10 Secret Tips & Tricks in After Effects

I don't mean to keep secrets from you but there are some things I haven't been fully open about it's time to reveal my favorite secret tricks and effects in off effects so let's up straight into after effects with tip number one this one is a secret effect that I use way too often and haven't really spoken about before and that is extract I'm going to use FX console to add my effect to my layer and essentially what it does is you can either extract the highlights or the shadows and I use this super often to only add glow to the highlights just cuz I think it looks a little bit more pleasing I have this little image in here in my composition and I've added the effect and now I can just drag the sides up here to either remove the Shadows or the highlights the way I like to do it is I like to drag it up and then this bottom slider right here if you drag it out you can further it out so it's a lot more of a smoother transition what I like to do from there is just add a deep glow and there you go you've added glow to only the highlights which just looks a little bit nicer like if you see up here in the corners you can see it just gives that nice little Rim lighting I feel like it's an effect that doesn't get enough attention tip number two is adding markers to your composition this is super useful in project management and longer projects where you have different scenes you want to transition between and animate between one another the shortcut for it is super simple so I have this little sequence from last week's video and if I were to actually make this a full project I would just go to where I want to transition and then hit shift four and then I know this is a new transition and then you can always double click on it and you can change it to whatever you want let's say transition to map and you can pick any color you want so you can keep it organized let's say you have animated sequences you have regular footage you have transitions little overlay text super easy way to keep it all organized and I know some of you have asked about how I actually work my animation workflow and this is one little trick that I use very often and just helps me stay organized and get an overview of how far in I am and what what I still need to do tip number three is grain I've talked about texture before but I don't feel like I've touched enough upon this very specific effect which is ADD grain there's a bunch of different ways you can add grain to your layers in this case I just have a little composition set up let's add an adjustment layer you have noise hls noise hls order noise Alpha noise but my favorite is ADD grain now you can add this and you'll get this little rectangle so you want to go into the effect and change it to final output to see it everywhere and it's just going to be a very subtle little grain you can see if we turn it off it's very minimal there's nothing crazy the reason why I love this effect in particular to AD grain is because of the presets they have a whole bunch which all have a little bit of a different characteristic so you get a little bit of different looks and they have some film ones as well which just look super sick I like codic 200t I just I I just it just Vibes with me I also like uh codic vision 800t is also very nice a little bit more Punchy but that's not all that goes into the fake cuz the way I like to do it is I don't really like these the color in the noise which is normal that's how it actually works but I don't like it now they do have a monochromatic option but it's not true black and white cuz you can still see there's a little bit of brownish greenish color so what I like to do is I like to make a new layer so hit command yre to create a new solid and then change the color to metal gray 50% gray 80 80 80 for the hex code set that up and then you can add green the effect to that layer and change it to final output pick the preset you really like so in this case codic 200t you can change the intensity which is just how crazy do you want it to be the size of the grain I usually like to go just a little bit higher just cuz it makes it a little bit softer more pleasing in my opinion change the softness as well if you want it to be a lot softer the main thing we want to do with this though is add a tint or a Tron or colorama or a hue saturation and just decrease the saturation so the you get a black and white image so this way we're actually going to get a true monochromatic and it works really well with blending modes pre-comp that layer name it grain and then you can change the blending mode again little bit of a of an inside tip hold shift and then use plus or minus to shift between the blend modes it's just a little bit easier to work that way rather than picking one seeing what it looks like this gives you a preview in real time with the grain I typically like overlay soft light or linear light they all give a little bit of a different look linear light is the punch used one of the more so if you going for more aggressive look definitely go with that I use it often cuz I do like a lot of noise and green in my in my animations if you have a transparent background you just want to make sure that you have track mat selected and they're just going to make sure that it's only visible on the layers that you actually to see now tip number four has saved me a whole bunch of time and I didn't start using this shortcut cuz I didn't know it until recently where I started to work with a lot of different size compositions and footage I'd have maybe a 4K composition with 1080p footage and instead of having to scale it up scale it down using the scale I would then go in to my layer right click transform and there so we actually have some shortcuts so the one I use the most just cuz it's second nature to me at this point is fit comp to width shift option command and H we'll scale it right down and that's usually where I like to go by it just makes it a lot easier otherwise you can use G instead of H for the height instead of width save me a lot of clicks save me a lot of time my fingers are happy tip number five is a bit new and I mentioned it in the last video as well cuz it is so sexy and I can't believe I've slipped done it for so long but it is war chroma now there is a way to do this