After Effects 16.1: New Features Overview

it's that time of year time for another After Effects update and this one has a lot of crazy really cool new features in it in this video I'm going to be going over some of the really big headline generating features and also some of the smaller quality of life improvements that Adobe added to After Effects 16.1 if you want to stay up to date on everything that's going on with After Effects and with the motion design industry in general please subscribe to our Channel and go to school motion comm for a free student account you can get on our motion Mondays mailing list once a week we'll send you a very short email that will keep you up to date on everything going on in the industry After Effects 16.1 is a big improvement and there's some really neat new features so let's jump in and take a look alright so let's start with what is probably the craziest new feature that was added to After Effects and this is content aware fill for video now this feature is still very new it's not totally perfect but I'm going to show you a demonstration of it which if you're anything like me is going to blow your mind alright so let's say you have this shot here and you know I'm really focused on this building here I kind of like this nice little driving down the street shot the problem is you've got these two annoying polls you've got the light pole you've got this little sign and you want to remove those now of course if you're a visual effects whiz you could track them in mocha and do all kinds of clean plate you know painting and stuff like that that is gonna be really tricky and not everyone has that skill set so now there's a new way to do this so this is how the Tool Works you start by just drawing a mask around the things that you want to remove all right so I'm just gonna draw a mask around this pole and the more precise you are the easier it's going to be to get a decent result but in fact the way this tool works it doesn't really matter if there are extra pixels you don't need a super-tight mask I'm gonna set this mask to none mode so I can still see it while I'm working on it and then I'm gonna hit option M so I can put a mask a keyframe and I'm just gonna go sort of to the end of the clip here and move this ask over and then I'm gonna have to just sort of go through and manually create a little bit of a roto Matt here so that I make sure I'm getting the entire light pole contained in the mask on every single frame and that's gonna take a little bit of manual tweaking I'm not gonna make you sit here and watch me do that so all right and here we are look at that so I went ahead and made two masks one for the light pole one for the sign and you can see that as I play it I mean they're comically sloppy masks but they actually work they do cover up the features so now if I was gonna paint this out the traditional way I would have to basically make sure I have a clean frame of this wall and then I would have to track it back over itself to cover up these sections here no more so here's how the tool works I'm gonna click on the layer and make sure that the masks are set to subtract this tool works by filling in holes in the layer so it's important that you have holes that's why I have it set to subtract mode you do not need to feather these masks sometimes that gets you a better result but you don't actually need to do it so now let's come over to the content aware fill tool now you can see as I scrub through the shot this little thumbnail is kind of updating and showing me where the holes are in the footage now there's a lot of features in this and a lot of settings and we're gonna actually have a separate video where we go over this tool in detail because it's pretty deep but the Alpha expansion is a very important property it's by default set to zero and I found that setting it to one or two it just sort of expands the amount of pixels that the algorithm tries to fill in and you don't get any aliasing around the edges there's different fill methods object surface and edge blending in this case I'm just gonna use object and then of course the range that you want it to try and fill in so I'm gonna leave that at work area and now I'm just gonna click generate fill layer now you can see that it's analyzing and depending on your computer and how long the clip is this can actually take a little while but in most cases it's pretty quick and it looks like this is gonna finish in probably less than thirty seconds and now we're done so what's actually happened is After Effects has generated a PNG sea and if I solo this you'll see it's generated a sequence just within those pixels that I needed to replace all right and even just playing this it's pretty crazy how well you can see this tool working and of course if I unsolo it and I play this clip you can see that the light pole and the sign are gone now that's pretty crazy now if you're working on a feature film or something you have a visual effects supervisor that really likes to get in there make sure things are pixel perfect this tool may not work that well if you go frame by frame there are certain areas where you can kind of see some artifacting happening you know like I'm kind of noticing right around here right in there as I play it there's like a little bit of a there's almost like a little bit of a line moving through it that you can kind of catch but honestly there's a there's a phrase that I used to use a lot called good enough for government and this is good enough for government now one thing that has not been fixed is this little blob on the ground here you'll see that that was the base of the sign and the