Adobe After Effects CC: Motion Tracking & Compositing Basics

1. Adobe After Effects CC: Motion Tracking & Compositing Basics PROMO: Welcome to our adobe after effects CC motion tracking and compositing basics. Course I'm Will and I'll be your instructor. I've been using after effects since 2006 and have been the visual effects supervisor and lead visual effects artist on hundreds of projects, including full length feature films and television commercials. The techniques and work flows, all teaching every single lesson will be really world ways of enhancing your footage, such as removing acne from an actor's face, replacing a picture frame with another picture and removing objects from a scene. There are many unique work flows involved in motion tracking, compositing and throat. This course will explore several of them. I'll be using the aftereffects built in tracker as well as an amazing tracking program that comes with after fixed that not a lot of editors know about or take advantage of. Also, I've included the exact same footage that I'll be using throat the course, so I encourage you to download it and follow along with me. This is an intermediate course designed for people who already know the basics of after effects and is a great follow up to my Aftereffects CC four beginner's course throat. This course I will be focusing on various techniques in ways of thinking in order to achieve a certain result that will enhance your footage. Thanks for checking the score, so and I hope to see you in 2. Introduction: Welcome to our adobe after effects CC motion tracking in compositing basics course. And thanks for enrolling. The goal of a visual effects artists is to hide something so the viewer never knew it existed. Toe add something so the viewer always thought it was there or to enhance footage to bring a scene toe life. I believe the most important skill of a visual effects artist or composite ER, is the ability to solve the task in their mind before actually working on it. Almost 1% of the projects I've worked on required me to plan ahead of time how I will achieve the results I'm going for with that being said as you progressing through the course, trying to think of the technique used instead of the actual tasks. Because if you can understand the technique, then you can apply that way of thinking to new and different projects. Motion tracking and compositing can be tricky, but with the right technique, you can achieve great results. All right, let's dive into the first lesson. Let's get started 3. Course Content And File Organization: All right, So now we have some finder windows open on our back. These air just folders. If you're on a PC, just open up a new folder. Um, I have right now some stock footage, so there's some seals here. I have a boat going by. I have some footage of a living room and I have a close up of a model's face. So in the next few lessons, these of the clips I'll be using. So let's organize some of these files. So let's create a new folder. We'll call this one tropical boat scene. Place that file in there. We'll call this 13 seals laying. Seen. We'll put that one in there that will continue doing this for each piece of footage. The reason for doing this is it keeps things very well organized. And I'd recommend you do this for every project to work on. Okay, so we have living room motto. Three seals, tropical boat. It's going to tropical boat. We'll make another folder called footage. We put our footage in there. We'll make a fool. They're called projects. Okay, there we go. Back out in model projects footage. It will just keep doing this for every single one. Okay, so let's go back. We don't need this folder, so this great that out. 4. Mocha AE Motion Tracking **WATCH NEXT LESSON AFTER**: All right. So to get started, we can go into aftereffects, so we have after fix open right now, So let's get started by right. Clicking, making a new folder, call this one footage and then let's command tab to our finder window. We'll go into tropical boat scene footage, we'll grab our footage, will drag it in here. Okay, Now that we have our footage in, we'll do is we'll go to composition new composition. Now, I know our footage is 1920 10 80. You can see that right here. So we're going to match that 1920 but 10 80 que square pixels. 23.98 That's fine. Our duration is six seconds in six frames. So that's what we will create here. Okay. And background color black. That's fine. Good. Okay, we're going to bring our footage down now. Alternatively, I could have just drop that onto this button here and what he created this, But I tend to always create my own sequences because then I'm guaranteed to have the correct resolution that I want to work with. Okay. So we can click this entered. Call it boat footage seen. Okay, so now we have a sequence created and we can scrub through to see what it does. Okay, so I actually have one frame here, so I'm just gonna go to the end. Impressive. And that'll can make a little shorter. We can right click and go to trim called toe work area. And we've adjusted for that extra frame we didn't need. All right, So motion tracking is very powerful because you can use it to track your footage and create specific key frames that attached to a certain part of the frame. For example, in this lesson, we will actually track this boat. And then as we play the footage, our track will follow the boat perfectly. So using that tracking data, we can actually adjust things like, let's say we want to remove this piece here or we wanted to attach text to the boat or really do anything with that tracking data because it's attached right to the boat. So I believe most people don't know that Mocha E actually comes with after effects. If you're a beginner, chances are you don't know about it. And Mocha is a tracking program. There are other versions of it. Standalone versions that have a lot more high end features. But the one that comes with after effects is actually fairly good as well. So in order to track this footage in mocha, what you do is click in your layer. You go to animation and then track in MOCA A. So what that's gonna do is it's gonna send our footage to MOCA. Okay, so let's go to MOCA. So now we have mocha open here. This is a new project. We have the name here. Tropical boat. That will be the name of our project. Right here. We have the location. This is where the project will be saved. So let's go to change. Let's go back to our tropical boat scene into projects. Must make a new folder here called Mocha will create. The only thing we really need to worry about is that our frame right is correct and our aspect ratio. So we're working with HD footage and then we'll hit. Okay, so then it loads up our footage here. I'm just gonna click and drag the anti, or to make it larger. Okay, so if we use this little white timeline cursor here, we can scrub through and see all of our footage from start to finish. Okay, so the first thing we want to do is while we're doing this, we want to analyze our footage. We want to check out and look at different parts of our footage and identify what would be a good place to track. So in this case, what we want to do is we would track the boat. So the