid that's tracked to the back of those mountains. So now we're going to go to the image of the sky which is this one. And with the Track solid selected, we're going to hold out click and drag this into the sky, into the Track solid. Now we can see a very small there in the background, so we need to make some adjustments. Firstly pressing S and increasing the scale. And then just with these three D arrows, putting it in the right perspective. Take a time with this. Now let's drag it to the bottom. And here we have it, our motion track sky. Now the only issue with this is because of the camera track, we get a little bit too much rotation, you can see of the sky. It matches, but I think it's a bit too much. It could be the position. So one thing that you can do is actually go to the three D T go to transform properties. Click the stopwatch on either the position or the orientation. Let's try the position first. Let's see that makes a difference. It's a little bit better. Let's undo that. And then actually click the stopwatch on the orientation. Okay, that's much better here. And that's pretty much it. This is how you replace a sky in Adobe after effects using the rod to brush 2.02 27. Night Sky Transition: All right, now that you have done a sky replacement, you should feel like you can pretty much do anything. Which is why using the same techniques as before with the sky replacement. I'm going to show you guys how to actually turn a scene from a daytime scene to a nighttime scene using our same composition, with the same techniques, with our rotoscope sky. And having our daytime sky as well as our camera track, we're now going to essentially make it go from day to night. So continue on from this one. We're going to be using the fact that this sky shot has already got the tracking data from before. Which means that if you want to change the sky to a night sky, all we have to do is click on the night sky. Hold out, and drag onto it here. Making sure that you select this first so that it works. And you can see now we have our night sky that's also tracked to our shot. Now I want to do a really cool transition. So I'm going to first go to about here, control shift D. To cut this clip, I'm going to click the second clip here. Drag in my night sky. Now I'm just going to re scale this sky so that it looks a little bit nicer. If you're wondering what this big blue thing is, it's essentially this arrow, but it's massive because of the tracking. So here is our sky, nice and tracked, so essentially it goes from day to night, which is pretty cool. However, our foreground is still in daytime, so let's go to our sky shot as a ready rotoscope. Do control shift D to cut it there. And now we're going to do some color grading to change this here. So the first I'm going to do is actually add lumetri color into this second clip from the basic corrections, We can start by lowering the highlights. Lowering the shadows, so we see it looks like there's less brightness in the scene. We're also going to add blue tint by going to the temperature and dragging it to the left so it almost matches this scene here. Now this can be done in various different ways, but I'm just going to go to the color wheels which separates the shadows, midtones, and highlights. And I'm just going to drop the highlights a little bit more because there really shouldn't be many highlights in the scene as well as the midtones. The shadows are pretty much crushed already, so that's okay. So I think, you know, it looks pretty good. You know, it looks like a nighttime scene, which is awesome. Another thing I'm going to do, which is a pretty cool technique that you can add, is if I click on my night sky, which is this one. Let me just rename this two Night Sky on this bottom one, Today sky, I'm going to add the gorgon blur effect. And I'm going to crank this up until it's fully blood. Then I'm going to go to my rotoscope sky and add the tint effect. I'm going to map black to the darkest part of this night sky, which is that color. And white to the lightest part of the sky, which is going to be one of the stars. Then I can go to my night sky and delete the gargan blur. And now if I go to my foreground, I'm going to turn this tint all the way down and just slightly increase it like so. Now essentially what this is doing is, is giving the dark and the bright values of this scene roughly the same value scenes as the sky. Which is really cool compositing technique that will cover in more detail in the compositing module, you can see that's before the tint, and that's after the tint. Now let's do a really cool transition by transition in the sky, on the foreground. So one going to do first is the sky. So I'm going to essentially do a luma fade. So I'm going to go to a few frames here. Take the night sky and just drag it back a few frames. 12345 usually should do it. Our night sky is in front and it looks pretty cool. So I'm going to add a Luma key. What it would do if I increase the threshold, you can see we get this really cool looking effect. And you can see that the key type here is to key out darker, which is what we want especially for this shot. So you will see that if we increase the threshold, what's darker gets keyed out and it looks pretty cool. And we can also mess about with the tolerance to see how much it actually takes, as well as the edge thin. And any feathering to smoothen things out, I want this to be quite smooth like this. So my feathering is 60 and I'm quite happy with that. So now what I want to do is actually reset this. Click the stopwatch, press you on my keyboard. Move that stopwatch to the end here, where it starts. I'm going to just actually set this to the number where just below where it actually starts to fade in, which is about here. So now you can see if I move frame by frame, it's going to start to fade in, which I think looks pretty cool. Essentially going to do the same thing but for the foreground. So I'm going to move the foreground a few frames forward with the foreground. I feel like the Luma key might be a bit much. Let me see how the opacity looks like. We can just do an opacity change to be fair. Keep it simple. So I'm going to add a key frame here, make it zero, go a few frames, and right at the end make it 100. So now it looks like that, which I think looks awesome. There you go. Now if you want it to be a little bit stylish with it, it goes from here up there. We can actually make it come in a really cool way by adding a mask to show that the background gets dark before the foreground gets dark. So to do that, we actually have to precompose our clip first because we can't add a mask. When we have a road to brush effect, I can show you, I can do a mask here and it doesn't appear. So I'm going to write, click here, Precompose Movie Will Attributes to new composition. And then I'm going to just draw a quick mask here that looks like this. Ignoring the foreground like that, maybe make it a bit smaller, like so. And you can see the effects actually starting to take place, which looks pretty cool. Press M on the keyboard, press the stopwatch on the mask part. Move