Clone Freeze Effect | After Effects Tutorial [Free Project File]

[Music] and how's it going guys joshua lefemi here live from la and welcome to creative week with herman huang on the olufemi channel creative week is a time when we step in every day for an entire week with one of my friends it's more creative and more talented than myself and we cover a bunch of really awesome cool topics so who is my bro herman and what can you expect from this week herman also known as coffee liquor on instagram is literally one of the coolest digital content creators that i know i could literally just sit on his instagram forever and just literally scroll down all this content which is a mix of photography captivating vfx travel edits and a lot of other random stuff this week he's committed to releasing one vfx tutorial a day on the channel which is crazy today we're going to be talking about the clone freeze effect but first of course we're going to talk about envato elements if you're watching this video you're probably a video editor and envato elements is a video editor's dream it's a subscription service that gives you unlimited downloads of the most incredible stock footage like cloud and fog overlays aerial footage fire lightning they also have incredible vfx packs premiere and after effects templates sound effects royalty free music and literally anything you could ever want as a video editor just by clicking the link below you will automatically get a free first month you'll see that coupon for the free first month at the very very end after you've finished signing up and that's it i use elements literally in some regard every day now i got two tickets one for me and one for you and we're going to take a quick flight over to beautiful vancouver british columbia the landscape here is just so lush and green you can actually download the after effects project file that hermann will be using in the description below for free herman huang the floor is yours thanks josh for this clone freeze effect i first used it about five years ago in a web commercial and it's a pretty trippy effect you can use it in your music video or product video it's not very hard to do i'm going to be sharing a simple way that you can do it and also a bit of a variation in which the thing that you want to apply the effect to to kind of slink around a little bit which gives it an even trippier effect so guys let's dive into it so once you have shot your footage you're going to bring up after effects so this is the clip that i shot and i colored it as well and basically i'm just catching a card i threw up in the air and then i move the card around so the first way that i'll be showing you is by freezing the moment that i want the clone effect to happen so i'm going to first put this into a new composition just like this and then let's say that i would like it to kind of happen around here actually i feel like i can speed up this catching part and reposition part now of course for your footage you don't have to worry about this but for me personally i feel like i'm going to just kind of speed up this middle section and how i'm doing this just really quickly is i'm cutting the clip and it basically duplicates the clip and cuts where the playhead is by hitting the shortcut ctrl shift d and then that's how i split the clip i'm going to right click it hit time time stretch and then i'm going to actually make it faster by about 200 and that means i will put in 50 because i'm doing half the time so i'm going to move everything over just like this and watch it back so now it's a little bit faster and of course you don't have to do that for your clip if you don't need to worry about the timing in this case i just felt like that moment could have been faster so that's a quick little tip for you even though it has nothing to do with the actual clone effect i'm going to pre-compose this by hitting ctrl shift c i'm going to call it card throw and then i want the freeze effect to happen somewhere around here so when i determine when i want it to happen that's when i'm going to freeze the frame over here so i'm going to hit the ctrl shift d shortcut again and that's how i'm going to split the clip i'm going to right click it hit time and then go to freeze frame and then what this does as the name implies is it freezes the frame so if i play it through catch the card and then it totally freezes for the rest of the duration so pretty simple enough i'm going to actually trim the beginning just a little bit and then move everything over so that it's a bit of a tighter clip so this is looking pretty swell so far so for this layer i'm going to do a few things first of all i'm going to duplicate it so by hitting the shortcut control d that duplicates the clip i'm going to mask around the area that i want the clone effect to happen i'm going to take the pen tool i'm going to do a nice little drawing around the object that i want to clone freeze all right so once you're happy with your mask i'm gonna actually feather it just a little bit maybe by two so i hit f to bring up the mask feather and then i just input the value to two just because it's a little bit soft it kind of hurts me a little bit that it's a little bit soft and it's not 100 in focus but i guess that's what happens when you're filming on your own so if you're doing this a quick tip is to have less shallow depth of field or shoot it on your phone so that pretty much everything's in focus or have a friend help you out but during quarantine this is this is the best i got so continuing on what we're going to do is we're going to name this card freeze actually we're going to call this clone since it's the clone freeze effect so before i move on with the clone layer i actually want to duplicate this layer and call this cut out because i'm going to have all the clone cards kind of echo behind the playing card itself so i need a layer on top so it gives that illusion that the clones are