Adobe After Effects 2022: The comprehensive A-Z course

1. After Effects Course Preview: Hello and welcome to this comprehensive Adobe After Effects course. My name is Peter. I've been working with After Effects for more than 15 years now. And during all that time, realized many professional projects from very easy to extremely difficult. Of course, we were looking at the fundamentals, the user interface, as well as the functions and tools in the theoretical or kick-off party. But mainly this course is all about experiencing the incredible possibilities of After Effects by means of exciting projects and practical examples. So we're going to animate a video to the beat of the music. Integrates texts into a 3D landscape. Remove objects from existing recordings, or let them fly in space. We're also going to create our very own 3D mobile model without any additional plug-ins. And we even want to create our very own car accident. That's it. I'm gone. The part from a hands-on with the most important hotkeys and expressions, you are going to get access to download the video material that I create with my drone at, let us go through exclusively for this course. In this way, you can actively participate in all life examples and really cement your knowledge. You'll be learning by doing how keying and camera tracking works. How to use keyframes and expressions to create even better animations. We're talking about particle systems, masks, forked, and many, many more tips and tricks to give you an overall picture. We're also going to take a look at ideal workflows to render your videos, as well as useful additional plug-ins and extensions. The main goal of this course is to let you finish with a general understanding of after effects, allowing you to find a solution for whatever individual project you want to realize. What are you waiting for? Start your journey to becoming an After Effects pro right now and I'll see you in the course. 2. Download and Installation: In this video, we'll quickly browse through all the steps necessary to install Adobe After Effects on your PC or laptop. So the first thing we need to do, of course, is to go to their website, adobe.com. And then we want to check out creativity and design and click on View Plans and Pricing. Now here they have different sets. For example, the photography sets containing loud, Lightroom and Photoshop, which will cost you $9.99 per month. Or you can choose the Creative Cloud set. This is the ultimate set containing all Adobe applications and even more than you can see here on this page. For example, Media Encoder, which we'll speak about later in this course. This will cost you $52.99. If you are a regular user, much, much cheaper. It will be if you are a student or teacher, then you can click on this one and you'll see it will cost you only $20 per month. All the prices seem to be a little bit cheaper than in Germany, but still $52.99 is some money to pay. In this case, we want to refer only to Adobe After Effects. So we click here for $20.99, we'll click on Buy Now. And then there are different options. If you want to be built monthly, you will have to pay $31.49. If you want to be built monthly but subscribe for a yearly subscription, then it will be $20.99 per month. And you can even be built yearly, then it will be 239 US dollars in total, which is the cheapest options of those, those three you can see here. So we click on this yearly built monthly and continue. Now I think there will be a little try to upsell this one with another $30 if you want to choose Adobe Stock as well. In this case, we say no, thank you. And then you will enter your email address. And afterwards they will give you permission to download Adobe After Effects, right from your account to your computer to use it and subscribe to this program before, I think, and CSS3, CS4, CS6, which I used, it was possible to buy them for a lifetime license, but right now it's all about subscription settings. So you will have to pay this one yearly or even monthly if you want to be a Adobe After Effects user. So just enter your email address, download Adobe After Effects in the version, you'd like to pay it monthly or yearly. And then in the next video we'll see and really start off inside Adobe After Effects, because the installation program process itself is just a very standard process which you pass on for every software you have ever bought. So just click on your favorite settings there or leave everything as it is. And then we see again in the next video. 3. First opening and our lifesaver: activating auto save: If you have installed Adobe After Effects and opened it up and you see something similar to what you see now on the screen, then I can say, congratulations, you've successfully installed Adobe After Effects and are ready to work with this awesome program. It might be that you won't see such a welcome message, but that doesn't really matter because the only thing we're gonna do with it is click away. So in the upcoming videos, what we'll be speaking about is all you can see right here, the user interface. Starting off with everything you see here on top like the tools. Then we go through the possibilities of your project settings, as well as the preview area with all its buttons here on the bottom. Then we speak about the right side, the information you see here, the effects and presets that can be browsed right here are found here on top. And we have this preview area. We have the characters, the paragraphs. But we'll speak about that later on in different videos. Of course, we'll also talk about our main work area, which you'll see here on the bottom here with the arrangement of your composition, as well as the timeline where you can arrange the different layers. For now, to start it all off, we will just install what I would like to say is my personal life saver and that is the so-called autosave function. So to find this one, you'll click for edit and then preferences. And we want to start off with general. Then you'll see that the front window will open up. And I would highly recommend you to take some time and browse through these different settings. Probably you won't need to make any changes. You can leave everything as it is. But in some cases, depending on your PC and how powerful it is, it might be useful to make some small changes here, for example, in the memory settings or even in media and disk cache. But this will be two individual to speak about right now, in most of the cases, I'd say ninety-five percent of every case. You can leave all the options as they are already set. What we want to do now in this video is go to auto save and enable the autosave function. I have already done so, meaning every 20 minutes there will be saved a copy of what I'm currently working on in the local files. And I have decided to save a maximum of five versions, meaning that if there will be another autosave, then they will start with the sixth version to override my first safe. So this means that no more than 20 minutes of my work can be lost at anytime. And I've decided save a custom location, I would really recommend to do so. While in earlier times, it was much more often the case that After Effects crashed right now, since there is this subscription mode, I feel like it's working much safer, but still I'm a friend of doing so and enabling here this autosave function because it will save you or it can save you a lot of time and stress. If you have your versions saved every, for example, 20 minutes. So just mark this checker and then click Okay. And now we are ready to kick this one off and start with the top area. And that's what we're going to deal with in the next segment. 4. User interface overview: Header area Part 1: Alright, so this is our first video talking about the basis, the foundation inside Adobe After Effects. And in this video, we'll speak about the header area. Before I get to do so, let me just quickly explain and talk about the general hierarchy inside Adobe After Effects. So your top layer, that will be the project. Here we are currently in a new untitled, an empty project. But in general, your project might contain one until basically infinite amount of compositions. Any composition you will find here in this project area. And those compositions will contain different layers. And those layers, they can contain the effects which you want to use on any different layer. On top we have the project, then we have the composition. And any composition contains layers, and those layers will contain different effects. That, to get that straight right at the beginning is your general structure inside Adobe After Effects. But now let's talk about this header area. And we start with clicking here on file and you have the possibility to create a new project. If we do so, we click on File New, new project, you see nothing will happen and that is totally right. So in this case, because we are already working in a new empty project. So if you click on New Empty Project, Oliver, new empty project, that's nothing to say if nothing to override. And that's why we're just getting back to our main window, as you see here, is different. Of course, if you're working in an existing project and you create a new project out of this project, then of course, after Effects will ask you to save your current file before going to create a new project. You can also open up a project, for example, by going and getting to click File Open Project. Or you can use the shortcut Control O to open up existing projects. And of course, you can save your current project by clicking File, Save As. And if you have already taken a location, a directory, then you can use the shortcut Control S or click here on fire safe to say if your project as it is right now. Another thing we need to talk about is the possibility to import sources like for example, videos or audio data. You can go and click on File, Import File. Or you can use the shortcut Control I. And you see there's a new window opening up where you can import files. But we'll talk about that later on when we speak about everything that's going on in this left area here, using File Import is just one of many possibilities to import files, but as I already said, we'll talk about that later on. Alright, so the last thing we'll quickly consider here under this file button are the project settings. While I think it is basically the same as your preferences in 99% of all the cases. You won't need to make any changes here as they are very advanced. But for example, you could change your video rendering and effects and use GPU acceleration. This is activated, in my case, depending on your GPU you are currently using, this will maybe not be activated, but if it's not activated normally, it has done so for a reason. So you can leave everything as it is as well. You could also change the use of expressions or the engine you use to create your expressions. We'll talk about expressions later on in this course. They basically give you the option to code inside after effects. And the standard engine which is used as JavaScript. If you want to change that, you could use it here or do So here. But in general, as I already explained, you won't need to make any changes here as well as with the audio settings and the color settings. You can just leave everything as it is. But if you want to do so, take your time and consider these settings and browse through them if you want to make any changes, of course you are free to do so. The next thing we quickly want to talk about is this drop-down. But as we're still in a very empty project, there's not a lot of choices we can make here. You can, of course, check out your preferences which are already told you. But for now that's just not really much we can do here. So we want to give our project a new composition, and we will do so by clicking on composition, new composition, or using the shortcut Control N. If you're a Windows user or option and if you use a Mac. So let's click on new composition and you'll see a new window will open up. First thing we could change is the name of the composition we want to create. And in this case I will just name it. Welcome. And now we have a lot of settings we can choose from here. In this case, I want to use the preset HDTV 1825 frames per second, meaning that we will create a composition in full HD settings. So we have 1920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels. Heat, and we will do so by creating square pixels. Of course, you have other choices here. But in all those years, I've been working with After Effects. There was not a single project where I needed to change this one from square pixels. So I think for now we can just leave this as it is. For the frame rate, we'll stick to 25 frames per second, meaning that 25 pictures will make up for 1 second of video material. But of course, depending on your sources, are the kind of project you want to create. It might be useful to change the frame rate, for example, to 30 frames per second, 60 frames per second, or even 120 frames per second. In this case, for the example, I think it's okay if we stick Twenty-five frames per second. You can also change any number individually. For example, if we want to make changes to our width, we can click here and change it to 2 thousand pixels. If we have this aspect ratio locked, then it will always be 16 to nine meeting that. Any change in the width will also also have an impact on the heat. If we unlock this one, we can change any parameter individually. Here under the resolution settings, we can change the resolution we want to have in our preview. This is not The finally rendered video, but the thing we really will see in our preview. You can also change that afterwards at any anytime. So you might want to change it to a quarter quality so that the video will preview faster. But in this case, it's just our example, our stick with full resolution. And then we have the possibility to change the start time code. This will just be your timestamp at 0 inside the new composition. So no need to make any changes there. We want to start at time 0. But what we want to change is the total duration of our composition. For example, if we know we want to create a short video for Instagram, which will have a length of ten seconds. We can of course, type ten seconds duration here. But as with all the other settings, you can change them at any point in time afterwards, after the composition has already been created. If you feel like you need more time in your composition, just open up your composition settings, change the duration afterwards and more time will be edit. So I think we are good to go. What we want to change is get back to our HD preset. So we have a width and heat in full HD, and we can leave the advanced and 3D renderer tabs as they are. But we will speak about the Advanced tab later on in this course, but for now, we just click Okay and create our first composition. Well done, we have added our very first composition inside of Adobe After Effects, and we'll see the welcome composition here on the left inside of our project data, as well as now opened up here at the bottom and ready to be filled with different layers. We will do so in a second. But just before that, let me quickly show you how you can make changes to an existing composition. Therefore, just open up composition, composition settings, or use the shortcut Control K. And you'll see that the very same window we've already seen will open up again. And you can, for example, add some extra two seconds and the duration. Click on okay. And if we zoom out in this timeline, we see that now our composition has a duration of 12th seconds. I'll make a quick cut for this video here. And in the next video, we'll continue talking about the Herat header area and we want to add our very first layer. 5. User interface overview: Header area Part 2: So let's add our first layer to this composition, and we will do so by clicking on Layer new. And in this case, we will begin with a solid, which can also be added by using the shortcut Control Y. A new window will open up and the name will be initialized by what the current color is. So in this case, it would be a dark gray solid. And of course, number one, because our composition is currently empty, this would be the very first dark gray solid. If you will add another dark race solid, then After Effects would initialize it with its name, dark gray solid two. But in this case, I will change the name anyways and write background simply because I like to have a good structure in the project and to see the function of the layer directly in its name. And in this case this should be a background layer and that's why I will type background as the name. Now we want to change the color, click on here, and maybe make it Some our dark blue color. And then we would have the option to change the size of this solid. Nowadays in composition size, you could make it a little smaller, of course, or go back to the comp size by clicking on this button. This is what we will be doing right now and then we hit Okay? And you'll see that this background has been added to our composition. You'll find it here under our welcome composition, or there's a new folder containing all the solids of your project. And in this case, we have only one solid, which is the background solid. Now we want to add a second layer and we click on Layer new. And now this is deactivated and this is because we are currently working in the project data. You see it active here. And now After Effects doesn't really know where to put the new solid. Of course, it's very intuitive that right now we only have one composition, so we want to add it to that composition. But as this composition is not active, After Effects doesn't really know what to do, and that's why we will activate this composition. And now we can click on Layer New and add a text to the existing composition. For now, we'll simply type welcome, and then click anywhere here in this bottom area, or click on the Selection tool to finish the text off. And with the selection tool active, you can now reposition either your text or the background layer. Just grab it. Click your left mouse button and hold it and reposition the layer you'd like to choose. For an hour, I will hit Control Z to undo my last change. And this will bring back my background solid into its original position as we are right now, working only in 2D space, meaning we have an x value and we have a y value. This will mean that if the welcome text area is above our background area, then it will be visible. While we ring the background layer to the top. Then the welcome texts, or it won't be visible anymore simply because we're not working in 3D space. So the text layer is not in front of the background layer, but now it's laying on the bottom of this background area simply because we have a top-down view. And the layer that is displayed here in position number one will be the layer that is displayed first. And as the text is laying behind this background layer, of course we won't be able to see it anymore. We will bring back the text layer right now. One more thing we can speak about, maybe to add an effect to this text layer. So with this welcome layer marked, we hit effect and maybe start off with something like Stylize and Glow. And now you see sort of a glowing effect has been added to this welcome text. Right now I changed my view by hitting the mouse wheel. You can do the same by clicking here and then make it larger or smaller. Or there's another, another option which is clicking View, zoom in or zoom out. But of course, I think the simplest option is to just use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. We could of course change the radius here or other settings in this glow effect. But for now this is just a presentation of how to add an effect. So I think we won't need to speak about the different settings. We will do so later on in this course as we will use the glow effect on some other parts. But right now, with the glow effect marked, I will hit Delete and get rid of that effect. Here it can change back to your project data. And here you will find the Effect Controls right now, of course, with the welcome texts layer selected, there is no effect active and neither is. So in the Effect Controls of our background, background layer. One more thing we can speak about is this tools bar. And I have already shown you the selection tool, which will get active if you click the button V and if you click the button h, you will see that it gets changed to the hand tool. And now you can just move around here in this space. And you could use your zoom tool by clicking. And now you have the chance to zoom in in different parts, but the same can be done with this hand to just go wherever you want and then zoom in by using the mouse wheel. There are many possibilities to zoom in into different areas of your preview. Now, we go back to our selection tool and we won't speak about those camera tools here right now. Simply cost that will be part of the course later on. And it will be much clearer if we have a direct example to use these tools, so we'll speak about those later on. But what we can start off with is using Mask Tools. And here you have, for example, the rectangle tool. If we click on this with our background layer selected, then you will see if we draw a mask in a rectangular shape like this, then it will be edits to our background layer and you'll see that this mask will be active and all the parts outside of this mark mask won't be visible anymore. We could also, of course, draw, for example, in elliptical mask or other forms and shapes. We'll see about that later on in the course as well. And we have the chance to create an individual mass by using the Pen Tool, for example. If I select that and now stay with the background layer selected, draw very simple mask. Then you'll see that this mask is edit to our first mosque. And we could also change and switch the display of our first mass to none. Then now we'll see that only our second mask will be active. Here. You'll see that there's another option to create a new text. You could do so as I've shown you with layer new text. But you can also just click on this horizontal type tool and click anywhere here in this preview area. And you'll see, welcome part two. And then finished this takes off that we've added another text to our composition, which is now laying below our first text, but still above our background. If we change this, then of course, the same as before will happen. And in this case, this means that our texts will be hidden behind the background layer. Here we have some more advanced tools which will also be part of this course later on. So I think for now this is enough for the tools bar. Here you have some more options. Considering the display of After Effects. In this case, we are using the standard view which can also be applied by using Window Workspace Standard. If your view of this place is somehow different than my view, then it might be that the workspace is not switched to standard. Might be that you are here working in the learn view. So I think it would be best if you'd also choose the standard views so that we have the same setting to work on. Or maybe you can go click on Window and check the individual marks you've set here so that we are working with the same settings, but these are just what is selected if you click the standard view. And for now I think you've gotten to know the most important things off the header area. We'll finish off this video and in the next segment, we'll talk about a project area you see here on the left. 6. User interface overview: Project area: Alright, so in this segment we'll talk about everything you see here on the left in the project area of after effects. While you already know some things, you've seen that the welcome composition as well as all the other compositions, were replaced here in this project area, as well as the solids and the layers you add to your composition. We could start off and right-click this project button here and close the panel, then you'll see that the project disappears from our left side. If this accidentally happens to you, no problem, you can bring it back anytime by clicking on window and project. And you've got it back here right now on the right side of the effect controls, but simply hit your left mouse, click it and drag and drop it to the left side again. Or you could right-click here and undock that panel. For example, if you're working on a lot of effects and you still want to see the effects at the same time with your project data, then you could undock the project data for some time and bring it on the right side. But for now I want to bring it back here to the Effect Controls. And I do so by left clicking. And then after effects, It's given me some choices where to put this. And I decided to put it here beside the effect controls. And there we are back with our project settings. On this left side. What we could also do hit the left mouse button and click on columns. And you'll see we have some checked here. And these columns are exactly what we see here. Like for example, the name, the type, and other settings, like for example, the frame rate, the end point, the outpoint, and all the things you decide to mark here in this Columns button. For example, we could decide to unmarked here the label. Then we see that these labeled buttons disappear. But I'd like to see those buttons as they give a good hint on what we are talking about. For example, the solids are, the folders are marked in yellow, the compositions are marked in a light brown. And here, if we open our folder and then we see that the solids are marked in red. What we could also do is open up our project settings from here. Then we are back at what we've already seen. You could make some changes here. That's the same as if we'd like to open File project Settings, or we already have here these, this little rocket. If you click on that one, it will also open up the project settings. I've already told you that you have a lot of possibilities to import sources. The first one was clicking on File, Import File. But the same effect happens if you right-click in this area and click on Import file. Or of course, you could also just open up any folder, like for example, the car accident folder from our course resources and import the car file just by drag dropping it here inside of our project data. Now what we can do besides of creating a new composition from scratch is we could start off directly with a source like for example, this car dot mp4 source. So we market and now simply drag it here to this small composition button and leave it there. And you'll see that a new composition is created. You see this here. It is named the same as the MP4 source. And it also has the same data, meaning it is created in full HD just as the source. And the length is also the same, in this case, five seconds and one frame. Now, what we could also do to create the same effect of imported source directly in a new composition. And we do this by clicking File, Import File or by clicking right here, Import File. Now we could, for example, select this beach video and hit Import Options, create composition out of this market, click Import, and you'll see that the beach dot mp4 will be imported and a new composition will be created. Just the same as we did with the car after drag drop in it. Now, the next thing we want to do is create a folder structure here. And we could do so by right-clicking and hitting new folder or simply click the small folder button. For example, we want to name this one media. And now we take our beach dot mp4 head control car. Then drag drop this into our media and you'll see that both of those files will be placed inside this folder. If we'd like to rename, for example, a source or later on maybe a layer. We can do so anytime by marking it, hit an Enter and then writing, for example, Miami Beach. Hit Enter again to save the new name. And you'll see that it will also be changed here in the composition. Now, of course, we can also delete data just by hitting either delete or drag, drop it here into this little bin, or just Bye clicking this bin with the fire marked. Then you will see that if you click Delete again, the phi will be removed from our project sources. Now of course, later on when you are really working in big compositions with a lot of data, a lot of sources. Then you might want to use this search bar and quickly find your data. Like for example, this car dot mp4 source simply by typing car here in the search bar. But I think that's very intuitive to use. So no need to further explain it. Of course, the search bar can be fun. For example, here, considering the project data as well as here, you can search for effects and presets, but we'll talk about that later on. One more thing we could maybe consider is if certain locations and directories change locally on your PC or laptop so that After Effects won't be able to find your sources anymore. For example, if we go back here in this current composition, it might be that after Effects won't show up this little car accident. But if the video has changed its directory, then there will be a very colorful image stating that after effects cannot find your file. And you can relocate this file by clicking the car dot mp4 source data and right-clicking replace footage with fire. And then you will find new location of your car accident, mark the Source, click Import. And afterwards, After Effects will change the source data and go back to the image you want to see. I think that's enough for this left part. We've talked about the most important things the effect controls we will consider later on. They play a big part in this course. But for now, the most important thing was to talk about this project area. You know how to create folders, you know how to import sources. So we are ready to go and speak about this preview area and will do so in the next video. 7. User interface overview: Preview area: In this video, we'll speak about the preview area, and therefore, I'd like to, first of all, switch back to our welcome composition where we have some more layers. And the first thing we want to talk about is the possibility to either work in your composition as you see here. Or if you, for example, a double-click on this background area, you'll see that a new drop-down will open up here. And now we're really working only in the layer. This might be useful if you are working in a very, very big composition with a lot of layers, then you might want to start changing the layer itself given after effects. Some less work to do for now. And if you, for example, adjust this mask and right now you're happy with it, how you produce it in this layer. Then you can switch back to the composition and you'll see that the adjustments will be overwritten here in this complex composition, like you have done so in the layer. So you can either open up the composition or work in different layers. And if you're working in a layer, you could also apply some more effects. But that's what we're going to see later when we are, for example, talking about the Roto Brush function. So I think that's enough to talk about for these, these top options here. What we're going to do now is talk about the most relevant things we see here at the bottom. While you already know that here with this percentage mark, you can change the view. The same effect applies if you're switching with your mouse wheel. Or of course you could go here and click view, zoom in and zoom out. Next in line are the options to show grid and other helping elements. So we click on here and for example, activate the tidal action safe. Then we'll see that here there are some small marks. For example, if you want to adjust your text right to the center, horizontally off your composition, then of course, these two red dots here mark the center of the text and this small line here will mark your center horizontally in the composition. And the same of course, will apply to this slide here, which will mark the vertical center. And here you have some other smaller helping elements. For example, if you want to adjust some elements on the left and on the right, then you could just turn on the title and action safe to have some helping elements. You could also apply the proportional grid if you want to give your composition some elements of the same size and in the same position, then you might want to use this grid and you could also get that one. More details. If you click on the grid check mark here. Also, you could take rulers and apply those that you have some helping numbers here. But to be honest, most of the time, I'm only using the tidal action safe to adjust my text elements. So that might be very useful to apply at some time in your composition. For now, we don't need that anymore. And the next thing we want to talk about here is this Toggle Masks, which this will simply turn on and off the border lines of your mask. Like for example, if I click here right now, of course the mask itself will still be active. If we check it out here. Activated our first mass for demonstration purposes, but our second mask, of course, is still active. The only thing that has changed is that the board has won't show anymore if we click this button. And this might be useful if we are working in a very big composition with a lot of mask, a lot of layers than sometimes those masks borders might disturb the view so you could deactivated. But of course still the mask itself will play an active role. Next thing to talk about is this preview time switch clicking on there you could go and jump to any given point in time in your composition. Of course, in this composition right now, there is no movement at all. So we might want to check this one out in the car composition. And if I click here, and for example, fly two or 3 second mark, click Okay, then you'll see that of course, the marker here in time will fly to that point in time and our composition, the preview, will also change to the point of three seconds and nine frames. On the right side of this one, we find the option to take a snapshot. To be honest, I have never used this option, but I might think of the only use case, which is if you want to create a loop video like for example on TikTok or an Instagram, which will always repeat itself, then you want to make sure that your first frame will be exactly the same as your last frame. So you might want to flight to your first frame. Click on this Take Snapshot option. You will hear the sound, which means that after Effects will save this frame in its cache. And now you could go jump to your last frame of the composition and click on this eye with your left mouse button pressed. So the snapshot will be shown. And if you let go your left mouse button, then you could compare both pictures. And in this case, of course, they are the same. So to maybe show it a little bit better, we jump right in the middle of this composition. If I left-click on this right now, leave my left mouse button pressed, then you'll see. My very first frame that I have saved in the snapshot. Of course, it looks different than the one here in the middle. So if you might want to create a loop video, you could check out this way if your first and last frame are exactly the same, so that the video could be played endlessly without anyone noticing where it originally started and ended. The next thing we want to talk about is this resolution factor here. Right now we are working in full resolution, meaning that our preview will really show up in best quality. While of course, we might want to work a little bit faster inside our composition. So we can change this one, for example, to quarter resolution. And this will really only influenced the preview and doesn't have any effect on the final rendered video there we can of course, change that one back to full resolution. And we could also make these changes here inside our composition settings. Either with opening the shortcut Control K, or just click on Composition composition Settings. And you'll find the resolution right here. As all the settings inside our composition settings. They might be changed at any time. So we could go back here, click on full resolution, and it will be applied to this menu here as well. If you're working in a huge composition, of course, this might be useful to switch, for example, to quarter resolutions simply to get your previews a lot faster. But the disadvantage, of course, is that you'll lose some detail inside your preview area. The next thing we want to talk about is this toggle switch for the transparency. Therefore, I'll go back to our welcome composition. And you'll see that this black area originally is not created by a really black solid, but it's originally transparent. And therefore, if I turn on the transparency, then you'll see that it won't be shown in black anymore, but it will be shown in sort of a transparent mode. And this might be useful to check out, for example, later in this course when we will create a T-shirt design. Then of course, what we want to do is we want to write something like We love Bitcoin or wherever we are going to create this area, we don't want to use and create an a black solid, but of course we want to put this on a gray t-shirt, on a black t-shirt, on a brown T-shirt. So we want to really make sure that we have transparent areas. And what we also need to do in case we don't want this to be rendered in black, we need to change our color settings in the Render adjustments, but we'll check that out later on. I think for now, it's enough to know that you can just turn on the transparency here by clicking this small button. For now, we don't want to talk about the camera settings right here, as they will be part of our 3D options, which we'll talk about later on in this course. And I think the only necessary thing we could maybe consider right now in this preview area is this small option here to change the exposure. If you're working in a very dark composition and you might want to enlighten the areas, then you could give this one a little bit more of exposure so that for example, if we're working in 3D, some layers will be hidden behind other layers, then we want to see the effect better exposure. So we could apply these settings here. And that is also just an adjustment for the preview area which won't have any effect on the finery rendered composition. But for now, I'll just go in there and give this one, get this one back to 0. And I think you now know the most important options here inside this preview area, so we can finish off this video. And the next thing we will talk about is this right area here. So we'll see again in the next video. 8. User interface overview: Right side Info and Audio: Alright, let's continue and now talk about this right area here in After Effects. And this area might have a very individual look depending on how you like your workflow to be in After Effects. What I'm always doing is click on here and activate the essential graphics. Meaning that info, audio preview, effects and presets align paragraph tracker, content aware, fill em, the character categories will be shown here. But of course, you can activate or deactivate any specific category at any point in time by coming up and clicking Window. And for example, clicking here on character. By first clicking it, it will show up this character category and by now click in this one again. The character category will now be hidden here from this right side. But now I want to bring it back. Before we start to speak about all those specific categories. You can of course also choose a different preset. Like for example, only show the motion tracking categories. Then you will only show info, preview and tracker as well as content aware fill here on this right side. But as I already said, I'd like to work with the essential graphics. So those would be the ones that we will consider in the next few minutes. The first thing we want to talk about is that of course, you can drag, drop your single categories and rearrange them like for example, this info category. Simply click your left mouse button and then you can, for example, rearrange this info box and bring it back to the bottom, or bring it back with your left mouse button clicked to the top. Of course, you can also right-click and close the panel and bring it back at any point in time with clicking on window and coming up. Bring the info again, left mouse button clicked and bring it back on top. But let's talk about what the info will show for us. And in this case, on the left, you'll find the color settings. And on the right side you will find the positional settings. If I come over into my preview area and go, for example, to the right side of my composition with the mouse. Then of course the x value will be very close to 1920 as this is our composition size in x. And if I come back here to the bottom, then it will be close in the y. Well, you 21080 as this is our y size of the composition. And you'll see that if get to come over, over our hour like purple layer, then we'll see that the R, G B values are now in the red channel, 57 out of 255. In the green channel, 58 out of 255 N in the blue channel, 83 out of 255, the single-channel colors will be edit up, meaning that if we, for example, create a new layer with red, well you 255, green value 255, and blue value to earn 55, then this layer will be white. Well, of course, for example, if we put all the channel values to 0, then we are working in black space. We are, for example, working in corporate design and you have one color that will always be repeated in different compositions and different layers than your first possibility might be. To just remember the settings we have chosen here, like for example, red, 57, green, and blue, a T3. Or what you can also do is come up and create a new layer, new solid. And now click this picker tool. And you could just simply come into your preview area. Click on the purple area here, and the color will be chosen like exactly the same. And you'll see here red, 57 again, green, and blue 83. If we now change, for example, are blue value here, then you'll see that the final solid will be much more bluish and it will come up, for example, to the red channel. And we switch this one up, then of course, the solid will get more and more reddish. I think that's clear for this step right now. So we cancel creating a new solid. And we have finished talking about the information box here. And what we want to do now is open up our audio box and there is no audio data in this composition will come over to our car composition. And now with this one marked, you will see that I could, for example, switch up the volume of this audio, of this layer here. And I could even change the single channels left and right if you'd only like to turn up the volume, for example, of your left channel if you are listening with earphones or you want to create an effect like flying from the left to the right. And you could of course, also animate those settings, will speak about animations and keyframes later on. But for now I think it's enough to know that you can change the left channel as well as the red channel. And of course, here in the middle, you can change the single channels both at the same time. And you can even click on here and write the number you'd like to have for the volume of your layer in consideration. I think that's enough for the audio box. And the next thing we want to talk about is the preview box. 9. User interface overview: Right side Preview: Alright, so in this segment we'll quickly get to know the preview category. And this category can also, of course be found here on the right side of your After Effects workspace. And talking about the Preview, I have imported another file, another source, in this case it's a drone shot from Mexico. And what she can do now in this preview segment is that you have different shortcuts. And these shortcuts can be mapped to different adjustments of how you want your preview to be played or how you want to hear your preview. In this case, we have the spacebar shortcut. And this shortcut will include both our video as well as our audio in our preview. Before talking about the range and player from options, we quickly come down here and see that this little bracket will be our so-called workspace or work area. And then here on top, we have the option with a navigator to zoom in or zoom out. For example, here towards our work area. Now, this point in time is our current time indicator. And yes, you will see here, the indicator right now is outside of our work area. And if we come back here and select the range to be previewed, is right now the work area extended by current time. Meaning that if I use the shortcut Space-bar right now, you will see that the preview, we'll start at this current point in time, although the point itself is outside of our work area. And you'll see here these little green lines. Those are the indicators of our range that is currently already rendered or saved in the casual After Effects before previewing the final video. By the way, it might be that right now I'm lagging a little bit because I'm pushing After Effects and my PC to its limit. Talking and recording, we're rendering a fork, a video. So please excuse me for that, but I hope that you will still hear me. So coming back here to this range, as I already said, the work area extended by current time just means that the preview, we'll start at the current time indicator, although this one might be outside of our work area. Now, if we come back here to the range and simply select the work area and we hit the spacebar again. Then you'll see that our first frame to be previewed right now is inside the work area. And you'll see the green line is more and more getting built up. If the whole work area has been pre-rendered, then after Effects will begin to play your video, and it will begin from your current timestamp. And the video will be played all over again and again. So the work area will be previewed all over again and again. And this can be changed by clicking this little button here. Then you have the option to change from a loop to only play your preview area once. Now we have some more options to select from. Of course, we could decide to not play it from our current time, but to play it from the beginning of our range. And here at the bottom, we can decide to play in different frame rates as well as skip some single frames. And this means that for example, a hero, my original frame rate is 59 comma 94 frames per second, meaning that 1 second of video material is composed of 59 single images. And if I change the frame rate to be previewed to 15, this will mean that my video preview will slow down by the factor of about four, because right now only 15 frames, we'll make up for 1 second of video material in the preview, where originally we had 59 frames per seconds or 1 second will be enlarged to four seconds in the preview. Here with the skip option, we could, for example, decide to skip two frames and only play every third frame. This means that right now from 59 frames per second, we only would like to play every third frame and therefore have a preview video of about 20 frames per second. And this will of course, make it a little simpler for After Effects to render a little faster. Here in this resolution settings, we could leave this with auto, or we decide to go with quarter quality. And this will of course as well, make After Effects preview our video a little faster. So that's enough for all these different options we have inside our preview category. Of course, there are different shortcuts. The most important ones are the spacebar, which is standard preview for video as well as audio. And then we have the numpad point, and this will only preview our audio. Will also see about that later on. For example, in the flyby titles are other sequences of this course. But for now, I think we can terminate this video of the preview category. And the next video will be about the effects and presets. 10. User interface overview: Right side Effects, Paragraph and Character: Next in line is the effects and presets section. And this section will basically give the same options as we can find them here under effects. For example, if we have this layer selected and we could apply any effect as we've seen with Stylize and Glow and will find the same effect here on the right side. Stylize and Glow. And we could grab this effect and either let go directly on top of the preview area or with our layer selected, let go there and you'll see that the glow effect will be applied to this layer. And we are back here in our effect controls on the left side together with our project settings. Now of course, we can also search for effects here like for example, the glow effect and apply it directly after having searched for those effects. That's basically the same as the search bar here in the project area, and the search bar here at the bottom. So wherever you find the search bar, you can of course, search for effects project data, or for example, different layers here. But now we want to get rid of this low effect again, press Delete. And that's enough, I think for this effects and presets here on the right. And next in line is the line segment. Here. To explain a little better, I'll come back to our welcome composition. And with my welcome text selected, I could for example, arrange these texts to the left of our composition and you'll see the effect or arrange it to the right, arrange it horizontally to its center. This will basically bring up the same effect as I did before with my title and action safe and just pushing the two red dots in the middle, horizontally in the center. And then there is of course, the same effect for aligning vertically. Meaning we can align on top, at the bottom or in the center. Of course, we can not only align texts layers, but for example, with our backgrounds solid selected. Bringing it up maybe here to the upper right corner. Then we could also click to align vertically. And then we'll have the same effect applied to this solid enough for the alignment category. Next would be to talk about the paragraph category. I think you might be familiar with those options because they can be found in any standard text editor. But let's quickly browse through them. For example, with our welcome texts layer, I want to double-click inside this layer. Hit Enter to create a new line and maybe right, welcome to this course. Course. And what we can do now, instead of aligning the text to the left, we could align it to centre or maybe right align the text and you'll see that the effects are applied. I think the other options won't need to be explained right now. Most important thing is that you can of course, a line, a text centered to the left or to the right. And now let's talk about the character category. And of course, with our text layer selected, we could change the font-family, for example, to Times New Roman regular. You can change the way you want to use the font-family by selecting different font styles, for example, the alternate or the bold italic. Also some options you might know from your text editor. You can change the font size. Here you can select the leading of your texts. If you look at the second line right now, it's selected to auto. But if we change it, for example, to 500 pixels, then we have some more space between the single lines. And of course, we could also lower that space to maybe 100 pixels. Then you'll see that there is close to no space between the first, the second, and any other line you want to create in your text. Selecting Auto here just means that depending on the way you want your font size to be, this will also determine the leading size. Then we have some more options here. This color will determine the color of your text. So for example, if we switch this to read it, Okay, you will see the textbook we read. And if we click on here, this will be your color of the stroke. So for example, selecting a wide stroke and enabling the stroke to be visible by enlarging this number here. And you'll see that a white stroke will show up beside your red fill color. Then you have the option like now to select this stroke over the Fill. That means that the stroke will have first priority. If we go to the option failover stroke, then of course, there will be a lot more red areas. The fill color will be the first priority. If we enlarge this pixel number, then of course the stroke will get bigger and bigger. We have some more options here. Of course, we could make it a little more bold as well as typing it in Italia IQ. But I think all those options, you know from your text editor and won't need to be discussed any further right now. As well as the tracker and the Content Aware Fill categories here because those will play a big part in this course later on when, for example, we want to track objects in 3D space as well as content aware of filling and deleting objects from existing scenes. So for now, I think we can check mark this right area. And next thing we want to talk about is this bottom area with the composition settings, with the different layers, all the options you have here, as well as a quick browse through the timeline. While I've already explained some things concerning that one to you, like for example, the work area, as well as the option to zoom in and out with this top bar here. But we'll see about that in the next video. So starting off with this left bottom area in the next one. 11. User interface overview: Composition area Part 1: Stay strong. We are really close to finishing this theoretical basis part now we only need to consider the bottom area here before we really get into practical examples, start working with texts and create our first project example, or sort of cinematic flyby title secrets. But for now, let's begin and start talking about this bottom-left area here. Of course, again, we have a search bar where we can not only search for layers like for example, this background layer, but we could also search for single effects, or for example, with our welcome texts layer selected. Go for signal properties like for example, the position. If we leave all three layers unselected and type again, another property than this property will open up in every layer. How to work with properties, how to select them very quickly, and stuff like that will also be part of this course later on. But for now, I just want to quickly explain to you how you could use the search bar to go for properties, layers, or other things you want to find in your composition area. Now you also have the option to adjust our current time mark by just clicking and dragging this one, for example, to the right. Then you'll see that the current time mark will jump to this place, as well as the possibility to control click inside this area to change from a view depending on seconds to a view depending on frames. And you'll see that for example here, this view has changed as well. So for example, 150 frames in this case, equals the mark of six seconds as we are working with 25 frames per second, control-click in to bring this one back to the second view. And what we want to talk about now is this symbol here, which n or disables the video view of your selected layer. So for example, if I switched off with this layer, then you'll see that the text will disappear from the composition. Of course, the same applies to all different layers, like for example, the background layer. And if you'd work with layers that include audio material, like for example here in our car composition, the Carnot MP4 source. Then in this symbol, we be able to turn on and off our audio signal. So in this case, the car lot MP4 will be displayed in video, but the audio material would not be included in that composition. Coming back to our welcome composition, the next thing we want to talk about is this solo button. Clicking on that one will really just solo this single layer and this layer will be displayed. But of course, you can also enable other solar layers so that working with a lot of compositions and you might want to focus on two or three layers only. There's no need to turn off all the other layers, but you could also solo just those two or three layers you want to consider when you are done. For example, working with one layer and you want to make sure that this layer won't get modified anymore accidentally by just clicking on it without having the purpose to do so, then you could just turn on the lock for that layer, like for example, in this welcome to this course layer. And now you won't be able to click on that layer and modify it any more. Those are the basic four buttons you see here. Turning off the video, turning off the sound, soloing a single layer as well as lock-in a single layer. In the next column we have a label which is then followed up by a simple enumeration of the single layers. The layer name, again can of course be renamed at anytime just by hitting the enter button and typing and new name. And this not only applies to your composition area, but also works the same way here for anything you'd like to rename in the project data. Now of course, these columns again, can be modified by right-clicking and hitting columns. For example, de-selecting the label of view. Then you'll see that those labels won't be displayed anymore. Here in our composition area. Talking about the mode here, I don't want to really go into detail right now in this course simply because we'll talk about that. When, for example, a creating a Bitcoin t-shirt design. By what I can show you. For example, with this welcome part two texts. If we switch, switch the mode from a normal mode to, for example, overlay, that you will see that the text soul of blends into our background. And with the mode, we have a lot of different options to let work together. For example, this text with anything that's laying behind in our composition. To give another quick example of how you might want to use these different modes is that we could introduce very structured texture image and combine our texts layer with the structure of their texture by simply putting the texture behind this text layer and then selecting a mode to combine the structure of that layer with the content of our texts. But again, for that, we'll see later on when we create, for example, our Bitcoin t-shirt design. For now, I want to skip talking about the Track Matte, as this will be better explained later on when we have a direct example. The only thing we might want to consider in this view here is speaking about the parent and linking of different layers. And if I, for example, take my welcome to this course layer and selecting this pick whip tool and pick whip this layer to the first text layer. Then what will happen is that we now have a sort of parent-child relationship where any change that is made to our welcome power to layer will also directly impact our welcome to this course layer. So the welcome part two layers is the parent, Well, welcome to this course layer. As a child still works individually so you can still apply any changes there. These changes won't affect the welcome part two layer. While any changes made on that layer will directly influence the child layer. A similar relation exists, for example, between your head and your eyes. If you move your head to the left or the right, these positional changes will of course, directly influence the position of your eyes while the ice itself can sort of still individually move or blink. Now, I think enough of this view here. If I turn on the toggle switch mode, then you'll see that we have some more options to talk about in this composition area. And that's what we'll do in the next video. 