CRAZY Pixel Sorting Tutorial | After Effects Tutorial [Free Project File]

and how's it going guys Josh olafemi here live from LA and welcome to creative week with Herman Wong on the olafemi 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 but 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 liqueur 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 of his content which is a mix of photography captivating the effects 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 discussing the melting pixel effect but first of course we're gonna talk about in bottle elements if you're watching this video you're probably a video editor and in bottle elements is a video editors 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 gonna take a quick flight over to beautiful Vancouver British Columbia my brother seriously lives in one of the most picturesque regions on the planet you can actually download the After Effects project file that Herman will be using in the description below for free Herman Huang the floor is yours thanks Josh thank you for the sick introduction now today we're gonna be learning how to do the melting pixel effect that you see right here now this was inspired by a lot of photos that I saw online that were going around on Instagram or Pinterest and basically these pixels will be melting out from people's glasses or they'll be deconstructing their body and have this really interesting surreal glitchy feeling to it and this in fact it's actually called pixel sorting it's an effect that selectively orders pixels and rows and columns in a way that is you know it might use the shadows with highlights and it gives this really a glitchy feeling to it and you may have seen it in a lot of sci-fi movie Hollywood movies things like ghost in the shell' etc maybe in the title sequences now this plugin is unfortunately not free it's something that you need to pay for it but it is well worth the money because you can do so much with it and you can alter your images you can do things for your title sequences for that modern glitchy feel so that's the type of aesthetic that you like to use in your videos or whatever it may be then you're going to definitely get your money's worth for it and this is just like the tip of the iceberg on what I'm teaching you today on what you can do like this is this is pixel sorting this is like what we're doing today so let's get into it guys okay so here we are in After Effects and basically you're going to need to bring in your footage into a new composition so in this case I already have a footage where I loop something but yours will just be kind of like a footage file like this and you'll be basically dropping it into this new composition in this case I'm just gonna be throwing this one in because this is going to be the footage that I'm using I've already looped it and look at this this is a footage of me looking really excited when Josh hit me up about doing these YouTube tutorials and let's say that you'll want to turn your footage into a still image you can totally do this all you have to do is freeze the frame you just got a right-click you hit time and then freeze frame that way if you play it through nothing happens because it is now a still image basically so in this case I'm just going to use the footage as it is and this new comp I'm just putting in this tutorial folder and you're gonna right click and we're gonna rename it to let's just say main because it's gonna be our main composition where we work with all the elements next you're gonna bring in your graphic or your image basically that you're going to be pixel sorting in this case I'm using this photo with instagrams kind of color scheme for their logo now for this graphic you can use literally anything just depends on your color scheme and what kind of tone that you're going for some people like to use ocean waves and have that blue teal feeling to it but in this case I used the colorful Instagram colors for their logo because that was the theme that I wanted to go for for this particular loop what I want to do is fill the frame by changing the scale over here so what I did was I hit s to bring up the scale so that's a shortcut for that and then I basically just adjusted the value so that it's big enough so that if fits with the width and then let's say that you know I want to fill up the height as well then you can unlock this so that uniform scaling is off and then you're going to adjust the vertical value like so so that way at full screens to fit the comp so I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna pre comp this graphic that I'm choosing this Instagram dot jpg right now by hitting the shortcut ctrl shift C and that's gonna bring up this I'm gonna move all the attributes into the new composition now you don't have to necessarily do this but because I'm gonna be applying some effects on it I just want to make sure that it's not going to distort or do anything funny because I stretch the image so we'll call this Instagram graphic and just hit enter and it is now pre comped what we're gonna do now is depending on the actual graphic using pixel sorter may have some trouble grabbing on to some pixels for it to have that pixel II feeling in this case one tip is that you'll be adding some noise so that there's more for the pixel sorter plug-in to actually grab on to and how you do that is by adding some fractal noise now to click this layer to highlight it and then I'm going to hit ctrl spacebar to bring up my effects console and this is a free plugin that you can get from Video Copilot and actually Josh released a video that was featuring Nick that talks about 10 amazing After Effects plugins that you could use this is actually one of them did I forget to mention that's totally free so you should totally check it out so I'm gonna pull it up again I'm going to basically search for the effect fractal noise right over here now the image of fractal noise is going to replace the graphic so what you'll want to do is set the blending mode over here to overlay that way you see some of the fractal noise on top of the graphic that you have now another way for you to add noise is simply by adding the noise effect itself like this and then you can adjust the value to something a little bit crunch