5 Basic After Effects Tools For Creating Viral VFX Magic!

if there's one thing I'm qualified to talk about it would be this I want to share with you five tools or techniques in After Effects that will help you make VFX magic I've spent the last six years making visual effects videos on vine and Facebook and Instagram in the last 10 years using After Effects I've seen a lot of people on tik-tok and Instagram making visual effects videos so I thought this would be a great video to show you so you can get started as well so a big portion of VFX videos is coming up with the idea and then figuring out how to shoot it I would say that is where a majority of the time is spent when it comes to VFX videos ideally you'd shoot your video with the visual effects in mind so that when you get to the editing process it's as smooth and easy as possible now when it comes to the editing there's a lot of tools and techniques that you gotta know so the five I want to share with you today are masking motion tracking match cuts the rotor brush tool and clone stamp so let's get into it starting with masking masking is the process of adding and subtracting from parts of your layers masking is one of the most important processes you will find in After Effects you're going to use it everywhere text animations visual effects you name it if it's in After Effects you're probably going to mask something somewhere now when it comes to visual effects a bad mask is going to look really bad but a good mask you shouldn't notice at all so to create a mask there's two different ways to do it you can use the pen tool or you can use the shape tool if you know your mask needs to be a quick circle or rectangle you can use the shape tool otherwise we're going to use the pen tool alright so we're here in After Effects and we're gonna do some masking my footage here is from my last video where I did a little trick with the iPad so let's take a look at our footage our first clip here is me tapping on the Photos app and swiping the second clip is me pushing the tennis-balls across frame so I'm going to put our mask on the top layer here I'm gonna select that layer and select the pen tool I'm just going to zoom out a little bit and create a quick mask across the frame now I'm going to adjust that mask so it lines up with the iPad and now we want to time our clip that looks fine so if you select our clip and click M on the keyboard it should bring up the mask path and then if we collapse it and reopen it it'll bring all the mask properties here now if we click F it'll isolate just the feather tool as well but let's look at all our properties here it's a mask path this is so we can keyframe the position of the points of our mask we're not going to be using that right now but we are going to be using feather this will fade the the edges of the mask so right now we have a pretty hard mask there so I'm just gonna turn that up a little bit maybe to 50 60 see how it looks and we have opacity if you want to turn down the transparency of your mask we're not going to use that right now then mask expansion this is pretty handy when you want to quickly just adjust your mask I use this all the time for example here maybe if if I want that fade to come a little bit over the edge we can just pull that up a little bit because it is in motion now this is a super basic example often I'm wearing a lot of masks to achieve the effect that I'm going for but I just want to stick to the basics in this one you can even track your masks which takes us to our next point motion tracking so there are six ways to do motion tracking in After Effects we're not going to cover all of them but I will list them so if you want to do your own research that's cool the first one is camera track the next one is track motion and we have warp stabilizer stabilized motion we have planar tracking using our masks and we have mocha for more advanced motion tracking now there might be more ways of motion tracking but these are the ones I'm aware of so the two we're gonna go over our camera track and track motion these are the most useful of the two and I use the most often think of them as camera track is a 3d tracker where track motion is a 2d tracker track motion will track the position the rotation and the scale of an object track camera tracks the position of the camera and gives three-dimensional space data that you can use in your edits so let's check these out in After Effects so starting with track motion we have this shot of my iPhone we're going to track the text iPhone 11 pro on the side here again this is the clip from my last video so to do that we're gonna click on our clip down here and then make sure we have our tracker box here if you don't have that go to window and down to tracker and that window should appear so again let's select our clip and click track motion now when you're creating a motion track point you want to find an area that has some contrast so I'm going to put my track point on the flash of my camera I think that should be enough contrast for this track to work and then we're going to go over to our right here where it says position rotation scale and we're going to enable those other two as well and that's going to give us a second point I'm going to put that on the top of the Apple logo and hopefully that will give us a second piece of data for scale and rotation okay now that we have those on there I'm going to track forward using the analyze forward button this is gonna be a little bit slow I'm working with 5k footage here so I will speed this up I'm just going to pause this to see how we're doing you select my clip and click you to see all my keyframes and I just want to take a look at how that track was going it looks good so I'm going to continue so here I had one of my track points fall off that's why I'm going to delete these points reposition that adjust my keyframe and continue on alright that's looking good now I'm gonna come back to the start and track the opposite way now for my motion blur I'm just gonna