Get Started with Adobe After Effects 2026 (Beginners)

1. Introduction to Adobe After Effects for Beginners: Visual effects, motion graphics, removing unwanted people, keying, and even treed animations are all created with Adobe After Effects. Sounds super exciting, and you probably can't wait to get started creating videos as well. The only problem? Where do you begin? If you're just getting started After Effects is a complex program. You could spend days if not weeks clicking around or watching YouTube tutorials to eventually still not understand what you're doing. Well, stop wasting time because I'm here to teach you everything you got to know about Adobe After Effects. There. I'm Jordy, a professional filmmaker and Va Vx artist for over 15 years now. Some of you might know me from the Citicom YouTube channel teaching After Effects to over 2.5 million subscribers. Now, this class is for beginners who would like to learn the basics of After Effects and understand what you're doing in well structured, exciting lessons. I got a feeling I'm talking about you. By the end of this class, you'll be able to create motion graphics and text animations, perform tracking to make your text follow objects. Part of your video. You'll be able to cut out specific parts of your video using various keying and masking techniques or remove unwanted objects and so much more. After Effects shouldn't be overwhelming. With the right approach, it is easy and a lot of fun. So I'm super excited to teach you all the ins and outs of Adobe After Effects. I hope to see you in my class. 2. User Interface: Oh, hey, there. Welcome to my class After Effects for beginners. I am super excited that you've joined. So let's not waste any more time and jump straight into it. The first time you'll open up Adobe After Effects, you'll be greeted by this welcome screen. Now, you'll see a bunch of buttons in here, but all it does basically is ask you to start a new project or open an existing one. Now, unlike many other video editing software, in After Effects, you don't, per se, have to create a project. You can just as well close this window. And start using After Effects immediately. Now, this comes with a caveat. If After Effects would crash, it does mean that you would lose everything that you've been working on. So it's good to try out something real quick. But if you're going to work on an actual project, it is very much advised to also save your project. And that's the first thing that we'll do. Saving, you can do that with Control or Command S on a Mac, or you can just go to file on top and from there, say Save As and choose Save As here. And I have a folder called After Effects for beginners. This is also something that you guys can download, which contains all of the project files and footage that we're going to work with. And let's name this one Lesson two, and I know this is the first lesson, maybe, but I'm going to count the intro video as well. So Video two or Lesson two, doesn't matter. Hit safe. So now this is safe. Now, you will see a ton of buttons and tools and bells and whistles and whatnot. Don't be overwhelmed by this. We're going to take it step by step. But the way you got to see it is that After Effects consists out of different panels, and each of these panels offer you a different functionality or a different tool. And you can see that. When I'm actually going to click here in this panel, it will be highlighted in blue around it. This is my project panel. And the Project panel is where you will collect everything. So let's do that. There are different ways to do it. We can go over to File here and then choose Import. We can also just right click in here, go to Import and then choose File or multiple files. Or the way that I like to do it is just to simply browse to your folder. So here you can see the project file that we've just created Lesson two. And here I have a folder called footage. And what I like to do most often is just, you know, browse to my footage. Let's start with clips. And I have a bunch of clips in here, which we're going to work with throughout this class. But let's get started with clip number one. Going to drag that into my project panel, and there we have it. And I'm also going to go back here into my explorer, head over to ethics or Effects and take my flare one clip and drag that into my project as well. So as you can see here, we can collect all the media files that we want to work with. And, of course, we want to make sure that this is a little bit organized, definitely if we're going to work with hundreds of different files in here, and so we can do that by creating a new folder. There's a button down here, a folder icon to do that. We can also just right click Choose New folder. And let's call this here, say footage. And I'm going to take both of my clips, select them both, and drag them into the footage folder. So this is really just like your operating system would work, create folders, put files into it. Alright, so that is the project panel. There are more panels, of course. We got the composition panel over here. We got the preview panel. We have some stacked as well, like the align panel, audio, the Effects and Presets panel. Here is then panel, but basically it's your timeline, and it's going to get active in a moment. The way that these panels work is that they are really just different windows, and that means that you can drag them around. For example, let's take the effects and presets panel and drag it to a different position. And you can see now that I can dock it somewhere. If I were to dock it here into my composition panel, you will see that it will act as a different tab. So we have composition here, and we got effects and presets over there, just like with the effect controls, which is also a different panel. Now we can also, for example, dock it over here on the side, and that will make it act as a new column. But we can also write click in the panel title on top and say close spanel from there, and now it's gone. But don't worry, we can always bring it back. Now, if you are familiar with Adobe in general, like Premiere or Photoshop, Illustrator or whatnot, you are already familiar with these spanels. They all work the same. If this is the first time working with an Adobe app, I really encourage you to just drag these pannels around and just get familiar. All times, you can go over to the window menu on top, go over to workspace, and from there, say, reset the default to safe layout. And that will just reset your workspace back to the default, and now you can see that I have my effects and presets panel back where it should be. And yes, that does mean we can create custom workspaces or load in different kinds of workspaces. Let's go back to the Window menu here on top, go to workspace again, and you can see that we have a lot of different kinds of workspaces. We have one for effects. We have one for essential graphics. Let's take this one. This is for when we want to create motion graphics and text animations and whatnot. Basically just a safe layout of other panels and different arranged panels. Panels, by the way, you can always find back as well under the Window menu again, and then here are all of the different panels. So if you are looking for something specific, like the paint panel, you can just activate that, and it's right there now. We can go ahead right click and close again that panel if you don't need it. Alright, let's go back to the default workspace. Let's like default. Where is it right? Start working on our clips now. So what I want to do here, I have this clip number one, and what I can do with it is double click on it. Do you view it in the footage or in the layer spanel? I'm looking at the source of that clip here. I can just play that back. So we have this woman here walking in this awesome grass field with a beautiful view on the ocean. And we also have a flare. This is something that I recorded in my studio. Basically, I've just shine a light into the lens of the camera creating this flare. Now, how do we start editing with this? Where's my timeline? It currently says none, so I don't really have a timeline. Let me just close here the layers tunnel for a moment. The way After Effects works is with compositions. And you can see it here in your composition panel that it asks us to create a new composition or create a new composition from our footage. A composition is really like a new item that we are also going to add to the project panel, and you can see it as a new timeline or a new sequence if you're familiar with premiere. That means that a new composition can also be created by just right clicking and from here choose new composition. Just like with the folder, we also have a button down here to create a new composition in one click. On that, we'll open up the composition settings. Basically, it's going to ask you, Alright, let's create a composition. But what are the settings of this composition? And really, this is going to define what kind of end video that you want to create. We have some presets on here. For example, we can go for a four K ultra HD composition. It shows you the resolution and the frame rates. But you can also go for a custom setting. You know, for example, if I want to go really exotic, I can go for, like, 855 by 481 for some particular reason. The frame rate right here, et cetera. Now, these settings might be familiar with you because I'm assuming that you've already worked with some video editing program like premiere, D Venture Resolve, Capcut. I don't know. It all comes down to the same thing, basically. Video settings don't change. But what is different is the duration. And After Effects, we're going to say, Hey, this is the duration, the maximum duration of my timeline, of the composition. Don't worry if you get any of these things wrong, you can always change it afterwards. So let's go ahead and click Cancel for now because I want to show you a second way to create a new composition, and that is a composition by the settings of your source clip. So we have this clip one right here, why not just make a composition that has the same settings? You know, if you look here on top, you can see some of the details that has this resolution that has this frame rate that has, you know, this length of composition. It's 8 seconds long. So can't we just do that? Well, of course, we can just very simply take that clip and drag it into that new composition button. Basically what that will do is create a new composition, and it has given the same name as the clip itself and put that clip into that composition. And we can rename that composition, have it selected, hit your Enter or return key on your keyboard, and let's type in a different name, for example, Lesson two, because this is Lesson two. And if we want to change anything else from it, we can always chose right click on it and go over to composition settings. And here we have that same settings window, but, of course, this time, we're changing the settings of an existing composition. Cancel this because the settings are goot. I'm going to add my flair also in that composition. As you can see here, our timeline looks like layers. After Effects is layered base. You can really see it as the Photoshop for video. We're just stacking layers on top of each other. And, of course, because my flare clip is on top of my clip one, we are seeing the flare clip. It's really like putting papers on top of each other. You're always looking at the top paper. Also have a whole bunch of layer settings. Let's have a look into that. So we can find it here on the right side. So you can see all of these different toggles. We can just click on that. You know, toggle things on and off, which are different layer settings. And I hate to break it to you, but we can enable more layer settings. Down here, you can see a button called expand or collapse a transform Control panels, which reveal some more settings like the modes and the track mattes and whatnot. So don't worry too much about all of these things. We're going to take a look at them throughout this class. But for starters, I already want to show you the modes. The mode is something that is used a lot in After Effects. It's basically a way that you can blend your clips together. Opening up this drop down menu reveals a whole bunch of different blending modes. And again, if you are familiar with Photoshop Premiere, you know these blend modes. These are exactly the same. For example, let's take any of these. Let's take at, for example. And oh, look at that. We can now see through our flare clip. And interesting is, let me just o on that Popa Box. And interesting is that we can still see our flare. It basically removed all the black in the video, but still revealing the brighter parts, the flare itself. And that's really cool because what I've now done is added a bit more flare to my shot using After Effects. We're already creating something here, guys. Isn't that awesome. So play around with the mode, see what they do. You can also stack two normal clips on top of each other or other clips. You can really play around with this, blend them together. You can also blend three, four, 5,000 layers together. Really fun to play around with. You could instantly create some really fun effects by just blending layers together. There's one more panel that I want to take a look at, and that is the Effects and control panel. Also something, of course, we're going to use a lot. And it's here on the side effects and presets. This panel holds all of the effects that we can use to work with in After Effects. And they are categorized. You know, we have audio effects. We have some channel effects. We got color correction effects, distort effects. You can expand these folders, take a look at what we all have. And let's start with something simple. Let's go over to the color correction. And there's something interesting in here called the U and saturation. If I can find it. If I can't find it, we always can use the search bar on top. Let's just type in, and here it is U and saturation. And to use that effect, you just take it and drag it onto the clip that you want to apply that effect to, and I'm going to apply it to flare 01. And immediately the effect controls are opened up. It's in a second tab next to your project panel. So here you can always find it back. Basically, here you will see all of the effects that have been applied to a specific clip, a clip that you have selected. If I were to select my clip one, which I didn't apply and effect two just yet, it's empty. The same if I were to not have anything selected. But if I select flare one, there it is, again, the U and saturation effect that I just apply to it. So let's use this effect. Let's change the which is the color of that flare. You can here see it. Look at the ring here. As I change the color, the master, so we can make it, like, more green or we can change it to a different color, perhaps have it a bit more red orange so that it fits more with the clothes of this woman. Let's play this back and look at that. Now we have a different kind of color flare. Isn't that cool? Practice this a little bit so that you get familiar with these first penels. You know, import some clips, create a composition, add some effects to your clip. Maybe explore some of these effects. You know, just drag anything you find onto a clip, see what it does. And then I'll see you back in the next lesson where we are going to further explore these effects and create some animations, as well. Gonna be interesting. See it a bit. 3. Layer Properties & Animations: Let's continue with layer properties and also animations, which is probably one of the most exciting things inside After Effects. So I'm going to go over to my footage folder, and let's work on clip number four in this lesson. I'm just going to drag that into my project panel like that, and as we've seen before in the previous lesson to create a new timeline or composition for that clip, I'm just going to drag it into this little comp button down here, which will create a new composition that has the exact same settings, the resolution, frame rate, and the duration of the clip itself. Now, let's explore the properties of this layer. Layer properties can be found back in various places. We have the property spinel, as you can see right here on the right hand side. If you can't find it, you can always go to the menu on top, window, and from there, select properties. Make sure it's active. Now, we can also find these layer properties back in the layer itself in the timeline. We can actually expand the layer with this button right here, and here we can find the transform properties. Expand that again, and these are the exact same as here on top. After Effects gives you multiple ways to change the properties of e clip. So it's really up to you what you enjoy the most where to change these properties. Now, interesting is that every single layer that you add to the timeline down here has transformed properties, and these will always be the exact same. We have an anchor point. We've got a position. We've got the scale, the rotation, and opacity. You'll find these back on every single layer that you add to the composition. And so to change them, we can change the value in here. For example, let's do the position. If I change here, the second position value, I move it up and down, or I can change the first value to move it left to right. As you can see, the property panel just reflects what I'm doing down here. So you can also change that in here, for example, the scale, we can skilled up or down. But we can also change a lot of these strands foreign properties in the canvas or in the composition view itself. We can just dig the clip and move it to a different position. We can take one of the outsides here and change its scale, as you can see. Interesting is that we can have a different X or Y scale, so we can kind of stretch the clip. If you hold down your shift key on your keyboard, it will actually always stick to the same aspect ratio. To rotate your clip, we're going to need the rotation tool, and that can be found up here in the tool bar. Here's the rotation tool. But it's good that you start to learn some of the short keys. If you hoo any of these tools, you can see what the short key is. It's W for the rotation tool. So let's hit W, which allows me to rotate it from the corner that I click on. Now, it's rotating around its anchor point, and that is this little crossair here in the middle. That's the anchor point. And as you can see here, the anchor point is also a value. We can change that in here. Or we can take the anchor point tool, which is next to the rotation tool or the wiki. Select that, and now we can just take that anchor point and move it somewhere else. So now if I were to take my rotation tool again, W and rotate the clip, it will rotate around that point now instead. Alright, but what if you want to reset any of these values? Well, we can easily do that by just right clicking on, for example, the anchor point and then say reset. Doing that we'll reset it back here into the middle. Works the exact same way if I were to reset it down here, right click, for example, on position and say reset. Or perhaps I want to reset all of the transform properties. We've got the reset button right here on top for transform, which is the entire category, or also here in the property spanelRset. Alright, let's do some animations. Let's decrease the scale of our clip like that. So what I want to do is make this clip move from the left side to the right side. Simple animation, but that's where it starts. Now, in order to do that, we're going to have to animate the position property. Now, animations are always created inside the timeline, so that's why I don't like to use the property spinel. I don't find it that useful, so it's up to you if you want to use it or not. So let's focus on the timeline and the position property in here. As you can see here on the left side, we have a stopwatch icon, which basically says to enable animation for that specific property. So, let's do that. Let's click that. And you can see now that we have created a keyframe inside the timeline. And this keyframe right here holds the current value of that position. It's currently on the right side. So, you know what? Maybe I want to move that here to the left side. You can just take it and drag it. And automatically, this keyframes now has been updated with a new position property. Just like with walking or driving a bike or a car, you want to go from point A to point B, and that takes a certain amount of time. So if our clip here sits on the left side on the clear in time and we want to move it to the right side, we also have to give it some time in order to do that. So I'm going to take my play hat and move forward in time, and now I can take my clip and move it to the right side. Automatically, a new keyframes has been created. It'll always do that, by the way, if you change a value, it will either update the keyframe or it will create a new one if there isn't already one. And so let's play this back now. As you can see, you just have created your very first animation. The clip goes from left to right. And just like in real life, if you get more time to walk the same distance, you just walk slower. So let me just take that keyframes and move it to the right side, giving it more time. So now if I play this back, you'll see that the animation goes much slower. If I were to move these keyframes closer together, the animation goes much faster. And just like that, we can animate any property because you can see all of them have that stopwatch. So at the same time, we could make a rotation animation as well. I'm going to enable animation for the rotation, and has automatically created a new keyframes. Then let's go forward in time, and let's increase here the rotation. You can also do that in the property itself. Let's make the clip go upside down. Alright, and you know what? Maybe I also want the first keyframe here to have a different value than just zero. This is where you got to be careful because this is a mistake that many beginners make. Sometimes you think you are sitting with your playhead on the keyframes, but actually you're one frame right next to it. And if I were to change the value now, let's say, I want to flip it to the other sites like that, you go back in time and suddenly you notice that your clip just jumps back. Like what's going on right here? And if you were to zoom in in your timeline, which we can do here on the bottom, just click here or just drag that slider to zoom in, you can see here that we have two keyframes accidentally created. So let's delete here the second one that we have created. Let me just zoom out again. Because I want to show you guys something. If you want to make sure that you are standing exactly on your keyframes, you got to hold down your shift key as you move your play had around, and you can see now here that it snaps to these keyframes. It snaps to them. And that way, you know that you're sitting exactly on that keyframes and you won't be making that mistake. So now I can just rotate it to the left side like that. And if I were to play it back now, you'll see that it kind of rotates while going to the right. If I want to start the rotation also at the beginning, just take that keyframe and move it to the left side. Staying with the last keyframes, move it to the right side. And that's in a nutshell how animations work. I want you to practice that a little bit, play some keyframes, do some animations with a transform property, especially if this is completely new to you. But it's always good to practice that a little bit, because in the next lesson, we're going to take a look at some more advanced key framing techniques as well as animating effects. 