Transcripts
1. Introduction: hi and welcome to this absolute beginner course for how to use Adobe after effects to create exciting motion graphics and visual effects. My name is Toby is in a run surface studio for about the last 10 years or so have been heavily involved in filmmaking, especially in the areas of visual effects and three D. Now, over the years, I've put out hundreds of two trials, many on my YouTube channel and my website, but a fine that they can be pretty unstructured. And it's hard to find your way through, especially if you're just getting started. So I decided to create a properly structured, well formatted absolute beginner cause for adobe after effects. It will take you from an absolute beginner level, so I'm not going to assume that you have used the program before through two intermediate. So by the end of this course, you will be familiar with all of the fundamentals for using adobe after effects, and you will be able to create your own motion graphics and add visual effects to your own videos. You should also be in a position where you can then pick up all sorts off more immediate material that you might find online into child's or other training courses will be able to follow along without a problem. In this course, we are going to take it nice and easy with first. Want to start out by looking at the absolute basics, like the interface of Adobe after effects? What is the composition? How do at media into my project and how to our export my project into an actual video file ? Then we're going to go straight off the D bands. Nike. It's not that deep, but we are going to start to looking at some of the more advanced fundamentals, which include animation, key framing, shape players, adjustment layers, track mats, parenting and how to work with text. Finally, will wrap this begin across up with creating our own morph effect, where we are going to morph one person into another with lights glowing part girls. There's compositing and all into a nice final visual effect. All the fact that you need to follow along with any of the lessons in this course are going to be provided as part of the course materials. But you can always use your own material, your own video on images. You probably just have a whole of more fun doing it. But don't worry. Everything you need will be provided for you to download just a final word of warning. This course has a few £4 not just because I believe that education should be entertaining as well. But we do have any comments, questions you get stuck on. Anything just hit me up here on social media anywhere else. I'm always happy to help out after effects is a very powerful program, and it is also a lot of fun to use, and I hope you will enjoy this course. But now I feel like I've offered on for long enough. Let's jump right into it.
2. What is Adobe After Effects : before we get into the deep end, let's talk about what it will be after effects is and what it is not. Adobe Aftereffects is a video compositing program that is distinctly different from a video editing program. During editing you made focus will be to go through all of your footage, pick all of the pieces that you want and create a sequence off consecutive clips to build up your scene or your final film project during compositing. Rather than creating a sequence of consecutive clips, your focus will be on layering different pieces of footage and images and other visual elements on top of each other and then merging them all together into a single composited shot. For example, you may start out with a piece of footage off you jumping away from an imaginary explosion . On top of that, you may layer is stock footage. Explosion. On top of that may be a footage off some debris, maybe some smoke, maybe some glow, maybe some color grading. And then you merge all of those together into a final explosion effect. The purpose of compositing is distinctly different from editing is to take many layers of visual elements place them on top of each other and then merge them together into a unified shot. And that is exactly where they'll be after. Effects excels after effects. Also has very powerful animation capabilities so that you trades really cool looking motion graphics using images, text or shape layers to create funky looking title animations or infographics for your business. Yes, you can do video editing in Adobe after effects, but it's not really the ideal tool for the job, especially if you work on larger projects. You much better off using a dedicated video editing tools such as Premier Pro Final cut hit film or any off the mirror of other tools that are out. There also will be after factors probably not the best choice if you want him to work with audio. Yes, after Fed supports audio and especially if you wanted to create animations that are sync up with the beat off a music track that is pretty easy to do. But if you're looking to create multi track mixes or maybe work with heavy audio effects, you're much better off using a dedicated music program or maybe even a d a W. A digital audio workstation. However, if you are looking to add cool visual effects to your footage such as explosions, ferry transformations, morphing effects, destructions or maybe you want to create cool motion graphic animated titles or infographics for your business, then after effects is just the right tool for the job. Over the length of this course, I will show you how to use Adobe aftereffects to create cool looking effects and motion graphics, and hopefully, by the end of it, you love it as much as I do.
3. What You Will Learn in This Course: Let's quickly go over what will cover in this course so you know what you've actually gotten yourself into. We will cover all of the fundamentals for Toby after facts, and I will try to lead you along a path that it's actually pretty easy to walk. First off will recover the interface off adobe after facts so you know where everything is and what you can actually do. Then we're going toe imports and footage. Create a composition, which is a container in adobe after effects that contains you actual effect. And then we're going to learn how to export that composition into a video, far that you can share with your friends, your family or the rest of the world via the Internet. Next, we're going to get into the meaty parts we're going to cover how to work with layers, how to create animations and work with key frames. And for long on from that, we are going to cover all of the basic tools that you have available in adobe after effects to create a visual effects. This will include masking adjustment layers, track mats, parenting, no objects, how to use compositions and pre composing your Lius how to work with text and much, much more. Finally, we're going to put all of that knowledge to use to create a really cool looking morph effect. By the end of this cause, I hope that you have enough often understanding off adobe after effects as well as enough confidence to start creating your own visual effects and motion graphics. Also, I really hope that he'll be in a position where you can then pick up any on land to try that you may find and be able to follow along. But now, finally, it's time to dump into adobe after effects.
4. The After Effects Interface: everyone loves interfaces. Right button is drop downs, menu bars, sexy stuff. Well, it may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but in order to get started creating cool stuff in adobe after effects, we first need to know how the interface is laid out and where we can find all of the tools that we need. So let's fire up adobe after effects and start exploring the interface that will be staring at. Father remained off this course when you first launch adobe after effects. You may or may not be greeted by a start up screen, depending on which version of after sex you are running. If he do end up getting a start up screen, simply click that new project button. You should end up on an interface. They look pretty similar to what I've got here, but the aftereffects does have quite a number of different panels, but don't worry. They're all actually pretty straightforward. But let's start at the top at the very top you will find in the very familiar main menu bar , and this is where you go If you want to open or savior projects perform, edit, operation, work with compositions, which are, as I mentioned, the containers. For your actual effects, you can work with layers, which are the visual elements that you place inside a composition. Again. We'll get to that later. And the reason everything is disabled in here as well. Assignar composition taps because we haven't created one just yet. Further to the right, you will find all off your effects. And again, everything's great out because we're not in a composition yet. Then this the animation temp for dealing with animations, key frames and tracking, and all sorts of more advanced features. View allows you to enable guides and grits and snap thing. Zoom in and out, and then you have the window option where you can actually enable or disable different taps that you see a new interface. Everything that's ticked right now is sports visible on the interface, and if you have a missing a tap during the to try and you can't find what people are referring to makes you come up into your window and make sure that that particular tap is enabled. Otherwise he will not be able to see it. But other than that, there's nothing special about this main menu now, just under the main menu, you will find all of the tools that you have available for working with the visual elements in your composition. Right now, everything's great out because we haven't created a composition yet. We haven't even imported any footage. However, just for the purpose of being able to go through the interface, let's quickly trade a composition. And for that over on the left hand side, he will find the project panel. The project panel contains all of the media files that were imported in your project. It will also include some information around your currently selected foul, which we'll get to in the next part. For now, you want to go into your project panel. And again, if you can't see this, make sure you go to window and enable your project panel. So in the project panel, which should be on the left hand side, go to the very bottom and you find a few. I can see that there's like a little picture frame I can, and this says to create a new composition. Simply click on that. This is going to pop open the new composition, dialogue and again. We're going to go through this in much more detail in the following lesson for now. Simply it. Okay. And because we've now created a composition in our project, all of the tools just below the main menu bar are now enabled. Now, what tools you have available may differ slightly, depending watch version of adobe after effects using. But for this course, all the tools you will need to follow along will be available, even using a pretty old version off adobe after effects like CS three or even before that. So don't worry about that. So that's where you will find all of the tools. Now, at the bottom off the interface, you will find the timeline panel in here. It says comp one right now because we've created a new composition called Comp One. And down here, we actually in that composition over on the left hand side. He will see all off the layers. Right now we have no layers. We haven't added any footage, any images or any graphics, anything into this container into this composition. So there's nothing in here get and over. On the right hand side, you have a timeline and this little indicator here, you can click and drag that around. So this is century scrubbing through the timeline. Right now, absolutely nothing happens. You just have a black previous screen because again we haven't imported anything. We haven't created any effects just yet that obviously it brings me to the preview window, which is usually be sitting right in the middle. Off the interface. You can zoom in and out of this view by scrolling on the mouse wheel up or down. You also have a whole bunch of controls just below the preview window over the left inside , for example, you can zoom in and out so I could say fit up 200% which will fit the previous screen into my interface. And then there's a whole bunch of other controls which you don't really need to worry about . Too much, for now will probably be touching on some of these throughout this course much more important on the right. Inside, you should find the effects and presets panel, and this is where you will find all of the effects that are available to you in Adobe after effects. My list again. It's a little bit longer because I have a few plug ins installed that you may not have. But in here, you can find and apply all of the effects that are available for you to build a visual effects or motion graphics. You may notice that this panel actually contains multiple taps. So there's libraries in here, which are my creative cloud libraries over on the right. Inside, under this little arrow, you might find some additional taps. But unfortunately, minor off the recording area. Now the last important panel just above here effects and presets or your libraries and all the other little things is the preview panel. In here. You can play back your composition and cool thing if you come down to the bottom off the panel and hover your mouse right over the separator between the preview window and the effects and presets. If you pull this down, this may reveal a whole bunch of additional options for controlling how preview and playback works, and it will be after effects. Now, some of these options may be different for you, because I know a lot of thes were introduced in Adobe after Effects cc going forward, but there should be a few additional options here that you can check out if you so wish. But let me distract that back up. And finally, if you accidentally close any off these panels, for example, I could right click onto effects and presets. I could close this panel. Maybe I accidentally also close my composition panel down here at the bottom and kind of stuck, and I want to reset this to where it started. For that, you could simply come up into your main menu under window, go into workspace. Select reset standard to safety layout. And this will reset the interface to Dobie after facts to where you started. So hopefully this gave you a quick overview off the interface off Adobe after effects. Now let's get to something a little bit more exciting in the next lesson.
5. Importing Footage: most of the time. When you creating visual effects, you will likely want to at those effects to existing pieces off footage that could be footage off a gun battle off a magical fairy transformation or off your Uncle Bob popping open a can of beans with lasers shooting from his lazy eye. You may want to use stuck for two elements for explosions or sparkles, or work with images and all your friends that you got off the Internet. Importing your footage is usually the very first step to creating your visual effects. Therefore, let's jump into adobe after effects and talk about how to import all of your media files into your project. Here we are back in adobe after facts exactly where we left off in the last lesson. And before we get into anything, the first thing I'm going to do is want to come into my project panel and delete this comp , one that we've created. As I said, we will talk about how to create compositions properly and all of that settings in the next lesson. For now, let's focus on how we can get all of our media into our project the most obvious way to import your footage is to come up into the main minibar and under file you will find import , and in here you'll find a whole bunch of different options for important different types off files. For now, let's simples like two important file, and you can also use the keyboard shortcut control. And I highly recommend that you do get familiar with all of the shortcuts in Adobe after effects because they will make your workflow a whole lot faster. Also note that I'm on a Windows machine. If you're on a Mac, do know that control refers to the command key and whenever I say old or a lt on the Windows key. That is the same as the option key on a Mac. But now that's click on Import a file, and this will bring up the import file dialog. It's part of the course materials. You will find a zip file that contains a whole bunch of different folders. You'll find audiophile, some effects images and miscellaneous files, as well as some video. For now, let's simply jumping to fall there for the video, and you can import whatever you like. You can also just import your own footage to follow along, but I'm going to import water dance. Dot a movie. Simply select this funding needs a double. Click it or down in the bottom that's simply select import, and it will be after effects for import that file directly into your project. If any project panel you select the file at the very top, you'll get a bit of information about this clip. So the information tells me that this is called water Danced or a movie, which is exactly what I imported. The resolution is 1920 by 10 80 pixels, and the brackets. You actually see the pixel aspect ratio. Now the pixel aspect ratio means that pixels are always square in. Your foot is sometimes a little bit elongated, but a pixel aspect ratio of one means it's a square pixels, so the width is exactly one times the height off this pixel. Then, under that, you'll see the duration off clip. It's 19 seconds and 20 frames long, and the frame rate off this clip is 25 frames per seconds, that 1,000,000 of colors. It's encoded with the age to six for Kodak and this audio track and you could see a liberal Audie way form down here as well. That or new track is at 48,000 kilo heads and 32 bits, but you'll just get a little of information up here in the panel once it's important. Your file. And once you've obviously selected it, another way to import files into your project is simply to double click into some empty space in your project panel solicitors. DoubleClick. Right down here again. This is going to pop open the import file dialog, and this time I'm going to navigate out off my video folder and maybe I'll bring in some audio files in here. I've got a variety of different sound files of some way files and some music MP three files , and let's just select the chimes dot wave. Hold on. Control on the keyboard is like multiples, and maybe we'll also select this horror loop dot mp three. And Adobe Aftereffects does support quite a large variety of different media files. And if you want to know all of the file types you can import down in the bottom, you'll find a little pop up for acceptable file types. And there's huge list of file extensions and yearning also pop this open and kind of scroll through. So these are all of the fire taps that are supported by Adobe after effects. But let's just leave that on the default and simply hit import and our audio files have been imported into our project. Now, one thing I highly recommend you get used to is keeping your project neatly organized. And if you dump a whole bunch of media files in here, this will just become a really long unmanageable list. So one thing you can do at the bottom off the project panel you find this little folder I can and that will allow you to create an actual folder in your project. So let's just click that to create a new folder. Let's call this one, audio it in tow, and let's select the chimes wave and the horror loop files and drag and drop them onto the audio folder. So now they're just nested in there. Maybe I'll make a second fall as well for video, and this one actually got created inside my audio folder now so I can speak. Grab this and drag it out so it's at the root level, and let's drag and drop the water dance, not a movie into the video folder. So I personally like to keep everything. As you need a highly recommend that you do the same. It will make your life a whole lot easier. Another way that you can import files into Adobe after facts is to Cindy pull up on Explorer or a final we know. Depending on where the young Mac or Windows, they can simply drag and drop files into the interface. So let's maybe jump into the Images folder in your course materials. Let's select Mass Venus and maybe of the moon. Simply drag and drop these images directly into your project panel in Adobe after effects let go and after liberal thinking those files will be important into your project again, let's create a new folder, court images and select Mass moon and Venus PNG and drag and drop them into the images. Fuller. If you want to get rid of media farts that you've imported, you can simply select them and pressed the delete button to remove them from your project. Do know that once you start using your media files however, that may impact compositions or effects. That you've set up, however, will be after factual, actually quite smart. And it will indicate how often a certain media file has been used throughout the entire products. We can see whether it's been used before you delete it. I'm actually kind of missing the mass now, so let's just bring that back. Let's pop open the Explorer. We know again that's simply drag the mass PNG back into our project panel known. Drop this right onto this Images folder to important directly at this location. Now the last thing to note is that obviously it will be after fix does support a large number of different five times. However, not everything is always going to go perfectly smooth. Let's go back up to the course materials and let's jump into the miscellaneous folder in here, for example, I have an unsupportive dot F o. P file, which is just something I've made up. This is obviously not supported by will be after effects. If you try to drag and drop this into adobe after effects, it won't actually let you. It's essential you can't import this file because this is not supported by Adobe after effects. Another problem you may come up against is let's select the corrupted dot a movie far and drag and drop that into the after effects interface. And after faxes actually go to get you an era, it says, file corrupted or a movie cannot be opened and maybe an un supported format. Now I know that a movie is actually a supported format by after facts. But this file, while as obviously suggested by the filing, may actually be corrupted. It may be a bad download, so do make sure that you can play back the file on your computer outside of Adobe after effects. Also, if you're working with a movie fans, which is a quick time format, it's actually quite a common format. When you're recording with different cameras or your mobile phone, you will need the quick time Kodak installed. The court is essentially the language in which that video is encoded in. If your computer doesn't understand that language, it doesn't have to coded installed. It can't actually play back and processes five. So if you're trying to import in a movie file into after effects and you getting this era do go online, search for quick time and install the Kodak, not the player. The player actually has a security vulnerability. So you just want installed the Kodak, and then you should be able to play back a movie files on your computer and import them into after facts. But just something to be a way off, just in case you're coming up against these Eris. Now that we've imported a whole bunch of media into our project in adobe after effects, let's circle back to creating compositions so we can actually start building up visual effects and motion graphics.
6. Creating Compositions: Okay, Awesome. We've imported all of our media into our project. So now what? In order to create a visual effect or motion graphics in adobe after effects, you first need to create a composition. Think of a composition as a container for your effect. Every composition comes with its own resolution and frame rate and lots of other settings and into the composition. You content at any number off visual elements or audio files and place it into the composition as independent layers. You can then freely rearrange those layers, overlay them, apply effects to them and animate them. And once you happy, you can export that composition into a video file. Needless to say, the humble composition is the fundamental building block in adobe after effects. But now I feel I've waffled on for long enough. So let's dump into adobe after facts and start creating some. Now that we've got all our media in adobe after effects, let's start creating some compositions to put them together into some visual effects. In order to do that, he once again have multiple options. You come into the main menu bar on the composition, you'll find a new composition option or used to keyboard shortcut control plus M or in the project panel at the bottom, as we've already done very quickly. When we talked about the interface, that's a little I can here to create a new composition. So that's simply press that. And either way you're going to see the new composition dialogue. In this dialogue, you're going to configure all of the settings for your composition. First off at the very top. Let's give this composition a name, and I'm going to call this one space dance. And then you can either use one off the many provided presets or to set this up manually and make sure you set your with 2 1920 your height to 10 80 which is full 10 80 p. And the reason I'm setting it to this resolution is because the source footage I'm going to use in this composition, which is called Water Dan Start a movie, is at 1920 by 10 eighties. I'm making sure my composition matches my source footage. Pixel aspect ratio. I'm going to leave on square pixels and the frame rate. Yes, again, I know that water danced on a movie is 25 frames per second. So let's set this to 25 frames per second resolution down here at the bottom. This doesn't actually mean much. This is his previous resolutions. We can leave this on whatever easy for me. It's a set on half starting time called Defiance, the starting time for your composition so your composition may start at 10 seconds or 20 seconds. This is usually used for when you're adding visual effects to an existing film project needs to slot in at a certain time. Markka was going to leave all of this at zero signals to select everything zero to blank it all out and said that zero and moderation able to set to 10 seconds. So make sure you have 10. Coghlan's a reserve, so that's 10 seconds and zero frames at 25 frames per second. And then you can set your background color. I'm just going to leave this on black. There's nothing fancy you need to do in here. Also do know that you do have taps to set up some advanced settings like shutter anger, shutter speed and samples as well some three D renders settings, but we're not going to dive into these ones in this course because they're just again that obviously advanced, which is why the called Advanced. So let's return to the basic settings. Make sure everything is set up the way we wanted to. And then let's simply hit. Okay, here is our new composition, and we now have a timeline that we can scrap through. But in a pretty we know, all we going to see is that black background that we've set up for this composition. So there's nothing at all in here just yet. In order to add any off the elements from your project into the composition, all you have to do is simply select them. So let's select the water danced or a movie file from the project panel and drag and drop it down into the layer window on the left side off this composition here. So let's let go, and we're not dropped the Walter Dance and movie as a layer into the space dance composition we canal scrapped through. And this is a video off Walter going bananas. Now. When I created that composition, you may have told us that are set up everything in this composition manually to match my water. Dan, start a movie with this fan selected up in the project panel. Let's have a look at the information for this clip. So enforced 1920 by 10. 80 With this square pixel aspect ratio 25 francs per second. The duration didn't quite match. This clip is actually 19 seconds long. And if I scrapped in my composition, my composition up here, you'll see the timeline. So that 01 2nd two seconds, three seconds, four seconds up to 10 seconds. Never scrapped through the composition doesn't actually go to the end of the Clippers MAWR on this timeline, but I can't see it because my composition is a bit too short. Now if I find that my composition doesn't quite suit my needs, you can always right click down here into your layer window at the bottom left or directly onto the composition in the project panel and go to the composition settings and that will bring up the composition settings again. And down here can now, for example, bring my duration up to Maybe we'll make this 20 seconds here, okay? And my timeline has not changed to be 20 seconds long, but we can still only see 10 seconds because up here, this is the zoom or the scale. So it kind of bring this out to zoom all the way out of my composition. And now I can see I've got 20 seconds off clip here at the end. There's actually nothing because the composition is now a little bit too long for this clip . But that's not too much of deals Who got the whole dance sequence? But you may not want to set up your composition manually all the time. So there's a really quick and easy way to create a new composition to match an element that you have in your project. Let's say I wanted to create a new composition. I wanted to add an effect onto my water danced or a movie. And the easiest way to create a new composition for this clip is simply to take this clip and drag and drop it onto this new composition. I can. So let's let go, And this is immediately going to create a new composition called Walter Dance next to the file that I've dropped onto it, and this composition matches the exact settings for the source file and don't hear the bottom, you know, have to taps. You have the water dance composition, and on the left hand side you have the space dance composition, which is the one we created manually. Now they both contain the same clip, then click between them just by clicking onto this little tap. You can also close these compositions if you have a few too many down here in your timeline panel. So let's close the water dance composition. And if you want to open this composition again, you can simply double click on it in your project panel. So let's double click the water dance composition and again, this is going to pop up and highlighted this panel down here and we're back an hour. Walter Dance composition. If you right click in the layer window and go back into the composition settings, you should see that the settings for this composition match exactly onto our Walter Dance. Start a movie, so it's 1920 by 10 80 square pixels, a 25 frames per second frame rate. Now the stop time coat is a little whack because the file had some embedded information around where it starts. So actually going to reset this zero again? This is just a personal preference, and the duration has been set to exactly 19 seconds and 20 frames. Let's hit, okay, and now this composition is a perfect match for the clip that we've dropped into it. Now you can easily scrapped through a composition to spread dragging this timeline indicate around. However, if you want to play back your composition, let's bring this time and indicate up back to the beginning off the composition and simply press space on your keyboard. This will play back your composition and you compress space again to stop the playback. Now you may have noticed this green bar on top of all off Malia's here in my timeline view , and that is filled up with Green SA playback. My composition this green indicates that all of those frames have been cased into my computer's memory. That means that they can be record and playback really quickly so that I can play this composition back in real time. If this green line is broken and it may, depending on the amount off memory, you half the performance on your computer or based on how many layers you have. New compositional. How many effects you have applied? If this line is broken, s you playing it back? Your computer actually has to render out those frames. So playback, maybe less than real time. Sometimes you may also see blew up here on the top bar on your timeline view. And that means that the frames have been rendered and caged, but they've been cased to your disk. They're not sitting in memory, so they're a little bit slower to access. But it's not going to be a slow as having to render the frames all the way to begin with. So just beware. This just indicates the cased status off these frames and whether you play back is going to be real time or not. And I think this feature actually only has been brought in after effects. Maybe CS four. I'm not 100% sure, but just be aware that your effects can be pretty computational, e expensive and take a little bit to render out. And a few frames aren't cased. Playback may be slower than real time, but now we've talked enough about how to create compositions and drop some off the media into it. Next, let's talk about how to actually export a composition into a video file.
