Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hello everyone. I'm Hallease, a digital storyteller, video
producer and YouTuber. I'm also the Executive Producer
and Creative Director of StumbleWell, my
production company. All that to say, I like to tell stories
and my chosen medium for that is film-making
and video production. I love taking a compilation of seemingly meaningless
footage and turning it into some story, whether it be to document
my own life and experiences on my YouTube channel
or for my clients. In this class, I'm
going to teach you the basics of After Effects. If you've never opened
After Effects before, this will be the class for you. We'll go over how
to open an organize a new project and a brief
overview of the interface. We'll also go over the basics
of creating a composition, messing with layers
in a 2D space, the basics of keyframing, which I know can
be a hard concept to understand for many, as well as some basics with
keying and masking as well. Finally, I'll also touch on some basic motion graphics
ideas and best practices. You'll notice I keep saying the basics with everything
for this class. That's because After Effects is an incredibly powerful
application with a wide array of tools
at your disposal. This class is merely meant to introduce you to
the application. I'll feel like I've done my
job as your teacher if by the end you can open
After Effects and not feel so overwhelmed and also begin to have
the language and nomenclature to explore
more advanced tools and skills in After Effects. I think this class
will be great for creatives who have a beginner to intermediate understanding of
applications like Photoshop, Illustrator or Premier Pro. Basically, any artistic
application that specializes in either
layers or video editing, I always describe After
Effects to people as Photoshop, but for video. For our class, you will need the latest version
of After Effects, ideally through an Adobe
Creative Cloud membership. You'll also need an
Internet connection to download the footage I've provided so you can follow along as we move through the lessons. I am so excited to get into
After Effects with you. Thank you so much for
interesting me with your time. Let's do this.
2. Class Project: Hello. For our class project, we're going to create
a moving portrait. Over on my YouTube channel, I created this video
portrait to rebrand my channel and celebrate becoming an Adobe
creative resident. I'm going to show you how to take all the different
video assets I created and bring them into After Effects to
create this yourself. Hopefully, during this process, teach you a little bit
about After Effects too. The first part of this class, we'll have a few lessons getting our lay of the land
of After Effects. We'll go through the
interface and focus on the panels you'll need to
create the video portrait. I'm also going to go over
a few keyboard shortcuts that are helpful to
keep in mind as well. Similar to my lessons
in Premier Pro, I'm all about the shortcuts
whenever possible, they help you work faster. It's a fact, they really do. From there, we'll use some of the different assets I've
provided to show some of the capabilities of the
program that I think can be really helpful for people who are beginning
to dabble in it. Until finally, in the
latter half of the lesson, we'll go through and
build out the portrait. Remember, like in other
applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, there are a ton of
different ways to do everything I'll cover
through the lessons, and there's no
wrong way to do it. If you figure out a faster
way to do things or a way that works better
for you, awesome. Excel past me in the
program, please. I like to say to people, I know enough After
Effects to be dangerous. That's it. If you haven't
downloaded After Effects yet and the footage as well, go do that, and with that, let's get started.
3. The Interface: Lesson 1, let's do this. Go ahead and open
up After Effects. If the home screen
doesn't show up for you, you can click this little button in the top left-hand corner, that is, the home screen. Let's see here on the home
screen for a second because I want to bring this
to your attention. Over here is the learn feature within Adobe After Effects.
Don't get me wrong. Happy you're here
hanging out with me learning After Effects from me, but don't sleep on these in-app tutorials
that are available. This home screen should
also look really familiar to you if
you're coming into After Effects from
other Adobe products like Premiere Pro and
Photoshop as well. Again, check this out, This home screen can
be incredibly helpful. Since we're going to start
with a brand new project, Let's go ahead and hit that
at the top, "New Project". That'll bring up an empty
After Effects projects. The first thing I always
tell people to do is save. Let's go ahead and go through
that real quickly as well. File, Save As, Save As. I'm just going to save my
project to the desktop. I've created a folder on my desktop called intro
to After Effects, and I'm just going
to put it here. Again, it's really
important to organize your footage and figure out
how you want things to go. I'd also recommend maybe putting the footage
that you download from me into this folder as well
if you want to do that. I'm going to rename
my project to be just practice project. I'm going to create a
subfolder in here called After Effects as well. Again, this is just how I roll. Simple naming conventions and
I'm going to save it there. Perfect. Now, we have saved our practice project
where we want it to go. Again, I also recommend putting the assets that I
will provide to you into that root folder as well so everything's organized
and easy to find. Once we are officially now in our After Effects interface, we have saved our
project how we want to, let's start figuring out what the heck some of
these boxes are for, at least the ones that
we'll use for our project. To help with understanding
the interface so that we're all looking
at the same layout, go ahead and come
up here to the top. This is where you can find all the different workspaces available to you
within After Effects, and go ahead and
change it to Standard. You'll see that removed a few boxes and simplified the interface
just a little bit. Again, I want everyone to
have the standard layout so that way as we move through
and I explain things, we're all seeing the same thing. This bar at the top is
called the workspaces. Workspaces are pre-built
or customizable layouts for the software based on
what you're using it for. If you're coming over from
other Adobe applications, workspaces should be
somewhat familiar to you. Take a second and
click through some of the workspaces to see how
they differ from each other. You'll notice how some boxes disappear and new boxes appear as you thumb
through them, so just take a second and click through them all just
to see what they look like. You can also customize your workspace layouts and
save them as something new. Here's how to do that. Let's click on this
composition window right here. You'll know a window
is active whenever this blue line is circling
around that window. But let's click on
it and drag it, I don't know, over here. We have now moved our
composition window to this side. Again, I know you-all don't
quite know what that is, but that's okay,
just bear with me. You can drag windows literally
to wherever you want. As you can see, I'm moving
this composition around to all places just by
clicking and dragging. If you have a dual
monitor, for example, you can utilize both screens, different setups,
all that stuff. Once you find a layout
there that you really like, you can just go up to Window, Workspace, Save
As New Workspace. I'm just going to call
this one practice. Now, you'll see that
practice shows up here. If I want to reference
this layout, again, which is a pretty weird layout, but it got the point
across, I can. Conversely though, if you
ever move things around so much that you want to go back to the default layout
for that workspace, you can reset to saved layout. Let's go to Standard, and you'll see that right now standard will still be this
craziness that I just did. Let's go up to
Window, Workspace, Reset Standard to save layout, and we're back to
where we started. Again, for the sake of going through this interface together, let's keep it on standard for now and also makes
sure that it is reset to be the saved appropriately layout if
you move things around. Let's go ahead and import the footage that I've
provided to you. Similarly to other
Adobe products, you can literally
just open it up in another folder and drag
it into your project, or you can go to File and
Import up at the top. I'm just going to drag
and drop everything in. That's how I roll. I
like doing it that way. Similarly to other
Adobe applications, you can organize your assets
in different folders. However, no shortcuts for this. If there are, I just don't
know them, so sorry. I want to create a little bend just to start organizing this. The way to do that
would be to come down to the bottom here and click Create a New Folder, it's that little folder there. I'll call this
self-portrait footage. That feels good. I'll put all
the footage of me in there. Then the next one
I'm going to create, I'll call this camera footage. Nothing amazing, and we'll go ahead and
drop those in there. Again, you can create
as many folders as you like to help keep
things organized, and drag and drop things
into those folders. Pretty self-explanatory
but worth noting. The window we just dropped everything into and organized, is called our project window. The project window is where
all your assets live, your compositions, again, I know you-all don't
know what those are necessarily,but we'll
get there, your photos, media, everything
in your project lives in the project window. Now, let's take our assets
and create a composition. There's a few ways to do that. The most common way to create a new composition is to go to Composition at the top and
then click New Composition, or use the shortcut Command N, Control N, if you're on a PC. This will bring up a new window. Generally speaking, you'll
want your composition to be at least HD high def
for the final export. Some common settings to
use are HDTV 1080 29.97. That's a good place to start. I find that when I work with different motion
graphics artists, they'll tend to send
me a final piece that's at 29.97
frames per second, even if what I've
filmed things on is at 23.97 frames per second. But again, for now and the sake of this project,
