How to Easily Animate Logos in After Effects

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Jay. That's better. Hi. I'm Jayden and I'm a video editor, animator, and motion designer. I really that trick works. Throughout the years, I have worked on a variety of projects, ranging from simple web and TV promotion, to big budget animated cinema or ads, to informational videos by the Australian government, to award-winning short films and transmedia series. Throughout all these different types of projects, I found that one of the most universal and vital elements is the logo. It's such an important part of the branding of a film, a video, or any piece of content. I think being able to animate a killer logo animation will be something that will help you, provision point to lens, we will now help you stand out from the crowd. Throughout this class, you'll be taking a pre-existing logo and creating a fully-fledged logo animation. My hair is a mess, but throughout this class, I will show you how to set up and prepare any type of logo file you're given because let's face it, especially if you're doing client work, you're not always going to get a neatly-labeled illustrator file. You might get a 300 by 200-pixel JPEG that the intern had lying around when they sent it to you. I'll show you how to develop your eye to animate for the style of the logo, and I will show you how just by using some really basic techniques and tools within After Effects, you can create something that looks like it took all day, but really just took less time than your lunch break. By the end of this class, you'll come away with some really simple but versatile techniques that can be applied to any type of motion graphics. So without any further ado, let's get started. 2. Class Project: For your class project, you are going to be creating a logo animation from start to finish using a pre-existing logo. You can use one of the two logos and I will provide a following along step-by-step, or you can use one of your own logos, a client's logo, or anything that you have access to. I recommend that you do use your own logo, and an original logo at that. If you want to use a pre-existing logo just for the sake of practice, you can, but please be aware that there'll be limitations to where you can post it. Copyright Law is unfortunately a minefield and I don't want you getting in any trouble. Across this class, I'm going to be animating two different logos to give you an idea of how different logos can have different animation styles. This instance logo, which will be more dynamic and full of movement, and this example corp logo, which is going to be more mechanical, and it draws on slowly, and methodically. To begin this project, you're going to need to open Adobe After Effects, and most likely too, don't hate me, but also open Adobe Illustrator. I recommend checking out the project description where I've put some links to some fundamentals of After Effects courses. Also, I recommend familiarizing yourself with the 12 principles of animation, where I've included a link to a article guide and to a video series that explains the concepts very well. When you're finished, I would like you to post your finished logo animation along with the original unedited logo file, in the project gallery below. Let's get to opening these incredibly CPU heavy programs, and get use to the sound of your CPU fan going nuts, and let's get started on making these animations. 3. Explanation of File Types: Now, before we begin, I want to briefly talk about file types and specifically the difference between a raster or bitmap image and a vector image. Raster image is anything that's made up out of pixels. Any sort of JPEG, PNG, any sort of VIA file, what most people are used to on the end. They have a certain set amount of pixels. Each pixel has color information and brightness information. Through the various amounts of pixels, that's how the image is conveyed. In a really big image like this, it works out great. You have a lot of detail in the laptop, you can see everything it's really good. But the downside to using raster images is that there is a set resolution and above that, image quality cannot be increased. That's okay for this file because as you can see, it's quite huge. But if the resolution was a lot smaller, say, like this, then you would not be able to scale in the same way that you could with a vector because once you Zoom in, you can start to see that the image quality starts to break it down. You don't have that detail, that clarity because that pixel information is set, it's just being stretched so, you can't really do anything with it. Raster images are best for anything that's meant to look photo realistic. The other type of file is a vector. Unlike raster images which are based on pixels, vectors use math to calculate the size of the shape, the relative position of everything and things like that. With a vector image, you get these just general shapes. Because it's just math on the computer, you can scale it as high as you want, and no matter how much, the image quality will always be the same. See the sharpness and detail and clarity on the keys is exactly the same. The downside to a vector image is it cannot contain the same amount of information that a raster image can. Anything that goes for something photo-realistic normally cannot be done in a vector image. Let's take, for example, this very flattering screenshot of me from earlier in the video. With this image, if we wanted to Zoom in on my face because, I mean, why not? With a raster image, we do lose obviously some pixel information. It's quite blurry. But if we try and do the exact same thing with a vectorized version of this same picture. You can see that the results are not great. Singly anything with like a gradient or strong light to dark fall off, vectors can't, really handled that much information very well. The two definitely have their uses and there are times as an emotion designer, why you want to use raster and when you want to use vector. But most of the time, especially if you're working with graphics, a logo, or something like that. You are most likely going to want to use the vector because you can resize, reshape, do so many more things with it than you could with a roster image. But things don't always pan out that way. Clients often don't know the difference between a raster and a vector. The lay person is far more familiar with raster images. It's very likely that you will get a raster images. In the next two videos, I'll show you the two separate ways to set up a logo for animation. The first way if you've got a vector image,an Illustrator file or an EPS, and the second way, if you've got a ruster image, a JPEG, or a PNG. 4. Importing and Preparing a Vector file (.ai, .eps): So now let's begin the process of actually importing your file so that you can begin animating it a little later down the line. Unfortunately, even though I build a vector files as being so much better and easier to work with, they do require some amount of setup in the beginning in order to get things moving. But trust me, it's going to save you a lot of headaches later on down the line. Before absolutely everything I like to set up my file structure. This is a little different because I have some previously done stuff, but in general, what I like to do is I like to have a folder for compositions and to create a new folder, you just click on the "New Folder" icon down here. I create a folder for Compositions I create a folder for footage, in this case it would be images, so maybe actually I'll rename this Assets, that's a name I use a lot and I like to have a folder for miscellaneous, things I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to use. Even though I was singing the praises of vector images before, unfortunately, you can't just import them willy nilly most of the time, because for example, let's try to import our logos. Let's do here, if we try to import it. Sure, if we turn on "Continuously Rasterized" down here, which is what allows the vector files to maintain their shape indefinitely, yeah, sure we have that and we have all that added benefit, but it's just this solid one piece. We can't actually manipulate any of the end pieces that's not great for what we want to do with all this crazy motion graphic stuff. Unfortunately, we have to go into my old friend, Adobe Illustrator, if you're not confident with Illustrator as I'm actually not very confident either, don't worry, because the steps here aren't actually too complicated. What we need to do, as you can see now, even though everything is technically on its own layer down here, After Effects is only reading this top layer. It's the nature in how After Effects reads certain things. We could just drag these up, drag them onto their own layer but unfortunately at the moment they lack layer properties. We need to give them layer properties and how do we do that? Well, there's actually a really, really simple way of doing it. Top layer selected and then click the "Drop-down Menu" on the right here and go down to "Release Layers Sequence" and what this is going to do is put everything, even though it was already separated, now it's on an actual layer property. What you can do is you can drag it outside of this main layer and now it's on its own, just make it a case of dragging everything up above here and then now you can delete this empty layer by going down the trash icon here and getting rid of it, and so now everything is separated on its own proper layer properties. I would go a step further and rename these. There's one more step I would do for this, which is actually to turn this because at the moment this is text so I can go in and edit this, if I wanted to change this to instasnce, why not? That's a punchy name, most of the time if you are getting this from a client, it will probably be already made its own object. But if you made it yourself, it's probably still going to be a text layer and for what we needed to do when it's read in After Effects, After Effects gets weird reading text from Illustrator. We need to convert this text into just a regular object and this is also actually pretty easy. You just make sure you've clicked on the "Layer," make sure everything is selected. Go up to "Type", "Create Outlines", and now it's a path, that process obviously seemed very quick and clean, but that's because this logo is relatively simple, it's ultimately only six real individual elements to work with, but say if we had our other example logo, this bad boy here, which has a lot more going on and if we check the layer structure here and it's a bit yikes. You can see this is going to take quite a bit more time, so you have to be careful. Now we can under our assets folder, make sure it's clicked. Go "File", "Import File", click on "Instance," this part is really important. You need to click this not as "Footage," as "Composition Retain Layer Styles." What this is going to do once everything is in, we can open up now in here, everything is its own layer and it's nice and neat. The importance of checking "Retain Layer Styles" is that as you can see here right now, the border-box is just for the width of the actual layer itself, which is nice, but if you forget to click that box, I can show you, it's still works, so let's re-import this again, it still works. Let's do this "Regular Composition" but as we can see now in this, the boundary box is the entire width here of the composition, which is okay but it's just far cleaner to do all this yourself. Now let's make this composition something actually workable so you can right-click anywhere down here in the gray section, go to "Composition Settings" and let's go to "HDV TV 1080 24". Now I'm used to working in PAL, in 25 frames per second being Australian, but with the internet, any frame rate works. Twenty four is the standard, it's nice clean number for doing certain things like if you want to animate twos, so 24 will suit. Ten seconds is good, and let's go. You want to turn on this here, "Continually Rasterize" because this is what's going to give the raster image its power. If you don't say, for instance, in scale up and wonder why it's blurry, make sure to check that this is actually on, it can save you a lot of hassle. What I would do now in this case, to scale it up, I will go "Layer", "New Null Object". Now, "Null Object" is basically something you can apply any data to that can usually these act as controllers. I'm going to actually rename this controller, I know where everything is at. I'm going to select all of my layers here, grab the "Pick Whip" tool here, drag and connect here, and so now what this will do is that the controller, anything I change to the controller will change everything else below. Actually, I didn't take my own advice, I forgot to turn on "Continuously Rasterized". To help find for composition. You can go down here and click on this and I turn on "Tidal Action Safe". Now this is a