Adobe After Effects Advanced Techniques with Ian Robinson & Nick Harauz

[Music] all right many of you may have noticed that we sent out a survey before the before this session and we got a lot of feedback and there are a lot of varying skill levels in here so what we're actually going to do is start with the basics what I consider the essential things of what Nik considers the essential things to actually have a strong foundation to utilize after effects to its highest possible level so we're gonna start with some of the basic fundamental things but then we're gonna ramp up quickly into some more intermediate and advanced things some third-party scripts some fun kind of things as we continue moving so just in case you don't know where you are we're at After Effects power tips to become a power user and I am Ian Robinson I'm Nick Nick Frost Thank You Roz yes just so you know who you are alright I'll have to do the formalities I'm just Nick all right and so we're going to cover a couple different topics inside this session so we'll cover some more than this but these are the essentials we're gonna talk about different ways to view the After Effects interface we'll talk about project organization fundamentals and tips both managing projects inside After Effects and outside of After Effects and you'll know what that means here in a little bit we'll get it some color correction tips and new features we'll talk about sequencing layers for creating some flexible reveals we'll create some shape layer tricks for fastener design and adjustments within shape layers those of you that have been in shape layers know there are a lot of things to drill down through but there are some ways to actually get through there pretty quickly we'll talk about some green-screen presets and setups for precise key we'll get into some camera scripts and techniques to better navigate 3d space we'll talk about adjusting keyframes in the graph editor I'll show you how to animate multiple layers altogether using one series of strokes within the keyframe editor or graph editor and then we'll be creating and editing some templates for Premiere Pro and then of course we're gonna end with some prizes and some resources that you might want to check out so hold on to your seats we've got a lot of stuff coming how does that sound everybody good yeah cool all right you want to hop into the next one yes we're we're gonna go into the next slide here but this in job search so everyone sees my screen okay and how I try to think about it is in terms up there's a very similar kind of workflow between premiere and After Effects using some tricks so in Premiere Pro there's a source monitor where most people will first load their footage right they'll make an edit decision they'll bring it into a sequence that sequence is reflected in a program monitor After Effects has a similar thing so just notice here in my project panel which I'll make a little bit bigger by pressing the tilde key if I double click a clip what this does is it actually loads it into a layers panel or you can see here footage and if I just treated this like regular footage I could come into After Effects and a sexually to make an editing decision the shortcut keys are a bit different so I'm gonna press option left square bracket for endpoint and option right square bracket for out point now if I took this footage window and I docked it over here to the side and had it next to my composition window we're kind of seeing that similar layout between After Effects and Premiere Pro and it gets a little better in this footage panel and that is that there are some similar edits that you can use so there's a ripple insert/edit as well as an overlay edit that you can place inside of a new composition once you choose your clip so this is one thing that just sort of helped me get over a little bit of the huge water of After Effects and how I looked at the composition window so I'm gonna hop back over to Ian and he's going to do a little bit of a description of how he's after yes so like many of you I'm guessing let me do a quick survey how many of you were primarily designers came from the print world and then hopped into After Effects and that sort of stuff yeah quite a lot of you right so one of the things that I actually love about After Effects is the fact that it is in my mind Photoshop over time so right now I'm showing you an After Effects project where I have Illustrator layers that I've brought into the project and laid out within After Effects but when I first got started when I actually started creating projects I didn't start inside After Effects I started inside of Photoshop and I would create funky icons and different graphics and things like that and then I would create those layouts inside of Photoshop and you notice here in Photoshop I have folders that contain different elements and then I have my eyeball here on the left that turns the visibility off and on and when I actually go ahead and double-click in the project panel of Photoshop and choose that Photoshop document I can import it as a composition retaining layer sizes and when I click open it's going to allow me to leave the layer styles editable if I had any Styles applied but I could click OK and now I have a composition and if I double click that comp you notice that it's been brought in and all of those folders are now pre compositions inside of my After Effects projects so the way that I view After Effects is Photoshop over time I just think when you're thinking of the interface it's good to kind of hearken back to something that you're familiar with in order to actually build familiarity within the other application so just like with the layers panel having groups of elements in here and the eyeball on the Left I have the eyeball on the left and if I double click on a pre composition I can see the different elements that actually make up that layer so when I think a Photoshop I or when I think of After Effects I think of it as Photoshop over time or even illustrator over time very cool yeah man so um I think we should talk about a little bit of a project organization some fundamental tips so I know you had some to show yep then I have a resource that I like to give everyone which shows some professional workflows of how people organize their files on their desktop and also generate a bunch of folders inside of After Effects I have two resources for you but Ian's going to start with some great housekeeping tips inside of After Effects fundamentals and housekeeping so how many of you have ever taken over a project from another designer and it's been extraordinarily well organized yeah ok that's kind of what I thought right well honestly what I encourage most of my friends designers clients to do is actually create a folder structure outside of After Effects that is your house folder structure it's a structure that is fundamental to your specific place so if you have freelancers that come in or somebody needs to pick up your project it actually makes sense and the reason I do this on the finder level or within the operating system is because After Effects references those files it's not embedding those files like a like a Photoshop document it's actually referencing those files so what ends up happening is if I have a project and things are strewn all over the place and then somebody just copies the after effects file it's gonna have a whole bunch of missing elements or if some of the video files are in one folder and some of the other video files are in another folder that's problematic so what I encourage