don't overthink it. In fact, we're going to make a custom composition
for our video portrait. Let's change our width and
height to be 2304 by 1296. These are the dimensions
for a 2.5k video, a little bigger than our
standard 1080p video which would be 1920 by 1080. Let's make sure our
aspect ratio is set to be square pixels. I'm going to keep our
frame rate at what I shot the footage at which is 23.976. Let's go ahead and
change this to be that. Perfect. Make sure your resolution
is set to full, and then for the duration, this is a short video. We shouldn't need more than
30 seconds of timeline space. Let's come down
here to Duration. Let's change that to 30.00. If you want a different
background color as your base, feel free to change it, but I usually leave it black. The background color will be the base Canvas color of your
composition once it's made. Again, I generally
leave it black, but you can change it to
something else if you'd like. Once you're ready, go ahead
and call this something. Maybe let's call this
the final export, because everything we
create will live here. Let's call this final
export and hit "Okay". Again, for those of you who have experience in Photoshop, fresco, Illustrator, think
of a composition as your Canvas or artboard. The visual representation of
everything you're creating. For those of you coming from a nonlinear editor like
Premiere Pro or Rush, think of the composition
as your program monitor. It shows you the
final exported video. At least this composition will. Another way to create
a composition, if you know you're going
to be working with a source video and need
everything to match that, is to literally drag your video material down to
this little icon right here, which is the composition icon. You can see here the
composition we just created is represented
by this icon. There's also the same icon
represented right here. You can literally say, let's take self
portrait reference 2, which brings it up in
our footage window. You can click on
it, hold and drag. It creates a new
composition now using the same settings from
that source video. A faster way to create
a composition as well. Again, we're going to use the first composition we created. I'm just going to
delete this one because we don't want it. Yes, I'm sure. Thank you. That being said, you'll
notice that once we created our final
export composition, the bottom of our
screen changed. Again, for those of you
coming from Premiere Pro, this should look
somewhat familiar, but also a little different. This is our timeline. If our composition is the visual representation
of what we're creating, then the timeline
is where we build. The timeline is
represented in layer mode. To show what I mean, let's drag and drop some things into the
timeline and play around. Let's again, take one of our self portrait
reference videos and drop it into our timeline. Click and drag. You see now as we have pulled that asset down
into the timeline, it is represented as a layer
in the timeline and we can see how long it is and also
the color associated with it. This blue line here is our play head and we can
use it to scrub through. Similar to Premiere, we hit
the "Spacebar" to play. This greenlight
here at the bottom as well indicates rendering. How much time it'll take to play back what
you're doing at the desired frame rate that you have your overall
composition set to. If you find that you're having a hard time playing things back, come up to your
composition window and mess with the resolution and lower it until you're ready to play it back for quality, then bring it back up to full. Generally, when I'm doing stuff, I tend to leave my resolution
pretty low at a half, at least, just for
overall playback issues. Finally, to zoom in and
out of your timeline, you would come down to these little mountain
peaks at the bottom, drag, and there you
go. You can zoom in. Also, you can use the
keyboard shortcuts similar to Premiere and I believe other
creative Cloud applications, the plus zooms in and
the minus zooms out. There is a ton more on the timeline that I'll show
you in a later lesson, for now, let's move on. Over on our right
side of our screen we have the Effects and Presets, along with our library. After Effects has over
300 effects and presets. It's a lot. Like I said, this application is incredibly
powerful and can do a lot. We're not going to
go over all of them. There's just too many, but
let's play around with one or two so you can see what's
good. You know what I mean? If you're coming from
Photoshop or Premiere, some of these
Effects and Presets should look relatively
familiar to you. Let's do a Gaussian
blur onto the footage. I'm going to click into
the search bar right here and I'm just going to
start typing out Gaussian. There it is. We have two
versions. Let's do the new one. Similarly to Premiere and
other effects applications, you can just click and
drag onto the layer. Let's move our play
heads so we can see. Perfect. Now, you see I added that effect
and nothing changed. But you probably noticed that our Effects Controls panel
here to our left has appeared. Your Effects Controls
panel is where you can see all the different
effects you've added to an asset or a layer
in your timeline. Your Effects and
Presets panel is where all of the effects
that After Effects has live, that you can use on
different things. Your Effects Controls is
where the effects you've added to something are
controlled and manipulated. Just want to make
sure that sinks in. Effects and Presets that is where all the
different effects live in the After Effects
that you can utilize. Effects Controls is
where you can manipulate whatever Effects you have
added to a layer already. Let's make my footage very blurry so you can see
what that looks like. Again, we're over here
in our Effects Controls. Let's up it to be crazy blurry. Now let's play it
back. There you go. We made my footage super blurry by adding
an effect to it. Now you can also
make adjustments to your effects within
the timeline as well. If you come down to a
layer that you have an effect added onto and
click this down arrow, you'll see that you have new drop-down
menus that appear, the Effects and Transform. If you click on the
Effects drop-down, you'll see I have
Gaussian blur there, the same effects that I added in my Effects Controls panel
now appear here as well. Similarly you can
see the effect I've added of 33 is there as well, and I can change it here and
it also appears at the top. This is just another
method or way for you to control the effects you add to different layers. Some people I know really love to work from the Effects
Controls Window. Other times it makes more
sense for whatever reason to mess with the effects down here in the
timeline itself, it really just depends
on how you work. Moving right along, let's
check out our Preview Window, which is over here. The Preview Window is a centralized location to
adjust your playback settings. I'll go through
and explain a few of these just so you know. Up here at the top, again, similarly to the space bar, you can hit "Play" and "Stop". This also allows you
to go frame by frame, which is something that
can be very helpful for motion graphics
and animation. This also can push you to the very end of your
timeline if you want. Right now, you'll see
that the shortcut for spacebar is to play, we
have it set to that. If you want to
change it, you can. I like to keep it at spacebar. The range right now is
set to the work area. Your work area right
here is in the timeline and is expressed
by this blue bar. You see right when
I hover over it, it says work area end. You can click and drag to
change what your work area is. Say you're animating something that is really intensive and you really want to focus on a certain five or 10
seconds of an area, maybe a gesture work area
then to only be that section. When you're hitting playback, it keeps rolling through that. Think of your work area as your in and out if you're
coming from Premiere Pro. Your frame rate, pretty
self-explanatory. Then also in playback
you can have it be full screen if you want. Again, different options
for how to play back. This may seem like
a lot, oh, my gosh, why do they have so much stuff
in here around playback? When you're in motion graphics and animation and doing a lot, having these controls can be
really helpful to help you work more effectively and not have to mess
with so much stuff. Also, it's all about controlling your resolution and
rendering times. Again, working with
specific sections and only having it render certain
things can be really helpful. After Effects, once again, is a very powerful
tool and can do a lot. It can also eat up a
lot of computing power. It can be good to have these preview window assets
and tools at your disposal. The final thing I
want to bring to your attention is right at the top here are the tools,
mine are at the top. Again, if you're coming from
other Adobe applications, a lot of these tools should
look very familiar to you. As you click on different tools, other Windows will appear. Let's click on the text one. You'll notice now we have all of our character stuff and our paragraph tools
are down here. Perfect. Let's click
on the Pen tool. Nothing really changed,
but we now have a pen. Let's click on the Square tool. Again, nothing too much changed, but we have a square tool now. Let's click on the Eraser tool. Our paintbrush came up, all our different brushes
are now available to us. Similarly, when we click
on the Brush tool, some new Windows pop up. Stamp tool, again, bringing up our paint brushing. Let's click on Rotoscoping. Fun. Let's go back to
our Selection tool, which is just the V key. All that to say, your
layout does respond to you as you're working on
things to help you out, which is cool.
That's this lesson. I wanted to give you just a brief overview of the interface and the main panels we'll be using to create our
video portrait. Go ahead and continue
to mess around with things and experiment
as much as you want. Before you move on
to the next lesson, make sure to import
all the rest of the assets I have
provided to you into your project Window and
organize them however you want if you haven't
already imported them. Then go ahead and reset
your comp to be blank. Make sure anything that you
have in the bottom here is gone so that way we're all
starting on the same page. I'll see you in the next lesson. We're going to start
messing around with layers and masking.