12. User interface overview: Composition area Part 2: So the first thing we want to talk about here is this little elephant hiding behind a wall and an after effects. This is the so-called Shy switch. And this switch does, well, that was really difficult to pronounce for me as a German. But okay, well this switch does, is, if you turn it on, for example, in this welcome to this course layer, then you see that the elephant is now hiding behind the wall, but nothing has really happened. And this is because you need to activate this Shy switch in general for our composition settings. If we do so, then we'll see that this layer is now hidden in our composition area. The effect of this is that if you are, for example, working in a lot of different layers and you're already satisfied with how you have arranged your background or how you have arranged your music, then you could toggle the Shy switch on for those layers and hide them so that they won't disturb you anymore in your composition work. Switching off this general Shy button will of course, bring back all the different layers inside of your composition area. Independent of whether this little elephant here is sitting right on the wall or hides behind the wall. But anyways, this is sort of a way to get a better structure inside your composition area. If you're working with a lot of different layers and you want to arrange yourself a little bit better and make it a little more clear. Or for example, if you are delivering a project to a client of yours and you want to allow your client, or make it easier for your client to only access those areas inside the composition that he should be able to modify it, then you could shut those other layers and make them invisible. Now we want to skip this little button here, which allows us to collapse transformations. Simply because this will play a role in the segment where it's all about creating our own 3D mobile phone out of a 2D videos. So you'll see this button in practice there. Next thing we want to consider is this little fx button here. Right now. It is disabled as there is not a single effect applied to any of these layers. But if we take our welcome to this course texts for example, and again apply the glow effect. Then you will see that if I turn up this radius a little bit to see a little better, that we could disable all effects of this layer by simply disabling this fx switch here. And we have another FX switch here which allows to disable or enable any individual effect about turning this button here will really have an effect on all effects applied to this layer because they are enabled if turning on or off. This fx, which here, the next button we want to consider is this little motion blur switch. And if we turn this one on, for example, in our text layer, then you'll see that it gets directly switched on as well for our general composition. If we switch to this one off right here, it has the same effect as with our Shy button here. So then it doesn't matter anymore if you have motion blur activated or deactivated for every individual layer, if the motion effect is generally disabled, and of course, a single layer in our composition will have motion blur effect. But what the motion bureau does in particular will be shown in the next segment when we create our flyby tight as a sequence. So for now, I'll just leave this as it is. This little switch here sort of marks our adjustment layers inside the composition. So far in this course, we haven't really talked about adjustment layers, but right now, I'll quickly show you what they can do for us by creating a layer, new adjustment layer. And you'll see this new layer here marked with the adjustment layers symbol. And if we now apply an effect to this empty layer here, like for example, Effect, color correction, exposure. And now we increase this value here. Then you'll see that all layers of our composition have been brightened up. And that's because every effect we apply to our adjustment layer will have an impact on all the layers below this adjustment layer. If we now take the adjustment layer and put it below our text area, then you'll see that this welcome part two texts now is no more longer brightened up. If we bring it back one more layer, then you'll see this text here also no longer is brightened up. But in general, if you want to apply an effect to all layers laying below in the composition, then there's no need to apply this effect individually to all layers, but you can create a new adjustment layer and make some general adjustments inside this layer. Last but not least, we have this little cube symbol which enables our 3D layer. So if I generally turn off this adjustment layer for a second to make it better visible, then we could grab our welcome to this course text and enable the 3D switch. And what this will do, it will give us an additional position value. We don't only have our x position and y position, but here in blue, you have your Z position. So we work in 3D space later on. But I can show you here with this text marked, if you click on P, one shortcut to bring up the position value, you see that we have an x value of y. Well you, and now also a zed value. To bring this one up and away from our point of view. We could also switch this active camera, for example, to the left to see that changes in that area were really have an impact on where this text layer is lying in 3D space. So that's it for all these single symbols. Of course, here, at the very bottom we have some different display options. Like for example, you could hide all these small buttons here or bring up the mode or Track Matte like we have talked about before. And here you have some more detailed options. Like for example, the in and out point, the duration of every single layer, as well as the stretching factors. But I'd like to keep it a little bit more simple and maybe just toggle this switches to have different views and leave my timeline a little bit larger to have more possibilities to work inside there. And as already mentioned, this timeline is our last segment of this bass part. And therefore we see again in the next video. 13. User interface overview: Timeline: Alright, so in this last video, we'll finish our theoretical base part of the Adobe After Effects course. And we want to now consider everything that's going on here on the bottom right, inside our timeline area. You already know that of course, clicking here on the left of your work area, you can enlarge the work area to the left side of bringing it back to its original point. And you're clicking on the right, you can of course, adjust the bracket on the right side of the work area. And if you click here on the middle and lift your left mouse button, click it, then you can change the work area total. Here on top, you have the possibility to zoom in from the left side and here on the right, you can, of course, zoom in from the right side of your work area or of your composition. And what you can also do to set your work area is, for example, going here and clicking the button B, then this will mark the beginning of your work area. And if you want to mark the ending of your work area, you might want to click the button n. What we can also do is adjust our composition to the current work area. And this will be done by right-clicking here. And then trim comp to work area. And now you'll see we have a new work area. And this area is now our total composition. And if we check this out in our composition settings, you'll see that what has been the work area right now is the total composition. So the work area before was four seconds and 29 frames long, which is now the length of this composition. And the starting point of the work area before was at second one and frame 11. And this will now mark the start time code of this composition. If I want to undo this, IF always, the possibility to click Control Z to undo my last step or go to edit, undo time change. In this case. You'll see that if I enlarge this bracket here on top, that now my composition is back to where it has been and has a length of about 11 seconds. Now you also have the possibility to zoom in and zoom out with these little mountains here on the button. Either by taking the control and dragging it, for example, to the right side until it on the very right. We see at frame per frame or just clicking the mountains, for example, clicking on the bigger mountains will zoom in for one step and clicking on the smallest mountains. Of course, we'll zoom out again. What might also be useful is creating some timestamps or a marker bins. You can either do so by dragging them into your composition. For example, if you want to mark your 4 second, then you drag this marker towards this position. Or what you could also do with the current time, aka being at about six seconds and ten frames, you could just click on here and the marker will be created at this point in time. And you could easily jump right there to this marker by clicking onto this point here or by right-clicking the marker and then saying go to marker. This might of course be useful to remember relevant points inside of your composition. But for now I want to delete those markers again, and I do so by right-clicking and either deleting this individual marker or in this case, I want to delete all my markers. So I'll just click on here and the markers have been deleted. One last thing we'll talk about at this point in time is the display of each single layer. Right now we see all the layers are displayed at this point in time. But of course, if we take our welcome to this course text and we grab our ending point and pull it before our current point in time. Of course, this layer will end. It's displayed before our current point in time and therefore no longer be displayed. What can also be done to split a layer at the current point in time is to use the shortcut Control Shift D and width are welcome to this course, layer selected. You'll see that at this point in time the layout will be split. With this being said, I think we can now really finished this theoretical part of our Adobe After Effects course. You are ready to go with your first practical example. You now know where to find the basic functions, how to use the project area, import data, as well as how to use the composition area. So in the next segments, we'll speak about texts. And at the end of the next segment, we will create our very first cinematic flyby title sequence. So stick around and we're going to see again in the next video. 14. Create a text: Basic and transformation options: Alright, so this segment will be all about texts. We were learning the basic transformation options, as well as creating our very first animations using keyframes. At the end of this segment, we want to create a flyby title sequence, which will look somewhere similar to this. Alright, so let's get started. Throw everything away we've created here and start from scratch by creating a new project, file, new, New Project. And we want to click New Composition. We want to name this one basic text and leave the preset with HDTV 1025 frames per second. And a duration of ten seconds should be enough for this one. So we hit OK. And of course we want to start with a new text. We can either click here on the Horizontal Type Tool or we just hit Control T, so that a new text will be created. When we click here in this preview area, what we want to write maybe is just example. And I will turn on the full resolution for this one. Won't be too difficult to render out. And we go here into the character settings and we increase the size of this text so that you'll see it better. And we can position this either by hitting and drag drop in this one, or we can click here on Align. And for example, align it horizontally as well as vertically. Now, we want to go through some basic character and paragraph settings. I want to make this one centered, which won't be visible a lot in this case. But if we have more than one line, we want this to be in the center and we have our character settings. Now, for this one, I'll choose RER and make it bold. And now we have our text size here we have set the tracking for this one to be at 0, which means that it will be adjusted to our text size in a normal way. If we want to increase this one, this will be part of our project with the flyby title sequence, you'll see that the text right now will be enlarged to both sides. Whereas if the program would be aligned to the left, and we would now do the same trick again and increase the tracking. Then you'll see that the effect will only take place to the right. Of course we want this to be centered, so that's why I choose Paragraph and center the text. Bring back the Align and align this one horizontally. And now we have some other options here. In this case, we don't even want to use the stroke, so we're just fine with the fill color and make it white. Later on we'll be using a gradient to make this text look a lot better. But for now, we're okay with the vertex here on this black background. What we want to be doing now is talking about the basic transformation options. You'll find those if we see our text layer here on the bottom left in our composition, then we can open up the text and transform options. If we had this arrow and open up the Transform options by clicking this small arrow here again. Now we see options like anchor, point, position, scale, rotation, and opacity. And those options are not dependent or visible only in text layers, but the basic transformation options will be there for every layer. Meaning if you will create a new solid, you can also pose, position this solid of course, or scaling it up or down. Now, we might begin with the anchor point. This is the little cross you see here. And this cross determines from where to do your adjustments. What I mean by this is right now the anchor point is here on the bottom, in the middle of this text. Now, if I scale up this text, you'll see that starting from the anchor point, that text will scale up. Only. Going up. If I position this anchor point, move it, for example, to the left or right, or here as you'll see, we'll position the cross right into the center of our text. And if I scale it up again, now, you'll see that the scale really starts from our anchor point. Now we have another option to position the text itself. And that of course, is the position. Right now as we are working in 2D space, we have our exposition, as well as our y position. Of course, you can always just click into those positions, type any number you like, or you will grab the text and just position it where you want to. Now the scale I've already talked about, we can scale this text up or down. And we can of course, also unlock the proportions, meaning that we can scale in x as well as y, which will, which will look terrible. But of course, that's possible as well. For now, I will lock those positions together again, bring it back to 100. And I'll quickly show you that you can also of course, a rotate the text to the right, to the left. Here. This little 0 means that we haven't done a circulation. But right now, if we circulated more than 360 degrees, of course this will turn to A1. Now, you have seen every option apart from the opacity and that of course, can bring down the opacity of the texts from 100 to 0 per cent. So right now, you know the basic options and what we'd be talking about next is animating those options to create our very first moving text. 15. Create a text: Getting to know keyframes: As already announced in the last video, in this one, we want to use our very first keyframes to start animating and moving this example text. Before I begin to do so, I want to bring back my rotation to 0 degrees. And now we want to focus on the position of x and y data. Right now you see we are at mark 0, so 0 seconds, 0 frames. And what we want to do now is click on this little stopwatch here, that a very first keyframe of our positional data is created in our current point in time. If I go forward now for example, to the 1 second mark and start moving the position to the right. Then you'll see that another keyframe will be created. And in this preview area, we can see the direction that this text will do over time. And if I bring back my work area by either taken it here and bringing it to the 1 second mark, or by clicking n at our current point in time so that this will mark the end of the work area. And now I click Space-bar to see the movement. Then you can see that the text starts to move from left to right according to our both keyframe data. In this data here at 0 we have an x value of 966 and a y value of 470. And this y value is still the same here, so that there's no movement in y space while the x value has changed to 1600, so that the texts will start moving from left to right. So that's basically how to use keyframes. And now what we want to do next is start animating our text a little differently. Starting here outside of our preview area. Then bringing the texts in quiet fast, slowing down here inside this area, and disappearing quite fast again to the right side at the end. So first of all, I want to enlarge this maybe to two seconds for my work area. And now I want to mark both of my keyframes and hit delete so that I start from scratch again and you see the movement has been deleted. At the beginning. I want to take my position at x data now, move it to the left. And this will go very slowly. You can fastness one up if you hit the Shift key while doing so, then you'll see the movement will be a lot faster. And this works not only for x value, y value, but for every where you, you want to choose, if you hit Shift that you can move a little faster in those values. So starting from here outside of my area, I want to again click this stopwatch to create my very first keyframe at our 0. Now we move forward maybe about ten frames. You can either see this here, ten frames or here. And now I want to bring the text In. Hit Shift again. Maybe we stop here that we want to stay inside our composition for maybe about 1 second. Here should be fine. And I want to move a little bit to the right. Maybe here and now, another ten frames forward. We want to leave our preview area and move right outside to the right. Now if I play this one out, you'll see our text flies and pretty fast, then slows down. And at the end flies out very fast again. Now it might be that in your case, the text does a little bounce-back effect right here. Because After Effects wants to interpret this one as kind of an intelligent fly in. And if it flies and very fast and then suddenly slows down, then it might be that after Effects prefers to interpret this one as a little bounced back before, then moving to the right again. And this might be because if we right-click, for example, this keyframe, check out the keyframe interpolation. Then here, this spatial interpolation might be auto best year or it might be linear. In this case here it's auto bezier and still moves from left to right without a bounce-back effect. But I want to show you the difference between auto bezier and linear in another example, which might cause differences. And therefore, I will delete all those keyframes again. And now we want to create a triangular move from the bottom-left to the top, to the bottom right. We start maybe without text here. Hit on the stopwatch, go to the 1 second mark. Bring our texts right to the top center. And then moving to the bottom right. And what you'll see now from the movement of this text is that after effects starts to create an intelligent way of directional movement. So this is not quite linear, but here sort of a parabolic move. And this is because the auto bezier interpolation is used. And of course this is differently. If I click on this keyframe here. Keyframe interpolation, spatial interpolation, and choose linear. And if I add okay, Now, then what you'll see is, right now, the movement will be exactly linear as we did with our keyframes. So this might cause some differences depending on what is your setting. The standard setting for this one is to use auto bezier interpolation, which is in most of the cases, the more intelligent choice. So for now we want to stick with this one, but if there is a little bounce back, then it might be because you have also chosen to auto bezier are some other methods of interpolation. So just for explanation, in this case, right now, I'll hit Control Z to undo what I showed you last. And we want to bring back our texts movement like this. Flying in, slowing down and then flying out. So that's it for the start of learning how to use key frames. And in the next video, we'll start adding some more keyframes to other properties of our text. And what we also want to add in the next video is a motion blur effect to make this movement look a little better and therefore, see you again in the next video. 16. Create a text: More keyframes and motion blur: In this short video, we want to add three more things to our example text. First of all, I'd like to animate another property here of our transform options. Secondly, I'd like to also animate a character option of our texts. And lastly, I would like to add motion blur to our text. So starting off with another property to be animated. And what we'd like to do is we want to fit this text in, in the moment it flies in from the left. And we want to let it fade out in the moment the text disappears to the right. So the right property of course, is the opacity. And we hit the stopwatch, make it a 100 per cent at this moment. Bring it back to the start. Make it 0, and get here to the third keyframe. And now we want to make this also a 100% like in the last keyframe. And for that we have two options. We either quickly change this to a T or something to create the keyframe, bring it back to a 100 and we got another keyframe. Or if I delete this keyframe again, we could also just click here on the left to add another keyframe with the same amount as the key-frame before. And then we wanted to come to the end and bring this down to 0 again. And let's check out the animation right now. Takes us coming in, fading in and flowing out and fading out. Maybe we change this and bring it back a little more insight so that the texts will fly in before and then will be completely visible. Alright? By the way, you could also at anytime, just see the properties with keyframes. If you hit this text layer and hit the shortcut U, this will mean that only those properties, properties with keyframes will be shown you to show the keyframes. And by the way, you could also hit K to jump to the next relevant frame. In this case, the next frame with keyframes. Or you could hit the shortcut E J to go back to your last relevant frame. So this is nice for your navigation to make it a little easier to adjust your keyframes. Now what we also want to add is another animation of one of our character properties we see here on the right. For example, let's say we want to animate our tracking. So here we have no stopwatches, but what we can do is open up our text layer, open the text options, and click on animate, and now choose tracking. And you'll see that some options will pop up. And if we hit the stopwatch here on our tracking amount, and to make it a little more visible again, we hit our text layer, click you only open up those properties with keyframes. Then we'll see keyframes have been set and the trekking amount here is 0. And now we want to enlarge this trekking in the moment the text is visible here in the mid area. So maybe we start at 0 at this point, navigate to this point and make it, for example, let's say 50. Now, what we've done is when the texts has flown in, it will also enlarge it's tracking and then fly out and fade out at the same time. Now one more last thing we want to add in this short video is we want to bring in motion blur. Right now you see the text is flight and quiet fast, but still it's sharp the whole time. And the same effect here at the end, flying out quite fast, but still sharp at any time. So the solution is simple. We just hit this little motion bureau button for our texts. Makes sure that the motion blur effect is enabled for the whole composition. And what will happen is you can see here when the Texas flight and it gets unsharp because it's moving quite fast. So in this video, we've added three things. First of all, we've animated the opacity. Secondly, we've also animated one of our character properties. And thirdly, we've added motion blur to our text effect. Let's render this out and see what we've done looking quite good so far. And in the next video, we want to also add effects to our text. And therefore see you again in the next one. 17. Apply effects to the text and use the mask to create a simple background: In this lecture, we want to add two effects to our text layer. And also we want to add a little color into our background. So with our texts layer selected, we start off with effects, generate gradient ramp. Now, what will happen is we have our start color and an end color. In this case, it's black and white. And we have starting and end positions of the ramp. So here you can see this is our start position where the color black has its origin. And this is the position where the color white has its origin. And this moment ramp shape is a linear ramp, so it will blend from the bottom wide to the top black. If I bring this point into the middle, then you can see that more and more of our texts layer will be black or at least in a darker color. Also, if we switch this from linear ramp to radial ramp, and for example, I take this black color into our middle. Then you can see that right now, the black origin here is in the middle of our texts. Well, this wide area right now is here at the sides of this circle. So if I move this one out, then the white will disappear. And if I bring this One more and more into the middle, and you can see that it starts to get a lot brighter. So what I want to do now is first of all, I want to swap the colors that are brighter areas will be in the middle of this text. And then I'll choose the end color. Click on it and make it maybe a darker blue click. Okay, and now I want to bring the end color more and more out so that the text itself will be a little brighter. That looks like a nice little gradient we have added to our text. Now we want to do the same or at least also add a gradient to our background. So therefore, I will create two more layers. Layer, new solid. We'll name this one background, one. In the size of our composition. The color will make it. Also. Let's choose the same color as here, the end color of our gradients. So therefore, choose this picker tool, click inside this blue area. Hit Okay. And now we could either create another solid or we just hit Control D with the solid selected. And then we have duplication of our first background. Hit Enter, name this one background too, and open the solid settings and make it black. Of course, the texts layer should be on top. Then we have our background one and our background too. And what we want to do now is sort of blend this background one into our background too. And we'll do so by clicking on this mask tool here or by using the shortcut queue to make it active. And if we had Q again, you'll see that it will switch to a rounded rectangle tool hit Q again, it will be an elliptical mask. And in this way we can navigate through a lot of different shapes to use. And for now, we want to stick with the elliptical tool and with our back 11 layer selected, start here in this upper left corner, hit the left mouse button and let go here on the bottom right. And in this way, we've added our mask one to this background. So what you see here at the sites, of course, is the background to Layer. And now we want to sort of blend this background one a little smoother into our background to layer. And therefore will open up the mask options by hitting this little error. And maybe we start with the mask expansion. Now, if we make this a positive value, this will enlarge our mask. And if we make this a negative value, of course this will shrink our mask. So for now we want to shrink this a little, maybe sort of like this, and then bring the mask feather up so that it will look a lot smoother and blend our background one into our background to this is one way of how to create a gradient for the background shape. But of course, as always an After Effects, There's a lot of ways to get to your target. And we could have done the very same that we've done with our texts layer, meaning that no need to create two background layers, but with only one background layer, we choose Effect, Generate and add a gradient. Choose the start codon, maybe again, a dark blue. The end color will be black. And we make the ramp shape radial and bring the starting points here right to the middle. And then maybe bring the endpoint a little more to the outside. Some this way. Of course, we will also add a gradient to our background. I bought, I wanted to show you with the two layers, was how to start using masks. And of course, mask will also play a role later on in this course. So I think we've got all the tools ready to go to create our very first project example. This would be the flyby title sequence, and we will do so in the next video, and of course, also add a sound effect to go along with this flying effect of the text. So see you again in the next video. 18. Practical example: Create a Fly-By title sequence: So at the end of this section where it's all about texts, we want to realize our first project example, which will be the flyby title sequence. Just as a quick reminder, this is what we're going to create together. By the way, it might be that on the first preview the audio is a little offset, but that's just a little trouble inside of After Effects and won't affect or finally rendered video. Because of course, we have made sure that the audio is perfectly suited to offline texts effect. So for now, I'd like to invite you to maybe stop this video in a second and try to create this flyby title sequence by yourself. Because to be honest, you've already learned everything that's necessary to create this effect. You know how to put effect on the text layer. You know how to create this gradient background. And you also know how to use keyframes to, for example, animate the position data. Maybe as a little hint in advance, these texts layers you see here 3D layers, meaning that apart from the x and the y values. If I, for example, choose this now text layer and hit P to open the positional data. You see that there's also that value. And this value will make sure that we can fly sort of like towards our view and more and more away from our view. So what I've animated here is the zed value as well as the opacity. And then the second text in and the third text theaters Solve is just like a replication of the first text. So make sure that your first text is perfect. Sync it with the audio source that you'll find in the course materials. And then you can just reproduce, reproduce those texts and reposition them here in time. And you're ready with this fly by title sequence. So you either stop this video and we will see again later on, or we just continued together and open up a new empty project. So file new, new project. And we start of course, with a new composition. Name it flyby titles. Choose HDTV, 1025 frames per second, ten seconds, just as before and we click, Okay. And maybe this time we'll start with a background. So Layer, New Solid, name it BG. And the color doesn't really matter because what we're going to do is Effect, Generate and add a gradient just as before. So I'll quickly do that, make it dark blue here. Swap the colors. That's a little too light. Okay, make it radial and bring the blue to the middle and then move the black area a little more to the outside, just like this should be okay. Next in line, of course, we want to add a text. So what we're going to write is now make it a lot larger, like for example, 350. And we want to do it bold. Maybe even larger. Or let's check out with the largest word. Theaters and align this one horizontally as well as vertically. Okay, so make it a little smaller. Choose the paragraph, make it centered. And 320 should be okay, and we align it back to the center. Now, bring it back to now. As that's the texts that we're going to start with. And what we're going to add is just as with our background and other radiant gradient. So we click on Generate gradient and again make it radial. Swap the colors, make this one dark blue as well. And bring the white area to the middle of our text. And I'll take the origin of this end color and move it a little more to the outside so that the text will get a brighter. Maybe one more time. We want to check with the longest word, which will be theaters to see you. It's a little dark here on the outside. And then take the gradient, move the end color even more away from the center. And like this, it should be fine. What we could do is maybe also change the start color to a little light blue. Maybe like this. And now we can really finally get back to our texts, which will. In the first place B now, and we want to add another effect, which will be Effect Stylize glow. So let's first of all increase the radius. Sort of like this may be. Then decrease the intensity to about maybe 0.5. And let's play around with the threshold. And I think like this, it looks quite nice. So we are ready with the effects of this text. Let's see, before and after we can turn on and off this fx switch, this was all takes before. Then we added the ramp, the gradient, and then finally we added our glow effect. What we want to do now, of course, is to animate this flying in and out of our tech sequence. So therefore we need the positional data as well as the opacity in the first place. We want to turn on the 3D switch so that we have an additional positional data, which will be the z axis. And we want to open up our positional as well as our opacity data. We could either click this button and then open the Transform options. And we have the position and the opacity here. Or we can just use the shortcut P to open the position and then T to open the opacity or hit P for position, and then Shift T to add the opacity to our visible options here. Now we want to start off by bringing this z value to the negative so far that this text will come as close to us and leave the visible composition area. Therefore, we just hit our left mouse button and move it to the left. And this will cause a very slow movement. But if we hit the Shift button while doing so, it will go much, much faster. So use the Shift button and we'll see at this moment, the texts has left the visible area. So about 2660 should be fine for this positional data. Now we activate our stopwatch. Maybe move forward about, let's say eight frames. Bring it to about 0. Then we want to stay there for, let's say 2.5th to second. Bring it a little bit farther away from our view. Maybe to about, let's say 450. And then another eight frames later. This should disappear quite fast. So with the Shift button pressed again, we want this to move very far away from our view to maybe about 7,500 should be fine like this. And of course, we also want to add a change in opacity so that the text finally disappears when moving away from our view. Therefore, we can go to this moment about here and activate the stopwatch, meaning that all the moments before this keyframe, it will be 100% opacity. And then when it starts to move away from our view, we want this to decrease to 0. So if I let our work area end in this moment by hitting the shortcut N. And now play this out. This is what we created so far. And what do you see now is what I've mentioned before when speaking about the First Tee frames. And we see this little bounce-back effect. And this is caused by the Bezier interpolation. Now, I think it doesn't even look quite bad, but still we want this to move linear. So therefore, I choose this keyframe here, right-click Keyframe Interpolation, and choose the spatial interpolation to be linear. It okay? And the same effect could occur in this keyframe. So we hit right again, keyframe interpolation and the spatial interpolation should be linear. Hit, Okay, play this one again. We see that now this bounce-back effect has disappeared, or text arrives, flies in, slows down a little bit and then finally moves out quite fast. But remember, as you see here, this is not played in real time as it is just 15 frames per seconds. So the final animation will move a little faster. Nonetheless, what we want to add next is of course, our sound. Therefore, I'll go to the project data here, bring up my folder with the course materials and just drag and drop this swoosh audio source into our project and bring it into our composition maybe right below our text. Now, we open up the arrows here, see the audio data, and bring up the waveform here in this moment, this should be where our texts will fly in. So let's see where this moment is. I think probably in this frame. So let's bring back our view and move this maybe one frame to the right. Now let's hit the spacebar again. Because remember, the shortcut spacebar will include the video as well as audio preview. So let's see what we've created so far. Alright, so I think that fits quite well. And now what we want to do, taking this text, which will disappear at about this moment here. We want to let this layer and there, and therefore just grab it here and move it to this moment. And let the text layer and about where the keyframe Briggs this one to 0 opacity or a little later. Now, all we need to do is just take this text layer together with the sync audio material. Mark both layers by hitting Control and clicking on those layers. And then hitting Control D to duplicate those layers. Move them to the top. Double-click on this now to texts layer and right in. And then we want to open up our key framed properties by hitting you. And we want to also mark the second audio material and now take the first keyframes of our second text to be just about at the same moment with the keyframe of the ending area in the first text. Zoom out a little bit. Make or work area a little larger. Do this one more time. So take the second layer, duplicate them again, bring them to the top. Double-click on the new texts and read theaters. One are too much. Okay? And then again, hit you with our texts layer to bring up the keyframes and move this together with the sound at about this moment. And then we want a work area to end about here. And let's preview what we've created for this project as being our very first project example, I feel like this is looking quite good. You could ofcourse at other properties in your animation, like for example, the tracking like we've done before. Or maybe play around with the text size. So you are of course, free to play around and improve this animation even further. But for now, I think we can terminate this section about texts. And what we want to do next is render this animation and save a local file on our PC or laptop. When doing so, let's quickly speak about the best render settings in general, different workflows to render out your animations and videos. And also we want to quickly consider different file types that you can import into After Effects. So the next section will be about import and export in After Effects. 19. Export video sequence via After Effects: AVI container format: In this and the upcoming few videos, we'll learn a little bit more about import and export settings of after effects. Therefore, will stop just for a little while creating new projects and compositions. But what we want to consider now is how to render such a project or composition. I think that's a good point in time because we've just finished creating our very first project example. And now we would like to locally save this file to our hard drive to add this project, this composition to render queue, we have different options. The easiest one is to open composition, add to render queue, or to hit the shortcut Control M. But you could also go to File Export and click Add to Render Queue. Either way, a new tab will open and this flyby titles composition has been added to our Render Queue. So here we basically have three different options to consider. First of all, the Render Settings, then the output module, and the easiest one, output two. If I click here on output two, this will be just our location where we want our video to be saved. So you can just decide for any location hit by hand or safe and English. And when we then finally click on Render, this will be the location where you can find your rendered video. But now let's focus on the Output Module and the Render Settings. Maybe we start with the output module, which is now set to lossless. This means that the format to be chosen is AVI. And AVI stands for audio, video interleave, and is sort of a container format developed by Microsoft in the 1890s. This format has some advantages, but also some disadvantages. The biggest disadvantages of a video to be rendered in AVI definitely is that the file will get extremely huge. On the other hand, this format ensures that are finally rendered. Video, if not individually downsized, will have a good or as After Effects as lossless quality. Nonetheless, we will consider other formats later on in the next videos so that finally we find a solution which serves both. So it has a low file size while still remaining with good or great quality. But now, let's consider these upcoming options. And of course, we want to include our video in the render to fire. So we leave this checked and for the channels, we can stick with RGB. Although later on when we, for example, create a T-shirt design, we will also add the alpha channel. And for the teacher design, this will ensure that we can print this t-shirt on different colors. And we don't want to include our black background. Well here we can just leave this for RGB. Acid is already set. And the same applies for the depth and color settings, which can also be left as pre-selected. Now in this next segment, we have the option to resize our video. But normally and in our case as well, we have of course, actively decided to create the composition in full HD. So we don't want to resize this video afterwards. Before rendering it. Neither we want to crop our video and the output audio settings can also be left as pre-selected. We hit Okay. And now it will switch to custom AVI. Although we didn't really change anything here, quality should still be lossless. Now, let's continue with the Render Settings. Now here again, we have a lot of different options to choose from. First of all, the quality we want this to be set to best. Of course, this will result in a bigger file size, but we don't want our video to be saved as a draft. So we really want to use the best quality settings possible for the resolution. We want this to stay with full. And this is also the standard settings independent of what you've chosen for your preview area. So no matter if the preview will be rendered in half or even less resolution, the standard solution to render your final video locally on your hard drive will always be full. And that's also what we want to choose. And leaf here. Now here we have some other options. For example, we could switch off all effects that we've made inside the composition area. Or we could decide on different displays on how to use the layers we've turned on for the solo switch. But normally if I have decided to solo different layers inside a composition than this means that I also wanted to be rendered like that. So no special treatment necessary, although you could decide to, for example, turn all those solo switches off. Now for the effects, you could decide to turn them all off for the rendered video. And this will mean that all effects applied to all layers will be turned off. Which might in some cases be useful. For example, if you have one video file where you have an effect applied to the whole video file. And the whole composition consists only of this one layer where the effect is applied. Then you might want to consider rendering the video without effect in advance and then importing this video and applying the effect again. But in our case, as we have applied effects to different layers inside the composition, it would be impossible to recreate what we've done here. If I now decide to turn off all effects and then import this video, then as I already said, it's impossible to create what we've done because the effect would either be applied to the whole random video or left out in total. So an almost any case you don't need to make any changes here. And the same applies for the time sampling as well as the frame rate. We have created our composition in 25 frames per second. And we want to stick with those 25 frames per second so we can hit Okay here. And now we have considered the render settings as well as the output module. We've decided for a location where we want our file to be saved. And if I click on Render, you'll see that After Effects will begin to render our video, which consists of 88 frames and has a length of three seconds and 12th frames. And currently 59 frames have already been rendered. And the total time will be about one minute. And if this process is done, we'll hear this sound. And if I want to show you the file, then indeed, you can see that the file format here is dot AVI. And this file is huge, although only three seconds long and has a fire size of 522 megabyte, which will of course then be difficult to be uploaded anywhere. For example, in the Internet center, friends over every you want to do with your rendered project. So in the next video, we'll consider another container format that's possible to render out directly from After Effects, which will at least lower Alpha size a little bit before then leaving after effects. And speaking about a software from Adobe that will allow us to render in many, many more different formats. And then finally, finding a solution with a very low file size while still sticking with good quality. So see you in the next video for the upcoming part. 20. Export video sequence via After Effects: MOV container format: In the previous video, we've gotten to know the render format dot AVI. And now we want to consider another format that's possible to directly render from After Effects. So here we have our sequence again. Of course, with the work area cut to the part we want to finally render out as a video. And now we choose Composition, add to Render Queue again. And we want to change the output module. By the way, the render settings, that is an independent option from the Output Module, meaning that no matter if you choose dot AVI or dot MOV, if you want to keep the render settings for the best settings, this would mean that we will, of course, render our video in full resolution. We will keep the effects. We will of course, also solo those layers selected. And basically anything we just choose here for the dot AVI file will stay if we change the output module. And that's what we want to do. So we click on this and for the format, we change dot AVI and want to choose QuickTime. If you're an Apple user, you might know the dot MOV file which will be rendered. Now. That is sort of the complimentary file to the dot AVI file from Microsoft. This is more or less the EPA solution and we click on, Okay. And what you can also do is if you hit this little plus, you can keep the render settings for Best Settings and maybe choose different output modules to render audio file, for example, in QuickTime as well as in dot AVI as I've chosen. Now, here we have again our output directories, one time with a dot MOV file. And the second file is the dot AVI file. And now click on Render again. And I think I will skip this part for you and we'll see again when the rendering process has been finished. So it should be finished in a few seconds. There we are. And if I open our folder again, you'll see we now have two more files. One is just a copy of a flyby title sequence dot AVI, again with more than half of a gigabyte. And the dot MOV file with the same length, of course, only has 74 megabyte. Still a lot for a 3 second long video, but a lot less than the dot AVI file and the quality will be just the same as the dot AVI file. So if you'd like to render out directly from After Effects, I would give you the advice to render this one in a dot MOV. But in the next video, we'll check out another solution which is even way better. And you can export your composition, your project to another software from Adobe and render your video in other formats there as well. So what we're going to do there will be explained in the next video. 