(hissing) - Okay, we're going there. We are going there together. I mean, we've never
talked about this before. We've talked about
Photoshop and Light Room and Premier and lots,
lots of other things. This... (exhales) We've never even dipped our toes in, but today we're doing that. Don't freak out. I'm doing everything I can to
make sure this is easy for you so that you're not gonna just combust. I'm excited, you should be excited too. Let's turn this thing around. All right. (upbeat rock music) What's up everybody? Peter McKinnon here and welcome back to yet another Tutorial Tuesday. And today we're talking
about Adobe After Effects. So, like I mentioned in the intro, we've never actually talked
about this program before. We've talked about everything else but we've never, never even
dabbled in After Effects. And I've seen a lot of
comments and questions and emails and DMs and a
lot of people want to know, "Why don't you ever do
After Effects tutorials?" or "Would you do After Effects tutorials?" or "I'd love to see something
from you in After Effects." So that's today. I figured we would start with this. There's probably going
to be multiples of these because this program's a beast and I don't think I can
tackle this all in one video. And you guys know how I talk a lot, so this needs to be split up for sure. So let's just call this After
Effects basics, part one. I'm gonna run you guys through
the interface of the program, show you what it's like, where things go, try and simplify it for
you as best as I can. And then I think we'll
just make a simple title, like animating a nice title that's tracked through 3D space, if you will. And I find these actions just
help me explain things better. We'll track a title so you guys can put those types of things in your videos or your vlogs or your travel films. It's a very good introductory,
small little task for a program as much of a
beast as After Effects is. So, what is After Effects? After Effects is kind of-- I'd describe it as like
the Photoshop of video. You can do so much in After Effects. Whenever you see special
effects happening, like in yesterday's vlog when you saw that Nerf gun turn into (growls). (loud gunshots firing) That's After Effects. If you guys follow me on Twitter, you saw what I did for Gary
Vee with his new shoes. (upbeat music) That's After Effects. It's possibilities are endless. People use it in such creative ways. It's an incredible compliment to video, really allowing you to just
kind of expand your horizons as far as your creativity goes. If you get a handle of how
good this program works and you get good at it and you practice, your skill sets, your worth,
your everything as a filmmaker or an editor is just going
to be that much better. So I figured it's time
that we dive into this and start maybe knocking
some of these out. This is the part where
you go make a coffee, you go grab a drink, you
do a hundred pushups, have a power nap, run
around your house six times, whatever you gotta do. We're gonna open up Adobe After
Effects for the first time. Let's go. All right, so when you
launch After Effects for the first time it's gonna open up with that project window the same as if you open up Light Room
or Photoshop or Premier, and it's going to ask
you what you want to do. You're gonna hit New Project. Okay, pause for a second. This is the interface of After Effects. It looks kind of the same as Premier. You'll notice you've got the
timeline down at the bottom. You've got your workspace up top. You've got some kind of file storage, some bins, some area on the
left side for your stuff to go. Your files, your videos, your music, whatever you're gonna throw in there. You got your effects on the right side. So if you are kind of like a seasoned pro or somewhat seasoned
by having used any type of Creative Cloud products
from Adobe before, this shouldn't look too foreign. But there's still probably
a few things in here that you're gonna be like, "Hmm?" Let's keep going. All right, on the left side
you've got your project window. This is where all your
files get dropped in. If you've got graphics,
if you've got music, if you've got whatever you need, that's going in the left side. Very much similar to if you're gonna put all your footage into
Premier to start editing, you're gonna drop all your
goods, all your assets into the project window. All right, immediately to the right of that is your composition window. That's where you're seeing
what you're working on. That's where your video is going to be. Everything your adjusting,
all the stuff your tweaking, all the effects, the after
effects that you're putting on your footage and your video,
that's the main spot for it. On the right side, kind
of like Light Room, you've got that big panel of effects, so that's where you're gonna
type in your different effects. Text tools, changing your fonts, all of that stuff (zip) over here. And then (swoosh) running right along top of that screen is your tool bar, so that's where you've go
all your different pointers and text tools again and little things that will change based on
what you're doing, okay? So, project files, main
composition windows, effects, (zip) tool bar, and then at the bottom you've got your timeline. Just like video editing, it's
gonna work exactly the same. That timeline is where
everything your working on, just like any other timeline
you are familiar with. Oh! So far so good, right? You guys are still with me. We're not getting into scary waters yet. All right, I'm gonna go ahead
and drag in a drone shot from Iceland of me
walking on this airplane. I'm gonna drag that into my project files, just like we talked about, because that's where
your project files go. What we want to accomplish
