Learn Adobe After Effects CC for Beginners

1. Introduction: Hi, apprentice. Welcome to my laboratory. The trick is not to burn your hands. It takes years of practice but I can teach you how to do that in only a few lessons. But if you do burn yourself, it is not going to be my responsibility. Can I introduce myself yet? I'm sorry, the name is Jodie, but for you, it's Professor. From the small country of Belgium, I run a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers where I teach the world about filmmaking and visual effects. In this Adobe After Effects class, I'd like to take you on to a wonderful journey of compulsating animations and special effects. The only thing that you're going to need is Adobe After Effects and a good life insurance, that's it. If you're completely new to Adobe After Effects or you're just starting out, perfect, you're the one that I need. Unless you're here to learn every single technical detail, I'm a man of practice, I like to invent stuff like my wetter machine over here. Let me Just turn that on, look at that and I'm not even getting wet. I'm going to teach you how to create that. Also how to create this over here, without needing to know many technical bells and whistles. All right, grab your safety glasses and join me into the most amazing Adobe After Effects class in the universe. 2. The Workspace: Hi there. I did not expect that you would join this class. I didn't expect you would join this class because it is the most amazing Adobe After Effects class in the universe. Welcome apprentice. Welcome to this class. Let's just dive straight into it. Yeah, I didn't really prepared for this class, I'm sorry, but that's okay. I've got years of experience. I've been a professor in After Effects for 200 years now. I think it'll go pretty well. This right here was Janick. He was my previous apprentice. I'm going to hang it right here to the wall because I do think that he deserves a special spot in my laboratory and you know what guys, if you can do better than him then you are going to get on that wall and I'm going to rip him off. Photoshop, let's do this. After Effects, as a professor I constantly forget things. If I'm forgetting something, just let me know guys. Discussion within this class, if you just have any questions, just let me know in there, I'd be happy to help you further. Let's start with the first lesson, which is an introduction towards Adobe After Effects. I'm going to assume that you know how to open up After Effects. If you do so the first thing that you're probably going to see is this welcome screen, and there are a couple of things that we can do from here. We can start a recent project and it seems that I did prepared this class. Look at that Lesson 12,10,11 that all in here. It was like six hours ago. Anyways, you can start a new project from here as well. If you click on the "New Project" button, which we are going to do, or you can open up an existing one which is somewhere stored on your hard drive, obviously. I'll just click on "New Project" that will just get rid of that welcome screen and now you're inside Adobe After Effects. The very first thing that I would always recommend to do is to save your projects. Unlike what Adobe Premiere Pro, which you might be familiar with already, Adobe After Effects does not need to be saved upfront. It's good to do quick things in here without saving your project, but if you are working on something serious then just go ahead and save that thing. The short key for that is just Ctrl S like with any other program. You can also go up to the menu say Save and of course, choose here, "Save As," and click on that. It's going to open up your Explorer. If you are working on a Mac it's going to open up your Finder, either way you want to name your project something. Let's call this lesson number 1 because this is the very first lesson. There we go and just save that. Adobe After Effects consist out of these multiple windows. We have the project window up here. To this project, we are going to gather everything that we're going to work with. These are going to be your media files. Let's just start by importing something in here. There are various ways to do that. You can go up to the menu select "File" and from there select "Import Files." But an easier way to do it is also just by double-clicking in this project panel, which will also open up your Explorer and I've got a folder in here called footage. Now guys, all the stuff that we're going to work with in this class can also be downloaded if you search for the year project tab here on Skillshare. From there you'll see a download button from which you can download all the project files, but also all the video assets. Let's just open up this folder and let's see what we have in here. I've actually shot this landscape. I'm going to select that. You can also select multiple clips, obviously. I'll just start with the first one and then hit "Import" and that will import that into the project panel or the project window. Every good professor in the visual effects industry is organized. Something very important. Make sure that you are organized. By that I mean, create folders. Within the project panel you'll see here on the bottom that we can create a new bin or a new folder. Click on that to create the new one and give that a name, for example, video files or video clips doesn't really matter. Look for a structure that you like and that is organized to you. Right in there, I'm going to drag my landscape video file into it. If we expand that folder you can see the landscape video clip in there. Right now we're just working with one video clip but throughout this course, you will see that we are going to work with multiple of these clips. Multiple video files, audio files, pictures, etc. We're also going to create multiple compositions. We're just going to be clear later on in this course what that is, but then it's really going to be important that we are organized within this project window. Next to that project window, you can see the composition window. This is the panel where we are going to see what we are creating inside After Effects, but we don't see anything yet that is because we haven't create a composition yet. We can click in here to say New Composition or New Composition from Footage. Let's just start by clicking on "New Composition," which is the same action as clicking on this little button down below here, which also says Create a New Composition. After Effects is going to ask you, I want to create a composition for you but what should be the settings of this composition? These settings are, for example, the resolution. You could shoot in a 4K resolution if you like so, but maybe you want to create only a full HD composition inside After Effects. That's perfectly possible. Or maybe you want to change the frame rate of your shots to something else. Maybe to 24 frames per seconds. Maybe that is your desired output. It doesn't always have to be the exact same thing as you are shooting in. Of course, usually it is going to be that. If you're unsure of what to do in here and you're not sure yet what the output is going to be, then maybe it's best to just create a composition that is exactly the same as the settings that you shot your clips in. In other words, the camera settings. I'm just going to press "Cancel" here for now. What I'm going to do is take my landscape clip right here and just drag that into that composition button right here. By doing so, After Effects will automatically create a composition with the exact same settings of my clip and you can see it now here in my project panel that a new item which is the composition have been added to it. Though, it currently sits within my video clips folder and that's something that I don't like. The first thing I'm going to do is just drag that composition out of it and maybe in the future I'm going to create a new folder called compositions, if I'm going to create multiple of these. But three I'm also okay. This is my first composition. If I want to change that by name, I just hit the "Return" key on my keyboard and name that, for example, lesson 1. Try to weigh in now, you can see that we have a visual in the composition panel right here. If you scroll your mouse, you can zoom in and out into that clip. Then down below here we have the timeline, and so we've got one clip in there, which is the landscape clip. If I'm going to press "Play," which is just the space bar onto my keyboard, that clip will play. Nothing much is happening because this is a pretty static shot, but it will play the stuff in your timeline and show it to you in the composition's panel. This really works exactly the same as in Adobe Premier Pro or maybe you're working in something like DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro, this all works similar. Now, these aren't the only three windows within After Effects. Each window gives you a different functionality, a different purpose. For example, here on the right you've got Effects and Presets and this right here is your Effects and Presets Library. If you need to create a certain visual effect or something, most likely, you want to jump in here and search for that specific effect that you're going to need and then drag that over to your composition. Of course, we're going to dive into this way deeper throughout this course. Other interesting windows are, for example, the Character Window. From here we can change stuff from our text, change the font, change the font size and everything. We also have the Tracker Window, which is going to be something super important. The tracker is a piece of software that is probably used in most often inside Adobe After Effects. Then last but not least, is here on top our toolbar. From here we've got multiple tools like the arrow which we have right now. Also, things like the Mask Tool, the Pen Tool or the Text Tool or the Clone Stamp, etc. Different tools to help us shape our video to way that we want to. Now, let's be real here. You are an apprentice, so probably you're going to mess things up, I'm sorry to say that. For example, you might want to go into your timeline on the bottom, but accidentally you click here on this close button and, buff, your timeline is gone. No worries, Adobe After Effects is apprentice proof. If you go up to the menu here on top and select "Window," you could find all the different windows or panels listed down below. If you would close your timeline, you can always recall that again by going all the way down here and click on "Timeline," there we go, it's back there. Maybe you are searching for a specific window in the future, but you can't find it, you can always go up here in the menu select "Window' and choose anything you need from here. But I hear you saying, professor, I not only closed one of those windows, but I also messed up my windows. What can I do now? Well, that's possible. You can take one of these windows and you can drag them to different positions like so. Now my project panel sits on the right instead of on the left, or my timeline I accidentally dragged it all the way up here on top. What's happening? My workspace is a mess right now. Well, again it's apprentice proof, no worries. You can always go back up to that Window Menu here and go to workspace, that's this thing that we're seeing right here. Currently, my default workspace is selected. Go all the way down and select "Reset Default to Saved Layouts." Bang, we're all good. That was it for this very first introduction lesson. These are the general windows inside After Effects that we're going to work with. In the next lesson, we are going to dive deeper into the world of the timeline. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you there. 3. The Timeline and Layers: I keep trying to add smoke to the space for the dramatic effects, but it gets away pretty fast. Anyways, let's get going with a second lesson. Welcome to the timeline of aftereffects. The timeline like we've seen before sits here on the bottom. I've already got one clip in there, but let's just add a few more in there as well. I'm going to double-click into my project Bonilla again. Let's add here, Jordy walking as well. Like we talked about before, I'm going to drag this into the video clips folder to have everything a bit more organized. The composition has already been made from the previous lesson. It's right here. It's called lesson 1, but right now we are in lesson 2. So let's rename that quickly. Now this composition right here already has a defined lengths and that is a difference as would in any editing program where you can just keep editing as long as you want. It's not really defines by length, and aftereffects it is. Currently with that selected, I can see here in the top what the settings of that composition is. It currently has a 4K or ultra high definition resolution. We are at 25 frames per seconds and it is 10 seconds long. You can also see here in a timeline that I can't truly go far than that 10 seconds because it is only 10 seconds long. Even, if we would like this thing to be longer, I actually need to change the duration of the composition. We can do so by right-clicking here on this composition, heading over to composition settings. From there, this is the same window that you would see if you would create a new composition. On the bottom right here, we can see the duration and we can change that too, for example, 20 seconds. If we would like that this takes longer. Then just press "Okay." From the timeline now here on the bottom, we can zoom out using this tool right here. So you can just click on these buttons on the site to zoom or zoom out in steps, or just use this slider bar. So right now you can see that this clip here is half the length of the composition, which is now 20 seconds, which can also be seen here on the top. This here represents the entire duration of that composition. Usually when you are going to add clips to a timeline, you're going to do that by adding in and out points just like way video editing program. So to do that, you have to double-click on any of your clips, like so, which will open itself up. Oh, look at that. This is actually me when I was younger. I was actually just graduated myself from being an apprentice. It's right here I was just starting with my parts to becoming an expert professor, which I am right now. Just look at it, my hair and beard were a lot shorter back then. Oh, the good times. Anyways, we're going to set an in and an out point on this clip. In order to do that, we can use these two buttons here down below. So let's say that I want this clip to start from where I am beautifully in that short. Over here, I'm going to set an endpoint. You can see here what it does to the selection of our clip and go a little bit further in time where I stand still maybe and set an out point. Damn, I was so dove back then. On the bottom right here, you can now see the selection of that clip that we've made. If we are now going to drag this clip into our timeline, it will only add that particular selection to it. One of the great things of aftereffects is that you can always see the total length of your clips, which lays here on the right side. But if I'm going to move this clip here a little bit more to the right. You can see that we also have a part on the left side. These are the parts that we haven't selected. So even from our timeline, we can trim this clip to either of the sides and thus changing our in and out points. If you are looking for a specific points here in your timeline, let's say that you want this clip to start exactly right here. It's now you would like to trim that clip over to your play heads. Very simply done. Just drag it to your play head, but hold down your shift key on a keyboard in order to make it snap to the play heads. Same thing goes with the out point just go a little bit forward in time, let's say right here, I want the clip you stop, then just trim it back to your play heads. So that is how you can make selections of your source files to work with them in the timeline. So already you can now see that we have two layers in our timeline, and is just like with any other program. The order of these clips are going to be important. If you stack multiple papers on top of each other, the only paper that you will see is the top clip. So if I place my play heads right here on top of this clip, I'm not seeing the clip below because it lays below that. If I'm going to change the Jordy walking clip beneath the landscape clip, l will then suddenly see the landscape clip, which by the way guys, I can also trim if I like so, as you can see over here. So you don't always need to set your in and out points in the beginning, but it does help you to specify more what you need. For example, maybe you have a shot that takes about 10 minutes or something and you only need a specific part from that. Well, then it's of course a lot easier to use Double-click on that from the project panel and select a small part from that with the in and out selection before you drag it into your composition, like so. It's like you've just seen me do. You can of course also make multiple selections from the source monitor and then drag it over to your compositions. You have multiple duplications, but maybe different parts from the same clip. So these are your layers. They can be changed in order but also moved in time more to the right or more to the left. A timeline is a linear thing. It's the same as going from point A to point B. Everything that you will see within that path or in that journey will be placed in order. So we actually first come across the middle clip here, Jordy walking. Then you would have come across the top clip, the first landscape and then you would come across the last landscape clip. So that is the basic understanding of the timeline. Let's have a further look at the layers. Inside aftereffects, we always name these layers and that's so much clips as we would do in a video editing program. Because we are compositing in here, this is this more like Photoshop, but then for a video. With every layer you would see this little arrow here on the left side, clicking onto it will expand its properties. We always have some basic properties in there, such as heat strands form and audio properties. We can expand them even further by clicking again on this arrow right here. Underneath strands form options, we can see that we have a bunch of starting properties such as the position. Changing the position of that clip won't do anything, as you can see. It's not doing anything and that is because, we're not standing on that clip as you can see. My play head stands currently here on the last layer, which we are not working on. So move your play heads on that clip and now you can see what it does. Again, we can change that position here as you can see. We can move it to left to the right. We can move it up and down. We can scale up as well, scale down, scale it up. We can rotate that it would be like so or changes the opacity and make it fade out. These are properties that every single visual element has within your composition. So knowing this, we can actually start to combine different of these letters together because, let me just drag here Jordy walking for example, underneath that clip as so. Already you can see that I am appearing behind that layer because we are scaling that landscape clip down and we are moving it to the side so that you can see me, the layer below. Now, not only we can change these values from here with any properties, but if you click on the clip right here, you can also visually change that within the composition itself. I can move it around, but I can also decrease its scale, smash it a little bit like that. Place that anywhere else that I want to. If you want to keep the proportions while scaling it like this then hold down your shift key and it will do so. A good rule of thumb is to always use your shift control or Alts key whenever doing something with your mouse, and it's not going the way that you want to. Usually, that could fix the problem. Rotating this clip goes a little bit different. For that, I will actually need to do rotation tool, but we can find that tool very easily within our toolbox. Right here we have the rotation tool. I just click on that and this allows us to rotate that clip. If you want to scale that clip again or move it around and take back your normal selection tool now we can do that action again. Did my smoke just disappear? See, I told you, my smoke just goes away way too fast. This is not a normal class. This is a dramatic class, so we want to keep it dramatic in the background. Let's continue now. These are the basic properties of your layers. Now, there are few more things that I want to show you, which are the last things within your timeline. Then we're going to stop with only the technical stuff and actually create something. Aside from the properties of the layers, the layers individual can also behave differently. Currently they are just behaving normally. You have them in your timeline. You can play them, that's it. But you can see that we have a bunch of options here to the right and also here to the left. Let's start off here with the left, very quickly. I also think that these are going to be pretty obvious as well. We can disable the video for that specific layer by doing so, you can see that it disappears, but layer still in there. Usually that is being used to if you just want to get rid of one specific layer that is in a way, or maybe you want to get rid of all the layers because you're working on one specific layer, which you then have to do is click on the solo button, which sits right here. This little dot. Just click on that, which will disable all the layers in your timeline except for that one in specific. You can also select multiple solo layers within your timeline, but that all depends on what you're working on just to make it yourself easy. Then to the right sides here we can find the switches and this define how your layers should behave, for example, should it be a 3-D layer? By clicking on that, now it acts as a 3-D layer. Should we enabled motion blur? Then we could also enable that right here. But these are all things that we're going to take a look at throughout this class. So I don't want to dive too deep and do these things. Next up we've got modes. These are blending modes. We can make this layer blends with other layers. Again, it's going to behave differently. We have some more things in here, like the pick whip. We can parent or link this to our layer, etc. Again, all things that we're going to see within this class. Now, If you don't see these options, you can always right-click into your columns right here. At over two columns, Alts enable anything from there. It works the same as your windows inside aftereffects. If you can't locate anything, then just head over to the menu select window and select the window that you're looking for. Well, theory is exactly the same, right-click columns and choose the column that you need. So if you can't find the switches right here, then it might be that it is disabled like that. Now, they're all gone. So then you know to just right-click in your columns, say columns and select switches, that's it. That is how the timeline works inside Adobe aftereffects. I should really stop doing that. In the next video lesson, we are going to prepare ourselves to create something stunning inside aftereffects. We are going to take a look at the libraries to start with. Thank you for watching and I'll see you there. 