Earn More as a Designer - Learn Motion Graphics in 3 hours

1. Intro Motion Graphics: Hey there, let me show you how to become a motion graphic designer using After Effects. I love teaching motion graphics. Why? Because we get to make some really beautiful things and video together. My name is Dan, and I'm an Adobe certified instructor for After Effects. Now, I love motion graphics because it ties together my traditional training and more graphic design, okay. So I love typography, and moves it into the stuff that I got into quite early with animation, things like Flash and After Effects, and puts it online now. So I get tied through my three loves. This course is for the visual person, the right brain, creative person. This course is project-based, we'll create a lots of different styles to give you all the tools you need so that you can add motion graphic designer to your CV. At the end of each video, I save a version so that you can download and check, and just to see if you're having any problems, you can compare the two. Now it's time to upgrade yourself, impress your clients, and get that job as an amazing motion graphics designer. 2. Exercise Files: Hey there, this video is about the exercise files, and the completed files, and the teacher files, as well as [inaudible]. Essentially, there is some files we are going to use through out this course. You can download them. There's a link below and download those and you can play along. You can use your own files, of course, and there's something called completed files so the end of every video, say I'm trying to teach you about 3-D type. The end of that little video, what I'll do is, I'll save my after fixed file exactly where I've got it so that If you're playing along and yours doesn't quite look the same, you can download my version, compare the two and just kind of check what's wrong about my one. It's a nice thing. There would be loads of those. Every video will have a completed file afterwards except for [inaudible] , there's no after fixed files, and the thing is there's a cheat sheet. There will be a link down the bottom as well, the cheat sheets and it's a nice little A4 printable thing stick it next to your computer when you new, even when your experienced. It's just a good thing to remember all the crucial cuts that you might not know. Just a little tips and tricks and it looks pretty so go and download that. The last thing is teacher resources. If you happen to be a teacher and you're watching this course because you want to borrow the course, that's totally fine. We all do so go off watch the video series, use the exercise files in your class. I'm happy for you to do that. If you want notes, that's part of it, so there's teacher notes and then there's a class notes for your students. There is a place where you can go and buy those. They're really cheap and there's a teacher version and a student version and you can just make sure it matches the videos as well. That makes it a little bit easier if you're expected to go off and teach after fixed for the first time, you can go and use those things. Let's go to the next video. 3. Relinking missing footage: Hi, there. In this video, we're going to look at what happens when a footage all goes missing. Now this might happen to you if you've downloaded the exercise files and you're opening up some of the production files and they can't connect there [inaudible] missing footage, they're all gone. Okay. I'm going to show you how to fix that. It's quite easy. So what we're going to do first of all is, just to note, we've got a bunch of images, some images, some sound, and some illustrative files, and there's some video in the background here. You can see this. [inaudible] We're going to do this in a later tutorial. So they are all part of this to make this thing go, and what happens is, say that somebody e-mails you the files or that you've downloaded the exercise files here. The files are not named the same or they're in different places. Say, this after fix file has been on my desktop. Okay, if I move it into this other folder, watch what happens to after effects, it freaks out, it goes I can't find you and this does look really scary. Okay, with these colored bars everywhere. So to go and fix it, you can tell the ones that are broken. Okay, they got little colored bars there and you can see they're italicized. So what I'm going to do is right-click one of them. And I go to the one that says replace footage, and then you replace with file. Okay, we're going to be calm, cool and collected. On our desktop, there's one called some other folder. And there it is in there. Hello. Okay and I'm looking for the BYOL logo, so you just need to find the one that I right-clicked. Find [inaudible] there. What we'll do is watch this magic after fixes. Happy enough to say, hey, I found three other files in there that have been missing; everything's back to normal. So if you end up moving your folder or they're not connected at the beginning of this exercise, when you're doing my tutorials, just got through and link them, okay, and everything is fine now. All right, I'll see you in the next video. 4. Project vs Compositions: Hey there. In this video, we're going to look at projects versus compositions. When you first open up After Effects, you get this little welcome video. What we're going to do, is we're going to click, close it. We're going to discuss what a project is versus a composition. Think of a project, as the housing for your project, as the main file that you'd open on your desktop. Within that project, you need compositions, at least one. Think of compositions as pages in a document. The project is that housing photo. When I've got After Effects open here, I've already been given one untitled document. You don't even have to start a new document. You can, if it feels good. You can go to file, and you go to new, and you got a project. Nothing really happens, you've just got the same window. You can't really have After Effects open without at least one project open. It might just be this untitled one. What we're going to do, is we're going to save it. What we'll do is, even then it went, let us say if you can see that it's grayed out, it just means that we don't have a composition. A project without a composition or a document without any pages, isn't very useful. To create a new composition or page within this document, we need to go to file and it's not in here. That's the weird bit about compositions, I feel it's really important to have compositions, but in after Phase 1 of the weird programs where, they've snack at over here on the composition. We can use a shortcut Command Int or Control Int on a PC and you click on New Competition. This is how you create a new page. I'm just going to leave the defaults. We'll look at the new compositions window in the next one. But you see there, I've got at least one comp now. Now, I can go to save, and I can save my little project. What we're going to do in this, is we'll do it in the next video, but you can save it onto desktop. We'll leave it there for the moment. Now, to say, you can have more than one comp. Let me show you one of my projects file and I'm going to go to open recent [inaudible] indent. and it's going to say, you can only have one project open at one time. You can see it's trying to save the one that I had there. I haven't really done anything useful so I'm going to hit on save, but you can only have one project open at one time. Normally, we were working through this class, especially we're going to only have one composition. We're going to be dealing one-bit of type animation, it might be one-bit of character animation or one bid of a motion graphics. Probably, you have one complex we saw in the last part. But in this one here, can you see I actually have, there's about 40 or 50 compositions in this one. Think of them as pages in a document. This one here, had just happened to have lots of pages. The reason I have this, is that I've done this one intro watch this by [inaudible] Here is my comp here, I'll slide it back, hit space bar on my keyboard and it's going to play through and it plays a little logo, and then the intro for my Chinese version of the websites. Now, that's great. Now, I've got 50 videos. What I've had to do, is copy and paste this. Literally you just Control C, Control V or hit at copy. Sorry, hit at copy, hit at paste when you're click on these guys. You can just create lots and lots of versions. What I've done is I've copied it, pasted it, open this one. I just change the text because it's the exact same animation, but with slightly different text. Depending on your project, if you're doing lots of different titles, you might just have one project and lots compositions within it. When you export these compositions, they only explore these running separate little movies. Hopefully, you get an understanding of what a project is, the housing, the outer wrapper. In a composition, you need at least one within the document, and that's where you put your animation in that comp. See you in the next video. 5. Whats the right composition settings: You're back. This video we're going to look at what the right settings are for a new composition. When you're knew you're like, "I'm going to make a new document", what size should it be? What we're going to do is we're going to get a composition, we're going to get a new. The good thing about it, it's is pretty easy, you dropdown here and you're looking for this one here, HDTV 1080 25. It's just the most common, it's HD size,1080 refers to the height of the video, and this is the most common at the moment, it's 25 frames per second. We'll look at a bit more nerdy stuff later on, this is old school TV, and that's old school UK TV, old school American TV. If you're making something, say that's going to go to broadcast, most people doing stuff for web at the moment, YouTube and videos for websites, you'll be using this one. If you're unsure, click him, change nothing else, and click "Okay." The one thing we'll have to change in here is just looking at the duration. Yours is probably set to 10 or 30, I don't remember the last thing we do. What we're going to do is just change ours hours to 10 seconds. Little timing thing here is that it's your seconds, you get up to hours, hope you don't need them, sorry, minutes and then hours. If you're using After Effects and you start getting into hours, After Effects is going to die. If you want to do full on editing a big long video, try Premier, but After Effects is to make smaller motion graphics or titles for videos from Premier. Ten seconds is quite common and this last little bit is how many frames that every second is broken into 25 frames. You don't need to worry too much about that, it just means the seconds. Let's click "Okay." We're given something called Comp 1 or Composition 1, we can rename it, because we're going to be very good when rename things, right-clicking it, and going to rename. We're going to call this one My First Comp. When you are making a first effect document and you're not sure what size your first comp should be, just make sure you set it back it to HDTV 1080 and 25. I said ten-eighty in there instead of 1,080. If you're new to After Effects, you're not allowed to call 1,080. People in the industry call it ten-eighty, there's no reason or use for, but if you walk into a video conference and you start calling it 1,080, they'll know you're going to be new. Make sure you keep up with the lingo and just call it ten-eighty. Now we're going to go off and start building our animation. We'll do that in another video. See you in the next one. 6. Changing the length of your composition: All right, before we move on, what I want to do is just make sure you know how to change the length of your composition, okay? We've picked 10 seconds and you might get to a point where you want it to be longer or your animation needs to be shorter, okay? It sacked as 10 seconds at the moment, you can see down here, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Yours might have slightly different numbering along here. Don't sweat up. We're going to look at that later on. Okay. To change to the length, okay, you click on your comp, right-click it and go down to comp settings. Here you can go through and change the duration, okay? Five seconds now, click okay, and it's going to be only five seconds long. All right, easy. That's how you change the length of your composition in After Effects. 7. Matching composition to video size: Hi. In this video, we're going to look at making a comp automatically from the video that you might already have.Can say in the first video there, or the last one, we looked at making a new composition. That might be because you're just going to start new composition, you're going to start making your own type of animations, it's going to be full on motion graphics, no actual live video, but you might be using After Effects slightly differently, you might have an existing video that you're going to Six Up with After Effects,so instead of making a comp and then trying to put the video in it, we're going to make a comp from that video automatically. The reason this is good is if you make a comp, like we had in the first video there or the last video, and then try put the video in it, you might find that's the wrong size, it might be slightly different frame rates, and things don't quite match up, and you end up having distinct things and move things around. So, you might as well just make a comp that's exactly the same as the video. This is really good mainly because that's what happens, people often they'll make a comp following my advice using HD version, and they might have some video footage that is lower quality, can might be 720, again which is standard definition, and they'll try and scale it up. There's no real point in doing that, again you might also just keep the whatever version you've got, scaling it up is just going to make the file size bigger but no extra quality. To do it, let's import our video, it's got some existing here, we're going to import, we're going to file. Now, on your desktop or wherever you've downloaded the exercise files, if you haven't yet, again there's an exercise files to download and unzip, again, you can play along, you can use your own videos obviously, but if you want to check out the website and download the exercise files. Let's open them up, and here look at the one called Particle Background.mp4, just a video that I've made. We're going to actally make this particle thing later on, it's quite cool, but I'm just going to use as a background graphic at the moment, for our type animation that we're going to do next. I've got a video, there's my first comp, so he's a little bit uses now we can delete them, but we'll just ignore, there's my video. To make it come from them, right click them, go to New Comp from selection, you see it's given it the exact same name, this is the little icon that we're looking for, and this little tape reel here, or this film reel, this is the comp window,t his is the raw footage and this is the comp come from it, and thank you. After Effects, what it's done is it's made a comp the exact same size, the exact same framing to match my video. Then, I can go through, and I click in here, and I'm going to space-bar, and it should play my little animation, you can see little dots moving around, it's just a little particle in the middle that we're going to do later on, this is the background for our type. Hit space-bar again to stop it, now you might see mine is cropped around the edges, I'm going to go down here for a 100 percent and go to fit, that just fits in these I can see everything. So, that's the way to make a comp from the video, and I do this very often, especially if I'm doing things like screen captures for these courses that I do for you, and then I get them at HD because of my laptop and the screen recording software, it comes through at about 720 standard definition. So, I just use those rather than trying to scale it up to HD for no reason. That's how to match your comp magically to your video. 8. Create type animation in After Effects: Hey, in this video, we're going to look at creating a type animation in After Effects. A nice simple one, just to get us going in After Effects. We're going to grab the Type Tool, this guy up the top here, click that once. Now, in the middle of our stage here we're going to click once, and you'll see we'll be given a new line, we'll just start typing, we're just going to type in a name. I'm going to type in BYOL. Let's select it all, so I'll just drag a box over and select it, and I'm going to pick a font. So the font is over here on the Character Window. If you can't see, sorry, the Character panel, go to Window, and you should see the name character to bring it up. I'm going to just make mine a little bit bigger so that I can see it a little bit better. Pick a font, any font, it doesn't matter what font you use. So I'm going to use Museo, one of my favorite new ones, I'm going to use the Museo Slab, 700 size-wise. In terms of the drop down menu here, you can pick. This is going to be a standard. You're having fonts there and you got to save any two for some magic reason. What you can do though is with it selected, watch this. You can't just obviously type it in there, you can click in here and make it 120, but you'll find that everything in After Effects is what's called scrubable, it means that it can be clicked and dragged across. If I hover above any of these blue things, only use font-size, click old and drag it to the right, and you can see it updates my font size in the right size, left then right. I'll get it up to a biggish size, mine is up to 210, I'm not too worried. To physically move it around now, go to this tool here, it's a little black arrow called the Selection Tool, I'm going to click this, and I'm going to move it down. We got a font, got a color. Now, if yours is coming out of different color, highlight the text with the Type Tool, and here is your color thing here. You can pick some basic black and white, or you can click on this white or black box here, the bigger version, and you can use this to scroll up and down to get the hue. Once you've picked a hue on, I'm going to pick something in there, and you can click in here to pick the color. Can you see it updating on the right? See if click in here. If you want it to be pure white you click and drag it up to the corner, or down here to the black. I'm going to pick something in this mickey blue and I'll make it a little more green. Click again. The other thing you might notice is that it's pretty poor quality, you can see on my screen here. Well, it depends on how you're viewing your video, you might stick it to the HD. But in terms of mine, mine is viewing on what's called quarter. Yours is probably default into auto and probably got full. It just means that with it set to auto, it's going to try and guess, is your machine old and crappy, and it might go auto, and might go down to quarter, but automatically. But if your machine is reasonably good and it's not being stressed out at the moment, it's probably going to default to full. Leave it on auto and it will jump up and down as it needs to. If you want to force it, say you want to see the quality of the image, you can force it to be full. I often force it to be full just because my machine is pretty good, and I like to always look at it if it's good quality, but that's not always true, you might have to jump it down to quarter. It just mean like quarter quality, it doesn't change the output of it. The quality is still when you finally render it, it's going to be as good as you make it, it's going to be full HD this one. It just means while you're previewing it, it's going to be a little bit low quality. So to do animation, we're going to make sure our timeline is all the way back here. This thing is called our CTI, or a Current Time Indicator, nobody calls it that though, it's the play head. So we're just going to call it the play head. So we're going to drag it along right to a zero, zero. You can tell I'm at zero zero over here on the left. What I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom out a little bit. We were on Fit before, so I'm going to zoom out to maybe 50 percent, just so I can see the edges. Now your screen, you might be working on a really big Imax, you'd be able to see it at Full, and depending on your screen. I'm working on my little laptop here, so I'll put at 50 percent. You can also do is, for shortcuts, for zooming in and out, it's really quite common. If you hold down the Control key and hit plus, it zooms in, and minus, it comes out. If you're on a Mac hold down Command Plus, and minus to zoom in and out. So what I'd like to do is my animation is going to start off at here on the right, so I'm just going to click and drag it with my Selection Tool, and what we're going to do is we're going to animate this lay here called BYOL. We're going to twirl down the edge, we're going to twirl down transform, and this is where our basic animation happens. You can see we can animate something called the anchor point, the position, where it is on the page, the scale of it, the rotation, and how see-through it is with opacity. So at the beginning here, I want to set my little key frame, Full position. To do that, can you see this little guy down here? It's quite small, he is a stopwatch. Literally, I'm going to click the stopwatch and it's going to start watching what I do. So it's going to click it. Now it's thinking and it's watching what I'm doing. So what it's done is it's put a key frame here this little diamond, to say at frame zero, I'm here, this x and y position. If I move it along a little bit, how far, it's up to you, I'm going to go maybe a second-and-a-half. Watch this, I'm going to click hold and drag it across. If you just drag, it goes willy nelly. If you hold Shift while you're dragging, it drags it across perfectly straight, it's up to you. You can you see that it's put another key frame at different position? So my play head here, there he is, he's off screen. But when I get across to this one, he is on screen. So drag the play head back, hit space bar on your keyboard, preview it, and it slides in. It's not very exciting, it's just sliding across, but, yeah. Well done. We've done our first bit of animation in After Effects. Two key frames, a bit of boring type, and it slides in and we are awesome. One thing you might notice is mine is a little bit jumpy compared to yours, yours might be even more jumpy. When I hit space bar, what we're going to do is keep an eye on this info panel here. If you don't have the info panel, is it the info panel or the preview? Yeah, the info panel. Is go to Window and find it, and where is info? There he is. There, make sure he is on. What you're going to do is hit space bar. I'm just going to keep an eye over here. Watch this, hit space bar, and it's previewing perfectly. How I know it's not previewing perfectly, it's jumpy, and it'll go right over here, and it will just give you an indication of how fast it's trying to play. Watch this. If I adjust my key frames a little bit, if I hit space bar now, watch what this happens over here. If I hit space bar, it's trying its best, and it caught up with it fine. Your computer might be a little older but full up, it might be running pretty slowly. What ends up happening is it'll play once and try it's best to get through, and then when it loops back around, it'll play nice. Can you see mine almost loop? It's not quite keeping up, but then it plays a second time, and it's all happy days, mostly happy days. It's dropping off a little bit. All I have to do maybe is drop it down to half, hit space bar, and it will play. Well, it's still not quite keeping up even at that low quality. The reason mine is doing so badly is that I've got screen capturing software running on mine so that you can follow along obviously with the videos, and it stresses my poor little machine out a little bit. I'm going to go back to full. Actually, I'm going to Auto, then it can decide itself. See, it's decided half. So that's our first bit of animation. It slides in, the next thing we're going to do is get to pause for a little while, which it's already doing. You can see as it just pauses, and then what we're going to do is we're going to get it to maybe drop down. What we're going to do is towards the end here, so maybe at about eight seconds, I'd like it to start falling. To do that, what we need to do is we want to key frame here to keep it right here. Because if I start dragging it down now, this happens quite a bit with people. Watch this. I've got a key frame here, always at the beginning, a key frame here, always it slides in. But then all the way between this guy and this guy, he's trying his very best, watch, to get down there. What I want to do is between these two key frames is just to wait for me. Then I want the animation to happen at this last little piece here. I'm going to undo. Instead of dragging it down here, what we're going to do is we're going to manually add a key frame. That's what this little diamond here does, watch. If I click it, hey, we've got a key frame over here. It just says, "Remain where you are." Key frame on the right, in the center, another one in the center so it just sits there, and then the last one at nine seconds. Somebody has got a bit of black video at the end here, that's my fault, it's not meant to be a black video. That's just my little mix up when I made the little particle video. What we're going to do is click hold and drag it down. What was the key I hold down to make sure it goes in a straight line? Shift, you got it. So I'm going to drag it just off screen, now I'm going to hit space bar. That's going to play, it comes along, waits for a little while, and then little particles fall, and then down it goes. That's a little bit of animation. It's a little bit what I like to call pal pointy, it's not very super slick and hasn't got any inertia or any movement, so we're very clunky at the moment, but, we'll fix that up in another video. But that's it, well done, buddies, we have made our first prototype animation, let's make sure we save it and move on to the next video. 9. Easing your animation: Hey, welcome back. In this video we're going to look at easing. Think of easing is things like inertia or adding a bit of real life to our time, because the moment it's got a little PowerPoint effect, were it kind of just chugs on which, chugs on just like stops just not keeping up with the little frame rates. I'm going to turn my resolution down to maybe a quarter just to speed things up for us. It chug along and just kind of stops, and it's not very exciting. What we need to do is add something that makes it feel a little bit more free or believable. Think of it, like when you say you want to go for a run, you're going to start slow and they end up being run, but there's no instantaneous speed. That's what outcome type has and it doesn't look very nice. We're going to give it a bit of real live action by doing some called easing. To do it, you do it to the keyframes. So you can right-click any of these keyframes. If you're on a Mac and you can't right-click, you just hold on the Control key, and give it a click. There is options on Macs as well to go off, and often the mouse does have the ability to right-click, you can turn it on, but if you don't hold control and get this click. So I'm going to right-click this keyframe, and I'm going to give this one as Keyframe Assistant. I'm going to go to Easy Ease. Nothing really changes, you can kind of see the icon there, it is now a little hourglass. Now we're going to do it to this N1 as well. So I'm going to right-click him. I'll go to Keyframe Assistant, then go to Easy Ease. Now its Easy Ease is not as extreme as I'd like it to be. So prepare yourself, it's not going to be super exciting here, we're going to make it exciting, but the moment we hit Space bar. It's just got a bit more of real life kind of like movement, watch this, kind of slides, it's starts slow, and goes fast in the middle there, and that's what easing is. It kind of adds a bit of like slowness to the beginning or end. So, yeah, that's Easy Ease. Now, the problem with Easy Ease is, it's not enough for me, I like to really extreme that up. So what we're going to do is we're going to right-click this guy, and instead of going into Keyframe Assistant, we're going to go Keyframe Velocity and this is like a manual way of overriding it. The Easy Ease is 33%. Okay, what we going to do is we're going to bump it right up to 70 and you do it for both sides is the easiest way to learn. Okay, just do 70% the same with this one. Right-click up, and velocity, and change this to 70. Now you don't have to add Easy Ease first, I just showed you that one, because that's what a lot of people use and they like it, I don't. I like to make it instead of 33, make it 70. Make a nice and extremes, you go straight to velocity. Now, be prepared for awesomeness, ready Space bar. Okay, I add sound effects all the way through this course, I'm sorry, it can't stop it. Okay, you made your own. Look at that. That's one of the two secret ingredients to making things that you've done in After Effect. A lot of people would teach themselves and they do okay, but it's not until you add things like easing and another one called Motion Blur, before you're like, that's cool and that's After Effects. All right, so let's do it to the last ones as well. So you can slink them both at the same time. You can see this, you can drag a box around the two, right click one of them and then go straight to keyframe velocity. Go in here and set to 70, tab across this one to 70, click Okay, and they both change at the same time. Ready, Space bar, and it pauses probably far too long, but I want to see those little pixels fall in the background, a little snowy things and then, nice.Cool, all right, that's our first step in making our type look more awesome. Make sure you save your file, command S or file save, and I'll see you in the next video. 10. Blurring your text while it moves: Hey, welcome to this video. This video we're going to cover something called motion blur. Motion blur is your secret source. Easing was cool, blurring is better. It just adds that believability because we've got some static type that had that PowerPoint feel to it. We added some easing to give it a little bit of real-world, real-life motion and motion blur is the next step to adding a bit of slickness to it. It just means that when it's moving, it's blurring, like it does in real life when something's running really fast in front of you, it blurs when it's moving, because we can't get a really crisp image of it. Happens the same on film with live action, we're going to fake it with static text. There's no reason it should blur other than it looks cool. To do it, it's pretty easy, and there's two things you need to turn on. You need to turn this button on here. This particular button turns along globally. So if you click on this, if you hover above it, watch it says, "Enables motion blur in all layers with motion blur switched set." To preview it's "Space bar" and you can see, no motion blur. I've turned it on, but nothing happens. Let's turn on globally, that says, "I am prepared to do motion blur to the layers that you tell me," and that's what we do. We've got two layers Louisiana tool [inaudible] up to make it look nice and clean. You can see here, I can add motion blur, see the same little icon here to the squeeze underneath, so I can add it to this one. I can edit to this one and an eighth, but it doesn't move. So it can be on or off, it doesn't matter because it's not moving anything you've animated with key frames, you turn it on, so you got to turn it on twice. They are globally and turn that one off afterwards, and now watch. Let's get back to the beginning, be prepared. Easing plus motion blur equals coolness. Ready and go down. It blurs while it's moving. Yes, you might be thinking that's not as cool as Dan makes out, I love it. To extreme it up a little because it's not really moving that fast, watch this is zip. So even I was a like a tiny underwhelmed, what I'm going to do is toiled on this, if I'm making frames, and to speed it up right, it's taking two seconds or nearly three seconds to get across here. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to say my friend, take one second, it's going to move a lot faster because it's got shorter distance across. Now, it token motion blur and shrink this one up as well, so it's about half a second, then here we go, motion blur. [inaudible] with it on, super sexy, nice. Motion blur is on for this, why would you have two buttons for? It was a bit silly. It means that say you've got a 100 layers here and don't be afraid if you do get up to like 50 layers in aftereffects totally part of it. You've got lots of things animating around and that's what happens. So what you can do, and what motion though does is it stresses the machine a little bit to turn blurred. So what you can do is in say, you're not worried about the look of it, use technically doing some stuff and you're sick of it taking forever, you can say globally, even there on for all of the layers maybe on for 50 or a 100, you can turn it off globally just while you're previewing, just a slow stuff down. So make sure you turn it back on when you finish to get that lovely smooth blurriness. That's how to add motion blur, and that's like the second step in the two-step process of making things look really slick and after effects. We're going to cover a bunch more stuff, but when you are teaching yourself and you're doing basic type animation, turn this too on, amazing but emotion blur and you will look awesome. All right, see you next video. 11. How to render or export your After Effects animation: Hi there. In this video, we're going to look at rendering or exporting your video from After Effects. Rendering or exporting, doesn't really matter what you call it, it's the same thing. What we're going to do is try and make a video at the end. We're going to try and make an MP4. An MP4 is the most common video format now. Plays online, it's good for broadcast, there is all good uses for MP4s. Let's go and do it. Let's go to Composition, and let's go to Add to Media Encoder. There is lots of different ways, you can go to Export to Add to Media Encoder Queue, you can go to this one, you can go to there, the shortcuts, great. It doesn't really matter which one you go to. Let's probably go this way: File, Export, Add to Media Encoder Queue. Now you can render this straight from After Effects. Now, that's totally fine, and it works very similar way. The reason we don't do that is that After Effects, while it's rendering can't do anything else, you're going to stuck waiting for it to finish. Whereas if you send it off to the separate program called Adobe Media Encoder, it's just a separate program, and he's got one function in the world, is to render video. The cool thing about him is he can sneak in the background, be rendering your videos, and you can continue on your merry way making new After Effects stuff. That's why we like it. We're going to go Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. It's a separate program on your machine. It will start loading up in the background, like my one mode, eventually. Now, one thing to note is that it's going to be rendering the version that I have open. You can you see I had this first one we did, it got nothing in it. We can get rid of him, but I have this one open. If I double-click him, and if I send it to Adobe Media Encoder, its going to render this one, this blank video. Make sure you got the comp you want to render open, then go to Add to Media Queue, and then it opens up. Lovely. Now the awesome thing is by default, it's already set. It's going to be H.264, it's going to be match source, it's the same as we made it, and it's going to put it in the right folder. At this stage, all we're going to do is click Play. We're not going to worry about too much more of the details. Later on in the video, towards the end, we're going to get into some advanced stuff, where we talk about codecs, and we're going to talk about getting the file size really small, and all of this other stuff. But at the moment, this is all you need. To get started, this is going to make you a video at the right size that you made it, at the right format that's really good and shareable in a place where it's easily found. Yeah, it's lovely. The cool thing about it, remember, it's in this other program called Adobe Media Encoder. It gets installed without you asking. If I jump in to After Effects, look, I can still work in here. Instead of getting After Effects will tied up doing stuff. It's up to you. Speed. It's pretty small one. You can see it's rendering down here. Now, where it puts it is a little weird. It belonged at one here, but it's on my computer here. What you're doing is you're looking for a way of you to save the document. That's the file that I was working on, my After Effects, aep is my After Effects project. What happens is when you just hit Play it goes and makes a folder here, with the same name, and adds this _AME for Adobe Media Encoder. That one there is my particle background. It gets its name from, if I jump back in to After Effects, is my comp. When you're naming your comps, you can't save some time by just giving it a name that you know you're going to use later on, so it's called Particle Background. Here it is them. This thing here, don't worry about, you may or may not have this one. This is just a temporary file. This disappears later on. Send it the MP4 we want. This is just a little file that I like to check out to see if I knows special reason. We're looking for the MP4. You can see it's 3.7 megabytes, and I double-click it. Massive. I hit Play. Motion play easing, poses, little particles fall, and eventually it drops off. Great. That's my little MP4, and that is the basics for exporting. There is no much more to that. If you want to get bit nerdy, you can skip along to one of the later videos where we go through, but more advanced exporting. I'll see you in the next video. 