Master 3D Camera In After Effects

1. Welcome! Start here: Welcome to After Effects three D camera. In this class, you'll go from confused three D to confidently creating smooth, cinematic camera moves that actually feel professional. This class is for motion designers, video editors, and creators who feel overwhelmed by three D camera settings. If your shots feel flat or unpredictable, you're in the right place. You'll learn how to build and control the three D camera inside after effects through three core pillars, camera foundations, clean camera moves, and realistic parallax. Using after effects, you'll create a fully animated three d scene from real footage. Along the way, you'll practice with guided exercises and downloadable project files so you can follow along every step without guessing. I recommend watching videos not because every lesson builds into the previous one. You can control the volume and the playback speed of every video learning at your own pace. If you can start have any questions, be sure to drop them in the current section below. Just make sure to check the existing questions first because there's a good chance that the question you want to ask has already been answered in detail. Point you'll be asked to review, please wait until you've had a chance to really experience the material. Your honest feedback helps improve the course and better serve you and future students. Thanks again for joining this class. I'm genuinely excited to help create stunning cinematic three D videos and to give you the confidence to use them in real projects with a personal or clients based. Let's jump into the first lesson. 2. How to Create a 3D Camera in After Effects: Welcome. And let's learn how to create a camera. There are a couple of ways we can do this. First of all, we need to create composition. This is going to be 1920 by 1080, 1080 by 1920, or if there's a specific one that you need, we'll just have to put it in person game. The first way is to right click in your composition window, click on you and camera. These are the camera settings that we'll talk about the next video. But for now, I'm just going to click on Cancel. The second way is going to go into layer and camera. So if I click here, it's the same thing. But you will notice here that if we come here, we have a shortcut, and I really recommend you to learn the shortcut. It's going to save you a ton of time. Instead of right clicking and clicking here and then searching because sometimes you don't always remember where it's located, it's a lot easier and faster to press a shortcut. So on a Mac, it's going to be Shift Option Command C. Windows is going to be Shift Control, Alt C. So just click it a couple of times. Make sure you remember I can save you a lot of time in the future. And once you learn that, let's jump into the next video. 3. After Effects 3D Camera Settings Explained Simply (Focal Length, Depth, Presets): In this video, let's talk about the camera settings. So once again, clickOs are good to create a camera, and we have a number of settings here. Now, you don't have to precisely know every single thing here in order to work with the camera. First of all, we have a name the top. Then we have preset. We use a preset if let's say you use specific camera settings all the time, then set your specific parameters here. You can customize this, and then you can go ahead and click here to save a preset, give it a name, and it's going to appear here. Next, we need to select the type two node camera or one node camera. Basically, the difference is one node camera. It's going to act like a layer. So whenever we move it, we'll just move it, right, left, up and down. However, a two node camera, it has a point of interest and we can set a point of interest to, let's say, my arm. And then whenever we move the camera to the left to the right up or down, it's going to face the point of interest all the time. So a one node camera is going to move like this right and left. But the two node camera is going to move like this. It's going to move around our point of interest, and it's going to face and always show our point of interest, always. Recommend you setting a two node camera because we can actually do something later to make a fit easier that will allow us to do both the two node and one node camera. But if you select a one node, you will not be able to use the two node feature. So just like the two node. Next, we have the film size, focal length, Zoom, and angle view. Now, these parameters are similar to an actual real camera. So if you know how real camera works, then simplifies a lot of things for you. If you don't know, let me quickly explain. So the film size is basically like the sensor size because you have different size sensors. There's a big sensor sometimes. There's the crop sensor. There's like a film sensor, which is absolutely huge and giant. And in your phones, you have small sensors. So this just shows the sensor size. And in this case, it shows it in pixels, which we can actually see at the bottom, but we can switch it to millimeters or 2 ", and it's going to change automatically. I'll say that it's a little bit confusing and not super convenient because, for example, in pixels, we want to make sure we see the comp size. This is the one we have in the background. It's height 1080 pixels. But if I want to see the film size, for example, I need to switch to millimeters because that's what I'm used to. But then the comp size is 381 millimeters, which doesn't make any sense. So for that reason, I just leave it in pixels. I just know it's the size 1080, and then whenever I need, I just select, for example, 50 millimeters and changes all the other values automatically. Now, the focal line that you see at the bottom, basically how zoomed in something is. On lens of the camera, sometimes you see 18 millimeter, 50 millimeter, and it's basically the same thing as we have at the top. So this is 50 millimeter. And if I switch back to millimeters, you'll see that it's 50 milli. It means that it's just kind of a regular zoom for the camera. It's not really like a wide shot and it's not really like a very zoom dental. And then for measure film size horizontally, vertically