Transcripts
1. Introduction: What I love about motion design is the fact that you can take something that was once static and bring it to life. Today, you guys are going to learn not only about Premiere Pro and After Effects but how to seamlessly use the two programs. Hey guys, welcome to my class. My name is William Kesling and I'm a digital design artist living and working in California. What we're going to be creating in this class is a 10-second tonal edit using Premiere Pro and After Effects. We're going to be jumping into Premiere Pro to make a quick sketch, and then once in After Effects, we're going to go over some tips and tricks to really elevate your motion design edit. Also within this class, we're going to be learning about organization. One of those fundamental things that if you can really master and focus from the beginning of the project, it's going to save you a lot of time, even if you're not an editor and let's say just a motion designer, you'll soon realize that they go hand in hand. Going from a motion designer to an editor or an editor to a motion designer is inevitable. What we're going to be going over today may not directly align with what you're doing at your job. However, we're giving you an example to be able to work through so you can understand these two programs and then take that knowledge and adapt it. Feel free to follow along by using the watermarked 3D render footage that we provided to you, and also the four options for music. I'm really excited for you guys to take this class because taking control of the programs that you're using allows you to be more efficient when you're working on a project, which then makes it more enjoyable in the long run. This all being said, let's jump over to the desk and dive right into this class.
2. Create a Sketch Edit in Premiere Pro: Now that we've made it to the desk, we're going to start with that 10-second tonal edit it in Premiere Pro. Then once we're done with that, we're going to show you guys how to go from Premiere Pro to After Effects, to where we can start adding some subtle animations and using the After Effects presets and effects that are in After Effects to really polish up this project. Let's dive right into it. Before we actually dive into Premiere Pro, we want to open up our documents folder and we want to make a new folder. I will call this SkillShare Master folder. Now, this is starting the project being very organized. Within this master folder, I'm going to make a new folder, and this is where I'm going to keep all of the information that I'm going to be using in both Premiere Pro and in After Effects. However I set up this initial folder is how I then want to correspond the following folders within the two programs that I'm going to be using. The first folder that I'll make, we'll call it Footage because I know I have footage. We'll call the next one Assets. Assets, I really put anything from specific visual effects that I want to use to PNGs or photos that I want to use. Then I'll call another folder Audio. Then I know I'm going to be working in an After Effects file, so I'll do Ae. I also know that I'm going to be working in pre pro, so I'll do a Pre pro folder as well. This is a good starting point, to just have your folders labeled out like this. If you think you'll need anything else like effects and you guys want to label that something different, feel free to put anything within this master folder. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump into Premiere Pro and we're going to start a new project up here in the top left-hand corner. What we can do here is we can choose our destination to where we want that project to be saved. I know that I want to call this SkillShare class, and you can call this anything you want. I'm going to go browse. I'm going to go to my documents, and I'm going to go to SkillShare Master folder pre pro. This is where I'm going to save this pre pro project in. All of this is usually good and I'll set up. You guys can take a look at how I have it set up and I'm going to click "Okay." You can see right away that's Premier Pro made a project folder right in that folder right there. We've got Premiere Pro open. If you've never been in this program, this can seem very daunting. But really, the thing about Premiere Pro is that you shouldn't be afraid of it. It gives you the media directions already. You've got your project bin over here. We can see that our now SkillShare Master folder has all the folders that we have in it. It has the premium project, it has audio, all set up with our soundtracks that we may or may not want to use, then we have the footage. We've got some good footage in here as well. Once we come back into Premier Pro, we're going to import all of our folder structure that we have. We can either do this by dragging and dropping from our folder structure, but we're actually not going to do that for this one, we're actually going to create our individual folders that mimic that of what we have in our documents folder. Now you can see that if we look at this and you look at this, we have the exact same stuff. This just keeps us organized from the very beginning. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my audio and I'm literally just going to drag my audio folder soundtracks right into audio. Then you can see that it'll just start to upload. I immediately have all these and I can play these back if I want to. Next, I'm going to bring my footage in. What Alex did when he sent us the 3D renders, and sometimes this is what you'll get when you're working with other people. They'll send you JPEG sequences. JPEG sequences are actually just a bunch of images that make up moving picture or a movie, which would be something like an MOV or an mp4. What we want to do is we will actually want to go into here and we want to see, we can see all of these are JPEGs. What we want to do is we want to open up our footage folder. We're going to double-click in here. We want to go to our footage and we want to go here. The cool thing about Premiere Pro is it'll see that these are all labeled and we can click options down here and we can say image sequence. If we click that first one, have image sequence and we click "Import, " now instead of just one image, we have the whole MOV. We're just going to drag that into footage. What you're going to do instead of not having to drag it every single time, you can just double-click footage. What Premiere Pro will do is open up a new band. We've got our master project thing here. If we go up to here, we've got our bin right here. We'll follow that same way to import all the other footage as well. You guys will just have MOVs and for the MOVs you'll just import this the same way except for you one of the image sequence. You can see that all of our footage right now is purple. We can take that footage folder and we can also select all of this, then we can label this rose for red. Now all of our footage will be red. This is just a good way to start to organize. All of our audio samples are green, which is come stock with