After Effects Playbook: 10 AE Tips and Tricks I Always Use | Motion Graphics Tutorials

hey what's up Todd here with Shutterstock and in this video i'm gonna walk you through what I guess I'm calling my After Effects playbook these are things that I find myself doing in almost every motion graphics project that I do so whether you're a beginner or advanced user of After Effects by the time you're done watching this video you'll be another step closer to being able to steal all of my clients let's do it so the first trick is basically how to create super smooth keyframes so right here we have this square in the middle of the screen and what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna have it do a simple animation onto the screen so the way that I would do that is right here I'll click on the stopwatch for position and if you don't have your position drop down already you select your object and hit the P key and physician will pop up so we'll start the stopwatch right there and so this is where I want the square to rest at the end so I'm gonna take this keyframe that it just created when I started the stopwatch and I'm gonna move it to about one second since the stopwatch is engaged every movement I make with that object is going to create a new keyframe so I'm gonna move this down off of the screen and here's what that looks like so not great not very smooth it kind of looks like a PowerPoint animation so what I always do with moves like this is I'm gonna go here to the second keyframe and I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna go to keyframe assistant and select easy ease you can also hit the f9 key and so that is going to soften that move a little bit but I like to take it even further I'm going to select that keyframe go to the this little button right here that's the graph editor and we're gonna make sure that we're looking at the speed graph by clicking here and go to edit speed graph and on the second keyframe I'm gonna take this little handle and I'm gonna drag it down basically it's going to pad all of that motion into the front and it slowly curves down so let's see what that looks like and next is the thing that I call null stacking I'm a really big fan of null objects they help me keep everything organized and it makes everything a lot easier and I'm gonna show you how so here again we have our square we're gonna animate it again and the way I'm gonna do that is I'm going to go down here in this little gray area I'm gonna right-click and I'm gonna select new null object and I'm gonna parent our Square to the null object using the pick whip tool right here so I'm going to drag that and select the null object now we're gonna do that same animation that we had before I'm gonna start the stopwatch I'm gonna move this keyframe down to about 13 frames and then on this one I'm going to pull it down out of frame now we're gonna do the same thing that we did again when I go to keyframe assistant easy ease go back to the speed graph pull that handle now we got a nice smooth animation yet again but let's say we wanted the square to come into frame rest there for a second and then move off to the side or something like that let's try to do that so I'm gonna start the stopwatch here and you'll see automatically After Effects is going to try to apply that same motion interpolation to every keyframe so I'm going to do this and we're gonna slide it off to the side like I said just right there so now let's look at our speed graph editor see what it's done is it's taken that animation and it's gonna do the same thing twice what I like to do is have each motion on its own no layer so I'm going to delete these two new keyframes and then I'm gonna make a new null object and what we're gonna do is we're gonna parent one Knoll to another but we can take this new null and create another animation on top so I'm going to go to position we're going to do kind of the same thing that we just did before and move the square off to the side and so now you see we have this animation but what that means is now we have both movements on their own separate nulls and separate objects so say you had another object in the scene like a circle and you wanted the circle to do a scale-up animation instead of moving from the bottom to the top but you wanted that circle to also move along with the square when it goes off to the side of the screen so what we're going to do is we're going to take the circle layer and we're going to parent that to the second null and now that circle is going to move along with the square but only when it moves off to the side and so now the circle can animate on independently but then now it's tied to the second part of the motion and another really handy thing about that is say you create an animation that you don't really like and you want to kind of give it another shot you don't have to copy and paste all these keyframes delete keyframes from one object and do it to another all that sort of stuff all you got to do is like say we don't like the part where it moves off to the side all you got to do is just go hit delete and now it doesn't happen anymore so you can see how that would be a really nice way to kind of keep everything organized I'm a little bit OCD about it but it does save me a lot of time all right and this next tip is how to make a quick vignette and so the way that we're gonna do that is we're gonna go to down here in this little gray area again I'm gonna right-click unless like new adjustment layer and our adjustment layer is up on top we have the ellipse tool ready to go if not you just hold down click and hold down and bring up this little option box we're going to select the ellipse tool and with the adjustment layer selected you just double click so now we've created an ellipse around the adjustment layer here and all we got to do is hit invert and then we're going to go up to effect and go to color correction exposure and we're gonna take