4. Layers and Masking: Welcome back. Before we begin, make sure you've cleared out
any assets in your timeline for our 2.5 K comp we
built in the last lesson. This lesson is going to be
another jam-packed lesson. We're going to start to
build out the background, play around with some gradients, and play around with
keying and masking me as well. Let's get into it. A composition in your timeline is made up of different layers. In the first lesson, I showed you how
a video layer can be represented in the timeline, but there are four other
types of layers you can create in After Effects to
use in your compositions. Those are video
and audio layers, solid color layers, layers for function
like cameras, lights, adjustments,
and null objects, it's okay if you don't
know what any of that is, synthetic layers that can hold a visual element like
a shape or text, and then finally,
there's pre-comp layers which are similar to nesting, if you've worked a
bit in Premiere Pro. The layer types
we'll be using for our project will be video audio, obviously, solid color, and we'll do a pre-comp one too, just so you can see what
that does and how that can help as your composition
becomes more epic. Obviously, there are more
layer types in the Layer menu, but remember, we're just getting our feet wet with this class. We're just trying to learn enough after-effects to
be dangerous, that's it. Remember, you can
think of layers in the same way you think of
layers in Photoshop as well. Compositions can contain
literally thousands of layers. Re-add my video layer
to your composition. I'm going to use self-portrait reference
1 as my video layer. Go ahead and re-add it. It doesn't need to be amazing. Just drop it into your timeline. We're going to mess
with it later. Let's go ahead and create a solid layer to
be our background. To create a color solid layer, you'll need to go to layer, new, solid, very simple. Or you can use the shortcut
Command Y, Control Y. This will bring up your
solid settings box. This is the same idea as a color map and
Premiere Pro as well. To start off, let's use
our eyedropper to get relatively close
to our background, and then we'll hit
"Okay". Let's see here. We're just going
to click wherever, it doesn't need to be amazing, and then hit "Okay". Perfect. You notice
I didn't change any of the other
settings because generally when you
create a solid, it's going to take on the
properties of the composition. You see now a few
things have changed. One, we have our
solid represented in our timeline and in
our comp as well. Two, if we go into
our project panel, you'll now see that we have a new folder bin that
is called solids. When you create a new solid, they're placed into this folder, so you can reference
them again later and not need to create
them over and over again, if it's the same solid
color, so very helpful. They just throw them into
this folder for you. Now, we want me to be on
top of the background. We're just literally
going to click on my layer and drag up. That way, I am now on top. As an aside, this
class is focusing on working in After
Effects in a 2D space. Similar to Photoshop
and Premiere, the order of your
layers will matter. But After Effects can work
in a 3D space as well. If you want to play around with 3D space in After Effects, you'll need to turn
the layer into a 3D layer by clicking
on this little cube. You'll see that mine actually isn't represented,
the cube isn't there. What I'm going to
do, is I'm going to toggle switches and modes. That brings up a
different menu system within the timeline. In order to make a
layer, a 3D layer, I would just click
on this little cube to convert my layer
into a 3D layer. You'll see now we have our x, y, and z rotations available. Something that's really
interesting about After Effects is
that you can have 3D layers and 2D layers in the same comp
at the same time, which can sound weird, but there are indeed times
when that makes a lot of sense to have that mix and
matching of 2D and 3D space. If you're interested in
learning about how to manipulate things in a 3D space, let me know down in the reviews and the comments of
the class below. But again, this class
will be all about 2D. I'm going to go ahead
and turn these back off so that way, everything is back
in a 2D space. I just wanted to make
sure you all are aware that is where that is. Now, let's manipulate my solid layer by adding
a four-point gradient. Because as you can see, if you look at my footage on
top of the solid background, the way I've filmed
it, I didn't light it quite as perfectly
as you should. You can see that
there's a bit of a gradient happening with this solid color background
that I have behind me. I just noticed that my layout, even though it's in standard, I have a whole bunch of
other stuff showing up. Let's go ahead and
go to workspace and reset my standard saved
workspace. There we go. We're going to head over
to effects and presets, and we're just going to
start to type in gradient. As you can see, where is it? There it is, four color
gradient is right there. Again, we're going
to click and just drag it onto our solid. When we do that, we are blinded by day glow, as you can see.
Things to note here. Effects that you add
to solid layers can change the base color
of a solid layer. Now, sometimes you do
need a solid color, so that's why I showed you that. But we're going to now go into our effects controls and pick the four colors of
my footage to match the slight variations
of our solid layer. Before we do that,
let's officially rename our layer though
to be background. This is really easy. All you do is have your
layer highlighted, hit the "Enter" key, and then we're going
to type in background, and then we'll hit
"Enter" again. This can be really
helpful so that way, you can start to rename things, so that way everything is just easier to understand
where things are at. But if for some reason
you ever do need to know what the source
name of your layer is, just click "Layer Name" here, and that toggles it between
what the source name is and what you've
maybe renamed it. You see self-portrait
reference 1 is in brackets because that's actually the
source name of the layer, it's not actually a layer
name that I have given it. In fact, we can go ahead and
change this to be Hallease, just so it's easier. Now, let's go ahead and
change our colors so we can get rid of this day glow. Again, I'm going to highlight the background layer and
then with each color, I'm going to take the eyedropper and pick in the realm of the
main color of that area. This doesn't need to be perfect. We're going to mess
with it again later. Let's do that.
That feels better. Then our second color, the green, we're going
to go right here. Again, this doesn't
need to be perfect, we're going to do more with it, but just to get a rough
idea. Then our blue. Yeah, that's pretty good. We're starting to imitate
the subtle variations again in our background. Now that we've gotten our
background colors changed, let's go ahead and change
my position in the frame. You'll notice that we have space right here
where I'm cutoff. If we actually move forward with the project, it will
be a little weird. Let's go ahead and
move me down to the bottom of the comp, like we would probably want. If you're someone who's
watching this lesson and you're a little bit
familiar with Premiere Pro, if you wanted to change
the position of something, we would usually go to
the effects controls panel over here to do that. Well, in After Effects, things like scale, rotation, position, all of that
is actually done directly in the timeline
under transform. If we come down here to the timeline and we
click this down arrow, you'll see transform is here and there are all our basic motion
controls like position, scale, rotation, opacity, and
adjusting the anchor point. Again if you are
coming from Premiere, this should look
pretty familiar to you Another thing that's worth mentioning though
is that you can go and do this manually by
clicking the arrows. But again, we are all about
the keyboard shortcuts here, so let's learn the transform
shortcuts real quick. Let's go ahead and have
this highlighted first. Position is just the P key, and you see when we click that, it removes all the other
transform features and only has position there. Rotation is R. Scale is
S. Anchor point is A, and then finally, opacity, is not what you would think and most people
would think it's O, but it's actually
T. Think of opacity as transparency and that
should help you remember that. Now you'll notice when
I did hit each key, the other thing was removed. If I hit P, it only has the
position, nothing else. If I hit T, it's only
opacity and nothing else. But there may come a time
when you want to adjust multiple things at once. The way to do that
is to hold down shift whenever you
push the next key. Right now we are on opacity
so I already pushed T. Let's say I want to bring
up the position as well, I'm going to hold
down shift P and now the position and the opacity are both there for
me to mess with. Again whenever you want multiple transformation
tools to appear, then just hit "Shift" and
then you can bring that up. So I just hit "Shift A" to
bring up the anchor point and leave whatever other
transformation tools were already up. If I just hit "S" now everything goes away
and it's just scale. Again, I'm trying to show you all these shortcuts because I think they are really
important to know. But something else you can
do is you can highlight multiple layers and with
multiple layers highlighted, bring up the
transformation tools in multiple layers simultaneously and adjust them simultaneously. With both layers
highlighted now, I'm going to hit "S" and that brings up the scale for both T, P, same thing. Now if I hit "Shift T" it
brings up the opacity for both. Again, trying to help
you be able to adjust things relatively
quickly in the program. These quick shortcut keys are, I think really
important to know. They really help
speed things up. With all that being
said, now let's hit the P key officially to mess with the position of me
in the Hallease layer, and then let's take R, was that y-axis I believe? And bring me down to where I kiss the bottom
of our composition frame. It's okay if I
probably go a little bit under just to make sure we don't miss a pixel
layer or something, but that looks pretty good. Remember, you can always slide and toggle these
just by clicking and holding or you can type things
in as well if you want. Whatever floats your boat. Unless I'm trying to be precise, I usually just drag things to be the
position that I want. Now we need to blend me with
the background a bit better. It's still very obvious
as you can see, that I'm not one
with the background, so let's create a mask
on my video layer. There are a few ways
to create a mask. The two main ways are using the pen tool or the shape tool. Those are the ways
that most people do it. I'll show you both. The keyboard shortcut
for the shape tool is Q. If I hit "Q" and
I make sure that my layer is the active
layer in my timeline, I can then just click and drag, and I have made a shape layer. I can also adjust what type
of shape that is just by toggling through
Q multiple times. As you can see over
here in the corner, you can see that as I hit "Q", I go through each of them. You can also always just come up here and click on it as well. But you know me, we're all
about shortcuts here so yeah. As you can see, once I created
this first initial mask, it is now represented inside my Hallease layer at under
the subheading masks, mask 1. You can have multiple
masks in a single layer, just make sure to deselect and then draw as many as you want. They will all be represented
by different color codes, so that way you
can adjust each of them however you want to. The other thing you can
do is you can also change the shape layers
themselves within a mask. Let's mess with mask
one for example. To do that we just going
to make sure that we are back using our selection
tool which is the V key. Then we can literally
just move them around. Say I want to
adjust this corner, I can just click and
move it wherever I want. You can start off with a traditional shape
and then end up creating a mask
that's completely not a traditional shape. Similarly to Premiere and also Illustrator, or Photoshop, you can also change whether
a mask can be subtracted, added, lightened, all different things that
should be relatively familiar to you again if you're coming
from other applications that specializes in
layering and masking. That is how to create a
mask using a shape tool. Let's go ahead and delete all of our crazy shape masks there, so we're back to square 1. Now, let's utilize the
pen tool to make a mask. In After Effects
the pen tool is G, that's the shortcut.