manually do this because there's no way the computer is going to be able to track that and I don't think it's gonna matter too much alright now that we have our motion track we need to do one thing we need to create a null object we're gonna right click down in this space here go to new and create a null object a null object is a placeholder for keyframes and data so we're gonna go over to our Edit target button on our in our tracker window and we're gonna select our null it might automatically select null for you and you can hit OK and then we're gonna go over to apply and we're going to select X and Y and now we have a null object that rotates and tracks with our object so we can do now is add in our edit and what we can do as parents are edit to the null object and that'll create the motion track here now in this example I'm adding text to screen but you could do anything this you could change the way your phone looks you could replace the screen on your phone all that would require motion tracking this is just one quick example of how to use the motion track tool all right 3d camera track I'm going to keep this one real quick I don't really use it too often and I'm realizing this video could get pretty long so I have a moving camera shot of my desk here and I have a PNG of my Rubik's Cube let's say we wanted this to be a floating object in the midair above my desk so what we could do is use a 3d camera track to track the camera and then add the object over top of the desk and create some shadows maybe some effects to composite the rubik's cube in the air so let me show you how to do that real quick we're gonna select your clip and again go over to our tracker window and click track camera so now I'm just going to let this track I'm gonna jump cut this track it will probably take me 5 6 minutes ok now that our track is completed we have all these fancy little dots all over the screen these are our track points so we can do is go into our effects control panel here and select the 3d camera tracker and click create camera so now any 3d objects in our composition should move around in space so you can click P for position to try and get things where you like them so I know this isn't a very compelling effect but maybe you could make it interesting if the mouse was floating and I had pens on my table my keyboard floating you could do something fun here but I just wanted to quickly show you how to use the 3d camera track and you can very easily throw 3d objects into your scene now for number three I have a technique that I use all the time it's called match cuts now I describe this pretty well in my last video but I'm going to do it again in this video because it is very important when you're doing your effects for your videos the idea of a match cut is to seamlessly transition from one clip to the next without the viewer noticing so I've come up with three attributes that I use when I'm doing a match cut the first one being composition the second one being exposure in color and the third one being motion so these three attributes we want to do our best to keep them constant from the one clip to the second for example if this shot was a match cut I would want to cut to another frame that that looks almost identical or has very similar composition and the same goes for color and exposure if my frame is warm I want the next frame to also be warm so for visual effects we want our frame to be the exact same white balance from one clip to the next for example in my last video when I drop the tennis ball the tennis ball was the motion from the one clip to the next and that helps create a seamless effect between the two this is a good way to kind of hide that jump cut so here's an example of a basic match cut you guys know that classic effect where someone pulls their shirt and then it instantly changes to another shirt I'm going to show you how to do that real quick this is the most basic match cut you can do something like this you could even do in premiere you don't necessarily even need After Effects to do this it's literally just a cut and when I filmed it I tried to keep myself in the exact same position as before and just try and be really aware of the way you were in your previous take and the way you need to look in the next take so in this case everything pretty much is blocking but let's say you shot this handheld and the camera was moving what we would need to do is try and line up our two shots so that the composition is identical so what I would do is I would take my opacity down a bit and then just try and line up the the background and the foreground as best as I can and once you find the sweet spot you make your jump cut this actually turned out pretty well so when it comes to motion it's good to plan your match cuts around motion that'll make things look a lot more smooth and you'll hide any glitches between the two Clips so this basic example has no masking no motion tracking but often to create the perfect cut it requires a lot of masking and motion tracking just to hide those glitches when the frame changes number four I have the roto brush tool now I occasionally use the roto brush tool but I do prefer masking but sometimes the roto brush tool can be very handy the roto brush tool is an automated alternative to masking I'd recommend using it when you have good contrast between your subject and your backgrounds for example right here with my shirt being dark and my chair being dark it probably wouldn't work very well now if I was standing in front of a white wall that would be different in some ways you can emulate a green screen effect with the roto brush tool it's just gonna require a lot more work in time so here's how we use it all right the road tool this one can be very handy but warning it can be really slow especially if you're trying to rotoscope a large area so let's say I wanted to change the background of this clip or put something behind me what I'd want to do is isolate myself from the clip the first thing we're going to do is make sure