this point to the beginning. Go to the end. Essentially we're going to just bring all the points back. We can actually press V on the keyboard and select many more points at a time. Okay, now we can see if you go frame by frame, the effect start to take place, which looks pretty cool. I'm just going to get rid of these lines because it's getting in the way. So I'm going to just click here where it says Toggle Mask and Shape Path Visibility. I'm going to press M twice on the layer to bring up the options I just wanted feathering. So I could have just pressed for feather and you see if I add some feathering, it looks pretty cool. Check it out. Look at that. Isn't that cool? That is so cool. That looks like a really cool effect. Boom. All right, this looks really cool. Now, we do have this little line flicker here in the middle, which is just because of the clip underneath it. So I'm going to press on the keyboard for capacity and just essentially make this disappear. So now it should start disappearing from here, just like soil, and here we have our night sky effect. Let's move on to the next. 28. Subject Duplication: This is pretty cool. Let's take our subject in a shot, a music video, or a dance, and duplicate them. Make them appear from the center and then come back in. Fine is gonna be a fun one, Let's try it out. All right guys, we're now going to be doing a really cool looking subject duplication effect that you can do to music videos, you can do to car videos, product videos. So many different things that you can do with this tupos, dragging our subject, this hip hop artist. We're gonna take our subject, we're going to duplicate it and call it artist roto. And then we're going to just as always, roto brush him out. So I'm going to just draw around him roughly and pray that tab does a good job. I actually did do a good job, except for his ear right there. So now I'm just going to check all the frames, make sure data looks good, looking pretty decent. I'm going to just stop about halfway there, just for the sake of this tutorial. But essentially, once that's done, we're going to hit Freeze. And once it's frozen, let's go back to our composition. And we see now we have our subject independently. So what we're going to do is the following. We want him to be duplicated and to come out from the side. We want to do this a couple of ways. The first way is easy way, and that's by using an effect called offset. It's in distort offset. If I drag it on, you can see that we can get our subject to pretty much be copied and offsetted to the side, right. However, you see that the subject comes out from the front. But I want the original subject to be in front. So what I have to do first is actually duplicate our roto on top and delete the offset effect. Now we have our subject in front of the one behind. Now I can literally do one here. Control D, slide this one to the left like that. And now we have three of him. And what you can do is actually go to the offset. Click a key frame after a few frames there, go to the beginning and just reset it. And you can see that now he slides out, then you can do the same for the other one. Just press Stop, watch there. Go to the beginning and reset it. Now the subjects slide out, but the time is a little bit off. You want to select these two press to bring up the key frames. Just drag the key frames slightly before and you can see now they slide out and then select all of these right click, easy ease. Now they come out and then when you're ready you can add a keyframe there. Go forward and then just click reset for both. Now they come out, stay it for a second, and then they come back in like this. They come out and back in. And then you can add whatever effects you want. You can make them glow. You can basically do whatever you want to these guys. One cool thing you can do is to make the guy in the middle have a drop shadow. So if we add a drop shadow to him and increase the opacity and increase essentially the softness of it from here, keep distance the same. We have a drop shadow, it adds a little bit of depth to it. You can see that without the drop shadow, it doesn't add as much depth. You know there's someone behind you that's going to be a shadow. So you can have the shadow start to come in. So I can key frame the opacity to go from zero to the maximum. So zero here, as it gets to that we have the maximum and then it goes back down to zero. Alright, so now our effect looks like this, but there's a little thing that you can do to make it slightly better and that is to add motion blur. So let's just add CC force motion blur to both clips. Now you can see what it looks like, it looks pretty cool. The other way that you can do that is by not having the offset effect. And to just literally pressing P on the keyboard and adding a key frame to the position and moving it out with this is great because then you can move it wherever you want. You have more control over that. Yeah, that's the other way you can do it. Also, one cool thing with this offset effect is that go to the beginning, reset everything. A key frame to shift center two, move a few frames and actually just slide this and continue sliding it, continue, continue a few times and then go back to the beginning. Now you get this really cool sliding effect. Then once you enable force motion blow, you get this really cool sliding person effect. If you have too many gaps between the people were, you can just do is actually duplicate it and then just change when the next one leaves. So you can have this one come out there. Then I just drag this one so that the next one comes out. Now you have a very cool looking effect. 29. Car Stacking: Now let's do the same subject duplication as last time, but let's do it with a car. And then let's try and make the animation a bit smoother. All right, so another cool way to use the roto brush is to do this thing called car stacking, where you essentially put a car on top of each other and it looks really, really cool. And I've done it in loads of videos and it's very similar to what we covered in the last tutorial, but it's a little bit of key frame finessing. So what we're going to do is drag in the Mclaren car stack video file that I shot on my drone, and it looks like this is pretty cool. So what we're going to do is essentially, I want to start rotoscoping from here to about there. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to now duplicate this one here. Go to roto brush, double click, And just like before, we're going to do the rotoscoping. Now this subject is a little bit complicated. So it might take some time, but with the magic of editing, we have now actually done the mask, although it was very rough. But for the sake of this story, I didn't want to spend too much time on it. So that being said, what we're going to do now is actually rename this layer and call it car roto. And now what we're going to do is essentially pick a point where you want the cars to actually rise up. Let's say here for example. Now let's duplicate the car roto and name this one, car stack one. And bring it in between the car roto and the background. Let's call this background. So now what's going to happen is essentially if you press P on the keyboard, you can actually bring this car up and you can actually see how terrible my roto scrapping was. But you guys will do a better job than me. I'm 100% sure of that. Essentially what's going to happen is we're going to add keyframes and make the car go up. But let's duplicate this two more times using control D twice. Now we're going to start doing some key framing. I'm going to press the stopwatch. Here go maybe a few frames and drag this up. So I went 1234567 frames, and now you see the car went up. Now what we're going to do is halfway through this one, we're going to go to car stack two. We're going to press P. We're going to add a key frame. We're going to go forward the same amount of frames, 1234567. We're going to go up like that. So now we're going to go one, and then we're just going to do one more. You don't have to do four is a bit extra. But what's going to do for, because why the hell not? So we're going to go halfway through that second one, add a key frame, 1234567. And the way I'm going through the frames is by pressing control on the right arrow and just going up one more time. So now we have the car stacking up. If you did a good rotoscope, you shouldn't get these flickerings, whatever. So now we have the car stack like this, and it looks pretty cool. And then we want to finish your animation by going to a point. You want to stop like say here, select all three, Add a keyframe by clicking this button here, then go in 567 frames, and then resetting by right clicking on one of them and hitting reset. And now they should all come down together. So now they go up in the ladder form, and then they come down, and if you could time this to the music, it will look so good. And then the last thing you want to do is just select all of these key frames, right click keyframes, easy ease, so you get a nice smooth motion like that, All right? And then finally, the most important thing, motion blow. So I'm going to click this button here and we're going to get some nice motion blow, as the cars go up. So a you press play, it looks like this, which is really cool. Again, yours will look nicer because you'll spend more time on your rotoscoping. Let's say you do this stack effect. I added some shots that I filed personally for you guys to try this effect out and send them to the discord so I can see how you guys are doing and everybody else can learn from each other. But that me said, let's get on to the next example. 30. Pyramid Rise: All right, so I'm going to teach you guys how to take a pyramid shot like this and make it reveal in two different ways. It's going to be a very fun video to test out some of the skills that you've been picking up from before. So the first thing you want to do is actually select our pyramid using the rotor brush 2.0 tool. Making sure that we have a good selection of the pyramid. And we play it through to make sure that the selection is for all of the frames. And now we're going to prepare it for removal. All right, so now that we have our pyramid removed, let's duplicate this layer first. Let's name this pyramid only. Let's name this one pyramid mask. And then I'm going to double click onto this one here and unfreeze it. And then tick, inverted background. And then freeze it again, just because we want to have the pyramid by itself so that we can make it come up. So now what we're going to do is create a clean plate here. And try and remove this by going to the Content Aware fill tab. If you don't have it, you got to window Content Aware field. We're gonna start with Edge B***d. Object is the best one and that is probably going to give you the best result. I always recommend to start with Edge b***d, just as it's the quickest one and will likely get you a good result in some cases. So I'm going to do edge b***d, select work area, generate fiel layer and edge b***d did a pretty awful job. So I'm just going to delete this and do object alpha expansion. Let's make this five just so it collects data from a little bit outside the mask lighting corrections. Let's make them strong. And if we preview this, I mean, it looks pretty bad, but because we're going to only need the first few frames, I think this can work. Before we continue, let's go to our pyramid mask at the bottom, which is just going to be the bottom layer with the mask. And let's turn off that rotor brush layer, which doesn't look like nothing now. But when we leave the fill, it goes back to our final shot, which is what we want. So right now we have the fill layer by itself, the pyramid by itself, and the mask of the pyramid. So let's take this fill layer and actually put it at the bottom such that if we were to take our pyramid only and move it out the way it'll be moving underneath that fill layer. But I really want these pyramid bits to be in front someone to just drag the pyramid only to the bottom. Now it looks like the pyramids coming down from underneath, which looks pretty cool. So let me just reset my position and let's do the following. Let's add a key frame to the position of the pyramid at the beginning, at its final stage, and drag it to the right. And then we're going to lower this down. So now it looks like the pyramid is rising up, but that looks a little bit boring. We're going to firstly add some bezier curves to our key frames by selecting both of them. Right click key from assistant. Easy, ease. And you can see it looks a little bit better, but I want this to come faster and slow. So I'm going to click the graph editor with the pyramid only selected. Click, make sure we're in the speed graph. Click that first point, so it's only this point selected, so this one is not filled. And then drag this one to the right, making sure not to go too high up. Now it will look like this. There you go. Now the most important part to any animation that's moving motion blow. So we're going to tick this button here for motion blow. And now we're going to have a really cool look animation. There's a couple of things that we need to do. The first is we see this little outline here. And this comes from the pyramid mask. So in order to fix that, we're going to just play around with somebody's settings. We can start with the feathering, the shift edge, the contrast, until we actually get rid of that. And you can see it's actually gone. Now, there you go. So now we have that triangle gone, and we have the pyramid sliding up, which looks really cool. Here you go, and that's the effect onto the next one. Now we don't have to only slide things up for this effect. Here's another cool idea that we can do. Let's actually take our position and click the stop pot to reset everything. Right? Click here, reset. Let's make this pyramid come from the sky all the way down. I'm going to just drag this on top of the mask so that it can actually come from the top like this. The only thing is that the pyramid has a really weird shape now. So we're going to click on the puppet Pintool. Click and hold it. We can just click puppet position Pinto. And then