21. Adobe Media Encoder and best export settings: In the last two videos, you have learned about two video formats that can be rendered directly from After Effects, dot AVI as well as dot MOV. And in this video, we want to take a look at another solution and other software from Adobe that allows you to import project data from After Effects, but also from other programs such as Adobe Premiere Pro. Now, the great advantage of this program, which is called the Adobe Media Encoder, is that it comfortably placed along with, for example, After Effects or Premiere Pro. You can build up your random list, go to sleep and let this external program render out your files, for example, at night. Also, you can render in a lot of different video formats, such as, for example, the dot mp4. But we will take a look at that closer in detail in a second. The disadvantage on the other side of the Media Encoder is that it cannot be bought as a stand-alone software, such as, for example, Photoshop, After Effects, and all those other programs you see here. You need to be owner of the Creative Cloud in order to have access to the media encoder. And the Media Encoder will be included in this Creative Cloud, all epically, all applications package only. Now what you can do is decide to take a trial of this Media Encoder. But if you really want to be a frequent user and run reality of projects with this encoder, then you need to be owner of the Creative Cloud all applications package. I can only recommend doing so, especially if you want to use other software from a DO RE such as Photoshop or Premier Pro. Then of course, the Creative Cloud all applications package is your best solution. As the installation of this Media Encoder is quite self-explanatory. We'll now go back to After Effects and see what this Media Encoder can do for us. So I'll open up After Effects again. I'm back here in my flyby title sequence. What I want to do now, instead of choosing composition add to render queue, I want to add this one to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Now, this might take some seconds and then the software should open up. Now here we are inside the Adobe Media Encoder. And what you'll see is that our composition flyby titles has been added directly from Adobe After Effects to the rendering q of the Media Encoder. And currently the output file will be a dot mp4 file and the format will be H dot two C64. Before going into detail considering these different formats and output files, let's just leave these settings as they are set. Click on this green arrow to render out our video and we will see again when this one is finished. Now here we are again in our directory and as you can see, we've added another file, which is the MP4 file, read nuts directly from the Adobe Media Encoder. Now, this new file only has a fire size of 1.09 megabyte, which is a whole lot less than the dot AVI file, but also a lot less than the dot MOV file. We've ran out before it directly from After Effects. In terms of quality, however, this still looks very good as I can show you by playing this video. Now, going back to our Media Encoder, I've already said that the format is the H dot two C64 format. And this normally is based on the codec x to six. For this codec basically ensures that both is true on the one side, the fire size still stays very small. On the other side, a maximum of quality still is kept inside of our video. Now, it is also set that YouTube deals best with this H dot H.264 format before doing their own conversion. But what I've done is I've uploaded all three files that we've currently rendered, the MOV file, the AVI file, as well as the MP4 file, and play them out in full HD. And what I can say in terms of visible quality, they all look the same. The main basic difference, of course, was that for the AVI file, we were uploading half a gigabyte for the MP4 file. This was done in five or ten seconds. So the visible quality looks the same for all three uploads. But still, my advice for you would be to render out in MP4 with the H dot H.264 format. If possible, if you are using the Adobe Media Encoder. And if not, don't worry in the next video, we will speak about another option to use so that you can use your rendered files from After Effects to convert them in other formats and safe a lot of file size. Nonetheless, back in our media encoder, let's now talk about some options you can choose inside this software. Now, first of all, the media encoder can not only be used to import projects directly from other Adobe software, such as Adobe After Effects. But what we could also do is decide to use the media and color essay converting tool. This means that, for example, I could take my dot AVI file, which we've recently ran out. Directly in After Effects and drag and drop this video file into our data here in the Media Encoder. And what we could do is create the same MP4 file directly from this video file as we've done before with importing our project in After Effects. Also, of course, we have a lot of different formats to choose from. If we check out this preset brother here on the bottom left, we could type H dot H.264. And we see that just for this very special format, we have a lot of different options to choose from. Like for example, the 720 P preset or the full HD preset. We could decide to specialize here on different devices, such as the mobile device. And of course, there are tons of different other formats. Not only the H264, but all in all, there are a lot of different options and many, many more options than our possibilities are in After Effects. Now, what I'd like to show you as well as the watchfulness options. Just maybe we create a small example if I hit this plus button. And here I have created an auteur render file folder on my laptop. And if I choose this folder and pick this folder, what this will do is anytime a new file will be added to this folder, that could be a video file or an After Effects, after Effects project file. For example. Anytime a new file is added to this folder, these settings here, right now the H.264 setting is used to convert this fire directly when the new file is added to this folder. If you decide to watch this folder and for example, save your projects or your videos to be converted in that folder. Then this tool, the media encoder, can be used to create these files automatically. Now lastly, I'd like to show you that you can of course, also individually change your format settings and you do so by right-clicking here on this format and hitting the export settings, this will open another window, and there it is. And on the left side, of course, we have our preview from the imported project. And here on the right side, we have some other options to choose from or to even add. For example, effects after having imported the project file. Normally to be honest, I have never edit and effect afterwards because of course, our project is finished when importing this from After Effects. But if you want to do so, you could, for example, even add lumetri look after importing your project or a video files. Now you could also change the basic video settings, like for example, the width or the heat. You could even change the frame rate or do changes in the audio settings. And what I think is very interesting is this Publish button. And this allows you to leave your login data, for example, for YouTube and the Media Encoder, after having rendered your video file, we'll import this file, upload it directly to YouTube. Now normally I choose this button to use the maximum render quality. This will then take a little longer to render out, but we really make sure that our finally rendered video has the best quality possible via this Media Encoder. But for now, I think we have talked about all the unnecessary and all the important steps that you can do here in the Media Encoder. Again, my advice for you would be if you use this encoder to import your projects directly from After Effects and render in this H dot 264 format. And of course leave all the other options Just as you've created your composition in After Effects. Now, in the next video, we'll talk about another option. If you are not using the Media Encoder. If you don't use the Adobe Creative Cloud, then I want to show you that using a free converting tool also allows you to import, for example, the AVI file that we've ran out before and reduce your file size by creating another MP4 file. So for that one, see you in the next video. 22. Digression: Video Format Converter: This will be the last video about possibilities to render an export your project files from After Effects. And in this case, we want to talk about an alternative solution without using the Adobe Media Encoder. But still, you'd like to save your final file as an MP4 file or a similar format. However, you don't want to stick with the AV or MOV file that are possible to render directly from after effects. And what you could do in this case is use a free video converter, like for example, the, any video converter from a and V soft. This can be easily downloaded for either Windows or Mac user, and you could open up the software and directly import your rendered, for example, AVI file from After Effects, grab it and drag it into this area. Then we want to do some adjustments here, of course, for the basic settings. We don't want to change the start or end time of our video. Also, we want to leave the video size as before. Basically it's all just the same as in the last video where we've talked about the settings with the encoder. We want to keep the quality as high as possible, meaning it will be a larger file size. But still of course, we want to choose the high option here. And for the video options, we will see that the video codec in this case will be the x 26 for that I've mentioned before, the video bit rate. You might want to change this to original bit rate and keep the frame rate as well as the aspect ratio set to auto, and also for the audio options and nothing has to be changed. Then here, going back to the basic settings, you will see that the output folder in my case, will be after effects slash MP4. This can be changed anytime. Here in the general settings. In this case, I have created this After Effects folder. Click Okay, if I start converting now, then you'll see that my imported flyby title sequence has been added to the Render Queue and very quickly is perfectly converted. And we'll see it has a finite size of 1.17 megabytes. For the filename, you'll see that the codec used has been added to the end of this file. And if I play this video now, you'll see that it still turns out to be decent quality. Now, in general, of course, the more conversions video has to pass, the more quality it will lose over time. But I think in this case, without using the Adobe Media Encoder, we can still be satisfied with our final result, which will be a MP4 File. Now of course, my final advice would be to, if possible, render with the Adobe Media Encoder and directly import your project from After Effects. But if you're not using this encoder, then you might still want to convert your AVI or MOV files with, for example, the video converter. Now that's it for now talking about different render settings and possibilities in After Effects. In the next video, we want to do quite the opposite and talk about possible ways and formats to import data in After Effects. 23. Importing sources: Video, image sequences and more: Before going back to work inside compositions and really create awesome project examples. In this video, we quickly want to consider the different input types and file formats that are accepted in Adobe After Effects. Now, of course, as you can already see here on the left side, the most common of video formats, such as, for example, our rennet dot AVI, dot mp4 or dot MOV files will be accepted. And they are video and audio tracks will perfectly work here inside Adobe After Effects. The same applies for other formats, such as, for example, the W, m, v. But in the worst-case possible, if you have a fire in a format that will not be accepted in After Effects, you might find the solution to use either the Media Encoder or for example, a converter such as the any video converter, to start converting your video into a common file formats such as, for example, the MP4, and then use that converted file to import it inside Adobe After Effects. Of course, you can also import audio files, such as, for example, the MP3 file or a WAV file. And what you can also do is import picture formats, such as the PNG or JPEG format. And you can also import a sequence of pictures, such as I have done here. This is a sequence of me going with my drone in Mexico. And if I click on the first picture here, I can select the option to import the whole PNG sequence. And by doing so, what you'll see is that this will be important as a sequence. And if I drag this into a new composition, after Effects will do the interpretation and frame by frame. This will be added up to create this short video sequence. Now, you can even import 3D models inside Adobe After Effects. Here we have an example of this, diets, Coca-Cola. And what you can also do is normally orbit around in 3D space in these models, such as for example with this Coca-Cola or what you could do is import a 3D model of a mobile phone. But what you will need is another external plugin. And I think in this part of the course, this will go too far and we just want to get started by creating the next project example, and therefore will see again in the next video. 24. Our goal: 3-dimensional phone model with individual screen content: Welcome to this new project example, where we want to create a 3D mobile phone with the possibility of individually animating our phone screen. And to be honest, this is a very spontaneous project example because in the last video, I talked about possibilities of importing 3D models. I showed you the Coca Cola can. And I talked about, for example, importing a 3D mobile. And that's when I just got excited to try to create my own sort of 3D model by model without even using a 3D model. So what am I talking about? This image or this 3D mobile phone that you can see here, has been created only by using a 2D video sequence. And after all, we wouldn't even need a video or we wouldn't need as just two pictures, one of the front side of our mobile phone and the other one of the backside of iPhone. So you can take the course materials. I've put a small video and there, and I put a video because I want to show you one more thing and that is how to create freeze frames out the videos. But we'll check that out later on. But what we're going to do to create in this project example will be this one. Hello, and welcome to this comprehensive Adobe After Effects course. Hello and welcome to this comprehensive Adobe After Effects course. So what you can see, we can individually animate our phone screen. Our phone does have a backside, and we can determine how we want our phone to move in 3D space if we want to even show the screen, for example, here on the right side and move along with our phone and many, many more things. So this project example will really be exciting. And one reason why I chose to include this example, this course, is that it shows very good the one scale that I want to develop for you by Learning and watching this course. This skill is to have a solution in mind what you want to achieve, in this case, sort of 3D mobile phone model. And then develop the skill or the ideas how to be able to produce your solution. And in this case, as I've already said, we are just using 2D images, putting them together to create a sort of 3D mobile phone. But you've seen what we're going to create a. Now, let's get started with a new empty project and see you again by starting with this product example in the next video. 25. Part 1: 3D mobile phone face: So here we are inside a new and empty After Effects project. And this time we want to start with a goal in mind and create our final composition first. And this composition later on will not only include the 3D phone model itself, but also have this model fly around in space as you've seen in the previous video example. So we click composition, new composition, or use the shortcut Control N, and name this one final comp. And the preset HDTV should be fine in full HD with 25 frames per second. And the duration of ten seconds is enough. So we click Okay and have this composition created. Now we will fill this composition with content later on, but for now, we want to start an import our phone or video from the course materials. So just drag this video into our project files and then create a new composition out of our MP4 file. And as you've seen the video, you might have noticed that it not only includes view from the front of our mobile phone, but also later on, we have the backside view of the mobile phone we want to create. And of course, apart from that, there are some other useless and irrelevant notes that you might have read. I was feeling funny So today. So if you like this course, feel free to recommend it, to give it a good rating. But now, let's get back to the important things and start in this video by creating a front view of our mobile phone. So what we want to do is we want to find a frame that we can use for the front side of MOF phone, maybe this frame. And then we want to mask this frame, or better said, mask our mobile phone and use this frame as our front view. So in this case, you'll notice that there is a little rotation in this phone and we want to straighten this up. So what you could do is either activate here the proportional grid and check out those lines and hit R to show the rotation and rotate it. Or you could also just create a new solid, maybe in red. And just grab this solid, move it here to the side of our phone and use this solid as a helping layer to adjust our phone. Now, I want to adjust the rotation. That's too much. Maybe sort of minus 1.5 should be good so that it is perfectly adjusted. Then I can delete my red solid again. Now we want to use a mask from these mask tools here to cut around our mobile phone. Now, the problem here is that these masks will go along with the rotation of our layer, meaning that the layer is now is rotated by 1.5 degrees. But our mobile phone is flat and we would like our mask to be flat as well. But if we now take this mask and make it a little clearer by increasing the rotation and navigate through those masks until you arrive with the rounded rectangle tool. And now we create a mask. You will see that this rectangle now is also rotated by 27.5 degrees. And do the last steps with Control Z. However, we don't want the rotation to be included in the mask as we've just adjusted our phone to be flat. And that's why we now want to create a new pre-composition. And therefore mark this layer and click on Layer pre-compose. And what we want to do now, we want to move all the attributes into the new composition, meaning that we want to move the rotation into the new composition. So we have, if we open this new composition, we will see that the rotation now as here inside this layer and this new created composition now as a rotation of 0 degrees. And now of course, we can take our rounded rectangle tool, start in the upper left corner and move to the bottom right. And before letting go your left mouse button, you can adjust the roundness of this mask by either moving the arrow up to increase the roundness or moving your error down to decrease the roundness. And I think it should be fine like this for first try. Now we let go. And then of course we will now adjust each corner. First, we want to start with the upper-left corner. Just take this mask point here, move it to the beginning of the roundness. Take this point, move it down a little. Then we can take these small points to adjust the roundness. This corner is fine. And we do so for all the four corners. Move down. Take this mask point, move it up a little. And lastly, our bottom-left corner. A little bit more roundness here. And this should be fine. So if we check out our image now, you'll see that we have created a nice front view of our mobile phone. But of course, right now this front view is extracted from a video sequence. But when we want to do, of course, is to use the current frame as a reference frame and freeze it over time and use this frame the whole time of our composition. I've intentionally included a video sequence and the course materials because I wanted to show you how this is done, which is very easy. We simply have to right-click here and choose time freeze frame. Now of course, you could also time stretch your videos are compositions and then make the video play slower or faster. But in this case, we really want to freeze the current frame and use this frame for the whole composition. So you see that this keyframe has been added. And no matter where we are in time, this will be the front view of our mobile phone. Now we can name this phone composition. Hit Enter to rename it, and we want to name it front. And in this composition, right now, as you can see, we have included the front view of our mobile phone. And then the next video we'll do the same for the backside of our mobile phone. 26. Part 2: 3D mobile phone face additional information: Before we continue and create the backside view of our mobile phone, I quickly want to show you that as always, in After Effects, there are tons of different ways to come to a desired solution. And in this case, the solution we want to achieve was to create a front view of our mobile phone. We could have not only done so by freezing this frame and time, but what we could have also done was to adjust and shrink the work area to this one frame, either by manually picking the brackets or by eating the shortcut b to mark the beginning of the work area, and n to mark the end of the work area so that in this case, the whole work area consists of only one frame. And we take this frame or we take the whole composition which only consists of this one frame and edits to the render queue. And now we want to change the output module, make it either a JPEG or a PNG sequence. So in this case, of course, we won't even render a sequence because we've just added one frame to the work area. But anyways, what is very important is that for the channels of the video output, you want to not only include the RGB, but also the alpha channel. What this means, I will show you in a few seconds, but for now we hit OK. And for the name, we could, for example, name this one front underscore. And now you have these five hashtags which only represent a running number in case we now would create a sequence. Now we hit Render. And what we've created now are rendered. Now is this image here, front underscore and then the frame and time. And now can now import this frame. And you can see that this frame will be our mobile phone. And of course, this would be the same result as, for example, freezing of frame. Now, the difference between this random picture and the picture without the alpha channel is the following. I have also render this one without including the alpha channel. If I import this picture, you will see that we don't have these transparent areas. All areas apart from our mobile, which have been transparent, are now rendered in black. And that's why it's very important in this case to also include the alpha channel. And we'll see more about that when we create a t-shirt design later on. But for now, I just wanted to show you that, of course there are several race to get to a desired image of the front view of our model iPhone. Anyways, I will delete the images again and we'll continue working with the frozen frame. And now we will do the very same with the backside view of our Melba. 27. Part 3: 3D mobile phone back: I'm pretty sure this will be a very short sequence just because no new techniques need to be explained. But what we're going to do is we're going to adapt the very same technique that we've used for the front side of our mobile app to create an image of the backside of a mobile phone. Therefore, we'll start and take the MP4 video, create a new composition, and then we'll click on this composition, rename it with Enter and name it back. Now of course, we want to find a frame to use for the backside. Maybe this one is good. And we do the same procedure again. So first of all, I create a new solid which will help me to adjust my mobile phone. Bring it here to the left side. And then with this layer checked, we hit R to bring up the rotation and rotate it and move the red solid. Maybe minus 38 should be good. We delete the solid again, and now of course, we want to create a new composition. Move all the attributes into this new composition so that when creating a new rounded rectangle, we will work here without any rotation. I will mark our rounded rectangle tool. And with the layout checked, we start in the upper left corner. And again, let go here on the bottom right. And now we move and shake all those corners. Beginning with the upper-left corner. Take this point and move it a little to the right. This point maybe here, adjust the roundness. And then we continue with the upper-right corner. Move down. And we continue with the lower-right corner here. Take this point and this point, move it a little to the left. Make it a little more round here. Okay? And last but not least, the lower-left corner here. And there we are. So this will be the backside of our mobile phone. And of course, again, we want to freeze this frame. So right-click time, freeze-frame. To use this frame for the whole time of our composition. And what we'll do in the next video is sort of adjust and sink the back to our front view before then creating the middle part of the mobile phone, which will then, together with the front and back view, creates this three-dimensional look we want to finally achieve. 28. Part 4: Aligning phone face and back: Alright, so as already mentioned in this short video, we want to sink and align the backside of our phone to our front view. And therefore here I am in the back composition and I want to take my precomposition, hit Control X to cut the phone, open the front composition control V, to add our phone to this composition. Now to make it a little clearer, we want to add an effect to the backside, which is Effect Generate Fill, so that our mask area now is filled in red. And then we want to bring down the opacity, use the shortcut T. We lower the opacity maybe to 50% so that now we can grab our backside and have a good overview. To sync the front and back side. Use your arrows to maybe adjusted a little better. We can zoom in here and see that the backside is a little smaller than the front side. So we want to use the shortcut Shift S to also add the scale here, maybe bring it up 210 for. This looks good here. Maybe a little too large, so 103 should be good. Let's check on top. Alright, so this looks good. Now we have the backside to our front side, so I can undo the fill effect by hitting Delete. And we can bring back the opacity, cut our backside again, hitting Control X, come back to our beck composition control V to add the backside again. And now we have both sides sent. In the next video we will add the middle part, which will stick between the front and the back side and at the end, create this three-dimensional look we want to have in our phones. So see you again in the next video. 29. Part 5: Side area of the mobile phone: So in this video, we want to talk about the middle part of our phone or the outer face. And this video is kind of where the magic happens. Although, as you'll see in some seconds, It's a very simple trick to achieve what we want to do. So right now we have fear, our front composition and we can open the project data. And the first thing I want to do is duplicate this front composition. So Control D. And then we want to rename this second front composition and name it mid. And now what we want to do with this precomposition is turn on the 3D switch. But I'll do so in the mid composition, not in the front composition. So open up the mid composition, turn on the 3D switch. And the only thing that has changed so far when turning on the switch is that we have an additional position data, which is the z axis. If we look at this now from the left, then you'll see that our phone right now is flat in z, so it has only one pixel size in z space. So what we want to do now is just duplicate this precomposition. Hit Control D. Open up the position data by using the shortcut P and then switching this z value from 0 to two to see it has moved a little bit here to the left side of this view or to the backside of the z axis. Now we want to duplicate this layer again, open up the position data and make it four, will do so again until we arrive at the value eight. So one more time for 61, more time for eight. And you'll see that we start to get a little thickness here in that space. But of course it's not enough. So what we want to do is hit Control a to mark all composition so far, Control D to duplicate them, bring them to the top, open up the position data with P. And then for this 0 value, we want to continue with ten. So grab it and let go. When it hits the value ten. Then we have 1012141618. Do the same procedure again with a five layer selected Control D to duplicate those layers, bring them to the top, open the position data, and now of course, change the value ten to 20 by grabbing this value and adjusting it so that the other values will also add ten and their value, if you click inside here and type 20 than all those five layers will have the value 20 afterwards. So now we have the values from 0 to 28. And what we want to do now is again, select all layers by hitting Control a, duplicate. Those layers, bring them to the top. Hit P to open the positional data. And again, we want to change this 00 value and make it 30, so that we continue from 28 to 30. Alright, there we are. So now we have the values from 0 to 28, continuum with 3032 and so on until 58. Still a little bit too thin. And my opinion, maybe we want to continue until the eighties, so we take the values from 58 to 40. And therefore you can mark the value 40, mark the value 58 with hitting Control Shift click. And then you have all those layers from 40 to 58 selected. Now we want to duplicate those layers again, bring them to the top, open the position data, and change the value from 40 here to 60. So there we are. And we have added the values from 60 to 78. And I feel like this is a good thickness for our phone. And now let's get back to our active camera. Meaning in this case, we haven't created a camera, but it will be the front view. But we want to create a camera now just to orbit a little bit around and see if everything looks good. And therefore, we create a new layer, new camera. We don't have to play with these settings, just hit Okay? And now we can grab our camera here and orbit around. Then we'll see that we have started to create a nice three-dimensional phone. Now, in the next video, of course, we will also add the backside to our phone and maybe adjust the settings here for the middle part, for the outer face a little bit so that the colors will look even better. But as already said, that will be part of the next video. 30. Part 6: The composition: So what did we do so far in this project example? We have created, as you can see, a mid composition for the outer area of our mobile phone. We have created a bag composition including the backside view. And we have created a front composition for the front side view of our mobile phone. Now, theoretically, if we just consider the optical view of our phone and would be enough to just add this back composition. Here on the backside of our mid composition. Still, I also created a front composition just because I want to afterwards have an easier navigation and possibility to adjust my phone screen. And that's why we will also put this front composition here right before our first mid screen so that we can adjust the settings of our screen in this front composition. So for now we want to stick those three compositions back, front and midst together. And therefore, we create a new composition and we want to name this one 3D mobile. Now for the preset, we will switch to a four K preset because the underlying video, the phone dot mp4 file was also for K video. And therefore we will create the 3D mobile model in for K. And later on the final composition then again will be full HD only. Switch this to UHD for k 29.97 frames per second, as this is also the frame rate of the phone video. Click. Okay. And now we want to import the back composition, the front composition, and of course, the mid composition. Now let's start with the mid composition only. So for now we'll turn off the switch for the front and back composition. And what you can see here now is a two-dimensional layer, which gives this three-dimensional look of our phone. And that's because the camera is still active and we have orbited around. So we enter the mid composition one more time and we will delete the camera first of all. Then we're back to this front side view. In this composition, we want to now add a new layer, a new camera, by creating new camera, click. Okay. And then of course, as we've already seen with this short message, the camera needs a 3D layer to work perfect. So therefore, we will again turn on the 3D switch for this middle layer. And if we now fly around with our camera, what you can see is that, yes, the mid composition is a 3D layer, but still it only transports, only delivers right now a two-dimensional image. This is because this switch here, the collapse transformations switch, has not been activated. If we now activate the switch, you will see that the layout finally is interpreted as we want it to be. And we have this three-dimensional phone back in our model here. Now, we need to add the front and the back composition. And if you remember, the mid composition includes different layers in different Z positions. The first that position was at value 0, and the last one was at value 78. So of course the bag needs to be at zed value AT, and the front needs to be at z value minus two. So first of all, we start maybe with the front, activate the 3D switch, activate the view of this composition. And then we hit P for the position. And we'll choose minus two. And if I fill this composition Effect, Generate fill, then you'll see that right now, our front composition really is what determines the screen of our phone. We delete the effect again. Now for the back composition, first of all, activate the view, hit P for position. Turn on the 3D switch. And now change the Z value to 80. And now let's fly around again with our camera that we see the backside of our phone. And there you go. We have the backside view of our phone, perfectly included in this 3D model. So that's it for this video. We have created our 3D mobile model. And now in the next video we want to see if we can further bring these colors here on the outside to perfection and make some adjustments there. So for doing that, see you in the next video. 31. Part 7: Further adjustments: In this part, we want to further enhance the colors here at the side of our phone. Therefore, first of all, I'll orbit this back to sort of a side view like this. And now I feel like the colors here are little too bright. Now, you might think that this is very easy because we can just select the mid composition and then choose Effect Color Correction and maybe adjust the brightness and contrast. If we, for example, decrease the brightness to about minus 150, you will see that, yes, Now the side here looks darker, which for itself really is more realistic. But now after Effects will have some problems with interpretation of this three compositions, front, mid and beg, and doesn't really know anymore how to set those together, especially if we have a collapsed transformation, like in this case. Now After Effects doesn't really know how to handle those compositions. And I can show you this by orbiting around again to the back view. And you'll see that now the backside of our phone has disappeared. And what we see is solve a transparent new phone that we have created here. And this is because the effect has been added to this mid composition, which has been a collapsed transformation. So if I just delete this effect again, you'll see that we are back with our phone, back with the back view. But of course, now we don't have these nice darker colors here on the side. So the second solution you might develop is to just go into the mid composition, create a new adjustment layer. And remember this adjustment layer and the effects will apply to it, will have an effect on all those layers below this adjustment layer. So we could again choose Effect, Color Correction and brightness and contrast and bring down the brightness again to minus 150. You'd see that again. It has an effect, of course, you're on those layers in the mid composition. But going back to our final model, then again, you will see that we have the same problem. And the backside again is not really displayed the way we want it to be. So this solution also doesn't work. So we delete the adjustment layer. And now what we want to do to really get to a solution that will work is adjust the pre-composition, hear the phone dot mp4 comp one and now plays an effect on this found on MP4 file. Now before doing so, we have a small problem, which is that this phone MP4 comp one has also been used in our front composition. Because what we've done to create the mid composition was we just duplicated the front composition. So of course, this phone dot mp4 comp one has its place in the front composition, but also in a lot of duplications here in the mid composition. Now, to of course, not have the effect applied to the front composition because we still want our screen to be as bright as it is now. What we want to do is duplicate this phone dot mp4 comp one pre-composition. So with this one selected, we'll hit Control D and then bring this phone dot mp4 comp three here into a front composition and now replicate all the effects. We apply it to this precomposition, which of course was to create a frozen frame at this point in time. So time freeze frame. And then we apply the mask. So to open the mask settings, just hit the shortcut M. And we want to take this mask, hit Control C and Control V to apply it to this composition. And then we can delete the phone dot mp4 comp one. So now we really have a new composition which itself is the same as decomp one. But if we apply effects to this layer here in the comp one, then of course, it won't have any effect on our final front composition. I hope this was understandable for you, but what we do now is we apply the effect again to this found on MP4 file. And we choose Effect, color correction, brightness contrast. And again, we lower the brightness to minus 150. We'll see this has a direct effect on our video. And coming back to our model will now see that yes, we still have the back side view here. And we also lower the brightness of the colors here at the site. So once again, maybe we want to speak about these project files here. The phone dot mp4 comp one. This now is part of our mid composition. Only. The phone MP4 come to was part of our back composition and the phone MP4 comp three precomposition is a duplication of this comp one pre-composition, only without the lowest brightness of the phone video. And this is now the product that is playing a role for the front composition. So maybe to make it a little clearer, we can hit Enter and name this one mobile front. Here. We then have mobile MIT. And here we have mobile back. So once again, we check our mid composition and you'll see there are a lot of replication of this mobile MIT composition. And in this composition we have applied the brightness and affect the brightness and contrast effect to the phone MP4 file. While here in the front composition, we are using the mobile front with also this phone dot mp4 file in the very same frame. But of course, we still stick with the brightness. So this our results and our final phone model, which I now really think looks quite good. Of course. You can further do more adjustments here to make it look even better. Like for example, with the back view, you could just draw a mask around this camera and then again, choose different z values to bring the camera out here. Or you could maybe also add some buttons here at the side. But I think just for understanding how 3D modelling can work without even using 3D layers. So for the final aim of this project, I think we are good to go and what we want to do now in the next video is to let our final Mobile model fly around a little bit in 3D space. 32. Part 8: Movement in space: So we have completed building our 3D mobile model. We've checked it from different perspectives, and I feel I'm happy with the final solution that we've created. And therefore, I can now delete this camera again from our model composition. And we then can finally get back to our final comp that we've created in the first step of this project example. And of course in this final comp, we now want to let the 3D model fly in 3D space. So therefore, we will import this 3D mobile composition into our final composition. And as the 3D mobile composition was created in for K. While for the final comp, we can stick with full HD only. We, first of all, I want to lower the scale of this 3D molar composition to 50 per cent and see that now our mobile is perfectly fine here and adjusted in this full HD composition. So next step, of course, is to turn on the 3D switch for this mobile composition. Just to see that we have the same problem as before. I'll show you by creating a new camera. Click. Okay, and again, we orbit around a little bit, just to see that. Again. While the 3D mobile composition itself is a three-dimensional layer, the zed value only came out in one pixel. So of course, we again want to activate the collapse transformations to then see that our mobile phone is back as we have created it. So next step, we want to animate the position as well as rotation data from this mobile phone. Therefore, I'll start and turn off the camera. And then we want to open the Transform options. And what we want to animate now in detail is the position as well as the X, Y, and Z rotation. First of all, I'll show you what these rotations mean. The x rotation will create a rotation around our red arrow. And of course, the Y rotation will create a rotation around the green era. And the z rotation will create a rotation around our blue arrow. So let's start and activate the stopwatches, x, y, z, as well as the position. And in my preview video, I created the effect that our phone, first of all was here on the upper right part outside of our preview area, then flying in, slowing down here for maybe one or two seconds and fly a little bit over to this left side and then rotating and flying out of the preview area at the end, maybe around the 3 second mark. So let's try to recreate that. Although of course, you are free to create whatever movement and rotation you like to do. So, first of all, maybe let's add a little x rotation. But focusing on the Y rotation maybe to like this. And then bring the x position down here to the right side. Also move up. And maybe this should be a good starting point. Then we get to, for example, half or two-thirds of a second like here, frame 16 should be fine. And we want to now fly to our visible area. Of course, primary lower the Y Rotation again to make our screen visible. And then come down in the y value to maybe about here. And here should be fine. Now we want to stay in the visible area for maybe 1.5 or two seconds here. But what we could do is maybe spin a little and fly to the left side. So we open the screen of our phone. Therefore, maybe like this should be fine. Then of course, bring the x value more to the left side. Here. Also maybe move a little bit up and then gets to the 3 second mark. And now we want to be a little more spectacular. Maybe rotate this 1.5 times around x. And a little bit also in y. And then of course, for the position, fly out of the visible area, maybe flare up again so that finally, finally we have created a parabolic movement. And then I want to hit N to mark the end of my work area. Now, let's quickly check by just dragging this time Mark and see what we have created. This should be the movement and then fly and rotate out at the end. Looks good so far. So what I'll do now is preview this, which will take some time. And if the process is ready, then we will see again. So this is what we finally created. And to be honest with only using two pictures, one from the front and one from the back of our mobile phone. I really think that we have created a cool 3D model flying around in space and look in quite realistic. Now, what we want to also add a background to this final composition. Therefore, you know, the method we create a new layer. Layer, New Solid. Make this one maybe dark gray. Click Okay. Rename that solid to Biji one. Bring it to the lowest position here from the layers. Duplicate that layer, bring down the background to adjust the solid settings, make it black. And then add a mask to our background one. An elliptical mask. Start in the upper left, bring it down to the lower right, and then featherless mask. And shrink the mask a little. Maybe even decrease the mask opacity to 50 per cent to make it a little more dark. And this gives the whole composition more realistic look, I think. And what we also want to finally add is a new adjustment layer and maybe increase the contrast of the whole composition a little bit and therefore Effect Color Correction. And maybe bring up the curves here. And now, pull this string here a little more up here, a little more down. This means make the darker colors even darker or lighter, Carlos, even lighter. So all in all we increase the contrast so that right now, I really think this looks a little bit better, especially here on the screen of our phone. So I think we are ready with the flying effect of this phone. But what's missing is an individually animated phone screen. And this will be the final segment of this section. And therefore we see again in the next video. 33. Part 9: Customizing the phone screen: Now here we are already in the last part of this video series about our 3D mobile phone. And what we want to do in this last video, of course, is to create an individual phone screen. Now, you might remember that what determines the phone screen we see here is what we create in the front composition. Because this front composition in terms of the Z position, laying in front of the mid composition and that of course, is laying in front of the bike composition. So now we can switch to our front composition. We just need to change this phone screen here. So therefore, I have also included an example video here in the course materials. This is just done by a simple screencast of my phone. There are several apps on the App Store or Play Store that you can download for free to, for example, screencast, what you do with your phone. You might go to check your YouTube channel. You might link to your Instagram account or whatever you'd like to show in this flying mobile sequence that we've created. So for now, I will just import this phone screen here that is a screencast of the Udemy course. And right now I will take this MP4 file and just drag it into our front composition. And now all we've got to do is place this phone screen here right on top of our phone. So let's just bring it here. And then or maybe we'd take it to the side to see if it's still a little bit too large. Therefore, I hit S to open up the scale, maybe scale it down to 95 per cent. My advice would be to leave this a little bit larger than what we finally need here because we will just also create a rounded rectangle for this at the end, as you can see here, so that we have a little bit roundness in the edges. But of course, we still don't want to see any parts of our old phone screen, but just leave this a little bit larger so that we will just see this phone screen and our phone here at the sites. So now I can bring this here, further adjusted with my arrows. Now. Maybe make it a little bit larger to 95.595, comma five and Germany. Alright, so now we won't see any parts of the old screen. And now we can grab our rectangle tool here, switch to the rounded rectangle and go to the upper left corner. Come down here to the lower right corner. And before letting go, we can adjust with our arrows the roundness again. In a thing like this, it fits the phone. So we can let go. Now we see that we have sort of created this phone screen, but here at the right side we still see our old screen. So therefore, I'll just grab those two mosque positions here. And now I can move the arrow a little bit to the right. That was too much like this maybe. And then we see that now we are only seeing the new phone screen. And it really looks like this is integrated in our phone. Still as this was a screencast, I feel like the contrast and brightness is a little bit too high, and therefore, I'll choose Effect, color correction, brightness contrast. And we want to lower the contrast a little bit. Maybe minus 15. Also bring down the brightness to minus 15. And maybe even adjust the saturation. Therefore, we can choose Hue saturation and bring down the saturation a little bit to minus ten. So that it looks a little more realistic like a real integration of this phone screen. Now of course, you can improve this basically until infinity by, for example, also adding a reflection effect here on this video. But for this demonstration case, I think that it's already looking quite good. And therefore we can now switch back to our final comp and see that this green now is perfectly integrated here into our flying phone in 3D space. Now, we might adjust the timing of this screencast a little bit to push the focus really on our After Effects course. Like this. In this case, it's a screencast of my German After Effects course. And we really see that this course is now in-focus of this flying mobile phone. Now what I've also done in the preview of this flying 3D model is that I've also added the screen here at the side of our phone. And of course that's quite easy. We switch back to our front composition and in this case, I'll demonstrate the effect by just adding a text here. But you might of course also, for example, a copy or duplicate this phone screen here and put it here to the side. But for now, I'll decide for texts. And maybe we just right after effects increase this texts in size. For example, like this. Then in this case, of course, it's aligned to the right. And now I bring it maybe here, right beside our phone. And of course, as this front composition is integrated in 3D space. First of all, in our 3D mobile and then of course in the final composition. And therefore we see that this text will now as well move with the positional change of our 3D mobile composition. And of course, as I've already mentioned, you could apply the same effect not only for texts, but you could sort of show the screen again a little bigger here, like when the preview video of this course starts. Or what you might also do is in this front composition, maybe bring out simple symbols, are just some elements of this text. To shoulder the focus on those elements. You are really free to create whatever you like. I think for this example, I hope you learned how to be able to create a 3D mobile without even using any 3D elements. So basically, all we needed was just an image from the front view of our phone as well as the backside view. And then we've added a screencast of a phone, which is also very easy to create. This sort of leads us to a really nice three-dimensional phone that is flying in space. So for now, we are finished with this segment and we will continue with another nice project example in the next video. 34. Our goal: Animating Music - Video2Music: Now here we are with another project example. And in the process of creating such a music wheel as you see here, you are going to get to know expressions and how to use them in After Effects. And we're also going to take a look at some new effects that we haven't used so far in this course. Now, the final goal, of course, is to animate elements to the beat of the music file. And again, the audio dot mp3 file is of course included in the course materials and ready to use for you. But before going into too many details, let's just check what we are going to create in the next videos. Now, as you can see, there's really a lot going on in this project example. We have the changing text here in the spike moments of our beat, as well as the beat itself displayed one time in a circular fashion, as well as these spikes here displayed in a line form. So a lot of things are waiting for us and therefore we will see again in the next video and start with an empty project. 