Basic Screen Replacements (With Reflections) in After Effects

how's it going everyone boone here so today i'm going to be talking about screen replacements inside of adobe after effects now there's a few different ways that you can perform one of these but for this specific technique i'm going to be showing you something that's pretty versatile that's going to help you keep all of your reflections intact and not only that you're going to have control over those reflections so you can control the opacity of them bring them in and out if you want it's a pretty cool method so let's jump in see how it works so i'm here inside of adobe after effects and i have this sample clip that i've shot of me holding a phone and you can see my reflection in the phone screen but the phone is turned off it's just a black screen and the beauty of this technique is that you can use it on any screen uh that's turned off like this it's uh and you'll be able to maintain those reflections okay so for the first step with the clip selected i'm gonna go to effect boris fx mocha and hit mocha ae that's going to apply this effect i can see it in the effect controls panel if you can't see that go to window and select effect controls you can also find this effect in the effects and presets panel under borus fx mocha this comes bundled for free with adobe after effects but you can pay to have the premium uh pro version now with this selected i'm going to click this big mocha button now don't be afraid of this program there's quite a bit going on here but it's actually quite easy to use once you play around with it for a bit and they have an essentials workspace that makes it um extra easy to use so make sure you're you're set up in this workspace so i'm going to go grab this x-spline tool now to track this i want to place some track points around the phone but i really want to avoid the middle of the phone where i have that reflection it's causing a lot of movement and i don't want that movement to throw off my tracker so what i'm going to do is just kind of circle around the outside edges here and then back down here and to close this i'm going to right click now i can kind of position this and hopefully we'll get a good track with with tracking there's always a lot of trial and error so be ready to play around a bit to get things how you want them so i want to make sure that my track is set to perspective as well i'm going to rename this layer created this layer i'm going to rename it phone screen so when i bring it inside of after effects i have a reference just under the track motion options i have the actual tracker buttons i can go forward and backwards the playhead's all the way at the end here so i'm just going to track this one frame forward and then we're going to track backward and let's just kind of watch actually select the layer track forward and i'm going to track back and then i'm just going to kind of watch here and make sure that none of these drift too much now this is a planar tracker system so it's different from after effects point tracker and the good thing about this is you don't actually it's not a straight translation of whatever i pick here is automatically translated to where the points will be placed this is going to transfer this over to after effects and when i apply it it's going to apply as a corner pin but it's going to take that corner pin data from the surface area so let me show you what that is now let me first just let me check this and this is looking like a good track now to really see it i'm going to go over here and hit show planer surface now this is the information that is going to tell after effects where to apply those corner pin effects and this is going to be the top left so even if i move this down below that's going to stay top left so you want to be aware of that so now i'm going to put this in place of where i want my screen to go just kind of rough this in i will be able to make some adjustments after the fact but it's really good to get this right first because it's much harder to make adjustments after the fact now to make sure this is set up right i'm going to click this show planer grid because as i move my surface area it moves that grid all right that plane is looking good now i what i can do is i'm just going to save this close it and now all this information is saved within the mocha effect and i'll be able to pull it up here now it's time to prep the clip that i'm going to be using as the screen insert now this being a vertical screen it's going to make this a little complex so i'm going to go back to my project panel i'm going to insert my last tutorial here because let's say i'm narcissistic and i want to watch myself on screen now take a look here this is us this is an ultra hd clip 4k and what moca is going to do is that when it applies the tracking data it's going to essentially apply corner a corner pin effect and it's going to pin all these corners and place them in my phone screen now the problem with that is that it's going to squash it down because this is vertical so i need i need this to match the resolution so since the tracking data is on my original clip i need my insert asset to match the resolution and this original clip is the same as my insert it's 3840x2160 ultra hd 4k so what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab my insert and i'm going to pre-compose it and i'm going to select move all the attributes to the new composition now we want to stay organized here because this can get a little confusing and complex so i'm going to call this screen insert hit ok so now we have this screen insert and it matches the same resolution as our clip here but we still have the problem that it's going to be squashed so what i need to do now is dive down into this i need to grab my clip i need to pre-comp it again move all attributes but i'm going to call this one screen insert clips so this is where all the clips will be this comp is where i'm going to match the resolution of the phone so to do that i'm going to make sure i've got the screen insert clips comp i'm going to go to composition composition settings and i'm going to match the resolution of my