we're going to add some points here, here, here, here, here, here. And on these lines so that they stay straight. And essentially, if we actually go to our pyramid only layer we go to the puppet, we go to mesh one, and we go to deform. We can see all the pins that we added, and they have some key frames. So I want essentially the pyramid to kind of from here, lands like there. So our key frames are actually okay. I'm going to select them, press you to open them all up. I'm going to just select them all and move them slightly forward. And one frame before that I'm going to actually go to these pins. And then let's deselect them all by clicking the space. Select the first pin here, I'm going to just drag it down like so. Drag this one there, and essentially, I'm just going to try and make it look like the pyramid is straight. May need to add another point here. It doesn't have to be perfect, just kind of looking like a pyramid, if that makes sense. So essentially it'll go from looking like this to one frame after getting back into shape. So now we do is we click the layer. We press P for position. We're going to start up, right, the top press, press the stopwatch. Go forward a few frames like here, and have it come down. So now, actually we want the pyramid mask on top. So it comes down, boom, bang. And it lands. So I look something like this. Boom. Now I'm going to make this animation a little bit better by making it quicker then selecting these two points. Right click, easy, ease clicking on the graph. Zoom in to make sure we have the edit speed graph on. Make sure we have position selected. I'm going to move this so that it has this kind of shape by dragging this yellow handle across, so it looks like that, boom. I'm just going to have to change the position of all of these key frames, which are actually the puppet tool. Key frames. I'm just going to move to here, bang. Now we have our pyramid that slides down like this. So it looks cool. However, a couple of issues as it's coming down, it's coming in front of this building here. So what we're going to have to do is duplicate our pyramid mask. Delete the road to brush effect. Put it on top and just make a simple mask that looks like this with the pento. We don't have to use the road to brush tool as quite a simple one. And then we want to make sure we're tracking. We press with the keyboard, right click on the mask, track mask. Let's track it backwards so that it only really appears the frames that is coming down, which is this. However, we have another issue is that because this pyramid mask is just the pyramid, when the pyramid comes down, it's actually in front of it. And if you put it above, we see that, you know, it's as if it's the stencil of the pyramid. So what we're going to do is actually leave that where it was and in the same mask that we did, we're going to add another mask which is going to be of these pyramids. So let's draw these out. That's one. We have another one here. And same thing, we're going to just track these and go backwards. And because you guys did the first part of the course, you guys are very familiar with this. So track this back, track this one forward only has to be there for when the pyramid is coming in. So it should look like that. So here's animation is looking pretty good if I say so myself. Now there's only a couple of things missing. The first is when the pyramid lands is kind of passive. You know, when something lands there should be a little bit of a shake. So I'm going to add a shake. So as soon as the pyramid ands here I'm going to write click New adjustment layer. Then I'm going to add the effect transforms. I'm going to just drag that in. Then I'm going to find where the pyramid actually lands, which is right here. And I'm going to click on the adjustment layer. So I'm going to increase the scale to one oh five. And I'm going to add a key frame to the position and the rotation. Here, press you on the keyboard. Move one frame, move the rotation to one degree. Move another frame, move it minus one degree, and then move another frame, make it 0.5 degrees, another frame -0.5 degrees. One more frame and make it zero. So should do some kind of shake like that. Boom, there we go. There we have it. Here is our pyramid. Boom, coming down into our scene. And then the last thing is, as we move forward, we can get rid of these masks by pressing out on the right square bracket and we can get rid of them as soon as the pyramid land, maybe add some feathering to these masks. Five, there you go. There is our effect. And right as the pyramid hits, we're going to cut off this one with all the masks we'll need it. We're going to cut off the pyramid only we're going to go to the pyramid mask and do control shift D and then we can just get rid of the road to brush effect. So we're just back to our normal clip and that's how we do this effect. And then one last thing you can add is some dust to kind of hide some imperfections. So let's drag in this dust splash from the files. Let's go to toggle switches and modes. Change the mode to screen, then we're going to just change the scale of this so that it looks like it comes in and it creates a bit of a mess. So I drag this to the bottom there. I think I have to put it underneath the pyramid. Only mask as well, you know, like this. Let's also go to tint, add a tint map white to the sand, I guess like that. There you go. You know, obviously spend more time on it and try to do a better job than me, make it more realistic. But that's how you do this really cool effect. 31. Mocha AE Introduction: All right, I hope you're ready because after this module you're officially in the big leagues because Mocha AE is an incredibly advanced tracking and rotoscoping software that I guarantee once you master it, you're going to use it for all of your projects. In fact, motion tracking and rotoscoping are never going to be the same after this, I'm telling you. So you're probably wondering, what's the big deal with Moco? Why is it used in the film industry? Why has it won awards, like what's going on? Well, basically the reason that Moca is so good is because they use something called planer tracking. Well, planar tracking does is it allows you to get detail from a plane rather than a point tracking like in all of the other tracking methods. Now this is great because you can draw a mask around something and you're masking it out. But then you're also taking in the tracking data which you can use for many different applications that we'll get to later. And it'll save you loads of time when you're trying to do complicated visual effects or transitions, et cetera. Now, Ka by itself used to be a very expensive software. In fact, it costs this much money, which that's probably the reason for the UK's economic crisis. But there is now a free version maker that comes with after effects natively. Which is actually very good and will allow you to do some really cool stuff. So download the phone assets down below and let's get learning. Alright, so what we have to do first is dragging the effect maker into your clip and then we double click this big