There you go. Then of course again,
if you keep hitting G, you will toggle through the
mask feather tool as well, but we're just using
the pen tool for now. Again, with me highlighted, let's go ahead and sort
draw a mask around me. I'm going to go ahead and
move my play head to when I'm the most epically
spread out in the frame, which is right about here, it looks like, and let's go ahead and
start drawing our mask. With a pen tool
you're just going to click once to begin, and then wherever
you click next, it will begin to
build your mask out. We're going to try to not
clip my hair too much. Then when you're ready to close out your shape
using the pen tool, you just connect and we now have a loose pen
tool mask around me. Were still not
blending in very well. So what I'm going
to do is I'm going to go ahead and open
the drop-down for my mask that I've
created and I'm going to feather it, just a smidge. I'm going to feather it as
much as I can get away with feathering it. Let's do that. Then let's go to our selection tool by hitting the V key and
then let's try to adjust to catch most of
my hair at this point. That's pretty good. We can also select the pen tool again, which I said was the
G key and we can add another dot right
there and stretch it out. As I just showed you, you can add more
points if you need to. From there we can also make little adjustments
if we want as well. You see when I pull this up
since we feathered our mask, you lose me here. Let's keep it to where it's all the way off
the frame so that way we don't lose any of
the bottom of my shirt. I think that's pretty good. Let's scrub through the
play head real quick. We lose some of my hair
again just a little bit, but I think for the purposes
of this, it'll be fine. I don't think people
would really notice, you know what I mean,
so I'm good with that. With that being done, now
that we've tweaked it, now, I want to go back into our
background and I want to make some further adjustments to
really blend this in well. I'm going to start again just, there we go, kind of eyedropper, messing around to see how
close we can blend this, how seamlessly we go. That's actually
looking pretty good. That's not too bad. I'm going to adjust my
mask because I notice that we could see
the cut right there. I don't know if you'll be able
to see it on your screen, but I can see the
cutoff of the video because I've
feathered it so much. I want to just come in here and not screw the
whole thing down. I'm going to hit the V key to go back to my selection
tool. There we go. Now, push that down just a little bit to
get it away from there. Again, I can see it
on my screen you may not see it on yours. Then now let's scrub through. That's not too bad. We can play around, we could keep playing with
this all day if we wanted to. But again, I'm pretty cool with the hair getting
a little bit feathered out. I feel pretty good about that. If you haven't
already, go through and do everything I just did. Create a mask and then adjust your background
layer colors to match as well as you can, play around with it.
This looks pretty good. By the way, I think we could totally move forward with this. But again, the point
of this is to teach you a bit about After Effects. In the next lesson what I think we are going
to do is we are going to play around with actually keying out of all my background altogether so that
way we can just have the cleanest
version possible. To emphasize what
I'm saying here, I'm going to go ahead and
hide the background layer. In the next lesson, what
we're going to do is we're literally going to get rid of all of these tophi around
me by keying it out. I think this is something
that can be really helpful for people
learning After Effects. Because this is something you'll probably use a lot if you bring different PNG and JPEG assets into After
Effects to manipulate. Generally speaking, you build
things in After Effects from other assets and you
need to isolate those assets, remove parts of
those assets, etc. In the next lesson, we're going to learn
all about keying. I'll see you over there.
5. Keying and Pre Comps: Welcome back. Let's hop right into this
Keying and Pre-Comps. Keying is the act of
defining transparency by a particular color value
or a luminance value. In other words, getting rid of a certain color in an asset. Let's try and key out as much of my background of this
video clip as possible so I fit better into the artificial background we've created through our gradients. If we head over to
our Effects and Presets and type in key, you'll see a ton of different keying options start to show up in After Effects. Each has a different function, so let's say you've
started to play around with green-screen
effects, for example. There's actually a really great beginner class on that here on Skillshare using
DIY Green Screen. It's by, I believe Paul Trillo hopefully I'm saying
his name right. You should definitely
check it out if you can. But if you were
taking that class, for example, then you'd
probably want to use, I would guess the keying
green blur right here and probably a little
bit of key light 1.2. To clean up my background, we're going to use the
option Linear Color Key. We're going to actually
be really basic about it so we're just going
to use that one right there. Go ahead and add
it to your video so let's throw it on me. This is one of the more
simple color keying options, and you'll see in just a second why green screen and blue
screen are the colors used the most when filming to key out backgrounds
and other things. Over in the Effects
Controls panel, let's start to play around with the footage and get rid
of this background. You see over here in
our Effects Controls, we have all the
different things we can start to mess around with. You can see that the key
color is already set to blue, which again, you can see it's
a very vibrant, epic blue. It's a type of
blue you would use generally for keying things out if you go into production knowing
you're going to do that. Obviously, we don't
want that color because as you can see, nothing's being taken away. It's such an obscure
color that generally speaking unless you actually film with that color in mind, nothing will get removed, that shouldn't get removed. We're going to take
our eyedropper and just click and voila. As you can see, it got a lot of the
background to go away, but you'll notice it also
took that color out of my shirt a little
bit and also out of my face right here
a little bit as well. That's because this
toffee orange color, that is my background is
within the skin hues of almost like literally anybody who isn't maybe an alabaster
god or goddess. See what I mean? Most
people across a variety of skin tones is going to have some hue version of
what our background is, which again is
this toffee color. As you can see, since I
didn't go into filming this thinking I would be keying out
backgrounds and stuff. I just picked a color
that I felt complimented my skin tone and complemented
what I was doing. Let's start to tweak it
a bit and let's just see how much we can
tweak to make this work. Let's have it be not
so accurate and change the matching softness down
to maybe like 5 percent. That brings back a
bit more of my skin, as you can see at the top, it more or less brought
back most of my shirt. But you can also see I'm
still missing color right in the palm of my hand because again if you
look at the palm of my hand, it's about that shade
so not too bad. But hopefully, by seeing
this you're again, realizing why if
you do want to go into After Effects to key
things out and remove things this is a
prime example of why green screen and blue screen
are the industry standard. This is a prime example of why. Anyway, we're going to make
the best of it though, it's going to be fine. I think this is
going to be about as good as I'll be
able to make it. But something we can
keep in mind for this is I actually think we can
just use a mask to fix this. Because we don't want the key to focus on my face and body. We just want it to focus on catching the
background around my hair and outside of
my physical body shape. Let's copy and paste this layer. Copy and then Command
C, Control V, paste Command V, Control V on a PC. Now we have two versions of me. Let's remove the key from
the top layer of me. Right now we have the second
version of me highlighted, we're going to go ahead and
remove our key from it, and you can either
click up here, hit "Delete", or Command Z
to bring it back real quick. You can also delete
the effect within the drop-down as well within
your timeline to remove it. Our top layer now does not
have the keying on it. Our bottom layer, however, which is the same thing does. Now, let's adjust
these top layers mask to only cover
my physical body. We don't care about
the hair anymore. Let's adjust it, so the
way we're going to do that is we're going to click to isolate this and then click again to now start to move it. Again, we're just
going to adjust this to only really cover me. We don't really care
about the hair anymore we just want to
make sure that our keying only affects everything past my physical shape
essentially and you see we're losing color
right here again so that's sketchy out,
right about there. Let's go there. Let's scrub
through a little bit. Yeah, so for the most part
my top layer is always there and I never
lose color now. Perfect. Adjust the feathering, anything else you want to do, I think right now I have my
feathering crazy high, 164. Let's drop that down to 96. There we go, so that way it's staying a little bit more
tight into it because remember we also have a
second layer of me that is also feathered with a
mask and there you go. That looks pretty good. Let's turn our
background back on, and now let's play it back. We're losing me right there. It's this one, our top Hallease, and let's click to isolate, and now let's stretch it out so we never lose
the bottom of me. We're going to need to
stretch it out quite a bit. Let's go ahead and hit G
to bring up our pen tool. Let's add a layer right there. Now you'll notice the
first time I brought up my pen tool to
adjust my mask, you'll notice I actually had these little side
stretching tools to actually make the mask start
to curve if I wanted to. That can be something
that's really helpful, I'll show you again. The way you access that is
you click and then drag. Now you can also start
to make your mask have different curvature
shapes as well. Which can be really helpful
if you're trying to mask out a certain shape like a
circle, things like that. I usually for stuff like
this when I'm building, I don't usually need that, but again, it's something
that can be very helpful. I think that's pretty good. Let's hit the V-keys, so we bring back our just
general selection tool, and then let's click away, so that way our layer
isn't highlighted, so we can just see everything
with nothing covering. It play it back. Now I think this
looks pretty good. Actually I think we