diagonally, it doesn't change these settings at all. It's just the way the information is presented. So if I go to vertically, some of the numbers will change here. Then it doesn't actually change the settings. It just changes the calculations. But the ratio and the quality and the size, everything stays the same. If I click on diagonally, it's going to do it even differently. So this one I just always leave at horizontal, it's good to go. Now, you will also notice that the enable depth of field is grade out, and we'll talk about this a little bit later. So if I move this a little bit up and click on see that we have Advanced and three D, I'll talk about the difference a little bit later and explain everything in detail. But for now, remember that in classic three D, we have depth of field and advanced three D, we do not have deptofeld. So if I click on Classic three D, double click on the camera, we have this option enabled. So now that you know how it works, just remember to node camera, select a preset of whatever mill you need. If you don't know what kind of millimeter you need, then just set 450. It's going to be like a default one. And press okay. And there you go. There you have your camera. So if you have any questions, let me know, let's jump to the next video. 4. Move the Camera or Move the Layers? Understanding 3D Camera Movement: In this video, I'd like you to understand how the camera moves or how layers move. So there are two ways that we can do things. We can basically move the camera to the layers or we can move the layers to the camera and works perfectly in two ways. So let me give you an example. Why would you want to move a specific layer to the camera? Because if you know something about SVG files or about rustizing, basically, in order to keep very good quality, we need to increase the layer in size. So for example, on the screen, I have an Apple Joy panel, and there are a couple of things we can do. We can either we can move the camera closer to the panel or we can move the panel closer to the camera. Order to make sure it works when we work with camera, we want to make sure our layers are three D. If it's not going to be three D, by clicking on this button, it's just not going to be affected by the camera. So I'm going to click on the camera, press on Peep. I'm going to open the position of the camera, and right now, I can either zoom out or zoom in. By person shift, I'm going to zoom in more. And you can see that we lose the quality. The PingGe is in a very bad quality. If I was to click here and click on this button, rasterize, and this button makes sure that a layer is rasterized. It means that if I click on S, for example, and I increase the scale, you will see that we keep the same quality, even though it increases in size. So if you ever work with SVG files or the files that can be rasterized, like, for example, text as well. So if I put any text on the screen, it's very small going to increase in size in the properties panel. Let me just quickly disable it. The MAC files and it's put it in the middle. Once again, if we were to use the camera to zoom in, we would lose the quality, but if we use the text itself to increase the scale, it's always going to be super super sharp. So if you use text or SVG files, in that case, you can increase the files themselves. And if you work with anything like videos, pictures, then the camera is going to be your best friend. I just wanted to mention that because sometimes with SVG files, you want to make sure you keep this very, very high quality. 99% of the time, I move the camera itself and not the layers. If you have any questions, let me know. That let's jump into the next. 5. Classic 3D vs Advanced 3D vs Cinema 4D Renderer in After Effects: In this video, let's talk about the different renderers. In order to change the renderers, we need to create the camera. Shift Option command C. We're going to create the camera, and there we have them. We have classic three D, advanced three D, and Cinema four D. Cinemat Do applications, all about three D. And if you have it, then yes, you can set it, but if you don't have it, this is what you're going to have. R. So I don't have Cinema four D, and that's why I only switch between the classic three D and advanced three D. So we need to know the difference between classic and advanced. Remember, I told you that in classic three D, we have depth of field. What is depth of field? Well, it's blurry background. So if you ever saw, professional pictures taken, the background is blurry, that's how you do it with the depth of field. On DSLRs, on mirror less cameras, you know, those big cameras with big lenses, it's very easy to do, and you will always have it with those cameras. However, here, we can disable. So, let me give you a quick example. I'm going to press on Command Y to create a solid. I just want to create the background, and I'm going to press on Q to create a shape. And let's create maybe another shape. Okay, so we have two shapes and going to make it white. Okay, so we have two shapes, and we have a background. I'm going to leave the background two D so that it's not affected by the camera. But for the shape layer one and shape layer two, which is the two rectangles, I'm going to make D. And also, I'm going to add a camera. Another important aspect is we have different viewers. So view one, where I can add the second viewer so that we can see things better. This allows us to move things in three D a little bit easier. For example, this is the top view. And so if I select one of the layers, press on P, and actually let's select this one, the one left and move it a little bit further away, you can see that it's the top view. So this is what the camera sees. Like, this line is where the right rectangle is located, but the rectangle on the left, it moved a little bit further away. Now, we double click on the camera and enable the depth of field and select one viewer, we'll see that the viewer on left is a little bit blurry. And that's exactly the thing. That's the depth of field. To make it even more visible, we can open the camera layer camera options and increase the blur level so that it's going to blur things a little