boat is what we will pay attention to. So as we're scrubbing through, we want to look for places that don't change much. I would say somewhere here would be a good spot. And what you also want to do is identify places that have a change in color or sharpness, things that kind of stand out. So I think the black windows here would be good. This edge, maybe around the letters here, so somewhere right around there would be a great spot. The track. Okay, So what we want to do is set this to the beginning. We're gonna go up to the top here. We're gonna choose this tool, which is the create explain tool. Click it and just like in after effects with the mask tool. What we're gonna do is just start clicking, okay? And then at the very end, once you're done, you just right click, and it will close it that it created that layer for us up here. Okay, so that is our track point That said to our first frame. Okay, So we can actually go in and adjust some of these. If we feel that it needs more data to work with, it might be difficult to see. So what we're gonna do is I'll actually cold said and then click and drag, and I can actually zoom in on this spot a little more. Okay? You can also hold X if you want to move this around. So we have a surface tool and you can see what it does. It makes a little box of four corners. So we're gonna take this corner. We're just gonna try to align the side of his boat because we want to tell mocha that the side of this boat has this perspective. Okay, So to reference that you can see that we have a smaller area on this side of the larger, longer area on this side. So it's still not correct. Exactly. So what? The goal here is to get this shape toe look like the perspective of this side of the boat. Okay, so what we can do is pulleys around until we feel so we feel that they kind of match the perspective of the boat. Okay, so now we can start tracking. So down here in the input channel, we have the luminant set up, which is what we want. The minimum percent of pixels used is set to 90. Right now, if you find after your do your first track that it didn't do a great job, you can play around with these numbers. And the way to do that is just click and kind of go in a circle. We'll go the other way. I think it works pretty good around 90. At the beginning, we kind of analyze this footage, so we should have an idea of what's happening in this scene and to explain it. We have this boat starting from the right side and moving towards the left side. So we have a hand held camera, so there's a bit of motion and we don't have much perspective, though This surface of the boat generally for the most part, stays perfectly flat towards our camera. So for this one, we would probably only work with translation scale and rotation. So it's uncheck that in after effects. Once we send this data, we can actually decide if we even need scale of rotation. But I always kind of leave those on just in case so we can decide what kind of track it is . The motion in it, from right to left is pretty big. It doesn't just do something around here. It actually moves from here to here. So we'll keep that on large. And that's about it, Really, for ah, you know, a basic track. So what we can do here is go to this spot right here and click track Ford's and you'll see what it does is going to start analyzing every single frame and you'll see that are tracking data is falling our boat perfectly. This is going to go all the way to the very end, and what this will do is create a whole bunch of key frames that we can export right here into after effects. And then we can actually start compositing footage and attaching things to this tracking data 5. **UPDATED LESSON** After Effects Mocha Workflow: Okay, Welcome back in this quick update video, I'm going to show you what the new after effects has in terms of the workflow for how to track footage and keep the tracking data so that you can work with it in aftereffects. It's a little different, but it actually makes things a little easier as well. So it's definitely a good improvement. So while making your way through the rest of the course, just keep that in mind so that you're able to continue to work. If you're using the latest version of aftereffects and as a reminder, you can always replay this lesson and reference it as you need it. All right, so we have the boat layer here, I'm going to click on the layer, go up to animation and then track in Boris Effects mocha. So now how aftereffects has set it up is it is in the effects window, and in order to launch the mocha program, you just simply click mocha and then mocha will open. Now I prefer to work within the classic view. So you're gonna want to set up the Classic to follow along everything else you'll learn in the next lesson is pretty much exactly the same. So for now, I'm just gonna go through this very quickly. So essentially, just grab the explain. You make a whole bunch of points on the area that you'd like the track and you can clean them up a little bit if you like, and then down here, like to pick a high picks amount now, because this is more of a flat object going across the screen, it doesn't get bigger, it doesn't rotate. I'm actually just gonna take off sheer rotation and scale. I'm gonna keep it the translation on Lee for that reason, and then I'll change it to a small motion because it's pretty consistent. It moves across the screen in a small way. And then since we're on the first frame, we're gonna go to the far side here and track Ford's. As you'll see, it is currently tracking as this is running across the screen. And once it's done, we'll have our tracking data that we can go back and use in after effects. So from there, we're gonna do is click file save project. And then we're gonna close now because it's built into the plug in here. If we click mocha, it'll still open up back to if we cook the layer here the tracking data that we just closed . So just like in the next lessons, we will create a no object, and then this will be used as the control air for the tracking data. Then we're gonna click on our boat layer, and they were gonna go up to the effect within the effect controls panel because we're not working with a mat. Instead, we're working with tracking data. We will just open up this and then at the bottom. We have export options. So right now it's corner pin. We just want to set that to transform, then under the layer export to we will go to none and we're gonna choose no. And then just before we hit apply, we need to go to create track data and it's a little confusing, but this little panel window comes up. It may be hard to see, but underneath this little gear you can click and that will enable this layer when you click on OK, It has now created the tracking data for this, but we have not applied it to the No Larry it. So you can see here under effects that all of the tracking data exists, but it currently isn't doing anything. So in order to get it to appear on the no layer the last stages simply to apply the export . And now you'll see, When you go into here, the transform data has been applied, and that is the new way of working with mocha inside after effects. So instead of like you'll see in the next few lessons copying the information after track into mocha, you simply can just use it inside the panel window here. So again, you can reference this lesson as you need when you're progressing through the rest of the course and then just to finalize this, for example, it's just created text layer. Okay, I've placed it where I'd like it, and then you simply go to the boat and you attach it to the no layer. This way. The null is controlling the text layer, so if we scrub through, you'll see that it now tracks perfectly with our boat. So, as I said before, when you're tracking data in newer versions of aftereffects, this is the way to bring the tracking data for Mocha into aftereffects, so references video as you need when progressing through the rest of the course. 