7. Exporting: course. So now we've imported some footage, created the composition and added some visual elements into it. So now what chances are you want to share your digital masterpiece with friends, family, or you want to use it in the own firm project. Therefore, we now need to export that composition into a video file. However, before you press that render button, there are a few crucial questions that you really need toe ask for one. What format do you want that video file to be? Do you care if it's an and before filing a movie file or a Navy? I What video Kodak do you want to use? Which determines the compression off the video? What quality do you want? Do you want really high quality? But then, how big do you want the file to be? If you want a small file, size usually means you're going to get lower quality. But high quality usually also means a PG fun size. Do you need a transparent background for your video? And what about audio? There's a ton of options available when you're exporting your composition and all. We won't go over every single setting in detail here in this beginner cause. Let's dump into adobe after effects and have a look at the basic work floor for exporting your composition and turning it into a video. Here we are, back in Adobe after effects exactly where we left off at the end of the last lesson. And let's do a little bit of housekeeping first. Now I have to compositions here one called Walter Dance and one called Space Stands and essentially contained the same footage, So that's still in one of them. Before we do that, though, let's re select the Walter Dance movie in our project panel, and I want to point the attention to the infra panel. Appear at the top. So now my water dance and we let me direct this panel over says it has been used to times. So this indicates to me that if I was to delete this file, it would get removed from two off my compositions or one composition where it's used twice . So if he now select this file and president lit after effects will actually warn you, saying that you are using this clip in some of your compositions and those have to be removed if you delete this far, so this just helps you avoid accidentally deleting footage that is actually being used by less. Press canceled. I don't like you want to delete the footage. What I do want to delete is the actual water dance composition. So let's selective press delete on the keyboard and again, after fix is going to be nice enoughto ask whether we showed to delete it. Yep, I'm absolutely sure. Let's delete it. And let's export of this space dance composition into an actual video file before we get to export our composition. We need to talk about your working area at the top of your Tomlin panel. You'll find this rather thick bar, which has to blue handles on the left and arrived, and this defines your work area. You can actually click on these and drag them around, and you can see this old highlight here moving in so and you can also drag this whole area around. This defines the range off your timeline that you will export when you export this composition, so you want to make sure that the beginning off your work area is set to the beginning off your composition or to wherever your layer start and you want to export from, you can either pull this forward or let's leave it there with your time than indicator. At the very beginning, you can press be on your key waters at the beginning off the work area to wear your timeline indicators. So let's press B and had script to the very end. And, well, we do have a little bit of black at the end of our composition, but don't really want to export that. I really just one expert till the end off this layer. In order to snap my time indicator as I'm dragnet, I can hold down shift on my keyboard, and it'll now snap to the end of this layer. So right there is where I want the end off my work era to be. And again, I can either drag this over and try to align it. But I can also press n on the keyboard to snap the end off the work era to wear my current Tomlin indicate, is less press, and now it wants to export this composition. I would export everything from here up until the end of this clip which is the end of my work area. Now, I still have this little bit of black at the end of my composition. And if you want to get rid of that all together, what you can do is you can actually right click on this work area bar and selected trim comp to work. A rescue composition will be trimmed to fit exactly onto the work area that you've got defined. Let's like that and we lost a little bit at the end here. And if we now scrapped through to the very end, our last frame is the last frame off the footage. So now composition is nice and clean, and we're ready to export. In order to expertly composition. Make sure you have it open in your project penalties. Double click on it to make sure you have this space dance composition opened in your protect, then come up into the main menu bar Onda composition select at to render queue. You can also export this composition using the adobe media encoder, but that's probably a topic for another lecture Or another course for now isn't going to say at to render Cube and this is going to pop open the render queue at the bottom off the interface. And in this render queue you will find one item has been added and that is our space dance composition. And now we need to configure the output settings, and then we can render it out to disk. First, you need to define your render settings for that over on the right inside this little blue text, and this may say custom for you or draft or whatever you default settings are in after effects. So it's simply click onto this blue text to bring up the render settings, and in here you'll find a whole bunch of different options. The main ones are your quality into resolution, so quality. Right now it's set the best, so we'll export highest quality. You may also want to export as a draft or wire frame if you just do a quick test render. But let's leave this at best. Resolution is set to full right now, so this is the full resolution off my composition, which 1920 by 10 80. If I change my resolution to half, you know that in brackets will say 9 60 by 5 40 well, which is half off the full resolution and now for exported. This this would only be half the size again. This is more for preview rendering or if you just want to create a smaller file just to check it out. But again, I'm going to leave this on full. And then there's a whole bunch of other settings for using disk Asians. You could change the frame rate and a few other things. You leave most of these untouched and then simply hit, okay, And so now we've set up our render settings. The next thing we need to do is we need to define our output module again on the right inside of the output module. That's click on whatever this text may say for you to bring up the output module dialogue. This dialogue is probably the most important one when you're exporting your composition, because in here you define the video output format as well as the Kodak that it's used for that has a transparent background. You can resize things, and you can enable or disable audio. First off at the very top, you'll find an option for your format, and if you pop this open. There's a large amount of different formats available for use of right now. It's said to quick time. He could also export this as an A V I, but do know that A. The eyes are usually un compressed and therefore lead to humongous file sizes. So, personally, I like to use quick time. You can also exported s age APEC or a PNG image sequence, or maybe just have audio. So you want an MP three file or a way file? For now, I'm just going to leave this on quick time and again. If you don't have this option available, maybe you just missing the install for the quick time Kodak on your computer to make sure you have that installed. So let me select quick time and then down in the video output over on the right. Inside, you'll find the format options, so let's click on the former options and in years you can now define your video. Kodak. Now the video format is essentially the container. It defines the file extension. So Amanda being an MP four and Impact and a movie on a V I file the video. Kodak is essentially the language for the compression off the video. It determines how the content is actually going to be compressed into that container or into that file time. Right now, my video, Kodak is said to PNG. And if you pop this open, there's a pretty long list of different options here. PNG. I usually only used if I need a transparent background. Most of the time, I probably leave this on 8 to 64 It was just a basic video or basic little effect. So let's select age 264 and again. Your options may very depending on what you have installed in your computer and what version of after effects. Using the next most important settings is likely under your basic video settings, and that is the quality slider. This determines the bit rate and therefore the quality, but also the file size off your exported video. If he eject this up to 100 means that you're going to get the highest possible quality for this video. Kodak. But your file is going to be a whole lot bigger. As he reduced this, the image quality is going to go down, but you're far size will shrink so you may have to play this a little bit to find a right balance where the video looks good, but it's not huge for small clips or small visual effects. I usually leave this on 100 which may end up with a 50 megabytes, 100 megabyte fire. But again, it depends on the complexity on the video as well as the length off your composition, obviously, and then you've got. If he advanced settings for how much to key frame and limiting the bid rate and other things. Don't worry too much video. Kodak and quality are the main ones you want to set, then hit okay and back in the upper motor settings on the left side of format options, you can determine what color information to actually export for your video. Right now, my channels are set to RGB, which is essentially just the color channel off my video. I could also determine to export justice, transparency, just the Alfa Channel, and right now it's disabled for me. But I could also determine to export both the color as well as the transparency for my veal . Now, this may be important if you've created a title that you want to be on a transparent background. The reason this options is able for me is because the age to six for Kodak that are selected doesn't support it. So I may have to switch this over to maybe a PNG format, which does support an Alfa Channel. And then I could export RGB plus Alfa. But because it's just a random video of water dancing, let's just leave it on RGB. You can change the color or how the color in the Alfa are being combined. I usually leave thes ones on default a little bit further down. You can unable to resize your video, and you can kind of stretch it and give it any other output size that you would like usually again a leaf this off. You could also crop your video or not and a little bit further down, and this tends to throw people off. Usually, Adobe Aftereffects does not export audio by the fault, because adobe after effects is usually just used for the compositing off little effects. Our motion graphics or he was usually done in a separate program. But adobe after effects that support audio and you could drop all you far into composition and place them exactly where you want them to. But then, in your expert process, you need to make sure that you turn your audio output on otherwise or you will not be exported and you will end up with a pretty silent movie, and you can then tweak the audience settings as well. It has separate format options, but again, I'm not gonna dig into too much off that right now. Now you may notice I'm actually getting a little warning. I can it again. It might depend on which version off after 50 using. And that's because my settings don't quite imagine is telling me my output as Alfa should use straight color. So what am I don't want to do? In my view, Output and I recommend to have a look at what these errors actually tell you. Just in case there's something not quite right thing is telling me in my color to go in here and change this over to pre multiplied and again a bit too detailed for now to go into . Just make sure you don't get any warning if you get a warning. Tried to fix that up first, just in case something isn't set up quite correctly. Let's it okay. And the last thing you need to do is you needed to terminate path for the output file. For that, let's simply click onto this blue text next to output to, and this is going to pop open that the file dialog and let's navigate to cause materials. And let me just create a new folder in here. Maybe I'll call this one export and give you file a name. I'm happy with space Dan Start a movie hits safe. And now, with all of these things set up, we simply had render over on the right inside to render the composition out to our hard drive. Now this may take a little bit, depending on the performance on your computer and how maney effects and layers you have inside that composition. So let me speed this up a little bit so we don't have to sit through it. And once it's done, you should end up with a file on your hard drive. The cost materials export and you can play this video file back shared with friends or family, or uploaded to the Internet for the whole world to see, by the way, feel free to use all in any off. The clips provided us part of the course material to experiment and play around with and use online. And if you do feel like it should be a message on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook so that I can check it out, I'm always keen to see what people get out of my strange little training courses.
8. Working with Layers: Congratulations on making it this far. Here, have some cake. What? You don't like cake? How about a really awful pun then? Because in this lesson, we're going to be talking about layers. Get it? All right, I tried. We've now covered the basics of how to get your media fast into adobe after effects, how to create compositions and how toe export them is video fast. Now let's jump into adobe after effects and look at how we can work with layers to create some more interesting visual effects. Welcome back to adobe after effects. And this is exactly where we left off in the last lesson was still in the render queue. So let's click into the space dance compositions who we're back to where we started and you may notice that right now, on top of maternal, you'll see this blue bar here a little bit of green on the left side, and then there's a few gaps over on the right hand side. It s image before this just indicates the casing status off these frames. So the green ones are memory. They render really nice and quick about play this back blue ones will have to be loaded from my disk and the ones where there isn't anything. They'll still have to be rendered. But because my composition is nice and small, I only have one layer. There are no effect. If you had space on your keyboard, this should play back nice and quick. Cool and you can see the green by expanding. Asked. The frames are being cased into memory, and once everything's cased, this will play back in real time. But now that we've covered all the basics on how to get media into after effects created composition at some layers into them and the expertise composition as a video file, let's get to the fun stuff. Obviously, visual effects would be pretty boring if all he had in your composition was a single videophile. Quite honestly, there isn't even much of a point exporting this composition because you already have the source filed water, then start a movie, and this composition doesn't add anything to it. It doesn't change anything at all. So now let's add a few other layers into our composition. Let's select the Master P and G, the Moon, PNG and the Venus PNG, and let's drag all thes three layers down into our composition. If you have over these layers, you'll see little blue line that indicates where these layers are going to be inserted. And let's make sure that that blue line is over the water. Dan Start a movie, so we're going to add these layers on top. Let's let go. And immediately, in a preview window, you can now see all three planets placed on top of our footage. And this is crucially important. The order you lay aside in the terms the order in which there rendered so at the bottom in the bottom off the layers, as well as the bottom off your preview window and your final output. We have the water Dan start a movie. On top of that, we have the Venus image than the moon and then the Mass. If we take these three images, mask Moon and Venus and drag them down below the water danced on a movie in your video, they will disappear because now you rendering the water dance movie right on top. So because that is pretty pointers, let's select the Walter Dance, start a movie, and draft that down to the bottom off our composition. So are three planets now again are on top. Right now, however, this looks more like fried eggs than it does like planets. So that's reposition these planets. Your instinct may tell you that you can simply click onto Mars writing the Proview No and Drac forever. This is going to select and drag our Walter dance and movie clip because we already have the layers selected, and we are clicking onto the area off that layer within our preview window. That's press control and Z to undo that operation. And now you can either select mass down here in your layers or this is click somewhere and un select everything. And now, if you click on to Mars in a preview arena without anything already selected, we're going to select the Master P and Delia and contract this around and place. It may be over on the left hand side right there. Now we can also click on the moon because we don't have it selected yet, and we're not clicking onto the area. Off are selected Maher Slayer. Let's drag this one over to the right hand side off our preview window, and that's going to reveal Venus. So again, that's click and drag this over. Maybe along the right inside, down here on the bottom. And now, if you scrub through a composition, you can see Walter dancing between a couple off planets. Next, let's scale some off these down. Obviously, we're not going to be astronomically accurate in terms of the relative size, but I think the moon is a little bit too big as well as Venus. So when you have these layers selected, you'll find number of dots. There be nine dots around the outside. Off your land is actually defines the edges off you layers. If I select the water a movie and again either I could do that in my time. Nine window here I can just click on it in the preview window. You'll see these thoughts on the outside off this video faster. That just determines the dimensions off this layer. And because I have this video selected, I now can't select the moon right here in my creamy Reno and un select Everything First, which I could do despite clicking somewhere in my timeline we know or next to my preview window. Let's like the moon and now what you can do is you can actually click on these corners or onto the sides and reshape your layer in any way that you want to grab the sides and squish it in. Or you grab the corners and kind of just both. And with end the height, however, you may not want to excellently squish you moon. So what you can do? Let's undo all of that. Let's grab a corner and again, this is going to allow us to scale our layer. But let's hold down shift, and this is going to lock the width and the height so they scale uniformly. Let's just drag this in a little bit and scale the moon down and move that over to the right and side. Let's do the same with Venus. Let's select the layer. Let's grab a corner, hold down shift so that we don't squish the layer. Scale this down just a little bit and placed on the right inside, and it just looks a little bit nicer. You can also rotate your layers, and for that you need to select the rotation tool. So let's come up into the tuba and over on the left. Inside, you'll find this little spinning arrow, and that's the rotation tool. Or you can just press W on your keyboard, and with this tool selected, you can click and drag on a layer to rotate it. So let's rotate Venus a little bit. Let's rotate the moon downwards. Just I'm just clicking and dragging with my mouth. To do that. That's track mass up a little bit, and so you cannot position these in any way that you want. Let's return to the selection tool again. You can do that up here in the top, left side, off the tuba or simply present V, and I'm going to start using the shortcuts a little bit more just to get you used to them the other way, you can actually transform all of your layers. It's come down into your layer window, and next to the name, you'll see a color patch, which is the color off this layers. Right now, these markets are purple. If you click on this little color patch next to Mass and let's change set over to read, you'll see that all of the layer indicators in your preview window have changed. Color as well as in your timeline is just a way to mark specific layers. But next to that on the left inside, you'll find this little triangle, this little twirly. Let's click on that, and this is going to expand this layer and reveal its properties. The Miles Layer only has a single property called Transform, but again it has a little twirly next to it. So let's click on that, and under the transform, he will find an anchor point position, scale, rotation and capacity. You can change all of these properties here directly in your layer window. So, for example, over on the right hand side, let's click on the position and maybe let's type 400 click enter. Have now moved the Mars layer to 400 pixels in the X excess in the horizontal. You can also click and drag these properties kind of tweak them in the Justin in any way you want. You can modify the scale, and by the fall, this will scale uniformly unless you uncheck this little lock Aiken, in which case allow you to stretch and squish your layer. But let's under that and re engage the lock and you can, obviously rotating layer down here swell. The other two properties that are very important is, for one, the anger point. The anchor point is the central point around which all positioning, scaling and rotation will happen. In your preview window, you can see this anchor points this little star or circle with like pointed edges on the outside. Let's zoom in a little bit of masked by scrolling up on the mouse wheel. And if that Mrs the aim, you can hold down space and just click and drag. So that's temporary. Going to engage the hand on the drag tool. So contract this around while I'm holding down my space key. Let go, and I want to return to the selection tool and right in the middle off mask is this anchor point. Now you can either shift the anchor point again in your layer. We know, but changing this around and you'll see the layer moves. But this anchor point stays the same. Personally, I find this way of changing and appoint a little bit un intuitive, and instead what you can do is come up into the toolbar, and here you will find the pen behind Tool or the anchor point tool. Select this tool. Come into your preview window, and now you can click and drag this anchor point around. So let's, for example, positions and upon down here on the left side, off Mass on one of thes corner points and press V to return to the selection tool. And now what is going to happen if he now scaled down this layers? Let's grab a corner, hold down shift so we scare uniformly a track. It's going to scale down relative to this anger Points is kind of converging in on that point. Furthermore, let's zoom out again by scrolling down on the mouse wheel, and if you a little bit off position wise, you can either come down to the bottom left off the preview. We know and changed this from 50% to fit up to 100%. But again, let's learn the shortcuts and simply press bold and forward slash on the keyboard, and it's going to reset our preview window to fit up to 100%. Let's re select our March Slayer. Let's scale it back up in this time is going to come into my layer window. Just bring up the scale just a little bit. And now let's change the rotation. I'm simply going to click and drag, and now you can see that mass is going to rotate around that anchor point. So if you want your objects to rotate or scale around the center, make shoes like the pen behind Tool and drag the anchor into the exact centre off the object. But moving this anger point off can actually be very useful when we come to animation and you'll see that in late Alexis For now, I just wanted to point out what this is and why it's important that's Press V again to return to the selection tool at the last property off a layer that is very important is the opacity or the transparency. Right now, the capacity of our Mosley is a 100% that means, besides the part of the PNG image that are transparent to begin with, of course, this layer is fully opaque. Let's click and lower this a pass iti and you can see Mars of vanishing, so it's going to become more and more transparent, and this is really cool and very useful for a whole lot off visual effects. So just know that you can adjust the transparency off your layers down here in the layer window. Now that we're done with all of these layer properties, let's click on this little truly up here again and collapse our layers. So we're back to nice and easy and one thing I might quickly do. I'm acquitted, renamed these layers Right now. They still have a PNG at the end, which makes sense if you want to know where they came from. But right now I don't actually need to call the Master P and G, so you can simply click on a layer press enter to rename it and then just type in your name . Selous called the top one Mass that's called the 2nd 1 Moon. Let's call the 3rd 1 Venus and the last one. Let's just rename this one toward her dance next. Obviously, you have a whole bunch of different switches and other little bits and details in this layer we know, and it can be a little confusing. Now, one of the important ones over on the left hand side, you'll find this little speaker. I can and this means to emit audience. If I'm playing my composition back now, it will actually play back the audio former Walter Dance Layer. If you disable that labour will not have audio for the water dance layer. And it also means that if I was to export this composition, it wouldn't export the audio. So make sure you enable it. If you do want the audio and over on the left inside this little I I can pretty obvious. It's just the visibility on the layer. So if you click on this, I I can. Next to the mass layer Mass will vanish if you disabled for moon that the moon will vanish and Venus will vanish, etcetera, etcetera. And obviously again, if these ones are disabled and you expected composition, they won't be visible because you're only going to get exactly what you see in your preview window. Let's re enable all of our layers again. And if this doesn't yet look complicated enough for you at the bottom off the interface, you'll find a little button saying toggle switches and modes. And if you press this, this is going to real additional settings for these layers you can press this button to return to the previous. Moti can also press F four on your keyboard to toggle between the switches and the modes, and the modes are really important. The most determine how all of these layers are being merged and blended together. Right now. At the bottom, we have our Walter dance clip. The mode, which is the blending note, is set to normal, and in here you actually have a whole bunch of different ways of merging layers together on the bottom one. Usually I do leave it or normal because there's no layer below it with which to merch. However, let's select Venus come into the moat switches. Click on that, open up this big pop up menu and let's change this over to baby. Let's go with at You'll notice that the way Venus is rendered has changed, and that's a scale. This up just a tad again, holding down shift and that's dragon over Walter, and you can see you can actually see water through it. So Venus is being rendered on top off this water dance layer with an additive blend mode. So if you want to get into the technical details. The way this layer is being combined with Walter Dance Layer changes depending on the blend melt. So maybe let's change this over to colored dodge. And again it's changed slightly the way these colors interact and not going to go through all of the's. There's a huge amount of different options for interesting effects and all sorts of cool stuff that you could do with it. For now, I'm just going to reset this to normal, so the Venus layer is going to be rendered exactly like the source file looks. But just know that the blend modes out there and that we are going to be using quite a bit throughout this course. Next. Let's talk about the lifetime off a layer right now. You know? Time of you if you scrap through this. Walter dances throughout the entire composition, and the planets are visible again throughout the entire time. Off the composition. If you look into these layers thes bar, see that define the layer again. They extend from the beginning of the composition to the very end. However, most of the time, when you working on visual effects and motion graphics, that is likely not the case. You can actually take the beginning off these layers that selected the beginning off this moon layer Click and a drag this into maybe about two seconds, and we've now essentially set The moon layer will only start at two seconds into this composition. So if we scrapped to be 42 seconds, the moon isn't actually available. It's not even active. It doesn't exist until two seconds when it comes in and maybe at around eight seconds, let's go over to the right and side. Click onto the right end off the layer and drag this in two about eight seconds. So at eight seconds the moon is going to vanish. You can also click and drag on these last two. Position them somewhere new timeline. And this is often really useful when you're trying to align multiple clips and kind of, you know, blending different things together with a certain timing so you can distract these around. And it's quite useful to know the shortcuts for setting the start and the end off the currently selected layer. So let's go to the very big beginning of our composition, and I say I want to reset this to the beginning, so I can either drag it to the beginning and maybe hold down shifts. A little snap to the cross ill. It's just a bit easier to do. But let's under that. Let's not do that. Instead, let's press Ault and left Square bracket, and that'll snap the beginning off this layer to our Tomlin indicator that's moved to Tom, an indicator to the very end. And again, make sure you Mullah is still selected press old and right square bracket, and it'll snap the end of this layer to this timeline indicator. Now one last thing when working with layers. Up until now, all we've done is dragged and dropped existing footage into our composition. However, if that's all he could do, that would be rather inflexible. You can actually create a whole number of differently as directly in it'll be after effects , and the way to do that is simply to right Click into some empty space with in your layer windows. So let's right click. This will bring up a little papa menu, and if you go all the way to the top, you've got a option for new, and you can actually create a whole number of different layers. In Crete, text layers solid layers, which are solid colored layers. You can create lights, cameras, null object, shapeless adjustment layers, import Photoshopped farts or cinema for defiles. We're not going to touch on all of them at once, But let's just create a new solid because this is actually the simplest type off layer at select Craig in you. Solid Let's call this one yellow with untied should match your composition. But just make sure it's 1920 buying 10 80 which is the size off our composition. We can just press make comp size if you're unsure. Down at the bottom, let's select a color. And as the name suggests, I'm going to like a pretty bright yellow here, okay? And OK. And now we have a solid yellow color layer in our composition. On top of that, you can only see miles because in our layer we know well, we have this yellow solid, and the only thing above it is masked. All of the other layers are below this yellow solid. Let's select the yellow solid, come over into the moat and changed it over from normal to scream and that's a little bit strong for a final effect. Still, kind of looks just weird, to be honest. So let's open up the opacity settings, and you can either expand this twirly here. Go into the transporter, Amelia opacity, or let's collapse all of that with this layer. Selected. Simply press T for passive T on your keyboard that will reveal the opacity property. Let's just lower this from 100%. Maybe down to about 15. So essentially, what we're doing, we're essentially just adding a little bit of yellow tint toe all off the layers below this one. So it's going to be added to the moon, the Venus and the Walter dance layer. I may also want to take this master and dragged below this yellow solid. So mass is also going to get that yellow tint. And now I could export my composition, and I have water dancing between the number off different planets. Everything is a little bit tinted yellow. Obviously, all of that is still pretty basic, but I do hope that he's starting to get a feeling for how to take different visual elements and composite them together in the next lesson. we're finally going to get into how to apply effects to all of our layers and start having some real fun.
