AFTER EFFECTS BASICS VFX TUTORIAL

all right so if you haven't noticed already take a look right now and you're gonna want to go ahead and get comfy because this is not a short video this is gonna be a full in-depth the tutorial for beginners and After Effects is Gabe come on come on okay so literally this is the most requested tutorial that I've gotten from you guys and this is on the award-winning software that's been using movies from Avengers to avatar I used After Effects for over 200 shots it just freakin blows my mind this stuff that you can do with this software so you guys know that I love talking about After Effects I mean it's practically my job but sometimes I get DMS and comments are just like whoa whoa whoa Nate slow the fuck down we just need you to talk about the absolute basics of After Effects you don't need to be getting hype about plugins or kpop edits all this extra stuff that you know that's exactly what we're gonna do today I'm gonna be taking you through building one of my all-time favorite effects it's actually the first effect that I ever learned in After Effects about nine years ago and everything that you learned from doing this effect actually translates into most VFX shots making it one of the most useful and also one of the most cool let's just roll the clip okay so without further ado here it is After Effects basics 101 let's get right into this I'm excited I know you are too let's go okay so I know After Effects is just one of those programs that seems impossible to get into I know when I first started I was like what the fuck is going on why are there all these like extra things all these things like compositions and layers and what is it but the way that I was able to finally understand it was to think of it more like Photoshop but for video that just seems to make way more sense so if you've used something like Photoshop before and you're making that transition to After Effects that's gonna make your life a whole lot easier and if you don't know anything about Photoshop just imagine all the cool crazy stuff that people do with photos yeah you're gonna be able to do all that cool crazy stuff but with videos and don't worry we're gonna make this as easy as possible for you to get into it so you don't need to be a super expert or can start from absolute ground zero anyways this is a point where you sit back you get comfy take a hit you grab a coffee you do whatever you need to do to get in the zone because we are starting this in three two one alright okay so we're gonna make this lit fire my hand effect which is surprisingly simple to do before I learn how to do this effect After Effects felt like just a monster I cannot tame but trust after you learn these effects After Effects is gonna feel like your book that was not good okay so what is After Effects and what is it being used for for those of you that haven't read the Wikipedia Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects motion graphics and compositing software it's used for all sorts of things in post-production and film television shorts I've seen it like literally used so much since it's come out it's really good at doing things like tracking keying compositing animation and it's okay if you don't know any of those terms because we're gonna be talking about them using real world examples I'm not just gonna ramble off about them right now all you need to know though is that it's super dope and we're gonna talk about it so let's just open up After Effects and get right into the software here so as you can see right now in after-effects now if this looks completely foreign to you that's okay over here is a project panel where all of your media clips all of your files from like you know illustrator files pictures videos whatever it is if it's gonna be using your project you're gonna put in your project panel right over here and then over on the other side of it we have right side here's where we use all of the cool tools and effects and gonna have things like our text adjustments things like all of our effects and whatnot I normally put like different miscellaneous things on this side at the bottom is a timeline which works as you'd expect from left to right up and down we'll get more into the timeline in a bit and all the way up at the top we have super useful tools that we're gonna be using throughout the project and at the very very top you're gonna see all the different tabs for the settings right here in the middle we have our main composition window so this is basically where you're going to be putting all of your After Effects where the magic is gonna be happening right here you're gonna see it so let's just go ahead and start with the first window that you're gonna see when you open up After Effects and this is the first window that you see in After Effects now if you've used Premiere Illustrator Photoshop pretty much any Adobe program this is gonna look super familiar to you if you have not it's okay this window is what comes up every time that you start up one of the programs and all its gonna ask you to do is open up a new composition or open up one that's recent so we're just gonna go ahead and start from the very basics let's go ahead and click on create a new project and bam as you can see I'm in After Effects okay so so I want you guys to go ahead and give yourself a quick pat on the back because if you've made it this far you guys have honestly sat through some of the biggest hurdles when it comes to understanding After Effects which is the UI itself for being able to understand that you guys just got it yeah all right okay so the first thing that you're gonna need to do to make this super lit effect pun intended is you're gonna need a video clip that you want to put fire on so I'm just gonna go ahead and use this