4. Smooth Keyframes & Effects : Let's continue with animations in After Effects. We're going to take a look at some more advanced key framing techniques, and then we're going to apply that also to animating effects, which is also going to be for this lesson. So in the previous lesson, we have animated this clip as it rotates and moves into position. But as we play this vacuum mode, that animation is very stiff. And just like with a car, you cannot go 0-70 miles per hour, you slowly accelerate to it. That's basic physics, and you want to see that back in animations as well, because that's what makes your animations feel natural. Let's see how we can do that. The keyframes that we're currently looking at are called linear keyframes. They just start immediately. But I can right click on a keyframe, or I can also select multiple keyframes at the same time and then right click, then go over to keyframes Assistant. And here we can find three options which are going to be very important. Easy Ease, Easy Ease in, and easy es out. If an animation starts, we're always going to choose easy Es out. Might be counterintuitive because it feels like out is like your last keyframes, and in is your first. But the way you got to see it is like this. Your animation goes out to the right side of that keyframes. Right side is out, the left side is in. So as it goes out, we choose EZ Es out. And now you'll notice that the animation will start smooth. It still stops very immediate, so we're also going to select the two last keyframes. Right click, go over to keyframes assistant and then choose EZ Es in as the animation goes from left to the right into the keyframes. And now playing this back, we get a smooth animation starting and stopping. There are some more natural things missing in this animation. You see, if I wave my hand around, it's kind of blurry. This is called motion blur, another natural phenomenon. And that's something that we can enable as well inside After Effects. You'll see here in the later properties that we have a toggle for motion blur. Just enable that right here. And now, as we play this back, you'll see that the rotation and the position also leaves this blurriness to it, which is natural. Say you have multiple layers in here, you can choose which one has motion blur or which one not. But let's say you have 100 layers in here, A's playback is going to be very choppy because of that motion blur, well, you can then easily toggle it off globally here on top for all the layers without having to individually disable it for each layer just to preview what's going on. And then, of course, once you're going to start rendering your video, once it's done, you just enable it back for all of those layers. Alright, I'm going to move here to the middle somewhere of my animation, and I want to create keyframes current value right here. So how do we do that? We've learned that we can change the value to create a new keyframes. But what if we want to make a keyframes of just current value as it is? Well, for that, we can create a manual keyframes well here on the left side. We just click to create a manual keyframes and we'll do the same thing for the rotation as well. Now, you'll notice that these keyframes kind of look different. I can tell that these are not the linear keyframes. Instead, these are automatic Bzire keyframes. Because After Effects knows that we have an ease in and an Es out keyframes, it'll automatically do that. It will kind of smoothen the animation a little bit. It's not that noticeable. It is there. If you don't want that, you just hold down your control key and click on the keyframes to reset them back to linear keyframes. And now we don't have that smoothing in the middle. If you want to add more smoothing to it, you can also right click them. Go over to keyframes assistant and choose EZ Es, which is both an ease in and an ease out at the same time. Now, what does that mean? This means that the animation will kind of stop a little bit in the center because it will slowly come to a halt and then slowly start again. You know, ease in and ease out. Let's play it back, and you can see here now that it stops here in the middle for just a moment, but it's smooth. So smooth animations and motion blur. And now that we know this, we can continue with animating effects. And for that, I'm going to drag my clip number four again into a new composition. Like that because, yes, we can create multiple compositions in After Effects. I'm going to rename these, though, because the first one here is more about, like, smooth animations. And then the new one that I just created, just hit return on your keyboard to change the name. We're going to call this animating Effects, like that. And perhaps, you know, let's create a new folder. Let's call this one Comps. For compositions and put both of these compositions in there to stay a little bit more organized. And you can see here now in our timeline that we have two tabs, the smooth animations that we just created, and then a second tab, which is the second composition. If you were to close one of these, you can always reopen them in my folder here, animating effects, double click on it, and it will open up itself again. We've got a clean slate, you know, just a clip in there. And let's have a look at what the model is doing inside of that clip. You know, she's doing this movement with her hands, and then she's shooting out something. So let's create some kind of effect where she creates some sort of an energy ball perhaps and then just shoot set out to, I don't know, a dragon that is sitting off screen. So I want to go to the Effects and Presets tab, and it's good you've already kind of explore the Effects library a bit, you know, just drag some stuff, some effects to your clips and see what they do. I want to go over to my distort folder. And look for the CC flow motion. This is a pretty fun effect. By the way, guys, if you'd like to learn more information about each effect, you can click the info button right next to it, which will explain all of its properties and settings. But you guys got me, so no need to press that button. Let's drag the CC flow motion onto our clip, which we can do in the timeline or we can also drag it directly here in the Canvas view onto the clip. As we've seen before, that will automatically open up the effects controls, which hold all of the settings of the effects that we've applied to it. Now, interesting is that we don't see that back in the property span. Properties only show the basic transform. For the effects, we still have to go to the Effects Controls panel. Or as we've seen before, we can also expand the layer itself, and under there, we can find the effects right now. Here it is CC flow motion and all of its settings the same as we have in here in the effects controls. So let's explore. We get two dots. We have nod one, the amount for the nod one, not two, and its amount. And then we got some more settings that are mostly interested in the nod one, and its amount. So we can change the position of not one. You can see here in the canvas that it's visually changing that point. So that means that we can also just take it right here and drag it visually to anywhere we want. You know, let's make it start at her finger, for example, and we can increase the amounts. We can increase it to have, like, the image be sucked into that point, or we can, like, decrease it. To have some sort of, I don't know, like a black hole or some energy field being created. But I really like this because this is kind of like a ball. If you move it around, you can see it here, like an energy ball that's creating she's warping space and time. While animating, it's oftentimes easier to just see it without the effect. So let's bring the amount back to zero. And let's focus here the not one. It's a position value. It has two values X and Y. Let's enable animation, which we can do from here, or we can also click there. It reflects, as you can see, it has created a new keyframes. Let's go forward and time a little bit, and just take that knot and move its position. Like so let's fall over her finger. Automatically, a new key frame has been created as we change the position. Let's go forward, change that knot, forward, follow her hand a little bit. You can do this very rough. Like, so she goes inward here like that. And here she shoots it out. Oh. Maybe one last keyframe here, and then it's gone. There we go. It shoots out. Maybe we need to readjust these keyframes a bit in the timeline, move them a bit further apart or closer together. Let's add some amount to it. Let's say, minus five to have like this energy ball, and let's play this back, see how that looks. Yeah, that looks pretty cool, doesn't it? Maybe I want to bring this last keyframes a bit closer like that so that it hoots out a bit faster. Okay, looking good. Now, as for the energy itself, I wanted to, like, come in so that it's not there yet. Like she's creating the energy. So let's also create an animation for the amount. Let's set the start to zero, enable animation. Go a little bit forward in time, let's say until here somewhere when it's in front of her, and then set it to minus five. So that way, we have it slowly coming in, like so. As we've seen before, we can right click here the end keyframes of the amount, go to keyframes and choose EZ Es in to make it slowly, smoothly stop. As for the first keyframes, we actually don't need to smoothen that because we don't see anything at the start just yet. We just have the amount coming in. So only the amount we can right click, go to keyframes and choose EZ Es outs. As we don't see the start animation because there is no amount to it, we don't really have to smoothen that. Also, not the keyframes in between. We don't have to smoothen those because we need to follow our hands. And also we don't have to smoothen the last key frame because this effect goes out of the frame, as you can see, maybe we even want to move it out a bit further. Like that. So we don't actually see the ending of that animation. It's just out of the frame and it goes on forever. And now you might think, let's add some motion blur to that. Well, okay, let's do that. Let's enable motion blur for that later and play it back. And as you will see, there is no motion blur. Well, that's because motion blur can only be applied to transform effects where there's an actual movement going on of the clip itself. But After Effects cannot see any movement with effects being applied to it. Don't worry. There is a workaround for that. In the Effects library, I'm going to look for motion blur, and there is one called force motion blur. And this is one you're going to use a lot, as well, like in this case, you're going to drag that. You can also drag it into the Effects Controls now, by the way. So you will use this always together with animation you've done on effect. So now if I were to play this back, you could already see it here, it will have motion blur. Of course, playback will not go as smooth. It will be pretty shoppy, so you want to play it back once so that the line here on top gets green, which indicates that it's rendered, and then you can play it back a second time. Well, now it has motion blurred, and it looks a whole lot better. So oftentimes I would also just disable that effect, which you can do here with the ethics button on the left side of it. Just disable it so that I can work more smoothly on my animation, and when I'm happy with it, when I'm done, then I enable that effect again, and then I can start rendering it or have a preview first. Okay, our energy ball is starting to look really cool. It's following our hands, and we have motion blur going on. All of the ingredients for a natural animation. But there are still some things missing. You know, the animation looks kind of choppy. In my opinion, it could be a whole lot smoother. But for that, we're going to have to work with layer linking. But that is for the next lesson. 5. Layers and Layer Linking: So we have just created this here in the previous lesson, this energy ball that has been created and then shoots out. But I don't really like how it looks. It's pretty choppy. It doesn't look as smooth. Now, if we go back to the previous composition that we created like two lessons ago, which was this rotating clip, you can see that we have this line right here, which represents the of that animation. And interesting is that we can take that, for example, the middle keyframes and move that up to change the path. You can visually see it. This way of animating is much better, and it will give us much more control as well. But it's only possible to see the animation pads on transform properties. So these are the basic properties of eclip and not on effects properties. But there is a workaround with property and layer linking. I'm going to go back to my animating Effects composition. And if you want to see all of your keyframes that you've created on your layer, you can select it and then press the key on your keyboard. That's oftentimes very useful to not see all the properties that you don't work with definitely if you have multiple layers in here. So I'm going to delete all of the position keyframes. So just select all of and delete them because I cannot see the path for it, so it's not really useful. If we take a look at the property value itself, we can see that it has two values. It has an X and a Y value defining, you know, where that knot position is at. And this is something that comes back very often. We also have that with the normal position property. So, in essence, yes, these are two of the exact same types of properties. So what I'm going to do is right click in an empty space in my timeline. Go over to New and then here, I'm going to go over to Null Object. Let's click on that and add it to the timeline. This null object is a nothing object. It's really nothing. As you can see here in the canvas, it just sits there, but it doesn't do anything. We can't see anything. But interesting is, like we know before, every layer has transform properties. Let me just expand it from here because I don't like to work with the properties panel. Transform. There it is. That means that with the null object, we could create an animation, see the animation you paths. And maybe what if we then link that to the knot position? Well, let's try and do that. I'm going to go to the beginning, take the position of that null object, the nothing object, place it there, start animation for the position, move forward in time. She makes the curve. I'm going to just move it to there. You can see the paths now. Maybe let's disable the amount or let's select our clip, go over to the effects controls, and for a moment, I'm going to disable the CC flow motion, which is going to make it a bit easier. Okay, select the null object again. Where are we at? So here. Okay, let's bring it inwards. Move forward. She's bringing it to here, right before she's going to push it out to shoot the dragon like that. Now, in essence, this was somehow the animation that we got when we were animating the knot position itself of the CC flow motion. Not very smooth. So what we can do now is select one of these points, and we can take the convex tool. It's right here under the Pen tool. Just click and hold to show the menu, convert vertex tool. The V shape. Take that, which allows us to click and drag on that point. And as you can see now, we can make it curve. So now I will just go back in time and just see how her hand flows. So maybe I want to pull that a bit more like this and make sure that the null object follows her finger. It goes a bit too fast. Well, here's a workaround to it as well. Right, click the first keyframe, keyframes. Easy Ease out. Make it start a bit smoother. Her hand is also starting smooth, accelerating. Okay. Here she makes another turn, so I'm going to pull the second keyframes as well so that we keep going in this rotation. Looking good. This one, as well. We can zoom in a bit more by just scrolling with your mouse. If you hold down your space bar, you can actually move around in your zoomed in image. So let's see what we have to do here. Also pull this point. Just pull on these levers to make like a nice round arc and make sure that it kind of follows her finger, her hand, as she then shoots it out. So looking at this pad here, that's zooming out, this pad looks a whole lot better than what we had before. And this is only possible to do that on the position property. Okay, I'm going to select my clip four again and enable the CC flow motion effect again. And in order for this bolt right here to follow that position, we simply have to link it to it. Right next to the value, the XY value of the Nd one, we can find this PiwipTol and we can now very simply just click on it and drag it to link it to the position of the null. So it's taking over and you can see it now in a red color. It's taking over the position of another property. And just like that, the bulge or the energy field is following our hands from the animation that we just created. So that is the first benefit of doing your animation using a null object or a nothing object. It's actually pretty useful for being nothing. But there's a second benefit, and that is when we want to link multiple properties to the null object. Say that I want to add some more flair to this energy ball, like literally a flare. I'm going to go over to my ex and Presets panel and look for flare. If I can type it correctly, oh, my God. There it is. Lens flare. I'm just going to take that and drag it onto clip number four, as well. A beautiful flair. And if we take a look at the properties, you know, we get we can choose the lens type, maybe change that to something else. This year, some more bluish looks pretty cool. We can also decrease the brightness, which will also make it smaller. If you don't want to make it go smaller, you can also take the blend with original, which is kind of like an opacity property for the lens flare and keep the same size, but just not as bright. The position on that flare is again, defined by an X and Y value, a position value. I can move it around like this. Now, if we weren't using that null object, it meant that I had to manually reanimate that entire flare. And maybe I have some more ideas for extra effect. But I also want to follow that same path and I had to reanimate it every single time again. But we know that we can link properties now. So that means I can just go into my lens flare. Let's expand that and let's make a bit more room here in my timeline. Like, so let's go over to flare center. Take the Pick Whip tool and also link that to the position. And just like that, it will just follow that energy field. And the only thing left to do is animate the blendwd original or brightness, maybe to make the flare come in as the energy ball is being created. And here's something interesting. I'm actually going to start animation. Let's go for Blendwid original so that it has one keyframes. Then with the layer selected, I'm going to press my UK twice, first is to collapse, then to expand, which will show all the keyframes, but only those properties that have been animated, which gives me a bit more room so I can make this panel a bit smaller again. Since this is going to be my end brightness, you know, 39%, I'm just going to take that keyframe and move it all the way to the left, align it with the flow motion keyframe. And we can hold down Shift to make it snap on the same position here in the time of the other keyframes. And then here in the beginning, let's set that to 100, which means that we don't see it. It's not opacity control. It's a blend with original control. So it works the other way. We also want to right collect the first keyframes, keyframes, easy is out. And then here the last one, keyframes, easy is in. And just like that, we now have two effects creating this energy ball. We have this flare going on. Look at that with the motion blur looking awesome. On the end, we still kind of see the flare. So maybe we need to take the null object, the position, the last position here. So just zoom out, take that null object, and move it even further. And since it's covering a longer distance, I might want to give it a bit more time for that animation. Move the keyframes a bit to the right. Let's play this back, see how it looks. Yeah. Okay, that looks. Alright, guys, we're getting there, layer linking. The null object is something you're going to use very often just for that specific purpose. I'm going to collapse my layers here for a moment because I want to show you guys one more layer, and that is the adjustment layer. Right click, go over to New and in here, you'll now find adjustment layer as well. Adjustment layer is also kind of a nothing layer, but it is used to create adjustments to everything what's below. And to better demonstrate that, I'm going to import another clip. Let's go to the Project panel. I'm going to open up my explorer, go to Effects and take that flayer again, drag it into the project, like so, and maybe create a new folder, call it footage, and drag my clip four and the flare into the footage folder. The way, whenever you create a new adjustment layer or null object, it's also added to your project panel under a solids folder. After Effects does that automatically. And let's drag the layer one into the timeline. And we want it to be above clip number four. You know, we've seen this before, papers on top of each other, and we're going to blend that. Let's show the blending modes by toggling here the transfer control panels, expand or collapse it, and change the mode to like screen or add, something like that. If you want to make that flare a bit brighter, you can really just go into your effects and presets library, look for brightness and contrast. Take that effect, drag it onto the flare, and just increase the brightness of that. As you can see now, that flare becomes much more brighter. You can also increase the contrast a bit to remove some of the glare coming from the left side. So let's go back to that adjustment layer, which is why we're doing this. The adjustment layer is going to add a certain effect, usually a certain type of look or anything of that to everything below. So very often used for things like color correction. And we can find in the effects library, actually the lumitry effects. Lumtry Here it is lumitry color. This is the exact same color correction effect that is used inside Adobe Premiere Pro, if you're familiar with that. Drag that onto the adjustment layer. And now you'll see in the effects controls all the exact same settings we get in sits premiere. This effect holds every color correction setting that you need to perform color grades or corrections. In the basic correction, we can find, things like exposure, contrast, and all of that, the temperature, maybe we want to make this a bit warmer, then we can just do that, increase the temperature. And it's also applying that to the flare itself. If I were to place the flare on top of that adjustment layer, let's do that. It will not be applied to it. You can see here that it becomes a little bit more bluish again. So the order of layers becomes very important here. Alright, let's drag this flayer back underneath the adjustment layer. It's going to be above the null or below. You know, the null object is still a nothing object, so it really doesn't matter where it sits. That's like the adjustment layer again, and let's explore this a bit more. We've got some creative controls. Here we can increase the sharpness, perhaps a little bit, the saturation, make it more vivid. We got things like color wheels, which is also pretty interesting. We can add some blue into the shadows, just push it in there. You know, make the shadows a bit darker as well. Make it look like cinematic, but that is for a different class. We're not going to dive too deep into color grading and corrections. Just know that it's there and that it's usually being applied to an adjustment layer. So yeah, there we have it. If you're using an adjustment layer for a specific purpose, you can also select it, hit your return key, just like in your project panel, and give that a different name. For example, color grades. And if you want to look at the before and after, you know, you can do that up here, disable the lumetri effect from here or enable it again, or you can also just enable or disable that entire layer like this. Right, I'm going to do one more lesson about animations, which is going to be a text animation, and it's good to repeat some of the things that we've already done to really practice the stuff that we're going to spend most of our time with inside After Effects. So we'll see you guys in a bit. 6. Time Remapping: Time remapping or speed ramping, a fancy word for putting your clips in slow motion or fast motion. Also, again, it's going to require animations and keyframes. I'm going to browse over to my clips and look for clip number eight and number nine and drag both of them inside my project panel. Start with clip number eight and I'm just going to drag it into the new comp button, which creates a new composition with the same settings. Now, I do want to change a few settings because if I were to make this clip into slow motion, you can see here that I'm at the end of the composition link, and I will not see anything beyond that if my clip were to be in slow motion. So I'm going to right click my clip eight composition. Go over to composition settings, and let's change the duration. Let's make it double as long. So tree is going to be six. And then we got 28 milliseconds after that. Press. Okay. And now I can zoom out my timeline, and you can see we have some more space here, some blank space right next to it. Let's also disable the modes so that we have some more space in the timeline. Are different ways to put your clip into slow motion, and we're going to start off with the easiest one, which is just by right clicking on your clip, go over to time and from there, say stretch time. You can see that we have some options, but we're going to start with stretch time. That gives us a pop up box from which we can choose how much we want to stretch this. We can choose the stretch factor in percentages, putting that to 50. Let's hit Okay, 50% is half the speed. Or double the speed. You know, it goes faster. So let's play this back. You can now see how fast the model does her movement with her hands because it's going faster. Right click again, go to time, time stretch, and let's set it to 200% now, which is going to be double or double as slow, I guess. You can also change the time, by the way. Just insert an exact duration that you want it to be. For example, I want it to be exactly 5 seconds, which is going to be or translate to this stretch factor. Okay. Now, you will notice once you're going to make it or put it into slow motion that something is going to happen and to demonstrate it better, you know what? I'm actually going to set it back to 200%, make it double as slow. You will see that the playback goes pretty choppy. And that is because our clip, if we select it here in the project panel has 30 frames. We can see that right here, 30 frames per seconds. But I'm using that 30 frames now over double the length of the clip itself. So that means I'm only giving my clip 15 frames per seconds. And that's why we're looking at a very choppy video, a 15 frames per seconds video. Now, to solve that problem, we have clip number nine, which has 60 frames per seconds. So that means if you were to stretch it, make it double as slow, we will have 30 frames per seconds, and it will still play out smooth. But that is for later because we have a few options to solve that issue. After all, it's After Effects. We can do magic with this thing. There is a layer option here called frame blending, and we actually have a couple of options. Clicking once on it will just enable frame blending. It's going to blend the two frames around it together treating this ghosting effect. Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes that's good. You can see now here that it plays back much faster, but it has that ghostly look to it because it blends those frames together, creating a fake 30 frames per seconds. But there is a different technique to blend these layers together, and that is true pixel motion. And all you got to do is just click on that button again, which will change it to pixel motion. That will actually create some new frames by generating some new pixels in between. I'm not a big fan of it because you can see the artifacts here that it creates an extra finger that shouldn't be there. But hey, maybe for your type of video, it works, so you got to see what works best, the frame blending or the pixel motion. Maybe it's good for, you know, stuff that happens in the background, which has less detail and everything, but foreground objects, as you can see, just looks weird. So we can click on it again to just disable it together, go away with your pop ups. So those are our two options if we don't have enough frames. Now, let's have a look at clip number nine, which does have 60 frames per seconds. And here is where it gets a whole lot more interesting. I'm going to drag that into a new composition as well, and as always, you know that I like to stay organized. Coms let's put all the comps in there, and footage, let's put all of the footage in there. So. And also for this here, so clip number nine, I'm going to right click.com, go over to comp settings, and let's also double that, or let's just round it up to 10 seconds. Doesn't really matter. There we go. Zoom out in the timeline so that we can see the blank space that we're going to need. Now, as we drag our clip into the new com button, remember that it will take over all of the settings of the clip. And that also means the frame rate. So we have now created a composition with a frame rate of 60 frames per seconds, and we actually don't want to do that. We have a clip with 60 frames per second so that we can use that in a composition of 30 frames per seconds. So I'm also going to right click that again, composition settings and actually change my frame rate here to 30. Hit Okay. And you will see now if I'm going to right click my clip, go over to time, choose time stretch, and change that to 200. It will actually play back very smooth because we have those extra frames in between. Of course, if I will stretch it even more, to 400, we end up with the same problem. We are back now at 15 frames per seconds with that clip. So I hope that that makes sense. All right, let me just hit Control Z to undo my action. You can use Command Z on your Mc, and I'm going to do that one more time to set it back to the normal speed because there's a different way to add slow motion or fast motion to your clip, and that is by animating that speed, also called time remapping or speed ramping. And in order to do that, we're going to right click again, go over to time and this time choose enable time remapping. And that will create two keyframes for the property time remap. So what are these two keyframes? Well, this is the beginning time and over here is the ending time, the last keyframes. So what I can do here is move the last keyframes to the right. What I have to do is also trim my clip outwards like this. We're actually making it longer. We're doing it more manually, and this is the exact same as adding slow motion to it. We're giving more time to the playback with these keyframes by spreading them apart. We've seen that before. We can also give it less time by just taking that keyframes and moving it back. Look at that. Obviously, after that keyframes, there's nothing left anymore. So that's why we are just sitting here on a still frame because this keyframe represents the last frame of my clip and this is the first one. So that's why you want to make sure that these two keyframes remain in your animation. One sits at the start and one sits on the end. What I'm going to do next is add some more keyframes. So let's say here in the beginning, you want to have some slow motion going on until here, where she makes this movement, perhaps. So I'm just going to create a keyframes right here. Record that point, then move forward, it's going to be fast, and then here maybe add a new keyframes, go back to slow motion. As this wave comes in, and as it splashes down, maybe another keyframes where we go to normal speed or something. I don't know. So we've recorded these points now in time. We've added them as a keyframes into the time ramp property. So that means that we can start moving them around. So for the first part, things have to go slow. Alright, so I'm give it more time, move these keyframes apart. As you can see now, this part will go slow motion. After that, we go fast because these keyframes are now closer together, and I can even move them even closer if I want to. Make this part go fast like this. Then we can go back to slow motion, perhaps. So move these keyframes further apart. And let's see if we need some more space here on the end. Yeah, maybe we do. Maybe we do a bit more. And now just play back your clip a couple of times, see if you want to move your keyframes further apart or closer together. Maybe this goes a bit too fast here, this part. Let's add some more spacing here. Play that back again. Slow motion, fast, slow motion again, and then normal speed, kind of. Alright, looking good. And just like we've seen before, we want to gradually go from one speed to another. So I'm going to right click this keyframes, go over to keyframes and choose EZ Es Ouch, perhaps. That is something you can experiment with. Oh, looking good. Also, here, right click Easy Ease In perhaps. You can try and see what EZ Es does, you know, both having smooth in and smooth out. There's never a correct answer with After Effects. You just got to try out a few things, look at your canvas, the composition, and see how it looks. And also here maybe right click EZ Es out. And the last one can just remain as it's the end of your clip. So maybe I want to trim here my clip itself to the end keyframes. Pull down Shift again to make it snap to that keyframes. That's what everything. That's why this technique is called time remapping. We're not just adding slow motion or fast motion to the entire clip, but we're working on different parts. We're making certain parts go fast, other parts go slow, and we're mixing them together, creating transitions between the fast parts and the slow parts. But really, this is something you got to practice. To me, it was very overwhelming. The time remapping. I had my keyframes wrong all the time. They were messed up. So you got to practice this a little bit until you're familiar with it, and then I'll see you back in the next lesson for some masking techniques. 7. Masking: Oh. Hey, I'm sorry. I was just masking. You know, cutting out a piece from a paper? Oh, you don't know. Oh, well, let me just show you how masking is done then. I've got a brand new project in here with a new composition and a clip inside. Clip number seven this time, which is a still image, and we have our model standing there on this cliff. Now, let's say that I want to cut out a piece from that video. Well, we can do that with the mask tool or the Pen tool. And we can find that on top here in the tool bar, the pen tool with the short key G. Now, very important is that you have your clip selected as you start masking. If you have your clip deselected and I'm going to take my pen tool, the G tool, I'm actually going to draw a shape instead of a mask. Let me just click and make some points like this. I just created some sort of a rectangle, which is a new layer added to my timeline called a shape layer. But Shape layers is for later in this class. For now, I'm going to delete that shape layer and instead have my clip seven selected and then start drawing something like that rectangle or whatever shape you like. And there we go. We have cut out a piece from the video. It's as simple as that. And if we expand the properties of our clip, you'll now see a new category in here called masks. Expanding that again, we can find our mask one in here. Expanding that again, we get some mask options, such as the fetter, we can decrease or increase the opacity. And we have a mask expansion. So that's already in a nutshell how masking works and what it is. But now, where would we use masking? Well, I've got a great example for that. I'm going to delete my mask one. You can just select it in here and delete it. And I'm going to browse to my explorer inside my Images folder. You guys can also see that if you download all of the project files, and there's an image in there called AI Generated. And I'm just going to drag that into my project panel like so. I'm going to double click on it to view it in the layers window or in the source window. And as you can see, it's the exact same as the video, but the foreground is a little bit different. All I did was feed in a frame from the video into gemini and I asked it to make the foreground more interesting. And this is what it came up with. And that's great. I'm going to close my layers window so that I can focus here on my composition window. And I'm going to drag that image on top of clip number seven. The image itself is a little bit smaller than the video. So what I want to do first is align it with the video. And in order to do that, I'm going to open up my opacity control, and you can either expand the options here, go to transform to find opacity, or let me just collapse all of that. You can also just hit the T button on your keyboard. I know T for opacit T, I guess, makes no sense. But that's a short key. And at all times, if you want to change any of your short keys, you can go to edit on top and then go over to keyboard shortcuts, where you can see all the shortcuts and also change them to your likings. That's with every program the same. So I'm going to decrease the opacity a bit so that I can see both layers. And now I can go ahead and reposition my image and scale it, hold down shift as we scale that. So that it retains the aspect ratio. So I just want to move that into place so that definitely here it aligns with the video. That's the entire idea behind it. And it takes some time. You need to fumble around a bit. By the way, with your layer selected, you can also use your arrow keys to nudge it to the left to the right, up and down. But something like this should be okay. And I'm mostly looking at the rock here. Over there, of course, here I cannot compare because we generated something new and also not the talent itself because we're comparing a still image with a video, obviously. Okay, I'm going to zoom back out. There we go. If you want to fit this back to the frame here, you can go down here, this little drop down menu and say fit. Let's increase the opacity again to 100. Now, because my video is shot on a tripod, everything is not moving except for the talent itself. So that means I can use anything of the image except for the talent. So let's cut out a piece from that image. With having it selected, very important. I'm going to take my pen tool and I just want to draw what I want to keep or retain in the image. I can click to create points, create a pad, but I can also click and hold to create that lever again and have some sort of a smooth path going on in here, an arc. You've seen that before when working on a position pad during an animation? Like, so like that. I'm going to zoom out a bit more And just click to close that entire path. Alright, it's looking good. Let's put that back to fit. And if we play this back now, we have an interesting foreground, plus we have our model doing our moves. Now, there's a small issue here because we've made that cutout, we can kind of see the line of that cutout appear and here, and we can kind of hide that by going into the mask properties and just increasing the feather a bit. And now we cannot see that hardline, and that is used very often. So this is one great way to use a mask. There are so many AI tools out there lately. You can just generate something, put it in there, and then mask something out of that generated image or even video to blend that with your existing video. But masks can also be animated. And to show you that, I'm going to open up my footage folder again, head over to my clips and this time, select clip number ten and clip 12. Select them both and drag them into the project panel. And I'm just going to drag any of these two. Doesn't really matter into the new composition button to create a new comp for that, and let's rename that comp to animated mask. And I'm going to drag that into my comps folder and drag the other two clips into my footage folder, and let's also drag that AI generated image into the footage folder. You can make an extra image folder if you like, so that organization is up to you, but it's just important that you organize. Alright. I'm also going to drag clip number ten on top of clip number 12, because usually when you're going to mask, you want to have two clips or multiple clips on top of each other because that's what masking is all about. You see, if you cut out a piece from a paper, you can kind of see the underlying paper. So clip number ten is kind of this whip pen. We have the model standing there. And then underneath that, let me just disable that. Clip for a moment. Underneath that, we have another kind of whip end, but more slower of her turning around, but the camera is going into the same direction. Now, what I want to do here is as the camera moves, I kind of want to reveal the second video right next to her, creating a transition, and that's where masking comes in again. Now, interesting is that we don't have to be at the start. We can also start somewhere in the middle. And then from here, create the mask. With that clip selected, take the Pentool or the G short key, and I'm going to draw a mask, maybe zoom out a little bit around her head. You can do this roughly, but still a little bit detailed. Perhaps. Because after all, we are moving, we are having this motion blur, so it doesn't have to be that precise. And so you just click and drag to make these arcs to fit it around your clothes. As you create a new point, you can always take the lever from another point, drag it around. Hold down space bar, and then move up. And I'm just going to continue to go around her with that mask. Now, if you were to accidentally deselect your mask by just taking back your selection tool and clicking somewhere, and you're going to take your Pen tool again, you want to continue, you'll notice that you actually start to create a second mask. Yes, that is possible. We can create multiple masks on the same clip, and it will be indicated by a different color. If that happens, don't worry too much about it, delete these points. You can see which point you have selected, like so, but just delete those and select the last point from your previous mask. And once you've done that, you can continue from that mask. But masking is really the same in every application, whether it's Photoshop, premiere. So if you are familiar already with this, this will go smoother. If it's the first time you're masking, definitely practice a bit with it. Make some cutout, see how those lovers work and everything. Alright, we are done with the more precise mask. We can now be more rough with the rest, like that. I'm just going to click around so that I can collode the mask. And that will reveal here the right side of the underlying clip. I can either expand the properties again, go to masks mask one. Here it is mask PAD. That's the thing that we want to animate. Or if I'm going to collapse all of that, I can also just hit the key on my keyboard for mask, which will open up the mask pad. And at the current position and time, the mask looks good, so I definitely want to record that with a keyframes. And now it's just a matter of going frame by frame and adjusting the mask. And instead of scrubbing through the timeline, I'm going to hold down my control key and then use one of the arrows to go one frame to the left or one frame to the right. Uh, let's start with the right side. Going to zoom in a bit more one frame to the right. And I want to take this mask now. I currently have the entire mask selected, so I'm just moving the entire part up one frame. But sometimes you notice that you want to select specific points on your mask. Well, in order to do that, for example, here on the bottom, I'm just going to deselect the mask in here, like so like my clip again. So no, I don't have the mask selected, but I do have my clip selected. And when I have one point selected, after that, I can even click and drag to select multiple points. So now I'm moving these four points individually, and I can align them better what are close here on the right. Point bring it forward. Let's see how everything looks. I want to select all of these points again here. You can also use your arrow keys now, by the way, to nudge them. Into place, and then that process continues. You take all of the mask points, you move it up, one frame forward, and so on. I'll fast forward this part. Now, if you believe that your camera Whippan is going into a pretty steady motion, it is possible that you can skip a few frames. So instead of going one frame forward and adjusting, I'm actually going to go 23 frames forward and then take my mask and adjust it. So in my animation, let me zoom in a bit more in my timeline. I mean, it just goes from this point to that point. So in between, it will also follow. And oftentimes, like I said, when that movement is pretty smooth, it follows correctly. So let's just do that. Let's go three frames forward, adjust one, two, three, which saves me a bit of time, select my clip, deselect the mask so that I can select individual points to adjust a bit better here, select all of them again. Go one, two, three frames forward. Hey, perhaps the bottom ones again that I need to manually adjust a bit better. Alright, that's the first half of the animation, and I know this is a tedious process. But hey, welcome to After Effects. Now, sometimes it is easier to not yet see the image behind it. You just want to see your mask pad, and that's it. You can then go into the mask option here into the blending mode of the mask itself. It's currently set to at. But if I change that to none, that will not show the cutout, but only the mask itself. And now that we are back here in the middle, we got to work a bit backwards. So let's continue. I'm going to select all the points here on the left side. I mean, the right side like that, and then go one frame back this time, or maybe three frames. Let's see if that works. I'm going to move this up and just double check if it follows, it does. It follows. Okay, I'm going to fast forward at this part again. And we are done. We got a ton of keyframes, but our mask has been animated. And to see the transition, all we got to do now is just set the blending mode of the mask back to At and play that back. Looking really cool. Now, you can see that the edge is pretty hard, so we already know where to change that. Let's expand the mask properties and increase the feather a tiny bit. And oftentimes when you are increasing the fetter, you get this halo, and that is because you're also kind of expanding the mask a little bit with a fetter, so you might want to decrease the expansion a tiny bit to bite a bit more back into your subjects. No, obviously, the more time you spend on animating that mask, making sure that each point is exactly on par with the edge of the subject, the better it's going to look. I mean, that's what everything in life. Sometimes you can do things pretty rough. Other times, you have to be very precise. Definitely, if you don't have such a movement going that's it for masking. You know how to create one right now. You know how to animate one, and that's basically all there is to it. So practice that a little bit. As I said before. Definitely, if masking ends creating that pat with the arcs and the levers and everything is new to you. And then I'll see you back in the next lesson. 