35. Part 1: The audio spectrum effect, polar coordinates and aligning on mask path: Now, before we create a new and empty project in a couple of seconds, let's just quickly summarize one more time the necessary steps that we're going through to create this music. We'll now first of all, what you see is this text here, which is of course changing in the moments of heavy beat kicks. And what we're also going to add in our project is an animation of text size. I haven't done so in the example I created, but just in order to demonstrate that we can animate any property we want to. We will also add and change the text size going to the beat later on. Then of course, we have this music wheel which has been animated in two different ways. First of all, we have a digital form here with these strikes going in and out. And then we have this closed line form, which is as well going to the beat and the whole music. We'll composition itself with the texts and with those circles is also rotating and moving a little random here in space. So those would be the necessary steps we will take. And in this video we will start with these two circles you see here on the outside of our text. So let's finally go by creating a new project. And in this case, we want to start by simply importing our audio file from the course resources. And then dragging this file into a new composition, which will then of course have the same length as our MP3 file. Now, in order to create those two wheels that we've seen in the last video, what we want to do is add a new solid and then apply an effect to that solid, which recreate a line here in the x space with the amplitude of our music data in the y position. And after having done so, I will show you two different methods of how you could transform the x and y data into sort of a circular way of displaying our music data. The first method will be based on a second effect that we want to apply to our layer. And the second method will be based by simply modifying our first effect. So the effect that we've chosen to display our music data, because this effect can be aligned to different forms. And then of course, we can choose a circle form that we want this effect to be applied to. So let's get started by, first of all, creating a new solid. We want to name this solid. We'll one, make it come size, which in this case is still for k. We haven't added any video data so far, so the comp size will be the same as the last composition you've created. For now, I'll hit Cancel for a second and switch to the composition settings. Change the preset to HDTV, 25 frames per second in full HD. As I think that's totally enough for our music. We'll then get back to creating a new Solid. Make it come size. Of course now full HD. And the name, again, we'll one. The color doesn't matter in this case, as I show you in a second. And then we hit Okay, to create this new solid. And now we want to apply an effect to that layer which will be Effect generate audio spectrum. And what you can see already here is the line on the x position that I've explained to you with the amplitude in y position. But however, for the amplitude right now as I move forward and backward here in time, you see that so far there is no amplitude and this is because the audio layer is set on one wheel one. But it has to be, of course, our MP3 file. So we switched that to audio dot mp3. As you can see now, if I move forward and backward in time, this audio spectrum effects starts to work and interprets our music data to show the amplitude here in whitespace. Now, let's first of all, maybe shrink our work area a little bit so that we can focus on this small area here and now make some changes to this effect. To have a better look for our final music. We'll now first of all, we want to change the start and end point. Those points, you can see them here. And here. We want to change in the exposition. So for the start point, we will bring down the expedition from 192 to 0 to really get it to the left side of our preview area. And this, of course, will also be changed to this point, which in full HD is at position 1920. Now, next thing we can change is the number of frequency bands. So the number of lines, you will see here, right now it's set to 64. If we increase this number, you'll see that we get more details. In our audio view. Maybe we'll switch it to 250 like this. And then we want to also change the maximum heat, bring it up so that we have harder hits for our audio view. This looks quite good. And next in line would be to change the thickness. The thicker. You will change this, it starts to look a little blurry. So let's bring this back down to maybe three. And then we want to change the inside and outside color and switch them to sort of a greenish or bluish color as I've done in the preview. Maybe this green for the inside color and this blue here for the outside color. And what I haven't applied in the preview I created is the hue interpolation. If we increase this interpolation, then you'll see that the more degrees you will add here, the more of the full color spectrum will be added to this display. And I think this looks quite good, so I'll increase it to maybe 330. And next in line would be the different display options. In this case, we have decided to show a digital way of display, but we could also switch this to analog lines. This will be the form that we choose for our inner circle later on. Then of course, we have another one which is the analog dots. So for now we want to stick with the digital display and then we have the site options. And these will only decide on whether you want your lines to be only going upwards, are only going downwards or as in this case, going in both ways. So of course, changing to site a will let the effect only apply and move upwards. Site B, you might guess, we'll show this effect only going downwards. Side a and b will be the effect symmetrically in both directions. Now, this looks fine so far, but what we want to do now of course, is transform this line into a circular view. Before doing so, let's just preview and see that this animation is really going to our music. So yes, this is going along to the music quite nicely. But now let's finally switched the way of display to a circular way. Therefore, of course, with the layer selected again, the first method we want to add another effect, and this will be Effect Distort polar coordinates. Let me just close this audio spectrum effect to have a better view for the new effect. And what we can do here is convert either the polar way of display to a rectangular way or rectangular to polar. And that's of course what we want to do here. And if we now increase the interpolation, you will see that we start to sort of transform our coordinates to a circle. And if we bring it up right to a 100, you'll see that we've perfectly edit this closed circle here. Then of course, the amplitude is displayed the same way as before with the lines. And as this will finally be the lines which should be on the outside, where we will add another wheel with a closed line here on the inside. And therefore I will go back to our audio spectrum. And I want to change the site options to only display to the outside of the circle. And therefore, I think it's sine B. Yes. Then let's see, for the heat of those spikes, I think we can even increase that a little more. Let's see where there's a heavy hit here. So maybe we want to increase the maximum heat to about 2900. And I think this looks quite nice. So we are finished with the first circle. And what we want to do now is simply take this, we'll hit Control D to duplicate this wheel. And now we want to rename the second. We'll hit Enter and name it. We'll do with this second, we'll, we want to change the display option to analog lines. And I think although this is quite different than what I've done in the video preview, I feel it's looking really nice. What we can maybe change here is increase the scale of this whole layer to maybe 105 per cent. To add here a little space in between the first and the second. We'll now think this looks really cool. We can leave it as it is and then add a third wheel this time. So we duplicate our second wheel again. And this third wheel. Should be placed here on the inside of that wheel. So first of all, we want to change the site options to side a. Then we want to maybe scale this one down a little bit to 95%. And then for this we'll maybe we don't want to show the whole color spectrum, so we will decrease this, bring it maybe to only 30. Really focus on those two inside and outside colors that we have selected for this line maybe increase the thickness like this. And let's check by moving forward and backward a little bit. I don't want these hits to be as hard on the inside as on the outsides, like here. So therefore, will decrease the maximum heat for this one. Maybe like this. And that looks quite good. I think. Now of course, as with any project example, you can do your individual changes and adjustments to make it look even better. You've seen that this also looks quite different than what I've created for the preview video. So any project is individual, but for now, let's just see what we've created so far. Now, first of all, sorry that this sounds a little weird. It's because the preview was not played in real time, but a little slower so the music sounds a little awkward. But still we can see that the effects are nicely applied and move along to the beat of our music. But there's one problem. And this is the little break here on top, because the line here from the left to the right has been transformed to this circle. Then of course, it doesn't have the same effect here in the moment where the circle is put together. Therefore, I have already told you that there's another method that doesn't use this polar coordinates effect, but is directly applied to the audio spectrum effect. And therefore, let's quickly turn off the second third wheel and delete this polar coordinates effect. What we want to do now with this audio spectrum effect is used the option to align it to a path. And therefore, we could either add an individual path or use some of these mask options here to add a path to this layer. And for demonstration purposes, maybe we want to start navigate through those tools again by hitting Q and add a star to this layer. So we start here in the middle and then create this star path. And now we can choose to align our effect to this mass that we've just added. And then you'll see that the spectrum starts to go along our created star. Now here, of course, as the layer is cut because we've added this mask, you'll see that also the amplitude is Cartier. So what we want to do is switch the mask itself from add to none so that the mask itself won't be applied to our layer, but just used as a path. And then again, you'll see that we have those amplitudes perfectly displayed again along our star here. Now of course, we don't necessarily have to use a star, so we'll delete that again. And what we want to do is switch to an elliptical tool and then start drawing an ellipse. And if you hit Shift, you'll make sure that it will be a perfectly drawn circle. Maybe want to let go like this. Then with the mask selected here. So choose only the mask. You can move this mask with your arrows, bring it into the middle again, and then choose the path again to mask one and switch the mask itself off to none. So now again, you will see that the amplitude is aligned around our circle. And also the break we used to see before doesn't appear to be there anymore. So what we want to do, of course, is also align those other wheels to a mask instead of using the polar coordinates effect. Therefore, we will start by bringing back our second wheel and then deleting the polar coordinates. Choose the mask here, hit Control C, Control V to apply it to our second wheel. And then of course, in the effect as well, change the path to mask one. Now, as the mask is scaled the same way that your layer is scaled. It is of course, important that the wheel itself is centered in the composition. Because if not, and you scale up the second wheel, then it might be that the second wheel is a little off in terms of its relation to the first wheel. So if the circle would be here on the left side and you scale up the layer, then of course this scale doesn't originate from the center of this wheel. Therefore, it doesn't perfectly match the first real. But anyways, what you could do is just bring up the mask options here with clicking m. Then select the mask and individually position that mask by using your arrows. So for now I want to bring this perfectly above our first, we'll think it's okay like this. And then again, take this mask Control C, apply it to our third, we'll bring back the view of our third wheel and delete the polar coordinates. And then again switched the path to mask. One. Makes sure that the mask is perfectly aligned in the center of music. We'll now I think we have a very nice animation going along to the beat of our music. And let's finally check out what we've created so far. Alright, looking quite nice so far. In the next video, we want to introduce the use of expressions and also add a text to our animation. 36. Part 2: Introduction to Expressions: In this video, we want to go a step further and extract our music data to make it accessible for any effect, for any property, we'd like to connect it to. Remember, in the last video, we applied the audio spectrum effect, which itself looks quite nice, but of course, limits the way we want to display our music data. And now for this case, we want to choose another tool. And this will be by selecting the MP3 file, right-click and choose keyframe assistant. Convert audio to keyframes. Now, this will add a new layer audio amplitude inside our work area. Let me just shrink this to make it better visible here that we are focusing on the work area. And you'll see that this new layer has been added. Now, the layer itself is a null object, which can also be edits by choosing Layer New Null Object. And you'll see that such a null object is displayed by this little square. But the layer itself, you can imagine it to be sort of an information carrier, meaning it has the same options, the same transform options like position, scale, rotation, et cetera. But the layout won't be rendered at final. What you can of course do is, for example, connect the position of some other layers to the position of the null object. And if you then change the position of this null object, then of course it will have direct effect on the way. You'll see your composition here in the preview area. But if not connected to any properties than this null object is only a carrier of information for you to make it better accessible when desired. And in this case, the information that is carried here in this audio amplitude layer is the music data in the left channel, right channel, and both channels. So this will be an effect that is applied to this null object. By the way, we have chosen to select the keyframe assistant and convert our audio to those keyframes. Now here we have the left and the right as well as both, as well as both channels. Because sometimes when you hear a song with, for example, your earphones, you recognize that some instruments are played louder on the left channel, or some instruments are left out on some channels. But in this case, both channels will be the same. And we'll hear the same song, the same instruments on the left side than on the right side. And because of that, what we want to do is delete the left channel by selecting it and clicking Delete. Also the same for the right channel. And we want to focus here on this both channels effect. Now, if we open this effect, you'll see that a slider has been added with keyframes. That safety information of our music data frame. For frame. Here inside our work area, we have this slider, which is going from a value close to 0 to a value of about 50. In the moments like here of heavy hits. We can also make it a little more visible by selecting the slider and opening the graph editor. Then you will see that this is the way our music is played. And we have, of course, some moments of low volume and we have some moments of harder hits inside our music track. What we want to do now is add a text to our composition and then link some properties of the text to this audio amplitude. Display it here in the both channels effect. So we go ahead and create a new text by choosing this text tool. And maybe we just click here and start with music. Make it a little larger in area. Bolt. And bring it here to the middle. But we'll adjust that later on. And now what we can do is maybe start by selecting the scale of this music layer by hitting the shortcut S. And now we want to link the scale of this text layer to the slider of the audio amplitude. And we can do so by choosing this pick whip tool here, and then let go here on the slider. Now what you'll see is that the scale has changed its, its value in this case, in this frame to 40.5. So the same as the slider. And now those percentages are displayed in red. And of course, the scale at any frame and time now has the same value in X and in Y, S, the slider. And as we have the value displayed in red, this means that now an expression has been added to this scale. And we can open the expression by clicking on this small arrow here and you'll see the expression. For now I want to close the graph editor to make it a little better visible. The expression that has been added by this picker tool is that we have added a variable which will be temp. And this variable will be connected with the value from the layer audio amplitude. So from this null object layer, the effect both channels and the value slider. So this of course, is this exact value here. This variable, them to be transported to the scale will be temp, in X and in Y. So of course, the scale has two dimensions, x and y. So this variable will be displayed in X and in Y to be the exact same amount as our slider from the audio amplitude layer. Now, let's for 1 second solo this text layer and preview what we have connected so far. Again, sorry that this video was played a little slower than real time. This is because my PC has too much to do at the moment to record myself. We're previewing this and rendering some other things. But I think it gets clear that the music, the scale, is moving to the beat of our music. Now, the next thing we want to do is we don't want our music to scale down to about 0 or close to 0 like here, below ten per cent in the moment of low volume. But we want our music to be at least scale a 100%. And in the moments of those hard hits we wanted to scale up. Or let's say in every moment we want to add this scale to the, to the value of 100. And this can be easily done in different methods. The easiest one would be to just take our temp x data at a 100, take our temp, why data and add a 100. And now you'll see that it will change from 47.1% to 147.1%. Again, play this and preview what we've done. And again, you'll see that the text layer is moving to our bead from the music. Now, another way of displaying or achieving the same thing here is to add a second bracket and then adding a 100100 outside of our first temp, temp. Now of course, you could also apply other mathematical operations like multiplication. This with the value of two, subtracting some other values or whatever you want to achieve. Now, in the next video, what we want to do is in the moments of small changes here or from low volume moments. We don't want our music to move or to scale like a little bit. But what we want to have is a value and below that value of music hits, we want our scale to be the same. And only in the moments of those hard hits. Let's check it one more time here in the graph editor. So in these areas, we don't want any change to be applied to our scale, but only if the value reaches a certain unit amount, we want the scale to scale up. So this is what we're going to focus on in the next video. 37. Part 3: The Linear Expression: Once again, what do we want to achieve in this video? So we basically want to dismiss these small changes in scale as here, 101%, 102 are in these areas, one hundred and fifty and one hundred and sixteen. So we want to dismiss these small distortions here and only concentrate on those heavy hits here, close to 50 units. So let's say at the end, we want to dismiss all changes in scale below 40 units and only concentrate on those moments where we are above 40 units. And therefore, what we need to do is modify our expression. We can either modify the value of this slider here by adding an expression here, or we can directly modify the expression in the scale here that currently is directly referring to this slider. And the way we want to modify it is by introducing so-called linear expression. With this linear expression, what you can do is transform a range of values to a new range of values. And at this moment it might sound a little complicated, but don't worry, I will explain step-by-step how to use this linear expression. But first of all, let's speak about on where you can apply this expression. Now the first option would be to directly change this variable temp here, which by the way, of course, you could also rename and name this one audio for example. And then what we need to do, of course in these brackets, has changed the temp variable name also to audio. But now let's concentrate on this linear expression. So what you could do is refer the audio variable, of course, to our slider. So this value here, but then apply the linear effect to this slider value. And this is just for demonstration purposes that I'll close this bracket. The expression itself has more values to put into. But for now, this is just to demonstrate that this would be one method of how you could introduce the linear expression so that the variable itself will take the slider value, which then is considered for the linear expression and this linear expression than will be applied to the scale x and y. And then again, we want to add the a 100% value. Another method would be to apply the linear expression directly here with the slider, but we'll see about that right now. So I want to delete the linear expression from here. We want to apply the linear expression to this slider value. Now the thing here is that we didn't introduce any expression here so far. And we also don't want to use the picker at this moment. So there's another method to introduce expressions. And that is by hitting the Alt button on your keyboard and then clicking on this stopwatch with the odd button pressed. Thereby, you will see that the value itself will change again to the red color, meaning that we have introduced an expression. And you can also see that here again, the expression will open up. And currently, what we are using for the value of the slider is the effect both channels. Now in this case we want to modify this value. So again, we will apply linear open bracket and close this bracket. And then we need to apply an ad for more values here. And I will add those and explain later on what they are meaning. So for now I'll add one comma 1000, comma 100, comma 0, comma 200. Now, this means that first of all, the first value of course, is our source. Where do we want the linear expression to be applied to, in this case, of course, to our both channels effect to this value here, which in this case, in this frame is 16.2. Then we have with these two values, we have our source range of values. And here we have our goal or our target range of values. So in this case, what we want to do is we want to transform the value 0 to 0, and we want to transform the value 100 to 200. And in-between we want to linearly transform the values, meaning that a value of, for example, 50 in this case will be transformed to a 100. A value of 0 will be transformed to 0100 to two hundred fifty, two hundred. A T21, 160. And you'll see that in this case, any value in between 0100 will just be multiplied with the value of two. And also any value below 0 will be transferred transformed to 0, and any value above 100 will be transformed to the value 200. So if there's originally a value of 110, it would now be 200. The same for one hundred, fifty, five hundred. All those values will be transformed to 200. And also the values below 0 minus ten minus 50 will all be transformed to 0. So this was B. This will be the first example on how to use the linear expression. Now, just to see, originally we had the value 16.2 and if I hit Okay, and now you'll see it will be 32.4, so it will be the double value. Now, what we could also do is change the range from 0, maybe 2, two hundred, three hundred. And now this would mean that we would simply add the value 200 in-between the values 0100. So if we now have a value, for example, of ten, this will be transformed to 210, while 90 will be transformed to two hundred and ninety and a hundred, of course to three hundred and one hundred and fifty also to 300, a value of minus 20, again also to 200. So this would be just a switch or we will just add the value of 200 in-between those values. Now, but let's see how we can directly use the linear expression to achieve what we want to. And in this case, we want to use our slider value. And as you've seen before, we want any value below 40 to be transformed to 0. And we want any value above 40 to 50 to be transformed to the interval 0 to 100, and any value above 50, we want to be transformed to a 100. So what can we do? We will write 40 comma 50 comma 0, comma 100. So in this way, 3536040, all those values up to 40, where we transform to 0. And all values above 50 will be transformed to a 100. And all the values in-between will be linearly transformed to our new range 0. And in this case, of course, the original range had a length of ten and the new range has a length of a 100. So any one change here will have an influence of ten points in the new scale. So 40 will be 041, will be 1045, would be 5049 will be 90. And of course 50, or any value above will be a 100. So for now we'll hit okay with this one. And now you'll see that what we have achieved, if we take our slider and again, choose to see the graph, then you will see that all these moments here, where we are below 40 will now be transformed to 0. So all those moments here. The slider originally was at 151614 units. Right now, the final result will be 0. And only here in those moments, here we have the slider at a 100 or close to a 100, like here, 69. Anyways, in the range of 0 to 100, only in the range here where they are heavy hits. So this is one way of how you could use the linear expression, as already said here directly in the expression for the slider. And another option would be to delete the linear effect here and only use our slider like this. And again, apply the linear effect here for the audio variable. And then of course, use the very same values which have been comma 40, comma 50, comma 0, comma 100. Now, close this expression here. And again, you will see that the original value was 46.94 in this moment. And our new value is 169.4. And this is because first of all, we have added a 100 and then the interval of 40 to 50 has been linearly transform to 0 to 100. So 6.94 has been transformed to 69.4, as I have already explained. Or one step in the original value will be transformed to ten steps in the new value. And only in the moments where we are above 40, we will have a direct effect on our scale. Now, the last thing I want to explain is that we could of course, also now get rid of, get rid of this plus a 100100. Because we could also modify our linear expression. And therefore we don't want to transform 40520 comma 100. But what we want to do is transform, transform 40 to a 100. So 100 will be our minimum value and 50 will be our maximum value. And therefore we want to change it to 200. So we have added a 100 points here in the linear expression. And now we can delete the 100 here in the audio camera, audio plus a 100100. And you'll see that if I now close this expression will still be with 169 comma 4%. So I hope this got a little clear on how to use the linear expression. And now let's see what we have created by again, previewing this video. So now you've seen that the music really only scales up in the moments of those heavy hits. While most of the time it sticks with a 100% scale. So this is what we wanted to do for this video. And in the next video, we want to further adjust our music texts and add some other effects to it. 38. Part 4: Link more parameters to the Music: So first of all, what we see with this music texts layer, let me just deactivate this solo button again. What we see is in a moment this scales up. The origin from the scale seems to be here at the bottom, right. Because the text will scale and leave its position here in the center of this wheel to just scale up to the upper left corner. But of course we want the music to really scale out of the inside from this circle. So what we can do is, first of all, we choose the paragraph and make it a central text. So now what we see is that it doesn't scale from the bottom-right anymore, but from the center in the bottom. And this is because this little point here, the anchor point of that text is laying below the text itself. So what we want to do is bring up the anchor point, which is a transform option. You can see it here, the anchor point. And this should be changed to really the center of this music text. Especially the y value, needs to be changed here. And we will do so so that the point of the anchor is really in the middle of our text. Now, if we scale this text, again, you'll see that the music really appears to scale from the center of the text. So now what we can do is just grab this music texts or maybe just open the alliance settings, align it horizontally as well as vertically. Then we see that our music wheel as a little bit off. So what we can do is just grab those three wheels. We have one hit Control Wheel too, and we'll three. And just move it with your arrows to fit the arrangement of the music texts like this. So, so far, we have created those two wheels on the outside, or in this case three wheels. And then we have the music texts, which will scale in those heavy hit moments. Now, in these moments, I also want to add another effect. And to make this work out as planned, we first of all want to change the basic color of our music texts layer. We could now change the character color here and maybe make it a light blue or even picking this color here from our wheel. Or what we could do is add a gradient. So Effect Generate Gradient Ramp. And now maybe we could start with the color here on top and end with the color here at the bottom. And then maybe choose the start RAM to be here and the end to be here. So this will be our basic color. And now what we want to do is add an effect, which will be the glow effect. So we choose Effect, stylize glow. And now we could play with some of these settings here. So the glow radius determine how the text will be affected in terms of its surrounding. Then we have the threshold, which will change the brightness necessary in our texts layer in order to be affected by the glow effect. And of course we have the general glow intensity. Now, let's bring all those values back to standards. So we just click Reset here. And maybe now we can link the glow radius again to the beat of our music so that an order in the moments of these heavy hits, the glow radius will be increased. So what we can do is click on this below radio stopwatch in order to activate an expression here. And you'll see the color will change to red. And then we have this glow radius opened up here at the bottom. And here again, we can find this pick whip tool. So before choosing that, we want to make sure that we can see our slider here. And now of course, we again want to link this radius by choosing the pick whip tool and coming all the way down to our slider and let go there. So that of course, we just leave this expression as it is. You'll see that the radius changes to the actual value of the slider. Now, before we have used the linear expression, and I have shown you two different methods how to use this linear expression. In our case. The first method was to just write this expression here inside of our slider. And the second option was to add the linear expression to this variable here inside the scale. And now of course, we want the linear option again to be applied here. But as this has been just written inside the variable here, we now need to write the linear expression either again, here. At the top or adjust, cut the linear expression from here and paste it here onto the effect. But let's just write it here on this top layer, once again inside the radius. So that also we have a little bit more of freedom to maybe individually adjust the linear settings inside this radius effect. So again, we will change does just the link to the slider to linear with of course, this is our source. And then first of all, let's start with the same settings. So it was 4050, 0 comma 100, making sure that below 40, there won't be any effect on our radios. Or let's say the radius will be 0 and above 50, the radius will be 100. And everything in-between will be linearly changed into the interval from 0 to 100. Alright? So right now it will look like this. Here. We won't have any glow radius. And when the music really pops, the radius will be enlarged. Now let's play this to see if we are happy so far with how the music texts works out. Maybe we could even increase the radius a little more when the music really hits. So maybe we just want to multiply this linear effect with the factor of two. So let's just write two times linear. Then, again the same expression. So now we have the radius of 200 instead of 100. Of course, we could also sort of create the same effect when writing 200 year at the end. But I just want to show you that you can, of course, also multiply the linear expression itself. And then maybe we also want to change the color of the text by making it a little brighter in these moments. So this can be done by changing the threshold. Right here we have a threshold of 60%. And if we bring this threshold down, you'll see that the text will get brighter. So how can we achieve this effect? Well, all we've got to do is modify our linear expression so that in these moments when the music pumps out, the threshold will be lowered in this case. So let's just start by again, Alt clicking on the stopwatch here in the lower threshold to create an expression. And then we could either start by Pig weapon, our threshold again and link it to the slider. Or what we can also do is just copy this expression here and paste it onto our threshold. First of all, we want to delete this factor two in this case. And then what we want to do is if the slider is below 40, we want the threshold to be added standard value, which is 60. And if the slider will be at 50, we want the threshold to be 0, which will in this case, ensure that our texts will brighten up. This will create a negative relation from 40 to 50. It will be transferred to 60 to 0. And now we want to leave this expression and you'll see that in this moment when the music texts pops out and our original value was above 40, the threshold will change to 0 in this case because the value seems to be above 50. So now we have the effect that we wanted to create. The music itself will be without a glow effect. And most of the time. But when there's a heavy hit, first of all, the radius will be enlarged, and secondly, the threshold will be lowered. And I think this looks really nice and really focuses on those heavy beat moments. Now let's play this one more time and see what we've created so far. So I'm really happy with how this turned out. It looks like a nice flesh effect in these moments of music hits. So all in all, I hope you understood how to use the linear expression. It's a very nice and powerful expression in my opinion, that gives you all the possibilities to modify your expression to a desired range of target values. And also with the possibility of extracting your audio data to a null object. You can really link any effect or any property to the music data. So that's it for this video. And in the next video, we want to animate the whole circle together with this text effect by letting it move a little random and space and also creating a rotation in time. 39. Part 5: Customizing the text content, Time and Wiggle Expression: Now, what I forgot to mention in the end of the last segment was that in this video, of course, we also want to change the text itself in those heavy beat moments. So therefore, let's check one more time the audio amplitude layer, maybe select the slider and choose to view the graph. What we could do is change music. Two is in this moment my passion. So here we have those hits you'll see, here we want to change to is my passion. So for now, let's choose this frame and time. Or maybe we'll start one frame earlier. And what we want to do now, this is the moment where the texts should still be music, and here it should be is. So we don't need any expressions for that, but we will simply animate the source texts by introducing keyframes to the source of this text. So therefore, we want to open our text here. And then we have the text option, open that, and we have the source text. So now we simply want to hit the stopwatch to create our first keyframe. And now we have a keyframe set at this moment. So at this moment, at, at any moment before the texts will be music. And we continue in the next frame. And we want to change this text to is. Then leave it like this until the next hit arrives in this moment. So here it should still be is we set another keyframe by clicking this little symbol here. Making sure that in this area the text will be, is now for the next frame, it should be my. And then we continue until the next head, which is here. Here it should still be my. So set another keyframe. Move forward one frame and change the text to passion. And we want to stick with passion for the rest of the time. So let's play this one more time to see what we've created. I think this looks quite nice. Although of course here at the end, we have another moment of high amplitude where the text doesn't change anymore. So what you could do there are of course, several ways and you could decide to create any animation you like, but you could, for example, change the text to music is my greatest passion. So that you have a change in texts at every moment of high amplitude. Or you maybe want to decide and delete the text here in this last moment. And this also could be done in several ways. For example, just create another keyframe for the source texts at this moment, move forward one frame and time. Just click into that text and delete the text. Or what you could also do is just let this layer, and in this moment, of course then also the text would disappear at this very moment in time. But for now, I think we are okay with how the animation looks and what we want to do for the last part of this video to music project example is that we want to move this whole scene that we see here. So the circles together with the text, we want to introduce a random movement as well as a general rotation in time. And therefore, we will first of all create another composition which will be the final composition. Then we want to import this audio composition into that final composition and play around with some of these settings off the audio composition. So let's go ahead and create a new composition. And now what we see is that the suggestion from After Effects for the duration will again be three minutes and 1 second. Therefore, I want to cancel this for a second. And see that here we have concentrated to work inside this work area. And we don't want to focus on the whole three minutes. So what we can do for the audio composition is just right-click this work area and then trim our composition to this work area. And now, instead of creating a new composition, what we can do is choose our project data and simply select this audio composition which has now been trimmed to our work area. And then just drag this composition into a new composition. Rename this new audio to composition by hitting Enter and just write final comp. And now we have already imported the audio composition into that final composition and we can continue to work in that final composition now. So first of all, I set that we want to introduce a random movement as well as a general rotation of this audio composition. The thing now is if we have a random movement of this audio composition and say, We will go down a little bit in whitespace, that it will look a little awkward here because it gets cut off on top of that composition. Now of course, we want to see all those hits here and have the whole We'll included in this movement. So therefore, we need to adjust a little bit the audio composition. So let's one more time open this composition. And now we want to get a little bit more space here. So what we can do is simply open our composition settings and then switch the preset from full HD. We need a little more width as well as heat. So therefore, maybe what we can do is stay with 25 frames per second, but just choose four K hit. Okay? And then what we can see is now we have more space here at the sides. But still our wheel gets cut off here on top. And this is because the layer itself still is created in full HD. So the layer ends here at this position. Now, you might think that what we can do is just select this layer and then change our solid settings to make them calm size. And therefore now we also are working in for k with this layer, then it knew. But now you can see that also the mask has been scaled up, not only the layer, but also the mask and therefore the whole view is changed. Or better said, if I now also increase the size of weird too as well as we have three, we again have the same problem that we started with. And then those hits here again, we'll leave our space of the composition. So how can we solve this problem? What we need to do is get our mask out of the way before adapting the size of that layer. One more time, I'm going to undo what I did last. So then again, I have my weird one layer in full HD while the whole composition is for k. And now I'll open up my mask by hitting M. And then I want to cut this mask for a second, control X. And now I can change the solid settings, make this solid column size. Select the layer again, Control V to paste the mask again. You'll see that now the mask has the same size as before. But what we need to do again, of course, is open our audio spectrum effect and choose the path again to be the mask one. Now you can see that here we are again with our mask. And the hit here is displayed as we'd like it to. Now, we will do the very same for our second. We'll just cut this mask, open the solid settings, make it Comp Size, paste the mask Control V, open our audio spectrum effect. And again choose the mask one to be the path. And then you'll see here at the top that it is fully displayed as we'd like it to be. Now, we don't need to do that for the wheel three because in this case, our layer is of course still full HD, but the effect is applied only to the center. So this will be an inside we are which then of course we'll never leave this layer here at the site or at the top. So now we have created the effect. We want to end. All moments. Also in this very hard hit moments will see that the music is fully displayed as we want it to be. Now coming back to our final comp, we can then move this composition in space. And before we start to do so, of course now we are working in full HD here in this final column, while the audio composition has been changed to four k. So what we wanna do is just scale it down the shortcut S to open the scale and scale this to 50%. And now we can just let this, we'll move around in space. And it never gets Cartier at any position. But before doing so, let's just quickly align this again to perfectly match our composition. And now maybe we can start with rotating this wheel. Therefore, I want to use another expression and we open the rotation with shortcut R. And now what we want to do is Alt click the stopwatch. And I want to write something like time. Multiply it. By the value of 40. Then you will see that this wheel starts to rotate. And this is because of the time expression. Now to better explain how this time expression works, I quickly want to add the text to this composition. So just use the text tool and click inside our preview area. And then we just close our texts without writing anything. So we have created this empty text layer. We want to open this, open our text and then add an expression to our source texts. So again, Alt click this source text, and then we want to change this to time. So what we see now is the value of the time expression at this very moment. And if we then change the time indicator, then you'll see that the time expression is moving. And it just shows the point in time where we currently are inside our composition. So here of course, this is the moment 01 second later we are at time value 12 seconds later, time value2, etc. Now what you can see here inside this composition is that currently are starting timestamp is at about six seconds, while the end is about 11 seconds and some frames. And this is because we have shrunken the previous composition to fit our previous work area. And that work area started at the 6 second mark. And therefore this is our current start time stamp here in the final column, as well as also in the audio composition. Because remember, in that composition we started to trim our composition to that work area. But again, of course, we can just change this start value by opening our composition settings and changing the start time code to be 0. Then of course the values you see here. So for example, three seconds be the very same f, our time value from that expression. So this value is of course changing at any frame. And we want to use this value to create our rotation of this audio composition. Now, the rotation would be very slow if we just use the time value. And therefore, what I've done is just edit this factor of 40 to make it rotate a little faster. But still I think the rotation is too slow. Therefore, I want to change this factor here, 280. And then we have created this nice rotation of our music. We'll now I can delete this text layer. And next we want to also add a sort of random, random movement in x and y space to give this one a little more dynamic. So therefore, we can use another expression which will be used to modify our position. So we can hit P to open the position. Or remember, you can also hit Shift to open several properties like for example, our Shift P to open our position and rotation data. Now again we create an expression, Alt click the stopwatch. And now we want to write, wiggle. Open the brackets, three comma 100. Close this expression. And you'll see that the part from the rotation, we have added soul of a random movement in x and y space. And this is done by the wiggle rotation, by the wiggle expression, which in my opinion is a very powerful expression that can be used in many, many projects and compositions and always adds a nice effect to your desired layers or compositions. Now the two parameters inside this wiggle expression simply determine how many times we want to wiggle per second and be the extent of that wiggle. So in this case, we want to wiggle three times per second by an amount of 100 pixels in x and y. Together with the rotation, I think this music we'll now looks really nice with a cool dynamic in time. And let's see one more time what we finally created in this project example. Of course, again, you could do many, many more adjustments. Like for example, take this audio composition here, duplicate it, then open the scale as well as the opacity. Maybe scale this one up to 150 per cent while bringing down the opacity to 20 per cent. To have another we'll hear in the background, or you may be duplicated the first real, to have another wheel here on the right side and one more We'll here on the left side. Of course, this is your individual choice on how you like to have your video move to the music. But for this segment, we got to know how to use expressions. You already know the linear expression, which allows you to change an origin range of values to a desired target range. You know how to use the wiggle expression to make, for example, random movements in x and y. And you also know how to use the time expression to create, for example, this never ending rotation of our music wheel. So that's it for this segment. I hope you liked it. How this music we'll turned out and let's see again in the next video. 40. Using a Greenscreen to go on vacation from home: For the upcoming segments, I'm welcoming you directly here from the Caribbean, whether it's using a scrape. And so part of the cocktails and I think together we can easily fix the next video is right from here. So what we're going to talk about in the next segment will be just kidding, Although I wish it was true. But what we're going to talk about in the upcoming videos will be first of all, on how to use such a green screen in order to, for example, place yourself into a different setting that I'm going to show you another method that even allows us to place objects into different scenery without using such a green screen. And at the end, we are going to create an interview with ourselves. We are going to appear two times in the same setting. So I'm going to get changed now and then we'll see again in After Effects. Alright, Now first of all, I am deeply sorry for this, really desperate to try to create a little vacation mode inside this course. But I felt like this might be a good example video for the upcoming effect that this video is all about, and that is the so-called key light effect. Now, looking at this composition, what you can see is that at the bottom we have the sandy beach, a video which is this Caribbean beach here in the background. Then we also have a Caribbean music included. And on top of that, we have to green-screen layers. Those layers, of course, meet the stock video. And then we have applied different effects that I will talk about in a couple of minutes. I will also explain why I added two layers for this green screen video. But for now, let's just begin with the original stock video. And I will activate this layer. And you'll see that this is just me standing in front of the green screen in my living room downstairs. Now, first of all, of course, later on, when the killer effects be applied, we will get rid of all those green areas here. But before doing so, what we need to do is of course, take a mask and just cut this stock video here to the green screen area. We do so by picking the pen tool and then starting here at the left, bottom. And just drawing a rough shape to only include our green-screen areas. So there we are. And now we can really focus on the key light effect. Now what you can see before doing source, that the lighting is not perfect. So we have a little light green area here at the top and we get to darker areas here at the bottom. Nonetheless, we can make this effect work and we start by simply applying it, choose Effect, keying, key light. And now let's talk about the different settings and properties of this effect. The most important one, of course, is the screen color. And we want to choose the picker tool and just let go here on our green area. And now I want to delete those green-screen to and green-screen three layers where the effect has already been applied and we will really start from scratch with this video. Now what you can see is that the effect has been applied. So those green areas here at the top look quite good. But here at the bottom, as I already mentioned, in those darker areas, it doesn't yet look really perfect. So let's talk about some more settings. Here. You can open up this screen met. And there you can either increase the Clip Black value to include more and more of those darker areas to our key light effect. Or on the other hand, you could decrease the clip white value so that more and more of those areas will be left over after playing this effect. So if I decrease this clip white value, what you'll notice is that more and more of the darker areas will still be there after the effect has been applied. While if increase the Clip Black value, more and more of those areas will be cut out. And that of course, is what we want to start with because we want to get rid of this darker bottom areas here in the picture. So therefore will increase this clip black value until all those areas disappear. And if we further increase it, what you'll notice is that parts of my shirt also starts to disappear. So let's find a value where the bottom areas are perfectly left out. Why my shirt still looks good, should be about here. And now we can decrease the clip wide value to make my shirt look a little better. And the more I decrease it, you'll notice that certain areas here at the bottom start to appear again. So let's just find a perfect value. Increase this clip black a little more, decrease the clip wide. And what you cannot do is decreased this clip wide further than you have increased the Clip Black value. Because if you do so, the frame will be inverted and that of course, is not what we want to achieve. Okay? And then we have some more options here. Like for example, we could shrink or grow the whole mask. And if I increase this value, you'll notice that A border around myself starts to appear while decreasing this value below 0 will make myself a little thinner than I am in nature. So therefore, let's just state with the value 0 here. You could also apply a little softness right now as you can see, the mosque year, the borders are really hard. If I increase the softness, then as the name already says, of course, the borders here, We'll start to be a little more soft. But as the background is very, very sharp, I also want myself and the edges to be quite sharp. So therefore, maybe we'll just choose a very small value, such as 0.2. And that's it about the most important settings for this effect. We have some more advanced settings here. But most of the cases you should be okay with what I mentioned before. So let's just focus on those settings. But if I want to consider my pens, maybe focus a little bit on this area, then you'll see that maybe we want to shrink the screen a little bit more here. So therefore, what we'll do is come down to the screen, shrink and maybe choose minus one. And this looks a lot better for depends here whatsoever. We have some areas here in the cocktail where now the keying effect has been applied and of course should not be applied. So that's the little trick I used before. If I have a little lighter area here at the top, while a little darker area for the lighting here at the bottoms. What you can easily do is either of course, play around with all those settings until you find a perfect match. Or as I always do, I apply another mask on this layer here. So let's just choose the rectangle tool and focus on our top. Maybe until here. And now we don't want this mask to be added. But what we want to do is we want to intersect our masks. So therefore, we will only apply the mask here in this upper area where really both masks have been placed. And then we want to duplicate this layer and open up the mask settings. And for this time, we don't want to intersect the masks, but we want really to subtract our second mask. Now, this layer really focuses only on the bottom area, while the other layer focuses on the top layer. So we have already applied the effect perfectly for the bottom area. So for this one, and now let's focus on our top layer and try to bring our cocktail back in the game. So therefore, we want to decrease the blacks a little more like this and then also decrease the clip wide. We don't have to focus on those areas here like we did before because there's of course as part of the other layer. So now we can really focus on the top layer here so that the cocktail, we'll be back in the game. And I think like this, it looks quite good for both the shirt as well as the pants. Now what I also did was apply some color settings, some color effects so that it matches a little better. The background. What I notice here is that we have some black areas left. So we come down to this layer here again, open up the screen mat and increase the clip black. Until this area disappears. Should be good like this. Maybe increased clip wide, a little more, increased Clip Black. This is the advantage of really cutting those layers into pieces because now you can just really focus on the dark areas and improve those without having an impact on what we did here. For my face as well as my shirt. Now, I already mentioned I applied some color settings and colored effects. So let's just open up our top and choose Effect Color Correction and maybe start with increasing the saturation. So apply hue and saturation. And now we want to increase the saturation, maybe 220. And then we also want to apply brightness and contrast. So open color correction, brightness contrast, and then maybe increase the contrast to ten. And make this one a little darker. Minus ten. Decrease or increase the contrast a little more to 20. And then of course, you want to make sure that all the effects and settings you apply to the one layer will be applied the same way to the second layer. So just copy those. Hit Control C and come down to our second layer and hit Control V to apply the effect. And there we are standing right in the Caribbean with our cocktail perfectly included. And I think this looks quite good. So that's it for the key light effect. If you have a green screen, this is my recommendation for you to use. There are other effects to apply. A key thing like, for example, if I delete those effects again, we could also choose Effect keying, linear color key, which will be more simple effect so that less memory space is needed and it will be rendered a lot faster. But anyways, there are not as many options and settings to play around, and the final result won't be as good as with tequila effect. So here you can see we have some green areas still include it. Of course, you could play around with the tolerance as well as the matching softness. But my recommendation, if you do own a green screen or blue screen, would be to really use tequila effect because this is a kind of intelligent tool and allows you to create a good solution for yourself or any object standing in front of the green screen. So that's it for this video. And then in next video we'll talk about some other options that can be applied to include objects and move them to different settings, even without owning a green or a blue screen. So see you for that one in the next video. 