behind it now if that sounds a little bit wordy let me just kind of demonstrate so for this cutout i'm going to have all the cards kind of let's say come out this way so diagonally to the top right and i'll get a little bit fancy as well and have the cards clone downwards as well so i'm going to additionally mask the areas that i don't want the clone to be in front of so it wouldn't make sense if the cards kind of came out and through the finger so i'm going to mask around here and we'll speed this up and once you have your cutout we're gonna actually label this cut out to a different color so it's a little bit easier for us to distinguish let's make it cyan that's a nice color and in contrast for the clone i'm going to make it red so it's nice and bold okay so we're ready to move on to our clone layer and actually get into the effect and how we're going to do this is we're going to first keyframe the position by hitting p to bring up the shortcut and then i'm going to hit the stopwatch so i create a keyframe there so i'm going to move a few frames ahead let's say around here and i can always adjust it later and i'm going to move to where the first layer of the clone freeze to happen so like this so if i play it through kind does that might not be fast enough maybe i want it to move in a little bit closer like this now what i suggest is easy easing these uh keyframes by hitting f9 after highlighting the keyframes it'll turn into this type of shape it looks kind of like an hourglass and we're going to go into the graph editor like this and then we can see the keyframes over here i'm going to pull the handles over like that and you can play around this i feel like the secret to really good motion in after effects is by using the graph editor like so and then adjusting the keyframes like that and that way it smooths out and feathers the animation or the motion that you're keyframing so that's a neat little trick for you so i'm going to duplicate this layer i'm going to actually work with the layer underneath because i want it to look like it's kind of reverbing underneath and i'm going to hit p to bring up the position i'm going to go to this later position keyframe and i don't need to touch the beginning because i want it to kind of start in the same spot and i'm going to readjust it so that it kind of staggers and overlaps like so do the exact same thing a few times and in terms of positioning and how far apart they should be that's totally up to you and the graphic or the footage that you're using so just play around with it i'm basically just going through the basic procedure on how you can achieve the effect all right so we're going to stop here for now this is good enough for now and if i play it through it looks like that and it's kind of rippling out all at once which is okay if that's the effect that you would like to achieve one other option that you have is by kind of staggering the position so that um it feels like it's kind of rippling as opposed to it all expanding from the center and how i'm going to do that is i'm going to highlight all the clone layers i'm going to hit p to bring up their position and then i'm going to start kind of offsetting these keyframes by maybe two frames like this so that the motion is kind of rippling so it starts from the beginning closer to the card to the outer cards i'm gonna hit ctrl a to select all hit u to show all the keyframes and then hit u again to collapse everything just so it's a little bit easier on the eyes and then now it kind of expands a little bit slower but it looks kind of like there's a ripple as opposed to it all happening at once so all together this is kind of what it looks like so we're going to get a little bit fancy here i'm going to actually do the same thing on the other side so it ripples from top to right and also top to sorry bottom to left oh my gosh so disoriented this cutout allows me to have layers underneath without it overlapping so i'm going to take one of these clones this one over here and in this case because there's a finger cut out kind of over here and i don't want to kind of like if i were to offset it like this and let's say like right now it's being covered by the hand which is fine but if it gets to a point where it's around here and you start seeing it that wouldn't be too good so you don't have to do this but i'm just choosing to ripple it on the other side so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit the rotation and i'm going to go 180 because playing cards are mirrored so you won't be able to tell so that way this edge won't show the finger and this corner will be hidden so i'm going to delete this keyframe actually because i'm going to make sure that it is starting here i'm going to move this over like so and i'm basically offsetting it the exact same way just the opposite side boom that is looking much better because it's the other side i'm going to change the label to a different color let's say purple just so it's a little bit easier to differentiate your layers and you don't get confused with like all your clones so i'm going to do the exact same thing i'm going to offset it in this case it's going to match the number of clones on the other side as well so i think there were like 10 wait is this 11 so we're gonna make sure there's 11 on the other side as well [Music] if i zoom out let's say fit up to 100 this is kind of what it looks like of course this is a little bit shorter because that one's animated to extend later and we're going to basically do the exact same thing but on the side and for now i'm going to hit the tilde key i believe it's called the tilde key it's the squiggly line one on the top left of your keyboard and i'm going to kind of let's say match with these i'm gonna hit p as well to bring those up and if it doesn't totally match it's totally fine i think it'll still give a pretty cool effect so hit the tilde key again now i see the screen and then if i