6. Working With Mocha Data Inside After Effects: Okay, so now that it's done, we can just verify that that track is absolutely perfect. And it is. Okay, So what we can do is go down here. Export tracking data look like this. We have a few different options here, so we have corner, pin, corner pin that supports motion blur. And we have aftereffects transformed data. So for this one, we will just use this transformed data we will copy to Clipboard. Then we will command tab back into aftereffects. What I always do is I make a new no object in the sacks, more of a controller, and then I can parent the tropical boat footage layer to the No. This gives me a little more control over the footage. Okay, so on the knoll object will press center will call this tracking data because organization is very important. So with tracking data selected and our timeline cursor at the very beginning of our composition, well, press command V to paste it. And if you press you on your keyboard, it'll bring up all of the key frames that are on that layer. And now we could really bring in whatever we want. Attach it to this, and it will follow it perfectly. And to give you an example of that will go to the type tool here. Well, type in vacation. Okay. Cool. Give it a little bit of a border. All right, so then we can drag this wherever we want. So for now, we'll just leave it right there. We'll use the pick whip on our text layer. Well, parent it to our tracking data. Okay, so now the parent is set to this layer, which means it is using the data that we tracked in MOCA A. Okay. So because with the beginning of the timeline, and we set that up properly when we scroll through this, you'll see the text follows along with boat. Absolutely, perfectly. We can actually move this anywhere we want. And because it's attached using the information from the boat, no matter what we do, it will follow the boat perfectly. All right, 7. Hiding Objects On Moving Objects: this is very powerful. I'll give you guys another example of this. So, Billy, zoom in. Hold space bar. We'll find the boat. Okay, We will then duplicate the boat layer or footage. So now we have two versions of it will go up to the pen tool, and we will draw just beside here. Then from there, if we just so load this layer, you'll see that that's all we have. Okay? And that's exactly what we want. So what we can do is at the beginning of our composition, we will, right? Click. We will go to time and we'll freeze frame. Okay, so it's sold that. And that means throughout the entire composition, this piece just sits exactly where it is. Okay, What we'll do is we will take this layer and we will cover this part here. Okay, Well, press mm. Owner keyboard to bring up the mask properties. Well, feather the edges a bit. Okay. And then what we'll do is we'll duplicate that again and we'll drag it down a little bit, and then we're going to do is attached to this data to our tracking data, and then we will go back out If you want to get rid of this little square, you can actually just turn this layer off and it'll still do the job and you'll see what we did is we actually remove the piece hanging out from the side of the boat. And now that it's attached to the tracking data, once again, that will stay the same throughout the entire thing. All right, so if you were to redo all of these for all of this, then you'd actually have a blank canvas here than you could put your own text on the side of the boat. So that's kind of the basics to tracking, and we will see you in the next lesson. 8. Acne Pimple Skin Fix Part 1: Okay, Welcome back. And in this lesson, we'll talk about removing acne or pimples, blemishes, that kind of thing on the face of a model. Let's go back here. Let's find the footage we're working with Model close up, okay? And we'll go and create a new aftereffects project. Good. We'll save it in in our model close up projects model. Remove back me in here will create a new folder. Will call it footage and then we can command tab, select this click and hold command tab. Bring into footage. Okay. Once again, we will create a new composition just before we do that. That will actually click Nestor so we can see what this is. So new. Composition gates, Foley ci square pixels. That's right. And this is duration of five seconds. So it will do. Is five seconds here? We'll call it model skin clean up. Click. OK, and then we will bring our model footage down into our composition, and we're gonna try toe clean up her skin a bit by using some tracking and compositing techniques. Okay, so let's click on our layer. We will scroll in and zoom in, or we can change it here. They will hold space bar and click and drag over. So we get to the spot where we want it were at the beginning of our timeline, which is fine. So now what we can do is we can duplicate. So we use our pen tool now. And what we're trying to do here is select an area that will be good for tracking. That doesn't move much, so her eyes might blink her mouth may move. So this part is probably the best point. This is also what we want to remove. This would work. Great. Let's just draw right around, okay? And then this is the technique. So you draw a larger area just like that, okay? And then if we solo this, you can see that that's all we have right now. And if you press him twice in your keyboard, the mask properties will show up that what we're going to do is click on mask one. We're gonna window, we will open up the tracker. Okay. And then we will track Ford. Now, this is gonna take a bit, But what it's doing, basically, is tracking this part of the person's skin, and it's gonna go rate across now. The reason why we want to do this way instead of using mocha is because with this is a very easy way to to attach the tracking data directly onto the mask and you can see that it's coming off a little bit of our tracking data. But that's okay. We don't need to worry about that too much. Okay, Almost done. There we go. OK, so no, that tracks it pretty well. Comes off a bit at the end. Okay, so now that it's done, we have all our track points. What we'll do is we will mask, feather this weaken solo this to make it easier. Okay. And what we're trying to do here is make a spot in the middle that isn't affected by the feather that is large enough to cover this section here. So something around there, it doesn't really affect the middle spot. So that's good. And then we're going to do is