9. Applying Effects: sweet. Now that you're the master of all things layers, it's time to move on to the next exciting topic, and that is how to apply and work with effects. Adobe after Effects actually comes with a pretty large list off in bill effects, and these arranged from very simple color adjustments to distortions, artistic looks or generating grade Ian's textures or particle effects. So in order to get our hands on to the fund, let's jump into adobe after effects and do as the name suggests, which is to apply some effects. Welcome into after effects, and it's time to have some fun. Let's look at applying some effects to our layers for that in my space dance composition, let's select the Walter dance layer at the very bottom and all on the left hand side. Let me just quickly introduce you to one more layer switch. You'll find this little dot here. This is a solo switch, so let's enable the solar switch on the water dance layer. This is going to temporarily hide all of the other layers. And again, if I was to export this composition now, all I would get would be this water dance layer to make sure you disabled solar mode before you export your composition. So let's enable solo moat on. Let's apply some effects to this Walter dense layer. You will find all of the effects available in adobe after effects over on the right, inside in your effects and presets. Penhall. And as I mentioned before, if you can't see this effects and presets panel, it might either be hidden behind some other taps and or to make sure that a new window you have it actually enabled other ones. You may not be able to find it, so let's go into the effects and presets panel. Let's make this just a little bit bigger, and you can either browse through all of these categories. So, for example, you can expand color correction. You'll find a whole bunch of effects for color correction in here. Distortion effects generation effects. Now I do have a bunch off installed plug ins for ignited magic bullet and a few other ones that you may not see, but you should still have a pretty large amount off in build effects for adobe after effects. And if you don't browse through all of this because it gets a little bit messy considered, come up into the search bar at the top and search for its search for blow up. And under the distortion category, you should see a CC blow byes effect. And if you're using a really old version of after factory, don't have some of these effects. Just used any other one to follow along. It doesn't really matter. It's really abstract the basics of how to work with effects. And in order to apply this effect to the layer, you have two options. For one, you can simply select the effect. Drag it either onto the layer in your preview window, and it selected the Walter Dance clip. Here's of a Let go. I can apply it to this layer. Or you can keep dragging it. India Lay a window directly onto the Walter Dance Layup. Personally, I prefer doing it this way because sometimes you may have other layers in your preview window and accidentally applied to the wrong thing. So let's drag it into the layer window over our Walter dance layer and let go and say you go. Walter looks a little bit different if he now script three composition. You can see that Walter has been while globalized. If you play this back, you may know just that preview has gotten just a little bit slower. And that is because once you start applying effects, Deleuze rendering will get a little bit slower in. It'll be after facts, just one of those facts in life unless you have an absolute monster off a computer. The other thing that you may notice is that our project panel on the left hand side has switched over to the effect controls. This tab actually lives in parallel to your project taps. I could still see my project here, and I can click into it and go back to my project panel. But over on the right inside, I've got the effects controls. And right now this is show me the effect controls for my Walter dance layer. So this is showing me all of the effects that I applied to my currently selected layer. If I select a different layer, lets like the Venus, for example, my effects controls Panelists empty because we have deployed any effects to the Venus layer . So let's re select the water dance. Leah come into the effect controls panel. And, as always, if you can't find it, make sure you have it enabled on the window effect controls, so make sure that is unable for you. That's come into this effects control panel. Select the CC globalized effect and a system needed. There was fun, but we didn't really get very far. Actually, I just want to show you the other way to apply effects to Yulia, so make sure the water dance layer is selected. And this is very important because you can also come up into the effects and presets panel and simply double click the effect and apply it to your currently selected lance. Let's double click cc globalize and that will apply the effect to the water dance layer and in the effects controls for the Walter Dance layer. You can now see the settings for the CC blob allies effect. Every effect in It'll be after effects is likely going to come with its own set off settings. So right now we have different settings for bloodiness, and it's expand this tap and then you'll find a whole bunch off different options. I'm not going to go through all of these in detail. You can simply come in here kind of treat them settles, bring down the softness a little bit. Maybe we will push it up a little bit, actually, just normalizes just a little bit. So it makes Walter just look a little more human, but very wonky. And again, I'm not going to go through all of the's. But you can open up all of the's taps and play with the settings and tweak your effects in any way that you want. Let's rewind a little bit and play this back. Remember, by pressing space on your keyboard and that looks pretty nice and wacky. Let's return to effects Controls panel, and you could either delete this easy blob allies effect. But sometimes you also just want to disable them, and for that on the left side, you'll find this little F X. I can click on that to essentially temporarily disable this effect on the layer, and I use this Ah, whole lot because a temporary just wanted disable in effect without actually deleting it, because the leading it would lose me all of the's settings. Let's just keep it disabled and let's collapse it against we don't actually need to see all these settings. Let's come back into the effects and presets panel and let's search for the cartoon effect on the stylus. You should find a cartoon effect this time. I'm going to click and drag this cartoon effect right onto my preview window and onto the water dance layer within that. So let's let go. And this is essentially going to give our footage a cartoony look again in the effects controls panel in the cartoon effect. There's a whole bunch of different settings that we can tweak for weaken low, other shading steps. It gets a little bit flatter. We can expand the edge options and in here maybe let's check up with a little bits of the lines. Get a little bit thicker. They will increase the threshold ist world, so there'll be a few more lines around water again. I'm not really trying to explain how the cartoon effect looks, just that it is available and how to tweak all of the settings. So now if you scrape through essentially a cartoon version off water dancing, let's again disable this effect and collapse it and they will do one more just for fun. Let's search for the CC plastic effect on Let's apply it to our layer simply by double clicking and remember, weaken. Double click this as long as we have. Ah Walter dance layer. Select listens. Double click this effect, and it's essentially go to make water look like is wrapped in bubble wrap. Now, if you wanted to, you can always return to you. Effect controls and re enable the cartoon effect. For example, apply the cartoon effect or maybe even the CC globalize and the order off these effects matters. Adobe Aftereffects will apply these effects in order, top to bottom, so it will first apply a CC blob allies effect, then a cartoon effect and then the CC plastic effect. The reason that is important is because your image might look quite different, depending on the order off your effects. For example, if I drag this cc blob allies effect down to the bottom, my image changed. Not massively, but it did change because now the blob allies effect is actually applied. After my image has been cartoon ified and after it's been plastic wrapped. So just keep that in mind. The order off the effects is actually very important. Now let's move on to something different. And for that let's delete the CC globalized effect and this easy plastic effect because I believe that the seas he indicates that it's only available in Adobe after effects Sisi and above. So let's just delete those the cartoon effect. I believe he should have an older versions off Adobe after effects as well. And let's come down into our layer window and unsold of this Walter dance layer. Now we have all of our planet's again, as well as this yellow tint and weaken scrapped through our composition, and that's looking pretty funky. Now the next thing I kind of want to make Venus glow. I know it's a planet and it doesn't actually below because it's not the sun. But, you know, let's just do it for the fun of it that's coming to the effects and process panel and let's search for the glow effect. If you see a whole bunch of stuff in here, you may just have to scroll down a little bit and under stylized, you should find the glow effect, and I can't double click this now because I have my water dance layers selected. So in order to apply to my Venus layer, I need to grab it, drag it, and I can Actually, I can't drop it in my preview window because that is actually going to select me my yellow solid, which is on top off my Venus layer. Sit down here. You'll see this yellow solid. It's on top of everything, so I can't actually drop this effect onto any off the planet's below, because the only thing I can select right now is this yellow solid that spends the entire area off my composition. So in order to apply this fact to Venus Layer, let's come into the timeline window and drop it on our Venus layer. So there you go. We now made Venus Globe in the effects controls. What I'm going to do is I'm going to lower the threshold a little bit, so Mawr Venus is going to glow. I'm going to increase the radius. A little bit of swelling. Maybe I'll jack up the intensity now just quickly. One of the things he probably want to do whenever you're dealing with Grady INTs or glow or any smooth type off effects return to your project panel up on the left hand side and at the bottom off the project panel. You find this little number here. Eight. BPC. That means your composition or your project is, Curley said, to eight bits per channel. This is the number of colors available to adobe after effects and what you want to do when you work with radiance and smooth things and Grillo. Hold on, hold on your keyboard or option if you're on a Mac and click this once to turn it to 16 bits per channel, and it's quick of one more time to turn this to 32 bits per channel. This just going to make sure that Grady INTs and glows are nice and smoothness. Plenty of colors available, and you may have noticed it changed slightly over an hour. Composition view. Let's return to the effects control panel for the Venus layer of school to jack up the radius. Maybe just a little bit more to get this really intense, cool kind of glow. And now the last thing I'm going to do. I don't like that this yellow solid is, well, just a yellow solid. If I temporarily increased capacity off this layer again, again. If he can't see this. If this layers collapsed, you can again either expanded or presti on your keyboard to reveal the capacity. If reject this up 200. This is really just solid yellow. It doesn't look very nice. So let's come into the effects and presets panel and let's search for the Grady and Ramp effect. The Grady and Ramp effect lives on the generate tap, and these are effects that will generate images or Grady INTs or patterns for you, so you don't usually want to apply them to footage like I wouldn't apply a Grady and ramp to my Walter dance layer, usually because otherwise I'd lose my footage. Instead. These effects are usually applied two solid layers or just millet's toe, which will get a little bit later. So let's take this grading tramp effect and apply it to our yellow solid, and that my temporarily changed the mode off this layer from screen back to normal. So this is what our yellow solid looks like. It's no longer a yellow solid and in our effects controls. Let's select the Grady Int ramp effect, and you may not have noticed one off the things that does happen. With quite a few effects. They have additional settings and controls available in the preview window. For example, the grating ramp effect has a start and an end point. And if you have this effect selected in your preview window, you get this little Marcus that you can actually drag around. These ones are part off the effect if he don't have the grading ramp effect selected. So if you just click in some empty space in the effects controls panel, those markets will vanish and you can't actually control them. So whenever you're tweeting, in effect, makes you selected in the effects controls panel, and that's just drag these around a little bit and define the radiance. I want to pull this point down a little bit, have a really nice and smooth radiant over the entirety off my screen and now in the greatest ramps headings and want to change this over. So my end colors curly white at the bottom. That's changes that over to the yellow. So we're creating a Grady in from yellow to black kind of just looked a little nicer. Maybe pull this black one down just a little bit and the yellow one s well. And now let's change the moat from normal back over to scream, and it's actually looking a whole lot more interesting. Finally, let's lower the capacity off this layer back down to maybe about 17 20%. And so now this layer, if you temporarily disable the visibility, actually just adds a little bit off a yellow Tim like a yellow glow coming from the bottom . It just looks a whole lot more interesting. Obviously, there's no right or wrong in what effects you may want to apply or how you want to tweak them or how you want your final effect to look. Just know that in the effects and presets panel, you have a huge number of different presets and effects and other things available that you can apply freely to any layer new composition, and they come into the effects controls panel. Make tweaks and changes change the opacity off some regulars to blend them all together into a final effect that you'll be happy with. Now, All of this, except for Walter dancing like a madman in the middle, is still pretty static. Therefore, in the next lesson, let's look at how we can add animation into our composition and to our effects
10. Adding Animation: so far. Besides the video off water dancing, our composition did not include any moving parts. We had no animation on any off the layers or any off our effects. And without animation, things can seem rather static. Therefore, in this lesson, we're going to look at how to create animations in adobe after effects. We will learn how to enable in set key frames for the various properties on our layers and on our effects, and this will make them change over time and creates a much more interesting and organic effects. But now, without further ado or any chance for a bad joke, let's jump right into it. Welcome back once again to do we after effects. And this is exactly where we left off in the last lesson, which applied a whole bunch of different effects to our layers. But as I've already mentioned besides Walter, dancing in the middle, which is just this video file here at the bottom off our composition we have no movement. There's no animation, everything else is just static and a little bit boring. So now let's make these planets move for that, let's come back to the very beginning off the composition. Let's select mass. And again you can't actually selected in the preview window, because at the top of your composition you have this yellow solid. So let's select the mass layer. And I've already mentioned that you can track and reposition this planet anywhere in your composition. But well, essentially, just stick in its new location because we haven't added any animation. In order to add animation to any property on your layers or in your effects, we can use this little stopwatch, Aiken. And if I temporarily re select my yellow solid, he may noticed that all of the properties, in my effect, half the stopwatch I can see on the left hand side. If I select Mama's layer and I expand this little twirly in my transform again, make sure you have this expanded. All of the properties have this little stopwatch here, and this allows us to enable key frames in order to have a planet move. We need to enable key frames on the position property. In order to do that in your layer window under the transform, let's click on the stopwatch icon next to the position property, the stop what I can has been turned blue, so it's been enables. And on the timeline right underneath, where our current Tomlin indicator waas on the position property, you find this little blue diamond that this is indicating that there's a key frame for this property at this position. Also, if you're Tomlin, Indicator sits on the frame that has a key frame on the left side in our layer window next to the suffered I. Can you see this little blue diamond? And that just means that there is a key frame at the current time. If you move retirement indicator off that key frame, you'll see it's no longer highlighted. But now what we can do is we can move forward to maybe about six seconds. And now there's no key frame at my current time nine position and any change to this position, property will create a new key frame with a new value. So what do you do? Grab planet in your preview window, and that's drag. It may be down here to the bottom left, and that has immediately created a new key frame for the position property with a new value . What is now going to happen is s U scrap between these two key frames, Adobe after effects will interpret it will change the value from its initial position at this key frame to its final position at the second key frame. And if you look at this planet in your composition, this makes our planet move. Let's remind a composition and play it back by pressing space on our keyboard. And can I see the planet move? You can add as many key firms as you want to, so maybe we'll move forward a little bit and let's move the planet back. Appear to the right hand side and again that created a new key frame. Let's move forward to maybe 16 seconds and this. Move the planet back down to the left and again, a new key frame. Let's go to the very end. And again, let's move this planet down to the bottom. So over the course of our composition, the planet is moves around on the left hand side. Now, while that is pretty exciting, let's at some rotation to our glowing Venus here on the right hand side. For that, let's select the Venus layer, and you can either expand the settings for this layer or you can actually press are to reveal the rotation property off this layers. Less press are there's rotation property, and again it has to sort of stopwatch icon on the left hand side. Let's go to the very beginning off the composition and press the stopwatch Aiken to enable key friends and create a key frame at time. Zero So that we go. Let's go to the very end of the composition, and right now Venus doesn't rotate at all. Nothing at all happens, and let's change the rotation value down here. You can also press W on your keyboard to enable the rotation tool and that simply click and drag on Venus to kind of rotated around a couple of times, maybe 23 times. And let's rewind a composition and he cannot see Venus rotate. That looks pretty cool. Now. Do you remember that in a previous lesson, we trimmed down this moon layers so the moon only appeared after a few seconds in because that's when the layer became active. Now let's fade this moon in over the course of a few seconds. In order to do that, let's reveal the opacity property on this moon layer. And again, you can either expand this twirly or presti for passive T. And again it has settled stuff, which I can. So let's an able it. And right now rapacity is at 100%. So this key frame here is 100% capacity. You can actually double click onto these key friends, and it's going to open the property window. He actually changed the property right in there or again, just with the timeline indicator right over this key friend. Make sure you have to sell blue. I can hear to indicate that you are indeed over. That key friend has changed its value down to zero, so a moon has now become invisible. Let's move forward to maybe about four seconds, and that's exactly capacity up to 100. And now, if he scrapped through the composition, the moon fates in slowly. Now that's all well and good, and we've added some exciting he friends to the layer properties within our composition. But the real power often will be after factors that you can animate all of the effects that you apply to your layers. Let's, for example, select our Venus layer and you may remember that you applied a glow effect to it, which is what makes it glow. So if he disabled its effect, Venus stops glowing. If he enable it, you get this really intense glow. And by the way, let's reach back to the selection tool if he haven't already either. Selected from the toolbar appear on the left of this press V to return to it. Otherwise, he may accidentally rotate a few off your other layers and in the glow settings under the effects tap. All of the's properties have stopwatch, I guess, and you can enable key frames on every single one of them or anyone off them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come to the very beginning off my composition and able to stop watch on the glow, intensity off this glow effect and lower that down to zero. So now Venus doesn't glow. Let's push this forward to maybe about five or six seconds, and let's bring the glow intensity up to about 1.5. Or whatever you think, looks good. Answer. Now. If you scrap this composition, Venus slowly starts to glow in your timeline view If you want to see the actual key frames on the glow intensity property for the glow effect, you can again either just expand all of the's properties. And next to the transform that what's already on the Venus lay. You now also have an effect tap. Because we have an effect applied to this layer, you can expand this fun. You can open up the glow, and down here you'll have to glow intensity. But let's collapse the Venus layer again. And a really, really handy short cut that you really should know is that if you have a layer selected and press you on your keyboard, it will reveal all of the properties that have key friends and able. So let's like the Venus layer press you and the two properties that have been revealed is the glow intensity off the glow, in fact, as well as the rotation property, because those other two properties that actually have key frames and tables now the lasting want to talk about in this lesson is key frame interpellation. For that, let's return to our project panel, and I want to double click into some empty space because I want to bring another item in and the item I'm going to bring in you're going to find under the Images folder after the race, snail dot p and G. Let's bring that in and let's quickly create a new composition. And again, you can click onto the new composition I can or right click and select create a new composition. And this one I'm going to call race Snail. The resolution isn't all that important. I'm going to leave it on 1920 by 10 80 25. Strange for second steps just fine. Want to set the duration to exactly 10 seconds and let's hit okay and into this composition , let's drag and drop this race. Snail PNG and in my product panel most going to move this into the images, fall at us to keep everything nice and clean and collapse everything. So we're just nicely organized in our project panel and in my composition are now have this race nail PNG press enter to rename the layer. Want to call this one race snail and if you scrap through it, absolutely nothing will happen. Let's flip this layer around and again if you're not quite sure how to get this to be exact 100% What I would recommend. Let's go control Z select the layer in your timeline window and press s to reveal the scale property. And I'm going to unlock the with at the height stark and scale this non uniformly and on my ex I want to change this from hundreds Tu minus 100. That's going to just flip my image horizontally so I can make my snail race from the left side to the right side, going to place this down here on the left hand side, select the layer press p to reveal the position, property and unable to stop watch. I can so enable key friends for the position. Let's move forward to five seconds and let's drag this over to the right inside. By the way, if you're dragging layers around and you hold down shift, you can actually lock down the movement in X or y so I can move this over to the right inside without moving it in the white corner without shifting an up or down. So now I have my snail moving left to ride across the screen, and if you play this back, you will notice that the snail moves with exactly perfectly constant speed. Now, unfortunately, that does look a little bit unnatural because it does. It feels like it's a bit mechanical, and this works really great for animating. Robots are things that are meant to be mechanical, but it doesn't feel very organic now. What I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate my layer for that selected layer, then come up into edit and you can select a duplicate or press control and D, and that's a sense you go to make a perfect copy off this layout. So I've got now snail and snails to with this layer selected. Let's press you on the key. Want again to reveal all the properties that have key frames enabled? And, not surprisingly, that is the position property, which looks exactly the same as on our original layer. Now with the Tomlin indicator over an actual key frames. To make sure you see this little blue I can hear. Let's select all of the key frames, and you can simply click and drag a rectangle around all of the key frames, and we're going to now select this layer So click hold on shift and drag down. So essentially offsetting this layer and all of the animations. So this nail is going to be a perfect copy off the 1st 1 And if you know Scott through, they raise exactly the same left to rise. But what I'm going to do now, I'm going to change the interpolation mode for the key frames on my race. Nail to layer. What that means is, I'm actually going to change how Adobe Aftereffects changes the position value from its start to its end key frame so that it is no longer this robotic and linear interpolation. In order to do that, let's select both of these key friends again, distract direct angle around to make sure that both blue and highlighted and press F nine on your keyboard. This will enable busy interpellation and what this will do If he now compare these two snails, you can see that one of them takes off slower, but then speeds up and slows down to what's the end. So essentially created an ease in effect as well as an ease out effect. So it starts slow that gets faster and then slows down again, and that gives you a much more organic and natural feeling movement. If he not play this back and you look at these two snails, you notice that the top one looks a little mechanical like at a fun fair. When you're shooting those rats moving past the target field and the bottom one will feel a lot more again and like it's speeding up and then it's kind of coming to a slow stop. So let's play this back cool. The interesting thing to see is that they still reach the target location at the exact same time. But the animation is quite a bit different for most visual effects or motion graphics that I work on. I usually use the busy interpellation or to get that more organic, feel animating a robot or something that this meant to be mechanical, In which case I do leave it on linear now, one last thing just really quickly to touch on it. I'm not going to go into too much detail. You can actually select these properties in your timeline window, and you can view a graph that represents how the change of values happens between these key frames that is called the graph editor, and you can access it on the top right hand corner here. In your timeline view, that's this graph editor. And if you click on that, it will change to graph, and this does get a little bit technical. But all I want to demonstrate is that with the position off this race nail selected, you can see a straight line. So it's a linear, a constant change in the position, which is why you get this very mechanical and stiff looking animation. If you select the position property on this race nail, too, you can see this is organic curve that God created than this determines the way the key friends get changed. And this is why you get this smooth easing in and then slowing down towards the end. But again, this is getting a little bit technical. I just wanted to show you it's available. You can actually make changes directly in the graph editor. If you need more control, let's disable the graph editor again because for most part, linear interpolation or just selecting them and pressing F nine to turn on busy interpellation is usually going to be enough for your animation needs.