play it through boom does this ripply expansion effect which is pretty trippy now in this case it's cutting my arm and i believe playing cards are not actually that sharp to be able to cut off your limbs so in this case i'm going to actually set it to the instagram portrait mode dimensions but before that i want to give one more tip and to give a more i guess illusion of depth i'm going to add a drop shadow to all the cards so in this case right now it looks like everything's really flat and that's okay if that's the effect that you want to achieve in this case i want to give a little bit of separation between playing cards so what i'm going to first do is i'm going to hit the cutout layer i'm going to find drop shadow and i'm going to drop that on here and i'm going to play around the settings so that there is drop shadow and in this case for only the cutout i think i'm going to have shadow on both sides so the top right and the bottom left so in this case i'm just going to play with the distance to what i feel looks good kind of like that maybe change the opacity of 30 so it's not too harsh and i've got some drop shadow on the top part now i'm going to also just duplicate it by hitting ctrl d and then i'm going to change the direction to the other side and i'm only going to do this for the cutout layer now with the rest of the playing cards i believe the top part i'm going to add a drop shadow just on the top part over here so i'm going to take the first drop shadow that i work with which is the one heading towards the top right and i'm going to apply it to all the red ones because all the red ones are the ones that are on the top right so i'm going to hit ctrl v to paste all the drop shadows over and now it gives this sense of depth and i'm going to take this drop shadow and if you did not rotate your footage like i did then you would take the other drop shadow and have it make sure that it's facing the same way if you rotate it like i did then you can use the exact same drop shadow because it'll face the same direction and highlight all the purple ones hit p and now i have a drop shadow on all the layers so if i play it through boom this is what i get looking pretty sick now we're basically done the clone freeze effect we've done the basic procedure this is what it looks like but i'm going to provide a quick few tips that can make it look even more sick and add a bit of spice to it so it's even more eye-catching what i'm going to first do is i'm going to highlight everything by hitting ctrl a and then i'm going to pre-compose it ctrl shift c and then call it clone phrase effect whatever you'd like to call it i'm going to change the composition setting to my final delivery kind of resolution so control k will be the shortcut to bring up composition setting i'm going to call it uh for instagram i'm going to change the dimension to 1080. the height will be one three five zero which i believe is the resolution for an instagram post if it's on portrait mode i'm going to hit s to bring up my scale and i'm going to basically scale and reposition everything so that it doesn't look like i have a chopped off arm so let's do that maybe we'll center it and then if i play it through it looks like that which is kind of cool and if i want to get a little bit fancier i can kind of have a slowly scale by keyframing the position and the scale i'm going to keep going up to here i'm going to bring the scale to maybe let's say 88 like this and reposition it like that that way when i play through there's a subtle push in if i fit up to 100 like that and it adds a little bit of motion even though you froze everything and that's a nice little detail to make it look more dynamic when i add one more thing i'm going to right click hit new adjustment layer and i'm going to add a bit of like a brightening glow effect the moment that the clone freeze happens so this is optional for you because like i said you're basically done your clone freeze effect i just want to get a little bit fancy and provide you with options we're going to rename this to glow i'm going to pull up the glow effect i'm going to use this plugin called effects console which is free by video copilot which i love to use because it saves you a little bit of time from grabbing it from the effects and presets panel over here i'm going to search up glow and then this is a little bit too much so i'm going to play with the settings over here to whatever i believe looks kind of good and i want it to happen around here so i'm going to keyframe the glow intensity by hitting the stopwatch hit u to bring up my keyframes i'm going to hit 0 over here and i'm basically going to have it kind of glow before the freeze effect happens and then come back out so play it through it kind of does this glowy effect and you can play with the position of the keyframes to match with the timing that you believe is correct i'm gonna do one more thing i'm going to add a curves layer on top as well and just have it a little bit brighter a little more contrasty and then i'm going to pull up the hue and saturation as well and have it desaturate a little bit just because this is the type of effect that i enjoy using and i'm going to also let's say hit t to bring up the opacity and at this point i can make it so that it doesn't happen until later and actually i didn't have to keyframe the glow intensity if i planned on using the opacity as well but in this case it was just kind of a last minute idea to include these other things because sometimes when you're editing you just jazz it and you just add in some extra effects and of course take away effects if they don't work as well so when i play this through this is looking pretty cool and you are done method one for the clone freeze effect congratulations [Applause] now before we continue if you're liking the video so far please check out my instagram page at coffeelicker and you can see what i've been working on shoot me a dm