here like let's take 25 like I said it's really going to depend on your image and you can go back to adjust these values later when you try try it with a pixel sorting plug-in and see the result of that but once you've applied these two effects what you're gonna do is pre-comp it again because if I were to play this through you can actually see some movement with a noise but we actually want it as a still image just so it's a little bit easier on your computer so we're gonna do that by ctrl shift C we're going to call it Instagram graphic noisy this still playing through but we're gonna freeze this as I mentioned earlier what you have to do is just right click it hit time hit freeze frame and now it's a still image now comes the fun part where we're gonna be starting to do the melting effect and how we're gonna do this is by opening up a new comp like this and just make sure it matches the dimension of the composition so in this case I'm doing 1080 by 1350 because that's my composition dimension and when I call it melts layer like this make sure that the duration is also appropriate in this case we're just doing like 18 seconds that might be too much we're going to go with 8 seconds so I've got eight seconds on our timeline and what we're gonna do is we're gonna right click hit new we're gonna make a new solid it doesn't matter what color it is because we're gonna be adding some fractal noise to it so let's just call it that to make things a little bit easier so we're going to apply the fractal noise effect just like what we did before and we're going to actually adjust the values this time so we're gonna keep the fractal type basic we're going to have a noise type soft linear as well and what we actually want is for it to have a high contrast so the blacks are darker and the whites are brighter and then when I set the brightness a little bit lower kind of like that so we're basically creating some texture here and the complexity and everything should be okay well we actually want to do is have this stretched vertically and one way we can do that is by hitting the transform over here we're going to uncheck uniform scaling that means when you change the value of the scale you can individually choose whether or not you want to adjust the width the height so in this case we're going to set the width all the way down we're going to set the height just a little bit higher so your values don't have to be exactly the same as mine if I want to adjust it to like let's say 250 for now just so it's a little bit of a nicer number we'll do the negative 30 for brightness so it's easier if you do decide to copy my values I'll set the width to 20 that's good and then we'll set the height to 200 so we have this just so it's a little bit easier for you to follow along and this is still enough contrast for this to work what you want to do now is take this layer you're going to duplicate it twice by hitting the shortcut control D and D again and with two layers you're going to reposition them so they are sitting on top so it's going to be one layer here and then one layer on top and we'll get into what we're actually doing with this in a bit but all you have to do is just take it and then drag it up top now if you want to make sure it isn't shift around and that it actually aligns vertically while you are moving your layers we're going to hit shift while we are dragging and that way I'm actually moving my cursor left and right and it's not going to move because I've already defined that I want to move it vertically and it will do so so we're gonna do this it's okay if it overlaps just a little bit by a few pixels that's okay and then I want to take one of these layers and drag it over like that so now as you can see from the red outline there are three stack together one on top of another so now you're gonna create a new null object all you have to do is right click new null object now this null object doesn't do anything but it is going to define the position for these three layers I'm basically going to animate them so that they're moving downwards and how we're gonna do this is we're just going to rename it to something like position just so it's a little bit easier for you to follow along and we are going to take these three fractal noise layers we're going to parent it over to the position or the null object layer and how we're gonna do this is by highlighting this three take the pick whip over here it could be any of them because they're all highlighted and you're going to drag the pick whip over to the position lair just like that so now as you can see over here they're all parented to a position layer it would be three children over here called fractal noise I wouldn't name my children without the noise so we're gonna hit the P key as a shortcut for the position I'm going to hit the stopwatch so that we have a keyframe in the beginning and this is your beginning position and we're actually going to go all the way to the end over here and then start dragging the vertical position the Y position and I'm going to move it all the way down to about here so that it reveals the top layer so that way if I were to play this through from the very beginning it's basically shifting downwards so basically these three layers are copying the movement that the parent is telling it to do in this case just moving downwards so this is basically some texture for the melting animation if you want to melt a little bit slower of course you can readjust the duration of your composition and then move these keyframes over or this keyframe over at least or if you want it to melt faster you would just move this a little bit closer like this and then it would move faster but your animation would be a little bit shorter so we're gonna go back to the project we're gonna go to our main layer again actually we're gonna move this melt player over here so it's all in one neat little folder organization is totally key take them out layer put it on top like this we're gonna create a new adjustment layer just right click hitting you I'm gonna hit a justment layer just like that and we're gonna call it this place mint map we're going to add a displacement map by searching it up over here displacement map and as a reminder if you decide not to go with effects console