After Effects: Warp Zoom Transition

1. Course Overview: Welcome to this short After Effects tutorial on creating a warp zoom transition with a little added advanced flourish, with separating the RGB channels to help smooth the transition out. You will have the project files, you'll have these video files of these medical animations to test with and this class is for anyone who's new to After Effects or even seasoned, and want to add another tool in your toolkit for transitions. At the end of the course, you will have a finished transition which you can use over and over after you build it one time. Thanks for watching and I will see you in class. 2. The Edit: Welcome to this quick aftereffects tutorial, where we will recreate a very popular transition that I call the warp zoom transition. We're going to do that using some 3D medical animation clips that you can learn how to make yourself if you're interested in that in my 3D medical animation class. let's jump over to the files that you can find in the project files and just click and drag those into the after-effects project window here. Now that we have those files, we can click on them and get a little preview. What we want to do is to drag one of these in that we're going to start with. I'm going to start with the cell division. You either drag and drop it here or in the new composition and then I'm going to hit Command K or Control K to pull up the composition settings, which you can also get from here. We already have them open so I can click it but that's where if you don't know the shortcut or want to know the shortcut, there it is right there. What I want to do is increase this because we're going to add another clip here because we need to make a transition. We need to extend the timeline. That's how we do that through the composition settings. I'm going to hit Minus on my keyboard to zoom out. You can also click and drag this little guy here. Now we have a timeline that we can scrub and see the video clips. We need to bring in another one that we're going to transition to. For right now I'm going to drag and drop this one in, pull it over here and let's just zoom in do the transition over while it's still in two. I'm going to click and drag this down and then we're going to do the edit basically for this lesson and find the in and out points of the transition that we want. For this clip, I want to do the transition while we're still in this tunnel of the DNA double helix. The shortcut to trim a clip is Alt Bracket. You can also click and drag as I did, as you saw me do before. Then to make the composition smaller, now that we've done our edit, we can click and drag this down, or we can hit N, the letter N on our keyboard, then right-click and say trim comp to work area. Now the maximum view here, which we can also effect with this little slider at the bottom, is exactly to the edit that we want. In this lesson, we just learned a little bit about the interface and after effects, how to bring in clips, edit them, and make the transition for where we will do the warp zoom transition in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 3. The Effect: In this lesson, we're going to do the actual work transition. Before I do that, I just want to mention real quick. If you open up the project files, you might need to re-map where these movie files are located because I don't know where you've downloaded them on your computer. It will maybe say missing file. How you fix that is right-click here, go to replace footage file and then just locate that file wherever you've saved it on your own machine. That's how you fix that error if you ever open up these project files and try to follow along with those. Now we've made the edit, and we need to make the transition because it's just a cut right now. But we want a smooth transition that warps, zooms in to the cell and then zooms out into this double helix. We want to take this cell division composition. You can tell its composition by this thumbnail icon here, and we can click and drag it into another composition. We've basically nested this composition into a new one. Now we can't see the cut anymore, and what I'd like to do here is to find it. You can frame by command arrow or control arrow on your keyboard and frame through, and then I find it and I click this little button over here to make a little marker. Just a quick way to visualize where the cut actually is so when we're animating, we can tell where we need our keyframes. Now let's make the actual transition. Let's go to Effect Controls, right-click in the effect controls here. If you don't see effect controls, you can open those from the window and go down to effect controls. We will right-click here, and we can go to the store and go down to optics compensation. I'm going to set a keyframe on this transition frame right here, by clicking the stopwatch and increasing this zero number way up. It's doing the opposite of what we want to do. If we take a look at the options here, we can actually reverse the lens distortion, so let's check that. Now it's actually going in the direction we want it to be going. Just keep cranking this up. I find a number around 170, 180 to be good. Depending on how extreme of an effect you want to go, you can choose this range. We have this keyframe, but we can't see it. With the layer selected, let's hit U and it'll pull up the keyframe. Now we can see the keyframe. When we scrub it's all just store it. We need to set another keyframe and turn this effect off. I think it does well over about a second transition, so I'm going to go down here. This cut was done. We can see over here at 407. I'm going to go down to somewhere around 307 and I'm just going