8. Mask Tracking: You might be thinking, Jordy, this is not what I signed up for. So much work to animate the mask. Well, I've got a solution for that. We can automatically animate the mask. So what I've got right here in my timeline is a clip of our model and a close up. And what I'm going to do is make her eye glow. And for that, we're going to have to mask out her eye and then add some effect to it, some coloring effects. So I'm going to start by just duplicating that clip. When it's selected, just hit Control D for duplicate or making a copy of it. And I'm going to rename the top one, hit the return key on your keyboard to rename it to glowing eye. Then with that selected and being at the start of the timeline, I'm going to draw my mask. But instead of taking the Pen tool which allows us to create a custom shape, I'm going to take the shape tool, and it's currently set to the rectangle tool. But if you click and hold, it opens up a menu which allows us to also take something like the Ellipse tool. And that will allow us to create an ellipse. But if you hold down the Shift key on your keyboard, it will snap to being a perfect circle. And even better, if you hold down your control key, it will create a circle mask from the center point where you clicked. To better demonstrate, let me just hit Control Z to undo that mask. I'm going to stand here in the middle of the eye. Like so, click and drag, hold down the control key to make sure it's being drawn from the center. And if needed, you can hold down the Shift key to make it a perfect circle, but maybe it is not needed because of the perspective of the camera, so maybe in the lips, and I might want to nudg this a bit more to the left. So what I can do is just take my selection tool again. Take that mask and just move it a bit to the left so that it covers the eye. Now, animating this mask so that it follows your eye has to be very precise. We don't want to see that there's a mask drawn there, and that's where mask tracking comes in or basically automatically animating your mask. And in order to do that, we just have to right click the mask that you just created. And choose track mask. That will open up the tracker window, which you can also just open up for the window menu on top and then from there, choose the tracker, which is right here. Now, we get two options. One is the tracking itself, and then the second is the method. Like, what do we want to track? Only the masks position up and down, left and right will be tracked. You also want to track the rotation. So that means the mask can also rotate as it moves around or also scale. Doesn't have to skew Va a perspective, which is kind of 2.5 de tracking. Enter also two face tracking options, one for a very rough outline and one for detailed features. In this case, I'm actually just going to take the first one, the position. It's round, so it doesn't really have to rotate. Her head is also not rotating. I'm not really rotating the camera either. I'm just kind of moving the camera slowly around. Her head is moving a little bit, so only the position is fine. That's going to give us the most accurate tracking. Now, of course, I always encourage you to do that experiment. Just try out a different tracking technique and see what it does. You can always undo your action and do it again. Alright, then the analyzer or the tracker option. We can go forward by one frame by clicking this button, and you can see here that it automatically creates a keyframes. Let me just open up the mask pads property. For the mask pads, and you can continue doing that. You know, just click one frame forward each time. Or we can also just play it back and let it just continue to track that entire video. And you can see here now how beautifully that mask is following her eye. Definitely, with shots that have more contrast in them, more detail in them, this option works really good. Alright, perfect. It has animated the entire mask frame by frame, as you can see here in the timeline, and it is following her eye exactly. We can now go ahead and go into the Effects and preset senal, and I'm going to look for the U and saturation. It's right there. So just drag that onto the glowing eye clip. And from there, we can do something like change the and you can see here what that does. Or we can also colorize it to just give it an entire color by enabling colorize and then change the U down here to what color you want it to be, perhaps have it like red. I don't know. We can increase the saturation, as well as the lightness or the brightness, like so. Now, it doesn't really look so good. And by the way, if you don't want to see the mask in your canvas as you're working on these effects, you can disable to toggle the mask and che pad visibility with this button down here in the composition window. Obviously, this looks pretty bad. So we have to do a couple of things. First of all, we might want to blend that better with the clip down below. Let me just collapse this for a second and toggle the modes again from the button down here, which reveals the modes or the blending modes. And let's take something like at. So you can see now that it much better blends with the existing clip. And, of course, we also want to fetter the mask. So let's expand it here again and increase the fetter a bit so that we don't have that hard edge. And as we've learned before, we also want to pull back the expansion a tiny bit as we're fettering. But hey, this is looking pretty cool, as you can see here, her eye is red. Awesome. But the red glow is kind of like bleeding above her eye, and that is normal. If we enable the mask path again, you know, we've drawn a circle, but we also have her eyelet in there. So actually, the mask shouldn't have been a perfect circle. So do we have to do all this again? Well, don't worry. You can create a mask and then afterwards, cut out a piece from that mask. And that's exactly what we're gonna do right now. With the clip selected and not having your mask on selected, I'm just going to take the pen tool and draw a second mask. But I'm going to make sure to be at the start of my clip because we're also going to track that and perhaps zoom in a bit more, and I'm just going to draw a mask like so around your eyelid the part that I want to remove from the other mask, and the other points can be pretty rough, like so. Now, by default, it will also just add that new mask as part of the current mask. But in the option here in the mask blending mode, instead of add, we're going to choose subtract. So instead of adding the mask, we're going to subtract apart, and that will create a cutout in the first mask. And so we're going to right click mask number two and say track mask as well. Always double check here in the tracker window which mask has been selected, currently mask two, which is what we want. And then you hit track forward, and it's going to do the exact same thing. Now don't worry too much as it's going to do its tracking. It's going to disable all of the tracking mode, so your video might look weird once you have applied effects to it, but that's going to solve itself once it's done tracking. At all times, by the way, you can just click that play button again to stop the tracking, if you think that you might need to adjust a bit. So you can just take any of these points, adjust a tiny bit if needed, and then continue the tracking. Of course, you want to avoid that as much as possible because making manual adjustments in a tracking could be visible. And we are done. Let's go back to the beginning here. You can see the cutout and obviously also here, we want to fetter that mask bit. I'm going to disable the mask pad so that I can see the fetter better here on top. Like, so, aunt maybe also decrease the expansion or increase this time, a tiny bit. So now only her eye has been targeted. Looks great. Let me set the zoom to fit. Let's lay this back. Her eye is beautifully glowing red, and the two masks are tracking along. We don't even notice that we created a mask, and that is what this is all about. Now, maybe one last thing, let's make her eye glow come in, which we can use just normal opacity of that entire clip. So hit the T button on your keyboard. Here is the opacity. So sending it to zero, sets the entire layer to zero opacity, and we can use that to make the glow come in. So enable animation for opacity. Let's move this keyframes a bit to the right side because that is 100. Set it to a zero at the start. So that way, it comes in, zero, and then on the end, perhaps we can also create a new keyframe for hundreds. Then go forward in time and set it to a zero. So now we have a fade out on the end and a fade in in the beginning and in between, it just stays 100 opacity. So there we have it mask tracking. Really fun to play around with. You can also track faces and all of that. Definitely try and do that with some of the example footage or maybe something that you shot yourself. And then I'll see you back in the next lesson. 9. Luma Keying: There are different techniques to cut out something from your video. We've just seen masking, which is one of those. Another technique is called keying. And you've probably heard about a green key before. That's where we're going to select the green and then remove that. We're taking a key from the green color. But a color key or a green key is not the only way to key. Can also do a luma key. So we're working again on this clip here where the model is doing this awesome movement on these rocks. And interesting is that we have a very dark foreground and a very bright background. And that indicates to me that we can do a luma key. Luma stands for luminosity, bright or dark, and that means that we can just say, Hey, remove all of the bright parts. And if we go to the Effects and Presets library, we can look for luma key. But we find out that it is within the category obsolete. And let me just remove my search and open up the obsolete folder entirely. Here we can find a whole bunch of effects that are planned to be removed eventually. So you can use these, but maybe in one of the future updates of After Effects, these effects might be gone. That doesn't mean that After Effects is removing features from its program. It just means that it's replacing them with other effects or other tools within After Effects. Fact, if we go over to the keying folder, which holds all the effects to do with a key, you know, we have the chroma key in here as well or the key lt effect. This one here is used for green keys and blue keys and whatnot. But what we're interested in is the extract effect. And this is exactly the same as the Luma key effect, but I guess that they just made it better and renamed it for some reason. So let's take that extract and drag it onto clip number seven. Nice about this effect is that we can see a histogram. So this shows the bright parts and the dark parts in your clip. So here on the left side, we have black, and then here, we have white, and you can see a clear difference between these spikes right here represent all of the bright areas in the shot, and this spike represent the dark parts. Then what channel do we like to take a key from? Is that the entire luminosity spectrum, or is that only the red, green, blue, or the Alpha? Well, in most cases, like in this case, it's going to be the entire luma spectrum. And then we get two points, the black point and the white point where we can start removing something from. As I change the black point, you can see here that it starts to cut in into all of these rocks, the black areas. You can also see it here visually. That means that, yes, we can also just take these points and just move them to the right. Now, this is sometimes easier because if I want to remove all the dark parts, I can just move that entire indicator to the middle to here, and now I know that everything on the left side has been keyed out. And the same works here on the right side, and I might need to make this window a tiny bit bigger to see those points as well. I can just stick that and remove all of the whites. Now, that could leave us with a very hard edge as we can see in the composition. And for that, we have a softness control. So either for the whiteness here on the bottom, the black softness or the white softness, we can increase that or we can also just take the bottom points and drag that out, which will soften that edge. It's revealing back a bit from the sky, so I might want to push that softness back. Maybe push the keying all the way back. And sometimes your edge might still be a bit too much, then we have to bring this back a bit more and maybe bite a bit into the black areas here. And sometimes you might think, Okay, my keying looks great. But here's a great way to see if it's actually good or not. In my timeline, I'm going to right click in an empty space, go over to new. We've already learned about the null object and the adjustment layer. We also have a solid in here. The solid, we can pick a color down here. I'm going to take pink, which is the most used color to check how your keying is going because this is a color that we don't often see back in a video. So you want to take something that you don't see in your shots, it okay. And I'm going to bring that solid below clip number seven. And now we can very clearly see that we have been biting here into these rocks, which have probably a highlight from the sun on them. So I'm going to select my clip again, and I might want to readjust until all that purple is gone. But sometimes it's just really hard to get that purple out of there to get a good key if you're working with a shot like this where it's just static, the only thing we got to focus on is the model, and she looks pretty good. She has been keyed out pretty nicely. So in order to fix the foreground, what I can actually do is what it's selected, hit Control D to make a duplication of that, and we're going to rename the top clip to four ground mask or something. And I'm going to delete the extract effect from the foreground mask clip. Then take my mask tool, as we've seen before, and I'm going to manually bring back those rocks. And you can do this roughly. You can do this more precise. That's going to depend on your clips. I'm just going to do it fast because by now, you guys know the idea behind this like, so just go over that entire rock. Definitely make sure that we have this green grass inside of the mask because that is probably being keyed out. So you add a little bit to close my mask like that. And you might want to fetter it. You almost always want to do that. With it selected, you can also just hit the F key on your keyboard to bring up the mask fetter. And there we go. If I now enable and disable that layer, you can see here definitely in these parts in the bottom left that we have fixed that. So keying or cutting out a certain part in your video often involves multiple techniques. We do a key, but on top of that, we also do a manual mask. So why are we doing that? I'm going to disable the magenta or the pink layer in the back because obviously we don't need that. I'm going to go back to my project window. And here, we can find a night sky JPAG image is a still photo that I took, and I'm going to drag that on the bottom as a background. And this is a way to change the sky, and it's a very large photo, so I want to de scale that hold down shift to keep the proportions zoom back in. Let's see where we want to position that. Kind of like this mate, maybe zoom in a bit more. I don't know. Alright, looking pretty good. So we went from a pretty normal sky to this awesome night sky with the stars, low sunlight and everything. We have just done a sky replacement, obviously, using a keying effect because if we had to manually animate a mask around the talent here who's moving her arms around, that was very tedious. So we combine two techniques. One was key and the still part was masked. Now, there's one problem left, and that is that the sky in the back and the foreground doesn't really match. I can tell that the sky was replaced. Well, for that, we're going to have to do some color correction, and that is for the next lesson. 10. Color Correction: Color correction is going to be one of those things that takes years to master, but it is going to be part of your VVX journey. When you're going to composite different layers together, like the foreground video was shot in the Faroe Islands, and then the night sky picture, I think, was shot a couple of years back in Iceland. So even though they have nothing to do with each other, we are bringing them together to create a new kind of video, and we can see that something off with the colors here. It doesn't feel natural, and that's where color correction comes in. That's the first step. We're going to correct the colors to make them match. I'm going to go into my Effects of Crist folder and look for lumetry. Now, since we have created a foreground mask of these rocks, we kind of have two clips here. So does that mean that we have to apply the lumitry color to these two clips? Well, no, we can group them together into one layer. And to do that, simply select layers that you want to group, right click and choose precompose. Is going to give you a pop up Box what you want to do. So if you have created certain animations and stuff like that, you could say, like, Okay, move those animations as well in the group or apply those animations on the group. Usually, 99% of the time, you're going to choose move all attributes into the new composition. And we're going to give that a name. Let's call it the cliffs, because after all, it are cliffs and hit okay. And interesting now is that you can see that this is a composition. And if we expand the coms folder, you can see here that a new composition has been created. What is this about? Well, we can put a composition inside of a composition. If I were to double click on clips, it will just open up a new timeline with these two clips inside. So a composition can either be the timeline that you work in and eventually going to export, but it can also be a group that you will use inside another composition. Technique is also called nesting. And if you edit using Premiere Pro, and there, they also call it a nested sequence. It works the exact same way. But now that we have that one composition, we can easily drag the lumetric color effect to it, like so. We're currently at night, and that means two things. It's more bluish and it's darker. So I'm going to open up my basic correction in lumitry color, and let's start by just decreasing the exposure. Make it a bit darker, especially in the shadows. So perhaps I want to bring down the shadows as well, like that. We're almost going to create a silhouette. We can still have a little bit of highlights. That's okay because we also have still some light in the sky, but not as much anymore. And finally, I want to decrease the temperature, make that a bit more bluish. You can definitely see that here in the highlights. So already with these few adjustments, we can match that layer better to the background. Okay, what else can we do? The background is in the back. It's in the far back. And usually what's in the back is out of focus. So I also want to add some sort of a blurriness to it so that the stars are not as sharp. Let's go to the effects and presets and look for blur. And you'll find a ton of blurs, you want to go in here, the blur and sharpness. And there are different ones that we can choose from. You have some very simple blur effects like the Gaussian blur, but you also have the fast box blur, which I like to use more often. It has a better look to the blurriness. There is also a camera lens blur which you should be using but it's a pretty heavy effect. You're going to have trouble playing back your video, and I don't see the difference that much. So you got to see for what kind of project is it? Is it for a high end client. For now, let's just go for fast box blur and drag that onto the night sky image. And let's increase that a tiny bit, not too much, like, I don't know, like two, maybe. It can be pretty subtle. That looks pretty good. And just like that, we have color corrected our shots and match these two different clips together. So that's the color correction part. Next up is the color great. And with the color grade, we're going to give a specific look to the video. And this is nothing new, so I'm going to go fast over this. Right click, go over to new and adjustment layer because we want to apply the color grad to both the cliffs and the night sky, and I'm actually going to delete the magenta solid in there because we no longer need that. It was more of a helping layer with the keying. Right, adjustment layer. I'm going to rename that to Color, great. Stay organized, guys, and we're going to take the lumitry effect again. Lumetry There it is. Lumitry color onto the adjustment layer. Let's go to creative. We can choose one of the looks in here. There are a whole bunch of presets, different kinds of looks pre built in. There are a lot of film stocks in here, for example, the Kodak, you can see here what that does. But you can also pick a different one, monochrome, go black and white, if you prefer that. What else do we have in here? The cinyspace that's, you know, cinematic. It's very intense. So we can decrease the intensity, also. Got some more controls down here, such as faded film, which is also nice to get that film look a little bit in there. It's going to wash out the blacks. And if you like, you can go back to basic correction and actually increase the temperature. And you might think, Hey, Jordy, aren't we at night? Shouldn't the front cliffs be more bluish? Well, yes, we did that. We first matched two colors, and now we can just take both layers and add more warrant in there, if we like so, because we're changing both of the layers. Your clips are matched, it doesn't really matter what you do in the grades. And then, of course, you want to show off your awesome effects and color grade with that very typical transition reveal. Let's create that as well. I'm going to go back to my project panel because what I want to do is take in my footage folder, clip number seven again and drag that on top of everything else. So this is just a normal clip without having any effects applied to it. So if we toggle it on or off, you can kind of see the before and after. Now, we could create a mask and animate that, but that's tedious. That's too much work. So let's just go into the Effects and Presets panel and look for linear Wipe transition. Drag that onto clip number seven. And we get some very simple properties like a transition completion, which is going to create that wipe, and you can also choose the wipe angle or even fetter that line if you wish so. But we're not going to do that. Let me just reset wipe angle, right click, reset. And we're going to start on the left side. Lick on the Stopwatch to enable animation. We're going to move forward in time. And we're going to set that to 100. And if we press the U key with that clip selected, we can then also see the keyframes that were created. So that's why you most typically want to go back to your timeline to animate the properties. And what I also like to do always is right click the first keyframes, choose Ease out, and then ease in on the last keyframes. That way, it goes a bit smoother. Look at that. The awesome reveal of the sky replacement and the cinematic color grate. Isn't that something? Alright, practice that a bit, do some color correction, and then I'll see you back in the next lesson. 