the exposure slider here and just drag it down and as you can see we're making a darker part in the corners here let me click off and show you so we have a circle and then now we can kind of feather it out and make it look nice so I'm going to click on the adjustment layer hit the F key and that's going to bring up feather options or if you wanted you could double tap em and that brings up all of your mask options and here in mask feather I'm just gonna drag that up and wallah now we have a nice looking vignette and if you wanted to you could play with the mask expansion if you wanted to make it less or more and that's all you got to do alright this next tip is how to fix banding so a lot of times when you're dealing with vignettes or if you have like a gradient ramp or anything like that sometimes when you export your project you'll get some nasty banding issues especially after you've uploaded it to YouTube there's a couple ways that you can try to fix this sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't so say we've created a gradient ramp and we're using that for a vignette instead a really quick way to fix your banding issues and I don't know if you can see this or not but right here you'll see this ramp scatter option and you just turn that way way up the way that I see I don't know how it looks for you on YouTube but the way that I see it all the banding is now gone it looks nice and smooth but the way that I usually do it is at the end when I'm done designing and I'm just kind of doing all my little finishing touches I will usually just go to new adjustment layer and I'll go to effect noise and grain and just select noise and I'll do something like four percent noise and you know that does add noise to your project so if that's you know if you want a really really clean pristine look maybe don't add the noise to it but I've kind of personally I kind of like the look of it and I'll show you how I like to make text reveals so right here we have our title text and all we're gonna do is we're gonna go up to the rectangle tool and I'm just going to draw a box kind of perfectly around the size of our title text and I'm gonna go down here and find out the track map for our title text and if you don't have it open you might need to hit toggle switches and modes until you have this track map option right here and here on this drop-down that says none I'm going to click it I'm gonna go to alpha mat shape layer one okay so our shape layer has disappeared and the shape layer is creating an alpha mat for our title text so I'm going to select our title text I'm gonna hit the P key and I'll start the stopwatch and then I'm gonna take our first key frame here that we just created by starting the stopwatch and drag it to around 12 frames or so and I'm going to drag down the Y position on the title text and you'll see right there it's going to disappear so now we have smoothed out the key frame and we have a nice little title animation so that's a pretty common thing you see it all the time that's a really quick and easy way to do it but let's take it one step further I'm gonna take our shape layer that is the Alpha mat for our title text and I'm going to duplicate it by hitting command D and we're going to drag it down below the title text and I'm going to turn it on so now we have this yellow rectangle here and go ahead and just change our title text to black and so now the title text appears okay so it looks pretty cool but let's have everything animate on really quick so I'm gonna take our title text and move that animation down just a little bit and I'm gonna take that same shape layer I'm gonna duplicate it and I'm gonna have this rectangle use itself as an alpha mat so I'm gonna go to the drop down for the bottom layer of the two and we'll select alpha mat again so now this rectangle only will exist inside of that alpha mat so I'm gonna start the position and do what we always do I'm going to drag it down a little bit and we're gonna push this down so see now that rectangle disappears going to Easy's everything up make it nice and smooth and so now we have this animation so pretty cool you can use that for a whole lot of different things sometimes it's cool to kind of have them going simultaneously but let's say we wanted to also have them all and it made off so this is where that null stacking kind of stuff comes in and you can really do some pretty cool stuff so I'm going to create a new null object and with this null object I'm going to parent only the visible item so the title text and the bottom layer of the two rectangles that are creating the text field I'm going to parent those to our null object and then now we can animate using position keyframes only those objects smooth it out and boom really really quick title animation okay now I'm going to show you a couple of tricks with photos and After Effects so I'm gonna show you a quick trick to kind of make a bordered photo I picked this kind of wooden surface that kind of looks like a nice wooden table or maybe a floor or something like that and I'm gonna take a picture and just drag it into the scene and if you you may recognize this picture it's from me and Logan's adventure doing large format photography if you haven't seen that video check it out right here but I'm gonna scale it down and to do that I'm going to select our picture hit the S key and we're just going to drag the slider till we get a size that we like so I like it somewhere right around in there so I'm gonna select our picture here and I'm gonna duplicate it and on the bottom layer I'm going to go ahead and select that and we're going to go up to effect generate fill and I'm gonna give it a kind of white color we're gonna go a little bit off white just because it's straight white just doesn't look very realistic so we're gonna bring it down a little bit and maybe add in just the slightest bit of yellow very slight so we can't see anything just yet I'm with this