algorithm wasn't you know sort of smart enough I guess to fix that and make it look like sidewalks so there's another really cool feature that I want to show you really quick and that is to create a reference frame so if I go to this frame here right and I'm going to leave this fill on and what I'm gonna do is click create reference frame now when I click this what that does is it renders that one frame and it opens it in Photoshop what I can then do is use any tools I want in Photoshop to paint this out and make it look exactly the way I want so I could just use say the clone stamp tool to kind of clean this up a little bit make it look a little better and I'm just gonna do a quick and dirty job here all right so that only took a couple of minutes and now I have a much cleaner frame and if I save this I can now go back to After Effects and you'll see that there's a reference frame layer in there now because this is in my comp the content-aware fill tool is going to use that reference frame as kind of a guide as it fills in the pixels it's going to try and match that throughout the content or fill if I click generate fill layer again I can actually do another pass of content-aware fill over the result that I've already got here so this is gonna be really cool what I'm gonna do is pre-comp what I have already and then I need to put a mask around this part of the shot this part that I want to get rid of and I need to be a little bit more precise here okay and then I can set this to subtract and you can see with my reference frame there that that frame looks clean now and I'm gonna have to do the same process and doing a little bit of manual key framing to make sure that that mask tracks with that object at the entire times I'm gonna do that real quick and come back alright so now I have a mask that tracks with that thing and again it's pretty rough and lumpy but should do the trick then I can just hit generate fill layer again but before I do that I'm gonna change the fill method to surface now surface works by treating the area to be filled as sort of a plane and so in this case that's exactly what it is now in the other example when I was removing the pole and the sign those were changing perspective the camera was moving and they had all kinds of motion blur on them this is literally just a smudge on a flat surface I'm gonna try this surface fill method and hit generate fill layer the surface method does analyze and process a little bit faster so that's one of the advantages of it and just like that our shot is basically cleaning that you'll see a little bit of something happening kind of towards the end of the shot here and that could just be because my mask was a little bit loose so I could easily go back in and fix that but you can see in really about five or six minutes of work here I've removed two objects from this shot without having to actually know how to do that the old-fashioned way which is very labor-intensive especially on a shot like this now like I mentioned this tool is brand new and it doesn't always give you the perfect result you kind of have to try it I think it's one of those tools where when it works it's like a freaking miracle but when it doesn't work sometimes there's not really a good solution to that so I wanted to try it on this shot because this seems like the perfect kind of thing where if you're an editor or someone who just doesn't really have the skill set yet to remove logo like this Amelie motor-oil logo here from a shot you could use a tool like that so let's just try that really quickly so all I'm gonna do is just draw a quick mask around the logo like so I'm gonna set the mode to none so I can still see it I'm actually gonna open up the tracker and with the mask selected I can use the mask tracker so I can kind of track forwards and then I can track backwards to get the entire shot and this way I don't actually have to do any manual keyframing I can let after-effects do the hard work for me so now that the mask is tracked on there we can set that to subtract we can come to the content aware fill panel and we can create a fill layer and the fill method is still surfaced so let's try that first and here's our results now you can see there's a lot of strange things going on there it ain't perfect right and this is the thing that you have to remember with tools that are just being launched they may save you a lot of time or they may not work and if they don't work I know this tool is gonna get a lot better over subsequent versions of After Effects but as you saw in the previous example sometimes you can get really incredible results here's an example I wanted to just show you really quick to let you see what happens when the tool doesn't work at all I tried to remove the runner from the shot and I suspect that there's a lot of reasons that this shot isn't a good candidate for content-aware fill but this was the result you can see I mean it is interesting you know it's almost like there's a rip in the space-time continuum happening over here so you know I mean this could potentially be the start of a cleanup and maybe you know you could also then just track this mountain back in there sometimes this tool isn't gonna be enough all by itself and frankly in some cases it's just not gonna work for you but when it does it really is a miraculous time-saver all right the next feature I want to show you is gonna make everyone who uses expressions and after-effects really really excited so temporarily I jumped back into the previous version of After Effects 16 0.01 and the reason I did that is to show you how expressions look in the version that you've been using up until now