4. Working with Libraries: I think I need to be honest for a moment. I built all these amazing machines here in my laboratory but not everything that I make is actually myself. It's also crazy, I mean, why should you reinvent the wheel. In this lesson, I want to show you libraries. We're inside Adobe After Effects and we don't have a composition yet so the first thing it'll do is go over here and create a new composition. I'm going to give this a name, which is now lesson number 3. We can choose a preset for a composition. For example, we already have the ultra HD 4K composition selected, but I can also select the HDTV 10 ADP, 25 frames per seconds composition. When selecting one of these presets, you will immediately see what its settings are. We're currently now in a 1920 by 1080 resolution, which is the normal high definition resolution and below that we can find the pixel aspect ratio, which at most of the time you want to keep that at square pixels. Back in the old days when I was at apprentice, we used to work with different sizes of the pixels and that way we could save storage on our media drives, but today, that isn't really necessary anymore. Cameras are getting faster, SD cards are getting larger. that's why we are now working in square pixels, which is also not going to give us problems in the future. Then below that is the frames per second. You can choose whatever you want and here 25 frames or 30 frames per second is a standard. Then below that is the resolution. It's currently set at third. Don't mind this too much. It's a setting that we can change afterwards. This has actually something to do with performance so at this point, I'm not going to bother with this too much. Of course, here the duration, which we've seen before. Let's just press "Okay" to have that composition in our project panel. When it comes down to visual effects, most of the time, we are not going to create those effects ourselves. Usually, we are going to use something from a library that someone else made or maybe that you've made in the past and that you're going to reuse. Let me give you an example. I've made this gun recently, here it is. Now, this gun right here took me about 10 seconds to make, let me just show it to you. Pretty cool, the effects that you're seeing right here are called muzzle flashes and this is something that I've created prior in my studio, we were actually sticking small firecrackers into a metal tube, filming that in a dark studio to capture the muzzle flash. Pretty dangerous, I know, but it's part of the job. [inaudible] here, my very first apprentice, he actually lost his hands while doing so. Now, that muzzle flash is only one of the many visual effects that can be found on the web on your own library etc. I want to show you a few of those libraries which are the most common for people to use. Starting off within After Effects itself, we can already find the Adobe library. I've already got it open here on my right side you can see it right here, libraries again, if you can't find it, go up to the menu window and select "Libraries" from there, which will open up the libraries. Now, there are two libraries available. You have your own library which is stored on your computer and then there is the Adobe Stock library, which is on the Adobe computer somewhere. If you want to search their library, then you actually have to click here on this drop-down menu and from there, select the "Adobe Stock" click on it, and now you can search in Adobe Stock. For example, I'm looking for that muzzle flash so I can just search it here, muzzle flash, and that is going to give you a few results. Let me just enlarge this a little bit more. Here are all of those muzzle flashes. There's even a kitten over there. Sometimes you will find some weird stuff in that library. Anyways, you can just use any of these. For example, right here, we could find a very nice muzzle flash. Then I can just drag over into my After Effects program. Look at there. There it is inside of my project's panel and I can just start using it right away by dragging it into my timeline and start working on this thing. Fortunately, there sits this water marker onto it and that is because it is not licensed yet, you actually need to pay to use this muzzle flash in your projects. Adobe does allow you to already start working with clips and once you're done with your project, and you want to render out your special effects, you could then choose whether or not you'd like to purchase it as well. Perching this thing, it goes super easy. You just click here on this, license this item from Adobe Stock, click on it and it will license it for you. These items will have multiple versions, such as an HD format and a 4K format. Usually, the 4K format is going to cost you a little bit more, just like the one that you need, press continue etc., but I'm not going to do this because Adobe Stock isn't the only library out there. There are also cheaper alternatives then Adobe Stock. There are even free alternatives than Adobe Stock and that is also something that I'd like to show you guys. Let me just delete this expensive muzzle flash. There we go into the trash can and let me just open up the inter webs. This right here is Storyblocks for video. They also have a library for audio and for images as you can see here on top. The great thing about Storyblocks is that there's only a single price per year and with that, you can download unlimited video assets or images, etc. When you are becoming a heavy user of such libraries, then this is a much cheaper alternative, just like with Adobe Stock, you can find a bunch of footage in here that you can just download straight away, also, HD and 4K resolutions. If we search here on top for the muzzle flash, let's just do that then you will also find a bunch of these muzzle flashes in this library right here. By the way, guys, these are actually all muzzle flashes that we have created in our studio right here. We have then uploaded them to Storyblocks. We're actually working a little bit together. If you would like to check this out as well, I'll leave a link in the notes of this class. You can see it in the play bar down below here of this lesson, there will be this little note with a link into it too, Storyblocks, if you'd like to check it out yourself, but you don't need to pay for anything if you like so because there are also free alternatives. One of those is, for example, Pexels. You can see the website over here, which has a bunch of videos, but also photos that are just free to use. Another great website is Unsplash. I'm going to leave links to all of these things in the notes down below here so you can check them all out. Things like these and that, and this over here is all created using these libraries. It's just the easiest way to create certain visual effects and that is something that I want to show you in the next lesson how we can bring all of these things together and create something unique. 5. Creating Masks: Sorry guys, but I'm trying to find "The make the world more beautiful -o- matic 3000", but I can't find it anywhere. You know what? I'll show you a clip of it. Here it is. This is a a shot that I took of a nature park just nearby. It's so beautiful that I was was hoping for. I put my make the world to look more beautiful o matic 3000 in action and turn it into this looks a little bit better. Well, this is actually a technique called set extension, which is probably used in every Hollywood film that you watch in the cinema? Because let's admit it, the world's isn't so beautiful without the make the world more beautiful o matic 3000. Yet it's riots, Hollywood's birds at about a thousand of those machines from me. Yeah, good money you know, but since you paid for this class or pirated it somewhere. I'll show you how you can create your own, "Make the world more beautiful o matic 3000". We are inside After Effects, obviously, let's start off by importing a shots, something normal. I'm going to double-click here in my projects panel and I've got this landscape shot over here. Let just hit imports and dragged it over into a new composition. Now, this looks boring. To make your own, "Make the world more beautiful o matic 3000" machine, you're going to have to add some library stuff into it. The thing that we've seen in the previous lesson. I'm going to double-click here in my project panel again and go over to stock, which are stock clips. I'm just going to select a few photos, perhaps some clips in here that I downloaded from the Internet, now these are all free or stuff that we've created ourselves. What you can download to your projects files from into your project tap here on skill share and have this stuff yourself so that you can just follow along with this lesson. For starters, this right here looks already a lot better, so I'm just going to select that photo and click on imports. It's just a simple photo of some mountains. I'm going to drag that on top of my landscape clip over here. I just love these mountains, look at those. The photo is a ton bigger than my normal clip and they can see so if I'm going to scroll out here and have that clip selected or that photo you can see to wire-frame around, it's going to scale that down; of course, holding down the Shift key to keep the proportions to make it match more with my shots. Now I would like to have these mountains right here on my shot. Let me just disable this clip here for a moment in the background here on my shot, but I do want to retain the grass guys it's important to me. Let me just enable that layer back in order to only use the mountains, we actually need to cut those mountains outs. Well, that's actually pretty easy; It's a technique called masking. The mask tool can be found here in your toolbox and its called the Pen tool, we also have the Rectangle tool which also cuts out a specific portion of your shot. Let's start off with that Rectangle tool; If you click on it, it's active and we can now draw a rectangle make sure that your clip is selected, otherwise it won't work. With that clip selected, just draw a rectangle to cut out a piece from it, it's the same as cropping your clip. To undo your action; simply hit Control Z or Command Z if you are working on a Mac, we can also click and hold the click on this rectangle tool to find out more tools. For example, the Ellipse tool, which allows us to draw an ellipse or a circle if you hold down the Shift key, again, a good rule is always to use the Shift, Control or the alt key, if anything goes not according to plan, we're going to hit Control Z again to undo that action because we actually want to create our own custom sheep. I want to draw a mask around those mountains, I'm going to go back up here to the tool box and this time select the Pen tool. With that one selected, I can now draw my own path, I'm going to draw here underneath these mountains and won't do start by clicking, which is going to create one points, then go further here on the picture and click again to create a second point and that way they will be connected to what a line. If you want to have curved lines, then click hold and drag that point open and that way we can kind of create these beziers with our mask. It's always advice to go a little bit out of your frame when cutting out certain pieces, like doing so, that way you are sure at the edge of your mask would be visible within your final results. Let's just go over the horizon here of that mountain. You can click to create multiple points in here. Sometimes it helps to zoom in by just scrolling on your mouse in that picture. If you want to be more precise, with your masks or maybe you want to mask around the mountain here more precise but would set extensions it's usually not going to be so important. You can do this pretty roughly, there we go, again, go out of that frame like so, and now we have this mountain, select it. We can now go back to our selection tool and move the mountain clip here to a different position and that way we can make sure that it covers up our backgrounds. The first thing that I'm noticing here is that the clip actually had to be a little bit bigger. Let's do that. I can just make that clip bigger even with that mask on to it. Hold down the Shift key to scale in the right proportions. Maybe I'm want to move this here a little bit more to the right, just try to find something so that it matches which your shots. Then other times you also find out state your mask is not correct. You can always go back in here and adjust just stand on any of these points here and just drag it to a different spots and that way it's covering up my boring backgrounds a ton better. Then when taking a look at this shot, it doesn't really look realistic,you can see that we've cut out the mountains and just put it on there. We are going to have to make sure that our edge of the mask is not going to be too visible. In order to do that, we have to jump into the mask properties and those properties can be found within the layer itself. To go already see it's here mask one, which is the mask that we've created, if you can't see it, then you probably need to expand your layer, go into the mask one and expand that property as well. Now, in particular, we are looking for the mask feather by increasing that value, you will see that we are softening those edges, making them blends better with my shots. Already this is starting to look more realistic. Now, because you are changing your feather, it might be that you want to select your later again and change your mask if you'd like so, just to make sure that you're covering up everything the way you want it to. Currently you can see that my mask path has a pink color, which is not so visible in this example, maybe if you are working on a dark background then that pink mask might be more visible, but in this case it's not, so I'd like to change that so that it is more visible to me that it's also very easily done from the mask properties to go back into your layer, but this time you want to locate this colored square right here, which resembles the color of the path; double-click on that, which allows you to change the color. Lets just take something vibrant reds maybe, like so, and then just press Okay and it's now my mask is a ton more visible, which makes it easier to select the points and move them around to cover up my backgrounds. All right, so this mountains are already making my shot look at ton more interesting, but I'm still not liking those clouds, so going back into my project window, double-click right here, and I'm going to locate some clouds that I've also downloaded from the Internet, click imports and I'm forgetting something here. You need to be organized guys. I'm going to create a new folder for my project window called this footage or whatever you like and drag-in all my footage in there, so that's my landscape, clouds and these this picture unit as well. By holding down the CTRL key on your keyboard, you can select multiple items and then just drag that into that folder, like so. Being organized is the key here. I'm going to take my clouds and drag that into the timeline. Important now is that we are going to drag this below the mountains because this guy sits behind those mountain and not in front of them, so just drag that below those mountains, let go and there are the clouds. This clip is smaller than my composition. I can see that here with the clouds clip selected that it is only full HD hence my composition is 4K, so I'm going to have to select this cloud clip now and scale it up. We can move it up a little bit so that it sits beautifully there in the upper sky where the cloud should be and we still see a little bit down below here which shouldn't be there and that is of course because of the mask of the mountains which aren't covering up entirely those clouds, but I also don't want to stretch out the mask like that either, so I'm going to create a new mask, but this time on the clouds, and we'll just set this back up here. Select my clouds clip right there, go over to my pen tool in the toolbox and right now I'm going to create a rough mask that goes through these mountains like so and now only within that mask, the clouds are visible and not anymore below that. Masking is a technique that is probably used the most often within After Effects and you can literally see it as taking a piece of paper and a scissor and just cutting out parts from it, only here with an After Effects we have some more freedom as we can still move the cuts or to points from the mask around to create different or new shapes. All right, let's continue making this shot even more interesting. I'm going to double-click in my project panel again, which will open up my Explorer and let me just locate this ponds right here, select it and hit import, also that I'm going to drag over to my footage and now I'm going to drag this image here on top of everything, a beautiful pond, which is going to make my shot more interesting again. I'm going to scale this down somewhere to where I want it to be, maybe right there. If you aren't really sure to where to place these shots, a great trick is to actually go into the layer properties of that new clip here, go into the transform properties and from there I'm going to decrease the opacity I'm going to set that to around 50 percent and now I have a better visual of where I would like to place this shot. Let's put that somewhere right here, the ponds can be a little bit off screen, like so and then we can increase the opacity back to 100's like before, take the pen tool, we're going to draw a mask around this ponds. It sits in our scene right now, but it's not looking so realistic. We're going to head into our mask properties from that layer, expand that and increased the feather. Just look at that we have now transformed our landscape shot. Let's just solo this one out to see the before and now the after. Look how beautiful that is, this is a place that I want to live in. All right guys, that was it for this lesson, we have now learned how to work with masks. In the next lesson, we're going to build footer on this beautiful landscape and actually blend different things in there, like fire, some fog, etc. Thanks for watching. 6. Blending Layers: I'm working on this 3D camera tracker guys, but it's not working yet. Until then, let's continue with this class. That's something for later. Make sure that you have your safety glasses with you when it's the time. All right, I want to continue in this lesson on set the extensions, making the world more beautiful, Omega 3,000, which is a machine that works. The 3D camera tracker is going to work very soon. Stay tuned for that. So it already looks at time better now this set extension, but we can make it look even better. Let's start by adding a few more organic things to it. Let's start off with a little campfire, for example. You're going to work the exact same way and go to double-click in my projects panel, head over to my stock clips folder and right here, you can find a campfire, near body of water. That is not important, it is a campfire selected and hit import. Again, I'm going to drag this into my footage folder, expand that and from there, drag it into my compositions timeline, a beautiful campfire that we are going to blend in as well with my scenes. I'm going to scale this down a little bit, move it to where I want it to be, for example, here on the sides like that, take my pen tool. These are all things that we've seen prior. Just draw a mask around this campfire like so. Go into a mask properties by expanding your layer, expanding the mask, the mask one, and increasing the feather. Now it seems like we have a campfire in our beautiful scene. We can move that around, maybe place it somewhere else where we like it to be. This looks pretty good and the fire itself doesn't really look so great. It's a small fire and if you know me by now then, you know that I like bigger explosions or bigger fire. Let's make this fire bigger. For that, I'm going to double-click into my project panel again and this time I'm going to search for this thing right here, which is campfire burning at night. Select it and hit import. I'm just going to double-click on this clip first, just to have a look at it before we're going to work with this. This here has been a very selective choice and you need to have fire, but in order to use that fire, I actually needed to be on a black background. That is going to be super important because I cannot mask around this flame because one frame forward or a couple of frames forward, that entire frame has changed. That it's gonna take me a ton of work to mask out the entire flame, but if the background of this clip is black, then we can actually very easily remove that black with one click and that is something I want to show you right now. I'm going to go back to my composition tab up here, just click on it to see what's inside of my timeline and then go to drag the campfire burning at night here as well into my composition. You can also drag it directly here to decomposition instead of to your timeline, if you'd like so and of course, make sure to be organized. Now we are going to draw a mask for starters. It's going to be a little bit easier for us to work with. This can be really roughly just around that fire like so. Again, open the mask properties and feather the tiny bit. Now we can reposition and place that fire here over the actual campfire. There we go. Now in order to get rid of that black background, we are going to have to blend that fire and blending is a technique, we're going to mix two different video layers together in a specific way. We've already seen it in one of the first lessons of this class, and those are the layer behaviors which we can find on the right side of your clip. You want to search for the mode. Again, if you can't find it, right-click columns and make sure that mode right here is enabled. Mode will give you a drop-down menu. It's currently says normal, which means that the clip is just going to behave normal, but we can change its blending mode. There are a ton of different ways that we can blend this clip with the clip below. That is important to know as well. The first blending mode droop on top right here, are going to make sure that all the lighter parts are gone and that's all the darker parts are going to stay and there different ways to do that. In our case, this is not what we want. So we're going to take a look at it the next ones which are going to remove the darker areas but keep the lighter areas. For example, the add, which is going to be a very hard in the blending mode. Just select that and already you can now see that the black is gone and the fire will remain. This actually looks pretty good. The fire, it is now a lot better than we had before. Even going to enable and disable that layer quickly, you can see it before and the after. Today is actually looking pretty good. Now maybe that fire is a bit too hard to blend it in. We can then change the burning mode to something else. For example, string which is a different way to remove the back but keep the lighter areas. You can now see that it is a bit softer. What I would always recommend is when you are going to blend clips together, it's just to try out different modes. Maybe one is going to be too much and the other might be too less. That's why you want to try a few to find the right spot or right blending