Premier Pro. What we can do is we can label those. Let's keep it green, we'll just label them so everything that's green. Then Assets, we don't really have anything right now. This is really just allows you to make things organized from the very beginning. Now that we've got this really cool footage, what we're going to do is we're going to start a new sequence. What you're going to do is you can go down to this little new item and you can click sequence. This is just a good thing to go over because this thing looks a little bit crazy and there's a bunch of different things you can go through, but really you don't need to worry about this, especially if you're just doing an initial sketch at it to get your idea across. Don't worry about any of this stuff. Well, what we're going to do is we're actually going to create our own sequence. You can see that I've already created one. I'm going to show you guys how to do that. We're going to go up to settings, up in the top here. We're going to go up here to the editing mode and we're going to go to custom. Then within custom, we're going to go to 23 frames. Twenty three frames per second is good. It works, especially since our footage is 29 frames per seconds, it'll be a little bit of a mismatch, but when we're doing something like this to where we know we might want to slow things down a bit. It's good to have a lower sequence frame rate than the actual footage you're using. It's not good to go the opposite, to have a higher frame rate sequence and lower frame rate footage, but if you go to where you have high frame rate footage and low frame rate sequence, you're able to slow things down and really utilize slow motion a little bit better. Then you'll do a 1920 by 1080 or we want square pixels progressive scan. We want a 23 time code, Rec 709 is fine for this. Then down here, you just want to make sure that this isn't higher than what you are shooting. This is just your video previews. You want the video preview to be lower res than what it is. This first sequence that we're creating, we're going to call it master selects V1. I use V1 because those are my version numbers. Sometimes, you go through ten different versions and it's just good to always have multiple versions and to always label them, V1, V2, and so on. Now we have our first sequence, what we can do is we can go in here and make a new comp. We'll do underscore comp. Comp is short for composition. You could also do underscore sequences. I use an underscore within my labeling here because underscores or asterisk or any kind of number would obviously bring it to the top of the list. If you've got 40 different folders, you want to have your comps at the top. It's just easiest to get to where you need to go. You can see I do comp, nothing really happened there, but if I click up in this name thing, you can see that it brings it up to the top. I want to take that master selects Version 1, and I want to drag that into my comp folder so now everything is in it. I can then go right-click and I can go down to label and I will label them Lavender. Sure. Now what we're going to do is we're going to start to basically select the footage that we want to edit with. Of course we have all this awesome footage that Alex Sailor gave us and we can go through this and just watch what we want here. You can see that this one is already labeled with an in and out points. That looks great. What we're going do is we're just going to select this and drag it down to our sequence. Since we made our own sequence and we didn't create a sequence from our actual footage, it's going to give us a warning. It's going to say that the clip does not match the sequence settings. Change sequence to match the clip settings. This is because the frame rate is different. For this instance, I'm going to show you guys that it's okay to do this. Now you can see that in this window, it's showing my edit. Then I'm going to go to the next footage and I'm going to see what I like about this. I know that this could be cool to speed up and do something maybe like this. I will start it here and I'll do I for N on my keyboard. Then maybe right here for O, for out. Then again I will just drag and drop it. Then we're just going do this for all the shots. You pick and choose what you want. Now we've got our selects. You can see that we've created a sequence. Basically, all of our clips roughed out and laid out in our sequence of what we want to use for our edit. Now what I'd like to do is I like to create another sequence mimicking the one that I just created. But what I'm going to do with this sequence, I'm going to go to my comps, I'm going to select my sequence that I created, and then I'm going to right-click it, I'm going to click "Duplicate." Now I've got master Selects version 1, Copy 1. You see when I opened up a new sequence, you can see that it opened up another tab right here on the top of my panel down here, which is cool because then you can jump back and forth through them all. You just saw that Premiere Pro saved, which is great, thank you for saving it, but it's always smart to save your guys' projects, so it is command S to save your project, because we already set it up in that initial folder in the very beginning. Now that I've got this sequence selected, I want to call this one Edit version 1. Now that I have these two different things within my composition, I could even get more organized and within my comp, I could go make another thing called Bin and I can call this one Selects. I can go ahead and drop my Selects sequence into my Selects folder, and then for my edit, I can go ahead and drag that into the folder, just another way of making a folder, and call this one Edit. Again, don't be afraid to over-color your things, and we're just going to go on and call this magenta, so all of our comps are magenta. Now we're going to go to our edit and we've got our master edit version 1, and we can see that it's exact same thing that we had before. Now, this is where it gets a little bit more fun. I'm going to drag that over to the side, just to give me a little bit more space. I know that my edit is going to be around 10 seconds, so I'll go and I will do O for out, and I can go in the beginning and create I, just to create an in and out point on my sequence timeline, so then this is where I know I'm going to be working within. A cool thing that you can do too, let's say you're working on something that's more Instagram based and you want it to loop, what you can do is you can go up here and click the "Plus" button on the side here, and you can see that there's a bunch of other tools that you can use. A tool that we want to write down is this and we're just literally going to drag it down and we're going to click "Okay," and then boom. This is the loop playback tool. We're just going to clip loop playback so that when it gets to the end, it loops back to the beginning. Now what we're going to do to start our edit is we're going to add some sound. Especially when doing something tonal like this, it's great to edit towards sound. We