everyone to do is do something like this if you have a project and you have a ton of different elements like I have here which are just Photoshop documents JPEG files illustrator files a video file I suggest creating a folder structure so what I'm gonna do is create an empty folder structure here on the desktop as my template and I'll save that in a method to where you can send it to any designers before they ever come to your facility and they know how things are going to be organized so to start I go ahead and just create a new folder and I'll just call it a project and usually when I do this I'll number my folders based on how busy I am so if I'm in a busy facility that cranks through projects I'll name it zero one project whatever and I'll start the numbers like every month so January has 1 through 120 projects February has 1 through whatever notice I don't put the date in here the reason I don't put the date in here every operating system has the ability to search files by date so I don't want to be that redundant but or organizing them according to number actually does a really good thing because a lot of us remember when we're busy oh yeah the end of September was killing me because I was getting everything ready for Adobe MAX right so when I look at my projects and I go I think it was in September I was really really busy I can go to the higher numbers because I know it was towards the end of the month when everything was rockin out does that make sense okay so my 0-1 project I would not name it project I would name it whatever the actual client is or the project so if it was for Adobe I would say Adobe and then I might put a dash max or what-have-you right but this is my generic structure so I'm gonna leave it set up like this then I'll do a straight-up folder structure based on file kind so I'll do 0 1 4 PS DS and then I'll go ahead and do another one for illustrator files ai I'll do another one for still images and I call it stills because a lot of times it's JPEGs its pngs it's whatever they're flat still elements right and then the fourth one is the one we're all go ahead and say After Effects and I know everybody that's in here knows After Effects is number 1 but how After Effects works it imports everything in so most of the time like I said earlier I'll start an illustrator or Photoshop and do my designs then bring those into After Effects and then if you have a workflow where you're interfacing with other video editing applications like I don't know Premiere Pro I'd go ahead and put 0 5 underscore PR PR oh ok now this is my base structure sometimes I will add an additional folder for like client files if clients send you references I'll do something like new folder and I'll say 0 6 clients ref ok it's important to say client reference because I don't know whether those images have been cleared to use in the project so anybody knows if they're working on this project anything that's in the client reference folder isn't necessarily something that you're going to be delivering or working with but it also gives you a good track because your clients as they're working through things could turn around and say I sent you that on whatever dates and if you go in the folder it's gonna be sitting in the folder does that make sense to everyone alright now once you have this structure set up for the unorganized projects it's a simple method of just copy and pasting each of the different elements into the folder and noticing here I have a footage folder that's missing and the reason it's missing out of here is I work in a system with shared storage and 9 times out of 10 my video files are shared on shared storage those of you that work in larger facilities might have a similar situation so for the shared storage I usually actually have a folder structure just for the video files that are shared through everything else that I'm working on but if you're working remotely or on systems like this like a laptop you want to go ahead and add a footage folder so I'll go ahead and just add 0 7 for any footage so that's video footage DSLR iPhone high-end cameras uncompressed red whatever ok so once this is set up what I'll do is I'll right-click and I'll go ahead and compress the project folder so it is now a zip file and that will forever live as a zip file with empty folders so anytime any of my new freelancers come into the facility and they start a new project all they do is double click on the zip file and it automatically creates another folder where they can go ahead and change the folder structure does that make sense to everyone all right so I have a resource for everyone as it comes to organization that you might want to check out and I'll email everyone after who is signed up for the session so you'll have this as a resource you don't need to take a note a site out there is called just in the klore slash gyst and what this is is they've interviewed a bunch of art directors post professional post-production professionals VFX artists in different lines of work and they allow you to download their folder structure so I don't want to get too much into the folders anymore but you can see here on my desktop I have downloaded some professional workflow structures here of how people work with After Effects you can see here a four folder structure with many subfolders again this is free to download from that site and this resource is contained in a keynote that will email anyone who signed up for the session now the site gets a little bit better when it comes to organization and that is some of the people that they interviewed actually gave a free After Effects prescript and the script generates the folders that you actually see here in my project panel so I just want to show you how it works once you've gone inside your After Effects preferences and given permission to write scripts you can install a script in a specific folder which the documentation contained from this site will give you and you can run a various script the script that I'm going to run is the main gyst script which is called the folder generator and I have a folder structure here it's just going to duplicate it right now but I want to show you how easy it is you can walk into an After Effects project with the script and get a bunch of folders generated for you right away so while this might not be the one that you want this is one form of organized that that organization uses there are a few others that you can download from that site now in terms of another way to look at this where you might receive an After Effects project and you have no idea what the other person's done inside of it you look at the project panel it's extremely messy video files are all over the place that never happens and someone's decided to literally label every single composition untitled one through ten so this is a nightmare for you to get a hold of and there is a third-party script it's a paid-for script and what element that I thought it was awesome this script is called motion 2 and it does a lot more besides what I'm talking about but one thing it does is it identifies Clips images based on metadata and will put them in folders for you it is one of the best scripts I've seen online for basically taking a messy project and giving you some form of organization again I'm gonna include this link for you into the resources if you've signed up for this session so don't rest assured you'll have that motion to mount mograph way of generating and starting off with an organization level so enough about organization I'm gonna hop into a few color correction tips