if you want to chat or if you've got any questions as well because i'd be more than happy to reply back all right let's continue so now we're going to move on to the slightly more advanced version where the cards kind of slink around as they ripple and i'm going to borrow the composition that i used earlier this card throw one just because i retimed it earlier and i'm going to create a new composition over here and we're going to call it sling actually the dimensions are already set to instagram which is great so i'm going to hit ok this is our new composition i'm going to go back to the old one so we can copy and paste this footage of course i need to rescale and position it so it fits and then in this case i'm not going to freeze the ending because when i play it through i have this extra motion for it to move around i'm actually going to kind of have it ripple on the top right so not on the bottom left this time so i'm going to give a little bit of room over here so that when i catch the card it'll kind of clone freeze this way and then when it sinks around i'm giving some extra room for it as well maybe just a little more space kind of like that and that should be good enough okay so what we're going to do now is we're going to pre-comp this and call it card throw scaled because that's what we did i'm going to move all the attributes into the new composition so before we actually get into the cloning itself we're going to track this playing card so that the movement tracks the motion of the playing card so how we do that is i'm going to add in mocha now you can do this natively in after effects or you can use the mocha effect i like using mocha because i believe that it gives slightly more accurate results at least from my use so if you've never used mocha before don't be too intimidated all you have to do is hit this pen tool and then draw over the area that you would like to track i'm going to hit this forward track and it's going to track the playing card like magic and then i'm going to stop here because my clip ends here i'm going to track backwards and of course it's going to be a moment where i catch the card where it's going to do this because it can't track it anymore so i'm going to hit ok hit ok again hit ctrl s to save this data and then i can close it and back in after effects i have the data but i'm going to actually apply the tracking data to a null object so it's off of this layer by right clicking hitting new and then null object this null object doesn't mean anything until you put things on it so i'm going to rename it call it track go back to this layer and go to tracking data create tracking data and i'm going to hit ok because this is the only tracking layer that i worked with i'm going to change the export option not to corner pin but to transform and then layer export to track now that's a bit of a crash course on how to do some basic tracking in mocha and bring it back into after effects so i'm going to apply export and then now if i hit u to bring up all the keyframes in this layer you can see that the position scale and rotation have now now have data so as you can see the null object is basically this red box tracked onto the playing card and that's going to be handy later because the clones are going to follow this track layer so we're going to go back we're going to find the sharpest motion or the sharpest moment like somewhere around here and i'm going to hit ctrl d i'm going to freeze this just like i did before right click time freeze frame i'm going to delete this moca ae just because i don't need it on my clone layer so delete we're going to rename this to clone so it's easier for you to remember easier for me to remember actually i'm going to label it to let's say cyan that's a nice color and what we're going to do is start masking around this just like what we did before and remember we're basically only masking the object that we would like to have the clone freeze effect happen all right so we've got this masked so if i solo this by hitting the solo toggle it gives me this playing card and it's not going to move because i froze it so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to parent it by hitting this pick whip and pick whip it over to the track layer and what that's going to do is it's going to tell this clone layer that hey you got to follow this track layer so the track layer is going to move then this playing card is going to move too and we're going to basically do what we did before and we're going to keyframe the position by hitting p stopwatch going to a few frames forward and then moving it over like this we're going to easy ease by hitting f9 and highlighting the keyframes and then go to the graph editor pull the handles so they look like this and then i'll just kind of slope and ease out so this is what you have so far and what we're gonna do is we're going to create a cutout layer just like what we did before otherwise it's gonna show this finger over here and it's playing card looks like it's on top of it which doesn't look cool so we're going to take advantage of this track layer by having the mat tracked onto it if you don't know what that means i'm going to actually create a new solid by hitting control y and then when i call this matte all of this will be explained as i do it i'm going to hide the visibility of this matte and maybe this clone layer too so that i can see what's underneath here i'm going to basically highlight this and draw a mask over the area that i want cut out just like what we did before he said this time we're not gonna be drawing it on the footage itself because then we'd have to keyframe each frame to match the motion of the playing card and we have the luxury of a track layer right now so we're gonna make full use out of it by tracking the matte layer so this side can be a little bit sloppy because none of the playing cards will go on that side and then i'm gonna hit f to bring up the feather