11. Working with Text: Whenever you want to create some title animations or funky and for graphics, you probably won't get very far without adding some text into your compositions. Text layers are extremely useful for Paige. Yep, pointing out the obvious. They're also really useful to easily create some text elements that you can customize and animate. So, without further ado, let's jump into after effects and start dropping some text. Let's leave our racing snails behind it. Use a different clip for this lesson. I'm going to import a new video and they want to go to select. You're going to find on the course materials video, and it's called Walter in the disco dot MP for solicitor. Simply import in this clip was going to drag it onto the new composition. Aiken. Too well, create in your composition. You've seen this clip before. It's the view of water. While dancing, I've just added a bundle of disco lights, a little bit of glitter to make it look a little bit more party. Now, before we jump into creating text at the bottom off the preview know your father's drop down here right now, this is set to quarter might be on auto or full or half authored for you. And this is the actual resolution, the preview resolution that you'll see in your preview window right now this is set on quarter. This means that aftereffects will only render every fourth pixel in my video into this preview window. If you zoom in a little bit, you may notice this is actually pretty pixelated. So what you can do down here, you can change this previous resolution to 1/3. You know, this gets a little chopper to half to fool. This is now at full resolution or you consider Toe Auto. And this will automatically set the resolution to suit your preview. No. So usually I like to leave this on auto. And the reason this is important is because if you preview gets really slow and leggy because you have a lot of effects and lay us in your composition, you can drop this down and kind of lower the previous resolution and after effects will start to work a whole lot faster. So let's set this to order for now, and let's zoom out of our preview window. And the easiest way to do that is simply the whole down the old key on your keyboard and press ford Slash, and it will zoom out as far as it can. Now that was plenty off detour. Let's start creating some text. Creating text in after effects is actually really easy. Simply come up to the two about and write about in the middle. You'll find this T this horizontal type tool Cindy selected. Click into the Middle Off You previously known You notice that occurs there has actually changed to this little text typing present, so let's just click into the preview window and type some text in order to exit text mode. You can either come up into the tuba and selected the selection tool. Or you can kind of click either into your project panel or down into your layer. Witnesses click somewhere, not any preview. We know you finished editing the text, but let's also make sure we return to the selection tool, and now we can click and select our text and move it around over on the right. Inside. You used to see this effects and presets panel. Now you may have noticed that this changed over to the character tap again. If you can't see this tap. Make sure you come up into the main menu and on the window you have the character tap enabled. And in here you can change to fund the waiting, the size and all sorts of other settings for you currently selected Text Element. Let's change this fund to something a little bit more solid. Maybe I'll go with impact. Yep, that looks pretty cool, and I can simply increase the size down here. You can also scrapped the corners off this layer and scale it out and again. Hold on shift. If you want to scale it uniformly, this position it down here a little bit. And over on the right hand side, you can actually change the color. Right now. It's white with no outline at all. So maybe we'll change it to read. Now. Let's also add a little bit of a white outline to this texture, so it stands out a little bit stronger for that in the character tap over on the right hand side, you'll see the secondary, the stroke color here at the back Right now. If I click on this, it'll be brought to the foreground. It's set to nothing. So let's click on this again and change the stroke color off our text to White. Okay, but we still don't see the actual outline. And that is because in our character tap down about the middle. You'll see the stroke size here, and right now it's set to zero pixel. So if you jack this up, we're now adding this solid white outlined to our text, and that actually doesn't look too bad. You can change whether you want the stroke off the Phil or the phyllo with stroke to be displayed and down at the bottom of things like turning and spacing and all sorts of other cool things that you can come off tweak in any way. You want to make the front look the way you would like it to. And for that you've created and customized you first text element. Now let's say you don't want horizontal text. You like your text vertical for that in the main menu bar under the horizontal type tool. If you click and hold, you can actually select the vertical type tool, and this works exactly the same way. Stars on the tool. Except if you click and then type some text. You can now type vertical text. And again, let's return to the selection tool and bring this text over to the left side just a little bit. And he may have noticed that this text, that of type, actually has exactly the same styling and fund and format. Asked the party text that we've added before aftereffects will simply retain your fund style from the character tap and apply it to any new text element that you create. Let's once again return to the horizontal type tool that's click somewhere into the middle and let's type more than one line. Now there's two important things to notice. For one, we're still in text Edit motor still have this vertical cursor here, And if you now go into the character tap and, for example, increased the font size or change the color, nothing will actually happen because I don't have any text selected. I'm literally still in edit mode. If I wanted to change any part of this text, I can actually come in here and click and select the parts of the text that I want to change. You notice that the character tap has once again been reverted to the style applied to the select text. But now, with this text selected, I can actually change the font size or the color and customized bits and pieces off my text in any way that I want. If I wanted to affected the entire text as a whole, I may have to go back to the selection tool, select the entire text element, and over on my character tap, you notice that the phone size as well as the color are marked with a question mark because my text element has more than one style applied to it. However, if I now changed the fund over to Blue, it will be applied to the entire text. If I again just wanted to change individual characters, come back into my horizontal text to this kind of click and select individual letters or individual words out of my title and again with that selection maze, I can customize that again in any way that I want. Let's again return to the selection tool, and the last thing on the touch on before we get to animating our text is that right now this text consists of multiple lines and he load. Is that the line to the left side? Off this paragraph? In order to change the alignment off your paragraph down on the right hand bottom side off the after effects interface, you'll find the paragraph tab. And, as always, if you don't see this come up into window, make sure your paragraph is enabled. So down here on the bottom, right, you'll find options to align your paragraph, and this applies to the currently selected text element. So right now have water and disco selected. It's left line now, but I can also sent outline it or I can write a line, all of the text, and this just helps you customize the paragraph. If you have more than one line, let's delete the water in the discotheques again simply by selecting it and pressing the delete key. And let's animate our two remaining text element to tell people that this really is a pretty fat party. What I want to do is I want this fat tax to kind of drop in from the top and let me move my timeline indicator to probably about two seconds. Let's reveal the position property on this text layer down here and a text layers just like any other layer, and it will be after effects. It has a full transform sort as a position, scale and rotation, and you can really, either by expanding the little twirly or with the lay selected, simply press P to reveal the position. Let's unable to stuff, which I can next to the position to enable key framing. And this is going to create a little blue diamonds were key frame. Let's go back to about a second and 1/2 and let's take this text element. Hold down shift and that's drag this textile mill up and off the screen, and this has created a second key frame. And now, if it's report, you'll see the text drop in. They must like both of these key friends and press F nine to enable busy interpolations for the text. Kind of comes in and slows down. This looks a little bit nicer, and now two seconds just as the vertical text comes to rest, let's reveal the position property on our party text and again enable the stopwatch icon. Then let's take the text and holding shift toward moving at a ball down has pushed this text off the left side off the screen. Let's go forward to about 2.5 seconds and because I'm working at 24 frames per seconds or, well, 23.976 really. But down here in the time and this will kind of appear life, 24 frames per second to 12 is half a second in. So that's 2.5 seconds at 24 frames per second. So at 2.5 seconds, let's grab this text element. Hold on, shift together. Let's bring it back in. So the textile, um, will slide in from the left side. This has created another key friend. Let's like both of them press F nine to enable busy interpellation. And now, if you scrap back and play this back, you have this text slide in. Now, this looks pretty nice already. However, one thing to make this look a whole lot better is to enable motion blur so that kind of distort and blur out a little bit as they're moving into the screen. In order to do that, I need to see my layer switches and remember Right now, we're only seeing the moats, and you can either press F four on your keyboard to toggle between the two or at the bottom . Simply press toggle switches and mounts, so make sure you can see all of your switches. And this one here, these little three circles overlaying each other is the motion blur. Switch on. What I want to do is I want to enable. So take the switch button for the fat layer as well as the party lands going to insert those Aikens here and I'm a fat layer swells my party layer half motion blur enables. However, if you scrap through, you know there's nothing is being blurred out at all. And that is because you also need to enable motion blow on the overall composition in order to do that at the top off your layers. We know you have some switches for the composition as a whole, and again, you find this little I can hear for motion blurs. Let's make sure you take that as well, and immediately you can see the motion blur appear on these text elements, and if you now rewind and play this back, it looked a whole lot more natural, but now feel free to play with the transform off these text elements, move them around, scale them and do whatever crazy things you want to do. One last thing I want to show you before we move onto. The next lesson is how to use the animation presets that come in build with adobe after effects to create all sorts of cool text effects. For that, let's delete the vertical text in our composition, and I'm also going to disable the key friends on the position property for our party layers . So it's just right in the middle of the screen. This position anywhere you want. Let's rewind a composition to the very beginning. Let's come up into the effects and presets panel, and if you can't see it in here, might be hidden behind some off these taps. There it is. He may also you able to use these little pop out windows. Obviously, you can't see it because off screen, but just make sure you return to the effects and presets panel. It's gonna make this a little bit bigger, and at the top you'll find this little star animation presets. That's pop this open, and in here you will find a folder called Text again. Let's expand this. In year you will find a whole bunch of effects that you can apply to text layers. The coolest ones are animated in, and there's a whole bunch of presets in here as well as animate out so animate in Will make attacks appear and animate out will make it disappear. To apply an animation tree set to you text, let's apply an animate in first. Make sure you at the time where you want to text to start appearing and that's grab, for example, decode a state in its Simply grab this and drag it onto the text layer. Let go. The text has now disappeared, but if you scrap through, you'll see the text appear in a really cool and interesting way. Let's go to maybe about six seconds. Let's collapse this animate in animation presets. Let's use one of the animate outs. Maybe I'm Gold has used the encoder fate out, and the endless is click into drag Venus and drop it onto our text layer. And now the script forward. Half the text disappear, and this is a really easy way to apply all sorts of cool effects. You can actually combine the supply, all sorts of effects to your text layers. And the cool thing is that if you selected text am praise you to read all of the key frames on this text layer, you notice that there are now two range selectors apply to this text effect now. Custom text animators in all of that is probably outside of the scope off this course. But just know that they have key frames that define the start and the end of the animation . You can move thes around and adjustment any way you want to extend the duration of some of these effects or make some of them faster. Selected key friends Press of nine to enable busy interpellation and make this look a whole lot more organic. Play around with these presets, customize your text and have some fun. There's a huge amount of things that you can create with these text effects that are already available in adobe after effects
12. Masking: on that night. Get it, Bad man masking Well, I tried in this lesson, we're going to talk about masking. Masking is absolutely essential. When you want a composite multiple layers of video on top of each other, it essentially allows you to cut out or extract different parts off your layer, making the rest invisible so their bottom layers can show through. This allows you to create some really cool visual effects, like the table cloning effect, where you have multiple copies off yourself roaming the screen. Eso Let's jump into adobe after effects and get masking before we jump into adobe after effects. Here's the final effect that we will be creating pretty cool and super easy to create using masks in. It'll be after effects. I have a brand new project here, and the very first thing I want to do. Its import. My source footage in the cause material. Under the video folder, you'll find three clips called Thieving Clones 123 So let's select all of them holding control on our keyboards and hit import. Let's drag Stephen clones one under the new composition Aiken to create a new composition. If you scrap through this clip, you will see that it's a video off the first Walter trying to eat his natural chips and then pretending like some are already took them. Let's drag Stephen Clones Co. Two into the composition and place it on the top. And this is a video off the second clone, essentially grabbing the natural chips, passing them on and at the end again pretending like somebody stole them. Let's drag thieving clones or three into the composition as well, and drop it at the very top. And this is a video off the last clone off the last Walter, essentially grabbing those natural chips and being all happy. Now what we need to do is we essentially need to combine these three layers and have cut out the pieces that we want and overlay them together so that it looks like one concurrent clip with all three clones in it at once. This is exactly where masks come in. For now, let's disable the visibility on the top two layers of really to see the first even clones or one layer, which is this 1st 1 clone in it. And in the toolbar at the top about the middle. You'll find this little rectangle tool and a pencil, and both of these ones allow you to draw masks. You'll see this little triangle icon at the bottom right, and if you click and hold, this will reveal rectangle tool rounded ellipse tool. Startle so just different shapes for drawing your masks and under the pen troll. This might very a little bit, depending on which version of after effects you have, but you should always have a pen tool at Vertex Tool. Delete verdicts tool and to convert Vertex to mask. Feather Tool, I think, was in CS six and above. Don't quote me on that, but that's a bit newer, but you should have most off the basic tools. For now, that's simply grab the rectangle tools to click and hold. Make sure you select direct angle tool and then do make sure that the layer you want to apply the master is selected. So select your thieving clones or one layer. Make sure it's visible in the preview window and then simply click and drag to draw direct , angular mask around the piece of footage that you want to keep This essentially now cut direct angle out of this layer. And while everything around it looks black, what it actually is if underneath the preview no, you enable this little checkerboard the transparency, grit, you'll see that essentially, we have only one layer in our composition. We've cut our direct angle, and everything around it is essentially transparent. We've just cut this little square out. Now, I know this isn't getting us much closer to the final effect, but I just want to go over some of the basics first. So for now, let me disable the transparency grid just because it's a little bit bright and shiny on my eyes. Just remember everything. Black right now is essentially transparent on this evening, clones layer under the mask tap. You will now find a mask mask, one, which is directing that we just applied. You can pop this open and you'll find a number of properties that you can adjust for one. You can change how this mask is actually being applied. Right now, it's additive. It's adding content to this layer. If you click on this little drop down for several changes to subtract you essentially now cutting the contents off this mask out of the layer so you can combine different mass and cut pieces out or app users to it. You could draw multiple masks onto the same layer. So, for example, what I could do is still with the rectangle to select it. And with my layer still selected, that's a straw, another rectangle into this one here. And so now what we've done, we've got one mask which subtracts its content. And then inside that mass, we have another mosque which adds content back in and again. This one has some properties that you can adjust. For example, mask have something called feather, and this is highly important when you want to create some visual effects. If we bring up the feather off this mass to this inner mask, this pushes up. You can see how the edges get nice and soft and blurry, and quite often, when you're combining different video layers, you don't want harsh edges because it looks really unnatural. You kind of want to add a little bit of feathering to your masks usually, so the layers kind of blend together on the edges of this looks a whole lot more natural. You also have mask capacity so you can control how much percentage off this mask is actually being applied. And you have something called mask expansion, and this essentially just lets you to push out or pull in the content area off this mask. So if I bring out this expansion, I'm including Maura Maura around the mask. If I bring it in, I'm including less and less off what is defined by this master again. It lets you control how, exactly this mask effects your layer. Finally, you also have a mask path, property, and this just has a shape defined. We're going to be using this in a second. This essentially allows you to animate the actual shape off the masks right now, if you scrape through it, the masks are very static, but you can actually animate these masks to move around freely. Kind of follow moving objects along will be using that to cut out are clones nicely in a minute. So just know what's there and all of these properties have a little stopwatch icon on the left inside mean you can animate every single one off them. Let's select mask to press delete to the lead. It's like mask one press delete to delete there, too. So we're back to our base footage and let's start creating the actual visual effect. Let's enable sieving clones, too. So it's bring the visibility off that one back, and obviously, because this layer covers up everything underneath it, we can't see the video layer underneath it anymore. But let's use a mass to essentially. Can't this clone out off the video so you can essentially click and drag a rectangle around this water clone? And we know may want to adjust this mask. Right now, we're still on the masters, so you can't actually dragged the edges. In order to adjust the shape off your mask, you compress V to return to selection mode and then double click on the mask itself. And this might be a bit tricky if you can't hit the edge. Exactly, and then you can bring in the address here or if you're at the corner, she can click and drag to rotate your mask around as well, so you can try to align this mask a little bit nicer, so it only covers the second clone. So what is essentially happening? Let's solo the thieves clones to layer. That's really just this section off the layers. Just the second copy off water sitting here and everything around it again, remember, is transparent. So the bottom layer it's disabled. A soulless which again, the bottom layer, thieving clones one is showing through everywhere else. Now, one thing you can notice quite clearly is that as I filmed those clips, the light has changed. Tightest. We can see this really harsh edge off the mask, and this is where mask, feather and become so important. Let's pop open the properties for Mask one on leaving clones, too. And let's just bring up the mosque feather a little bit. And what's going to happen is that that edge, that harsh edge almost vanishes because it blurs between those two layers, and that looks a whole of my natural already. Let's scrap through and just check this out obviously. Well, right now it's kind of weird that water has a natural trips back, but there's already another one lying on the ground, and what's going to happen is right here. Water essentially places that back on the ground. But this is where kind of these layers overlap because our thieving clones two layers now covering up the one underneath. So you getting this really strange effect off the first water since reaching underneath the layer off the second clone? So that doesn't quite work for us. Also, what I can see a zoom in a little bit is a little bit off that natural bag left because off the feathering on our mask. So let's off this slightly differently in just a little bit more clever. Let's the lead mask one again. Let's come back to right here. So right here. We need to assume that this natural back isn't actually there yet until the first cloned actually places that back on the ground. I hope you're following this. If not just, you know, rewind a little bit, Play this back again. So what I want to do is essentially, at this point, only want to have this clone cut out, not the natural back. But then, after the first from places the back on the ground, I'm going to expand this mass to include the back on the ground and then the second water can essentially pick it up. If that sounded complicated, don't worry. It's actually not that bad what I'm going to do now, going to come up into my tuba. But rather than using direct angle tool, which is just a little bit static, let's grab the pencil and that the pen tool allows you to draw a free mask shape. So now what I can do. First off do make sure that your thieving, close to layer is selected. And now I can click and move and click again. Move and click and draw a path around this clone. But I'm going to exclude this natural back. Make sure that you close the mask path by clicking on the first point that you creators. If the mask is not closed, it will not actually be applied. Now, if you're not quite happy with the shape of the mosque again press V to return to select mode, you can click and drag around individual points. So at the foot, for example, I conceal a bit off the shadow off this nacho back here. So I'm going to drag this in a little bit because I don't want too much off that going to bring this point down. So we're getting this nice, smooth edge down here so I don't need that much space around the foot, either. So that's actually looking all right. If you want to move the mask, simply double click on an edge and then you contract the whole mask around. I'm going to control Z that because I don't actually want to do that. If you want to return back to point selection, because right now you can select the points anymore. Simply hit escape, click outside off the mask. And now again, you can kind of click and drag these points around. It takes a little bit getting used to, but it's not that complicated. Once you got the hang of it, let's zoom in a little bit. Come down here and again the edges a little bit too harsh for me. So I'm going to open up my mask. One properties just bring a little of feathering into it. Don't push too much. Just enough to make this edge is visible. Edge disappear that zoom out. So that looks are right Now I might want to kind of bring this point in because I can see the shadow is being cut off just a little bit. I kind of do want to share. Oh, to be moving across the first cloned just looks a little bit more natural. That waste were not blocking out the shadow here. So clone one sits down. Clone one now places the back and again here. I may want to justice mass just a little bit so I can see the whole now to back being placed on the ground right here. Now what I need to do, I need to cut over this clone to essentially include this natural back, because what's going to happen is that this clone our reaches down to grab the natural back and pull it out. But we're still being covered up by this layer were being cut off because it's not included in the masks. So what I want to do is right here as I'm reaching down, I want to animate this masked, essentially expand and include this natural back at the bottom. So let's leave this point right there. Zoom in a little bit and now let's animate the actual mask path also are noticing. The foot is a little transparent here, so let's just fix all of that up by just animating this mask path properly. So unmask one on thieving close to enable that stopwatch I can on the mask Path property, and I'm going to bring these funds out a little bit. And again, if you moving the entire mask around, that's under that click outside off the mask somewhere first and now I move the points individually, and this has created a key frame for the mosque path. Let's go back a little. This is where it's happening. I'm moving the foot. So what I want to do, it's right here again. Click outside Damascus. Bring these points in a little bit. So essentially the mosque when I will animate to follow my foot. And now I need to make this mask follow my hand as well. So let's move to where the hand is fully covered. Let's just move thes ones down and over the nacho back to maybe about there. And what's going to happen is this mask part. It's not going to reshape between these key friends. So as some Estes arm comes down and grabs it, we're cutting over to the other layer. So now if he zoom out, we want a little bit and play this section back. It looks like the second clone is stealing the natural from the first clone and what I'm noticing right here, where we're placing the natural bag hand is being blurred out and cut off a little bit. So again, select that layer. Let's just push this mask out just a little bit more, so we make sure we know where we're placing it, right that cool. So now, half the first half off this effect complete it. Clone number two is stealing the natural back off clone number one. Now let's collapse this layer enable the visibility on our thieving clones three and again everything Venice's because this layer will cover up everything that's beneath it. And that's a video off clone number three coming in and snatching off that nacho back. So again, let's apply a master this layer to essentially just cut out this clone here as he's stealing that nacho back away. For that, make sure thieving clone number three is selected. Grabbed the pencil, move out just a little bit. And by the way, to move my preview and around this, holding down space on my keyboard and dragging. So let's draw a mask around this club just include a little bit. We're going to have to animate this mask anyways. But I don't make sure I've got everything off this clone in this mosque. So now what we should have. We should have clone number three come in. And, of course, we're going to have to fix up with the clone reaches for the natural back the foot. He has been cut off a swell. What's going to just move thes mask points over a little bit, So make sure at least I'm getting his entire heading. So and then he describes the bag and stands on the site. So that looks all right again. We having a pretty harsh edge on the mask itself here for just being cut off a little bit. I'm actually going to align these points kind of with the edge off the kitchen floor just because it usually looks a little natural. If your masks follow more natural lines and I'm going to actually drag these points here to be aligned with the corner off the kitchen, it usually just ends up looking a little bit more natural. So that looks all right. Let's select Stephen clones, layer three, and you can either open up this too early here to get to the masks. You can also just press em on your keyboard to reveal off the masks, which is much easier, or m m. If you want to expand all of the masks and their properties on this layer, and let's just bring up the mosque feather just a little bit to just kind of blew out these edges a little and again, we can see that kind of cutting off the foot here. So let's just bring that in a little bit because right now we don't need that much, so that looks all right. But again, let's animate the mask path to make this whole thing happen that's unable to stop, which I can for the mask path. Let me just make this a little bit bigger and let's start scrolling through All right here . I can see his foot vanishes. So let's bring these again if you move the whole masks. Control Z clicks on the outside of the Marsten s direct these