Adobe After Effects 2018 New Features

1. Adobe After Effect 2018 New Features: Hi, my name is Daniel Walter Scott from bringyourownlaptop.com. 2018 After Effects just been released. Let's look at the features. There's been five official features released by Adobe, but really there's going to be two of them that are getting me excited and the cool thing about them, if you combine these two new features that might actually change your life. At least it's changed mine, I love it. Let's go and look at those. The first three that is just like general updates, one is it's faster GPU enabled, Blurry fix, so that's going to render a bit faster. Cinema 4D, if you're using the light version of that, they've brought through some of the new features from the Cinema 4D's R19. But that's more of a cinema 4D update, not After Effects. Another one is if you're working in virtual reality. If you're working in VR in After Effects, there's some previewing updates. But the two that are really exciting are data driven animation where we connect spreadsheets to our animations to drive the animation. The other one is taking shapes and parts that you've drawn and easily breaking them apart and connecting them to null so we can estimate them. Let's look at both of those and then we'll look at them together and how awesome they get. The first one is paths to nulls. Let's look at that. What this means is that I can draw any shape. I'll draw a star here and double-click it so that my anchor point is right in the middle. It makes it easier. Let's scale it down. Something usable. At the moment I can't animate these particular points of these shapes because, A, It's a whole shape. We need to outline at first turn into a busy path and even then it's still really hard to animate. Let's look at what happened. First thing we need to do is to add a shape layer here and find out contains. Find Polystar path 1 and right-click it and say convert to Bezier path. That has to be done for especially, any of the shapes that are in this drop down. Next thing I want to do is, I'd like to slip through these points and use this new thing window. Now, my vision here it's under Create nulls from paths. It might be up here in the final release, I'm on an earlier version here. Create nulls from paths is the thing I want. This little panel opens up. First of all, we need to select the left points, we do it by clicking in here so we want to find path one. Click on this end one here, path. All these little dots appear, then click Points "Follow Nulls". What it's done down here is that it's pulled all of my anchor points and created a null and attached it to it. You see this null here, if I go to position, I can move them around and that null is connected using the expression. But it now it makes it really easy to animate these nulls over time. This just wasn't easy before so let's have a look at position, maybe not a wiggle. Everyone loves a wiggle. I'll get it to go very fast within a 100 pixels. Do you wiggle magic? You can see here because I'm operating that null it's pulling that point with it and it's wiggling. Very exciting, I guess what I'm trying to show you there is that you can draw any shape and then just quickly attach all of its anchor points to nulls then animate those nulls nice and easily. That is how to do it with one of these specific shapes so let's delete them and go. If you're going to draw your tool or use a custom-made shape using the paint tool, that process is a little different, I'm going to draw a random shape. It's not random, it's definitely a triangle. You don't have to convert it to a Bezier path first, you're just going to make sure that the points are selected often as soon as you join it, it will work unless you click somewhere else like I did. If that happens, you can go down into your contents, shape 1, path 1, and click on that so you get all the anchor points. Now we can do Points Follow Nulls. I'm going to find this tough guy here, do animation. Why? Because I feel like we need to show you why we're doing this. We'll set our first keyframe maybe there, have this guy nice and lower. Why we're doing this, I'm not sure. I feel like there needs to be some sort of demonstration, so you get a demonstration. You probably skipped ahead doing a little rebound overshoot type thing. It's going to be pretty amazing. Better be. I've taken at least 60 seconds of your life. A little easy is hold back. It's not that exciting, but you get the idea. I can take my shape, yank out the points and just animate those nulls, and those nulls pull the anchor points alone very cool. All right, stop it there. One last thing before we go, if you are drawing like I do often in Illustrator and bring it into After Effects afterwards, just make sure under Layer, you're porting your Illustrator file. Go to Layer and there's one in here that says "Create Shapes from Vector Layer first", so do that first before we get into these other steps. That's the first feature that I love. The next features was, close that down, is- Let's save. It's [inaudible] this, delete it and move on to my next feature. This is probably the most amazing one. Why I was saved to the end, I'm not sure keep you around. I'm going to drag in actually a background that I drew in Illustrator and just sets up our little project here [inaudible]. Bringing in data from spreadsheets is always been a problem. Now what I've done is this is a way of bringing in JSON data. JSON is an interchange format, so it's If you've got a CSV, you can use a JSON file to get it to hop into After Effects. If you have got data in it, say it's MySQL or what's an Excel file or CSV, you need to use a bit of conversion software first or just one of the online apps. I'll show you what I've done. I've got some data here. It's the average weather in Dublin. It's going to copy it here from Excel, and one of these, this is the one he called CSV to Jason, and just paste it over this side, hit this side and we've got