like what I'm doing right now you can just search it up over here and the effects of presets panel displacement map and it shows up he's out the same way so the displacement map layer we're actually going to set the target to melt layer this because it's going to take the information from the melt layer and what we're gonna do is hide the melt layer because this isn't actually this doesn't actually need to show up we're using it to help this displacement map make a nice little melting effect which you'll see in a second so we're gonna set the value over here for the horizontal displacement and the vertical displacement to luminance and we are going to shift the vertical displacement value down like this now of course the intensity is going to depend on your taste let's go let's just go overboard let's just go to like okay maybe not that much let's go maybe a hundred like this so it looks even melty err now depending how much of the area that you're going to be actually melting let's say that in this case I don't want it to really peak over from the top and the bottom so very simple fix mean pre-comp all these three layers to this placement map the melt layer that it is taking information from and also the graphic layer and then pre-comp it will call it IG okay we'll call it for continuity sake Instagram melting like this and then you can take what I did before by unclicking this so that you can only adjust the vertical and stretch it like this and now the top and bottom are nice and filled so this is your melting effects so far we're going to add one more element to help make it look like it's melting by making a new adjustment layer we're going to rename it to liquify because that is the effect that we are applying to it so we will apply the liquid fire effect like this and we're going to use this finger pushing icon over here and this is the tool we'll be using we can go into work tool options so that you can define your brush size and is checked by kind of overlapping over here so let's see if it's big enough we'll make it even bigger maybe like this and we're basically going to aid the melting process by pushing downwards because we're having a meltdown I'm gonna push it down so I'm just clicking holding it down and moving it down like so vertically because I want it to be melting vertically this tool selected and we're gonna animate this liquefying effect that you just applied just hit the stopwatch for a distortion percentage like this so this is going to basically say what is the percentage of the amount of the fact that you just apply so if you hit this layer and hit you it'll show everything that is that has keyframes in it basically that you're animating in this case it's the distortion percentage so you can see that this keyframe over here is a hundred percent I'm gonna move it all the way to the end because this is the ending effect that I actually want and then we're gonna go to the beginning and I'm going to hit zero so basically if I scrub it through it's going to melt downwards now this may not be enough so what you can do is duplicate it by hitting ctrl D so you have two liquefying effects so now that you've applied these melting animations I hope you're keeping up okay so far I know there are quite a few steps but I hope that you're also taking away a lot of quality information for you to use in future projects as well but we are getting to the fun part now we're going to apply the pixel sorting plugin now before we continue if you're liking the video so far please check out my Instagram page at coffee liqueur and you can see what I've been working on shooting you DM if you want to chat or if you got any questions as well cuz I'd be more than happy to reply back alright let's continue so you're gonna right-click we're gonna make a new adjustment layer and we're gonna call it pixel sort for organization sake and we're gonna apply pixel sorter 2 which is the plug-in and that I was introducing earlier now this could be a little bit intimidating at first there's all these values that you can play around with but the ones that we are actually going to be using is having it under process effect and then knowing what we actually want to effect first so do we want it to affect the highlights first or the shadows first now this is going to depend up to your taste and what the effect you want to basically achieve but in this case I know that using highlights is a little bit better for this graphic at least I'm going to set the angle to zero because right now it is 90 degrees which is going to be you know left to right which is not what I want we hit zero it's going effect downwards how we're gonna know is by playing with the threshold this is going to be the fun part and as you can see the pixels are melting now you're gonna have to play around with this value because depending on your graphic it'll give you a different look so in this case around here is pretty good so if I were to just Ram preview this but as you can see the individual pixels it's it's looking pretty clean now this is looking a little compressed because I have the resolution set to a third I'm just going to go half for now so you get a clearer image and if we play it back it's kind of what it looks like looking pretty neat and of course you can play around with a threshold to see how much more pixelated you want it to feel and there's a lot of these other settings that you'll want to play around with as well such as the length of the pixels so how long they're gonna be do you want to be shorter do you want to be a bit longer the block size you can define as well so you can have fatter chunks of blocks in this case maybe we'll do like two so it's a little bit less thin width wise so we'll play it through and check it out and this is looking pretty good look at that some really interesting melting pixels going downwards quick tip is that if you are worried about this defined line over here you may not see it unless I play it through but there's basically a line that's dropping down it's kind of camouflaged with the whole pixel sorting effect but let's say that you want to get rid of it this is actually due to your melt layer over here with this very harsh edge alternatively what you can do is take the layer overlap it a little bit and