second layer we're gonna hit s with the command key held down I'm going to scale up and so there you go now you can see our border kind of appearing so we're gonna get something that we like something right around in there looks pretty good to me so here's what we've got just a nice little basic kind of scale rotation sort of thing almost like a slideshow kind of look so let me show you the cool thing about doing it this way so let's say you have multiple photos and some of them are in landscape format some of them are in portrait format all you have to do is with our two photo layer selected and remember the bottom one is the border I'm gonna select our new photo our second photo which is in landscape format and this up here in the bin I'm gonna hold down the Alt key and I'm gonna drag it on top with these two layers already selected and what that's going to do is it's going to replace those two files with the new one and so it's going to retain all of those same effects and the drop shadow that we added so we have the exact same animation now just with a different photo so now I'm going to show you a trick that I do all the time for adding organic looking camera motion to your motion graphics so I just grabbed a picture that I had laying around and throw it on the ground and just got a quick shot with a camera you could do it with anything you could even get a shot with your cell phone if you wanted to but we have this shot here of a picture on the ground and it's just got a little bit of a handheld camera motion to it and we can easily steal that motion from this shot and apply it to our of our picture from before and so the way that we're gonna do that is I'm going to take my shot I'm going to drag it right here to this new comp button right there and with our layers selected we're gonna select it and go up here to track motion if you don't have that option you might need to just make sure that that's checked right here in your window drop-down but with our layer selected we will select track motion and what that's going to do is it's going to add a track point and we want to make sure that we're tracking for position rotation and scale and I'm gonna go here to the options and just make sure that we have luminance selected and I like to set this to stop tracking if confidence is below 90% so we're gonna hit okay and I'm gonna go ahead and make a new null object we've done that a few times already in this video so should make a new no object real quick and here on edit target let's make sure that the null that we just created is the target so we're gonna hit okay now we need to move our track points somewhere on the photo with high amounts of contrast so that it can easily track those parts I'm gonna stick it right around in here and make the track points a little bit bigger you just drag these little boxes out and let's find a second point the second point is going to allow it to track the rotation and we're gonna track this is a square and we're going to hit the analyze forward button right here and what that's gonna do it's gonna take a little while but it's gonna track your shot okay so now our track is done and we can go ahead and hit the apply button and right here you'll get this little X&Y thing just hit OK and so now we have this null object with some handheld camera motion applied to it so what we can do is actually take that null object we're gonna hit command C copy it and we're gonna go to our composition here with our picture animation and I'm just going to paste it in and now as you can see our other layers are parented to the background layer so I'm going to take the background layer and parent it to our new null object and you'll see now we have some pretty cool-looking handheld looking stuff now you might look at that and say hey that's ridiculous that's way too shaky we really need to tone it down so it's really easy to do all you got to do is take your null object and you can move it around you could move it forward back there's like a smoother part of the shot and you could also with your null object selected hit the U key and that's going to bring up all of those different key frames and you can just select them and hold down the Alt key and on the very last key frames well click down and drag and what that's doing is it's actually taking your keyframes all of them relative to each other and spreading them out so now we have a much slower animation you might even want it even slower so I'm going to delete some out and do it all over again there you go now it kind of has a nice subtle little bit of a camera move to it that kind of looks a little bit handheld a little bit more natural this is a trick I do all the time and I'm going to show you kind of my go-to techniques for finishing the color and overall style of a lot of my graphics so here I just made like a really quick and dirty kind of fake sort of movie trailer title it's not great I just threw it together really quick so I'm gonna right click create a new adjustment layer and first off I want to add some glow and to do that we're gonna go up to effect stylize and glow now you're not gonna want to use this on every single graphic but for stuff like this sometimes it can look pretty cool so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to take our glow radius here and I'm gonna Jack it way way way up I do this kind of pretty often it just kind of gives everything sort of a nice gleam II shimmer a little bit of a haze kind of look and I'm gonna also take our glow threshold and I'm gonna bring it down just a little bit and we're gonna see what we get and now obviously right now in its current form this doesn't look very good so now I literally do this on every single graphic I've ever done we're gonna make another new adjustment layer and I'm gonna go to effects color correction curves and I always just add a little bit of a contrast curve now in this case I'm gonna add a really big contrast curve just to