bit of a relic from the old age of TV broadcasts. These boundaries here was basically what the TV screen would cutoff. But I find these days it's a good compositional tool because you don't really want to go to far beyond the edges of a lot of these and it can help you line things up. Let's say for some reason that you didn't have Illustrator. Now this day and age with Creative Cloud, you'll most likely going to have access to Illustrator but you never know you might be in a situation where you don't. There is a way that you can separate by shape in After Effects but it's a little bit clunky. What I mean by that, I'll give you an example. Let's say we import it and let's import this but just as "Footage." There is a way to turn this into multiple layers and what we can do is we can right-click "Create", "Convert Shapes From Vector Layer" and now this will create a shape layer above it, as we can see here, it's now turned off, where each individual part is turned into its own shape layer. You may think, wow, that's skips a whole bunch of steps, why don't we do that from the beginning? The problem is, it's all under this one After Effects layer and you can certainly manipulate these individual parts by themselves. I can scale this up, I can move this around, I can even add my own key frames but everything will be under this one entire layer, and especially considering what we are doing, we're going to have so many key frames, navigating through just this one layer is going to be a bit of a nightmare. You can separate from layers like this but again you run into some other problem, say if we made empty Shape Layer and we thought okay, we're going to separate this, and if we just cut this dot here and put it there, all the information is going to be wonky, it's not going to be exactly the same. I find that the easiest way to do this then is to duplicate this however many times as we have, with this we have, let's see, 14, we'd need to duplicate this 14 times and then go in manually and just delete all but this, and then go into this one, and we'd have to delete 2, we'd have to delete 4, and so on and so forth, and it ends up just being so much more of a hassle than actually going in to Illustrator and separating it by layers that way. I do like to use the "Create Shapes From Vectors" tool though in a very specific instance. Let's select all of our layers here and right-click "Create Shapes From Vector Layers." This is basically created everything into its own individual shape layer. Now there are three main reasons why I've done this, the first one is that now we can actually go in and manipulate the key frames, which will become important later on. The second one is if I have this original logo, say for example, if something were to happen, if I were to lose the logo file while moving things from hard drives, if it got corrupted, or if an alteration was made, then Adobe dynamic link would it make those changes in here and a lot of work could be lost. I just like to make these so I'm not actually manipulating or damaging the original file and the third one is that because I made the text just this one layer, when I did it all through in Illustrator, if I go into here, now they are all separated into their own individual groups. Now I know I just talked earlier about it's better to have things on separate layers but I actually think it's better to work in these subgroups, things that are very, very similar. This instance logo or the individual letters work much better and I can manipulate these just how I would want but it's still nicely contained into one single text layer. I think it ends up being the best of both worlds, and though if you wanted to, you could even go ahead and delete these layers. I'm going to keep them there just for insurance may be for a reference if I wanted to come back to them, and yeah, now, more or less, this is ready to be animated. That's how to import and set up a vector image under the best possible circumstances. In the next video, I'll go over what to do if you have a raster image, and there are some useful techniques and things you can learn from even if you have a vector file, it's always good to have this knowledge as a backup, let's get cracking on the next one. 5. Importing and Preparing a Raster file (.jpg, .png): Now let's cover what to do if you only have access to our raster image instead,. It's not the end of the world, especially if you're going to PNG and it's higher res enough. Let's say for example, you get sent something like this. If we create a new composition, that's good, PNG example. Yeah, I'm quite loose on my filename. If you're working on a project with multiple people who are going to have access to the same files, you might want to be more clear, but if it's your own personal thing, just make sure that you understand where everything is. Let's drop the PNG in here. We can see this is pretty high res. We can do quite a lot with this. This isn't too bad. The way I would go about working with a PNG or something like this, is work out exactly how many individual pieces you have. At this, we have these five elements and we have 1,2,3,4,5,7,8,9. Nine pieces of text. We ultimately need 14. We would duplicate, and we would duplicate this 14 times. You might be seeing a pattern related to something early on. Then what you would do is flip the first one, to appear to the mask tool or the pen tool, and you would start masking around these elements. This is obviously quite generous. They're big spaces, so I don't have to be quite accurate with my masking. I can just make this general shape. You would go ahead and do this for every single one. Now every single piece is individually separated into its own little mini thing here. Before we would do anything else, I would select all the layers. I would do Control, Alt, Home, descent is the anchor point into the center of whatever your lamb maybe. To move the anchor point, you can go up to here to the Pan Behind tool or you can hit Y on the keyboard, that's the keyboard shortcut. Maybe you can go in and fix some of these, so like this one's way off. It put this more in the center, same with this one. Once again, I would go Layer, New, Null Object. I'm going to pick whip parent, everything to my null object here. Now I just have a controller. I would probably go in and rename all of these to their specific pieces, like again, we did in Illustrator. This is a pretty good way of getting things set up. Obviously, you don't have the same level of freedom for some of the things we're doing later on. But this is a pretty good place to stop. Now if you only have access to a JPEG image or PNG without any transparency, there are still a few things you can do. Now JPEG's contact transparency naturally. You can still do all the exact same things we talked about. You can go in and separate these layers. Just for the example, I'm only going to do two here. If you put everything under, we went Layer, New, Solid. Make Comp Size. Yeah. Pump this under here. There's no problem, except we want to move over the edge of the mask and where the white background is going to come in play. This is a bit of a dilemma that there's no real super efficient way of dealing with. Probably the cleanest is just to keep the entire thing on the same color background as whatever the JPEG has. This may be a bit limiting later on down with if you want to do some crazy compositing of a footage, your options are very limited. But for the most part, in most logos tend to be animated on a solid color, so that's okay. Another way of dealing with it is you could go in, for example, and you could be incredibly meticulous with your masking. You could go here, then here. But the problem with even this method is, let's just close this off here for the moment. You can see it's not flawless. It takes a long time to get right. If you're going to the effort of actually just masking that meticulously, it's way better to actually end up re-creating the logo yourself, either with inside after effects. So you could use a shape layer. If you don't have any layer selected, and you have the pencil, it'll automatically create a shape layer. You could go through here like this and recreate it. You're starting to get semblance of the shape. With texts this is quite difficult. You would probably just want to ask the client for what their font was. But for certainly for these shapes. If you'd just grabbed a solid here, easy peasy. If you're going to that trouble, I would just recreate the logo yourself inside After Effects. That's essentially what to do if you end up having a logo that is entirely too [inaudible]. Something like this. If we scale it up, that's unworkable, that's tedious, that looks unprofessional and you are unable to do anything. You would have to recreate the logo anyway. Even though you'd probably end up recreating the things later on, even if it's perfectly high enough resolution on transparency, just the nature of what you want do. It's easier to recreate some elements. It's always a good idea if you have a raster to start with this process because it gives you a clear foundation of exactly what you need to work on and visualize there of what you're pieces are. Now that we have in whatever form decomposition setup, the file imported, let's get moving on to actually starting the animation process. 6. Transform Properties I: Position, Anchor Point & Scale: This first part, we're just going to focus on mainly using position and scale, because that's what this logo animation mainly uses. Now, even if you are absolutely beginning and this is the first time you've seen after effects, the transform properties are pretty straightforward. If you go down to the layer drop-down menu here, and then down into transform. You have the five basic transform properties, from opacity through to position. They're all pretty self-explanatory. Opacity is how transparent something is, rotation is how it's rotated. Scale is the size and you can de-link these, which is nice. Maybe you want it more of a rectangle and position is where it's located. Now, anchor point, however, is probably the most interesting and the one that's most likely if you're having any trouble with the transform properties, it's probably because of your anchor point, because the anchor point is the center of the layout. Let's move it over into the corner here. If we now then try to do the same thing, so if we scale that's going to be the point from which it scales from or if we do rotation from where it rotates from. If your key frames, you're having some problems, it's not really turning out the way you want. It might be because your anchor point isn't where you want it or need it to be. I always make sure to at the very beginning before I put any key frames in, make sure my anchor point is where I want it to be. Let's start actually building this animation. Now to begin, I don't really like the checkerboard background. It's hard to see what I'm doing. I'm going to go to composition settings, background color, and change it to white, turn it off. Now, it's going to resemble if it's just on a white background. Now, I'm going to turn all these layers off for the moment and I'm going to go over to the shape tool, go to ellipse, going to hold down shift and drag and holding down shift allows me to make a perfect circle without holding shift. It's more of an ellipsoid to control all time to put it in the sensor. I'm going to go over to the aligned tab down here and align it in the middle where I need to. Actually I'll turn this back on just to get the color reference going to go over here to film and I'm going to change this to the middle color here. Hopefully you have some base knowledge or have looked over the 12 principles of animation because we're going to use some of them here. The most important ones, I think for motion graphics or at the very least for this example are squash and stretch, anticipation, follow through, and slow in, slow out. Like I said, I want to make sure I've got the anchor point where I want it. I'm going to use the pan behind tool hold control and that allows me to lock it to down here because we want this ball to bounce. It makes more sense for this scale for when we stretch it to be effective from there, just going to make it clean out down the line. I'm going to add about 12 frames and hit the position stopwatch. Now for this drop animation, it makes more sense to work backwards to me. I'm going to set the resting key frame here go backwards, maybe five frames, go up a little bit and hold shift to lock it to a plane. Maybe I'll put a little bit, go back a few frames, drop it down a little bit, more over here, and then go to the very beginning and pop it out of frame. Now if we play that back, we have a very simple bouncing animation. Now it's not great at the moment. It's a bit stiff. A way to make this just a bit more punchy is you can hit F-9 and this puts easy, ease key frames all over. Basically what this is, if