provided you guys four different soundtracks and we can listen to them now. They're all very inspired by Interstellar and Matrix and sci-fi. Now if you want to use something totally different, by all means, use something totally different, I would love to see what you guys choose. I'm going to actually use Example_04 for the soundtrack, and I'm just going to drag and drop that onto our timeline. You see that it's able to drag and drop on that whole bottom half because this whole bottom half, this is all your audio, this is all your footage. You can see now that I'm playing my edit, it's actually playing back. I can just start to lay out what do I think would be a cool intro shot out of the shots that I have? Well, I think this one's pretty rad, so we're going to want to start with that. Maybe we cut off the beginning there, so it gets right into that motion, and then it stops right there, or maybe give it a little second and then boom. A lot of editing and rythmatic editing is just feeling it out, like how does it sound? Then it edits and then it cuts right there. We're going to make that, and then it's going to cut. This is a lot of just playing too. It's good to go, "Okay, that'll happen," present it, and then maybe we go into something like this. Maybe you show both of them just to show. I like when that light goes around there right there, so I'm just going to find the point where that light comes. What I'm thinking about while I'm going through this edit is, although it's rythmatic and it's more tonal of a tone central 10-second loop, I'm thinking about how can I still tell a story, even if it's just something that I know. It allows you to think about edits in a different way so you're not just like, "Well, this shot is cool, let me start with this, and this shot is second cool, so let me put this there." Now, in this instance, every shot is cool. Just to let you guys know what these little things are, these are actually little keyboard pieces just so you can maybe think about the story a little bit more. We've got, let's say one character here we're showing, and then we're going to show both of the characters and then maybe showing the inside. One thing to note that when you're going through this, this is a rough sketch. I have a tendency to overthink and really dive into edits and try to make it perfect, but for this exercise, and it's good to practice this, and I practice this all the time, is just to lay something out roughly because then we're going to take it into After Effects and add that final polish and add a final edit too if we need to adjust things and move things around. You can zoom in here holding option and your mouse pad and you can see that the sound drops off here, and I want to move this so I just drag and clip it. But if it's just a couple of frames, I can select the clip that I want, and I can hold "Command," and I can just nudge that clip over be command and the arrow key, just to make it precise. Maybe for this, I'm going to speed this one up a little bit just to see how it looks. Cool, I think that'll be pretty nice to have it been right there. That's where the end of the song is. I can click "O." Now I need to figure out that last shot still. That's showing pretty nice. Now what we're going to do since we've got our sequence all edited and it's in a rough edit, we're going to command S to save this and we're going to actually duplicate our master at it in V1. We're doing this for the exact same reason I did it the other time, just to be able to have a version 2. What I want to do in this version 2 of the edit, I actually want to get rid of every clip that I didn't use. I'm going to click "A" on my keyboard and that's going to pull up these two double arrows, which I can then select the clips and then delete. I'm going to show you guys two ways to bring this into After Effects. I always encourage you to put all your footage onto one line within the sequence, so cleaning up your sequence that you've now edited in because you're going to take this into After Effects. We're just going to drag this down, and I hold "Shift" because Shift allows it just to go up and down, and so I drag "Shift" and I'm just going to drag these. Then we have our little edit, command S. Everything that I just showed you about how to make a quick edit can be used on projects both large and small. Usually, I like to start all my projects doing a quick sketch edit and then using those version numbers to then be able to boil down and make the edit more polished. Now I would like you guys to try to do the exact same thing, learning these skills using the watermarked footage that we've provided you guys or any other footage that you guys think that works for your edit or for the project you would like to try out. Don't forget to post your guys' progress or any questions that you guys have into the discussion board. Now, since all that's been said, let's jump into After Effects and start to label this all out and bring our Premiere Pro project in.
3. Bring a Premiere Pro Project into AE: Now in this next lesson, I'm going to teach you how to go from Premiere Pro to After Effects. Premiere Pro is great for a lot of things, especially doing the edit, minimal effects, doing color correction, doing sound design, but it can't do what After Effects can, and vice versa. It's great to know how to use these two programs interchangeably. What I'm showing you guys how to do right now is not necessarily the end-all be-all, there's a 1000 ways to do everything, but these are the two ways that I find the most effective. Once we open After Effects, you'll see that we are prompted with an initial screen similar to one that we got in Premiere Pro, we're going to once again create a new project. On our new project screen, we have similar panels like we did in Premiere Pro, we've got our "Composition" panel where we're going to be working on our composition, our "Main Project" panel where we're going to throw all of our footage and label our folders like we did previously in Premiere Pro, and then we've got our "Sequence" down here that we're going to be editing in as well. I'm going to pull up my Finder just as a referenced, and I'm going to go to "Documents". I'm going to see that I need an audio of "Assets" and a "Footage" folder within my "Project" panel. I'm going to right-click on this and I'm going to click "New Folder". You can make this a couple of different ways, or you could click this bin down here, it creates a new folder as well. I need three folders. Now that I have everything labeled out in my After Effects, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to create a new composition. I want a custom 1920 by 1080, that sounds great, square pixels, just as my last one, 23 frames per second, just as my Premiere Pro project, and then all of this resolution, because this is your playback, is fine as well and then my background color, we can change that later if we need to. But for this composition name, I'm going to label it "Master_Comp_v1". You can see just as in Premiere Pro, now in After Effects, we