12. My computer is really crappy help: Hi, welcome to this video. This one, what we're going to do is talk about what happens when you've got a really old and slow computer, and you need to speed it up a little bit. It might be working okay until now. As we go through this course, we're going to do some more hard core animation, and you'll find after fix getting even slowly, it happens to the best of computers. What we need to do is just figure out a few tricks to get it going. It will always output fine, it's more the previewing that we need to fix with. When you see this preview Window, if you can't see it go to Window. There is a preview, if you want a nice big screen or an iMac, you'll probably see this whole view, but if you're like me on this laptop, watch if I drag it down, there's actually lots of awesome stuff in there. Hello. That was hiding before, you might have to make it bigger that way. Now, by default, watch this. You're looking at this little green bar along here. You see this little green bar, if I hit space bar, it's going to try and render it. So it's kind of like going forward and trying to render it before my little player gets there, it's called caching and cache. Just trying to get there and buffer and try and get ready. It's doing it fine. It does kind of speed and this animation and my computer doesn't seem to be very stressed at the moment, which is awesome. That's fine, but see it is running a bit jumpy. What you can do is you can say in here, I want to skip every second frame because it's running really smoothly showing you by default zeros, so it doesn't skip any of them, so plays it smoothly. Well, if it's running a little slow you can say skip everyone, please. It will skip every say two. It's going to run a little jumpy, but that might not be watched. You're not looking for pure quality now. You 're looking more to kind of timing or just some kind of basic. Look at that. Now, I need to clear that green stuff. It's easy just to grab something and drag it around because it has to go and redo it now. If I hit space bar, look at the time. You can see it's very different, it's got little green dots. So it's actually jumping between those two now and it's just ignoring the two frames in between. It's faster at keeping up with it. It's going to buffer, it's going to buffer longer. You can see, it's just little jumpy there. But you might be okay with at the moment, just kind of getting working on timing or maybe see you working with sound, that's a great way. Now, your final output doesn't get changed. It just stays on it's format zero and it'll output every frame. But just what you're previewing, it's quite a handy thing to do and that'll speed you up a little bit. Now, the next thing to do is to have a look at your preferences. So if you're on a PC, it's under edit. Way down the bottom here is preferences because I'm on Mac it's in a slightly different place. It's under after effects preferences. Let's go down to media and disk cache. So a couple of things, disk cache; if yours is running really slowly, the reason mine runs really slowly, often it's because I'm running out of hard drive space. I'm going to get like 30 gigs worth of my laptop, [inaudible] , which is really bad. That means that your maximum diskette size, yours as much is probably a lot higher. All it means is that while it's working, it needs to store all your previews somewhere. What you can say is actually instead of storing camera default 220 or 30 or 50, it stores too much amount because it fills up my hard drive completely and my machine goes into critical. I just made mine a lot smaller. It means that you can't preview as much or as long, which is fine for me at the moment I'd rather it run fast. So you might play around with that one. The other thing you can do is say your hard drive is full or empty or it's just a really old drive. I've got a really cool what's called an SSD drive, which means it's just a solid state drive. It just means it goes really fast and it's really quick. So I like to use my SSD drive because it's super fast. You might have a really old laptop with a really slower hard drive. Not going to get into it, but you can't get slow hard drives and fast hard drives. What you could do, especially if you're working with really big files, is you can actually choose where to store these instead of storing them on your hard drive, like I am. You can say actually it's going to choose a folder and you can actually plug-in like here, I've got an external drive here. You go plug it into that one and say store them over there. The only trouble with that is just going to make sure you've got a reasonably fast external hard drive to check how fast that is, and how fast the connection between it is for getting a little nerdy, sorry. But try to make it go as fast. The other thing you can do to make things go fast is, if you're looking to upgrade your laptop, there's two things to upgrade. RAM is the quickest and easiest. This little Mac you can tell much RAM you have if you go to the memory. Mine has eight gigs of RAM. Four is base minimum, eight's just usable, 16 is awesome, 32 is world winning. So it depends, just check how much RAM you've got. That's an easy one to upgrade. It's cheap, it's easy unless you're using a new MacBook Pro like mine, which turns out a bit painful, especially if your PC RAM upgrades are something even a novice can do in the afternoon. Buy a new RAM that fits, stick it in there take it into a shop, whatever. It's only a couple of $100 will get you some good RAM, that's American dollars. RAM; get that upgraded. It's cheap, it's easy. The next thing which is not as cheap and easy is to upgrade your hard drive. If you've got an old tape drive. Which is most computers at the moment have tape drives and which have like spinning wheels in them, upgrade it to an SSD drive. Take it to the shop say, "I want an SSD drive." You'll have to pay. They're reasonably expensive. A cheap one that's maybe half a terabyte it's still going to be $400. It's pretty expensive. But it's an amazing thing to do for video especially because SSD's are a lot smaller size-wise because that might be a big problem for you. But doing about half of what you can get for the normal tape drives. But they are crazy, I have installed them on a couple of laptops for our training centers and it turns the machine that can't do after effects, I had mixed out RAM but I installed an SSD drive and, hey presto, it starts running really fast. That's a really cool thing you can do. The last thing you can do you kind of make things run fast is upgrading your video card. Your video card is something in your machine that, it process all the video and it can be upgraded. It's probably the most complicated and painful of them all. But it can be one of the big benefits. But try RAM first, try an SSD next, and then go for the video card. Lastly, but not least, is to upgrade your machine, if you've got a really old machine you planned on doing lots of video stuff and it's just running, it's not usable, then you might have to look at getting an upgrade. That's it for how to make your crappy computer run a little bit faster. 13. Empty your disk cache to clear hard drive space: Hey. In this video, we're going to look at Disk cache and clearing out some space on your hard drive. I said in the previous video, I have got very little hard drive space left. If I look down here, I've got 25 gigs available of my two to five. I don't have very much to start with and I've run it all out. I live on this edge of having to clean stuff out all the time. Now, what happens in after effects is that, when it's previewing, these little green bars, it's storing all those preview somewhere and holds onto them. When you close the program, it doesn't get rid of them. It just means that you've got this huge amount of file space that's being taken up. If you open after effects and use it for a day or two and then don't use it for six months, it still store those giant files, they get up massive. We looked at an earlier video, if I go to After Effects preferences, and if you're on a PC, you have to go to Edit, down to Preferences or on a Mac. I'm going to go Disk Cache. I've told it's steal tin account right off the top of my head by default. So I think it's like 30 gigabytes. So you've got 30 gigabytes that it's storing in there and it doesn't get rid of them.So what you can do is just do this and do just cache. Okay, see, I've got 7.3 in there. That's why it's used just in doing these tutorials for you today. But click "Okay". Alright, so you can do that now just in case you are doing it as well. Premia, which is a program that often people use with, in conjunction with after effects, premiums. You editing program afterfixes wanting special effects and titles. So premia, if you're doing that, that actually sucks up even more. I go into the preferences and they have find Meteor and disk and clear that one as well. you can save like another 30 gigabytes width of space. You might turn it down too, so it doesn't steal as much like I have to. But the higher it is, the more previews the faster it runs, the more previews doesn't have to redo. So you care if you've got a huge amount of file slice, you get a couple of terabytes leftover, then crank it up, okay, and you can have lots of good previews. Just before we go as well, there's one in here called autosave, this one here, I sit every 20 minutes. I like it to every new machines crappy and dying and you might even turn it down to either five-minutes. It does pause it for a second to do a little preview. But it means that when it crashes, and if it's crashing quite often, it means it's more likely to go and it has an auto save, which is cool. But I might want to tune it up instead of 20 minutes, it's every five, but if you find it's getting it, it'll flash for a second and it's auto saving and it might be annoying, so you can turn that down. Alright, that's how to clear your disk and play around with the autosave 14. Ive lost my timeline in After Effects: Help, I'm lost in the After Effects. That happens quite a bit when I'm teaching and it's pretty much one main culprit. If you're new to After Effects, you'll get lost this one way probably loads to get started with so let's cover it now. Essentially it is, I can see I might bring your laptop here, and people like to double-click things and if I double-click this it's gone. Where did it go? I've got my animations to there, my timelines there they are, but if I play it I can only see these little guys here and this weird little timeline. I can only see parts of it. You might have done something separately, you might have double-click on the text and you can only see the text. All of this is that you can see here's my composition, we've jumped into this isolation mode. We double-clicked the layer and we've gone inside that layer just by itself just to see it and alone and just by himself which is kind of handy. Well, it's never handy actually just a bit of a pain, especially for my students that are new it just means that we're back at square one here. Let's double-click the text. We're beyond the key-frame here. If I double-click this text. Double-clicking the text doesn't work. It just doesn't editing the text, but you double-click the background or some sort of layer that you've got or type, and what it'll do is jump into here. That's how you get unlost by just jumping back to that tab. Hopefully that helps. If it doesn't help drop me a comment below say I've got some other thing that I've got lost in and I will help you. Screenshot would be super helpful so I can know what you're looking at, but dump it into the forum below or the comments and I will try and dig you out from where you are. All right, that's it for getting lost in After Effects. 15. Lower thirds type animation: Hi there. In this video, we're going to create a lower thirds title overlay. People put a lower thirds, titles, any bit of text that appears at the bottom of the screen explaining. Normally, we have a talking head and you want to explain who they are, okay? Set the scene, what they are? What their credentials are? Who we're talking to or listening to, at least, okay? To do it we've got this all project open. I need new ones. I just want to let you know, you save it and you go file and you can go to close project, okay? Remember we get given an untitled project to get started for our next project. All right, so first thing we need to do is create a composition. Instead of going to a new composition, we're going to let the video create it. We're going to import video, and I'm going to give you your first bit of sneaky shortcut awesomeness, is can you see in the project window there's a big MD area here. If you double-click it goes to import, what does it mean, okay? Instead of going to Import File, you just double click in there. Nice, okay? There's one in here called Talking Head.mp4, bring that in. I've got this thing before and you can double-click it to preview it, okay? This is not a composition, it's just giving your little preview, that's Space-bar. It's me talking to myself, okay? What we can do to make a compromise, just right click it. You come from selection, okay? With this thing called Talking Head. You could rename it now by right-clicking it. Talking Head bores to me, all right? I'm going to save this project. I'm going to stick it on our desktop. Where did we stick it? I'm sticking it in this one here. Actually I'm thinking mine somewhere else. I'm sticking mine in here. You can put yours on your desktop. I'm putting mine in these production files here. Mainly I talked to you about them earlier just if you get lost, you can use my files, right? This one here is called 15. Here we go, great. Next thing I need to do is this is me playing, running through. I'm going to turn the audio down; A, because I hate listening to myself talk and you need to be able to hear me talk, weird. I can see over here this little mute button, okay? Put that on I can hear stuff, put it off it's just me talking, okay? You got to make sure you turn it back on when you go to export because otherwise it won't export audio, okay? I'm going to bring my play head back to the beginning]. What I'd like to do is a white box to slide out over here, okay? Or maybe just up here and then type to slide into it and then it rolled to disappear over later. We're going to do a couple of its animation. It's really just the same things we did for our first tics animation, slightly different, but key-framing, adding some motion blur and some easing. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to grab this thing here called the rectangle tool. Now the rectangle tool is a crazy one. If you're self-taught and you start doing this, watch weirdly it becomes a mask, okay? Use one a rectangle, I just want a white box. I'm going to Undo, okay? Undo is under Edit. There's one called Undo, okay. All right, so I've gone back to its fine. What you need to do is grab your black arrow and just click off in here so you've got no layer selected, okay? If I have known layer selected here and I used the exact same tool, okay? It will go through and draw rectangle. It's a red one, that's not what I want, okay so just make sure you have nothing selected down here. All right, let's go to full color and we have white, and in terms of the stroke on the outside, because it's a white stroke you're not going to see it. But I'm going to get rid of it just by tuning it to zero. Click in here and type zero. All right, and I'm going to draw it a box. It's going to be like this size. I want it to appear over this side here and I'm going to put some type. I'm going to put Daniel Scott after fixed trainer or something like that, okay? First thing I need to do is going in with my black arrow and we're going to set some key frame. What I'd like you to do is actually play for a little while before this thing even starts to play up here. To get it to start later on, okay? At the moment it starts right the beginning here. I'm going to start it at about here, maybe after a second or two and watch this. I can drag this guy along, okay? Just so that it doesn't exist and you see this gap here now and it exists from then on, okay? It just appears at the moment. I've had a little shortcut. I'm going to leave it in there because I accidentally hit it. I hit the In key on my keyboard. In key is a shortcut, which is really good when you know what you're doing. But if you don't, and it starts doing this, okay? You get that error, okay? If you get that error then it means that you've hit the In key accidentally. All it means is that that might be your problem, okay? This is called the work area we'll talk about him later on. But if you accidentally get this really small, it comes up with errors and you just need to extend that out to be the whole animation and you should be a wagon. All right, not my smoothest tutorial by far. But we've worked out a few little problems here so we've got them along. What I'd like to do is I'd like to play around with the opacity. I want this to fade in. To do it, I want my play head to be right at the beginning here. Watch this. It's not very clever. It doesn't snap to beginning, all right? It's not hard to get to the beginning here, but a nice little thing you can do is while you're dragging your play-head or your CTI, okay? As you can drag it along and if you hold Shift on your keyboard. Watch mine, if I hold Shift, drag. Watch when it gets close, it just launched out there and snaps to the edge. It's really a cool little shortcut. Two shortcuts in one video, awesome. Okay, so I'm at the beginning, what I'd like to do is play with the opacity. Along here there's a bunch of things hanging at the bottom of the Shape Layer. Let's call this one, and let's double-click the word. Let's right-click it and go to rename, okay? Let's call this one instead of Shape layer, let's call this one Lower Third Background, great. Under transform, okay?I want to go down to opacity and we're going to set the little stopwatch going in, so it's waiting. Click and now it's recording what I do. I'm going to turn the opacity down to zero so it's completely gone. Then after little while. How long? I'm not too sure yet? Maybe, I don't know, half a second, something like that. You can drag these icons around and afterwards. Tune the opacity up to a 100 percent. Now if you're following along, you can always keep an eye on this. If I say about half a second, you can see I've actually put a one second, 16 frames. You can type that in here by going like this and a cool little trick is you can just go 116 and it will put it in the colons and everything for you. All right, so if that's zero because it goes to 100 percent. Put my play-head back Space-bar and, I'm happy with that timing. It's fine. If you're not happy with it, you can drag it further apart, make it go slower. Watch this, Space-bar slowly comes on, okay? If you want to be faster, you can bring them together and they go a bit faster. That works for me. All right, so what is that? Now I want to type to slide in, okay? You can see if I tilt this up and I tilt that up, you got two layers, okay? This is my video on behind, there's my lower third background. Now I'm going to grab my top two, okay? I'm going to click once here. I'm going to type in Daniel Walter Scott, okay? Select it all, pick a font, okay? We can't see a font so looking at this character one here, I shrunk mine down when I was dealing with this preview. You can't find yours anyway, get a window character. All right, and font size I'm going to drag this down so it fits. I'm going to make it a color I can see, I'm going to click black from there, okay? Got my black arrow to move it around so it's going to end up here. I'm not going to worry about too much because I'm going to end up changing this. What I might do is double-click it. Go jumps to the top two, put our 10 in and I am the founder. I have to use B-Y-O-L because it's just too damn long. Bring your laptop. I'm just going to shrink that down, okay? Might use that as the bold. I might use that as the light vision, okay? You can spin edges on fonts. I'd like to, but I need to get all of this tutorial, okay? I'm going to go to fit as well, okay? The reason it's all pix-elated as well. Why is it all pix elated? Did you guess? It's because of this. It'll export fine by previewing and here set it to quarters. I'm going to set it to full because I really want to see my lovely preview. Another good error, see this red thing down at the bottom it says disabled and it goes black, okay? It means because I got my caps lock on. Because a second ago I was typing in uppercase. I have my caps lock on my keyboard on. I'm going to turn caps lock off and magically it comes back, okay? If you ever have the problem of that, okay? Where it goes blank and the little red bar at the bottom, it's because you've left caps lock on your keyboard, okay? I've had people re- install after fix trying to get rid of that thing and it turns out caps lock was on for the whole afternoon. Okay, so I've got this, I got that. What I want to do is start animating it now so where? I'm gong to hit Space-bar. That appears, and my type here, just like this other one I wanted to start a little bit later. Instead of starting right at the beginning here I'm going to get to start about there so roughly I'll shift to get to play-head. If you following me, mines at 1:19, okay? What I'm going to do is I'm going to start it off screen so I've got my black arrow. You my friend, hold Shift to get to go straight, get off. You might have to zoom out a little bit. Can pick to 50 percent so you can see this side here. Okay, and we're going to set our first key frame and its full position so twirl it down, transform, set the stopwatch going, so it's going to set a little key frame right there off-screen. Little bit along, okay? How far is a little? I've got mine at two seconds, two frames, and I'm going to hold shift. I think you need to start dragging then hold Shift rather than shift to start with just start dragging and pulling then hold shift and it will get it in a straight line. Cool, so I'm going to drive back, preview me talking. If this happens, can you see its any buffering and only getting to here because the green thing and loop around, it's because I accidentally hit Space-bar twice. I might have to bring it back here, hit Space-bar. If you hit Space-bar twice it tries to loop back on itself so if you get stuck in the eternal loop just strike the play-head out again. Hit Space-bar again, and it should be fine. There it goes. Okay, it's a bit fast so I'm going to open it up a little bit back to here. Okay, so it's sliding on, but it's missing the magic. We learnt the magic in an earlier video. There's two of them; there is easing and there is motion blur. The reason I'm not doing motion blur and easing to the fate of the lower third, the white box, is because I find when you do fades is that you can mess around with easing all day and the motion blur all day and it makes no difference. There will be periods up there out there that will not agree, but I figure it's just not worth it. I can't see any difference with easing with things fading in and out. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'd like to play around with these two guys no. To do the easing, its easiest just to grab both of them. It depends what you want to do. I'm going to get mine to ease both sides. You can just do one so it starts fast then ends slow, okay? I'm going to do both of them because I like to look at that right-click key frame velocity 70- 70. Drag it back. Hit Space-bar and still little fast. It's smoother, but I'm going to open it out a little bit. Yeah, it looks nice. Now the other magic so that's the easing first step and awesomeness. The second step is motion blur. Okay, remember you turn around globally, and then you forget and you could play and nothing happens, okay? What do you have to do? Remember, you have to go through and turn on globally, but also for this particular layer, okay and a to list down to make it look nice, you could turn off this one as well, and this one, it's not going to do anything. Why? Thank you. You can't see it at least so here we go. Slide, blurry when it moves. All right, hit save and I will see you in the next video. 16. Creating a watermark in After Effects: Hey, welcome back. In this video, we're going to look at creating a watermark on top of our video using After Effects. To do this, what we need to do is we need a graphic to bring in and uses watermark. You could just use the type tool here and skip bringing in an object, just type in your brand or your URL or something. What we're going to do is bring in a graphic. The graphic can be anything, it's probably best that it has a little bit of transparency. So maybe you've used the Photoshop or Illustrator, I've used Illustrator to bring your laptop logo that I want to stick in the bottom-right corner here to watermark it. So I'm going to import, so I'm going to double-click this area down here or then only. I never go the long way. So Import, File, I'm going to click down here. Bringing watermark to AI, now, it just means to be probably an AI file or P&G, so it has some transparency. It doesn't really matter. You've got to make sure it's good enough quality, if it's a really budget logo that's not very nice, it's going to look pretty bad, and I've got this AI file, and watch this. I'll click and drag it, I'll just drag it where I want it. I've made mine the perfect size for this, so you might have the scale goes up and down. We've got a video later on of how to get the most out of Illustrator and Photoshop. But for the moment, let's just drag this one on and get it in here. What I'd like to do is lower the opacity of it. So my watermark layer is I would like to drop this down. Actually what I'd like to do is actually lower the opacity of it all but also, didn't think of that. So I'm going to have my watermark over here, good call. Or on the top right, up to you. Probably now of this on the other side and the watermark down here, but we'll label them. So I'm going to have it done here. So what we're going to do is change the overall opacity of it and then we're going to get it to fade in as well. So what we'll do is we'll turn on here, transform this one and here, we've got capacity which is just I'll see-through it is, you can just drag this to the left. Examine target right down to see-through, it's up to you. You might do a scrub along just to see, mine is viewable the whole way through because I'm in quite a dark background. You might have to have a different logo, you might have a black version or do what I've done is I've actually had a little drop shadow to this thing here in illustrator, I bought it in. You can either drop shadow and After Effects as well as if you like. So goodness, but I actually wanted to animate onto one on the whole time, I want to maybe have that bit and then it fade in. So there's a couple things I can do, I can drag the beginning of this, it only starts about there. Then it goes and it goes and just appears. What we'll do is we'll get into fade in. So we want to get this to snap to the beginning of my timeline. What key do a hole down to get it to snap? That's right Shift. Grab Shift, drag my play-head, it's less beginning opacity and I'm going to select key frame for it. So we're at 24 at the moment, I'm going to sit down to zero and then shuffle along a little bit, and I'm going to set it up to 2014. So it starts at zero, it gives up its 24 and because then I'm changing anywhere, it just hangs at 24. So ready? Space bar plays along, that fades in, that slides in, that fades in and stays for the whole thing. If yours is stopping previewing like mine, it's because I've rented the hard drive to cash it, it gets around here and stops. Its got a bit more now, it's doing all right. Can you see it's chasing itself? That's fine, it just means that I'm killing my computer trying to do these tutorials. So what we're going to do is I'm going to do what we did before, go to View, I'm going to go to Preview, there you see. They're small, and I'm going to switch this to maybe skip every single one, it's going to give a jumpy but at least it's going to preview the whole way through. I'd like to obtain that something I'm meant to do there so I can show you guys but it's not just because my computer is getting stressed out. This is a bit jumpy, but you can see, slides in, plugs in, you appear watermark the whole time. Loving, that's our watermark. Let's hit Space bar, let's save this one, and let's move on to the next video. 17. Rules of motion graphics anticipation: Hey there. In this video, we're going to talk about one of the rules of animation, it's called anticipation. You can go off and have a look. A more traditional animation is like 12 principles you can work from. One of the most important ones in terms of motion graphics that I find is one called anticipation. Essentially, what it is, is things moving back before they go forward. What I mean by that is, say you've got a type, instead of it just starting it, just heading off in the distance. Give it more human qualities by leaning back before it heads off. It gives it a really nice look and feel to it. We do it as humans. When I want to go this way, I still need to put my weight on my back foot before I go forward. It gives that anticipation of what I'm going to do. If you want to get it to go fast, I build up energy and do it. You can do the same types of things with your motion graphics, and it gives even a nice feel. Let's go ahead and do that now. Let's look at doing it with our lower thirds animation. 18. Custom easing using the graph editor in After Effects: In this video, we're going to look at using the graph editor in After Effects, and it's so that we can do customizing so that we can get that anticipation working. What we're going to do is, well, a little preview where we're at, cause along, slides in, wait for a little while. Then may be after, this maybe about five seconds, 500. About five seconds, what we're going to do, is get it to go up a little bit and then down. First of all, it's just some basic keyframing. Yours might be two of them like mine, we're going to be working on the type layer, not the watermark, so we're on the top layer, tool this down. What we're looking for is position. We did some positions earlier. We are going to start lifting this golden and we're going to get to wait for a while and it's going to stop till then. I wanted to wait until it gets to five seconds and then go up and then go down after that. Do that, I need to put in a keyframe. Between these two keyframes here, it stays still and lets scroll along a little bit. We have to play around with the timing for this. Anticipation is truly more art than it is and technical science and After Effects, you cannot drag, keep forms around, play with these in trying to make it feel the feeling that you wanted to have. I'll strip along a little bit. I'm at nine frames. Five seconds I frames. I'm going to drag it up and holding shift. After I start dragging, just so that it gets to about there and then he's going to come down. Then how far down? I'm going to get there. About there maybe it's five frames 20, sorry, 20 frames per seconds. I'm going to get it to come down holding shift. It come all the way off screen. You're not going to see it much in this bottom. But anyway, so we're too worried about it, but so about keyframes, hold Shift dragging this, is my first one. It's static the metal there is up,there is down. Let's preview to see what it does if I hit Space-bar, it's actually not bad by default because it's picked up. You can see these ones are not diamonds. When I put them in there the same as the eyeglasses. It's gives the easing from this. To be honest, we could leave it there but then we wouldn't know anything about the graph editor. Now, the graph editor is probably the most complicated thing in here, it's not hard, it's fiddly. You're going to get lost a half dozen times where you're playing with it. That's Okay. We're learning. What we're going to do, is I'd like to pair on the easing of these. What we've done previously, is what these keyframe velocity, and we typed in 70. Now, that's totally fine. But we want more control rather than just guessing numbers. So to do that, we're going to use the graph editors. What we'll do, is we'll move our play hit. This beginning keyframe here, I've clicked on it and I'm going to click on this thing here called the graph editor. The graph editor is a toggle switch watch graph editor, no graph editor, graph editor, no graph editor. You can turn it on and off to get inside this one. Now, it's showing me the red one is my x. That's this animation earlier on, is when it slides in, goes in and slow, gets fast in the middle, and get slow again. But it's showing me the whole animation. What we might do, is there's a few buttons down here we can learn, and actually it's probably just easy as zooming in and out. Can you see these little mountains down here? If I click on that one, zoom in. I'm dealing with this one here. I know because I've used it before. The green one is the y-axis, and that's the up-and-down axis. The x is left and right, y is up and down. At the moment, is doing some really weird stuff in here, it's not going really smooth, so I want to smooth this out, or what I really wanted to do, is get it to go super smooth, stopped really slope, go fast, and then where it gets to the top of its animation. I know it's upside down, but it's going to go really slow and then speed up. Because the moment it's speeding up and then slowing down towards the borrowing and I want to keep going. So look at falling, it's going fast. Two, to do it, we need to split the x and the y is easiest. If I click on these guys, you can work on these, but you can't see the line handles and it's a bit of a pain. What we wanna do, is split the x and the y. The only trouble with doing that if I zoom out and let me do it, is that see this lovely sexy curve here for the x which says if I click on this button, this is the major ones, separate dimensions, ruins that one though we can fix it afterwards. All I wanted to do though is click on y. It's over here. You might click off, click on just y and x is the layer. But they're being disjointed, whereas before there was sucked in together and they'll just had the weird position. Now, it's got x and y position separately because it's a bit more control. I'm going to make sure just go to y. If it's still stuck on button and just click outside, here has some way until you get just the y. Then we're going to click on this guy. You still get these lovely little handles. So the anchor point is my keyframe. If I toggle back, that's what these little guys are. Do you see these guys we've made earlier, these keyframes. That's called the little dots are. Click on y, that's what these dots are. Cool. These little handles is the easing. Now, I'm going to make quite a bit bigger so you can see what we've done and I'm going to click on this little guy here. What I want to do is I'm going to Flynn him out. What I wanted to do is a couple of things. I know because I've done it before, so I'm cheating. I know exactly what I want, but it comes along and it's going to come out of this and go slow and aware it's going straight up and down, that's when it's going faster. It's going to get slow, fast, then it's going to get a little slow again, and then it's going to speed off, and that's what I want. You might have it like this. What will remain, is it'll go fast and it slows down at the in there. I'm going to have my strap it down here. Let's give it a preview, scroll back, hit Spacebar, watch it. I love it. It's cool. Gives a bit of quickness. Watch it. It's maybe pauses a bit too long at the top there. Can you see waves because it's going quite slow across here. To do that just to make it so it doesn't go so slow, as you can tuck these in a little bit towards the keyframe. I would shift they suck in a straight line and do it for both of these. Just means it's not going to pull this along. The tops got a bit more of a directional change rather than hanging about 3D. I like it. Let's get in there. Now, this is where it comes down to the fiddling. It's going to depend on a couple of things. How high you lifted it. My one goes up to a maximum of this use Mac, I really high do as my own go a little bit. It depends on how far these keyframes are apart, because it's going to change it. If you're finding it's maybe it's not great along here. What you can do, is you can start stretching is out. There is no difference between dragging this out, holding shift to get a bit more time, or doing it here. Because I'm doing the same thing. That is the same as dragging that one there. You might toggle back to this one because it makes more sense. Ignoring the x and just drawing the y, I want a bit more time, maybe spit this out. This is a bit more time between them. Go back into here, and there'll be further apart in here as well. You might move here a little bit, put them in the middle, where the city map. I like the bitter before. I'm going to get undo until my keyframes will back. This is the fun game. Clicking these little keyframes, playing with a little handles, holding shift to try and get them to go straight and just try and apply it's test plays. After you've done a few, there is not getting sense, what feels good in terms of anticipation or just any easing in that case. It doesn't have to be anticipation, it can't be just regular old velocitizing. The thing we're going to have to do though, is go and fix our x-axis. I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to go to x. Then was that on here. I know and I'm going to share with you what I know. I'm going to zoom a little bit. i like it. Down there. What you can do, if you have a keyframe selected, there's a little trick to say, instead of zooming in just randomly in the middle there. I can say, where is it there? Fit selection to view. So I'm going to slit hold, shift, grab both of these two guys. Can see, just stretches it across my little window here. I know a nice little ease and ease out. Looks good like this. It's just like S-curve where it start slow and gets it straight and that's what was there originally. It gets destroyed it when we hit that x, y. Let's go back to U editor. I'm going to zoom out a bit so I can see my whole thing. There's my x and y looking bit mingled down. Let's go along. Review along. Waits and then goes up, down. Nice. It's not my best work, but it's getting there. If you finding this is really confusing, these x and y one's here, don't do anything, it doesn't move left and right. So you can save and go away, just to tie it up, there's two's x and y one's over here. Now, sorry, there's two's and one's here.So there was x one's.I got rid of that because it's only doing the y stuff there. These two here, I need. I can make it more confusing. I should stop talking. Then the up and down. You've got left and right, the beginning and the up-and-down there and we're awesome. That said save. That is the motion or the graph editor. Now, if you found that extremely complicated, because your trainer didn't explain it very well, me, we'll look at it a little later on to carry on. Don't worry thought, for me, it's probably the toughest bit when you are teaching anybody new is the graph editor. So if you're feeling a bit lost, don't worry, lots of people do. Let's go to the next video. 