modes. I'm going to set it back to add because I actually do like it to be a bit harder. All right, it's pretty cool. Now, that fire is now vivid. It's more a life. We should also see more reflection on the floor from that fire. This time to create a reflection, we don't need to work with stock clips. But you can actually do this with something build in of After Effects. You want to make sure that your timeline right here is selected and then you can go up to the menu, pick on layer, select New and from there we're going to click on solids. It gives you a window from which you want to choose which solid that you want. Down below here for the color, we're going to pick something orangey, which resembles the color of the fire. Press "Okay." You can give that a name if you want or the automatic name that aftereffects is creating here, which is now Orange Solid 1, press "Okay." All ready it's being added to the timeline and obviously I can't see anything because this orange solid here sits on top of my entire edits. Let me just collapse the other layers here. But we can use that same trick as before, or are we going to decrease the capacity of that layer to see what's below but actually this is a solid, there is no structure into it and there is also no reason for us to decrease that capacity. We can just as good disable that entire layer. Then while it's disabled, we can still work on that layer. Keep that selected, go to the toolbox on top and maybe this time go for the ellipse tool. Click on that one. Again, if you can't see it click and hold to select the ellipse tool, and now we are going to draw a mask around the floor of this campfire. When we are going to enable that layer again now, you can see that that mask has been applied on that orange solid. The fire sits on top and below that comes our glow of the fire. So that's why we are first now going to change or move this orange solid below the campfire, then open up the mask properties and increase the feather and with that very simple trick, we've now added a glow around our campfire. Now we just enable and disable that glow to see how it looks. Maybe it's a bit too hard to feather and looking at it now. Something like this would be better. Now, if for example, your mask would be too small or maybe too big, there are a couple of ways to change that back. The first way is by changing your mask parts, take the individual points and move them around to change your shape. But something that also works is going into the mask properties and change the mask expansion. By increasing that value, you will expand beyond your mask parts or you can also go into the negative value to decrease that within the mask parts. In this case, I might want to go a little bit outside of that, the tiny bits, something like this may be 10 pixels might be enough. The glow might be a little bit too intense and that is because the orange solid hasn't really been blended with the environment yet. There are a couple of ways to blend this orange solid. The first one is again by going into the mode right here and select one of these options right here, for example, lighten. But now we are blending two bright layers together, which are going to be too bright. I'm going to put the orange solid back to normal. We don't want any blending mode with that, but we are going to make it a little bit softer and we can do that by going into the transfer option and decreasing the capacity. That way we can steer at how much we want that glow to be. Maybe around 50 percent or 40 percent would be more than enough. All right guys, I want to show you one final thing with these maskings and blendings. Let's have a look at this pond right here. It is certainly just a normal pond, but let's turn that into a hot top. For that, I'm going to double-click into my project panel again and search for some smoke, select it and hit import, or you can also just double-click on that clip which will do the exact same thing and drag the smoke into the composition like so. I'm going to increase the size of that smoke. Again, these are all free assets that you guys can use as well if you download the project files. We're going to use that same capacity trick again to see where we have to align the smoke. To do that, we have to go back to the properties of this layer and search for the capacity. But if you're doing this more often, it might be a good idea to start learning the short keys of your keyboard and to go into the capacity properties, just simply select your layer and hit the T button, and that will open up the capacity. Has decreased that to around 50 percent to see what we're doing and maybe this looks pretty well like this. Then take back the pen tool on top and I'm going to do something different here, and that is just to show you guys something else within the mask properties. I'm going to create a negative mask. That actually means I'm going to make a selection of everything that I don't want to have. So there is something like this and just go around like that outside of the clip. Right now, all of this here on the right side is smoke and above the pond, which is going to be hot top, it has no smoke. That is not correct, I should have made my mask the other way around, but let's just jump into the mask properties for a moment here. I'm going to expand that property and from there we can also see an option right here called invert it. By enabling that, we're going to invert the mask. If you would draw your mask wrong, don't worry too much. Don't redraw your entire mask, you can just invert it from here. Actually, sometimes it will be easier to create a negative mask like this in specific work environments. Then just go ahead and feather that mask, go into the burning mode and maybe set that do screen or just a little bit softer than the adds of burning modes, which makes it look a bit more realistic. You can always play around with the capacity to make it stronger or less stronger, but something like this would look pretty good. Let's render death clip and see how it looks. Now look at that, a beautiful campfire at the hot top. That is something cozy. Thank you so much for watching again and in the next lesson, we're going to build even further on this magic and add some crazy effects to it. 7. Creating Effects: Welcome back apprentice, let's have a look at the effects library in this lesson. It's always here on the right side inside Adobe After Effects. Again, if you can't find, it's menu Window and search for Effect & Presets. Within the effect panel there are a bunch of different effects that we can find in there, and they are already grouped together. For example, we have effects that add a distortion to your clip. Here we can find a bunch of them, but we also have effect that do a color correction. Right in here we can find those effects. There are also other effects, for example that do keying which are needed to pull off a dream key which we will also take a look at in this class. There are effects that will generate something such as a color gradients, but also things like light rays and all sorts of different and interesting effects. Obviously I can't show you guys all the effect because that will take ages. Also, some of these effects are basic, others are more advanced that I would suggest you learn or to try out in the later stadium. But I do want to show you guys a few of these effects that are used more often, and that already could give you a cool results. In order to demonstrate a first effect, I'm first going to create a new composition from here and let's call this Effect Demonstration and just hit "Okay". I'm going to go into my Footage folder and search for that Landscape, again drag it into my composition. Then it's shot right hear is actually in 4K. I'm in a high-definition composition, so what I'm going to do is scale this clip down to make it fit. From our timeline you can see that we have two tabs now, we've got the previous composition or timeline in which we are going to work further later on in this lesson. But first let's have a look at this second composition that we've just created. For my Effects library or the Effects & Presets window, we can search for a specific effects or we can also just look for it through all of these folders. For example, let's jump into the Distort folder, and I'm going to locate this CC Lens from here. Let's just drag that onto the clip, which we can do with dragging into the program monitor right here, or decomposition, or into the timeline onto one specific layer. Already you can see that it does something to our shot, and automatically the Effects Controls are opened up. The Effects Controls is a new window that we are introduced to right now, and this window allows us to control the effects that we are applying to one specific clip. Generally you can see in here that CC Lens has been applied, and then it has a few options. If you can't find the Effects Controls, again Window and search for the Effects Controls right there. It's being introduced as a second tab in that same window, as the Project's panel which we can find back here. But also make this a little bit bigger so that you can always see them both in the same window. For me CC Lens option, we can change some settings in here for example, the size. Maybe we don't want this lens effects to be happening so hard, maybe just a tiny bit on the sides as you can see here what it does, it converts a normal shot into a wide angle shots. We can also change the center just click on this "Option" which allows us to move that center points to a different spot, for example over there. We can change to convergence, etc. Just a bunch of basic options that comes with this CC Lens effects. There's also a second way to locate these settings from the CC Lens, and that is by going again into these layer options, just expand that and now you can also see that instead of only the Transform and Audio that we also have the Effects property in here now. Expand that as well, and in there we can find this CC Lens with all of these same options that we have in here. These two options represent the exact same thing, so it's just a matter of a personal choice whether you'd like to work in your timeline on the effects or in the actual effects controls. Then later on in this course we are going to create animations which have to be done inside the layer properties, so most of the time you'll be working inside here. Unless you're not going to work with animations, then some effects might be easier to work in the effects controls. Again, a personal preference. Now that you know the basics of how Effects work, let's go back to the Landscape composition and let's tweak this a little bit further. First of all, the mountains in the background they are a little bit too sharp. Note they are in the back, so they should be a little bit out of focus. What I can do here is go into my Effects & Presets window and I'm going to search for the blur effects, and we can find a bunch of blur effects right here. There is actually a Camera Lens Blur, but between you and me the Lens Blur effect isn't really optimized yet. It will decrease the performance of your computer while using this effect, and I can see that because of this icon next to it. It is a 32-bit effect which is great but it is not an accelerated effects which the Gaussian Blur is and I can see that with this icon next to it which are these three little stripes, and that's triangle next to it which indicates that it is fast. I'm going to use the Gaussian Blur which is actually similar as the Camera Blur. Let me just check, I forgot which the mountain clip was and I'll just place that back into the library. Maybe it is a good idea to rename the clips inside of my timeline, because it is starting to get a mess over here. The smoke is clear what that is. Well, we have two campfires, and we're going to solve this out to see what it is. These are the actual flames, so I'm going to rename that by selecting that layer hitting "Return" on my keyboard and just renaming that to Flames. The Orange Solid is just a reflection of those flames, maybe rename that to Reflection of Flames. Here we had the actual campfire, then this John thing is actually the pond. John is a photographer of this ponds, and these are probably the mountains. Let me just sold it at out for a moment. Yes, those are the mountains, so let just name that Mountains, there we go. This works a little bit easier now. Now I do know where I need to drag this Gaussian blur to which are the mountains. In my Effects controls the Gaussian blur opens up, and very easily I can just increase the blurriness to make the background a bit out of focus. Let just increase that a tiny bit maybe that's a bit too much out of focus, let's set it to 10. This is something that you have to try out, set to a certain value and see what it does to your shot. Now, it seems more like those mountains are in the back being out of focus, and the same thing can be done with the clouds because I have my focus here to the front. We're also going to add a Gaussian blur to the clouds right there. When it's selected change that value may be also to 10, just a tiny bit of blurriness onto it. All right. Perfect. The next thing that I want to do are some color corrections because the grass of my shot, and that of these beautiful mountains aren't really the same. We can either choose to make my grass more vivid or make the grass from the mountains more dull. Let's go with that. For that I'm going to go into my Color Correction, and from here there are a bunch of things that we can choose. However, I would actually suggest you most of the time go with the Lumetri effects which can be found right here. You can also just search for Lumetri of course. Lumetri is actually an effect that comes from Premier Pro. You can color correct your clips inside Premiere Pro using Lumetri which is a dedicated panel for it, and the great thing is if you are going to work which Premiere Pro and After Effects together, this effect is linked. That means that you can change something of the Lumetri effects in one program, and it will also be updated in the other program. That is why I would always suggest that you work with the lumetri as it has all the color correction features within. Just drag that the Lumetri color over to the mountains. The Lumetri color effects come with a bunch of options, we've got basic corrections ,creative corrections, curves, color wheels, etc. I'm going to dive too deep in all of these settings, we actually have a dedicated course about that here in Skillshare where we cover everything about color grading and color correction. For now, I just want to jump into the basic correction, because I probably want to decrease the saturation and to make that green a little bit less vivid. Which can be found here on the bottom, just decrease that saturation to around 50. Maybe more or 60. You have to play with that, but although it already looks a little bit better. The exposure can also be a little bit less as you can see, the mountains are a bit too bright, so let's decrease the exposure. The final thing that I'm seeing is that the mountains are a bit colder than my shots. My shot, was shot a little bit more warmer, and that is because the in-camera temperature setting, which wasn't really the same as with the mountains. That's why I'm going to head over to the temperature slider by moving that to the right side, through adding orange to that shots making it warmer. Let me just do that little bit drastically, and going to the other side it will make it colder or more blue as you can see over here. I'm just going to reset that back to zero, and maybe just add a tiny bit of that warrant into the mountains. I think around 30, would be more than enough. If you would like to see before and after of his effects, we can just simply go up to the effects here on top, and on the left sides here, we can see the f-x button. If we click on it, we disable it, which worked the same as just disabling a layer within your timeline, and you can see that it matches a ton better now with my shots. Maybe the ponds right here also looks a bit too vivid. We might also could have correct that as well, but instead of dragging that lumetri effects onto the ponds, and making these same changes again, I can actually, copy lumetri effects that we've just applied to these mountains right here. You can just select that effect and hit, control C on your keyboard or, command C. If you are working on a Mac to copy that affects, then select your pond, play it right here, when it's selected, just hit, control V and now it is also added to the effects controls right here. Here, this actually looks pretty good. One last thing and that are the clouds up here, which are also to vivid for my shots. Again, also there I'm going to select the clouds and hit, control V. I do see now, that my clouds look a bit too dull so I'm going to reset the temperature to zero. I think that looks good, and maybe the exposure, let's set that back to zero, as well. Because, the sky should be bright, but the saturation is set to 60, which will make them a bit more dull. Though I do end up with one little problem here, and that is that my entire shot starts to look like pretty dull now. Maybe, it wasn't such a good idea to color correct everything dull. You know what? I'm going to color correct my entire shot with one effect. In order to do that, we have to create something special. First, we'll just call it an adjustment layer. Like we've seen before with the orange solids right here, we're going to go back up to the menu, go to layer, new, and this time instead of solid, we're going to create an adjustment layer. Click on that. It's already being added to the timeline as you can see over here, but it doesn't really show anything. That is because, an adjustment layer is a nothing layer. It does nothing. But, we can use that layer to apply effects on, and all the effects that we will apply to this layer will automatically be applied to everything else. Let's add lumetri effect to that adjustment layer here. If we now go into the basic correction, and It's maybe increased the contrast it will be applied to the entire shot as you can see. You can also increase the saturation a tiny bit and just look at that, how vivid the entire shot right now is. Conclusion, if you are making a set extension, combining different shots together, make sure that they are first at the same color level, same brightness and all, and then apply an adjustment layer on top of that to color correct everything from a basic start. That's it about color corrections and how these effects work. In the beginning of this class actually, the trailer you saw that I had this weather machine right here. This machine right here, makes sure that we can generate snow, or rain, or like sand or anything else. It's my weather machine. This thing here is actually top secret, but you've been doing a good job so far so I'll show you the secrets. We're going to go into the effects library again, and I'm just going to search for rain. Look at that, there's actually under this simulation folder a rainfall effect. Sometimes when you are looking for a specific effect, just search it in your effects library because maybe the effect exists already. You want this rain to fall over the entire shot. Again, we are going to use that adjustment layer. Just drag that rainfall onto that adjustment layer, and bang, we've got rain. The rain is not really so present. We can see it here a tiny bit. If you want to have some bigger rain falling, you might need to change some settings in here of that rain. For example, the size of the raindrops. Let's set that to five. Now we've got a little bit thicker raindrops. We can also increase the drops to instead of 5,000 let's make that 10,000. Now, we've got more rain. We can also add a little bit of wind to it to make the raindrops go more to the side, or increase the opacity of those rain drops to make him more present. Just be careful that whenever you're going to apply certain effects, is that they stay natural. With the opacity set to 73, it looks like stripes in my shot. Maybe, it was a better idea to just keep them at 50 percent or maybe even less like 25 percent. With one simple effect, we can generate rain into any of our shots. I do have to be careful or my fire won't go out now. Anyways, what happens if it rains, rain drops fall onto your lens. Let's create that. The are rain drops are actually distortions of the shots. We can't really look for raindrops on lens effect. We are going to have to search for Mercury, right here Mr. Mercury. Also,this has to be applied to our entire shot, so drag that to the adjustment layer and see, yeah. That's what we want, but our entire shot is smushed together. We have to do here something because our entire shot is gone, we can't see the beautiful landscape anymore. Let's start off by deleting that Mr. Mercury effects. We're going to have to duplicate our entire scene two times. One will function as the normal shot, and the other will function as the raindrops on the lens. We can't really duplicate the adjustment layer, because that is not how it works. We are going to have to do something called precomposing, also a technique used very often in sight after effects. Precomposing is simply sets combining all of your shots into a group or actually into a new composition. Let's do that. Select everything in your timeline, right-click, and choose precompose. It's going to give you a pop-up box, and you want to rename that composition to anything you'd like. For example, rainfall in the landscape. That's how original I am. Press, okay. You can now see that we have all of these layers grouped into one composition. We're even going to head back to my projects panel, you will also see that, that composition has been added to my project as well. This is nothing more than just a composition that has been added into a composition. That's it, nothing more. If I double-click on this composition inside of my composition, it will open it up with all of its layer contents that we've been working on previously, it will open up a new tab as well, in my timeline and I can head back to my normal landscape composition in which that composition sits. Because, this is now grouped together, I can simply duplicate that layer. That is done by selecting that layer and hitting control D on your keyboard, which stands for a duplicate or commands d, If you are a Mac user. Now we can apply the Mr. Mercury effect onto the top clip right here, on the top composition which will add that weird raindrop effect to my lens, but it will also have the normal shot underneath visible. If I disabled that, you can see what it does here. This rain drop doesn't really look so natural, so make sure to select that upper composition and jump into the Mr. Mercury effects for which we can change several things. For example, we can increase in radius to make it expand a bit more over the entire shots, also the y radius like that. I'm actually noticing now that my computer is having some trouble, to run all of these effects here together. Let's have a look at a few things that we can do to increase the performance while working and mixing all of these effects. First of all, I'm going to disable the output of the layer down below here for a moment. In that way after effects only needs to render one of these layers instead of both of them. The next thing is the resolution that I was talking about prior within this class. Then below here, in our composition panel, we can see here third. This right here is the resolution of what I'm playing back in my timeline. If I'm going to set this to full and playing back the full 4K resolution, which is pretty heavy for my computer. You can also see it when I'm heading back to my projects panel, and click on landscape that the resolution says, 4K. But, if I'm going to change this to a half, it will now say,(1920 by 1080), which is high definition the half of 4K. I can also change this to a third or even a quarter. Again, you can see that the resolution is lowering here, of that composition. Now, don't worry, this will not affect your final output. It will just help you to render stuff faster while you are working inside after effects. Once you're going to render out your video, you'll have the full quality. Let's go back into the effects controls here, and I'll change a few more things. Maybe the birth rate of these weird stains. It's a bit too much let's decrease that, there we go. Now we have fewer drops. We can increase the gravity to make them fall or drip faster over the lens or not. Maybe it's going a bit too fast. Let's set that to 0.5 and see how that looks. It's dancing a bit too much. That is because the birth size and the death size. When one of these drops comes in, it has a birth and when it goes out, it has a death. We want to set the birth size and the death size to the same amounts. For example, 0.5, also the death size to 0.5, and now you won't see those smaller drops, but they are still relative to the scene. Furthermore, if you want to change the values in here and see what it does to the effects, then go back into here, maybe change something else and again, see what it does to your effects. Every effect works differently, so it's really hard to say what the exact settings should be, it also depends on your situation. A good rule of thumb here is just to change different settings, see what it does, keep tweaking it until it looks right to what you are looking for. This can take a little while, but that is just how visual effects work. It takes a lot of time to tweak it, to get it right where you want it to be. I think that we are there,where we wanted to be right now. Let's enable that bottom layer again. The first thing that I'm noticing now, is these raindrops are close to the lens, and they should also be out of focus. I'm going to ask a Gaussian blurr to do that again. Gaussian Blurr, you can type it, right there it is. Drag that to the top layer, which are these raindrops, and increase that to a little 20, or maybe even more let's say 50. This looks actually pretty good. Let's just play this back and see how it looks. Look at that guys, are beautiful. The sun is shining yet it's raining. It makes certainly no sense. But we've learned something new in this lesson, how effects work, how you can change it's properties and all, to create something unique. That was it again for this lesson, and after that we're going to jump into a brand new chapter, which is all about motion tracking. 