41. The Roto Brush tool: Overview: In the next part, I want to show you another method or another tool that allows us to cut or key. For example, a person as we see here in this video, without even having to use a green screen. So as an example, we want to consider this video of a woman a dancing at the beach. I will show you the video right now. And the cool thing again is that after cutting the woman, we have access to her as a person in a very own layer. And therefore, we can, for example, give this one a text here behind the person. Or even duplicating this layer with only the person so that we have a shadow effect as we see here. And finally, create a video like this one. So of course, again, the possibilities of what you can do with this tool are sort of endless. The very nice thing is that even the hair here, which is a very complicated thing to cut or two key, looks very clean here in front of our text. This is because the tool that we use, the so-called Roto Brush Tool now is in its second version, which I can say is a lot, lot better than the first version and really works. Very, very good. So of course, you can, again follow everything we are going to cover in this part because the dancing video is part of the course material as well as another video, which is this person a break dancing. And this was the original video. This one. I will show you quickly how it looked. And what I did for this example was to just duplicate our person again by cutting it with the so-called Roto Brush Tool. Then duplicating this layer two more times, sort of modifying the color of the pants and then again, putting another text in the background, like in this case, breakdowns. So this is the final video. So there we are. We have our original person duplicated two more times to the left and to the right with another text here in the background. So what we're going to do in the next video is focusing in detail on this vacation video. And I'll explain to you step-by-step how to use the Roto Brush Tool. And as you've learned how to create this effect for the dancing woman, you will be easily able to follow what we're going to do for this video. It's sort of a repetition only. So therefore, we will cover in detail the vacation video and then do a quick summary for this dance video. So let's get started and therefore see you again in the next video. 42. The Roto Brush tool: First example in detail: So let's get started. We want to recreate this vacation video, and therefore we will begin with a new and empty project. And then start by directly importing our two videos from the course resources, which will be the example dance, as well as the example of vacation video. Just direct drop them into our project files and then take the example of vacation video, drag it into a new composition. Now this video is one minute long, but in this case, as we just want to focus on how to use the Roto Brush Tool, which is a very useful tool, but also a demanding one in terms of the usage of our GPU. And therefore, we will just shrink this video maybe to the first four or five seconds, either by just shrinking only our work area and working inside this area or as we want to do in this case, right-clicking this work area and then choose trim comp to work area. So now our composition is only four seconds long. And still we have a lot of movement here inside these four seconds. So we can learn how to use the Roto Brush Tool just by concentrating on these first seconds. So let's get into it and use this Roto Brush Tool you'll see here at the top. And this tool is used inside a layer. So right now we are in decomposition of view. So what we want to do is double-click onto our example vacation video to open the layer view. And then we can apply the Roto Brush tool and start drawing a rough shape here inside the person that we want to be cut out. So what we can see here is the first proposal of this roto Brush tool to define the edges. And now of course, we want to further enhance these edges because what this tool will do then in the second version is use machine-learning algorithm to track those edges in time. So it is very important that our first frame that we want to use as a reference will be quite good so that the tool will have some good edges to follow in time. So of course, what you can see here is that we have parts of the sea included, that of course we don't want to be part of our persons, so therefore, we can hit the Alt or with your MacBook. I think it's the Option button, leaf, this button pressed by using your left mouse to change this one to a red pen and have some parts excluded. And then again, use the green pen to further enhance these views here. And I think right now, we are already in full resolution. That might be quite important because the better their solution you will use, the more easy it will be for these tools to find the edges. So again, we want to enhance this one here. Now, that was wrong, of course, we want it to be excluded. What you can also do is hit the Control button, leaf this one pressed, and then click your left mouse button and pull your mouse up or down to D or increase the size of the circle that you want to use for your pen. And now let's quickly go around here and see where we can further enhance our edges. I think in this part here we want our fingers to be included. Okay? And then let's see here. Here, of course we want this part to be excluded. So again, hit the Alt button, draw a rough shape there. This looks quite good and here, okay, we want to decrease the size. And then again, have this part included. Exclude this one. Okay, this looks fine. Looks good as well. Maybe here we have a little part of the C included, so let's de-select that part. Has already said the first frame you want to use is very important because this will be the reference to start the algorithm. And then again, machine-learning will be used so that frame-by-frame, these edges will be followed. And we have a little special case here with the hair, which is very difficult to analyze. And therefore we have another tool which will be the so-called refined edges tool. And you can open this tool by using your left mouse button. Select that one, leave it selected, and then choose the Refine Edge tool. Now again, you have the same objects like increasing or decreasing the circle size with your control button. I think this size should be fine. And now we want to draw around our hair here that we want to give this one special focus. And see that these edges here are looking quite good. So what you can see here is our final teaching or final key objects that we want to use. And also we can have different views here, like for example, have in red the areas that we don't want to be included. And what you can see here, the person that will be included. Now of course, you could change the color of this one, maybe two blue. But I've never done so. So let's just go back to red. Then we have the option to view the Alpha. So the white part will be included. We have here these defined edges and here in the hair we have a little bit of further details. So let's just get back to our standard view, which is this one. And then here we have some more options of these Roto Brush tool. First of all, we have the Roto Brush Options and then we have the edge option. So the Edge is what we've done here for the hair. And the Roto Brush is what we've used in all the other segments. So if you would, for example, one to increase the feather, then you will see that these edges becomes smoother. But in this case, of course, we want them to be very small, like for example five. Then you could also in or decrease the contrast. Shift the edges to increase the object in total, like you'll see here. But for now, we just wanted to leave this for 0. And also the same options could be applied here to the edge matte. But in this case, we are happy with how this turns out. And what we want to do now is check some other frames. Maybe we move forward here. Two or three frames. Let this tool do its job. We'll see what the edges will look like after the fifth frame. And I think the edges are still perfect. Maybe check one more time. Five or seven frames. To the other direction. These edges seem to look quite good, which I can tell you really is a huge enhancement of this second version. Because I was using the first version for many, many years. And in this example, I'm quite sure that for example, here in this area where in some frames we will see a little bit of the sea, while in other frames, the arm here is in front of the sea. So they are, the first version would have a lot of struggles following these edges. But the second version seems to work really, really well. So what we want to do now here is just choose our work area for this tool, which in this case will be shrunken to those four seconds. And now we want to freeze those frames. And what this will do is start of the algorithm to analyze those frames and freeze these frames so that we can then work with this effect as a single layer. This will take some time because it's very demanding. And as I've already said, machine learning is used. So we need our GPU to fix this one. And right now here we are with 12 or 13%. So I'll just do a quick break here and we'll see you again when this tool has done its job. Alright, so we are done. And if we now duplicate this example, a vacation, a video layer Control D, and then get rid of our Roto Brush effect here for the bottom layer. Then you'll see that here, of course, in the composition, all will still look quite as before. But if we now add a text like for example, vacation 2022, and then maybe bring this text here. You'll see that if the texts here is in second position behind our example vacation with the applied Roto Brush. Then you will see that this text layer is looking perfectly positioned behind our dancing woman. And also, which I really think is quite impressive, is how this hair here is treated with this tool. It really looks very, very good here in these difficult parts to analyze. But still we have the letter O, of course here included. Beside the hair and here where the hair is, we have the person in the foreground. So this looks really good. And what I've also done for the example video was two more things. First of all, I duplicate it. These extracted layers here for the woman. Therefore just Control D again. And then position this one a little bit to the right. Makes sure that you don't move up so that the leg will be cut here, but you could move a little darker and I'll just bring it a little to the right. And then I decrease the opacity T to open the opacity, decrease this to May 60% ring a little more to the left, then again, duplicate that layer. Choose the one on the bottom, bring it a little more to the right. Decrease the opacity again to maybe 35 per cent. And I think for the example, what I did was to bring up the text to second position. So that will be before those duplications. And now we have this woman dancing in time here with two more duplications. I will render the final results later on about one more thing I also added, and that is to adjust the text to the shape and position of the horizon here in the background. And I can do so by selecting our text layer and then choosing the pen tool. And start with the first here on the left side. Then add another point here on the right side, lift the left mouse button pressed, and now move up or down to bring in the curve for this shape. Adjust this to our horizon, sort of like this. Then let go. And now if I open this text layer, open the text options, go down to the path options. And for the path, select this first mask. Then you'll see that if the baseline shift will not be so huge, bring this one down to 0 that our texts really is adjusted to this mask which follows the horizon. Now also, of course, I want our text to be in the center, and I can do so by opening the paragraph options and then choosing centered. Now we really have the vacation texts here behind our dancing a woman. And also I think in our example, what I did was to do a little color correction here. And in this case, what I want to do is open the mode here and then switch this mode from normal to overlay. Blend with the background. But also there are many, many other modes that we'll cover later on in this course. But I think the overlay option for this example looks quite nice, better than the soft light and better than the hard light screen. So let's just stick with the overlay to blend this color into the background. So let's check out what we finally created for this example. I think this is looking really good, although of course, we are not really able to see the text vacation. So maybe what we can do is click inside this text some more spaces here, maybe some spaces here on the right side to move the whole texts a little to the left. And of course again, the possibilities here are endless to further enhance this. But I think for demonstration purposes, this should look quite okay. We are done with this first example. We have the woman dancing in front of the text. And now let's switch and consider our second example and add some a break dance moves. 43. The Roto Brush tool: Second example in fast forward: Alright, so in this case I want to use the roughen edges tool, not only for the hair of the person, but also to follow along the left and right-hand. Okay, So I'm satisfied with the mask for the first frame. And now let's follow along and teeth in time and see how this turns out. Well, that's what I was expecting. This shoe is a lot harder to understand for after effects than before for our dancing vacation lady. So we need to put some work in to follow this one along, but no problem. Again, we choose the Roto Brush Tool and remark our shoes. Well, this shoe is seems to be very hard to understand for Adobe After Effects. That's a little bit of a bad work to do. But still better than as if you would have to mask this person out by yourself. I think it's 90% less work, so you can manage to just follow along this shoe. Alright, so it's getting interesting here where the hand is now behind our body and also the hair is not really visible anymore. So what we can do is get rid of the refined edges. In this case, we want to choose them. You find edges tool again and then de-select your area with putting the Alt or Option key, and then just de-select this area. Of course, again, reposition our shoes. So choose the Roto Brush Tool again. Go along with our shoot. Now we've lost the second shoe as well, so we need to rethink that one too. And this of course happened because the shoe was moving here before our body. Then when leaving the body, it got a little lost, but now we find it again. And let's see how this turns out. Alright, so I followed along for a little more than 1 second and this should be the end of my area before just drag this end here, and then we want to freeze those frames. Alright, so we are done. And first of all, let's duplicate this example dense layer by hitting Control D. And then of course, for the layer at the bottom, we want to deactivate or delete our Roto Brush Effect and then get back to the composition. And you'll see nothing really has changed so far, but we're going to add a text. And we want to write something like break dance. Maybe choose a little better font here, something like this, which is looking like graffiti. And then increase that one. And for the color, we want to pick the color maybe from the pants here, so an orange. And then we want to rotate it so that it fits the bottom here. So open R to bring up the rotation and then maybe decrease this for, let's say maybe 2.5 minus 2.5 degrees. Bring it up a little bit so that it's directly behind our densa. And what I also did, of course, was to duplicate those layers here with the Roto Brush effects. So just hit Control D again. Bring it up to the right. Make sure that our dancer is still here, dancing on the bottom like there. And then I changed the color for the parents. And I did so by choosing Effect, Color Correction, change to color. And what we wanna do is for the front color, we want to, of course, choose the pen color and then maybe bring it to something like a greenish tone. And now we see that some parts of our hands and arms have also changed, so we need to decrease the tolerance here the hue has been chosen to be five per cent. Lightness tolerance is 50 per cent and saturation tolerant tolerance as well, 50 per cent. So let's bring those two values down. Maybe both to five per cent. And you'll see that now our arms are back in the tone they have been before, and we have a little orange border here, but I think this looks quite nice so we can leave it as it is, and then duplicate that layer again. Bring it to the left and change the final color to something like a blue one. This looks quite nice. So now let's see our final composition, our final project that we've made out of this dancing person. Alright, so there we are now three dances in front of this gray wall with the breakdowns slogan. I feel this is a cool enhancement in comparison to our original video with only one denser here. Of course, in this case, we needed to put in some more work, which is because the object, first of all, is hardly separable from the background, especially the shoes here. And of course, secondly, the movement of the dancer is pretty fast. Now, feel free to play this out for yourself. Of course, you have the course material with this video included, and now that's it for this tutorial. And in the next video, what we wanna do to end this section is create an interview with ourselves. So see you for that one in the next video. 44. Set up an interview with yourself: In this very last segment of the section, we want to be doing some fun stuff and create an interview with our self, as you can see here. But before I dive into that and explain to you step-by-step how such an interview can be created. Let's just check out the final video. Before we get started with the interview, Let's quickly check what can be achieved by good lighting. And now let's welcome our special guests. Hello, and thanks for having me. You're welcome. Today. It's all about your new Adobe After Effects course. Well, my course, your course, either way, I would be more than happy for any five-star rating or recommendation. I'm sure the audience will check it out. And now let's get back to the main office. Where first of all, I hope you listen to those two guys you can see here and give the course of five-star rating if you like it. And now let's get back to After Effects. And to be honest, creating such an interview is very, very easy, especially if you decide to not physically interact between, let's say, person a here on the right and person B on the left. Then you just have to make sure that first of all, the cameras setting will be the exact same as your firm for person a. And later on, of course, you'll formatted for person B, then you can just intersect those two frames. Here on the left is what you see from person B, and here on the right is what you see from person a. And secondly, of course, you need to make sure that you are independent of changing circumstances, such as, for example, wind or a changing lighting you have outside. So better film this one inside your home where you really have the exact same frame here on the left as on the right, so that you will never see those intersecting areas here in the middle. And later on, of course, in this case, we also added a fist bump, which needed a little preparation because I had a little point here where those fists needed to meet. But to be honest, this didn't really work out perfectly, so I needed to fix that in post. What I also needed to fix what's the pause times? Of course, I knew at any point the whole interview was scripted when I ask a question as Person a and knew the exact answer from person B and spoke the answer in my head, trying to recreate the past times until the next question came from person a. But honestly, I underestimated the pause times apparently in my head, I spoke at it a little too fast, and therefore we also need to fix that one impulse, but I show it to you in a second how this can be done. So let's get started in After Effects, and I'll explain to you step-by-step how such an interview can be created. Okay, so first of all, I think in this case, the most efficient way for you to understand this would be that we just stay inside this project and I'll explain to you the most important steps. Like, for example, matching the pause times of Person B to the speaking times of person a. And secondly, of course, to understand how the fist bumps can match. Now here on the left we have the part for interview, as well as interview. And interview 0 is the name for anything that happens before the light switch. So let's just start with interview a. Do a new composition out of that. Maybe also import interview B as well as interview 0. So for interviews 0 here at the top, you can see of course, that this is all that happens before the lighting switch. And I guess this is really very easy to understand because I just waited for the moment where I want the change to happen which would be here. And in this moment is where we want to interview 02. And so we just grab it here and take interview a move forward one frame. And then match this with the exact same moment. And you'll see here, this is how the lighting switch was created. So this is just a timing question. And now the more important and a little more difficult part would be to match interview with interview B. Now therefore, let's just open the audio settings from interview a, meaning the person here on the right. Open the audio settings and especially the waveform. And do the same for interview, be composition, meaning the person on the left. Open the waveform and maybe get a little more space here so that we can see a little better. Now of course, what you see here on top for interview, especially here, for example, is the speaking time from interview person a on the right, and here is the speaking time from interview person B on the left. And now of course we need to match this. This is where person a says, let's welcome our special guest. And here, interview B says. Hello, Nice to be here or something similar like that. So first of all, we need to bring this to the right to match the pause time here from interview a. And then we could just bring the beginning of our work area to this point with hitting, hitting the shortcut B. And here we could ended with hitting N. And then just, let's check out the audio by only hitting comma. Now, let's welcome our special guests. Hello, and thanks for having me know work on today. It's all about your new Adobe After Effects. Well, okay, we need to bring this one a little more to the left. Play this one more time with comma. Now, let's welcome our special guest. Hello, and thanks for having me. You're welcome. Today. It's all about your new Adobe After Effects. Well, my course, you're okay. So the first one here seems to be fine. This is the introduction. Then interview person B says, Nice to be here. Then comes the first question from interview a. And now here we see the first problem, which is that this pause time, we trained the first one from interview B and the second one is too short. So what can we do in this case? Now, of course, we need to bring up a little more time here in this interview person B, composition. But we cannot do so in the times where interview person B is speaking, of course, because it would be very visible and also hear a bell. But what we can do is if it's not too much of space we need to get, then we just grab the pause time here from interview person B, where basically nothing happens and we can just bring up a little more time by slowing down the composition. Now before doing so, let's just quickly create a mask here for interview so that we see both at the same time. And we just want to start very basic by just bringing up the mask here. And now you'll see that interview person B or B is starting to appear. Now we don't want to consider the fist bump at first. We just want to arrange the clips so that they match in terms of audio. Now, before doing so, let's just open the mask by hitting M and M again to open the mask options. And now we want to bring up a little feather because right now I think we still, okay, You can see it a little bit. So just enlarge the feather to maybe 50. Or even, let's say 80. So that now you really cannot see where this picture from person B is changing into the one of person a. Maybe bring this up a little more to 120. Okay, Perfect. Now back to matching the audio. So we have already seen that if I reopen the audio here for person a, we have already seen that the first one seems to be fine, but what we need to do now is consider the pause time here from interview person a B, and give us a little more time. So what we need to do is just mark this composition from interview B and hit Control Shift D to just cut it at this position, then move forward a little more in time. Here is already the moment where interview person B has begun to speak again. Open the audio settings for this new composition as well. And here I think we can make another cut. So again, Control Shift D. And now just take this pause time here, right-click and choose time. Time stretch. And now we want to bring up effector like maybe 115%. Click Okay. And you'll see that from this point to the end of that composition is what we have just one in terms of time. So now we can bring up this composition here. So the first frame from that composition should match the last frame from the composition below. So let's just zoom in a little more there. But it seems to be fine. And we'll open up the audio for this one. Bring up the waveform again and you'll see that still there's not enough time. So this was very bad, badly done by myself. But of course, we can fix this with a time stretch. Of course would be better to not use anytime stretch and just have the perfect matching interview. But I just wanted to show it to you because it once again explains that you'll have a problem and you need to solve in After Effects and you'll find your way to the solution. So maybe let's, let's do 130. And bring the composition more to the right here. And let's just hear if we need to bring even more space or if it's okay. So we hit comma again After Effects course. Well, my course, your course. Now, let's welcome our special guest. Hello, and thanks for having me. You're welcome. Today. It's all about your new Adobe After Effects course. Well, my course, your course. Now that sounds quite nice. And this is the very same method applied to any other pause times between interview a and interview person B where it did not match. So in those cases, just grab that composition or that layer here, go to the beginning of a pause. Had control shift D to split that layer, go to the end of the paws, hit Control Shift D again, and then grab the pause layer and stretch the time. Now you can increase the time factor by 20 or even 2530%. But I'd say there is a maximum value. If you need to double your time of a parse, Then sad but true, I'd recommend you to do the interview one more time because you will be noticing that when, for example, blinking your eye or even doing any other small movements. But alright, we have timed our interview now perfectly. And now I want to show to you two more things in the final composition. So that's open that one up and then go inside a and B here, interview 0, as I've already mentioned, is just the timing for the lighting switch. And then we have an adjustment layer to even have some better lighting. If I turn that one on, you'll see that I changed the light some more afterwards. But the important steps are happening here inside the a and B composition. And now first of all, how did they introduce Person B? Let's just check this out. And you'll see that here. He's jumping in. Now. The jumping is what I did originally in the interview, so that was not created afterwards. I was just jumping into the picture. And then what I did was increasing the opacity. As we can see here, we have the interview be layer then hit U to open any layers or any effects with keyframes. And in that case it is the opacity layer. So here we're going from 0, of course, to 100 per cent for that layer. And then of course for the fist bump, we get some problems because we have a mask here, but of course, there will be a problem when the fists need to match. As we can see here. There are the fists and of course S here on that layer there is a mask with some feathering, will see that the hand starts to disappear. Because of that, I created another layer or another composition which is the interview a hand. And if we bring this one up, you'll see that the hand gets back in place and this layer, or this composition is laying on top of any other layers so that the mask does not have any effect of that layer. What did I do in this interview? A hand composition. Let's just open it up. And what you'll see here should be no surprise as the name of the composition is already telling you it is just the hand interview person. A leftover by using the Roto Brush effect that you've already gotten to know in this section. And then of course, I only focused on the important frames beginning on this moment where the hand is intersecting with the mask. And then until the hand is back behind our mask. And we can just focus on the normal interview a and interview B compositions. So back to our a and B composition. And seeing here the fist bumps. What I also added was another mask for this interview, a hand because I didn't want to really have the whole hand above the other hand, but I wanted to create an effect as if they were really meeting and matching at this very moment. Of course, again, you need to have a good timing, especially if you have audio and the fist bumps. You can also, of course, not time stretch the moment where those fist bumps me because he will notice if you are really bumping out your fist and you will just slow that one down. It will also be noticeable and that's why I would suggest you to really have the fist bump at the very beginning, maybe be before Person B is speaking at all. So then you have a little more freedom. Just adjust the fist bump in time. So this is how the whole Seth interview was created. We have our person be jumping in the picture. We have a fist bump. And of course we have the person a and B doing an interview all together. And at the very end, what we also did was just adding some more lighting. I hope this section was a little fun for you. You could learn some things. And that's the end of the section and we'll see again in the next video. 45. Introduction to Mode and Moving Mask as Structural Elements: In the upcoming parts, I want to teach you about different filling methods as well as blending modes inside of Adobe After Effects. Now for this part, we want to focus on image editing. And again, of course, learn by having a look at specific project examples. Now the first example will be the creation of such a t-shirt design, in this case, a Bitcoin to the moon. And what we want to especially learn is on how to add such a texture here to the text elements, but also to the images here to have this one a little more structured. So that at the end, you might be the next T-shirt designer and even upload your own designs on platforms such as emerged by Amazon. Now, first of all, a little disclaimer. I know that after effects would not be your first choice if you'd focus on image editing. But still, if you want to consider After Effects as an all-round solution, I want to show you on how you could even create such cool images inside of Adobe After Effects. So for the next two videos, we want to cover on how to create this cool T-shirt design. And at the end of this section, I will also show you on how I created my course image for this Adobe After Effects course, completely inside of Adobe After Effects. So let's waste no more time and get started. 46. Fill methods and their function: Alright, so the goal of this section is that you will get to know and understand how to use the different blending modes you'll see here. And we will also cover and take a look at the track matte that you'll find in this column. Maybe the best way to get started is to just grab our texture that you'll of course also find in the course material and create a new composition. Now, maybe to get to know the different blending modes, what we also want to add is a new solid. So choose Layer, New Solid. And then we'll make this one maybe a light blue, maybe something like this. Sure that income size and click, Okay. Now what you'll see here, of course, is only our new created solid year for this composition. Now we could either lower the opacity to bring in place our texture as well. Or what we could also do is use these blending modes here. So bring back the opacity to 100% and now open up those blending modes. And here we have a lot of different modes to choose from, which are separated into different categories. Now here the first category, these are the subtractive modes, and here we have the additive ones. And then later on we have some more complex methods to use. So maybe we start by just click on, for example, multiply. And what you'll see here is that our solid now interacts with the texture below in a way that the solid, the solid is multiplied with the texture itself. Now, my advice here are my tip would be that you just browse through these different categories as well as the different modes themselves and check out their effects for yourself. I couldn't Now click and we'll, we'll have a look at all these different modes. But I think in this case, we'll just browse through some of them. So multiply is part of the subtractive category and you'll see that the solid itself gets a darkened. The same applies here for Linear Burn and all the other methods here inside this category. Now, if we want to add this, then you'll see that the color of the new created solid is added and interacted with d below texture. The same applies for screen. So all of these modes basically create a more light image, and all of these ones here basically darken your image. Then as already said, we have some more complex ones here. For example, overlay or hard light. Soft light. So again, just browse through them. You have the texture for yourself and you can create some very cool stuff. So let's do so by, for example, choosing, multiply it for this one. And what I'd also like to do in most of the cases is just a mock or texture, choose Effect, color correction, brightness and contrast, and now further enhance the contrast of this one. Maybe even 200. And then play around with the brightness. Maybe make this one a little darker. Then if we want to maybe make this one a cinematic poster, we could even add a text and write something like, for example, let's say the wall makes sure that this text here is on top of all the other layers. Make it maybe a little larger, even 250. Arial Black Sons goods, make sure it's centered. And now we also want to let this text interacts with the layers below. So we wanted to choose a blending mode for that one as well. And what could we choose? Maybe something like Vivid Light and then change the text color to a little darker so that it allows the below layers to interact. Maybe something like a light blue or even some greenish that are here in the blue area. Alright, so this looks good. And then we could also add a glow effect to that text layer. So I'll choose Effect stylize glow. This is a lot too bright, so bring down the glow intensity, bring up the radius, and then also increase the threshold. This looks pretty good. Let's finish off with another text and maybe write something like now in theaters. Changed the font of that one to maybe rage. Rage makes sure that it's not all caps. Bring it up and decrease the font size to something like 150. Pull it right below our, the wall. And then I'd say we have created this nice cinematic poster in just about five minutes. Now what you could also of course, add something like a vignette here. Makes sure to then select the solid as well as the texture, creates a new pre-composition out of those two pre-comp, one should be okay. For that precomp, we want to select our masks here. Click queue until you fit the elliptical one and start in the upper left corner, go down to the bottom right. Let go and then open our mask options by hitting M, M and increase the feather. And there we are. This is the very next big blockbuster in cinema and theaters coming soon. So that's it for you. You've gotten to know how to use the blending modes. As already said, feel free to play around with those different modes. You have the texture in the course materials. And next in line, we want to create our Bitcoin T-shirt design. 47. Practical example: Bitcoin Tshirt design: Heaven, our knowledge from the last video in mind and especially what we learned about different blending modes. Let's now try and really recreate this Bitcoin shirt design. In this case, we want to start and simply grab our Bitcoin, a JPEG file that you'll of course, also find in the course materials and create a new composition. Now, the black area you will see here in our composition is now really part of the Bitcoin JPEG image. And that's of course not what we want S in the final place. We really want this designed to be printed on a blue shirt, maybe on a dark gray shirt, but of course also on a black shirt. So we want this area here to be transparent. Right now as we toggle this switch on, you'll see that it's not transparent. I can also show you that by creating a new solid and maybe make it red. And then you'll see if we put this solid into second place, that here this black area really is part of the Bitcoin image. Now, what we could do is choose a different blending mode for this, uh, bitcoin image and maybe switch to a Luma. Now, what this will do is the lighter our Bitcoin, a JPEG image file is in current places. More of the red solid will be left through. Here at the sites we had the black area, and therefore, the final result will be black as well. And if I now create another solid and make it maybe blue, then you'll notice that still those areas here at the side are not transparent as we would like it to be. So therefore, what we want to do is not choose a blending mode in luma for this one. So come back to normal. But we want to activate a track matte here for this red solid. And therefore open up this one and choose luma matte Bitcoin jpeg. Now what this will do is really what we want to achieve, meaning. We will only let those areas through where our Bitcoin coin is really visible. And here at the side where we had the black area, we want is we want this to be transparent. So if I now turn off the blue solid and target on the switch, then you will see that here. We really will print this in transparent as desired. So now let's continue and switch this solid to a color that we'd like our image to be. And therefore open up the layer solid settings and make it sort of a mood color, maybe like a light blue, grayish one. Sort of like this. Hit OK and OK again. So this will be our first composition for the Bitcoin image, and we now want to use this composition in the final short design. So therefore, let's create a new composition. But before I do so, I quickly delete the blue solid here as we don't need it anymore. And now open composition, new composition or use the shortcut Control M. And we will name this one shirt and make it 4,500 by 5,400, which is a lot. But this is the preset that, for example, merged by Amazon wants you to use if you want to upload a short design. So we want to choose that one hit, okay? And now we want to start and import our Bitcoin composition. Now what I did, we want to create Bitcoin to the moon. So therefore, we want to duplicate this composition here, the Bitcoin to hit Control D and bring this one a little to the left. And also then I added two texts, one for the letter M. And we want it to be Arial. Black sounds good, but of course, a lot larger, like 350, or maybe make it even 400. And then we want this first Bitcoin to be a little smaller, so maybe bring it down to scale off 70%. And for the second one, open up the scale and make it maybe like 90%. And then we want to also of course, change the color of this letter. So use the eyedropper. Click on the B here from the Bitcoin. And now what we can do is duplicate this letter again, hit Control D, right? Letter N. Bring it a little to the right. And of course make it a lot larger as this should be the smallest one. And then we want to get larger until this letter n here. So maybe make it 1200. Looking good. And now we want to rotate those letters as well as the coins here. So starting by this m, we want to bring in a heavy rotation. So open R to bring up the rotation and maybe rotated to the left. Something like 60 to 70 degrees. Then open up this Bitcoin here, are again rotated. Maybe something like 50 or 40, let's say 40. And then bring up the rotation for that one year. Rotated a little less, let's say minus 20. And now the n here bring up the rotation and rotate it just a little bit. Maybe ten degrees. And now let's place it. So that is looking a little better. And we can really read the word moon. Ring up this one a little more down here, and now grab the letter M. Alright, so this looks good. Right now. We don't have to worry if this is centered, we will position all those letters later on. So we want to make sure that the M is on top and the n is at the bottom. And then of course we want this one to be above the second coin, as we see here. This looks good so far. And then of course, what we also need to add is Bitcoin to the, to finish our slogan, Bitcoin to the moon. So therefore, we will write this as a text of course. And BTC to the we don't want we want to get in any trouble. I'm not quite sure if you could use the word Bitcoin. So therefore, we just better, right, BTC if you want to upload this finally, too much by Amazon and make tons of money to all those Bitcoin believers. So therefore, in this case, we want to choose a different font, maybe something like this one here. Make it regular. And now we want to also include small letters. This looks good. Make it of course a lot, lot smaller. Something like 400 maybe. Okay. Now what we want to add is a gift those letters a little more space. So therefore will open up the tracking and increase that one. Maybe to even a 100. Okay? And of course we want to position this as a mask, so therefore we'll grab the pen tool. Start here. Create our first. Let go here for the second. And then with your left mouse pressed, we go to the side here to sort of recreate the moon curve and then let go. And now we want to open the text options here, Text Path Options. And then we want to choose our mask, one that we just created. Now in this case, of course, we want the text to be centered. So therefore, choose this one here to be centered. And then what we could do, We don't want our text to be below this mass. Therefore, we'll open up the baseline shift, which is now at minus 322 pixels. We want to bring this one up. So there's really along our line that we just created. Maybe make it just like minus 50. Okay, that's a little too high. So therefore minus 100. And then maybe bring up our point here like that. And maybe bring this, or give this one even more curvy, curvy pixels. So this is looking quite good and bring this one a little more down here. There we are. This is close to our final design. And now what's missing is the structure that we want to add with a texture. So therefore, we will leave this composition and create another one, which then will really be our final composition. And therefore, we want to name this one. Final comp. Stay with the settings to be able to upload on Merge by Amazon, then hit Okay. And now we want to import our short composition that we just created. So just drag that one. And then of course, we want to add our texture from the course materials. Plays it here. And then, first of all, we want to position our shirt. So bring the shirt to the top. And then makes sure that if you'd imagine that this will be our T-shirt than we want it to be, of course, at the center and maybe here at the top. So let's open up our grid here. Or maybe you better the safe one year. And then position our shirt. Bring it a little more to the left. Okay, this looks fine. And now of course, we want our texture to fully covered this image. So therefore, we need to increase it in scale, open up the scale by hitting S, make it maybe 200 per cent. And then place it here behind or Bitcoin to the moon. Okay? And then we want to bring up the track matte and choose luma matte shirt again as just we've done before for our coin. And then of course, the same as in our last video. We want to also bring up an effect which will be the brightness and contrast. Or in this case, let's just choose the curves as this gives a little more possibilities to increase the contrast even more. So here we want our lighter areas to be even lighter and our darker areas to be even darker. Then this structure will be added. But right now it's a little too much, not clearly visible anymore. So therefore, we'll bring those one's a little more to the left. And this is looking quite nice. I think. This is our final, uh, bitcoin to the moon shirt design. And now we want to render this so that you can really printed on different shirts. Remember, if we want to toggle our transparency grid, then you'll see that this can really be printed on a different colors. So we just want this to be printed as an image, of course. So therefore, let's scale down our work area to just our first frame. And then open composition add to render queue. In this case, of course, we can render directly in After Effects. And now what you need to make sure is that for the output module, we will of course choose this one to be a sequence or an image sequence, sequence. In this case, it won't really be a sequence because it's just one frame, but makes sure it's the PNG sequence here. And then we need to change, change the channel here and add the alpha channel, which is really important because if you won't add this tunnel, then all those black areas here will really be printed in black so that you'll have a black border around our image. We don't want this to happen, so therefore, we'll change this to RGB plus Alpha. Hit. Okay? Now we can really render our shirt design and make a ton of money out of this. So that's it for this video. And in the next video, we want to see how I created the course image for this Adobe After Effects course. See you for that one in the next video. 