have got "Master_comp_v1" is now laid up on our "Project" panel. I'm going to go ahead and say, I want to create a new folder and I'm going to call this "Comp", and just as before, I can underscore "Comp". You can see that a lot of the things within Premiere Pro and After Effects run together. Now I'm going to drag my "Master_comp" into my "Comp" folder, so I can see that this is my "Master_comp_v1". I'm going to double-click that so I have it open. Now it's open underneath my "Editing" panel down here. I can see that there's obviously nothing in there. The easiest way that I've figured out to go from Premiere Pro into After Effects only really works when you're working with a project that has minimal folders and minimal footage. The reason why is because After Effects likes to bring everything in, the way I'm about to show you. What you'll do is you go to "File" , you go to "Import", "Import Adobe Premiere Pro Project". Everything is labeled, so you go "Premiere Pro", "Skillshare_class", and you click "Open", and it will say, "All Sequences", so I go "Master_Edit_v2", because that's the one where I put all those layers on one timeline within Premiere Pro, and I click "Okay", and you see how it brought in everything. I know that I didn't use all the footage, and I know that I didn't use all of the audio, but it's really okay because this project is so small. Although this is a little bit of a faster way to do it, I'm going to show you a way to where you can be a little bit more selective but you have to do a couple more steps just to be able to make it how you want it to be. I'm going to click "Comp", make sure that that's selected, and then I'm going to select "Footage", and you'll see why I'm going to select "Footage" here in a minute. Then I'm going to jump back into Premiere Pro, and I'm literally going to drag and select the footage that I had in that initial edit, version 2, I'm going to "Command, C" to copy it. I'm going jump back into After Effects with footage selected, then I'm going to jump down and I'm going to click into the "Composition" panel, and I'm going to literally "Command V" and paste it, and boom. Now the problem with this is it didn't bring in the audio. What we need to do is go into Premiere Pro, and there's two ways to do this again. You can select your audio, and you can click "Command C", and then you can bring it in. Make sure audio is selected, select into your "Composition Editing" panel, and you can "Command V", and it'll paste it right in there. You can see that we can listen to it. Now the thing about this that I see that sometimes it works and sometimes doesn't, for experimental sketch edits, something quick, this is actually really great. You just paste it in there and then you're able to add effects or titles or any color correction or anything that you really want to do to bring this to life. But the thing that I like to do is actually go back to my Premiere Pro project, and this really helps out if you have additional sound design, or if it's a longer piece. You can go into here, and you go "File", "Export", "Media", and that'll bring up your "Export" panel. But a good thing because we love shortcuts, "Command M" will bring up your "Export" as well. We're going to go up to "H264" format "Waveform Audio", and what I'm doing is I'm exporting just that audio. Since you can see I have my in and out points, this is the only portion that is going to export. Then all this is good, I'm going to select where I want this to go. I know that I want it to go under "Audio", maybe I want to call it something like "Edit_Soundtracks". Then we'll call this "Edit_Soundtrack_v1". Boom, your video was exploited successfully. Then if I go back to "Audio" and I have "Audio" selected, and I double-click into this panel, you'll see that I'm able to import footage, and then I am able to go down here, and "Edit", I'm going to click "Open", and you see that it pulls up "Edit_Soundtrack_v1". I'm going to drag that into audio, and then I can drag that right down into here. Although the copy and paste works really well for the footage, the copy and paste doesn't always work as well with the audio. Sometimes the audio comes in a little bit distorted or the audio come in a little bit lower than you had expected working in Premiere Pro and then trying to bring it directly into After Effects. I found out that exporting a WAV file from Premiere and then bringing that WAV file into After Effects works out the best. I'm going to get rid of that initial thing that we had brought in, and I can delete that also from the audio too. Now you can see that everything is in there. What I liked to do from the very beginning, although we're very organized here, is that we're not very visually organized here. Sometimes I get bad at labeling my layers, but always label your layers, don't do as me, I suppose. But it's good to always label your layers, and I know that all this is somewhat labeled but I'm a more visual person, so I'll select all these, and I'll select the little color right here, I'll do red, and for my soundtracks, yellow. Now looking at our edit, click "O" on our keyboard, which is going to bring you to the end of the layer, and I'm going to click "N". Unlike in Premier Pro where it was "I" and "O", in After Effects, it's "B" and "N", beginning and end, I suppose. Now that we've got everything labeled out into here, I want to show you how to make a workspace preset. Workspace presets really help you guys as efficiency, and make it quicker for when you jump into a program because you know where everything is. This really also helps when you have plugins that you use on a daily basis. For me, I'm always using Motion 2. Motion 2 is a great plug-in at affordable price, and I use it for every single project, so I would highly recommend that. Another great one is GifGun, that really helps you make quick little exports and GIFs when you're editing something like this that is already pretty quick. Using GifGun to show a client, or show your boss, or show a coworker where you're at with an edit or motion design process is great. So I live and die by GifGun. Let's say I have everything organized well how I like it, and I want to go up to "Window", I want to go to "Workspace", and then I want to go to "Save as New Workspace". I can call this "1920_1080_William", and I can click "Okay". This will save it. If I were to go up to "Workspace", and I were to go under "Text", it would switch everything around. But if I want to go back to what we just had, I'll go to "Workspace", and I'll go to "1920_1080_William". This is really good to use workspace presets, both of them Premiere Pro and After Effects to make your workflow more efficient. Now you guys have seen two different ways to improve your project from Premiere Pro into After Effects. Play around, try different things, and see what really works for you. With that being said, I'm excited to see what you guys create. Be sure to post any questions that you guys have, and let's start a conversation around what people are creating with these new techniques.