so I've got this little setup here where I've got a mouse pointer and as I get close to these layers they scale up and they kind of turn pink all right all done with expressions so if I open up the expressions on these layers you'll see I've got one expression on the tint effect one on the scale property if I click on the scale property expression you can see this is what it looks like and looking at expressions in the old editor you're not given a lot of visual cues as to what you're seeing most modern code editors like Adam or sublime text they color code your code for you they pick a different color for variables for functions for numbers for things like that for comments it makes it a lot easier to look at there's also features in code editors that can help you write the code when you type an expression in After Effects you just start typing and you hope that you get it right there's not a lot of help given to you now let me show you how it works in the new expression editor so back in 16.1 let's put an expression on the scale property of the ball and you can see right off the bat that the editor looks totally different there's line numbers there's color coding going on with the expressions and we're gonna go in and write a little bit of an expression so you can see how it works now the first thing I want to do is set up a variable to grab the layer for my mouse pointer now you saw as I was typing this little box popped up and that is the auto code completion box and I'm gonna show you how that works in a second let me pick whip to my mouse layer and add a semicolon and hit return now already you can see that this color coding makes this easier to read all right as you're writing your expression things will automatically be turned to the right color and you'll be able to see when you're referencing a layer when you're using a variable when you're using a function all of these things will have different colors it's really really handy the next thing I need to do is grab the true composition of this mouse so to do that I need to use the two comp expression so what I can do is set up a new variable mouse location equals and what I want to do is use two comp on this layer so I'm going to type in the name of that layer and you can see as I'm typing it after-effects realizes ah you're probably trying to reference that mouse variable that you set up previously and so I can use my arrow keys and just kind of up and down pick the one I want hit enter and then keep typing so then I'm gonna say dot two comp and again after effects has already guessed I want to use the two comp expression but if I wasn't sure I could arrow up and down and look at the other options and this is also a great way to learn what expressions what functions and properties and methods are available to you so I want to comp you'll see that After Effects has already given me the parentheses and inserted my cursor right in the middle the next thing I want is that Mouse layers anchor points I can type in mouse dot ank-ooo and it will guess anchor point I hit enter and I'm done I add a semicolon boom on to the next slide this is how most modern code editors work by the way if you're in software development you know this if you're a motion designer you probably don't this is a much much faster much nicer much easier way to work now I won't make you watch me type out the rest of this I'm just gonna copy and paste it so take a look at this this is the entire expression in there and you can see that we've got different color coding for things like comments numbers the semicolons the variables when we're referencing layers when we're using a function like length there's all kinds of visual cues here to tell me what's going on it's much much easier for you to read and especially if you share expressions it's easier for anyone else to read now I have another expression on the tint effect which is what actually turns these dots purple when the mouse gets close so if I go to the tint effect and I open up that expression it's very similar to the scale expression with one big difference at the end of the expression the way it works is it checks to see if the distance between my mouse pointer and my dot is less than a certain threshold and if it is then it tints it 100% otherwise it tints at 0% it does this using an if statement and what's cool about if statements and other statements like this is that they're sort of encapsulated they're like these code blocks and they're wrapped in these little curly Q's and when you have curly Q's that sort of contain these giant code blocks or tiny code blocks in this case you can actually collapse them and expand them this gets really really handy if your expressions get long if you have lots of if statements if you're doing loops if you're defining functions and then reusing them the ability to collapse and expand code blocks is really really handy another really cool thing about this expression editor is that you can actually change the way it looks if you go up to the after effects menu preferences there's a new section called scripting and expressions and there's some brand new preferences in here and they've moved some of the scripting preferences to this menu so enable JavaScript debugger allow scripts to write files an access network that's where that property's located now which makes a lot more sense than where it used and what I love is you can totally customize the expression editor so right now the font size is 14 by default it's 12 so we can set it back to 12 you get a little preview of what that's going to look like and this is really cool there's lots of different themes that ship with after-effects