use the mask expansion to reduce the size of this mask to cut out this part. Okay, so it's clicking drag, and then that's gone. Maybe just a hair more. And then we can open this up a bit. That's pretty good. We will turn this back on. And then from there, all we do is just click here and then just move it so it hides that spot from here. You can also play around with the blend until it does exactly what you want. So without it with it, Okay, so now we can scroll through here. Now. You can still see a little bit here, but it's a big difference from that. Okay, so it's zoom in a bit. 9. Acne Pimple Skin Fix Part 2: a technique that I like to use is creating an adjustment layer. Okay? And then using the pen tool and simply draw all around the area that you wanna soften. Okay, Go back to the regular tool. You know, you just clean it up a bit. All right? And then now that we have this selected will do the same thing. Press MMR keyboard. We will click mask, and we will track Ford. All right, Now, this is gonna take a little bit of time, obviously. But if you're track isn't perfect, you can always stop it. At a certain point, I just press space bar on the keyboard there, we'll click the mask here, click away, and then you click this again. Select what you want. You can actually move it a bit. We we can actually manually for the next one. Bring it down just a bit. Go to the next one, bring it down a bit. Next one memory down a bit. Then gradually, over time. It will do that. Okay. And then you can see here that we still need to do tracking. So from that point after we've adjusted our track and try to try to smooth out the change over a few frames. We can go back here and pick up where we left off. No, actually, I'm gonna stop it there. You can see that this is changing a little bit. So we wanted to do that Ford a bit. Even the last one will change it just a hair too. Okay. And they will continue here. So the goal here is we're just trying to create a very good track that follows her face. It doesn't have to be perfect because we will feather the edges a bit, but try to spend some time and get it as close as you can, okay? And we don't really need to worry about right here, because there's nothing there that we are affecting. So now that we have that, we can actually do a ton of stuff with this. So just a show. You exactly what it is doing. We can apply a black and white effect to it, and then this is what it's doing. So in order to blend it, we're going to adjust the feather of it, something like that. Okay. And so now you know kind of what it's doing What we'll do is we'll remove the black and white and up here in the effects panel window will type in blur, and we will apply a fast bowler. We'll drag us open, will repeat edge pixels, and we'll just blur her skin tone just a bit. Okay, so maybe 1.5. You can see here that you just hide some of the pours a bit. Okay, Another thing we can do is adjust the color of our previous fix up. So let's just zoom in a bit and we'll type in curves, okay? And then on this layer, what we can do is you can see it really helps with blending in. So I'm gonna just turn this off, so you just see that? All right. So just subtle changes here, and then we can click on there's a critical mass capacity and just drag it down just to about 90% or so. Now, just helpline that even a little more. Okay, another thing we could do is remove some of the readiness. So in this layer here, free tape in curves, we can also remove a little bit of the red by going up here into the Red Channel and just dragging down a bit. And you can see what that does right here just a bit. So with this technique, you can apply it. There's so many different things. It doesn't have to be just skin removal. Could be removing a spot on a couch, a mark on a wall, really anything and as well. Using the adjustment layer, you can add effects directly to it. Because you've tracked it. It will follow the subject. Okay, so I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 10. Picture Frame Replace Part 1: Okay. In this lesson, we will talk about how to replace something in a scene. You can apply this technique to replacing footage on a TV screen on a computer screen and an iPad. A picture on a wall. So that's exactly what we're gonna do. Stay. We're gonna replace a picture on a wall. Let's go into our living room scene into our footage. And so what we have here is just some living room footage and I think will probably replace this. Let's go into after effects. Okay. We will make a new project save as living room into projects. Living room. Replace picture. Okay. Command tab will grab our footage. Bring it over here. We'll make a new folder, call it footage, place our footage in it. All right. Okay. We'll make a new composition. It's HD. All right. The duration is 7 11 like the popular convenience store of chain. So seven, 11. Okay. We'll bring our composition outside. Will leave our living room footage in here. Well, scrubbed through into we got okay. Now, I could use the built in trucker for this, but I do like using mocha most of time. So what? We'll do is we'll open a mocha again. Tracking mocha A. Okay, so we have our new project opened up. We have named living room. Location will change this to inside projects. Call it mocha. You can place this stuff wherever you like, but this is just where I tend to place it either in projects or in the root folder. Frame rate, 23 picks aspect ratio HD. That's good. Click on. OK, All right. So we can see once again, scrubbing through our footage goes from closer to the picture frame, and the camera backs off and reveals a wider shot of the living room. Okay, so we know already. We're gonna be tracking this so it's analyzed what we're looking at here. So if we study this for a bit, we can see that the picture frame shrinks. As time goes on, it gets further back, which means the scale of this will be smaller at the end that it was at the beginning. Bring that back to the beginning. Let's go to our splitting tool. And for this risk under a whole bunch of points Now I've had the best results by drawing a lot of points I've seen some people just draw, you know, one or two points around the corners. But this tends to give me the best results. I should note that you don't necessarily always in the draw around what you're tracking. Since this entire wall is on one surface area, I could just draw everything because there definitely is a lot of detail on this ball. But this should work perfect for what I'm doing anyway. So we'll just leave it like this. We can adjust this stuff so we'll go to our piece right here, and you can see that it's actually doing a pretty good job. If you click here, you can see up in the top left corner that you get a zoom in area click here. I will just line those up with the corners here, okay? And then you can see that our surface is pretty close to matching the wall. So maybe just this corner down a little bit. This corner, something like that. I don't think it's gonna get much better than that. Okay, so we'll turn those off. So down here, luminous channel 90% is good, and this time we'll turn on perspective just in case, uh, and again there's quite a big difference