we look at the speed graph here, we can see these nice loops. This is the slow in, slow out mode from the 12 principles. That's already looking pretty good. As you can see, we've got these. You've got to follow through here of when it bounces it over shoots a little bit here before coming to its rest. It doesn't just come to it's complete stop. It's very subtle and you don't really notice it when you watch it, but you definitely feel it. That's what a lot of the time, the 12 principles are. You don't notice it, you feel it. We can make this even more, is we can add some squash and stretch. Let's hit the S scale to bring up the scale position, hit the stopwatch to create a key frame, and then hit U and if you hit U on a layer, you can see all of the key frames that you have currently on that layer. Because I just realized, I'm going to rename this because it's bothering me. An important thing to keep in mind about squash and stretch, particularly when it comes to scale, is that most of the time objects need to maintain their volume. What I mean by that is when doing squash and stretch objects won't suddenly gain mass. If you make any sort of change in values, say for example, to the horizontal value of the scale, then you need a counter balance change in the vertical value of the scale. Let's say for a squash. Let's make it a little exaggerated so we can see it. Lets do 125. Then here we need to drop the 75 percent. Let's go to 75. Now you see what I mean, it maintains its volume. This is a bit more exaggerated in my example, but let's go ahead and animate this. As it reaches the top, it would go the opposite direction again, that follow through. Let's say now this one shoots to a 110 and this one goes to 90. You see as it comes backup, it's now regaining it's shape. As it comes to a rest, it can easily and nicely go back to 100. We play that back. You can see we've now got a nice little bouncing ball. Let's go ahead and make this further. Now we're going to begin to have it split apart. We've heard a bit of a problem with this because I move the anchor point down to here. If I want to change the scale now, it's always going to be on the side, which is a bit of a problem for what we want to do next. However, thankfully, because this is a shape layer, we can affect the transform properties on the individual shape within here. If you just click down contents, down to the ellipse, down to the transform. We now have our own new set of transform properties to use and the anchor point is in the center, which is lovely for what we need. Now let's use a little bit of anticipation to start setting the stage. Let's set our base scale key-frame and let's go ahead maybe to about a couple of seconds. Because this is going to stretch out horizontally, maybe we want to bunch up a little bit vertically before it spreads out like that. Again, we'll de-link the scale properties here and will bunch up a little bit in the middle, and we'll increase this out accordingly. It will bunches up a little bit and we'll hit easy ease, F-9 and let's even add a very tiny before at the opposite direction, like the tiniest amount, just to add extra punch to it, and now let's go ahead and begin the opposite direction. Let's stretch it out to maybe there and stretch this down. Even in this splitting section, you want to maintain a volume a little bit. See at the moment this is a little too slow for what I need it to be. But you don't want to go to the hustle of individually moving these key frames. For this it's actually not too bad. But say if you had many, many, many more key frames, it'd be too much to like move each individual one. Let's select everything, hold Alt go to your last key frame and then drag it across and now it'll re-time. Now the downside to this is it doesn't lock it to a frame, so it's slightly off there. You have to manually go in and make sure they align just to be safe and there's more to do here later up but with just the transform properties now going to want to create another layout. Let's again make the ellipse tool, hold shift and now we want a new layer for this. Let's go roughly about the same width. That's pretty good and let's set it here. Now I want to duplicate this ellipse and put it on this side here. Now, you can do this on separate layers, but I like to keep it in the same just because we'll be duplicating it again even later on. Click on this starting circle and hit alt and a square bracket just to trim it so that we here at the very end. We want to do the opposite here. Go alt, open square bracket and it's a little off, so let's just drag this across and now splits like that. In this point, known in building the foundation of this logo animation, what I'm going to be doing is pretty much more of the same. If you're feeling pretty confident that you understand how to use and apply the position and scale properties, you can go ahead and skip to the transform properties part 2 video, where we will be covering how to use rotation and opacity, as well as doing some solidifying and how to use scale. To do this, we'll be switching to our other example logo, which can better exemplify these properties. But if you're still feeling like you don't quite have the hang of it, in the next video I'll continue to go piece by piece of how we finish this foundation. Whichever one you choose, see you in the next video. 7. Bonus: Applying Position, Anchor Point & Scale: Let's continue where we left off in the last video with applying the rest of the position and scale transform property techniques. These two ellipses here, Let's make a position key frame and a scale key frame that's what we're going to need. Because I had both of these selected at the same time when I'm hit those stopwatches, when hit U, they'll be on both which is good for what we need. Let's drag these over here and let's set where we want our final position to be. Make sure to click transform here so we can move it. Hold shifts, so we keep an horizontal plane, drag it over here. Going to turn on tidal action save just to help me with composition. Then I'm going to do this same here. Then I'm going to go back to position. I'm going to move over here just so I can see what I'm doing. Make sure they line up in the middle here and then bring that back. Now they'll be two separate like that. Again, we want to put some overshoots. Let's go beyond here. Set now a key frame so we can know what we're doing. Come back to this one and let's overshoot it a little bit. It's pushed to about there. [inaudible] just these end ones. Let's see, that looks pretty good. But let's do the scale. It's put vertical here at 110. Let's put this one at 90. Then we go. Let's actually, you can just click on this and copy the entire scale properties. Now data like this, some follow through here. Let's go to the opposite. Let's make this 97, 104 and just copy this single key frame because this are exact the same engulfing the key frames. Let's drag this out so that's a bit more. I actually made a little mistake here. But these things happen you have to clean it up. Sometimes it doesn't turn out as perfectly as you want. Now it's pretty good. Now we're going to do the same thing that we did with this one. We're going to have that expand and then contract. Let's set our bass key frames here. The beauty with this one is we can just keep them on the same. Let's go in and expand. Now this time they're going to be expanding vertically. We'll want to set this to be a bite high. This to be a little extracted, copy the same key frame. Then expand up like that and expand down like that and we want to move this timing because we want to keep this moving at a pretty good pace. To pretty much just after is okay. We can just copy these key frames. Down to the bottom here. We going to offset these a little bit too. Let's have this one starts that little bit after this one. Just to give it a tiny sense that they are happening individually. Again, let's hit alt, square, bracket to cut it off. Let's make a third layer again with a perfect sphere and again, let's give it a similar width and duplicate it. Go alt, square, bracket here. Grab these two select the same time. Transform, position scale hit U. Now we have them brought up brilliant. Let's go ahead to here. Move this to where we want it. Yes, that's pretty good. If here to where we want it, it easy forward again for scale and scale. Go to here. Contract, boost and copy what we did for the first one. Let's add opposition overshoot. Remove this fall a little bit and it's I now overshoot. Again, let's put our scale overshoot [inaudible] copy paste. Then we have it for this side here. But of course we needed on the other side too. Actually let's trim that so we get the effect here. You get the effect. Let's close this, go to the content's drop everything. Let's just duplicate these two layers and holding U again. Now, select all of the position at the same time by holding control. Then if you're on the right key frame, when you move, it will move everything at the same time, all the key frames that you have selected. Which means now that when we play this, it's perfectly mirrored, which is pretty good. Again, because this one was slightly offset and we want to shift these over just by one set of key frames. Just now bit of dynamics, not exactly the same. Now we want them to all come to meet in the center. Now he is where I really want them to be different. Hit U, here something for our position on all four, go ahead a few frames. Zip to the middle here. Now I want to use this middle point as a way to have them just touching for when the final one comes together. There we go and now I'm going to just offset each of these by one frame hitting alt, the arrow keys. Now they owned is come on frame a little off like that and go to this frame here and hit alt, brackets, it's cut off. Let's create one more circle in the center here. Roughly the size of all of them. Center hold square bracket shifted. Then I'm going to hit to transform scale, bringing it up over here, scale it down. When here hit it again with [inaudible] open up. I want this to hold for longer and I want this to be bigger. Before comes back down. Maybe I don't want this to Easy Ease actually. Now if we play it all back, we have the workings of the starting of what we had before. Now again, my timings is not exactly perfect. These aren't what I want. I would go in and I would say, for example, here is too long of a pause. I would find here, and I would drag it all so that it starts earlier. Find me in bringing these across. Do the same for here. I want these to start much earlier. Grab on the key frames and start moving them here. Then we have it, it's starting to come together. One last note before we get to the next point is that when these speed together in the middle, if we want to add the like speeding or like the scale key frames and give it the sense of movement, if we do it at the moment. Let's say with this one, it doesn't work because, now just goes like this. We have to finally add some rotation key frames. First let's go ahead and add our scale key frames. Double hit U, which collapses all the key frames and then select all of the ellipse layer here, or the transform rotation. We can add our rotation key frames to all. Now hit U. We have allow rotation key frames. What we going to want to do is when the scale first stops here, let's drag them over here. Let's change the rotation of each one. Let's start with this one. The rotation needs to be like this. So that way we do it, it will scale like this. Just a quick note for doing all of these. Now if we play this back, we can see the beginnings of how everything comes together. It already looks pretty good, even just by using position scale and a tiny bit of rotation. In this video, we basically only used position and scale. In the next video, we're going to switch over to our other logo and show you how rotation and opacity can also work to create some very interesting effects. 