Animating With The Camera and Null Object

hello everyone my name is shun Jabril and welcome to this awesome tutorial I'm super glad you're watching this because we're going to learn something really cool and that is how to use a null object to animate the camera in After Effects and when you learn how to use this thing you're going to be able to do some really amazing animations and After Effects and animating is going to be less frustrating and fun for some people depending on who you are but um here's a sample video of what we're going to be making so pretty simple animation but the techniques used to make this if you can use those if you can understand the technique you can make some really awesome kinetic videos so um yeah enough of watching this put a lot more time there we go alright so let's get into it now if you open up After Effects I already have this set up but uh if this looks kind of strange to you like After Effects I really recommend that you go back into my previous tutorials and watch the beginner tutorials on how to use After Effects and getting started with it but this is a tutorial on a null object so it's going to be kind of sped up a little bit but yeah so you have your composition set up every text laid out and you want to animate it what do you want what do you do well first you want to make sure that your text you have the 3d layer switch turned on for your text because that's really important and because you want you want it to look good like there's movement you want to turn on the motion blur for the text and what you want to animate doesn't have to be text like if you put a graphic of maybe a jar of peanut butter you'll do the same for the jar of peanut butter motion blur and 3d layer and you also want to turn on the enable motion blur I'm layer switch up here so you can actually actually see the motion blur in the composition so you turn on motion blur for this motion blur in 3d layer for the stuff you want to animate and the background I will turn on 3d the 3d layer for that because I want the background to stay has just the background I don't want it to move it on so I'm going to go to layer new camera 35-millimeter is good hit OK I'm going to go to layer new null object I'm going to hit enter on my keyboard and call this camera control and I'm going to take the camera and parent it so this pig whip tool right over here I'm going to take it see make sure you see the black string thingy if you don't see this you see it I'm going to take it and parent it to the null object that I just call camera control and I'm going to turn on the 3d layer for that and because I parents it to that whatever I do with this I can do with the camera so let me even show you why it's important to do that so if I uh hit control Z on here it's not parented if I pull up the position for the camera and I want to move it on the X which is 960 right here I wanted to move left and right which you're supposed to be able to do that with the X look what happens it does this weird thing this is not what I want now maybe it might be what I want for something else but I want something simple where I could just move it on the x and y and that's what happens for the Y not really what I want the only thing that really works is a Z now you can go to our to what the camera control here and move it like this or like this but you have to keep hitting C over and over so you can get the stuff you want now that's kind of hard that's not good for workflow I mean maybe depending on your project you might like to use that but we want to make some simple kinetic typography videos or and text animation movement thing you know what I'm talking about so we're going to take the camera and parent it to the null object or camera control and turn the 3d layer and now we'll pull up the position if you want to move it on the X it only moves left to right on the Y up and down on the Z front sub back sounds like a song but yeah so let's do a little bit of Adam animating let's move these layers a little bit in time in the timeline so they come up at different points so we're going to take the camera let's set a keyframe here going to move it like it you can move the controller by moving it the null object here in the near timeline box thing or you can go to the rectangle the square here and just drag it and just move it to get it how you want depending on like whatever way you find easier it's all preference sometimes I like using the square sometimes it like going here because we're here I can putting numbers so get it precisely or in here if I feel like I know what I'm doing I can do it like this so we're going to start here set a keyframe there and move forward in time set another keyframe I'm going to move it in the X right here for the time set on the keyframe we're going to come down to the peanut butter right here then zoom in move forward set another keyframe then we're going to finish up the peanut butter zoom outs then we're going to go forward set another keyframe and it's really important to set a keyframe because if I don't set these keyframes when I when the animation is here and I just go for it and I do another one I can pretty much just move in but then is going to be a bouncing so I set the keyframe to tell it at this point in time I still want it to be in the same position and then that's what I'm going to do the animation I what I'm going to change change and then I'm going to move it forward oops excuse me that's not what I wanted there we go I'm going to move it forward and now we have just let's preview what we just did I love peanut butter a little fast but yeah if you want to change it up you can just drag these the track is in time because all that was I think that was one second so I don't know if he caught that in one second but yeah and I just make the adjustments that you like let's see how that looks like yep yeah you can keep spreading them all to make it go slower so if I spread out the keyframe the keyframes image it's going to be a little slower you know that's readable but yeah that's that's the easy way you can do with the null object yep that's it well thanks for watching hope you learn what you needed to learn hope you'll use a null object more in your projects and it makes it a lot easier let me know what you think about the video like subscribe comment share there's more to come see you next time peace

Channel: Seun Jubril

Views: 185,175

Keywords: Seun Jubril, Real Motion, Unashamedbeliever390, Adobe After Effects, Motion Graphics, Editing, Animation, HD, 720, 1080, YouTube, Tutorial, Basics, Learning, CC, Video Copilot, CS6, CS5, CS5.5, Series, Camera, Null Object, Motion Design, Animate, Easy

Id: WGn4Jd6HHTs

Length: 7min 8sec (428 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 05 2014