by the end of this video is having a title on our footage that tracks into the scene and it grows and kind of moves with the camera as the camera continues to
fly over the plane, right? So instead of just putting
a title on the screen and the drone shot moves over the plane and that title never moves, we want it to feel like that title is in the same environment and
that camera is moving over it and closer to it and the
closer that drone gets to the title the title's getting bigger. That's the objective of today. We're gonna start with that. Kind of looks a little bit like this. (intense instrumental music) Now, if we really wanted to get crazy we could mask out some of that text so that it's behind me when I'm walking but we'll save that for
maybe like a part two. Don't even, we'll just, uh... Moving on. Okay, so the first step. The first thing you're gonna want to do is click on that footage
in your project window and drag it down into this little icon. You're gonna drop it on
that and then (pop) let go. That button is the Create
a New Composition button, so when you drag your footage, whatever that is, right onto that button it creates a composition based off of those settings of that video. 4K, because I shot this in
4K, 24 frames per second, all of those are baked into that timeline. That totally makes sense. If it confused you, essentially
we're taking the drone shot, we're dragging it into that icon, it's gonna open the window up and make our timeline the
exact settings we need them based on the settings of that drone shot. This is a 4K clip so
it's massive right now. It's taking up a lot of our composition so let's just go ahead and click this little arrow right here and fit that to screen. That's looking a lot better. We are nice and crispy
4K, that's full res. You can click this little drop down here and change the resolution, which is actually gonna
render your projects faster. You see, unlike Premier Pro, where when you drag your footage in it's rendering in real time so that you can play through your footage and edit without having
to wait for render times. But After Effects doesn't
render in real time, so dropping that quality
is gonna allow you to play back what you're doing and what you're working on
without having it being choppy or anything like that, or
having to wait for render times. So I always recommend
dropping it to a third quality if you don't need to see the quality for whatever it is that you're doing. You can always change it back to full, but for this case I think
we're gonna drop it down. We basically need to mark
our in and out points on the clip that we just selected so we know exactly what piece
of footage we're working with, what part of the footage
we're working with. Go ahead and hit space bar,
that's gonna play the video. All right, this is where I
want the footage to start so if you click on the actual
video in your timeline, which is this little
blue strip right here, you can grab the front end of that clip. You'll see the arrows pop up. You can click and drag
that to your timeline. Now, if you want it to snap right to your play head, hold down shift. It's gonna snap right over. If you've got a full-sized
keyboard like I do right here, you can actually use Page Up and Page Down to go frame by frame so you can fine-tune that last part of the clip that you want. When you have it you can drag the footage from the very end, holding shift, right back to your play head so that you've condensed that whole clip into just the portion you want. Essentially, in and out. I believe you can also use B and E for beginning and end. Might be N for End. There's so many shortcuts. Once you've deciphered which
in and out point you want and you've trimmed that down, you're gonna move that to the
beginning of your timeline and then we're gonna do something that's gonna just make everything
a little more efficient and a little easier to deal with. Now, if you notice that little blue bar, that is your footage. Right above that is the time ruler. We're gonna go all the way
to the end of the timeline, we're gonna grab that time ruler just like we did with our footage, and we're gonna drag it all the way to match the end of our clip. Then we're gonna go up to
Composition in the toolbar and we're gonna select
Trim Comp to Work Area. Now it's gonna take this
little clip that's our footage and it's gonna take all of
this stupid nothing space that's just gonna annoy me and it's gonna obliterate all of that and make that entire
timeline our entire clip. It's just easier to deal with, easier to think about,
cleans everything up. Get it done. (finger snap) Okay, so we've done that,
that's the easy part. Go ahead, head up to the toolbar,
hit that T for text tool, type in whatever you want. I'm going to type in my
name, Peter McKinnon. This is the beginning
of creating our title so that we can track it
through space and time. I just love saying that,
it just sounds so great. We're gonna track a title
through space and time. Come along, I'm in. All right, so now that
your text is on the screen and you've got your shot playing, go ahead and play that through
again hitting space bar. You'll notice as the camera moves closer, as the drone flies closer to that plane, that title doesn't
move, it stays the same. It doesn't look very
good, it's just small, it's a standard text on
frame, it's just blech. How do we make that better? That's where I'm saying we
want to track this title so as the camera moves
forward the text becomes bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger as if the camera's actually moving towards text in real time. To do that we need to create
something called a null object. Now, a null object is gonna be something that you come across very
often in After Effects. Let me explain what a null object is with regards to tracking this
title through space and time. A null object is like an invisible aid that lives on the screen