did a pretty good job. If you need a pause to mess
with yours a little bit, go ahead and do that now. When you're ready, go ahead
and resume and move forward. You've resumed, so hopefully yours looks something like mine. Now remember how we talked about the different compositions
you can create. I'm going to show you
another version that's used a lot in after effects to
help with organization, and building graphics
on top of each other. It's called the pre-composition
or pre-composing. If you've worked
in Premiere Pro, think of a pre-comp as
nesting very similar concept. Where you can essentially
take a sequence, and bring it into
another sequence, and then when you click
on that original, that new clip it just takes you back to that
original sequence, so you can make
adjustments to it without disturbing
your final piece. Pre-comps, essentially
act as the same thing. Let's create a pre-comp of
our two self portrait clips. That way they're always together
in our main composition. Highlight both, have both
of them highlighted, and then the shortcut to create a pre-comp is Shift Command C, or Shift Control C. That'll bring up your
new pre-compose window. Since we have more than
one layer highlighted and they have effects on them, the only option is to move
them to a new composition. Which we want to do
anyway, so it's fine. Let's go ahead and name it for redundancy sake, Hallease. I also want to go ahead and adjust the composition duration to the timespan of
the selected layers. The default setting usually is that this is not selected, and I'll go ahead and
show you what happens. It creates a new layer
with a pre-comp, that is the same length
as the entire thing. Which in some instances
can be very helpful. But for the sake
of this project, actually we do want to know more or less where
the footage ends. I'm going to command
Z, Control Z to undo that pre-comp I created. I'm going to Shift
Command C again, to bring up the comp
window Shift Command C, Shift Control C if
you're on a PC. Then I'm going to
click this box, adjust composition duration to the timespan of the
selected layer. Again, I'm going to rename this Hallease for the
sake of redundancy, and then we're going
to hit, "Okay". Now you see the pre-comp
layer that has been created is now the duration of what
my original video clips were. Again, you can see how
that could potentially be pretty helpful, depending on what type of
project you're working in. Which is why I wanted
to show it to you. If we go into our project now, we'll see that we have a
hallease composition now, because we just created it. We have our final export, which is what we're
working on right now, and we have our hallease one. Something I tend to do
and something that a lot of animators and motion graphics artists
that I work with do, whenever they package a
projects to give them to me. Is they put all of their
pre-comps in a separate folder. I'm going to go ahead and
do that now for the sake of organization and just to get
you all into that mindset. Again, to create a new folder, come down here to the
folder icon, click, and most of the time
everyone calls it pre-comps, or some variation of the
word pre-composition. Then I'm going to throw
hallease in there. Because generally speaking, when you're
trying to organize a project that maybe you might want someone
else to work on, or again, you might want to come back and reference
it at some point. Organizing your stuff, I
think can be really helpful. It already creates a solids folder for you, which is great. We have our self portrait
footage, that I've given you. We have our pre-comps folder now where we're throwing that, we will have our final
export just out and generally if you're
buying templates for after effects and
things like that. They'll have the
final export or final render just be a
composition that's out. Then the camera
footage I gave you, which we haven't done
anything with yet. Here is what we're looking like. Now that we have our
pre-comp created, I wanted to bring your
attention to the effects controls panel for
this pre-comp. Notice, there's
nothing there now. Because this pre-comp has
no effects added onto it. However, though, if
we double-click, now we go to the two
versions of me and you see a new timeline has opened up. These are the two
versions of me, and if we click on these layers, we see our different
effects controls. We see our linear
color key on this one, and then on this top one, remember there's
no effects on it, but it does have a mask on it. Now we see them, and that's
where these effects are. They now live inside of
this pre-comp layer. Hopefully that makes sense. Now, let's say I want to take this hallease just to prove this point of pre-comps
and how they work. I'm going to hit the P-key
to bring up position here. I'm going to move this top
layer of me over to the right. Now we just randomly
have two versions of me in this pre-comp. When I go to the final export, you see it is now
reflected there as well. But again, nothing
else is happening now say I wanted to
move both of these. We're going to hit
the P-key again. I want to move
everything that is within this pre-comp
I've created. Now I can do that. You can see it has now moving
both of them together. Command Z, Control
Z to undo that. I'm going to undo
what I did in there too. There we go. Do you see now how
you can begin to build things on
top of each other. You can work in design and
create things in a pre-comp, and then have that
pre-comp live in your main composition
and do something else. For example, say you download
or create a little car, and that car its own pre-comp, you built it in that pre-comp. You then bring it into your
main composition which maybe has a background
and a road, and street, and all that stuff. Then you want to animate that whole car to
drive down that road. That whole car is a pre-comp. You can now focus on
just messing with the position rotation scale
of all of it together. It can be a little
overwhelming to understand the
concept of pre-comps, but once you start to mess
with them is once you start to focus on working
in multiple layers. Pre-comps can be really,
really, really helpful. With all that being had said, make sure you have your
two halleases built, put them into a pre-comp, and then go ahead and organize your project panel as well, so that way you're good to go. All right, In the next lesson, we're going to start adding our cameras into the project, and we'll continue to
build on everything we've learned thus
far in after effects. Before you move forward, again, I know I'm beating a
dead horse, but again, make sure you've got
your background done. I'm in the frame wherever
you want me to be, with my background keyed out, and also that you've
pre-comp to me as well. I will see you in
the next lesson. We're going to be doing
key-framing and a bit of rotoscoping. See you over there.
6. Keyframing & Rotoscoping: Now we're going to
start to put in all of the cameras that are surrounding
me in the background. You'll see what the footage
I provided that I have given you clips called camera 1, 2, and 3 selects. Each of these videos has a combination of
clips of me throwing different cameras
in slow motion for you to now add to
our composition. To do so, we're going to utilize everything we've learned
in this lesson already. Layering, masking,
composing, and now keying. Let's add our first camera. I'm going to go ahead and find an option from the camera 1 selects by bringing it down
into our timeline under me. I'm just going to go
ahead and have it highlighted and
literally drag it down. You'll notice I dragged
it down under me, but on top of our solid. Remember we're working
in a 2D space for this project so the order
of the layers does matter. In this project, I had all
the cameras flow behind me, but in front of the background. You'll notice that
where I put my camera selects layer is again, behind me are at least comp that we built in
the last lesson, but in front of our solid digitally
created background layer. Now just FYI, I put multiple
options in each video clip, but we just want
to focus on one. Let's shorten this layer to be exactly the section we want. We can do that in a few ways. The first shortcut to
shorten the clip is option open bracket and then option close
bracket for the ending. Let's do that now. In fact, let's go
ahead and get rid of me so we can see
what we're doing. Let's find a camera select
we want. There's one. Let's have it start right
when it enters the frame. To start our clip there, we're going to hit Option, Open bracket, and you see
that scoots it down now. You can still see that there is technically other
things there but we're only utilizing or seeing the start of this layer
right at this moment. We're going to have
a go all the way until at least frame. You see we go to black because I give you some black
space in-between each one. Let's have it end right there. Again, option close bracket to now have this be our select. Now you see we have
this going only two seconds into our start. Let's go ahead and have this start right
at the beginning. To do that, we're
going to hold down Shift as we click and drag, so that way it snaps
right to the front. Another way you
can do this if you don't like using the
option bracket option, you can also split
a layer as well. Let's go ahead, Command V, Control V on that. Let's say I wanted to
split it right here. The way I would do that
would be Shift Command D, or if you're on a PC, Shift Control D.
You see now it has split my layer right where my play head is into
two separate things. This is another
way you can do it. Then you would just delete
the bits you don't want. Those are two different ways
to pick selects from a layer that you're using
for the composition. We've got our selection
we want to use. Now, let's more or less
get it into position. Remember the shortcut
for position. It's the P key on your keyboard. I also want to go ahead and
turn me back on now so I can see where the camera
is in relation to me. It looks like it's about
directly behind me, so let's move it out of the way. Let's get it over
to the left a bit. Nice. Then let's also get down a bit. I'm going to make it
so we're completely removing my hands
from the situation. Now let's play it back. You see my hand just a
little bit of a tip there. Let's get in there. Now, let's add a mask
using our pen tool. Remember the
shortcut for that is G. We're going to
go ahead and have it be more or less when it's at its highest point.
Let's say there. This mask is just to more or less just get rid
of all the excess. It doesn't need to
be too amazing. This mask, just really basic. Great. Looks good. Let's get rid of as much
of the background as we can by using our key, which is actually still highlighted here,
linear color key. Let's throw it on here. Then let's more or less
pick a background. That's cause the softness
to drop a little bit. That helps to bring
a lot of the camera back, which I like. Let's play it back.