some features in terms of the lumetri effects but I'm also going to talk just about a cool thing that you can do with curves and After Effects how many views curves in another application whether it be Photoshop Illustrator so you've got the same thing in your effects and presets and After Effects in my effects and presets tab I'll come over here and just do a search for curves I can see that under my color correction category I'll drag that on a clip inside my composition I've already added it once today to make sure it works so let me get rid of the duplicate and just show you that you've got a couple curves to choose from RGB your red green and blue and your alpha if you use your command 1 key that's going to go to the red channel command 2 is going to go to the green command 3 and command 4 so just a quick way of being able to easily select curves which is a really nice trick especially if you're coming from Photoshop or illustrator coming into here I'll make a brief curve adjustment here on the red channel just in terms of closer to the shadow area and also to my highlights and what I'd like to do is try a few different types of blending trips with this layer that I've already duplicated in my composition I could go here making the timeline large for a second with my tilde key and of course navigate through all of these various blend modes or I can use a handy two sets of shortcuts so if I select the clip on top and I press shift equals you can see that it's actually cycling through the blend modes in my composition panel it's moving forward between each of the various blend modes right now I'm on linear burn and if I press shift - that's going to move back handy little feature in Photoshop already but something that you can bring into After Effects as well and used to cycle between various blend modes and speed up your workflow there's a new addition in terms of color correction that actually comes from Premiere Pro and is now it's the lumetri effects and this is just a great overall effect inside of After Effects as well that has a ton of color correction options no matter which application you come from and I wanted to show some of those new features on this clip here in front of me I'm gonna do a search for a luma tree in my effects & presets tab and apply it to this clip if you're new to the lumetri effects inside of After Effects one thing I would suggest is you could go to the creative section there's a bunch of various sections in here some for basic correction for those of you that use Lightroom like creative curve adjustments color wheels if you come from video and even secondary based Corrections looking at the creative section I kind of think about this as a way to apply looks and there are a ton these mostly come from Premiere Pro but are embedded here as well where we can choose a bunch of color looks and try to see what that looks like on our footage we can actually load our own look-up tables and we can play around with the intensity or just a great way to come up with different color looks from your project that are already built into the application now what's new on this feature happens to be under the curves tab I'm just gonna close down this section here where it says RGB curve and focus on these hue and saturation curves that are available and this is basically a way for me to either select a I select a pixel in my composition and based on that pixels hue or saturation I can make some sort of selection and do almost some secondary color correction meaning I'm affecting only part of the pixels in the image if I go here to the hue and saturation selector I'm gonna select the eyedropper and just sample a color out of this lady's blouse you can see here that selection has been made and three dots have been made on the hue versus saturation graph what I can do is now boost this hues saturation or alternatively do a cool look where I can select everything else outside of the selection so if I drag down these two dots on the opposite end you'll notice that only what remains is that blue color and everything else has been desaturated in the image now I'm gonna add to this with the next few verses hue selector so going through the process this time I'm selecting a hue based on a pixel so I'll select the eyedropper again make a selection here we can see here that we have a similar selection where we've got three dots on a graph but this time I actually want to use this to change the color of her shirt so I will drag up you'll see there that you get a little line based on which color you can switch it to and I've changed the color here of her shirt now there's a slight problem and if you pay attention to the window on the right hand side you'll see that there was a blue tint coming from the outside color and it's also becoming affected the great part about any effect in After Effects is you can combine them with masks and I'm going to basically make a math around that section say to ignore the window and make sure that you're only affecting the dress thanks this is a static shot but we could also combine it with tracking I want to select my pen tool and this is a shape tool unless a clip is selected and once a clip is selected you can come in here make a mask around a specific portion of the image and what I'm going to do now is get this Lumet's recolor effects to reference that mask this has to be done in the composition window I'm going to double click the lumetri effects inside effect controls and you'll notice that that's a cool tip to get your lumetri effect down here in the timeline if I make this window a little bit bigger by pressing the tilde key one thing you'll see is there's a series of compositing options under the lumetri color effect and if I click on the plus icon it's now referencing mask number 1 on this layer now I don't quite have what I want in fact what I'd like to do is actually come here inside my color work effects and here where you see masks is just inverted so I want everything outside the mask to be affected not what's inside the mask so there was just a little bit of a newer tool that we wanted to cover in terms of using elementary effects and how you can do some secondary base Corrections really easily and fluently and then also combine After Effects masks to get the selection that you're looking for was that pretty cool guys ok um Ian alright I think you got some cool tips to show ya I'm in what a hospital all right excellent so one of my favorite tips happen to overlap with one of our favorite experts tips so school of motion Joey Corman he sent in his tip we we went out and asked a bunch of different designers that we really enjoy and Joey's definitely one of them and he's a great instructor as well like I said with school of motion and one of his tips was sequencing layers and that's one of my favorite tips as well so I'm gonna show you a couple different techniques that we can use to sequence multiple layers and as I do that I'm also gonna drop in some key framing techniques and maybe the graph editor or some other stuff I don't know we'll see how it actually goes there's a town good all right sweet so now what I'm gonna do is go ahead and double click on the start composition that I have here in my project and you notice I have a bunch of illustrator layers that are layered on top of this background now I want to sequence these layers to appear from right to left okay so what I'll do is I'll click on this bottom layer which is my right layer here and I'll just drag it over the right and as I drag I'm gonna hold shift so it snaps along the x-axis