8. Transform Properties II: Rotation & Opacity: Now let's jump into our other logo and begin applying some rotation and opacity key frames, plus a little bit of scale will be hidden there along the way. So before we do anything else, I'm going to select everything, right click, Create, and create shapes from vector layer. Now you may notice right away, that what's happening here, why is it all white? When aftereffects converts shapes from vectors, it doesn't convert the transparency, so it's a very easy fix. We are just going to pull these up here. We just need to find the two squares here, hit T to bring up opacity and drop it down to 20 and boom. Now you also might notice that compared to the original, these lines here, we can see that the color information is a little bit different. This can happen time to time when converting inside AfterEffects, but in this case it's not too bad because we are just going to recreate these lines later on down the line anyway, but if it's something a little bit more vital, you might not want to convert from shape and just use the original illustrator layer. Again, before we do anything, I'm going to go to layer, new null object and put it up here, rename this controller. Now before I pick whip, I'm going to move this actually into the dead center here, because this middle section is going to animate on first, and then later we're going to zoom out to see the example corp. So I'm just going to put in the middle there, and then I'm going to select everything, pick whip to the controller and actually while I'm here, I'm going to put in those key frames now. I'm going to hit S full-scale, go maybe about four seconds. Yeah, that seems pretty good. Hit a scale key frame, go maybe 12 seconds before, scale up to what I want, I'm going to drop. If you're finding that it's lagging, you always go to the resolution down sample panel here and pop it down to half. You generally get a pretty good idea, actually I'm going to put that in further into a third. This can be good just to see exactly what you're doing. Just remember to turn this back up to full later when you want to render a preview of the whole thing. That's pretty good, and then I'm going to hit P, hit position, double hit U, drag that across here, put this in the center roughly and here we go. So for now I'm going to turn off everything that I'm going to need. The first thing I want to animate is these squares here and so first we're going to do scale, our friend from the previous video. Let's start with this little one down here. Zoom in so we can see what we're doing, pick up to half. Hit S scale, let's go ahead to about here and again, it's easier to work backwards, we're going to go about five frames. One, two, three, four, five. Hit the add key-frame button here and let's go 120. It's going to be very subtle and go back five frames, or six frames doesn't really matter and hit zero. Let's hit these last two frames, make them easy, ease, and it pops up nice and simple like that. Now I almost always find, if you're scaling up from zero, it's best to have this middle key-frame of follow-through, where it just overshoots the target, it makes it punch a bit more because if we just did this, it's not as impactful as this. Again, you don't see it, but you feel it. Now the beauty of this, is we can just copy this information, go to the next outline here, hit paste. and maybe let's shift this over, so it started out here. Let's go to our blue one. I'll actually move to blue and up here and hit paste and the last one, let's move this up here and hit paste. Now these timing isn't of course, exactly what we want, but we're just laying down the foundations at the moment. In the previous example, we had this looping rotation animation and let's just go ahead and add that in here. So this is pretty easy. To add, hit R to bring up their rotation properties, hit the stopwatch, double-tap use, so we can see where our scale key-frames are and now let's create a bit of anticipation. So let's go ahead three frames, go -10, and let's go forward. This is a pretty long ones, let's go forward about 12 frame and now let's have our overshoot, so let's do 100. Go backwards three frames and come to our rest at 90. Off course, let's easy ease all this and now we just have this really nice subtle rotation animation and on this last key-frame, we're going to want to hit right-click and toggle hold key-frame. What this is going to do, is that if we paste any information, if we drastically altered it here with the toggle key-frame, normally if these ones toggled, it will just continue rotating because we have the key-frame information. But when it is toggled, it just holds until the change happens and this is good for this because even though we rotated it a complete 90 degrees, the fact that it's the square means that, if we just copy paste this information, if we did it just here and then here, it's going to look like it's just always rotating like that. This is very handy and now I want to go to these all of our squares, which we created and just paste this rotation information at random. You just want the sense that, there is no real rhyme or reason, so you can just go ahead and paste it however you like. Yeah, I think that's starting to look pretty good. Now let's start to animate these little dots here, the line that starts to come on. To start this, first I'm going to move my dots layout to below my squares, I think it looks cleaner that way and now for this, we need to actually go into each individual shapes content because I wanted this to all be on one layout because I thought that was a lot cleaner. Let's go to the first dot here, which is actually number 30, funnily enough in the naming scheme and let's go to this dots of the clip. Maybe when this little square here is about starting to come up, let's go drop-down menu, transform, and let's click rotation and scale, hit U, so we can only see those key-frames and now again, we're going to work backwards. So let's do one, two, three, four. That's too is about four fall. This time let's scale up to about 200. Because of the size of these little squares, we need to make the action bigger. We'll go and do a much higher than we did with these bigger squares. Let's go again another four frames and let's drop down to zero and also while we're here down in rotation, let's go -90. Now it's not only going to scale up, it's also going to rotate, while doing so. Let's easy ease these lost key-frames here, and then we go and rotates and zooms up. Now let's copy the scale and the rotation, control C. Make sure just to copy scale and rotation, we don't want it to be copying this, this will mess things up and let's close this, so we can see a little bit better, let's go to the beginning, go one frame ahead, and paste that information to the next square here. Let's go one frame ahead and add it to the square next to that. One frame ahead to the square next to that and even just by this, you can start to see what we're doing. Of course it's a little bit tedious, but we're going to go ahead and just paste this key-frame information, one frame ahead to each of these individual squares. When you start getting to the end of it, we can mimic our own ease in, ease out manually by instead of doing one frame after, let's just do two frames after. Again, two frames for the next one and for the final one, let's do a whopping three frames. You can see here, this just gives its own little subtle slowing down effect. It's very subtle and actually why don't we go ahead and hit use, we can see our key-frames. Let's shift the first three back a little bit too, so remember Alt, arrow keys, Shift back one, shift back one, and let's shift this back three. If we play that back, they all drawn like that and you can see already, just by copy pasting some of the same information, this is already looking pretty good. Now we need to do the big square down here, we forgotten about him and again. We can just copy the information from this square here, scale, copy and let's do Alt, Control V, lets move it back to where we want it and yet towards the end here. Actually let's go ahead and let's drag this out a little bit, I just want it to be a little longer. Yeah, that feels a bit better and let's make the pop a little bit big, amounts to 130. Yeah, that feels pretty good. Right, so hopefully you can start to see how it's all coming together. Finally, for opacity. Opacity is the most straightforward of all the transform properties tools. Let's do Alt left brackets, so we can close it, hits T for opacity. Yeah, it's annoying most of the other transform properties, like anchor point, scale, position. They all start with the letter of their word, but a opacity is T. For the big background one, we're going to want to Shift L base key-frame over and let's just drop down to zero and let's have this just fade on first. When this is fully faded on, you can hint Alt, left bracket to the top one, go T, opacity. Now we're at 20, so we want this to still be at zero, and let's actually have these two intersect. So go to the top BG here, Alt left bracket, T, opacity, roughly the same and zero. If we easy ease the back key frames, let's play this back and you can see very simply, it starts to come together. You can play around with this timing forever, we could try maybe something like this. That feels a little bit better to me, more dynamic, like it's happening at once. There's a lot you can do with these. This is by far not the only thing we are going to be doing with the transform properties. We are going to continue to use them later on in the class, but this is as far as I can go where we're only going to be using the transform properties. So please join me in the next class, where we are going to start talking about shapes and mask path key-frames, where you can start to actually manipulate what the shape actually looks like. 9. Adding Shape & Mask Path Keyframes: Let's start messing around with shape and mask path key-frames and for this, we're going to head back into our instance logo. If we look at our animation at the moment, we can see we've got the movement and motions down pretty well, but the shapes still have this rubbery feeling to them. They are not exactly that fluid like in our original example where it was like a weird putty. To give it just that little extra oomph. Let's start messing with the shape key-frames. To do this, we're going to go to our first initial starting circle and drop down, go to Contents Ellipse. Now in order to actually manipulate the shape at the moment, this is just a shape layer and not a path. We need to click on Ellipse Path. Right-click converts to bezier path and now if we hit G to activate the pen-tool, we can manipulate and move around the actual shape of the object itself, which is very, very useful. If you look at our original example, we can see it's buckles in a little bit here before it pops out. Let's replicate that. Let's go into the logo here. Let's first add, let's find the normal point which would be about here. To add a point, click anywhere on the blue circles, let's click one here, click one down here, click one here, and click one here. You don't have to be that precise just in the general areas is okay. Then right-click the bottom here. Let's add our key-frame. Hit U, just click on one of these little points and drag down to start buckling it. Let's do the same for the bottom one here. We create these weird little sponge shape. Now if you click on one of the points here, you notice we have these little divots and this controls exactly how curved it is. We can make this just a little bit more rounded and nicer just by dragging these across here, like this. Just spend a bit of time getting it to look exactly the way you want it. Now if we play that back, it is looking pretty good. We can see that buckle just add that little bit more to it. Actually let's just make it a little bit more pronounced. That's really sponge this up. That looks good, so let's go and do the same for the two balls here when they split into the balls here. Let's open up the DuoCircles, go to contents ellipse 2, convert to bezier path, ellipse path 1 convert to bezier path. Make a key-frame for both so we can see what we are doing. Hit U so we can see those two key-frames. Let's go ahead. Let's drag this over to where's dots, trying them out here. Again, two key-frames. Just doing the exact same thing we did last time. Let's play this back, and you can see it just feels that a little bit more. If we look at our original example, we can see that when it does split, we have these tendrils they are like these previously sticking bits that suddenly break apart and take a little bit of time before it solidifies into it's ball-shape. Let's go ahead and add these trail effects. Now the reason why I went ahead and did this buckling animation first is that when you add key-frames, they're going to always be there. Let's say, for example, on this one we didn't do the buckling animation first. Let's say we added the tendrils and say we added a bunch of stuff here at the path. Let's say we added all the tendrils, did all the stuff, made this shape really, wonky and crazy, comes together, retains its normal shape. Then when you try to go and do the buckling animation, you're going to find that you now have too many extra points that you have to deal with and move around and it's just that little bit more tricky. You certainly can do it, but it takes a lot more effort. This is looks like a Pac-Man had a rough day. It's much easier to add vertices later after you've done the big simple animations because it retains everything when you do it. You go back to the start and let's go just before they're about to settle into their final shape. Let's hit the key-frame for both paths here. Go to the one here, and let's extend it out a little bit just so we can get an overlap and see what we're doing here. Let's just start to go crazy and add a whole