This looks pretty good. Actually, I don't need that. Let's click away so we can
see it without anything. It looks pretty good. Don't
hate that. Let's see. You know what else I'm going
to do here just to make sure with our mask, let's go ahead and feather it. Just to be sure, it's still like a gradual thing. We're still getting
a little bit of my finger right there. Let's go back into position
P key for position. Just get rid of my finger. There we go. That
looks pretty good. Now, depending on
how well you picked the color for your linear
key on the camera right now, it might still be a bit
obvious to you when the clip ends and when it starts like there's just this pop
of color that appears. Let's see if we can see
it on mine, we might. Yeah. You may not see it on
your end, but on my end, I can see that right
when the clip ends, it pops away and we get back whatever the base space
gradient is that we created. It's just slightly
off on the color. The way to fix this
would be to use keyframes to mess
with the opacity, to have it gradually appear
and gradually disappear. I'm going to show you
how to do that now. In the process, we're going
to learn all about keyframes. Basically what we're going
to do is we're going to create a fade using keyframes. Before we get into
creating this fade, a little bit about keyframes. Keyframes are used to set parameters for motion, effects, audio, and many
other properties, usually changing them over time. A keyframe marks the point in time where you
specify a value for a layer property such as the spatial position,
opacity, or audio. Values between keyframes
are interpolated. In other words, they assume going from one
value to the next. When you use keyframes to
create a change over time, you typically use at
least two keyframes. One for the state at the
beginning of the change and then one for the state at
the end of the change. All of that snazzy
talk is to say that keyframes are
more or less how you create the motion
in motion graphics. If you're coming from Premiere, you'll recognize the
stopwatches for keyframes. I'll bring them up right now. Remember we have our camera 1 selected and we're going to mess with the opacity
in just a second. Go ahead and hit the
T key to bring it up. That brings up our opacity. This little stopwatch here is how you toggle
keyframes on and off. You'll also notice that
even in our effects, within our effects controls, we have these stopwatches again. Again, you can keyframe
things to change. Maybe your color key starts
off being key this color, and then you activate
keyframes and you change it to then start
to key out another color. You can usually
keyframe most effects, if not all, in After Effects. Let's go ahead and create
just a simple fade on our camera video clip in this layer will fade it in
and out by using keyframes. Again with your clip selected, go ahead and hit the
T key if you haven't already to bring up our opacity. We want it to be at
100 percent or at full capacity right before
the camera comes into frame. Let's find that spot
right about there. It needs to be at 100
percent right there. We don't want it to still be fading in when the camera
is already in frame because then that'll mess up the illusion that we have around the cameras just appearing
from all over the frame. Right about here, then we're going to activate our keyframes
by hitting our stopwatch. You'll see now there's a little
blue diamond right there. The value of that little blue
diamond now is 100 percent. Now, leading up to this, we don't want it to
be at 100 percent. We want to fade in. We're going to move our
play head like I just did back to the beginning
of the clip. We're going to now change
this value to be zero. Voila, you see that since
I touched the values here, the percentage, a
new keyframe was created because I have now
changed what I want to start. Remember in the definition I
gave earlier of keyframes, usually, you at least have two. Right now we have a keyframe right here
saying this clip needs to be at zero percent transparency
or opacity at the start, and then by this next keyframe, it needs to be at
100 percent opacity. Then again, like I
said, in the center, it interpolates what the
keyframes are doing. If we actually show, we can see our number
here right at the corner, it is figuring out how
much time it would take to linearly make it go from zero to 100 within
the time allotted. Now let's say I'm
moved to this keyframe all the way over
here to two seconds, you see it's going to take that much longer for it to
get finally to a 100, and once it gets to that 100, it just stays there indefinitely until I add another keyframe. Very simple. We just created
a fade using keyframes. If you really want
to see it in action, let's get rid of our
background so you can see it. There we go. You see how you see it come up in the
beginning. One more time. Now that look good. Let's get to the end
and let's fade out as well so we don't
have that harsh drop, and here's what I mean
by that harsh drop. Now that we have the background
gone, you can see it. See how it just popped away?
We want to get rid of that. We want it to be a gradual
fade away so that way no one ever really
notices that we've got tons of layers
going on here. By the time we're done,
you'll have tons of layers. Let's go right when the camera is just out of frame,
so right there. Remember, right now
with our keyframes, we're at 100 percent
opacity because that's what our last
keyframe value was. Now we're going to
hit our diamond again because from here to here, we want it to stay 100 percent. We want to see the
camera the entire time. Now from here to the end, we want it to fade. We're going to move
our play head to about the end and then we're going to hit our
diamond in the corner to create a new keyframe. Or you can, instead of
hitting that diamond, you can also just change the value and that'll create
a new keyframe as well. Now from these two, it goes from 100 down to zero, and you see how it
faded away to there. Now we play it back. It's a way more
smooth transition. Again, this is the idea around motion and motion graphics. Let's turn our
background back on. You have now just
created keyframes, very simple keyframes,
but keyframes. Something I will say is
after playing this back, you'll see we're still losing
a bit of information on our camera because of our
linear color key that we used. Again, I picked a color
that is not good, not conducive at all for keying in the long run because most objects have some variation of
this hue in them. With this, we can technically do what we did before with me, we can copy this again, so Command C, Command V, Control C, Control
V on a PC to create another layer of this
exact same thing and then we can go ahead and remove our keying that we did on this
top layer of the camera only. We can come up here to our linear color key
and just delete it. Then what we can do is we
can now create a new mask on just this top
layer for our camera. What we're going to
do is now we can hold the G key to bring
up our pen tool, and let's just loosely create a layer around
our camera cover, and mostly this top part
because that's where we were losing a good bit
of the information. It doesn't need to be perfect. Voila. As you can see, we get a lot of our color back. If we take this layer away, you see how much of it
we lose right there. Let's click away so
you can really see it. That's with our top layer off. That's with it on. You see how we get some more of that silvery shininess
of the camera on top. Nice, it's adding
something for sure. Now, remember, we
also don't need to have this mask here anymore. Let's go ahead and delete that. Yes, and there we go. Now remember, with me when
we were designing mine, when we did our pre-comp layer, I didn't move too much. It was fine to just
have the mass more or less be in the general
area in that workout. But this, it's moving. You'll notice you can see
where our mask still is. It doesn't follow the camera, so our mask needs to move. The way we can do that
is by using keyframes. Here we go. Let's see. My originally, yeah,
it looks like I amassed it right at that point. We're going to go to mask path here and
then we're going to turn on our keyframes
from mask path. Now right at this moment, we have created where
this mask should be. The next thing we
need to do now is go frame by frame and move
the mask to match. I'm going to do this a couple of times for you just
so you can see it. But let's go real quick. I'm going to go up to
our preview window here and I'm going to go
to the previous frame. I'm going to go like three or four frames, because again, remember it'll interpolate
in between the key frames. Now I'm going to move
the whole mask down. You see how when I do that, a new keyframe is presented
in our mask path. I'm just going to
keep doing this. Remember this is
getting really into the weeds a little bit
of just wanting to have that shininess of the
top of the camera be present. Now let's play it back. Let's play it back
so we can actually see our mask. There we go. You see our mask has followed
our camera all the way up, and then it stops here because
I haven't animated it yet. Let's animate it the rest
of the way. Why not? Obviously, it's not the best, but that twist is
a little rough. But that's all right. That looks not too bad. Go ahead if you need to write
here, go ahead and pause, build your mask for
your camera and key-frame its motion
to match the camera, and then start backup
when you're ready. Congratulations on
finishing your camera mask. Now if you want, we can
pre-comp this again, and our main comp
can stay organized. Let's click both of these
because this feels pretty good. Remember it is Shift Command C, Shift Control C on a PC. I do want it again to be the same duration as our two
layers that we're using. and let's just call
this camera 1 for now. Maybe if you wanted to put
something like camera 1 bottom-left or something like that you could if you want to. I'm going to hit Okay,
and now we have this. Something I want to do is I
want to change the color. All pre-comps standard
come as this color. I want to change
the color just so it looks a little bit different. Let's go and had it be cyan
just picking something else. The way I did that
is by clicking on this little color
square right here, and then it opens up different
label options for you. Now when we double-click
on our camera, we get into our two
cameras that are here. You notice nothing else is here, just our two cameras. Then finally, the other
thing we can do is we can go ahead and put
our camera pre-comp into our pre-comp folder so that way again, we're
staying organized. I just showed you how
to do this manually. I'd showed you essentially how to manually rotoscope something. But after effects now
has a rotoscoping tool. You can use that,
uses the power of Adobe Sensei to do
just what we just did, mask something and the movement is incredibly more
accurate than me. Let's go into our camera
1 comp we just created. I always like to
show you how to do things from scratch so that way you know how to do
things from scratch, but now I'm going to
show you the shortcut. Let's go into the camera we
just created. Here it is. Camera comp. The first thing we're going
to do is we are going to remove the mask from the
top layer we just created. I'm going to go ahead and
click that, remove it. Now, we see our entire camera. Then we're going to
go up to the top and we're going to click
on the Roto Brush Tool. The Roto Brush Tool
is at the very top. You can see it here and
it's the little human with the little paintbrush
connected to it. The shortcut for it