and hit three just so it does a little bit better so we're gonna do next is just like before we're gonna parent this over to the track layer and what this does if i turn on the visibility of the matte layer is it will follow the track like this so it looks like i'm holding a white playing card sort of which is kind of funky and you can always adjust the mask so in this case like it doesn't cover this area uh in this case i'm not going to do it but you can keyframe the mask path by hitting m and then just readjusting it but i'm just going to move along for now because i think that's not going to be much of a problem i'm going to duplicate this bottom layer which is the footage that we see i'm going to put it right underneath the matte layer and basically we're going to use this matte layer to kind of tell what's going to be shown in this layer by going to the track matte area we're going to select luma matte and now if i were to solo this it shows only the part that we masked in the matte layer so that's a neat piece of knowledge for you to take away with if you don't know about this technique already so i'm going to go back now we're going to actually duplicate this track layer and then parent this over to the track 2 layer and the reason we're doing this is because we're going to pre-comp all of this by highlighting all of them ctrl shift c and then we're going to call it cut out tracked so we have this nice and neat and what we're going to do next is we're also going to pre-comp these two layers i'm going to turn the visibility of the clone back on like this and as you can see because of the cutout layer it is it looks like it's actually behind the playing card and we're going to like i said pre-comp this ctrl shift c and call it clone tracked like this and then let's change it to different colors so we know alright so we only have one playing card so far so this case i'm just going to trim the clip so it starts kind of around here and here comes the fun part we're going to duplicate the clones like what we did before ctrl d to duplicate and i'm going to offset it like so all right so once i've duplicated it i'm just going to fit up to 100 so you can see what's going on if i play it through it looks like it just suddenly expands like that which doesn't look slinky yet but we are not done what we're going to do is offset these layers and you can do them manually by just adjusting them kind of like this and then having a stagger or you can use a free script that you can get from aescripts.com and it's called shift layers so we're going to pull that up and it's going to basically save a bit of headache of doing it manually just over here shift layers and i'm going to highlight it from top to bottom and it does make a difference because i'm going to have it kind of stagger from top to bottom from the shift layers window i'm going to select stagger selected layers and i'm going to click add to existing layer times and i'm going to put it to two frames and basically what this does is it's going to stagger the layers by two frames apart from each other so if i hit apply you'll see what i mean if you look at the timeline just like magic it staggers and if i play it through now [Music] it has this nice little snake effect now of course we'll kind of end the clip before the block happens so i'm adjust the render bar and we're going to add one detail to add some depth and that's why you guessed it adding the drop shadow to the layers so i'm gonna go back to this one that we work with just to save a bit of time copy the drop shadow and paste the drop shadow i'm going to add it to my cutout layer as well and what i'm going to do is also take all the clones highlight them and i'm going to turn on motion blur so that now it adds a bit of a blur while it's in movement and i think that looks pretty cool and looks a little bit more i guess realistic and the final thing i'm going to add is that little glow effect that we keyframed earlier and slap it on top and have it kind of happen when it decides to duplicate so we've made it this far congratulations because you're done let's play it through and see what we've got oh we got this trippy effect that looks kind of like you're on psychedelics i guess don't do drugs just stick to video editing now of course we want to render this out so you can render it to whatever settings that is your favorite so you hit control m and then you can just select whichever thing that you like i personally like to queue in ame because for me there are more rendering options but i would suggest if you're going to upload on instagram just to export it to h.264 that is it you guys are definitely going to want to try this yourself and just be amazed at how it's going to turn out now subscribe to josh olufemi's youtube channel if you haven't done so already for more sick tutorials for more videos from both him or myself and check out my instagram as well at coffee liquor until the next video guys over back to you josh shout out to herman one of the awesome teachers that we have on the channel thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with us and make sure to check out all the videos in this week's creative series they can all be linked in the description below lastly make sure to subscribe to the channel thanks so much for watching guys and as always remember to keep it chill

Channel: Olufemii

Views: 43,314

Keywords: after effects, tutorial, after effects tutorial, after effects transitions, after effects animation, after effects motion graphics, premiere pro, premiere pro tutorial, premiere pro transitions, vfx tutorial, vfx, after effects plugins, premiere pro plugins, premiere pro effect, how to use after effects, music video effect, after effects clone, after effects clone effect, after effects duplicate person, after effects duplicate, after effects duplication, zach king tutorial

Id: Ry4heQfaXA4

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020