8. Animations and Keyframes: I'm trying to figure this out now for a couple of days, guys, but I can't find the problem. Let's try it. Okay, that glitch wasn't normal. Let's try it again. I think we need to jump into the source and see where the problem is coming from. Let's see if After Effects can help us here. I think it has something to do with animations. I'm inside After Effects right here and let's start like always with a new composition. Click on the composition button right here, and I'm going to name this animation. I'm going to leave the high-definition settings as they are and press "Okay". Let's first start with the very basics of animations inside After Effects, before we can locate the glitch problem. We currently have no layers inside our timeline, so I'm going to go up to the toolbox right here and select the ellipse tool. If I'm now going to draw a shape into my composition right here, hold down the Shift key to create a circle. You will see that a new shape object has been added into my timeline. Going back to the toolbox up here, we can change the fill, the color of that. We can also add a stroke to it, etc. But these are things that we're going to take a look at deeper, later in this class. For now, let's just work on this circle right here. Let's animate the circle, I'm going to just drop my selection tool here, so that it goes from the left side to the right side. Now, animations always need to have a certain amount of time. If you go from point A to point B, it requires a certain time to do that. That is where our timeline comes in, which sits here on the bottom. We're going to set a starting point which is point A. Usually you're going to start somewhere in the beginning, and let's move our circle right here to the place where we want it to start, for example, here on the left side. Now, we know that we can change the position of this circle with the position property. Let's just go into the shape options here into the transform, we've all seen this right here, position. If you move that to the right, we can actually make that go to the right. We are going to use this property right here to create an animation. In order to do that, we first have to enable animation for a specific property. In this case, that is the position. To enable that, I'm going to click here on this little stopwatch button next to the position property. Click on it and you can see now that a keyframe has been added to my timeline. That keyframe actually now holds the value of the current position, which is this right here, and this is our A. Let's go forward in time. We can now change the position value. We can either do that in here, just change that value, or I can also just take that circle and drag it to a different position. Automatically After Effects will create a new keyframe for us because it saw that the position was changed. This is our point B. If you go back in time now and play this clip, you will see that we'll go from point A to point B. That's pretty cool right? Now, this position is not the only property that we can animate. Let's say that we also want to animate the scale, for example. We can start with a small circle that might go larger over time, so let's decrease the scale of that circle. But what's happening now? While I'm changing the scale of that circle. It also moves in position somehow. Actually not. That is because of the anchor point, which just something super important whenever you're going to animate something, definitely with the Position, rotation, scale, etc. The anchor point is the middle point of your object, which could lay outside of the object, like in this case, like you might have already guessed. This right here, is exactly that anchor point. We want to move that anchor point into the middle of our object. In order to do that, we need to grab the anchor point tool, which also can be found here in our toolbox right there, pan behind or the anchor point tool. Click on it, and this allows us to grab that anchor point and drag it to the middle of our circle. Like before, hold down the Control key to make it snap in the middle. Now when we are going to scale the circle down, you will see it will scale around that point. Let's decrease the scale for that circle, turn the keyframe forward, go forward in time and maybe you want to be at the exact same point as we're already circle stops. In order to snap on that keyframe, hold down the Shift key which will snap our play hard to it. Now we are sure that we are also at that exact same point where we are going to enlarge that circle again. Because we were changing the anchor point, which is actually something that you have to do in the beginning, the circle lays now outside of our Canvas, no problem. We are standing on that keyframe so whenever we are standing on to it, we can always change the values within. Simply take that circle right here, of course, with the selection tool, and not the anchor point tool, and drag it to a different position. Now let's play this right here, and the circle goes bigger plus it changes in position. If you want this animation to go faster, you could take the outer keyframes right here or the starting keyframes, and drag them closer to each other. Because the less time that they get to go from point A to point B, the faster that they have to travel. Let's play it right now, as you can see it goes a lot faster. Moving them apart will make the animation go slower. When it comes down to animations and again, definitely with position, scale, etc. It's very important that you are going to create smooth animations. If I'm looking at this animation right now, and to emphasize that even more, I'm going to put them closer to each other. You will see that the animation starts immediately and also stops immediately, and this doesn't really look so good. It looks amateuristic. Every professional animation is made smooth. That it is very easily done, we just have to change the behavior of the keyframe. Currently looking at these, these are squared keyframes, and that tells me that these are linear keyframes, but we want to change them to being a busier keyframe. That can easily be done by selecting the keyframes that you want to change, right-click on them, head over to Keyframe Assistant. From there, ease in or ease out. Because this right here is the very first keyframe, the starting keyframe, we're going to choose "Ease Out". That is because the animation will start from here and go out of the keyframe to the right. Then for the second keyframes, right-click, "Keyframe Assistant", "Easy Ease In", because the animation comes from the left to the right into the keyframes. Now, that circle will start and end smooth. Which looks a turn better as we did before. Finally, there's one last thing that I want to show you, and that is motion blur. If I'm waving my hands right here, you can see that my hands aren't really sharp. You know, there is a motion blur to it, and that is because of the shutter speed of the camera. Every camera has that. But inside After Effects there is no camera, so that means that we could also make animations without motion blur. Like here, this circle stays sharp throughout the entire animation, which looks again, not really realistic, so we are going to add motion blur to it. Motion blur inside After Effect is a layer behavior. We're going to go to our layer right here, and on the right, we have the switches. I've already covered that you can set your layer into a 3D space. But there's also this option right here. Motion blur, simulates shutter duration. If I'm going to enable that by just clicking here in this box for that layer, I have enabled the motion blur for that layer specific. Because motion blur is something that eats up resources from your computer, there is a switch inside After Effects as well to enable or disable motion blur for your entire composition. That button is the exact same icon which sits here on the top right of your timeline. Click on that to also enable the motion blur. The reason that we have two buttons for this, is because in the future you will work with 10, 20, maybe even 30 layers inside your timeline, and if your performance is bad while working in After Effects, you're going to have to disable the motion blur for each individual layer, which is not so user-friendly. That's why you can just disable that with one click of a button. But now let's enable that and let's have a look again at that animation. As you can see, this looks a ton better. All right, now that we know how animations work inside After Effects, we can start to figure out where that glitch comes from. I'm going to double-click here on my project panel and search for, under my footage folder, right there, Jordy Glitch. Select it and hit import. I'm going to drag this clip into a new composition. There it is. At a certain point, I will make a movement like I'm getting this glitch. Because I only want the glitch to appear on me and not the entire surrounding, we're first going to have to mask myself out, and this is something that we've seen prior in this class. But if I'm going to mask myself out, that also means that the backgrounds will be gone. Just like with the mercury effects that we've seen before, the raindrops onto our lens. We're going to have to duplicate this layer. Now because there's only one layer, we don't need to precompose that or group that together into a new composition. I can just go ahead, select this one layer and hit Control D to duplicate that layer. With the top one selected, I can now select my pen tool right here, and I'm going to draw a rough mask around myself. I'm going to do this very quickly, there we go. Now when I'm going to disable the layer below, you can see that I have myself soloed out right here. Then let's enable that layer again and jump into our Effects library where I'm going to search for the glitch effect. It's there, the VR Digital Glitch. Drag that on top of the top layer, and there we go, that glitch has been applied. There is where the glitch comes from. The glitch has a ton of options. I can go into any distortion, for example, and increased the color distortion. I can increase the geometric distortion as well. I can also go into the transform option and move that glitch around to get something unique. Now currently that glitch has been applied throughout the entire duration of that clip, which makes me look a little bit silly. What I'm going to do with animate the glitch effect? Before making this weird move right here, the glitch has to be gone. I can change that into my effects controls right here. I'm going to go into my layer, open up the effects, VR Digital Glitch, and from there I'm go to change the properties. I'm going to go into the distortion. There are two values that I would like to change. One of them is the distortion itself, the distortion rate, and I'm going to disable that. You will see that all of those values are gone and also the color distortion, if I'm going to put that on zero, then we don't see the glitch effects. If I'm going to create an animation keyframe for the color distortion right there and for the distortion rate over there, then move a couple of frames forward in time, where I'm going to make this movement right here, and then increase those two values. It will then animate that glitch so that it comes in, as you can see right here, it's a short burst, so a little bit forward in time, I'm going to remove that glitch again and set those two values back to zero. I'm playing this right now, you will see that the glitch comes in, right as I'm doing this movement. Now this glitch is an effect, it's not a position or scale attributes. Changing these keyframes to ease out or ease in doesn't really make much difference here, so I'm just going to leave them to normal linear keyframes. Also, it's a glitch, so it can be a little bit weird, of course. Going forward in time, I have again one of these bursts. The problem is that if I want to create a keyframe for the current value, which is zero, I can't really press this stopwatch button anymore because that will disable the animation again. Clicking on to it will delete all of those keyframes here. I'm just going to press "Control Z" to undo my action. In order to do that, create a blank frame or a keyframe of the current value, what we then have to do is press this button here on the left. Clicking on that will add a keyframe of the current value, which is zero. Do the same thing for the distortion rates, then move a little bit forward in time where I have again, that distortion and just increase those two values all the way up, go forward in time a little bit, and change them back to zero. I see that I have this glitch one more time. If you have multiple of these glitches or animations that need to be happened, there's actually an easier way than constantly creating this animation all over again. Actually copy and paste these keyframes, and that is easily done by just selecting the keyframes that you want, Control C, copy, and stand on the starting point where you'd like to paste these, which is right here, Control V. There we go, we, again, have our A position, the B position and the C position where the glitch goes outs. that's how you can animate a glitch effect onto yourself, super easy with the glitch effect. This was a very basic introduction to animating effects inside Adobe After Effects. We're going to take a look at some more examples later on in this class but now at least I know where that glitch came from. It was created in After Effects. It wasn't my fault. That's great. All right. Let's continue with this. 9. Green Keying: Hey, I want to show you something very quickly. I just invented something brand-new. Its goals, the green screen device, follow me outside because it's pretty big and it doesn't fit in my laboratory. This right here is the green screen device. Let me show you guys how the green-screen device works. Oh no, something is wrong with the green-screen device. Let's go inside and figure this thing out. While I was running back inside it struck me, to green screen device is working. It was meant to be that way the explosion had to happen, and I want to show you guys inside the Adobe After Effects, how I did that. It's already inside my project [inaudible] green-screen clip that you've, you've seen outside. I'm going to double-click on it. I can make a selection by using the in and the out points tools that we've seen prior as well. So let's start off with the green-screen shot right here. I'm just standing in front of that dream screen device. I'm going to set an in point right here with that button over there. Go a little bit forward in time near the explosion happens, and then over here I'm going to set the out point and I'm going to use this part here in my timeline. So I'm going to now just drag that clip into a new composition like so, and it will only use that selection that we've just made. Going back to my green-screen clip here, double-click onto it [inaudible] what you just did outside it is that we let the camera roll. As you can see here inside after effects, if we're going to strip a little bit forward in time, you can see that we're just kind of clear the shots here [inaudible] smiling probably because I just told a great joke. But then right here we can see that we have an empty shot, and that is always going to be super important if you are going to mix different elements together within the same shot. Also super important is that you're going to film this from a tripods because we're going to blend two clips on top of each other. If one clip is moving and the other one as well, they won't match. But it both to then sit on a tripod. They are static still and they will match perfectly on top of each other. So that's why we've got this empty shot right here. I'm going to set an endpoint as well, go forward in time and set an out point here somewhere to make a selection at that empty space. Then drag the green-screen clip again to your timeline. But we're going to place that underneath the first green-screen clip, and I see that the bottom one had to be a little bit longer here. So just take the outside over there and just trim that open to the right site, there we go. What we have right here now is the green screen chat with me, into it and an empty shot. If I disable that layer for a moment as you can see. So because this was shot on a tripod, these two shots match perfectly, and for convenience. I'm going to rename the clip on top green-screen and the clip below is going to cold empty, there we go. Now what we are going to create is an explosion that happens behind me. So that means that we need multiple layers of the same shots. We started off with me than behind me comes the explosion and behind the explosion comes at the background shot. That's why we had to work with the green screen because I'm going to have to mask or key myself completely out so [inaudible] unable to put the explosion behind me. Now before we are going to start by pulling off this green key, we are first going to mask out everything else that we don't need in this shot to make ourselves not only easy, but also [inaudible] green keying won't work. So with that's top clip selected criteria in a timeline, take your pen tool and draw on the inside of the green screen like so and this can be done pretty roughly. There we go. Now I'm going to disable the empty layer here below for a moment, you can see it just that masked out and that everything else here is black. To remove the green, we are going to need an effect called key light, and this can be found in our Effects library here on the right side, just search for key lights. Drag that effect that you can find over here onto your clip, the green-screen clip and a key light is the most used effect to pull off a green key or blue key doesn't really matter any key that you would pull. But usually you want to work when a green-screen because it's the least common color that appears and clothing and of course it also doesn't come back and skin tones or anything else like hair or something like, for example, if you would take a red key already, yellow key, although it's our color things that come back into skin tones. That's it's going to give you problems. It's best to go for a green or a blue key, and by the way, green screens are more sensitive to digital cameras, so those things will go easier. Alright, within an effect, we can find a bunch of settings, but actually there's not that much that you need to know. The most important setting of all is this friend right here to screen color. Of course you wouldn't say it with the color picker right here. Click on it to select the green in our shots like so, and by that you're saying this is the green, remove it. Already there now you can see that the green has been removed. It might seem that your dream key went well, but there could be some problems and to make sure that we are avoiding those problems, we're going to go back in the effects right here and set the view instead of final results right here, we're going to set that to screen map. Just click on that, which will show you the map of the key. Everything white is that we're going to keep and everything black is what we're going to remove. As you can see here in my t-shirt, never stop learning. It's kinda visible there, so it's slightly being keyed out because blue is that's pretty close to the green or apple see green-blue, whatever it's visible. So we are going to have to play a little bit with the settings in here. Right here we can find a setting gold Screen Matte, which is exactly what we've selected over here. By expanding that property, we can find a bunch of settings to further tweak to keying. The first thing that I noticed is that the white is currently set pretty aggressive. 