points over just a little bit . So I do get his entire foot in and again, you may have to justice a little bit kind of move about to make this look as natural s you can. So that looks all right. And at this point, I think I can probably move these points back again. So that's the foot fixed up. And I think that works. Okay, Lets fix up the hand, and we're going to do exactly the same thing at this point. Justice were about to reach right here as we're about to reach for the natural back, let's just make sure including the entire hand. And at this point, I want to make sure that this mosque includes the entire nacho back. And what has happened here is asked me to find key frames to deal with the foot. We've actually keeping the entire shape off the mask. So now it's already reverting. It's already moving about not quite what I wanted. So let's zoom in here in the time that I should do this at the top here in the time that I've got this little zoom bar. So I just bring this in and kind of expand this out. I can see the key frames here a little more clearly. So what? I want to do is here. Let's move to the next key frame and on your keyboard you can actually use J to jump to the previous key frame and K to jump to the next one is actually really useful. So from this key, Friendster looks okay. Let's press K to jump to the next key frame, and that looks a bit wonky. So let's fix this up to make sure we've got all off the nachos selected and the hand is visible as it's grabbing it. Let's make sure that looks OK. That does look OK, Let's press K again. That looks okay as well Press K again. And that looks wrong because the mask contracts again. So is seeing the original copy off that natural back. What I want to do is at this key frame point, I wanna make sure that the mosque again discovers up this natural back and no longer being their press k again, and we may have to fix this of one more time. So there's just really getting U mass to animate properly and issue animate one part. The entire mass part is going to get key friends so you don't have to fix that up along the way. So now I've got the clone reaching for that nacho back and stealing it, and it is pretty much permanently gone. So now let's zoom all the way out by pressing old and forward slash, collapse or less reminds. You can also hold on Ault and stroll with your mouse. Meanwhile, in the timeline and zoom in and out and let's play back the final effect. Cool. That's the first clone. And let's steal that Nazi back that is looking pretty it and let's wait for the next going to come in and complete this steel cool. And with that, we've used Mass to create a really cool looking clone interacting effect in adobe after effects. And this is not actually a simple feat. But just know that masks are at the core off almost all visual effects in one way or another, and you can get some really cool stuff with them. The last thing I want to touch on because I know what that's confused. A whole lot of people. Let's disable the visibility off the top two layers. We just have this base footage, but I really just want to go over a very basic principle form asks if you use the pen tool and you don't have a layer selected. So right now I have no layers selected. If I now click and start drawing something, I'm not creating a mask. What? I'm creating a shape layer and we're going to get to them in another lesson. But just make sure that let's delete this layer again, this shape layer that got created make sure that before you draw your mask, you have the layers selected that you want to apply the mass to. Otherwise, this is not going to work, so I can now draw a mask and it actually gets applied to this layer. Let's delete the mask again, and the other option you have is well, rather than just clicking to create points, you can actually click, hold and drag to create busier points. You can create rounded edges for your masking kindof create. These s well, if you just click. Basically, you create a single point. If you click and drag, you create these nice round edges that's close this off and the cool thing with these edges . If you select one of those points, you'll see these busier hands, we can adjust them in any way you want to kind of just give the edges really nice. Soft corners and again. You can animate all of this stuff as well, however, if he accidentally created a busy a point and you wanted to be a boring, simple linear one. Instead, you can, with pen tools, still selected old or option, click on to the point to convert it to or from a pay zero point. So this is just one way you can customize your mask, and it doesn't confuse people when they don't know about it. But it's just one of those really simple things that you can do with masks. Do you just need to know how to control it when you need to? Let's delete the mask again. Collapse everything re enable the visibility of all off unless we're back to our final clone effect. Hopefully, this gave you a good idea of all the cool stuff that you could do with masking their really essential to almost any visual effect. And you regret some really great visual trickery by do nothing but combining a few video layers, applying some masks and animating them intelligently
13. Shape Layers: whenever you're working with masks, sooner or later you're going to accidentally end up creating some shapes instead. But instead of just getting all frustrated and annoyed that your mask didn't work, shapes and shape players actually give you a really easy way to add some cool little elements to your compositions for your motion graphics of visual effects without having to use any images. So let's jump into adobe after facts and look at how we can create and what we can do with Shea. Players beckon adobe after effects, and hopefully you remember this effect off. The three thieving clones have recreated in the last lesson. We did touch very briefly on how to create shape players, but more in the context off how to avoid creating shape players when you're trying to create a mask. Now this video, I want to talk about how to deliberately create shape, layers and all of the cool stuff that you can actually do with them. Remember, in order to create shapes and it'll be after effects used the exact same tools you use form asking. So up in the tuba you have the rectangle tool and again, if you click and hold. You've got rectangles around the directing us ellipses, polygons and stars, and obviously you have the pencil. We can draw free form shapes in any way that you want. So let's for now. Go over to the left inside and select the rounded rectangle to. And if he don't have any off your layers selected, so make sure you have no layers selected. Just click somewhere toe un, select everything, and you now click and drag in your preview window. You're going to create a shape, so this actually just creates a shape. And down in my layers panel, I can see a new shape layer created over here on the right hand side, which, if I collapse, it is separate from my three video less. And if you expand this layer, you can actually see in its contents. It has a rectangle, and that's this rectangle share that we just create it Now. You may have noticed that when he selected either the shape tool or the pen tool kind of in the middle top off the defense, you'll have these new options appear. These are options for defining how that shape looks without new shape. Still, selected under the shape layer contents. We've got rectangle one selected at the top. We can change the Phil and the stroke off this shape, so let's check. Click on this fill color selector. Maybe we'll change this to a muted green and the Strokers wide right now, so let's click on that. We will make this like a light blue, and it's probably way too small to even see so on the right inside us. Bring up this pixel so we can increase the thickness off that stroke outline. So we now have a slightly fancy shape. Now you can add many, many shapes into the same shape layer. In order to do that, simply make sure that you shape layer is selected and then grab a pencil. Or they were going to go with a star tool for now and then simply click and drag to create your new shape. The cool thing about the star Tulis. While you still drag to created, you can scroll amounts will apple down to add or remove points from this shape. You can also hold on control or command on the Mac and drag with the mouse to define how spiking that star will be Once you let go, you've placed your new star and in our shape layer. We now have direct angle and a police start again. Let's select the police style that has changed to fill. May well make this one a little bit more orange, maybe just a bit warmer as well. Let's change the outline color. Maybe I want this one to be slightly red and maybe not quite as thick and again present V to return to the selection tool, Nick. Now click and drag the shapes around at will, and you will notice that the options for the fill stroke and other effects change depending on which shape you have selected. So obviously you can modify them individually. Let's collapse this shape layer. If he don't have the shape layer, select its let's un select everything and let's maybe grab the pencil and let's draw a new shape. Do the after effects will create a new shape layer because it didn't know that he wanted to at the shape to an existing one. So delete this layer. Make sure the shape layer one is selected, and now if you create a new shape that one will again be edit to the shape layer. If you expand it under condoms, he will not find a rectangle, a police star and a shape. Let's delete the police stance was selected and press delete so like the shape and delete that as well. President, to return to the selection tool is going to drag this shape back into the middle. What I might do. A swell It's collapsed. This. Let's delete the thieving clone layers, I think the more distracting than anything, and let's create a pretty trippy to D shape animation effect for that. The first thing I'm going to do is let's create a new solid Leila's a little bit of a soft Grady int in the background off this effect. So right click into your layer window, come to new and let's create a new solid. I'm going to call this one radiant and hit. OK, make sure that this Grady in always is. It's below your shape layer come into the effects and presets panel over on the right hand side, and let's search for the Grady int ramp effect. Let's apply this effect to the Grady in player, and yeah, that doesn't look too bad. I'm not too keen on the color that's exchanged the end color, maybe two. A very, very dark blue. I just want a very little bit off a Grady int. And remember, whenever you do work with radiance, come into your project panel and make sure you're setting a project to 32 bits per channel simply by holding down Ault or option and clicking on this icon to turn this to 32 bits per channel. The greatness will just look a little bit nicer, not 100% sure how well those Grady's come through in the video itself, but it just looks a lot nicer on my screen. Now. Let's select the shape layer expanded. Make sure the wrecked angle is selected, and you can check whether that's selected by changing some of these properties. And we definitely have the rectangle selected. And now let's add some animation down in your layer window. Let me just make this a little bit bigger again. You can expand the shape like the rectangle that we've created, and in here you'll find all sorts of different properties that if you expand them like the stroke, the fill the path itself. You can keep from all of these properties to, you know, have disappear or change color all sorts of other cool things. I'm going to leave these ones collapse for now, re select direct Angle one, and instead I'm going to use a much easier way to add effects and all sorts of other cool things to this shape at the top. With direct angle shape selected, your fantasy will pop out at Aiken. In this menu, you will find options to, for example, create a shape group, and we haven't touched on that yet. Essentially allows you to act multiple shapes into a group and apply effects to the entire group. You can obviously apply more shapes like rectangles, ellipses, police stars, path, etcetera. You can trade filled strokes or very cool Grady in Phil's and Grady in strokes. Or you can apply all sorts off cool effects. One thing I'm going to do is we want to add a Grady Int Phil, so this now has added a Grady and fill effect to direct angle itself, and you can kind of justice in any way you want. Let's just move this about a little bit down in the layer window. Let's pop open the grate, infill and other colors. You can actually edit the grade in color so you can really create some really funky Grady ins with, you know, many, many different colors. You can have, like a bit of a rainbow effect that's kind of click and create a few colors to make this look a little more trippy. So and then push these about. You can see how the Grady it looks right there and maybe I'll just drag the started in point off this Grady int. So that looks kind. Of course we know at Grady and fill to our rectangle. Let's come back up into at, and maybe we'll add a pucker and bloat down in U shape. Blair under the rectangle shape, you know, have a packer and bloat option. Let's expand this out, and you can now bring up or down. This amount of kindof creates a really cool, interesting shapes. If you wanted to, all you can animate this I'm going to do is want to come to the beginning off my composition and just for fun. Let's animate this. Let's say this starts out at zero that's unable to stop watch. I can move forward to maybe about two seconds and let's bring this up to Maybe we'll go with about 65. Come back to six seconds. That's changed this to minus 65. Come to 10 seconds and we can bring this back up to 65 or can just simply select. I know that this key frame is 65. This one it's minus 65. Let's like these two key frames and copy them with control or command and see, Then paste them into the current time land indicator with control or command and V, and let's go to 18 seconds and paste them in. And again, let's select all of the key French press F nine to enable busier interpellation. And now, if you play this back, you have this really cool animating shape layer kind of mesmerizing. Now there's a huge amount to shapeless and cool stuff you can do with them and encourage you to this experiment and try everything out there so much cool stuff you can do. The last thing I want to show you, though, is the repeater effect. So let's re select our shape up at the top under acts. Let's open this up and let's at a repeater effect. The repeater effect essentially allows you to repeat and animate and scale and rotate off those copies like a trail of shapes coming from a single shape on your layer. For that in the layer window, let's open up the repeater effect that we've just added. I need to find how many copies you want to act. Let's say I want to add six copies. You can also offset these shapes to animate them, kind of moving about the screen, kind of like a snakes or Caterpillar style effect. That's make sure I reset. This offset to zero, and let's bring up the transform options for the repeater. This defines the changes that are applied to each new copy off this shape. Right now, the only property that has a value is the position which defines 100 pixels in the X direction, which is why every new copy off our shape is moved 100 pixels over to the right. If I now bring down this scale, for example, let's move this a little bit smaller. What happens is that every copy off our shape is 83% off its origin. So it's getting smaller and smaller towards the tail end, kind of create some really funky effects. You can also rotate it so every copy is rotated. Round obviously can animate this to kind of create a really, really interesting and organic looking effect you can define. You pass it easy, give fade out the tail if you wanted to, so it kind of gets more transparent to the end or at the beginning. You can also change the anchor point if you wanted to. There's all sorts of cool things that you can do. And again, you can obviously animate these in any way that you want. Now the last thing. Let's like our shape that's come up into ad. And let's add one more effect. Let's at a twist effect. Let's open up the twist effect not to bring up this angle to really kind of twist our entire shape with all of its copies. So we created this really cool, swirly effect, and the cool thing is, have a look. What happens now. It's because our shape still changes, right? We've animated the packer and blow defect, so that gets rippled through all of the copies and all of the effects on the shape, you can create some really tribute stuff just for fun. Let's animate the angle off this twist effect as well. Let's enable key frames and let's start at zero. Let's say at about four, I want to have an angle off. Maybe about 200 or something. Let's go. Maybe to eight seconds. Maybe I want that to be back at zero, then go back a little bit. And maybe I want to twist the other way. Couple of hundreds. And again, let's just select the more press F nine to enable busier interpellation. And now who want to play this back? You have a really cool, organic looking, trippy animation created with absolutely nothing but shay players. While she plans may seem simple on the surface there so much you could do with them. You can color them in. You can reshape them. You could twist them. You can animate them. You can repeat them. They're really great for creating some really interesting motion graphics, So dig into them, experiment and just have some fun
14. Track Mattes: and I'm tired filling up in up all night cause water. This won't stop partying, but then again, maybe he's just excited that in this lesson, we're going to be talking about track mats. Track mats allow you to define the opacity or transparency of one layer using another. This opens up the possibility to create some really exciting visual effects because it allows you to stamp out and image or shapes or text out off another layer. But party must go on, I guess so. Let's jump into adobe after effects and start working with shrapnel that's beckon adobe after effects and let stand out with an empty project. Let's import some footage and under the course materials under the video, you will find a togias sleeping dot mp four and a water in the discordant on before. So let's bring those two clips into the project, and that's grabbed that Toby is steeping and before and drag it onto the new composition I can, and it's just a small clip off me in bed, you know, just trying to get some sleep. Let's drag the Walter in the disco, clip into that composition and place it right on top, and this is just a clip of Walder showing off his well. IM moves. Now, if you want to blend thes two clips together somehow and superimposed, Um, we'd have various different options for one in the mold column within your layers and again . If you can't see this more con, come down to the bottom here and click toggle switches and moats to make sure you see the MoD column. You could change the water in the disco, Let's say, from normal over to screen, for example, she come to superimposed Um, you can also leave the mode on normal press T maybe. Let's lower the capacity counters, blend them together that way into something a little bit more trippy. But that is all pretty basic. Obviously, we've also learned that you can now simply use masks so you can take the pencil. Make sure that the water and the disk a layer is selected and destroyed. Mosque around Walter. Then you could expand the mouse properties and kind of just feather that mask out a little bit. And again, you kind of have a superimposed version off water. You can't take the top Landers dragon over a little bit of swells in kind of replaces the teddy bear, but again, that's nothing really special. Let's delete the mask again, and let's talk about Schrag mats. Now. Treatments allow you to define the opacity or one layer using another layer in order to demonstrate this. Let's come up. Select the text tool, and that's time some texts on a word to type is party. Let me drag this over a little bit so you can see that Texas a huge block of text of excuse show card Gothic. But again, this pick any phone you want us. Make this fairly big and make sure that this text layer sits on top off the water in the disco clip because the track matte needs to sit directly above the layer that it effects. So he has this big party text end on the layer next to the Mod column on the right. Inside, you'll find an option for you. Track matte again. Click toggle switches the modes if you can't see this column so you may notice that the party text there, which is at the top of the composition, doesn't have this option because there's no layer above it. There is no way to set a track. Matte, however, on the water in the disc earlier, you have this option for track. Matte. If you pop this open, you have four different options. You can set it to the Alfa Matt, so the transparency off the water in the disc earlier would be defined by the Al father. Transparency off the layer above it was a step party text. You can use the inverse off that the offer inverted. You can also use the Duma, the brightness off of the text layer, which again we're going to get to in a second. Or the inverted brightness luminous refers to brightness is just a fancy term for it. For now, let's us go super simple and simply say, used the Alfa off this text. Now two things happened. The text layer, which is now a check. Matt has become invisible because usually you don't actually want to see track mats if unable to visibility again, essentially just covering up what we're cutting out of the discolor. It doesn't really make sense all that much, so let's hide the visibility again and you'll see this little I can hear this little docked within a square just indicates that this text layer is now a track met. And the other thing that has happened much more importantly, we've now defined the opacity off water in the disco to be the transparency off the text. So we now essentially stemmed the text out off this layer. If you scrap through, you can see the video is actually playing, except that it's transparency is limited to the text above it. The cool thing is that you can actually move, animate your track matte, and they will affect the transparency off the layer below it. So if I select this party layer again, visibility disabled to don't need it and just drag this around, you can see that this layer now essentially defines where, exactly, our water in the disco layer is visible so I can move this text over to the left hand side , come to the beginning of my composition, press P to reveal the position property enable the stopwatch. Aiken maybe will go forward to about eight seconds, is going to move this across over to the right hand side and you can hold on shift. So does move up or down is gonna move across the screen to the right hand side, select both key friends and press F nine. And now, if you rewind and play this back, you essentially have the text move across and to reveal the water in the disc. Aaliyah as it's playing back, if that's still didn't quite make it clear enough, let's disable the visibility on the togias sleeping layer, and everything is black underneath this party text. But again, if you enable the transparency, grit, and you can see that the water in the disc away is only visible where the layer above it, the track matte is opaque. It has Alfa now, if on the water in the discolor, you change this track matte over from Alpha to Alpha inverted. What's obviously going to happen is that the layer above it will the Senate just be cut out so everything is visible except where the layer above it? The track matte is OPEC has alfa, so this can be very useful if you just want to cut certain pieces based on another layer out of your footage, let's re enable the Toby a sleeping layer underneath and again that will now show through our Walter in the disc a lair, so you can now see me while trying to sleep underneath Walter having a party in order to explore the other two options. Loomer, Matt and Loomer inverted. Let's go a slightly different route because our text is fully wide, so I would kind of behave the same way as Alfa, Matt and Alpha inverted. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete my party text layer and you can see the track. Matte option has now disappeared on water in the disco, and again, it's fully opaque and covering up everything else. Let's create a new solid layer. Let's call this one noise. Make sure just at the very top of the composition. And I believe this only happens in newer versions of Adobe after effects. The water and the disk earlier has essentially remember that it had a track matte, but for now let's changes over to no track matte on the water and the discolor, so the noise layers just a black solid right on the top, covering up everything else. Let's come up into the effects and presets panel, and let's search for the turbulent noise effect. Let's apply the turbulent does affect to our solid layer, and it's just going to generate some well turbulent noise. Let's bring up the contrast by quite a bit, so we get quite harsh, bright and dark areas. I'm also going to expand the transform section and maybe scale this up a fair bit more so that the patches are a little bit more easy to see. And right now, if you scrub through your composition, it's it's really ugly and static. Nothing actually changes, so it looks a little bit boring. So what I'm going to do is go toe animated this evolution property. But let's do something just slightly different, just slightly more advanced outside off the comfort zone that is the beginning area. But again, it's not going to be too scary. Don't worry about it. Simply hold on Ault or option. If you're on a Mac on the keyboard, just hold their key down, then click onto the stopwatch Aiken next to the Evolution property. And this is going to pop open something called the Expression Editor, which gives you access to a huge amount of advanced features in adobe after effects. All you want to do is right here, down at the bottom. You've got this little text editor. You want to just wipe out everything that is in year in simply type time star 50. So we automatically animating the evolution to follow along with the time off our composition. Simply click outside off this little text editor into your timeline. This is going to apply this expression and now, without having to add any key frames. If you scrap through your composition, this noise will animate. And that's why expressions are really great. But again, not going to be part of this course. I just wanted to show you this little trick because it makes it so easy to get this really nice animated noise. Let's collapse this layer again. Let's select our water in the disco layer. And let's change the TrackMan option from none over to Alfa. Yes, Alfa. Well, what happened right now the entire layer is opaque. There's no transparency at all because our noise layer it's re neighbor. The visibility. While it does have dark spots, it's not actually transparent. It's actually just solid black, so it's fully opaque as well. And so the Alfa off This layer, which is absolutely everywhere now controls the A pass ity off the water in the disc a lair , and therefore it's fully OPEC. Off inverted will make the entirely invisible because again, it's just the inverse off the Alfa Trackman option. But what we want to do because our noise again, that's renewable visibility has. He's nice, dark and bright spots. What we want to do is I want to change the track matte on my water in the disc Alaia from Alfa to loom up to the brightness off the layer above it. So let's change this to loom are Matt and now what we have. We have the water in the disc, Alaia visible wherever our noise layer is bright, wherever we have white. In this noise layer, our water and the discolor is actually visible. And because we've animated this noise that changes, we get this strange, undulating pattern happening. You can also change this over to loom inverted, which will do pretty much what you expected to do. It's essentially the inverse off that. So now wherever the noise layer above his dark, our water in the display will be visible. So this allows you to create some really trippy effects. And it does become really useful when you compositing together a whole bunch of different shapes and patterns and textures and stock fortunes and base elements. And all of that needs to get blended. Track mats are hugely powerful because they let you create some effects that you couldn't create with any other tools, and they are used in a whole lot of visual effects. Let's do one last thing just to show you something that looks a little bit more like something that you may use in a movie to create a bit of a trippy effect. Let's delete the noise layer again before we do that. Let's just change the track. Matte from Loomer inverted over to none, too, so we don't remember it. So let's delete the noise layer on top. Let's duplicate this water in the disc earlier and rename this layer to Matt, then come over to your effects and presets panel and search for the hue and saturation effect. Let's apply this effect to the mat layer. Let it drain. All the saturation out of a list has drained this down to zero, so we just get a black and white image. You don't really have to. It just makes it easier to work with, in my opinion. Next, come back into your effects and presets panel and let's search for a curves effect. Let's apply the effect to the mat layer and in this curve is just the color curve. Essentially, what I want to do is on the click and drag at the top end to brighten up the bright parts and then click and drag down in the bottom, entered dark and the dark parts and condo going to create a really contrast, very harsh contrast the image with some bright parts and some black parts. So maybe softness out just a little bit. Just play around a little bit, not going to go into too much detail. What I want to do now that I've got this layer defined here with water in the disco, I'm going to use this as a check Matt on my actual water in the disc, a layer beneath it. So on the water in the disc, a layer which sits underneath your mat layer changed track. Met option from none. All that to Yuma. Now what we've created with create a really trippy effect where Walter is essentially wherever that layer is bright, visible and overlaying are based footage. Now, unfortunately, this seems to be covering up my face a little bit too much. So I'm actually going to change this track. Matte from Loomer to Loomer inverted. This creates a really interesting and trippy effect where only the dark parts off the water . In the disc, Claire actually visible and overlaying the base footage. The key take away. He is really that this is not something that you could do with masks or blend modes or by adjusting the capacity. This is something where you do need track mats, but they're really easy to use their really powerful, and they allow you to create some really interesting of really cool looking visual effects .