11. Video Stabilization: Hey, welcome back. We've already gone through almost half of the class, which is really good. Congratulations for that for sticking with me for so long. Anyways, we're going to take a look at some more automations, inside After Effects. We've already seen the mask tracking, which was sort of an automation, but there are a ton more. So let's explore that starting off with stabilizing our footage. I've got right here in After Effects is clip number 11. I put that into a new composition. We've done that a dozen times already, so you should know how that works. And if we play back this clip, you can see here how it kind of shakes a bit. It was shot handheld. And by the way, that was not because I was scared because of the high cliffs. It was just very windy, okay? To stabilize this shot, we're going to have to locate the tracker window. I can already see it here on the right hand side. If you can't locate it, you know that you can always go to the window menu on top and then look for tracker, which is down. So we can find a couple of options, track camera, track motion, warp stabilizer, and stabilized motion. We're going to work with all of them throughout this class, but for now, let's focus on these two warp stabilizer and stabilized motion. The first one is the easy mode, warp stabilizer. Let's just click on it, which will actually apply the warp stabilizer effect to the clip itself, and it'll do some analyzation of the motion of the camera and then apply a stabilization to it. And it's already done, as you can see. And let's play this back. Let's see how that looks. The handheld motion is a whole lot smoother. What if we want this to make it seem like it was shot on a tripod? Well, let's explore some of the settings here. And a result, we have smooth motion, which is currently set, but we can also choose no motion, like the name implies, no motion at all, so that it seems as though it was shot from a tripod, and that works really good. Now, stabilizing your footage can be done through different methods, and you might already be familiar with that if you also edit in premiere or final cut or Da Vinci resolve because they also have a stabilization effect build in. And the warp stabilizer is really just that. It is an effect that is also present in Adobe Premiere Pro, so it works the exact same way in here. And under methods, we can find some different options on how we would like to stabilize it. The subspace warp is going to bend the pixels around to stabilize the entire shot, but it could cause some weird distortions, definitely, if you have heavy motion. So that could be a reason to maybe go for perspective, which is not going to bend the pixels, but it's going to, like, your image around. You also have position, scale rotation, a very simple two dimensional adjustment, or only just position. Now, we're going to explore this a bit further in a second, so don't worry too much about it just yet. As for the framing, if we're going to stabilize, that means we're also going to have to zoom in a bit into the shots. Because if we don't set that to stabilize only. The clip is actually being animated. It's counter wise to the camera shake, which makes it seem as though it is shot from a tripod now that there's no motion. Obviously we don't want to see these black borders. So for framing, we're always going to choose to crop and also auto scale. So that is one way to stabilize your footage using the warp stabilizer effect. Also something we can find back within Premiere Pro. But let me just delete that warp stabilizer effect because there is a second way to stabilize our shot. Is through a manual tracking. Because what After Effects is all about is taking manual control over all the vids, the animations, the tracking, and whatnot that you're doing. Plus, it will make us better understand what stabilizing and tracking is actually doing to our clips. The second option we have here in the tracker window is the stabilize motion. Clicking on that is going to open up the clip and its source window into the layer clip. And let me just make some more space for that. This time, there has not been an effect applied to my clip. In fact, to make the tracking work, we have to look at the clip without any effect applied to it. Maybe you've already been working on your clip. You have applied a bunch of effects and animations to it, maybe, well, the stabilized motion wants to look at the source clip without anything applied to it. That's why we are working now in this window, the layer window. And so I currently have one tracking point, as you can see here. I can take that and I can drag it to somewhere else. And it is very much zoomed in because we really want to pinpoint that to some sort of high contrast pixel. We got to ask ourselves the question, what do we want to track? Is that the position? Well, it's already enabled here. And we can perfectly do that with one tracking point, up and down, left and right. That's it. Position. But we can also track the rotation, and enabling that will create a second tracking point. We can also enable scale, which also it's just going to use the second tracking point. Once we're going to track the rotation or the scale as well, we're going to need two tracking points. See that's moving backwards and forwards when treating hands held two points in your clip will come closer or go further apart. Same with rotation. If you were to rotate your camera around, those two tracking points are going to rotate against each other. And it is that data that we need to perform the tracking. So how does this work? Well, let's zoom a bit in on track point number one. We've got an inner square and an outer square, and we can actually make them bigger. Both the outer and the inner. And then we have this little cross hair here in the middle, which is going to define the points that we want to track. Now, tracking works best on high contrast objects, things that really stand out against the rest. And I can see here on the left hand side a bit of poop. There were a lot of sheep there, so hence the poop. So I can just take that tracking point and drag it on top of that poop. Now, the inner square is going to define the points that we want to track. So we can make that smaller and really make it fit around the poop. And then we've got the outer square, which is going to define the searching area. So with every frame that we're going to move forward, that poop is going to be somewhere else because we are moving the camera. And so it's going to look within that search area where that poop is next. So with heavy motion, you want to make your search area bigger, and with smaller motion, you can make it smaller. The bigger that search area is, the longer the tracking is going to take. That is why you have some control over that. Otherwise, you got to wait days until the tracking is done. Let's take the second tracking point. I'm going to make this a bit bigger like that and drag it to the second poop. I can see laying around here on the right side. And it's good to have these two tracking points be separated this far because that way, we can see the tiniest motion in the rotation as well as the scale. Alright, let me just adjust this a bit more, make it fit around the second poop, as well as the search area like this. Right, we've set our two tracking points like this next sure to be at the start of your clip, and now it just works the exact same way as we did with the mask tracking. You can go one frame forward like that. Automatically, the tracking points will adjust or you can just play back your entire clip and hope for the best. If you can see that somewhere, it might go wrong. You can always hit Stop, go back a couple of frames by holding down your control key and then going back with your arrow keys. Then I would not adjust your tracking points. I would just make them bigger. Like this or make the search area bigger and do those trackings again, so you go forward again. You know, maybe, let me just demonstrate that. I'm going to make my tracking point like super small, and my search area may be also super small, and you will see that this might go off a bit. I'm going to play this back. For some reason, it's still following pretty good. Okay, okay, here it's going wrong. Here it's going wrong. I just hit Stop. So let's go back frame by frame. Let's look where it goes wrong. So here you can see it jumps to a different poop. That's because my search area is too small. So let's keep going back frame by frame until we're back on the correct poop. I'm going to make my tracking point bigger as well as my search area, and then I'm going to just re track. You can go one frame forward or just play it back like that. Alright, and the tracking has been done. You can already kind of see all the keyframes, the animation that it has created. But now, how can we apply this to our clip so that it has been stabilized. Here on the bottom, we can find edit targets. Okay? What target would you like to apply this tracking data to? Obviously, clip number 11. It's the only clip in the composition, so there's nothing else to choose. Okay. And now we can just hit Apply and it's going to ask you, do you want to apply it to X and Y or only to X or only to Y, which is up and down the left and the right mot. Obviously we want boat, which is going to be like 99.99% of the cases. Select that and hit Okay. And now we can close the source window or the layer window. And just like that, our clip has been stabilized. But we can see the black borders here on top because we're doing a manual stabilization. So we're also going to have to manually adjust for that. Now, the problem is that we cannot just scale the clip up. Let's have a look at all the keyframes, the animations that have been created. One of the animations is actually the scale. So either we're going to have to adjust all of these keyframes or we're going to have to find a workaround, such as a second transform property, perhaps, so that we have a double position, a double scale, a double opacity and rotation, perhaps. Does that exist? Well, let's have a look at the effects and presets window. And I'm going to search for transform. We can find it here under the distort category transform. Drag that onto the clip. And yes, there we have it. The anchor point, position, the scale, and whatnot. It's all in there. So now that we have these double, these are not animated, so we can just scale up the clip a bit more. Let me just make a bit more room so that we can see what we're doing. Scale it up a tiny bits. Alright, looking good. And just like that, we have stabilized our shot. Now, why are we doing this manually while there is this automatic warp stabilization effect, which does an even better job, in my opinion? Well, after effect is all about taking control. And yes, for this example, the warp stabilizer was the best choice. But for another situation, the manual tracking is going to be better to give us that extra control. In fact, what we've just done is not just a stabilization it is a tracking, and tracking is something we very often used within After Effects, and it's also one of the strongest features of After Effects because once you got your tracking, we can do a whole lot more than just a stabilization with that. But that is for the next lesson. 12. Rotoscope: In the previous lesson, we've already explored motion tracking, but before we delve even deeper into that, I first want to show you guys how rotoscoping works. We're working on the same clip as before, and what I want to do this time is actually cut out my entire subject so that I can play something else behind her, such as a text or something like that. Already kind of done that with the luma key or the extract effect, which can cut out anything that is brighter or darker within your shots. But the problem here is that we are pretty close to the subject, and definitely things like her hair, which have a lot of detail are not going to be keyed out that good. Plus, on top of that, we got bright spots from the clouds, but also darker shots here from these cliffs. So an extract or a luma ke will not work in this example. Okay, so what else can we do? We can draw a mask around her manually adjust that mask frame by frame. Okay, but her cape right there is moving a lot because of the wind. He hair is going to all kinds of places. This is going to be a very tedious process. Hm, there has to be a better way to do this. After all, After Effects is the king for automated tracking and whatnot. Well, luckily, there is, and that technique is called rotoscoping. Let's go to the start of the clip to start the rotoscoping process. And I want to go up to my tool bar here on top and look for the Rota Brush tool. Click on that to activate it. And then click in your clip, which will open up a pop up menu, and it actually says, Hey, to use the Roto Brush tool, you got to open your clip in the layer spanel. We've seen that before. So I'm just going to say, Okay, okay, fine. Let's open up in the layers window. So what I'm going to do here is double click on my clip 11. You know what? I'm actually going to take that window and docket here into the composition window so that I have two tabs. One is my timeline view, and one is a source view. I still have my tracking point in there because motion tracking also works on a source, but we don't want that. So what I'm going to do actually is from the tracker window, make sure that the current track says none to remove that. So I have this brush, as you can see right here, a green dot, and what I can do with that is select what I want to mask out, which is going to be the model. So I'm just going to draw around her like this, you can kind of, like, paint and select what you want to add into your selection, her legs, maybe a bit of the grass as well here in front, like this. Okay, great. And it has made a selection. Let me zoom in a bit more on my subject because the selection was not that great. For starters, the clips here in the back should not be added. So I'm going to do now is hold down my Alt key, and you can see now that my brush turns red, which allows me to select what I want to remove, like this. And you can do this pretty precise like this, even a bit more bite into that stuff over there. Let's go of your alt key to select what needs to be maxed out, like here. There a bit more from that edge perhaps here, like this, here as well, a bit more from her booth. In between her legs, we also want to remove that. Let's band up. You can do that by holding down your space bar. And I'm going to select a bit more from her shoulder here, like so face as well. And if you believe that your brush is too big or too small, you want to change that size, what we can do is go to the window menu on top and look for brushes, and it's right there. Just click on that, which opens up the brushes panel. I'm going to collapse my tracker for a moment. And from there, we can change the diameter. We can make it bigger. Or we can make it smaller, which is definitely nice if you want to work on some of the details. Like, let's make that small to really make sure we have this part here selected as well. Like, so and not have this here, a bit more from your finger. You can go really precise with this. Luckily, we only have to do this once. All the rest is going to be automated. A bit more from here. Alright, looking good. Now, her hair is a little bit of a problem because it is so much detail. Her hair waves in the wind. So how should we select that? It's not going to be easy. Well, that's where the hair tool comes in. If we go back to the Rotor Brush tool, click and hold, you can see here that we have the refined Edge tool, which is the hair tool. And I'm going to make my brush a bit bigger. Like, so perhaps. And I'm just going to very roughly draw around the edge of her head to select all the hair, and you can see here that it creates a contrast area, and it's going to use that contrast area for those details. Maybe a bit more from here, as well. Like that. Alright, it's looking good, looking perfect. Now, all we have to do is just play our clip, but pay attention at all times how the mask is going to follow your subject because it can go wrong, and that's where you want to adjust. So let's play this back. Make sure that your finger hoovers your space bar as you do that and take a look it's going pretty good so far. Pretty good. Still Oh, no, it's not going good. It has also removed a part from her belly right here, so we want to bring that back in. I'm going to take my normal brush tool. And I'm actually going to go back to where it went wrong. Let me just zoom in on that. Let's use the control key again. Hold that down, and then use the arrow keys to go back one frame. And it went wrong somewhere here. Okay, let's select that. Make sure it's part of the selection. Go one frame forward. Add that in there as well. One frame forward, one frame forward. Okay, it has it now. Good. Let's continue playing this back. Keep looking at the details. I can see it goes wrong here again. It's biting into it for, like, one frame. And that's how you want to adjust at all times. You can also just go one frame forward. You don't have to play back your clip, obviously. If you need some more time to look at everything, just hold down control key and then use your arrow keys to go one frame forward. Look at the edge. Make sure that your subject is within the entire selection, and it does a great job here, by the way, I can see here the cliffs in the back, and it knows where the cape is of the subject. And when you believe it's been following pretty good, you can hit play again. Keep an eye out on the entire edge. You can see her hair. It's nicely being followed by the hair brush tool. Even though you still got to be focused on what's going on, it's not an as tedious process as manually having to animate a mask. But I see that it went wrong here again. So let's go back a couple of frames. You're gonna notice that it's always going to be the same part. And you might think by yourself, Hey, you have already drawn a green brush over that area dozens of times now, and after effect still doesn't know that it should be part of my selection. Yeah, it's usually like with one spot. Alright, looking good. We can foot her plate is back. I'm going to keep an eye out in this area here. But so far, it's looking good. Awesome. Yep, and there we have it. Our mask or Roto Brush has been animated for the entire clip, and it's perfectly following the subject. Congratulations, by the way, because this is one of the most used techniques in Hollywood. They have teams of hundreds of people doing only this, but the technology is getting better and better. We can see that here in the Roto Brush effect that has been applied to the clip now version number used to work on version one, which was slow and absolutely not accurate. Now the problem with a rotoscope is that it's not really animated If I select my clip down here, press the U key to reveal the keyframes, there are no keyframes, and that means that it will also continue to try and adjust its Roto Brush. So we're going to have to bake the rotoscope something to remember. Down here in the bottom right, we can find the freeze button, and that is going to lock the Roto Brush in. So hit that button and just wait it out. It can take some time. And it's done. We can now go back to the composition window here on top. I'm also going to take my normal selection tool again or hit the V key on your keyboard. We no longer need the otobush. But what's so nice about the Roto Brush is here, look at her hair, how beautifully that looks, all the details. It's super nice and an awesome tool to work with. We have some more controls here in the Roto Brush tool to refine the edge. Let me just zoom back in here on the talent. We can add some more fetter to it. If I set that to 20, you can see here what that does to the edge. Typically go for, like, a fetter of three, which is more than enough, maybe four have a reduced shatter option if you see too many pixels around the edge. Try and experiment with that maybe like 20%, see what that does. It smoothens it out. The contrast control is something I typically like to lower as well to around 20% because that takes away some of the detail. And then the shift edge, you can use that to bite a bit more into the subject, which is kind of like your mask expansion and decrease that or increase that depending on your need. Now, what I'd like to do next is actually place a text behind her, so that means that I kind of need the background back. In order to do that, I'm just going to take my clip number 11, hit Control D to make a duplication of that. Let's rename the bottom clip to background so that we know what we're dealing with. Now, I'm going to delete the Roto Brush effect from the background clip. We also duplicated that effect. So now we have the background here, and then the foreground, we have the subject. So we've got these two things now separated, which is really nice because that means that we can play something in between. Let's go to the textol here on top. We haven't really worked with text yet, but it's really simple. Just take the text tool, click somewhere, and now you can type. Super Girl. We can then take the selection tool again to drag that text anywhere we want. And when it's selected, if you go to your property spinel, you can find some more properties than we usually have. With text, you also get font options, text size, and everything like that. We get some alignment options down here. We can center it like this. If you select a part of your text, so just double click on it. To select some part of the text, you can increase the size for one particular selection. Let's take a better font. Let's select everything. Let's take I don't know, what do we have here? Like Verdana, I don't let's bring these a bit closer together, perhaps, the spacing. I mean, these are pretty self explanatory. If you've worked with any kind of text editor, you know what they are. But interesting now is let me take my selection tool again. I'm going to make that even a bit bigger. You can also just scale it like that. I want to place this behind the subject. Well, very easy. Just take it and put it below or in between the two clips. And just like that, we have a text behind the subject. Let me just make that even bigger. Isn't that looking awesome? And I love here how her hair has been cut out. We can see all the details there against the background of the text. It is perfect. And there's one problem. I mean, there are multiple problems with these shots. I mean, we can kind of see that the text isn't really part of the video here. So that's what we're going to have to work on in the next lesson. We're going to have to motion tracking again. But this time on the text, we're going to add some shadow effects to it, as well to really make this text be part of the shot. Gonna be really fun. I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Motion Tracking: We're going to continue where we left off and focus again on motion tracking. We've already done that when we stabilize the footage, but motion tracking can be used for various things. Like in this example, we have our subject cut out and placed a text behind her. But as you can see, the text is not really moving along with the shot. So either we can stabilize the entire shot. That way, the text and the shot matches as well, or we can add that handheld motion we have onto the text. So let me select the background clip in the timeline because that's the one that doesn't have the rota Blush. I mean, the Roto Brush effect applied to it. And I'm going to head over to my tracker window. So we've seen warp stabilizer, the automatic stabilization. We've also seen stabilized motion, which is the manual stabilization. And now we're going to check out the track motion. Now, funny enough, the track motion and stabilized motion are kind of the same and you'll see that in just a moment when I click on Trek motion, we get exactly the same thing a trek point. Automatically, the clip has been opened up in the layer window. That's something to be very cautious about and something to get used to as well in After Effects. We've done this before in a tracker panel. This time, you'll see that under track type, transform has been selected. If you were to click on stabilize motion, stabilize was selected. So this time, we're going to go for transform. So that's why these two buttons are almost the same. As before, I'm going to enable rotation and scale as well because I would like to have two tracking points. And I'm going to go to the start of my clip, and let me just hit space so I can pin in my clip. I'm going to take one point, make that a bit bigger and move it onto the first poop onto the left. I'm going to make my tracker rectangle a bit smaller because this defines what we want to track, and then the outer rectangle is the search area. And we'll do the exact same thing with track 0.0. Let's make that bigger. Move it up onto the left hand poop, like that. Now we can now play this back from a tracker window to start the tracking. Pay attention to both tracking points that they retain under spot, but it seems to look pretty good. So the idea now is that we apply this tracking onto the text layer. That way, the text layer will follow. Could do that, but it's not good practice. As we've seen before, we had to use a workaround by adding a second transform effect. So here's how the professionals do it. I'm going to right click into my timeline, go over to New and select the Null Object, which we've also seen before, this is the nothing object. And then from the tracker window, I'm going to click here on Edit target, which means, hey, where do you want to apply this tracking data to? And from the layer dropdown menu, we can choose Supergirl, which is a text layer, but I'm going to pick the Null Object. And hit Okay, the target has been set, so now I can go over to apply. And again, X and Y, yes, hit Okay. And in the timeline now, we've got all of the keyframes applied to the null object, and that null object will now also beautifully stick to the grass, follow along with the handheld motion. So that's great. And what I often like to do is just rename that null object now to tracking data. Now, let me expand the properties of the Supergirl, the text layer, go over to transform properties. And we've seen before that we can link any of these properties here with the speak whip tool to the properties of the tracking data. But in this case, we kind of want to take over everything. We could link every single property to the properties of the tracking data, but that's tedious work. Instead, what I'm going to do is, let me just collapse all of the properties again. I'm going to take the Pi Whip tool from the entire layer and just say, Hey, take everything over from the tracking data or the null object like this. You can see here now also in this drop down menu that the tracking layer has been parented or linked to the text layer. And if we play back the clip, you will see that the Supergirl text is beautifully following along. And what's interesting now is that we can take the text and position it where we want to because all of the transform properties are still there. We can still change them, but it will still take into account the current properties that we are setting in here. So I can scale it down if I like to reposition it behind her, do whatever I like. It will stay tracked as we've linked it to the null object. And so that is also very interesting to know. That means that I can track multiple things to that null object. I can create extra shapes, more text layers, do whatever I want, and all link it to that same null object. And because tracking is always done on the transform properties, position, scale rotation, very easily enable motion blur by going to the text layer here and say, Hey, enable motion blur for that text layer, and automatically it will have motion blur. Let me just disable and enable that so you can see that before and after. You can definitely see it here in the edges of the R, for example, where we get some motion blur going on as I toggle that option. That really makes this text part of the entire shot. It has motion blur. It's following along. It seems as though it is just hovering there above the cliffs. But I'm not entirely convinced just yet. You see our model standing right next to the text. Shouldn't she be applying a shadow on that text? Well, I believe she should. So let's take care of that in the next lesson. 