100 is the maximum value. I'm going to click and drag that to the left to decrease the white to make it less aggressive. As you can see here, I am removing the selection of what was on my t-shirts. When you think you've got a good selection, and by the way, guys, I have no idea whether this year is shown. It shouldn't be because I've got a mask that is probably a buck with an After Effects, don't mind that's. Anyways, I'm going to go back to the view here and set it to two final results, and let's have a look when I'm going to enable the empty layer back, how it looks. As you can see, there's this tiny edge around me, which shouldn't be there. What I'm going to do here is jump and to the screen shrink slash draw, which allows us to kind of expand that edge around ourselves or decrease that around us. Probably when I set that to somewhere around minus three, so that it bites a little bit into me and that way the edge is gone. Those were the only two tweaks that I had to do, by the way, this was not shot on a special camera. It was abnormal DSLR camera, if you make sure that you're outside [inaudible] plenty of daylight outsides, that there are no wrinkles in your green screen that you take some distance from your dream screen as well, then the keying inside After Effects will actually go pretty smoothly. Alright, we already got two layers of our shot. You've got me and the backgrounds or the empty. This was only possible with a green-screen. Now I'm going to import that explosion, double-click here and your project panel and I'm going to go to stock and I should have an explosion here somewhere. Fire explosion there it is. I'm going to drag this fire explosion now between me and the background and that way we have to fire explosion sitting behind me. But the background is still in the backgrounds. Like we've seen before changing the blending mode of that fire explosion to something like art for example, to make the explosions really bright. I'm going to scale this one up as well so that it covers up the entire screen like so. Now I want to locate the point where I kind of make the movement off when the explosion should happen. Kind of see it at my face here. Somewhere right here or my arms go up there, the explosion should start. So from there I'm going to drag this clip here, the fire explosion to the right, holding down my shift key on the keyboard, I can make it snap to the play heads like so. let's render this out and see how it looks. The green-screen device in action look how awesome that looks as simple that was. This is one example of what you can do, what a green-screen super fun to work with. That was it again for this lesson. Thank you so much for watching and see you next lesson, we are going to track some masks. 10. Mask Tracking: Welcome back, apprentice, As a famous professor, I don't want to get recognized in public. That's where my next machine comes in. It is the don't recognize me machine automatic 3,000. Let's have a look inside Adobe After Effects, how we can make that. Like always, I'm going to start off by importing some footage, Double-click and your projects panel and, I'm going to select this old footage of me where I'm walking, select import, this was at a public place by the away, so that's why I want to make sure that I'm not recognized. You know, all of those teenager girls screaming. Then I'm going to drag this clip into a new composition like so. Now we can start. All jokes aside, in this lesson, we are going to take a look at how we can track our masks. For instance, I'm going to duplicate my Jordi walking clip right here and a timeline control D to do that, and who the top lip selected, I'm going to head over to my pen tool on top and to draw a mask around my face. There are multiple reasons why we want to do this. The first one is, for example, as you can see, I am pretty underexposed in my face, so I can go into my Effects and Presets, and I'm going to search for that Mettrie effects, drag it over to that top clip, and I'm going to go to the basic correction from which I'm going to increase the exposure at tiny bits, and that way my face pops out a little bit better as you can see. Of course we also want to go into the mask properties like so hence increase the better of that mask. There now it's subtle, nobody notices that there's a mask onto my face, but I am popping out a little bit better. Now the problem is that the mass here on top of my face is not really following me, it just kind of sits there and we want it to make it follow my movement and that's where mask tracking comes in. Now there are two ways to do it. The first one is the manual way, and the second one is the automatic way. Let's quickly have a look at the manual way, which we are not going to do it because it's crazy, but the manual away goes as follows. This right here is the mask path which we can find baking error properties as well, here it is the mask paths, and we know that we can make animations onto it because I can see this animation stopwatch on the left to it. Click on it to create a key frame, we can go forward in time and we can then change the mask part, so it can just grab this mask, its points and drag it to a new position. Now what I'm going to scrub through this, you will see that the mask will follow my head. But this is a tinner work and why should we? Because there is an automatic way inside After Effects that actually works better at any manual way. Let's see how we can do that. For starters, I'm going to click "Back" on that Animation Stopwatch to delete all this key-frames. I'm going to right-click here on my mask one and head over to track mask. That will open up the Tracker window here on my right side. The first thing you always have to make sure to do is that you are in the beginning of your timeline and you want to create your initial mask also at the beginning right here. In its tracker panel, we had a few options under the method. Choosing a different option tool here will tell the tracker how to track that mask. For instance, you can say to only track by its position and then the mask will only follow left, right, up and down, that's it, but you can also choose to track the position and it's rotation or even to scale as well. For example, you have a car that is driving towards the camera and you want to track the headlights to make them brighter. Well, those headlights will actually scale up as it comes closer to the camera, so if that's the case, then you also need to select the position, scale and rotation. The face tracking is something that happens a lot inside After Effects, so that's why there's this dedicated option to it. We're going to choose the face tracking outline only. There's also a more advanced tracking, but for most of the work when you just have a first and running around, that is not needed. I'm going to click on the outline only face tracking, make sure that you sit into beginning and right now I'm going to press play. But as I do so, pay attention to the mask itself. There we go, automatically After Effects changed the parts of my mask, and the reason for it is it knows we're doing this face tracking, so it was going to look for the edge of my face and create new points accordingly. Knowing this means that we can actually create very quick masks, very rough masks around someone's face, because we know the After Effects is going to change the mask anyway properly. The tractor is now just following my face surrounds calculating my movements and it is done. As you can see now here in my mask bats property, all those key frames have been automatically generated, something that we would otherwise have done manually and scrubbing through this clip, as you can see, After Effects did a great job at following my face. At any point now in this shot, you can see here if I enable or disable that layer, that my face looks a little bit brighter, making myself pop-out better. This is a technique used very often in films to draw more attention towards the face of your actor, which is the most important parts within your shots usually. For me, this is actually not what i want because my face was pumping out more, thus more teenage girls were running towards me. I know I would just dry way too much attention with this rightness on my face, so I'm going to do something different here, I'm going to delete the metric color effects, and I'm going to head into my effects and presets tap. From your search bar, I'm going to look for Mosaic and drag. That's right here for me stylized folder onto the top clip. The blocks or the cubes are currently set to big, so I'm going to increase this value to make some smaller cubes and up probably wouldn't have them at the same size, so set them both to around 50. There we go, now I am unrecognizable, and because the mask follows my face also will that mosaic effect. There's something that I'm noticing here is that on the edge, my eye is getting visible right here. Now instead of changing that entire mask like we've seen previously in this class as well, I can just go ahead and increase the mass expansion a tiny bit from here, like so just to make sure that the mosaic effect is definitely covering up my entire face, and of course, this is a technique used very often to track the license plates of cars, or maybe you have people in your shots that don't know that they were filmed, then you also need to make them unrecognizable. What I am working inside Adobe After Effects, it's mostly because I am tracking something. I'm tracking the movement of the object, the actress, or maybe the camera, a three-D camera tracker, which is something that I'm still trying to figure out its anyway, there are different types of tracking inside After Effects, mainly three types we have just seen the first one, which is a pretty two-dimensional tracking, a mask tracking. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at motion tracking, which is a different technique that can create some stunning effects. 11. Motion tracking: Motion tracking, the second tracking technique that we're going to see in this class. Now for motion tracking, we are going to have to prepare ourselves a tiny bit and this is something that you've probably seen already, inner cold tracking marks and for cracking marks, you can basically take anything such as some tape or a marker, anything like that. I'm going to take a piece of tape right here, a very tiny piece and I'm going to stick that to my finger, like this. This is now a tracking mark. I can use these points right here to track the motion of my finger and that way I can make, for example, a text follow my finger or a flame that my finger is on fire. Maybe let's create that. The one thing that you do need to remember while making these tracking marks is that you have a clear contrast between the tracking mark itself and the surrounding. So in this case, my skin is pretty white and I've got a black marker onto there. What I'd like to track the motion of my mouse pad right here, I might want to add some white tracking marked onto this thing. With that tracking mark, paste it to your finger, let's make a movement like this. Now let's head over into After Effects and see how we could put a flame to it. First of all, like always double-click in your project panel and I'm going to locate something here called flame on my finger. Hit imports and I'm going to drag that clip into a new composition. So there I am with the tracking mark on my finger. Now in order to track the movement of my finger right here, what I'm going to have to do is open up the tracker window. Now this one is different than the mask tracker window. So we can just go directly into that tracker window that we've seen previously and you will also see that it kind of looks differently like before and that is because we haven't opened up the mask tracker. You can't find the tracker window again, window and tracker right here make sure that is enabled. Right here we can find a few different options on top and the way that we want to track the motion of my finger. We're not going to track the camera because the camera is standing still on a tripod, but I am going to track the motion. A motion is some kind of an object that is moving in your shot and you want to follow that. So hit on "Track Motion" and that will give you a track point. Currently we have one track point. After they've clicked on this button, you can see that we have a bunch of options, but the only think you really have to pay attention to, is that the track type is set to transform. Then we want to say what's we would like to track, is that the position? But as that may be also their rotation? But maybe also the scale? That is something that out we can enable, right here. The only problem is what we are going to enable rotation and or the scale, we're going to introduce a second tracking point. However, I have only created one tracking point on a finger. So this is something that we cannot use right now. So that's why I'm going to disable these two options and only track the position for now. Again, this is something that we're going to see later in this lesson. Your tracking point to something that we can move around in our shots and we want to move that over to our tracking point right here on my finger. Make sure that little cross here sits over that black dot. We have two squares in my tracking point, the inner square defines the tracking point itself, that one can be a little bit smaller like so and the outer square is the searching area. Within this area After Effects is going to search from that point, so even go into move my finger around and it's going fast, then I might want to make this square larger. But if I know that these movements are very subtle then you might want to leave this place small. The bigger the searching area is, the longer it's going to take for After Effects to automatically calculate all of the tracking points. All right, this sits good. I'm going to zoom back out, make sure that I sit at the beginning of my timeline, just like with the mask tracking and it's now I'm going to click on "Analyze forward". We can analyze by just playing the clip or we can also analyze per frame. But most of the time you can just click the play button right here within the analyze, click on it and let After Effects do its work. You can now see that the tracking point is perfectly folding my finger right here. All right and when it's done, you will see the entire path of what the tracker has created for you. This time it didn't really animate something, it did animate the tracker, but the tracker is something that we can't really use further in After Effects. So what we're going to do is take out this tracking data and store that into something that we can use and that is something called a Null Object. For that, I'm going to head over to my menu, click on layer, select New and from there we can find Null Object. Click on it, and it'll add a new layer into your timeline. But a Null Object is really nothing. It's a Null Object, it has nothing, no properties whatsoever. It's like an empty box, but we can use it to store our tracking data in, so we can fill up that box. Now in order to do that, we're going to first have to go back to our tracker window and click here on edit targets, click on it, which will open up this window and from a layer, you want to select that Null Object, then press "Okay". When we are now going to press "Apply", all that tracking data will be transferred into that Null Object. It's first going to bother you with another pop-up box. From there, make sure that x and y are both selected and then press "Okay". Now you will see that Null Object, which is a square, but actually does nothing, is now following my finger as I move it around. That is great if I'm going to open up the Null Object from here, open up the transform, you will see that the position property has been animated, and that is great because we can actually use this animation for other objects. Let me show you how that is done. I'm going to collapse this layer back. Double-click here in my project's panel, open up the stock folder and in there I will find a flame clip. Again, one of those video assets that you can download from the internet. This is actually something that we have created ourselves here in the studio, which you again can download as well from the project tab, click on import and I'm going to drag that flame over into my composition. There it is, a beautiful, pretty big flame. I'm going to scale that down a tiny bits. Like before, this is something that we've already seen, I'm going to set the blending mode to something like screen maybe or maybe let's set that to add, so it's a little bit more vivid and now I can kind of use this flame here in my shots. So let's scale that flame down and to position it over my fingers that it seems like my finger sits on fire. It's a tiny fire, it seems. But that's okay. Something like this would do maybe a tiny bit bigger like so. There we go. Now obviously the flame must have going to follow my finger yet. What we have to do now, is say to this flame that it has to follow the movement of the Null Object and in order to do that, we can simply link that layer to the null. From our later properties here under right, we can find parent and link. Again, if you can't find that right click on your columns, go to columns and from there, parent and link. It has this little pick whip tool as you can see. If you click on that and then his little troll, you can take that and link it to a different layer. In this case, it's going to be that Null Object. So just link it to it. Let go, you'll now see here in this drop down menu that null one has been selected and that flame will now follow the exact same movement of that Null Object. So I can go to scrap in my timeline, you will see that that flame is perfectly following my finger. Let's just render this out and see how it looks. Well, isn't that looking amazing? This right here, guys is my put your finger on fire biomedic 3,000 machine. Yeah. Now we are still running into one issue and that is the tracking mark itself. Okay, it did help us to track my finger, but that tracking mark is visible. So we also would like to remove that now. Well, that is very simply done. For starters, I'm going to select the normal clip, the flame on finger, hit "Control D" to duplicate that, I'm go to solo it for just a moment, Click here on this Solo button so that all of the other layers are disabled for a moment. I'm going to grab my pen tool right here, and I'm going to take a different kind of flesh for me. Maybe somewhere here down below of my finger. Just create a mask over your finger like that. There we go. I'm going to disable the solo layers so I can see everything again. It's now going to take this clip right here and change its position. So go to move this part right here of my finger from the duplicate over to that tracking mark, like so and maybe you want to re-adjust that mask a tiny bit and like we always have to do, go into the mask options and feather that. But here's a very quick shortkey for it, just make sure that, that clip is selected and hit the F key on your keyboard to bring up the Mask Feather and they'll just feather that a tiny bit, not too much, little bit, five pixels might be even enough. Maybe re-adjust that mask a little bit more, there we go. Now nobody sees that we had a tracking mark on our finger. There's one last thing that we have to do, this new finger part thing also needs to follow the tracking data. So just like before, like with the flame, I'm going to take the pick whip tool and drag it over to the Null Objects to link it to that one as well. So this means that we can create one tracking data Null Object and link multiple objects to it. Now before I can play this back, there's one last thing that we have to do, that's actually right-click here on this duplicate and head over to Time. Freeze Frame, very important because if you don't do this, the video will actually display and as I'm moving my finger, you will now see that we suddenly have a blue part within that mask. That is because of the backgrounds, because I'm moving my finger. The new parts where we are covering up the tracking mark width has to be still. We're going to freeze that frame in the beginning of our timelines and make sure that you sit there, Right-click, Time, Freeze Frame, and it's now does video is freezed, which means that nothing will change, and it will just follow my finger. So yeah, that looks good. Nobody sees that we have a tracking mark in there. There's maybe one last thing that I want to do to really finished this off, and that is motion blur. Because I am moving my finger, the flame is also moving now, that flame should also get some motion blur just like my finger. We've already seen this before. I'm going to enable the motion blur for the flame, and also for the new flesh part on my finger, and finally, I'm going to enable the global motion blur here on top. That way you can see that the flame gets this motion blur to it, which makes it a bit more natural as I'm moving it around. That's it for motion tracking with one point. Now let's have a look at motion tracking with two points, which actually goes the same, except you've got two points. For that, you would create two points. I'm going to recycle a piece of tape right here, and just stick to my finger or to my hands. There we go. Now, we've got two tracking marks onto my hand. This one does require you to put on safety glasses because it tracker might explode. We've seen that previously in this class as well. Now I'm just going to move my hand around. You can go to the front, to the back, we can rotate my hands, we can do everything with this and that's it. We can now go ahead, jump into After Effects and drag this hands. Double-click in your Project's panel and I should have a clip right here called texts on hands. Let's add a text to it. Good idea, Jordan, professor. Selected and hit Import. Now I'm starting to get a mess into my project panel. I'm going to create a new folder and name this combined footage, and select all of my clips in there to be a little bit more organized. I should be the example to you guys. Open up footage and from there, drag that into a new composition, which I'm going to drag out of the folder that we had our compositions in here in their roots, there is that clip of me waving my hands beautifully around with the two tracking points. With the layer selected, go over to your tracker window and click again on track motion. This time we're going to need two tracking points, so also enable rotation and the scale. I'm going to zoom in here on my hands so that I can position the two tracking points over my markers like that. Close that in here, the inner square, and enlarge outer square a tiny bit so that it has a searching area. The two tracking points can't overlap, so no worries about that. Once they sit in place, hit Play. Oh, no something's going wrong here. The tracking point here has lost its mark. Look at this. Be careful guys. That's why you should have put on your glasses. Things can get pretty dangerous now. No worries, we can fix this. Look, we're going to step back in time and see where it was still okay. I'm going to press the Control Key on my keyboard, and then the arrow to the left. That way we can go back in time, and if I go three frames back in time, there, we were still in the right spot. Something's off here. I think that my searching area is a little bit too big, because After Effects thinks that these shadow here in my hand is the tracking point, which could be the case because this also has a big contrast. I'm going to decrease my searching area. Let's see if this fixes the problem. Just to be sure, I'm not going to play the tracking now, but I'm going to press on analyze one frame forward, and just see what it does. Everything goes well. I'll just go a couple of frames forward, and I think that After Effects is back on track. Let's hit Play, but we'll keep an eye out on what happens next. Keep your mouse here on the Stop button if anything else goes wrong. Oh dear, it went wrong again. Let's zoom in here on our hands. Control