and then I'm gonna go up here to my top layer which is my plain layer and I know you can't see that it's a plane but since it's selected in the timeline when I click and drag and hold down shift now it's going to be selected so I can drag it over here on the left hand side okay so I want to distribute these so they're actually placed across the middle of the scene so to do that I'll select layers one through layer six by clicking and shift clicking and I'm going to use a panel that a lot of people discount when they're inside of After Effects and it's the align panel and you might see Nick use this a little bit later as well this is one of my favorite panels also in the align panel I can distribute layers and I chose the top and bottom layers and position those accordingly so now when I go ahead and distribute these layers based on their midpoints now they're going to be perfect we spaced and distributed across the middle of the composition cool all right how many of you use the align panel a couple of you a lot of you awesome you guys are amazing alright so I'm gonna go ahead and close this now and what we'll do is actually create multiple frames of key frames or key frames on multiple layers using one set of techniques by selecting all of the layers so right now I want all of these elements to appear in these positions so we're going to animate backwards okay if you're new to animation this is a technique you might use a lot if you have something positioned where you want it to resolve set that keyframe first and then move back to the beginning so what I'm going to do is move my current time indicator to about one second in the timeline and then I'll select all these layers and on the Mac I can press option P on Windows it's shift alt P so P shows you the parameter option P opens the parameter and sets a keyframe okay that works for all the keyboard shortcuts P for position s for scale R for rotation you get the idea okay so now I'm gonna go back to frame 0 and I'll deselect all these layers and I'm just gonna select my plain layer and I'll move that over here and I'll hold down shift as I start to drag it to make sure it stays on its axis okay so now that's positioned over here and I like that position and I want all of these other elements to save but to use that exact position so since that keyframes selected or I could go ahead and just draw a lasso around that keyframe I can copy it and then select all the other layers underneath and paste okay so now if I press the spacebar in preview you can see everything fans out okay and it's moving in a linear fashion so I'm gonna do a couple things the first thing I want to do is go ahead and make sure that I adjust my keyframes so they're not linear okay because that's kind of boring so to do that I'm gonna go ahead and drag a lasso around all the keyframes okay so with all the keyframes selected I'm going to press f9 on my computer which isn't the same thing as going up under go animation and going to the keyframe assistant and choosing easy ease okay so that applies an ease on both sides of those keyframes so now if I press the spacebar you can see everything comes in and slides in an easy fashion okay but ease is a nice little way to move things but if you guys have been paying attention to anything in the industry I'm sure you've noticed that people like much more drastic speed changes wouldn't you say oh definitely yeah so the way to do that is to use the graph editor and if you've never used the graph editor before don't be scared all right follow along with me I'm gonna go ahead and make sure all of the keyframes are selected by drawing the lasso around all of them and then I'm gonna go ahead and click the graph and your button here to pop it open in the graph editor now sometimes when you open the graph editor it will look like this and other times when you open the graph editor it will look like this either way it's sometimes an intimidating look when people first open it up right but what's cool about this is the fact that I have all these keyframes selected I can make one adjustment to handlebars and it will adjust all of the keyframes that I have selected so what I'm gonna do is change the magnification of my timeline by clicking this little blue tab over here so I can zoom into my timeline then the second button I want to make sure that I'm in this speed graph like so and I'm gonna click and drag a lasso around these two anchor points here which is going to give me control handles so what I want to see happen is have these elements slide in quickly and then slow down gradually so to do that I'll just grab this one handle and click and drag to the left and this is giving me a beautiful visual representation as to the speed of these elements when they move into the scene so now if I pop out of the graph editor move back to the beginning of the timeline deselect all the layers press the spacebar you can see they've slid in and they've slowed down all from using the graph editor was that bad was that okay was that scary all right cool all right so now what we're going to do is sequence the layers because doing all this all at once is fine but if I want them to actually slide in in sequence I'll use the sequence layers come in which is actually one of the oldest commands and after-effects but it is in my opinion one of the single most useful commands yes are none so the way I like to work with this is to actually set a duration for the layer based on how I want the offset to function so for example if I want these to sequence in and have a new one appear in the scene every 15 frames I'm gonna move my current time indicator to 15 frames in the timeline and then I'm gonna use one of my favorite keyboard commands after I select all the layers so I'll click on the right layer shift-click on the top layer and I'm gonna press option right bracket okay on Windows it's all right bracket that will trim the layer to the current time indicator not slide but trim okay so now all these layers are nice and short and this is the most important thing to pay attention to with sequence layers the order in which you select the layers will determine how the sequence functions so if I click on the right layer and then shift-click on the plain layer and go up under animation go to my keyframe assistant and choose sequence layers I can go ahead and click OK and it's going to sequence based on the first layer that I selected through the last layer that I selected is that cool all right so check this out right I got all excited when I first saw this I was like sequence layers that's great let me go ahead and preview this and no that's not it right it's close but not quite so what we need to do is press the spacebar and go ahead and move the current time indicator to the end of the timeline and the easiest way to move to the end is to use the end key so when you press and it moves to the end of the timeline and with all these layers selected I can repeat the same command I used to trim the layers by pressing option right bracket and that will trim the layers all the way to the end of the composition so now when I press the spacebar everything is going in in sequence we've created something dynamic and we've done this in a matter of minutes even with all my explanation does anybody think that's cool all right sweet yeah so now that we've gone through some of that stuff are you gonna jump into some of Iran's tips yes so we got some tips from both Iran Stern who's doing some sessions here on After Effects some of you might have taken his boot camp and jomi Corman from