kind of show you what it can do so now it's kind of looking more like what my original vision was let me show you an a B so obviously that was a lot of glow a little too much glow and that just kind of brings everything and crunches it down and you just kind of get a little bit better of a look so to me another thing that I do on almost every graphic is I make another new adjustment layer at the very end of the whole project and I'll go to effect color correction tint and that's going to turn your whole design black and white but now what we can do is go to amount to tint and I'll just bring that down to like something like 30 and all that's done is it's d saturated our graphic by about 30% the colors in this one are just a little bit easier to look at they're not quite so harsh and it overall just looks like better design all right now this trick is basically how to get a nice texture onto a text element so we have this chalkboard kind of texture so we're going to create some text so I'm going to grab the text tool and let's just type chalky text now it helps to use a font or a look that kind of has that chalky vibe so I'm using this font right here it's called card Daniel modern I believe what we need to do is make it look like it struck one really easy way to do that is I'm going to take our chocolate background and I'm going to duplicate it by hitting command D and we're gonna put it right above and now with our text layer selected I'm gonna go over here to the track map drop-down and again if it's not there toggle your switches here and we're gonna select luma matte inverted okay so what we need to do now is intensify the texture of that luma matte so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to effect color correction curves and I'm gonna make an insane contrast curve I'm gonna bring the darks all the way down to like right about here and then I'm gonna take the highlights and bring them all the way up here and you'll see now when I start kind of dragging this back a little bit you'll see something happening you'll see now we're getting kind of a little bit of a chalky texture on that text so we could even duplicate that and it's gonna go really crazy so you know it's all about finding something that looks kind of natural but let me show you what that layer will look like so now if we turn that layer back on that's what's happening okay and you can even get a little bit more fine detail if you scale down the luma layer like this and you know you can move it around and find the part that you like the most that's looking a whole lot more like it's been kind of written on this chalkboard texture so that looks a lot better all right real quick I'll show you how to make I don't really know what to call it besides it's kind of like a scale wipe transition sort of thing it's just a quick way to make a nice animation that kind of wipes on and wipes off so we're gonna go down here we're gonna go to new solid and we'll just make it red and hit okay so now we have this red solid covering up the whole screen and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna with our layer selected I'm gonna go to this tool right here it's the Pan behind tool we're gonna click that and this allows us to move anchor point so I'm gonna take this anchor point and I'm gonna move it to the right edge of this element and I'm gonna kind of zoom in and just make sure we're really nice and tight on the right edge of it and then now what we're gonna do is we're gonna have the object animate it on and then scale down and disappear so I'll show you what I mean by that real quick we're gonna open up position and I'm gonna start the stopwatch and create a keyframe and then I'm going to move the object to the opposite side that the Anchor Point is on so we put the anchor point on the right side I'm gonna move it left out of frame using the position slider here and we're gonna go ahead and make that keyframe nice and smooth like we have been doing all right so now we got a solid that just flies in just like that no big deal nice and easy but now I'm gonna go ahead and with this solid selected imma hit the S key open up scale and here I'm gonna unlink the scale properties so now it won't scale uniformly and this left number is gonna be your width and the number on the right with the percentage sign next to it is going to be your height I want it to scale down in terms of width and because we move that anchor point it's going to wipe off the frame so right about here where it hits this side I'm gonna go ahead and start the stopwatch and we're going to go down to about a second and we're gonna click on the left number of the two and hit zero and now we can also smooth that out you're probably noticing a bit of a theme here and let's see what we got boom nice quick and easy interstitial and you can do this for a lot of things again lower third design little wine elements that kind of fly onto the screen speed lines I use this little one-two punch all the time now I have quite a few more of this kind of stuff up my sleeve so consider this maybe an unofficial part one if you'd like to see some more stuff like this please let me know in the comments I'd love to make some more anyways as always I hope you found this video helpful like comment subscribe all that good stuff and I'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Shutterstock Tutorials

Views: 168,283

Keywords: After Effects Tutorials, Shutterstock tutorials, elegant text animation tutorials, modern slideshow in after effects, after effect modern slideshow template, smooth and elegant text animation in after effects - after effects tutorials, after effects basics, after effects tutorial - minimal title intro animation, minimal title intro animation, clean text animation, smooth text animation, Motion Graphics tutorials, simple text animation after effects, After Effects Guide

Id: uG8sb2itj2s

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018