bunch of vertices on the edge here so we can simulate what this looks like. Again, no real rhyme or reason, you can just pretty much hit anywhere. This looks better the more non-uniform it is. So it doesn't really matter exactly where you put them. Let's just drag some of these out a little bit. It looks pretty good and this comes in there. It's hard to see at the moment because these are both the same color which will be changing as well and don't be afraid to shoot out like this. That's okay too. Let these gaps to match up a little bit, but it doesn't have to be exact just something in the general vicinity. Let's play it back. Now you can see we have the tendrils and then you just go ahead and do the exact same thing on the tendrils here. Let's play this back and you can see how just by adding these simple little key-frames and manipulating the shape like that we've changed how the texture of this shape actually feels. It just adds that little bit of extra dynamics to it. Now the final thing we can use by altering the shape paths is making these little lines here drawer on. Let's go ahead and start animating this and we're going to be using some of our old friends, the scale properties again. Before we do anything, we need to get our old friends over here. That we haven't forgotten about and put them into the center. Let's link the rest of these to the middle one here as it's the most easily grabable and recognizable. Hold control to select individual layers together. Let's pick whip to CO3 outlines. Let's hit a position key-frame to mark, when it ends and it stop, let's say over here. Just for now, then let's pop it directly in the center. Now let's grab our ending circle here. Let's go ahead about three or four frames. We want a little bit of a rest before we get started. Let's add our anticipation scale up to maybe 115 and let's try to scale it down to roughly, the size it's going to be. We can move this up a bit. If you select all of the position key-frames at the same time, and then move like this. All of the key-frame information will be altered. So it's going to move in pretty much a straight line like this, we can put it up to the middle here. Now let's move our outlines above everything so we can see what we are doing. Let's have them start here. Let's go, contents, group, path, hit a key-frame, you want to keep it like this. If you hit this button here, it solos the layer. Everything that you've selected as solo layer is going to be the only things you can see which is really helpful for editing something like this. Lets hit use. We have opposition key-frames. Let's find our path. Now, doing what we are going to do here, just temporarily for the moment. It'll be easier if it's rotated basically at a 45-degree angle because it's just much, much cleaner to use what we're going to want to do. Let's make this again temporarily as public to 50 so we can see what we're doing. Hitting new. Grabbing G for our pen, hit shift to select vertices together. Let's drag this into the middle, like this. Let's do these. We're going to essentially create a quasi circle. Let's hit nine easy, ease. Let's put the capacity backup. Now L shape grows outwards like in the original. It's a little too fast, so let's expand it and let's drag it across it. I wanted to start immediately, maybe a little bit more. That's good and let's hit Alt square bracket on our ending circle. We don't need it anymore. Let's begin animating the rest of these on. Now you can see the shapes pop out like we want them to. Let's go back to our middle one, hit rotation and let's turn it back to normal. Now let's go ahead and scale these up individually. We don't need to do it for the center one, but we will want to do it for the middle ones. I'm going to drag these across so I have some time to work with. Hit scale, hit the stop watch and then go back to zero. Let's easy, ease this. Actually I want to change the timing a little bit. I'm going to drag these across here. I want this to be just after. I want these to overlap a little bit. I don't want it to be comes to a stop and then starts. Drag that over. Again, the beauty of scale key-frames, I can just click on scale, here hit C, and paste it for each of the ones. Let's just offset these. Control select, maybe mount here is good and these two control select, and that's looking pretty good. That's how you can use the shape and mask path tools within after-effects to manipulate the shape to exactly how you want. The next video we'll be covering some more cool computer-generated shape effects. I am looking forward to seeing you there. 10. Four Cool Shape Effects: In this section, I'm going to go over some miscellaneous tips, tricks and techniques, that you can use with shape layers to add that little bit of extra detail to the work. This isn't going to be in any particular rhode and is basically just going to be wherever the dye falls. Let's do what's possibly the easiest, changing the color of an object. If we look at our original animation, as the balls break apart, they also change color to reflect what the color scheme at the very end is. If we go back to our original one here, let's hit u just to hide everything, click the drop down menu and navigate through contents ellipse and down to fill, and then simply hit the stop watch to add a key frame. Let's do the exact same thing on eclipse number one here. Now you can see just by doing this, we now have this lovely little color line here, and this is what we're going to be using. Let's put the first key frames, make sure they're at the very start of the layer. We want the beginning to be the exact same color. Then let's go to just before they come to a rest here. Here is probably good and lines up with these key frames. For this, let's turn on our background reference image, if you haven't deleted it, if you have just drag and drop the original logo and so you get the color reference. Let's make this one on the left. I want this to be the darkest red here. Go down to the color picker here, just simply click on the red O, this one on the right here, this is the one that's going to change your color. [inaudible] really matter on this particular instance. There we go, and now it's instantly change color, and let's do the same one here, let's make it this one here. Turn these off so we can see, and now, you can see they change colors. Pretty good. Let's just do the exact same thing and now neatly changing colors. Once again, just before everything comes to an end, let's hit u, let's go to the beginning here, make another key frame for all of these. This time we just extend beyond the end and just change all of these. We've now animated the colors of all these. The next thing we wanna do is make this little circle bars effect that I have here, let's just solo this. This is actually fairly simple to do. It uses again the scale key frames and animating the stroke width. To do this, let's go back to our original one. Let's find when it pops up like this, let's make yet another shape layer, so ellipse tool, go to the center, hold shift and drag, hold alt, go up to fill, and when you hold alt and click, you cycle through the modes of the fill layer. We just want to cycle through three times until we get nothing. On the stroke, you want to hit until you've got something, that's just changed its color to orange. I'll square brackets, so we shave this off, drag this over the top here so we can see what we're doing. First and [inaudible] , let's animate the scale. We want it to start just as the initial pop happens. Let's go here, put this stroke down to about 30, and scale this down her. Lets go to the drop-down menu , contents, ellipse, transform scale, hit u and see what we're doing, and scale this up to about 150. Once we're happy with how long it comes up, go to one frame before your first key frame and put that to zero. This will become important later. These two have nine. The way we do this is to animate the strokes width. In order to do that, go down the contents, ellipse, stroke and put a key frame on stroke width here, set it to 30. This is our very first key frame, hit use so we can clean it up. Go to about the middle, where it will reach the height of its peak, let's bump that up to 30. When it goes down here, it's going back to zero again. If we play that back, you can see we've got the starting of a little best. The beauty of doing it this way is we can duplicate this like we have in our original. Let's duplicate this ellipse, we don't have any position key frame, so it's all good and drag this across here. Now, we do want to change the size key frame just so it's not as big as it was earlier, let's do ellipse. Let's scale it down to about half of its size, don't forget to lower the scale here because otherwise it is going to stay the same size. Let's shift this across two frames as it comes at different times, and now we can quiet easily just duplicate this three times. We want to make a grid, and now offset these by two frames each. For good measure, I went ahead and changed the color to match the colors of the logo design in the first place. Of course, you can always adjust the timing, but now we have this circle best. While we're here, let's go ahead and mess around with the shape path just a little bit more again, using a tool called wiggle paths. If we look at our original example, when these all come together, it has this nickelodeon [inaudible] splat, you did need the noise. You could do that manually using the pen tool and manipulating it, but it's a lot easier just to use automation for this one. Go to ellipse and go add wiggle paths. What this effect does is it just using computer-generated like fractal numbers and randomized numbers, is it lets you warp and manipulate the shape of a layer. You can make some pretty cool and interesting looking stuff. You only need a key frame full size so that we know we're doing and set that to zero for the time being so that we have our end. Let's push that over about three or four frames and then drag that back up so that we have just some crazy fractals going on here. This is where you've got room to wiggle around and put it how you see fit, I don't want too many, I'm going to go to, mybe about four. Set this to smooth so we get that splat, move random seed till you get something that looks the way you want it. Play around with the settings until you get something that looks the way you want it to, but essentially using these fractals like this can just be a way that makes it far more easier than doing it all by hand. For the final shape trick, we're going to jump back into our example co-op logo. Long time no see old friend. We're going to animate the lines here that draw on using a technique called trim pots. If you remember during the E-vector importing video, I said that these lines here, even if the color information is lost, it doesn't really matter since we're going to be recreating them anyway. That's what we're going to do exactly right now. As these are at the moment, if we zoom in closely, we can manipulate the vertices and make these funky shapes because it's being treated as a shape. We need this to just be one solid line which we are going to apply stroke data too. First things first, just on a blank area of the video, let's quickly recreate these lines here. We can turn off our original lines layers, we don't need this anymore. Let's move this down here where you can see it running these lines, let's go ahead and just for the sake of this video might actually be easier just to make it solid white. To make these animate, we need to use and effect called trim paths. We go down through contents, add, and trim paths. This is actually really easy with all of these here, let's find the point where it stops animating on. We want this one here, to start before everything else, my be the very beginning, a few frames out, hit end on the stopwatch and drag it down here. Let's go to the very end, which would probably be about here and drag this up to 100. Before I forget, don't forget to pick the new lines layer to the controller, otherwise, when it scales down, it's going to be lost. If we play this back at the moment, they all draw on at the same time, which is a cool enough effect of itself, but to replicate what exactly we did in the original video, we are going to have to go down to trim paths and simply change this to trim multiple shapes individually. Now they will draw on at different times, the problem is they draw on top to bottom, so shape five will be the first one that's drawn on. It's just simply a case of rearranging them and put it in the order that you want. If you wanted to go a step further, you could even separate these, let's duplicate this line layer and get rid of four and five here, and let's go here to get rid of one to three. We can just shift this over so that they start coming on at the same time rather than all in one big chunky and actually let's move these around just to add that little bit extra dynamics to it. They start coming on, not all as one big piece. That's how to use trim paths to draw in some lines. Those were four miscellaneous shape layer techniques that you can use to add that little extra detail to the animation. They are all really cool and have many applications across multiple things. I think knowing those little things that you can just add just to give that bit of extra [inaudible] goes a long way in selling the animations. I think it's a good idea to stop building like a mental dictionary of all those little tips and tricks that you can do within layers so that you can later apply them to your own projects. In the next video, we're going to jump into using mats and pre compositions, which will allow us to do some complex nesting effects within our animation and is what's going to start to add some depth and three dimensionality to our animation. 