4. Source and Relink Footage: Now that we've got our After Effects project setup and we're about to add some effects, what I want to go into is how to source extra footage to add a little bit more visual effects and also how to re-link footage if things were to get lost or if things were to not be linked when you go back into an edit, whether it's Premiere Pro or if it's in After Effects. Sourcing footage is something that you can do on your own to help you further tell a story. It is okay to source footage. I think it's okay and I think a lot of times it's looked at as if it's a bad thing. I source source to add visual effects to my content, to my projects to really push them even more. For this lesson, we're going to source dust particles. When used correctly, although it seems like a very small thing, it can be used to really elevate, especially the project that we're working on to give it some atmosphere. What we're going to do first is we're going to pull up YouTube. When we have YouTube up, we can go ahead and search for what we want. Now it's good to know that you don't have to use YouTube. Obviously, there's a bunch of stock footage websites out there, but let's say you don't have the funds or you don't have the money, going to YouTube first is what I recommend. Don't be afraid to just get good with your searches and figuring out how you're going to phrase this for when you're looking for what you want. Make sure that when you're sourcing something, using the words like "free" and making sure that in the description it's free to use. Even if it is for something that you're doing internally, it's still good to always think about that and practice that. I know that I want dust particles. I'm going to type in "free alpha dust particles". Alpha is almost like if there's going to be no background. But definitely, go look for things on your own or you can follow what I do and I'll put the link of the one that I use in the description that you guys could just download if you guys don't want to search. I'm going to type in "free alpha dust particles" and click "Enter" and make this a little bit bigger. I'm just going to go to the first one. Let's click and see what he's asking for and see what it is. It's got a little bit of music to it. It's literally just little dust particles floating, which is exactly what we want. Click "Show More" and he's asking for a donation. He's got a Patreon. If you have the money, you can give the person some money to be able to download this, but he's also offering it for free, so you can go download 4k and he gives you a link. Gumroad is a website that I've come to multiple different times to download plugins or to download free things like this. I know that it's a secure website and I feel safe going here, and I know that this is more reputable and I can trust it. Once you guys have sourced your footage and downloaded it, what you can do is you can go to your master folder that we had set up from the very beginning. You can go to your new video that you've just downloaded. I labeled it "dust" and what I want to do is I think I want to drive it into Footage. Within Footage, I want to make a new folder. I want to call this "Animations" and I'm just going to drag them into here. I want you to know that since you adjusted your folder that you have been working out of, you're going to want to be cautious because when you go back into your programs that you've been working in and I'll pull up After Effects, you may see that some things have now been moved. Files could not be found. This isn't something to get scared about. This is just a good lesson to learn. What you need to do is click "Okay". You'll go to your footage and you'll see that they can't be found. This is what it will look like, intimidating. But all you'll have to do is right-click and you can go "Replace Footage". Click "File" and you want to go to explode. I know that if I go to my Documents and then I go to my Skillshare Master Folder, Footage folder, Animations folder, I know that Explode is underneath Explode 1, and then I can click explode0000, and just like that. Then down here you can see that it's asking you to import as JPEG sequence. I go open and then boom. Since I re-linked that first one, Adobe After Effects and Adobe, in general, is smart enough to know and look for the other missing footage files in that same folder and it found them. Same thing goes for Premiere Pro. Now that I have everything re-linked in both my Premiere and After Effects, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new folder underneath Footage and call it "Visual Effects" and then I'm going to go and find the dust and I'm just going to drag the dust into the Visual Effects folder. So now all my footage is still really organized and I can go on to After Effects and add this dust and to make a little bit more of depth and atmosphere within my edit. Sourcing footage shouldn't be a scary thing. Use it to your advantage and learn how to use it better. Learn how to search more efficiently, learn how to search for things that you actually want. This all goes back to thinking about your projects before you dive into them and being organized from the very beginning. Sourcing footage should not be a scary thing and it's always good to not own anything that's not yours and to give credit where credit is due. With that being said, let's now dive back into the edit, into the project, and see how we can push this even further.