when you're editing. You can't see it. It's never gonna appear
in any of your videos but you're able to attach
different effects to it and it controls different
effects throughout After Effects. So different things that
are happening on screen, different things that you're
trying to make happen, all sometimes run through this null object and it enables a lot of
different, cool things to happen, like what we're going to
do with tracking this text. We need to track that text
and attach it to something on the screen so that it ends up working. That's what a null object does. I'm trying to explain it in a way that's not gonna
completely melt your face. But let me get into this
edit a little bit more, then I think by the end you'll understand. It's just one of those
things that you need as a step to begin using After Effects. To activate this mysterious null object... And if you want to know more about that I'm sure you can Google
it and get a better answer than I could possibly figure
out how to convey to you. But just right click in your timeline, hit New, and go over to Null Object. When you click that, a
red box is gonna show up. That is your null object. That's just the little invisible box, the little invisible controller
box that's gonna live on screen for the rest of this edit. You'll also see it down in the left corner where you see all of
our layers, if you will. We've got our footage,
we've got our title, and now we have Null 1. Now's where it gets a little confusing. Refill your coffee, right now. What we need to do is have After Effects track all the pixels in this scene. It needs to just play the scene forward and it needs to analyze and track the movement of this scene, which is our drone shot flying forward. After Effects needs to figure
that out, needs to map it. Once it's done that, we
attach it's tracking data. We attach what it's done
to this null object. Then, when we take that text and we attach that text
to the null object, it's also tracked because
they're both running through this little helper,
this little invisible aid that is the null object, okay? So we track the scene, we attach those settings those
settings to the null object, then we take the text,
attach it to the null object. Bob's your uncle, you're good to go. Click on your footage,
that's the DJI clip for me, whatever it is for you. You're gonna click on that
layer, probably the bottom layer. Then you're gonna go
over to the right side where it says Tracker, and that's gonna bring up a little window. If you don't see that, like anything else, you can go up to the top of the toolbar, hit Window, go down and make
sure that Tracker is clicked. If it's not, go ahead and
click that, then boop! Your little toolbar is gonna
appear on the right side. If it's already there, you're golden. Follow these next steps. You're gonna click Track Motion. Once you click that it
opens up a new layer window. Now, you might be like, "Huh,
where did my composition go?" But if you notice at the top here it'll say Composition DJI 0001. That's my clip, so whatever your clip is, that clips gonna be over to the left. What I mean by it opened a new window is now beside that we see layer one, which is that track motion layer. So your other composition
is still there, we're good. It's just opened a new window so that it can perform this task. Now you'll see, right in
the middle of the scene, it says Track Point 1
with a little white box. Now we're gonna want to zoom in so that we can see this better, so hit plus and minus on your
keyboard to zoom in, zoom out. But go ahead and hit plus and
get up nice and close to this so that we have a very good view. And I also noticed this footage doesn't look very good right now because if your remember at the beginning we dropped that quality down to a quarter so that we could render this thing faster. So right now, just for simplicity's sake so that we can actually
understand what's going on, let's bring that quality back up to full. Boof! Look at that crispy, tastiness. We're back baby, 4K. Mm, feels good! But now we can actually
see what's going on. Now you can see our track
point number one box and what that does is tracks a group of pixels across the screen
and calculates its movements. But we're gonna need to
make another tracking box because we want to do two things here. We want to move into that text so we need to track moving into that text, but we want that text to
also scale up and move bigger so we need to track that scale as well. So we got two things
happening at once here. Don't worry, we're fine, we're good. You'll see over on the right side here, we've got Position checked off. You're gonna go ahead and hit Scale, make sure that one's checked off too. And then a second tracking
box is gonna pop up. (pop) Just like magic. (weak explosion sound) I got nothing, I got... And you thought I was
gonna do magic, didn't you? You were like, "It's coming." No, no. You don't own me. Just to double check everything
is in good working order you can go ahead and hit Edit Target. Now a little window's gonna pop up and you're gonna see that the selection is selected to Null 1. That's the null object we created because, remember, we're trying
to track all these movements and send all that information to that little, invisible
helper, that null object. So making sure that's
where it's going is good. Which it is, golden. Hit okay, boom, moving on. So now we just need to pick
two things in the frame that we can lock these little boxes onto that After Effects is gonna
use to track this scene, right? So high-contrast points. We don't want to chose the fluffy, faint little cloud in the distance. We don't want to chose