sign. We'll get into these other settings later. So the plan here is to rotoscope out this screen, then track in the brand new screen that you have also downloaded, essentially a screen replacement, which is something that is used a lot in films. In fact, I think every film uses this because it's just easier than having to have the right thing on the screen. And, you know, there's like reflections on the screen, et cetera. So yeah, that's where it's used a lot. So once we've opened up Ka, which is on different software screen panel per se, there are different workspaces you need to be aware of. But for now, let's just go into the essentials, which is just the basic one. The other ones just have more tools and stuff. But for now, let's stick to the essentials. Let's scrub through a timeline and find a good place to start our mask like here, where the screen is perfectly visible and in a good plane. And then we can get our spline tool, which is essentially the pen tool on steroids. So if we just click the basic spline tool with the X on it, we can click around the areas that will be masked out. And when we're done we just right click. Take your time with this. You know you want to be accurate, but even if you're not, there are some cool things you can do. Now if I go to my pick tool or press control F, I can now click on the blue handles and drag them inwards to make the sharp edges into curves. For example here where the bezels are. But if we press and hold the spline tool and insult the tool with the B on it, this is the Bezier layer spline tool, which means that when you click around, every corner is automatically curved, just like when we use the pentel and click to bezier. And we can manipulate these handles just like the classic Pento. So so far nothing different. But here's where things get good. Just to get used to the basic spline tool, let's just click around some points, and when we're done we just right click. So let's actually draw a spline around the edges of the phone screen, bezels, et cetera. And once we're done, we need to track this mask A. There are options here for how we want to track it. In most cases, you will use all of these four except perspective. Which perspective should only be used when you're trying to track something that has a perspective? With those four selected. Let's click the T for the track forward icon. And if you need to track backwards, you can use the other one too. Now if the mask at any point comes out of place, you can simply fix it by aligning the points until they're right. Or you can click and drag to select a few points at a time. And then realigning them. And then what's going to happen is that maker is going to tell all the other points from beforehand to follow suit. Which means you're not going to have to go back and fix every single point. Once that's done, we now have a perfectly tracked rotoscope of the screen. Or do we? Because my fingers get in front of the screen. We need to do the same for this one too. How do you do it? If you want to add another shape which is click this new layer icon, name it, finger and repeat the process. However, as we want to remove this finger from the matt, we have to go into the layer properties. And whereas b***d mode, we do subtract very similar to the pentool and going into the mask and changing the mode. But this is all within Mocha. Now if you click Save on the top left, close the screen and click Apply Matt. We see the screen rotoscope out as well as my finger. Now we can click Invert. We see the perfectly rotoscope out screen, but that's not all. The bonus is that with Maker, we also have tracking data, which means that we can track things into the information that's already stored, such as the screen that you downloaded from the assets. Let's drag this into the composition. Now let's go back into Ka. Let's click our screen rotoscope. Let's click this button here, which is the shape layer. Which will determine where a layer will be tracked into. Let's scale this to the size of the phone and press play to chit that the tracking is good, save and close. So I've dragged my Instagram scroll bit and I'm going to try and time it with the person actually scrolling. So it looks like this, you can see. And then what we need to do is right click, precompose, and move all attributes to new composition. Now for some reason this happens where it makes it shorter, just extend it to the end. Cool. Now if we go back to our phone scroll and we open up process tracking data. We can click Create Tracking Data, and we can select the screen roto, because that's got the motion tracking data from the screen. Let's click okay. And you can see we've got some points on our screen which are essentially track to it. Which is what we're going to now add to our Instagram screen recording. And to do that you go to layer export two, select the Instagram, make the export option as corner pin with motion blur. Corner pin is essentially an effect that takes the corners of an object and allows you to move them wherever you want, which is very good for putting things on screens. So Elect Source and click Apply Export. Why does this happen? So this happens because our Instagram composition is a different size to that of the screen. But all we have to do is double click on the composition. Right click on Instagram file transform Fit to comp, And I know it looks ridiculous here. But once you go back to the main composition V, we have a brand new screen tracked into this phone, all done within one software, without having to get completely new tracking data after doing the rotoscope tract. Isn't that great? Now the only issue we have is that we have this part of the hand showing. So what we have to do is go back to Moka, add a new spline of the finger just here. We don't need this shape tool and we can just track that backwards. Track it forwards. Click in here, Layer Properties, B***d mode, and do subtract. Now we click Save and close. We can see that that bit of the finger is now out and now it looks a lot more realistic. Now we may need to realign the phone a little bit, which is fine. We can just do that, maybe changing the scale, the rotation a little bit. But this is how we do a simple screen replacement. Now if you wanted to make changes to say the finger mask by itself, rather than going back into mocker, what you can do is click here where it says Create a Masks. And what this does is it creates after effects masks that if you press M on the keyboard, you can actually individually select. For example, we can individually select the finger one and we can make some changes. Now we can delete mocker and just fix up some of these masks by changing them back to add. Now what we can do is click the finger by itself. Maybe change the expansion, Maybe the feathering. If for example we don't have it quite right to make it look a lot better. Here's the final example. So now that you know the basics of Moca, let's get into some fun projects. 