is Option W on a Mac, but because this is a tool I don't really
use very often, I haven't bothered to
remember the shortcut for it, but Option W. You'll see this turned our cursor into
the green circle thing. I'm going to move our
play head to a section of the timeline when the
camera body is very visible and separate
from my hands. I don't want it to be
up here, for example, where my hands are still very much there because I want to give the AI a clean shot
of what I wanted to track. I say like there,
that's probably fine, and now I'm going to
loosely click and drag around it with my brush tool, and you'll notice a lot of
things are starting to happen. You'll see down here at
the bottom it says for best results to change
it to full resolution. Let's go ahead and do that
just to make sure we're good. Right now I have it set to half. You remember at the top of
the lessons I told you, you can change things to a lower resolution
until you're ready to get more epic with stuff. Well, now it's time to
get more epic with stuff. Here we go? I have drawn around it. You can see it's made of a loose guess on what
I wanted to rotoscope. Now, this is actually
probably good enough for what I needed to
do because again, we don't need this
to be amazing, perfect. I have it here. Now what I'm going to
do is I'm going to hit Play and I'm going to
let Sensei do the rest. You see now that blows my mind
how fast it did that, it has started to build
out making that mask, which is just crazy to me. I'm sorry, it always
blows my mind to watch me do it but you see it is more
or less created it. Let's now go back to here, and you see we're now
in our camera comp. You see how well it's doing it. I mean, just crazy. There is with it off. You see we're losing information because the bottom layer is
the linear color key. We're losing information around this main part of the camera because there's
bits of that color in there, bits of that hue, I should say. Then we put the top back on. You see it as now really
masked it super tight. The Roto Brush Tool is obviously
so powerful, so amazing. I've barely even tapped into
what it's capable of doing, but you see it did
a really good job of capturing our camera. Now, literally what you can do next is repeat this step
over and over again. Head backup to your
project panel, pick another selection
from the multitude of different takes I have
in cameras 1, 2, and 3. Go down, add them
to your timeline, mask them, create whatever
layers you need to. If you want to rotoscope them the old-fashioned
way, go for it. If you want to use
the Roto Brush Tool, go for it. Keep doing that. You can have them come out
of the top if you want. You have them come out of
the sides of me if you want, go ham, you can have
some of them come up in front of me, if you want. It's up to you, but
go through now and do that animation for as
many cameras as you want. I would recommend having
about at least 10-20 cameras so that way it really
sells the look. When you feel like you're ready, your After Effects
projects should look something like this. Maybe you had cameras coming
in from different angles, from sideways,
horizontal, whatever. Whatever you decided to do, yours should look
something like this. You'll notice that mine does not have as many pre-comps
as yours probably does. Again, pre-comps
aren't always needed if you aren't trying to
keep things organized. When I originally
built this project, I knew that I would be
the only one in it. I didn't really pre-comp
anything and you'll notice that each of
them are doubled up. If I wanted to turn
these into pre-comps, similarly to before, highlight
both, Shift Command C, Shift Control C on a PC, and then I would do all
the same things that I taught you to do
in other lessons, and I would keep that the same. Then there you go. I could
then go through if I wanted to and pre-comp each of
these just to do that. I think utilizing
pre-comps and learning to think in terms
of pre composition is a really important thing that is the bulk of after-effects
as well as pre-comping. With all that being
said, as you can see, we've pretty much wrapped up creating our digital
moving portrait. In the next lesson though, I'm going to go over a few more interface
things that I think are worth noting when you're getting started
in After Effects, just some stuff I just want
to make sure you know. I'll see you over
in the next lesson.
7. Switches, Modes, & Pick Whips: Hello and welcome back. Your composition should look something like this
now, again, amazing. Congratulations. I wanted to cover
a few more things about the interface with
after-effects that I think will be important
as you begin to learn more beyond this class. Again, that is my hope for
you to continue beyond me. First, I want to explain
the layer switches. If they're not showing
up for you right now, go down to the bottom and toggle between layer
switches and modes. To switch back over to the layer switches mode toggle switches and modes
down here at the bottom, click it, and now we are in
the layer switches mode, which is what we're
going to focus on. The first thing is this little guy right here
peeking out in the corner. This is called shy, and this hides your
layer in a timeline. You have the master control for your layer switches up here. Let's say that I want all
of these top layers here to shy away whenever necessary. This is another way for you
to organize your projects, when you're working
on certain things, you're not focused on having things open that you
don't need to have open. I've clicked enable shy, and when I click up here, it's a higher layers in the
shy mode, they're gone. Again, this can be really
helpful for again, organizing your project or wanting to make sure
that you're focusing on very specific layers as
you move through the system. I also want to show you this because a lot of ways
that people learn after-effects is by actually buying templates from
third-party sites. Adobe Creative Cloud has its own After Effects templates
you can buy as well. But usually, the best
way to learn after effects beyond a
class like this is to buy a template or get a template for free from
somebody and then open it up. Usually, in those templates, you'll see that they have their base camp in shy mode
and things are missing. If you want to
actually learn how they've created something
interesting and After Effects, you want to turn off shy and see everything
that's possible. I wanted to go ahead
and show you that. That way again, as You
progress past this course, you can start to
retroactively learn different things within other people's After Effects projects. The second thing is
this little star right here next to
the little shy guy. This little star, you may or may not use it, but this collapses
transformations or a continuously rasterized as the layer if it's a shape text
or a vector layer. For example, if You bring
something in from Illustrator, then generally You'll want to leave this off unless You're really trying to rasterize every layer to get the
best image quality. But again, generally, it takes a lot of previewing
and rendering power, so most of the time, You're not going
to mess with it, but I figured it was
worth showing You. This next one next to it, this little dots right here. This is the quality
and sampling. Similar to changing things
to a lower resolution like I showed You before by clicking here and bringing things down, so that way You're not using
so much computing power. You can also toggle between
the different modes here to again calm down how much it's rendering
and how quickly. There's different modes. This one's at the blending mode, this one's a drafting mode. It just depends
on what You want. For most of the things I do, I leave it on the
quality that it's at because it tends
to work well for me. But if You're
noticing that you're struggling with things, then maybe mess with
that a little bit. Next is the effects option. This is just a way to
quickly toggle on and off any effects that
are on a layer. If I turn this off,
you see now we have this whole situation, our color key is
completely gone. Turn it on, it's back on. This can be an easier
way just to see what a layer is quickly
without having to go into maybe your effects controls panel and mess
with everything that way. The next one is the
frame blending layer. You see what this actually
have it turned off. But generally speaking, whenever I am working
with video files, I tend to turn this
on for everything. In the same way that
when you're animating, you probably want to have
things to have a little bit of motion blur, or even when You're filming
traditional content, You usually want to film things
to have some motion blur, to have that cinematic look. You can add that to your footage that you bring
into After Effects as well. Again, You can toggle
it on and off. This all just ties into the believability of
whatever You're creating. I think it's worth mentioning
and turning it on. Likewise, this next asset, is also the motion blur, and it simulates a
shutter and this works regardless of what
type of layer it is. Again, all of these had the film motion blur activated on them because they're all
technically video files. But say we had other
types of layers, solids, and whatnot. We would still maybe
want there to be a bit of motion blur whenever we're doing different keyframes and positioning
keyframes with them. That's what this is, is just another way to add and make it not
look so jarring. Make it look more seamless, give You that motion
in motion graphics. Now the next one is called
the adjustment layer. Similar to Premiere Pro, anything you do in
this layer will act as an adjustment to
everything below it. I have yet to ever use
this in After Effects, but just so you
know, it's there. Then finally the 3D layer, which I talked about earlier
on in this class, again, we're only focusing
on a 2D space here, but that is something
that exists, and you should mess with it
more whenever You're ready. Those are all of
the layer switches. Now let's toggle it over
to the layer modes. There are two modes that will
probably look familiar to you if you're coming to After
Effects from Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere,
similar to those, you can blend a layer
using different modes. Let's show me right here and let's do the
top version of me. Similar to before
you can darken me, you see that did something. Here let's make
this one go away. Switch just the top one. You can darken me. You can Linear Burn me. You can difference me. These are going to
be familiar again, if you're coming
to After Effects from Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, other
applications like that, these modes should look
relatively familiar to you. The next thing over
is the track matte. This can be really helpful
when building out shape layers and turning them into
masks for other layers, or even texts layers
too for that matter. In fact, we're going to go ahead and mess up our
project a little bit. I've gone ahead and made all of our layers invisible
so we can't see them. You can literally click
and drag, by the way, to make all your layers visible, invisible very, very quickly. Right now, I want to
go ahead and create a new layer and we're going to make it a text
layer, just real quick. So we're going to
hit up to the top, two ways to get the text
command T. Because remember, T by itself is
just transparency, so we're going to hit command T, control T to actually
get the text tool. Then we're going to click
and let's just type in, 'This class is fun.' Then let's make this big. Let's mess with some of the basic settings
of it real quick. I can't seem to highlight
a period, that's weird. There we go. Got