bit more, although we need to go into the top down view and change the focus distance because right now the focus distance is here. So we're focusing on this our rectangle on the right is placed right on the sling here. So we need to move this a little bit further away. So for focus distance, I'm just going to move it a little bit further away, like so, and now we can increase the blurry level perfect. And the background is going to get a low blurriar. So let's select one viewer, and this is the perfect setting. By the way, I somehow had two cameras, and if I delete the camera on the background, we are going to get rid of these lines diagonal lines on the screen. If we were to switch to Advanced three D, we are not going to have any depth of field. The reason is because we have something more here. So if I go to Classic three D for a second and I open the shape layer, we have some sort of geometry options, but it's grade out. Well, that's because we need to go into Advanced three D, and in advanced three D, we have the geometry options. Now, we can make layers very three D. Like we can stretch them out. So we can add the extrusion depth, and then if I rotate it, so if I do rotation, you will see that we added, like, actual depth to it. But this can become a bit of an issue. What if we want our layers to be three D, but we want to have blur in the background? Well, unfortunately, there's no real way to do it in after effect because there's an issue with the renderer. So if you really want to do it, what you can do is you can kind of, like, precompose what you have on the screen by pressing Shift Command C or Shift Control C on Windows. Click on a K. And so you will have this composition that you need to turn three D, and then you can move the whole composition or you can rotate it around. But the problem is that this is what you're going to get. It's not real three D. Like, the one right is going to look three D, but it's not actual three D. But I'm going to press Command to precompose. And yes, this is the big difference. In classic three D, we have this beautiful blurred background, but in advanced three D, we can turn things actual three D. Depending on the type of work I do, I switch between the different renders. Most of the time, I'm going for the blur, but that's just because my work allows me to do that, and that's kind of what I'm passionate about about the blur. Depending on the type of work you do, you should choose an appropriate renderer. So if you have any questions, let me know, let's jump to the next video. 6. Mastering 3D Camera Options in After Effects (Position, Focus & Depth Control): In this video, I like to talk about different camera options. What I mean by that is that if we open the camera, we have camera options. We don't have a lot of camera options in advanced three D, but if we switch to classic three D, who, there we go. We have a lot more. So what can we do here? We can enable and disable the depth of field. We can zoom in or zoom out, like change the focus distance. So as you can see, we have the one on the right in focus, but then I can make sure that we have the one left and focus and the right and the one on the right out of focus. Like so then we can increase the aperture. Basically, increasing the aperture will make the blur a little bit more, but then we can increase the blur level to increase the blur itself. And everything you see lower, starting from iris until the highlight saturation, it's everything to do with the customization of the blurry background. Agra. So limit delete all of this, I'm going to person Command Y to create another solid, and I'm going to apply CC ball action. I'm going to decrease the size of the balls. Like so put it below our camera, make sure we turn into three D, and there you go. If I zoom in, we can see we have, like, a very specific blur on the background. But we now open the camera settings, instead of, for example, fast rectangle, go to decagon, it's going to change the way the blur is presented. So if I zoom out, this is what we're going to get. So before and after, before and after. You can customize the other things here as well. But I will say that all of this is if you have something super specific that you're going for because the client request it you're working the project that has to have it, or you just have a lot of time and creativity to do this. But most of the time, I do not recommend touching this because changing this will not really change the result of your work, but it's going to require you to spend some time on it. But if it's not going to make you work better or more valuable, then why would you spend time doing this? You're just going to waste your time. So really touch this because it's already done automatically, but like default settings. But if there is a need for you to go with something super specific, you can go ahead and tweak the settings. All you have to do is to literally just drag the slider right and left, like so, and then you'll be able to see the difference on the screen. But for most of the people, like 99.999% of people in 999 9% of the time, you don't really need this. If you have any questions, let me know and let's jump into the next video. 7. Animate Camera vs Null Object Rig in After Effects (Best Professional Workflow): Now let's learn how to animate the camera. And there are two ways we can do this. We can either animate the camera itself or we can connect it to nulls and animate the nulls. What is a null? If we don't know? Well, it's just an empty layer that you can adjust all sorts of different parameters, apply effects to. And so if we connect camera to the null, it means that we'll be able to influence the null and it's going to drag the camera. But the great thing about this is that we can create multiple nulls and connect one null to another, and it's going to have a very specific effect, which I'm going to show you it's going to create like super, super smooth movement. Which after effect is famous for. So let's create the camera. And if I double click on the camera, it is a two node camera. Now, if I opened up and open the transform and change, actually, let's turn this stuff three D. And if I change the