key 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 frames back. How many frames? Oh, there we are. We're back on track. As you can see, my searching area is coming too close here into this shadow. Maybe I have to make this even smaller. Go one frame forward, and let's just see what it does now. Then it goes wrong again. Maybe we need to help After Effects a little bit. We can easily do that by actually just grabbing this tracking points in the middle of a tracking, and move that back into place. We're doing this, we're saying to After Effects, "A-hole, watch out, go back to your spot." Maybe I'm going to make the inner circle a tiny bit bigger, just to be sure that we've got the entire tracking mark in there. Let's try something else, maybe increase that searching area really big, I don't know. Let's just try something. One frame forward. It's doing its job again, like it should be. I think we can press Play again, and we are at the end. You can take off the safety glasses now. If there is a ton of motion or you have spots in your shot that looks similar to your tracking mark, then you're tracking could go wrong, but it's okay. That's why you always need to have your mouse pointer stuck on that Stop button. Whenever something goes wrong, just hit Stop with the Control key, and the arrow to the left, you go back into time frame by frame, and you look for the points where the tracker is back on its right spot. From there you can adjust your tracking points, maybe put it back into place, and hit Play again. Don't worry too much if things go wrong. We go to Tracking, Layer, New, Null objects. It's in our timeline, and its targets, make sure that it's selected, and I would just hit Apply. Now you can see that the null object also has the scale and the rotation any minute as well. Let's create a text. I'm going to go into my Text tool here on top. We haven't seen that yet here in this class, but it is pretty straightforward and we're going to take a look at this tool in more detail later on. I'm going to click here in My Composition, and let's just create a text, for example, hand text. That's the best thing I can come up with now. Maybe make that a little bit more bold. We can find here on the right side some more options. We've got the font, the font thickness and all, these are things that we all know if we're working in a word processor or any other tool. Then take the selection tool again, and I'm going to place that here over my hand, maybe scale it down like that. Now it's just a simple matter of taking that pick whip tool again, linking the texts to the null object. If everything went according to plan, that text should now follow my hand, and also follow the rotation and the scales. You can see that the text becomes bigger, smaller again, rotates as I do this with my hands. One last thing, go back in time, close that null object here, collapse it, duplicate the normal clip. I'm going to solo it out, I'm going to zoom in here on my hands, and because we have two tracking points now, I am going to have to take the pen tool here, take a piece of flesh somewhere like that, disable the solo, move that over to the tracking point like so, make sure to feather this tiny bit, not too much, and I'm going to name this layer here, Cover-up Track 1, right-click on to it, Time, Freeze Frame. I'm going to link this the null object as well. But to avoid all that same work again, I can just duplicate the cover up from track 1, duplicate like that. I'm going to rename that to, track 2. Of course, I'm also going to take this here now, the duplicate of that one, and move it over to the other tracking points like so. Now that is covered up, and the last thing I wanted to do is, enable motion blur for the text and to the two cover-ups and then enable the global motion blur. Let's render this and see how it looks. There we go. Hand texts. I think that I should have come up with a better text. But I think that you apprentices understand what I mean. That was it again for this lesson. This was motion tracking, and in the next lesson, make sure to put on your goggles again because we are going to do some 3D camera tracking. Then that is something really awesome. 12. 3D Camera Tracking: I did it, look at this, I print this. It's the 3D camera tracker device, though I haven't tested it yet. I do hope that it works and that nothing will explode over here. You know what, let's go outside just to be sure because I don't want my laboratory to go up in the sky. The device is running, there are no explosion, so I'm hopeful this time. It's working, the 3D camera tracker device is working, all right. Let me show you guys the software side of this thing. Let's go back inside. Mission accomplished, I never thought that it would work but it did. Let's see inside After Effects how we can make this 3D camera tracker work. I'm going to double-click in my projects panel and to locate the clip that I've just shot right here 3D camera tracking, which is just a normal shot of me running around that you've just seen outside. Now what I want to do is track the motion of the camera, which is going to be completely different as we've done before, where we going to track the motion of one specific subject or object within our shot. With 3D camera tracking, we are literally going to make a virtual 3D camera that resembles the exact same movement of our camera, let's do that. Now with my clip selected in the timeline, I'm going to head back to the tracker window. Let me just collapse this one right here, there it is the tracker window. This time instead of clicking on track motion, I'm going to click on track camera. Now this is a completely automatic feature, which at Adobe After Effects. This is really cool, though very important though, is that you're going to make sure that you have structure in your shot. In this case we have a lot of structure here on the floor as you can see, if you're only filming a wall and make sure that that wall has a specific structure, things like grass also work perfect. You'd just need a lot of structure, a lot of contrast in your floor or on the waltz. Now after effects is doing the work for us, as you can see up here, it's almost finished analyzing this shot. Once it's done, you will see all of these tracking points on the floor. This is what's after effects came up with, and as you can see, it follows beautifully the movement of my camera. There's one thing that I want to show you, I'm not going to go too deep into this, but it does help you to further understand what this 3D camera tracker actually does. Going back into the effects here at 3D camera tracker, I'm going to click on "create camera." Clicking on that will create a virtual camera. This came right here is a digital camera that will actually make the same movement as I was doing with my camera. I can show that to you by changing the view in my Canvas right here on the bottom, you can see one view, but then go to change that to four views. At the top right, we just have our normal shot, on the left here we have a top view of that virtual camera, which sits right here. The bottom there we've got a front view and right here, you got a right view. As I'm going to scrub through my shots here, you can see the movement that my camera is taking. As I'm scrubbing here through my timeline, you can see what that 3D or virtual camera is doing. This right here is the automated spat that after effects has generated for me. This is more advanced stuff that you should not put in your mind yet. I'm going to place this back to one view and just have a look at our normal shot. I'm also going to delete the virtual camera right here. But hopefully this does give you a better understanding of what a 3D camera tracker does. Now going back into that effect selected right here, I'm going to click on one of these points. These points resemble an actual spot within the shot, for example, let's take out this point right here. Just right-click onto it, creates text and camera. After Effects will create that same camera, again, that virtual camera, but it also creates a three-dimensional texts for us. Let me just zoom in a tiny bit more so you can see what's happening here. The behavior of this text has automatically already been set to three dimension, as you can see right here from the switches. Because of that, it will react to the virtual camera. Now let's change that text here for a moment. I'm going to click on it, double-click here on a text name that anything you'd like, for example, "awesome" because I do find this pretty awesome. Let's just make this a bit more bolt. I'm going to change the fonts to impact, which is a pretty thick fonts. If I can type right, there we go impact. Just make that bigger like so. Let's play this clip right here and as you can see, it seems like that text is now just part of my scene. How cool is that? Then when you select this clip, you also see this new thing here being introduced, this right here is the x, y, and z axis. Pulling on them will change the position of the text. I would only suggest you pull on these axes if you're just going to grab the text and just move it around wherever you would like. You don't know where it actually sits, because this text right here is actually linked to this point that we've selected previously within a 3D camera tracker. If I'm going to pull the text up on the y-axis, I know that, that text still sits on that same point, but just a little bit higher. By doing that and playing the clip again back, now seems like that text its floating there in the air on that specific points. You can also go ahead and take the rotation tool from our toolbox up here and rotate that text here on one of these axes, just stand them then and rotate on that axis, as you can see. That way the text still sits on that same point, but it's more turned towards the camera. Now lets reset this CTRL+ Z to undo my actions and it sends back on the floor right here. I'm going to select the text here in my timeline and hits CTRL+ D to make a duplication of it. The duplication I'm going to rename that to shadow. Because it sits on the floor so it should be some kind of a shadow, where the top one is selected here. I'm going to take my rotation tool and I'm going to rotate it here on the x-axis to lay it on the floor, like so. I'm going to make that text black by changing it here through my character panel. Click "OK", and with my clip selected, I'm going to press the" T" button on my keyboard to bring up the opacity property, just decrease that because else are a shadow is a little bit too hard like so. Now it seems that we have a shadow from the awesome text as you can see, which is pretty cool as well. Maybe that shadow is a little bit too hard, so what we could do is go into our effects and presets, tap, anthem, go just search for blur. I'm going to take that gosh blur that we've seen previously. Just drag that Guassian blur onto the shadow and increase that value of the Guassian blur litter here to blurriness a tiny bit so that the shadow is a bit softer. Now it seems like a more natural shadow coming from the awesome texts. Looking awesome, and that was already at and how the 3D camera tracker works within after effects. We've already gone a little bit ahead of ourselves. We've been working with texts right here, but we haven't really seen how texts work inside after effects, and it's pretty straight forward. In the next lesson I'm going to go quickly through how you can manipulate a great text inside that program. 13. Working with Text: I know that you're already starting to feel like a professor like me, but you're still an apprentice. Keep that in mind. In this lesson I'm going to focus on some basics again, which is text. You've already seen how we can create text, but there are a few more details that you should know before you can go to the next level and take the spot of genic on the wall. We're back inside after effects of course and I'm going to create a new composition so that we have something to work in and let's just name this text. Press Okay, and we've got ourselves a timeline. Now in order to create text, the only thing that you have to do is go up to the Toolbox in here and click on the Text tool. If you click and hold down your mouse, you also get a vertical type text tool but we're just going to create a horizontal type texts which gives you the text tool click anywhere in your composition and you can start typing anything you'd like in here for example, my first text. Whenever you're done, take back the selection tool and now you can just move that text around to any spot in your stream. The way the text selected on the right side, if you go to character, again, if you can't find that window, window right here and search for a character. Within that panel, you can find some options to change the text. Like I mentioned before in this class, these are basic things that you can find in any word processor as well. I think these are pretty straightforward. It's going quickly over there and we've got the font family where you can just browse you're all different fonts. We've got some more font options. You've wanted to have these in thin or vault or whenever we got the font size over here. If you are going to work with multiple lines, for example, if I want to change my texts, I could just double-click on to it and add a new rule to it. My first text is awesome. Take back to Selection tool. Then I can change the offset between the two rules with this option right here. You can also change the spacing between the individual characters. Clearly the text is white but let's say but let's say I want to make this more red text. There you go. You can also add a line around the text. That is by increasing this option right here which has increased the pixels value to increase the outline of it. Generally, that outline is black and we can change that color from the second color over here. Just double-click on that and change the outline to, for example, whites. Now we've got a white text that is filled in with a red color. Clearly the stroke is over to fill but we can also say that the fill has to be over to stroke like that. This way the stroke will expand outwards, etc. On the bottom we have some more options. For example, put everything in italic or maybe you want to have everything in bolds or everything in capitals that can be done right here as well. These are things that are pretty straightforward. I'm going to have to deep anymore into these things, play around with the text setting and just see what it does. Apart from the character panel, there are a few more panels here and after effects that work together with your text. The first one that I would take a look at or the second one actually now is the paragraph tab. At this moment my paragraph is set to center it, which is good because my texts also sit somewhere in the middle. But whenever I want to change my text to the left side then I might want to make sure that all of my texts is aligned to the left. Then I just have to select this, align it left text button and to move my text over to that side. This is also a very important setting. If you might want to change your text later in your project, for example, you are just working with one line of text. I'm just going to delete the bottom one like so and my text is currently set at the left side of the screen and go to move my text over to the right side of the screen. I wanted to stick on the right side. Now I suddenly decides to change my text. For example, let say it is now my second texts. Well, right now the text is not any more aligned to the right side of my Canvas because I have it aligned to the left side, which starts here at this point where I dragged my text too. If you have a text that you drag anywhere in your shot, for example, to the right side here, I would advice you also have the right alignment enables and then drag your text over to the right side. If it will now change it to this is my third text that will keep itself aligned to the right. I'm going to change the text now to something else. Let's just say, text because that's the best thing I can come up with right now. I think my selection tool, is move my text anywhere in my Canvas, doesn't matter. They'll say I don't want to have this text right here perfectly in the middle of the Canvas. Well, I can drag it to hear it and guess where it should be or I can also go ahead and to the aligned tab right here, which align tab I can click right here to align it horizontally to the middle and also vertically to the middle. Now I am sure that this text right here sits in the middle of my Canvas. If I wanted to be in the middle, but on the left side, I can say first, align it vertically and horizontally fields, we're going to align it to the left so that are with these options are for. The one I'm going to align my text here to the left it might be sticking a bit too much to the edge. Now if we want to move this text to the right and my mouse is going up and down a little bit, it is not centered vertically anymore. I can either go back into his option click Vertical line again but you know there's an easier way to do that. I'm going to reset this text back to the left site. If you hold down your shift key on your keyboards and you got to move the text to the right site, it'll stick here. As you can see, my mouse is going up and down, but my text will snap to that horizontal line. The same thing goes if you'd going up and down, that shift key will help you to snap the text to a specific guides. Speaking of guides, we're currently working in an empty Canvas. Which is not only so easy for us to align our texts. Definitely if there is a lot of text that needs to be added to our project. Well, there are some useful tools for that. Looking here in our composition window, all the way here on the bottom, we can find a button that says choose, drifts and guide options. Click on it and from there we can choose a few options. The first one is actually something super important that is called the title slash action safe. Clicking onto which will open up some guides, by the way, guys, these guides will not be rendered. They are only a visual help while you are working in your project when you're going to render out or exploit your video, these guides will be gone, so no worries about that. The title safe area dates back from the old days when you had CRT television and a problem that those television often had was over scan, where a video with scales over the actual framing that we got within that television, resulting in texts that appearing in completely on the screen. If I were to place my text here all the way outside in the title safe area and my television was only showing the portion here within the title safe area, then the T was invisible anymore. For a video, that is not a huge problem, but for text it is because we can't really reach texts when letters are missing. This not really applies anymore. If you are watching videos on YouTube or on a flat screen television, usually at a video, what is being streamed or shown is seen completely without being parts cut out, but the title safe area is still a useful tool for us to align our text. If I want a text to appear on the bottom left, then place it here on the title safe area. That way you have some breathing space around to the text. It doesn't look good if your text going to sticks to the edge of your video, always make sure that there is some reading space around it. That's when you can use this title safe area. Also, when I'm going to add a second text to my shots, let's call this cool and I would like to align this perhaps to the corner rights and a bottom, then I can also again use that title safe area to align my text over there. These two texts right here, sit perfectly in my shots. That's it for a title safe area am going to disable that back. Now I want to take a look at the proportional grits enabling that will give you a grit. Again, it won't be rendered so no problem, but it is a grid that can help you to align different texts. If you have one text over here and you would like to have another text here than below it then you can use this grit to align your different texts to its. There we go. If you really want to be precise, then you can go ahead and disable that proportional grid and enable the normal grid, which is really detailed, which allows you to really place your text exactly where your wants. That's it for this lesson, that is what text is about and after effects. We're going to dive a bit more into the advanced stuff of texts later in this class but now you know how to create text, place them around in your Canvas, etc. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at shapes. 