school of motion so again when I send you the keynote these tips that they are we're covering just a few of them we have a document of three from Iran Stern and three from Joey for you to have that breaks down these tips and a lot more detail so for Iran's tips I'm in here in my composition and you might have noticed that someone who was in this room got really mad and sort of tilted over the plant so this is just where my plant itself if I press s for scale and then go shift are for rotation if you take a look at the values they've been set from their original the other is 45 degrees in terms of rotation there's a few handy tricks by double-clicking various tools in the tool bar to reset these back to square one so one of those is with the plant layer selected if I go to the default selection tool and I command double click control double click on a PC it resets the value to 100% if I do the same thing with the whoa tape tool or the rotate tool however you want to pronounce it because it you select it with a double you command double click the rotation is set so those are some tips for you to basically reset your settings and there's a cool one here where you have what I'm going to call an array and arrays where you have multiple values for a given parameter ie in this instance because this layer is 3d shape has an array of three and you can see there that there's also a lock icon to make sure that we don't make any errors to the scaling of the lair for instance if you drag on your lair in the composition panel sometimes it can get tricky and you can make a change here and skew your lair there's a handy function if you option double click that lock I'll just show it again 132 skew but if you option double click this area where it was locked resets the values all to a hundred percent so just some double clicking tricks in terms of getting around your interface how many of you guys have done some texts in After Effects come back the next time and really wish that After Effects is character panel was set to square one any one of you so if I come up here I've got some really ugly text that a designer before me created it is line spacings all off and they've chosen my least favorite thought I think this is Comic Sans it's my favorite you guys compose me a ticket if you have that you know in the bag did you guys see those tickets please give me one a little bit later but I'm going to come up here and just show you something here in the character panel so in the character panel and a lot of panels I like to call these flyaway menus because if I didn't tell you it was there you probably wouldn't know and it flies away from the eye but you see these three lines and at the very bottom you'll see you can reset the entire panel back to its original so that will work a lot better if I select the text come over here and reset the character panel okay that same value is also available in the paragraph panel so you can reset those back to their default values at any time you choose one more thing from Aeron stern that i wanted to cover and that has to do with lights so you can add lights when you make a layer 3d and then that light will interact with your layer when it is 3d now how many of you guys have used adjustment layers in another program there are some things called adjustment lights so the idea is I've just moved down my spotlight so it's under these two values here under the wall in the background and you'll see here this is your kind of adjustment layer category and right now this light is affecting quite a bit of the room I don't know why everything's going black but if I actually change it into an adjustment layer light now it's affecting only the two layers underneath the wall and the background this is just another way to limit what your light is affecting there's a ton of other parameters under layers where you can choose for 3d layers not to actually interact with lights but just a really cool trick that Aaron is shared with you in a document again that will send so let me just make this and turn it back to its original and I wanted to show you guys a couple of really handy shape tricks because there's so much with shape layers in After Effects it's really good just to know some shortcut keys to get shapes really quickly and efficiently number one here you can cycle between all the shapes in your toolbar by pressing the Q key so the Q key is going to cycle between every single lay a shape once I select it now I have the rectangle tool here and notice what happens when I double click a rectangle is the composition size matching exactly what's in the composition that was open just a great way if you're wanting a background through a shape layer I'm going to undo that and actually use the Q key to cycle a bit further to the star tool I'm going to make sure that nothing is selected here in my project we can see here it's fill is actually red and if I start to drag but two of the keys that I like to use to make sure this is going to be constrained from the center are the shift key and the option key which gives make sure that that shape is looking great this is actually going to the default values of the previous shape but what I'd like to do on the fly is add or take away points from my star so if I use the downward arrow key notice I'm taking away points from the star now the biggest thing here my hand is still on my mouse I haven't released my mouse you release it these shortcut keys aren't available so the downward arrow taking away points the upward arrow adding points to add to this if you use your left and right arrows these effect to values within the shape layer referred to as inner and outer roundness and you can take a star and come up with a extremely different looking shape I'm using the right arrow right now and kind of bloating that star shape a pattern on the fly without even having to go inside the shape layer and adjust these values or parameters a lot easier to do so there's some shape layer tricks I've got one more which actually has to do with Photoshop so in Photoshop I have a blank project here that's set for video quality 1920 by 1080 and there's this one tool the tool is called the custom shape tool it's under the menu just above it the hand tool and it gives you basically options for a bunch of custom shapes the custom shapes that are available happen to be at the top of the menu what shows to you at first is a few shapes but if you head to the gear icon you can change this list to all if I choose okay you've got a lot more shapes available so I'll select something fairly simple here to go with that background I'm going to select this cat guy and I'm going to drag out and hold down shift an option to make sure that that is constrained now the cool part is I can take this layer and copy it as a shape layer into After Effects the way to do it is just above the custom shape tool is a way to get to the direct selection tool with this tool notice all the points selected in the cat now that that is selected I'm going to press the handy shortcut to copy and see I'm gonna go into After Effects and inside of After Effects I will come here and select this layer actually no I won't select any layer - that I'll select the pen tool and I'll click and make a point so you can see the shape layer there at the top of my composition panel called shape layer 1 if i press command-v based on the properties of this the fill is the shape that's been given to you and now you can replicate this pattern you can animate it using all After Effects properties this and the gateway to the Creative Cloud