14. Track Mattes: We're almost convinced that this text is part of the shot, but it needs a bit more tweaking. So let's add a drop shadow to it. That's easy, right? I'm just going to go over to my Effects and Presets window, look for drop shadow, and it's right here under perspective. And let's drag that onto the subject, the clip here on top. Look at that. We have a few options. We got the distance, like how far that hado needs to be. We can fetter that a bit, add some more softness to it, change the direction of where that hado needs to be, and finally change the opacity, like how much shadow do we want. Okay, so that kind of works, but we have a problem. You see her shadow, let me just zoom in on it. Her shadow is also being applied on the background. I mean, that makes no sense. Like, her shadow should not be on the clouds or on these mountains in the back. It should only be on the text. So does that mean we're going to have to mask out around the text? Well, luckily, no, because that is where track mattes come in. Trek mats can be used to apply something only on one specific layer. Now, for that, the layer does have to be cut out. So something that is masked out works, something out. But also text, obviously. So where can we find the track Mat options? Well, it's also within the later options, but we're going to have to show those columns first. We know where that button is by now. It's down here, expand or collapse the transfer control pane. Click on it to show the blending modes. But right next to the blending modes, we also have the track Mat option. And just like with the parent and link option that we've seen in the previous lesson, we can also just use the Piquip tool here or use the drop down menu to choose where we want to apply the drop shadow two. So let's take the Piwip tool and say, Hey, this should only be applied to the text, Supergirl. Like that. Now, by default, the text layer has been toggled off because very often track mattes are used to only apply an effect to something but not actually use the track mats. Let me demonstrate that real quick to give you an idea because track mats could be a little bit overwhelming, even though it is very simple. I'm going to reset my track mat. From a drop down menu, just set it back to no Mt. My text layer is disabled. As you can see, let's keep that disabled for a moment. Let's say that I only want to apply a drop shadow here on top. What I could do is without any layer selected, I'm going to take my pen tool, and with that, I can draw a custom shape. So I'm just going to do that. This around her. It's through her middle, just like that. And so what I can do now is say, Okay, well, I'm going to use that as a track mat. So clip number 11, take the Big whip tool for track mat and link it to that shape that we've just created. And just like that, you can now see that my drop shadow only applies to that area. It's using that shape layer to define where my effects should be applied to. Of course, in this example, we want to keep that shape layer disabled. If we enable it, we got that weird shape just floating there, which we don't want. Let me just reset that all back, set it back to no Mat, and I'm going to delete my shape layer because obviously we want to apply drop shadow to the text layer. So take the Piwip tool again, or you know what? Let's go to the drop down menu, and just from there, select Super grill. It's the exact same thing. And of course, we want to enable the text layer as well. And there we have it. The drop shadow is now applied to that text layer. See it here, War cape as that moves around, how that shadow moves onto the text. Of course, with clip number 11 selected, let me just collapse the Rotter brush effect for a moment so that we can focus on drop shadow. We want to tweak that a little bit, so that it looks a bit more realistic, maybe not as much softness, maybe not as far, just a tiny bit like this and obviously decrease the opacity. So we just have a very tiny bit of shadow going on in there. Not too much. Alright, this looks pretty good. Let's set the view back to fit, and let's play this back, see how that looks. I'm noticing sort of an issue. Let me just zoom back in here on my clip because is that the edge of my text that is visible through my clip? These are artifacts that could be introduced because of the rotoscoping that we've done. In fact, with that track mat, we're applying all effects to that tract mat, not only the drop shadow, but also our Roto Brush, which is on the clip. That's something very important to keep in mind. So if you are seeing artifacts like these thin lines that are coming through, what you can always do is just make a duplication of your clip. So for clip number 11, I'm going to select it, hit Control. D. Obviously, for that top clip, we don't want to use a track mat, so I'm going to set it back to none. And let's rename these layers a bit better. So the top clip is going to be the talent, and then the one below there is going to be the drop shadow. So what we're doing now is that we have a clip with a rotor brush and a drop shadow, and we are track matting that, we're linking it to the text layer. We're keeping the text layer enabled because we want to see the text. That is causing issues, so I have a duplicate, which is just a talent, nothing else, which is going to solve those artifacts. Of course that duplicate only has the Rotor brush effect to it, not the drop shadow because we've already used that right here. That's the idea behind it. Let's set it back to fit. And now if you play this back, you can beautifully see this clip without any artifacts and our drop shadow being applied to the text. Although it's not needed right now, I do want to show you that there's also an invert button just right here next to the track Mat options. And if we enable that, it will just invert the track mat, basically applying the dropshadow now on the background instead of the text. So you also have the option in there invert if that is needed. That is in a nutshell how track Mats work. Practice that a little bit, because although track Mt is just a simple one click solution, it could be overwhelming to wrap your head around. It was definitely for me when I started out with After Effects. Then I'll see you back in the next lesson when we're going to further work with text and graphics because after all, the text is looking pretty dull. Just a white plain text and a very simple font, we can do so much more with text and graphics. 15. Graphics and Text: Hey, welcome back. We've already seen a ton of things and After Effects, but there are a few things more we got to explore such as text and graphics. So what I have for you here is clip number six, which is a beautiful drone shot of these cliffs in the Faroe Islands. And we're just going to use this as a background so that we can put a text and graphics animation on top of it. Make that work better as a background. I'm going to go to my effects and presets stab and look for two effects. The Gaussian blur, a very simple blur effect. Let's drag that onto the clip. And also, I'm going to look for brightness and contrast and drag that onto the clip, as well. Then from my effect controls, the blurriness, we can increase or decrease that if you like, so. As for the brightness, let's decrease that and perhaps also decrease the contrast to wash it out a bit more. But this way, the text will pop out a little bit better against that background. Alright, let's start with graphics, and we've already touched a bit on it with these controls here, the Pen tool or the shape tool, we can create shapes. But for that, we're going to have to deselect our clip. If we have it selected, we're going to create a mask. So deselect it this time, and now we can go ahead and create a shape. And I'm just going to take the rectangle tool for now and create some sort of around shape like this, which is going to function for the background for the text. So we can see now that a new shape layer has been created, and with it selected, we can find in the properties panel also a whole bunch of shape properties now. So only with graphics and texts, we get more than just the transform properties. And there's a whole lot of properties in here, as you can see. We get specific shape properties, such as the size. We can still change that over here. We get a roundness control to add some roundness to the corner. We can change the stroke color in here, the stroke width. We get some cap and join controls and the fill color. Let's change that to something more muted. Let's go for something like green, cyanish, something like that, perhaps. For the stroke, let's pick something thinner, just a couple of pixels white like this. Looks good. Now we're going to see down here that we also get some shape transform controls, and these are the exact same. We get position, scale, rotation, and all of that, the exact same as for the layer transform properties itself. Well, that's because when working with a shape, you have the shape transform properties, but you also have the layer transform properties. So yes, we have those double in in fact, I could go ahead and create another graphic inside that same shape layer because after all, you can see here the layer content, we have the shape layer and then one rectangle inside of that. And that is simple. We have to select the shape layer in the timeline. If we don't have it selected and we're going to create a new shape like this, it will also create a new shape layer entirely. We don't want that, so let's delete Shape layer two. I'm going to select shape layer one and then create the second graphic. Let's make it like a very long rectangle. And now you will see that it will also be added to that same shape layer. In the properties now, we can see that we have two rectangles in there. And that is also the reason why we get another shape transform control because after all, we got to reposition, rotate these shapes separate from each other. All right, let me just reset that. Now, what I want to do is create this thicker line down here. So let's copy some of the properties of the rectangle one. And you know what? Let's rename these. Unfortunately, we cannot do that from the properties panel, which is kind of stupid. We're going to have to do that here in the composition which your rectangle selected, hit the return key, and now we can rename that. So Rectangle one is going to be the big rectangle. The other one is going to be hit return a small line. And by the way, as we know, we get all of the controls as well that we have in the property spinel in here too. So you don't have to work with the property spinel. But for shapes and definitely when you're not in the animation process yet, I do find it useful. Okay, let's take the big rectangle and I'm going to copy the size of it, especially the width property. So let's hit Control C or Command C on the Mc to copy that value, then go back to the small line. And instead of pasting that immediately, I want to uncheck here that proportions have to constrain. Otherwise, the height is also going to change its value in proportion to the width. Then let's paste the width like, so, hit return, and now my line should be as white as the big rectangle. As for the stroke, I'm just going to make that zero because the entire fill color can kind of be the stroke. So let's change that to white. Now, we can go ahead and fumble this line into place by trying to aim it to the bottom, but that's not really accurate. So instead, let's take a look at the shape transform properties. For starters the position right here. We've got an X and a Y position. This position is always where the anchor point is laying at. Let me just zoom in a bit more so you can see it. This little line here has an anchor point. We've seen that before, the point where you rotate around, but it's also the point that's going to define where it has to be positioned. So if I were to set my position to zero for both the X and the Y value, it's going to be positioned exactly in the middle of my canvas. The middle is zero position. That is great because it means that I'm aligned now vertically in the middle, so I just need to change the Y value like that. You can also take your graphics layer and hold down the Shift key on your keyboard to lock it in place when you move it up and down. Then it will only move it on the Y value. And by the way, same if you were to move left and right, take it. Hold down your shift key, move it left to right, and it will be locked. I'll kind of know what you're trying to do. Is it up and down, or is it left and right? So let's reset position back to zero I'm going to do the same thing for my big rectangle, as well. It's not horizontal yet in the middle. So let's set that to zero. Now, we'd like to align these two corners a bit better. So let's select a big rectangle perhaps and decrease the roundness of it like this, maybe. Maybe also set it to nine so that's the same. And we can take the small line again and move it down. Take it, hold down Shift key as you move it down. Yep, that is starting to look pretty good. So we've got this big rectangle with a smaller line on the bottom. Of course, you can add as many graphics into your shape layer as you want. And I also recommend you try and do that. Maybe first recreate what I did and then create something of yourself. But now, the text because obviously you want some text in there. We've already seen that as well. We're just going to take the text tool. Now, unfortunately, we cannot just select the shape tool and hope that the text layer will also be part of that. Text is not a shape, so you can't add it to a shape layer, maybe in the future. I don't know, because I do think it would be a nice feature. Anyhow, let's type something in here, like big Cliffs, the title of this documentary. Let's take my selection tool and bring it into the middle. And by the way, since we have our shape layer exactly in the middle of the canvas and we want our text to also be exactly in the middle, what we could do is go over to the alignment window right here. I'm going to have to scroll down a bit. And here we can choose how we want to align that text, so we can do it on the left side, but also exactly in the middle and also do that vertically like this. So now the text is exactly where it should be. Alright, the text controls. You've already kind of see this, and I don't want to go too deep into it anymore, because after all, text controls are self explanatory. Let's just keep the font as it is. There are more beautiful fonts. But if I'm sharing these project files with you, I also hope that you won't get a font error if I'm using something very custom. So for Donna will do for now, let's make the text a little bit bigger so that it fits and perhaps move it a bit down. I'm holding down my shift again so that it snaps vertically. I just have to be careful. It doesn't snap horizontally. You can also use your arrow keys to nudge it in place. And that looks good. I'm happy with this. Let's go ahead and animate these graphics and text now. I'm going to go a bit forward in time and also make some more space down here in my timeline. Let's start with the text, and we're going to make an animation on the position. So when it's selected, hit the Pike on your keyboard to open up the position property. Let's create a keyframe for that. Next, I'm going to go into my small line. Look for the transform options for specifically the small line, not the shape layer. Be careful of that. Also create a position keyframes. Let's collapse all of that again. Open up the big rectangle and also create one for the transform for the big rectangle for the position is right there. What I'm going to do now is select these two layers and hit the U key on my keyboard to only show the properties that have a keyframes. This works a whole lot better. So these are the keyframes that have been created for the ending position. So what I'm going to do here is just take all of them and move them to the right side because at the start, I want to have everything off screen. And now let's bring the position of all of these elements outside of the screen. For shape layers, if you have the same properties selected, like we have now, if you deselect them, you can select them again by holding down your control key. So let's select both of these position values. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with the position of the text because it's outside of that layer. But inside, have these two selected, and if I change one property, it will change the both of them. So let's bring that outside of the canvas like that, and we're going to do the same thing for the text. Bring it outside. We have this animation now. And as we've learned before, I want to select the last keyframes. Right click, go to keyframes assistant and choose EZ Es in. At the moment, all of them just come in at the same time. It's pretty boring. We have different layers, so let's show that we have different layers. Now, for instance, we could have the rectangle come in a bit faster by moving these two keyframes closer to each other, and also maybe let them come in a bit earlier, be one of the first animations to come in. And next we could add the text animation, also make the animation go a bit faster, move those two keyframes up to the right. And finally, the line also make that faster that has to come in as last. Wait, that's a big rectangle. Let's swap these two. This is the small line. Alright, so what we end up with now is that we first have the backgrounds coming in, then the text of the cliffs, and then the lines. So it's a bit more dynamic. We can kind of see the lines now. This is something that I often do with text animations like these. Alright, looking good. Perhaps we want this to go a bit faster, then you can change and tweak these keyframes, play it back, see how it looks, and adjust as needed. And, of course, we also want to enable motion blur for these two layers. So just enable that from the layer properties right there. And there we have it. There's one last thing that I'm going to do instead of having them come in from the left side of the canvas is have them reveal from behind a track mat. And shape layers are a perfect thing to use for track mats. So what I'm going to do is deselect everything in my timeline, then create a new rectangle like this, a new shape layer, and let's create something like this. It can be very rough. And let's rename that shape layer to track mattes, and let's rename the other one here to my graphics. That way we know what the difference is between these two shape layers. Let's also collapse these here. We don't need to work any further on the animations. Let's locate the track Mat options. Since we don't see them in here, it's probably because we're going to have to toggle those options. Now, we do see them, and what we want to do is link the text to the track mats and also the graphics to the track mat. And once we've done that, very interesting, we can see the animations through the shape layer or the track mat shape layer, but we want that to be inverted. So very simple, just toggle the invert options for the layers that have been linked to the trakmt. And just like that, the entire animation now gets revealed behind that shape layer block. And that's kind of it in a nutshell what textaGraphics animations is all about. Practice that a little bit, try to recreate what I just created, and then create something of your own. And then I'll see you back in the next lesson for some more advanced text animations. 