15. Adjustment Layers: When you start to work with more complex visual effects and motion graphics, you may find yourself applying the same effect too many different layers in your composition. While this seems practical, this also can be really tedious if you do need to treat your facts because you then have to go through all of the different layers in your composition and make the same adjustments to multiple copies off the same effect to make this job a whole lot easier. Adobe Aftereffects has something called adjustment layers. An adjustment layer is an invisible air that any effect that you apply to it will automatically be applied to all of the last. That's it beneath it. This gives you a powerful tool to apply effects, too, and manage effects on a very large number off layers, new composition. So let's jump into adobe after effects and check out how to work with adjustment layers. Hopefully, you will remember this clip of our three thieving clones. Let's assume we wanted to add some color adjustments to this video to make it stand out a little bit, look a little bit different and be a little more stylized. Now. There are quite a few different ways to solve this problem in adobe after effects, and we are going to get to pre composing and pre compositions a little bit further down the line. For now. Let's just assume we're going to go a fairly not ive approach and start applying some effects to our layers in the effects and presets panel. Under the color correction tap, you'll find a huge amount of different color adjustment effects, and you can use whichever one you want to follow long. It's going to grab the photo filter and apply it to my thieving clones or one and in the effects controls. Under the photo filled, I'm going to push up the density to maybe 50 60% so it gets quiet. Nice and orangey have very warm tone, however. I've only applied this effect toe one layer. So Michael onto and clone three are still really white, so they stand out and you can see them being cut out quite clearly. So let's select the photo field effect Press control, see or command see on a Mac, select the clone tube and pasted with Contrave Select Clone three pasted with Control V and now all layers have the same effect. Apply it. Let's say I'm still not quite happy. I want this to be a little bit more Contrast e So again that's coming to the effects and presets panel. And let's select the brightest and contrast effect again. Sits under color correction. And let's apply that to our thieving clones or one. Let's just bring up the contrast a little bit just to make this stand out of pop a little bit more dramatically and again, the effect is not applied to our second or third clones. Let's selected control, see or command See and let's select even close to you can also hold on shift and select clones two and three Cemal, Tennessee Press control V to paste the effect to both less and now we have a pretty cool, stylized look. So now let's imagine someone comes to your assessment. I don't like that orange so much. Maybe we'll make a blue. So now let's go to our theme and clones. One come into the fold of filter, and any adjustments we make on these effects will also have to make them on our thieving close to and a thieving clones. Three layer. Otherwise, those aren't going to be in sync anymore. So if on my Stephen clones one layer in the photo field effect a change my filter from a warming filter over to, let's say, a cooling filter, I'm gonna have to do the same thing across multiple layers. And if you imagine we have a composition with many, many, many layers managing those effects of constantly copy and pasting them across and adjusting them, it's gonna be a real pain in the butt. Let's under that with Control Z and let's create an adjustment. They instead, to solve this problem for good, simply right. Click intel a window come up to new and let's create a new adjustment layer. Naturally, this layer will be created at the very top. But in case it isn't, just make sure it's at the very top off your composition, and I'm actually going to call this color grading again. Remember to rename less simply press enter on your keyboard, and now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to come onto my clones. One layer could be player two or three as well. They all have the same effects. Take the photo filter and the brightest and contrast effect. Press control X or command axe to cut them out, select my color grading adjustment layer at the top and now paste those effects onto the adjustment layer. Now it looks better, but close. Two and three look a bit weird now because they still also have to four to fill them. Practice, in contrast, effect applied, so that gets applied twice now. So make sure you select your even close to so, like all effects with control A or command A and really does when you thieving close as well. Select all of the effects and to lead them because all effects that you apply to an adjustment layer are automatically applying toe all off the layers that sit beneath it. So the photo filter and the brightness and contrast effect are being applied toe all three clone layers. The great thing is that now, in my color grading adjustment layer, I could make any tweaks that I want. I can make this brighter, stronger I can change the filter to be blue or warming or yellow or anything that I want, and it automatically gets applied toe all off the last. That's it. Beneath it now. This might seem simple, but is actually a huge time saver. If you have more layers. New composition there's nothing wrong with having them above the adjustment layer. Just know that they won't be receiving the effect. So if I drag thieving clones three buff the color grading adjustment layer, it will no longer receive those effects. So let's grab the color grading and drag it back to the top. Now one of the cool things that you can actually do with adjustment layers. And this is what I personally really love about adobe After effects, you can combine the whole bunch of different concepts to create something much more sophisticated. We've talked about track mats. You now know what adjustment layers are, and, yes, you can combine them. Let's grab the text tool and create a new text layer and just type anything that you want. Return to your selection tool. Make sure that this text layer sits above your adjustment layer and now, on the adjustment layer under track, Matte changed his option over from none to Alfa Matt. Now, if I move my text around, you can see that the adjustment layer is actually only applied where the track matte is visible, so we now have a track matte on an adjustment layer that then applies effects to all of the layers underneath it. Now, right now, this might be a little bit hard to see. So in my effects and presets panel, let's come down a little bit and let's grab maybe a colora MMA effect and drop that on our color grading layer. So this is obviously much more in your face. But now if I move my text around, you can see that the effects from my adjustment layer are only applied. When my text, my track matte on that adjustment layer is visible. This unlocks a huge amount of possibilities and creating some really cool visual effects because you can now apply effects to multiple heirs and also control where exactly those effects are being applied.
16. Pre Compositions: compositions are great. No, not those compositions. I mean that great, too. But they don't help us build any visual effects. No, Go on now. This really has gotten awful enough. So far, we've only used compositions for a very simple purpose as container for our visual effects . Now, technically, that is all they are. However, they can be used to solve a variety of different problems when you're building more complex visual effects. For one, they can be used to group together different layers or to reuse elements within and across your compositions. So let's jump into adobe after effects and check out some of the more advanced uses for compositions. Let's return to our thieving clones affected that we created in the masking lesson for this course. And while this effect looks pretty cool already, let's add a little bit mawr magic to it. And by magic, I mean some particles. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some particles floating off the natural back after the first loan, place it on the ground, and I'm going to add particles to the natural back as it's lying on the side of the couch just kind of to indicate that magical transition off the natural back from one clone to the next. For that, let's import another clip into our project and in the course materials you will find in Effects Folder and in the Effects folder, you'll find a natural particles movie clip. So let's bring that into our project and let's drag it into our composition. Now you can drop this writing your composition, and it will get placed at the beginning off your timeline or let's not do that right now. Instead, let's scrap to the position where we want the effect of start, which is right here after the first phone places the natural back on the ground. Let's grab the natural particles movie clip and rather and dropping it into our layer window. Let's drop it into our time. Not that heads. Drop it at the current cursor positions to ride way. We want the actual effect to start. This is going to add the clip at the position. We dropped it off. So, timing wise, this is a whole lot easier. Let me move this a little bit, and it's a little bit hard to see because it sits right over the second clone. So I'm going to zoom in just a little bit, actually dragged this layer down over the natural backswing, kind of check this out a little bit more easily, and that's actually just a really simple particle effect. Let me actually drag this in the line. That's a little bit banner with the natural back. So it's kind of looks like the particles are coming out of the natural back and what's going to time it. So the particles start just after the back has been dropped off. Cool. That actually looks all right. And then the particle stop. When the second clones snatches up that natural back, maybe move him up just a tiny bit. Feel free to justice in any way that you want. Next. Let's change the color off those particles to match the natural back a little bit better. For that, let's come into the effects and presets panel and search for the tinned effect, and you should find the tinned effect under your color correction. So let's just grab that and apply it to the natural particles layer and in the effect settings for the tint effect, Let's does change the map wide to property, and it neither just changed the color to anything you want. Or you can just take this a little color picker or on the right inside and a select the color off the natural back. And I prefer using the color picker because you're more likely to pick the color that matches your actual footage. So let's just pick a fairly light ish red. That's it, OK, And so now the particles are nice and red. And finally, let's selected in the natural particles layer and change the blend mode from normal over to at cool. That's looking pretty nice already. Let's make this a little bit more magical, though, by just adding more particles for that, I'm simply going to reuse my natural particles layer. So let's select the layer press control de or command D on the Mac. To duplicate this layer press s to reveal the scale property and over on the right inside, I'm just going to click under this little chain link. I can hear toe take that. So I'm actually unblinking the width and the height so the width and height will no longer scale uniformly, and I can change them independent on one another. And what I want to do is actually want to change the X scale Tu minus 100. So essentially this, flipping the layer horizontally. So now I have a second copy off my particles that just flipped horizontally And in order to make sure they don't look too matchy actually going toe offset this layer time wise just a little bit. Just that doesn't look too uniform. And maybe I moved the second layer up just a little bit cool. That looks pretty nice. But now let's say you're not quite happy with the color off your particles. Obviously, you can select your natural air, come into the tent effect used to color picker right here to maybe change this over two more off a yellow. But now we only change half the particles because we have a second layer with the same effect that now also needs to be changed. So we're kind of back at the same issue where we were trying to apply the same effect to multiple layers, and this time we cannot solve it with an adjustment layer. The reason we can't solve it with an adjustment layer in this case is because if I create an adjustment layer in my composition and place it at the very top, it's going to apply those effects to every single area, including the footage layers that I have in here. I really just wanted apply a single effect single tent effect to both off these natural layers Together. As a group, you can group together any number of players from your current composition into a new nested composition. That process is called pre composing, so first off, let's remove the tin defect from both of our natural particle air. So let's select one. Delete the tint effect, select the other one and delete the tinned effect. And let's group these two layers together into a new composition. For that, make sure both off those natural particulates are selected. You can come up into the main menu, and under layer, you will find an option to pre compose. You cannot use the shortcut key control shift and see or command shift and see on. A Mac is going to use this menu option, and this is going to pop open the pre composed options. First, you want to give you composition a useful name. Let's call this one natural particles comp, and then you will see two different options. One of them is great out right now, so don't worry about these bonds too much. For now. Just make sure that the option is selected for move. All actually use into the new composition, and that should be your only option because we are pre composing multiple layers. But as I said, I'll get to that in just a minute. And this Ablett is an option in the later versions, off adobe after effects to just the composition duration to actually match the length off those layers. So you get a composition that is exactly as long as those two layers together. I'm going toe antique that simply because that is going to resemble more what you get in earlier versions off adobe after effects. If you have this option, I highly recommend always use it. The reason I'm leaving it off is because I know that some people may not have the latest version of after effects, and I want everyone to follow along in the same way. So let's hit okay, and that has now created a new composition called natural particles comp, which, by the way, if you go to your project panel, you'll find this new natural particles comp right in here because it's it's just the composition, just like your thieving clones composition. It's the same thing. It's just nested inside the thieving clones. So in our Stephen Clones comp, we now have a single layer, which is this nested composition. And if you double click on this composition layer here or in your project panel, it's just click on to it in the time and so it's double click that you'll jump into that composition. So you see, right here you have a new tap free natural particles countries. Now, in that natural particles comp, you can click back to the thieving clones or back to the natural particles comp, and this now contains our two layers. They're still in exactly the same position as they were before. Makes you just move down. Zoom out a tiny bits you can see. So those are our two particle layers. And if you go back to the thieving clones, all this all are particles, except now actually grouped into a single layer, you can disable the visibility together, and now any effects that you apply to this layer essentially being applied to everything that's inside it. So let's jump back to the thieving clones. Select that the natural particles come. Let's apply 18 defect to that. And let's change the map white to property again to liken orangey red. And this will now affect all particles together. Maybe I make this just a little bit more brighter red. It just looks a little bit nicer to me. But again, few free to change this to anything you want. Now, one thing you may have noticed that those particles don't feel quite as right anymore. And the reason that is happening is that even though inside our natural particles come, we have these two particle layers and their blend bonus set to additive in our thieving close composition, the natural particles complainers blend mode is actually set to normal. So let's change the blend mode off this layer over to at, and our partners are nice and bright again. Also, now that all of our particles are grouped together in this new company, we comply other effects. So let's apply a stylized glow effect to this layer. Let's tweak the settings a little bit, push out the radius, maybe make it a little more tens. A swell just to add a little bit more flair, a little bit more energy to these particles. Feel free to tweet this in any way that you want. For now, let's come back to those pre composed options and go through them in a little bit more detail. Let's jump into the natural particles comp simply by double clicking on it. And in here you will have your to natural particles. Lay us and let's come into the effects and presets panel. Search for the tin defect. And let's apply the color correction to defect to just one of those particle layers. Let's change the map. Why? To property to anything you want. I'm just going to go with a little bit off blue. Let me disable the visibility on the other natural particles layer as well. I really just want to go over a few off those options for pre composing. Now, if I open up the position and the scale off this natural particles layer, you will see that we've moved this layer around right. It's not straight in the middle of our composition. We've scaled this to flip it horizontally as well, and now we've got a tent effect on it. If you select this one layer and you come up into layer in select pre compose again, we can create a new composition and nest this single layer in that new composition. Let's just call this one test comp, and now you should have both options enabled. You can say to either leave all attributes in the natural particles comp, or you can choose to move all attributes into the new composition. What this means is, if you select to leave all attributes in natural particles comp so remember this layer. Every pre composing has been positioned and scaled. It's got an effect on it. If you leave all attributes in the natural particles comp, it will create a new composition with this layer. But leave the changes to position scale, anti effect in here. It won't actually move those effects into that composition. So to try that out, let's simply hit okay with leave. All attributes in natural particles come and well, you now have a new composition, and sure enough, if you jump into test come by double clicking onto it, you find your natural particles, but on this layer there is no effect. Also the position and scale with its 100 100. And it sits exactly in the middle off your composition, so no transforms have been applied to this late at all. However, in you natural particles come on. This test complain you still have that tint effect. And if you open up the position at the scale, those changes to position and scale have actually been applied to this new composition. So it essentially group that layer into a new composition, so you can do whatever you want within that new test come. But all of those transformations, all of the effects, haven't been moved into the new composition. Let's undo that with Control Z or Command Z. And again, let's recompose this layer with control shift and see or command shift and see. And I highly recommend you get used to those shortcuts. They just make life so much easier again, let's call this test comp, And this time let's choose to move all attributes into the new composition. Let's hit. Okay? And now our test come itself is positioned right in the centre. Also, if you open up the position and the scale, you can see that that's just the default. And there's no tint effect on this composition forever. If he now dig into this test, come on this natural particle layer you will find it has the tent effect, and it has to change its position in scale. So all of those attributes the scale transforms the position, and the effects have been moved into this new composition. So that is what that option is for. And those options are really important to understand, because sometimes you want to keep all of those effects up in the parent composition. Quite often, you just want to nest them down in the child composition. Let's return to the natural particles. Come and undo that. Let's delete the tint effect as well re enable the visibility off the other than natural particles layers. So we're back to where we started. And now if you select all layers with control A or command A and pre composed those control shift and see well, we can create any composition with those two layers group together like we did before, and the reason the option to leave on attributes in your naturopath become is disabled is because you have more than a single their selective. There is no way to group those together but leave. All of the effects apply because you end up with a single air rather than multiples. So that's why if you pre compose multiple s, he will not have the options to leave. Attributes in the natural particles come and, quite frankly, moving on. Attributes into the new composition is 99.999% of the time. Exactly what you want. Let's not do that, However. Let's return to our thieving clones comp, and let's look at the second reason pre composing the layers is awesome. That zoom back out and we have this cool little particle effect here, and unfortunately, this layer is actually really long, and for the most part it's entirely empty. If you double click into it up until we reach these particle effects, there's literally nothing on either side of it. So one of the things I personally, really like to do like to come in to the very beginning here, where the particle effects start, jump back up to my thieving clones and you'll see the Tomlin indicator is exactly at the right point, and that is going to drag this side corner in. You can hold down shift to kind of snap it to where the time not indicate this. Let's move forward a little bit, too. Where the particle effect, yes, and it and you can either drag this end in, or you compress fault and right square bracket with the layer selected to snap it to the point. This is kind of marks that this is the part off that layer that is actually visible. Just makes it a bit easier to deal with, because what I'm going to do is I'm now going to duplicate my natural particles comp, and I'm going to move this effect over to where the second clone places the natural back on the corner, off the couch. So let's move this over because I know the effect starts right about here. Let's drag this up. Let's scale this down a little bit, a swell, because the natural back us a little bit further away. So essentially we have a second particle effect occurring on the natural bag right there. Maybe just a little bit bigger. Cool. So we have one particle effect right here after the 1st 1 places it and another part of effect right about there. Now here's the other great thing off pre composing layers to form groups. Those groups are reusable both off these natural particles. Calm players refer to the same composition, so if you change this content off this composition, it will affect both effects. It will affect the first particle effect as well as the 2nd 1 because both of those layers refer to the same composition. Let's do that now and jump into the natural particles calm. Let's go back a little bit. Let's create a new adjustment layer come into the effects and presets panel. And let's search for the turbulent to displace effect that's applied to that adjustment layer. And obviously make sure the adjustment layer sits at the very top of few composition. So effects all of the particle layers underneath it. Let's shrink down the size to maybe around 20 and the amount can probably be about 50. So what? We have to kind of have this little weaving, a distortion effect happening on our particles and the other thing I do just to vary it a little bit. I might actually apply a glow effect to only one off these layers, just so that one set off. These particles are slightly bigger and slightly more tense than the other one. So let's select a glow effect and apply a stylized glow to just one off those particle layers. Mayor pushed of radius up a little bit more intensity as well, so we can't just creating two separate groups off particles one a bit more intense. The other ones are just a little bit more muted. This kind of answer little more variants into this effect. And now, if I return to my thieving clones, I can see that those changes have been applied to the first particle effect and to the 2nd 1 So pre composing the layers and creating nested compositions is great for grouping layers together and managing effects across all of those layers, as well as creating little sets, little reusable elements off visual effect pieces that you can then use across your entire project. You can issue compositions as deep as you want to. The only thing you won't be able to do is create a circular nesting so I wouldn't be able to bring the thieving clones come into the natural particles. Come because then the natural particle comfort depend on the thieving clones comp, which depends on the natural particles compound that just doesn't work. But other than that, you ca nest any layers in anywhere that you want, leave the effects that the parent moved them down, Nested s deepest. You want to, and this unlocks real potential to create some really intricate and really, really cool looking visual effects.
17. Parenting: Fortunately, there's hopefully very few sleepless nights and no diaper changes required when parenting in Adobe after effects. Parenting simply refers to the technique of linking one layer to another in terms of transform. That is its position, scale and rotation moving in. Animating the parent will automatically move inanimate all of its Children relative to the parent. Sounds easy enough. Which Horace Let's jump into adobe after effects and build ourselves a small and horrendously inaccurate model of our solar system. We once again going to start with an empty project and let's start out by importing all of the images that we need for this lesson in the course material. Under the images fuller, you'll find a whole bunch of different planets, so select all of those, as well as to which had nebula. You don't need to select the race nail unless you want to have a snail in space. Let's import everything into our project. Grab the Witch Head Nebula image and drag it onto the new composition. ICANN to create a new composition. Make sure this composition is around about 10 to 20 seconds long, so we have plenty of space for our animation and now come up in the public panel, grab the sun and drop the image off the sun right on top off your nebula. I want to scale the sun down just a little bit in again. Remember to hold down shift to scale this layer uniformly and yes, I know the sun doesn't really belong into the Witch Head Nebula, but as I said, we're not trying in any way to create anything that is astronomically correct, which is trying to have some fun creating some cool animation and learning about parenting . Now, right now, everything is very static, so let's add a little bit off rotation to the sun. For that, select the son lay on press are to reveal the rotation property, and you can now key frame this to rotate the sun for the length off your composition. However, for continues animation, it's much easier to add a simple expression and again, no stress. We've done this before in the track mats to Charles when we created the animated noise, Simply hold down or Tony keyboard or option. If you're on a Mac and click on the set of Stopwatch Icon next to the rotation property this is going to pop open a little text editor, the expression edit tied in here. Make sure you select everything and clear everything out and simply type Time stopped 20. And now, if you look out of the expression editor and scrapped through composition, the sun will continuously rotate without any key frames. Now let's at the first planet into our fake solar system. And let's start out with Venus. So grab Venus and drop it at the top off your layers into your composition. It's probably a little bit too big up. Really want this to be a libit smaller than the sun, and let's move this over to the right hand side and again, we do want Venus to continuously rotate, so select the layer. Press Arab to reveal the rotation property. Hold down all or option and click onto the little stopwatch icon. And let's say I want to rotate Venus just a little bit quicker than the sun. So I'm going to type Time Star 30. Click outside of the expression editor, and now, if I scraped through, I can see the Venus and Sun wrote it. Now, however, we need Venus to rotate around the sun as well us around itself. For that, your first instinct might be to come to the beginning off your composition, reveal the position property on Venus and at a key frame. Maybe we will go to two seconds. Movie nous to the bottom. Let's go to four seconds moving us over to the left hand side. Go to six seconds, movie nous to the top and go to eight seconds and then moving us down to the right hand side. But if you play this back, it actually looks kind of clunky and really weird, and it just doesn't really work now, one of the things you can actually do with key friends and I haven't touched on that yet. If he's select all few key frames after effects can show you the path that this object is going to move in order to see this motion path, as it's called, simply come up into your preferences under edit preferences and then go to display. And in the display tap, you will have options to reveal the motion path so I could say, revealing the motion path for all key frames. It okay, and now with these key friends selected hope. You can see if there's a little path drawn right now that shows me how this object is going to move now. It's a little bit hard to see, but all of my path points actually have these busier handles that I can activate by clicking on these points. And this allows me to kind of smoothed out this path and drag this out so it's not could not so stiff. So it kind of gets a little bit more for around it movement and then kind of fake. Venus is going around the sun and, you know, somewhat off a circle, so that's kind off looking a little bit more natural. But it's really just It's just clanky, right? It doesn't continue. You'd have to add more and more key frames. It does doesn't really work very well. So let's come to the beginning off the composition and disable the key frames on the position property. What we can do instead much easier weaken simply parent Venus to the some. Now it's important to note that the sun itself is a lay on the anchor point for the sun is right in the centre off the some If you now take Venus and over on the right inside, you'll find this column for parent. Right now, Venus parent is set to numb. However, you can use this little too early, this little pick whip Aiken. Click on that and drag. That gives you something to connect this layer two. And let's select the sun So we're going to parent the V's layer to the sun, So let go over the some and you'll see the sort of dropped down here changed to the sun. You can also just use this drop down to select a parent. But now what will happen if I scrub through my composition? Whoa, Can you see how Venus automatically follows the movement off this some by parenting these delays? Together, we now essentially bound Venus is transform, including positions scaling rotation to the position scale invitation off its parent off the sun. So if I now move the sun, I will move Venus. If I scale the sun up or down, I will scale up and down Venus. And obviously, if the sun rotates Venus were road it along with it. It is important to note that all transforms all scales and all rotation happens around the anchor point off the parent off the sun, so Venus will move around the center point of the sun. It will scale outwards from that center point and remove along with the center point off the sun. Let's bring the scale off the sun up again a little bit, so it's not quite that tiny, and it is important to know that you can still freely move Venus around to anywhere that you want. Then, if you scrap through, it'll simply transform relative to its parent from its new position. So if I go back to the beginning, moving this back to the right hand side and start scrubbing through, it just follows along. If a movie is anywhere else, I can scale it down or up in any way again. It will simply fall along with everything that happens with its parent. Let's bring it back into its original spot and let's bring in the earth. So grab the Earth image and drop that at the top off your composition. And again, let's just say this is a little bit smaller, then the sun may well make this approximately the size off. Venus and I want to move this over a little bit more to the left, because when the earth swings around, I don't wanted to collide with Venus. So let's bring this over a little bit to the left hand side. And let's also bring in the moon. Now the moon obviously should not be bigger than Earth, so let's scale this down by quite a bit in place this somewhere on the edge off Earth and now select the Earth Press are two real irritation because I do want the Earth to again rotate around itself. Pull down old option. Click on the rotation property and let's have er, throat head the other way. So let's type in Time star minus 25. Click out of off the expression editor and now earthly. Rotate anti clockwise. Now let's add some rotation to the moon. Select the moon press are hold on. Hold an option again. Click onto that stop, which I come this time. It's going to make it rotate very slowly, So enter Time star 10 and obviously few pre to vary this in any way that you want. So now we have the moon rotated just very slowly and again, let's link the moon to the earth. So the moon rotates around the center off the earth. For that selecting Malaya and either pick whip the Earth or, in this drop down here, simply changed this from none over to Earth. So when I'll specifying the Earth as the parent off the moon. And now if you scrap through the moon will rotate around the Earth prequel now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to parent the Earth to the sun because he could stagger. You can kind of higher, actively build entire structures off parents to their Children, and all of those transforms will propagate correctly. So let's come out of the earth layer over on the right inside. Take that pick, whip Aiken, and let's select the sun to parent the Earth to the some And now that is pretty cool. We've got the Earth kind of moving out off balance a little bit. So what I might actually want to do Let's bring the earth closer just a little bit. So we kind of see both of the Middle East. So now you've got the Earth and Venus rotating around the sun and the moon rotating around the earth. Let me quickly collapse all of Malaysia's. And because of this hierarchy that we've set up moon, being parented to the Earth means that any change to the earth will also be applied to the moon and because the earth, in turn, is parented to the sun instead. If I move the sun, I'm going to move all of the planets. Parenting is really useful if you want to have one layer, follow another, which you tend to do in motion tracking a lot, which again is probably something for another two Taurus years altogether. But you can also just use it to affect one layer with another, set up little animation hierarchies and create all sorts of cool effects. And, best of all, parenting is actually super super simple.