manually in a way so if you watch my VHS video you'll see exactly how to do that but walk chroma is just so much faster and when you on deadlines you're working on projects you want to be efficient and this is definitely one way so adding an adjustment layer I'm just going to add the war chroma effect using Effect console adding that up we already have this super sick look and we can of course adjust it we can add a little bit of spin to it if we want to and we can adjust the strength by moving these uh the red and the green line closer and further away from one another so I like to just a little bit on the edges which just gives it a little bit more of that texture especially on something that's supposed to look like a computer screen or more stylized this looks super cool cuz you get some of that nice RGB split and there's so many settings you can play with and you can mess with the colors of it so really have fun and play around with it make some cool things as always I feel a link in the description if you are interested if not the VHS video will show you how to do something very similar for free natively in After Effects the six tip is the power of Photoshop files this is something I've been using pretty much ever since I started working in After Effects and it's just been so efficient for my workflow being able to use Photoshop files because they let you change things in Photoshop and update in real time in off the effects for the longest time I found it so much easier just aligning everything and getting the spacing right in Photoshop and then animating it and after effect so this is one way to let me get the best of both worlds so if I take a PSD file here and I drag it in and I'm just just going to import kind composition and merge layer Styles into footage and then you can hit okay now we have this nice little artboard if I click in and then remove that background you can see we have a couple of different layers and we also have a text layer but I noticed hm I can see my text is spelled wrong what I would normally do is go into Photoshop and then I can go in and let's say I want to change this to nice and actually spill it right and maybe even move it up here and then change the font to something a little bit cooler we can do that increase the cing a little bit and Center it up and then I'm just going to save it and then go on straight back into off the effects you can see it's updated in real time so it just makes it a lot more efficient if you're working with a lot of layers or in my case I really like the cage style so I have a lot of photo elements so it just makes it a little bit easier if I have to lay out and maneuver those things another thing about this is if you have a text layer like this layer right here and you want to add some text animators to it you can do that in off effects simply right click click on the layer and then go to create and convert to editable text that's going to keep the text exactly where it is you can change it it's fully editable text it's just a regular text layer at this point tip number seven is grids this is super useful if you want to line stuff up or if you have some text animations where you wanted to keep it centered this is a super neat way of doing it and it's basically how I line everything up in off the effect so I have this little text set up here and it's not the straightest I've ever seen so I would typically use my grid so alt or option and then apostrophe and that'll bring up my nice little grid and then I can start using these to line up but sometimes I need just an extra level of specificity or Precision so I can remove that hitting the same shortcut which is option and apostrophe and then instead hitting command an apostrophe and that's just going to give me a tighter grid with more little extra grids inside and just make it a little bit easier to get the spacing right and then I can start one by one I'll line it up using typically my arrow keys just lining everything up and we can get the spacing perfectly our top row already looks way better because we aligned it using the grid now this eighth one is a little bit of a secret effect hack spice sauce looking thing I use this all the time just because I like it it flows well it's a nice little detail element and you can do a couple different things with it sometimes I'll use it as a background element and make it a lot thicker sometimes I'll use it just as a little detail going across the screen it's all powered by the stroke so I've just got a simple stroke set up here I just took my pen tool we can even delete that hit G to bring up a pen tool make sure fill is removed and add a stroke color and you can set the width to whatever you want just depends on the look you're going for and then I just click and drag and click and drag until I get a nice little shape that looks pretty smooth and organic you can always go in and change it but then we're going to add a trim pulse to it first and foremost so go to add trim PS and we are going to set a key frame for zero with the end and then we're going to go forward to just whatever key frame that to 100 then go a couple frames backwards and key frame the start go forward again and set the start to 100 so now we have it coming through and animates out if we go into the shape and then go into stroke and wave we can get it to look pretty sick so if we add a little bit of wave so just increase the amount you can see kind of looks like this well wavy stroke increase the wavelength so it looks a little bit more natural and not as intense that looks pretty good and we can even add some taper to if you like that so taper it at the beginning so it just kind of eases into that shape in this instance we're just going to do the wave I don't typically combine the wave and the taper it's usually one or the other additionally we'll animate the phase of the wave so just key frame the phase go to the end of your animation and just set that to one rotation and that'll just mean that as we animate it just goes along just looks pretty sick just adds a little bit of extra movement and you might want to do it the opposite way just depends on which way your line is animating just make sure they go the same way that typically looks the coolest that's only the beginning of it though because we have a little bit more