that Adobe included and you can try them out here and you can kind of see which ones you like and let's say we want this playground one you hit okay and now everything's updated in this code editor this is a massive massive improvement from the previous expressions editor inside of After Effects I know it's only going to get better with time but this is already approximately 10,000 percent better now if you think that this expression setup is cool you can actually download it for free at school of motion comm check the link in the description of this video and all you need is a free student account go check it out you can download this file and many many more on our site next feature and this is one of my favorites even though it is not the sexiest I think it's super important there's been some really great updates for guides in After Effects so you know guides if you have your ruler opened command R you can grab a guide like this right and let's say that we wanted guides set up right where these type layers sort of begin and end right just like this so let's say that I wanted to share this guide set up with another after effects artist well you could do that in previous versions what you could do is basically save this After Effects project out and as long as they took this comp and they duplicated it the duplicate would have those guides in it right but there's no way to copy and paste those guides from one cop to another and so that can create hassles if you already have things set up so what adobe has done is they've added a new feature or you can export guides so what you do is go to the View menu go to export guides and you export a dot guides file once we've done that if we make a new comp we can then go up to the View menu and say import guides and you can import the exact same guide set up which is very handy what's really cool about this is you can also import these guides into Adobe Premiere and you can export guides out of Adobe Premiere and import them into After Effects so that's one pretty nice update that I think is very but there's an even cooler one I want to show you next now in previous versions of After Effects there was no way for scripts or extensions to access guides and After Effects and to set them in Photoshop one of my favorite tools is in the View menu new guide layout this panel will let you set up guides with all kinds of functionality you could do a rule of thirds guide you could have a 12 by 3 with a gutter and a gutter by the way is actually spacing in between columns or rows you can set all these up and then you have this perfect set of guides that you can snap to and design with now After Effects doesn't have anything like that built in and in previous versions there wasn't even the ability to do that but now there is so you may have noticed I have a que bar installed and if you're unfamiliar K bar is an extension that lets you add little one-click buttons to commonly used tools effects presets scripts extensions things like that and you can customize it to your heart's content so what I've done here is I have set up a button using this new feature in After Effects to give me a one-click rule of thirds and this is really cool because it actually works no matter what the resolution is of my comp now I have to thank mr. is Zack Lovett creator of explode shaped layer is one of the creators of flow an all-around classy guy he built the code for this this is a scriptlet that you can load right into K bar and it gives you a rule of thirds no matter what size your comp is now I know you're probably thinking to yourself I wish I had my own cable button for a rule of thirds guide layout and Zack Levitt has been kind enough to give us permission to just give that to you so again check the link in the description go to school of motion comm and with a free student account you can download the little scriptlet that will let you add that button to K bar now that's all well and good but what if you don't want rule of thirds what if you want all that sweet control like you had in Photoshop well that's where this really great tool comes in called grid guide now grid guide is not new but in previous versions of After Effects it was kind of hamstrung because it couldn't actually make guides for you and it sort of had is really clever but hacky workaround and it would open Photoshop and save a Photoshop file and import it and that it was crazy so now because of this new scriptable guide functionality it works as it should and it's basically indispensable at this point and here's how it works so if I click this button here this creates a bounded grid which is typically the one that I want what happens is you get a shape layer in your comp and that shape layer has some controls on it so you can set the row the number of rows and the number of columns so let's say we want like a 12 by 5 or something like that having 12 columns is actually pretty common if you're doing web design so maybe that's what we're doing we're doing something that's going to end up on a web page you also have a setting for a square grid if you want to do that and then you can add a gutter let's say a 20 pixel gutter and if you really want a margin you can set that as well and then when you're done what you can do is click convert grids to guides and what will happen is this shape layer will get turned into actual guides so I'm gonna click that button and it literally takes less than one second and it's done if I close this now and turn off my shape layer and now I have guides now what's cool about guides guides are snappa ballif I grab my shape tool I can very easily snap to any intersection of these guides