18. Null Objects: Everyone loves a bit of nothing, right? Then you're going to love null objects because that's essentially what they are. Nothing. You can create them like any other layer, and it'll be after effects, but they're not actually visible when rendered, so it makes absolutely no sense to apply any sort of visual effects. To them, however, now objects. I extremely useful because they still have a position, scale and irritation and as such can be used to hold tracking data or have non visual effects apply to them like expression controls. Two topics were not really going to get into too much depth in this course, but you can also use them to control animations by using them as parents for other layers in your composition. In short, these little guys make your life a whole lot easier when you're building up more complex visual effects or motion graphics. Oh, whoa, Off off, Off you go. All right, All right. Let's jump into adobe after effects and check out what we can do with them. Let's revisit our horrendously inaccurate set up for the solar system from the last lesson . If you remember, we had a bunch of planets set up. So we had Earth and Venus rotating around the sun, the moon rotating around the Earth and all of the planets kind of rotating around themselves. Now let's say that I still want all more planets to rotate around the sun. But I don't want the sun itself to rotate, however, because both Venus and Earth are parented to the sun. If I stop the sun from rotating, those planets will stop rotating as well. A dirty work around would be to simply duplicate your son layer. Let's rename this layer to static. Some press are to reveal the rotation. Open up this little twirly so we can see the expression and that simply click onto this expression in your timeline window and just delete everything that's in there to remove this expression. Then let's hide the original son. And if you know, scrap through, the planets are still rotating, essentially rotating around this invisible son layer, and we just placed a static son right on top. This, however, may seem a little bit up because we've essentially used an image layer that we've hidden. So there wasn't really a point, this being an image, and this is exactly where now objects become useful. Let's create a new nail object, and for that simply right, click into your layer window, come up into new and create a new null object. Let's drag this null object to the very top, and you can see this little square here in your preview window. What I might do, I might temporarily solo this now. Objectives. So that's all we see. And I want to disable the transparency grid so it's on black. This is what anal object looks like. It's essentially just a marker and the reason it has to sell the boxes because a number object while it's invisible, it still has a position. It has an anchor. It has a scale, and it actually has a rotation. So it still has all of the basic transform properties that layer has, but it just has nothing visible associated to it. Let's undo all of that unsold this layer and let's rename this one to some center. It's placed is no object right in the center of the sun, and I'm actually placing this corner here. I hope you can see this. There's this little anchor point in the corner. I wanna make sure that this corner this is the actual position off the nal objects. It's right in the centre, off the sun. Zoom out a little bit and now I'm going to make that null object rotate. So with the null object, selected press are two real irritation. And again, another object has all of those properties old. Click onto the stopwatch Aiken to add a little expression to this rotation. And again, I'm just going to type time star, maybe 10. Maybe this. Have this rotate fairly slowly. And now the scripture. You should see that this null object here that we've places actually rotating. Now let's delete our original son the rotating hidden version that we've used to parent the Earth and the Venus, too. If you delete this layer right now, this is still the parent for the Earth and the Venus over here on the right hand side, keep an eye on these two boxes. If I delete the sun, those two boxes will become empty because the Earth and Venus are now no longer parented to anything. If you scrap through, sure enough, they stopped rotating around the sun. They just rotate around themselves Now, however, we've got this non object placed right on top of the sun so we can now use this est apparent. In order to do that, simply select the Earth and the Venus. I'm holding out shift to select multiple ass, come over to the right inside the money they used to pick rip off either off those layers or used to drop down and select the sun center. No object. Now, both off those layers Earth and Venus, apparently to this null object which is by nature invisible. And if you scrap through your composition, you now have those two planets rotate around the sun again. Obviously because the Earth and the Venus Anil parented to this null object. If you move this son that won't actually affect the rotation point off the earth and the means because they're rotating around this null object here. So let's place the sun right back in the send off the null object. So that kind of makes sense again. And the next thing I'm going to do is right now you've got the moon rotating around the earth. But the speed off the rotation off the moon around the earth is again Title irritation off the Earth. We can unlinked those rotations by inserting an object between the rotation of the earth and the rotation off the moon around it, in order to let let's create yet another null object. Let's move this to the very top. Doesn't really matter. Let's call this one earth center and thats grab it and drag it to the center off the earth right about here. And let's parent is null object to the earth because I want this now object to always follow along with the earth. S T Earth is spinning around the sun, so selected the Earth center over on the right inside. Let's not use the pick whip This time. Let's use this drop down. So just pop this open and change this over to the earth. So now the null object essentially just follows along with the earth. But again, the number objects rotation is still bound to the earth, so it's still kind of looks very much the same. Let's add some independent rotation to this none object itself. For that reveal the rotation property on the Earth Sentinel object, ault or option. Click onto that stopwatch Aiken, Maybe this time I'm going to go with Time Star, maybe minus 15. Click outside of the expression editor and now you have this knowledge rotate a little bit differently to the Earth itself. Maybe I'll actually rotate this forward so it's kind of against the grain. It's clockwise. While the earth spins counterclockwise, car looks a little bit more natural. And now what I actually want to do is I want to link the moon to this null object to the rotation off this now object that is parented to the earth. Can you see how we're building this really long, chain off parenting dependencies? But we're using now objects where it makes sense, right? Obviously, you could use any off the visible layers in place of this null object. But because you don't actually need to see anything for creating this link between animations and not objects makes a whole lot more sense. So let's select the moon, Take that picked up I can on the Malaya and let's selected the Earth Center. So now the moon will actually be aligned to the rotation off this no object And if you strapped your composition now that looks so much more natural. Can you see how the moon is spinning around the earth? The earth is spinning counterclockwise, so it's opposite. But the rotation off the moon is no longer bound to the rotation of the earth, and it just looks a whole lot more natural. Now, just in case you're curious, you can apply effects to numb objects so you can come into your effects and presets. Panel. Let's scrap all the way down to our stylized tap. Let's bring this open that supply a glow effect that's applied to the Earth Center. Now object, and you can do whatever you want in here because the effect of supply to annul object, it won't make any difference because the null object itself is invisible Now you may wonder what's the point of even allowing effects to be applied to null objects in the first place ? Then, well, let's delete the glow effect and come up in the effects and process panel. And there's a special category of effects called expression controls. If you bring this open, there's options for three D point angles, checkerboard colors, layers point in slider controls, and these are actually effects so you can apply them to another object. So let's drag this onto the Earth Center. But they're actually just effect that give you you. I control so you can have a color control on this layer, which is essentially a color selector. You can have point controls or other controls on this null object, and then you can tie these you I elements to control other effects in your composition. However, this is a fairly advanced topics. I'm not going to touch on that. He just wanted to show you there are certain effects that do make sense to be applied to a non visible air because they don't actually have any effect visually on that layer there just for you. I controls, and those ones are usually start in another object, or maybe even a hidden solid layer. But this is a little bit outside of the scope of this course, so let's to select all of the effects with control or command and a and then press the delete key to delete them. It's all or option and Ford slash to zoom back out and let's collapse all of our layers. So now we have this really nice galaxy set up also know that while right now you can actually see the outlines off these now objects, they won't actually get rendered, so you won't get squares when you're rendering this out. If you concerned, you can always hide the visibility on those nail objects, but they will not actually be rendered the invisible elements. And the only reason that you're seeing these little rectangles where the knell objects as just well so that you know where they are, not objects are really useful to control your animation, especially when using parenting. They're also really useful for some more advanced concepts, such as using expression controls or motion tracking, which I'm going to be part of this course. If you're really curious, though, you can just go and check out my YouTube channel have to Charles that cover expression, controls and motion tracking and a whole lot more on their. For now, just know that no objects are there. They're invisible, but they're really useful to control your layers and build up some really complex animations.
19. Exercise: Morph Effect Setup: all right, give yourself a pat on the back. You've made it through all of the basics for Adobe after effects. Now we could end the course here, but what kind of a lackluster ending would that be? Instead, let's use our new knowledge to create a simple but cool looking morph effect in adobe after effects. I hope that this will help cement your knowledge and give you an idea of what you cannot do with all of the newly acquired skills. But now, before this grass grows past my line of vision, let's jump right into it. He we are in an empty brandy project. And let's first important footage that we need to create the morph effect in your course materials. Under the video Fall A, you will find two clips one called Water Ferry Transformation Not and Before and Water Ferry Transformation. Dash togias dot mp for Let's import those two clips into our project and because I already know we're going to be using a lot of glow and shine and high contrast effect for the more effect, I'm going to bump my channel depth up from eight bits per channel 2 32 just so that all of the Grady inside the glow effects will look a little bit nicer. And now let's grab the water transformation dot mp for the one without a dash. Togias. Let's drop this onto the new composition. Aiken. Let's check this out. And this is just a very simple clip off water coming into the shot with his weird ferry stick, casting a spell on himself and transforming himself. This is where we will create the actual transform or more effect. And then, while this clip ends with him failing and just walking off the screen, all set. But we're going to make him a bit happy and actually do the transformation effect. Then let's grab the second clip. Water transformation Desh Toby A. Stop and before and drop that into the same composition so we can check it out. And this is the second Clipper shot from the same location. So essentially pretending to come in from their transformation, Self kind of started out doing the same movement as Walter did standing there. But then, if you imagine me just morphing in wherever water cast a spell, I might be pretty confused. So that's exactly what I'm doing is giving a bit of a well, what the hell, kind off look. So we're going to kind of blend over to me right here to finish off. The more perfect, you will note that this clip actually includes two takes, and you can use either one for this. I'm probably going to use the 1st 1 first. Let's prepare a little bit and aligned these two clips. Time wise, we want to be able to cut over from water, casting a spell on himself over me, standing there and getting all confused. Now, if you look at these two clips, there are two issues that immediately jump out at me. For one, the camera is moving a little bit, so those two clips don't actually cut over cleanly. However, we can fix this up quite easily by selecting the top layer on. Let's just move it over to the right, maybe 34 pixels. Four pixels actually seems to be right, so that you just don't notice the movement off the camera anymore, and it's not 100% but it should be good enough for this effect. Now. The second issue is a little bit harder to deal with, and that is, if you look at exactly where Walter standing and where I'm standing. I'm not standing in exactly the same spot, a kind of move backwards, a little bit. And ideally, I would recommend in the situation like this. If you can simply reshoot reform, you're seen with the actor in the exact same spot. It's going to save you a whole lot off time and hassle and effort to try to fix this as an effect, but for the purpose off learning how to deal with such situations because they are going to come up whether you want them or not, we're going to deal with this, and the way we're going to deal with this is a little bit with visual forgery, essentially going to add a whole bunch of particles and glow and shine and other effects on top off this during them off so that you can't really see that there's a bit of movement happening just underneath it, and it's just not as obvious that there is a liberal movement now. It won't be perfect, but it should be good enough, so it's going to kind of fudge over that so just be aware of that. Now let's align these two layers time wise for that, let's select the top layer the one off Togias Presti to review the opacity lets us bring this down to maybe 50%. And now all I want to do right here. What what has kind off wetting that ferry stick onto his head? Wanna grab the top? Wanted aligned that so that I'm doing the exact same thing on my Toby a slayer and then they kind of just smile, smile, smile and probably by roundabout. Here's where definitely would want to be cut over. So right here I can end my Walter layer again. You can just drag the end in or press fault or option and right square bracket to trim the end off the water layer. And obviously, let's bring the capacity of the top layer back up to 100%. So somewhere here we want to cut over from Walter to me. But obviously we want to spice this up with some glows and particles just to make this look like an actual morph effect. This this looks a little bit more interesting now, the easiest way you could create anything like a more perfect. It's essentially just animated capacity off the Toby's layer on top to kind of come in, so reveal the capacity by pressing tea and able stopwatch icon and started out at 0%. So we're starting out with Walter. Then maybe let's go forward. 10 or frames needs press page down for that 123456789 10 and a jack capacity up to hundreds of villages, cross fading from one to the next, which you know is not the worst. But it's not a great effect, either. Let's disable the key frames for the opacity property. That's Jack that back up 200. And let's extend the Toby's layer to maybe write the Walter kind of hits himself on the head with their fairy stick, so that at that point, up until maybe about here, we've got time to kind off fade those two layers across and what we now actually need to do because these ones are fully solid layers. I can't apply effects just to togias the way it is. We essentially need to use masks or some way to extract my shape as well as Walter shape from these two layers so we can apply things like glow effects or shine effects and kind of blend between those two layers a little bit more organically, and there is no super easy way to do this. What, We're going to do this. We're going to have to use something called rotoscoping, and that's going to be the topic off our next lesson.
20. Exercise: Morph Effect Rotoscoping: Ah, rotoscoping. Some hate it. Some love it. Rotoscoping refers to the act off painting over or outlining visual element in your footage , usually frame by frame for the purpose of extracting it from that footage. Ever seen the movie where it's all black and white and only a single flower or a single dresses still colored? That's usually done using rotoscoping. We are going to use rotoscoping to extract water and myself from the footage for the few crucial frames during the transition in the morph effect. This will allow us to ensure that the transition is seamless and to apply effects such as glower distortion only to Walter and myself without affecting the rest off the footage. Rotoscoping is very simple, but it can be very time consuming. So without any more time to lose that stump into, it'll be after facts and get rotoscoping. There's actually quite a number of different ways that you could do rotoscoping in adobe after effects, but it does depend a little bit on which version you have. If you have after effects CS five and above. Up in the tuba, you'll actually find something called the Rodeo Brush Tool, which does make rotoscoping a whole lot easier, and again, it's a bit more often intermediate topic. But I do have something Charles on my YouTube channel. If you do want to check that out for free or another option with Yulia selected under intimation, you'll find something called Mocha i E, which is for motion tracking. But you can also use it for rotoscoping again, kind of out of the scope of this course, but also again, I do have some two trials for that for free on my YouTube channel. So go check that out if you want to. Now, because all we've learned in this course so far because it is for absolute beginners, is masking. And, yes, you can use masks for rotoscoping. It's probably not the ideal tool for the job, but for simplicity and only using the skills we've learned in this course to create a special effects. Let's wrote a scope using masks now because I want to create this transition from Walter over to me during this period. This is probably the section where I need to wrote a scope myself. S villas, Walter, out from our footage layers. So I have separately, us which just contained Walter in just his body outline, as well as a layer that only contains me and my body's outline. Because this will then give me the ability to add glow effects to our bodies or at shine only to certain elements and create that really intricate morph effect. Because right now, if applied any glow effect to this layer, it would apply to absolutely everything, including all the background and the rest of the footage. So we do need to cut ourselves out first. So let's that out. By rotoscoping Togias. For that, let's take the Walter Transformation Desh Togias Land duplicated with control de I'm not rename this layer with Enter to Togias Roto and I probably don't need the full duration. So probably about here, where I want the transition to be pretty much complete. I can actually just cut off this layer here so short and so this is really the section where I want to roda scope. So let's go to the very beginning and I do hold down shift to kind of snap to the beginning off this layer. Let's zoom in, and now we need to create masks. You can create a single mask for the entire outline and the dusky frame that frame by frame . Or, you know, every five or however many frames you need to kind of follow along with movement. But that can be really, really clunky and just not work very well. I recommend using multiple masks for the different parts of the body because as I move, my legs moved different from my upper body. My arm moves differently. My, you know my head moves differently. And creating separate masks for all of those body parts will just make road discovering a little bit easier. So let's grab the pen tool. Make sure the togias roto layer is selected. Assume in here. Let's create a mask for my right leg. Obviously, I'm going to speed this footage up a fair bit of so you don't have to sit through and watch me painlessly click all of these points off the mask. You're going to have all of that fun anyways, if you doing at the exact same way, and then just kind of finish it off over my lower tummy section here. Let's expand the Tobias, wrote Alaia, or just press them to real the masks. I was going to pull this up a little bit. You can actually rename masks a swell, which is actually really useful. So let's rename Mask one and call this right leg and let's unable to stopwatch icon for the mosque path. Let's zoom in on the timeline just a little bit. You could do that by holding down all or option and scrolling on your mouse wheel to second . See Mikey friends a little bit better. Let's go to the very end. And obviously this mosque is now off. It doesn't really align with the aside off my leg or yet the bottom. It looks OK, but now what I want to do is I sense you want to reshape this mosque to kind off include my leg as clean as I can. So it is starting to create this animation off this mask to follow my leg. Fortunately, my foot is moving and that looks all right. Let's move in a little bit, too. Maybe around about here, try to find spots as far between other key friends s you can where the mosque is the most off and you can actually square select a whole bunch off points as well. It's rather clicking them all individually. If you in point selection mode already, you can actually just click and drag a big outline around all of the points that you want to move. It kind of grab and drag a whole bunch off them simultaneously, which doesn't make a whole lot easier. So right here, for example, a man. I wanna have all of these a skeptic and square select nous Pull this in a little bit. You don't have to be perfect with this because there's gonna be so much glow and shine and other effects overlaying it doesn't really need to be perfect, but the more accurate you wrote a scoping the more detailed control you do have over your final effects So it doesn't pay to spend a little bit of time on this. Cool. Let's scrap forward a little bit. Yeah, that's going off again. And it really is just a matter off going through, finding all of the points where the mosques are off and just kind of dragging this on to kind of follow the shape s closely s you can and it really now assistant exercise of kind of scrubbing through your footage, finding all of the spots where that mask is off and realigning it as best as you can. Now, obviously, I'm going to speed this footage up. Otherwise you're going to just have to watch me do this forever. And, yes, masks are definitely not the most convenient way in adobe after effects to do Rhoda scoping the roto brush tool or mocha a lot more convenient. And I do encourage you to check out my YouTube channel. If you want to learn how to use them, they'll just make this whole process are a whole lot less painful. Just a few pointers that sometimes you may find that you mosque isn't actually accurate enough to kind of capture what you're trying to Roda scopes around here. Feel like I could use another point of gonna bump that out. And you can always come back to the pen tool or press G on your keyboard and click on an existing edge to just at a point to that president to return to this lecture mode. So account is inserted another point into this mask so you can just can't, you know, detail. Autumn asks whenever you need to. So let's just keep scrubbing through this and adjusting this mosque cool. And I would say that actually looking All right, let's solo this layer temporarily and just check it out. Yep, that's not too bad at all. Let's on solo the layer and because I don't actually accidentally want to modify this mask as I'm adding all of the other ones that I need for this rotoscoping like to lock down my masses, This little lock I can hear if I enable that on the mask. I can now no longer click and select the mask points themselves. I can obviously still move the layer, but I can't excellently modify this mask as well. Just in case you're interested as well. You can also locked down entire layers, so you can't even select that layer anymore. But I want to leave the layer unlocked. I just want to lock down this master I can no longer. I can't even selected or change it anymore, so that's just fixed with the togias roto layer. Select it. That's an another mask, and you can start adding one for the left leg, one for the arm, the shoulder part. It doesn't really matter. Let me add one for the head for that. Let's just come back to the very beginning because there's a lot of movement at the first few frames, and then I'm kind off stabilizing a little bit better. So let's come to the very beginning and let's start drawing a mask around the head. And again, I'm just going to include a little off the neck and just a lived off the shoulders so that those masks can overlap in the end. Oversee one. Include My Year and the top of my head again. Let's give this mask a useful name and call this one head now. One thing that might happen is that aftereffects automatically assigns a color to your mask , and that color might be pretty difficult to see. Depending on the footers you are working with. However, in the Master, actually click onto this little color square here and change the color off that master something much more visible, so it's much easier to work with. So just keep that in mind. If that's getting a little complicated, let's expand the mask, enable the mask path, and let's start rotoscoping. This oneness well. However, to not bore you out of your mind. I'm going to go away in tow, all of the rotoscoping for both Togias and myself, using the exact same techniques of just adding more masks, animating their mask path. And then once I'm done, stopping them down and adding the next one because it's going to be a little bit boring. Also, you will not have to do this if you just want to create the final effect. I will include pre Roe disco players for you to work with. But that's fatal black. And when we come back, I'll be done rotoscoping. This is the final rotoscoping jump that I ended up doing for Togias is quite a number of different masks. And if I pop this open, I've got masks for the right and left leg, the head right to left torso, left arm. And then I've got the right upper arm and the right forearm right here, the kind of going outside off the main area. All of this probably took me about an hour or two, definitely longer than it would if with the road brush tool or maybe even mocha e. That said, it's probably not a bad idea to go through this exercise at least once, using nothing but masks so you know how to work for them. You feel comfortable with them because you are going to use them a whole lot when you create your own little effects or motion graphics. However, if you don't want to spend the time and you simply want to follow along with this tutorial , I'm going to render this layer dystopias roto layer out separately with some transparency so you can just import that and use that in your own project. You won't have to go through the rotoscoping process now. One thing if you have wrote a scope this yourself with mask hours recommend you do is enable the motion blur. Switch on that layer because that motion blur will get applied to the masks. And again, she can't see the switch toggle switches and moats and enable motion blur on the overall composition. So wherever your masks move, you'll get a little of a nice blur along the edge looks a little more natural. And of course, I also have a water Rotella limiters collapse all of the's. So this is the same thing done for Walter. You can see it's not perfect, right? That's kind of you can see a little bit of edges here and there. But for the purpose off, this more fact, I'll probably be good enough. One thing I recommend you do, though, is that once you've wrote a scope delays and you've got a whole bunch off animated Mass on that layer, pre composed at layer. So let's like Togias, Roto, press control, shift and see or again on a Mac command shift and see to pre compose. Let's call this one, Togias wrote to calm and do make sure you move all attributes into that composition, so all of those masks, all of that complexity, is hidden. You really this working with this visual layer off Toby is on a transparent background because some effects get applied before masks and some effects applied after masks. And if you have masks on this layer in your main composition, it might not work the way you expected to. So once you wrote a scope, always pre composed that layer, including all of the masks, so that you work with a nice and clean Leo and let's do the same for the water. Roto. Let's call this one water road to come Move while attributes into the new composition. And now we have separately. As for Togias, Roto and Walter Roto ready to be used to create the final morph effect.