phone and i googled it and it is vertically it is 1080 by 2340 and i'm going to hit ok now we can see that i've got this here but i still need to reposition my clip so i'm going to right click on the clip go to transform fit to comp height and that will automatically snap it there now if i want to reposition a little bit i can do that and if i want to um you know what i don't want just a clip of my face i want two clips so let me open this up in the layer panel i think i'm going to grab a different area here too let's grab this part right here okay so now i've got this i'm going to transform this fit the comp height and let's just bring it over so we can see some of what's going on here there we go so i've got the screen recording here and then that's going to cut to my face here and i'll reposition this okay so i have these two clips that are going to show up on my screen i'm going to close this comp so now i still have the problem in this comp where mocha is going to squash this so what i need to do to compensate is stretch this and since it's going to be corner pinning this comp i'm just going to right click on this transform fit to comp and now it's going to position that perfectly so now when it applies that corner pin it's going to squash it back down i know it's a little complex so take a look at the workflow here i've got the main nested comp here screen insert clips this is where all my clips will be and i'll edit them this one i changed the resolution to match the phone that's nested in this comp which i resized it fit it to comp so it matches the resolution of my main original clip and that's applied in here everything is prepped and ready to go i'm now ready to take that tracking data and apply it to the screen insert so to do that i'm going to grab the original clip i'm going to go to effect controls and under here is the tracking data so now i'm just going to create track data now i'm going to collect the phone or i'm going to select the phone screen layer and hit ok i can't really see what's going on it's because i've got this screen insert clip let me put this below here and if i select original clip again in the mocha effect you can see right here it's applied these corner pins so the data is there now i need to tell after effects to export it to the screen insert clip so to do that i'm going to go to export 2 i'm going to change this from corner pin to corner pin supports motion blur and i'm going to layer export to the screen insert so now all that data will be applied to this it's going to squash it down and check it out voila now i've got my screen insert let's take a look at it okay so it's tracking well the corners are good but it's just looking a little too fake it's something with the colors the brightness so we want to help blend this in and help composite a little bit more now if you're in a hurry there's a real quick way that you can do this and that's to just take the screen insert layer and go to the blend mode and just set that to add and that will immediately bring back your reflection now you can try a different blend mode like lighten or screen a bunch of them work so just like that now you have your reflection back super super cool but i want to have some control over this so let me show you a method that gives you a little more versatility i'm going to switch this blend mode back to normal now what i'm going to do is create separate reflection i'm going to basically isolate the reflection layer so to do that i'm going to duplicate the original clip and i'm going to call this reflection i'm going to bring this to the top now i'm going to solo this so we can see what we got going on so now it's just our original clip so what i'm going to do now is grab the screen insert i'm going to duplicate that and bring that on top of my reflection and still we can't see it because i have the reflection layer the original isolated here i'm going to call this reflection matte so essentially what i'm going to do here is i'm going to use the screen insert data and isolate or use that to isolate or mat out just the screen and then i'm going to apply that blending mode so to do this i'm just going to grab the reflection layer and with track matte here i'm going to set that to alpha matte and now you can see bang i have just the screen with it turned off so now the reason i want to do this is because when i set this reflection mode to a blend mode i can set this to let's say lighten so now i have the reflection again but the cool thing now is that i can control this reflection totally separate from my screen so watch this i can control i can hit t for opacity s for scale and shift p for position now check that out i can bring the intensity of the reflection down i can scale up the reflection and that's all matted out so that's not going to leave for even more versatility i can apply the same technique to the screen insert right now it's just sitting on top but let's say i want to actually mat out this area of the original clip and have it underneath that way i can scale it and it will always be hidden by the borders of the phone to do that i'm going to duplicate the screen insert drag it beneath the original clip and i'm going to grab the original clip and i'm going to do alpha inverted and now if i isolate this clip you can see it's just this phone with it punched out and the screen insert is now under it now i can go up grab a transform effect apply that here to my screen insert and now i can scale this up i can adjust the position and do whatever i want to it so now you can see that's three different elements i have the screen insert with total control i have the original clip here and i have the reflection very cool okay i hope you enjoyed the tutorial if you did be sure to hit the thumbs up button if you want to see more 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Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 17,600

Keywords: PB, PremiumBeat, After Effects Tutorial, AE Tips, Screen Replacement in After Effects, How to Replace My Screen, Mocha AE, Mocha Screen Replacement

Id: 32T9kb7TK4U

Length: 11min 55sec (715 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020