11. Mattes and Precomps I: Basics: As we hit the latest stages of the project, let's move into using precompositions and mattes in order to create a more smooth composition. First things first, let's learn how to make a precomposition. It's essentially a composition inside of another composition. This could just make everything a little bit neater and easier to navigate and figure out where everything is. For example, right now in the example cope logo, you can see we have a lot and lot of layers, and it's hard to know everything is especially if we just wanted to grab one particular layer. Let's turn to this up with some precompositions. I've decided I want to, everything visible right now to basically be in its own precomposition. I'm going to select the first layer here, "Lines 2". Scroll down to bottom outlines and whatever this is, cutoff here, hold "Shift" and click. We've selected everything right-click, precomposition. Again, depending on how many people are working on the project, you can name this whatever is easiest for you to navigate through. Now that we've done that, if we scroll back up, the entirety of what we just animated is now safely contained in its own layer. If we double-click on the "Lines Big Com"p here, it'll open up the precomposition we just made and we can edit all the elements exactly the same way as they were. If I hit you show all the keyframe data is still here. It's all manipulable. It's just we've compressed it. We've put it into its own layer or section or it's different box. Now there are a couple of things to keep in mind when making precompositions. The first one is that if you have any parenting information. We did before we had everything connected to to control here. When we scaled down and zoomed up. When you make the precomposition, it will lose whatever parenting that it had. You need to go back down here, make sure on a blank starting slate here, and pick whip it back to the controller. Now it scales down accordingly. Again, another thing you need to keep in mind when making precompositions is if you're making a precomposition of a single layer, if you've got two layers you've got no problem. But if you're got one, you run into a different sort of this. Let's use this enormous After Effects logo here. Let's do some basic weird manipulation to it just so we get yeah, that's fine. I'm even going to throw some color correction. Let's make this look really crazy. Maybe I decided I want this to be a precomposition for whatever reason I want to apply another effect on top of it that requires this to be rendered as its own raster image, and I want this precomposed. If I right-click "Pre-compose" and go to the settings and I accidentally leave all attributes in "Example Corp" on. It seemingly looks fine, but when I double-click on here, this is just, as you can see, this is just the normal aftereffects layer. All of our effects are actually applied to the precomposition. If you are doing a single layer and you want everything to be rasterized as a full image, you're going to want to right-click, "Pre-compose" and make sure move attributes to the new composition is selected. As you can see now, this has already made the boundary box that much more visible. It's now rasterized like a normal image. If we go into the precomposition, all the effects are now applied it in here. This is just something to keep in mind. Now let's go into the more complex segment which is using a matte. Now, matte is basically a film making technique that has existed since basically the dawn of cinema. Mattes are little difficult to explain. But in basic terms, a matte is one solid color, usually black or white, which is then completely replaced with another image behind it. In the old days of film making, this was achieved physically as in the filmmakers would literally either block part of the camera so that not all the light was getting through the lens. Then going back and using the exact same film stock, refilling it and this time blacking out or whiting out the part that had already been filmed. But these days it's just easier to make a shape within the computer and tell the computer I leave this as empty, put whatever is behind it. Let's turn on our bottom texts layers down here and we're going to start using them for a matte. First, I want to decompose these to make it a little bit easier to see what I'm doing. Right-click, "Pre-compose". As you can see, it didn't go exactly as planned. I'm just going to move these into the center here. Then I'm going to go down to this tool here called the region of interest. I click on this, drag it across here so you can only see this. I'm going to go up to "Composition", "Crop Comp to Region of Interest". This is just going to make it cleaner and much easier, more easy to use. But before going to go back to example, crop, and reposition it where we want it to be. There's fine. Again, remember to parent it back to the controller, so that it can animate on properly. There are two ways of making a matte within After Effects. The first one is if you look down in the layer properties here we have something called track matte. This is what a layer itself is going to tell the top layer to use that top layer as the matte, as the cut out. For example, I'm just going to make a vague shape over here. The size of example corp, drag it above example corp. I'm going to click on this "Track Matte" drop-down menu "Alpha Matte Shape layer 1". Now if we animate the position of the example here, so let's get "P", stopwatch, go back down and drop it underneath. Let's play that back. You can see that basically everything below this line here is completely cut off. This is all well and good. I'm going to hit easy ease on those. I'm going to go over to here to the graph editor. I'm going to move these across down. These control the exact speed of your easy ease. I want it to come up really fast and really slow like that. Then we go. Good I like that. Now you can see we've done something pretty good and pretty clean. The beauty of doing it this way is that say, for example, I wanted to change this. I wanted to go down lower, rather than doing any complex masking or anything like that, we can just simply change the position and the speed of the keyframes. Now the problem with doing on a layer by layer bases is say now we want to do the same thing for great demonstrators. Well, we could make our position keyframes, drops down the same way that example corp does. Now though is if I push this underneath shape layer 1, we've got this doubleness going on here where example corp is now using, it's hard to see, but it's using great demonstrators as the alpha mattte. This is because the way that using the track matte in After Effects works is that whatever is above the layer that has the alpha matte selected, that's what's going to be used as the outline. If I move this back down here, you can see, now it's all well and good. The other problem comes in is that now if we do it this way, not only do you have to be aware of the ordering of where everything in your layers is. Now, we can't do two layers on the same matte. If I wanted to use this, I would have to duplicate the shape layer, drag it above great demonstrators. Now I can go to "Alpha Inverted Matte", which means I don't have to change the position at all of this track matte. But this still means I've made two unnecessary mattes when there is a much, much cleaner and more elegant solution that requires only one matte layer for everything. I'm going to go ahead and delete this and clear out track mattes here. I'm going to rename shape layer to our "Main Matte". Now let's start with example corp. I'm going to go up to "Effect", "Channel", "Set Matte". Now this will allow us to basically tell this layer to use another layer as a matte. I want to go to our main matte here. Perfect, we've got it done. The beauty is I can just copy this. Let's turn on great outdoors here, paste. This time just select "Invert Matte". Now if I play it back, the mattes working perfectly and I've only got one layer. I don't need to change it. It's all working as smoothly as possible. The beauty of this is now I can go around and play with the timing of these as much as I want. I don't have to mess around with changing a mask or anything like that, just makes it smooth, easy. Once you really know how to use mattes, this is going to really kick off your animations. To complete this, I'm going to mess around with the timing. I'm going to drag these two back here. I have our middle outlines and I'm going to do our old scale up from nothing trick. I'm going to set a keyframe at about one second tier. I'm going to go back 12 frames, delink our scale. I'm going to scale up to horizontal. That one 40. It's just pushing the edge and go down to the back here and go to zero. Of course. Hit out easy ease. That's looking pretty good to me. Now let's go back to the example corp. As we have it at the moment, we have set the keyframes to the very beginning of the example corp animation. Again, the beauty of precompositions is we can just slide this over to start animating on exactly when we wants it, which I think is about just after it settles. Although, I need to change the position a little bit. That's looking pretty good to me. That was the basics and how to use mattes and precompositions to create some more dynamic nesting effects within After Effects. In the next video, I will be continuing how to use mattes for some more complicated and dynamic imagery. Specifically, how to wipe on a piece of text. 12. Mattes and Precomps II: With Motion: So to give you another example of how you can use maps, let's Wipe this logo text on. Let's make our pre-composition, go to the beginning, let's do right-click Pre-compose, move all attributes into the new composition. Let's go back in here, and let's just trim this down, so we know what we are working with. Composition should come to a region of [inaudible]. Let's make our rectangle here, so roughly the same height as the logo. It looks pretty good. Control-Alt-Home to put it in the center and let's rename this Wipe. Actually, I don't want the anchor pointer in the middle of it, I want it positioned just on the edge here. That's pretty good. So now let's animate the Wipe. We're going to create the Wipe using a combination of position and scale key frames. Hit P, drop down the stopwatch, hit S, drop down the stopwatch, hit U. We can see what we're doing. Hopefully, you're getting the knack of this now and these are starting to become ingrained in your brain like they are in mine. Let's go ahead about one minute, hit our stopwatch, and drag these over here, and that looks pretty good for now. Let's hit just on the position., let's make these F9. Now I'm actually going to drag this scale over to the edge here and I'm going to drag this scale back here. We were at 4-5 frames on both of these and let's play this back just real quick. The positions look can pretty good. Let's go to the dead middle, or just after the dead middle, because we've moved the anchor point, and lets boost the scale here so that its quite big. Again, we're looking for that squash and stretch, over this time it's more like motion blur, it's moving so fast that it's streaking across the screen. Let's go to the beginning. Let's actually set this to zero and let's set this one to zero too. I messed up a timing a little bit, but we can get something we want by pushing it back here. We want to position to start moving before the scale. It looks a lot better. Now we've got a basic Wipe and now let's angle it, so it's at the same angle at this italicized font that we have, and so we're going to go into effect, distort, transform, which adds a whole new set of transform properties. Let's change the skew axis here to 90 and change the skew so that it looks roughly the same as the L here. So I think 14 is looking pretty good. Now if we play this back, we got a pretty cool white and you can make this as fast as you want. I'm actually going to again hold Alt and click and drag just so that it speeds up a little bit. That's