32. Dancing Building: All right, so let's create this dancing tower effect using ker AE. So make sure to download the tower file and drag it into a new composition first. If we're going to actually duplicate this, we're going to name the top one tower mask and the bottom one background. And the first thing we're going to do is actually rotoscope out this tower using Ka. And then we're going to use Content Aware fill to make a clean plate. So let's firstly search the effect mocha, which comes through with after effects unless you have cap. Then let's click this button here to open up. Cha see we get a brand new window. So let's go up here to our create explain layer tool. So we want to essentially rotoscope out this tower so that we can then fill it in. So I'm actually going to rotoscope around this area here too, just because when it gets filled it'll fill this in two so it can try and be accurate. And let's make sure we are at the first frames. I want to just go also around it a little bit, not too precise so that the content aware, Phil, has enough data to fill it out. Then once we're done, we right click to close this mask. So now that we have our initial mask, we can actually go around and we can see the kind of movement that's going to happen. So maybe change the positions. And now I'm going to make sure that I'm in the Essentials workspace. So I'm just going to select all of these except perspective, because we're not really changing the perspective here, we're just really going around. So let's now press the button here for track forward and we can just watch how the tracking is being done, making sure to stop and make any corrections along the way should something happen. So I'm just going to stop it here because I can see that if I click on the magnifying glass and zoom in, it's starting to go into the building. So let's just fix that. And it's great that when we fix one point, it fixes all the other points, and now we can let it play. So another example here is starting to bleed into the building. So I'm going to go around here and just fix that. This is going a bit too wide now, so let's just fix that too. Now, this would have been impossible with the regular masking tool, because if you make a change to one point, it just changes it to that point. And as you can see here, we made a change to the point and it actually fixes. You have to go back to some keyframes to not carry over mistakes. Like in this case, when you make a change, it adds a key frame to the point. And you can cycle through the key frames with these arrows here. And if you want to remove a keyframe you made, you can do that by pressing that keyframe icon. I'm just going to let it render over. Now. I think it's going to do a good job. All right, so I'm going to stop about halfway, just because I only want the effect to really take place as we're going around here. And this looks pretty good. So now that we're done, we can click up here where it says Save the Project and close it. Now if you go to our matte layer here, we will see that if we click Apply Matt, and we turn off the bottom layer, we have our roto. It looks okay. It's a bit rough, but that's fine. Now if you wanted to apply the content aware feel to this, we will need to actually invert this. So let's click Invert Mask. And now you can see that we can apply that now because I stopped about halfway, like about here. We're going to change the work area by dragging this playhead to here. And I'm going to use Object, because for this situation it's going to work best and make the lighting stronger. So I'm going to click now, Generate fill layer and you have to save it somewhere. All right, so now that that is done, if we scrub through the playhead, we can see I did a pretty good job actually. It's as if it's just a ghost of the tower left. So we can actually name that fill clean plate. Cool. Now let's take our tower mask and put it on top of that clean plate. And where it says invert mask, let's untick that this time and bring back our background. Now just a couple of things to do. I need to actually fix up this mask slightly just because if we isolate it, you can see it's got a lot of bits there. I'm just going to add a little bit of feathering, to be honest. And then what I can do is actually click here to create AE masks, which is a very important tool because this allows you to have a lot more freedom. Because if I now press M twice on the layer, I can now change the expansion. So I can now bring the mask further in. I can do my feathering, et cetera. Judge, Well, let's do your animation now. So there's two ways that we can do the animation. The first is using the CC bend it effect. We can drag that onto our tower mask like. So we can put the start point right at the bottom. The end point up here so that it's above the object. If it's too low, it just gets kind of disappears. I mean, you can do something like that, that's pretty cool. But for this effect I'm going to put it here. And essentially what's gonna happen is if I increase the bend it amount it's gonna move. Make this the point of reference so I can essentially move it back and forth. Dung dug, dug. Dung dug. So the way that I will do this animation is I'll maybe start it in the center. So I'll click reset, add a keyframe. Move to the right, bring this to the side, so now goes bouncing to the left. And then move a few frames and go to the right, and then a few frames, then left again, but not too far back. Essentially, I'm reducing the distance that it's going up. So it's almost like like a spring. Oh God, this is so slow. Let's move these keyframes closer together. You might want to time this with the music as well, but just do something like this and have it end in the middle so I could do something like yeah. And then what you would do is you'll select all the key frames. Right click key from assistant. Easy ease. Then you can actually go a step further by going into the key frames and essentially playing with the velocity such that things speed up into the spin. So it goes fast into this, take this point, drag it backwards. So it does this. You can, you can really play around with this however you want. This is so silly. Basically, you can do this however you want to do it. You can experiment. But the most important part here is you want to actually get some motion blow. And you see that if I just click it here, it doesn't come up. So you can just drag in a CC force motion blow and you see it'll look a bit more realistic. And also what I decided to do is actually move the key frames much closer in together so that it shows that the movement gets dissipated. If you know what I mean, you can probably add some more. But just for this one, you can do were you want, okay? So the second way that you can do this effect is using the puppet position Pinto. And the way this works is you click on your mask and you make some point. I don't know, you make these two. And essentially what you can do is manipulate the tower however you want. You can add more points if you want to, and then you can do crazy stuff. The way that you can do this is say, I don't know until you put these three points. For example, we can press you on our keyboard, which will bring up the point. And what you can do is maybe go a