5. Add Atmosphere and Depth: Whether it's a tonal piece for a product like what we're creating today or if it's an interview, it's always great to be able to figure out creative ways to add depth and atmosphere into your project. I'm going to show you how to use some of the stock effects that come with After Effects to your advantage, and I'm also going to show you guys how to use that sourced dust particle footage to really add depth and atmosphere to your project as well. First, I want to show you guys what we're going to try and mimic and create a shorter version of. Here here is, enjoy watching this. Now after seeing that, let's dive in and see what we can create together. Being back in our After Effects project, we can see that we have something that is already pretty great. What I want to do first is I want to show you guys how you guys can incorporate those dust particles that we showed you earlier. The first thing I want to do is I want to bring the dust particles into my project. Well, I know that I have them underneath footage and I want to drag all that footage and I want to call these Animation, and then I want to go into my finder, and I want to go into my Visual Effects panel, and I can just maybe drag this right in here. Sometimes it doesn't work, no problem. We're just going to drag the dust right into the footage folder, and it's going to come up here, and I want to put it in a visual effects VFX. Now we've got our visual effects dust right here, I can say "Fit" to be able to view the entire thing, and you can see that it's rendering, so it's a little bit slow, but you guys can get an idea of what we're working with. Now that it's in there, I want to apply that dust to this shot right here. What I want to do is I want to pre-comp this shot. Pre-comping a shot is basically taking a shot that you have in a composition and making another comp within that composition that just holds that specific shot. I'm going to select this shot. I'm going to do "Shift Command C" to make a pre-composition of that shot. I want to label this Podium Dust. I'll do move all attributes to new composition even though I don't have any effects. What we need to do is adjust composition duration to the time span of the selected layer. My selected layer is only this long and so I want the composition that we create to also mimic that, so I'm going to click "Okay." You can see now that the pre-comp composition that we just created is now the size of the shot that we had edited already. Now to get into this pre-comp, what you can do is just double-click on the pre-comp. What I want to do next is now I just want to drag my visual effects dust on top of my panel here. You can see that since it was Alpha, there is no background to the actual image, which is great. Now we can see that even now it adds a little bit of value, but it's not really pushing it to where we want it to go. We wanted to make it a little bit more subtle and a lot of times when doing stuff like this, it's all about being subtle. Clicking "R" to rotate, maybe just seeing how it looks like this. I think it looks a little bit better when it's rotated more at a 90-degree angle, and I hit "S," right about 19 and that's cool right there, maybe a little bit off to the side. I want to mask it off, so it's only in a certain location in this actual shot, and now I want to create a mask on this, so I'm going to do "Shift Command N" and I want the mask to look a little bit organic. What I'm doing is I'm just selecting these points, I'm going to click "G" on the keyboard to then be able to get my pen tool and I'm going to hold "Option." When I hold "Option" and drag over this, you'll see that it's different. This is me not holding "Option" and I get something that I can just move. Now if I hold "Option" and I drag it over, I'm getting the pen tool, so I can make this a little bit more of an organic shape, which is what we want. Now, I'm just going to get an organic shape here that feels nice, maybe does a little wrap around here. It doesn't need to be perfect and you'll see why. Now you see it's positioned right around here, and maybe we want to make it a little bit bigger. We want it to go up a little bit more and then rotate just a bit like this. I'm going to click "M" on that layer because I know that there's a mask on it, so if I click M, then the mask will pop up. Now on the mask, I want to twiddle this down and I want to go to Mask Feather and then I want to feather it out. You see if we feather it a bunch, the line isn't as harsh, which is nice. Now what we can do to make this a little bit less harsh is we can put a simple choker on this. The simple choker, you'll see what it'll do, is it'll add an outline to the outside or it'll come down a little bit on it. I'm just adding a simple choker just a little bit just to make it, so they're not as intense of pieces. But then I want to add a little bit of a sharpen to maybe bring out some of those small pieces. You can see if I go all the way up, it'll bring up a lot of the pieces, which is obviously not what we want, but maybe we want around 300, then we can toggle that off and on. You can see some of the things are showing up a little bit more than the others. Now we can say, okay, this is looking nice. I can see what I am trying to achieve, but now I want to adjust the lighting a bit. I'm going to go up to Layer, I'm going to go to New, Adjustment Layer. Adjustment layers are you guys' friends. Adjustment layers are going to allow you to apply a bunch of effects to a bunch of different layers simultaneously instead of going through each individual layer. There's definitely use cases for adjustment layers, so definitely play around with them and see what works best for you. What I want to do with my adjustment layer is I want to add a little bit of color correction. There's a bunch of different ways to add color correction, from adding tints to adding levels. I always like Lumetri Color. You can go ahead and select your adjustment layer and you can drag and drop Lumetri Color directly onto the adjustment layer, or with the adjustment layer selected, you can double-click Lumetri Color and add it directly onto the adjustment layer. I like this way to color because it gives you a lot to work with in just one effect. It's something to get an idea across, something to do a quick edit, something to add a little bit extra color fast. Basic correction with this will give you things like your white balance, tone, saturation and then when you get into creative, you'll get things like your original adjustments, which will be like faded film sharpen, vibrance, more saturation. But what I want to do is I want to go into saturation and I want to boost up the saturation a bit, go into tone and I want to jump contrast a bit and I want to maybe bump up the whites a bit, and I want to take down the shadows. Contrast will add a little bit of saturation as well. Contrast I'm going to do is 50. Really I'm just playing around. You guys can see what I've done here for my color correction, a really simple color correction, but you can see the before and after and how we really brought this thing to life. After we did this initial color, the thing that I've noticed is that the dust particles are a little bit too bright and unnatural. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my dust particles, I'm going to click "T" to pull up my opacity, and I'm going to take down the dust particles to around 40 percent. What I can do to even soften up those particles even more and make them feel a little bit more natural is I can add a blur to it. You can see if I turn off the blur a lot, everything will go away. I just want to keep this super minimum and do a 10 percent blur. You can see that now we've got something that's feeling a little bit more natural. I want to add a little bit of glow to this actual piece. The glow will give it a little bit more brightness and it'll also bring it to life. I'm going to go back to my adjustment layer and I'm going to add glow. Glow when it comes to dark. It's pretty powerful tool and it's definitely worth playing around with. You get threshold. You can see when adjusting it. Then your radius, which we want our radius to be up because we don't want the glow to saturate on those bright points, we want the glow to be more dispersed and feel a little bit more natural. Once that is we can turn down the threshold to see what that does. Going up that radius makes it a little bit better. When you lay your effects within your adjustment layer, it's good to note that the effect at its lowest will affect all of the effects that are above it. Right now, my glow effect is actually affecting the color that I put on it, but if I don't want it to affect the color, you'll see that it changes and the glow is not as saturated. If I go back up and now I add just a glow, you can see that the glow is more white and less of that blue. That's feeling pretty good to me. It's also one thing to where you can go to Adjustment layer, and you can call this one color. Then what you can do is you could duplicate that layer by Command D, and you can call this one glow, so instead of having both your color and your glow on the same adjustment layer, you can go and have them split up. On the glow adjustment layer, I'm actually going to delete the color and on the color I'm actually going to delete the glow. Now you can play around with which one affects which just by switching over glow and color and how it goes. How I'm going up and down with these clips is Command left bracket, right bracket, left bracket, right bracket to go up and down. Don't be afraid to fine-tune these things to make it right. One thing I'm thinking, after getting this all the organized is that maybe the dust particles are moving a little bit too quick, so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to do "Command Option T" to bring up my time remapping. Time remapping allows you to remap the time of a certain clip to make it go slower or make it go faster. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do time remapping and I'm going to make a Keyframe, and then I'm going to go to about the end and I'm going to make another one. Then I'm going to drag that point out just to make it a little bit longer of a clip. Because I want this to go a little bit slower. That feels pretty good. I'm just going to go into the opacity again and I'm going to change it to 40. I can even go back into that mask, feather this out to about 100. Now when looking at this we can see what the before and the after was. After and then before, is this. I'm just giving you the utensils to be able to push this even further, so play around with all these settings. But really it's nice to be able to see how you can take that source free footage, put it into your project right away and make it add a little bit of depth and atmosphere to what you're working in. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go back into the composition folder and we can see that since you made a pre-comp of that podium shot, it is now come up into here. We don't want this to be in our Comp folder, just folding around. We want this would be in a specific folder called Pre-comps and we can drop that podium pre-comp right into there. Now when we double-click the master we can see that we have this, but if we were going to pre-comps, we can go to podium dust and we know that that is the podium dust shot that we have. Always remember to save your project and be as organized as possible. Doing this upfront will help you guys save a lot of time in the long run. Now I want to show you guys how to adjust another shot within our edit and see how you guys can push it even further with a couple more effects that come within After Effects. We're going to jump back into our master composition. I want to take this shot right here, and I'm going to add some things to it to really push it. What I'm thinking would be really cool instead of just one, maybe there was 40 or maybe there was 50 of those and I'm going to show you guys a quick way to be able to do that. I'm going to do mine a little bit so I can see this and I'm going to create a mask, so "Shift Command N" to create a mask and I'm just going to make this mask right around this piece right here. I'm just going to play it, so I'm going to click "I" to go to the beginning of that specific clip and now I'm going to click "B" to make the play head start there and then I'm going to "O" to go to the out or the ending of that clip. I'm going to click "End" or "N" to do the end of the looping period. Now when I play it, it'll just play this shot. I want to make this shot a little bit smaller here. I want to show you guys the effect that I want to add first, it's called Repeat Title. I'm going to double-click on that to add it. You can see when I go right it has more and when I go left it has more, and you can adjust it with the same with the top 1700, 1700. Now, if I were to go and I were to select this layer and I were to go to scale and say make it smaller, you could see that it's only going so far. I can see that when I move it, I actually went a little bit more to the left than the right. Now within this, in fact, you can even add a little bit more and you can make it more visually interesting by flipping them. Which I think is pretty cool. You can go through these tiling effects and you can figure out which one works for you, which one you think is pretty rad. I'm going to go with this one. The cool thing about this since it is on a mask, you can adjust the animation by doing animation on the mask. If I wanted to do this, I could click this, I could go to "M," I go to mask. I could set the timer for the mask and do a Keyframe and then I could go a little bit and I could adjust it by selecting those two points and dragging over and now you've got a cool little animation. You can adjust that for the entire shot. What you can do is you can even adjust this side too and, you guessed it, you can even do it to the top as well and to the bottom, and so now. What you can even do to push this, you can add a scale change, so "Shift Option S" to create a key. Then what I can do is I can actually make that larger in the beginning without any ease, just plain animation. You can see as if it was falling back, and as it was falling back the shot is pushing itself. Now maybe what I want to do is I want to put a little ease on this and I'll right-click. I'm going to go down Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease, and you can see that there's a little bit of ease on this. This is coming from one shot to the next maybe I'm thinking I want that ease to be a little bit more abrupt, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the graph editor which is right here. You can see that I have both of these Keyframes selected, or all the Keyframes selected, I'm going to go into the graph editor and I'm going to select just the left holding option and zooming in. I'm going to zoom in. Then I'm going to go to the right to really make all the energy and momentum here I'm going to select this right one and I'm going to push it even further. Now we're zooming out, you can see that all the momentum is in the very beginning. You can see we have something that's pretty aggressive. Maybe we don't want it to be that aggressive, so let's just back that one out. I think that's pretty cool. If I wanted to I could