is just a collection of content screaming to you to add to shapes and use the power of shapes in after effects including extruding these objects and making them into logo animations so I wanted to give you guys a couple of shape tips what you guys think pretty cool ok while a lot of you in the pre-survey didn't answer that you're working with green screens I wanted I'm standing for a second because I've been sitting all day during sessions so don't mind me but I want to refer to something that I like to call blind key which most people partake in blind keying is the option of you add a keying effect to key out the green and all you do is you pick a pixel and you hope for the best that it will remove most of the green in your screen you have no idea what's going to happen after you move to something called mat view right mat view is going to show you a black and white image of what you want to keep and what you want to remove white being what you want to keep in this case it happens to be my subject so for some simple setups of green screen tips and After Effects you could avoid something called blind King with a little bit of a setup so follow me here as I take the layer in my composition and I double click it so this layer is opened inside the layer panel I can see here clearly by this film strip and I'm going to do a side-by-side comparison with this in terms of my composition window on the left and the layer panel on the right in fact I do this so often that under the window menu I've actually saved a workspace layout called green screen which sets this up automatically by it's gone to a another cop here by accidents but let me select that so the cool thing about this panel is I'm going to do a search in effects and presets for key light and if you ever do this for a green screen there's going to be two things that show up the actual key light effects and this which is a preset I suggest that you use the preset as it's a way better way to key and gives you three effects to make the process a lot smoother so adding this preset you can see here in my effect controls I've got my key light effects I've got an additional effect called a key cleaner and I've got this additional effect that handles spill as spill is when you start to key out green you're gonna get its opposite color which happens to be magenta in a color wheel and in order to make or neutralize that magenta you want to get rid of that spill so it just adds this cool preset that I suggest you use in terms of key now the cool part about this is inside my layer panel its referencing the spill suppressor effect the last one here but I'm going to click off this button which is called render and under my key light effect I want to change the view to something called status so I told you what we're seeing here white represents what you want to keep black represents what you want to remove from the image and we want to remove pretty much the entire green background if you select your eyedropper here in scheme color and hover over to the layer window I'm gonna hold down the option key and I get a sense now for what pixel is best to start with you can see there I'm getting some better values over here but if you spend some time holding down that alt button in connection also with the eyedropper we can start off with a fairly decent key and then refine those properties under the screen color or matte so anyone who wants this I'll also send you just a link to this link in terms of the split window but just a great way to start keying or getting a reference for what you're choosing in terms of pixel oh yeah I'm not performing blind key where you have no idea what that pixel is gonna do pretty cool awesome do you want to talk about the other two in the preset the I talked about the green screen pset but I have the camera thing okay and that's so I wanted to talk about cameras for a second there was a little bit of feedback in terms of like how can I work with cameras and After Effects a bit better how many of you guys use cameras and After Effects right now okay a lot of times I'll find myself trying to sculpt movements between various text layers maybe various illustrations and Photoshop and I'll really want to have a good idea or a grasp for constructing movement or at least a way of constructing movement a little bit easier so let me hop to a composition I have here called camera framing and my timeline is getting really busy so I'm gonna right click and I love this option which is just to close all other timeline panels so that I can remain sane for a couple more minutes so I've got in this composition a camera and I've got two text layers one of the sorry text compositions one of these text compositions happens to be off screen and zSpace not seen by the camera what I'm going to do to show it to you is review at camera view so there's a way of seeing or keeping sane in 3d space by bringing up various camera framing views so here on my left is a top view now my right is the active camera view and just to show you by my camera is here and the title camera is right over here I've got another layer way back kind of again in space which I want to fly to as easily as possible so some of you might have used something called a unified camera tool and this tool allows you to basically change the window layouts of your orthographic views or your perspective views which basically adds orientation in your 3d space but in your top view here I'm just gonna zoom out of the scene and just show you further out here you should see a second camera scene it starts a little bit later but you can see it right there so here's my first layer and here's my second layer and I want the camera to fly from here to here as easily as possible without trying to manually move it in terms of position so a cool little tool here that most people use in orthographic views happens to be the frame tool what this allows me to do is select a camera and select a layer and if I press in this top view the F key notice how everything is framed to the view of the window just to do it again I'll select the camera and my one title camera layer and press F again and it frames this sort of flat text animation and my camera so I actually use this in active camera views and I want you to see that my camera also already has a bit of animation to it in terms of its position to move around the first text layer and around this point where my two layers overlap so my first title group and my second I want to fly to the second camera group what I'm going to do is select this second camera text group and my camera and look right here in the timeline where my point of interest and position is with the active camera view selected sorry and again my camera and the camera seen by pristine there we go active camera view I have my unified camera tool selected and I press F I don't know if you just saw there but because I've already started the key for a new process it framed up that second group for me already and I don't have to manually drag to find it it just flew to it for me you'll see that side camera tool it's really kind of a cool thing because if you design something and you position it in a random place a lot of people's pain points is navigating the camera around the scene and if you use that technique you can just with one button have the camera automatically move to your graphics and frame it yes and then you don't have to actually manually drag the camera to find that group so the trick of this is you have to be in the unified camera tool so we're in the unified camera tool that's where the