Transcripts
1. Introduction: In this short motion
graphics class, I'll teach you how to
create the CRT screen look in Adobe After effects. We'll start things off
by creating a grid, and then we'll pile on a few more effects to
really sell the look. Let's head into Adobe After
effects and get started. Can't wait to see
your class projects.
2. Getting Started & Class Project: Getting started with this class, you'll need Adobe After
effects to follow along. The class project is to
recreate the CRT screen look, and optionally, you
can use the effect in your own video and submit
it as a class project. I'll provide a project file on the project and
resources page. It might help if you get
stuck on one of the lessons. And, of course, feel free to post your project to
the project gallery. Always love seeing
what you create.
3. Create the RGB Comp: We'll start things off by
creating a new composition. I'm going to name
the composition RGB for red, green, and blue. We're going to create a
very small composition with a width of 15 pixels and
a height of ten pixels. This will make sense later
when we go to create our grid. The rest of the settings
really don't matter, but to make things simple,
you can copy mine. We'll click Okay. The
first thing you'll notice is just how tiny
this composition is. Let's zoom in. I'm going to grab the rounded
rectangle tool. We'll double click the rounded rectangle tool to
create a shape, and we'll toggle open
the settings under Rectangle one and then
Rectangle Path one. We will unlink the size, and then we can type in a
value of 4.5 into the X value. In the Y value, we'll
type in a size of nine. Now we're going to duplicate this layer twice to
create three copies. You can duplicate a
layer with Control D. One of the layers will align to the right
side of the composition. Then we'll take the
second layer and align it to the left
side of the composition. Now we have one aligned to the left, the center,
and the right. Now we'll change
the fill colors. For this one, we'll
turn it to pure green. The color code for pure
green is 00 FF 00. Then we can rename the layer. Remember enter to rename a layer, and we'll
name it green. The second layer, we
want it to be full blue. The color code is 0000 Ff. Then we'll rename that layer. And finally, the last layer, we're going to turn to pure red. The color code for
pure red is FF 0000. So now we have a green, blue and red layer. Don't forget to
rename the layer red as I forgot to do in
the original tutorial.
4. Create the Grid: Now we can create a new
composition to create our grid. I'll click on the new
composition button. This composition,
I'll name RGB grid, and we're going to create
it way larger with a width of 5,000 and
a height of 5,000. We can keep all the
other settings the same. Inside our new grid composition, we can drop in our
RGB composition. With our RGB
composition selected, using the align panel, I'm going to align it to the
top left of the screen. In effects and presets, search for the CC
repetile effect. Expand right, we
can expand it to 5,000 and expand down to 5,000. Now we have a grid that
covers our whole composition.
5. Using the Grid: And so now we can go ahead and
use this grid we created to create the CRT look. I'll start by creating
a new composition, and I'll name it
Main with a width of 1920 and a height of 1080. Or in the preset menu, you could select social
media landscape HD. I'll fit the screen to
the composition window. Now we're going to need something
to add our CRT look to. I haven't exported animation, but you could use a composition
inside after effects. I'll drop that into
the composition. Now I'll drop the RGB grid into the composition
over my animation. Now, you're probably
wondering how we're going to achieve the CRT look. You might think that we're
going to use a blending mode, but that won't exactly achieve the look that we're going for. We're going to use a
more advanced method. First thing I'm going to do is click this toggle switches and modes button to make sure
that this icon here shows up. And we're going to have
to click this on in order for the effects we're going to use to work properly. Now I'm going to select my
loading circle animation. And over in the
effects and presets, I'm going to search for
the set Matt effect, and we'll add that to the layer. So once we have that set mat effect added to
our animation layer, we're going to set our take Matt from layer to the RGB grid. So now we're using
it as a track mat. On the US for Matt list, we're going to
change it from Alpha channel to red channel. We can turn the
visibility of our RGB grid off because we don't
need to see it anymore. So essentially, what
we did is now we have our animation layer
only showing up on the red shape of our grid. Remember earlier we
created three shapes, one for blue, one for
green, one for red. Now this layer is only
showing up on the red shape. I'm going to rename
the layer red channel. I'm going to duplicate
the layer with Control D, and I'm going to set this use format list to the
green channel. So now this layer is only
showing up on the green shape. I'll rename the
layer green channel, and I'll duplicate that layer and set the use format
to the blue channel. Again, I'm going to rename
the layer Blue channel. So now we have three layers
for the red channel, green channel, and blue channel, and they're all showing up
on the respected color. Now we're going to clean things up a little bit and make it look more like a CRT screen
by adding a few effects. I'm going to start by creating a new adjustment layer
to add our effects to. I'll right click New
Adjustment Layer, and I'll rename this
adjustment layer to effects. The first effect
I'm going to add to the layer is a Gaugin blur. On the blurriness tab, I'm going to change it to
something really subtle. I think five is a little low, and ten might be a little high. We'll meet it in the
middle and go with seven. Next, I'll add a glow effect. We also want this glow
to be very subtle, so I'm going to turn up the
glow threshold to 100%. And that's the only thing I'm
going to do for the moment. We could always dial in
these settings later on. Next, I'm going to
add a curves effect for a little bit of
color correction. I'll add a point here and
drag it up a little bit. I'll drag this point down here
to the right. There we go. It's beginning to look
a little bit more like a believable CRT screen. One more effect I'm going to add is an optics compensation. I'm going to change the
field of view to 45. And that'll just shape
our animation layer more like a CRT screen. It's a little bit hard to see. I'm going to go top
composition settings and change the
background to black. Now you can see it better. So now we just have
one final step that I've saved for last, but I think it's an
important one to get the authentic
CRT screen look. Under effects and presets, I'm going to search for
the Shift channels effect. We'll add a shift
channels effect to each of our channel layers, one to the blue channel,
one to the green channel, and one to the red channel. On the blue channel layer, we'll set our take
red from to fall off, and we'll set our take
green from to fall off, leaving only to take
blue from to blue. On our green channel layer, we'll take red from to fall off and take blue
from to fall off, leaving only take
green from to green. On our red channel layer, we'll take green
from to fall off and take blue from to fall
off, leaving only the red. I'm going to bring
up the scale for the RGB grid layer by
pressing the S key, and I'm going to
change it to 50%. Remember, this is why
we made our grid so large so that we could
adjust the size later on. So I'll just give a quick demonstration of
exactly what we did. I'm going to take
my RGB grid layer and scale it up to 300%. So now our grid is larger. So our blue channel, we have showing up only
on our blue shape. Our green channel is
only showing up on our green shape and the red channel only showing
up on the red shape. And we achieve this by adding those two effects to each layer, the set mat and the
shift channels effect. We're using our grid
layer as a track mat. And because we have our
grid scaled down to 50%, the grid is so small
that it's giving the optical illusion of being the actual color
of our animation, which is how the old
CRT screens work, and our effects layer is just being used for our color
correction effects. So hopefully, that helps you understand
exactly what we did. That's pretty much
it for this class. I hope you enjoyed it and
see you in the next one.
6. Outro: Congratulations.
You've made it to the end of the class.
I hope you enjoyed it. Now you can post your projects
to the project gallery. I love seeing what you create. Thank you and see
you in the next one.
Tyler Bennett, Motion Graphics Designer & Photographer