the part of the boot that's moving as a walk across this plane because it's moving too much. We want to choose two nice, solid, stationary, high-contrast points that aren't moving very
much so After Effects says, "Thank you, I can easily
track this scene for you." We're gonna do that by
selecting these windows here. I think I'm gonna go with
one window on the right and a window on the left side. Sometimes this can be a
bit of trial and error but it is doable. I'll show you what I mean by that. Click and drag tracking
point one, that's the box. When you click and drag it,
it's gonna magnify the area that you are hovering that box over. That's what's happening right now. This nice sharp edge of the window, with that high contrast
being it's black inside, we're gonna use that for
our first tracking point. And maybe we'll try this
window over here on the right. That one may be a little iffy, but we're gonna track that
one as our second point. So again, we're gonna click
and drag that to that point. Essentially, we're sticking
targets on this frame so that After Effects says,
"Okay, we got your targets." Now I'm gonna hit Track and we're gonna-- Let us do our job and we'll try to hang on as the scene moves. Let's go ahead and do
that and see how it does. If you want to just double
check your tracking points before you go ahead and
hit Track on After Effects, what you can do is skip forward a little bit in your timeline. This is a little pro tip here. Skip forward a little bit in your timeline and that's gonna obviously
show if the scene has changed. And the scene has changed. That's not a good spot to track so let's go ahead and change that. We give this program a better chance. All right, let's go ahead a move this up to this little black hole here. I believe that was part of the ladder that was in the side
of the plane to get up. That's a nice high-contrast area. It's nice and dark there,
so let's start with that. Let's zoom out before we do this. You can go over to that drop-down menu right here and hit Fit. Now we are going to
analyze this frame forward by hitting the little play button down here where it says Analyze. All right, let's see what happens now. The frame is moving forward. You can see it's tracking,
everything looks good so far. Looking good still. Oh, it's looking-- It's moving a little bit. Oh, there it goes. Okay, so After Effects just lost it. That's what I mean by, it
had those tracking points, it was locked on nice, it
gave it good information, it tracked all the way up until it just slipped at that last second. And this is what I mean by
sometimes it's trial and error. Sometimes you gotta do
this a couple times. Once you get used to it and you start tracking different things, you'll know what tracks well, you'll know where good
contrast points are, and sometimes you nail
it on the first shot, and you're like, "Mm!" Sometimes it takes three or four times, but that's just all part of the process and the beast that is Adobe After Effects. We're gonna go to where it slipped up and we're gonna adjust it
so that it just hangs on for the rest of the frame there
and then we're good to go. We're gonna zoom in a little bit so we can see this a bit better. You'll notice that you see two boxes. The inner box is the one that After Effects is actually tracking. You can click and hold
and see the exact point where the program is looking to track. That second box, the outer box, is there to make sure that that little one isn't moving inside it. It's kind of targeting that little one. It's almost like a backup system. So if that little one moves, we can drag that outer
box bigger to, again, make that target area bigger. Give the program, again, a
better sense of tracking. Essentially, we just don't want that little box to move out of bounds. So in order to do that we're
gonna make those bounds bigger by dragging the outer box larger. That way it's got more room to move around without that big box losing sight of it. We're gonna increase
the little one as well, just so that the target
area is even bigger and that way when we reanalyze
this it's not gonna get lost. We can go ahead and do
that for both sides. All right, now that we've adjusted that, we can hit play again on Analyze Forward, over here on the right side, and it's just gonna overwrite all the tracking points it did
before where it went off. Now that we've adjusted it, it's just gonna continue moving forward, keeping all the data behind it. Okay, it's a little slower to track because those boxes are
bigger, but it is locked on. It's looking good and... Perfect! So obviously, it slips up and leaves once the plane
is no longer in frame but, Ladies and Gentlemen,
we have our scene tracked. If that was traumatizing for you, my condolences, rest in peace. But I don't think it should be. Again, I would watch this
tutorial two or three times and then try to make this, try
to do these titles yourself. You'll be a pro by the end of the day. Now that we have all
of this tracking data, we want to move it to the null object so it has all that
information stored inside. Our invisible aid living on the screen. All we gotta do to do that
is go own to the right side where that little target
tracking area was and hit Apply. This little box is gonna
pop up that says X and Y. Just hit Okay, good to go. Now look at your timeline. Look at all those crazy little
diamonds and motion track. (explosion sound) Just nonsense. Go ahead and collapse
those in the Layers panel on the bottom left corner here. You can hit these little arrows and let's just get rid
of all that nonsense. That is way too stressful to look at. I don't want to see it,
you don't want to see it, so let's go ahead and hide that. Okay, so now that we've tracked this scene and we've connected all that
information to the null object and it knows what we're doing and it has all of that
information stored inside it, we want to attach the