16. Advanced Text Animations: There are three ways to animate text and graphics. The first one is through its transform properties, such as the position, scale and whatnot. The second one is through effects. So you can add some kind of a distort and then animate that or the third one, and that is through added properties. And that's what we're going to take a look at in this lesson. Start here by creating a quick shape layer to demonstrate something. In the property s panel, everything we see here can be animated. So not only the normal layer transform properties, but also the shape properties, such as the roundness, the stroke width, and all of that, because I can tell that by the stopwatch icon next to every property. And we can find all of these properties back within the layer itself here in the timeline. There it is, for example, the stroke. We can change the width from here, and we could animate it if you want to. For the professional graphic animators among us, even this is not enough. So let's design something. I'm going to delete my entire shape layer and start all over again from a blank *****. Let's take the rectangle and create a similar shape as we had before in the previous lesson, like so. And let's swap these colors here for the stroke color. Let's take white. And for the fill color, I actually don't want any fill color. So instead of the solid color, we're going to set it to none, and then make the stroke width like a bit smaller, make it more modern, and perhaps like a small roundness to it, not too much. Alright, and let's align the position of that shape. Zero, zero, so that it's exactly in the middle. And, what I want to do next is animate the stroke so that it kind of seems like it's being drawn. But where can I do that? I don't see any option for the stroke path? Well, that's where added properties comes in. And if we go to the layer in the timeline view, we can see under the contents this little Add button right next to it. Clicking on that reveals a menu with a whole bunch of extra properties. And I also encourage you to play around with that, add some new properties to your shape later and see what they do. You can create some very interesting animations with these. But the one that I'm interested in right now is the trim pad. Click on that and it will add its property to the layer. Now careful, though. Added properties will never show up in your property s panel. Another reason I'm not too fond of that. So let's open up the trim paths and see what we have. I'm going to collapse my rectangle one. We've got a start and end property, and as I change that value, you can kind of see here how the path is being trimmed. I can animate that. So let's do that. I'm going to stand here a little bit back, create a keyframe for a start, which is currently at 100, so I don't see my path. Let's go forward in time and set it to zero. And, of course, that has been animated right now. If I want my animation to start somewhere else, I have an offset control, so I can make it start, let's say, over here in the middle somewhere, then I will start from there and draw the rectangle. So play around with it, see which properties you can add and change. I see some fun things in there like the Bucker and bloat, the twist, the wiggle pads, the zigzag, all fun things. But now we also have these options with text. That is where it really gets interesting. Oh, before I'm going to collapse, my shape layer, let's right click the first keyframes, Easy Ease out, and then the last one, keyframes, Easy Ease in so that my path plays back smooth like that. Alright, let's now collapse it, and I'm going to create a text layer. So take the text tool. Let's type in this rectangle and call it. Let's call it huge cliffs this time. And let's reposition that. I'm going to use my align tools down here to make sure it's exactly in the middle aligned, and I want to decrease the size a bit. Alright, looking good. So again, we have some options here which we can animate, such as the layer transform properties, fortunately, we cannot animate the text options because I don't see any stopwatch next to any of these properties. And if we expand the layer in the timeline, you also see that we don't have that many options to animate. But we do again see some nice menu here on the right side. This time, it's not called ads, but it's called animate. I know After Effects is very good with its consistencies, but clicking on that menu reveals all the properties we can. I think with some of these, like, why should we add a position property? I mean, don't we already have that? Well, these are properties we can add specifically to a character or to a word instead of the entire text layer. And that is where it gets interesting. Let me take that position property, for example. I'm going to make some more space here in my timeline. See that a new animator has been addited. We get a range selector, and then we have that position property in there. And we could add more properties into the animator one. For example, let's also go to property here, and let's take the opacity and we also now have the opacity in there. Now what I could do is, for example, change the position. And yes, at first, that will just bring the entire text down. I can decrease the opacity. Let's set that to zero because this could be my starting point, perhaps. We're doing right now in the animator is actually creating some sort of an offset. We're not really animating the position or the opacity in here, we're creating an offset for the position and the opacity. The animation is done in the range selector. So let's expand that property and see what we have in here. Again, we have that start and offsets. As I increase the start, you will now see that each character will be animated separately and is looking at these two properties that we've just set, the position and the opacity. And so it will bring back each character back to its position where it should be. So what we could do now is just animate that start property. Let's go to where my rectangle is being created somewhere right here, keyframes for start, move words and set that to a hundreds. And as I played this back now, you can see how every letter is nicely animated. If you'd like to get more control over how that animation happens, you can also see an advanced option down here. From there, we can choose whether we want that animation to happen on the characters, as I said before, or we can also set it to words. So this time instead of each character, each word will be animated. Which is two keyframes, we can further tweak how that animation has to look without having to add a bunch of more keyframes. Let's set that back to characters because I really like that. We have some easing options, so we can increase that. So we don't even have to set an ease in and an ease out right here with these keyframes because each character is animated separately. And if I were to smoothen out these keyframes, only the first character and the last character in my text would be smoothen out. So all the smoothing options happens in there. I can set a smoothness amount here, I can set the Ease in and the ease out right there. Which is going to have an impact on every character specific get around with that, see what it does, how we can create some nice and cool looking animations. We currently have one range selector, which is going to take care of both the position and the opacity because we've added these properties inside that animator one. But let me just collapse that for a moment. We can go back to animates and add another property. For example, the enable per character tree D is something I really like as well. Now, that is not yet a property that we can animate as well. We've just made the layer in tree D. We're going to explore that a bit more later in this class. Now take something like the rotation and add that into an animator two property. But since our text now has been enabled for Tree D, we also get some more rotation options. We can rotate it in a tree D space. We've got the X rotation, the white rotation, and you can see here how beautifully each character is rotating around its own axis. And so since we've added that to a second animator, we also get a new range selector, and we can create a new animation for that specific property. So we're not bound anymore to the keyframes of the animator one. That means that we can have that come in a little bit later. Let's set the start back to zero, create a keyframes, go forward in time and set it to 100. Play this back, see what we have. So the text is coming in, then it kind of rotates. Okay, maybe after all we do want to align these keyframes. Let's select the layer, hit the U key so we can see all the properties which have keyframes and align these. Hold down your shift key to make them snap. Let's play this back, and here it goes. Huge glyphs. And obviously, we want to enable motion blur for both of these layers. And we're going ourselves a beautifully animated text graphic with some of these added properties. Play around with that, see which kind of fun properties you can discover and keep in mind that you can add multiple animators, because with one animator, you could animate multiple properties, or you can separate them into multiple animations. So that way, you can offset the keyframes a bit so that one thing happens first, and then another thing happens later. That's up to you. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you back in the next lesson. 17. Content Aware Fill: We have already seen a ton of great things, what After Effects can do for us, and it might be overwhelming at first, but don't worry. After Effects just takes time to master. So definitely after each lesson, just practice the things that you've learned and after a couple of weeks, you'll be an After Effects pro. Now, in this lesson, we're kind of jumping into a new chapter because we're going to take a look at a brand new tool, the content-aware fill. So what I have right here is a beautiful shot of our model standing here in the middle of these two cliffs and we have these beautiful rocks in the background. We got this bird flying there in the distance. It's such a beautiful. Oh, wait a second. Who is that? Who is ruining my shot? Oh, no. There's a guy with a yellow jacket in my master shot. Well, don't worries. We're inside After Effects, and After Effects has tools to remove that guy. Now, the first thing I want to do is actually remove the guy with a mask very roughly. So what I'm going to do here is select my clip in the timeline, head over to the rectangle mask tool, and just very roughly create a mask around the fella, like that. Then with my clip, select it in the timeline, hit the MK to reveal the mask pad, and we're going to create a keyframe for the mask pad. This can be done very roughly. All we want to do is just make sure that this fella stays within that mask. So you can go back like a bunch of frames, move that mask up a bit, make sure it stays in sight like that. Looking good. Let's see here on the end. Move that up a bit as well. Like that. All right. And the last thing we want to do is obviously remove this part and not remove everything else. So that's why we're going to click the inverted button for the mask property right here. Just like that, we got ourselves a black hole. Locate the content-aware fill tool, let's head over to the menu on top, select window and then look for content-aware fill. It's right there. Click on it, which will open up a new panel, and it will show you the fill target, which is good, the hole that we just created. We can expand if we like to, but usually it's not needed if you've done a correct job with your mask. Then what do we want to remove? Is it an object? Is it a surface that we want to clean, or is it an edge that we want to blend? And in 99% of the cases, you're going to choose for objects. You know, to me, that person is not a person. That's an object. Finally, we got an option to do a lighting correction. I would first try it without if you see didn't really work, enable that option and see if it does a better job. But yeah, let's give it a try. Let's click on Generate fill layer, and it will start analyzing your clip and filling in that hole. There's nothing you have to do, so just put your hands up and wait for things to be done, and it's already done. Look at that. Let's play this back. Usually, for small things like these, it does a very good job. We do not notice that we cut out an object from there. Now, as amazing and easy as this looks, unfortunately, the content-aware fill isn't a magic tool. In many scenarios, you will notice that something has been removed and that's not good. But for small things like these, it works really well. Now, we can also help the tool. So if your results aren't that good, we have an option here to help the tool to deliver a better result. So let me show you how that works as well. And for that, I'm going to delete my fill layer, which is the one that the content-aware fill has been created, and all this is is just a filler of that hole. So let me just delete that. And what I'm going to do is create a couple of reference frames for the tool to help. So let's create one here at the start. We're going to click here on Create Reference Frame. That will open up Photoshop. So you're going to have to need that or have that installed as well. And I'm going to keep this very simple for now. We could use all of the Photoshop tools to fill in that hole perfectly and all of that. But we can also just use the building AI. So I'm just going to take my selection tool, select the hole that we have right here, and click on Generate fill, and then just say Generate. There you go. This looks good. I'm just going to hit Control S to save this and then go back to my a project. We have created one reference frame for the first frame in the video. We can go then forward in time, Let's go somewhere in the middle and say create reference frame. Again, I will again open up Photoshop, and we're going to do the same thing. Select that hole, hit generate fill, and hit generates. Hit controls to save that, go back to After Effects, and let's create one more reference frame here on the end, click Create reference frame, select the hole and click on generated fill generates. And save that and go back to After Effects. Of course, you can also use the clone stamp and other After Effects tools to create some kind of a fill that looks better in your scenario. But what we've just done is created three reference frames across the entire video. And when we now click on generate fill layer, After Effects or the content-aware fill tool is going to use those reference frames to create the entire fill throughout the entire video. Now, even without the reference frames, it already looks really good. Now it should look even better, and fortunately, it doesn't. Now we can actually see that something is wrong in here, which is pretty funny. So yeah, it's always kind of a surprise using these AI tools and After Effects. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't in this case, even the reference frames was not a good solution. So, let's just delete everything and just generate a new fill layer without using any reference frames. There you go. Looks a whole lot better. So, I mean, try it out with this shot, try it also on a different shot. Use your phone, perhaps, just film something like your cat and then remove your cat. See how that works with the content-aware fill. If it doesn't do a good job. Try the reference frames. It should work better. Uh, but, yeah, it's always a surprise. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you back in the next lesson. 18. Camera Tracking: About to step into the world of three dimensional and After Effects. Now, After Effects has gotten many updates over the past few years to improve its tree D features, but also it has seen lots of new tree D features added. And that's what we're going to take a look at in the next couple of lessons because Tree D is very awesome and yes, After Effects is becoming a more capable program to do tree D stuff in. But let's take it step by step. So we're going to start off with a very easy tree D tracking. And we head over to the tracker window, there's one last button that we haven't explored yet, and that is a track camera. Have here in my timeline is a drone shot where we just fly over this road. And what I'd like to do is add a text on this road that seems to be sitting there like in the shot that it's been films like that. We kind of did that before with a two D tracking, which was just a handheld tracking. But this is a moving shot. We're actually going forward, we're moving the camera in the T D space. So a normal motion tracking, which is just two D doesn't work. For that, we're going to have to do a camera tracking. So let us select the clip in the timeline to activate all the buttons in the tracker window, and let's hit the track camera button. And, like with many features in After Effects, it's a waiting game. After Effects has to analyze the shot and then perform its camera tracking. And it's done, and I make it seem like it's super fast, but obviously I cut out the 2 minutes that I had to wait. As you can see here, it added a three D camera effect to the clip. And all of a sudden, we see all of these different points in the shot. And if you overdose, we kind of see this target disk. And if you don't see any of these points, it just means that you don't have your camera tracking effect selected. If we deselect it, they're all gone. So you got to make sure it's selected to see them. And if we scrupthrow, you can kind of see that these tracking points beautifully aligned with things it can see a shot. And now you can choose any of these points where you'd like to place an object or a text. Now, you can place it on a single point or you can place it in between three points. It will automatically mark that by this target disc. So that's up to you. All you got to do is just right click and then say create text and camera. A default text has been added, and as we scrub through the video, you can now see how beautifully that text stays on that point and how it's part of our video. Let's select the text and see how we can reposition it, move it around, perhaps. As you can see, we've got a three dimensional text now. We can rotate it like that, rotate it on the y axis or on the Z axis. We've explored this a little bit when we were animating the text, but now we're taking it to the next level. Objects need to be put in Tree D. We have a little toggle here. You can see next to the text that has put the text into Tree D, and we can do that for any layer that we want to. If I turn that off, it is just a two dimensional text, and it won't track along my shot anymore. So you want to make sure that that is enabled. Because I disable it and enable it again, it also has reset its position. So I'm going to have to click Control Z a couple of times to bring it back in place. I'm also going to reset the rotation, what I did here. So maybe let's select the layer, hit the archy to bring up all your rotation values. Let's click here on orientation, right click and say reset. Let me just collapse that again. We could also see a T D camera tracking inside the timeline. This is a virtual camera that has been created by the camera tracking. Now, what the tracker did was analyze the shot so that it could create a virtual camera that would represent the actual physical camera. In this case, the drone. So it had to see which kind of lens it had, was it a wide angle, a ti lens, maybe. But it also had to try to figure out the movement of the camera. If we expand the TD camera tracker, let's do that for a moment, and I'm going to make a bit more space in my timeline and go to transform, you can see a whole bunch of keyframes for the position and the orientation. Which is exactly that. The movement of the physical camera, the drone in this case, has been recreated virtually. I still find that so amazing. Unfortunately, it doesn't do a perfect job. If I were to take my text here and move it, so I can take one of these axises, as you can see here, I can take the Z axis, for instance, and move it backwards. So I would think now that I'm moving this text to a little bit further down the road. But now you will notice that my text starts to float a bit. You know, perhaps, let me just bring that forward like this. You would think that the text is sitting here now on this part of the road. But it's not really. It's kind of floating. You can really see it here. I'm going to zoom in on it's floating. Let me just hit Ctrl Z a couple of times to bring it back where it should be. That's why in most scenarios, you can only put objects on the exact spot that you've chosen. At least, that is for the Z axis, so moving it back and forward. If you want to move it up and down or to the left or to the right, that is essentially a two D adjustment, and that is perfectly fine. So I can move my text to the left side, I mean, to the right side, for instance, and it will still stick there perfectly. I can move it up. And it's still flowing here this point on the road. So that is something really important to keep in mind as you're going to move your text. Now let's change this text to something else. Let's name it to rod. Yeah, that's the most creative thing I can come up with right now. And let's also decrease the size a bit so that it actually fits on the road. I can use the X and the Y axis. And yes, I can also rotate it on any axis that I want to because it's being rotated around that one point, although this is going to look pretty weird. So let's just put that back. It was maybe hit Ctrl Z a couple of times. Let's not rotate it. Just know that you can. But that's it in a nutshell. That is how you can place objects like text into the real world. And if you would like to add more objects or texts within that same shot, what we can then do is go back to clip number five, make sure that three D camera tracking is selected. And we can take another point. Let's take this one here. Right click and say create text. Then we'll create a text on that point. The stupid pop ups always appear. And let's take second text, rename it to two. And I'm going to add a third text, perhaps. I got an idea. We've got a creative spark. I'm going to take this point, create text, as well, and name it to love. Isn't that beautiful? Maybe decrease the size of this one a little bit. So we've got the road to love. Let's play this back. We got three texts sitting there nicely. We're following the road to love. So now that we know how this works, let's take this to a whole new level and make our text. Also, b3d because after all, right now, they're just two dimensional. They're just flat. Let's make them real three D, but that is for the next lesson. 19. 3D Text Animations: We're going to continue with the TD camera tracking inside After Effects because there are a whole lot more features that we can explore. And also, personally, I find it one of the most fun things to play around with. So I have here clip number six in my timeline that we're going to work on, and I've already done a TreD camera tracking on it, which we've seen how that works in a previous lesson. So the effect has been applied to my clip, and we can see a whole bunch of different points. And like before, I'm going to select one of these points or maybe stand in between treat points so that we can see the targets, right click and then choose Create text and camera. And as we play this back, the text sits there on the cliff. Perfectly. So we talked about it before where the TD camera tracking is now a virtual camera of the actual physical camera in the shots. But it's not really accurate, and that's going to be a problem when we want to move objects in that Tree D space over a solid plane. So if I want to move this text here now on, let's say, the grass plane here on top, that is not going to work. I'm going to have to find a point actually here on this grass, right click and create my text over. As long as that text is going to float above something, it's not going to be that noticeable. So what I want to do is bring this text close to my virtual camera so that it can actually fly through the text. Wouldn't that be awesome? Because after all, we have a shot where the drone is flying backwards, so we could, in theory, fly through the text. Well, in practical, that will also work. I'm going to change my text to something else. Let's rename it to cool so that we have some circles where the camera can fly through. Let me take my selection tool again, and of course, we want to move it in that Z space, bring it closer to the camera. But where exactly is that? We're going to have to work a bit more precise. We cannot just guess something. Well, in my canvas and I'm going to have to make a bit more space for that. Like this, you can see here a couple of buttons on the right side. One of them here says one view. And what I want to do is change that one view to two views. And this allows me to look at my scene from a different angle. You can see it highlighted a bit here in the corners of each window. If I click here on the other one, you will see it highlighted here. Let me just zoom out a bit. And now I can change the type of view for each of these windows. So for the left one, let's just keep it on active camera. You can see it here. In the second drop down menu, it's set to active camera. So we're looking through the view of the camera. In the other one, it is set to default. But we can change that too if we click on default to, for example, top and that is going to give me a top view because after all, we are working in a treD space. And so that means, let me zoom out a bit here. We can actually see the camera and right here is the text. And so if I were to play this back, you can see the camera going forward and backwards because that is, after all, what it's doing. It's flying backwards. So that means I can now perfectly see where my text is sitting and where my camera is sitting. Obviously, in that top view, you can also change it to something else like left. So now we can see it from the left side. Again, the camera is moving forward. Backwards. If you want to see multiple sites at the same time, you can also change your views instead of two views to four views and have four of those windows open. Automatically here you can see that it set the top right to top view, here to the right view, and here to the front view. From what we are doing, a two view is more than enough, but just know that the option is there. So I can just take my text now and move it on the ZX, but I'm going to do that from my left view. And I'm going to bring it closer to the camera. Let's move it up a little bit. Of course, you can also still work in your active camera view. We can rotate it from here. Align it a bit better with the camera, or we can also change the view. So instead of the left, let's change that back to top to see where that sits, looks good. Maybe set it to the right side. Look at it from a different angle. Maybe you want to tilt the bit up the text like this. Let's play it back. Let's see how that looks. Is the camera actually going through the text? And yes, it does. It does, but not yet through the O from cool. So let's move the text up to the right side. Let's bring it down a bit more and just try to aim that camera going through the O from cool. Alright, that's looking cool. And I might want to bring back my text a little bit more. Somewhere here, perhaps. Let's see how that looks. So it's going through the O, and there it sits cool. Alright. This is pretty awesome. This is something you got to practice, though. If you have never worked in a tree D space before, this is, again, overwhelming. I'm using that word a lot. But it is. These are all new tools and techniques that you got to get used to. It was really good practice if you can just add a text into your tree D scene and move it around, see if you can get it to a spot where you really wanted it to be. And things like these, making a camera move through