After Effects Playbook PART 2: 10 MORE AE Tips/Tricks | After Effects Tutorials

hey what's up Todd Shutterstock here and I'm back with some more After Effects tips so this is part two of this series if you haven't seen it yet I highly recommend checking out part one especially if you're a beginner but I'm gonna go ahead and do ten more tips from my After Effects playbook these are things that I do all the time and all sorts of different projects and I did record these over the course of like a holiday break so you'll notice my shirt might change and I might be a few holiday cookies heavier by the end of it let's get into it this text looks like it could have that kind of Wiggly hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation kind of look to it and that's really really easy to do so we're going to select our text element and we're gonna go to effect distort and we're gonna select turbulent displace and so that's gonna do some pretty wacky stuff it almost has like a bit of a psychedelic feel and that's obviously not exactly what we want but with a little bit of fine-tuning this is gonna work so I'm gonna go to these size we're gonna turn that way way way down probably let's try 10 and then what we'll do is play with the amount so now it looks almost like ghosty so we can turn the amount down if you play with the evolution you can kind of test how it's gonna look and that looks pretty good to me and now what we need to do is kind of have it animate so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start the stopwatch for evolution and I'm gonna go ahead and hit the page down key about let's try maybe two times and I'm gonna drag this slider over quite a bit and then we're gonna do it again two times dragging it two times basically just repeat that process for a good chunk of time and once you have a few keyframes created you can check how many you've made by selecting your text element hit the U key so we have this I'm gonna just kind of clean this up a little bit so now we have this and we can just go ahead and copy paste and copy paste paste paste we have about five seconds that's enough for me and now what we can do is select all of these keyframes we're gonna right click and select toggle hold keyframe and what that's gonna do is it's gonna make it where it doesn't animate between the frames it's gonna basically just have like little still shots of each keyframe so it's gonna look more like the hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation style and so there you go real quick you have that nice kind of you know jittery hand-drawn animation style all right now I'm going to teach you how to sequence layers really easily now this is a trick that you'll use for various reasons a lot so we have the solid and we have let's say we have this many copies of it and we want them to kind of play out and then go to the next one play out go to the next one again this happens a lot with photos or if you have a specific animation and this also works with things that have keyframes or anything so if you have one thing fading into the next again like a slideshow or something like that this is really really handy so the way that you can sequence these automatically without having to go and you know spend all this time dragging one and making sure it lines up etc all you have to do is from the top and again it will do it in the order that you have them selected so if you do it from the bottom it's gonna go this way if you do it from the top it's gonna go this way I'll show you what I mean with that so with the top layer selected we're gonna scroll down and we're gonna select the bottom layer you could also hit command a and that'll select all and now we're gonna go to animation keyframe assistant and sequence layers and in here there are some really cool options for overlap if you want them to kind of cross dissolve between each other again for photos and you can select how long you want that duration I'm not gonna do that right now but I'm gonna go ahead and turn that off and I'm gonna hit OK and so there you go it has placed all of these layers sequentially and again if you had some keyframes on them they would retain all of that alright now I'm gonna show you how to make a kind of bouncy animation now there are a whole lot of different little scripts and plugins that you can do and basically just click a button and you're good to go so check out ease and Wiz that's a really good one animation composer there's a lot of stuff that just kind of automatically does this but a lot of times I end up just doing it by hand cuz it's it's not hard or anything so we have this circle here I'm gonna make it kind of bounce onto the frame so I'm gonna go ahead and start the stopwatch and this is where we want the animation to rest so I'm gonna move that to about a second here and now we're gonna go ahead and make another keyframe just by typing 0 into the scale properties so now we have it where it just scales up and here in the middle I'm going to create one where it goes past its resting point so its resting point was at 100% let's just put it up to let's say a hundred and I don't know 115 all right so obviously that doesn't really work but you know you see the starts of something so what we need to do is kind of add some spring a little pep so what we're gonna do is we're going to select the front keyframe here we're gonna turn it into an easy easy keyframe and do what we've been doing in the speed graph editor just kind of drag that out and do it again on the end so now it's going to be kind of smooth on both sides of the animation so in the middle point see now we have a nice little bounce and you can actually sort of alter the amount of spring to the bounce by moving this middle keyframe around so if you want it to be really really springy you can move the keyframe up if you want it to be a little bit softer and move it back and so there you go you know nice little quick and easy three keyframe bouncy animation all right so now I'm gonna show you a really quick way to make some floating embers like a fires burning I come from a trailer editing background so I spent a lot of time making text lights for like trailers and stuff so I had to make a lot of fire embers from time to time so I have the scene here and it's just kind of a you know a flickering light down here at the bottom so we're gonna add some embers to this scene we're going to right click and