to turn this off when I click it and type in 0, and now we can see this transition start to happen. The problem is we need another one, so we can set another keyframe and type 0, or we can just select that keyframe and command C, command V, copy paste that in about a second later. Now we have this warped transition, but it's still fairly poppy. I think part of that is because we need to crank this up a little bit, we're still around 150, and the next thing we want to do is also to easy ease these keyframes. I'm going on my Mac function F9 on a PC, you can just do F9. You can also right-click and go to keyframe assistant and down there off the screen just drag this up. It says easy ease, right there and you can see that says F9. What that does is it just smooths out the start and end of those keyframes. It start slow, it transitions slow, so it's a lot smoother animation. The way I want to address a little more of this transition is I wanted to zoom in on the actual nucleus of the cell on the left. How we do that is we need to animate the view center. But in the helix, I wanted to come out of the center because that's how that composition is set going down a spiral. I like where this is here, so I'm going to leave it there and keyframe on that because I want it to stay there. If we hit U again, we can see this next keyframe. Let's use the shortcut to pull up all keyframes on layer. I wanted to start here as well, then animate over into the center of the nucleus. I'm going to set another keyframe so we're still just centered up here. I wanted to animate over to the center of that nucleus and what we can do is just these are x, y coordinates so x is left right, y is up down. If we click and drag 640 over, we're going to left and see this little icon, this little overlay. I don't know what you call that, but I'm trying to find a word for it. But basically you can either click this and point, but because we're dealing with a distortion, it's hard to know where to click. That's why I'm affecting the numbers and it's pretty straightforward. Now we're in the center of this thing. Let me go back to this transition and it play by just hitting space bar, you can see how we're zooming in to the center of that and it's happening a little late. I might just delete this first keyframe and leave it over there. It's going to zoom in from the very beginning. What we did was instead of it traveling from the center over to the right, let's just have it start in that position. We can see that, If you can't see that thing, you have to have the view center selected so now we can see where it is. That's another way to line it up. Now we can actually click and move it. We can also click and drag it as well. But that's set on their keyframe, which we don't want so let's just delete that. Basically we have this one frame transition on the position because we want the center of focus to be over here and in the DNA helix we want it to be back in the center, so we've made that transition over one frame and I'm going to zoom in here a little bit just to show you that one frame transition. In this lesson, we learned how to do the actual warp zoom, and we're not done yet though. I want to add a little extra flourish to this, because this is kind of a basic way to do it. I want to add a little more advanced flourish to this. In the next lesson, we're going to dive a little deeper into an advanced concepts and dig a little deeper into aftereffects. Thanks for watching. 4. The Extras: In this lesson, we're going to add a little extra flourish to this warp zoom transition. What I mean is, we're going to separate the RGB channels of the videos so that each channel is offset from one another. So we'll see whatever channel we want to start with maybe let's say the red, we'll see that channels start to warp before the others. What that does, is it just helps to soften that beginning of the transition and it slows it down a little bit as it distorts even more through the zoom effect, but also through tearing the RGB channels apart. I think that adds to this effect and it sets it apart from a normal warp zoom transition by adding a little extra texture to that transition. So let's dive a little deeper into After Effects. So we have the same scene that we've been messing with and I want to duplicate this layer, before I do, let me just add the important effect to this lesson and this effect. So I want to go down the channel and go down to set channels and what this does is what it says in the name, it sets the channel, so red is to red, green is to green, and blue is the blue as you would expect. So what we want to do is we just want to turn off the green and the blue. Now we just have the red channel and that's not super helpful. We need the green and the blue. How did we get that? We need to duplicate this layer out two more times. Let's command "D", and let's start to rename these. This will be "R" and I'm renaming by selecting the layer, hitting "Enter" and then typing. You can't double-click. It's one thing always going from other softwares, you typically can double-click something, but in After Effects you have to hit "Enter" to rename it. So we have RGB, but currently they're all set to the red channel. Let's go to" G" and we'll go into the effects of this. Turn it "Off" for the "Red", turn it on for the "Green" and then we will go to the "Blue" channel, and turn it "Off" for the "Red" and turn the "Blue" on for "Blue". It's a little hard to see here because they're all bunched up but you can kind of read from left to right, set blue to source three is blue. Now we have R, G, B and it hasn't changed because our blend modes here are set to normal. If you don't see those