a letter is a great exercise. If you can pull that off, it means that you understand how a tree D space works. Alright, I'm going to set my views back to one view because we have a text where it needs to be. Let me just set that back to bit. But now, the camera is flying through a pretty flat text. As we said before, we want to make it three dimensional as well. It is three dimensional, but it's like a flat three dimensional paper. So let's check out the text properties. Maybe there's a way to, oh, what is this? We get some more options. Well, that is because we have set the text to treat. If you were to disable that, those treat options are gone. If you enable TreD for your layer, you get those options back. We'll have to do a control Z to undo those two actions because if you uncheck TreD from a layer, it will also reset its position. Now, I'm mostly interested in the geometry options. Unfortunately, as you can see, it is grade out, and there are no options underneath. And that is because we are in the wrong renderer. Afrofax is helping you by saying, Hey, you might want to change rendering by clicking here. And when I click on that, it will open up the composition settings. It brings you automatically to the TreDRnderer tab. So that means that if I'm going to cancel that window, if I'm going to go to my project panel, like so, right click my composition and go to composition settings. We have explored this window. We know what it is. We can find this treat renderer tap here as well. And there's a setting in here, the renderer. It's currently set to classic Treaty. But we also have an option Advanced and Cinema four D. And we're going to select Advanced tree D, which is going to enable a whole bunch of extra features such as these geometry options. But it's also going to disable a whole bunch of options. We can see that here on the right side what it's going to disable. One of those things, for instance, is the motion blur and depth of field. So, yes, that does mean that we cannot enable motion blur anymore. It really depends on what you're doing in After Effects. You don't just want to change your renderer to advanced three D with every single project. If you're working with two D animations or whatnot, just leave it on classic three D. Only at the point where you want to extrude your text to make it actually three dimensional, you want to enable advanced three D. Because that means for motion blur, we're going to have to use the force motion blur effect. Let's select that one and hit Okay. Now the geometry options are active. We can expand that option. Let me just make a bit more space and we get an extrusion depth effect. Look at that. We got tree D text. And we get a few more options like the Bevel style. Perhaps put that to angular. You can see here what that does on the edge. You can increase that or decrease that. And now we have an actual three dimensional text where the camera is flying through making it look a whole lot more realistic, dynamic. We also get a few more material options where you can further tweak a reflections and the shadows all has to look. Like the shininess, we can increase that to make it more like metal. And like, what color does the shadow have to be? You could take, like the color Pi tool and maybe pick, like, a real shadow in your shot, like the clips here in the back. I'm going to click over there. It's a bit more blue. These options are very limited, though, After Effects is still not a Tree D program. It has a ton of features for Tree D, but if you really want to get realistic quality and all that, you're going to have to work with something like blender, for instance, which is a dedicated T D program. So you're mostly going to get stuck with 90s Tre D graphics where your materials and textures and lighting isn't really going to look that realistic. Does that mean that this tool is completely useless? Well, absolutely not with the right approach and taking manual control over the lighting? Because, yes, that is something that we can do. We can actually create realistic treaty graphics. But that is for the next lesson. 20. 3D Models and Lighting: We're going to explore a bit more of the three D features inside After Effects, and it might get a little bit tricky, but don't worry, we're going to do this together. What I've got right here is our model doing this weird movement with her hands. At the moment, it is weird, but once we're going to add a three dimensional rock above her hand, it might seem as she's floating that rock above her hands like a real Earth bender. Yeah, if you're an avatar fan like me, then you're going to find this in. When we talk about T D, the first thing we always want to do is select a clip, go to the tracker window, and do a track camera, as we've seen in the previous lessons. And this is going to take a couple of minutes. So let's do a transition. Oh, wow, it's done. And we get a whole bunch of points where we can assign a text or a tree D object too. Obviously, we don't have any tracking points above her hands. We do have a few here in the cliffs in the back, but that is way far in the back and not above her hands. So we're going to have to be a bit clever. From the previous lessons, we know that we cannot just drag a text or any other tree D object to the front or to the back. Basically, move it in a T D space. But what we can do is move it up and down left and right in the two D space. And so when I look here at her wrist see a whole bunch of tracking points that we can use because these do somehow align with our hand. The only thing we got to do is just push the object a bit to the left and then a bit up. Now, when I click on one of these points, let's take the red wine right here. I can create a text. I can create a solid, and I can create a null. But it doesn't say, create a treaty rock, what I want to do. Let's just go for that null end camera, then. You've seen that before. The null object is a nothing object. It sits over there, and when I scrub through my video, you can kind of see how that null object sticks to her wrist. And it's also rotating around that null object, which is very important. We want to capture that same career movement as it kind of, like, rotates around her. Alright, so we've got that in place. All we got to do now is kind of, like, swap the null object, the nothing object with a let's go to my project panel. I don't have a rock in here just yet. But when I browse to the footage folder that you guys can download, as well, there is also a tree models folder in there, and there we have a folder called Rock. And in that folder, we've got the rock, which is an FBX file, a tree D file, and then we got some textures because obviously a tree D model also needs a texture, what it has to look like. You can find things like this on the worldwide web. Just look for free three D models, where you can also take a scan with your phone these days. There are many apps that allows you to scan an object, and we've done a video about that in the past before, where I would scan an oil barrel, and then I would punch it away like a superhero. So let's take that rock, the FBX three D model, and drag it into the project panel. Here we can see a preview of it. It's just a rock. So let's just drag that into the timeline. And the first time you do, After effect is going to ask you a couple of settings for your model. But don't worry too much about this. Just hit Okay. There it is. It's a very small model there. It is so small because it's already taking the perspective of the virtual camera. And like I said before, the virtual camera works, but it's not accurate. It thinks that all of these tracking points are very far away in the distance, but in reality, we're sitting right next to the talent. But that's fine. We can go ahead and select the rock, hit the SK on our keyboard to bring up the scale, and just scale up the model. Now here we are running into a first problem. It is scaling from this anchor point, which we've also talked about previously in this class. Obviously, we don't want the rock to change in position as we scale it. So we're going to have to fix the anchor point first. Select your rock and hit the A key on your keyboard to bring up the anchor point property. And now we can move the rock up so that the anchor point is going to sit somehow in the middle of it. Alright, and now when we go back to scale, it will scale around that point, much better. Now, we could go ahead and link the rock to the null object, but then we are adding the position of the null object to the rock. But what you want to do is just have the rock on the same position as the null object. So we don't want to link it. Instead, I'm going to expand the properties of the null object. Head over to transform, select that entire category, which holds all of the position, scale and everything, select that and hit Control C to copy the entire transform properties. Then I'm going to click on my rock. Just hit Control V to paste all of those properties. Now, the opacity of null objects is always set to zero. So if you're going to paste over those properties, you want to set the opacity back to 100. Keep that in mind if you don't see your object anymore. Alright, I can collapse this now, and we could go ahead now and delete the null object. We no longer need it. It has done its job. And we also pasted the anchor point properties of the null object, so we're going to have to redo that again, let your rock, hit the A key for anchor point and move it until it matches somehow with the anchor point like this. Alright, so now if we scrub through that rock should somehow stay on her wrist. It is moving a bit because the tracking was not that accurate. But we're going to make it float above her hand, so that is not going to be that big of an issue. We have the camera rotation in there, which is what we need. So let's select the rock and use the up and down. Do not push it to the back or to the front, move it up and down, left and right to bring that above her hands, like this. And we might want to increase the size even more like so, and that is looking pretty good. And now, if we play that back, you can kind of see here this rock floating above her hands. Pretty awesome. But she's doing this movement with her hands, so that might indicate that she is kind of rotating the rock as well. So let's create a quick animation. Let's go to the start of the composition, select the rock, and I'm going to hit the archy for rotation. We basically get two options, orientation and rotation. Orientation can only go up to 360 degrees so one rotation in total for each axis. And the other rotation properties are for each axis, but they can take multiple laps. So where it says zero X, it just basically means it has done one full rotation. So if I were to increase X rotation all the way to 360 degrees, which is one complete rotation. You can see here how that zero becomes one X. All right let's find out where the vertical rotation is, which is this one. And let's create a keyframes for that. Let's go to the end of the clip and then move that around like this, a couple of turns, like this, maybe. And I'm doing it in the direction of her fingers. So if I play this back now, you can kind of see here. How that looks pretty awesome. We might also want to make it drift a bit on some ter angle. Let's take the rotation, but just like a tiny bit, make it, like, floaty, like so. Doesn't have to be much, but that looks pretty cool. And you can see here how that rock, kind of, like, moves up and down, be very floaty. That would never work if you want to place that rock on a specific spot in the scene. But having this float above her hand, nobody will notice that the camera tracking was absolutely not accurate. Alright, guys, we're getting there. We're getting there. Let's take this a step further because if we take a look at the scene, there are a whole bunch of extra things that we can do, such as the lighting. If we take a look at the model, we have a shadow here on her right side, on her back, and so that indicates that the sun is coming here from the left side. If we take a look at the rock, the lighting is coming from above because we have the shadow here on the bottom. So I kind of want to move the virtual lighting as well. That's going to be very easy. We just have to add a light to the timeline. Right click, go to New. We have seen this menu before, and you'll also find a light in there. Clicking on it is going to ask you, Okay, what type of light would you like to create a spotlight or something else? Well, in our case, we're going to pick the environment light because we are outdoors. We get a few more options, but we can change those as well later on in the properties of the light. So let's just hit Okay, and it is added to the timeline. But definitely try and play around with these different types of lights. They all work a bit different. They all have some different properties. So if you're really into T D and After Effects, explore them. Light options, there are a few things that are very important that we got to enable and that are the cast shadows. It's currently set to off. So let's enable that, set that to on. And next up, we want to move the lighting. So let's go over to the transform properties. And let's change the rotation here. You can see here on the rock very well what that does. Maybe let me make a bit more space and zoom in on that rock so that you can see it. And doing that allows me to add that shadow more to the back of the rock as well, just like we have here with the talent. And furthermore, you can play around with the intensity of that light to really make that rock match with your scene. Like yeah, this is already looking a whole lot better. And by the way, this light also works on treaty text or any other treaty object that you add into your composition. We're almost there. There's one last thing that I want to do. It's almost looking realistic, and that is adding some motion blur. Now, because we are in a different renderer of the composition, we cannot add motion blur. We've seen that in the previous lesson. So if I were to enable motion blur for the rock, like, nothing happens. So we got to use the force motion blur. Let's go to the Effects and Presets window. I'm going to search for the force motion blur. And when I try to drag that now onto my rock, you'll see that I can that is because the force motion blur, unfortunately, only works on two D objects, and it's not on tree D objects. But don't worry, there's going to be a workaround again. And these are techniques you're going to use all the time and After Effects, workarounds. If you want these tree D objects to be, again, two D so that we can add the motion blur to it, all we got to do is just simply group them together. Now, we can't just precompose the rock because it needs the light and it needs the tre D camera. But what it doesn't need is the clip because the clip is just two dimensional. The video itself has nothing to do with the tree D. So we can group all these three D objects together, select all of them. Right click, go over to precompose. Let's call this precompose rock. And we're going to say, move all the attributes into the new composition, and then hit Okay. So now everything has been grouped into a new composition, and if I open that up, we can see everything in there that we've just created and our rock being floaty and rotating. Let's go back to clip number two composition. Let's take the force motion blur, and now we can apply it to that entire group. And immediately here you can see how that applies the motion blur to the. Let's play this back and enjoy the beautiful visual effects that we just created. We've got ourselves a real Earths bender. So what we learned, null objects and precomps always get you out of trouble. Now, we've almost reached the end of this class. There's one last thing to do, and that is obviously export your video because with all of this beautiful motion graphics and via Vx, we want to show that to the world, and so that means we're going to have to export our creation out of After Effects as a video file that we can share. But that is obviously for the next lesson. 21. Export your Video: You have just created a beautiful VVC shot in After Effects, and now it's time to share that video with your family and friends. So to take this video here out of After Effects, we got to go to the window menu on top and locate another panel, as we always do. And we got to look for the render queue, which is all the way here on the bottom. And here we can add the compositions that we want to export. But there's also a short key to do that. We can even close that window. Just stand in the timeline of the video that you want to export and hit the control key on your keyboard. That will open up the Render Queue window and add your composition in there. But since it's a, yes, that means that we can add multiple compositions in here. Let's take the rock, for instance, here, this pre comp. We can just drag that in there as well, and it will also be rendered. So if you have a ton of clips, you can let them render and go drink a coffee or take a walk. But for now, let's only focus on clip number two, that composition, only one to render. And we get three different settings here. We get the render settings, which is certainly set to best settings. Then we get the output module, which is the format that you want to render to. And finally, where you would like to save it. And you can already set that. Click on Not Yet specify inside my After Effects for beginners folder, and we can give that a name. Awesome rock via Vx and then hit safe. So we got the location set. That is good. But what kind of format are we exporting to? Well, first of all, we got to look at the render settings. Open up that drop down menu, and you can see a few options in here. Now, 99% of the time, you're going to go for best settings, obviously. How your video is going to be rendered. This has nothing to do yet with the format of the video. Either you're going to go for best settings, which is in most cases, what you want, or you can go for draft settings if you just really want to export your video as fast as possible so that you can have a preview for yourself, but that's never going to be used as an end product. So let's keep that to best settings. But then, what kind of format do you want to export to? You can again open up the dropdown menu to choose between a whole bunch of presets, but I also want to show you the custom settings. You can do that by just clicking here on the blue text of the current format that has been. Don't want to overwhelm you with a whole bunch of format settings, but there are two very important formats that you do have to know about. And the first one is the H 264. It's already set here in the format. You can find it in the drop down menu. This is basically a compressed video type, and you're going to use that format to have your video shared online, on YouTube, on social media, or even on a USBSick and give it physically to your friends and family to then open up on their computer. It's a format to share. Here we want to click on Format Options. And there is one setting in the format options that I'm interested in, so you can ignore everything, but here, the target bitrates. This will define the quality of your video, and the lower the quality, the smaller the file sizes. Other times, you don't really care about the file size, so you can just pump that up, have better quality, but also end up with a bigger file size. As a rule of thumb, around ten to 15 megabits per seconds is oftentimes enough. You're going to see a few compression artifacts, but you're going to end up with a small file size. This will be on the lower end, but it's absolutely fine. Then if we go to 20 to 25, this is a higher quality. You're going to see less artifacts, but you're also going to end up with a bigger file size. Eventually, you're entering the realm of, let's say, 35, 40, that point, you really don't care about the file size anymore. You just want the highest possible quality. So that's to give you some idea about the target bitrate. But again, just explore that yourself, try a few exports with different bit rates. See how it ends up is the file size or the quality good enough or not enough for you. Alright, I'm going to hit Okay because there's a second format that I'd like to explore. Let's go back to the drop down menu here on top. And instead of H 264, I'm going to Quick Time. And then let's go to the format options for QuickTime because there are a bunch of different codecs that we can choose. But the only one that I'm actually interested in is that Apple ProRes 422. So what's the difference between this and the H 264? Well, the H 264 is heavily compressed. It's trying to make the file size as small as possible while still retaining a high enough quality so you can share it online with your friends. The ProRes Kodak is very lightly compressed. That means you're going to end up with a very high file size. But the quality will be very good. So why do you want to pick the PRS file, then? Well, this is considered an intermediate Kodak. Don't worry too much about that word. All it means is that you're not going to use this video as an end product. You're going to use it to further work on. So you're going to export it out of After Effects and then import that again inside Premiere or Final Cut or DaVinci, where you are going to do color correction on or you're going to further edit your video. A PRS video, even though much bigger in file size will play back much smoother inside your video editing software as with an H 264 Kodak, which is smaller it is heavily compressed, so your video editing software has trouble playing that back and doing further color correction or editing on it. So those are the only two formats you got to know. Are you going to deliver it or are you further going to work on it in your video editing software? And that's all there is to it. So let's select one. Let's go for the Apple ProRes. I might want to do some more color correction on it. Hit Okay, and then just hit Render and wait it out. It's already done. It makes that beautiful playing sound, and now I can find it back here. Awesome rock via Vx inside my folder After Effects for beginners. And I can play it back from there. Look at it. Beautiful. Let's play that again because it looks really cool. And that's pretty much it. Now, I would like to congratulate you, but I'm not going to do that just yet. I want to see you in the next lesson as well, the conclusion lesson, because in there, I'm going to share a few exercises and congratulate you. But that's for the next lesson. 22. Conclusion: Hey, congratulations. I am so excited that you've sit through the entire Adobe After Effects class. This is really something. You can be very proud of yourself, give yourself a tap on the shoulder. Now, you have learned a ton of new information about this wonderful program, so it takes some time to process all of that information. It takes years to really master After Effects. So don't expect things to go smooth in a couple of weeks. You got to practice, and that starts with a great exercise that I have for you. What I would like to see is a video where you implement tree techniques from this class. Start the video with an intro animation, create a fun motion graphic with some text and graphics, create some smooth animations, remember those smooth keyframes, and then show a clip where you have done some sort of a keying or masking technique. Either use the mask with an animation on that, use a rotoscope or a luma key or maybe even a green key if you have that laying around at home. And then finally end the video with some sort of a TD shot. You know, either place a text into your s through a treaty camera tracking or maybe at a treaty text where you extrude it or maybe even an actual treaty object. You can use the rock that I provide or you can also download another treaty model or maybe scan it using your phone. That's up to you create something fun and enjoy while you're doing so. And remember, in the future, while you are working on some sort of a project, you can always come back to this class and rewatch some specific lessons about what you want to make. After effect is a journey, and you got to enjoy that journey. I'm always super excited when I see new features coming to After Effects, then I can learn some new things and create new things as well. So go at create and show your creation the world. And like I always say, stay creative.