then adding masks so you can feather the mask so that it blends a little bit better so what I'm gonna do is highlight this layer which is this one on top I'm going to kind of draw square over here and then I'm going to set the mode to subtract and right now it's still a harsh line because I haven't done anything yet but if I hit F it's going to show the mask feather and I'm gonna feather this just a little bit let's say up to 100 now of course you can still see through it so what we can do is adjust the position and move it down kind of like this now if I play it through it's a little bit better there's a bit of a white blur over here but you don't really don't need to worry about it and then you'll basically do the same thing with this layer as well of course that means you'll have a shorter animation so you could just duplicate it and stack another one on top but that is totally up to you said to subtract and there we go this now in this case why not we'll do it for examples sake I'm gonna duplicate this top layer over here so that I have one right on top I'm gonna move it over so that it overlaps and it's still parented to the position layer so I don't need to worry about it not following the parent listen to your parents guys so when I close this and I'm gonna go back to this animation and if I play it through as you can see there's a less harsh line now here's an option for you to take a load off your computer what you can do is actually pre render this animation so that when you're further working with it it's not going to be super slow because you'll have the RAM for you you just like a bunch of times and we don't want to do that so I'm going to hit control m to bring it into the render queue I'm going to actually just set it to anything it doesn't really matter but if you have Adobe Media encoder you have a lot more render settings so I'm going to output it to say melting pixels this would be effects I'll make a folder called pre-render and we'll call this melting pixel melting pixel Save q in AME this will bring up your media encoder if you have it installed already and you can change it to whatever file format that you think is appropriate that won't lose too much quality even if it does lose a bit of quality it's not that big of a deal in this case I'm just gonna do a quick time Apple ProRes four for four or forty to light these are the ones that I like to use without losing too much quality hit okay and then you're just going to render now in this case I already pre rendered one and I called it this melting pixel asset before and if I play it through this is what I got now this one looks different than the one that I was playing with earlier this one's a little bit brighter and that's because what you can do is have a harsher Faculty's so you can set the contrast even higher or you can apply a curves layer and then make it a lot more contrast D you just have to play around with settings to see what result looks the best to you but once you bring it back into your project just play it through to make sure that it looks okay damn that's looking cool just take a moment to appreciate it now if you want to loop this animation because you don't want it to last for just seven seconds all you have to do is take the footage you're going to put it in a new comp I'm just dragging it into this new comp icon we're going to name this comp let's say loop at the end same name and we're going to set the duration a little bit longer let's say I don't know 22 seconds so if i zoom out I have more time to work with now we're gonna set the opacity here around halfway by hitting T to pull up the shortcut for opacity hit the stopwatch so that it's a hundred percent I'm gonna go to the beginning and then you're gonna hit zero so that way it fades in from black or from being transparent so why I'm doing this is because I'm gonna duplicate this layer like so and I'm gonna stagger it kind of like this offset it so that when this layer is done done playing over here if I hit you to show the keyframes this will reach 100% to replace the animation underneath basically so you're gonna start seeing this top layer and then because we have a longer fade or crossfade kind of effect it looks imperceptible and we're gonna do this a few times depending on how you want the animation to be now it wouldn't be good if you were to stagger it and offset it like so because then you would have this moment where is still fading from being transparent so just make sure that you're overlapping the keyframes so that there won't be a moment like that you don't do this a few times boom we're gonna say it last all the way to here and of course in the beginning you want to make sure there is something there as well so we're gonna make one more duplication and we're going to put it kind of like this I hope we play it through it looks like it is looping isn't that neat so now you've made a looping melting pixel effect with the plug-in pixel sorter we're gonna go back to our main composition what you can do is just move this out of the way you can either have the visibility or you can pre-comp it as you can tell I like pre compy things just to keep things kind of neat and call it Instagram melting pixel effect moving all the attributes to it the new composition and then we're gonna hit OK now you can either delete this because it is still in your project or you can just turn off the visibility by hitting this eye icon over here on the left and we got this because now we're gonna replace it with this melting pixel composition so you've got your melting pixel loop and if you got your image to work with or in this case looping footage we're gonna do next is you're going to make a new solid we're going to call it Matt's because we are going to use the solid as a matte layer and we're going to basically hide this pod this so we see your image and know where we are going to cut out for the actual melting pixel effect to appear now maybe that's not a little bit wordy so I'm gonna show you what I mean we're gonna take the pen tool and basically what's happening is I'm gonna first set it to full resolution so I can see what's going on and we're going to have the melting pixel effect melt from my glasses pen tool when i zoom in we're going to hit the mat layer to make