between the starting frame in the last. So we'll leave it on large, and we'll just begin tracking. So click on the button here, track Ford's okay, and you can see it's going all the way across. Gonna take a little bit of time. Tracking always does, though, especially when you're tracking large areas. If I were to track this entire area here, it would take far longer the truck. So keep that in mind. If you can get away with just tracking this part, then definitely do that because it's more efficient. You'll save some time and you'll get the exact same result either way. Okay, so 60% done or so all right. And now we're done. So let's go all the way back. You can see what it does. And again, it has done a fantastic job. Mocha is a great great tracking program, okay, and then from here will go to export tracking data. And what we'll do is we'll use the same one transformed data copy to clipboard. Okay, Now we're in after fix. What we'll do now is import the file that we want a place over this. So it could be another picture, A logo, whatever. So in this case will just use a logo that we have. So we go back out, we'll bring this one in. 11. Picture Frame Replace Part 2: Okay, so we have this image in here. It's a PNG with a transparent background, so we need to add a color behind it. Press snr keyboard will scale down to roughly the size that we're going Teoh place it. Okay, well, actually, zoom in a little bit here, something like that. Then what we'll do is we'll create a new layer solid make it the same Is this So let's go like that click. OK, and then we're going to do is usar mask tool. Let's draw rough areas for now we have that will bring this on top and you can see that the rotation is a little off. So what we'll do is will bring up our rotation. We hit our on the keyboard. To do that, they will just rotate the image on this. We will feather the edges of its will hit MMR keyboard will friendly there just by, let's say four. Okay, so that blends into the original image a little better with that, we have that set up like that, which is looking good. So we'll click on both of those. We will right click go to pre compose. We will call this picture logo. Goto. Okay, now we still have our tracking data copied. So what we'll do is once again go to new No. We'll call this tracking data. We will paste our data command d press you just to confirm that. Okay, the rotation scale position, that's all great. And then we have our picture. And once again, we will parent it to our tracking data, making sure that we are at the beginning, and then they should follow perfectly. All right. And that looks great. Okay, so now what we can do is just composite it a little better. So if we zoom in here, it's a very high quality, sharp image. And compared to all the other stuff in the footage, it's far too sharp. So in the picture logo, we can start adding some effects to try to get to blend in a little more and composite better. Okay, so we'll type in. Blur will use fast blur, repeat edge pixels, and we will just lend it. We'll try 0.3 and then if we go back out, okay, it doesn't really make a difference here, But if this footage was being played on a big TV you would notice the difference between the original and the slightly blurred. So maybe we will go out up to four. Okay, The next thing is a bit of color correction, so we can try curves. All right, so I just always make a few different points here. You control the darker parts, that brighter parts in the mids without affecting the rest. Okay, so let's go here. Just a little more. OK? So a little darker, I think looks good. That's fine. Okay. And then now we also need to add some grain to this, because again, if playing on a large TV, there will be grain naturally in the footage. All footage has grain. Um, it's very minimal, but it is there, and this will have no grain as is so what we'll do is type in grain. We will add grain to this logo, Kate, viewing mode, final output. And I believe that one should be okay. How we contest this is if we zoom in all the way and then go to the Eid grand turn off and on, you can kind of see what it does to exaggerate that a lot 15. So it's really adding a whole bunch of great, That's a little too much. So at 2% it's still too much. So one is okay. You can also go like 10.5. So the idea here is you want to make sure that the grain here matches this way, and the best way to do that is to just watch your footage. Okay, so I would say it's a little too much. Well, this back it off a bit. I think 0.5 was good. Okay, so it's gonna fit, and that's really it. To mess around with this a little more. We could go into picture. You know, we could always go to sold settings, changes to pure white and right away, get a brand new look to this. And of course, we would need to mess around with the curves or go back and change the color so it's not pure white to make it blend in a little better with the room. We can just drag this down a bit and you can see kind of what that does, so it just helps it blend in with the other whites that are present in the room. So without it looks like that which it pops. It looks like a digital screen, which is not realistic. So with the curves just helps it blend in a little more. And once again, it's all about the technique we're using here. It's not about specifically always changing a picture frame. You could be replacing a television screen. Someone's iPad, this one over here. I mean, you could remove the light switch or remove some things on the coffee table. You could really do what? Everyone who could remove some of the items here. You get add items here. Okay? So keep in mind that technique and apply to any other projects you have in the future. Okay, so I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Remove Object From Scene Part 1: in this lesson. We will ain't out an object in footage we have. So let's get started. Let's go to finder. Let's go to three seals laying. This is our footage. So we have three seals laying on some rocks beside the ocean clips about five seconds longer. So all right, let's bring this into aftereffects. Will place it into a folder called footage. I will save this project into projects seals laying. We'll click on this so we can see what we're doing here. New composition. H D. Five seconds. 