if I like that shape I can then duplicate it and move the copy wherever I want it and it will snap if I want to make the type snap to the guides I can do that as well right and so this just makes layout all heck of a lot easier if you're interested in grid guide we're gonna link to it in the description for this video and we're also going to link to it in the article that goes with this video on school of motion comm check it out at AE scripts comm it's an amazing tool so here's a couple of really small updates that are really nice to have they're just kind of quality of life improvements Thank You Adobe so we just have this simple animation here with an arrow moving from one keyframe to another and let's say we want motion blur on that well it's obvious we go to the layer switches and we turn on motion blur now before I do that I want to remind you that in previous versions of after if you had to turn it on here on the lair then turn it on globally for the comp well now in 16.1 if you turn it on the first time you turn that layer on its gonna automatically enable it for the comp now maybe that's not the behavior you want maybe you want it to work the way it did in the previous version so if you go to preferences previews you can turn that off and it will revert the behavior to the way it worked in 16-point oh 1 by the way this also works with frame blending so if you have a piece of footage and you enable frame blending it will automatically enable frame blending by default in the comp there's also a new contextual menu option that you can access so for example if I wanted to change this artwork in some way this linear keyframe here I wanted to change the way it looks or something like that I can control or right-click on this layer I can go to open and edit original has been added to this menu you can also set a hotkey for this if you use this feature a lot but now you can also right-click and very quickly get to it this will open the original artwork either in Photoshop or illustrator and so let's say I wanted to change this keyframe in some way maybe I want to you know just duplicate it and have a scaled-down version inside so you get this kind of weird interesting fake 3d look and then I can combine those two layers and make sure that the layer is named exactly the same hit save jump back into after-effects and that layer updates and we're good to go now pretty cool alright so just a couple of little things that I thought were nice the last thing I want to show you is also a really handy feature that was added and this is really nice if you're working in a studio or with a group of artists and you have to figure out what font someone used and sync it and do that a lot so to show you how this works I have a font here this is an Adobe font and this feature only works with Adobe fonts and this is nimbus sans extended bold so what I'm gonna do is deactivate this font and I'm gonna open this project in the old version of After Effects and then in this one and you'll see what happens so these are the Adobe fonts that I have active on my system and here's nimbus sans so I'm just gonna deactivate it just like that now let's go back into After Effects point-o one so here it is the old version of After Effects and if I open that project you'll see that the resolved fonts dialog pops up telling me Nimbus sans extended bold is not installed now I can click this and I can hit OK and that's really not that big of a deal but watch what happens in the new version in the new version if I open the file you'll see that for a second the font is not correct and then wait for it wait for it boom and there it is the font has synced pretty nifty huh now this isn't a huge deal but if you're working with After Effects artists or editors people like that who are not super savvy with After Effects this is just one of those things that can save you and save them from getting tripped up so again another good improvement on After Effects now of course we just scratched the surface here with the improvements and additions that Adobe made to After Effects 16.1 if you want to know every single thing that was updated or changed we are going to link in the description of this video and on our site to a page that adobe setup listing every single tweak and improvement they made I hope this video got you excited about the updates to 16.1 we're gonna have other videos focusing on the specific features like content-aware fill for video in the new expressions editor those will be coming out soon and if you'd like to stay up to date on After Effects and the entire industry please subscribe please go to school of motion comm register for a free student account and we will see you on the next one did you dig this video if so please give it a like and subscribe to our channel then head to school of motion comm to grab a free account to download tons of project files take a free class get our weekly industry newsletter and much more let us know what you thought in the comments tell us anything you'd like to learn and we will see you soon [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 132,950

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, Updates, 16, After Effects Updates, New After Effects Features, Adobe, Adobe After Effects, Expressions, Expression, Editor, Content Aware Fill, Content Aware, Remove, Object, Objects, Tutorials, Basic, Intro, visual effects, vfx

Id: nT5q0JRAszI

Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

Thanks for sharing new features

[u/Colorless267]

the expression update is such a good update

[u/thewhalejonas]

Thanks for sharing! Bookmarked for watching later!

[u/dno_bot]

DETROIT!