bit before and add some key frames to the motion. Maybe make it move around, do some crazy stuff, I don't know. Maybe like bound up. Oh my God, what's happening? There's a lot to play around with this one, So you can do so much, you can make it bounce up and then come down like a ball. And then maybe reset these points. So then it kind of goes up and down and up. And if you find that, you get this line here, this little line, you're just going to click here where it says Transparent and then it disappears. So yeah, you can do some really cool looking effects. And then finally just add CC force motion blow so that you get some really cool realistic motion blow and yeah, have fun with this one. 33. Rising Buildings: So let's do this. Really cool rising building transition into a sort of high collapse using mocker AE. So let's download the city video file and drag it into a new composition. And essentially what we're going to do is just make these buildings here rise up and then it's going to continue into the transition. Now what's really good about this show is we have a very nice clear sky, which will be very easy to fell. If you have a more complicated sky, you might have to do the method where you go into Photoshop and you create a new field layer using content Aware. The first thing we need to do though is figure out at what point we want the buildings to rise up to and when we want them to stop. I'm going to go a few frames here and say about about here is where we want the buildings to be there. Now I'm going to add a marker here using one on my keyboard, so I know that that's where that's going to happen and now we can essentially stop. So the first thing we want to do is mask out all of these buildings independently. So I'm going to go to protect some precess, drag in Mocha, click on the kaon, and you can see that that is essentially the point where we want to stop. So I'm going to just click here and to set an outpoint. So now I know that between here and here is what I need to mask no further. So let's go to the first frame. And we can actually change this to essentials because we don't need to make it any more complicated than it is if you wanted that end frame. You can see it in the classic work space. And then you can go back to essentials. Now I'm going to go to the spline tool here and I'm going to go to the first frame. And I'm going to draw my first spline of one of the buildings. And I'm going to keep these two separate so it should look really nice. Okay, once I have my final point, I'm gonna right click to get rid of it. And you can see we have an issue which is at the corners are rounded and I don't want them to be rounded. I'm going to get the pick tool and I'm going to click on these handles and drag them out. Just had that so that they're sharp. And I'm just going to realign them properly like so get the hand tool, go to the bottom and do the same thing here just to make sure that everything is nice and straight. So that is the first building, we can actually double click, then let layer here and name it building One. Now we just rinse and repeat this for all the other buildings. So we're going to click on this blind tool. Again, zoom into here. And I'm going to just select this building there. Right click, and just do the same thing. And you can see now we have a new layer which we can name building two, building three, and so on and so forth. So I'm just going to do that for all the other ones real quick. And remember that if you want to go through the frames with the hand tool, you just hold X on the keyboard and you can click and drag to look around. Now I'm going to go very rough with these just for the sake of this tutorial. And if you hold Z, we can drag forward and out X and Z are two very useful keys. All right, so now we have our four buildings independently masked out. Now all we need to do is track this mask for these frames. Now that we've drawn all four of these splines, because we have the gear selected onto them which says process, we can just click Track forward and they'll track all of them at the same time. So now they all track. We can essentially click Save and close this off. And you can see that nothing happens. So we have to basically go to Mocha. Go to where it says Matt. Apply Matt, which you can see our buildings invert the mask, so you see them gone. And you can see that I made a mistake. Because there's a little bit of a gap in one of these. There's a gap there. So I need to just fix this gap here. So in order for me to fix that mistake where you can see a little bit of a gap, I'm going to click a number of building four. Go to View and Matt. And show Matt, we can see this is the map for that building and I'm not actually covering that building, so I need to just cover it properly. This is a very helpful tool to have. And if I just adjust that, you will see that the track gets adjusted. And if I click on building three, you can see that I made a mistake on this part here. I now click Save, close, and that little gap is gone. Another gap is gone. We're fine. And go back to Matt and uncheck invert mask and check where it says create AE masks. Now it's going to create after effects masks that we can manipulate ourselves. Now we can go to make AE and delito. We don't need it anymore. And you can see we have masks here. Now all we can do is duplicate this layer, go to the bottom layer. Let's make this background press M on the keyboard for the mask. And then change the modes on all of them. To subtract, subtract, subtract, subtract, subtract. At the bottom we can check control shift D, press M on the masks and delete all of these masks. The layer with the masks gone, it's going to be the background. This is going to be masked out buildings and the top layer is individual buildings. So if I turn off the top layer on, we have the individual buildings. If our isolator, we have the individual buildings. And the last thing I need to do is at the point here, press out and right square bracket to close off this layer, so we isolate the layers. We see we have the individual buildings, we have the masked out buildings on the background. Now we have the final shot back to normal. So the first thing we want to do is click on the mask style buildings. Turn off all of these ones, and we're going to fill in this space. So let's go to Content Aware fill, change our alpha expansion to five pixels so that we get more information outside of the building. And I'm going to make the fuel method edge b***d first because sometimes that gives us good results. Especially in a shot like this that's very plain. But if you have clouds and stuff, definitely use object. Now I'm going to change the work area, so it's just this space here. And click Generate Fuel Layer. And now I have to save it somewhere. And you can see I was right. We have a very good result just from the edge b***d version and now we essentially have our clean plate. Now I'm going to drag in this field layer below our individual buildings. Such that when I turn the individual buildings off and move them, you can see we can manipulate them. So this is where