clip that I took with my phone just to make it nice and easy plus I'm using the DSLR right now to film this tutorial BAM right here we have that clip at first it looks like I'm just you know talking to the camera said I want to go ahead and be able to put fire in my hand as if I was like a dragon and just you know spy Road fire into my hand that's what we're gonna do right now so let's go ahead and import that click now there's two ways that you can import an After Effects the first way is super easy and really the only way that you should be doing it which is by dragging and dropping but if you want to take the long way you can go ahead and click all the way up and file scroll all the way down the import a new file go over right and then navigate on your computer the different folders and yeah I never mind just don't do it that way drag and drop it because that's going to make your life way easier in the long run but if your computer is not working for some reason that's the longer way to do it so once we have that in our project panel we're gonna want to go ahead and click on it and drag it down to this cool little icon that has all these little shapes in it and this is called the make composition button and we're just gonna let go once it's on there and bam we have a brand new composition made with the exact same settings as that footage and what that means is that if we shot in 60 frames per second at 1080p our composition is going to be 60 frames per second at 1080p we should on 24 it's gonna be in 24 and yeah you kind of get the gist of it if you've used something like Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro you would know that having your sequence matching your film settings is gonna make the process a lot faster but in this case that does not work for After Effects because the higher the frame rate and the bigger the resolution is the slower the programs going to work it does rendering entirely different and I'm gonna show you how you can go ahead and make it run nice and smooth for your computer so you're gonna want to go ahead and click on this button right here which is one of the most important buttons when it comes to previewing and After Effects and this one will let you change the resolution from being either a hundred percent which is full resolution or you can dial it back to like one half which normally works pretty well or even one-fourth of your computer's running super slow alright let's get out all that technical jargon is take you right into making this effect also important to note is that After Effects works best for sure it seems so even though I may have something like a 10 minute video I'll probably only be doing things inside of 30 second compositions at most even then I would most likely lower down the frame rate from being something like 60 frames to something like 24 just to be able to make sure that I'm not putting too much effort into rendering whenever I'm working on on After Effects on this computer unless it's like for something super commercial that needs to be in 60 frames most of the time you're going to be able to get away with 24 any lower and your video is gonna start looking like you came out of a flipbook so yeah those are just some things to keep in mind okay so super important we're also going to right click in the timeline and select create new null object and what that is is basically an invisible square now we can link things too and it will be able to control stuff and this is gonna be really important because our tracking data is gonna go onto this null object which is then gonna go on to our fire if that makes absolutely no sense and I just lost you just stick with me for a like ten more seconds because it's gonna all make sense I swear trust me on this one all right so okay so right now if this video clip was at a party and my friends were to ask me if it's late I would want to say yes but right now there's no fire in it so we're gonna have to go ahead and add some fire to it so let's go ahead and pull up a fire clip now you can use any clip that either you find online or that you're able to procure yourself procure clips that work especially well will be ones that are on a black background because it's a really easy way to take those out so I've even been able to just take a video of like fire at a fireplace and just lower down the settings to make it super dark and it's only getting the fire that works pretty well but I don't leave a link you can Google free fire the effects and you'll probably find the clip of fire burning on a black background and you can use that for this one though I'm gonna be using video co-pilots action essentials once you have a clip downloaded you're gonna want to import that into after-effects next step that we're gonna do drag down this clip from the project panel into the timeline and BAM just like that we have a super dope lid effect now I'm just playing we got to do a little bit more to it so now we can have fun with this clip because it's inside of the composition so if you click and drag anywhere once that layer is selected you're gonna be able to move it around okay so let's reposition the fire roughly where my hand is so it looks like you know it's coming from it and if your screen just looks like a big black screen with some fire on it that is completely fine what you need to do in order to get it to look like this is change the blending mode which I'm going to show you how to do that right now so if you don't see the blending mode setting what you can do is press the f4 key on your keyboard and that should toggle between the different settings that you get for your layers so what we're going to want to do is go over to blending mode and change it from normal into screen and basically what that does is all this kind of