19. Adding audio & music to your video: Hi. In this video, we're going to look at adding some background music or audio to your video. We've got to rearrange things and drag this down so my timeline is not so big and exposed. I'm going to [inaudible] so that we're in a little less lost. You can zoom in. Go to Fetch. Nice little trick is, as while when you're zooming in and out, we use command or control minus and plus. It you'll be doing it from Mac or PC, but if you've got a mouse like mine with a scroll wheel in the middle, just use your scroll wheel. You just got to hover over the middle here and then scroll wheel in and outs, quite a nice way of doing it. What we're going to do is you'll have to unmute Daniel. There I am there and you can turn me back on. I am going to leave mine off, just to make it easy for this tutorial, do not wreck my head. I'm going to bring in some more audio. You can bring in anything. You got WAV, MP3s, and those are the main ones, OGX, any of audio file or come in. There's audio that I've got here for you it's produced by a company called Wistia. Now Wistia are a video hosting site that I use and they offer some free videos, a few soundtracks, backgrounds, go and check their T's and C's. Look for Wistia free audio, you will find these ones you can download and just have a look through the T's and C's and see whether you can use them legally, but we're going to use them for our tutorial in here. We've got a couple of options, 1, 2, and 3, you can pick any of them. On a Mac you can hit Space-bar, it previews it in browser. It's quite cool, PCs don't. I'm going to use, which one? This is the tone. I'm going to click on OK. There is there and to edit to it, you can do a couple things. You can drag it into middle here, which adds to it, or you can edit, click and hold and drag it down here [inaudible]. You see a little black arrow hovering bound, we can drag onto the up to you. I find out about the audio at the bottom, it doesn't matter where it goes. I'm going to drag this along in that space-bar, and I'm going to turn me on just for a second to get the sense of the balanced in terms of who's high, whose low. Hi. My name is [inaudible]. I'm less happy with it audio now that it's in there. You might have to do what I do, like go through and download lots of audio. There's two places to get audio from, that I get audio from at least. One is called [inaudible] in one's called adobe.stock.com or I think it's stock.adobe.com. One of those two places, I'm going to use this one that said notice one here, [inaudible]. It re-transforms your video, if you add a bit of backing music. I'm going to edit and then we play with the volumes, get the balance right. [inaudible]. It's a bit more [inaudible]. yes, but more catching. Play around with the audio, scroll us down, this is audio. What we might do is I might start it. I like that, a beat thing. Then when it gets to some [inaudible] about then on, I might lower it down to go underneath. It starts all catchy and playing music. What I'd like is to low it down and you do key framing just like you do anything else. I'm going to hit a key frame there. I wanted to be quite high there, but after maybe here I wanted to lower it down. I am going to lower it down by clicking and dragging. Disavows is a funny old digit, you put into negative disavows, it's fine. Now, what we might do is Twitter on the waveform as well. That can be quite handy to visually see. Can you see if I drag this up, down, up, down just to see what pace. You can do the same thing with my talking hint. You can turn me up or down if you need to. Go to waveform, you can see me talking through there, toll that backup, but they've got audio levels. I've got to key frames. Let's make it look nice and easy to give him one, at negative 16. Let's go back here. [inaudible]. It gets pretty quiet underneath this, so I might hold Shift, get back to that key frame. It snaps to it perfectly, lifted up a little bit and it becomes pi and negative disavows [inaudible]. I'm dancing here to this little music. There it is. It's in the background. That's the trick. I know my first videos that I ever did for this type of thing, my own tutorials is that I always had the audio too high and everybody online wind, "It's great, but the music is too loud." I hate the intro music. Be careful when you're using music that it's not. I'm using this one because it's more of an intro video of interrupt, but I might not put it on every single audio. You'll notice that you're watching my video now. I don't have music under right now. Could be cool, but you'd get sick of it after 50 videos, which is about this course. Just make sure audio is appropriate. You're allowed to use it legally. What can happen is if you go off and steal music, and so dun, dun, dun and you go and pirates and music and trying to add to the background. You trying to use any sort of system like YouTube or Youku who, and what will happen is, they have really cool automated systems, cool for you, but it's cool for them that automatically knows that that is a licensed but a music, and unless you can prove to them that you have the license for it, they will most of the time they'll let you run the video, but you won't be able to generate any ad revenue from it. Ad revenue for me, for some of my free stuff is really useful. I've got to make sure I'm using music that I'm allowed to. When you do get it, make sure you download the license. Some of them might say you can use a commercially, but you have to have a link to it. That just might mean that on your website where it's being viewed, you have a link to it if it's YouTube or Youku, you might have it in the comment section. If you have the audio, sometimes they might want it in the credits. You might have to add credits to the individual video so that you can say audio supplied by Wistia or whoever [inaudible]. Double-check before and know that you might get caught out just summing that everyone gets caught up with before they think they've got uses of it, but they don't. One last thing is that, I speak about this because I've gone through the pain already is I've used something say from iStock and I pay for it and I'm legally allowed to use it, but YouTube and Youku don't know that. What I had to do is I had to go to iStock and say, "Hey, I need an audio release?" I e-mailed them and they said "Sure", and they affects me or they e-mailed me audio release signed document from the person who made the music. I then gave that to the YouTube people, and then everybody was happy, but it took a couple of weeks to sort that out. If you've got your own music or you can make music or some, but just make sure that you get the rights to use it. That long-winded spiel, and it's pretty easy to add audio. Just dump it on hand. You can lower it up and down. That's all for audio, I'll see you on next video. 20. Inspiration for you motion graphics: In this video, we're going to look at where to get some good inspiration for your motion graphics. You might be thinking, yeah I got some basic skills now, but what do I actually do? When I've got a project, I've got something coming up, it's a new title sequence for some of these tutorial videos, or something a little more exciting, and is in my personal projects, and I go off and look and try and find some things. We're not calling it copying, we're calling it appropriation. We're going to find some things, we like the look off, and we're going to adapt it for our style. Though, it's copying though. To go off and find awesome stuff, one of the easiest ones is go to YouTube, and use some search queries like this motion graphics, showreel is a good one. If I am a professional after effects person like I am, I create a showreel to show people all of the things that I've done and in a nice little quick little [inaudible] so type in that have a look round, avoid the ads, and let's have a look at this one. Is this a cool one? That's pretty cool. It's getting there. Sparkly bits. Skip through, we'll have that little transition. What you're trying to do here, I'm going to mute it, is you're trying to look and go, "Oh, I like that transition or how to do it." Then you spend ages doing what I do, this. You spend ages going back, play, back, play, just to see how the transition's done, and then see how you might copy it. What you can do is, say you see something you like, "Hone, jeez, I love that, Dan. How did they do that?" Is use my website, go off, use the form on the website and to say, "Hey, this is that link, how did they do that?" I'll either point you to a tutorial that I've done, or I can actually show you, maybe give you some tips on how to get started and doing that particular exercise. Go through showreel motion graphics, have a work through to see what other people have done. The other place to go to, is this place here. This is amazing. It's called Art of the Title. Now, art of the title is, there are professionals who only do the intros to movies or a title sequence to a TV series. They don't do any of the editing of the actual series. Let's do that 60 about at the beginning or end, maybe they credit to the end or the title's at the beginning. Now, this thing here has through, yeah, just has all the really nice ones that are around, and it's highly updated, you can see this one here, it's updated for me a couple of days ago, but, yeah, you just click through and you watch them and you get inspiration. I'm going to click this one and pause or mute on it. No mute? No. But you're just getting ideas of all these things and what goes on and let's go along. Cool. So I can't tell you how they do it, but it's going to show you, get you some ideas going. What is the one that I like? Is called Stranger Than Fiction. Now, I'm showing you this one mainly because we're going to do something very similar in the next tutorial. But I really like this one here, stranger than fiction. Okay, Play, Will Ferrel. It was done a long time ago, 2006. We're going to use really easy tricks to do an after effects. What they did back then before they had these tricks is genius. I'm going to skip along, these clips along. This is the wrong Will. We're going to start tracking bits and pieces so that things stick to it in a 3D space. How do I mute it? I can just mute my computer, nice. You can see this bit where there's some 3D going on, casting shadows and it's, yeah, well connected to the fumes. So we're going to do that. This is where you go through and you have a look at loads of different things and like, "Oh, I like that, I like that and then reach out and see if you can figure out how to do it, and if you can't, go and look tutorials, and if you can't, email me, or drop me a line on my website or via Twitter, am danlovesadobe. Yeah, this is out of the title. Cool inspiration, not stealing. It's stealing. 21. Trimming the length of a video: Hey there. In this video we're going to look at trimming the length of your video in After Effects. We've got a video that's I shot yesterday at the office and I need to trim it up. What I'd like to do is bring it in here, trim it up and then through the next few videos, just tidy it up a little bit. Let's bring in the video. I've got a new project open and we can double-click in this one or we go the long way, import files. I'm going to find on my desktop after fix files and here there is Dublin BYOL office. We're going to make a new comp from it. You'll see this one here, I shot this yesterday with a DSLR camera, not very good one, so we're going to have to do some fixing up. It's a bit jumpy and needs trimming up. Let's right-click it. Lets go to comp. It says standard definition of 720P High. There's my comp there. Lets load it down here and you'll notice we'll play it through. First of all it got sound, I want to get rid of that because I don't need it. Get rid of sound. There is a little mute button here, gone. Next thing I would like to do is trim it up. I'm going to scrub through and just walk through the office pretty badly. You can see it's all very jumpy and this is what happens when you've got my DSLR. It's new enough. It's the rebel, what is it? They call it the rebel something, the rebel something in America. It's called the 760 here in Europe. It's not great for wondering around and recording video. What I want to do is maybe trim off this beginning because there's lots of bits around just starting off slow. Maybe after about, let's put in four seconds, put for in 400 here. Jumps to 4 second zero frames and we're going to trim it up. We're going to use this thing called the work area. This thing here, it's just like the [inaudible] and the thickness of the two bands don't touch this top one and it's does some way stretchy, scaling, zooming and then use this one here. Hold above it you can see it's work area. Drag it across, hold shift and it'll snap to it. That's going to be my work area. What we do is we use the work area to trim it up. You can use this to crop it up. You can use work area for lots of things and we'll look at. We'll explore during this class. It's really good for trimming video. Its going to come along till I get to about here. I don't need this last bit just a bit long. I'm going to drag that in, hold shift, snap it there. The easy thing, just kept composition. There's one that says trim comp to work area. The physical MP-4 that we brought in from our desktop is still fine. It's still an MP-4. It's not going to be trimmed. We just trimmed the comp down to match our little workspace area. What we need to do is export it. We go to composition and we go to Add to Media Queue or File Export to Media Encoder. You render it out and ready to go and watch. I'm going to do now is not render it just yet. I'm going to hold on for the next couple of videos because I want to show you some other things we can do to tidy this up. That's how to trim your video using After Effects. 22. Color correction exposure & adjustment layers: Hey, welcome to this video. In this one, we are going to look at color correction, exposure, adjustment, layout, just color fixing up a video. There are a billion ways of doing it. Literally, okay maybe not a billion, but there is definitely about 20 different ways to fix up video in After Effects. You might find a tutorial online or somebody else that you know who might give you a good suggestion and that might work for you perfectly. I'm going to give you this one is called Lumetri Color, and it's the one I use. It's the one a lot of people use and it's just really easy, especially if you've come from any other Adobe products. It's similar to lots of those. What we can do is we've got to go find it and it's under the Effects & Presets. You go to Window, you go to Effects & Presets. Where is he? I can spell E. There he is. Effects & Presets and it's toggled in with this Libraries one. Now you do a search at the top here and we can type in. It's L-U-E. Okay, it should get down to here. Now, I could just quickly add this to my video and you can see over here it has applied that effect. Now that totally works, but it would be more common now to put in what's called an adjustment layer. An adjustment layer is just like a placeholder and accepts things like these color adjustments. An adjustment is on its own layer that you can turn on and off. Why it's really useful is that at the moment, say we color correct this video and we have another video that we want to interact with this but we have to then apply the Lumetri to that one as well. You have to put all of them. Whereas if you just hover on the Adjustment Layer right at the top, it affects everything underneath. That's really handy because we're going to look at little bit like a vignette. Say you want to apply the vignette to the whole video and there's lots of different videos. This whole story composition, there's lots of different videos that are part of it. It's easy just to add it to the adjustment layer that sits over the top and affects it all. If that doesn't make sense, let's just do it. What we're going to do is we're going to go to Layer, New, Adjustment Layer. Cool. Nothing really happens. See down here, here's my adjustment layer. What we're going to do, is instead of dragging it and adding it to this video, watch this. Lumetri, here you go. Add to this one. Okay. It's the same thing. It's going to fit everything underneath. If you're looking from the top down like a bird, everything underneath. We could have hundreds of things underneath here and it will still get the same color fix. There's lots to go through in here. Well, I'm going to give you the basics. Now, the easiest thing to know about this is you just start at the top and work your way through. The most obvious and big changes are in this first one called basic correction and then you work your way through some of the creative bits and color wheels if you need to. To be honest, I never get out of basic correction. Does everything that I need most of the time. We'll jump down to vignette in another video. What you can do to really help out is set the white balance. White balance just means this video here, if I scrub through, okay, is it looks fine. It looks like it's got a reasonably confident White anyway, but you might be working on different videos. Okay, so what you want to do is grab this little eye dropper tool and set the white and tell it what you think white is. I know that using my massive human brain, I think that's probably the widest thing in here. I know that's white in real life because I've been in that window. I've been in that room. Okay. That looks like pretty solid white. So I'm going to say you are white. What happens is nothing where you changed in this one. I'm showing to you so that I guess when you're working on something else and it might you might see a bigger fix. Usually you tell it what is white. That is white, that is white set, you might see some bigger changes. Next is temperature. Temperature just means at the moment is quite blue because it's all under these fake fluorescent bulbs. Anything gets a blue tinge. Plus this is Dublin and Dublin is always cloudy. It's never going to be like streaming blue, streaming sunlight and other things. It's got lots of artificial stuff even though it's the daytime. Okay, said image I'm going to woman up so. Yours might be different. Just drag it right, lift, decide you want to make it cool or warm one. Okay, I'm going to make my little warmer to make it feel like it was a sunny, warm day in there. Okay. You've got mine up to about 38. Seems a bit warmer here. Next is Tint. Not going to have to play around with this. If you finding it's little too red or too green. Watch this. I can make it green or I can make it pink. It depends on your image and I'm not going to have to set. I'm going to set that back to zero. Mine doesn't need to go anyway. All right, I'm going twirl back at white balanced to keep it nice and clean. When it goes to Tone, this is where you start at the top. Just kinda wiggle this things left and right. You can either twirl them down and drag this slider back and forth, which might make more sense to you. What I end up doing is I'm going to set that back to zero. I close that up and then use that scrubbing that we did for fonts earlier. Just going to click hold and drag the number there. This particular image you could follow me, but when you're doing your own stuff, this is more artistic than it is a science. You going to drag it left or right? Are you making a better? Are you making it worse? I'm bringing mine one down. Actually it's not much change in terms of that exposure. Puts out nothing. Now the way to turn on and off, as you can see up here, there is this is little effects button. If I click that on, off. So that's what it was, that's what it is now. It's definitely warmer and it is a bit better. It's up to you and it's what you're trying to look for and you're trying to do. I'm trying to make this look like a lovely warm environment. Toggle this on and off. All right, exposure, contrast, left, right, left, right. What do I want to do? I'm happy with where it is. Maybe I want to pull it down just a little bit, okay, because of the stuff in here. I'm lowering mine down a bit. Highlights up, down, up, down. I'm going to lower mine down a little bit. There is some weird stuff coming in through the windows here which says if I lower it down, you can start to see more stuff out the window. Once again, this is total just artistic eyeballing what you think. have I made it better? I made it worse. Shadows. Okay, I'll lift mine up a little bit. Whites. Just so you know, the biggest changes happened at the top here. This smaller ones have just like little tiny adjustments. You start Exposure, mine was shot okay. It was on a bit of a crappy camera but with a good lens. Wow, an average lens if I'm honest. It's captured okay, but then you just go through and decide what works for you. I'm just add mine a little bit. Okay. Then next one is Saturation. These one's all to do with tone, okay. The lights and darks and grays. Saturation here's color, so I crank it up. It's going to get crazy funny color. I can make it black and white this way. Okay. What I'm going to do is I'm probably just bump it up a little bit. Probably not too much. We've got this really cool orange thing going on in the office. I don't want to extreme it up and it's lifted a little of things quite cool painted lines. All right. Now the rest of the options, okay, we're not going to go through here. Creative is literally that. You're going to go through and there's a lot of dragging of things around. Instead of fixing, once you got into creative, this is trying to make it look like Instagram filters and those sorts of things so we're going to leave those for the moment because this is more of a corrections video. You can work your way through all of these, but to be honest, once you get down to here, you getting into some really minute details which could be cool in what you want, but just startup basic correction moved through, playing around with the tone, the white balance and your saturation. All right. That is how to fix a video. Remember to turn on and off. Have I made it better? Have I made it worse? I've probably made mine a little too saturated, but I'm okay with that for the moment. All right. See you in the next video. 23. Creating a vignette in After Effects: Hi. Welcome to this video. We are going to make a vignette. A vignette is that glow or black darkness around the outside. Photographers from the days of yours, spend their time trying to not remove it, because it was part of the photography process with flash bulbs. Now, we all edit to make it look cool. We're going to do it to this case. We're going to put it around the edges, and we're going to add it to this one and we're going to use it throughout the project. Because, I don't know why? It's one of those little secret sauces. We've done easing, which is nice, and motion blur, which is nice and that vignette is one of those nice little things that make it more after-effects-y. To do it, it's really easy. You just add this one here, the Lumetri Color. If you haven't done the previous video, just type in here, "Lume." What you're going to do, is make sure that [inaudible]. Now, we'll leave it here. If you haven't done the last video, go and do that. We've created this thing called an Adjustments Layer. If you haven't, go to Layer, New, and add the Adjustments Layer. That is there. Then drag Lumetri onto this layer and hey presto, you've got them here in your Effects Controls. If you can't see Effects Controls, go into here and there's Effects Controls. We've been playing around the last ones. We've got all of this stuff here. What we might do is just twirl it up to make it look nice and pretty. Close them all down, and even if you haven't done basic correction from the last one, you just going to do vignette. You can leave all of those blank and just do a vignette here. Vignette here is one of those words that I will die not knowing how to spell, virginity. I can never google it. It takes me ages to figure out the spelling for this one for my notes. But anyway, vignette is just as clear on the outside and you'll see. You drag it to the right, it goes white. I never need a white vignette. It's always dragging it to the left. I'm clicking and dragging. Maybe you can lower this and use this if you prefer. You see that gray around there, also the blacker on the outside, that is a vignette. It just gives it that feeling like its a little bit old-school. Watch this. Mine is not keeping up very well. I want half. I'm going to go to full just to. But you get a sense for it? We're scrubbing through it, and it just gives it that glow on the outside. You might hate it. Don't do vignettes. If you do like it, add them to everything. That's a vignette. You can play around with these things and get in terms of the mid-points. Watch this, you can get it to creep in a little bit more. I'm really overcooking this at the moment, but I'm okay with that. I love vignettes. The more than merrier. The roundness: depends if its a big oval or more like a square. I'm going to make it a bit more like a square. Further, just the transition is perfect as it is. Let's move around with that. You can see that's what we're starting with here. Hey, presto vignette, do you like it? On, off, on, off. It's definitely a lot different than it was. You might be horrified at the over-saturated colors, but I don't mind. You can do it your way when you are doing it. That's how to do a vignette in After Effects. 24. Fixing shaky footage with warp stabilizer : Hi, welcome to the video, and in this one we're going to fix shaky footage. Okay. So it might be that it was not shot on a tripod, that there was no way to shoot on a tripod, and you just want to smooth it out to make it look nice, okay. So we're going to do two versions of this. The first one is going to be the video we've worked out up until now. It's like the office for bringing it on up top doubling where I'm walking along. We fixed up the colors, but it's a bit shaky because I couldn't make it shrink. So let's bring in that one first. So I'm going to "Double-click" on Project, and go to my Desktop, go to After Effects Exercise Files, there's one in there called, where are we? Warp Stabilizer 1. Let's grab that one. Great. Let's make a Comp from it, easy. Now we are going to use this thing called Warp Stabilizer. If you can't see it, go to View, and go to Tracker. Where is it? Okay. And you should have it selected down here in your Layers and just "Click" Warp Stabilizer. Then you kick back, and relax, and watch it smooth it out, hopefully. The thing to watch is it'll go through two stages, obviously, step one of two. But over here is where you check. You can see Frames and it's been through them all. I've shot mine at 50 Frames per second because I forgot to turn it off when I was using my camera, so it's going to be nice and lots of Frames. So that's going to take a little while. So give it a wait gap here, wait, wait, wait, and it'll eventually do it. Once it's got through the list, then it's going to go through and try and stabilize it. That's the optional bit, okay. It needs to analyze it first regardless of these two steps we're going to take. I'm filling in now where it goes. Here we go, finished. Okay. Now it's going to stabilize, it's going to be using this thing called Smooth Motion. It's going to work pretty well, by default, soon. Other people would cut this out. So I "Hit" Spacebar, off it goes. Mine's taking a little while to Playback because I'm on Full. I thought I changed that. Go to third, and you're just keeping up and look how smooth it is. All right. We should have previewed it before and after. I'm going to go to my Effect Controls, okay, and I'm going to turn off this. This is what it looks like. It's me wiggling around. It's a bit embarrassing, I was trying to be really smooth. I thought I might have to shake it up a little bit to get a really good effect to show you guys in the videos, but it turns out me being as smooth as I can is still this shaky. You can see it jumps around as I'm sliding feet in front of each other. Let's turn it back on now. Whoa, look how smooth that is. One thing you would have noticed is watch this, when it's off and when it's on, it's a different Crop level. This is going to show you the mystery of what's happening. One of the things you can do, if it doesn't work, you can crank up the smoothness up to 100 percent, or lower it down if it's doing it too much. That's the first thing you change [inaudible]. Next thing, just have a look to see what's going on is, this thing's been "Cropped" at three percent, which is a scale of 130 percent, that's fine. So this one here, we're going to go to one that says Stabilize Only. I just want to show you this. This is quite cool to see what's going to happen. You can look at the edges here, can you see them wiggling around, especially this side? You see the black lines coming in and out. That's what it's doing, it's moving my video and time to try and make it look steady. Then what it's doing is when I'm hitting this one here, it says Stabilize and Crop Auto-scale. It's just like scaling it up so that those black edges don't get in there. Now if you're working on something that's being moved around quite a bit, you're going to have a huge amount of Crop. You might end up with only this scene that's here because it's Cropped all these outside bits. So you might have to go through and have a play around with actually two minutes smoothing, so it's not cropped in so much, or come down here and play around with scaling. You can decide on what the maximum scaling is and lower that down so it's not too ruthless with the scaling. But it's interesting to see isn't like with Stabilize Only. Is there any bigger movements? There, it's a good one. Yeah, it's a good one. Okay, [inaudible]. Let's go back to this one. All right. So that's how to Smooth out Motion, and that's what we want in this case. If I hit Save Now. What we're going to do is bring in another video. So we're in Effects Controls, you can "Click" on this little arrow here and go to Project or Window Project, it's up to you. I'm going to bring in another video. So let's bring in Warp Stabilizer 2. This one's different. So I'm going to make a Comp from it, great. This one is different. What I want to do is, I don't want to Smooth Motion, I want to stop the motion altogether. If I "Hit" Spacebar on this, you can see this is me in my office, and it's me, again, trying to hold it still. Now, I swayed here. I was standing there holding it up. My camera is not that heavy, I can hold a camera, but I turned all the settings that the camera has got in terms of trying to automatically smooth things up, just so I get a good experience. But that was as steady as I can hold it. That is a broken dinosaur that I ain't fixing for my son, this is my little white comb, some camera lenses, a laptop and stuff, and some portrait for mine, and the world's smallest device, check it out. So we're going to go through and fix this up. So what you want to do with something like this is we don't want to Smooth the Motion, we want to stop it altogether. So use the same button, "Click" Warp Stabilizer, kick back, relax. It's going to do the same first part, but then we're going to go and change this thing here from Smooth Motion to No Motion, and we'll see the difference. Actually, what I might do is get it to speed it up this time. So really powers of video, go. All right. So it's nearly finished. Now it's going to Stabilize. What it's doing at the moment is my little Auto-save, a little bit annoying, is that it's going to use the Smooth Motion option, and we'll see what it looks like when it does the Smooth Motion. Here we go. It's Cropped it in again, and this one here is Cropped up a little bit more, so 117 because I was jingling it a bit more. Let's "Hit" Spacebar. I've got it down at really low quality just so it plays nicely, right. Watch this. It's still moving but smoothly, which was perfect in the last because I was moving and I want to smooth it out. At the moment though, I want to keep it rock steady. So it's using the Smooth Motion when I don't want it to be. It looks like I'm bad, I'm swaying, a little more drunk than I was before. So I'm going to go to No Motion. It doesn't have to do the whole Analyzing thing again, just the last part of Stabilizing, so it shouldn't take too long and we won't have to speed it up. Here we go, done. So the same kind of Crop. Actually no, more of a Crop, because it's not moving around. So let's "Hit" Spacebar now. You can see, rock steady, like I'm on a tripod kind of. It's close enough. There was still a tiny bit of jingling there, just a tiny little bit. But you can see how nice it is now to keep the motion not moving. So No Motion, and when we're doing the last example, Warp Stabilizer 1. It's there. This one here was better with a Smooth Motion kind of smoothing it all out, and this one here had No Motion. All right. The last thing we're going to talk about before we move on is, Warp Stabilizer, it took forever, right. It takes a long time to go and create it. It's quite stressful on the machine, and because it's this lovely, it's not an Effect that's done forever, you can turn it on and off. It's like this active effect, and what that can do is slow your workflow down really, quite a bit. So if I now go through and start doing Animations to this and sliding it around, or doing more Color Correction, what it ends up doing is having to do the Color Correction, and go back and Warp Analyze it again. That will kill you, having to do that every single time. You saw how long it took in the last one. So what you need to do is, now you go to this Stabilize video, now you're want to go out and Export it. You Export it as an MP4, and then even if you still want to do Animations for it, and you're not quite finished, Export it, so you've got an MP4 and then bring that back into the project, and start working on that thing. Because then it's fused into it, and it's hardwired and it's not stressing out After Effects. You can skip to the end of the video now if you want to, but I'm going to show you how to Export a video. You've done it before, just to make sure everyone knows what we're doing. What I'd like to do is we've got two compositions in here, we've got Warp Stabilizer 1, and Warp Stabilizer 2. We'll Export this one here because we'll use this in the next project. With that selected, we're going go to File, Export, Adobe Media Encoder. I keep going to the different one either under Composition or under Export every time I do this. You should be consistent in command. This is going to open up Media Encoder in the background. If you don't have Media Encoder, you probably do. If you are installed After Effects, just appears there without asking. It's one of those programs you keep meaning to use, but here we go. So I've got this one here, it's going to be H264, perfect. I'm going to Match Source, so it's exactly the way it came in and it'll come out. In terms of where it's going to stick it, that's going to be perfectly fine. Yeah, so it's going to go into the _AME file. I'm going to "Hit" Play. It's going to render out that little video with the Warp Stabilizer baked into it. What we'll do now is we'll use our little Power off Video again to speed it up. All right. I'll see you when it's finished. All right. I think it's Exported that video. Now that's what I've called my video, 25 Fixing shaky footage, just to make it useful for you guys because I want you to be able to download these files if you're not making it work. Maybe the production video is really long. It's made a folder here with _AME, under Media Encoder, and here is my MP4. Now this is the one I'm going to re-Import into After Effects and start doing work with. So I'm going to maybe close this Project or at least not use these Compositions anymore. I'm going to create a new one to work with. So let me just show you how to do that. So I've got these ones here with these Effects applied to it I'm going to bring in. I've been going File, Import, Double-clicking. There's another way here. You can "Drag" and it's up to you. I've got Warp Stabilizer 1. I've already got one called Warp Stabilizer 1, that's not good. I'm going to rename this one to make it a little clearer. We're going to use a little of a [inaudible] and we're going to call this one Tracking Camera. Good. Make a Comp from this one. And now you can see here is nice and smooth, and now we can go through and type After Effects. And just ignore these last ones here, we used them. You can bend them now if you needed to, or make a new project and start working on it. But we're now just going to work on this video file, instead of having it fixed by two, it's going to be nice and smooth. All right. That is it for fixing your shaky footage using After Effects. 