14. Graphics and Shapes: Welcome to solids and graphics. I've already created my composition inside After Effects here, so we can start straight away. You've already seen how to create solid. So I'm going to go quickly over it, going up to the menu Select layer, New, and from there we can select Solids. Click on its from which we can change the color. Let's for example, pick something like light blue. Press "Okay," and then press "Okay," here again. So we've got a blue Sullivan here right now. If we would like to create graphics, this is one way to create them. We have a solid and now we can use one of the mask tools here on top to create a specific shape. For example, we would like to have a rectangle, then just take the rectangle tool, with that solid selected, just draw a rectangle, and we've got ourselves a rectangle graphic. I'm going to undo this action because I want to show you guys a different tool and then it's for example here the rounded rectangle tool with that one selected, I can create a rounded rectangle. But now let's say they don't want to change the roundness of the corners that is possible with this tool. However, not unmasks because if I'm going to jump into the mask properties of this solid right here, you can see that we don't really have these options. We've got the mask path, feather, opacity and expansion, but that's it. So there's a different and better way to create shapes inside Adobe After Effects. For that, I'm going to delete this entire solid, go back up to the menu here and select a tool that I want. For example, that rounded rectangle tool. It's now I'm going to draw again that same shape like so. As you can see now, automatically aftereffects created a new layer called a Shape layer. Now, even go to jump into the options of this one here to your rectangle 1, you will see some different options. We've got the path itself, we have got the stroke, we've got the fill, and then we've got some transform options, specifically for that rectangle. Jumping into the options of the path itself, we will find the option in here, roundness by increasing the acts, we can increase the roundness of the corners or decrease that to have less roundness in those corners. The color of this shape can also be adjusted by simply selecting it and using the toolbox here on top, we've got the fill and the stroke over there. It's currently red. We can add a stroke around it, which is currently set to white. If I'm going to increase the stroke white, you can see what it does to my image. I'm going to show you something pretty cool now, I'm going to delete this shape right here. Go back into my toolbox, click and hold to take these start tool. For convenience, I'm going to disable here to stroke set that to zero pixels and with this, we can draw a simple star like so. Like I've seen throughout this entire class experiments with the Shift, Ctrl, and Alt key. Because here comes some pretty cool things. For example, let me just undo that action, for example, while and creating the star shape right here, and go to hold down the Ctrl key, which is going to enlarge the spikes of that star. Letting go will further enlarge the star. I can also make those spikes smaller by holding down the Ctrl key, and then enlarge death star further, which is a pretty cool option to create some unique shapes inside Adobe After Effects used by using the star option and holding down the Ctrl key. Now, even going to rotate my mouse here in After Effects, you will see that we can also rotate the shape around. But let's say the ones, one of these spikes here to be perfectly on the bottom, we can aim for that or we can also just use the Shift key, which will snap it in this way I can't rotate the shape anymore. I'm going to delete this again and create another shape to demonstrate your something else. For example here a rectangle, and I'm going to draw it on the left side. By holding down Shift, I can create a perfect square instead of a rectangle. I want to create an animation of this shape, for example, a rotation. For that I'm going to select my shape layer entity R key on my keyboard to bring a pure rotation property. A world rotating this shape, you will see that it will do something weird. It's kind of rotating, not really on its own axis, but around this axis right here, and that is the middle point of my Canvas, which is the anchor point, also something that we've seen previously. Before you go to any major shaped mixture that's your anchor points sits at the correct place. You can take the anchor point tool here on top to grab that anchor points and place it in the middle of your square. By holding down the Ctrl key, you can make it snap in the middle of that square. Now, when I'm going to rotate that square, it will do so around its own axis. Let's say that I want to animate to the scale of this rectangle. From that I'm going to select the shape player hits the Esc key on my keyboard to bring up the scale property, we will then scale this rectangle from the middle. But it could also be that let me just reset the rotation first back to zero here. There we go, and then go back to scale property and let's say that we want this square to be scaled up from the bottom, what we then have to do is graph the anchor point tool again and to move this one right here through the bottom, holding down your Shift key will make it snap to that vertical axis right here. Then just bring that old way down here to the bottom, like so and now when we are going to scale this rectangle, it will do so from that points. If you are running into problems which are animations, always make sure to double-check where that anchor point is located. Then go get reset that back to the middle and let's do something more with the colors of this rectangle. For example, let's add a gradient to it because it is something that we can't really do from the fill option at the top, we could only choose one specific color. Neither our gradient options if you go into the shape properties, but it doesn't really work that well. I like to work with the gradient effects from the effects library. To do that, head over to effects and presets, and I'm going to search for gradients. It brings me up some difference gradient effects, for example, the gradient ramp, which is a normal gradients, but also a four-point color gradients. I'm just going to go for the normal Gradient Ramp. Drag that onto your clip or on the square. Doing so will give you all the options to change your gradients over your square. Now, some effects inside Adobe After Effects will have options to visually change the effect insights you're a composition right here. With the grading defects selected, you can see that we have two points here, on the top and on the bottom. If I grab them, I can change the first color, color A, and the color B. From there I can then select here the starting color, which is point A, change that to a different one. For example, somewhere around the green color, and then have the ends color here on the bottom. Maybe take something here and he cyan, something like that. Now we've got this subtle gradient over our square. There is also a different gradient option in here. For example, currently we just have a linear ramp, but we can also set it to a radial ramp, which will add more of a curve to the ramp. Let me just change the color to something else here to red and you can better see it a differences between radial and linear rigging tool like wrap a little bit more over the other color, and as always, we can change the points if we like so. A drop shadow is also a very common effects to add two layers or shapes in this case. Let's search for that one as well. The effects library drop shadow and it's right there, drag that over to our square, and we're not really seeing something that is because of the black backgrounds. Of course, a black shadow on a black background doesn't really reveal itself. So we're going to have to turn off the black background for a moment. Well, there's a very simple option to do so because after all, the background isn't really black. It is transparent because the only layer that we have is this shape layer and that's it, the rest of the canvas is black or nothing transparent. In order to see that nothingness or transparentness, we have to enable the checkerboards, which can be found on the bottom here of our composition. That checkerboards or a transparency grids. Click on it's, there we have it. If you ever working in Photoshop, you probably know this checkerboard as well so from the drop shadow options, we can increase the capacity, we can increase the softness, or the distance, or whatever we'd like to add some drop shadow to it in this way this entire shape is coming a little bit more to the front. Within that shape, we might want to add a text so I'm going to take the text tool and click in here, give that a name, for example, text because I'm so original, drag that text into the middle, maybe make it a little bit more smaller, like so. Also here I'm going to change the anchor point to the middle, remove the outline and change the text color to whites, there we go, and that's how graphics or shapes work inside Adobe After Effects. Now, apprentice, when you are becoming ready to graduate from this glass, you are going to need a logo animation. So that's what I wanted to prepare you for in the next lesson where we are going to create a logo animation, I should really stop hitting the table. 15. Advanced Animations: Apprentice, we are more than halfway through the class and that means that we should start preparing ourselves for an epic logo animation. I should stop doing that. Let's see inside the After Effects how we can make that. First of all, always, click the "New Composition" button. I'm going to name this Logo Animation and press OK. Zoom a little bit in and from there I'm going to go to the Mask Tool on top and click the rounded Rectangle Tool or select that one. Hold down your Shift Key to draw a perfect circle like that. I'm going to take something different for the fill color. I'm going to take red but I want it to be a little bit washed out like that. Let's jump into the Align Panel and center that baby up, but I will probably add some text below that. Holding down the Shift Key, I can move this entire circle up, but I will stay on the vertical line. Something like this would do. Next thing I wanted to do is take the Anchor Point Tool to move this little anchor point into the middle of that circle by holding down the Control Key. There we go, and that is the first circle. Then I'm going to select this first shape and hit Control + D to make a duplication of that. The next shape that lays on top of that, I'm going to take a circle as well, but I'm going to make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to decrease the scale but hold down the Shift Key. Make it somewhere like this is okay. With that shape selected, I'm going to change the color of that one to white. Now we've got a white circle and underneath that we've got this washed-out red circle. To make sure that everything stays organized in our timeline, I'm going to rename this. This is the Outer Circle. On top of that we have the Inner Circle. I'm going to create one more circle, so duplicate the inner circle here. This one I'm going to make smaller, something like this, and that one I'm going to make vivid red. This is going to be the red dot in the middle. Now let's animate this logo over here, and by the way, guys, if you like so you can use that awesome logo for your productions. The first one who can copyright it can claim the rest. Sounds fair to me. Let's start off with the inner circle, the white circle. I'm going to press the S key because I want to change or animate the scale, I'm going to enable key-framing for this scale. Now this should be the ending key-frame that I've already created right now. In the beginning, I just wanted to be nothing, scale zero. What I'm going to do now is take this key-frame right here, which is already the ending position or point B, and just drag that to the right side. Now I can change the scale to zero. Right now when I'm going to play this, you will see that the middle circle will open up in scale to that last position, which is exactly what we want. Now in between these two key-frames, before that middle circle actually goes to its ending position, I'm going to add one more key-frame. I'm going to go a little bit back and I'm going to increase the scale of that circle so that it is somehow the same scale as the outer circle. Now what happens is; this circle comes in, it covers up the outer circle, and then it goes to its ending position. The outer circle should appear when the inner circle is covering it up. At this point right here, at this key fame, and you can snap your play head to it by holding down the Shift Key like so. We've seen this previously as well. I'm going to trim that outer circle to it. Like so. Again, hold down the Shift Key to trim it to your play heads. Now in the beginning we don't see anything. The white circle comes in. When it's at its biggest, the outer circle will start to reveal itself behind that white circle. You know what? Let's add one more animation to that white circle because I'm really liking this idea. I'm going to move a little bit forward a time here and make some room. This is our end position, our ending key-frame. I want to keep that, but in-between here I'm going to decrease the scale all the way to zero so that it's back small. The white circle comes in to its maximum, it goes back out to zero, and then it comes back in to its ending size. Now right here when that key-frame here sits at zero, back, at that point, we're also going to animate the red dot. With that selected, hit the S Key on your keyboard to bring up the scale. Enable the animation. Move that key-frame to the right because this is the ending key-frame. For now, let's make this zero. What kind of happens now is the white circle comes in, it introduces this outer circle, it goes back out and as it comes back in, it's also introducing that small red dot. When playing this back, we can already see a nice animation going on here. The animation looks okay, but it doesn't look so professional. If you're coming out with one of these, then you are not getting the spot on the wall. Stop doing that, Jordi. We are going to make smooth key-frames now. We've already seen that previously in this course. What we have to do is select all of the ending key-frames here. Right-click, Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease in. The animation comes in from the right within that key-frame, it'll kind of smoothen that out as the last key-frame. As for the first key-frame over here, right-click, Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease Out. Because that is the very first key-frame, and the same thing goes for that red dot here. His first key-frame also will be getting the Easy Ease Out. Right now the animation starts smooth and stops smooth. Now for the key-frames here in-between, they kind of need to stop smooth and start smooth at the same time. For those key-frames, what I'm going to do is right-click, Keyframe Assistant, and say Easy Ease. That way the animation goes in smooth and goes out smooth. Also for this one here, Easy Ease. Right now when I'm going to play this entire thing back, everything should go pretty smooth. Look at that. It looks pretty amazing. Now this thing is still not good for us. We want to go for extraordinary. What we're going to do right now or have a look at now are the key-frame curves, and here's where it takes up the magic. This right here is the inner circle. Let's start with that one. As I've said before, these key-frames right here now have a certain behavior. Now they start smooth, here the end and start smooth, end and start smooth again, and then stop smooth. That is a key-frame curve. Now we can't really see that curve unless we select this layer right here with the key-frames and click here on this button right there. The Graph Editor in our timeline. Click on it, which will reveal the curve of the key-frame. Let me just zoom in a bit more on that so that we see what we are working with. Let me just enlarge that window and zoom in here on my timeline. Here is that animation curve, so it starts smooth, it stops, it starts smooth again, etc. We have a nice curve. However, if I'm going to select one of these points, you can see that we can pull on these curves. At pulling onto them, we could even define the smoothness of those key-frames even further. What I'm doing right now is saying, "You really have to start super slow, accelerate faster, faster, faster, faster until you're at your maximum, and then go to the last key frame." Let's have a look at this. This is the after. It starts very slowly as it comes in, but I can also just undo that. But now let's pull on the lever of the other key frame to the left. What it'll do now is go super fast and then slowly it'll end. Let's have a look at that one. As you can see, it has a different behavior. Right now I'm saying that it should come in fast and then slowly go to the next point. By pulling here on the next key-frame to the right, what we are seeing now is coming fast, stay going slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, and then we are going back to 0 percent scale. You're going fast again. Bang. Fast. Maybe with your last one, select and also pull that one. Right now we're making a beautiful curve. The animation starts fast, go slow, it goes faster, faster, faster, faster, super-fast for this point, and then it goes slow again. Let's play this back and look how dynamic this animation looks. Super awesome. This right here is astonishing. All right. I'm going to disable or close to graph editor by clicking again on this icon, and it's right now, let's select the red dot, which is that small red dot in the middle, click on the Graph Editor and maybe for this one also here, let's say that it should start fast and end slowly. Pull here on the right key frame, the last key-frame to make it stop fairly smooth. Now, let's play this back entirely. Now, that is a good animation. The last thing that we have to do is just enable motion blur for all of these layers, and a quick way to do that, it just by clicking in the first layer and just wiping your mouse down like this which will enable it for all of those layers. Finally, make sure to enable the global motion blur, and we play this back. Right now we've got ourselves a beautiful professional looking logo animation. Now, our production company has a name. The next thing I'm going to do is take the Pen tool from the tool box here on top. Click on it and let's create the text, Red Dot Productions. Also that name guys feel free to use it. The first one who can copyright it can claim the other's. I'm going to align this text here to the paragraph to the center like this, then I'm going to align it to the middle of my shots and maybe drag it a little bit down, and I like to have this thin design, so with the tech selected head over back to the character tap and I'm going to change this to fin, and this actually really depends on the pen that you are using. I'm using Robato but anything works obviously. I'm going to disable here that the text is thicker and also the It's helic thing for all, and I'm going to disable it as well. Just to make the text a bit more clear guys, I'm going to disable my checkerboards so that we can see better what we are doing in here. All right. For the entire text, I'm going to move all the characters closer together like this, but for the red dot actually I want to span that over the production size as well. You can actually double-click here on your text and select only the portion of the text you would like to change now. With the red dots selected, going back to the character tap, I can actually make the space between the characters bigger for only the red dot and make it align with the production below. All right. Looking great. red dot, look at that. Maybe make that entire thing a bit smaller, move it a tiny bit up like so, that should be good. Red dot productions. Now, there are different ways to add animations to your text. But I want to show you something very interesting without using effects, and those are some more advanced titled properties. I'm going to collapse the other layers here for a moment and open up the Text Properties. Right here we've got text and obviously there's a property for the source texts, which we'll also have a look at in the next lesson, what we can do with that. Basically, this is just a source text, the Red dot production. Now we can add some more properties in here by clicking here on the Animate menu. These are a bunch of properties that we can animate and we'll show you guys something pretty cool. Let's enable both character 3D, which will make that layer three-dimensional, and we'll add some more three-dimensional options to it as well, we're going to dive too deep into those things, but we do have a two-dimensional text right now. That allows us to do something pretty cool. We're just the same as the 3D camera tracking where we've also seen three-dimensional space inside After Effects, this time it's only being applied to debts text and I can change some properties now of that 3D text. For that, I'm going to go back and do that Animate menu, click on it, and let's for example, choose to notation. It's going to add the Animator 1 property to the texts. There is a range selector which I'm going to show you later, but first I would like to estimate one of these rotation properties and I think it was the white rotation, there we go. Every letter now rotates around its own axis, which we can animate beautifully. After we've seen the logo coming in, the Red dot production text may pop up. So that is somewhere right here. This is the starting position, for that, I'm going to take 90 degree so that we don't see the text. Start the animation for the wide rotation, go further in time, and set it to zero. So right now, the texts will rotate around its own axis revealing itself. Right-click on the ending key-frame, Key-frame assistant, Easy Ease In because he animation come from the left and a right into that key-frame. Maybe dragged in a bit more apar, and now let's have a look. How does letters beautifully come in. Maybe dragged them in a little bit more part so that we have a smooth animation going on right here. There we go. Looks amazing. Because we still see some of the edges of those letters right here, even though that they are at 90 degree, I'm going to trim this layer here towards that point. That means that the text will start turning around from that point as the animation starts. Make sure to also enable the motion blur for that layer super important. You want to make it seem natural, there we go. The last thing that this logo animation needs is an outgoing animation. Because a logo comes in which is good, but it also has to go out after you've rolled through intro. For that, I'm going to do something simple. I'm going to scale all of my circles back out to zero. Now, instead of animation each individual circle to do that, I'm going to use a technique that we've done prior as well. I'm going to go up to my menu, select Layer, New, and choose Null Objects. Place that null objects here in the middle of the circle designing you hold down the Control key in order to do so, then with that layer selected, hit the S key on your keyboard, straight to key-frame for the scale, go forward in time, and set it to zero. So that no object right now just scales to zero as you can see. If we now select all of the layers that we want to scale out, use that Equip tool, we can insulate link it to that null object, which makes all of those circles scale down as well. It's that easy. Also here, right-click key-frame assistant, Easy Ease Outs and Easy Ease In for the last key-frame. There we go bye-bye logo. Maybe it should go a little bit faster and move those key-frames closer to each other, and that is looking better. The Red dot production. All right, the last thing I wanna do now is the red dots production texts itself, and now I want to show you that range selector. I'm going to go back in 2D property straight here, and I'm going to add a new animator. Click on the Animate menu, and from there I'm going to click on the Opacity right now. It's very important that we are going to use the opacity from the Animator window right here. Because this gives us the range selector and with the normal transform options, we don't have that selector. I'm going to simply fade out the text. From somewhere right here, I'm going to start the animation for the Opacity from 100 all the away to zero. The text now just fades out. But that's not really so exciting. What I actually want to do is make sure that each individual letter will fade out after each other. That's where this range selector comes in. By expanding that range selector, I can set a start and ending. That means instead of animating the opacity of that text, I'm just going to disable that opacity and set it to zero opacity. But with this range selector, I can say all right but where does that opacity change need to start. If I'm going to decrease the ends, you can already see what it does to my text. It will reveal itself again, so that means I know that I can try the key frame for the ends, move further in time and change it to 100. If I'm playing this back now, you can see that my text beautifully fades out letter to letter. Maybe it goes a little bit too fast, let's move this a bit more apart. There we go. Which is looking amazing. Basically with this range selector, we can change any property of the text that we can find in this menu right here, but we can define whether or not that change should be a applied or when that should be applied. Something that we can do with the normal transform tools. Hence by animating either the start or the end, we can let each character do its change after each other. There's also an advanced option under the arranged selector, which allows you to change whether each character should be changed over time, or each word, or each space, or each line that is up to you. If we'd say for each line, then that would mean that first the top line would disappear and then the bottom line, which is not so exciting, so I'm going to change this back to characters. So guys The last thing that I want to say is that this range selector comes with every property that you have in here. For example, if you want to change the position, you can let each letter come in from the bottom to the top separately. There we have it our awesome logo animation of the Red dot production. Again, you can download this, use it wherever you like. The first one to copyright can strike the rest. Thank you so much for watching, stop chewing that chary, damn it. Now see you all in the next lesson. 