like math stuff that you don't have to worry about with inverting pixels and multiplying them and stuff but at the very core of it it'll take out all the blacks make those transparent it'll make whites seem a little bit brighter to the footage below it so this is gonna work perfectly for something like a fire effect which we need all of the black background to be removed but you still want to keep the fire in there and you want it to make the rest of the footage look a little bit brighter okay so this effect already looks pretty cool but it doesn't follow my hand like it would if I was a human torch so what we're gonna do is we're you need to track this clip to my hand once we have it in a nice like general location I'm gonna go ahead and click this little eyeball icon which is gonna toggle its visibility so it's out of the way while we do all of the tracking now tracking and after effects is it's okay there's a lot of better ways to do it but here's this simplest way which is to go up into the window go all the way down to tracker click on that all of a sudden you're gonna get a new panel that pops up if it's not docked already just go ahead and dock it to the side make sure it's fully expanded so we see everything there from the position rotation scale forward and backward settings and make sure that everything is there because tracking is gonna be the next step that we talk about now another thing to note is whenever we're tracking we're not gonna be doing this in the composition window it's gonna look like it's in the composition window but really it's in the layer viewer window which is pretty much like right next to it it's gonna look exactly the same except when whatever we're in the composition window that motion track buttons are not gonna work that's just a little way to make sure that you're actually doing it right is to see that those buttons are actually highlighted and if not then just go ahead and double click on that layer and it's gonna take you up into the layer viewer ok so to get a nice clean track we want to use a point of contrast in the image and what that means is like you see these lines on my hand and how this part is white but this parts like a black line these are really great points of contrasts that we're going to be using and we're gonna tell After Effects to use those points by choosing those two boxes that you see right there first one on the inside of gonna be telling it what to track and the outer box is gonna be telling it what pixels to also look for for that tracking so it's pretty much like what's its reference area and I'm gonna go ahead and select a little sliver on my hand here one of those like melanin rings I don't know what these are why don't one of these pretty much and that's gonna be able to work for a track you don't have something like that you can go ahead and just like draw a little dot with the sharpie or a little X with the Sharpie on your hand and that'll also work we're gonna go ahead and click this little right arrow which is gonna select it to motion track forward and in time so every time my hand moves a little bit you're gonna see that little tracking dot change its position if we want it to go in the backwards direction hit the backwards arrow the single arrow icon is going to make it go ahead through the entire sequence until it loses its track whereas the one right next to is just gonna go one frame forward or one frame back this is just really useful if you need a fine tweak the track if it's not working out all the points inside of it can just click and drag it if it needs to be corrected and if the computer didn't get it right now this track is looking pretty good I only needed a little bit of tweaking together just right once everything's looking nice and good I'm gonna go ahead and make sure that the target is set to our first note I'm gonna go ahead and click apply now the position should be the only thing that is selected right now because I didn't really rotate my hand that much so we can go ahead and use X&Y position which is pretty much the X&Y coordinates of the track so okay so once we have that track applied to our null object you want to go ahead and parent now our position of our fire so it's not just staying in place but actually following that null object and the way that we do this is by clicking on this little spirally thing called a Piqua tool we want to go ahead and just drag that over to the lair if we have the fire already in the roughly same position as we needed it to be then you're gonna see that it's gonna look like it's following the hand almost perfectly there might be a little bit of overlapping here and there which we're gonna clean up in a bit so to clean up those parts where it overlaps in order to make this fire effect look like it's actually matching my hand and my fingers what we're gonna do is use the liquify effect in order to get this effect we can right click on the layer go all the way over to distort and press liquify or you're gonna see me do with the short way which is by using FA console plugin that i talked about in this video right here check it out if you got time so the cool thing about liquify is that it's gonna let us use this brush tool and all you're seeing me do right now is slowly just kind of adjusting the fire to look like it's roughly matching up my hand just clicking and dragging here it doesn't have to be perfect what i'm gonna do once it's in a nice general rough location i'm gonna click on the stopwatch icon right next to this torsion mesh which is gonna create a keyframe which is basically a point that holds all of the data for where that distortion is and as we scrub through the timeline i'm gonna slowly make adjustments to this distortion mesh and all of those adjustments are going to be reported in time