25. Add text to live action video: Hey, welcome to this video. What we're going to do in this one is we're going to try and put some text into live action. What I mean by that is we're going to try and take some real live footage, the one we've used in the Dublin office, and we're going to put some fake stuff in it, and it could be type, it could be logos, it could be anything. It'll make more sense once I get the video up here. So let's import the video. This one here is going to be called, not Dublin office, the one we rendered from the last tutorial, going to be this one called camera tracking. I'm going to make a comp from it. What I want to do is put the type on the floor to make it like it's sitting within this 3D space while it's moving through. We're going to to this one called tracker, window tracker if you can't find it. We're going to click on this one here that says Track Camera. Now, it's going to take a while, like before when we did the warp stabilization, keep an eye up here and track it. What I'm going to do is speed it up. Actually, I'm going to make a coffee and hopefully speed it up afterwards, back in a sec. All right, so it's finished and now we get these lovely colorful little dots here. Now, the more dots in the area , if you've got loads of them, awesome. If you've only got a couple, then it's probably not going to work. It'll work in this tutorial because you're working with my file and often it works, but if you've only got one or two points with your footage, it's not going to work very well. What we going to do is scrub along, you see little dots move along, they appear and move and that's great. Where do we want to pick one from? Let's pick one from scrubbing along here because this is where I want it to sit. What you can do is move it along because I'm getting mine out to about eight seconds and I'm going to try and find one on the floor here that matches now. You might have to work your way around and try and find one that fits, you see it like that one there? That one does not match the floor. So you're just trying to figure out one that feels like it's matching the floor, that one feels good. Can I click on them? So I just clicked on them, it isolates them, then you right-click them, and go to the Create Text and Camera. What you'll see is if I zoom out, can you see? Spacebar, there's text glued to the ground. How cool is it that? Is it matching? It looks pretty good. Now, if that goes horribly wrong and it looks like it's wobbling around, the best bit now is to go back to here Edit, Undo a couple of times until the little trackpads are here, but the text is gone. You'll notice that these two things will be gone. Saying that, this is what's created, created a camera, and this is what helps us match this 3D space. We've the text here, and that's the text that's on the ground, and we're going to select this text layer. Because what I want to do is change the size. Mine is down at two points, yours will be different depending on what you're playing around with. I think mine is down at two because my font was at two when I started, yours is probably a lot higher. Unfortunate, I have to work between zero and two. Yours might be between 70 or 20. Mine gets small pretty quickly. I'm going to type in 1.5. That's about the size I need. Double-click the type, type in your name, I'm going to put in Dan, and try to use caps. Why would you use caps? Because if you use a letter here, if I put in Dan with a j, actually let's start with a j. Can you see Dan sits on the baseline there? If I put j in, or a lowercase j, can you see it dangles underneath the baseline? So it's going to look like it's below the floor and not look as good. So capital letters are better in this case unless you have a word or a name that doesn't have descenders which drops below the line. I've gone ahead and selected. It needs to be a little smaller, maybe 1.2. Now, I need to move them across, now don't try and drag them. Don't grab your black arrow and try and drag them across, unless you've worked in 3D before. The easiest way to do it is on the Dan layer, I've spelled Dan a bit wrong, let's drop that down, let's got to transform and let's go to this one that says position and it's this first one here which I click, hold, and drag. Hey, where did it all go? Do you remember this from the earlier video? If you've figured it out, it's caps lock. If you leave caps lock on, it all goes blank with a red dot down the bottom. Position, I'm going to drag that one across. You might click and hold and drag a couple of times to move it across. If you spell your name wrong, don't click it. Get rid of it, and go back to the black arrow when you're finished. Mine's too big. So I'm going to put my down at 0.8 maybe. Yeah, it looks good. I'm going to drag it over a little bit further. Whoops, wrong one it's orientation I want position, drag it across. I hit spacebar to see if it looks like it's still on the ground. It's looking pretty good. What I want to do is stand it up. So we're going to use X rotation and we're going to use the second one here. Click and drag it and hey, look it stands up in 3D space. I want it to be up straight, so I'm going to type in 90 degrees and I'm going to put my font size down again, so 0.5. Come to side position. Now when you are playing with the position, try not to play around with the second one along, which is Y. Makes it above the floor and below the floor, even though you can it doesn't really look like it gets below floor, it will mess up your look. You can play with Z, that sends it further back and that brings up further towards the camera. I'm going to leave mine as it was. Great. So I say preview. Watch it all the way through and be amazed by your amazing type matching the floor thing. I'm amazed. All right, so what you need to do now is in terms of this program here, I have to fix this 3D very badly. So it's 3D, it's in 3D space, but you've noticed there's no depth. If you get close to it there's no thickness to it. There's tricks you can do it. There's something called ray trace. You can look into that if you want to do it. It stresses after-effects out and doesn't look very good. If you want to get into serious 3D, Cinema 4D, there's a plug-in in After Effects. We're not going to have the scope to cover in this tutorial series. But there's definitely another full course on my website for Cinema 4D for motion graphics, and you can tie it into After Effects quite well. We're going to fake it in After Effects now by adding a bit of a shadow. So add a shadow. I'm going to twiddle with that to make it look tidy. I'm going to click on this, Copy Paste. I'm going to say Copy Paste, I had it selected and we're in Ctrl C, Ctrl V. Unless you're on a Mac then it's Command C, Command V. Or you can go Edit, Copy, Paste. I've got two of them. This one here is called Dan 2. I'm actually going to name it, right-click it, rename it. I'm going to call this one shadow just to mix. I'm not changing that text, it's still called Dan. But I'm going with shadow down here. What I'd like to do is I'd like to lower it back onto the ground. So watch this. If I go to Transform, we set it up to 90 degrees before it's changed it back to zero. You can see it's flat on the ground? Now what we're going to do is this cheap tricks now. There is official ways of doing drop shadows with things like Shadow Catches and Shadow Mattes and that is really hard and tricky, and it depends on what you need, I guess. In our case, we just wanted to fake it and make it look pretty good, doesn't have to be amazing because it's not real type. It's quite obviously fake so an obviously fake shadow is not going to be to bad. What I'd also like to do is with the type selected, I'm going to change to black so it's in the background there. Let's get in along. It looks quite all right except the sun's coming into the window and it's coming the wrong direction. What we might do is instead of sitting it flat, we might flip it over this side. So this one's going to be 180 to be out to this side. Do I like a bit over that side? I don't know. This doesn't work with the lights very well but works enough for us. Next thing I want to do is I'm going to lower the opacity and blur it a little bit. Transform, there's one in here called opacity. We're going to just lower that down so it's a bit see through, and then we might add an effect like blur. So we're going to go into our effects and presents, there it is there, let's pick up blur. There are lots of blurs in here. Which one should we use? We'll use Gaussian blur. Why? Because everybody uses Gaussian blur. There's lots of different options. So we're going to use Gaussian blur blurriness. So lift it up a little bit. See if I crank it right up can you see it is really blurry? It matches, nothing's really sharp in here, it's quite blurry. I'm happy with that up to about 20, and let's hit space. A blurry shadow. What I might do is put it behind it. Why? I didn't know, I just think it looks better behind it. There we go. This is obviously wrong. All right. So that's how to put 3D type-in, fake a bit of a shadow using the camera tracker in After Effects. 26. Matrix effect using time remapping: Hey there, my name is Dan. In this video, we're going to look at creating the matrix effect using time remapping. Now it's not really the matrix effect, it just the cool slow-mo things look like the bending bullet type thing. Let's go and do that, let's bring in a video. After Effects files here, we've got one in here, called time remapping, where is it? Why can't I see it? There it is time remapping. Let's make a comp from it, new comp. There it is done here, it's a skateboarder, doing a kick flip. What we want to do now is we want to do a couple of things say, let's forget the matrix thing, you want to speed it up or slow it down. What you can do is with the selected down here you can go to Layer, go to Time. There's one in here called time stretch. What it does is say it's 28 seconds and you want to cut it down to say 10, it's going to shrink it right down. You could drag either percentage or the time, so I'm going to make this a lot quicker. You can see it shortened it up and watch, he's walking. He's going a lot faster and [inaudible]. But that's not what I want to do. I hit it "Undo". That's what if you want to speed it up or slow it down, what we want to do is a bit more when he gets to his kick flip. I want him to go quite fast, but when he gets to his kick flip and it goes, I want it to get it really slow about here. Let's go and do that. The thing is called time remapping. With the layer selected, okay, we're going to go to Layer, Time, there's one there called enable time remapping. Nothing really happens. You get a couple of key frames either side for you in this little thing called time remap. What we want to do now is you leave those two key frames alone and what you want to do is put two key frames either side of the thing, in this case, it's him doing a kick flip. I'm going to have it just about here. I'm going to force a key frame in by clicking the little node on, then just afterwards strike my play-head. Just about when he lands, I put it in another key frame. Then what we want do is drag them apart. Think of this as one long rubber band and we're going to grab it and stretch between these two points here. What happens is that gets stretched out and goes slow and these ones here get a bit slack because they are joining up and it goes a bit faster in these bits. I am going to preview it now. It's not going to look beautiful just yet. There's a couple other things we need to do, but just get a sense of what's happening. He's cruising along, cruising along. I should really trim out this video. It's a bit long. But then when he gets to here, it launches into a slow-mo, really bad slow-mo. I understand. There's two things we need to do to make this look nice. First of all, is we need to change these down because the moment this launches into slow-mo, the way to ease it into it, you can hold down, if you're on a PC, hold down the Control key, if you're on a Mac, on the command key, just click these. It's an easy way to add a bit of blending between these two key frames. Instead of just launching into, it's going to slowly get into it. It's not a very nice but at least it's not just like suddenly becoming slow. That's going to do the first part. The next part is something called frame blending. A frame blending is the moment of what it's doing is it's because it's slowing it down, it's just like pulling the frames apart and it's going really slow so jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump. What we can tell after fix is be a bit more clever and blend the frames to make this like composite thing. To do that we need to do, it's like motion blur you need to turn it globally. Then you need to turn it on per layer. Turn it on globally and then down here can you see this layer here has about the same option? This one here has two options and motion blur just has one on and off. This only has 1, 2 and off, so 1, 2, off, 1, 2 off. In this case, you draw with both depending on your footage. Generally they're the second one here. First one, no, second one, yes. It's this one here, this frame blending. That one there tends to do a better job. It's going to take a little bit long to render. I'll just stop mine here so it is not far away. Watch this, hit the "Space" bar now it should do more of that matrix [inaudible] Nice. Doesn't weight things with the lights, but it's cool. Now, depends on how far where your key frames were, how far apart you've had them say you find it maybe take a bit long. It did take a bit long, didn't it? Some swirrlies in here [inaudible] closest so it's not as extreme. It's slow. But a whole lot nicer than without the frame blending, if I turn it off globally. Jump, jump, jump. Frame blending on. Smooth. All right, that's how to use time remapping and make that matrix slow down type effect. 27. Text to follow live action: Hey there. In this video we're going to look at getting ticks to follow some live action. In the earlier video when we had our room inside of our Dublin office, we put 3D type setting statically within a live action footage. That's one way of doing it. What we're going to do now the more a stranger than fiction, on star 1 it's going to move and attach itself to a point. What we're going to do is we're going to get the skateboarder and we're going to see if we get the ticks to follow parts of this foot so the ticks follows along. Let's bring it in. We're going to bring in one called Track motion. We're going to make it come from it. Then we're going to go to our Track window and we're going to go to the one that says Track Motion. What happens is you get this little track point here. We're just going to use one in this case and we are going to chase this foot here because it moves up and down up it's going to be cool to follow the ticks with it. Now what we don't want to do is we want to try and follow something that is in the shot the whole time. We can see and it's got a reason to be a good bit of, how do we say? Contrast. It's easy to follow. If you're following his knee here it's all the same color as the background be quite tough. This wheel here might be good, little spot here in the wheel. We're going to use his foot. You can play around with different stuff on your footage. It can be a little hard to do so let's work through the things that make it work better. First step, we need to go through in. To get good tracking, you need quality video. If you've got fuzzy video, it's going to be pretty hard. If you've got access to HD video, use that don't use the low-risk stuff, even if you're going to output it later on to a lower-risk try and find the original stuff. When you're working on it and when you're back here, just make sure we're on full. Rather than this third, just means it's going to be a nicer quality to try and follow. I'm going to put up to high full. Over here is going to be full as well. Next thing we need to do is we need to make these little targets lock onto a point. It's quite far away so I'm going to zoom in and I use my trackable wheel thing on my mouse. But you can use the shortcuts. You can use this one here or you can hold Command Plus or Control Plus on a PC. What we want to do is move these targets. What I need to do is I need to drag it this way. If I drag the center of it it just triggers a center, which is not what I want. I want all three bits, these two rectangles in the center. What you do is see my cursor. When I hover above, that's bad. Black rectangle or black arrow is good. You can drag anywhere in here as long is the black arrow, that icon. That's bad, that's bad, that's bad, this is good. We drag it over here. We're going to have to slide along. The easiest way to slide things along, you can click hold and drag if you want, or you hold on Space bar on your keyboard. Watch if I hold Space bar. I can click. I am holding Space bar, that's it. Now if I click and drag my mouse, I can move around. That's often what I do. I'm going to drag it using the good method. I've practiced with this one before and I had a couple that goes with it. You will have to give it. If you've got your own footage you're going to have to give it a couple it goes as well, find a good checkpoint. I found this one pretty good. Next we need to do is, the target is where it's following and these little boxes here tell it where to look. It takes a bit more of system but it's okay. We want to say look in this joint area here for the check point. Because what it's going to do is this leg is going to move up and it's going to try and track it through the square here so we want to make it very big. How big can you make it? Just make it that size. You must play around with this. Next bit is going through and tracking. The next thing I want to do is, you can hit this Play button watch this play. It's going to go through your footage. Depending on how fast your computer is, yours might beginning a little faster than mine. Mine is stressed out to the max. It's going, It's going, It's going. Can you see it lost a little bit there? So it's automatically trying to track it. This might work for you, give it a go. Back on track, there it is. Come on. It's going to definitely lose it. It's back. It's gone. It's going to lose it here watch this. Don't hit Space bar while you're doing it. Continue playing. It's going to lose it when it gets to behind the skateboard because it loses behind here. Watch this. It doesn't know where it goes. It gets lost and then starts tracking the boards and it's completely lost a foot. What happens when doing this tracking and this automatic tracking, I never do use automatic, always ends up badly. I'm going to edit. Undo track motion. I'm going to go edit again. Undo track motion. Back to the beginning. It's always better, for some reason, if you click it frame by frame, it gives a time to catch up and you get adjust that if it gets lost. Watch this click, click, click, click and it's doing good. This is the boring, but depending how long you footage is, you're going to have to go track and just keep an eye on it. It'll track definitely better than when it was doing it by itself. You can see its lost a little bit there. I'm going to zoom in a little bit more. Drag it down. Use go through frame by frame and just make sure it doesn't get lost. When it does, you put it back on track. Back on track. If you contract and there's nothing automatically tracking about it, you can do this frame-by-frame. Say you've got the fuzzy video, that just why I tried to anything. You could spend your whole day just checking one point, and every time moving it, adjusting and moving, adjusting. If it's still not working, drag these. It's almost tracking it but not quite, drag these rectangles a little bigger. Just keep going through. I'm going to keep going. Grab the lace. I'm going to move up there. It's going to get interesting when the board gets behind. Sorry, when the shoelace gets behind. Now, you see I've let it go a little bit. I'm okay with that because it's a nice smooth action and we're tracking it with a big block of text. It's not going to be very obvious. It's not pin perfect. There's all of this. Following a nice smooth line is more what I want. Click, click, click. If you're really tempted to just smash away at this button, click, click, click, click, that will work to a point. But it doesn't get enough time to reanalyze the footage. It's often better just be a bit patient. This is what is going to become tricky. It's lose in here. Now, it's a guessing game. Where is the shoelace? I don't know. Neither do they know I know a little bit. I can guess better than the computer can. I'm just moving it around and then what I'm dragging it, I'm avoiding these things. I'm just dragging anywhere in here. I feel like it's up there now. Now what we'll do now is power our videos again. We'll get this just to speed up double time. So you'll see me adjusting and fiddling. All right, ready, set, go fast forward. I'm back. I tried the little weigh through. You saw me in fast forward. I'm going to zoom out now. Terrible last little bit there, but that is it and how to track it. I'm going to hit save. What we need to do now is a couple of things, you might get lost here. You might have had your tracking points and you're like, "Whoa, I lost them. They all disappeared." They haven't gone. What's happened is, you've gone back to the composition where we normally are. You can see, here's our video, but none of the track points. You might have jumped out of this mode. We're inside the video now doing the track points and they happen here. If they disappear, jump back out into here. We've done this, but next thing that we need to do is we need to get something to follow up. Now, what we could do or what we can't do, at least, is we can grab the type tool, type up something and, say, you follow their track point, strangely. What we need to do is create the select container that follows it around, and then we can get the ticks to follow the container. Strange, yes. What we need to do is create something called a null. A null object is here. A null object is a total discontainer. It doesn't print, it doesn't have any values other than it can follow a track point, and we can get the ticks to follow the null. It'll follow along. Let's go null object, and we've got this thing called a null object. Down here, we say edit target. We say null, we click Okay. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go back to composition. What you'll see now is a null not following it at all. We're going to go back in here, we're going to click, where do we go? Not null, click on this. You're going to edit target, null, click Okay, click Apply. Don't forget to click that. Let's click Okay. Now, a little null should follow. I like to pretend to do things like mistakes, just in case you do, but really, I just make mistakes too. You can see now a little null object. If you drag it back and forth follows along. That's not very helpful because it doesn't actually do anything. We need to get some type to follow along. You can do anything. You can get a rectangle to follow it along. You can get some type. I'm going to get some type. I'm going to click once. I get an empty type box. I'm going to put in skater. You'll notice that if I select my text, I've got my right aligned, left aligned, right aligned. I've got mine right aligned just because I want to do a little bit of a graphicky thing. Hey, it's gone. Where is it gone? [inaudible]. I'm going to do skater and it's going to be my name. I'm going to have Scott. Actually what I might do is, you totally don't have to worry so much about this. I'm spending far too long doing it. I'm going to put that down to 300, get that up to 900. Get that one up. It's up a little bit higher, and that one can be 500, just bigger. Good, with that all selected, I'm going to play around with the space between the lines because it's a bit to make gaps in here. So what I'm going to do is go down paragraph or character and this thing here set to order. I'm going to drop this down to, i want something nice, it's the top line. It's this one here. I'm going to highlight this one and change this one to be separate. This is the leaving or the space between lines. Probably if I was doing this, I'd go off and make this an illustrator because I'm faster with it, but you can use other things, no problem. I just spent so long doing it then. The overall size of this thing is to big, so I'm going to go down here and shrink it down and transform, scale, track it down, so it fits within my screen a bit. Caps lock, go away. I want this to flow along. I'm going to rotate a little bit and use the rotation tool, and you probably will do this, watch. You'll click the rotate up and it rotates the video behind it. You just got to be really careful. Click on the words skater and actually click and drag in this little area here. If you don't, it drags the back thing. Let's get back two him. Yeah, that's the right angle for me. I'm at the front of my video and I'm going to have it so it kind of follows his foot there. I'm less impressed with my amazing, but it takes time. Anyway, so now we need to get you to follow the null object, and that's really easy to do. All you say is, view, there's this thing called parent here. If you can't see it, toggle this thing, you can actually see parent in both. Forgive me. Under skater here, go to null and I want it to follow, instead of following nothing, I want you to follow null along. You're the child. He's your parent. The skater thing is the child to this parent, the null objects is going to follow him around. Hopefully now, hit space-bar, fingers crossed, and whoosh. If this ever happens to you, it means your machine is really stressed out. I'm going to hit save, if it doesn't crash. It's because my machine is trying to record live video on really bad hard drive. You always will, hopefully, be a little more climactic rather than me just dragging him along. It's back. You see up my hand man's dying, not real time. Will he do it the second time around? Whoa, it's getting better. Awesome, it follows. What I might have to do is just lower the quality down, just so it plays a bit smoothly now. That's how you track a point. We could animate this type now. We just got static type, but you could animate the type before you get to track along. Let's hit save. That, my friends, is how you track a point using camera tracker. Now, just remember, if yours is going horribly wrong, make sure you're using high-res video, the best you can find, whatever it was captured in. Make sure you're on full in terms of resolution of here. The other thing you can do is to make sure your targets are nice and big. We had ours quite small. Wow, reasonably big, you can make yours even bigger, and the other thing is just to go frame by frame. Frame by frame, you have to move it around. Remember, if you lose your tracking, this probably means that you've jumped into here and you've lost it, but you can draw back into that. I'll see you in the next video. 28. Working with Illustrator in After Effects: Hey, welcome to this video. In this one we're going to look at working with Illustrator inside of After Effects. If you've never used Illustrator before, you might want to skip this one, because it just requires a little bit of Illustrator knowledge to work with it. If you are an ACA illustrator, this is a cool of the tutorial, because you can do a lot of drawing, and shape building, and typography inside After Effects. But it's actually really easy if you already have skills in something like Adobe Illustrator, you can just jump and use that program and just import the graphics and just use After Effects as a pure animation tool rather than a creation tool. To do it, I've got a new project open, or an untitled project. I'm going to make a new composition. Composition new. It's going to be about HDTV, and we're going to make sure that it's this one here 1080 25. Great. How long is it going to be? Let's make this one 10 seconds. Ten seconds, zero frames, and let's click "Okay". We got a comp. It is there. We're going to bring in an Illustrator file. We're going to double-click in this area here, or go to "Command I" on a Mac or "Ctrl I" on a PC. Let's go and find it out. After Effect exercise files, there's one there called, monster. Let's grab him. Bring him. Then we and drag them over here. We've dragged this little monster. Now, hey Presto, he's in here, we can start animating him. I could set my position key frame here. Start it actually over here. Move along a timeline and get him to go in here. Aid my easing, aid my motion blur, and hey, Presto, done some cool stuff with Illustrator. I'm undoing, so I'm going to edit undo and I'm twiddling all that up to make it look tidy. The biggest problem most people have is that, they've got this guy here. We're going to go to full resolution and we're going to scale it up. I'm going to hold "Shift". If you don't hold "Shift", it gets a bit squidgy. Hold "Shift" to lock the proportions. If I drag it up, what you'll notice is, is that it's got pixelated around there. It's on full, but it's got a bit jaggedy around the outside. I'm going to scroll down a little bit. You'll start to see it's pretty bad. It's meant to be a vector, so it's meant to be scalable. I've scaled it up and it hasn't. By default it doesn't want to, After Effects, all you have to do is hit the magic button. There it is there. It's this one here, it's under this little star. Now, if you can't see these stars, and you've being fumbling along, and you've been ignoring the motion blur. I should have gone through this earlier, but this happens. Toggle switches and modes. We were on switches, modes were not going to prior. We're going to use a tiny bit in this class, but mainly were on switches. If you do accidentally click on this, you can toggle these guys, you want to be in this little icon mode. See this little sun here, this is the magic button. You're going to click that and you watch that. One, two, three click. Beautiful. Whenever you're doing Illustrator files, bring him in and the first thing you do is click on that. It does stress the computer out a little bit, trying to redraw every frame, but it looks bad otherwise. Bringing those files, turn that on, then you can do your animation. Next thing we're going to do is we are going to talk about editing this file. You can do two ways, and you can just open up the file in Illustrator. Here's my guy. There's nobody there. I'm going to open the monster from my desktop. It goes here. Illustrator, monster. I can go through it and edit it. I might go and let's add a mustache. I'm going to get my pencil tool. Where is my pencil tool? There it is there. I'm going to go with black. I'm going to grab this awesome tool, the width tool. If you haven't used the width tool before, be amazed. What am I drawing there? I'm drawing a mustache, but somehow I drew some squiggly line. Let's draw it again. Pencil tool. If you wondered how great I'm drawing super smooth. Yours is coming out really jagged, double-click the tool. There's no an Illustrator class but, you can crank smoothing up. That's how I cheat and make it look really nice. I'm going to go U, like that. That looks pretty good. Move it up. I grab that lovely tool called the width tool. If you've ever tried to draw anything with a pencil tool, it can be really painful. It doesn't even look like a mustache, looks like another tentacle. It doesn't matter. Let's hit save. See up here it's unsaved little asterix, I'm going to go to File Save. That's not what I want, that's Save there we go, and then jump back into After Effects. It's gone and updated in here. If you have an early version After Effects, you often have to go in here. If it's not updating, it's not updating for some reason. Right click it and there's an option in here that says, update or reload footage. You might have to do that. I will set it automatically. The other thing you can do, is instead of having it open in Illustrator, close it down, is you can right click it here and there's one that says edit footage. I click on "New" and I go to can't remember, it's edit original. There it is there. Edit original, and it will do the work for you. It will open Illustrator, find the file and open it up, and you get the same thing. You can go through in here, and I'm going to go to you, I'm going to select that. Go select, same fill colors, and pick a new fill color. There we go. Hit "Save". Make sure you hit "Save", if you don't, it won't update here. You have to go to file Save, otherwise it won't update. That is how you ruin a perfectly good monster illustration with something that looks like a mustache or not and make him blue. We dragged him and scaled him up. Say you want to do a quite a detailed illustration. You wanted to mesh in here, you don't want it to scale it up and start adjusting stuff. What you can do in Illustrator, say you making a new file, it's a new bit of graphic, so you going to file new. Just make sure in Illustrator, you going profile, select video and film. Then here we can go down to the one that we've been talking about HDTV 1080. There is no frames, because it's a flat graphic, so that one there is perfect, and to match our size. If yours has as a bit of a weird size, you can type it in here. Click "Okay". The only trouble with it as you get this maddening looking graph with all these green bits and pieces. I often go into View and turn it off. If I can't remember which one that is. It is Hide Guides. That's not it. It's one of these ones. Smart Guides, Perspective Grid, Snap to Point. You're looking at it right, and you can see and you're like this thing you know what he's talking about. Just this one thing that always catches me out, bounding box. It's one of these that's going to keep smashing them. There it is transparency grids one, and I want to hide the other bits. All right. I had to go Google it. That's how far I got lost. I figured out half of it easy enough on my own, but then couldn't work out the rest of it. Let's go to View, and let's go to Rules, and let's go to Hide Video Rules. Got rid of half of it gets through the dots on the top. Actions safe and titles safe. These things here. Now what I want to do is find them, and they are hiding under here. You've got the airboard. Then you turn these guys off one,two,three. Go back to your move tool. Just got rid of it. That's how to turn those off. Now you can start designing in here. You can grab any tool and you can start doing all your illustrations knowing that it is going to match your After Effects files. See that's it. I came on this. I had to Google it. But it's okay. I'm okay with that. Then it will match the edges of this, so you can design that way there. No problem with that. Next bit, all right. What we're going to do now is we're going to animate. We're going to get rid of monster. Thanks monster you were really helpful. Let's clean it up. Let's bring in a couple of graphics. We're going to do some animation now with some Illustrator stuff. We are going to bring in octopus' head and legs. I've selected both of them, by holding "Shift" and clicking both of them. If you don't know how to do that, just bring them in separately. What I want you to do is drag the head in. There it is there. Drag in the legs, line them up. The reason I've got them in separate files, is that so we can animate them separately, because really what I wanted to do is hit that one there and that one there, so we can leave the legs or the head, i'm going to put the head at the top. Then I dragged the head, click hold and drag. You can move the head. You've seen the difference over here, watch this, that's up. You can see that now the heads in front. I have the head in front, and this guy at the bottom. What I'd like to do, is zoom a little bit. Because I want to animate these legs. I'm going to animate the Illustrator file. I'm going to turn both of these guys on, so that the vector gets updated. Select on this one. What I want to do is, I want these legs to squish in and out. We're going to do some animation, like we've done before, but we haven't done scale yet. We're going to look at getting it to loop in the next video. What we're going to do, is we're going to twill this down. We're going to twill it down and we're going to start the scale. What I'd like to do, is I'd like to not scale it, because the moment if I scale it, it does both of them. What I'd like to do is break that link, so when I scale it, I'm just doing that one, so it's going in and out. It looks like it's squidding around. Undo, so it's back to a 100 percent. Broken that link, I'm going to set and make sure my key frames in the beginning, I am going to hit the scale. Set my first keyframe, then I'm going to jump along a bit. How long? I'm going to jump over half a second. It's 25 frames. We're going to end it about 12 or 13. I'm going to put in another keyframe. I'm going to use this first slider to suck it in a lot. Then I'm going to come back out here to one second, and I'm going to turn it back to a 100 percent. It's going to go zip in and zip out. Now, I want to get this thing to loop. What am I going to do is this video is getting quite long. I'm going to save this one, and let's do looping in the next video. 