we're gonna select new solid and black is gonna be okay and we're gonna go ahead and just set that to add and now with that black solid selected we're gonna go up to effect we're gonna go to simulation and select CC particle world and I'm gonna drop down this grid and guides drop down and just turn off the motion path then the grid and also the horizon and access box I just don't use any of that stuff and now we're gonna go into the producer settings and I'm gonna take this producer and we're gonna pretend like there is a fire down here at the bottom of the screen so I'm gonna just kind of kind of widen it out a little bit and put it somewhere right around in there and then we're gonna take it we're gonna push it down where the fire would be and I'm gonna also just take our Z radius right here that's just kind of the Z depth of the particle emitter and we're just gonna turn that up I'm gonna do something like one point five let's just widen our X radius a little bit just so it kind of fills the screen a little bit better and now I'm gonna go into the particle settings here and right now it's set to a line type we're gonna set that to a faded sphere and another thing that I always do just so that there's already particles established in the scene I'm just gonna grab this layer here and I'm gonna scoot it forward in time and just extend it so that it's already started creating particles before the scene even begins and for the birth and death size I want them really really small I'm gonna set those two point zero to both of them and I also like to turn the size variation up all the way so we're gonna go into the physics section and this is where we kind of do all the fun cool stuff first I'm going to set the animation style from explosive to twirl and I'm gonna set the velocity to like something like 0.3 0.3 1 something like that and for for me the gravity is extremely intense at pretty much any setting here we're gonna do negative 0.001 right here in the longevity section the particles aren't lasting any longer than one second so all of our particles are kind of dying out pretty quickly so I'm just going to turn that up to something like six something like that and another thing that we want to make sure we do for this layer is we're gonna turn on motion blur so we want to make sure that motion blur is enabled right here for the comp and we're gonna toggle switches until we get these options and right here I'm going to turn on motion blur for that particular layer and so now we're also going to add just a quick glow effect so that way we can kind of see it better and it looks like it's actually a fire and burn is burning so once we do that you can see it kind of brings the embers out a little bit more words before they were kind of small and not quite as visible and these are all settings that you can kind of alter and play with for your particular scene and so there you go I'm pretty happy with that you could put some text in there and turn it 3d and you know do some cool stuff with the lighting and you have a pretty cool little movie trailer style text slate alright so now I'm going to show you how to use animators and repeaters there's kind of a very underrated part of After Effects that a lot of people don't find out very early on and their After Effects I don't know career and it's a really cool feature especially for beginners so we have this text layer right here and if you click on this drop down for that layer you'll see this little button that says animate if you click on that you have all of these different parameters that you can add to an animator so there's position scale rotation skew all these other sort of things there's character offset tracking spacing all of these things are going to be animatable using an animator and I'll show you what I mean so we have this position and now once we have position we can actually add another parameter so I'm going to add opacity so I'm going to take the position and I'm just going to move it down on the y-axis just like this just a little bit I'm gonna take the opacity and I'm gonna bring it all the way down to the bottom so now what's happened well nothing yet so we're gonna drop down this little range selector here and we have offset so I'm gonna drag offset up and now you see what happens okay so letter by letter right now it's going to kind of fade up and move up on the y-axis because those are the parameters that we set using the position and opacity options and so now we have a nice little you know it's kind of a PowerPoint looking style animation but a lot of times what I do is I drop down this Advanced tab and I change some of these options so now I'm gonna say based on instead of characters which is the one letter at a time thing you're gonna say words and so now the whole word is going to come in like that now another thing that is kind of similar but with shape layers you can let's just draw a line here so now we have this line and it's not doing much and it's just a pretty basic shape layer with a line in it now we can go over here to this same button it's not an animator this time now we have a lot of shape options so there's repeaters so now we can take our line or say if we had a square and we can add squares and it's going to repeat that square so let's just turn up the repeater and so now we have boom lots and lots of squares we can come into the transform options kind of change some of the say the rotation okay some really weird stuff going on there so you can play around with that stuff that's a lot of fun another thing that I really like is there's kind of stuff that alters the shape so there's a twist option and that's a really quick cool way to turn off Phil here so if we just have a line we can use this twist option to kind of make a cool swirly effect just like that or if you wanted to make a zig zag there's a zig zag option so let's look at that really quick so there's zig zag now you can take it and kind of make you know pretty cool little zig zag shapes and now I'm going to show you a trick called Orient along path this is a really good way to make sort of animated arrows or if you had a plain animation on a map or a plane was flying from one part of the world to another so first we're gonna grab the pen tool up here and we're gonna turn off the fill you just click on this little blue fill text here we'll turn that off and so right now we just have stroke and let's just make like