16. Expressions: Believe it or not, but you have just gone through the basics of Adobe After Effects. We've just seen everything that you have to know except for one more thing, and that is how to export your video, but we're going to get into that in your last video, or last lesson of this class. First, I'm going to show you something more advanced, and it's a very important thing to know because it is a very big thing within After Effects, and I'm talking about expressions. Let me show you here in After Effects where the expressions are and how they work. I'm going to go to my toolbox and I'm going to take the Ellipse tool right here. I'm just going to draw a simple circle in my Canvas like so, then I'm going to grab my Anchor tool and change the position of the anchor points to the middle of this circle by holding down the control key on my keyboard. Then with the Arrow tool or the Selection tool back, I'm going to play into somewhere here on the left. In the beginning of my timeline right here, I'm going to open up the position property for that circle. With the layer selected, hit the P key on your keyboard to open up the position property. Start the animation for the position, then go a little bit forward in time and it's moved that circle up to the right side. Now we have animation of the circle going to the right side. This is nothing new, we have seen this in this class how this works. Then let's say that I want to add a bounce effect to the animation. The circle here goes to the right side, but it just ends at the last point, which is obvious. But I will want this ball to bounce on the ending key frame. Well, that is where expression comes in. Expressions are small pieces of codes that we're going to insert within After Effects, and those codes will execute a certain commands, such as the balance effects. Where can we get out in this program and starts writing codes? Well, that's within the animation properties. Going back to the position property that we've just animated ends by standing on that stopwatch, we start reach here, but the end of the line, Alt click, adds or remove expression. Let's do that. Let's hold down the Alt key on your keyboards and click on that stopwatch. As you can see, something happens here. We have an expression property right now, and on the right side we've got a text box, which I can also enlarge by just pulling it down from there. This gives me a text field and I can just remove this here, because I want to start with a blank page. I can just type anything I'd like in here, this is not going to work obviously, I have to write a proper expression in here, a piece of code that will execute the bounce effect for me. This is an Adobe After Effects class for beginners also. I'm not going to teach you how to write code in here, but I will teach you how to copy and paste, because a lot of these codes are already written down and you can find them all over the internet. For example, let me just go to our website for a moment here, where we have an article that covers a bunch of expressions that you can just copy and paste from this article. The first thing that we already see here is the bounce effects. The only thing that you have to do is select a coat in here and say Control C, to copy that text or Command C for the net users. Then go back into After Effects, I'm going to Alt click again on that property rights here because it disappeared because I went to a different program, delete what's already there, and now I'm just going to paste the code that I've just copied. Just hit Control V, that is the codes, then just click away. If everything was well, let's play this animation, and as you can see, the circle is bouncing there on the end. We can still move arrow key frames around, so I can make the animation go faster by moving these two keyframes closer to each other and that bounce will still acts like it should. Instead of creating dozens of keyframes in order to get that bounce effect in there, it's just a matter of copying and pasting a bunch of codes inside After Effects to get the work done as well, and this bounce effect in particular also works on scale animations, on rotation animations, etc. I'm going to leave a link to the planar here on skill share, somewhere down below to the article where you can find five of these expressions. But if you search on the web for After Effects expressions, you will also find thousands of them. I want to show you another way on how expressions work. For that, I'm going to open up the second composition right here, which is also empty, right now we are going to create a timer. I'm going to grab my Text tool and just click in here. Now a timer is a piece of text or some numbers that count up. We have to look within these source texts in order to make that timer work. We can just click in here to start creating a text. We have our text layer down below here, but we don't need to insert any actual text in there, the expression will do that for us. I'm just going to go directly into the text properties here, expand, that's going to text, and right here we can find source text, which is the source, the actual text that we can input in here. It's like before, I'm going to right click on the stopwatch to start writing my coat in here. Going back to our website, we can see that we have somewhere right here, the timer up or down. Here's that code, just select all of that, control C to copy that code. Go back into After Effects, I'm going to remove what's already there, and I'm just going to hit control V to paste all of that code in there. Let's see how that looks, isn't that awesome? Straight away, we've got our timer. There it goes, super simple with the help of some copying and pasting, and because this is in the source of the text, that means that we can just treat this as a normal text. With this layer selected here, I can still change the front to whatever I like, I can change the boldness, the colors and everything, just the way that I want I can drag it to any position and that timer will still do its work. Moving on to the last example on how expressions could help us and that is going back to our landscape composite thing, something that we've seen in the beginning of our class, this is what we've created previously. We've been trying to make a reset a bit more alive by adding some moving clouds to the scene with this fog criteria from the pond and also to fire over there. There is one thing that is still looking not so natural and that is the glow underneath the fire right here, which is currently just a solid as you know. If I'm going to enable disable that layer, you can see what the glow does to the scene. Because of that fire which is alive, that glow should also be more a live. Now instead of going in the properties right here, transform opacity and just keep any meeting that opacity may be to make that glow as you can see here, what it does. We can also use a simple expression. Now because this expression is so simple, I'm going to teach you how to write it yourself. Like always just Alt click on the stopwatch right here to start writing your expression, we can already go ahead and delete that thing. Then what we are going to create is a wiggle expression and the wiggle is going to make sure that the current value is going to randomly wiggle around. Currently the opacity is set at 42. By adding a wiggle expression to it, I think can deviate from that 42. We can go to 30 to 50, it's go into wiggle around that 42 percent. This is how it goes, within the expression we're just going to write wiggle. Its that simple. Now we have to define two values. The first value is going to be the speed of the wiggles. How fast does that change have to be? That is within seconds. Just open up your bracket like so. If I'm going to type in here one, that means every second that value is going to change. Let's make that a little bit more faster because the fire is also pretty heavy. I'm going to change this to five. That means every seconds the value will change five times, and then just add a comma like so, and now we are going to define how much that change has to be. For example 20. If I'm going to type in here 20, that means that the change around the 42 can be a maximum of 20. That means a minimum of 32 or a maximum of 52, which gives us a range of 20. Then just close the brackets like that and just click away. I'm just going to solo this layer for a moment so that you can see what it specifically does to our layer. There we go with a very simple codes, that layer now is more a life. Wherever you click within your timeline, you can see here the actual value on that point of the opacity. So right here it says at 51, then going a little bit back, it's back at 40, then over here 38. There you can see how it changes. What otherwise would took a lot of work with key framing, we just simplified that when a very small piece of codes that helped us a lot. Now looking at the entire scene over here, as you can see, that glow beneath the fire looks a lot more alive and more natural as well. If you are a little bit blown away with these expressions, don't worry too much, these are definitely more advanced things within After Effects. But I just definitely wanted to show you guys that expressions are out there and what they do. This is really an introduction to expressions. Because if you decide to explore Adobe After Effects folder in the future, then expressions will definitely be a very big part of that. But just check out our website writes here, we've also got a dedicated video here on top that it shows you in depth how these expressions work. You've already seen three of them right now, but there are some more in there as well, like you squash and stretch to emotion trail, etc. That was it for expressions. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you guys how to export your video so that you can share it with your friends or use it inside a Premier Pro projects. 17. Export your Video: Apprentice. You did it. You've just gone through the entire Adobe After Effects class. How good was that? Now, you are actually nothing right now, because you can maybe make cool visual effects machines, but if you can't export your machine, nobody will see it, nobody will see your machine in action. That's why in this final lesson of this class, I'm going to teach you how to export your video in three possible ways. The first export technique is going to be final delivery. That means, you're going to upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo, or you're going to send it over to a friend's or maybe for a client. Let's see inside After Effects how we could do that, shall we? Right here we can still see that landscape compositing and we've just made, and, of course, we want to show that to our friends. We're going to export this. If we talk about final delivery, the video should be small so that we can send it over, yet it's still should be within a relative good quality. Unfortunately, After Effects can't do that because it is not really designed for final delivery, but there is a little bit of a workarounds to its. When you install Adobe After Effects, it also comes with a program called Adobe Media Encoder. Just look that up on your computer and you can fire it up. Now, Media Encoder here is meant to export your videos. If you're familiar with springing are pro, then you already know the existence of this program probably. Now, what we can simply do is grab decomposition that we've created and just drag it over into that program, and you want to drag it over to the cue right here on the right side. Just let it go, and there it is within the queue. There are two settings that we want to change in here. First of all is the codec, and second of all is that preset of that codec. The codec can be changed here on the left side, just open up that drop down menu, and from there you want to select the H 264 codec. This is a very good codec used in almost anything for final delivery. Youtube is fully supported, Vimeo, any other video streaming websites out there also. If you're going to send it over to a friend's or two a client, the video is relatively small and everyone could open it up. Just select the H 264 from there and on right to it we are going to select the flavor of the H 264 codec. These are the presets, just opened up debts drop down menu. As you can see, we have some Vimeo, even some Twitter presets in there or some YouTube presets. It's now these presets are actually pretty good. There's no reason to dive into the settings of that codec. We here at [inaudible] also always work with these presets. Usually we pick out it's the YouTube preset. Even when you're going to upload to Vimeo, the YouTube preset is also fine. There's actually no real difference between the Vimeo or the YouTube presets. Usually you are going to select one of these YouTube presets. We have 480 ATP, which is a very small resolution. Usually you'd go to export to that preset if you want to send a preview over to a client, but you also want to make sure that that client is not going to receive the full quality yet before he or she paid your invoice, maybe that person they'd already paid, and then you can go for a higher resolution such as full HD, which is attaining the beat or down below, or maybe the 4K resolution, which is this one right here. Let's go with that one because after all we have been working in 4K, as you can see here inside After Effects. Then finally, the last setting that we have to define is where we are going to save that video. Just click here on Output file, and to locate any folder to which you want to save that, for example here within my learn Adobe After Effects folder. Give that any name that you'd like, Amazing landscape, hits Save. Then as the final step, you want to split here on start the Queue. Clicking onto it will start rendering. It takes a little bit of time, of course, and if you've been using heavy effects and it's going take a little bit longer. Just let this thing do its work. What you can do in the meanwhile is actually just minimize this program and just work further on After Effects if you like. It's not because the video is rendering that you can't do anything else, you can simply just work worked further on After Effects, but you do have to remember that your computer will probably be task slower, because it's doing this big task in the backgrounds. The are rendering is complete. Now let's check it out here in my explorer, and there it is, the amazing landscape. Double click on it to play the video. As you can see, that quality looks pretty amazing. So that was the first way on how we can export a video. For the other two, we are not going to need the media encoder, so I can just close this program and let's solely work with an After Effects right now. The second reason why you want to export your video is because you have just created a certain animation or a visual that you want to use within your video project. For example, in Premier Pro or in reserve or in final cuts, it doesn't matter. So you want to export to a codec that is light weight for your editing program, that is easy to handle, but at the same time also hold the best possible video quality. To do that, I want to locate to render the queue inside After Effects. From the menu and top select window and all the way at the bottom, we can find the render the queue. It raise actually an easier way to bring our composition within the render the queue, and that is simply by selecting your timeline here from the composition that you would like to render it out, it's just simply hits Control M on your keyboards, and that will bring that composition into to render a queue. From the output module here, I'm going to click here on Lossless to change the settings. From the format options, I'm going to change that to QuickTime because QuickTime is the most used formats within the film industry. Then I'm going to choose my codec because QuickTime has many different kind of codec flavors, and that I can change from the format options button right here, just click on there. Currently, it says animation and animation is actually a pretty good codec that you can go for, but your entry result is going to be pretty big. There are two other options and those are Apple ProRes or DNx. If you aren't running the latest version of Adobe After Effects on a Windows machine, then you won't see the Apple ProRes options in here. No problem, Just select DNxHR/DNxHD right here, which is perfectly fine as well. If you do choose to go for Apple ProRes , you can simply take out the 422 or 422 HQ version. The HQ is a little bit higher in quality, is also bigger in file size, to the eye is the difference, won't be noticeable. So only if you are go do some further, gather corrections and all that may be the HQ will be better. But for this example, I'm just going to pick the DNxHR/DNxHD right here. Then finally for the resolution, we're just going to pick the same resolution as that we've been working inside After Effects. Make sure that it just sets to HQ 8-bits or 10-bits if you have been working in 10-bits and you want to do some more heavy color corrections. But in this case, I've been working with stock lips, which usually are in 8-bits, so that is more than enough. Then just press Okay. Also from this window, press Okay. Like we've seen before, change the outputs to a location that you would like to export to, which in this case is going to be in that same folder, and I'm going to rename it this time to high quality export. Click Save. Like before, instead of the play button this time, we're going to click on Render, and the render has started. You will find out that rendering throughout After Effects will actually go at ton faster also because of the codec that we're exporting to DNx or ProRes codecs, are very light weights. They are bigger in file size, but the codec itself it's just much easier to handle within Premiere Pro final cuts or resolve or any other program that you're editing in. It's exported. Now, let's have a look here in our folder. There it is, the high-quality export. Let's open that up. Look how high quality bat looks. To the eye actually, you can't really see the difference between this one and DNxHR/DNxHD, but is going to be easier to edit with afterwards and also to do color corrections and all that kind of stuff. Let's have a look at the final way to export your video, and that is true dynamic link. For this, you do need to edit inside Adobe Premiere Pro. If you don't, then you'll need to export your video to a DNx file.So I've got a Premier Pro project opened right here, it's currently empty. But what I can simply do, is just grab my composition from here and just drag it over into Adobe Premiere Pro. We can now just use that as a simple clip within Premier Pro. So I can just drag that into a timeline and start editing onto its etc. The cool thing about this is that I can make real-time changes. So for example, I want to get rid of that fire in here, what I just then have to do is go back into After Effects here, to my landscape compositing, and I'm going to delete the entire fire like. So glow also has to go just save your projects, Control S or Command S to save it, go back into Premier Pro and bang. You can see that the campfire now is gone. There's a real time link between Adobe After Effects and Premier Pro. The only downside of exporting your video this way is that it is pretty heavy for premiere. You're probably not going to be able to play this back in real time. Your computer is going to have a hard time playing this back, and that is why we often just export it out through After Effects. But basic animations can be imported directly into Premier Pro from After Effects if you'd like so. Those things can usually play back pretty smooth. That was it. Apprentice. You've just gone through the entire Adobe After Effects class, and you know what? You did an amazing job. I'm super proud of you. Stay with me for the final lesson in which I'm going to give you a conclusion and also a nice project that you can work on. 18. Conclusion: Apprentice. I am currently so proud of you right now. You have no idea. You've just went through the entire basics of Adobe After Effects, which is amazing. This is a huge step forward. With all of this, you can start creating things and after effects, which is really amazing. Of course, there is still a lot that you need to learn. Adobe After Effects is such a wide program that it takes years to master. I have been working inside After Effects for about 15 years now and I still don't know all of the functions all of the in and outs of the program. That's just because it is so complex, you can literally do anything inside Adobe After Effects, but don't let that stop you. Remember about the things that you've learned right now. You really know some great things you can create some stunning things in After Effects. Do you know what? I believed it you've done an even better job than my very first apprentice, Genic over here. I promised it. Genic I'm sorry, but you are coming off the wall and your picture is going to go to his place so Genic can go away. This right here is a picture of you yet or are more people watching? I just had to make this idea of how my general audience looks. I thought a wise men with a hat, that is probably you. Let's grab some tape here and hang you to the wall in my laboratory. A nice spot is that is what you deserve. Congratulations. I'm going to look at you're picture every day and my think that apprentice did such a good job with me that he might become an expert and Adobe After Effects one day. That time hasn't come yet. You still need to practice a lot and that's why I'm going to help you further with that as well. If you click on the your "Project" tap your on Skillshare. You will find a very nice project and assignment from me that you can work on. When you create that assignment, you can upload it here to Skillshare I'd be happy to give feedback on that. It's very simple assignment where you have to create something inside After Effects with all of things that you've seen within this class. If you do however still struggle just let me know in the discussion below. I'm very active on Skillshare. If you have any questions whatsoever, let me know and I'd be happy to help you further. Thank you so much for watching this class. I really hope that you've enjoyed it and learned a ton on new things. Definitely make sure to check out our other classes as well, we have a bunch of things about film-making about lighting, and also a beginners class to Adobe Premier Pro. If you haven't started with that and yet. Good luck with your career in the future. Maybe we see each other again in the future. Maybe on Skillshare, on YouTube who knows maybe in a workshop and we see each other in real life, that would be really awesome. But the most important thing of all, stay creative.