10 frames. Okay, bring her composition outside. Footage down to here. Okay? And we have the same thing before, so we'll just go to their press. N Trump, come to work. Area Senator Mocha A All right name, location, frame rate. 23 pixel aspect ratio HD. That's good. That's good. Okay. Okay. So we have mocha open. What we can do now is go through a footage and try to find a good spot to track. So obviously, this is just a huge, like rock mountain. So pretty much anywhere will be good. The track we just want to avoid anything that moves, such as the water or the seals themselves. I think what we'll do is we'll remove this seal from the scene. So it's just these two. So in order to do that, I would suggest trying to track the area closest to that object or subject. So in this case, we can probably track all around there. So let's bring this back to the beginning. It's get are exploiting tool. And let's just start making a whole bunch of track marks all around, and then we're gonna use this rock area to track our footage. Okay, So once again, if we go like this and just check out the footage, there's no real perspective change at all. So we're just gonna leave perspective off. This is set to 30. So we're actually gonna leave this to 90. There's quite a bit emotion as well. The camera does go down near the end, so it's set this to the beginning and track forward so you can see here that the seal moves . If we were trying to attach something to the seal, then we could actually just track around his face, and then this tracker information would actually be following the face of the seal in this case, we want something that doesn't move, so we have chosen to do the rock. The reason we chose this spot is because it's surrounding or as close to this object that we want removed from the scene. OK, where you are almost done and you'll see here that the information is the tracking did is going off the screen. That's perfectly fine, because it has all of this information. These points will be perfect. Okay, now we're done. Let's just check out our information here and that. Tracking data looks good. Okay, lets go. The beginning. Export tracking data go to transform copied clipboard. Let's go back to aftereffects. 13. Remove Object From Scene Part 2: create a new no object. Call it tracking data. Click it. We will pace that information onto it will press you just to confirm that. Here it is. So we can press you again to hide it. Okay, we will turn off the eyeball, which means we won't see the red marks on the screen. So it'll be easier to do the work. The next thing we're going to do is figure out what part of the scene we can use to paste over the object we want to remove. I think if we follow the rock edge, we can probably just use that information and kind of re create a rock here. So let's go ahead and do that. All right, let's duplicate our bottom layer on this layer. We will then zoom in a little bit. So we want something with kind of, ah, rough edge. I'm gonna go with with this right here, so we'll see what that does for us. So let's go to our Pento. We're just gonna draw perfectly around until it covers the entire edge of this rock piece. We basically we don't want to do things like this because there's no edge there. So it'll be harder to blend in and make it look good. So it's command said, Just keep going. So what is full on the edge? All right, let's just keep going here, all right? So if we sold that, that's what we got to work with. Press. Mm. Owner keyboard. Well, feather this by, Let's say four. Okay. Just to give it a softer edge, Then what we're gonna do is right. Click freeze frame. And then we will attach this to our tracking data, making sure that our cursors at the beginning otherwise it does that. Okay, so compare that to our tracking data, and then you will see that it follows it perfectly, but nothing has changed. All that's happening right now is we have our frozen frame from the beginning, Just tracking along perfectly with our footage. Okay, so now what we can do is move this anywhere we want. We could literally put it right there, and it will just follow the footage perfectly. So at that point, you can kind of get the idea of what we're doing here. So we're gonna essentially just place that there, Okay? And already, if you just kind of glance at this footage. If you didn't know that SEAL was originally there, you know this would do a pretty good job. But there are some spots that we can clean up a bit, such as the blending here or the blending here. So that's where we can kind of zoom in on the spot and work with our mask tool. You know, we could even delete all those and follow this edge here, all right? And we're just trying to make it blend in as best as we can. Okay, so that's looking a little better now, the rocks here, worm or shiny and a little brighter. So what we can do is go to this layer. We can actually rename this by pressing Enter. We call this rock composite. Okay, so you can see what it's doing. Its hiding that so we can go to curves again. Rock composite. Okay, so we have curves open. And for this we want a dark in the overall image. So what is? Grab the whole thing just like that. And then let's go back to our and then what we'll do is we'll go to our mask. Feather will turn off the this part here so that we can see what we're doing. And then we will increase the feather until we get something that we like. All right, it's gonna fit. If you were to just look at this and you had no clear once again that there was ever a seal here. Now that we have a better composite, there is no way anyone would ever know. And that's kind of the idea of a visual effects artists is you are manipulating the footage in some way to either enhance the footage by making the color better by adding something to it or you are removing something so that no one ever knew it was originally there. So if we scroll through this, you'll see that no one will ever tell it out. Third, see was there that we can turn it off and on to kind of see what that does. And you can see how we removed this part of the original mascot to kind of follow this line because it just made sense that the composite kind of ended there and the same thing. This with this part, we, uh, and the same thing with this part, we could try to make it match this edge, so it blends in a bit, you know, and again, it's all about the technique or how you apply this kind of stuff, this way of thinking. For example, if you ah shoot stock footage and sell stock footage, you could upload the original one with three and then composite of one of them, and this could be an entirely new clip that you upload. You know, you could you could, um, pre compose all of this stuff. Then you could zoom in just a bit, and this could be a completely new clip that you could upload, and therefore you have more clips online for the chance of being sold. So again, this type of technique is fantastic and could be applied to many different things. This is just one quick example of using other parts of the frame to hide something. And when it comes to being a visual effects artist, it's really just about getting the job done in any way you possibly can. So a lot of the times people will, you know, even myself. I'll open up photo shop and creates something entirely from scratch imported into the scene and kind of blended in just to kind of hide something. If I can't utilize the rest of the scene itself, or sometimes I'll go up here, go save frame as photo shop players. And then I'll use just this still image in photo shop, and I'll cut out parts and paint some new things, and from there I can import it back in and then track the original footage and then use that new image file anywhere I'd like in the image and then just attach it to the tracking data. So it's really powerful stuff, and I really encourage you to think about the technique itself versus just what we did today about. You know, we're moving a seal. It's so much more that all right, so that brings us to the end of this video course. I hope you guys learned a lot. Remember that these air riel world examples things that