basically bring the same color correction that I did on this previous clip, so I can double-click into that pre-comp and I can go to the color, I can copy the entire color adjustment layer, and so I'm going to paste it onto the clip. When I paste it on the clip you can see that the effect that we had earlier gets a little bit messed up here and that's because now the color is affecting the effect. We actually want the color to be first and then we want to put the effect on it, so we just have to raise that up. I'm actually not really liking the color and how it translated, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to adjust it. That looks pretty cool there. What we can do now is we can add the glow effect that we added previously. We have a nice glow here and it plays through, but maybe I want to make it to where it's flickering a little bit. A cool way to do this is using sliders, so I'm going to show you guys how to use a slider. What you're going to do is you're going to go to sliders. You're going to add a slider on to this adjustment layer, and then within the glow, you're going to hold "Option" and you're going to adjust the threshold because you see when I adjust the threshold right here, it's actually giving me some variation, so what I want to do is I want to go option-click the stopwatch for glow threshold, and that'll make it red. When it makes it red that means that I can add an expression onto it and adjust the percentage in a way that I think best fits, so I'm going to use the wiggle expression. The wiggle expression is something that is great to use, and it has multiple different uses and this is just one thing that I've found is pretty cool. You can do it to a lot of different things like position and different effects to give it a interesting effect. I'm going to type in "wiggle" and I'm going to click "Enter," and then type in "13," and then do comma and then I'm going to use the pick whip, and I'm going to go and I'm going to select the slider, and then I'm going to end it with a bracket and I'm just going to click out of it. I know you see nothing's really happening and that's because our slider is at zero. So if we were to click the stopwatch on our slider, select our adjustment layer, click "U" to bring up all the Keyframes that we have. We can see that we made the zero button in the middle. We can zoom in here holding option and scrolling. If we click "I" we can go to the beginning of that adjustment layer and we can make it 30, just so you can see what is really doing and now it goes 30-0. You see you we're able to adjust the wiggle expression to almost have it do a little bit of a flicker. That's just one way to use sliders to your advantage when using the wiggle expression. Feel free to play around in After Effects, and don't be afraid to just try things and make mistakes because a lot of those times, those mistakes turn out pretty cool when you're able to really learn from them. It's an incredibly powerful program and utilizing just one percent of it, can really push your project to the next level. I've been playing around in After Effects for years and I'm learning so much and I learned so much every single time I jump into the program. It's really a program that allows you to be able to play around and find certain effects that worked for your projects. It can be something that simple or something that's very, very complex with multiple different layers, but it's all up to you and how you want to utilize the things that come in with After Effects.
6. Export in Media Encoder: Let's say I'm done with my project and I want to take this and I want to export it. I'm going to save it first, then I'm going make sure that I have the comp that I want to export, selected. It's selected, I'm going to go over File and I'm going to go over to Export. I can do two different types of exporting. I can do add to Media Encoder or add to Render Queue. Adding to render queue is a sense of what you're going to be rendering directly in After Effects. That means you're not going to be able to do any further edits in After Effects while you're rendering. Also with rendering, in the render queue, within After-Effects, there are limited formats that you can actually render in without making your own presets in another program. What I encourage you to do, is play around with rendering in a queue. But I'm going to show you guys how to render in Media Encoder first because I think Media Encoder is the best way to utilize your time and be the most efficient. We're going to go add to Media Encoder Queue. When you do this, it may seem like nothing is happening. But then you'll see that Media Encoder opens up. This will allow you to then go back into After Effects while you're exporting, to be able to make some of those changes and make another version or continue to work on your projects so you don't have to wait for the edit. Media Encoder usually comes up with your queue selected. But if the queue isn't there when you go into Media Encoder, go to Window and make sure that queue is selected. Another Media Encoder has popped up. What we can do is we can see that there's three different things that we can select. You can change your format, the preset, if you have any presets already set in your output file. What we're going to do is we're actually just going to click the "Format" to be able to get into the actual panel that shows you a little bit more about customization. If you're doing your final export here, that looks pretty rad. We want to do H264, because let's say where this is going for and review or this is going to be living on online, then H264 is totally fine. If you're going to be doing something that's going to be much higher res maybe ProRes, and you can look into what ProRes is. For this, we're going to do H264, and after doing H264, I want to click "Custom". Then you want to go to your output name. Your output name is where you'll be exporting this. Here's my master folder, I'm going to create an export folder within my master folder. You could also call this render as well. Then within Export, I'm going to label my video. I'm going to call it Skillshare_Class_V1 and save it. Then if I come down here to my video settings, you can see that my video basic exports, I want to match my source, this is just an easy way to match the source of where you're coming from. We want to click "Render at Maximum Depth", "Software Encoding", that's totally fine. Then we want to come down and do a 2-pass. It might be on 1 pass and 1 pass is totally fine. One Pass will give you a larger file size. But two passes allow you to have a smaller file size. I usually keep mine at 15 and 20. I want to use maximum render quality and then make sure everything is good. Then I'm going to click "OK". Then you can see that it's H264 Custom and then it's in the folder that we selected with the export and it's all ready to go. Once it's ready to go, you can go ahead and click this green arrow and it will then export. You'll be good to then send that off to whoever needs to see it for review or for the final delivery.
7. Final Thoughts: There you have it. We scratched the surface on how to make a sketch edit within Premiere Pro, taking that sketch edit into After Effects, adding just a few effects to really push it to the next level, learning about sourcing footage and reorganizing footage, and in the end, really making sure that everything comes together in a unified project. I'm really excited to see what you guys create and thank you for coming. Please don't be afraid to start discussions within the discussion board and ask me any questions that you guys want. Thanks again and talk soon.
William Kesling, Motion Designer & Videographer