29. Looping your animation: [MUSIC] We're going to do some looping. Now, there's two ways of doing it; there's the hard way and the easy way. The hard way is using scripts. Scripts are fine and great if you're happy using code and you'd think looping would be a nice, easy, simple, better script but it's not as easy as it sounds. We're going to do the way that all visual animation guys do it, and we're just going to duplicate the frames over and over. We've got the length of 10 seconds. If you need to have something to looping for infinity, then maybe looking into scripts will do it. We're not going to cover it in this video, although, we're going to do it the easy way. There's little re-frames, and we're going to copy them. Then we're going to make sure I'll play hid as lined up with the last keyframe. What do I hold down to make sure it lines up. Shift. I line up with this one, I have paste. Easy, I've looped. Hold shift. The last one, paste. Getting a bit mundane and you got too, grab all of these class, copy them. I'm just using Command C on my keyboard or control C on a PC, or you can use Edit, Copy up the top there. I got a big chunk. Just line them up. If you've got loads to do, you just keep copying and lying at the last one and paste-up. Looping, easy [inaudible]. It's safe. It's gone to the next video. [MUSIC]. 30. Grouping is called a pre comp: Hi there. In this video we're going to look at something called pre-comping. It's basically just grouping. Because what I would like to do is, I'm going to show you an example of why it would be awesome. What I'd like to do is I'm going to toil it down just to make it look nice, I'm going to zoom out a little bit. What I'd like to do is, I'd like to get this octopus to move around this animation. Let's say start at the beginning here, what I want to do is grab the head. So I want to move it down here, that's fine, I'll move it down there. Then I got to go and move the legs. So I'll grab the legs, and I'll move it down. The trouble with this though is that say later on, actually I'm going to undo twice. What I want to do is animate them both, so I'm going to set position keyframes of both of them. I'm going to set your position and your position. They're both waiting for me to move them. So that's them there. I'm going to go long to maybe two seconds, move down and [inaudible] the legs. Move down. That's going to work, watch this. Comes down and he's doing it. The problem is I had to move them separately, which is not a big deal in this case, but say that I want to now move this head up here. I want to get the legs to move as well. I'm just going to grab anything here. Then I wanted to move them over here. I have to spend this time moving all of these objects and that's fine. That's not over, it's not fine. It's a bit of a pain. Because trying to line them up perfectly every time, I'm winged it and it's looked all right, but it is not lining up perfectly. It just means that if I had, say three things say that I was blinking, it was a separate animation and he had bubbles coming out of him. The problem is I;ll have to move every single one of those every single time and I'd be here forever. You could do it that way. I'm going to undo, so get it undo. Until I'm back to here. All right. So what I want to do is group them together. I'm total those up. So I can group these guys together so that so that I can move them along as a little unit and it's called pre-comping. To do it, I slick you and you. You can either drag a box around them all, or hold. Click the first one, hold "Shift" and grab the second one. Then I'll right-click it. Okay, there's one called pre-compose. Okay, so if I pre-compose, I can give us a name. This is going to be called my octopus. I'm going to click "OK", and now he's pre-comped. What's happened is, there's my comp, this is my original one that I made. You just call Comp 1, you should name all of your layers. I never do. You should. Why do? Unlike you, I probably forget. If you're a Photoshop user and you've got hundreds of unnamed layers, I'm like you. All right, so I've got Comp 1 and this is the new one that I created. Remember it was called pre-comp, it's a composition. It's just like a group and it's wrapped that all south in there. If I go inside this octopus, double click. There is my little animation originally. But if I go back to my comp where I was, you can see it's just one layer now, a nice little tidy group that I can animate. What I can do, is I can say I want to start you maybe there, and maybe I'll rotate you round. There's a Rotate tool at the top there. I click and drag anywhere. I go back to my Move tool. Place that there. So that's going to be the beginning, so I'm going to go down here and I'm going to say Transform and I'm going to go Position. Then maybe after about three seconds, he's going to move across there. Actually what I might do is undo. So let me get back to the beginning. So I'm going to get one keyframe, and while I'm here I might do on the scale as well. We start nice and big, and when I get along to about three seconds, I'm going to move him up and make him quite small. So I'm going to grab the scale and move it down. Still looks like he's hitting away or something like that. All right, there he goes. Go do your little squidy octopus thing. Nice. So you can see how easy it is, that they're just one unit. I could now bring it along and maybe up to 10 seconds, get them to head over here and be even smaller, so down to zero. He's moving a weird way. There he goes up to there. He moves around, slowly but surely, get smaller and smaller, bye. He moves along. That is pre-composing. You can do it with anything. Just has to be two, it could be 20, it could be 10,000. Just pre-compose them, and I guess adding the pre-comp is a big one. Because you've just got one layer now, say I want to change the way that the squid is going in and out. I need to go inside of it, you can do it a couple of ways. You can double-click it. Which is if I double-click it, a couple things happen is this changes at the top here, and can you see here, there's my original Comp 1 and there's my octopus. I've got inside of it. To get back, I need to go back to Comp 1, or click on this tab here. It's up to you which way you want to work. But just know, inside I can go in here and I can play around with my say it's my legs here, I can start to [inaudible]. This is a cool thing. See these little black dots? These little black dots are your keyframes further down. Because at the moment we want this one called Transform. So we're not at position yet, there they are. So these little black dots just indicate that somewhere down here, there's some keyframes. It's like a visual cue for you to say that down here, below somewhere is a keyframe. So I can pull down, there they are, awesome. I can decide to maybe speed these up, or say I slicked all these guys now. I've got them all even. Okay, hold down "Alt" and just drag them that way, to speed them up. I don't want to just make them. That's working now, cool. I can tie them down and lift them up. Yeah. Then when you're finished, close that one down, back to Comp 1 and everything's being updated. Great. That's how to do a pre-comp. 31. How to make a motion path: Hey, there. In this video, we're going to look at a motion path. We've made them already. You have looked through this animation. If I click on this, that is the motion path. That's following it along. If you've got one like me already created, what you can do, you just click on the start, so you're clicking the squares, and then you are looking out for these little sneaky, they're hard to see. I totally understand if you find them painful to see because I do too. These little dots here. If I grab this guy, these little dot, if I grab that, I can edit this motion path. If you've ever used Illustrator before or any anchor point tool, this is going to be easy enough, so you can start modeling. Watch him, click him, click him. It means I'm just going to change the way he flows in this path. Instead of just going straight across, watch this, it follows along. If you need more control, say you need to do something over here, what you do is you get him to where you want about there. I know in my timeline about there,what I'd like to do is twill it down. Thank you, bank of Ireland. This twill is down and let's go to here. Here are my keyframes and I'm going to put it in a position keyframe. You see if I move along now, there's another little squares. The squares is our anchor points and the line has to pass through it. These little guys are on the outside, think of them as gravity like little moons, they drag the line. It has to pass through the anchor point, but these little moons pull the end tag on the lines. You can mess around with here. Let's say that you didn't have, you want to have a start with one. What I'm going do is I'm going to my position off. If I take this keyframe, be careful when you click the stopwatch off, it wipes all your keyframes. This is what I wanted a moment ago. Pushing up at my timeline back to here, and I'm going to turn it off, they're all gone. I'm just going to create one by, create a motion path. To get started with, what I'm going do is drag it onto the end and physically drag my tiny little speck. The scale is all the way down so that's why it's tiny. I need to put him back here, undo it. So don't forget. I'm going to turn it off and turn it back on. It's starting to record again. I got my first keyframe. This guy as he gets smaller and smaller out here and I move him to there. That's a new watch. Here he goes and then he moves along there. It's pretty much the same, it just means instead of having the beans that were already there, if I can click on any of these guys, look out for the little dots. I can play around with this. To add more keyframes, put your play here where you want it to be a keyframe. You can see my little guys lined up there, add another diamond and move it around. One thing we haven't done yet is orient a path because at the moment it's following along and it's though the way it is, it's not changing direction, if you know what I mean, it's just going sideways for bits of it. What we're going to do is get him to orient path. What we need to do is, you just want to make sure you stick it on the layers. Go to "Layer," go down to "Transform" and there's one in there called "Auto-orient." Click on that and turn "Orient along path" on and it's going to work. We just click "Okay" and I scroll back. He's moving along the path and not quite how I would Imagine. He's now permanently going sideways. But you can see he's adjusting as the path goes along. What I'd like to do is get him back to the beginning. What we need to do is, because you can see, he's lined up weirdly to the edge here, he's following it as he jumps on to the line there. What we need to do is adjust him here. Right back at the beginning here we're going to grab our rotation tool. I'm going to click and drag him. You see my line comes out there, I'm going to zoom in. You can see it hits off that way. So what I want to do is make sure he's lined up with where the trajectory of that line heads away. You have to play around with it. But now, if I zoom out, "Spacebar" he does what I'd hoped he'll do a bit more. Follow along the line, he loops along, but was wow. Let's hit "Spacebar", hit "Save" and that is motion paths in After Effects. 32. Green screen Keying After Effects Intro v3: Hey everyone, it's a new day and it's a new video, not new for you, not a new day at least. You are watching it and probability a nice long series. But no, I'm good. I'm caffeined up and ready for another video. In this one we're going to look at green screen or King. Essentially just shooting anything. Can be people or objects against a green screen background and then removing it, so that you've got a masking, you can put them anywhere. Let's look at it. In my project window here, and I'll double-click, I am going to get a green screen and bring this one in. We're going to make a come from it. Right-click. I come from selection, hit space bar. You can see a new day. My computer is running a whole lot better or a full even. You can see there's my hip hop men. He's been charged against the green screen now this green screens particularly good. What happens is when you're shooting against a green scree. We can fix it now and after fix like the last 20 percent. But if you've got a really bad green screen, it can be impossible to go through and cut things out. You might have to look at something like rotoscoping, which we're going to do later on in this video series. But it's all about setting up the green screen, spend the whole day doing the green screen. Otherwise you spend the next four days trying to cut out the person because it's a really bad green-screen. Now how to do it? The best thing to do is making sure it's lit. This person here needs to be far enough away from the green screen in the back so that there is a bit of distance between the two. That's another good thing, so there's no shadow cast onto it. Another good thing you can do is to make sure that the background is lit and by lit I mean, like there are some lights lighting him. You can see there's a strong light on the side here, but actually have more lights lighting the background. This green thing, if you'd light it up nice and bright, it ends up being a nice, consistent color and makes it really easy to key later on. I've seen people ironing their green-screen, say it's a fabric one, they've ironed it and they're playing around. What ends up happening, it's a lot easier to maybe just to really light it up rather than spend the day ironing all the creases out. The other thing you can do to make it a little bit easier is that use lens if you are a photographer and you have access to a couple of lenses, is to have something with a really shallow depth of field so that this hip hop artist is in good shot focus, but then it falls off and it's quite blurry in the background. That helps blend this nice green area here. Let's say that we've got our green screen shot and it's reasonably good. All we need to do is over here in my Effects and Presets, you might have to get a window Effects and Presets to open it up. There's a couple of different effects in here. Most people, including me, use Keylight. There's one, angle Keylight and what we do is click Hold, drag it on. Nothing happens, except we've got our Keylight effect over here. All we need to do is grab the eyedropper tool, click once in the background, pick the green, and hey presto, we've got our background gone. Now this one here is a great green screen. Now if yours is pretty bad, you might have to then go through and start playing around with the different Keylight effects. Now the thing to start with is under a matte weekly down here under Screen Matte. This has the most effect on this green screen. If you've got it's green mostly and there's a little bit of shadow or a little bit change of colors, then you can play around with this and it's either clip black or white. Just work your way through this list, which we'll start with this one. Our is good, so we're going to making our worse. But I've given you a, for instance, I guess of status zero goes left and go right and just see whether this fixes the app or not. Same with the white. It's at 100 at the moment, you can lower it down. You can see there, because it's so consistent, it's right, but you can see there's a bit of adjustment in that one as well and you just slowly work your way through this list. One of the big ones I guess, is if you've got a bit of ghosting on the outside, it's like a little bit of a green halo. It's this one here is quite nice. This grow-shrink. Watch this. I can move the ages out. There's a halo. Move it in a little bit, just to tight it in a little bit. So I like this. Yep. Perfect. All right. Yeah, just work your way through this list. If it's terrible, you're going to have to go and mask some stuff. Look, there's masking tutorials further on in this course. But yeah. Then now that we've got this guy masked and let's put them on background. Because on a black background don't sweat it. If you're mask isn't great and it's a bit of ages and it's not great is to make sure he is against. Say our dancer here is against the background. He's actually going to be finished on rather than black. Black is the hardest of all things to have masks against because it's really tough. What you can do is actually just stick him against the background. I'm going to go back to my project window, double-click in here. I'm going to use the particles thing we used earlier. Particle background. Here we go. I'm going to put this in underneath. I just click Hold and dragged it underneath. There we go. Make sure you're working against the background because you might have found that against black, there's a few little artifacts and things aren't working, but against the actual background, you might find you can't see anything. There's no point spending the whole day doing your green screen when potentially, what we can see there is a bit of green screen. You can see that it's not a bit of, I think it's probably because I was messing around with our settings there. We're going to go back into clicking on this layer. It's got to fix controls. Let's have a look in here. What we might do is put that back to zero. Is that it? No. Put him back. I liked him, I'm going to put a six. Now we're going to just do some slight editing. It's not you, it's the blacks. There we go. You can see the difference there. You might, if you're watching the video, it's kind of a low rays, you might not see it, but there's a bit of cloudiness either side here. The black, will just light that up a little bit. That's tucked away nicely. All right, and next thing we want to do is just while we here, we've finished King now, we've got him against the nice background. I'm going to put the resolution down to Third so it plays a bit nicer. There it goes, particles falling. We're going to play around with the hue and saturation. Just we type in hue in our fix, there's one called hue and saturation. Drag it onto the right layer. The particles, and I'm just going to go where it says hue, I'm going to drag this around. You can drag the dielectric which is probably easier. I'm just kind of change the background so it's not green. Everything is just green-gray. Back to green, out of green. He's hip hop man on a really pink background there. All right, let's save this one and I'll see you in the next video. 33. Basic Masking: Hi, in this video we're going to be doing masking. We are going to look at the basics of masking, then we'll work through a couple of other options. We've done Green Screen, now we're going to do just some basic masking. What I'm going to do is I am going to bring it in a logo. On my Desktop and under After Effects there's one in here called bring your laptop logo, BYOL Logo. Grab that, bring it in. Okay, it's an Illustrator file that's cool. What I want to do is make a Comp to go into, because if I make a Comp from this I'm going to get this really strange comp size because it's the size of the logo. It's not what I want. I'm going to get a New Composition I'm going to make it my HDTV 1080 25, background color. Now in this case, what we can do is you can say I want it to be white because my logo is going to stay down what better. Any troubled with this, is that this white here is temporary if I go to Export Now or Render it, it's going to go back to being black that background there is just like a place holder. If you want a white background I can make a new comp. It doesn't really matter, if you make the background here white or black, and leave it as black to make it obvious what we're doing. What I need to do is I need to put a background and you do this you do Layer, New and you go to Solid. Down here you pick the color and it matches the right size. I'm going to call this instead of white solid and I call this background. Now when I render this, this will actually have a white backgrounds. One of those after a fixedisms that'll catch you out. So don't bother changing the comp size, make sure you've got a background actual solid. It's actually just a big box, big awkward rectangle but we're going to use that in the background. Also we're also going to do is use this the locking icon down here click that, it just means I can't move it so it just stays there as a background. I'm going to drag my logo on and here is it, I'm going to scale it up a little bit, I'm going to zoom in first of all and scale it up a little bit. I'm going to hold "Shift," grab the edge, and I'm going to start dragging then hold "Shift" and get it to about that size. Now it's going to stop pixelating, this happened earlier when we're working with illustrating you can see it gets fuzzy. Does anybody remember how I get it to look crystal-clear if it's a vector graphic or an illustrator graphic? That's right. Make sure your have toggled between these two use this one here. That little sunshine one if you click that it's going to redraw the vector every time. You might not notice a big difference but if you are a bit of a resolution purist you'll notice the difference when it exports. What I'd like to do is draw a mask. Now to do a mask the really simple way is to have the logo selected the thing you want to mask. It can be anything because it doesn't have to be a logo, can be type, it can be video, it can be anything. Then grab one of the things you want to mask it with, we're going to use the Rectangle Tool. You could use the Pen Tool if you know how to use it, but we're going to use the Rectangle tool. We're going to do is see we want to get rid of that text here, I want to click and drag. I'm going to grab my Move tool and now I've got this guy. I've masked off all the text, what's happened is on this logo layer here you can see there's this thing called Mask. If I twill it down, that is my mask. Yeah, it's just like added a mask to this physical layer which is cool. What I want to do is maybe animate this mask so the Type looks like it appears. I'm going to undo so it gets back over here. That's just the basic mask, job done finished. Next step, let's look at a mask at that. Hey, we wrote this but I must turn these things off. I am going to get the mask to animate. What I need to do is this thing called the Mask Path, that controls this box around the outside. What I can do is exit little animation I can say, "Go." You start timing you see here is a little key frame and it might go off to about maybe one and half seconds. What I can do is I can click on this mask, double-click and I'm going to go, clear. There's two keyframes back here, it's nice and small and up here it's nice and big. I'm going to whether these guys where I click them, go to Velocity, change it to 70 and let's have a little look, nice animated mask. It might be a way that you do this for your total sequence. We did dialog thirds earlier on in the series and it might be a nice way to get you type to come on and just appear on the page. Rather than slide on from the outside which we did in that one. The next step is we're going to have to look at something called Track Matte will do that in the next video and I'll show you why we need Track Matte. It's a fancy name for just a different way of masking. The big problem with now is I can animate the mask perfectly fine as long as this guy doesn't move. Say I want to move the type and the logo. Say I want the mask to stay where it is and I want the type to slide in from the side. The problem is that this mask join to this layer here. If I want to start the thing over here but keep the mask over in this spot it won't. The mask is attached. I can't shake it off. I want the mask to stay there and you go over there and I want to slide in but it won't. We're going to have to do a Track Matte. Let's do that in the next video. That's it for a basic masking. 34. Object & mask animate separately Track Matts: Hey, welcome to this next masking tutorial. In this case, we're going to animate the mask separately from the object. It might be typed, it might be a video, might be a logo, in our case it's going to be monsters. They call them track mattes or after mattes, and this is how they work. First of all, we're going to bring in one of our monsters. Double-click our project window, we go to "File Import." Jump up to "Monsters" pick your favorite monster and there are some goodies. I think I like this guy today. I've got him in here, now I'm going to make a new comp for it. I don't want to make it comp from this guy because it's a weird old size. So I'm going to "New", "Composition", new comp. I should give it a name; I never do. Length, it's going to be, let's make it shorter, it's a bit too long, it's five seconds long. Click "Okay". What I'd like to do is, zoom that a little bit, if I drag my icon here, he's a bit small, so I drag them up. Start dragging, hold Shift after you've started to get it to lock the height and width otherwise it gets a bit squeegee. It's going to be bit pixelated. You can see it's a bit pixelated there. Let me zoom in, pixelated. How do I get rid of that? You already know, click this button here. Look at that, super smooth. What I'd like to do is I'd like him to start off screen and slide in. Now if I attach the mask to it like we did in the last tutorial, you can't. What we're going to do is we're going to do something differently. We're going to grab him, start him off screen, actually just start him over here, behind the little his screen get. I'm going to go to my Transform window, I'm going to go to my position and, I'll turn this off. It's got a key-frame there. After about one second, I'm going to get him to slide on. I'm holding Shift while it drugs to get him into the center of the video. Now, two things I want to do is I want to right click it and go to Velocity and I'm going to change this the easing to 70. Looks nice, and what we'll also do is the other magic trick member is turn Motion blur on both globally and in the lab and this will make it look a lot cooler when he moves. he's going to get a little blurry there. I like it. Now, what we're going to do is we want to add a mask to it. What you could do is you could slick this and grab this and you can mask him. But the trouble is, the mask animates with him, it's not what I wanted. I want the port hold to stay there and the glider to slider underneath it. To do it, I'm just going to de-select over everything. There's two ways of creating a track match in terms of creating the shape that I want. If I have the selected right and I click on this guy, we've seen it before. If I click this, it just makes a mask on that layer. What you can do is there's the easy way and the quick way. The easy way is to go to "Layer", "New" and I'm going to go to "Shape Layer". Then we've got this new thing called Shape Layer and we draw our circle on it. Great, so it's just a regular old circle. You can do it that way, that's totally perfect. I'll show you the way that everybody does though. I'm going to get rid of my shape layer. What people do is, because you see if I grab my circle with the layer selected, it masks it bad, what you just do is make sure nothings selected, okay? Then if you draw a circle, it creates a shape layer in all one big go. Just make sure you don't have that layer selected. Just click off anywhere in the background just so nothing's highlighted. I'm holding Shift to get a perfect circle. Perfect, that's good. There's my little port hole now. We're going to use this here. I would like that to mask the thing underneath and the way you do it, you're going to twirl it up, is we're going to switch this thing for "Toggle Switches". We're going to say, "You my friend have a Track Matte of an Alpha Matte of Shape Layer 1." That's that guy here. I'm going to rename it to make it a little easier. That's my mask, cool, undo. I'm going to make you and call him, let's call him Mask. You, my friend, are going to Track Matte or Alpha Matte Mask. That is how you Musk. You've just got to make sure that this circle here is just above the guy underneath. So here's my mask. It's right above this Monocle.ai. There is there. Very James Bondy. He's got attached for it. That is Track Matte. Next thing we're going to do is we're going to look at rotoscoping. It's the big boy version of masking. Let's hit "Save". I'll see you next video. 35. Rotoscoping & faking depth of field: Hey. In this video, we're going to look at something called rotoscoping using the Roto Brush. Now essentially, all it is, is masking, but in the previous exercises, we use just standard shapes. In this one, we're going to do some customizing. What I would like to do is actually cut myself out, and fake a bit of depth of field. Depth of field is there's this backgrounds all fuzzy, and the cameras look very sharp on me but fuzzy and out of focus in the background. We're faking this because what I've done is this, if I have a look, I've got a top layer which is sharp, and the one underneath that's being made blurry. I cut the top layer out. Watch this, but in the bottom layer out, there's me. I cut out the top layer and the one at the bottom, fitting the top layer off. You can see, the bottom layer is all blurry and I've just got this car over the top that's a nice sharp focus. That's what we're going to do now using the Roto Brush. All right. First, let's import our bit of footage. We're going to use Rotoscoping 1 to MP4, let's make a New Comp from it. Great. Before we move on, this footage is just shot from my DSLR camera, we're going to clean it up a little bit first of all, before we do the. I'm going to use the Lumetri which we've used before, and I drag it on, and just make it look a little prettier. I'm going to use basic corrections. Probably, the big one is temperature. It's a bit blue. I'm going to warm it up a little bit, and then just play around with these. Remember, I started at the top, just worked backwards, forwards. Am I making it better? Am I making it worse? Take that. Remember there's no right or wrong. You're just working your way through the settings. The last thing I definitely want to do is, and the basic corrections on the saturation. I just want to lift this up a little bit, just to make it a little warmer. It's probably a little warm. Okay, a little more saturated. Here we go, cool. Since the fx button here, I can twirl this down, you can turn this on and off. Have I made it better? Have I made it worse? Yeah, it's a little bit over-saturated, but I like it. Looks like a nice warm day and a happy man doing happy things. I've got Lumetri done. Let's right-click this guy and rename it. Let's call this one 'the shop'. Okay. We're going to keep this one shop and cut out the background. To cut out the background, we're going to use something called a Roto Brush. Now we're going to have our play hit right at the beginning here, and we're going to grab our Roto Brush tool and we're going to, this is important, you double-click the video here. There was the original one, we go inside this guy here and we're going to do the rotobrushing in here. When we finish, we come back out to our compositions inside the layer. The way it works is, I click, hold, and paint over the things that I want to keep. If I click hold and paint over my face, whatever happens spreads out. Can you see that purple line that spreads all over everything? I'm going to zoom in a bit. Can see this purple line? That's the mask that you're making. What you've got to do is, it gets better and better as it moves along. I'm going to write this down a little bit. I'm not holding anything down on my keyboard, just painting across. I'm trying to get what's left of my hair, grab my ear. You can see it starts getting other bits. It starts getting clearer and clearer as it goes along. Just make sure you don't miss any bits. You must go round and keep looking out for the purple. You can see here, I've got too close to the edge. All these tonal range between the back of the wall and my skin is actually really similar. So what we're going to have to do is minus a spit out. At the moment it's green, so it's adding to it. If we hold down the option key on a Mac or alt key on a PC, you see changes to this minor. Now I click hold and paint out this part, paint out this part. You're going to spend your time going around painting bits in. It's going to grab lots of things you do want, and then it's going to grow. You can see it reached down and grabbed this keyboard that I don't want. So I'm going to hold down Alt or Option on a Mac. I'm going to paint these things out. Great. It's got it in there, doing okay. Down there. Rotobrushing is amazingly quick compared to its predecessor using the Pinto to do it. The Roto Brush is good, but it does take a long time. If you're using this particular exercise, this bit's probably going to catch you out. See these white bits of words, it's really hard to see the purple around the outside. I'm just going to paint in and make sure I grab all of these guys, and make sure none of them. The way you know you've got them all is, if I jump back here you'll see these holes left in it. So if I jump back here, I paint these out. I'll leave some, like the E there. You can see E is gone. So he's got to make sure I paint out you you you. Now if I jump back, he's looking better. I need my arm. I need more of my arm and at least the chair. So holding down option. Because unmasking this display the background, we don't have to be too good. In fact, if I was shooting this, which I was shooting it, and I was intending this for a rotoscoping, I just found this stuff to use. It wasn't shot specifically for this. I would make sure that I wasn't using a black shade against the black chair, because it obviously causes lots of trouble trying to match these two. It's not all right here, but it brushes pretty clever. But yeah, it can cause problems. So we've masked part of it. But we've masked just one frame. You can see this age here. You can use things like the feather on my crank, of the feather just a little bit, just to blur it. Crank and vivid more more, just to fuzzy this age. I could spend more time going through with the Roto Brush tool. But I'm just going to fade it so it's less obvious. I'm going to go back in here. Now we've done for the first frame. Now, what you could or might have to do, is do every single frame. So we've got 15 seconds here, 25 frames per second. If you did the math, I count, you'll be there for a long time. What Roto Brush is good at, is trying to guess. What you do is, you jump along a little bit, maybe just chop and then drag along with autonomy. Watch what happens. It's tune away, and what we're looking for is a little hard to see, I guess. There's a little brush, there's a little line that joins up, and it's trying to calculate between where we were and where we are now and try and guess. It's done a pretty good job. Let's have a look. It's done a pretty good job. You might have to touch on a few things like that. Yeah, it's done a pretty good job there. So what I'm going to do is two things. One is can you here, this is the line. This is where you get a Roto Brush to. At the moment it's going till here, and then we'll finish. What I want to do is, I actually want to Roto Brush this whole long list here. This is width that I would call a Chevron thing than the bottom here, drag it. So you're going to do the whole thing, the whole 15 seconds. What we're going to do is, we're going to come along and how long? I'm going to jump out to this file and watch this little line. Zoom in a bit. There he is, Ks come along, and he's done a pretty good job. If I drag it out really far, it's going to go off and try and calculate which this line. It's going to calculate every room in between. This is probably too far. Jumping out a couple of seconds and hoping that it guesses it. It's really easy actually, if you've got something really high contrast. I know that this is not. It's going to blend with the back of the chair, probably, and the keyboard. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Let's see how it goes through the little line. Here he comes. We've done a pretty good job. It's lost my ear. You can see over here after minus has put the chair off, so it's not bad. What you're going to have to do, is keep working your way through this, and smaller steps. I've done quite a big chunk in this case. Work along in little steps until you get to the end of your footage. Now, in my case, I'm going to leave it till about there. I could drag my play head out all the way to the end here and hopefully it fills in the gaps. It won't. It's not that clever, especially with this black on black and the black of the keyboard back there. What will happen is, as you work your way through a couple of frames at a time, drag it along a little bit, you might have to work backwards. Once you've finished, you're going to hit this one called freeze. What freeze will do is because the moment is trying to render it every time you drag the play-head, freezing would just say, "Hey, process it all, and in white. Stop trying to redraw this thing every time I move the play-head, so hit freeze, kick back, relax, and it will take a very long time." Okay. We're going to speed this up at supersonic speeds to get to the end, and it's going to try and do the whole thing for me. Now, because I didn't spend as much time going through with the brush tool, adding and subtracting, it's going to lose this little way all the time, but yeah, let's speed this up and we'll see what it looks like when we're finished. All right, that's locked in into the vision, and you can see here, this is me cut out. What I'm going to do is I lift this up a little bit, and I'm going to that went up. Look at my shop version. I'm going to copy and paste this one. I've selected it here, and I'm going to go to, get a copy and a paste. I'm going to write to this one. I'm going to call this one blurry. I'm going to put this at the back. The moment are about the same. This bottom one though is, I'm going to keep the lumetri color versus Roto Brush. I'm going to turn that off. He's back to him. What I would like to do to him though is, over here, I'm going to find Gaussian blur. I could drag it onto this lab, but I'm going to actually just make sure I get onto the right layer, the blurry one. Blurriness: how blurry? Crank it right up. Let's say 10, let's go to 30. You can see the background's really blurry. Maybe for this example, I'll keep it quite high. I probably wouldn't keep it this high when I was using it, so background's nice and blurry, but the top one is nice and sharp. You can see here but the top went off, sharpen and this blurred. That's how to use the Roto Brush to isolate something in moving live footage. Now we've done it to blur the background. It could be that you want to accentuate the background. It might be that you want to cut some things, you want to put it in a different scene. You're going to use Roto Brush just to cut me out and put me on a different background. Instead of being in my office, I could be on a tropical holiday. Let's look in the next sets of our exercise as well, to look through another use case for using the Roto Brush. All right, I'll see you next video. 36. Rotobrush putting type behind video objects: Hey there, this video we're going to look at rotoscoping and what we're going to do is map something out and try and stick stuff behind it, and in this case it's going to be some text. So my project window, I'm going to open up and bring in rotoscoping 2 and I make a cut from it. This is our little bit of footage, just the lens moving across. What do I like to do is slip some text behind the lens. So it's interacting with the background a bit. Could be a logo, could be a footage, it's up to you. So what we're going to do first of all is we needed to rotoscope it and we're going to use the Roto Brush. So grab the Roto Brush, and if that Roto Brush doesn't work until you double-click the layer, now it works. So we'll start at the beginning here. Actually, what we might do is get it. Because if I start there, I can rotoscope it, but I'm missing the other half of it. So I wait for it's own, click and drag across it, it's got most of it. Perfect. Now, because it's got easy contrast against the background, it's easy rotoscoping. You're going to have to probably do a lot of adding and subtracting by holding down the Alt key to remove and without the Alt key to add. So that looks good to me. You can see it's projected out that way and that way we want to do the whole thing. From all the way that way and all the way that way and we are going to say If it goes a little bit, it's doing good. Goes a little bit, it's doing good. If you haven't done rotoscoping before, check out the video just before this, we go into a lot more detail this one is more like a project. Alright now I know, because I've done it before that this one here is a really easy thing to rotoscope so I'm going to jump out because here's got the line all the way going to here, it's done to layer. I'm going to go out to here, I hope it's good. Wait for it to do its thing see it creeping along, there it is. I've seen it all the way to the end much, I should go through all and just check it, because at the moment it's like guess and just assume that it's doing it's right job along here without any sort of interaction. So it's going to do it all, and I'm going to be happy because I've used this example a hundreds times actually. So I'm going to draw this way. So getting the side as well, see it's reaching out. I should go in little stages and add and subtract, but this one here is too good. I can slip a coffee while this one does it's work. Well, that's all. Alright so it's doing it all, waiting for this little line. Come on and boom, now we have this pretty cool rotoscope. Can you see? Right along here, nice. So to check back in our composition there is a mask. It's got a few little things you can play around with, but in this case, because I'm sticking it back over the original, just put something in between you aren't noticing any of these gaps you could play around with the feather and stuff. What I'd like to do now is I'm going to duplicate it. So I'm going to copy it and paste it so there are two versions. The one at the top here, I am going to right-click and call lens, this one right-click, this one's going to be the background. So I've got two of them, backgrounds. Remember that thing I showed you when you get lost by double-clicking stuff? I did, yeah? Back at composition. So I've got two. They do exactly the same thing, but this back one here I'd like to do is turn the Roto Brush off. I can either turn the effects off or just delete Roto Brush off this one. It's on the first ones still, there it is if you turn off the layer underneath. Here is my lens. This guy just fills the background. Now, we need to wage something in between. We'll do it with some type. So if I grab my Type tool, type my name. That's all, that's my name. If that's all I wanted to do, watch this. Just want to text in there, that doesn't work. Make sure you type in-between these two layers so clicking, holding, and dragging so they are in-between each other. You can see here now, I've done a cool little thing where in between this interacting with the background. What I'd like to do though, is I'd like to track it so it moves along. Remember, earlier on we did something called motion tracking, It's kind of 2D tracking It's when we use it for the skateboarder. So we're going to do that again as a little exercise just so it sticks itself to hear. So it moves along with it so it looks like it's behind it. What we'll do is, let's go and find the tracker. Let's turn this layer off and It doesn't matter which one of these you track the lens or the background, it makes no difference. We're going to get to Track Motion. Track Point, we're going to make it a little bit bigger. Warning space about to drag. Remember, don't drag the white bits, drag anywhere in between to get a little black arrow and grab that little corner there. I'm going to have to make this a little bit bigger. Don't hit the Play button because it's automatic and it's cool, but you should do it frame by frame. That is true of most footage except for this one. This one is too good. It is a really nice easy, clear, contrast, so I'm going to let the computer do the work. So I'm going to start right at the beginning here. It's better to start right at the beginning or right at the end, either way, move all the way through. If you start halfway, if you have to track one way and then go all the way back to here, make sure you have the perfect frame and then track backwards so you can track forward and backwards. So it's just easier, just start at the beginning, move this thing again. I'm going to kick back, relax, and try and watch out. I'm just keeping an eye on it to make sure it doesn't jump off too much. I saw a little bump there, a little bump there, and that's going to affect my type. So I should go back now and adjust those ones. You can go through and just see where there is the jumps. Where is some jumps? There is one there. I can physically go through and move these things. I see there's a bit of a jump, where is it? If you can't see Page Up, Page Down, if you're on a laptop, it doesn't work, the Page Up, Page Down, moves you frame by frame. You can see there's a little bit of a jump. That's not bad actually. I'm not that worried about it. This is what it looks like. So I'm zooming out Control minus or Command minus on the Mac. So I've got my tracking points. Now, if you remember from before, we're going to have to make Layer, New, Null because the ticks white follow that track point, but the null will and we can make that ticks follow the null. So I've got this null object and I'd like to say Edit Target, make sure it's the null, click Okay, click Apply, check X and Y, and hopefully now I have got this null object following along. I'm keeping up but that's okay because of the full and my computer's trying to do the video capture, it's just that little bit, but it looks like it's matched up. A couple of ones here, yeah. So matched up nicely. So we've got our null object, it's following all the bits and pieces. Next thing I need to do is get the ticks to for that. So you text, I'd like your parent if you can't see this, you might be on actually, you can see them both one so, and let's get on this one here, go to null and my type, I'd like you to follow my null. Follow him around please. Let's turn our type on. Now, I'm going to try and preview this. I'm going to turn it down to a quarter to make it run fast. Goes in. Hey look, my type follows along like it was part of the little thing there. What you might have to do now is you might lower it down just to make it look like it's on the ground. In this case, Transform position. What we also do if you want to play around with 3D scene, push it further back and further forward, make sure it's on this little option here, adds a little 3D. Watch this. With off, you've only got a certain amount of controls, with it on, you can push it back, further away. So what I want to do is just drag it down, I can put it on the ground there and to make it look a little bit more believable, let's hit Space bar so following. Make it look like it's on the ground there, I'm going to fake shadow. So I'm going to copy this one, paste it. This top one here, I'm going to drag it underneath and I'm going to rename it and call it shadow. I'm going to lay it down. So I'm going to open it up, go to position, and I'll use the X Rotation and I'll lower it down. It looks like it's on the ground, so I'm going to do minus 90. I'm going to make the type black, Is it helping? Its just in the background there. The one thing it's not doing, it's not tracking the null. So you follow the null as well, buddy. Can you see I moved my play head and then got it to track so I'm going to undo until it was lining up perfectly, then make them black, then get them to track. Awesome. What else I might do is just to fake it a little bit more and I might grab the scale, unlock it. Do you think the scans are that way? More believable? We're getting there. The cool thing about it is can you see? Because it's 3D, it's bending along. Let's crank it up to full. Let's lower the opacity. Opacity, lower down. We're going to add a blue filter so I'm going to go to Effects and Presets, Blur, we're going to use Gaussian Blur. Can't spell Gaussian, but I can spell the fist three letters of it. It's all you need. We're going to try and edit to it. There we go. Shadow. Grab the blurriness. How blurry should it be? Just checking them out there. There we go. What I also might do to make the ticks feel a little bit more believable because it's quite grainy back here is I might add some grain to the text. To do it, this Daniel Walter Scott layer I'm going to find my fix and presets, there's one in here called noise. These are bunch of the ones. I'm just going to use the regular old noise, edit to this layer, and zoom in to show you what a mean. Noise does this, If I crank it right up, makes it a little spotty, but I'm just going to lower it down to make it look like the background. You can see this is speckly stuff in the background here. That's too much for me. I might also add the blur to it. Because it's just a little bit further back because it's too crisp. Obviously aftereffects has made it perfect as it can be. Blur is too long, Gaussian. Let's go and edit to the type layer. Let's crank it up just a little bit. I'm going to zoom out. Can you see just to make it feel like it was more in there, you see just a little bit to match the background that can be sharper even then it's not super sharp. So just to match the background, you can play around with the different blurriness to make it feel like it was there. You might add some noise to the shadow as well, but in this case I'm not going to worry about it. I'm going to put it down to third, preview it. It moves along, the shadow moves. It's behind that thing. I can now animate the type if I like to. Save. If I can animate the type so it slowed down so I could start with this now and animate this over time, but I'm going to leave it for the moment. I'm happy with that. So that is how to use rotoscoping to separate different things on a layer, and also sneak things in potentially between them. I'll see you in the next video. 37. Animated infographic line chart: Hi, and welcome to some infographics. We're going to start with a line chart and it's going to try to get the stuff we already know. I'm just going to show you how to do it. In this case, we're going to use a mask to show how a line chart grows. The big trick here is that the liner will exists. If you're watching loads of pretty much all animations, either after fix or it animates or any animation program, it's a lot easier just to have the line exists rather than create it through after fix like to build a line using scripts. Physically, you just have the line already existed. That's not a word, but it already exists and you reveal it. Let's show you how to do that. Now, I've created the Line graph in Photoshop. Photoshop's probably not the greatest way to make a graph. I'll show you the two little parts here. There is this one here and this one here. Here's the line and the background's separated. Here's what you need to get started. You can do this in Illustrator. Illustrator has its own graphing tool. You can do it in Excel and bring that in. It's going to get ugly but however you can make the graph go off and do that. We're going to start with these two. I'm going to import Line Chart 1 and 2. I'm going to make it come from Line Chart 1 because it's more on my background and now in Photoshop, I'll just show you in here. Whenever I'm working, I just make sure that I'm using File New. Then here use film and video, HDTV 1080p, and then hit "New" then you start off with the size that you need and you can make your graph in here. Then it will match the size. I'm going to close all that down. Don't save. Just to leave a few resources for my computer. Photoshop and After Effects together are a strong combination. They demand lots from your scene. Anyway, I'm going to go to this one that says, "Fit" it fills my screen. I'm going to go to "Full" just to see it looking pretty. I've got this, I'm going to grab my Line Chart 2 and drag him just above and you can see it snaps into place, nice. Great, so the reveal. We start at beginning here and we're going to add a mask, we did this when we did the bring out laptop logo. We grab the "Rectangle Tool" and as long as we have this Line 2 here is selected, I'm going to rename them to make them easier. This one here is the line, and this one here is going to be the background. I'm okay with that line. Make sure it says makes a rectangle and what's going to happen is, I'm going to draw a rectangle that shows the whole thing. That's cool. Now what I'm going to do is animate it. Here's my mask, it's touched to this line here, and I'm going to tilt it down. What I'd like to do is we're going to pair on the mask path. So I'm going to still here and I'm going to click on this one, set a keyframe. At the beginning here, what I'd like to do is I'm going to go by black error, and I'm going to double-click it and I'm going to shrink it in here. So its all gone. You can see it we're going to do. After time they're going to go, okay we're going to animate with super keyframe. So the beginning is going to be there. Then we move along. How far? To about half a second, I'm going to double-click the edge. Then I'll see if we can grab it a little bit tough, want to grab the one that has the pointing out the area. If it doesn't work, you might have to zoom in, but that's all right. I'm going to get it to go to about there. They run on that line there. Great, then I'm going to get it to pause for a few frames. Just because I like it. I had to pause, remember, but this keyframe and I want another keyframe, right there and like the keyframes get made when you start moving stuff or if you don't want to move it like I don't and want it to pause, click on this guy and then it's going to go out to a whole second. I'll tidy this up in terms of timing later on because we need to kind of see it going in there and mess around with it. Now I'm going to do it. ''Double-click'', get it to go out to this one, great. Then after a half a second, I'm going to get it to pause and we're going to step and repeat this one so you can screen and hit now and do it all, so I'm going to double-click it. That's going to be out here. Move along here to see, now all these videos that you are watching, you can often in the bottom right, switch out to double speed. If you find me a bit slow, or I work a bit slow double-click it and you can watch me at 1.5 speed or two speed of a chipmunk but you guys fast. There's my pause and I want it to go out to here and I'm going to double-click trying to work as fast as I can now, sound effects here, pause go along, have thickened. Prohibition, did the whole thing I should be testing as I'm going along, just to see what it looks like but I'm pretty confident, I'm pretty awesome. Double-click and then it's going to go all the way off course here, and then, yeah, and it's going to loop around might have to shorten my timeline, but let's give it a go It's not going to, yeah, the pause is probably aren't long enough, are they long enough? Maybe not. So what we'll do is, we'll probably all of these guys, unfortunately, I'm going to move out and I'm guessing these here. You can be a bit more precise with them by counting frames. I'm no. Better. There's a bit of a pause now. Also I'm going to do is play it, easing some slick them all right-click velocity and I'm going to go to 70. I can keep it in 70 you can pick anything from that easing, I picked 70 because it looks good, now we're going, that feels nicer. So there's my little lines here and that is pretty much they're done. We're going to do a bar graph on the next one and that's just a similar method, but you do this animation bar, which takes a little bit of long time, but you can animate a bar graph when you put it that way and what we're going to do just to finish this one off is I'll hit save and I'm going to do one last little thing and will tore this up, so it all looks nice and tidy and we're going to add some little circles that are kind of up here. What I'm going to do is back here at the timeline and maybe add this one here okay, and now to line it with keyframes, what I'm going to do is going to toil down line. I'm going to make sure that I get to this one here. I'm holding shift, so it snaps there. I know I'm at the right stage, okay, and I want to circle to up here so I'm going to grab the Ellipse tool, okay and we're going to have nothing selected down click off and draw a circle. We've drawn our circle now we're going to scale it in and out and this is going to highlight some width stuff so if I click on "Transform", can you see there's my circle but there's its center of rotation, or it's anchor points, sorry. If I scale it up and down, you can see it actually scales from there? Which is really weird, okay, so whenever you draw on something and you want to start animating any the transform properties, grab this tool here, this is called pan behind tool or anchor point tool and you see it there, and grab him, grab this guy and you can try in hover and trying to make sure he gets this into here, but you'll never get it. Watch this if I drag it and I hold down the command key, can you see it snapped in there snapped to the different sides. Hold down the Command key on the Mac or control key on a PC and to make sure that center of rotation is in the right point. Now what I want to do is I'm going to set a scale and I'm going to set that to zero percent and then I'll use Page Down. Just to jump across a couple of frames, you can drag your play head, that's fine so page down maybe three frames, I'm going set some timing afterwards that's okay. Then I'm going to scale it up to maybe a 120 percent and I'm going to scale, and I'm going to go across two more frames and get it back to 100. It's going to hit it as like can you see it go like bigger and retracted back and if we six it up with a bit of this, velocity, I might turn it down now so the velocity is a little lower. Nice, let's see how he does nice. So what I wanted to do is play get there. In terms of the timing, and I'm going to drag this back a little bit because I want it to get to there and just before it even gets in there I want to have this this place, I'm going to drag it back a little bit. What we can do is, this theory here because it's zero percent scale. Well, this area doesn't mean anything. But when I'm lining things up and make a little visually nice by lining this up so it doesn't really matter if with that was there or not because it's the thing doesn't appear. But what's going to happen now is when I toil this up and I go rename this thing and I call this point yeah, I can copy and paste that layer now and can you see it makes it a little bit easier to line things up. Now, cool other new shortcut, there is a shortcut sheet you can download a cheat sheet that'll go at the end of this video, but I'm going to give you the little bits as we're going along is underline, I want to find it with a keyframe sign It's not hot I can drag this down and under mask, but say things are all twirled up. I twirl it down I can't find the key frames like see the black. Nice easy trick is to select this and hit "U" and on the keyboard. It only opens up the layers of keyframes If you hit U again, it closes it. So it doesn't really matter what you're doing, just hit U it opens and closes same, with point two if i hit U can you see it only opens up scale, even though if I close it up and open it up again, there's all these other things, U is just a super handy shortcut, we're going to start using more in this course. Here he is there I want to find, actually I'm going to topple him up, there's a line I want to see, and I'm going to grab, and I'm going to drag it. Actually watch this if I drag him along, I was messing around with this tool here, I forgot about the pan behind tool it's still open, so I watch this, I can scrub along all I like and nothing changes the keyframes, are still there watch. I'll undo all that and what I want to do is make sure moment black error. Now when I drag it, hold Shift to snap it to it perfect, and now I'm going to play the fun game of, zoom out a little bit here. Let's first of all test it, lets go to fit let's see what it looks like, I see my keyframes, tore them down there they are, it's because he's in the right, his over the exact same spot good right then. I'm going to grab this one and I am going to, you can either drag, it's quite hard to drag these things. Just avoid the target of the center, nice work cool and, I'm going to do the same copy paste. Drag this along to where just a little bit before then. Selected I'm going to drag you come across to there because he's a little tiny. Stiff and repeat lets do it for all of them. We're back. That is a very cool little graph. May be a bit slow, we could play around with the timing. I like it, lets hit "Save", and that is how you do infographics. We're going to do some pie charts that are slightly different, but often lots of these infographics we use, especially doing graphs and things. It is just a lot of masking with things already exist like the line and you unmask it or reveal it, then you add a little flourishes. So you'd be considered flourishes, these little dots just to six it up a little bit. That's it for this one I'll see it in the next video. 38. Pie chart infographic in After Effects: Hey, in this video we're going to look at making a pie chart infographic. Instead of having a line chart like we did in the last one and just having a reveal, we're going to have a pie chart, the little slices popping out. To do it, we're going to create a new composition. We're going to background color, I'd like to change it to white, but remember we can't do it here. We need to click "Okay" and add a new layer of solid and we are there. Make sure it's white and of course from background, I'm going to lock it and this is going to sit there in the background. To do a pie chart, we're going to grab the circle tool and remember, I have nothing selected down here, otherwise the circle would just become a mask. I'm going to pick a fill color. We might pick at any color, green, click 'Hold" and drag out circle. We've got a circle. Back to my black arrow. For this trick to work, you really need it in the center of your composition, even if later on you're going to move it around to start off with the rater what needs to have the circle in the same time. To do it, open up your line panels, go to Window, go to Align. It's now already open. Here's my Align. There is down here. It's here in composition, so it means it's going to go sit in the middle. Then in the middle, it sits perfectly in the middle. It's going to help us use this thing called a Radial Wipe. we've got one slice here. I'm going to rename this one and this one is going to be called a base. I'm going to close that up to make it look pretty. I'm going to copy and paste this one. I'm going to right-click this one and call this one slice. This top one here, I'd like to make a little bit bigger and change the color. I'm going to go into here and what you'll notice is that I'm going to increase the scale of it, but watch what happens. It's going to scale from the center point and this is a bit of a pain when you draw things that that was the center of the composition originally. Now, I've removed it around. You want to use the pen behind tool. This make sure that this guy is in the center. Do you remember the key to hold down to to move the anchor point around? Its "Command" on Mac and "Control" on PC. I'll just snap to the center. Now, when I scale it, it's going to go from the center. I'd like it to up to about may be 120. It's just going to be the pie slice is going to be slightly bigger than the rest of it. I'm going to turn it down now. Here's my slice. Change the color. I'm going to click on it. Click on "Contents", click on "Ellipse", and at the top here, black arrow actually with a selected and let's pick a new color. What color? Any color. I don't know. I'll click that one. We've got our slice. It's a little bit bigger. Now we need to add the Radial Wipe. Over here in your Effects and Presets, type in radial wipe, is what you're looking for. It's in the bottom here, drag it on, and there he goes there. If it wasn't in the center, if I undo before I edit and I put this guy down here and then I add the Radial Wipe, you'll end up with this problem. Can you see it? It does it from the center of the composition, not the center of my circle. I'm going to go undo, put them back. Now, I add Radial Wipe to them and now when we drag out the completion, it's going to do a cool little pie slice thing. Now, we're going to play around with the timing. At the beginning of my timeline here I'm going to get it to play for a little bit. Actually no. At the beginning here, I'd like to see a stopwatch so I can see the key-frame and I'd like to see that to be complete 100 percent, means it's all gone. That means it's all the way through and you can't see it. It's a 100 percent. Then may be about one second into it, I want to put in a menu key-frame. Down here and menu key-frames. Where are we? Effects, here it is. There, Radial Wipe. Turn it down. There it is. Then I'm going to put in a diamond to say don't move. Between here and here, it doesn't go anywhere and may be after half a second, it's going to expand out. To get it to expand out, we're going to get it to expand out how far. It's on the wrong side, I realize we're going to flip that around. That's okay. Actually I'm going to get mine to go at 80 percent. You'd have to calculate what your percentages for your bar graph and work back into percentages. I'm going to do that. At the moment watch this. It's cool, but it's coming down that way. What I want do is start it, so it's over the side here. This is one here called Start Angle. I'm not going to animate, I'm just going to move the whole thing around to about there. It comes out that side. It's coming from the bottom-up. I want to switch that around from clockwise and counterclockwise. I have to play around with my angle again. It's about there. All right, I wanted to do this. The last part of notion is I'm going to make these closer together. I'm going to select them all. I'm going to right-click them, go to velocity. I'm going to change this to 7 percent. The easing is lovely and the last little thing, I'm going to add my motion blur. Turn it on for the project, turn it on for the layer and just toggle back. That's okay. Watch this. Is it exciting? May be not. I mean, it's a bit more time. Yeah, it's cool. I haven't actually turn my motion blur on. Which one did I turn it on for?Nothing. I avoided the whole [inaudible] That my friends is how to do a pie chart. Now, you could duplicate the slice by copying and pasting. What we'll do is we'll turn down the key-frames just to see where they are. It pauses for a long time and then just pops out. What I'd like to do is drag this along a bit, so the timing's a bit afterwards so watch. This one starts and then this one's going to go off a bit afterwards. Let's open up him as well, it starts and then about there that one starts. To make it look different, there's couple of things we need to do. Select it with a black arrow. I can pick a different color, any color and what I'll do is I'll get him to rotate around. Now I got to make sure that I'm actually on a key frame which is if I stop playing around with how long it's being acting for. It's going to add a new key frame. What I want to do is hold down the "Shift" and I want to get to here. So how far is it going to pop out? This one here is only going to pop out a little bit. I'm going to go pop out 93 percent which is cool and I want to start with the Start Angle. I don't want it to start there, I wanted to start when that one finishes, about there. It's going to go. You can do a few different ones all popping out by duplicating it. That is how to make a pie chart infographic. That's it. Save. I'll see you in the next video. 