position, then you will see that it always focuses right on the middle. So this is what point of interest does, and I can change the point of interest to the right and to the left. So therefore, it's going to change like Z. But I'm going to press and commands. Now, if we were to animate this, let's do some very simple animation. Let's change the position, and let's increase the size, and let's move it maybe a little bit to the left so that we go something like this. And then we can select it, press F nine or Mark F N F nine, and let's make the movement a little bit smoother by pressing this button on the graph. So let's take a look at what we have. It's very fast. Let's make sure it is roughly 1 second the movement is. Perfect. So that's one way to do this. But then if we were to do a second movement, we would have to put another keyframe and maybe and maybe move like a little bit. Well, let's do it like this. But if we go to the graph editor, the movement now looks a little bit weird. And basically, what has to be done is it has to do the first movement, stop, and then do the second movement. But let's track the second movement. Like so. So let's take a look at the movement. There you go. Well, it still looks pretty interesting, but there's a better way to do this. So I'm actually going to just duplicate our composition, open the second composition, and let's delete the camera and create a new one from scratch. Now, I'm also going to create a null by pressing Shift Option Command Y or Shift Control Alt Y on Windows. And I'm going to click on our camera and then parent by clicking here you will notice that if I now press on P, and actually, let's turn the null three D, and I move it to the right and to the left, it just moves right and left because we don't have any point of interest with the nulls. And it means that we have the camera where we have the point of interest so that if I move the camera, we have exactly the same effect as before. There we go. But then if we move the null, we don't really have that. So we have a bit of flexibility. Although, whenever I work personally with nulls, I don't really touch the camera transform at all. So I'm just going to go ahead. Close it. Now, let's create position keyframe and orientation keyframe, pressed on R in order to have this. And I'm going to press on you to have both the position and the oritation. So I will drag these keyframes to the very beginning, go to one seconds, and let's do roughly something similar. So I'm going to zoom in and what do we have here? We zoomed in and a little bit to the left. Okay. And let's do rotation a bit to left and change the position a little bit to the right. So sound like so, boom. And here's the part why we want to do nulls because we can create a rig out of that. So for that, I'm going to select our null, duplicate it, and press on you, and we're going to have exactly the same animation. But I'm going to delete the first key frames. Now we need to connect the first null to the second null. Let's do it like so. And now if I change the position, rotation, whatever, it's going to work very similar. So let's see what we had here. There you go. Let's create something similar. So we need to change the position a little bit. You do have to play around with it, but I'm going to show you the reason why we're doing it because it's going to allow us to do something we would not be able to do. So let's see if it's something similar. Okay, there you go. Well, it is roughly similar. It doesn't have to be precise for this example because we can always make precise a little bit later. Now, here's the great part about this. If I select all of this and I go into the graph editor and I press F nine to make sure if I select these keyframes here and press F nine to make it smooth. Select it, make it smooth. Like so let's see what we have. I know the movement is a little bit weird now because we played around with it like a little bit too much. But here's the best part. We can now overlay these keyframes, and what it allows us to do is it allows us to make super smooth movement where it doesn't have to stop. But while the first movement is finishing, the second movement starts. And so this is the part that allows to create super smooth movement. So if we take a look, while the first movement is still in process, we're already starting to move a little bit up or we can overlap it even further. So let's take so this is the part that becomes super, super smooth. And if we compare it to here where it has to stop, this is the part where it has to stop. And there's a couple of things we can do. We can kind of move it a little bit up so that the movement doesn't stop completely, but it's just a lot easier to do it with nested nose or with this, like, rig out of nose. So let's see what we have with. Can see it's still not super perfect. We can try to make it, like, super perfect and smooth, but let's see if we can do it. It's still not super, super smooth. There's still a bit of a bump, but here in between, super smooth. And so this allows us to create we can connect like ten, 15. It doesn't matter. There's limited number of nulls that we can connect to each other. Now, I would recommend you to kind of give a try for both and see whichever you feel like is more convenient for you, more straightforward. Maybe you need a bit of time to get used to this, to play around 90 plus percent of the time. I use nested nulls or, like, null rig in order to animate the camera, and I do not animate the camera itself because it's just a little bit harder because we cannot achieve this super smooth movement, like battery smooth movement. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, let's jump to the next video. 