a JSON file. I'm going to save it, I'm using After Effects, you can use any text editor. File, New JSON, Create, Paste, Save, and that is the format that After Effects wants. We'll do a little bit of an integration then I'll show you a bigger video that I've made for doing a full integration with JSON. Let's say I wanted to display the city name and this would be good for lag bumpers or lower thirds, but you've got a lot of them to do love repetitive tasks. Displaying text from spreadsheets, super-duper, easy. Then we'll look at a little bit more detail of pulling out these temperatures and animating say a line graph like you saw at the beginning. To bring in JSON, you bring it in, File import and our JSON file just like any other file. Bring in that thing we'd saved out of Dreamweaver, and now we need to connect it to something. I'm going to do texts for this one's going to go up the Type tool, click here, paste in some text. I'm going to duplicate the text layer, keep them separate. That's just going to be some stack text. But this thing he has going to be updating full of the city that I want to work with. I'm going to, for no good reason, make the white look bigger and put it next to it. I've got two bits of text. This is the one that I want to update from my JSON file. I wanted to pull through this option here. The first result, I want to pull through the word city, while the value City, which is Dublin. Let's make that work. Open up city and opened up text, and let's hold down our Option key. We'll, Option key on a Mac or O key on a PC. For a say, source text, click on the stopwatch. That will turn into what's called an expression. Now, I want to bring in that JSON file. I can start it by grabbing the pick whip here and just point to it. That pulls it through. Let's make this a little bit bigger. Man that's really friendly to get to. What do we need to do to this JSON footage here? What I'd like to do is turn it into source text and load it into a variable. I'm going to load it into the variable called weather even and I'll add footage to it. Now I need to make that run and I wrap the whole thing up in brackets, and I use the eval function that'll just make this thing run or execute or evaluate and a semicolon at the end to finish that off. That is me bringing in my JSON file and I've loaded it into this thing called Weather. If you are experienced in expressions already, you can start looking into this variable and start pulling data out. We'll do it with just some basic text. What I'd like to do is I'd like to look inside weather. I can't spell weather today. I'd like to look at the first value. In here, this is my first value and I want to look at the word city because I want Dublin I want to look at the first value, square brackets, and the first value in JavaScript is zero not one. It says the first value. Inside of that first value, I'd like to look at dot and in city semicolon, and yeah, hopefully it should load. This is Dublin, awesome. Now why is that super cool? Is that it's amazing if I need to update this now I will just right-click, replace Footage, File. I look at some other JSON file that I've made, that was the exact same one. Let's replace it and actually look at where you're clicking on, Auckland. That's where my home country is, Auckland, New Zealand, and you can see it update. We've doing lots of repetitive text inputs, maybe lower thirds, show titles, bumpers and you have to pull through lots of data and it needs to be updated every week, then that is super cool and super amazing. At least I think it's super amazing. Those are the features. Now, I told you the beginning what I thought was the best when you start combining them. I'm going to go and start with making that line chart, but I've turned it into its own full tutorial. But let's have a quick little look at how these two things fit together. If I've got the paint tool like we drew the triangle before, I'm going to make sure that nothing's selected. I'm just going to put in a bunch of, when I say a bunch, I'm going to put it in exactly 12 because I want to match my lines here. I'm going to make sure it has no fill about the stroke. The cool thing about that now is remember, I can have my point selected. Window, Create Nulls from path. If you click this and nothing happens, you can go into here and make sure you've got your path selected, and it's there and Points Follow Nulls. Still doesn't work. One more deep down. There you go. Click on the actual path word, and now they're all converted into dots. The cool thing about them is we could obviously just go into position and play around with the height of these, and do some manual animation that might be enough for the project you're working on. But if you want to connect it to a Spreadsheet, we can use that JSON file to drive the animation. Now, I've turned that into full other free video here so check the in-screens or in the description, there will be a link to how I go off and build this thing here, so we'll look at the final version, I'm going to save this. It's the same one you saw at the beginning. Weather Reports. Let's looking at the Auckland data, you can see, and I made it over time. I can go into here, Auckland data, Replace Footage just like we did earlier, pick Dublin, super-duper, super easy. I hope you can see the value in both JSON, which is probably the most exciting, and then being able to pull anchor points out of shapes really easily, and combining them to give a full data driven animation magic. That's the updates. If you like my teaching style checkout, bring your own laptop.com. I've got lots of courses. After Effects, Photos-hop and Design, Illustrator, music. There's a bunch on there, go check that out. If you want to learn how to make this specific thing right in front of us, go check out the link in the description or one of these end-note click things that are coming up in a second. All right everyone, [inaudible] I will see you in another video.