39. Using cameras in After Effects: Hey there. In this video, we're going to look at cameras and after effects. Now we're going to start with a nice simple camera exercise to get you used to using it. If you're finding through this tutorial, this particular video at least, that cameras are really hard, you're right. Cameras can be a little bit tough. We're going to do a nice simple one and then advance on later on in the tutorial series. Let's get going with the basic camera one. First of all, what you need to do is we're going to create on New Composition. Five seconds is how long mine is, it's up to you. Click "OK". Do we need a background? No we don't. I was going to use the black background. Let's grab the title. Click once, and we're going to have three objects, it's up to you, what you type. Maybe caps lock in on, this one's gone written and disappeared. I'm going to have this one. I'm going to copy and paste this layer. Move it across. This one here is going to be cameras, then you copy paste, caps lock off, move it down with the black arrow, double-click it, hard. Caps lock on again. Make sure Caps lock off. What we're going to do something else, then the camera's going to move from Cameras, Are, Hard and it's going to move around the screen here. It's going to give it a bit of 3D, I guess. This is what cameras are going to do. We're going to start where by creating our first camera. To do it, we're going to go to "Layer", "New", go to "Camera". Okay. You name a camera, you can pick, if you are from photography and you understand lenses, you can play with lenses, you can play with depth of field and all cool stuff there. You can build the ultimate camera. We going to leave everything set by default, if yours is not default, you must want to make sure that this is a two-node camera, okay? There is a 50 mm, you'll be able to play along with this one, fine. Let's click "OK". Now I've got a camera. Now normally there's a little warning that comes up there and it says," Hey, nothing's being seen in the layers, blah, blah, blah", click "OK". For some reason, mine doesn't appear anymore. It just means that the camera can only see things that have got this turned on. See this little icon here? This is a 3D layer and you can see there's nothing in this that hasn't turned on. What we need to do is say camera, look at these guys, watch what happens to the scene. Nothing happens. But what's going to happen, is if I grab this tool,unified camera tool and I start moving stuff around, can you see, it's now in this like 3D world. Go back to the black arrow, and that was just for instance. I don't want to mess about what that unified camera do. What we're going to do is we're going to, the moment we're on one view, we're going to go to four views. We can just see it. There's no point to go to four views, unless you're dealing with cameras of 3D, okay? There's my active view, that's the one that's going to be rendered, and these are the other views. You can zoom in on this, this is the front top left, and if I click on this one, here, what I might do is, this one is front. It's exactly what I've got here. What I'd like to do is change it in front, and let's put in custom view one. You can see here. I'm zooming out a little bit. It gives you a good indication, this my camera, okay? There's my subject, we were looking through the camera lens now. All right. Another thing, another little shortcut we're going to use is we're looking for the tilde key. If you've never seen the tilde key before, it's like the little wave key, and depending on your keyboard. On mine, it's below the escape key, okay. I've often always seen it as well on the right-hand side, just above the return with the open and close square brackets with a P key is, that can be over there. If you tap that key once, just on the keyboard, can you see? It actually makes this whole screen, full screen and you can tap it to toggle in and out. It just gives me a bit more space when I'm working in my laptop. You can do the same thing if you're hovering above, if it's doing something way like this. Just move your mouse as above, which says if I hover above the layers, it's going to expand the layers out which is great when you got really complicated layers to have it off. If you are lucky, project went and you got lots of files tab in here, gives you a nice big view of everything, character panel, everything. Okay. So in here, we've talked about what to know of cameras, in terms of the point of interest and the camera. What we're going to do now is we're going to look at animating the point of interest. Because you animate the camera or the point of interest is up to you. In this case is going to be so much easier to animate that point of interest to get us to understand how cameras work. To do that, what we're going to do is actually just going to do it from one of these views here. What we might do is, where is this top? Why is this right view? I never use a right view. We're going to switch them out to the front view, okay. I'm going to zoom in a bit. What I want is these my camera, okay? There's my point of interest there. My point of interest, you can see I can move around. I want to see it actually, this is probably the easiest view to see it in. As you can see this, watch when I move the point of interest. Can you see the camera here? It's focusing on this guy, look, hey. So I can animate this guy, move this camera then made it around to look at these different ways. We started as the camera sets. Let's get a point of interest here to be seeing this. You can see my cameras focusing on it there. There he is. Actually what we might go? Is it top view? Where's my? I'm going to go into full view. I'm going zoom in a bit. If you're unsure where you graphics are, the easiest way is to click on the layers, can you see Cameras that shows me there. Are its in there, and Hard is somewhere underneath here. There's my three views. There's my Camera one, it's going to be right to my camera. I'm going to go into here. But point of interest, I'm going to face at that camera. There is there, and you go, my friend. You have to use all three layers to get it in the middle. Looking at it, that's the true view, okay? Next I want to do, is I want to zoom in a little bit. Under Camera options is I want to go to Zoom and I'm going to click and drag it to the right. You'll see a slowly move in. Now if we're dragging this thing forever, sometimes, it's slowly getting bigger and bigger. Dragging to the right. If you hold on shift while you're dragging, hold shift, drag it and it moves in and like at tons of by ten. It just gets into [inaudible]. You can see there, I can zoom right into the sky. Here's my point of interest, and watch this I can move him around to the different things, okay. I might use this view here. That's going to be the easiest view. Here is, this cameras are hard. They are hard. What I might do is use the front view here. Cameras, hey you are friend. Zoom it across. Lovely, there's the first one. I'm going to set my keyframe. I'm going to get a transform point of interest. I'm going to hit "Keyframe" go, and they move along a little bit. Maybe after one second, I'm actually going to get to pause for a little bit. It's going to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Put it in a keyframe, okay. Then it's going to zip across here at one second. Where is it going to zip across to, to Are? Here we go, and then it's going to pause here for a half a second to put in a keyframe. Move it across to two seconds and it's going to zip down here to Hard. I'll move it up a little bit to try and get it in screen. Here we go and that's going to pause for the rest of it. If we go back to the beginning, watching this video here, Cameras, Are, Hard. They are not hard. They're just filled with all these views. All right. To fix this up a little bit because it's just moving, it's a little bit Powerpointy, I'm going to select all of these guys. This is one of the big things you can do. Remember is you have your [inaudible] 70 percent, it's going to look a little bit better, even already it looks better. What we're going to do is to the motion blur. Remember our secret sauce, motion blur. I'm going to see how we through it up. Here's my motion blur. I'm going to turn it off, all three of these layers. Because I want all of them getting motion blur. Then here we go we woo, woo, awesome. Okay. That's an introduction to a basic two-node camera. I'll see you in the next video. 40. Animating a screen capture or screencast: Hey there, what we're going to do now is look at cameras a little bit more, but we're going to animate screencasts or screen capture. You're watching right now a screencast or screen capture, where I'm showing you how After effects works. What I like to do is sex them up a little bit for the intro videos, I'll show one that I've done for another course. This one here. Let me mute it. It goes along me talking, talking, talking, but then I get to showing demos and other stuff, and watch this. Can you see this? It's like the screens bending over backwards. Now, it's moving fast-forwarded. I want to just do this with a vignettes, and try and make it look cool. To do that, let's go off and do it. You, my friend, go away, like in After Effects. Let's make a new composition. Let's bring in my screen capture footage. This one here called screencast. Let's make a comp from it. This one's got some audio in it, so let's turn that off. My screencast here at the moment does nothing. If you're not on four views, back one view down here. This is the safety zone, we're going to switch to four views though. We're going to insert our camera. We're going to make a camera. It's going to be a two node camera. We're going to leave it all as is. We've got a camera now. Now, there's normally a warning that pops up and says, Hey Daniel, you forgot to make any layer 3D so the camera can see it. In this case we need to turn this layer on. Our screencast needs to be seen by the camera. With that off, the camera can't see anything. It's blind. With that on, it can see that guy. What I want to do now, is I want the camera to move around. We're going to move to four views. Maybe down in the front view, we're going to switch this one from front. I've clicked down here from front to the first custom view. You can see a nice angle there. You might have to zoom in and out to see it. Zooming in and out, I use my scroll wheel on my mouse. But you can hit "Command plus" or minus to zoom in and out, or "Ctrl plus" or minus on a PC. What we did before is we animated the point of interest. Now, we're going to animate the camera, and leave the point of interest alone. We're going to keep it centered on this. Can you watch this screencast as it goes through, you can see it's just me adjusting some bits, and showing people how to do stuff in Photoshop. What I need to do now, is undo the transform options, and we're going to ignore point of interest. We're going to play around position. If I move position, look at these views here. I can drag this one up, this one down. Holding "Shift" will increase the speed. It will always look at this, which is great. But I can move my camera to all places. I can zoom in and out, left and right. I'm going to undo until it was back to where it was to get started with. Where do you want to move to? This is totally up to you. I'm going to drag this down so I can see this view a bit more. You can see it a little bit better as well. I'm going to go to full view. This looks nice. At the beginning here, I'm going to set my position. Actually, doesn't really matter what you do is fast or not, I'm going to have it on a nice little angle. I'm going to start maybe over this way. I'm going to hold down "Shift" while I'm dragging this first x-axis. I'm going to zoom it in a bit closer, which is this last z1. I'm going to zoom. I'm going to move down a bit so I can see with the camera down a bit. I'm going to like whiz past it like that, and maybe do some other stuff as well. It's pretty exciting. What I'm going to do is set my fist keyframe. I'm going t curve an angle, and then I am going to move it to the end, and I'm going to change it. I got my first keyframe there, and then along here, what am I going to do? Well, I'm not exactly sure. I'm going to zoom left that way, maybe look down at it. This is creative gold. Maybe they are. You're going to move between this keyframe and this keyframe and just trying to get it so it looks nice. Moving mine. Look at that. It's all nice and moving. I'm going to have to go back to quarter view, to make sure my plays all the way through and stops playing, just because I've ran out of juice to keep going. Here is adjusting. Look at the little adjustments going on. How cool, is that cool? You could do it. That is how to do screencasting. Just to make it look a little bit nicer is I added a vignette. I add vignettes to everything. I don't know, they've been around awhile, vignettes. People still like them. I like them. I'm going to total that up to keep everything nice and simple. We could do it to the screencast or to the camera, but it's easier to do our vignette to a new adjustment layer, an empty layer here. It's whole job is to accept this thing called Lumetri Color. So just type in your fix and presets, type in L-U-M-E, and then hopefully that'll cut it down to that one, drag it to the right layer, adjustments layer, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to probably just grab the amount, drag it left. See it darkens the edges over here. I'll make it even more. Even more. I like it. Now, mine's going to run pretty slowly, so I'm going to have to go back to third. Look at the vignette around the outside. Beautiful. That's how to animate your screencasts. What I do is often as I make one project, do one screenshot, do another one, and then stitch them all together later on to turn into this little thing of all the different bits we might be doing in the different angles we're doing. I'll see you in the next video. 41. Animating static images using parallax: Hey there, In this video, we're going to look at Parallax and using cameras to fit in with the theme. Parallax is when you grab a static image and you cut it into little pieces on separate layers and you move them at different times to give it the feeling of 3D. Let's go and do that. So j this is the file that I've got in Photoshop here. I've masked out this front bit in the background, as you see, they're separated out, okay. I did this with a channel mask. If you've never done the channel mask and you want to Google it well check out my Photoshop training course and we'll go through that in proper details. But I've got an image and its own separate layers. Great, so save and close down Photoshop. All right next thing I want to do is bring in my video. I'll bring in my mask image. I'm going to go to after effects, I'm going to go in here, parallax dot psd. Now, this is important one yours is going to be font to footage, you want to switch it out to composition retain layer sizes. It just helps line things up later on. Let's click okay. It creates, here's my layers from Photoshop. See they're separated out, let's combine them into a comp for me. Where did it go so I'm going to double-click it to open up my comp. I'm going to zoom it a little bit. Okay. What I want to do now is you play around with my camera so to make a camera, go to layer lets go to camera. We leave everything to no cameras what we we're using before we leave everything default, let's click Okay. To camera now warning might pop up saying, hey, nothing can be seen by this camera remember we've gotten these guys to be 3D and now these guys can be seen for the camera. Now doesn't change much, and we're looking here. Okay, now what we want to do is place these guys in different, at the moment there sitting straight on top of each other. So if I go to View and I go to, I'm going to go to two views horizontal and this view over here, I'm going to click you see these blue dots in the down on the corners and go from top to Custom View one and I'm going to zoom out a little bit. Okay and you can start to see that my cameras here and there's my two layers, there sitting side-by-side. I want to push one further back, so i want these, I want both actually pushed further back so let's start with the car let's drill down here. Let's find the transform and we're going to use this one at position okay. We're going to use this last one if you can't see the last one, it's because you haven't turned that 3D on. I'm going to make this a bit bigger. Okay, so if you haven't turned that on, you can see there's no third option turn it on, there he is. We need to position and we're going to push him back, how far back you're going to have to play around with this. I'm going to zoom, scroll mine back, a bit about there where I got mine at, about say 1500. All right, now I want to scale it up. So I scale it up using any of these there all linked lets scale it up, okay so it fits down the bottom there nice. Actually I'm going to go a bit further past so it's a good idea to go a bit further past now I'm looking at this side here. You can't tell I'm looking, Can you? Okay, so I'm going to look at this side, and so I'm going to jump back to one view just so you can see. I've gone a bit past the edge, so I can move the camera. Okay, so it's further back, it's behind my clouds if that doesn't make any sense, it makes heaps of sense when you're in two views okay and you can see here, he's behind my clouds. He's bigger so it looks quite big down there, but he's actually behind it. Now let's grab the clouds, grab the clouds doing the same thing,take it down, transform, find the position that we are sending back. You'll see him moving in the screen here I'm going to hold Shift while I'm dragging it so drags in a lot bigger chunks, I'm going to push it and eventually you'll see it go behind. Go on. You can see there. This is infront, behind. This is going to go back quite far so it depends on how the distances if you've got something that's, maybe a wall instead of clouds and it's quite close to the car. You don't want it to be pushed back too far because it's not going to look right there's a lot of fiddling around. Hold Shift and I'm going to get my back to maybe about 5,000 lets say give it good numbers then I'm going to scale it up. Okay, and I'm going to scale it past where it needs to be, so I'm going to get back to my actually, I'm going to use my little tilde key, okay, it's the little wavy key and I'm going to get it go past, how far past,a little bit as well and that's good. Maybe scale it up a bit further get past where I need it to be, there it looks good. I'm going to move it up so it's a horizon line spout there. All right, so what we're going to do now is we're going to animate it. We're going to go back to our camera selected here, the camera is just facing in the center now what we're going to do is we're going to animate it. We're going to go to transform, and we're going to play around with the position of it. Before we played with the point of interest, now we're going to play around with the position so what we're going to do, is I might go back to one view so you can see I'm doing and I'm going to start at maybe over here and maybe a little bit down. You get to decide what you want to do with this one, but what you can you see is can you see I drag it and it's actually the clouds and the foreground moving at different paces, that's the key I guess. I'm going to start with it maybe there and get it to wrap around a little bit. I'm going to do a slow movement, not too much. My composition is five seconds long. You might have to change yours if your composition's too long or too short, right-click it composition settings and mine's set to five, it remembers the last thing you did, so that's what I've done before. All right, so I'm going to set a key frame here. That's my starting position and then right at the end here, I'm going to get it to move around a little bit and maybe just point up just a bit looks at the skies. Okay, I will start here let it run through you can see just a little subtle the clouds are moving differently from the sky. It's not running at full speed yet. Let's get it to run. You might and I'm going to extreme it up as well because it's looking good. It looks like it might be believable because everything is running at different paces, but let's maybe make it extreme because I want to make it obvious what we're doing. It's switching that. Here we go. Now to my view down to half to hopefully speed it up. Here it goes and that's it the camera's panning and moving like it was really there. All right, that is parallax. Now the trick is to make sure in Photoshop, you have separate layers and if you're like me, I had to replace this guy with a new one and because obviously the trees in here cut a hole in it, so I made a new sky and yeah. Okay there were just on separate layers, bring them in and then start animating them with the Z-Position push them further back, scatter them up, then animate the camera. Next thing we're going to do is a little bit more believability to this one, but we'll do that in the next one, we'll look at something called CC light rays. All right, see you in the next video. 42. Add fake lights with CC Light Rays: Hey there. In this video we're going to look at faking some lights to try and make this parallax image that we've done to make it a little bit more believable or cheap and nasty depending on how far you go with this exercise, so I'm going to total this whole episode. All looks nice and neat. If you haven't got this file here, you can download it as part of the production files or exercise files, and that is in jump to the website and download the production files and you can grab this one. Otherwise you can use it for any video, doesn't have to be parallax. You just see this one here. We've got this parallax thing with this guy's moving differently from the background. Do I like it? It's okay. By adding the lights to it, it's pretty easy to do. We're going to first of all add an adjustment layer because it's always best to add them to this layer rather than straight to any of these layers here it's easy to do it to an adjustment layer. I'll rename it instead of adjustment layer. I'm going call this one lights. I'm going to use and here so a fixed panel. Fixing presets type in CC light. Can you find the CC light rays? So we want to click and hold and drag it onto the light. This little door here, this thing here can be moved and you'll see when you move it. You can decide, you can put it on a glint on the rusty old car, unlikely. I'm going to put mine coming through the trees because I think the sun's actually behind this and those connect cloud photograph because you can't see it in the sky, we're going to fake it and lets pretend it's just behind here, just about to come out from this little bit. So in terms of the intensity, you can play around with how intense it is, so you can have this thing watch when it moves. I think space bar gets us to preview. That's probably a little much, that's the big man coming down and visiting this whole car. We want something a little bit more subtle. When I say subtle, I'm going to over do it. Its like finding the embodiment that lens flare in Photo-shop when I first found that, overused it. You'll probably going to do the same thing with this. You see the light behind there. If you're using a different image through the trees that's really great because it's a lot of texture in there. So it's sparkling on these lights. You can play around with the radius, will lights come through. There would be like a crystal ball type thing. So now undo that. You can play around with a few different of these options, but what you can do say if It's not really, it's coming out but it is not super exciting. What we can do is animate the center over time to fake it and move it along to say I want it to come off this and it's working. It's doing okay, but I'm going to turn down, that's all good. I'm going to give it to move because at the moment the center is moving off into the trees here. I wanted to follow the car. I'm going to start it here. I'm going to set a key frame for the center and after this time, I'm going to drag it down here. You'll notice that I've got a key frame. If I tool this down. Actually I hit you to give me my key frames. There's one there and one there. It just means it's moving out of the car. This is the opposite of what I wanted to do. It's a bit slower now. So I'm going to do the opposite. Instead of moving along with the car, I'm going to get it to move. Give me that guy. I'm going to move it along here. It's just going to sparkle as it goes along. You might have to move the centers to kick it into gear, that will make sure it's moving. Otherwise, like then was just sitting there not doing anything. It's still not doing a huge amount. But that's it. Light rays nice and easy, nice simple way to add a little bit of subtle effect. You can crank it right up and make it a not solar effect, but that CC light rays. It's safe and lets go to the next video. 43. Creating dust particles in After Effects: Hi there. In this video, we're going to look at adding dust particles. We did something earlier, we used it as background. Remember this guy? He was in here after Effects, he's called particles. I used, let's find the rest of the particles, particle background. There's the thing with the dots and bits and pieces. We're going to do something similar to that, same technique except for like big circles. We're going to use more dust particles, we're going to take aesthetic image and try and make it look a bit real. Let's double click here and let's bring in an image. So on my desktop After Effects files, the one called, old room. I'm going to make it come from it. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. You see old create a room. That's actually, it's got to fit. I might even make this a bit smaller so we can see a little better. So the first thing we need to do is we need to go through and create what's called a pocket world or particle emitter. So to do it, we need to add it to a layer, you can't edit to this layer, you need to edit to a solid layer, where is the solid? So solid we've used at the moment only for just like a background, big block that goes in the background. We're going to use this for our dust particles. It's going to be the same size as the background we've got a weird size from this image. You might go through, make it and put this image inside of it to match the HDTV for this random size here. It's going to have to be black, and just got a big black square and it says job. What we can do though, is we can add them over here and fixing presets type in particle, and you want the one that's called particle willed. I'm going to click hold and drag it, or you can make sure you get to the right layer down here. Hit space bar, it's pretty cool even without doing anything. This sparks flying out the window. So I'm going to use this little particle system to create dust particles. The first thing we need to do is go and play around over in here. So make sure you got your dust particles layer selected, and over here as LCC particle world. What are we going to do? The first one is to do with the producer. Twill him down, and the moment the radius is all coming into this seemed like it was just coming out as one dot. What we want to do is come out of everywhere. So instead of 0.025, we're going to put in three. I'm going to tab down three. So it's three for a radius of X, Y, and Z, radius and opposition. Now before we move on any further, hit space bar on your timeline down here, just to see what it does, can you see there's like this rain appearing around the outside. I'm going to go back to full, half so you can see it. So it runs. You see it's like raining sparks at the moment. It's cool. So if you wanted to make rain, you could totally do that. The other thing is weird about it is that it's starting, you'll see it like it's does nothing and then it appears so looks like it's just starting. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to start, what I wanted just to appear so it's not starting. What you do is see this lay here instead of bringing in that way, you drag it parsed there. Can say at the beginning has already started so the stats over here, and by the time it gets actually started when you play hit, the sparks are already going. We might have to do is extend this end out, so that it covers the whole thing. All right that's the starting, but now we're going to play around with bits and pieces to make it look like dust. Now this is where it's more up than it is technique. So you can go through and follow me, get a starting point. But it is going to be different depending on your image, how light or dark it is, and how physically size it, if you've got a really teeny tiny image, the spark is going to be too big. If you've got really big high res DSLR image, your spark is going to be microscopic and you have to play around with different pots and sizes to make it all work. So first thing is, is the radius, but just on that. Next, let's change it from under particles, the moments is like line, I want to change it too. You can play around with these, but in this case, faded sphere, not shaded sphere, faded sphere. Because it makes these like snowflakes and now it's snowing inside. Through sparky looking, it's a bit weird. So next thing we are going to play around with is the colors because it's, I don't want it to be yellow, I want it to be maybe a light off yellow and then a white. When it sees both color and deaf colors, when they start their there is yellow color and when they die, they are a white color. Now, it definitely looks like it's snowing. So the next thing I'm going to play around with is maybe the size. So we're going to play around with the size where I particles both size, I can't find you there. So we can just make ours smaller. Now this will depend on your image, some images need to go really big to make them safe they're are really big high-res images, and some of them give me a small tilt like this particle. So I'm going to put my 2.1 for the best size and 0.1 for the death as well. So they're just smaller. It's going to become harder to say this still falling, which is a bit weird. So let's go and play around with, and let's have a look at a couple of things, so let's look at longevity. So what I want to do is longevity here, the lasting for two out once. For one unit what I want to do is get it to go for three seconds. Just so they're around a lot longer before they die, they rather than just appear and disappear, they are going to be around quite a bit. Next thing you want to play around with is gravity because the moment is falling like it's rain. So what I want to do is I'm going to twin this in and I'm going to go to physics. In the physics, there's one called gravity, and gravity is at five, like you can play around between zero. So just, see a moment, I might to zoom in a bit to see if your, these little guys, we have some good on contrast. You can see them there, a no man's land moving around. Now, before you go off and think no, they keep coming towards me at the moment we're using the same code explosion. So I'm going to change it from explosive, explosive to, it's up to you can play around with the different ones, I'm going to play around with I like twill. They like wiggle around all different places he then we'll twill and about. I'm going to turn down a couple of things have gravity, I'm going to turn down to maybe have a little bit of gravity. It's just that a falling towards the floor and not up because these ones are going to perfectly sideways or maybe 0.05. just a tiny bit of gravity. See they just slowly drifting down rather than anywhere else. In terms of the velocity, I'm going to turn that down as well so they're not so active. So maybe 0.1, there we go. Gravity is taking control of them though so maybe 0.3, and then gravity, I'm going to have to make even less. So this is where I say, you're going to spend ages working on this and how fast they're going and their velocities and everything down to one. I'm there, I feel like it's their. Let's zoom out, we've got this dust particles going on in my room. Click out of this, and isn't dust particles going space bar, switch them. Now it's really subtle, I've decided to go really subtle. You probably want to go and maybe a bit more extreme just how it looks fun, but I'm trying to go for believability with my little snowflakes. So what we're going to do just, that's it for our particle emitter, and this a particle weld, you can play around with it to your heart's content, and we can save and close now. What I'm going to do is just show you a little bit extra stuff. So we're going to add a camera and we're going to zoom in. So what we're going to do is go to layer new camera. We did this when we did our Parallax, but instead of having two layer, we are just going to go with one and just zoom in slowly. So what we'll do is add a camera to node, we're going to make sure both of these are 3D, if it comes up with an errors just click "Okay" and what we're going to do is going to start it here, I open up my camera and it looks can play around with the zoom. So we're going to grab and transform that makes smaller. We're going to go Kim options are going to get to zoom. Click the little stopwatch on, you can see there I'm at the beginning of my animation first. Then I click this stopwatch got to key frame, and then further in, I'm just going to zoom in a bit. Zoom, I can drag to the right. How much am I going to zoom, I'm going play around with it? So I hit space bar and now I'm 1.5. Now I'm zooming in and zooming past my pixels. So that'll kick the, more in the room. It'll catch up now with a place or second time. Yeah, I'm happy with it. If you are watching this in low-quality, you might have to go through and crank it up to this video, up to HD, just so you can see the little pixels going on. But I'm pretty happy with my little fake room thing going on. One last thing is never that we did in the last one. CC light rays. CC light arrays there he is there, we're going to edit to the, CC light rays. What we should do is we're going to edit to our adjustment layer because we get good campus, I'm going to go, I'm going to at the light rays to it, and there it is. Now we've got a window with a really strong, where's it going to go? Actually it started here, just got [inaudible] space bar, I'm going to trim down to even lower third quality, it'll run to find marimba. Look at that, how believable is the dust bottle goes? The funny thing is, is like nobody's going to notice you dust particle, all your lights rise unless you go extreme and it looks like it's some ash and falling from the sky and the light is sparkling everywhere, but I'm happy with that. I'm going to hit save, and that's it for looking at particles in After Effects. 