8. How to Animate a 3D Camera Along a Specific Path in After Effects: In this video, I'd like to show you how you can animate a camera cross a specific path. In order to do that, we need to draw our path. I'm going to use the pencil by pressing J going to drag this part out, and let's do something crazy. It would be something like this. So how can we make the camera go through this path? Well, no to do that, we need to use nulls. We cannot just use the camera to do that. We have to use nulls. And in this case, I'm going to open the shape layer, content shape path. I have to select this path and press Command C or Control C, then we need to connect the camera to our null. And I'm going to make sure that the null, we don't have any animations. The press on P to open the position, select the position and press on Command V. And it's going to paste this path. Now, if I play this video, it follows this exact path. Now, it doesn't really follow this path here on the screen because this path is not really three D. So a person commands that, make the path three D. And now, if we paste it, you'll see that our path will always stay right in the middle. So whenever we go, it stays right in the middle. And one of the things we can do, we can select cha point by pressing on A of the null, and then we can make sure it is three D, and then we can just zoom in to follow this path. So there we go. Now we will follow from here to here. And some of the things that we can do is, let's say, select the shape layer and the null, press on to reveal the keyframes. And actually, for this shape, let's quickly do an animation, click on add Trim paths, let's animate the end. So I'm going to move this end 100% to the same keyframe as when we have the end of the null. And then here, just going to zero, going to select this both we're going to select and press F nine, and then go to the graph editor, select, and then drag it out smooth to exo, and let's see what we have on the screen. Let's play. There you go. Now our camera follows this. A couple of things we can do is, let's say we can enable the depth of field, have it. The depth of field is on. Great. So let's click on R for rotation of the null and then rotate it a little bit. So let's give it a try. Like, so just to see the difference, and then we can increase the depth of field or the blurry level, make it a little bit better. So let's see what we have. Okay, so this part is not in focus. Actually, let's have two viewers to see exactly what's going on. So I think we need to change the focus. Let's decrease the blurry level a little bit to see our path a little bit better. Go to one viewer, and there you go. So this is the kind of animation. And then, of course, we can animate the rotation as well, can actually go from all zero. So from like this to end like that. And then, of course, we can customize the focus distance. So if we go into view one, the focus distance needs to be roughly here because right in this point, we have our layers. So let's go to one viewer, and now we have this part in focus. And for orientation change, we can also press F nine to make it smooth. Perfect. So let's see. So that's how you do it. If you have any questions, let me know. But let's jump in the next 9. Depth Extension in After Effects: Creating Real 3D Space in Your Scene: In this video, I want to talk about a very interesting plug in for after effect. It's called depth. You can get it for free. If you have the ability to support the artist, then you can name a fair price, but you can always get it for free. So if you want to get free, just click on zero and purche again. The link is going to be in the resources section. Just go ahead and install it on your computer. The process is pretty simple, and then we need to go into after effects. Once you're in after effects, we need to create a new composition, and I'd like to walk you through what this. Do something very simple. Let's have two shapes. Let's have these shapes the same size. So I just created one, pressing Command D to duplicate, going to press on P to change the position, and there we go. We have two identical shapes, and we just put them right in the middle to make sure it is right in the middle by using the align tool and this one as well. Perfect. And let's enter the anchor point by clicking command and on this button here. Let's do the same for this one. I just like when things are super precise, right in the middle with anchor points also in the middle. If we turn these three D, let's go ahead and do that here and click on three D. If I want to move these in space a little bit, they will change size because if I put my arm closer to the camera, the arm is going to get bigger or the hand. And then if I put it further away, it becomes smaller on your screen. So the same thing happens here, and sometimes it becomes a bit of a problem. Let me give you an example. For example, actually, let's go into the horizontal and I'm going to set two viewers. Okay, so this is the top view. It's like the one in the bottom, and I'm going to move it further away. As you can see, as it moves further from the center, it becomes smaller in size. What if we don't want it to become smaller? Well, that's when we use the depth plugin. So once you install it, you will have it in the window and you need to click here and it's going to appear. In my case, I already have. To the right. And here's what happens. I'm going to press on Command set two and two. In order for this plugin to work, we need to have two D layers, and here's what it does. So layer spacing will tell how much space is going to be between different layers. In this case, it's saying 1,000, so it's going to be like 1,000 pixels. Although we can set it to a smaller number, let's say, to 500. Then you can ask to create a null with the camera. Something we already discussed about is the null rig that you can create. And then the layer distance is basically the distance that it's going to start with from the middle, but it's basically how offset all the layers will be from the center. I just always keep this one at zero. Then you can select the camera one you want. And then you just select your two layers and click on disperse. Take a look at what happened. It looks like these guys are in the same position, but these guys are not in the same position. These guys, one of them is right here. The other one is a lot further away, like 500 pixels away. So if a person P and person P, take a look. So, this one is 540, 12 68. So this is, like, up and down, right or left. But in terms of, like, the aces in terms of, like, the three D aces. This one is at zero, and this one is at 500. Now, it's also important to know that