things get fun. I'm going to now divide these buildings independently because I want them to come up at different times. I'm going to duplicate this layer four times 123, so we have four different ones. I'm going to make this one building four. I'm going to delete all the other buildings. This one. All the other buildings. So now they are all independent. So building one is building one, Building two is building two. Building three. B, three, Judge. So now we can have fun bringing them in. I'm going to go about the last frame. Select these three, press P on the keyboard and add a key frame to the position, because that is going to be the final position. And I'm going to go to the bottom, select all of them, and bring them to the bottom. Now this is a game of timing, so I'm going to go forward a few frames. I'm going to go to the first building, which is this building. And I'm going to move the final point a little bit further forward. So now this one comes in first. I'm going to get the second building to come in, just after that. So now it comes in, this one comes in, and now building three comes in. Building three and building four have to come in at the same time. So I'm going to just them do that. Now we get these three buildings coming in just like that. You can see that if we move the work area a bit forward, it now fits in perfectly. And I activate the background layer, it fits in perfectly with the rest of our shop. Now these animations are okay, but they can do with a little bit of work. I'm going to select all of them. Right click key from assistant As I'm also going to add motion blow to all of them by clicking this button here. And you can see we get motion blur, boom, boom, boom. That's pretty much it. That is how we do this. Really cool, building, rising effect with maker. 34. Rotoscoping with Runway ML: Ai rotoscoping with runway ML. The future is here and AI is taking over our jobs as editors are going away or are they? I actually think AI is going to help us do a lot of things such as rotoscoping. So even though you've mastered rotoscoping after effect and you have full control of how to do it yourself, in cases where you need a quick done job, you can use AI. I'm using Runway ML and another are other ones out there, but you can literally click a few buttons and you'll have a very detailed rotoscope or something, especially things that are very complicated to track, like people dancing or something like this. While it's quite magical, there are some drawbacks to it. So firstly, what is Runway ML? This is an AI powered tool that allows you to use pre trained AI models to do a bunch of video editing tasks, one of which is rotoscoping. But before you use Runway ML, you do have to create an account. And once you have created an account, you can use it free. But you do have some of these restrictions at the time of recording. But you can upload any video you want to the platform green screen and select what you want to be. Rotoscope out, then an robot will literally roto out your footage. I don't nowhere I put in a bunch of complicated scenes and it did a really, really good job. I was very impressed. And once the air rotoscoping process is done, you can export results for free. You're only allowed 720. So if you want to have, you know, pros, if you want to have four K, you have to pay for it, which is where the drawbacks start. But if you're going to use it a lot, and I guess that outweighs the content, the biggest drawback is that is two things. The first is that if you want to use this, you have to leave after effects, upload your footage, do the thing, download your footage, bring it back into after effects, so then do any other effects because runway MO is great, but you know you don't have all the effects that after effects has. So it's just another thing to add to your workflow. Secondly, if some small thing you have to change in the mask, you have to go back on and fix it. Even then, you don't have very accurate control as to how to fix it. It's just the same brushing mechanism as a roto brush. You can't fix it yourself. Like say you want to take something more out. It's very difficult to do in terms of flexibility to fix something, it's not there. But to get a very quick and dirty rotoscope for a shot you're doing, it's pretty good. 35. AutoTrace: What if I told you there's a way that you can create a mask within after effects with one click for all the frames of a shot. Seriously? Actually, it's not one click. It's more like two or three clicks. We, you can with autotrace in Adobe After Effects trace feature in Adobe After Effects. The total larger to create masks of something based on color channels or luminus. Now to be honest, this is not the most accurate way to get masks. In fact, it has very minimal uses. But on the occasion where it does have uses, it can save you a whole bunch of time. I think it's good to know how it works. So how do you use Autotrace? Let's firstly import our footage into the composition. Let's use this Buffalo Shot. Let's go to the menu bar and select Layer Autotrace. Let's check work Area, which will render the mask for our work area selected by these bars. In this example, I will make the channel luminous and check preview. And they will show me exactly what's going to be masked because this is a very simple black luminous, which just means changing light. With the buffalo being darker than the background, we can easily see what's going to be traced. In some cases, it's going to be much more difficult. And you might actually pick up other things aside from what you want to pick up, so you can play with a tolerance. I'll try and mess some of the other settings until you get a good outline. Then let's apply to a new layer, unchecked, unless you want it to make a white solid with the mask on top of your clip. Otherwise, I left it unchecked and click. Okay. And now you get a masked outline as we do here. Now you do have to press M to find the mask of your subject indicated by the right color. You might have picked up other stuff which will be created as other masks that you can then delete. But I mean, we have a pretty decent mask of the buffalo and I only took a few clicks. This works great in scenarios when something is one or two colors, red, green or blue, or the luminous is different enough. And what's great is once you've traced, you can manipulate the setting of the mask. Just like with the pentel. As we learned before. The benefits, now, this can save you tons of time, but there's loads of limitations. It's not always perfect. You may not accurately capture the details of the image. It's hard to make any changes because like with the pentel, once you trace a mask, if you want to make a change to the key frames, you have to change each keyframe independently. So if I want to move a bunch of points and I want to change it, it's very difficult. In conclusion, the autotrace feature is a valuable tool in some cases to save your time, but in many cases it's more of a gimmick. But I thought you should learn it anyway. In the next class, I'm going to show you a true one click rotoscope solution.