44. Swinging text in After Effects: Hi there. In this video, we're going to look at swinging text. It's just a cool motion graphic thing. Can you see this one, takes sliding down. I did it in front of a few of my tutorials a while ago. We're going to do that. First thing we need to do is create a new composition. I'm going to have a white background I know it doesn't export well, but I'm just going to make a white anyway. I'm going to make sure mine's five seconds long, and click "OK". We got a comp and I want to make this a little smaller. I can drag, here we go. I'm going to grab my Type Tool. I'm going to click once, I'm going to type in Daniel. That's better in this one to use uppercase. Lowercase ends up with bits dangling out and doesn't really look great. I'm going to use this. There's couple of things I need to do is, I don't want you to do that, put a return and start working on the tricks. I'm going to use the top name, add another line and I'm going to use three. I'm going to use my first, middle and last names. I want them to all be on their own three layers. There's the first one, I'm going to maybe make that one a big weighty 900. Then, I'm going to click this copy and paste, Control C, Control V, going to drag it down. I'm going to double-click it and put in my middle name. Make sure it's in uppercase. Uppercase off, select the text. I'll pin this one as a real light one, about the right size. Then I'm going to duplicate it again, click Walter, copy paste, drag it down. Holding Shift while I drag gets it into a straight line. Then I'm going to select this and make this a 500 one. Then, there are the font size just to make it. I'm going to match up for no good reason. Drag it down a little bit. The next thing we need to do is change the point of origin or the anchor point. The moment it's down here at the bottom and just means if I grab Scott and I toil it down and I grab a transform, and I grab rotation. It rotates around there. I want it to swing from that top down, so we're going to have to play with that. Tool little backup, and also just to make more sense with Daniel in the top, and Walter in the middle. This all matches there and there, so I don't get confused. I'm going to click on Daniel out, I'm going to grab my anchor point tool, or the pen behind tool. I'll drag the center, and if you hold down in the command on a Mac, you can snap to the top or Control on a PC, do for all of them. Drag it to the top of these guys. Try not to get it in to snap to something else. Try and get them to snap to themselves. There's the anchor points done. Next thing I'm going to do I need to make them 3D, because at the moment, if I click on Daniel toil it down, transform. The moment, it can rotate, but only like that way. I want to rotate backwards. All we need to do is I'm going to toil it up, I'm going make this a bit taller. These three need to come on. I'm clicking and dragging across them all. It's a good way to turn it all on or off, or you can just click them all three to one. Now it's going to be 3D. You don't have to have a camera to make them 3D. It just means we can't animate the camera and move it around. But, we are going to get all the good stuff we need in terms of all this extra data, watch on, off. Get you a lot more. The one we want to deal with is x rotation. If you find yours is doing me weird stuff it's probably because, you use orientation. It does work, but if you try and spin it around it tries to take the shortest distance, so even though you want to swing back and forward it'll go over the top. Just make sure you're using x rotation. To start here, I'm going to click on "X Rotation", awesome, get my first keyframe. I'm going to not to use the first zero, I'm going to use the 0.0 degrees, and I'm going to swing it back. Drag it back and forth, just get a feel what it does. Hey, It's already looking pretty cool. Let's just animate that. I'm going to swing it back past there. That's my first keyframe. Move it along how far, half a second, and I'm going to swing it. Whoop, not that way, that way. It swings past where I wanted to go. How far past it's up to you. Looks good to me. A bit further along now. It's going to depend on the size of your comp and the size of your font and all other things to know how far these keyframe should be a part to get swinging going. Don't copy me exactly I'm at 20 frames you might have play with something else. I'm just a little bit further along, 100 degrees. It's going to be playing around. I've done it a few times I get reasonably good, but I always end up changing it anyway. Swing it forward now, here we go. Just slowly getting less and less of the swing. They're getting a bit tighter as well. See the timing between these ones and then maybe my last one is at zero. How good does it look? Who knows, let's go and check. Space bar. That looks a bit not great. Make sure you add me easing first so I'll select all these keyframes, right-click them, go to velocity. Let's go to 70. Always looks good with a bit of easing remember. Awesome. Address on a fix that looks pretty cool. I'm going to save. I've got my keyframes now I want to add them to all the different layers. Now a couple of things just make sure you play heads at the beginning, it wasn't cause problems. Instead of just dragging across and copying all these keyframes because what you can do is just copy keyframes into another layer. But if I select all these can you see I'm selecting position and scale and all these things as well as this. What I want to do is actually just click these guys. That can be real sneaky and translate them in there, or just click the word, "X Rotation", that selects all the keyframes and I can go edit, copy, or Control C, I can toil him up. Take on this layer, make sure my keyframe plays at the beginning, and I go paste, and then I go paste. If I hit Space bar, look at these guys go. They're all going at the same time, awesome. Now what I want to do is I want to stitch them together see who'll fly along. Now the big trick with this is, if you have your play head at the beginning, it's not going to work or anywhere along here. You need to wait for them all to be finished. Move your play head somewhere along here. What we're going to do, it's all to do with parenting. I want Walter to follow Daniel. Daniel is the lead, he's the first one to come down, and then I want my last name to follow. You go and follow into the middle name there. It's like he's the start, then Walter follows him and then Scott follows him. They follow each other and watch this. Is it beautiful as it look? It's okay. They're all following along and what I want to do, I would like to play with the timing. Actually let me show you what could go wrong, if you do your parenting at a different time, watch this. If you do your parenting halfway like at the beginning, and you get Walter to follow Daniel, and you get Scott to follow Walter, look what happens. Then if that happens, that means you didn't have your play head further out. I'm going to undo until it look a little bit flat. Parenting's gone there. Just make sure your play hits out here in the no man's land where they're all flat, then do you parenting. Scott follows Walter, and Walter follows Daniel, and you my friends are cool and flowing. Now, what I want to do is play with the timing. Just going to stretch this out so they don't all start at the same time, watch this. It's cool. Little bit jumpy, a little bit jiggly. What you could do is select all of these, get you maybe grab all of these, hold down my Alt key and drag them out a little bit. Actually I think I have to do it per layer, that's not cool. Now I'm just playing around. I should just leave them as is and we're happy. Now I'm going to fiddle around and mess with my keyframes and probably wreck it. Let's just see. Better? Oh, it's not better, it's different. I'm going to probably mess around this for ages. That's cool. I'm of out myself, I'm sorry. These look amazing, I need to impress you with my aftereffects skills. I'm still not happy with it but that's okay. To add the last little bits to it is we've done the easing. Let's just check if this is the easing so I'm going to go for the easing. The easing is off so that's it. Let's select this. Let's right-click them and go to velocity. Can you do them all one bigger? Maybe. What do I click there? I'm not so sure. This could have been, 70, 70. Now look at it let's go. It didn't happen at all. Last things we can do to tidy this up to make a little nicer is to turn motion blur on. I'm going to turn it on globally, and then I'm going to turn it on for these three layers. Look a bit better and watch this. It's stressing my machine out a little bit. Actually, looks a whole lot better longer. But anyway, it does look better. Easing a better motion blur, and the last thing I'm going to do is always the Vignette. Always need a Vignette. Go over on New, Adjustment Layer. We've done this in earlier videos so I'm going to scan through it. Lumetri color, drag it onto your adjustment layers, go to Vignette, go to Amount, drag it to the left. It's not working. I know why? Because we've done two adjustment layer and it's affecting everything underneath, and there's a Vignette being applied to these text but there's nothing actually behind you. There's white, but it's actually coming from my comp. Remember we made our comp here in the comp settings we made it white. That's what's giving it this white. But the adjustment layer affect it. Essentially this white is no man's land and actually renders out black. It's just a place holder. I'm going to put it back to black. I should have done this in the beginning. I'm going to add a background layer, so I'm going to go to Layer, New, we're going to use solid. This one here's got a background color white, and even though it's going to look exactly the same. Let's get the layer order right, background, you at the back. It means that the vignette's got something to apply to, rather than adjust the text. Awesome that's my lovely vignette, that's my motion blur, and that is it for swinging text. I'll see you in the next video. 45. Character animation using the Puppet pin tool: Hey, there, in this video we're going to animate a character. The characters being drawn in illustrator and we're going to use something called the Puppet Pin tool to animate them. I'm going to bring them in double-click project, let's go down puppet two, great. We're going to make a comp from it because it happens to be a good size to start with. We going to measure that size, it's five seconds long, awesome. What we're going to do, it's white because that's the last thing I made in the last tutorial, made the background white and it will keep remembering that. What we need to do is in other videos we've gone through and made little sunshine button, just means the vector if we scale it looks very nice. But when we're using Puppet Pin tool, we need to leave that one alone for the moment. Grab the pin tool it's this one here click and hold down if it's stuck on something else, scrap the pin tool. We'll look at all three of these, but let's start with the pin tool. What we want to do is, I'm going to zoom in, come here buddy, I'm going to pin him once in his hand, once in the armpit both sides. I'm going to pin him in his knees he doesn't really have knees and maybe once in the tache and once in the hat. How many pins do you need? It's up to you. What we're going to do is give him a wiggle we just click and hold and drag and if there's any bits that's are moving that you don't want it to move okay, we can play with a pin tool. We can do it, maybe without. This is how to animate a character. So when you're drawing them, you can have them remove the spread so that you can do some bits with them. If they're obviously overlapped, it's going to be hard to move them around. Whenever you are drawing or illustrating, make sure you draw them spread eagle so you can then animate them afterwards. One of the nice things we can do is animate it over time. To do that, what we're going to do is we're going to click and drag this one. But while we're dragging it before we start dragging it actually is going to hold down the Command key on the keyboard or the Control key if you're on a PC. Hold it down, then start dragging and give it a wiggle, I'm going to get him to scratch his belly and they may be scratch his mouth, oh we ran out of time that's okay. Now we're going to hit Spacebar to playback and look, except he's now re-scratching his belly, so now he's scratching his bum, but it's okay. We can play around with it. That's how you get a animate stuff over time. It's quite cool. We're going to move, I'll play it back to the beginning him, we do the same with these different ones. We could hold down Command and we play at the beginning, hold on Command on my Mac or you can do control if you're on a PC and then you can get him to dance. Go back to the beginning hold on the the command key and I'm getting this one to dance as well. Back to beginning I hit Spacebar and we've got a dancing, a bum scratching monster. All right, and next thing we're going to look at is pin depth. At the moment, back to beginning and we've use the pin tool, let's use the overlap tool, it's not pin depth, that's likely on Photoshop, sorry. We're going to put in a couple of pins, we're going to put one in his hand, roughly the same sort of places as the last one, I'm going to put them just off a little bit so it's easy to see and I'm going to put it in maybe two pins there. What happens is, if I click on this first one now, so put in a couple of pins. Because that's where I wanted to actually above and scratches belly known as bum. This one's selected and this is where it says in front, they're worth 50 percent of the moment it'll actually all be it. Whatever the last thing you did was, if yours might be all that a 100 percent, that's fine. What we're going to do is couple things extend just drag it out. Can you see the white coming out? Your extent is probably white to start with by default because it might missed our mind before it's gone down. You have this white go around and it just means how much is this pin going to affect? Because you can see it's creeping up his arm now so it means that his arm is going to be potentially could see it in front I might move it up to 150. It's quite far the front. Now I want these guys to be back, I'm going to hold shift and click both of these and what I wanted is drag up the extent you. I don't want it to go too far, but I just want make sure that this area that it's affecting is going to be behind. You can drag it negative, doesn't matter as long as one goes in front and back. It could be one percentage between them. I'm just dragging mine to make sure you because black means behind just good example colors. Now when we play it, watch this. When he plays, I'm hanging down here, hit Spacebar. Let me just click off in the background with the black arrow and you can see now is the front. I made that go in front that stuff is back, now he's scratching his belly. That's called the overlap tool. Now we're going to do the starch tool, at that moment everything's quite fluid. The starch tool what it can do is I can spray there and stiffen up this bit so I can stiffen the extent, make it up and then I can make the amount how much stiff it is. It's like starching a sheet, it's going to be a bit stiff across here. Instead of being so bendy. It just means now when I go off, I'm going to click off in the background using the black tool and watch. It's just going to be, can you see it's just from the elbow there rather than the whole bit. You can starch to anything that you don't want to move, say these legs here that we danced around. I'm going to go back to the beginning grab my starch tool, I'm going to spray his leg. This one here is going out to far, I'm going to to break this extent can you see? Just comes in, it's not too far out, a little bit out. It's quite stiff so now his foot going to move. But you can see, let me check it out. But you can see it's not moving this one here is going bending all the way around but this one here is nice and stiff. Yeah. All right, so that is animating inanimate object with a bunch of the pin tools. All right, see you next video. 46. Spinning globe & star effects: We're getting to the end now, and this video here is going to be about effects and presets, and we're going to make this, the spinning globee thing with some stars in the background. I know it's not the most exciting thing, but I guess what it helps demonstrate is that we have now gone through and learned all the fundamentals of After Effects with a little bit of cameras and precomps and keyframes. Now that you understand those things, there are a zillion effects and presets that you can go and use. We have just used a couple in this Effects and Presets window. There are lots. Now that's the ones just built into After Effects, there are lots of third party stuff, there are free ones and paid ones, and I just want to show you this example because I want to show you how quickly you can get something like this, it's only about four or five clicks. To make this thing, I exaggerate a little bit, but you can get this going in one minute if you hurry. Based on effects other people have done, so there's lots out there, so hopefully now we've got a basic After Effects skills, we will be able to go off, and I've taught you how to fish maybe and you can go off now and do your own stuff. So let's build this. Let's go to File, New Project, let's make a new composition, and this one here is going to have a black background, it's going to be five seconds long, it's going to be HDTV, we should give it a name, I never do. Let's bring in, double-click down here, let's bring in World Map.ai, there's an illustrator file. It's a victory globee thing, drag it in, you'll see. Now what we're going to do is turn it into that globe. So over here in your Effects and Presets, there's one here called CC Sphere, spell sphere, there it came. All these ones is the CC, it's nothing to do with Creative Cloud, the Company that license the whole Adobe license from them is called something core, Cyclone core, something like that, anyway with CC. So they've been around in a while and that stuff that, these are third party ones that Adobe have decided to pay for themselves and put into After Effects for you, so there's lots on here, let's start with CC. We've used lots of them this one. Cool thing about it is we've got a globe, [inaudible] how about that? Now let's play around with the radius, is it 200 [inaudible] 400? Just so you can see it. Now, the other cool thing is under rotation here, watch this, I'm not going to use the first one, I'm going to use the second one here. Oop, wrong rotation. You can see, hey, we're there, we've got a 3D globe. So put it back to zero and what I'd like to do is, let's get it to spin 360 degrees. So at the beginning here, we're going to see the keyframe for Y rotation, and you'll see it down here if I hit "U" [inaudible] K is keyframe all the way to the end and instead of dragging this, like we normally do, we want to get it to go completely around. So instead of typing 360 over here, this first little one just means one time around. If I type it in three times, it's going to try and spin three times around in my little time here, so it's going to spin the fast watch. So actually I'm going to go here and I'm going to say just one times around, even that's a bit fast. One of the things in here is that you can see the inside which depends on what you want. You can see the back of South America there. What we want to do is we want to, I said South America, I didn't mean it. That's Africa, Google it then. So it's embarrassing when my geography is that bad, the big one. So let's look at getting rid of this inside, so at the moment it's rendering it full, we can just say, just the outside. Now it will just have the outside bits. What we also can do is let's put an ocean in, I'll put an ocean in, actually just go to "Layer", "New" and let's put in a solid, pick a color of your ocean, I'm going to have a light blue color. Then add that same CC Sphere. Now we could just drag this across and edit and adjust it how we wanted to. But actually let's click on "World Map" and up here with CC spheres, it's still this, there [inaudible] Click on it, just hit, copy on my keyboard, jump to this guy and then paste, you can see it just sucks in the same radius and has the same rotation. Rotation doesn't mean much because it's one solid mass spot. Let's play around with the layer order. So let's drag this medium royal blue thing here. I'm going to rename it and let's call this one the Water, and you can see now we have a globe with some water. So you can see just how by using some of these presets here, just one of them actually to get this going, just dump it on a layer of [inaudible] two layers, got it to spin with some keyframes. Let's look at one of the other CC ones, let's look at something called star, something rather, star, CC Star Burst. So this one here is going to give us that star field effect. So what we need to do is for this one, I'm going to have nothing selected, Layer, New. You see how my mind was grayed out, I was halfway through fixing one of these bits, sometimes it's just easier to click off in the background. Comes back to life, let's go to New Solid. This one's going to be my stars. What color of my star is it going to be? My going to be what? That's all it is, and then you guys CC stars and you add it to it, cool thing. Watch this, it's already animated, ready to go. This looks like it is being blown up though. [inaudible] So now it's just a matter of playing around with some of these bits. So Scatter, can you see? I can. How far they're apart. Speed, I'm going to slow it down, maybe 0.2, and it's just a matter of playing around, how much do you want this, then maybe a bit big, the size get it down to 50, so smaller dots. There's lots to play around with, just experiment. The other thing you might do is put the layer order. You can see my stars are above everything, I'm going to put it below my water, and here's my globe at the front there. Can you see just with a couple of little effects and a couple of little adjustments, we've got something reasonably high value, and I guess that's what I wanted to show you for the last thing. Now it's time to fish, and go off and find other things to do. What I'll do for my website as well is, I've got some other more advanced project or smaller projects that you can do. So check out those as well, have a look through the course list, and let's move on to the last thing, we're going to look at some advanced exporting. See you in the next video. 47. Making your video file size really small: Hey, in this video we're going look at how to make our videos nice and small. Good quality still, but nice and small in terms of file size. The reason you do this for a couple of reasons, one is, you want to send e-mail to somebody and it's coming out really big. Video is the biggest thing on my system, it fills up most of my hard drive, and smaller things are in the 10-20 megabytes but then you start getting into big long windows, and I start getting up to half a gig and a gigabyte, and they are really big. That's fine for final production, it might be that you're uploading it to YouTube, or Vimeo, or going to broadcast, or using it for something, but you want that good file size, a very high quality file size. But there are lots of times when you want it to be nice and small, stop being so big, and the cool thing about it is that, often when you lower things like bit rate, which we're going to look at, visually, it's very hard to see the difference. Pure as wood, there'd be people out there tutting going, it needs to be as good as it could ever be. But if you've shot it on a crappy camera, you know a crappy camera, you this one here, it's full here, it wasn't great footage to start with, so, just spins to have that as gigabyte file, this point is getting a super high def because it was shot in a crappy camera in low light anyway. But anyway, let's look at how to do it. Let's get the file size nice and small. We're going to do the same things we've done. I like this, this was my favorite of all the exercises we do when I'm teaching, pretty high value without a whole lot of work but a camera tracking. Let's export it, we're going to go to File, Export, we're going to use Adobe Media Encoder, it's going to hit it to Media Encoder. You'd have to wait sometimes, just wait, it'll open up in the background and eventually load up, I've got mine and my background there. There he is there. That's my tricking camera. One, what I want to do is, what we did in the first video, is we just left it as is, and then we'll give you a great quality one that everyone can use. Perfect, we're going to leave that one there. What we can do in here just to make a smaller version and compared the two, is I can select it and see this little bit enhances duplicate, so, you're going to say Conversion, and it's got to underscore one at the end. What we're going to do is instead of Match Source, which is going to match exactly what I had in After Effects. I'm going to click this blue, [inaudible] text and opens up this scary window. If you understand video stuff codecs and all bits and pieces, you can have loads of fun in here. If you're a little skid, all you need to do, is a couple of things to make the video size smaller. The biggest things you can do, is under video, and physically you could change it, so, it's going to e-mail it to somebody, and at the moment, this is any standard definition, so, 720 it could be that you've got it like 4k or high def, and you might want to lower it down because there's no point, say you are e-mailing somebody, they're going to viewing on cell phone, just make it a lot smaller. First uncheck this, you can change the size, just changed one of them [inaudible] , I'm going to leave mine the same size and frame it, It'll pick whatever the default was. Now in this case, this was shot at 50 frames per second, which is a little high than normal, that's high speed frame rate. The real typical one is 25, and what we're looking for is, down here it says, estimated file size. We going to change that a little bit. So changing the frame rate hasn't changed very much, the big one is going to change, this is the big one [inaudible] , done here, is this one here, this is bitrate, so, I'm on video and I'll scroll down to bitrate Think of bitrate, if you've saved JPEG and Photoshop or any other program, and it comes out with the quality slider and it says, hey, you know, you can have a 12 or 10 or 5, and the lower you go the crappy it looks, but the smaller the file sizes, what we can do is, it's the same thing in here except you have a couple two sliders. This thing here, we're going to set it to VBR, and 1 pass or 2 pass. 1 pass is going to give us pretty good quality, 2 passes takes longer, but it's going give us better quality and potentially a better of file size. So let's just switch it to 2 pass, it takes longer but we're okay with that. Then these two, what are this? There's a target and a maximum, what we're saying is, this one here is the main one. What happens is after fix tries to render every single frame, literally it goes you, then the next frame along and eventually it gets the whole thing, and there's lots of different frames in them. Every frame it looks at it goes, your target is tin quality. That looks really good, but there are some parts of the video where it's not really moving, it just uses the team, but there are some maybe bits that are really complicated. Say there's a [inaudible] Dan explodes the word and everything else is pretty normal, but there's this extreme animation going on. It'll jump up to the maximum, so, right along it target most of the time unless it needs to jump up to this high version. So it just gives a bit of [inaudible] , but gap to 12 if you have to. What we're going to do, is in here we're going to put it down target of 2 and bitrate of 5. You don't have to pick these. These are my lens and I stole this from other people because they were using them, and it just gives you a really good quality with a really small file size, without meaning really visual changes. That's my opinion anyway, you might decide to do 3 and 7. But you can see the file size has changed quite a bit from 16 down to 3. Now this is unreally short animation, and it's exponential,so, if you've got something that's going to be half a gigabyte, it's going to get down to something stupid, like seven megabytes is really weird ratio there, so, that's the big one to do, bitrates. Get it low, get it onto as good quality as you can. It takes longer, it does it twice to make sure everything is nice, then you set your target, and then you say, go up to 5 if you want to. Other little things you can do, you might just do bitrates, and other little things you can do, is that everything, is audio, you might go in here and you would say, Export Audio, don't need it. This has no audio at all, it's just video, so, I don't need it at all. If you do have audio and you want to switch it, say it's going onto something like YouTube. You might stick it in a mono, because is no need for stereo sound, you've only got one shot mono, so, it's going to stay mono. I'm going to turn off audio, and we're going to click "Okay", and we're going to hit "Play", and it's going to run through both of these. We're going to kick back, relax, it's doing both at the same time as we had, [inaudible] , it's the same video, it's encoding at the same time, but different ways. What we're going to do is speed this up, so, we're going to go to zoom, zoom, and you can see over here, time remaining, it's never right, time remaining goes up and down, but anyway, let's go zoom, zoom. Okay. Welcome back. It's done. Let's have a look at what we got. Desktop, where did I put it? It's going to be where we saved it, so, I saved mine, where? There, it's under this one. You're going to find these files on your machine, because I've stowed away on mine somewhere, the [inaudible]. Remember that's my video name and that's the folder that gets made with the underscore AME, and there's my two files in here. Don't worry about this they just temporary stuff that'll just damp. Okay. So we got two files, one is 103.4, and this one here is 19, so, remember it says 16 and 3. It's always just a guess, so, it has to be the final output that you are checking [inaudible]. Now, what we're going to do is, check them against each other. I'm going to toggle between this one and this one, this one and this one, can even tell which one it is, it depend of you're at high, which means that if you've got your video that you're watching at a high resolution. I can tell honestly, that it looks the same, that's the good one, so, that's the bad one, good one, bad one. [inaudible] from to get both to the end because then it would be easy. Oh, it's restarting. Good one, bad one, good one, bad one. The file size is significant. This is easily e-mailable at 3 megabytes, this one here is a bit tough at 19, and lots of e-mail stuff stops when it gets that high. Bitrates, frame range, file size can get your video nice and small for you to use. All right, that's it for this video, I'll see you in the next one. 48. Put all your files in one place collect files: Hi, in this video we are going to collect our files. What that means is that we've used an MP4 in here, and let's say we've used some music, and some images, and we view stuff all ever a hard drive and it's everywhere. I do this at the end of every one of my video series jobs. I've pulled files that I've downloaded, and stuff I've made and things from other people, and they're all over the place. What I want to do is to have an account, save them in one little spot. I've got a record of them, and I might save it as an archive so that they're all in one little spot. To do it, okay, we're going to use this thing called click files. But first what I might do is import a few files. I might bring in some audio as well, I'm going to bring in Octopus Legs. I'm holding command down to select multiple objects, or control on a PC. I've got a few of them. I'm going to add my music. I've got random logo, and now I've got random Octopus Legs. I've got all these files that have used in this project. Now what I want to do is I'm going to save it, and I'm going to go to file, and I'm going to go to dependencies, and I'm going to go to collect files. Dependencies, weird name for it. Okay, click files. If you've come from over a graphic design background, this is the same as packaging a document out of Illustrator or InDesign. I'm going to click, reveal and find it when I'm finished. Click everything and I'm going to click it, where am I going to stick it? I'll stick it on the desktop. I'm going to call this one my, this was the BYOL Office with Type, I'm not sure why I'm calling it that. It's going to go over, I'm going to open it up, there it is. On my desktop, there is a folder called BYOL Office with Type, and in there is my after effects file. There's a text file and a text file just tells you what was collected. If you send it off to somebody and they're missing a file, they can check to see what files might have been missing. You've seen as my file, my MP3, all the bits and pieces that I've used for it. It's just a nice tidy thing. Say if I want to send this to somebody as well, so I've got somebody else working on the project. I can just right-click this now, and go to compress. Now I've got a nice little easy emailable, shareable thing with people. That is how to collect files using After Effects. 49. End: All right, we're at the end. What next? What next is, you can keep in contact with me, ask me questions, find out if you're doing all right or there's another way of doing it. There's a few different ways now, like what I do is, there is a form in every page, on every page, probably on this page, down the bottom there, there is a little form you can play around with, its on the website, and ask questions. The other thing you can do is that there's a live chat. When I'm online, I make sure that I click on the little live chat, and you might see that if you're on the website, down in the bottom right, there is a little live chat thing, if it says I'm available, I actually am. I'm just sitting here at my desk doing stuff, and drop me in a message if things are broken, or things aren't working, just want to chat, and we have a little bit of a live chat thing going. The other thing you can do is that by weekly, I have a little live video stream thing. I use YouTube, and it just means that I sit there for about an hour, normally by myself. It means you can jump into the chat and ask questions, and I live, answer them. It's not as scary as it sounds. You just have a little chat window, I don't get to see you in your PJs, it's just me, answering questions. It might be After Effects, it might be Premiere, it might be, "Hey, I want to get more work," or "Hey, After Effects is not working," or "Hey Dan, just stuff." I generally sit there by myself, so jump in, have a chat, and it's nice and easy that way. The other thing is you can do is that I've got a cheat sheet, so there will be a link down below here and just a printable cheat sheet that allows you to just go through the cool stuff we go through in this class. You can print it up, stick it next to Look Pro, it looks pretty. The second last thing is, the Teacher Resources. If you are teaching this, and you've been asked to teach this next week, and next semester, and you need to get up to speed, and you do my course, and then there's a Teachers' Resources page. Have a look at that on the website. The cool thing about that is, you get to watch the videos, download the exercise files, and use that in your class, I'll allow you to. The also thing is there's notes. There's two sets of notes, there's ones that you can give to your students, there's little thing you can get those from, and there's a teacher set as well that you can buy, and we'll send those out to you and you can use with your class. It's cheaper than say class and a book and then follow this tutorial series and hopefully make your life a little easier. The last thing that I'd like to do is ask you for your help. In terms of what makes me successful in terms of my online training is links. If you enjoyed this class, you enjoyed my style, I'd love a link. If you have a website, link to me, if you have a Facebook page, link to me, if you've got any way of sharing me or linking me, I'd love you to link to the [inaudible] After Effects, but I'd love you link to the overview page, I'll put a link to that in the description as well the one you can link to because it's the thing where the more links I have, the more users I have, the more courses I can do. I'll probably still keep working out of my home office. I'll still keep pretending my disc is always this clean. It's never that clean, all my junk is just down there. But the more users I get, the more courses I get to do, all that jazz. That's an end for this course and I will see you. Check out one of my other courses. We've got Photoshop, Dreamweaver, there's UX courses, there's InDesign. There's all Adobe stuff. Dan loves Adobe. See you later. 50. After Effect Cheat Sheet: Hey, welcome to this motion graphics cheat sheet for after fix. We're going to go through some tips and tricks and cheats for people getting started with motion graphics. All right, let's go. Tip number one is easing. Easing is when things look pretty when they move. I've made a little animation, it just slides in from the side there and that's very power pointing. What we need to do is fix that with some easing to make it slide in really pretty. What we do is, I'm going to select both of these key frames, right click one of them, go down to Keyframe Velocity and I'm going to put influence 75 on this side, 75 on that side, click Okay, and there, the change the hourglasses, but watch this when I preview it. See, looks pretty when it slides in. That is tip number one, easing. Tip number two is motion blur. If anything is moving, make it blurry. Watch this, this is the easing we did before, it moves in, it's nice. But if we turn this on, motion blur, this is for the whole composition and we need to turn it on for each layer that's moving. We've only got one layer. Watch this, when it moves, can you see it's kind of blurry when it moves? Looks nice. It looks a bit better. Let's have a look at this other comp here with a swing text. This is one of the classes that we do in my course. Watch this. Can you see? Things look good when they're blurry. If I turned it off, they look fine, not as pretty as when they're blurry. Now, tip number three, snap. When you're dragging this little play hit along, officially called the CTI, if I drag it along and I want to align it with this keyframe here, it can be very difficult, but if I hold down shift on my keyboard, holding down, still dragging this guy here, he snaps to all the little keyframes. It makes it super easy to get your play head in the perfect spot and that is snap. Okay, ready for tip number four? Super zoom, it means that when you are looking at stuff, you can use these little mountains to go in and out. But say you're stuck here and I want to go all the way out, I hit colon on my keyboard, next to the L key. Just tap it once, zooms all the way in. It's super mega zoom now. I'll tap it again, it goes all the way out, tap it again, all the way in. Tap it again, all the way out, I can see my whole comp. That's a really handy one, just tap colon. Tip number five, time travel. Instead of going in here and saying, "Okay, I want to go to that, I want to go to two seconds and colon and then I want to go to maybe 10 frames and pushing enter. It'll jump to it." What you can do is time travel much quicker, okay. Click on this. I want to go to four seconds, type in 400, and it jumps to four seconds. Now I need to go to frame 15. Click in here, just type in 15. All over the top, it already rearranges it for you, so you can jump to any time. Two seconds and ten frames, it'll jump along. Alright, that is time travel. Tip number six, you've got a really crappy laptop and it runs really slow when you're working on jobs. Okay, now to fix that, a couple things you can do is, this one here under full, or it might be on order, force it down to quality and watch the quality of the text in the comp window, see it got a bit blurry. Now it previews nice and fast, or faster, and it will still render a perfectly high-quality one. The other thing you can do is in your preview window here, you might have to tear it off a little bit. I want to make mine a bit bigger. You want to go to this one here, it says skip. Instead of trying to render every frame, you can say skip everyone and render every second frame. It just means that it's going to be a little bit jumpy in your preview, but it will render a whole lot quicker. All right, that's what to do if you've got a really slow, crappy laptop. Tip number eight, what size should my comp be? Pretty much always, go to composition, new composition, and you can't go wrong if you go to preset and pick HDTV 1080 25. All the other ones are special use cases. Pretty much every single time, go to this one here, you can't go wrong. Our last super awesome shortcut tip, cheat sheet thing is this key here. What it does if you have your mouse hovering above here and you tap it, it makes that screen full. If I hover above, and you've lots of work going on down here in your timeline, click it. It makes it full screen, great for the project window, you got lots of files. Tap it, it goes full screen, tap it again, it goes away. Also as part of this course, go to bringyourownlaptop.com and go to the resources tab and there will be a downloadable PDF version. All right, that's how quick cheat sheet awesomeness for motion graphics people getting started. Remember, if you want to do a full course, if you're just getting into it, is to check out my website here. How to become a motion graphic designer in three hours and after phase, that's at bringyourownlaptop.com. All right. I'll see you over there.