whichever one is going to be on top is going to be closer to the camera. So if we wanted to do it vice versa, we would first need to move the shape layer one to the top like so, and it will give us the opportunity to keep it here and the one the bottom would move to this place. Sometimes you might have many different layers in different positions in terms of, like, three D positions. So let's say you want to keep like ten layers here and ten layers here. Well, all you have to do is just parent. So let me person commands, and let's do another one, P, I'm going to duplicate, move it to the bottom. Okay. And I'm going to let's do it like this. Let's put layer one to the top. So this is going to be the top one. Let's call it shape top. And these two are going to be at the bottom. Now, if I was to select all three, click on disperse, we would have three different ones. So one, two, and three. The third one is going to be even further away. You get the idea, right? So it's going to place them 500 pixels apart from each other. So 500, this is this number. But if I was to parent it, so let me parent this one to this one, so shape two to shape three. And I'm going to select all of these, click on disperse. Shape one is going to be right here, right in the center. But two and three are going to be in this position because we did parenting. I hope you can see the power of this depth plugin. It is free and it allows us to move things in three D, keeping them the same size. Basically, the way it does it is if we also click on shifts and Shift S, and let's do here shifts. So the one that top that doesn't move in three D space, the scale says at 100. The one that moves further away, the scale increases. So it moves further away, but the scale increases. So it just knows the ratio much it needs to go back and by how much it needs to increase the scale to keep it the same size. And the one that is parented, it just keeps the same size. But if I was to deparent it, it would be exactly the same as this one in terms of the scale. So super powerful, easy to use. Although I will say sometimes it is a little bit laggy, so it's not super perfect, but overall it is really useful. It's easy ton of time. So if you have any questions, let me know. Add than that, let's jump into the next video and use this in order to create a parallax. 10. Parallax in After Effects: How to Create Realistic 3D Depth with a Camera: In this video, let's talk about parallax. It's something we see in every day, but when it comes to three D in terms of the software, it is something that's so unique and so interesting that really separates the two D and three D, and this is one of the reasons why you want to use three D. So basically what parallax is whatever is closer to the camera is going to move faster than something that's further away from the camera. Just the math, the physics, and it's this perception. So let me show you an example. As you can see on the screen, the car is driving along the road. We have hills or whatever this is, in the foreground, it's moving very fast. But then if we compare that to something like clouds on the background, the clouds in the background move a lot slower. And this is the parallax. Whatever's in front of the camera, whatever it's super close, that's the part that's moves super fast, whatever is further away, move super slow. And we can do this parallax. After effect. So let's see how to do it. O depth plugin is actually going to be super useful because we already have two things in three D. So we have two shapes. One is closer to the camera. The other one is further away from the camera. So if I select our camera controller and press on P to move it up and down, we'll see that it's going to move slightly differently, right? The one that's closer, this is the one at the top, it moves a lot faster than the one in the background. So let's take a look And if I move right to left, you can see exactly the same effect. Actually, you can see this better here. So move camera the same, but the objects move slightly differently. Beautiful. So whenever you work in three D and create videos with Parallax, it takes the video just to absolutely next level, which makes the video a lot more expensive, a lot more interesting to watch because you cannot achieve this effect in two D. I mean, technically, you can if you animate every single thing, but you wouldn't do it. It's just it's not sustainable for a long period of time. So this is how you do it in after effects. If you have any questions, let me know, than that let's jump into the next video. 11. Practical 3D Camera Project: Turning Real Footage into a Cinematic 3D Cut-Out Sc: Welcome. Now that we've learned so much about three D camera, let's do some practice. In the resources section, you will find a file that you need to download and then just drag and drop it into after effects. Then in order to create the composition, we can do it by hand by clicking here. But we can also do is just drag it like so, and there you go. This is a camera, and this is a video of me. Now, I'd like to cut this video up a little bit. So let's come to roughly around here. I'm going to select our layer and press Shift Command D. By the way, you can record a video of yourself like this and then give it a try with the video of yourself, but if not, you can always just go to downloadable resources and download this video. And then I'm going to move this layer to the very beginning and press on shift so that it sticks, like so, and let's cut it to well, let's do roughly here. Shift Command D or Shift Control D on Windows. Now I'm going to press on N to set the in and out point. In this case, it's going to be the outpoint. And I'm going to press on Shift command X or Shift Control X on Windows to make sure we make our composition the size of the in and out points. There you go. Now, we will use something we haven't used before and not necessarily to do with three D cameras, but it's an interesting fact that we can do. It's called roto Brush tool. So select it by pressing here and then double click on the video. So a couple of things we need to do. We need to select myself, and we will cut myself from the background because I don't have this