much better for my tastes and let's create our matte. Again, just a vague shape, go to the very end of the composition, I think that'll be easy. Just before the end here and create a vague outline like this. Again, it doesn't have to be super accurate in this example, but if you have more complex things going on, you can mask it to as fine a detail as you want. We're going to turn this layer off, correlate the Wipe matte. Now we need to attach the Wipe matte here just to show you I'm dropping the opacity down. We need to attach the Wipe matte here to the Wipe. But the problem is, is that if we just pick whip it like this, it's going to get every property, so the scale too. There are multiple ways around this which are all a little bit clunky, but the easiest way I have found is to pick whip specifically the position. What you're going to want to do is hit P and then Alt, click the stopwatch, and drag this new pick Wipe to the position stopwatch only. Yes, there we go. As you'll find it's locked, which is annoying, because it's a shape layer, you can just move the vertices back down over here. If this wasn't a shape layer or something more complex and it just wasn't that easy, I do a multiple setup with varying different nulls and controllers, just so that everything was neatly and nicely layered. But for this, I'm not going to bother with it and you'll find a lot of the time when doing motion graphics, when doing these kind of things. This kind of patchwork job is everywhere and it can just save you a lot of time. With something like this, I'm going to let it slide. Now you can see the position moves but not the scale, which is exactly what we need. I'm going to turn the opacity back up. Turn off the matte, logo outlines, set matte, and Wipe matte, and now you see it wipes on. If we go back to the main example corp logo. Again, we need to shift the timing of it so that it starts wiping on after everything is coming up in opacity. There we go. If we play this back and take my own advice and remember to pick Wipe at back to the master controller. But let's play this back, you can see it's starting to all come together. That is how you can use mattes and pre-compositions to both tidy up your composition and the timeline and make everything look neat and more easy to navigate, and a way to actually do some cool effects and things that would be rather tedious to do with masks or some other things. I think the potential of mattes is near limitless and I really hope you master the skill, because you can do a lot just by building up a load of mattes. We're coming towards the tail end of this course. In the next video, I'm going to be finishing up and tidying up any little remaining bits that I haven't finished that we saw in the example logos. Hope to see you there. 13. Unfinished Business: Transform Review: Actually before we directly start compositing, we have a few pieces of unfinished business with these logos where I'm not going to teach you anything new, but there's a couple of things I missed along the way. The first one is with the instance logo, and in the original version, we had the word instance wipe on like this. Let's go ahead and do that using what we already know. When we made this logo, we put aside these keyframes here earlier, we need them again. Let's drag them towards the beginning of when our animation is going to start. When all this comes up to about here, yes, we'll have it start there. Let's hit easy, ease F9, and let's actually widen this off a little bit. Yeah, that looks a little better to me. Let's not wiping on the word instance. First, we need to turn it back on, find instance down here, make sure we're at the starting keyframe, hit Alt, open square brackets and let's drag it up just so that we can see things a little bit more cleanly. Let's go to instance, and let's open up the position. Hit the stopwatch, go to the end here, hit the stopwatch. Now we're going to leave this where it is, and at the beginning here, we are going to drag it so that the full stop or the period for you Americans is just peeking out here. We're going to hit F9. We've got it good. The only problem is it's poking out the back here, these pesky letters, let's go ahead and animate the opacity on. We're going to go back into the drop-down menu, go to contents, and let's find the full stop which should be group one. Yes. Go to transform, opacity, hit the stopwatch. Once hit Alt arrow key to push it about three frames outwards. Let's create 0 percent opacity keyframe so that It turns on. Now it's just a case of copying these keyframes, and pasting them. I think we're going to go ahead two frames for each. For some of them, they ended up being pasted only about one frame often, but you can play around with it to get the timing that you want. Now you can see we've completed the wipe. The other piece of unfinished business is just if you see in our original example corp logo, we have the main diamond piece shrinking in the background, and the example corp rising towards us. This was just a very, very simple thing to do. First things first, grab out diamonds comp here, hit s scale. Then let's go to the end of the composition, and let's drop this down to about there. Actually, we need the logo to actually be connected to the diamond. Let's grab example corp here, hit scale, it was already up the hit scale [LAUGHTER]. Let's do the exact opposite, let's scale it up. Now if we play this back, and it's a very subtle thing, but I think it adds a lot to it. Those are the two bases of unfinished business we had to attend to. In the next video, we're going to composite out Image, and finalize the look of what is going to be out there in the big bad world. See you soon. 14. Compositing and Effects: Okay, folks we are approaching the end game and that means we are ready to start compositing and putting these animations out into the well. Really there are infinite ways that you could composite these, but I'm just going to show you what I think works for these two specific logos. First things first, no matter what the logo is and no matter what the style I like to pre-compose the entire thing. I'm going to get out instance logo because I think that's the simplest one to do. Select turn off. We can actually delete our original ones now we don't need them. I'm going to select everything. Right-click, ''Pre-compose'' instance free company. Now for the instance logo because it's more geometric and simple, it's more about the motion. I think doing too complicated of a thing would distract be a bit too busy. I like it being basically on a solid background, but hey, I'll take those secret. I'm at the moment. It's not actually on a solid color background. It's actually on, if we go up to toggled transparency grid here, a transparent background. This is exactly what we want for our options later on. But if we want it on a solid background, what I like to do is just go up to the rectangle tool and make out solid color and drop it underneath this sickly green, yellow. Actually it isn't too bad. Now, think about it. I'm a little bit of fun of it, but just to match with the original, I'm going to go off to fill and change that to pure white and there we go. Now the other thing I like to do with a really simple logo like this and actually almost all logos. What I like to do is do exactly what I just did to the example corp logo here, which is put this small scale effect on it. In film making terms, we usually call it a Ken Burns effect. Again, it's a very simple case, just hit S on your precomposition save it at 100. I think it's best to scale down. In this case, I'm going to go to, let's do 90 and just play this back a little bit. Yep, that's subtle enough. It's so so small. If you're watching on your phone, you might not even be able to see it, but I think it adds a lot. Now a benefit of doing it this way, too is same. For example, you decided that you want this logo to be bigger. But at the moment, with this precomposition, if we scaled it up, you would start to see artifacts forming. You would lose a little bit of the quality. But never fear, because we can change that with the power of precompositions. We just need to hit the little box. We hit four continually rasterize before, which will now make everything as crisp as it is in the original composition. Now, this only works if you have vectors just as before. This can lead to some weird performance issues, especially if you've got a lot going on and sometimes it messes with effects, it's not perfect. But for a quick fix solution. If you don't want to go back in here and change the scale of everything. This way works absolutely perfect. But for now I'm perfectly happy with that. But let's say we wanted to do something just that little bit extra. Maybe we want to do, for example, like I have been doing with my titles, where we have this wiggling affects alongside some film grain. Well, we could do that as well. Let's go to this instance logo here. For this, you are going to need to source some footage of film grain, which isn't that difficult to do and this is where the magic of the blending mode comes in. If you've used Photoshop before, you know exactly what the blending mode is. It's basically a way to overlay two images on top of each other. In this instance, pond not intended. I think the best mode to use is multiply. Because multiply is going to tell all the light to be invisible and all the black to stay. As you can see here, we now have this film grain overlaid over the top and it gives it a certain different type of quality. In facts, it's a bit too crisp for this quality. Let's say, for example, we want this to be a little blurry. Let's go to Effect below, Gaussian blur and let's just add, just do some very subtle issues. Do three, actually this bump that up even more actually, let's do six, that's double it. You can see they're already, we've made it look like some old timely film. Okay and with our example corp logo, I want to do something in a little bit different. Let's say for example, the client comes back and they want over some footage and they want you to do it. They want some very particular things about that footage. Well, there are a multitude of ways you can go about that. Again, first, I want to precompose everything. I have some footage that I shot when I went to Shinjuku go in the other day, the other day being months ago. But in regardless, I have this footage. Let's say they wanted this example corp logo on top of it. It's playing fine, but the readability isn't so good. It gets lost in the background here. Well, what can we do? Well, there are a few things. Now, the easiest is to add a drop shadow, so we can go to Effect perspective drop shadow and this is going to put, as a basically says, a drop shadow underneath. Now at the base, socks. Let's play around with it a little bit. You could go for a solid color, let's put on full here as we see what we're doing. Let's increase the distance, maybe about eight. Yeah, you could go for a full-color, but when you have very thin text at the bottom like here, or it's very complicated and often doesn't look so good. In this case, I think the best thing to do is going to be to drop the distance back to five and drop the capacity down to about 33 and increase the softness. What this is going to do, you can play around with the settings. But what this is going to do is just add a little bit of separation between the logo and the background. If we can see, it's just added that little bit extra. But also in this case, it's still not perfect because the background footage is too bright. You could go ahead and color correct the footage. Let's say for example, you go to Cubs, last dock in it a little bit. We're going to keep some of those highlights. But now it looks not as sinister. Maybe we really want emphasize it's a warm day and let's drop some of that blue, we want some blue in the sky. Calibration is a whole hall of the beast and there's way too much to cover in this video would allow. Another solution is you can just below the background footage. Let's go to Effect, blur Gaussian blur. Then let's go about 13 and make sure to click ''Repeat edge pixels''. Just because for the background footage, we don't want this gaudy black outline. Already that's made everything a lots more readable. Again, we could adjust this a little bit so that you can see it underneath, we could go back into the cubs, we could lower the lightness and a little bit to increase the readability bumper saturation. As you can see, it looks a little bit more exciting than it would be on a solid color. This isn't enough for me. Let's say the client comes back and they're not happy with how flat it looks. Maybe they want to get a texture to it. I have this cardboard texture here. Very big file, let's place the crease right over the top here and let's scale it down there, so let's add this cardboard texture to our logo here. We're not going to learn anything new, we're just going to be using Set Matte. Well, actually I lied. We're going to go to Effect color correction, hue and saturation and drop the saturation to zero because, otherwise the orange of the cardboard would mess with the color. Actually I'm going to brighten it a little bit too. Before we do anything, we have to precompose this and why Set Matte effect gets a little bit weird when you've changed the properties of the layer you're applying the Matte to. At the moment, we've scaled this down, it's not its original size. If we go to example, precomp, that's not really what we want to happen. Even if we turn off stretch MAC to fit, It's going to be all wonky up. Before we do that, we just need to precompose this. Now we can apply the Set Matte effect. It's going to be what we want. As you can see, this cardboard texture is pretty much exactly over the example Corp logo. Obviously we don't just want this straight cowboy texture. Again, go back to the toggle switches and on our cardboard texture. Let's in this time do overlay. You can look now, we've got a bit of cardboard texture to it. I think that just adds a little bit more to it. I think compositing is one of the most fun stages of making these Logo animations. You've got all of the nitty-gritty fatally diddly identity. The net plant is n for x_k. Apparently, but the fiddly diddly elements of messing around with the key frames and delays and all that. All the leg work is finished. Now you get to play around and see what works, what you think is best for each logo. I really hope that you flex your creative muscles and come up with something very unique. All right and with that, we've finished creating our logo animations. In the next video, we're going to move on to the last step, which is exporting it and sending it out to the world. 