frame tool works if you have it selected any of the tools that are under Y pressing C you can then frame your camera and a group in the active camera group or another group and stay a little bit saner in 3d space pretty cool awesome so I think you have a couple things in yeah yeah yeah let's go ahead and hop in there alright so here's an exciting lower third graphic element how many of you have ever had to create lower thirds in your entire life yes exactly so one of the big reasons why we create lower thirds and After Effects is because it has you know excellent animation tools but another reason to create graphics inside of After Effects is the fact that you can create templates for Premiere Pro so what I'm going to take you through is a couple keyboard shortcuts that I use to manage shape layers but then I'm also going to show you how to prepare files to save it as a template so then Nick can open up inside of Premiere Pro and show us how to actually work with those templates in Premiere Pro because I don't know about you but when I do a design I like to go ahead and create the animation for the lower third and then give it to the editor and say have fun and they can make 85 other different versions of it but pre template time I was the person that was creating 85 different compositions and going in and changing each individual name that doesn't sound like any fun does it alright so check this out I have a lower third animation that's actually come up here and it's not quite finished so we're gonna finish it first and then we'll prep it so the first thing I want to draw your attention to are these shape layers that were animated so I want you to notice if I select both layers and then press the U key you will see any of the animated properties so I'm sure you guys have experienced that before right you see the keyframes okay now if I want to see what's been changed with this shape layer so I can make an adjustment to choose a different color I could press uu and it will reveal any of the parameters for that shape layer that have been changed so right here the color was a setting that was changed so now I can go ahead and just click in here and instead of having it be that dark green I could have it be something like this yellow brown okay does anybody think that's cool uu that's one of my favorite things for shape layers because shape layers are one of these things that if I collapse the shape layer and open it up you'll notice I have my contents in my contents I have my rectangle inside my rectangle I have my path I have my stroke it's much easier to select a layer and just press uu and then I can get right at the key elements that I've been working with okay now another pain point that I've heard people talk about is when they work with shape layers right here I can press uu you'll notice that I've animated the transform position for rectangle one right and part of the reason I did that was when this rectangle was created it has its own set of transform properties but if I collapse the layer and I open the layer the layer has its own set of transform properties right so if I go ahead and rotate here on this shape layer it's gonna rotate around the center of this specific rectangle right but sometimes you add a shape layer into a project and you want to be able to just go ahead and manipulate that shape layer using the keyboard shortcut for rotation so I'll say R rather than drilling down into the shape layer well if I say R that's gonna open the rotation of the layer and look at where the anchor point is on that shape layer is that frustrating a little bit right so if I want to fix that there's a keyboard command which is command option home so with the shape layer selected I can press command option home and that will reset the anchor point to the center of the shape layer now this shape layer only had one element on it so it's right in the middle of that shape layer is we all know shape layers can have multiple shapes so if you use that it'll put the center point in the middle of multiple shapes but since I only had one now when I go ahead and do the rotation it's set in the middle of the shape layer is that cool all right so now what I'm gonna do I'll just keep begging for applause so that's fine all right so now I'll go ahead and undo that last thing here and let's go ahead and do some basic animation as you guys know there is animation or there are animation presets inside of After Effects for text elements if you're new you may not necessarily be familiar with that so what I'm gonna do is actually fade up letter-by-letter just by going in the effects and presets and I'll choose fade up and I have options like fade up by characters or fade up by words so what I'm going to do is fade up characters on this text layer and notice I drag I drag and drop it directly on the text in the composition panel boom now I want to fade up yeah it's it's fine now hold on not done yet all right so now I want to fade up by a which one did I last do let's see was it characters yes it was characters now I want to fade up by words so what I'll do is I'll select layer two and I'll press I to move to the endpoint of that layer and I'll go ahead and fade up by words now when I pressed I to move the current time indicator to the endpoint of that layer when I drag and drop this directly on that text layer I can drop it in the comp panel or here in the timeline when I let go and then press the U key after selecting layer two I'll press the U key you can see the keyframes were added right at the current time indicator okay so if I need to retie this I can go ahead and click on a keyframe and just drag it like so but the first layer here if I press you notice my current time indicator wasn't at the start of the layer so what I'll do is just drag a lasso around those two keyframes or just click the word start so those will be selected and I'll click on one and I'll hold shift and as I drag it it'll go ahead and snap to the start of that layer now I can deselect those keyframes and slide it to the left like so and now to time this I'll go ahead and just slide my subtitle over to the right and I can go ahead and preview this and now you can see we have our text fade in and we have everything all set up right cool all right good stuff so now we're ready to actually prepare this for a template to send over to Premiere Pro so what I'm gonna go ahead and do is go up under the window menu and in the window panel do I will look for the essential graphics panel okay the essential graphics panel is the panel that allows you to determine what parameters can be changed inside of Premiere Pro okay so what I'll do is I'll make sure I have the zero one lower third composition selected and then I'll go over here in the master drop-down and I'll choose zero one lower third and now I'm getting a preview as to what that's going to look like and I'll click solo supported properties and it going to show me any of the properties that I can make editable for my editor so for example if my editor doesn't want this dark yellow color and I want to give them the ability to change that color I can just drag it and drop it up here and I can label that change I'll call it subtitle color or color with an art all right there we go okay I can do the same thing with the text itself when I scroll through I can look for the individual text elements here we go and to do that I'll drag the source text up here so for the source text I'll say title text okay and I can go through this process for anything that I would like to become editable in the editing