kind of background. I want to create my own background, for example. So I'm going to cut myself out, and I'm going to do this by, you know, selecting myself, like so. If you created a composition yourself and then put the video here, it may say that there's something like a frame rate mismatch. So all I want to do is to go into composition settings and then set the right frame rate here. So for this video, it's going to be this no, I'm going to select the Root Brush tool and I'm going to select myself. If you want to make the green selector a little bit bigger, press on command, press on the mouse like so, and then scroll up and down to make it bigger or smaller. If you want to get rid of certain parts, just press on option and make sure to diselect certain parts, but we need to select this part here, but diselect here. Let's zoom in a little bit and select flow more parts, select here and here. I want to make sure we do good selection. We can deselect this part because it's part of the wall and going to fit the screen by pressing here. Now I need to press on space. And it's going to play this video and make sure it does the right selection of everything. If this selection goes wrong at some point, you can always stop just pressing space and then do this selection once again by using the same tools that I already explained to you. Okay, this selection is perfect. I'm going to press and freeze, and we need to give it some time to freeze the frames because we don't want it to render it in real time and cut it out in real time because you're going to take a lot of power of our computer. Once it's completed, just make sure to cross this layer, and there you go. There we have our effect. I'm cut out from the background. I'm going to press Command Y or Control Y to create a white solid and put it on the background. So, you know, select the color, just make sure to click here and select your color and press in okay. In this case, we need to delete it. And we can maybe make myself a little bit bigger, put myself. Actually, let's not make myself bigger, but just move it a little bit to the right so that I'm more in the middle. Like so. So before and after. Yeah, I think this is better. I'm also going to save the project by pressing Command and call it M. Now, I'm going to go to Safari and search for smooth shapes, and I need to download some sort of smooth shapes. It doesn't matter what kind of shapes they are. Let's download these ones because we don't need a ton of shapes, but we need a few. So I'm going to download it. It doesn't matter that it's not PNG. Okay, I'm going to it in. And I'm going to search for an effect in the effects and Control panel, so you can search it for here, Color key. Or actually, I recommend you to set yourself up with an effect console. Just search for FX Console. By video copilot, it's absolutely for free. Just download it, and then with the shortcut, you'll be able to search for all sorts of effects. So color key. I'm going to select white color tolerance. Let's increase it a little bit, maybe a little bit more. Just want to make sure I get rid of all the white stuff because that's how it was before and now. I'm also going to thin the edge by one so that we don't have any of the white stuff anywhere. Perfect. Let's call it like smooth shape one. Select the shape tool. And by doing this, we will actually create a mask. So let's do a selection. Like so we cannot really see it. So let me do it here. There you go. We have just one shape. Why are we doing this? Well, because we are actually going to cut myself into pieces with these smooth shapes. How do you do it? Well, we are going to use something called track Mat in after effect. I'm going to click here, and this is the one we need Track Mat. So I'm going to track Mat that's called video of M, and this one's going to be background just to make sure things are a little bit easier. This is the smooth shape. Let's move it. Let's say, actually, let's make it maybe a bit bigger, and let's try something like this. And then click on the video of me, track mated to the smooth shape, and there you go. But I'm actually going to duplicate one of the videos of me, make sure I have no mat, and I'm going to disable it so that we have it on the background just in case. No, I'm going to select these two, pressing Command D or Control D to duplicate and move it a little bit higher. And here, I'm going to on the smooth shape two, I'm going to press on M to select the mask, and I'm actually going to move the mask a little bit to left to make sure we select the other shape, which was a little bit to left. You can see. So we're selecting this one right now. Perfect. And I'm going to move the whole layer a little bit to the left like so to cup myself out. Do exactly the same thing. Select the last two, Command D, move it higher, press on M to select the mask, then move the mask. Let's enable to see what we have. And now we can disable. I'm going to select it, and so let's press on R and rotate it a little bit. Okay, so we're getting somewhere. Perfect. Now, do exactly the same thing. Select these two. Actually, here's what we should have done in order to make it even better. So select the first pair, and then for the first pair, just parent video to the shape or the shape to the video. It doesn't really matter. And let's do it with the other ones. So now, when we duplicate it, it's already going to be parented. Actually, I don't want to duplicate the one that we rotated. I want to do the other one because when you rotate it basically becomes a little bit harder. You have to unrotate it the same backwards, but it's an extra step, so that's why we can just skip it. So press on. Select the mask, move it a little bit down. Mm hmm. When we parented them, the whole thing starts moving. So for the parent. Sorry for a little bit of confusion, but sometimes after effects just it's part of the work we have to anyway, I think this is going to be enough, and right now we need to parent the latest video to the shape. And if we enable the full video, this is what we're going to have with disable. This is what we're going to have perfect. Okay, now, here's what we need to do. We need to select all of