will come up a lot as a visual effects artist, painting things out, adding things, compositing things, changing the colors, removing acne blemishes from an actor. This stuff happens a lot, and it's important to understand the technique. OKay, guys, please give us ah! Rating and a review and from everyone here at NBC Masters. Thanks for checking out this course and we'll see you next time. 14. Bonus1 How To Track & Composite To Remove A Blink After Effects Tutorial: all right, I have after effects cc open. I have a 1920 by 8 16 clip brought into the project and then brought down into a composition that is also 1920 by 8 16 This is a wider clip, so that's what we're gonna be working with today. As you can see on the very first frame, Ali has her eyes closed here, and this is actually the first clip in our YouTube channel trailer. So it's not exactly the most flattering clip toe have as the very first thing that pops up when people play the video. So there are a few options here. Of course, we could leave it the way it is to we could re film or three. We could use a program like aftereffects to grab a frame later on and then paste it over this section by tracking and compositing. So that's exactly what we're gonna be doing today. So let's get started. First, let's set our composition to full resolution, and then click are layer head up to animation than track in Boris Effects Mocha. This is a program that comes with after effects, and it's really great for motion tracking Let's go into our effective controls panel and then click on the Mocha logo. This will launch Mocha and what's it's open. It will bring the footage into Mocha and set it up for you. This program has a lot of advanced options, and it looks very intimidating. But for today's video, we're just gonna be sticking to the basics and only using a few of the options. So the first thing to do in this technique is to find the frame that we want to use as a reference point. So let's drag the cursor and find a spot just as her eyes have opened up the most. So that looks to be about frame nine. Then on your keyboard, we're gonna hit the Z key and zoom in a bit, and then we hold the X key to bring it down a bit. Next will go up to the X blind tool, which is right here, and we will start drawing dots around alleys, eyes, and then we'll hit right click to close it off. So let's drag a few these to try to make it look the same as the left side doesn't have to be perfect But as long as we're selecting a good area that essentially will not be moving much around her eyes, we don't want to add any tracking points through her eyes because arise will be blinking. And that will interrupt the tracking data. Now for this type of tracking, it's only nine frames, so there's nothing too complicated about it. There's no perspective or scaling change that happens throughout this clip for the 1st 9 frames, so we don't really need to do any advance tracking work for this one. It's pretty straightforward down here. We'll leave it at 90%. Then we will turn off the scale rotation in sheer because it's on Lee the translation that we need, meaning there's no perspective change and because there's only a little bit of movement will change it from large motion to small motion. And then we can ignore the entire rest of the footage because we're only dealing with the nine frames here. So because we're on the ninth frame, we're gonna track the data backwards, so attracts the nine frames right at the beginning of the footage. So it's go over here to the track area and will hit this button here to track backwards. Okay, so that's all we need to do inside Mocha. Let's hit file save and then go back into aftereffects. This will bring us back into after effects. And then down in our composition, we will click are layer and then go to edit, duplicate well hit, enter on the top layer and rename it highs. This is good for organization. And then with the top layer selected, we're going to zoom all the way in. And then we're gonna use the pen tool and draw two masks around alleys, eyes. So right now, it doesn't look like anything's happening. And that's because both layers air on. But if we turn off the bottom layer, you can see what we have done within the eyes. Later, we're gonna open it up and we're gonna go to masks, will open both of those and on both of these were gonna feather the edges so that they come off a little more smoothly and blend into our bottom layer. So with the mask feather, let's change that to about 25 and we'll do the same for the bottom one now that we see how it's working we will turn the bottom layer back on. Then on our eyes layer, we will go to the ninth frame and drink. The top layer just passed it so it ends in the 10th frame. So, in other words, the layer that we're gonna be compositing with only goes from one frame to nine. Now that we've trimmed the clip, let's make sure on the very last frame of the top layer, we can confirm where in the last frame, by closing the bottom layer and then going to the last frame, we see something on this layer. We now want a freeze frame everything so that the entire top frame is just frozen with the eyes open. In order to do that, we right click, go to time and freeze frame. Then, as you can see as we scroll through, it is just the exact same frame, frozen throat, all of the nine frames. Now we can start the process of applying the tracking data. Let's go up to layer new and then no object. This will be the layer we apply the tracking data to, so it's click on the eyes layer that will bring up the mocha plug in within the effect controls than under the tracking data. We will, under export options, choose transform and then layer export to we will choose the null object. Next, we'll go and click on create track data and then on the layer. Here we will select the gear icon and then go to okay and the last thing we want to do, which is very important, is make sure that we're on the very first frame. And now when we hit apply export. It's gonna apply the data to the first frame on the null object. So it's hit, apply and then within the no layer, you can see that some key frames have been added. That's all are tracking data, and if we scrub through, you can see that the effects still hasn't been completed yet. So the last thing we need to do is lengthy eyes layer to are no layer, which is our tracking data layer. So in order to do this, we want to go back to our reference frame, which is the ninth frame and then under the parent and links section on the eyes layer, we want to select the no layer so Now we've completed the effect. Let's turn off the no layer and click on nothing so that we don't see anything and then scrub through the effect. So just like Magic Ali is no longer blinking at the beginning of the clip. And this is a great first frame, so let's go back to fit. So as you can see, this is exactly what we want. The very first frame has both of her eyes open, and this looks a little more flattering than what we had originally. So yes, this is a very subtle effect, and most of the time people will have any idea that you even did it. In fact, if I never revealed in this video that I did cover up a blink in our channel trailer right