we have our rotor brush tool selected and then we're gonna double-click our clip and that's going to bring us into our layer and we want to open the brushes tab and that will allow us to change the size of our brush so I like to do a pretty big brush I'm gonna go around 100 pixels and I'm just gonna highlight myself here pretty good now you can see it it selected some of the walls so if I hold down alt and click in there it'll remove a bit of the wall there but now my ear is falling off so now I'm just going to click my ear and that's looking good we don't need to get too precise yet but that is looking good so I think the computer is going to struggle with the rotoscoping around my neck and hair here so we're gonna switch to our refine edge tool and we're just gonna highlight those areas that we think are gonna have a little bit of issue so now if we just skip ahead we should see this green bar loading this is analyzing our frame and creating our roto now I'm just gonna let the computer do its thing for a minute so if everything worked out well we should have a roto down image now let's hop into our settings and we can refine our rotoscope so you can see the edges of my shoulder aren't very smooth so we can use the feather to kind of feather the edges of the rotor brush so if I turn this way up we'll see the edges of my shoulders so to fade out but we don't want to take that too far but a little bit might look good the contrast is a little bit similar it's it's kind of like the hardness of your edges then we have edge shift if we want to expand the edge of our rotoscope a little bit and then we have reduced chatter which will kind of smooth out the edges if if it's looking really jagged that's basically it this can be super handy if you don't have a green screen or if part of your body leaves the green screen and you don't want to use a mask you can use the proto-tool or if you have an effect that you need to go behind your subject for example if I had fire in between me and in the background the roto brush tool can be really handy for that and for my last and fifth tool I have the clone stamp tool if you're familiar with Photoshop you will also be familiar with this tool because we're working with a time line things can be a little bit trickier and there's just a little bit more we need to know I often find myself using the clone stamp tool to create blank slates or I'm even editing objects out of the frame I used this tool a lot in my old knife-throwing videos so here's an example of how you could use it alright this is actually one of my favorite tools because you can do some really cool stuff with it so I have a clip here we're gonna do a little sleight a hand trick a little magic trick here we'll see see how my sleight of hand is no one saw that right no one saw that pen fall on the floor that's alright they won't when we're done alright so we're going to come up to the top here and select our clone stamp tool and then we're gonna select our clip and let's go to a frame where the pen is in midair we want to make sure we have our brushes window open and I'm gonna make my brush pretty big for this one that's good I'm gonna keep the hardness very low but I'm just going to put it to 10% so what we're gonna do is we're gonna clone brush this pen out of the air so I have a little trick I like to do I hover my brush in one position and I leave it there and then I hold down ctrl and then arrow key two frames forward I hold alt we're gonna take our sample from this frame click don't move your mouse now we're going to ctrl back two more frames and now we can just brush right over where it is this is really important because if you have something in the background you're gonna get exactly what's in that position back to where it is so just like that we removed one frame now we can go into the next frame now one thing real quick in our paint setting we just want to make sure that we have our duration set to custom by default it might be on constant if we take a look at our paint effect and our clone we can extend or shorten how long we want our clone stamp to last so in my case I only want this to last one frame so if your unconstant let's switch it over to custom and set it to one frame right now let's head back to our brush panel okay now we're gonna do the next one super simple hover over the object control right right alt click control backpack and just make sure not to move your mouse through that process and you're good go on to the next one oh one more thing so what just happened there because I previously clicked on this clone path it actually over wrote my previous clone stamp so I'm just going to undo and make sure we have this clone one unselected and I'm just going to do that again real quick and this last frame and now we're getting a little bit closer to the hand this might be a little bit tricky but we'll see so I'm gonna do a second brush on this one I just want my diameter to be a little bit smaller so we don't end up bleeding into the hand too much I think I've already gone a little bit too far so I'm gonna back up and redo in the last frame and easy as that I'm a magician alright not gonna lie that's pretty sick and that's it for the clone stamp and that's basically it with the right idea and these tools you'll be on your way to creating visual effects magic on Tic Tac or Instagram let me know down below if this was helpful for you and if you're interested in any more After Effects content I would HIGHLY appreciate that don't forget to subscribe and have yourself a wonderful day [Music]

Channel: Matthew Paquette

Views: 109,369

Keywords: Matthew Paquette, Viner, Funny, Vlogs, Shot on RED, R3d, Cinematic, tutorial, B Roll, Broll, B- Roll, Premiere Pro, Premiere Pro Tutorial, Cinematography, Videography, Photography, Adobe, Adobe Premiere, Adobe tutorials, How to Get Cinematic Shots, visual effects, after effects, tiktok, vine, magic, edits, free, lesson, how to after effects

Id: LLa3w4C2I4s

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020