about a eight pixel stroke here and I'm just gonna click in here and we're just gonna start making kind of a wavy line so I'm gonna click and then click again and kind of drag sort of make a smooth sort of line for our arrow to follow let's turn up the stroke on this line a little bit and so now we're gonna go to back to the pen tool we're gonna turn fill on and we're going to turn the stroke all the way down and I'm just going to draw kind of a triangle and that looks good to me and we're gonna go ahead and right click on that object we're gonna go to transform center Anchor Point and layer content and I'm gonna grab the Pan behind tool here and just kind of put that down try to Center it as best as we can and I'm gonna rotate the object and just kind of try to line it up real nice with our path so it kind of looks like it's coming off of that path so what we're gonna do is with the line layer selected we're gonna go to this drop down and we're gonna go to contents shape and we're gonna find the path here and I'm gonna just click on that right next to the stopwatch and I'm going to hit command C and now we're going to go to the arrow and I'm gonna hit P for position we're gonna select it right there make sure I play heads at the beginning and I'm gonna paste it so now if you look our arrow is just going to kind of go along that path it doesn't look quite right just yet but we'll get there and so right now we're going to right click on the arrow we're gonna go to transform Auto Orient and we're going to select Orient along path and hit okay so now if you look it's going to automatically point along with that path but it's actually going backwards from the way I want it so you can actually just rotate it like so and now it'll follow the correct way so I'm gonna go to our final keyframe and we're just gonna easy ease that so it's nice and smooth and so now we can go to our line layer and in that drop-down I told you about before this add feature there's one called trim paths and so what that does is it makes it so where we can kind of start that line at a certain point in that line at a certain point and so now we can turn this down all the way at the beginning so I'm going to set the end point to zero here and then we're gonna go to the final keyframe where the arrow stops moving and we're gonna set that to 100 and we're gonna go ahead and make that nice and smooth see now the arrow follows that path and it animates on together really nice and pretty alright so now I'm going to tell you how to save animation presets this is also kind of a really nice feature of After Effects that a lot of people I find don't make use of it saves you so much time so for instance the ember effect that I showed you before you can just save that and reuse it anytime you want and it'll just be those same exact settings so here is that same project from before the embers that we had and I'm going to select our embers layer and you just go up to effect controls and right here is our two effects with all of our settings in them and we're just going to select those both and go to animation save animation preset I'm gonna go to the desktop and I'm gonna just save it as fire embers preset and hit save and so let's say let's just go ahead and delete that old solid right there with our embers on it I'm gonna go right click go to new solid again just do everything we did before and now with our layer selected let's go ahead and make sure it's on add like it was before and now with that layer selected we can go to animation apply animation preset and it's going to bring up a search dialog and right there as our fire embers pre set and we're gonna move this layer forward like we did before and turn on motion blur for that layer and boom there we go same exact look as before just a couple of clicks so now I'm gonna show you how I do screen capture animations you know the last thing you want to do is just have a still shot of the you know the footage of the screen just kind of sitting there I have a screen cap of me using the premium beat website and so I just captured that with QuickTime and I'm gonna take that and the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make it 3d so there it is I clicked this little 3d button right here so I'm gonna right click again in this kind of empty space down here we're gonna go to new camera and we have the camera settings options here I think 50 is going to be just fine so we're gonna hit OK and also what I always like to do is I'm gonna go ahead and create a null object so we're gonna right-click go to new null object and I'm going to parent our camera to this new null object and we also want the null object to be 3d so now I'm going to click on our new null object I'm gonna hit the R key which is going to bring up our rotation options and I'm gonna go ahead and on the y-axis we're just gonna rotate so now we have this kind of cool parallax effect and I'm just gonna kind of you know find something kind of cool looking like that and I'm gonna take our null object and hit the P key and we're just gonna kind of move things around let's see and we're just gonna kind of find an interesting little point in the video I'm gonna go ahead and go click on the free downloads button so we want to make sure that we kind of show that off okay so it's important to kind of look at what the mouse cursor is doing that sort of stuff so I'm gonna go ahead and take our position and we're gonna get really nice and close to that free downloads button if you drop down this little camera button here and we have the camera options right here we have a lot of really cool stuff we can play with first off I'm gonna turn on depth of field so I'm going to click on that little button right there and now we have depth of field and we can actually focus the camera so I'm going to take the aperture which is going to kind of alter how much depth of field there is so now we're getting pretty blurry and we can take the focus distance and kind of shift it around and we're gonna shift that and you might need to hit the shift key to kind of make it focus a little bit faster that kind of makes everything move a little bit quicker we're gonna focus on the free downloads button and I'm also gonna take the blur level and we're gonna turn that up however you like it just whatever looks best to you so I'm gonna start the position stopwatch here and we're gonna have it kind of dollying into the free