at the beginning, you probably would have never known or guessed that I did that. And most visual effects air tracking, compositing, jobs in after effects will be like this. You do a lot of work. It takes so much time to do it, and at the end of the day no one notices. But that means that you've done an excellent job because that is the point of visual effects. It's supposed to be a seamless composite 15. For Course How To Freeze Frame Effect In After Effects CC: In this one I'm going to teach you how to do the freeze-frame effect inside After Effects, SCC, as you can see, there's a frozen frame is me that's cut out and tracked into the scene. And it's surprisingly, not that difficult to do. All right, let's jump into After Effects. I'm going to grab the footage I'm working with and drag it into a new comp. And I should note that this type of footage will work best with action style footage, such as what we're working with here, skateboarding. So keep that in mind. If you don't have that type of action in your footage, it probably won't work out too well. So once your composition is setup and you've watched through your footage a few times to get an idea of where you want the effect to happen. Stop on the spot where you want the effect to show up. From there, select your layer and then duplicate it. You can press Command D on Mac or Control D on the PC and then zoom in a bit. You can do that by keeping them most in the composition window and scrolling forward with the most scroll wheel. Now to do this effect, you need to cut out the person. So the top layer is going to be our mask and the bottom layer will be our original background. To do that, let's use the pen tool and we'll zoom in a bit more. And the idea is to create a mask around the subject so that part can be tracked here footage and then end up being frozen. Masking like this can take quite a while, so I will spare you the time and fast-forward. And then we'll complete our mask by clicking the original one. And now I've isolated myself, but I don't have the skateboard isolated yet, so let's duplicate another layer. And then by holding spacebar and clicking and dragging with the mouse in the composition window, you can move to a different area without moving the frame. Like I mentioned, we haven't mastered the skateboard yet, so let's do that to our second duplicated layer. First, I'll get rid of that other mask. We create it and make sure we're back on the pen tool. And then we'll do the same process and I'll speed it up again. We'll change it to the fit view. And then if we turn off the bottom layer, you can see that we've completely isolated the top two layers. Let's go ahead and rename them for better organization. And then we'll go back to our main Selection Tool, will then turn our bottom layer on, and then we'll turn the top two layers off. With the top two layers turned off, we can now track the bottom layer and have tracking data that we can attach the top layers to later on. Now before we do that, let's set a marker at inner composition so that we've marked where our freeze-frame will be. So we'll press shift and then one. And now we've created a marker there. And let's also at that point in time, select the person layer, right-click and go to time freeze-frame. And then we'll do the same to the top layer. I'll turn the top two layers back on so you can see what the freeze-frame effect is doing right now before we track. So in order to keep that rate where we want it right at the start of the ledge, we need to do some motion tracking. I'll turn the top two layers back off and we'll select our background layer. And we'll go up to animation and then track motion. Let's zoom in a bit. And this is our track point. This is what we are going to be using to motion track our footage. If you move your mouse cursor to the middle of it, you can click and drag it around and move it to a different position. And then once again, let's readjust our frame by holding space. The idea is to place the track point in an area that will stay in frame as much as possible, but also on a spot that won't have anything that interferes with it. These small EY logos are great spot because it's on a flat surface facing the camera and they are in frame for the majority of the shot. Besides that, they have a clear difference in color or contrast than what's around it. So let's zoom in so we can see what we're doing. And then with the outside box, grab one of the corners and expanded. So it goes around the EUI logo. The outer parts of the box that we just expanded is the search area. And then will place a smaller box on an area that we think is a good spot to track and will increase the smaller box size so that it's just larger than the red area we are selecting. So this spot would work fine or at the top here as well. Now it's bringing a tracker up. And then we'll create a new null object. This will be what we attach the tracking data to, will bring it to the top and name it tracking data. And then inside the tracker window will select Edit target and change it to the tracking data layer that we just created. Since the footage just has some position movement as it pans from left to right, which means it doesn't have any rotation or scale. We'll just leave the position checked. And then the right button here will analyze one frame to the right. So I'd always recommend doing that for new tracks to make sure you're tracking properly. We'll do it one more time. And it looks like it's going to be a good tracks. So it's hit the playwright button to analyze forward. And then I'll press that button again to stop it just so we can readjust our frame. And then I'll press it again. Ok, then we'll go back to our marker position in the composition, and then we'll analyze backwards. And then I'll scan through the footage to see if I like the tracking data. And it looks pretty good, so I think I'll keep that. Let's go ahead and turn back on or two masks and make sure that our playHead is on our marker. And we'll go back into the layer where our tracking data is. And then we will apply it, press OK. And that will have the data to the tracking data null object that we created. We'll go back into our composition and it'll parent both layers to our tracking data. And then the effect is almost done. But you can see once I do the kick flip and land on top of the ledge to freeze frame is still there, which is not what I want. So will simply just trim both the mask layers. All right, that's looking good. At the beginning, you'll see that the track didn't do a good job. And that's because the UI logo was out of screens, so there was nothing to track at that point. So let's go ahead and manually fix that. We'll click on our tracking data and then press you on our keyboard to open up all the key frames. And then we'll delete these three so that we keep the last frame that has a good track. And the very first key frame in our composition will move the play head to that first keyframe and then adjust our null tracking data layer to our best guess at where the logo was. So I think that looks good and let's give it a play. Alright, so that's how you do the freeze-frame effect inside After Effects, CC.