as keyframes ok so right now i'm gonna click and drag on the layer in the timeline and move it forward in time that way the fire starts only when I open up my hand and that'll just make the transition part a whole lot easier so it's just not sitting around and floating in the beginning shots so this is looking pretty good but I think I want to add fire to the rest of the fingers and what we're gonna do is basically the same thing that we did before but I'm gonna add in slightly different fire effects from the same pack and I'm gonna go ahead and slowly just make these adjustments with to the position the rotation and making sure that just slightly looks like it's in the general rough location okay so that looks pretty clean okay so for the fingers I thought that it would be cool to try to make them 3d but I ended up scrapping this idea so that's kind of why you see it looking like it's 3d if you want to be able to mess around with 3d and After Effects you're gonna want to click on this icon right here which looks like a cube and that's gonna enable 3d inside of that layer specifically when you pull up rotation by pressing R it's going to give you orientation X Y Z rotation and then same what positions are gonna be x y&z that way that you get the full depth of being able to move around this object in 3d space so also I noticed that my fingers are further away from the camera then my thumb is and the forefront of my wrist and so to make this effect blend in with realism I wanted to add depth of field but without setting up the camera doing it super extra we're just gonna add a quick Gaussian blur to each of the fingers and the dista dust the settings accordingly toward the blurry is so the highest bhajan blur radius is set to the furthest finger now if we want to see all the keyframes on our timeline for a certain layer you can press the U key on the keyboard and if you want to see specific ones such as position scale and rotation you just press P s R and holding down shift and any of those shortcuts will open up more tabs than just one at once and bam that's already looking pretty good except if you notice the fire does not match the original footage at all so we're gonna get into the next process which is color correcting and adding a little bit of additional V effects to be able to make this fire blend and look like it's actually coming from my hand and not like we just slapped it on there in After Effects so in order to do that first thing I always love to do is add a glow and I don't just add one glow I tend to add two glows because most things that glow I realize have both a kind of like an internal or a tighter glow radius and then other ones tend to have like a like a fatter one outside they're just getting all the ambient light so without getting too geeky into it so you're gonna have to blows now it's got to look super funky at first that's because we haven't changed any settings yet so the first thing that you're gonna see over where that project panel is it's not going to become an effects panel that's where we're gonna be able to tweak all of the effects all of the settings of this fire right now first thing I want to change is the threshold and change if there's something that this looks a little bit more natural a little bit more spread out and the next thing is going to be the radius which is gonna change it from being so tight and closed up right by the fire and actually like having the rest of the glow affect the rest of the scene so you can actually see it on my hands on my clothes and on the background already this is starting to look pretty good but we're gonna add one more glow effect and just have those settings slightly different so that it looks a little bit more like a natural effect so right here or the cool part about After Effects is once we have an effect set up so if we have both of these glows set up before one of these we can adjust press control sheet and select the other layers and press ctrl V to copy all of the encase all of those effects I'm gonna want to go ahead and duplicate the original footage there's at the very bottom layer and I'm gonna make a quick mask using the pen tool super important tool in After Effects and this is actually a process called rotoscoping that's just a really like long and geeky way of saying making a mask over video I'm gonna go ahead and select just little areas it doesn't have to be super clean and super perfect it could be pretty rough cuz I'm gonna blur this out in a bit but we're just gonna go over the rough areas of where my fingers are that I want to cover up the original flame yeah that's looking pretty good so so once we have that selected we're gonna take that layer that has only the mask of my fingers now in order to get it less hard I'm gonna go into the mask settings and increase the feathering that way it gets a little bit more blurred out and already this is looking pretty cool so I can go ahead and right click in the timeline to create a new solid and this is gonna be our track mat or basically all of the information about where these pixels should be turning on and the way that we're gonna set this up is that we're gonna go ahead and press M on the keyboard for the layer that has the mask and press ctrl C to copy it and then we're just gonna click on the dark solid or the solid that we just created and click paste or ctrl V to paste in all of that mask and from once we have that looking pretty good I'm gonna go ahead and put that layer right above the duplicate of the original footage that we had just turn off the mask I can set the options to no there just delete it entirely and then I'm gonna click over to where you see track Matt and where it says none instead I'm going to change it to alpha Matt which is gonna mean pretty much only turn on