our shapes, person command D and move them a little bit up somewhere. Now press on Shift command C or Shift Control C, and it's going to precompose. Now, let me move it to the very bottom and let's open this composition and enable all the shapes. So we'll have all of our shapes here. There you go. And now we will enable our video and track mad this video to these shapes. But we're also going to click on this button to invert the mat so that if I disable some of the videos, it's going to be empty. But now you will see that we have few sort of weird shapes. We can see the outline of the shapes. Well, all we have to do is to come to here and increase the edge thin to two on every single shape, and it disappears. Perfect. Now, let's also parent the big video of me to the precomposed shapes. And now the moment that I've been waiting for, hopefully you two, we're going to use the depth plugin to make it even more interesting. See what we want. Layer spacing, let's do a little bit smaller, like 300 to make sure we will be able to see everything on the screen, and the slick can disperse. It's like two viewers, and if I use the camera and move with the camera, there you go. I'm going to have pieces of me. Interesting, right? But then what we can do is we can set the position, move to 1 second, move closer to the camera. So let's do it, so at 0 seconds, I'm just going to stand, but then I'm going to start moving to the front. And let's select this and press FNF nine to make it smooth. Perfect. Like, so no, let's select the camera. Actually, let's select everything, press A and A, A, to make sure we close all the layers. Now I'm going to select the camera. Camera options depto field on to make sure we get a little bit of that blur, and let's increase the aperture. Actually, let's see where do we have our focus distance? I see where it is. So where do we want the focus to be? Let's select it. Let's select it on maybe on this phase. So we just need to find this phase here. Which one is it? Is it the first? Disable and enable disable and enable, disable able. So it's this third one. There you go this one. Let's press on on the camera controller. And whenever we zoom in, want to make sure our focus point is here. So focus distance, I will start it roughly here, and then we need to put it here for it to be in focus. This point, I actually want to I want everything to be in focus, but if we zoom in, we're a little bit out of focus somewhere in different places. So I want to increase the aperture so that everything is in focus in the very beginning. So I'm going to create a key frame for it, put it to here because let's say I like the way it looks here, and I'm going to decrease the aperture here. So everything is sharp at this point, but then once we zoom in, we're going to focus on this part of me. We can also make it smooth. So FNF nine, there you go. I'm thinking maybe I'd like to move a little bit higher at this point, maybe something like that. Yeah, I think this looks interesting. So let's see. This was before, and this is after before and after. I think this looks a bit more interesting, maybe a bit more creepy for some people, but it looks pretty good. So I'm going to go into vertical workspace, and I'd like to press on till Day to select one view, and I just want to see how it looks. Okay, I'd like to move this to 4 seconds to make the movement a lot slower. Select all of these, go into the graph editor, select all of these, and make it a lot smoother. So let's see Yeah, I think this is better. Perfect. So is there anything else to add? Well, sure, we can experiment. We can add something like a star, so we can use the shape tool, select the star, put the star, and then why don't we make it? Let's use a stroke and no fill. But for the stroke, let's make it blue, and I will move it here and also let's make it three D. So let's do it, like so. We can also add something like a glow to the star. I just experimenting. So something like this. Then when we zoom in, here's what happens. Or we can add some sort of text on the screen. So get rid of the star and say some like three D, three D, cut, put it right in the middle, crease the scale a little bit, make it black, and press on P, move it higher. Make it three D. There you go. And let's also add something like a typewriter effect, press on U to enable the keyframes, three D, cut. I like how simplistic this part looks. So I'd like to keep it this way. Maybe we can add some sort of like a shape on the background, but not sure if it's going to make it better at this point. But this looks pretty interesting, right? Yes. Well, that's how you do it. After we are ready with result, we need to go into file, export, add to render Q, then just select where to export it to. I recommend you setting the high quality with Alpha. And if you want it to be here, always, just go into edit templates, output module, and set high quality with Alpha here, and then you will have high quality with Alpha here all the time. Then just click on Render. After this, let's just watch the video. So there's our video. If you have any questions, let me know, that let's jump into the next. 12. Last Step!: Congratulations to you. You're nearly 100% done with a three D camera in after effects course. There are just two small steps in today. First, take action. As Kafuhi said, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. So if you haven't already, take your first step by editing your first video. All of the best information in the world means nothing if you don't act on it, and even small steps lead to massive outcomes. Fan value in this program, I would really appreciate if you could take 60 seconds to leave you honest review. I'll be immensely grateful to you, and feedback will massively help future students in deciding the best program for them. Although this course is complete, your journey has just begun. I'm excited to see edits online to be sure to keep me and fellow students posted. Remember, I'm here for your success, so if there's anything you need, don't hesitate to reach out in the Q& section below. Thank you again for me as your instructor, wishing you all the bites and looking forward to seeing you in future courses.