48. After Effects Course Image Making Of: In this video, we want to take a closer look at how I created the course image of this Adobe After Effects course that you are just watching. And again, am I proposer and you can't even say no to that proposal would be that we will not create a new project and recreate the image from scratch, but we are browse through the different materials that are used. And then we're going to go through all those different layers, DLA one, until they are 24. And I'll explain the functions of those layers in order to finally create this image. So let's get started. And first of all, we have our after-effects dot PNG, which no surprise is just the after-effects logo that I'm finally holding here in my hands. Then we have to move it fires the camera one movie as well as the drone movie files, which both are used here in this camera one composition. But they are just used as an image. And the drone one is doing the petal here in the middle. And then we have the camera one movie two times, one time here for this reg, which originally has been placed somewhere here on the right side, but I think it fit a little better here on top. So therefore, I cut that with a mask and move to tier to the top. So this one here is just the wreck. And finally here in third place, we have the battery as well as all the rest. Finally create this pattern which then will be placed here on top of the image and lowering opacity as well as only be visible in black and white colors. Next in line we have the Meta jpeg, and this is the image in its origin. This is me standing in front of my green screen holding this cocktail lounge bar here, which then would be replaced by the after-effects image. Next in line we have our symbols dot PNG, and this is just used for the camera as well as the clipper, which then later on will be changed in color. But we'll take a look at that later on. And you'll see that here in the course image, of course, The Clipper here down on the left empty camera here in the upper right corner. Again, we have a texture and in this case, all of the chalky, grayish one. This is just here in the background. And then we have some watercolor strokes that you can see here in the upper left as well as bottom-right and behind our camera and behind the Clippers. So here we have this image. And then I just cut out one watercolor stroke and change that one in color again. So let's browse through the different layers. First of all, we have an adjustment layer, which is just my final color correction. So there's just one effect which is a curve effect. And if I deactivate that effect, you'll see that I just added some more contrast to the final image. Then in second position, I have my first meet dot jpeg. This file is used, I think, three times in the whole composition. And the upper one here in second position. This is just my hand before, this After Effects logo here. So therefore, what I did was I just duplicated the normal middle JPEG, which has been, first of all, masked for only the green screen. Then of course, tequila effect that you've already gotten to know to just cut out the green areas and then I use the Roto Brush tool to really concentrate on my hand. And a thing. There's also a curves effect to change the color a little bit and also add more contrast to that. And this of course, is also added to all the other meat dot jpeg layers. And if I deactivate this layer, you'll notice that the only function really is to let my hands appear in front of the After Effects logo. Now, next in position 34, we have this After Effects dot PNG file. The first one is what you really see here in the foreground with a glow effect in order to make it appear a little more shiny and fit the colors to the general colors of the image. And then we have another one here, also with a glow effect. But in this case, I've increased the radius to make it a little more shiny in the background. And then both of those layers here are 3D layers so that if we bring up the position, you will see that the second one here has been moved in z space to make it appear like a little more of a 3D image that I'm really holding something in my hands. And then in position five, we have the general media JPEG image. This is really what you see here. So if I deactivate that, That's really the main image. And then of course the effects or the very same. So again, the key light effect. And finally, a curves effect to add a little more contrast to the original image that I've taken from myself. And then the next imposition, six, as well as position seven, we have another duplicate of the mid dot JPEG, which works together with this solid. And this is here the border of myself that you'll see here. What I did for that was to just make this solid an alpha matte of the Meta jpeg. And also I increase the scale of this one here if you compare it to the general image. This year it has been scared to 43 per cent. And this one in the background to forty-seven percent in order to make it visible here behind myself. Next year in eighth position as the camera one composition that you've already seen. And this is just the general pattern here in front of our main image, modified with this black and white effect in order to get rid of the red record button because I didn't want any red colors to be included in the final image. And what I also did was I lower the opacity for that layer to 50%. Now in position nine, we have these symbols, dot PNG. Remember, those are the symbols, for example, the camera as well as the clipper but also other. So in this case, it's the camera that I cut again with a mask and then I use the Roto Brush tool to really cut out only the camera. And then this has been modified with different color changing effects. So for 1 second, Let's just deactivate those three color effects here. First of all, we have the hue and saturation effect that I used in order to change the general masters you here to minus 251 degrees, in order to first of all, change the blue color to a purple tone that would be used in the final image. Then I didn't want this sort of greenish tone here to be included, but I wanted it to be black. So therefore, this is the first change to color effect here. And what I did was I picked the greenish tone here and wanted it to change to sort of a grayish or darker tone. And last, I don't know why this is written in German, in Father and none, but it's still the same effect as this one. It's also changed to color effect. And again, what I did was I changed the general color here off the camera and made it a little less bright in terms of the purple that we will see. So this is the symbols that PNG to create the camera here. And then we have layers tend to 13, to be honest, those are just some trash leftovers from a tryouts in order to create this course image. So for example, the symbols that PNG in position 12th was just another camera that I maybe wanted to include. But finally, all those layers, 101113, didn't make it to the final course image. As you'll see, they are all deactivated, so we can just select those layers and delete them. Now let's continue with the new layer ten, which is another symbolist dot PNG. And in this case, of course, it's the clipper that we'll see here. Cut out again with a mask. Then I added the hue saturation effect and again change the March to hue to make it a little more grayish. And then I use the Roto Brush tool to really concentrate and cut out only the clipper. And then finally, use the change to color effect again, which in this case again is written in German. And I change this sort of a bluish color to a more grayish one here. So that's it for the two symbols layer, layers. First of all, the camera here on the upper right, and then the clipper here on the left side. Next, we continue with the water strokes. First of all, this one here is the water stroke here on the upper left. And again, with all those waters strokes, they work together with the solid behind. So in this case, we have a purple solid here. And what I did was I changed this solid here to the Alpha Matte watercolor strokes dot PNG, so that we will see this stroke cut out with a mask in the color of this solid. And this is the very same effect here for that watercolor stroke, visible in the color of that solid behind this clipper year. And again, we have another one here behind this camera. And finally we have the fourth watercolor stroke here, which is this one that you'll see here on the right side, I think it's clear how this one works. This was our original image for the watercolor strokes. And I use gammas to really cut out only one of those drugs, originally in blue. And then of course, together with this solid here, we can change the color in to the one of that solid. And then for the final two layers here, first of all, we have our texture. And again, we have normal gray solid, which works together with that texture. Again, this solid here is a luma matte for the texture. For that. Both of these layers together create this sort of chalky image here in the background. That's it. This is how I created my course image by basically combining 20 and not 24 layers here to create this composition. I hope you learned something. In this section, we talked about blending modes, created our very own Bitcoin shirt. And I've also shown to you how you could use track mattes in order to combine colors and layers. And now as already said, we are going to finish this section and the next section we're going to take a look on how to remove an add objects to different scenes. 49. What will happen in this section: In the upcoming section, it's all about modifying your video material, meaning we're going to learn about the 3D camera tracker in order to, for example, integrate text into landscape. And we're also going to take a look at the content aware fill method to be even able to replace existing objects from scenes. To give you a better overview of what we're going to cover in this section. I created a short little video. So that's what we're going to do in this section. First of all, we want to start off and integrate the text into a 3D landscape. That we have two practical examples where we want to remove objects. First of all, remove people from the beach and then a little more difficult, even remove a boat from the sea. And at the end we want to let some bank bills fly in space. So let's get started and see you in the next video. 50. Practical example: Placing text in drone shot - The 3D camera tracker: So let's get started with the goal of integrating our two texts in this landscape shot. Now first of all, we have the welcome to text here in the foreground linked to this sort of plates. So that of course, if I have a rotational movement for this welcome to texts, than this very same movement and rotation will be applied to the plate. So they are really linked to each other. And that's what we're going to do. We have some minor rotation here so that we will be flying direct D through the whole of this o. And then we continue and move towards our second text, my home, which really appears as if it was standing here on the grass, even with the shadow falling in the very same way as the shadow here from this tree. By the way, what you'll see here in the background is the highway number one in Germany, That's where I'm living in The Moonstone land. And if we come backwards a little bit in time, then here is where we're standing to take this drone shot, which by the way, looked like this. But anyways, let's get started. Create a very new project and create this one from scratch. So we go ahead and hit File New Project. And of course we start by taking our course material, the landscape dot mp4 shot, and dragging it in to our files. Now of course, you can work this one out with me as the landscape shot is included in the course materials, we begin by simply creating a new composition out of this with the method that you've already seen several times. So just drag that file and let go here on this Create New Composition button. There we are with our drone shot ready to be edited. And now we want to use a method or an effect allowing us to extract 3D data from this source file. And this effect is the so-called 3D camera tracker. There are several ways to open this. Now the one that I'm always using is to just open the tracker here on the right. If you cannot see it, then maybe you just open these arrows here and hit essential graphics so that here the tracker appears, or you might even want to click Window and make sure that the tracker here is Mark so that you'll find it here on the right side. And we can see it already, the track camera here. But as this will just bring up an effect and start the analysis. Therefore, we can also just open effect and hit perspective 3D camera tracker. This will do the very same. And of course you can also just go ahead and open the effects bar here on the right side. Just search for that effect and then just drag drop it onto our video. But as I've already said, normally, I am using the tracker directory here. And now I want to hit tracker camera. And this will directly open up the analysis of our drone shot. So right now as you can see here, the process is initializing and then it will be analyzed frame by frame, which is a very complex process. So right now we are in frame number eight or 385, and this will take a couple of minutes right now, six minutes remaining. So of course, I want to save that time and we'll see again when the process is done. Alright, so the 3D camera tracker has done its job. And next we could go ahead and directly use this button here to create a new camera. But for now we don't want to do so as we want to take a closer look at all these points that have been added to our source file. And these points are so-called track points, and they will really be followed along in time. And as you've already seen, if I take the selection tool and move over here in our shot, then I'll raise three of those points will be taken to sort of give us this proposal for the red target area. And as I'm sure you are an expert in math and have always listened carefully in school. You know that three points that are not laying on a line always define a so-called plane. So this red area here is the plane that will be proposed from the three points in focus. And of course here are those points basically create a very similar plane because they are all laying on the field. But if I change this and for example, move here in the tree, then you'll see that the plane will be a very different one. And we want to use these points now to create the second texts. We'll start by doing that one. And therefore we fly over a year. We arrive at the second grass here. And there you'll see that we have a lot of points here as well. If we just grab three of those points, then the plane will really be what we want it to be directly here on the grass. So let's just take, for example, these three points here and then right-click and choose create text and camera. Now what this will do is first of all, add a text layer as well as the 3D tracker camera layer to our composition. And now this texts here is directly lying in the new created plain area. So we want to take that text. First of all, change it to my home. Then we want to make it a little smaller. First of all, we open the scale options by hitting the shortcut S, and we want to scale it down to a 100%. And then maybe make it a little larger, let's say 700 pixels. And this should be okay. So right now we have the text here perfectly matched on our plane on the grass. But of course, we want the text to release stand on the grass, so therefore we will later on move it in 90 degrees. And that's why it's very important that we'll write our texts and capita layers. Because imagine if we have the letter Y here and it's just lying below the M or the home than we can not really yeah. Move their texts for 90 degrees because then we'd have the home flying in space. So that's of course not what we want, but we want all those letters to be standing on the grass. Therefore, we write it in capital. And now let's continue. First of all, make sure that the baseline shift is set to 0 because this will be defining on where we will move the texts if we rotate it for 90 degrees. So therefore, maybe from a previous project you'll have some baseline shifts. So make sure that's 0. And also what we want to make sure, because we want it to be rotated right now for the x-axis. And therefore the anchor point should be here below our texts. Let's take the x axis here. So hit the red circle here. Let's your, leave your left mouse button clicked and then you can rotate the texts and you'll see that it will be rotated perfectly here around our anchor point, which is lying here directly below the age of the home. Now, if you'd have another anchor point, let's say for example, somewhere here so that the anchor point or the point of origin for all our rotation will be somewhere here inside the age. Then of course, the effect by rotation is not where we want it to be because it will not directly be moved up here on the grass. But as already said, it will be moved and rotate it here inside this H. So of course we wanted to, we want the rotation to originate here below the age. So therefore, taken our red circle now and rotating it is exactly what we want to achieve. Now, you could go ahead and take this red circle here to rotate it. Or what you could also do this open up position data here as well as our rotation data. So bring up the transform options. And then what you'll see here is the orientation, which is now 276 degree for the text to be perfectly lying on the grass. And then we could just click in there and type plus 90 degrees. And this will of course, create the very same effect that we want it to be. Now let's move the text a little bit. So therefore, we will just go to that red arrow here and let your left mouse button pressed again and move it a little to the right. And maybe we also wanted a little bit to move in z space, so this should be fine. Maybe rotate it a little bit. In terms of why. Something like this. And a little bit more to the right. Okay, It should be fine like this. And next what we want to add is of course, bring up a shadow and light so that it will be looking a lot more realistic. And we want to focus on the shadow of the tree to sort of recreate that shadow and let our texts appear as if it was really standing here on the grass. That's what we're going to do in the next part. 51. Practical example: Placing text in drone shot - light and shadow in space: Okay, let's go ahead and learn about shadows and lights inside of Adobe After Effects. And of course, at the end we have the final goal to add realistic shadow to this my home texts here. Now, the easiest way to create sort of an artificial shadow would be to just take this text here, duplicate it with Control D. And then this new created second texts, we want to bring it back to its original position and original rotation. So we take this red X wheel here and rotate the text back to the floor. And then of course, we'll change the color, make it black or at least sort of dark gray. Hit Okay, and you'll see that we've begun to create this artificial shadow, which to be honest, might be sufficient for a lot of projects you want to create. And we can even then lower the opacity. So open T to bring up the opacity option than lower that to maybe 60%. And what we can also do is bring up the scale. Then first of all, unlocked the dimensions here so that we can work with the x, y, and z value here separately. And then we can, for example, take the y-value here and increase that and improve our shadow to the desires that we have for our specific project. But in this case, as we want to duplicate the cetera here from this tree, we will get some problems by simply duplicating this text layer. So what we want to do is create a real shadow inside of Adobe After Effects. So therefore, let me just first of all, get rid of this second text again. And then we open the Layer New and start off by adding light to our project. Therefore, new light. And we'll stay with the name of Spotlight one. And of course they are different line types like for example, a spotlight to ever really centered light. Or what we can choose is a point light and ambient light. For now, you don't have to know about all of these different options. But what we want to start with is create a point light. And important is that we want this light to cast shadows. So therefore, hit this option. And then we want to click OK. And you'll see that this point light has been edit. Now at first, it might seem that nothing really has changed. Apart from that the text is appearing that a little bit darker. And that's because we can't even really see where the light is. And if we come back in time here to our beginning, then you'll see that here is where the light has been placed inside of our composition. Now, if we open the my home text positional data again by hitting P, then you will see that this text here, which is sort of at the end of our sequence, has a zed value of above 10 thousand. Then we have the light and we opened the positional data for that one. And it has that value of only about 1300. And this is because here at the beginning of our clip, we are in zed value, like about, about thousand, and then we fly mainly in that space until we arrive here at the end of values above 10 thousand and even above 13 thousand. So what we wanna do, first of all, is take this point light and move it a little bit closer to my home texts. So therefore we take the zed value of that light and change it to 10 thousand, hit. Okay? Now you'll see that the text has changed and we go forward in time. And now you'll see that the light is been placed a lot closer to my home texts. And now we can play around with this slide, for example, move it in x. And you'll see that it's taken effect on our my home text. Now of course, we can change it in any dimension. We might want to move it up in y. And you'll see that it will have some effects on our text. However, we cannot see any shadows for now. But what we can do is as soon as you have added a light to your composition, there will be some more data for any layer. For example, this text layer here. We can now open the material options and we'll see that we have now a different light options here and even shadow options for this my home texts. So what we could, for example, do, we could deactivate here this option to accept shadows or accept lights. Now as we cannot see any shadows right now, let's for now, deactivate the option to accept lights and you'll see that the text is back to its standard with the light blue color. But we want this text to accept lights for now. And at the end of course, we want to create a realistic shadow for this my home text. So why four? Now, even if the cast shadows option is turned on, we cannot see any shadows appearing inside our composition. And well, this is because at the beginning, yes, we have analyzed our stock video or drone shot and created a lot of track points. But still, of course, it's impossible to interpret and to analyze the footage in a way so that After Effects knows on where to catch the shadows from this text. Because imagine, for example, we'd create a shadow that needs to be stopped here at this tree and then continues behind the tree. So there's no way that After Effects knows that here inside our footage, there's a 3D object that we need to shadow to stop and then afterwards continue with the shadow. So therefore, what we need to do is help a little bit and create a solid that would catch the shadow of this, my home text. And we can do so by, for example, again, selecting our landscape video and then opening up the 3D camera tracker to bring back those points. And then we want to select three of those points, creating the grass area. And we want to right-click and choose create solid. Now what this will do is add another solid to our composition. And first of all, I want to change the color of that solid to make it a little better visible for you. Maybe we'll make it white. And now you'll see that the shadows off this my home text begin to work. And of course, the direction of that shadow is determined by our point light. So if I move this light a little bit more to the right, you'll see that the direction of the shadow falling on this solid that we've just created is changing. And you could change the light, of course, in this direction as well as any other direction. This one will make it lighter in general. Therefore, we can move the light as we want to. Now, moving lights, to be honest in After Effects is a little difficult at least for me. And what I always like to do is create another camera and linked the camera to the position of the light. And therefore, if I move the light, then the position of the camera will move as well. And I can watch from that position of the camera on what the light will do and where the light finally will be placed. That was just a general explication and some words of introduction on how to use lights and shadows inside of After Effects. But for now, let's again delete the solid as well as also the created point light. And what we wanna do now is again, select our landscape and the 3D camera tracker effect. Choose three of those points here. And we want to right-click. And now not create a solid, but create a shadow catcher and allied. And what this will do is basically very similar to what we did before. The shadow catcher layer that has just been created. Basically again, it's only a solid. We have this newly added light here. The only difference is that for now the shadow catcher, if we open the material options and we bring up the option except shadows, you'll see that it's switched to only. So therefore, we can only really see the shadows, but not the solid itself. If we bring this to off, you'll see the solid itself. And if we bring it to all, you'll see the solid as well as the shadow. But of course, as we want to create a shadow, only, the right option here is to stick with only the shadow has been created. And of course, as already mentioned, the direction of that shadow is dependent on the light. So let's again find our light. And here you will see if we come to the beginning of our composition again, you'll see that the light year is positioned at the upper right. So to be honest for me, this is more or less a trial and error now to move the light in order to create a realistic shadow for our composition. And of course, we want the shadow to really go here to the left in a parallel way to this tree. First of all, what we can see here is that we have the border from our solid. And of course, we don't want this to happen. And therefore what we'll do is we bring up the scale of that solid and basically just scale a solid up in order to be able to really catch our shadow. But this will have, of course, no effect on the shadow itself as we just scale up the solid. And now let's move the light in a way that it will appear more realistic and match the shadow of our tree. So let's just bring up the positional data of our light by using the shortcut P. And now what we wanna do is simply play around with the X, Y, and Z values and see what they finally do for us in terms of where the shadow of this my home text will be falling. So we want to start with the x value. Just use your left mouse button and make sure to also press the Shift button and all u2 faster change those large numbers. And then you'll see that if we increase the value, the shadow will more or less four to the left. And if we decrease that value, will bring the shadow more to the right. So maybe for now, let's just place it maybe here. And then we continue with the Y value. And you'll see again with the Shift button pressed that if we increase the value, shadow will be enlarged. And if we decrease that value, it will be closer to our text. So maybe you want to have it like this. And then we'll continue with the zed value. And you'll see this will sort of bring our shadow up or down. So for now, let's just leave it here. And to be honest, is it just more or less of a trial and error until we have a shadow that really fits to our project. Maybe also what I wanna do is again rotate my text a little bit to this position here. And now again change the position of our shadow. And now you'll see that it really starts to match the position of our tree. Let's just play around with that a little more to make it even better. This looks quite nice. And now what I also want to do is improve the position of our texts a little more. So either select the text here in the sources or directly click onto our text inside the preview area. And then we want to move this one up in y position a little bit so that it really matches the shadow like there. And lastly, we also want to change the color of the text and make it even darker. Something like this. Hit okay? And if we now zoom out, I really feel like we've created a very realistic 3D texts here, standing on the grass as if it was really very well integrated into our landscape. Let's also check that one out in time. And you'll see that when we fly over there, it really looks like the texts was standing there creating this nice realistic effect that we wanted to achieve. So that's it for this video, and I can assure you that by doing so, the most difficult part has been done and all that's missing right now is the first text which will be welcome to that we need to rotate and move a little bit so that we will be flying through the whole of the O and then continuing on to fly over until we see My home. So that's it for this part. And then the last part, we'll do so and create. Welcome to see you. 52. Practical example: Placing text in drone shot - Integrate additional text: In the last video, I already mentioned that the most difficult pieces of this practical example have already been achieved. And this indeed is true because now for the second texts that we also want to introduce into our scene, we of course, don't have to pay attention and position the text to any plane. And secondly, as the text is flying in the air, there will be no shadows that we need to consider. So therefore, we can go straight forward and just create a new text by using our horizontal text tool. Just click into our preview area and we want to type, welcome to maybe better positioned this in two lines. And then I can already see that we need to adjust the leading here. Maybe switch this one to auto, or maybe decrease it a little bit. Something like 500. But first of all, let's just make this one capital letters. And again, we also want to make it a little smaller, something like this, and change the text color to black. And now as we fly through in space, while you'll notice, of course, is that our text won't be affected. And this is because still now it's no 3D layers. So we want to change that. Toggle the 3D switch for our welcome to texts. And now you'll notice that the text is very well integrated into our scene. So all we need to do now is make sure that we will leave perfectly flying through the whole of this O. And then maybe bring in some more rotation and movement for the text to make it appear a little more dynamic. So let's maybe find a point in time where we want to fly through the O. So here the texts should be visible. And maybe at this point here, we want to be flying through the whole of the old. So therefore we will bring up the position as well as the rotation data. Remember P to open the position and then you'll hit Shift R to also add the rotation. So first of all, we want to play around with these positional data. Remember, for the, my home texts, if we also want to open the position for that one, you'll notice that it has a very large zed value. So being here at the back for the second grass area, they are, the zed value will be very large. While here at the beginning, remember when we first introduced our light, there was a very small z value, something about a thousand. So changing the z value will move the text here four and back in this positional data. So therefore, let's play around with the zed value first of all, and now we want to position it so that it will be perfectly centered around our oath, that we'll be flying around through that. Oh, if we now again increase the value of this position here until we really have been flying through the whole of the old, bring it down a little more. This looks good. And now we'll be perfectly flying through the hole. And this point we want to save. So just click on this stopwatch here for the position as well as for the orientation. And this will just make sure that will be really flying through the whole no matter what we will be changing for the position and rotation data here at the beginning. So now maybe we want to bring this text a little more up. Either we could now play around with the x and y data here, or we just take the text and maybe move it here into the upper left corner. And then we also want to bring in a rotation, maybe like this. And then let's see. If we also want to rotate in z. This, it looks good and overall, Let's make the text a little smaller. Maybe like this, and then also decrease the lead here to 400. Maybe this looks good. And now as we've decreased the text and size, Let's see if we will still be flagged through the whole of the oh, no, I've changed that one as well. So baby, again, we come back to that point, change the zed value so we can better see where we currently are. And then we reposition the x and y data very quickly. Bring back the row to the middle. And again, flight through the all just like that. This is already looking quite good. And now what I also edit beside the rotation here. Maybe let's bring this one down. A little more. Speculation right now, but I think this looks good. So that we really flying through the O and coming back to the start. And now what I also added was sort of this border here for the welcome too, to make it like a sign. And therefore, we need to. Add a new layer to our project. So choose Layer, New Solid. And we want to make this one comp size and the color doesn't really matter, but we want to name this one, maybe border hit, Okay. And I will lower the opacity for a second to 50 per cent. And now of course, we also want to make this one a 3D layer. And what's important is that we want this to be very well sort of linked to the welcome to text. And we do so by simply choosing this pick whip tool here. And we want to choose it for the position as well as the rotation. So we'll hit to open the position. Shifts are to open the orientation or remember at any time you can also just open the Transform options to find the ones you want to link. And in this case it's the position. So take the pick whip tool for that one, link it to the positional data from the Welcome to texts. And then also take the orientation and link it to the orientation of our welcome to texts. And what this will do, of course, is just duplicate those two datasets and apply them for this, for this border solid that we've just created. And now what I did was I added a mask. So just hit Q here until you arrive for the rounded rectangle tool. And the good thing in this case is that the rectangle will be placed for this solid. Meaning that if I start dragging this rectangle now, it will be created in the exact way that we want it to be. So that we can just let go here. And we have created this nice little rounded rectangle here around our text. Now of course, this would also be one option to have a semi-transparent layer where you fly through and bam, there you are. And the new sort of seen as a raven. In this case, I want to only half the board as visible and therefore I'll choose Effect, Generate and stroke. And now what I want to do is I want the paint style to be on transparent. So therefore, what this will make sure is that we'll only see the path of this stroke which will be applied to our mask that we've just created. And then we want the color to be black. And then we will increase the brush size. There we are with a nice little border here around o. Welcome to text. Now, this is looking a little awkward because the transparency or opacity is still lowered. So let's open up T to bring up the opacity and bring it back to 100%. Now, that's what I did in the practical example. We have our rotation here. You have a little movement. Or let's add some more movement by opening up the position and move this one a little bit in x maybe, so that it will really fly in. Make sure there's no other positional data here. So delete that keyframe and we'll have this sign moved and rotated a little bit and then fly and perfectly through the hole. Now one laugh. Last thing I added was too little strokes here on the left and the right side of the two. And that's what I'll quickly do. So just again with our solid selected, open the pen tool, create another mask. Let's just zoom in here for a little bit. Begin here, make another mask point here. And then quickly select another layer and come back to that layer in order to not continue with this mask, but to create a new mask. The third mask. And there we are. Maybe grip this one, bring it a little bit done. Like here. Also bring down this point a little bit. This looks fine and all we need to do now is just change the path here from only mask one to all masks. And therefore, we have this two little strokes edit. And this is exactly what I did for the practical example. We have a nice little welcome to sign. However, I want to make sure that we can really read it. So therefore, bring a little to the right with a little bit. And maybe move this one a little bit in that space so that we also added some nice little movement beside our rotation. And there we are. Welcome to. We were flying through this sign towards our my home. And that's how it introduce the nice monster lend to you guys. And I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. And next in line, what we wanna do is, right now we added some objects or text to existing scenes. And the next part, we want to do the exact opposite and remove objects from existing scenes. So therefore, I got to practical examples for you and we'll start off directly with the first one. See you. 53. Addition to the topic of light in After Effects: Before we really kick it off and start to remove objects from existing scenes in just a second. At this point, I just like to give you a little addition to the functionality of lights and shadows, or better said, I want to show you a general approach that I always like to use when trying to understand more difficult methods and effects. And this method is to just break it down to the most basic setting possible. And then check out for myself how different modifications were work and what their effect will be. So in this case, as we want to learn about lights and shadows, what I did was I just created a very basic 3D room setting. So in this case, we have this gray solid year functioning as our floor. Then we have another white solid which represents the background wall. And if we want to now change this camera to the left view than what you'll see, of course, is that here we have the background was on it with a rotation of 90 degrees. We have the floor solid. And then what you see here is just the very basic object I added, which in this case it's just the red letter a. Now of course, all those three layers are 3D layers. So in this case, we have the letter a and the white and the gray solid or turned on for the 3D switch. And what I also made sure was that for the material options, we allow the red letter a here to cast shadows, of course. So make sure to also turn this option on. And if you then add a light as well as a camera, then you might want to start and check out for yourself what would happen if we, for example, change the position of the light in terms of the x value. Or we might even change the y-value and see the effect of this one. Or maybe you also want to check out the whole setting from different perspectives by changing the camera position and rotation. So therefore, for example, just open up the orbit around cursor so that we can really fly around. See the whole setting from different angles. Now what you might also want to learn about is different light types. So therefore, just select the point light here, open up the light settings and maybe switch the type to a spotlight. So what you'll notice is that the light is more centered to sort of create this onstage effect and will be also might want to do is even add another light source to see how several lights work out together in one scene. So therefore just open Layer New Light. And this time we might want to add a point light hit, Okay? And you'll see that the whole setting were turned a lot brighter. And right now we have two shadows. Because of course we have also added two lights to our scene. So all in all, a great method to learn about lights and shadows. Check it out for yourself. But for now, that's it. Now we want to continue as planned and start removing objects from existing scenes. 54. Practical example: removing objects by content-aware fill - beach: In the next two videos, we want to check out a method that allows us to remove objects from existing scenes. Now again, of course, I brought concrete practical examples. So feel free to grab those course materials and follow along. Now the first example, the beach dot mp4 file. There, we just want to remove pedestrians from a beach in Miami. For the second file, the boat mp4, we want to remove a boat from the sea in Mexico. Now, the first example will be a lot easier. Maybe you already have an idea why. And if not, no problem. We'll see inside the process of those two videos where the differences are and why the board one will be a little more difficult. So let's just begin and take the beach file, drag it into a new composition. And what we wanna do now is we have this beautiful beach here in Miami flying over with my drone. And the only sort of disturbing part in this video are those three pedestrians here at the bottom are walking on the sand. We'd like to remove those pedestrians. And of course, we not only want to remove them, but we want to replace the whole that will be, that will be created by of course and intelligent surrounding and create an intelligent substitute for those pedestrians. So the method that we want to use is the so-called Content Aware Fill. And here you can see it already on the right side below our tracker. Again, if you won't see this one, then either just switch to the essential graphics or makes sure that you have the window Content Aware Fill checked here. Now, we want to open this up and what we need, first of all, it's a target. And I've already said that what we want to fill these pedestrians here. So let's just start by creating a mask around those pedestrian CIA. Therefore, again, just use the button queue to navigate through those different tools here. And then we want to take the ellipse tool. And if you now use the Shift button, then what you'd see is that the ellipse that we create will be a perfect circle. So make sure to leave the Shift button pressed. And then an ellipse like this, or a circle like this should be fine. And we will move this one a little bit with our arrow keys like this. It should be good. Now first of all, what we need to make sure is that the circle will not be too large. This is because the larger will be, the higher the greater the task will be for after effects for the content and we'll fill method to do its job. And secondly, of course, we also don't want the circle to be too small because what After Effects will do in a second is just create an intelligent substitute. And if we make this circle too small, then maybe the heads of those people will be recreated, duplicated many more times and again after the process, see those heads still in place here. Of course, we don't want. So therefore a circle like this should be fine. And now for a second, I just want to switch this mask to none so that we can see the whole picture again. Then we'll go forward in time until those pedestrians leave the frame. And what we'll do now is of course, take the mask, open it, and then we want to animate the mask, the mask path. So therefore, just for a second, come back to the start. Taking a mask point here. And then again move forward to the second keyframe. And now we want to move the mask. By the way, if you have some problems moving the mask and for example, you just go inside and destroy the mask, then just hit the up button while doing so. Then you really ensure that you'll always take the whole mask and replace it to where you want to. So there we are. And now what we also need to do as the pedestrians are moving closer to the camera, of course, the mask now should be a little larger. So what we're gonna do is I want to again add the mask and then we'll add a mask expansion here. So therefore, let's just create a keyframe and then we want to maybe widen this for 40. And again, move the mask a little bit. That's what I just told you. So better just select the Alt button while doing so and move the mask over to here so that the shadows are still inside of our mask. And of course we want to go back to the start, switch the mask expansion to 0. And now let's see in some points here in-between that the mask will still fit. Our pedestrians maybe want to start here in the middle. And again with the Add button pressed, reposition the mask. And now it's in a sort of intelligent way, work your way through. So again, we'll take. For example, half the time between our first and our second mask point. Again, do a little adaption year so that it fits. This looks good. And there we are here for another point. Remember that here already there will be a mask expansion of 30 pixels, so it should be okay like this. Then let's see out here. Use the hand tool. And again, move the mask a little bit like over there. Let's check out here one more time. This looks good. This also looks good. Alright, so let's only find out here at the end. Now those pedestrians are leaving. So we just again take the mask and follow along like this. And now I think the pedestrians will be in place all the time. But let's make sure by just adding the mask. And we'll see that together with the mask expansion. Now the pedestrians really are in place all the time. So that's exactly what we want. And now, in order for the Content Aware fill method to do its job, what we need to make sure is that the mask we're not be set to add, but we want to subtract it. So therefore, this sort of hole that we just created will be what we want to give over to the so-called fill target. And then we have some more adjustments that we might make here. First of all, the fill method. But in this case, we want to stick with object as we have a flying camera. But we want to remove an object, which in this case are those three pedestrians. And then we also might change the range here. We could either select the work area, the entire duration of the composition. In this case, it's just the same. But of course it might be possible that you want to remove an object only from certain parts of your composition. So by the way, then you could just take your work area, let go here to adapt it. Or what you also might use other shortcuts, B and N. If you hit the shortcut B, then you'll create a beginning point of your work area at the current cursor position. And if you use the shortcut N, then you just create an endpoint for your work area at the current cursor position. So those two might be some useful shortcuts. But in this case, as we just want to select the whole work area or the whole composition as arrange, we are now ready to go. And what I'll do is I'll hit the Generate Fill Layer button to start the process. And now this might take some seconds, but in this case, the new layer has already been created. And what this layer will be is just a sequence of PNG image files. And now let's have a look at all those files. This is a PNG sequence that has just been created, starting at frame 0 until frame 242, which of course is the very last frame of our composition. And basically, what you can see in these pictures is just the mask hold. We passed over to the Content Aware fill method, and that now has been intelligently replaced by new material. This material, the PNG sequence that has already been imported and put into first-place here above our beach layers. So therefore, all in all, you really can't notice that there have been any pedestrians in this drone shot. So if I deactivate this fill layer one more time, you'll see this was the mass that we passed over. And now with the fill layer, we have some new material, which is just the picture at this certain frame in time that has been replaced to fill this gap. By the way, in some cases, it might be that there are some very small borders here around your mask. And in this case, of course, you want to get rid of that border. And what you can do is just bring up our beach or original video to the top. And then open up the mask settings and just decrease the mask extension a little bit, make it maybe minus two pixels at this point, and then move forward to the second keyframe where we just fix the mask expansion and make it 39 pixels. And all in all, this will be no problem as we created the mask, just a little bigger than necessary. So therefore, we can decrease it for two more pixels in order to get rid of those borders, which in some cases might be created. Maybe if you switch the resolution just to quarter and start the process. In this case, we didn't see any borders, but in some cases, just if you see those borders, this is what you can do. And of course what you might also do if you have some more difficult projects and you will see those borders are a little hard. Then of course you can again, also open up your mask options and maybe add some mask feather to make it a little more smooth or so. All in all, there are a lot of ways to further improve your results. Now, still here the results are perfect. And of course, this is because this example was very easy to solve for After Effects. And this is because the material that we use to replace our pedestrians is just all the same. So it's a very easy structure. In this case, the sandwiches has the same color at all pixels. So therefore, it doesn't really matter that After Effects, does this pixel perfect? And this is the great change that we now want to get through for the second project. Because of course, there we have moving water, which naturally is a more difficult structure to be solved. Now honestly, in this case, I feel like we wouldn't even need the content aware fill method to replace our pedestrians. Let me just deactivate this fill layer for a second to show you. And then if I duplicate our original beach video, just get rid of this mask for a second and draw another mask here besides are pedestrians. And then maybe add a feather to that mask we just created. Maybe make it 20 pixels and just move over the whole layer to cover are pedestrians. You'll see that if I do some small adjustments, extent, expand the mask for maybe ten pixels, and just follow along with this mask in the whole shot. Then I feel like for this shot it would be enough. And we'll also get the very same result. But using the Content Aware fill method is the correct and the more easily the better way to replace objects. And also we want to use this method to now focus on a more difficult project, which will be to get rid of a boat on the sea in Mexico. See you for that one in the next video. 55. Practical example: removing objects by content-aware fill - boat: Now here we are at the beach in Mexico. And what we'd like to do for this practical example is replaced our boat with some water. Now I've already explained to you that this practical example is way more difficult because we have moving water, we have reflections, and also we have waves, which all in all just make it a lot more difficult to, first of all, interpret this footage and secondly, replace it in a way so that we will not notice that this has not been our original image. Therefore, what I need it to come out with a satisfying result is just a combination of some more layers in this case. And right now I'm going to quickly show you what those layers will do for us. And then afterwards we're going to speak about that in some more details. So let's start off with position number six year. And this is just our original file. In all those points in time where nothing really happens. So before I want my boat to be replaced, layer number six doesn't really do anything for us. And then starting from here is where it begins, layer number five. And this is just the way that you already know. So I created a mask for our boat. And this is the mask that I will pass over to the Content Aware fit method in a subtracted way. Of course, just like in the practical example of the last video. And now what to edit R to fill layers. So to Content Aware, Fill generated PNG sequences which differ only because of the change expansion of the mask. Meaning here in position number four. I expanded the mask that I created here in position number five to create my first Content Aware Fill here. And now this still doesn't really look perfect here at the borders. And in my opinion, it's a little too greenish. And therefore I added another Content Aware Fill layer. So created another PNG sequence, which different in a way that here the mass that I used was not expanded in that manner, but just expanded a little less so therefore, the newly created sequence length just here inside our mask. And it's just putting above the second fill layer and now of course, with a lower opacity so that both of these generated PNG sequences work out together. And then still a fed like, first of all, the borders didn't really look perfect. So therefore, what I did was I duplicated my original MP4 file, and then together with a mask and a feather, I worked on those borders, as you can see, if I turn on and off this layer. So that's just basically enhancing my borders here. And lastly, to give it a little more wavy feeling here inside the mask, because right now we have of course, combined a lot of different layers. So we want more sharp waves to also come in place. And what I did for that was I again duplicated my original MP4 file. And then as I've also shown to you in the last video, I just took another area like this area where we have airwaves in place without a boat, and then move that one over here to our replaced boat. And again, of course I lower the opacity for that one so that all in all, I really feel like now we can not notice any difference here. So it really looks like an original image without any bolts here on the C. So now let's speak about all those different layers in a bit more detailed way. So I've already mentioned, again, we start just as you know, and create a mask around our boat. And if I open up my key framed layers, my keyframe effects by hitting the shortcut you. Then you'll notice that of course again, my mask path has been animated in a way that I will follow the boat along in time. In this case, I didn't need to also animate the mask expansion because the boat was always the same size. So therefore, we're all fine with just animating the mask path. And then what I did was for my first Generate Fill Layer here for this PNG sequence, quickly open up the mask options. I expanded my mask by 65 pixels. So let's just do that. And then for 1 second solo, this layer. So then we have this mask here that I will pass over to degenerate fill method. So all in all we have a lot of space here beside our boat where we can play with in order to then finally enhance this borders. Of course, I made sure that it's still only water that is covered here in this mask. That the mask is not as big to finally reach those boats here or even the beach. So that's what I did for my first Generate Fill Layer. And then for the second one, I only expanded the mask, I think for ten pixels. So this is my second Generate Fill layer, which leads to a sort of different result. And then I combine those two generated layers here to finally come out with my replaced image. Let's see here. If I solo this Generate Fill layer, you see this is just the mouth that I've shown to you, replaced with my content aware fill method. And then above this, we have the other generated. Png sequence, which first of all is lower in opacity, and as already mentioned, is a lot smaller. And then above that layer what we did was we copied our original file. And now here if I open up the mask options, you'll see that I added a feather and I expanded it even less, so I brought it back to 0 pixels to them. Finally, enhance my Boris here by adding a little feather. And then at the top, what I did was I just took a different area. So if I open up my position that data from this MP4 file, you'll see that originally this was at position nine hundred sixty and five hundred forty. So it's this area that I took and yeah. Just covered with a mask and then brought this area above our to be replaced board. And also lower the opacity a little bit for this one to 56 per cent. To just add a little more waves here inside our area. And all these layers combined then finally lead to this, I feel like a very satisfying result as if there never has been a boat on the ocean. That's it for this tutorial. And by the way, what I'd like to show you is another method that you can really use in order to replace an object from a still. So if you're not working with a moving sequence, a video, than what you might do is concentrate on a still. And therefore, let's just double-click this boat layer here. And then I want to move over to our boat. And what you then might use is the so-called clone stamp tool. Now, first of all, it works very similar to the Roto Brush Tool, so that you can use your control to enlarge or shrink your stamp, and then you just hit the Alt button to fill your stamp. Use also the leftmost button, alt and left mouse button pressed to fill your stem. And then just use your left mouse button to let go for the stem. In this case here above our boat that we want to be replaced. Now I really think this looks already quite nice. Let's again fill our stamp. Let go here to finally replace the last bits of our boat. And then just for the steel, we have replaced our boat just in a matter of seconds. So that's just a method that I wanted to show you if you want to work with still images in order to get rid of objects, really in just a second. And also here we have a difficult surrounding. A difficult yeah. Just objects to be replaced together with those wastes, but still it looks like they never has been a bolt on this image. So that's just for you to also gets to know this stamp. But of course, if you're working with video material, my advice would be to use the Content Aware fill method to finally come out with a satisfying result. And sometimes, as in this case, you need to combine different layers to just work your way through to a good solution. So that's it for now. And with this tutorial, we'll also finished with replacing objects from existing scenes. And now what we'd like to do is something very different about we want to let some bank birds fly in our poker room. So therefore, again, I created some material for you to use and also added the bills for you in the course material. So that again, we can work this one out together and let's get started in the next video. 