sure that we are masking the mat layer even if it's invisible you can still apply masks to it and then I'm going to take the pen tool and start basically masking this area where I would like the effect is start happening so start from here I want it to melt downwards so I'll do that boom now a trick to getting straight lines while you are I'm asking is like I said before when you're positioning things you hold shift and then you hit your point or you hold shift and you move the position it's the same when you're applying this pen tool as well for straight lines so in this case I'm going to go back to this layer over here I'm going to hit V just to make sure that I can click on this keyframe without completing this entire mask because if I were to hit G and I were to click this keyframe it would just complete the entire mask like this which is not what I want so I'm just going back to be I'm gonna click this point and then I'm going to hit G again and then let's say I want it to melt yeah somewhere around here is okay we're gonna hit shift down all the way over here and then we're going complete mask by doing this so this is one area that I'm going to have it affect the melting pixel so maybe I'll readjust this a little bit like that so it looks a little bit prettier boom that is one side of my glasses now we're gonna make a new mask over here on the right side and then close this off to now have two nice masks so if I were to turn on this matte layer now that you've been adding two masks - you can see that it is - white solid areas I guess that show where the melting will happen now this is looking beautiful what you can do now is hide the visibility of this matte layer you're going to highlight this melting pixel loop you're going to hit the track matte over here and you're going to actually go for alpha matte and then when you hit that nothing happens yet because we haven't turned the visibility of this layer once we do you can see that whatever area that we messed earlier will show the melting pixel effect so if I were to play this through it's looking pretty clean now some few things that you can help fix it up a little bit is if you believe that the mask is a little bit too harsh go back to a matte layer hit F and then just mess around with the feather in this case I'll just do about five or maybe three let's do that so it's a little bit less harsh and is blended looking a little bit better and at this point you are basically done you're melting pixel effect congratulations you guys made it however I'm gonna provide one quick tip just to make it look a little bit cooler and a little more eye-catching personally I like putting a little bit of a glow and things that I'm working with glitch art or sci-fi cyberpunk that type of genre because gives this nice little kind of neon feeling to it and how you can do that is by pre copping this mat and this melting pixel layer together ctrl shift C to pre-compose we're going to call it melting pixel cut out we're going to duplicate this so now there are two of those layers and then I'm going to pull up an effect called deep globe now I like putting this on literally everything because it gives physically accurate light fall-off now if I hit this and then set to screen now it's really glowy I'll change the opacity to maybe 50 so it's a little bit less glowy and if I play up the road right now is that full resolution so it's taking a little bit of time but this is what you get as opposed to this which may look a little bit flat now let's say you've already bought the pixel sorter plug-in and you don't want to pay for another plugin I think in Herman why are you hurting my wallets no worries you can do something very similar by using the built-in glow effect in After Effects so I'll delete this glow right now is looking a little bit brighter because it's still a layer on top set to screen we're gonna keep it that way we're gonna pull up the glow effect and then we're gonna play with the radius and also the threshold and this will provide us with a bit of a soft look and you can also play with the intensity but in this case I think keeping it at 1 is OK so this may not look as glowy but what you can do is duplicate this again increase the radius like so hit T and then change the opacity so it's a little bit lower and this essentially gives you a really nice effect as well in this case it almost actually looks the same this is the effect that you are left with guys and once I added an extra a little bit of graphics this is what I ended up with so that is it guys that is how you do the melting pixels from glasses effect and like I said before this is only the tip of the iceberg on what you can do this is just a little portion of the endless possibilities you can do with this plugin so do consider it I do believe that there is a trial period that you can use for the plug-in so you can try it out see if it's a good fit for you before you actually follow through and make the purchase anyways remember to subscribe to Josh Olaf Emmys YouTube channel if you haven't done so already down below there's a red subscribe button if you haven't done so already so that you can check out some more tutorials from both him and myself and be sure to check out my Instagram as well it's at coffee liqueur and that's it guys until the next video back to you Josh shoutout to hermann 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 [Music]

Channel: Olufemii

Views: 144,413

Keywords: after effects, tutorial, after effects tutorial, after effects transitions, after effects pixel sorter, after effects melting glitch, after effects glitch effect, after effects animation, after effects motion graphics, premiere pro, premiere pro tutorial, premiere pro transitions, vfx tutorial, vfx, datamosh, after effects datamosh, after effects plugins, premiere pro plugins, premiere pro effect, how to use after effects, music video effect, pixel sorting

Id: _ISodnXc7jE

Length: 32min 17sec (1937 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/binary_star7]

This is the first video in VFX week.

The 2nd video is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AfterEffects/comments/hrufw3/vfx_week_tutorial_2_fake_to_real_after_effects/

Both include free project files to follow along with the tutorial.