source to add to it one thing I love to do is changing the blend mode to dissolve and that's just going to give us a tiny little bit of texture in there and then if we add a false box blur we can increase that and that's just going to make it look a little bit cooler and then I typically duplicate the layer and then remove the fce Box blur and that's just going to give us a little bit of almost like noise Feathering in there I just think it looks super cool when you can play around with the parameters and get something you think looks pretty sick you can even go ahead add an extra one decrease the stroke width and change the color to a lighter color just make it like a nice core Center and then add something like a deep glow to it and that's just going to give us a nice little core that makes it look like a glowing almost light Savory the ninth one is super underrated I'm not very good at Math on the Spot I'm not going to lie so thankfully Adobe has me covered this works in illustrator in Photoshop everything and that is simply doing math in your parameters so let's say I have a layer here and I want to move it 10 pixels to the right so instead of going 10 times on my arrow keys I can simply go into my position in whichever direction I wanted to move I can add 10 I can subtract 10 I can even times it by 10 if I want to super easy way of doing animations and if you want to position stuff according to one another let's say they were both centered and we want to move them each 10 pixels away from the center so we can just go ahead and in the position instead of sliding and guessing and moving up and down we'll simply go in and do A+ 10 and then for the other one we of course want to move the other way so minus 10 and just like that we have a shape that now intersects exactly 10 pixels each way that works in your composition settings as well if you want to create a comp that double the size you can simply go into one and duplicate by let's say two and now we have a 10K composition it's that simple now this last effect is a secret stroke brush heck I suppose I watched this in a tutorial a long time ago and recently was brought to my attention again and I just figured I might as well share it cuz I use it from time to time it's a really nice way of getting a nicer looking brush strug if you don't have any assets what you want to do is select your shape tool and remove the stroke and then create a circle we'll just make a white click and hold shift while you're draging out and you can always move this circle around by holding space you can move it while you're creating it and go back to scaling it but we're just going to leave it right there and make sure it's a perfect circle and we're going to center it up and we are going to make a new composition and just name this brush go into that composition and we're going to hit command K to bring up my composition settings and we'll just change this to maybe something let's do a 500 by 500 and then we can just take our layer and use the shortcut that we just learned earlier shift command option H and that'll scale it down to fit our thing and now we can add a fractal noise to that you can change the look of the fractal noise to get whatever look you kind of want but you want to go back into your main composition and then we are going to hit G or just select your pencil up here and make sure that your layer isn't selected and now we can start drawing out the path that we want our brush to follow so let's say we want to do a little whimsical path here and then we can open up our path that we just made go into shape path copy that hit p on your brush and then paste it just command V delete that and now we have it going across and we can always scale this down let's hit s to bring up the scale scale that down and hit U and now we have this nice little animation that will follow along you can always right click transform and autal Orient and then Orient along PFF and that'll just mean that as it goes along the starting position and then in turns it'll follow along that path and now we can actually get to creating the brush we want to add an adjustment layer and we want to add Echo to it and that is the base or the driver of our brush we want to change the echo operator to minimum and then we want to change the number of Echoes as you can see we're starting to draw out our little path so far we have a lot of spacing but it goes a pretty far away actually looks like a brush so we want to change the echo time and we want to set it to something like. 3 and that'll give us a really tight brush from there you want to adjust the echo numbers you want to play around with this this can be pretty intense cuz we'll make a lot of duplicat so you might want to play with the time maybe set it to something like five instead of three and that gives us a nice little brush my favorite for this one is minimum or maximum depending on the look that you're going for minimum works pretty well and then you can add a motion blur to your brush and that's just going to smooth it out a little bit that is pretty much how you make a nice little animated brush if you want to taper it let's hit s shift s to bring up the scale alongside the position key frame the scale at whatever size you want it and then set it to maybe something like two and go forward and key frame again and scale it out to something like zero and then you can select your key frames and right click on them key frame assistant easy ease and just like that we have a nice little brush that is animated with some tapering and that is pretty much it for the 10 secret tips tricks effects video type thing we've covered a lot of effects and a lot of very specific Niche things and sometimes it's important to have that fundamental knowledge and just little things that will make your workflow easier and these are 10 things that help me in my daily workflow that's pretty much it I just want to say thank you hopefully you learned something new if you have any sick tips that I didn't cover please leave them in the comments I'd love to know and make my workflow more efficient and uh yeah thank you I'll see you again next week peace out

Channel: Mapal

Views: 13,421

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Id: Ks8iqkf3xM0

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023