environment and as you can see there are a number of different things that I could make editable inside of Premiere Pro when I am preparing this template okay so let's say these are the only two things I want them to be able to change they can't change the actual text of the subtitle but they can change the title for the lower third and they can change that color so what I need to do is click export motion graphics template and it's gonna tell me I need to save my project or I want to save it and I'll click yes so now it's gonna go ahead and ask me where I want to save this templates file what I want to do is if I'm working on this local system save it to a local templates folder but if you're working in a workgroup and you have your Creative Cloud rocking and rolling you can click on the drop down and you can save it to a library and then share that file out of your library with other people in the work group and they will have access to those templates now to save you the pain of having to wait for this to actually roll through and have Nick upload my upload he downloads Nick actually has a template already loaded so he's gonna go ahead and customize a template for a slightly more complex graphic scene sound good all right here we go so magic just happened in the template completely changed but what's it this is actually one of the templates or motion graphic templates that are available on Adobe stock you can purchase some of them for nominal free and there actually happens to be a number of free Adobe stock templates as well and inside of Premiere Pro there are two styles of templates that you should know of one are templates that are made inside of Premiere Pro and the others are templates made from After Effects the ones from After Effects are colored like this okay so this is a template which if he saved that to his local system would be available in the essential graphics panel under the Browse tab and if I look here under the Browse tab I can see all the actual templates that are here on my system all I have to do is simply take this template and then drag it into a sequence this essential graphics panel also has a secondary part to it which is the Edit tab and the Edit tab is where I can make all the changes another really good identifying feature of the difference between an After Effects and Premiere template templates made in Premiere you can actually change the text inside the project the program monitor I'm going to get into a screaming match with these guys like I said let's go program monitor that was way better yeah all right thank you thank you okay so you can see here the amount of parameters someone copied over to give to an editor some of these actually include switching backgrounds where you can have multiple backgrounds and give them an option to switch it I actually even switch some animation now on leaving this note this is a really render intensive file okay and we're asking After Effects to do a ton here I'm basically through premiere through something called dynamic link saying hey please look inside of After Effects and try as best as possible to play back in real time and sometimes depending on your system it's not going to work really well you're asking way too much so I want to show you this one feature that you should know if you're you think that you're at a final stage in your template close to a final stage or even final stage with an After Effects composition and that happens to be this option here it's called render and replace I refer to it as baking a cake what this does is it actually renders out your After Effects project as an MOV file or a format of your choice and nxf and will then link to it on your system but that's not the cool part that is not the cool part the cool part I actually did this ahead of time because I don't want to save you guys the process of actually rendering out this extensive extruded beautiful template you can see here that it's now referencing a movie file and this is what it would look like the color will change the cool part is even if you need to go back you can always restore the unrendered version and still continue to work with it inside of Premiere Pro if you've made an essential graphics template or even better press the shortcut command e to open up an After Effects composition and make some changes so it's like looking at a file on your system and either pointing to your rendered version or your actual other version but it's linked yeah and you're saving yourself the time of waiting constantly for this to playback you just take a little bit of time and make sure it's referencing the premiere timeline pretty cool all right ok good job man thanks man we have a couple closing notes yeah let me switch over here all right surprise prize are our friends at Boris effects they make a few products one most notably for After Effects which is built-in and available for you is mocha AE and today it went over a major overhaul in the way that it works and functions inside of After Effects now each one of you can get the professional version of mocha Pro which has even more features and it's unwatered marked for 30 days or you can pick one of two major plugin packages which is continuum or sapphire so it's 30 days the big note here is that you have to in the next 30 days download it or it's no longer going to be available so from today's date you have 30 days in order to go here on this slide which will also email to you and then use this for 30 basically 30 days on watermark on top of this you guys can do a quick look under the right side of your seat not too far in but we've left five business cards spread throughout the room whoever has a business card five people gets a one-year free subscription to any one of these products and that is courtesy of them so whoever has the business card it's gonna be on the right-hand side not too deep in you've just got yourself a one-year subscription to your choice of products we just asked you to come up and introduce yourself so that we can start the correspondence with Boris what do you guys think the session cool right so we have a I think our contact information up here to if and don't forget please let us know with the session survey say again we will send to everyone who signed up for the session our deck of what we've covered the extra tips that I promised you and then some additional details and I believe that they're recording this presentation so it might make its way on the Adobe site as well for you to reference but we wanted to really thank you I here's our contact information if you want to reach out and we would really appreciate your feedback to hopefully come keep coming back if you found it useful and if you have that business card come on up and get your free one-year that's pretty amazing these are high-end products so please I can't wait to meet you all thank you guys so much thank you so much for allowing me to speak for you guys have a great day

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 160,224

Keywords: adobe after effects, Adobe Creative Cloud, after effects, Adobe MAX session, Adobe Cloud, Creative Cloud, Adobe CC, Adobe creative suite, #MakeAdobeCC, #AdobeCC, #ACCTags, 24869, #adobemax, adobe, creative suite, graphic design, adobe premiere pro, after effects tutorial, how to use adobe after effects, adobe premiere pro cc, after effect tutorial, after effects tips and tricks, adobe after effects advanced techqniques, keyboard shortcuts in after effects

Id: LdBi6dn2uZ4

Length: 67min 59sec (4079 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2019