21. Exercise: Morph Effect Compositing: awesome. We're almost there. We have now wrote a scope Walter and myself, so we can deal with them. Is independent visual elements separate from the rest of the footage? Now it's time to create the actual morph effect, and that's a cool effects like sparks and glows and color grading and negative all come together. So let's jump into adobe after effects and finish off the final effect. This is exactly where we left off in the last lesson. I have the two layers here for my base footage. And then I've got a layer we have wrote of scoped out Togias during the moth transition, and one we have wrote a scoped out Just Walter. Now, because I want to make this course as easy as possible for you to follow along, I will not expect you to do all of this rotoscoping yourself instead of actually rendered out this layer of water on a transparent background. Sabella's this layoff Togias on a transparent background so you don't have to create these yourself could simply import the ones I've prepared for you. So let's delete these two complainers and let's import those two Rhoda scope clips in your course materials. Under the video folder, you will find a morph effect Dash Togias, Roto and a more perfect Desh Walter Road Eclipse. Let's select both of those and import them into our project. And let's drag both of these clips yesterday and drag multiple layers at the same time into our composition. But again, I'm not going to drop it into the layer window. Instead, I'm going to come to where I know my transition will take place. You cannot drag it to somewhere right around there. And just to show you, let's solo out the most effect. Desh Togias Rotella. So again, this is just a roto clip. June them off position off Togias, and it's rented out on a transparent background. And then I have the same falter on a transparent background, so you can simply use these two clips instead of having to roda scope everything yourself. Though the act of rotoscoping, especially using masks, is definitely a learning experience that might be worth having, because in the future you may come up with different projects of visual effects where you will have to do that, work yourself now. One thing you will have to do you will have to align these ones time wise. So let's solo the bass water transformation and the water Roto clip. And let's come to where water Zwerling that stick around because in he is probably going to be more obvious to align these two clips. And if you drag the rotor layer over that, let's make sure these to align perfectly. Yep, coats of those two now seem to be in sync and let's on solo does and solo out the base footage for Togias And the Tobias wrote a layer. Let's pull this layer forward again because I do want my morpher effect to be just a little bit longer. And if you can't see anything, make sure you haven't set the capacity to zero. So let's press t. And yes, we have animated the opacity. So let's bring this back up to 100% and disable to stop watch I can. For now that's grabbed the Togias wrote a layer and dragged it in place for that. Let's move to wear, moving my arm close just a little bit more obvious to see whether these two clips are properly aligned and that looks about right so that's the solar layer. And then that's what the base footage. So those two clips are not properly aligned, and we can start creating the morph effect. One last thing I want to clean up, though. If you come to the beginning off your composition, you may notice that this isn't actually at zero seconds. This is at seven minutes and 30 seconds in. And that's just due to the way we've created this composition, because the water transformation MP four based footage that be used has some starting time court information embedded in it. So I don't want to do is in my water transformation composition simply right click. Come up into the composition settings and under the start time coat that says, Wipe this out and simply put zero in here, okay? And now you composition starts at zero seconds, which makes a whole lot more sense. So there's our actual clip. Let's unsold or layers, but let's hide these two rotor layers and what am I doing? X might rename all of my layers because it just a bit hard to read. The names are pretty long, so let's rename the top one here to Tobias Roto the bottom one is more perfect. Dash Water Rodeo. Let's rename this just to Water Rodeo. The next one down is the base footage with me. So let's rename this one to base Togias and at the very bottom one is to clip of water. So let's call this one base Walter, maybe I'm a little bit O c D. But this makes so much more sense to me. It's much easier to see what is what in your composition, and especially if you start building up a whole bunch of different layers, This is gonna be really, really useful. Now. There are different ways to actually pull this more perfect off. So just keep in mind that the way I'm doing this year is just one off a myriad of different ways. Said you could be going about this. So feel free to tweak an experiment in any way that you want what I'm going to do, especially to also deal with the fact that I'm standing a little bit off from where war days I'm going to fade across. But I'm not going to show both Togias and Walter at the same time, not even while the semi transparent. Instead, let's disable the visibility off the base. Toby is less. We really just half Walter, and I actually want to fade Walter away from this shot. Now. The only way I could do that is if he also filmed that scene without anyone in it. That plane background image without any actors in the short is usually referred to as a clean plate, and I have already prepared one that we can import in our project. So let's import some more files. And in the course materials under the Images folder, you should find a water more clean plate. PNG. Let's bring that in and drop it into our composition. And right now I'm just going to drop it at the very top, and that is the exact same shot, but without anyone in it. So now what I could do. I could grab this clean plate and drag it to the very bottom, and now select the Bayswater layer pressed T to review the opacity. And now, if you lower that essentially have water fading out of the shot or well, at least it looks that way. The cool thing is, we can now animate Walter to slowly fade away and independently. We can then decide when to fade Togias in. So let's come to the beginning off this very transformation, maybe to about there that's unable to stop, which I came on the opacity property. Make sure it's set to 100%. Let's go fairly far in and let me zoom in a little bit. I want to make sure that my timeline indicator still is over this road layer so that at this point in time, we still have a layoff just Walter, because we want to add a few glow effects and other things. So before this roto layer finishes, I need to have water faded out all the way to zero. So right about at this point in time, let's lower the capacity to 0% select both key frames and press F nine to enable busy interpellation. Now, if you want and play this back and Walter is slowly fading out to nothing, next let's fade in. Togias S Walter is fading out for that that's re enabled the visibility on the base togias layer press T to reveal the capacity property. Let's enable key frames on the opacity property This time I'm going to start out with zero . Just move forward a little bit. We're going to tweet this timing in just a second and brings a passage up to 100. So now what we have is s Walter fates out. Toby is fates in. Now, One thing I really don't want I don't want at any point of time both Toby's and water visible because it makes it really clear that we're not standing in the same location. So what I'm going to do is able to track this end key frame for Walter forward so that I'm essentially having water all the way faded out just before Togias comes in. Also again, make sure you select your key frames and press F nine for busy interpolation. It just will look a little bit more organic and smooth, and it's dragged these key frames around so that Walter starts fading out. And just as water is no longer visible, we've got Toby is coming in. But at no point in time can you actually see both images? And therefore it's not as obvious that I'm actually changing position Now, if you make this transition to quick, you will still be able to see that change. But we're also going to cover this after the whole bunch of particles and glow another effect. So it will be a whole lot less obvious. Neighbors. Bring this in just a little bit more to make sure there's a small break when neither of them is visible at all. And then Tobias fates back in and again, make sure that Tobias has faded into 100% before we reach the end of this Toby is roto layer, so that by the time we can no longer apply effect specifically to my outline, we will be fully faded in analyst kind of cut across to the full Togias clip, and then the transition should be complete, So that actually looks pretty good to me. Let's start adding some particles. Let's collapse all of our layers and again. Particles are kind of outside of the scope of this course. And yes, I keep reminding people there are two trials on my YouTube channel for how to work with particles. If you want to check that out, I've pre rendered you some that you could just use for this cause. So let's import another file into our project. And this time, under the course materials in the effects folder, you will find a file called more particles. Start MP for Let's import that into our project and drag it into the composition. And I want to drag this to somewhere right about here and what this is. This is Angie. Just one big video off lots and lots and lots off particles. Let's change the blend mode off this layer from normal over to at so that the patterns are being added on top. And, yeah, this doesn't really work. I really just want the particles to be where water and Togias are. I don't want them everywhere else on this footage. Also, maybe I want a bit more particles. I kind of like a lot of sparkles, a lot of glow because we do need to cover up this transition. So let me actually duplicate this more particles clip just offset this a little bit. So it's going to push this over to the left hand side a little. And yes, I'm getting a harsh edge here, But as long as the particles cover all of the area where water stands and all of the area with Toby a stance. This should be working just fine now, in order to deal with both of these particles as if they were one. We do need to pre composed them. So let's select both particle layers. Press contra, shift and see or command shift and see if you're on a Mac and let's call this one particles comp. You won't have a choice but to move all attributes into the new composition because we have more than one layer that were pre composing and just leave all of the other options on default. Let's it okay, and this now turned into one layer. But again, the blend mode has gone back to normal. So let's change this back to sedative. And because I ended up with one really long stretch off footage where I can actually tell where the particles are starting to kind of starting probably right about there, what you can do, you can actually jump into this composition, so it's double click. You can actually click the name in your layers window or actually the bar in your timeline as well, says Double. Click on that to jump into the composition move the Tomlin indicator to the beginning off those clips and again, hold on shifts. Its snaps to that point returned to the Walter Ferry transformation composition, and this is now the time whether layers actually kick in and with the particles calm player selective. You compress star on your numb pet to place a markup that we're at a liberal market to this layer, so we know that's where it starts. You cannot trim in the beginning again. You can either drag this holding down shift to snap or just leave it out on the left and press fault or option and then left square bracket to to snap it to the points. We kind of just know where the particles start, and they're definitely starting too early. So let's come to where water actually touches his head with that ferry stick, which is pretty right about there. Let's drag this Ford's time wise. It aligns to the particle spawn after water cast that spell on him. So maybe a little bit earlier as well. So right about that is when all the particles come in now, the next thing we need to do is we need to limit those particles toe only appear where Walter stands, and then where I'm standing for that, we're going to use a track met. And this is where the road delays will start coming in handy because you now need to apply effects or restrict certain effects to only the area off the people that you're trying to move between. So let's take the water Roto and Togias Rodallega and duplicate them a present control or command d. Bring these funds all the way to the top. Move the town an indicator to the beginning off these two layers. Let's enable the visibility. And by the way, if you have multiple is selected and you change any off the properties that will be applied to all off those less over changed the blend mode for Tobias wrote, or two, while also having water road to to selected. A changes to at it will change both off those layers blend mode. But do you really want to keep them on normal? In this case, let's pre compose that those two layers again, the president controlled shift and see or command shift and see. Let's call this one particles Matt calm and again move all attributes into the new composition hit. Okay, because I know this is where my layer starts. Let's also trimmed down this new composition toe only start at that point by pressing down old or option and left square bracket. So it comes is trimming its alliance nicely. Let's double click to jump into this particles. Matt come. And right now we have both the Walter and Togias layers visible at the same time. Now I don't really want to start out this way. I should want fate Togias in. But remember, this is really just the mat that will define where those particles are visible. So let's select the Togias roto to layer Presti. To read the opacity, click on the stopwatch icon to enable key frames for the opacity property and just make sure you at the beginning off the layout, bring the capacity down to zero. Let's scrap forward a little bit. Let's bring this up to 100 and for the particles met. I don't actually mind that both water and Toby's are visible at the same time, because again it's just going to control where the particles are being spawned and June this transition so right now here in this middle section I actually do want the particles to be spawned both in the position where water standing and also in the position that Toby is is going to be so in my particles. Matt, come out of mind that that both visible at the same time. Then what's the end? Maybe we're going to the end off the water. Rodallega Presti, To really capacity enabled the stopwatch. I can bring the capacity down to zero. Come forward a little bit and that's just Jack this up to 100 again. Select all a few key frames. Negatives. Click and drag a rectangle around autumn press F nine to enable busy interpolation. And so now we essentially starting out with Walter Toby's face him. And then there should be particles all over the place and then the fading out And they'll only be over Togias. Cool down. It's all right. Let's come back to the water Fairy transformation. Make sure that this particles Matt calm player sits on top off your particles comp And now on your particles comp change the track matte option from no Matt to Alfa Matt again. If you can't see this column simply thick on your toggle switches and modes. Button down here. The bottom orders press F four on your keyboard. So now we have restricted all those particles to only appear where water standing and Tobias is fading in. So now if you scrape through this, you can see the particles only peer over. Walter, you can kind of start seeing there also appearing where Tobias is going to fade in and at the end that Onley left where I'm standing. Now they are snapping off at the end that have been cut off. And the reason that is actually happening is because our particles come Matt, which only contains out to roda layers, ends. So at this point, it just vanishes, right? And because we using this layer as a track matte on our particles and are particles track might is set to Alfa means that the moment the visibility off the layer above it vanishes, the particles no longer will be visible. However, we kind of do want this to remain visible until the particles are properly faded out. And in order to do that, we can simply extend the length of this particle Matt Comp in order to do that right. Click onto the particles Matt Comp, come up into time and then select to enable time remapping time. Remembering essentially allows you to screw with the timing off your layer in any way that you want. You can see a value here that indicates what time this layer currently is that sits at eight or five seconds. So there were playing through up until about 8 16 and then that they actually becomes invisible. That's enabled the visibility off this layer and solo it so we can see what's going on. So it's essential is placed back that track matte and around 8 16 It just vanishes now, however, because with enable time remapping, we can place new key frames to define the time off the clip. So let's come to the last frame with this particle mass compass still visible, which is at 8 16 Let's place a key frame here to say at this point you have to be at 8 16 Let's move forward to the end off our composition, and you should find another key frame at the end, and this actually indicates that at this point, the time for this layer will be 18 seconds and eight. But if we delete this key frame, the last value will be held and Dennis defined by this key friend to be 8 16 So past this key frame. The timing of this layer is held at eight seconds and 16 frames in so past. This point, it stops playing. It is pauses. Now there's a whole lot of other cool things that you could do with time remapping. But this is really all we wanted to do. That's unsold Slayer and hide this particles. Matt, come. And now if you scrape through it, you should see the particles nicely fade away because this particles Matt Comp remains visible. So the particles now slowly fade away over me. And that's looking a whole lot nicer now. Right now, the edges off this track met way too harsh. It looks a little bit like an alien effect from the eighties in order to fix that up, simply coming to the effects and presets panel. And let's search for the fast blur effect I'm going to use The fast bowler legacy effect is so that anyone can follow along, even if you have an older version off Adobe after effects. Let's apply this effect to the particles. Matt Comp Let's assembly bring up the blurriness just a little bit So we kind of softening out the edges here. Maybe around 20 upper. I don't wanna go to crazy just soft out the edges a little bit. Let's rewind and play this back cool. And that is looking a whole lot better. Now the next thing I want to do, I want to add a little bit of shine like lied raise radiating out from waters Body s is morphing into togias. For that, I do need to add in effect to these particles. Now you instinct might be to add in effect to this particles comp. However, the visibility off this comp, including any effects that you add to it, are restricted by this particles. Matt Calm So the effects won't be able to reach outside of the area off this Matt, because that's not what we want. In order to deal with these particles as if they were only defined where water and Togias are standing, we once again need to pre compose those to lay us. So let's select the particles comp the particles mad, calm and that's pre composed those two layers this time just for fun. Let's come up into the main menu is like the layer and then pretty composed. Let's call this fun more particles comp hit. Okay. And because the blend mode has once again changed to normal, let's flip this back to additives. So we're back to where we were. Let's duplicate this more particles calm player, and I'm going to rename this layer. Two particles shine and now coming to the Effects and Presets panel and search for the radio blur effect. You should find the radio blur under blur and sharpen. And again, I'm not going to use the CC version because it's only available in after effects CC. I'm just going to use the old style radio blur. Let's apply that to our particles shine layer, and you can see this card does a little bit of like a spin blur on our layer. And that's because in our effects settings under the radio blur, the type is currently set to spin. Let's change this from Spin Over to Zoom, and that might be a little bit hard to see. But now, if in the radio blur. We pump up this amount to maybe 100 or 200. What happens is that you get these really cool light street shooting out off the particles . And what's even better? You can actually move this center position around. Right now. It's kind of hidden behind my layer center, but I can she click and drag this around and this moves to center position off where this radio blur is emitting from. You can also sip tea. Click on this little target I can and click on Walter's face, for example, and you'll see the race and how emitting from its face, maybe reject this amount up to around about 200 again feel free to adjust this an experiment in any way that you want. Let's come back to the beginning, where the effect starts kicking in. Now it's a script from a composition you can see it's taking a little bit longer now to render, because the rave, the blur effect is not the fastest. Now, while I do like that, the race starts at the head. I don't like that it ends there, kind of want to animate this center position to move from the head downwards along the body . So those rays are starting to slowly animate and being upwards as this more perfect happens . So let's come to the beginning off this transition where the particles are kicking in. Let's set a key frame for the center position being right on Waters head. Let's come to the end where maybe that's just a few particles left, maybe right about here, and that's grabbed the center position and drag it downwards to maybe right between my knees. Let's rewind and check this out, and that is starting to look pretty cool with the particle chancellor selected. Press you to reveal all of the key frames. Select all of therm press F nine to enable busier interpellation people just drag the last key frame out just a little bit more. The last thing I want to do is on absolute, often intense, more colorful glow. For that. Once again, we can use this. Toby is roto layer. Let me able to visibility solo it and let's actually rename this one to Togias glow, then come into the effects and presets panel and search for the glow effect. Under stylized, you should find a glow effect. Let's grab this and apply it to the Togias glow Layup and for this layer actually only want the glow. So, in the settings for the glow effect, change the composite original drop down from behind to none and changed the glow operation from at to none. We're only going to be left with the actual glow that gets generated. You bring down the threshold a fair bit. I want most off the togias roto layer to glow. I'm going to jack up the radius to maybe around 100 50 to almost 200 so this should be a really nice glow layer. Then let's change the blend mode from normal over to at. And, of course, you probably want unsold. All this layer there's no after is really nice. Intense and colorful glow into the effect if you scrub back a little bit well but probably start a little bit too early. So again we kind of need to fade this low in for that. For the Toby's Gloria selected Press T to reveal the capacity that's come to where Walter starts transforming, maybe right about here, when the first off those particles start to appear, said a key frame for the capacity at 0%. Let's come down to maybe around about the middle off the transition, where neither Walter no Togias are actually visible. Let's bring up the capacity, and you don't have to push it all the way to 100% you're going to go with around the 75. I think that seems like you'll be plenty. Let's keep moving forward until Togias has appeared, and obviously, before this rotor layer has come to an end, let's lower the capacity back to 0%. Select all of those key frames, press F nine to enable busy interpellation. And again, let's remind and play this back cool. That is really starting to look nice now. Maybe gonna bring the value on this middle key frame down a little bit and again hold on shift to move the cursor right onto the key frame or press K to jump to the next one J. She jumped to the previous key frame, so on this key frame, it will bring this down to maybe around about 50%. I don't want this to be too intense, because I'm also going to add Olympic off Colotto Walter as he's going into the moth transition. For that, we can use the water Rodallega. Let's enable the visibility and solo this layer. And again, let's apply a glow effect to the Walter Rodallega Amata going who renamed this one toe water blow and same as before, in the effects settings for the glow effect. Let's change composite original to none and glow operation to numb. Let's bring down the threshold and bump up the radius. This time I'm going to go a fair bit, and I do want avoid this massive block off wide right here. So what's going to bring down the glow intensity to maybe around about two or three? Maybe I'll bump the radius up just a little past the 200 will bring the threshold down just a bit more. The real is getting a fairly diffused block off globe. Let's on solo the layer change the blend mode from normal over to at, so that's not just adding a little off glow onto water and again because it's kind of just popping in. We need to animate the A pass ity. So with water. Gloria selected press T to review the opacity, said the key frame that start this out at zero. Let's come to about the middle off, the more perfect and bring the opacity up. I really just want to add a little bit, maybe 30 20%. Then let's come forward a little bit and let's bring the opacity down to zero. Let's select all of the key frames. Press F nine for busy interpellation and again, let's rewind and play this back cool. That is looking really nice. The last thing I want to do is right now all of the glow is kind of concentrated on where the actual morpher effect is happening. However, if you had a shot and there was really that much light being emitted from people morphing into one another, you imagine that the whole room would be a little bit more lit up. So I want to add another go, but every broad and diffuse fun just to kind of add a little brightness into the rest off the shot. For that, I don't want that to be the colorful glow, so I'm going to duplicate my togias glow layer. I'm going to rename this fun to Togias glow wide And then I'm simply going to pump up the glow radius on the glow effect on what to push. Start by quite a bit, maybe 8 900 I want this to be really white and diffuse. Let's solo this Togias glow wide layer to check up on behalf, and that's just a little bit to defusing and hardly see it. So maybe let's bring up the intensity as well. A limit, maybe two or three. And maybe I'll bring in the glow radiance a little bit as well. Maybe around the 700 or 800 glow intensity. Maybe around the three year sell on a really wide and diffuse glow that just gets added to the room in general just brightens everything up a little bit. That seems a little bit more realistic. Let's on solo this layer. Let's hide the wide closer that's out, and that is with the white glow again. I'm to finding this a little too intense in the center now, so I'm going to bring down the glow intensity off the white glow to maybe roundabout to end on the Togias glow. Leah again. It's going to lower the intensity a little bit too, Maybe Roundabout 0.5. But this is really just now. Meddoff taste and just play around with this and make this look anyway that you want. Let's remind one more time and play this back nice. I'm actually really happy with this. More perfect. Finally. One thing I always like to do with all of my compositions and all of my visual effects apply a little bit of color correction or color grading to all off the layers in my composition. The reason I like to do that is similar to the principle of using a sandwich press. After you've made a sandwich, you may have lots and lots and lots of layers, but until you put them through a process that binds them all together, they really just independent layers. So one thing that really helps bind all of your visual layers together is to apply some common color correction or color grading, and that can be easily done using adjustment layers. So in our composition, let's create a new adjustment layer. Make sure this is at the very top of your composition, and let's call this one color grading, and to this layer, you can now really apply any type off color adjustment effect that you want, you know, effects and presets. Panel. Let's key out our search bar and let's pop open the color correction tap in here. You'll find a whole bunch of different effects and just few free to pick and choose. I'm simply going to apply a curves effect to my color grading layer. Now we haven't gone through the technicalities off the curves effect yet. All I'm going to do is I'm going to click and drag at the top of the curve. This is going to just add a little brightness to the bright parts and then click at the bottom off the curve and direct this down so there's going to make my dark parts a little bit darker. So this isn't just adding a bit of contrast into the image to serve. The image itself just pops a little bit more than under my channels. I'm going to change from RGB two red. So this is the curve for just the red color information in my image going to click and drag in the middle off this scarf to drain a little bit off red from our footage. So go to get a little off the green bluish tint and then in my channels, let's jump over to the Blue Channel, going to click once in the middle to lock it down and then just pull the bottom up. This add a little more blue into the dark areas. Maybe I'll come back to the RGB Channel and make this a little bit more contrast to some dark in the dark areas, even Mawr. And again, just display with this. Just have fun and tweak this so essentially have just added a little off color grading to all of the layers in my composition. Gonna bind them together just a little bit more So this is what it looks without the curves effect. And this is what it looks with the curves effect. And it just makes all of those layers fit together a little bit more because they've all gone through the same processing. They've all had the same effects apply to them, and that kind of creates a little of commonality, just binds them all together just a little bit nicer. So let's zoom out off our composition a little bit through minds and playback. Our final more effect
22. Thank You: Congratulations. You made it through the entire course. And I really hope that you know a lot more about adobe after effects than you did when you started with my final words. Don't worry, I'm not dying. Please leave me Some people, whether you love, like, hated the cause. When you think I missed something, we just want to share your thoughts. Leave all of that for me down below or just hit me up on social media. I was really keen to get feedback for what's good or bad about the courses so I can improve my training. Just make it a little bit more fun and educational. Also do that? No. If he'd be interested in some more intermediate and advanced training material for the after effects, There's so much like so much We haven't even touched on yet. And for that I really hope you dropped this course and learn something useful. Thank you very much for watching an until next time. I will see you later.
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