downloads button alright and so here we go here's a really just you know quick and dirty example of what you can do with this I added a little bit of an yet a little bit of noise but this is a really simple way to take a screen capture add a little bit of a 3d element it's something that I do all the time alright and so now I'm going to show you how to deal with a super-long motion graphics timeline so a lot of times you'll be doing like an explainer video or something that can be quite a bit longer than just your average you know 10 second motion graphic and in these cases you're going to be dealing with voiceover and music and sometimes sound design that you need to animate to certain cues and in After Effects it's kind of difficult to deal with audio so I have this voiceover file right here I'm going to drag it to a new composition and I also have my music now as you can see you know there's no waveform to look at it's kind of difficult to you can drop down the drop down here and look at the audio and that pretty much just allows you to set the levels you can look at the waveform here but it's not quite as automatic as it is in Premiere so with longer timeline projects like this I prefer to kind of map it out in Premiere first so we can go a here into Premiere and here we have our voiceover and our music in the same timeline and so what I like to do is kind of map everything out and premiere before and send it over into After Effects one thing at a time so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to this new item button here and I'm gonna go ahead and just select color matte you can do black video anything like that I'm gonna hit OK and I'm gonna just make a big red kind of solid and so I'm gonna go ahead and just call that AE replace so we have music and voiceover and you kind of you know sometimes you want to animate where certain things move to the music or to the voiceover etc so let's just kind of break it down into like a chunk so let's just say kind of like this first you know ten seconds okay so now you're thinking okay all I got to do is edit this ten-second chunk and then find some way to transition so I'm gonna drop this AE replace a little solid here and then I'm gonna make a cut on the audio and now I'm gonna select all three which is the voice over the music and our matte layer and I'm going to right click and select replace with After Effects composition and it's going to ask you to save a project so I'm just gonna just going to name it whatever I'll just keep it untitled project and so now it's going to open up all of that stuff for that period of time and After Effects so I can animate to it there and kind of instead of having this big long timeline I can animate in chunks and what I find that does is it helps me kind of keep moving forward because I'm not looking at this big giant timeline so usually I just go ahead and just delete that right out of there and now if you hit the period key you can you can play the audio back without any rendering or obviously you can hit the zero key and Ram preview like you always would and so all the changes that you make are going to dynamically link to premiere so that's a you know it's a feature that's been around for a while but this is how I like to do much longer projects now I'm going to show you some motion tracking tricks for particularly tricky shots to track so in this shot right here this is an old shot from a project I did a long time ago where I was doing kind of a stranger things you know upside down look and I put a bunch of I don't know if you can see but I put a bunch of little tracking markers on the wall I wanted to make sure that there was enough contrast and so that the tracker would be able to perfectly find these walls so that I could add elements to them here we are in premiere I'm going to go into After Effects I'm going to right click select replace with After Effects composition and so here we go now we have our shot in After Effects so what I want to do is add a ton of contrast to this shot before I track it so all the little contrast these spots are going to pop out and really have a massive effect on the track itself so I'm going to select this I'm going to go to color curves and what you'll notice if I try to do it this way I'm gonna just add a bunch of contrast so now I'm gonna go ahead and try to motion track this shot for with the 3d tracker so I'm gonna pop open the tracker here and I'm gonna select track camera and what it says right here is the 3d camera tracker analysis ignores masks and effects applied in the same composition so it's going to ignore that contrast that I added that is a really easy and quick thing to fix we're gonna click on our object we're gonna go to pre-compose layer pre-compose and we're going to move all attributes so now we still have our shot in this comp but now we've pre comped it so I can go in here and in this iteration of that layer I can go ahead and add my contrast and so now in this original comp we have no effects on that layer but in the pre comp version we do so it you know trickles over and now we have this extra contrast so now with that layer selected we can hit track camera and so after a little bit of weighting our shot is nice and tracked and you'll see now I have these all these little track points on the wall and I didn't show you the before but before they weren't really showing up properly so now we have all these nice little tracking points I can select them all and have it track perfectly to this wall so as always I hope you guys found this video helpful I love After Effects it's probably my favorite piece of software so you would like to see some more After Effects tutorials on this channel I'd be happy to make them just let me know in the comments and as always subscribe hit the like button all that stuff I'll see you guys next time [Music]

Channel: Shutterstock Tutorials

Views: 45,302

Keywords: after effects guide, after effects tutorials, motion graphics tutorials, shutterstock, shutterstock tutorials, ae tips and tricks, after effects playbook, motion graphics, visual effects, after effects tips, learn after effects, how to use after effects, after effects transitions, after effects basics, adobe after effects, after effects tutorial, after effects, after effects free, after effects for beginners, ae

Id: 2bx8uVs8JVM

Length: 24min 28sec (1468 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 09 2019