56. Practical example: levitating objects in real 3D space - Part 1: Let's add some magic to this course and lead bank birds fly in space. And for this one, we want to get started by having a look at the final result on what we are going to create together in this practical example. Now, before we want to switch to After Effects, and again started with a completely new and empty project to recreate this, let's first of all have a closer look on some details that we are going to add in the course of the next videos. So first of all, if you want to follow this 200 Euro bill, then you'll notice that it'll fly it from the right side to the left side. And also dynamically, animators sort of curling in space, moving with the wind before then finally disappearing to the left side. And also there are some more bills that have been animated. Like for example, if you take a look, this 200 Euro bill, then you'll see that it's sort of starts to roll up here, as well as the very same here for this 200-year a bill. Before all those bursts, then finally sealed to move inside the PAGA case, which then gets closed until the video is finished. So that's what we're going to do. So therefore, let's now switch to After Effects. And I've already imported all those different materials that again, of course, are ready for you to use in the course materials as well. We want to get started with the method that you've already seen several times. So just grab our original video and create a new composition. Now first of all, in this case, I want to sync my audio files. So for the poker table, all we have in this file in terms of audio, it's just me closing the poker case at the end. So we want to add the swoosh as well as the magic MP3 file to generate a better audio all in all. So therefore, let's start with the Magic file. And this is just sort of, yeah, the jingle that is playing in the background. So it should be fine starting at the beginning and then just rolling out here where then I finally, we'll also be closing the poker case. So this should be good. Just like it has been placed right now. And now we want to add this swash, which should be the sound when all those bills start flying into the poker case. So let's just open up the waveform either by hitting those arrows, see until you arrive for the waveform. Or what you could also do is use the shortcut L, L, so double-click L. And this will also bring up your waveform. You, that's also do that for the magic fire. And then bring up some more space here. And let's reposition this to the point in time where I want those bills to fly inside the poker case. So this is just me taking the case and then moving it to the side. And this here should be a good point in time where all those bills start to fly over to the case. So I want to position and arrange this switch MP3 file so that it matches. And now let's just bring up the audio preview by using the shortcut comma. Also remember that here you have your preview where you can readjust the shortcuts. But basically the comma will be your normal shortcut if you just want to play your audio. But of course, also you could just rearrange those different shortcuts to, for example, only include your audio in preview. But for now let's hit calmer and listen. Should be okay, like we have arranged it right now. And the next thing we wanna do is again, youth and meth, use a method that you've already seen. So we just select our poker file and then open up the tracker and decides to track the camera. Now again, of course this will open up our 3D camera tracker, start the process right now, it's initializing. And then I think we have more than 200 frames to be analysed. So therefore, of course, I will make a shortcut here and we'll see again when this process is done. So the process has been finished and you are of course already familiar with all these different points that have been added to our preview area, or better set inside the 3D camera tracker effect. So you could go ahead and just grab three of those points. Right-click and for example, create a solid and the camera. The very same way as we've done when we placed the text in the landscape. But in this case, we don't necessarily need to create a solid. So all we need is just our camera analysis and therefore we just go ahead and hit the Create camera button here. So what this will do is just add one more layer here inside our composition with all the analyzed data inside this camera. And now we can go ahead grab our project files and maybe start with the 50-year-old bill and just add this to our composition, make it a 3D layer. And then you're already notice that this bill will be moving with the rotation and general movement of the camera inside the scene. So all we need to do now is just create a lot of duplications of this €50. And then also add the one hundred and two hundred euro bills and duplicate them some more times to just create this dynamic effect. And what's very important for the effect to work and to look nice at the end is that we will add different builds in different positions. So of course again, those bills here have three positional data, X, Y, and Z. And what's most important for the effects to look good at the end is that we have different z values so that all in all, when moving this camera are birds were sort of overlap and create this very nice three-dimensional effect. So let's just go ahead and start with this €50 bill. Then move it and bring it back to the background. So just again, use your Shift button to make this work a little faster. And you could also just grab your bill position at here. And then what we also want to open beside the positional data or the rotational data. So therefore Shift R to bring those up. And then maybe we bring it in little x, rotation and rotation in z. Maybe move it over a little bit more to the right side. Let's get back to the beginning, see where this bill will be. Move it over a little more to the right side, and also move back a little more in z. So this might be where we want to place our first bill. And then we'll just go ahead at another one. Again, make it a 3D layer. You could just add another bill or duplicate your Fresco and change the position doesn't really matter in this case, we can bring up the position and rotation data. And then for this one, we want to place it in the foreground. Maybe just like here, and then in the center at the bottom, maybe like here. And you'll notice that it will really start to make this one appear three-dimensional. If we have several births in different positions, maybe bring this one up a little more. And that's just basically what we need to do in the first place. And then later on, we're also going to animate different bills and sort of add another effect and also adds the one bill that was flying from the right side to the left side. But for now I'm going to close this video as our first part and the next part I'm going to add some more bills. 57. Practical example: levitating objects in real 3D space - Part 2: Sometimes I'm not done. So edit some more bills to our scene. And next I'd like to show you two different effects that you might want to use in order to further animate our bank birds. Now, let's just demonstrate with this €50 bill here in the foreground. And then of course, you are free to choose whatever bills do you like to create your very own animation. So for now, I'll just select this layer here and then choose Effect Distort Warp. Now, this still looks very unrealistic, but if we change the website from AHRQ to maybe something like wave. And then we also lower the bent factor here to maybe 20. If we then start to animate our Horizontal Distortion, then you'll see that a nice little movement here will be added to our bill. So if you just set some keyframes for the Horizontal Distortion, you create a nice little animation here that you might want to use for some of those bills here, flying around in space. And second, another effect that I also used for the preview video was Effect distort CC page turn. Now what this will do is create this nice little roll-up effect here for our bank bill. Now, right now it starts at the bottom right corner, but let's just switch, switch that to the top left corner. And then we have another control here, which is the fold position. If we just choose this, change it maybe right to the upper left corner. What you could then do is just animate this full position in order to create this nice little turn effect here. So this is just another effect where you might want to use keyframes in order to animate your bank bills and really add up to the nice little dynamic movement here of our scene. So those two effects, where the effects that I use for the preview that I created. And now what we wanna do is add another bank bill and let this bank birth fly around in space. And also your sort of twirl around and fly to the wind until the bill finally leaves here outside of our left frame. So therefore, let's just take the 200 Euro bill here. Duplicate that bill Control D. And then we want to bring this one up. And what we wanna do with that bill now is to animate the position as well as the rotation. And we want to also use a nice little effect which will transform the two d bill into a 3D cylinder. And then animate and rotate along that cylinder that we just created or added to this bill. So for now, let's just take this layer here and create a new precomposition. Hit layer, pre-compose. And we want to leave all attributes in our poker table composition and just name this one, maybe €200 cylinder. Hit. Okay, and now this won't change anything. Our composition will stick as a 3D layer. And if we now open that composition, all we will find insight as just the €200 PNG file that we've just selected to create this precomposition. Now with this layer, what we wanna do is as the CC cylinder effect. Now we could either either just again select the effect or we open up our effects and presets and directly search for the effect. Let's just give it a couple of seconds here to load all those effects. And there we are. And now we might search CC cylinder, which has an effect that you'll find in the perspective category. And now we'll just add that effect to our bill. Now what you'll notice is that the bill will be folded in a way that is sort of creates a cylinder. So therefore, a 2D object will be moved in a way and folded new way to create a 3D object. Therefore, we also see this little symbol here beside the CC cylinder effect. Now let's bring up the position and rotation data so I can show you a little better. Of course, you can move this alarm in x as well as y. And for now let's just Increase the zed value so that you can see the whole bill. And if I now rotate the bill, then you will see that it's really been folded to sort of create this cylinder here. Now, in my opinion, this is folded or band too heavy. And therefore what we wanna do is if I just for now deactivate the cylinder effect again. This effect here is been applied to the layer, which is the 200 Euro bill. And asked the €200 is filling the whole layer. And this layer is used to create the cylinder. Therefore, the rotation or the bent factor that has been taken into account. It's just too heavy and the bill is sort of creating the whole cylinder itself. Now what we wanna do is we will take this 200 Euro bill PNG layer, delete the cylinder effect for now. Again, create another precomposition. So choose Layer, pre-compose. And now we want to move all those attributes into a new composition and name this 1€200. Let's say second layer. Hit. Okay? And then we want to open this precomposition. So right now we have created two different layers. We have the poker table final composition on top, which includes the €200 cylinder composition. And this composition again includes the €200.2 layer composition. So therefore, let's open that one up. Here. We want to scale our bill down to maybe something like this. And then we'll come back to the €200 composition. And if we now again apply the CC cylinder effect to this layer, then you'll see that the whole layer will be taken into account to create the cylinder. But the 200 Euro bill itself won't fill up the whole layer. So therefore it will not bend in a way to create the cylinder all by itself, but we have some more space. And it will look much more realistic in terms of the effect that we want to create. Now let's bring the resolution up to maybe full. And then you can see that this is the effect that we want to create. And now what we wanna do is combine a rotation of this Euro bill together with a rotation of our cylinder. So let's start by again opening up this €200.2 layer composition. And now bring up the rotation. Animate this rotation. Set a keyframe at the beginning, then maybe switch to the end. And what we wanna do is add a rotation for maybe 1.5 full tern. So therefore just increase this value, let's say to one rotation and maybe 186 degrees. So that's really nothing spectacular, but the bill is just rotating in a 2D fashion. Now, this 2D bill here is what we'd be applied to create the CC cylinder effect, which transforms a 2D layer into a 3D object. And not right now. All that is happening is that the rotation will start to be appearing along the cylinder. And now we want to combine this rotation with rotation of the cylinder itself. So therefore open the rotation of this CC cylinder effect. And now we might start and choose all those rotation x, y, and z to be animated. And then we have our first keyframe set. So hit U to see those keyframes. And then we maybe want to move to the end and add some rotations here of the cylinder. So maybe start and rotate in x. Then also maybe rotate this one a little bit in y and also in z. And together with the rotation of the bill itself, this will create a nice little twirl effect of our 200 Euro bill that we then want to apply to our final composition. Now, this is sort of a little guessing game or trial and error till you make this one look really good. And I've also tried out for a couple of minutes. And I've just written down some values that are now want to choose. So maybe we want to start with 160 degrees for the x rotation, 124 y, and 200 for the zed value. Then come back to the end and rotate in x for 250. Y will be 210, and these debt rotation should be 60. That's okay. And now we've created a really realistic movement for our 200 Euro bill, which is just flying around in space. So this is just a combination of a two-dimensional rotation of this bill together with this three-dimensional solid. Now that we've also rotated in its dimensions. Now what we wanna do is just add this composition to our poker table, and we've already done so because this was the composition that we just precomposed. So here it is. There you see it, but we scaled it down of course. So therefore, what we need to do is just open up the scale of this 200-year a cylinder and scale this one back up to maybe 300 per cent. And you'll see that the 200 Euro bill will start to be in place, but I need to fix one more thing. And that is get rid of the light options here. So we just want to turn up the ambiance to 100% and decrease all those other values here, diffuse and specular, roughness to 0. Then we won't have any effects regarding our light. And I'll come back to the poker table composition. And now you'll see that here we have our bill, which now starts to rotate and twirl here in space. And all we need to do now is just animate the position. And that's what I continue with. After you will get a little coffee, tea, or what? Water break, whatever you need. And then we'll see for the final part of this video. 58. Practical example: levitating objects in real 3D space - Part 3: Alright, let's continue and finally move our bill starting here at the right side, then appearing to our main scene, stay in a little while before then disappearing here to the left side of the setting. So therefore, of course we want to bring up the position data, use the shortcut P. And then first of all, I generally want to increase the Z value here so that we move the whole bill a little bit more to the background. Should be fine like this. And now at the beginning of course, we want to move the whole bill here to the right size. So therefore, either just increase the x value or take the whole composition and move it over here to the right side. We don't see it anymore. And this position we want to save by creating our first keyframe. So just hit the stopwatch to save this position. Now next I want to check how many seconds I will have before I close this poker case here. And just before closing, we already want this bill to be disappeared here on the left side. So first of all, what I wanna do is get rid of this beginning timestamp and reset this to 0. So either I have just already done so for you in the polka dot mp4 file that I pass over in the course materials. Or if not, you could just do the very same that I'll do now, which is open up the composition settings and then use the sort code 000. Again, 0, hit. Okay, so then we have a little bit of a better view towards where we are in our current position. So let's move forward. See where other close this poker case and it will be the case just about here. So we have maybe 3.5 to four seconds till we want this bill to already not be visible anymore. So therefore, at about half of their time, maybe here, 1 second, 20 frames that we want the bill to be solid in the middle of our image. And then just before I close the case, maybe here or there, we want the bill to be disappearing here to the left side of our image. So maybe just move the second one. And do that one. We only want the keyframe to move. So move it over just about to the middle of the time between finally disappearing and starting to appear. And now we'll see that for the whole animation, we only have about 3.5 or four seconds. So therefore, what I want to do is adjust the cylinder as well as second layer composition in terms of the animation that we created, which was just created for about eight seconds. So therefore we remove all those keyframes over to maybe the 5 second mark to just be sure, but we want it to be a little faster. So therefore will adjust those keyframes. And the very same we will do here for the rotation of the bill itself. So just move over this keyframe to the 5 second mark. And now we can come back to our poker table. Final composition will see that the bill will start to appear here, then fly to the inside. Before then leaving our image, our main scene to the left side. And then I'll start to close the PAGA case. Now, the great thing about this animation in terms of the position, is that we can treat this one sort of as a mask path. And therefore what I can do is I'll take this point here of the position animation and create a little more dynamic movement for our bill. Maybe let go here so that the bill will start, move a little upward, then fly a little bit downward, and then we'll take this point and continue with the animation. There may be finished with this final position, a little bit more here to the top. So this looks like a very nice parabolic movement. And that's what we want to check out now. So we just go through this animation, or Bill starts to appear, moves a little bit upward and also rotates along the cylinder, which creates this nice three-dimensional windy effect. And then we have our bill flying through the whole scene, finally disappearing to the left side. So that's it for the main animation. And now of course, what we also want to fix is that finally, we want all those bills to fly into the poker case. And again, I think the most efficient way is that we're taking a look at it for one built in detail before then speeding up the whole process because it will be the very same for all those different builds until we arrive with the final animation. But before studying and doing so, what I wanna do is change one more thing for the bill that is flying through the scene from the right side to the left side, which was this 200 Euro bill here. Select this layer one more time. And what I wanna do is I want to change those keyframes, select them and right-click Keyframe Assistant and change them to be easy ease. What this will do is just add a little more dynamic and not move from one keyframe to the other in a linear way, but just add a little more dynamic to the whole animation. So that's it for this movement. And now let's continue as planned and let one bill of fly into our poker case. Now, in general, I differentiated between builds on the left side of our PAGA case and builds here on the right side because all those bills on the right side basically was just one simple movement which is to let them fly inside of the case y for all those bits here on the left side, what I did was first of all, those bills flew over here to the right side before then from there on continuing the flight until they arrive here inside the case. So therefore, let's just maybe take it from the left side, maybe this 200 Euro bill here. And again, of course we want to open up the position data, use the shortcut P. And if you like, you could also animate the rotation. So therefore use Shift R to maybe also bring up the rotation. Now, let's see where we want the whole animation, the whole flight to be finished. So maybe here. This is a good point where we want all those bills to already be inside the poker case. So from this point on, Let's move backwards a couple of frames. And here maybe is a good point in time where we want the whole animation to start. So therefore, let's save our position and rotation data at this point and then move forward. Some frames, maybe two bars here, and fly over, or just move it to the right side. Also change the zed value a little bit so that the whole bed will move a little more to the background so that it really fits the PAGA case here. And as already said, you can also change the rotation, maybe off the z value here, to about this position. And then let's move forward some more frames to this position here. And then again increase the zed value. Again maybe change also the rotation. Move over this bill to the inside of our poker case. Now, as you'll see already, we cannot leave it like this. But what I also added was a mask. And therefore, with the layer selected. Yet, just use the pen tool and draw a rough mask here to fit the case. Just like this. Then of course again, open or a mask options and animate the path, move backward one frame. And here we want to change the path and just enlarge it year in those points so that we can still see the whole bill at this point in time. All those points before, of course as well. Now let's see here. This is where we'll be halfway to the case. And then one more frame forward. What we wanna do is just let this layer n. So therefore use Control Shift D to split the layer here at this point and then delete the first of those. So that's the animation. We have the bill starting here. On the right side. As you can see here. Then what this bill will do, it will fly over to the right side and from their own move inside the case. As to make this animation look even better and a little more unclear here in the areas of the poker, k is what we also want to add is the motion blur effect. So just activate it. And you'll see here, from this point on, the bill will start to move over and sort of disappear inside the poker case. Maybe you want to play around with the timing here of those keyframes. Maybe add some more time here, make it a little bit slower. So therefore, grab those keyframes, move them over. It's your decision where you want the animation to start. But this is basically how it works and that's the very same what I copied for all those different bills. Move them over here to the right side. Also increased the zed value until then finally disappearing inside this poker case. So basically that's it for this tutorial. I continue to do the very same for all those different builds. And then we'll see again for the final animation, I finished the process for all those different builds. As you can see here at this point in time, normal bills are still visible. While if I move backwards a couple of frames. Here, we still have all the different builds in place. And then of course, starting from the left side and continuing with all the other bills on the right side, they seem to fly over to the poker case and disappear inside that one. So basically that's it for this video. But what I always like to do at the end is just create a new adjustment layer and then apply some very basic color correction. So choose Effect, color correction curves. And then we just want to increase the contrast just a little bit so that the scene will look a little better. Now, this will be the final animation that I render and then show to you in just a second. So basically I decided to do this tutorial in a very detailed way because in my opinion, it included some very important contents. Now first of all, you now know how to combine 2D and 3D layers. And for example, make the CC cylinder effect work in a way that we want it to be. And also what you've seen is that we can animate the position of the keyframes the same way as a mask path. So that's it for this tutorial. In the next one, we're going to have a lot of fun and create our very own car accident. That also will be the last practical example of this course. But before we start with that one, Let's just see the final animation we just created. 59. Introduction: Now welcome to the very last part, huge project of this Adobe After Effects course. Before I'm going to explain to you what will be included and created in this example. Let's again start by having a look at the final result. That's it, I'm gone. Now, this also serves as my application to all the international soaps that will be shown in TV. So if you want to contact me, feel free to do so. But let's compare this final video to our original file, where there's really just a car going from the left to the right side. And you can already notice that there's a lot coming up to us that we want to include in this project example. So let's have a look at some more details here in the moment of the accident. So first of all, we want to artificially damage our hood of the car. Then also what will be included, of course, are here the brake lights, as well as the skid marks here behind our car. Also, we want to add some smoke or fork here in the front area of our car where the hit really appears. And as well, there will be smoke behind the car because of course the car is breaking. We have to pay attention to the shadow of myself. And also there will be glass shatters here coming out of the front area of the car. So all in all a, really, a lot to do and a lot to be considered in this project example. So let's waste no more time. You can either just again grep the course material of myself running across the road. Or maybe you might record yourself then of course, pay attention so that you won't cause any real accidents. And yet either way, let's again see for the next video and get started in After Effects. 60. Understanding time remapping: So here we are back in After Effects, and now let's go ahead and start recreating our own car accident. So therefore, I've already imported the different sources. First of all, we have to car crash audio file and then of course the car video, as well as me as a person running across the street. Now there's one more video inside the course materials, which is the car brake MP4 file. And this technically only is the end result of what we are going to create in this video. Still have decided to cover this inside the course. What we're going to do in this video, because in my opinion, it includes some very important contents about another method to rearrange time. Therefore, we want to go ahead take our car video and drag it into a new composition. Now basically, you have already seen that this is just the car riding from the left side through the scene until then leaving here on the right side. And if this is not your very worst enemy driving the car, then you would imagine that if the car gets involved into an accident, it will at least start a break-in somewhere here inside the scene. And this is what we want to do in this video. And we want to start with this because if we want to rearrange the time later on when this layer, for example, is already combined with me running across the street, then it will get very difficult to rearrange the time. We want to start with this and make this car a break here inside our main scene. So you already know one method to rearrange time, which is right-click time, and then open up these time stretch. So what you could, for example, do is come back to the moment this car arrives. So maybe about here, and then split the layer at this point. So use Control Shift D to split the layer. And then for the upper one, right-click time, Time, Stretch, and maybe use a factor of 110 per cent to slow the car down just a little bit. Then move forward some frames to, for example, here, split the layer again Control Shift D, and again open up the time stretch, increase the fracture, make it 120 per cent, and so on until maybe the car leaves here on the right side with a factor of 150 per cent. So this would be one way a method of introducing intervals to slow down our car. But in this case we want to do something different. So therefore, I'll delete those layers again and direct the car file back into our composition. And what we want to use is the so-called time remapping. And to introduce it, you'll just right-click again time and enable time remapping. Now you can already see that two keyframes have been edit. And now let's think about important moments here of this composition where we need our time to be remapped. So first of all, before the car is introduced into the scene, this is basically just a still, so therefore, the time it doesn't really matter. And the same applies here to the end where the car has already left the scene. So therefore, let's set one more keyframe here when the car starts to arrive. So therefore, we want to hit this button to add another keyframe and then move forward until the car has left, which is here and there we want to set one more keyframe. So let's start remapping the time and we want to do so with the head of the graph editor. Open up the Graph Editor with this button here. Now if this is the view that you will get, then you want to change this view to the speed graph. So therefore, click this button here to open up the drop-down and then change it to Edit Speed Graph. Now what we wanna do is rearrange our relevant key frames in a way that we will introduce a break effect for our car. So remember the second keyframe here defines the moment in time where the current gets introduced to the scene. While the third keyframe defines the moment where the car has left the scene. So what we wanna do is take this third key frame and just move it to the right side. Now, you're already noticed that at the current cursor position, the car gets back into our main scene because of course, between the second, third keyframe, we have introduced some more time. And now as this is the graph, what you can see here is on the x-axis, we have the time, and on the y-axis we have the speed or the velocity. So of course, S between our first and our second keyframe has nothing has changed. The velocity will still be one. While between the second and the third key frame. As we have introduced some more time, of course, the velocity has been lowered. To rebalance this. And as the time between the third and the fourth key frame has been lowered. Therefore, of course, in this segment, the velocity is above one, so the video will replay it faster. So that all in all at the fourth keyframe, we still are at the very same moment in time. So right now, this break moment would be very unrealistic because we start going with velocity one and then have an abrupt break moment, which then stays the same as 0 comma 71 seconds. Per second and time. So what we want to do now of course, is make it more realistic. But first of all, I want to introduce some more time to this composition. So therefore Composition, composition Settings, and then maybe make it 1 second longer. So six seconds hit, Okay? And this is just so that I can grab my fourth here and switch it over to the right so that we have sort of a constant velocity of one here at the end of our segment. Which to be honest, doesn't really matter because behind or after our third keyframe, we don't even see the car anymore. But what we wanna do now is improve the segment between the second and the third keyframe. So therefore, let's just take this point here and move it over to the other point. So what this will do now is start breaking in a very hard way. So the velocity will be lowered heavier than later on when breaking. And this of course, is what happens in reality. At first, we lose velocity very fast, well then smoothing out, still losing velocity. So it's of course still falling, but not as hard, not as intense as at the beginning of our break moment. So this sort of looks realistic and this is how we want to rearrange our time. And now we can just rearrange our work area. Maybe move this point here so that it's close to one. Even though it won't really matter as it's sort of a stent still image, but still, let's rearrange the work area to like this and enlarge this one more time to check again. So we have our car moving here on the left side in the normal velocity and then it will start to break here at this moment where the car is introduced. At first the velocity will be lowered quite heavy. While then the velocity gets lowered even more, but not as hard as of course at the beginning when the car is trying to break and avoid the accident. So let's finally check that this video in comparison to the original file. So I'll just drag the original file into our scene one more time, close to the graph editor. And what I wanna do is open up the opacity, make it 50%. And now let's see what will happen for the just created effect. So at first, the car will be introduced for both, for both layers in the same way. But then the original car will start to be faster, of course, because it stays in a constant velocity and then leaves the image before the car that we just created with this break effect, which will get slower the more it will move from the left side to the right side. So what I wanna do now is rendered this video. And then we continue and move along with the newly created car brake video. So what you can do is just take this video and with this one, we'll continue in the next segment. 61. Basic coordination of layers: So I have just ran out the time, remapped car video and named it car brake. And what I wanna do next is delete the original car video that we just remapped and therefore import the car brake video. Now, if you did So for yourself and you are now not using the car brake video from the course materials. Then what you want to make sure is that you will also once again import the original car video, then activate the audio source for that file and use the video source for the newly rendered car brake video. And this of course, is because we have moved the third keyframe to create some more time break in this car. And therefore, of course, the audio in that time frame will be a little off. So therefore, just make sure to use the audio from the original file. But to be honest, you won't really notice that later on, as we'll also add the car crash MP3 file. And therefore it won't be really noticeable. But just to make sure that we have a good audio, we will combine the car break with our original video. And now we will do the same for the person and therefore also take that one, create a new composition so that now we have the car composition and the person composition. And now let's go ahead and create another new composition and name this one. For example, a creche. Makes sure the preset will be the same as the person and the car video. And for duration, let's take ten seconds. This should clearly be enough and then hit Okay, to create this composition. Now first of all, we want to adjust the person and the car composition inside this newly created crash composition. So therefore, grip the person and the car. And let's bring down the opacity of our person to 50%. And then we want to move forward and see that we get those two layers adjusted. So this doesn't look too bad, but the person should be halfway across the road when the car really hit. So therefore, we need to bring in a little more time. So just take the car composition and move it a little bit so that when the crash starts to happen, maybe a little more. Then the person will really be halfway across the road and directly in front of the car. So this should be fine like this. Next thing we want to do, of course, is also at the car crash MP3 file. So take that file, edits to our composition. Double-click the L button to bring up the waveform. And then we have some break sound here at the beginning of this file. And then this impact here should really where the excellent starts to happen. So at this point in time, we want to adjust the car crash. So therefore grab the file here, move it over so that it really fits to the situation. And as the car composition will really be the main fire. So this will be the background that we will see all the time from this car composition. While here in the person composition, we will cut out our person. So therefore, let's adjust the end of this composition to the end of our car composition. Therefore, open that 11 more time and you'll see that here, the original current video ends. So this will be the end of the audio. So let's just create the end for the car wreck video there as well. So just move over the work area, right-click and choose trim comp to work area. Now, going back to the crash composition, you'll see that the car composition has been adjusted. So what we wanna do is also grep, the end of our work area here to the end of this car composition. And now let's play the whole phi, the whole setting one more time to see if the audio and video really fits the situation. So just use your shortcut 0 to create this preview. Alright, looking good so far. And also the sound seems to be well adjusted. So before we will finish this video, let me just mention one more time what I already talked about in one of the previous videos. And this is Tibet and not be dependent on changing circumstances. And here, although the person video has been taken maybe only 50 minutes after affirmed the car video, you can already clearly notice that the shadow of this lantern has changed. And this will make it a little more difficult for us to adjust those layers. But as we need to cut out the person anyways, we will work our way through to a final nice end result of this car crash that we want to create. So that's what we're going to start with in the next video. Cut out to me as a person and therefore see you in the next 11 quick addition before we then really start to cut out the person here. And this of course, is that we also want to lower the audio levels of the car composition when the crash here finally starts to happen. So therefore bring up the audio levels by using the shortcut L. And then in the moment of the crash, we want to set one keyframe here. So just use the stopwatch, create the first keyframe. Move forward, maybe a couple of frames, lower the audio to minus 35. And then let's play this whole setting one more time by using the shortcut comma. And maybe here at the end we want to bring in some audio back in place. So therefore, just change this to minus 20 maybe here. So that'll start from minus 35 and then come back in place a little bit so that we can hear the car driving again here at the end, just a little bit. And now let's play this one more time. Alright, this sounds fine. And now, as I already mentioned, let's finish this video and start cutting the person. 62. Cutting out a person: Let's go ahead and start to focus on the person in our composition. Now, although effort, like my acting performance was absolutely amazing, I would still suggest that we will change the video to a frozen image, maybe at about this point in time. Now to use a frozen image has some advantages out of which one is that we can use the so-called puppet tool. Of course, I'll show to you that tool later on. And secondly, my leg is quite high in the air here at this point. And this will be a point where I would already be on the hood. And I felt like it's a little unrealistic if the leg would go so high in the air at that point in time. Now of course, feel free to create a better version of this video for yourself. If you are way better actor than you might use the video and not consider changing to a standstill image. But as the car is still moving quite fast and also that will be smoke edit here and hear me will be on the hood. So all will happen quite fast. And therefore, you won't really notice if we use a standstill image or stick with the video. So what we wanna do is double-click the person composition to open it and then move forward a little bit. And maybe this frame here is fine. So what we wanna do is cut the layer Control Shift D and then right-click the upper layer time freeze frame. Next we want to go ahead and use a tool that you already know to cut off the person. And this of course, is the Roto Brush Tool. So therefore, double-click this layer here to open up the layer view and then select the Roto Brush Tool. And let's start to select the person. Now at first, when the car is not in place, to be honest, it wouldn't really matter if you just cut out a little bit too much. Like for example, the tree here beside myself, because of course this exact tree is also part of the layer below the person. But still, as this first frame will be the reference frame, I want to make sure that we will do a perfect cut of the person as this frame will be the reference. And then of course, when the car comes into place, it gets important that we really only consider myself here and not part of the sidewalk or parts of the tree here around myself. So just give me a couple of seconds to find the perfect Katia and then I'll be back and we continue. So I adjusted the Roto Brush Tool to follow me along in time. And notice that, for example, in this frame, parts of the sidewalk are still in place. But as already mentioned, this doesn't matter at this point because the very same sidewalk is also part of the car composition. And what I also not focused on, worse, the shadow that will be part of the next segments. So for this one, it was just important to cut out the person here for this layer. And of course also cut out the person in the frozen frame here in the upper layer. So that's it for this video. And now let's continue with the next one. 63. Null object and advanced expressions: So I use this button to freeze the relevant frame. So therefore, back to the composition view. You'll see that here when the image is frozen, of course I'm asked myself and before, when I was still move in and running across the street, of course. We also use the Roto Brush Tool to take a mask around myself. Now let's get back to the creche, the final composition here. And then maybe bring back the opacity to 100%. And you'll see that here. I'm introduced to the main scene, which now of course is the car composition. Until at this moment, where should have been hit. I will still stick in that position. And that's what we want to change in this video. We want to make sure that I'm sort of sticking to the position of the car. We don't need to worry about the shadow of myself at this moment. We will do so later on, but for now, let's just focus on the position of myself here along the crash so that I will really move out to the right side. Now one way to do this, the most intuitive way is to just open up the position as well as rotation data again. And then maybe create the first keyframe. At this moment here. Stopwatches. Then move forward a couple of frames to maybe this position here. Move the person composition over to the hood of the car. Also bring in some rotation here. Maybe like this. And then makes sure that all those frames in-between, I'm still on the hood here to make it look like a realistic accident. As already mentioned, this will be the most intuitive method, but right now I want to cement some knowledge from the course. And we once again want to introduce a so-called null object to save the positional data off the car so that we can use it. First of all, for me here on the hood. And secondly, we might also use that data later on to, for example, animate the brake light here of our cars. So therefore, let's once again delete all those keyframes. And what we wanna do now is create a new null object. So layer new null object. And we want to save the position data of the car inside this null object. I've already said that you normally use a null object, store inflammation. So in this case, the information that we want to store is the position of the car. So therefore, we will just take the null object and maybe take this part of the car here, the mirror, and adjust the null object to that position. Now open up the position of that null object. Create the first keyframe. And let's first of all move forward. Here we can still see the mirror also adjust the null object. Move forward a little more until the mirror will be out of the image. So we still want to take the null object until it has left the main image. So here, and here we have a little speculation should be about here, the mirror. Okay, Let's move backwards. Here. We can still see it. Alright, backward one more frame. Now let's check the frames in-between. Because of course the car is no longer linearly moving in the same velocity because we introduced the break effects. So therefore, it might be that we need to adjust the null object in-between. And now this should be fine for our purposes. Now what we want to do is link the position of this null object to the position of the person. So what we can do is just open the position data from the person. We can already see it here. And now let's take the pick whip tool here and just link it to the position of the null object. Now, this will work here at the end, whether the exit N has already happened. So I sort of stick to the position of the car. But of course, in those moments before the accident where I supposed to only cross the street here, we already stick to the position of the car and therefore, of course, this is not what we want to achieve. So we need to make sure that in all those moments before the accident, maybe until this moment here, we don't want to stick the person to the car. Well, of course here at the end, we want to stick the position of the car to the position of the person. What we might do is again, just split the layer here, Control Shift D, and then only link the second one to the position of the null object from this moment on. And before we only want the person to cross the road. But I want to show you another method that works with the use of expressions in order to finally link the person in a way that we wanted to be. And this is a little more advanced way to use expressions because what we want to introduce now is a condition. And I think it's a good point in this course to introduce conditions, to add expression because it might be very useful for you to use conditions in many other projects. So therefore, let's just try and add an expression with a condition in order to position myself. So first of all, the position of myself should be dependent on the exposition of this null object. And if the x position of this null object is still here on the left side, then we don't want to change anything for the position of the person. But if we reach a certain point in terms of the x value, then we want to stick the person to the car. So that's what we're going to add now. And therefore, first of all, we want to split the dimensions of the position data. So you can do so by right-clicking the position data here and then choose Separate Dimensions. Now what this will do, of course, is just split the dimensions so that it'll be a little easier to, for example, separately change the x position of the null object. So first of all, we want to do the very same for the position of the person composition. So just right-click again and choose Separate Dimensions. Now, let's begin by linking the x position of the person to the exposition of the null object. So again, just choose to pick whip, tool and a link those two values. And if we then want to see the expression that has just been added, we'll see that here for the X position, it just states, link it to the exposition of the null object layer. Now let's save this part of the statements here in a variable. So maybe we just want to name it x position, x underscore position equals the x position of the null object layer. Also add a semicolon. And now in the next slide, we want to introduce a condition to this statement here. So let's just write IF open up the brackets, then open up curly brackets, else and again curly brackets. So we begin with this part here where we want to write the condition of this statement here. And we want to link the x position of the person composition to the exposition of the null object in a way that if the car is here on the left side. So if the x position of the null object is still very small, then we don't want the person to be linked to the car, but we want to stick to the position of the original composition. And if the value reaches a certain amount, then we want to link it, linked the person to the position of the car. So therefore, we can use the x position of the null object. So let's say if the exposition is larger than, for example, 726 or the current moment in time, then we want the person to be linked to the car. So we want the exposition to be x position, which is the value of the null object. And if the value is below or equal to 726, Then we want the person to stick with value, which is just the variable, to stick with the original value of any expression that you are currently working in. So let's just close this expression. And what you'll see is that here at the beginning, the person is just running across the street anomaly in the original position. And if then the position of the x value which is linked to mirror here, I mean the exposition of the null object. If this one reaches a certain amount, then the x position of the person will also stick to the position of the mirror because it'll be the position of the object. So of course, this still doesn't look perfect. But it was just a way for you to get to know condition because I really think it can be very useful to use expressions and conditions in many, many different projects. So what we might do is change this value here, maybe switch it to 800, and only then start linking the position to the position of the null object. So that it'll look a little better. But still of course, we need to further improve this and separately link the position as well as the rotation from our person to really make this look perfect. Now, doing so, we have a little problem because we can no longer adjust the exposition as this has already been linked to the position of the null object. So let me just state, state one more time that the easiest way to link the position and make this look realistic is that you won't use any expressions in this case by just open up the position as well as rotation. And use some keyframes to adjust the position to the hood of the car. But still, I wanted you to see how you can use conditions inside statements. And now what we want to do is add another way to further adjust the position. So therefore, we want to add an effect, and this effect will be Effect distort transform. Now what this will do is bring up some more data, like for example, position and also rotation. And now here again, we can fix the position without having to modify the exposition here inside the original position data off the person composition. So therefore, let's just hear creates some keyframes, like for example, at this moment for the position and the rotation. And then move forward and make this look really perfect. So here we want the person to move a little to the right side and rotate to the hood. So right now you cannot grab the image because what this will do is change the original x and y position. But of course we want them to be changed inside this effect. Therefore, let's adjust that inside this effect here. This looks good. While don't worry about the arm as well as the leg. Again, we will use a mask to make it look as if the leg is behind the car or on the car or we need to worry about right now, is just the rotation and position so that really fits to the hood. So again, all you need to do is just move forward and adjust separately for all those frames so that it'll look perfect. And that's what I will do right now. And then we'll see again in the next video. 