it. We got there. Let's go ahead and bold it, and then let's just
make it like super, really big, so big. Make it two lines as well. You can see I'm just messing with the spacing and all
that fun stuff, cool. We've made this
superhuman go jumbo, let's make it even bigger. I just want to make sure
you all really see it. Then we're going to
switch back over to our select tool, move
it to the center. So now we have this text. Let's go ahead and turn our background to be an
Alpha inverted matte. It basically took out the shape of everything
from the text layer. Whenever you're trying
to change something, you want to mess with
the track matte of the layer below it that
you want to change. It's a little
counterintuitive, but again, try this out and mess with it so you can see what it does. Now you see I just alpha matte, 'This class is fun,' and all
of the background went away, but it has now taken form
of the color of the text. So again, this can be really fun and interesting to
use when you're doing things like building out texts graphics to
do different things, say for a YouTube video, or building out motion text to emphasize different
backgrounds of things, experiments, and
double exposure. You can start to do a lot
of different stuff by using these track matte options
that are available to you. Play around with
it, check it out. We didn't necessarily use
it in our class project, but I wanted to make
sure you're aware of that function
and what it does. The track matte can
be really useful for building out different
motion text graphics. In fact, let me know if you're
interested in me showing you how to build texts
graphics in After Effects, and then turning them into Maggard or template
files you can sell, or using Premiere Pro so
you don't have to open up After Effects every
time you want to change something in your text. Finally, the last
thing I want to cover for you all
is the pick whip, otherwise known as
parent and link. So let's say that I know I'm always going to want
each of my cameras to stay aligned
with me no matter what I do with me in this comp. Then I can parent pick whip each of them to my main layer, and then whatever I now
do to my main layer, it is reinforced
by the pick whip. So let me go ahead
and demonstrate to you what I'm talking about. Because I just said a
whole bunch of stuff, it may not make sense. So here's me, we're going to go
ahead and hit the "P key" for position here is me, my comp at the top, I'm moving me around. Nothing else is moving with me. Now, let's go ahead and
parent link some stuff to me. There are a few
ways you can do it. The first way is you can click, and you'll see every layer is represented in our
composition right here, and so I could
literally just every time go through
and click "to me." That's one way to do
it. Another way to do it is to click the "Pick Whip" and choose what layer you want to be the parent layer. So you click and drag, and literally that pick
whips it up to the top. Give me a second, I'm going
to pick whip everything. No, I'm going to pick
whip a couple of things, I'm not going to pick
whip everything. Now, whatever I do to
this composition layer, the parent layer, all of these other layers are now
linked to that parent layer. Whatever I do to it, maybe I change the
position of it. So let's hit the
"P key". You see now those cameras
are moving with it. It's almost as if
they're pre-comped with mine, but not necessarily. They are still their own separate layers that
have their own thing. In fact, something I can do is, I can click on two of these and change
their position again, maybe they'll be lower now, and you see nothing else
moved, just those cameras. Then when I move
it again though, now that new position
of that camera is being scooted over because
it's parented to, or linked to the parent
layer, which is me. The pick whip can be a
really powerful tool for linking different layers together and speeding up
your overall animation. Once you do whatever features
you want to a layer, especially when maybe
creating pre-comps, aren't quite what
you need to do, or feel like a bit
of an exaggeration, feel like you don't need to
do quite as much with that, you just need something to know and respond to something else, the pick whip/parenting is
a great way to do that. So check that out, I feel like that's
something worth knowing. Again, especially if you end up using other people's templates
and things like that, and you're trying to figure out why things aren't working, etc, check the pick whips
of your layers to make sure that they haven't
maybe parented something to something else and that's why
they're not working. That's it for this lesson. I wanted to explain a few more
tools that are built into the interface after
you had some time to build and play in the software because
I figured they'd make more sense to you
now that you've messed around in After
Effects and built some stuff. So in the next lesson, it's time to export,
I'll see you over there.
8. Render & Export: We've built our
amazing animation. It does us no good [LAUGHTER]
in After Effects alone. It is time to render
it or export it. There are two ways you
can go about this. You can add it to
your render queue, which is basically
like exporting something directly
out of Premiere Pro, if you're familiar
with Premiere. You can't do anything else
in the program while it's rendering or if you have the
full Creative Cloud suite, then you can shoot it
over to Encoder to export and keep working
on something else. Let's set it up to render first. Make sure that your workspace, remember that's
this top bar here, is adjusted to the area that
you want to have rendered. I think I already had
set it up to go there. That feels good.
Everything looks good. Now I'm just going to go to
File at the top and then down to Export and then Add
to my Render Queue. You'll see that brings
up a new window on top of your timeline. If you've worked
with Encoder before, then you should recognize
the word queue, meaning that, yes, you can also render a
list of things if you're working in multiple
comps and have multiple assets that you
want to work through. Generally, the default settings are going to export
your creation as a.MOV in the highest resolution possible based on your
original comp settings. If you want to adjust anything, you can, but if you're rendering straight
from After Effects, you're limited on the export
settings unless you really know what you're doing and want to manipulate
these settings a lot. You can do that by clicking
on whatever settings you want to manipulate and then working through those boxes. The main thing I want
to tell you to remember in this render queue is to actually figure out for sure where your final video
is going to be saved. Depending on what you've done in After Effects now or before, it might save it in a place that to you will
seem very random, but it's just based on After
Effects' default settings. I'm going to save mine
to the desktop, again, that base folder we
made at the top of this class and I'm just
going to call this Exports. Some people call it renders. We're going to make
a folder in there and I'm going to call it Final Export and I hit Save. Let's go ahead and
now render this out. Everything I feel is good, best quality settings, full resolution,
our sizes there, everything looks good on my end. Use the comp's frame rate, noticing that right
here and then Time Span: Work Area Only, is what I have it set to. Then we're going to go
ahead and render it out. Here we go. [NOISE] It's done. Now that is a way to set up a render in After
Effects itself. You saw mine pretty quickly, again, our final video
is only five seconds. Hopefully it doesn't
take you too long if your system is a
little bit older, but should work out pretty well. Now let's go ahead and
export a version of this to Encoder so you can see
what that looks like too. File, down to Export, and then Add to Adobe
Media Encoder Queue. When you do that, that is going to
open up Encoder. That brought up Encoder
and you see now that my final export from AE, After Effects, is sitting
here and ready to be encoded. Similarly to After
Effects as well, it's added it to the queue. Once again, you can have things in your queue with
Encoder from Premiere, from After Effects, all sorts of stuff, setting things up. I know a lot of motion
graphics artists, video producers like myself, they'll work all day on a whole bunch of stuff
and then set it all up to render while they go get dinner [LAUGHTER] or
something like that. Encoder can be a
really helpful tool. If you've used Media
Encoder before, it's going to use whatever preset or settings
you last used. In my case, as a digital
storyteller, video producer, YouTuber, I was using YouTube
1080p preset settings. That's what it's just using now, but you can also change
whatever preset it is. If you go down here to the left, you have the Preset Browser. My advice is to type in whatever platform you want
your final video to end up on. For example, let's say I want
this to end up on YouTube, which I probably would, as I start typing in YouTube, I bring up all the
different settings based on different
resolution sizes that I could use for
YouTube and these are optimized to work well
on that platform. Similarly, Facebook,
if I type that in, all the Facebook settings. If you're a filmmaker
and you put your stuff on Vimeo,
Vimeo settings. There are a lot of
different presets in here. Again, another one
that's pretty popular is Mobile Device
settings as well. Maybe something that
you want to go to, IG Reels or IGTV. There we go. You could utilize
these settings so that way they play pretty well, the video plays well on a phone rather than in a
browser of some kind. Feel free to pick your
appropriate settings. Again, I'm going to
leave mine at YouTube because that's
generally what I do. However, you'll notice that
this is YouTube 1080p. Remember that our
final comp is actually bigger than a 1080p video. Something I want to do is
I want to click on this, which is going to
open up Dynamic Link. Again, similarly if you are coming to this from
Adobe Premiere Pro, what you'll see should look
somewhat familiar to you. The one thing I want to do, so that way I make sure
that I'm actually utilizing all of the real estate that I've created with
my composition, is I want to hit Match Source. Now you'll see we
have our 2.5K comp that we created and the resolution matches
what it should be. I'm just going to hit Okay. You'll notice now it says Custom because I have adjusted
things just a little bit. Similarly to before, make sure you figure out
where you're saving this to. I'm going to click on this and then I'm going to
save it to the desktop, where again, we have our intro to After
Effects folder, Exports. We'll call this Final Export
Encoder and hit Save. With that, now you can actually, which you could before, but I'm just doing it now, I'm going to Command S, Control S to save my project. I'm going to quit out of After Effects because I don't
need it open anymore. You'll see Encoder is still
open and I can go ahead and hit the Play button
and have it render out. You actually see it
rendered out a lot faster. There you go. You can now
share your project down below here on this platform
or on social media. If you do share it, feel free to at me. I love to see what
you-all create, especially if you end up
creating something else, not using my footage, but learning from this class. @HALLEASE.MP4 is my IG handle or use the hashtag
HalleaseTaughtMe. I love seeing what you-all do with what you learn.
Alright you-all. With that, let's wrap
this completely up.
Hallease, Digital Storyteller, Video Producer