15. Exporting: Now, we've come to the final element of this class which is Exporting. Now, this may seem like we've completely finished all of the hard work and we've done a vast majority of it but please do not underestimate how important exporting is and also how easily it can go wrong. If I'm working on a big project, especially if I'm editing it myself, I usually leave a day dedicated before the deadline. One, just to double-check and make sure there aren't any really obvious mistakes like a spelling mistake or a black frame or something like that but also to give myself enough time to work something out if exporting goes wrong. In my experience, exporting always goes wrong. Please consider setting aside some time just for exporting when figuring out your time schedule for your project. There are three main ways to export in and out of after effects. The first and by far the easiest is to send it to Premiere. Let's jump into Premiere here. I've got again, a very flattering face that I'm pulling. In the footages, we just go up to "File", "Adobe Dynamic Link and "Import After Effects Composition". We find where our "After Effects" file is, click on it and here in the "Composition window", we then go down to find where our compositions are. Let's bring in the "instance" logo first. Click on it, click "Okay". Now we can load it up in the source monitor here. We have our brand new "instance" logo. The best thing about Dynamic Link is if say for example, no, actually in the end, I wanted this "instance" logo to be on transparency. I didn't want this white. Oh, I could go back into "After Effects" here, go to "instance" logo and turn it off, hit "Save", and back to Premiere. It automatically loads and replaces it within Premiere. This has saved my life so much. It's really shortened down my workflow time. It's maybe a little complacent, I'm not going to lie, I get a little bit lazy sometimes but if you're working on your own projects, this is a lifesaver. It's by far the easiest way to work with it. Let's say, for example, you're not editing the project, you are sending it to another editor or to the client them-self to edit it themselves. Well, again, there are two more ways we can do it. We can exploit it directly from "After Effects" itself. Now, I think this is best if you are keeping it for a lossless file. What I mean by this is if you want it to be as high-quality as possible, maybe someone else is going to edit it, they're going to manipulate it. It's not the final product. Make sure you have the composition selected here in the timeline. Go up to "Composition" and to "Render Queue". You can see I have a few things here. I'm just going to delete them. Now, let's go over what these settings do. Now the "Render Settings", usually in the past, you don't really need to touch these but recently I found "After Effects" has been doing some not so cool stuff with it. It's best just to double check. So I would click on "Best Settings" here. For the moment, the main thing you want to check is that it's using this comps frame rate and that the size is the exact same size as your composition actually is. Okay? Then "Output Module", you're going to want to mess with this. It brings up this dialogue box here. Now, there are many different types of exporting codec and exporting container. It's a very, very complicated thing. Again, it would be it's own skill share series just to explain it but I find the best one to do for your own personal thing if you want to keep a high res on hand is "QuickTime". So I want to click "QuickTime" here. Here is where it gets a little bit different. On the video output, if you have an alpha channel, you are going to want to click on the drop down menu, "RGB" plus "Alpha". At the moment, I don't have an alpha channel, so it's blacked out, so that's fine. Go to "Format "Options" here. I'm personally quite fond of Apple ProRes 422 HQ. Again, it's a very high resolution codec, it's not lossless, it is lossy. It's always identical to lossless in almost every application. That's the one I tend to do. Everything else is fine. I don't really have any audio, so I don't need that hit "Okay". On the "Output Toolbox" here, it's basically exactly what you would imagine it is. It's just the path of where this is going to be saved to. In this case, I'm going to save it in the Skillshare Class Proper Exports. Yeah, that's fine. Then once it is all done and you're happy with the settings, hit "Render". This is actually running really fast depending on how complex the animation is, how much data is going on, how much processing power, this could take anywhere from about three seconds to three days. Again, make sure you set aside some time. Another thing to keep in mind if you are exporting from "After Effects" like this, let's say we're rendering a bunch of things at once. We're rendering Example Corp, we're rendering the instance logo and let's say we're rendering this as well. We have three things we want. We can most definitely add all three to the "Render Queue" and all three can be rendered in one go but let's say, again in this example, we wanted to do two versions. We wanted a version of the "instance" logo on white, and we wanted a version on transparency. "After Effects" can render as many compositions at the same time as it wants. But if you have one composition, you make changes and you want to render that same composition as a separate file, that's not going to work. If you wanted to do all this at once, you would have to duplicate this composition, make the change, and then add it to the "Render Queue". I think rendering from "After Effects" is fine, say for a high resolution tends to be the quickest but let's say you want to send a proof of concept to the client. You want to upload it to YouTube, maybe send it in an e-mail attachment even, and you want a lossy versions sent. Well, things exported from "After Effects" that are of a lower quality sometimes don't actually look great. In that situation, and even sometimes if I want to high-res version, I send it to Media Composer, so to send something to Media Composer, and we'll make sure again because composition selected go to "Composition", add to "Adobe Media Encoder Queue". If you're familiar with Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, this is a walk in the park. You don't really need this step. But if you're not, I find again that the best way to send to a client is a H264 mp4. You want to click on any of these two here, I'm going to click on "H264". H264. I tend to go for the YouTube 1080p Full HD preset, but you can do with whatever you want. Again, I like to click this box here, "Match Source" because the base assumes you've got a 1080p piece of footage and that it's 24 frames a second. In this case, it's true, but sometimes it's not. Just to be sure, make sure to click that box so everything matches. I scroll down here. We have three options here. Constant Bitrate means that it's going to be the same bitrate throughout, the same amount of data in each picture but almost always I think it's better to use VBR, Variable Bitrate. What this means is it's going to use more data for frames that have a lot of information, a lot of pixels and it's going to use less data for frames that have less pixels, you have two options here, one pass and two pass. Two pass just renders it again and tries to find extra ways to hide data, but it takes twice as long. I usually, especially if it's just for a proof concept, leave it at one pass. These days if you've got a high bandwidth, 16 is fine. Sixteen megabytes a second is going to get you a very high quality export. Also, better the decent size. Let's say, you need to send it in an e-mail. These days, Gmail allows up to 25 megabytes, so we're okay here but if you've got something more, you can drag it down. But I tend to find that anything lower than eight, you're going to start to see some series dips in quality. For now I'm going to leave that at 16. I'm happy with all these other settings. We don't have any audio. Please don't touch the rest. You will have nightmares if you don't know what you're doing. I'm going to hit "Okay". Again, "Output File" the exact same as in After Effects. Just choose where it's going to go. Yes, yes, yes, that's all good. Then hit the "Start Queue" button up here. Again, this can take anywhere from a millisecond to a millennia. It really depends. If we now watch our exported files, this is perfect because I've test-run it before. I don't have anything I want to change to it. Let's test our hi-res. Yeah. Don't have any changes to make to it. The file sizes of these exports is going to be very different depending on how complicated they are in terms of pixel information. For example, our "instance" logo being very simple, very geometric, the mp4, the H264 we made is only three megabytes, and our higher resolution one is only 30 megabytes. But our Example Corp logo, which is much, much more complicated in terms of pixel information, is a little bit bigger. Our H264 is 20 megabytes and our ProRes, our high resolution one is 216 megabytes. You can see how it depends on the logo itself, even in terms of file size. Please consider that when you are exploiting and sending to clients, if the client needs it to be a small file size, but you've got a complicated image, you might want to play around, see what you can do but I'm sure you'll be able to find it. But as I keep repeating, please set aside some time to exporting. You can save yourself a lot of tears and potential bad relations with your clients. With that, we have completed our logo animations. It's time for a party or at the very least to watch the "Final Thoughts" video where I'm going to wrap everything up. Thank you very much and see you in that video. 16. Final Thoughts: That was quite long. Anyway, thanks for sticking through my various must Skillshare class. This was a learning experience for me too, and congratulations on making it through the entirety of this class. This was quite a journey that we've been on. We've covered everything from cleaning something up in Illustrator and importing it into After Effects, mastering how to use the transform properties. Some of the myriad of shape effects that you can use to your advantage, and some final compositing and texturization techniques. It's a lot of material and you should feel very proud for making it through to the end. Anyway, please feel free to post your logo animation in the project. I actually don't know where it goes, somewhere in the general vicinity of this web page. I really want to see them. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you've created. I hope you can see how these really simple techniques can be used to create complex and complicated graphics. Not by the techniques being crazy and, "Oh, I have the best plug-in, I'm the best of this, whatever." But just building on those basic ideas is what can be used to create something really special. Please feel free to apply these to your motion graphics, your video editing, your 2D animation. These techniques and not just the logos. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what you've done, and yeah. I don't know how to end this.