title to the null object. So now the title will take on everything that that null object has stored inside. And we do that by connecting it on this Layers pallet down here. There's a little zigzaggy thing, a little swirly pick whip
is what they call it. The pick whip. How much fun is that? Pick whip, pick whip,
pick whip, pick whip. I could say pick whip a thousand times. (whipping noises) Pick whip! You're gonna click and
hold that pick whip. You can just fling it all over the place. It's just so satisfying to do. We attach that text to the null object by clicking on that pick whip, dragging that line over
until it highlights Null 1, which is that null object
that we created, and let go. Now we've assigned all the
settings of the null object and all the tracking stuff that that null object
has stored inside it. Our invisible helper. And we've just attached the
title to that null object so now it should take on
the same characteristics. That should make sense. Now, you might be going, "Oh! "I see it all coming together." And you can see if you were successful with said pick whipping
by in the right side here you can see where it says Null 1 under that little menu drop-down so you know you've connected it properly. Now, when we play this forward, this is what it's gonna look like. (intense instrumental music) Looks great! That little glitch there at the end is where we lost the tracking data because the plane goes
completely out of frame, so that's pretty much where
we would stop the title. Let's just scrub our
timeline, our play head right to the spot in the frame where that information's gone. You can see the text kind
of snaps a little bit. That's where the tracking
just went, "Peace, I'm out!" And let's drag, using the right side, like we did at the very beginning of this. Let's drag all these layers
over to that play head, snap them right to that play head. Hold shift if you want,
snaps them right in. We're gonna get rid of those,
trimming comp to work area. So now our whole scene is
exactly the scene that we want, doesn't lose the tracking
information at the end, the text isn't wobbly,
it is a full sequence from start to finish to
tracking our nice title in space and time. Ha ha! Keep in mind too, you can move that text wherever you want on the screen. It doesn't have to stay in the center. If you want to move it to the right, to the bottom, whatever, does not matter because all that information
is connected to the null object so you are free to do what you want. But we're gonna keep it in the center because that's where it looks cool. We're coming up at the beginning of a vlog or a little short film
(whoosh) right in the center, (Rushing sound) tracked right over top. Mm, tasty! Now, we could get crazy and
start changing the fonts and then actually mask out the title so that I'm walking in front of it like-- (stutters) I've said too much already. That's definitely a part two. (inhales loudly) Okay, relax guys. Take a deep breath, you made it. You finished. (ding) That is it, you're done, you did it. We survived, you survived
After Effects part one. Do you think you can handle part two? I think you can handle part two. What I would recommend is
delete everything you just did and go back and do it
again like five times so that you really get the understanding of what a null object is and being able to use the
pick whip to attach your text and your tracking points
to the null object and just really understand
how that whole system works. Going through the compositions,
going through the timeline, going through the project
files, the effects and just familiarize
yourself with the shortcuts or anything else that you can so that you can get comfortable with it. One of the things that I really like to do when I learn a new program is, if I learn something specific,
I learn a certain task, I will repeat that task five to ten times so that when it comes time
for me to actually do that or make a title for a video,
I've done it 10 times already so I know exactly where to go. Composition, new composition,
drag this in, trim to... All that stuff is just
muscle memory at this point. So that's what I'd recommend for you to do while you wait for me to make part two because I've got no idea when it's coming. But I will make sure it
comes in a timely manner. I also had tons of requests to teach how I did the Gary Vee video. (hisses) Maybe we'll think about doing that. But, hey, I'm proud of you. Thanks for sticking around. Good job if you followed that to the end. If you're already a
seasoned After Effects pro, well, I mean, I'm jealous because I'm not, but welcome and thank
you for staying. (laughs) Other than that guys, hit that like button if
you liked this video. Smash it, if that's
something that you're into Just punch it in the face.
(whipping sound) Hit the bell if you want to be notified any time I upload videos. Subscribe if you aren't already and... And! (hisses) I got a plane to catch, I'm going to LA. See you guys in the next one. (whooshing) (upbeat instrumental music)
Yes! My first AE video I made was making clones of myself which I learned from him. Another great channel is SurfacedStudios, who makes good tutorials not only for AE but also for Blender and Mocha.
We have taken a few pointers from some of his videos also, but really all of youtube is your best friend when learning new and interesting things in AE. Our biggest hurtle was envisioning what we wanted to create, but not knowing what it's called within AE to make it work. Youtube in general is great at showing several different work flows and styles to choose from. McKinnon's videos are very helpful, but don't limit yourself solely to his tutorials for creating awesome content.
( insert some parable about wise men having many teachers or something.. )