this layer for the pixels that are visible above it if you've used Photoshop before this is kind of like a clipping mask but just a little bit different and what I'm gonna do with the duplicate footage this is going to be like an additional lighting that we're gonna have on top of the hand to look like it's being affected by the fire in order to do that I'm gonna change the blending mode to either a door screen which is gonna make it brighter and once we have that working with the track mat everything is only gonna get brighter for those pixels being affected by the track mat and so if you parent this to the null object that's gonna stay roughly in the same place for that time throughout the timeline based on that track and I think it's gonna work pretty well for this effect because my hand stays roughly in the same position the entire time already this is looking pretty cool so I can change the time that the track mat is on so it's not on for the entire duration of the composition but only on whenever we need it to for this fire effect I added curves which is an effect that I talked about in the 10 best effects for After Effects it's really useful for a color correction last up just to put a little bit more finishing touches on it we have a plug-in called heat distortion which is just my all-time favorite from Video Copilot and what it does is it's gonna make those nice ripples inside of the video and make it look as if heat is literally emanating from this fire and causing like all these little optical distortions in it so yeah it looks super cool it's pretty easy to do off of the bat it doesn't look super clean so that's why I went ahead and I increase the noise scale so that's really really big and I also change down the distortion amount and tweaked with the complexity settings so that everything looked a little bit more natural for this scene but whatever you're doing at home make sure that you're adjusting the settings according to your footage it's gonna take a little tweaking here and there moving things up and down back and forth because your footage is gonna look different and these for the most part are pixel based algorithms that that's why I'm not giving you too specific of numbers I don't want you to worry about that as much as just being able to get the overall look down and understand what it is that you're trying to achieve when you're making a VFX shot it depends so for this one I'm going for a little bit of realism but also fantasy so it's okay if it looks a little bit silly because it is me making fire come out of my hand so once that clip looks nice and ready to go we're gonna go ahead and click on composition at the top and click add to render queue all of exporting and after-effects is done through the render queue or through media encoder but I tend to love to keep it inside of After Effects so I've noticed a little bit faster render times and sometimes I get a little less errors so we're gonna go ahead and click on this right here which is gonna change our render settings I'm gonna make this instead of an avi which is gonna come out as a huge huge file let's just make this a QuickTime and if you have a CH point 2 6 4 on your computer installed then just go ahead and click on that because that's gonna be a really nice codec that's gonna keep the file sizes down and the quality up it's one of my favorites to use you don't have that setting in your computer you're probably gonna go ahead and have to download something like k-lite or even after codecs in order to get the full width of different codecs so you can export After Effects but it's ok if you don't for now because there's plenty that you can use just for at home right now we're gonna go ahead after we have that set go ahead and click OK then we're gonna click on the output folder which is gonna choose where the file is gonna get saved so let's just go ahead and call this fire in my hand click OK and then once you have that ready just click render and we're gonna have to wait probably you know 10 to 20 minutes depending on how fast your computer is if you have a dinosaur you know expected this to take you know much longer but this computer runs pretty fast so this is actually just gonna take one second that's it let's take a look at the effect and if it looks nice and cool it is ready to go alright and just like that you went from a complete After Effects noob to a master or them more like a novice you know I highly recommend you guys check out other tutorials to get more into the intermedia and more advanced stuff but this was hopefully a great introduction after effects and you know if you guys like this we're gonna go ahead and make a part two with some of my all-time favorite effects and how to make them step by step as always I hope to catch you in the next one peace I want to know what you guys think let me know in the comments down below was this tutorial is there anything else that you guys want to learn the after-effects leave it down below who knows maybe you're gonna see it on the next video maybe not you know if it's recommended enough it's definitely gonna be there bones don't butter them film

Channel: Black Mixture

Views: 2,108,314

Rating: 4.9001374 out of 5

Keywords: blackmixture, after effects, after effects tutorial, adobe after effects, visual effects, motion graphics, vfx breakdown, creative cloud, motion design school, fire effect after effects, fire after effects, essential graphics, adobe after effects tutorial, video editing tutorial, tracking, green screen, how cgi works, beginner, motion design, gfx, vfx tutorial, digital compositing, videography, compositing, glow, user interface, after effects basics, workflow, vfx, ae

Id: 9anmdLHV_DA

Length: 25min 25sec (1525 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019