64. Masking and alpha matte: So I added a couple of more keyframes to our Transform effect, animated the position and rotation datasets. So that it starts to appear as if I really get hit by the car and get thrown out of the main scene to the right side along with the vehicle. Now, before we further enhance this effect by introducing a mask to the hood of the car. Let me quickly show you the puppet tool that I already mentioned in one of the last videos. So you might want to select the person composition here, and then just choose this button here, the Puppet Position Pin Tool, which technically is only an effect. So you can also choose Effect puppet. And we might start by adding some Puppet points to, for example, the hat, the back, left, and right side of the person. And now you can really take those points to bend myself over and create this nice effect. Now this effect itself is really cool to see. I'm a great dancer also, but it doesn't look quite good when applied to moving images. So in this case, as we want, apply it to a video. You will notice that for example, if a bank myself over like this, move forward some frames. Then here my leg gets disconnected from the body. And later on also the hat will be disconnected from the body. So all in all, it doesn't really look that good. So therefore, we want to delete the effect here and then open the person composition. And if we now apply the effect to our upper layer here, which if you remember, is just a frozen frame, then you can see that if we apply it again, maybe create four points. If we bend over myself here like this, then this will really be carried along in time. And in this way maybe you want to improve the moment where the car really hits me to sort of create this heavy band effect. Because the car really hits me here in the bag. Then you might want to add this puppet effect and further enhance your own image. But for now, I just wanted to show you the effects that you already know how to use this one, for example, wanting to create a nice puppet in your own project. But in this case, we will delete the effect again and start adding a mask to our crash video. And now the method that you already know are the easiest method that you might consider now is just again, select your person composition and then choose the Pen tool and start drawing a mask here around the hood that you then want to subtract. Now, in this scenario, there are two reasons why this is not the most effective way to just add a mask to this person composition layer. Nonetheless, I will start and do so and then quickly explain to you why other methods in this case should work a little better. So for now, let's just start and draw a rough shape around the hood of the car like this. Then subtract this mask. And you can already notice that the mask doesn't really have the effect we want it to be, or at least the position of the mask is not where we want it to be. And this is because we have applied the Transform effect. So if I turn off this effect for 1 second, then you'll see that originally this has been my position. And as I'm completely outside of this mask and then moved with this transform effect. This is why you will still see the parts of myself here, even though they are inside of the mask and should have been subtracted. So technically, the position of myself is just about here. I'm completely outside of this mask and therefore I am not subtracted. Then moved over to the right side, and therefore, you can still fully see me here. Now, this is the reason number one. And the second reason is that we want to also use the information from our null object following the car again. So therefore, we will delete the mask inside the person composition at this point. So just select the mask and delete it. And now we want to add a new layer. So Layer, New Solid. Maybe name this one, Put, choose. Okay, and first of all, make the layer visible. Now what we wanna do with this layer here is create a mask and follow the hood of the car. So also turn invisible, the person layer for a second so that we can clearly see the hood of the car. And now with the hood layer selected, we want to start and draw a mask here along with the hood of the car. Maybe like this. Then again, open the mask options, subtract this mask. And what we want to do now, we want this layout to be an Alpha layer of our person composition layer. So therefore, choose this person composition layer, open up the track matte here, and choose Alpha Matte hood. Now what this will do if we activate the person layer again, you'll see that now we really subtract this mask area here. As already mentioned, this hood layer now is an alpha layer of our person composition. Now for this layer here, we want to use the information from the null object which will follow our car. So what we want to do therefore, is parented to the null object. So open up the parent column here and then select null. And now you can see that this mask will move along to the car. Not perfect. So we need to adjust it, but it will follow along with the null object. Now, you can also see the difference of parenting a layer and really Lincoln a layer with the pick whip tool. So if we open up the position data of this hood layer and we would then pick whip the position to the position of the null object, then the position would be the same. But if we parent it than any change to the position will also be applied to this layer. So if I move to the right, for example, to 50 pixels, then this would layer will also move for 50 pixels. And therefore in this case, we want to parent it. Choose the perfect hood in this case, and then follow along in time. And now what we need to do, again, also adjusted to make it look perfect. So it's basically fine. It will move along with the car as this null object here follows our mirror. But still, we need to do some better adjustments and create some keyframes. So for this hood layer again, what we want to do is open up the mask and animate our mask path. So I worked my way through the relevant keyframes and animated the mask path. As you can see here. What I also did was first of all, I move down the whole mask in general just a little bit to not fully cover the whole hood, but maybe start at about half the height of the hood so that it looks a little more realistic as if I'm relying on the car. And also add a mask feather of ten pixels to just make those border areas look a little smoother. Now, if you move backwards in time. And as this hood layer here, first of all follows the position of the null object layer. And also this layer works as an Alpha layer to the person composition layer. Therefore, what you can see is that here at the beginning of the main scene, the person will start to disappear. And this is because the whole layer gets moved to the left side along with the car. And as this layer is an alpha layer to the person, of course, therefore, the person will start to disappear. Now, what we can do to bring back the person is just increase the width of this hood layer. But before we can start to do so, we first of all need to cut the mask because of course we don't want any changes applied to the width of the whole layer to also be applied to our mask. So therefore just cut the mask, Control X, then open the layer solid settings of the hood layer and change the width maybe to 5 thousand, just to be sure. Hit Okay, and you'll see that as the layer has been widened, our person is back in place and now we can also bring back the mask. So Control V with the layer selected and our mask is back in place. So that's it right now, I'm really satisfied with how this turned out. So we have animated the position and rotation of the person and also edit a mask to the hood here so that all in all it really looks quite realistic as if I get thrown out of the scene to the right side and really involved into an accident. Of course, feel free to add your own effects. Maybe also add a puppet. Or if you have filmed yourself, just bend over a little more, play around with the rotation and position until it turns out with the result that you want to continue with. Now there's one more thing I want to add in this video and that is to apply the motion blur effect to the person composition a layer. Therefore, let's just select that layer then move forward a couple of frames to maybe at about here. And now we want to activate the motion blur effect. If you cannot see this effect, then just toggle switches until you can see the motion blur effect. So we want to activate that effect. And you can see that motion blur has been applied. But it's easy to see that it has been applied way too much. So we want to change that by opening the composition settings. Then click on this Advanced tab here. And there you'll find the motion blur settings. So for now we want to lower the shutter angle to maybe at about 20 degrees. And you'll see that motion blur is still active, but way less, which all in all makes it look way more realistic. It, okay, and that's it for this video. I'm really satisfied with how this turned out. So we have animated the position as well as rotation of the person. Also, we add a mask to the hood of the car so that all in all, it really looks as if I get involved into the accident and then thrown out of the main scene here to the right side along with the car. What we wanna do next is of course make it look even more realistic by bringing back the shadow. And then also later on, we will animate the glare of the car. And for example, also add smoke to the hood of the car. But as already mentioned next in line, we want to bring back the shadow and therefore see you in the next video. 65. Shadow of the person: So in this part, we want to re-introduce the shadow of our person to the main scene. So therefore, let's start and take the person composition out of the project files and just duplicate it. So use the shortcut Control D. And then we want to rename the second one to shadow. Now, let's first of all open that composition and delete the Roto Brush effects that we applied for the person. So that right now we really are back with the main scene with the person and the shadow that we now want to use into the crash composition. So let's just take the shadow composition and let go below the person. Now first of all, what you want to make sure is that before the crash starts to happen, the effect here, the Transform effect, you want to make sure that the position and rotation is set to its original value so that therefore, if we activate and deactivate the shadow layer, the person would really be still in the same place right before the accident. So if you didn't do so, then just set a keyframe to the moment before the exit. And so that really the Transform options will be set to the original values. You can just use the reset button for that. Now let's go ahead and start working with the shadow. So first of all, we just want to draw a mask and make sure that the mask here will not include the shadow of the Lantern as that has changed during the sun. So we really only want the shadow of the person to be included sort of like this. Then you can already see that right now everything is back in place. So we have the person here, we have the shadow of the person. So this basically is just the mask from the shadow layer. And here on the left side we can see the car composition so that the vehicle is also included in the final crash composition. Now, let's adjust the shadow of the person a little bit better because if we move forward a couple of frames, what you'll notice is that because I cut the shadow of the lantern, that also the shadow here of my left foot no longer appears. And this is because if I deactivate the mask of the shadow composition for a second, you'll notice that originally the shadow of the lantern has been here in that layer, and therefore, I cut the mask right below the lantern. So therefore, the shadow of the foot is no longer included. So we want to adjust that a little bit. And therefore, just animate the path of this layer here, the mask path. So here everything seems fine. So we want to set the first keyframe. Then let's move forward one frame and adjusted just a little bit here. Include the leg and also the shadow of the foot. Now, it doesn't have to be perfect because later on all this will happen so fast. But still we want to include the shadow of the food so that it appears quite realistic. Make the best out of it. Maybe if you film yourself without any shadows that you won't have these problems, but doesn't really matter because this is the main thing you want to learn in this course, which is to just find a solution for every problem you'll have and just solve it so that it'll look quite nice at the end and that's what we are going to do. So therefore, we want to make the shadow as best as possible. Here we want the arm to be included as well. And let's do so for a couple of more frames. Maybe like this. And then we want to activate our mask again. So switch it to add. And you can already notice that the car is already hitting us. And we also of course now need to re-introduce the shadow of the car. And therefore, we want to now add an effect to the shadow composition layer that will cut out the brighter areas of this layer. So that here the shadow, so the layer below the shadow composition layer to be back in place. So with the shadow layer selected, we want to choose Effect, keying, extract. And if we now play around with the white point setting here and lower this value, then you'll see that the lower we get, the more of the bright areas will be cut out of this composition layer. And we can already see that the shadow of the car, so the layer below this shallow layer to come back in place. So maybe let's lower the value to about 50. And then what you can see is that for all the moments before the accidents, we have the person, we have the car, and we have both shadows in our main scene. So all we need to do now is just enhance. Those moments, we are both shadows intersect. So here what you can see is that first of all, we have a very small border here around the shadow of the person. And we wanna get rid of that bottle, of course. And therefore again, with the shadow layer selected, we want to choose Effect met simple choker. Now, what this effect will do is you can enlarge or shrink your mask. So if we just lower this value, you'll see that we want to enlarge the mask. And if we just increase the value, then we will shrink the mask a little bit. And maybe a value of about two is enough. Maybe let's say three, so that we can really see both shadows here intersected. And now what we wanna do is we want to take this moment in time, this moment here, and cut the shadow layer at this moment. So again, use Control Shift D to cut the layer. And for the upper shadow layer, we want to make this one a frozen image. So right-click time, freeze-frame, you already know that. And now we can use the mask here and just deactivate the animation of the mask path. Because all we will use is just this one mask because of course we have a frozen image and this shadow layer. Now we want to again, first of all, linked to the null object so that it will move along with the car. And then later on we want to individually enhance the position and rotation data of this one to make it look a little more realistic. So basically it's all the same that we also did for the person. So therefore, first of all, link it to the null object. And then open up the position and rotation data. He made those and let's see how it looks over time. So this frame seems to be fine. We have added the choker to just cut the mask a little bit so that it really looks as if both those shadows play together. And then let's move forward one frame. And we already see here it's organized. So let's set a key-frame there. Then move forward one more frame and just grab the shadow layer. Move it over so that it perfectly intersects the car. Move forward one more frame. Let's see looking good. This is also looking good. And maybe we said one more key frame here. Move forward and then move it over just a little bit. Here we want to get a little lower. But all in. All right, now this is looking fine. So here the shadow is changing a little bit, although the car seemingly is not really moving. So therefore, we have set a keyframe for this one here, move forward one frame, and just apply it a little more to the left. And you're also a little more to the left so that it will fit the movement of the car. Now there's one more thing you can notice, and that is here at the bottom. There are a little bit on some parts of this plant here included because the plan seems to be quite dark. So what we wanna do is again, open up our mask path that we have d Animated. So it's just this one mask that we have. And we can just shrink this mask to only include the shadow and not affect here those plans area here where the darker areas might also still be included. So that's it. You can see me arrive in here. The shadow is still in place. And then the car starts to appear, of course, also with the shadow. Then I get hurt and the shadow starts to move along the car till I leave the image on the right side. So all in all, this was a little more complicated. As already mentioned, if you'd like to film yourself from a position where there's no shadows. Of course, your life will be a little easier. But this course is all about learning how to solve problems. And therefore, I wanted to make it a little difficult. Although I didn't really, I didn't really know that the shadow of the lantern will change so fast, but still, we have managed and find a way to make this look nice. So what we wanna do next is add some more effects to make it look even better. And we want to begin with adding skid marks and animate the brake light. So therefore, see you in the next video. 66. Brake light and wheel traces: We want to continue improving the main scene. And in this video we will add the brake light, and then later on also the skid marks behind our car for the brake light. Let's go ahead and first of all, create a new solid. And then let's name this one the brake light. Make it read as already selected, and also make sure that it's come size or if you like, you can also make it smaller, but come size should be OK, hit OK. Then first of all, we want to deactivate the view of this layer. Now with the layer selected, Let's just draw a rough mask around the brake light year of the car. So choose the Pen tool and start drawing this rough mask doesn't have to be perfect for our purposes. So like this, it should already be fine. Then activate the layer again and you can already see that we have applied the red solid here to the brake light, but of course, it's the looking very unrealistic and therefore we want to improve it in two different ways. First of all, let's open up the mask settings. So use your shortcut M, M. And then we want to introduce a feather off maybe about, let's say 25 pixels so that it would start to look a little better integrated into the surroundings of the car. Let's see. After and before we applied the red solid, already looking quite good. But we also want to add a glow effect. So choose Effect, stylize glow. And let's increase the radius a lot to maybe about 90. And then we want to lower the intensity to maybe 0.75. So this should be fine. And that's what we did. You can see this is after we have integrated the brake light layer and before. So all in all, it's really looking like this car is a break-in to prevent the accident, which unfortunately doesn't succeed. But still of course, we want to introduce this brake light. Now, all we need to do is just animate the position of this brake light over time. So first of all, you already know that we link it to the position of the layer that will of course follow our mirror off the car. So just choose the parenting layer to the null object layer. And then you can see that the layer sort of already follows our light. But again, we need to individually follow the position. So of course, open up the position a data one more time. Creates some keyframes and then just use your arrows on the keyboard to adjust this layer. So that will really follow the car over time. And that's what I will do. And when I'm finished doing so, I'll be back and we continue with the skid marks. So I adjusted the brake light layer, added a couple of more keyframes. And what I also did was I already included the skid marks layers here into the final composition. Now let me just quickly show you what I did to create those skid marks. So first of all, I created a new composition. And for the width, I chose 2400 pixels, so I made it a little wider. And 1200 pixels in height that are named Edwin skid marks. And then I added a white and a black solid via the white solid is only there so that you can see a little better what I did inside this composition. So I just added a black solid and then applied some masks or select the solid, choose the rectangle tool, and then draw a rectangle like this. Take that rectangle, Control D to duplicate it. Move down with your arrow keys. Do that a couple of times, maybe four or five times, to create this skid mark. That's what I used for now. I'll delete the fifth six months again and also deactivate the white solid. Then we can just take this skid marks composition and import it to our crash composition. So I did this two times, one time for the right wheel and one time for the left wheel. Now of course, this is a 3D layer that needs to be rotated. So what I did was I rotate it basically mainly here in the x-axis and then just a little bit in the z axis because it doesn't really move from the left to the right side, but it's also moving a little bit from top to bottom. So this is the three degrees here, but mainly you need to rotate in terms of the x value. What I also did was if I open up the scale, I unlocked the three-dimensions, just lower the scale for the y value. Then I applied to masks on this skid marks layer. So first of all, the layer is covering the whole scene from the left side to the right side. And then we have two masks. So the first mask, basically it's only following the wheel of the vehicle so that the skid mark will really end here right before the wheel. So this year is the first mask widened here to the left side. So that if we continue moving to the right side, we can still see the whole skid mark. And here on the right side, as already mentioned, We'll stop right before the wheel. So this again is animated over time. So the mask path has been animated to just follow the wheel of the car. And then I added a second mask, which is this one here. And this basically is only feathering the skid mark. So what I did was if I open up the mask settings, you can see I applied a feather of 400 pixels so that the skid mark, we're sort of fade out here on the left side and also here on the right side where maybe the car has stopped breaking, or at least it won't produce any more skid marks. So this mask is only moving just a little bit from the left side to the right side. And together with the first mass, creating this effect of the skid mark. And then of course, I just duplicated that layer to create the same skid mark for the left wheel. I lowered the scale for the y-value even more to 60%. And then I adjusted those two masks just a little bit. But basically you can just reuse them to create the skid mark for the left wheel. And that's it. I think it's easy to recreate that for you to sort of create those skid marks. And what we wanna do next is add some glass shatters. Therefore, see you in the next one. 67. Pieces of Glass via CC Particle World: So let's go ahead and create the broken bits of glass that sort of fly out of the windshield of the vehicle. And therefore, we want to use a very powerful effect that really allows you to create different three-dimensional objects that you might want to use for your very own purposes and projects. But before we can apply the effect, we first of all need to create a new layer. So choose Layer, New Solid. And we want to name this one glass, make it come size and the color of the layer doesn't really matter. So just hit Okay. To create this layer with the layer selected, we want to apply the effect. So choose Effect simulation CC Particle World. Now this effects, together with the symbol here, first of all, shows that you can apply it to a two-dimensional layer to create a three-dimensional object. You already know this from the CC cylinder effects that we applied in some previous project. So here are a lot of different categories and settings. And right now I'm going to explain to you the most important ones so that you can really use this effect for your very own projects and purposes. Let's maybe begin with the particle category. So first of all, you can change the particle type and general. So here you can see that we've created a particle world with lines, but you can also, for example, create bubbles, cubes, or very often used, creates a particle type system with faded spheres. So this will really create a nice three-dimensional space here. And then you can of course, change the color of the birth as well as death moments of those particles. Before we will do so, let's first of all change the type to a tri polygon. This would be the type that we will use later on to create our glasses. Now, let's continue. And first of all, let me mention that of course the particles have a moment of birth as well as a moment of death. And the time in between can be changed by the longevity of your particles. So in this case, those particles will live for 1 second, but you can, of course, let them live shorter. So then you'll see some less particles here. And if you increase the time, you will see more and more particles here inside our system. And then of course you have the birth rate, which determines how many particles will start to live in certain moments of time. So if you increase the birth rate, then of course, more and more particles will come into place. And let's continue with the category producer. There of course, you can change where those particles are born and where those particles will live over time. So if we want to change the exposition, then you'll see that particle system basically moves to the right or left side. If we change the y position, of course, easy to guess what will happen. They will change in their Y position if we change in the zed value than the whole particle system will move in, it's that excess. So let's just bring those values back to 0. And now what we wanna do is continue with the physics. And there again, you have different settings so you can of course change the speed of your particles by moving this velocity value. You can also inherit the velocity. This is something that we will add in just a couple of seconds. You can also change the gravity of the particles, as well as decide on how they should react when arriving to the floor of the particle system. This will also be changed in just a couple of seconds, but for now let's just one more time. Move back to the particle category. And what we want to do now to recreate those glass pieces is first of all, change the birth and death color. Now in this case, we don't want to make any differences between birth and death colors, so just choose a color that will represent the glass. So make it sort of this light blue color here. Choose Okay, and apply a very similar color here in the moment of death. Should be okay. And what we want to do next is changed the birth and death size. Again, we don't want to differentiate between birth and death size because broken piece of glass will stay a broken piece of glass. Therefore, we'll just lower the value in general to maybe about 0.025. So we lowered by a factor of ten. And then we create those nice little broken pieces of glass. And now what we want to do next is we need to make sure that the glass will move along with the car. And secondly, basically there's only one moment where we want the glass to be produced and that is the moment where the accident happened or where I fly here and hit the windshield. So therefore, let's play with the birth rate as well as the producer position. So first of all, let's see where the accident happens. So we need to move backward. And maybe this year is a good moment where we want the particles to be produced. So therefore, let's move backward one frame. Hit the stopwatch here and lower the birth rate to 0. And then we want to move forward just one frame. And then increase the birth rate to 20. Move forward one more frame. And again, choose the birth rate to be 0. So what this will do is you can already notice the glasses just start to be produced in this very moment where I sold off, hit the windshield. And now next what we need to do, of course, is make those glasses here move along with the vehicle. So therefore, first of all, we want to change the producer position. So let's again move backwards in time to maybe about here, set our first keyframe for the x position of the producer. And then move forward a couple of frames, maybe to about here, and increase the exposition. So move over the producer to the right side. You'll see that the glass shatters will start to move a little bit to the right side. But in order to really adapt the movement of the producer, what we need to do is increase the inherit velocity percentage. So we want to increase that value to maybe about 8085. Sort of like this. So now those pieces of glass will really move along with the vehicle. Maybe we want to decrease the movement of the producer just a little bit like this, so that the glass will really start to move out off the windshield here in the moment of accident and then fall over to the street. Now there's one more thing we want to add, and that is how to react when arrive into the floor. So in this case, the floor should be the sidewalk. So the floor that we can see here inside the particle system effect is already correctly positioned, but what we want to do is change the reaction. And therefore we'll open the floor category here inside the physics and change the floor action from none to balance. So what happens now is that those glass shadows here arriving at the floor really bounced back. Leg rear glass shatters here inside the main scene. So that's it for this glass shatter effect. But one more thing we want to add, and that is to apply a motion blur to the moving glass. And in this case, we're gonna do so by applying an effect. And this effect, you can find if you just choose Effect, time, CC, Force, Motion Blur. You can see that right now, the glossier looks a lot more realistic because really flying out off the main scene here to the floor and then bouncing back from the sidewalk. So maybe play around with those settings here inside the CC Particle word effect, as already mentioned, this is a very, very powerful effect that you might want to use in many, many different projects. But for our purposes, I'm satisfied with how this turned out. We have some glass shatters added to the scene. We also added the brake light. We added the skid marks here behind our car. And now next, we want to consider adding smoke here coming out of the hood as well as some more smoky or behind the car because of course, we are heavily breaking. 68. Smoke via Fractal Noise: We continue and in this video we want to add the smoke to the hood area of the car and then also use that smoke layer to create some more smoke here behind the car because of course we want to support that this car is breaking. So again, we start by creating a new Solid name, this one, smoke. Make it concise and choose, Okay? And now again, to create the element that we desire, we want to do so by applying an effect. And in this case, it will be effect noise and grain fractal noise. Now here again, you have a very different fractal types. So you could create turbulent noises as well as dynamic noises, swirly noises, or even strings. So just if you have some special desires, but in this case, we'll stick with the basic Fractal type. Then what we want to change is lower the contrast to make it a little more foggy. Maybe like this. And now to create a dynamic smoke effect, what we will do is animate the evolution wheel. So if I just change this value, you'll see that we sort of get some movement inside this effect. And if we then apply a mask to this effect and move this over with our vehicle, then we are basically already set and have created the smoke effect. So let's go ahead, lower the value again to 0 degrees. And we're going to hit the stopwatch here for this 1. First of all, also turned down our layout. Then I will add a mask to this layer. Let's move backward a couple of frames, maybe to about here. Then start adding a mask. So move over until you find the Ellipse tool. And let's just do a rough mask like this. And what we will do to adjust the amount of smoke is lower or increase our mask expansion. So we also want to animate the mask expansion. And what we want to animate is the general position of our layers. So therefore open up p for the position as well. And if we now use the shortcut you to open up all those different effects that we apply it and want to animate all the effects with the activated stopwatches. Then you'll see that here we are with the mask expansion, the evolution. We'll end the position that we now want to animate. So this is our starting point. Let's bring back the view of this layer. And first of all, what I want to do is generally lower the opacity. So that's what I forgot to open up t for the opacity, lower that to maybe let's say 44%. And then again, you bring back all those keyframes effects. And then we might start and first of all, lower the mask expansion in this point here. Also open up some more mask options, increase the feather and general to maybe about 90 pixels. And then let's move forward a couple of frames, maybe about here and there we want to first of all, let the fork or the smoke appears so increase the mask expansion. Then of course we will move the whole mask to the right side. So just increase the x value for the position of that layer. And let's again move forward some more frames to about here. Increase the exposition again to follow along with the vehicle. And what we also want to do is increase and turn our evolution. We'll hear. So maybe just add a spin for about 1.5 turns. Just make the whole effect a little more dynamic and create the very own movement here inside the fractal noise effect. So there we are. No smoke at this point until the year smoke starts to appear and we move over to the right side. Maybe what we can do is at this point increase the mask expansion a little more. So therefore, just increase this value so that the smoke will start to disconnect from the hood and attract more of the surrounding. And I currently notice that also the brake light at this point is not at its best positions. So just for a second, I want to activate the breakdown layer. Use my arrows to move this one over to the left side. Because of course, this also should be well adjusted. But now back to the smoke. And there you can see, first of all, the smoke is very concentrated here on the hood area and then starts to disconnect a little bit and create this nice effect. Now again, of course you might even improve this a little more for yourself, maybe rotate a little more. Inside the evolution, we'll apply some more settings here. Create maybe a better mask how you like. But what I did was just take this layer again, duplicate it, and then move it over to the left side. Now first of all, open all those keyframes points again, delete the keyframes. And then maybe I want to delete the mask and general create a very new mask here. The first mask was something like this. Of course again, I added a huge feather here. Also lower the opacity even more to maybe thirty-five percent. And here for the area behind the car, what I did was I combined several masks. So again, you might follow around for the vehicle here, and then maybe just take that layer again, duplicate it again. Delete the mask, create one more mask. In this area here. Play around with the feather again. Maybe lower the general opacity even more to 25 per cent. And this is how I created some more smoke here behind the car. I think because this is nothing really new. You have seen how to create smoke and general with the fractal noise effect. So what I will do, I will further improve this now here for the area behind the car. And then I'll skip this part and we see again in the next and final part, which is to create a damage or damage to the hood of our vehicles. So therefore it see you again in the next video. 69. Adding damage to the hood: Alright, final video of this section, final video of this practical example. And what we want to add in this video is a damage to the heart of our car. Now first of all, we want to take the car composition and duplicate it and rename the second one, maybe damage. And then we want to import this composition and place it right above the car layer. So it will be the new position number 13. And then we want to adjust it in time so that it really fits the car composition. So just move forward a couple of frames here, like this, and now it should really fit the car layer. Let's move backward a couple of frame until the very moment of this hit, which maybe is about here. And now we want to open the damage composition in this moment. And then we will draw a mask around the hood of this car here. So just select our car break, which is the video material of this composition. And then start drawing a mask around the hood. Remember, if you leave your left mouse button pressed, you can adjust and make it a little more curvy here. And should be fine like this for our purposes than just take this point and move it over here. And then we have the hood of the car. And what we want to do now with this hood is first of all, freeze this moment in time. So again, right-click and choose freeze frame. Also we can delete the car layer and general, because for this composition we don't need any audio. This is just the damage that we will add to the hood. And now what we want to do for this moment where we have frozen the hood, we want to apply an effect to then create this damage here to the hood. Before doing so, let's quickly introduce another layer, new solid, and just make it dark gray. Because before we will bend the hood, we also want to have a replication of this hood in terms of this gray layer here laying behind the hood. What I mean by that, I'll show you when I just duplicate this car break layer again. And then for this dark gray solid, we want to choose it to be Track Matte as an Alpha matte for the car brake MP4 files. So therefore, what you can see is if I just turn off this car break layer, then you'll see that behind that layer we have one more replication of that layer to sort of recreate our hood. Because right now we want to bend this car break here, but still we want to have a little replication of that hood lay behind it. So I want to make it a little darker even. Maybe like something like this. Choose, Okay? And then for the upper layer, you want to choose an effect which has Effect distort CC Split. Now here you can set to attacking points, point a and point B and then apply the split effect. Now, if we choose the point a to B in the left bottom corner and the point B in the right bottom corner. Then we can increase the split amount and you'll see that the hood will start to bend to the top. And behind with this dark gray solid, we still have one more replication of the hood here at the very bottom. So let's maybe adjust the point a little better because we have a very small part of the hood still staying here on the downside. So maybe move this one over a little more. And this should do the job. Now what we want to do is animate the split amount when the accident really happened. So at first of course, we have a normal hood and then when the car hits me, we want to maybe take three or four frames and just increase the split amount to add about 20 or so. So let's again move back to the crash composition and see where we want the effect to start. So maybe this is a good starting point. So back to our damage composition. Then we want to animate the split amount. Start with the value 0. Move forward, let's say four frames to three seconds and eight frames and increase the split to maybe 19 or 20. And then back to our crush composition. You can see that the effect has been placed here. But of course, what we need to do is again, follow our car in time. Now in general, again, of course we can link this to the null object. But we need to individually adjust just like we did before with the person, the smoke, or with the null object in general. So therefore, we will open up the position data and then move backwards a little bit until this point. And let's start animating the position. So move over this one to this position so that it really matches our car. And let's move forward and adjust the hood where we all start. Move over forward some more frames, deactivate our personal layer just for a second so that I can see a little better. And then I want to take the damage composition and move this one over to the right side. And let's see in the times in between, adjusted just a little better here. Then we have added a nice little damage to the hood. Now, by the way, I have to say sorry because what I did was when I created the damage for the sorts I needed to replace myself, also unmute myself a little bit more upward because of course we have now a little more space here because the whole Hood has been bent over a little more to the top. So therefore, you might want to change the position of the person for yourself afterwards. Or just start by adding the damage to the hood and then apply the position for the person. So for now I will just add some more keyframes here so that the hood really fits. And then I think we have added a very cool effect and I'll be back when I added those other keyframes. So again, I added a couple of more key frames. And now let's move backward to the moment just before the accident which is here. And at this moment we want to split our damaged layers. So use Control Shift D to split the layer and then just delete those moments before the accident. Because of course there we don't need the damaged hood layer to be active. And that's it. We have applied a nice damage to our hood to sort of reflect the impacts created by this accident. And then the car will move out of the main scene to the right side along with myself with all those broken legs and arms that this accident has cost. Now basically, that's it for the accident. And let's have a look at what we've created so far in this project. So in my opinion, this is looking quite nice, although I know it took us more than an hour of projects material here inside this course. But I decided to do it with a lot of details because in my opinion, it included some very important, some very nice effects like for example, the CC Particle word that you can definitely use in a lot of different projects. Also, you now know a method how to easily create smoke. You have seen the split effect. So all in all, I think this example was very useful and maybe you use it for yourself to try to surprise your parents that you got involved in your very own excellent or whatever. Now one more thing I always do at the end of the project, you already know it. And it's to create a new adjustment layer and apply an effect which normally will be the color correction curves effect. And let's just quickly increase the contrast. And maybe in this case, make it sort of an autumn scene. So just lower our blue channel a little bit and maybe also lower the green channel. So that it'll look a little bit like a nice autumn scene with sort of an accident, which of course is not nice about. Now let's play the final result, what we have created in this project. Alright, so one more time, what did we do? We have added a damage to the hood of the car. We have animated the brake light. We have also added skid marks here behind the car. We also added glass shadow to make it look even more realistic. Then of course, we moved the person over to fly out of the scene along with the car. We needed to care about the shadow here. So it was really a very intense, but I think quite nice project and I hope you liked it. And learn some more things about the great program that is Adobe After Effects. Now that's it. This was the last project example and we'll continue in the next video and I'll show you some more extensions and other grades. Who will that make it even greater to work with Adobe After Effects. 70. All-inclusive package Envato Elements and Transition extension in After Effects: At the end of this video course, I'd like to give you some personal recommendations that I feel can really one more time improve your work inside of After Effects and bring your projects to the next level. Now, the first recommendation you can already see here, and that is the website elements dot and Barto.com, all the subscription to the Envato Elements program. Now, this website really offers an all-round data pool in terms of, for example, video templates for After Effects, but also for other programs. You can download, stock a video as well as photos. You might want to use music or sound effects. Or you could even consider improving your PowerPoint presentations with different presentation templates. Now, the great thing about this website is that first of all, it doesn't stand still, but it is added up with thousands of new elements day in and day out. And of course, all those elements are licensed so that you can use them, for example, to create your YouTube videos and fill those videos with a cool music track. Now, the most interesting section for this video course might be the video templates for After Effects. So let's just bring this up. And you'll see that we have tons of different elements here. Like for example, a YouTube channel kit, which will include different subscription buttons and intro and outro and many other elements ready to use for you inside of After Effects and then create a YouTube video. Or you could use such a vintage titles pack with a lot of different elements that all by themselves look really, really cool. And of course, you can use the search bar if you have any special project you want to create and for example, needs something like a heads-up display than just search for that. And you'll see that we have a lot of different elements even here for this heads up display. Like for example, those dashboard infographics here with a lot of bright elements, or here we have different heads up display screens. And this was the case for anything I needed in the past. I just use the search bar and anything I need. It could be downloaded directly here on Envato elements, not just for the video templates, but maybe also a stock video that adds up to a YouTube video I wanted to create. And of course, I also mentioned the PowerPoint templates. So here you can download different templates to improve your presentations. Or you could choose from a variety of different music tracks. Right now, as you can see, there are 126 thousand royalty-free audio tracks available on this platform, which all can be filtered by different categories, such as the genre or the mood of those tracks, as well as, for example, the tempo. Or if you want to fit to a certain video, you could go ahead and filter for length of those tracks. Now, you can even download fonts to improve your videos. So all in all, Envato Elements really isn't all-inclusive platform, and I can only recommend it to you one more time. Now, let's talk about pricing of the subscription year. And first of all, I want to make sure that I'm in no way sponsored. I will get nothing. If you decide to open up a subscription, there won't be any affiliate link. It's just a personal recommendation as I myself am a really convinced user of Envato elements. So the price will be €14.50 per month if you decide to pay on a yearly basis. And I think it's double the price. So €29 if you want to make the payment month, month by month. Also, before opening up a subscription, you could start with a seven day free trial and just check out this platform. And there's also another benefit if you're a student. So then you will get another 30% off to those prices. So Envato Elements, really a personal recommendation for me. And next in line I have another recommendation which is an extension that I'm often using inside of After Effects. And the funny thing is that I've found this extension here on Envato elements, but I think I'd better show this extension to you directly inside of After Effects. And the extension I'm talking about is the so-called premium build-out transition spec. So once installed you'll find it if you click on a window, extensions, premium build-out transitions peg. And the really great thing about the premium builder in my opinion, is that it's very handy and well-integrated to work inside of Adobe After Effects. Now, this premium Builder does not only come with the extension of the transition spec, but there are also many others legs, for example, a titles sequence package, or also a YouTube channel package with this premium, a builder. But you have to imagine that normally if you download, for example, a video template directly from Envato elements, then those elements will come with an After Effects project file. And inside those projects, you'll have one final composition. And inside that composition, you will see all those different types of sequences in different compositions. So you have to navigate through those compositions in time to see what effects and what titles can be achieved and how they will finally look in After Effects. It's a little different here for this premium builder, because if you just open this up, click on that premium billed at transitions peg here. You'll see that it's directly placed inside of after effects without the need to navigate through different compositions but directly visible what effects can be achieved here? If I go back to the final structure, you'll see here that first of all, you can just drag, drop this transition spec and place it anywhere you want to put it inside of After Effects. And then here you have different folders with different categories of transitions, like for example, blinds or glitches, glasses, motions. So for example, let's open up the glitches and you can directly see how one picture will be faded into the other, in this case with a glitch effect. And those effects can be very easily applied just by double-clicking. And then those will open up in a different layer here inside this composition, I used those transition effects. For example, in the preview for the tracking video. Here you can see we have the text layer with integrated texts into landscape, and then this layer will be warped into the drone shot here. And this just was achieved by double-clicking inside a warped transition so that this layer here was created. So basically, you can not only transition from one picture to another, but also from one composition to another, or just from anything you'll place below this, on the left side of this transition will be shifted to what you will place here on the right side of that transition in time. So this is just another recommendation from me. I use this very often to achieve easy and smart transitions. Also, those transitions even come with sound. So I can only highly recommend using this transitions pack as well as other extensions here with this premium builder, just search for that, for example, on Envato elements. Now, I think we can finish this part with my recommendations and for this course as you one more time and the very last video. 71. Thank you: Now here we are. This is the very last video of this course. Thank you first of all, for participating. I really hope you like this course could take away something from it. And maybe now are just as fascinated by the great program, Adobe After Effects as I am. If you did like this course, then one more time it would be really happy and extremely grateful if you'd give this one a five-star rating and recommend it to your friends and family who would also like to learn about Adobe After Effects. This course has been more than one month of full-time work for me. So it will be a small gesture for you, but yeah, a great and important step for humanity if you just give this one a positive rating. Thank you once again and now all the best to you personally and a lot of fun and success in your upcoming After Effects projects. Bye bye.