blend modes, you can just toggle switches here at the bottom to bring him to blend modes and we want to shift select all of these or go one by one if you want. Click this drop-down menu and choose "Add". Adding all the colors back onto themselves and through that blend mode, if you've separated the channels, it makes the image back the way it should look. The trick here is we have these key frames, we have all the layer selected. Let's hit "U" to pull the key frames. We have all these key frames and they're all transitioning at the same time. So it looks exactly the same as it did before but here's the trick, we can get one or two of the channels to start before the others. I'm going to choose the blue because this has a red background, because if we choose the red, you can just see here I'm going to choose the top red one. The red doesn't show up as well on red, which tends to make sense. So if we choose green, it shows up a little bit better. Maybe let's choose green. It's going to get these back in line with each other. Now they're all lined up and I'm going to drag the green channel out a little bit. Now we can see the green channel is starting before the others in that wrap transition. It starts appeal away at that. so we might have gone too far and this is where you can start to play with this. We can go through here and see we've gone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, that's a lot. Let's say I'm going to go here and do command arrow over to count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Let's just do six for now and then we'll split the difference there with three for the blue channel. I'm going to drag this over 1, 2, 3, they'll domino effect of the channels. Now we can start to see the separation that helps sell this effect, that it's slowly getting distorted and warping and look how much that adds to this effect. We need to do it on the back end as well. We need to do it on the end of this. So we just need to pick the channels that we want to transition and on a blue background, let's choose red to be last. So let's just drag these over 1, 2, 3, and I'll drag the bottom one over 1, 2, 3, and as we get towards the end here you can start to see around the edge, especially of this helix and over here too the further away you get from the center of course, this effect will be greater. We can see that distortion really happening. You can see it definitely here separates that entire helix back here in the background and if we want to exaggerate this effect, we can just grab these and move them back in time even more to separate the channels even more over time. So that is how you add a little extra flourish. Might've gone a little overkill on that time wise. I'm just going to dial back that offset. The last piece of this is the fact that you can reuse this because this is precomposed. I'm just going to select all of these and minimize them. These are RGB channels and these are pre-composed compositions. If we go back to the original "CellDivision" here, we can actually replace this file and the effect will maintain itself. Let's choose a different video file to bring in. So I'm going to bring it in red blood cells and I want to do the transition here at the beginning of the clip. If we go back to "CellDivision 2", which we can just call the transition. Now you can see that effect actually works and we didn't have to do any extra work. We just dropped in a new clip and we have that work transition ready to go. So you only need to make this once and then you can use it again and again. If you have clips of varying size or length, you can just go into the original and change the composition length. Command "K", increase the length for however long of clips that you have and feel free to use this in the project files, now you have this file. You can just drag and drop your own, if you don't have time to recreate this for yourself. I encourage you to go through the steps so you understand what's happening, how we separate the RGB channels and the optics compensation effect, and how you can animate that over time. So how we save the sound into an actual moving file is by going to "Composition" and going down to "Add to Render Queue". That'll pull up this new tab and we can set the settings. I like to go with QuickTime and "Apple ProRess 422 LT" is the lite version and I'll hit "OK", but you can choose whatever you want. That's a heavy version and then if you don't even want to do QuickTime, you can change that here. Then we can say "OK", and then just save where we want to save it and that's how we rendered out and we just hit "Render" and it'll start rendering. That will be our animation for this class. Thanks for watching this lesson. If you're interested in learning more about After Effects and animation, I have several other classes that cover that in more detail in this course. If you want to learn how to make this 3D medical animation, I have a five hour long class. That is for the total beginner and I'll walk you through how to actually make these animations and render them out yourself. So you can go through the entire process, not just learning how to do this work transition now that you know how to do, you can actually make medical animations. If you want to follow along with that class or all the other 3D animation classes that I have as well. If another subject strikes your fancy, you can do data visualization or you can just learn the whole program. Autodesk Maya from scratch and my big Maya for beginners course series. Of course, I will be continuing to come out with more and more classes. Stay tuned and follow me for this. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next class. Thanks. Bye.