Create a Smooth Motion Trail Effect | After Effects Tutorial

hello in this after effects tutorial i'm going to show you how to make this really smooth looking motion trail effect we'll go over the basics of the effect how to add a nice slow fade off and i'll show you a couple of compositing tips to achieve a quick and easy retro look [Music] okay in after effects let's create a new composition i'm going to make my square and at 25 frames per second and i'll call it motion trail main let's begin by adding some text and we can just center this and we can select our text layer hit p to bring up position let's move it to the top add a keyframe and about a second and a half let's move it down to the bottom and to make this motion seem a little bit smoother let's select our keyframes and hit f9 to add easy ease and we can jump into the graph editor and we can just ramp up and down that motion and finally let's loop this animation so let's all click on our stopwatch and type loop out speech marks and ping pong and what this will do it will just loop back and forth between our two keyframes and now we have a quite nice dynamic movement so let's pre-compose this by hitting ctrl shift c and we'll call this animation pre let's duplicate our pre-comp we'll call the top layer fill and the bottom layer trail and we can hide fill for now now like any good motion trail effect ours is going to be built using the echo effect so go to time echo and let's just move down our timeline so we have a bit of motion and just so we can see exactly what's going on with some of these numbers let's just firstly increase the number of echoes and let's quickly run through the properties first up we've got echo time and that is a time in seconds between each of the echoes being generated next is the number of echoes that we're going to generate then we have the starting intensity which is the starting capacity of each echo then there's the decay and that is the ratio of the opacity of each echo to the echo before it so if i was to set this to say 0.5 you can see that each echo as we go along is half the opacity of the echo before and last up is the echo operator and that is just how the echoes blend with each other but we're going to leave this as add for now so let's start dialing in these numbers and the first thing we want to do is just reduce this gap between each of the echoes and we can do this using it by reducing the echo time and i found minus .005 works well then we want to increase the number of echoes and between 40 and 50 is a good place to start and as you can see nothing's really happened and that's because our decay is set too low so we need to increase this so that our echoes aren't decaying too quickly and for this purpose i found 0.93 works and we can preview this you may need to set your resolution to half okay this is looking quite nice already but if you look closely you can see that we do still have some sort of stepping going on and if i zoom in you'll be able to see it better and a really quick and easy way to get rid of this is to add a gaussian blur and you can just increase the blurriness until that stepping goes away but i found something between 10 and 15 works well now let's add some color and we're going to do that using color armor colorama will give us the ability to change the color of our echoes as they go through their life so go to effect color correction colorama and what color armor allows us to do is change the color of our footage or layer depending on the input values so we have an input and we have an output and because we want to change the color of our echoes as they go through their life and fade off we can do this by setting our input as alpha and straight away you can see that as our echoes fade off through their life they go through the color colors of our color wheel now this isn't quite the look that i'm going for so we can let's start off by just selecting ramp gray as you can see there's something weird going on here and that is because colorama is modifying a few modifying our alpha so let's just go and deselect modify alpha and now we can add some color so i'm going to start off with a nice bright blue as it fades off i want it to change to a darker blue and you can easily add a new color to this color wheel by just simply clicking and i want to nice purpley blue i want it quite dark something like that okay but you can see we've got some ghosting or it's a little bit muddy it's not very nice and that's because uh colorama is still blending our original colors with our new colors and we can solve this by deselecting composite over there and there we go if we bring turn back on our fill layer then we can really see this kind of motion trail that we've got going on now and this is already looking really cool now next thing we want to do is add the really slow ghosting effect so let's start off by duplicating our trail and we'll call this slow fade and so we can see what we're doing let's just solo our slow fade layer for now and there's a few things we need to tweak in the echo settings in order to get our trail to slowly fade first of all we need to increase our echo time and i found point minus .01 is good as you can see that lengthens our trail quite a lot next we want to increase the number of echoes and then because we don't want our echoes to fade off quite so quickly we need to increase the decay a little bit too and and i found about 0.98 works well and as you can see we've definitely increased our trail but this isn't quite the look we're going for and in order to really reduce what's going on here we can decrease the starting intensity and we want to go quite low so i found 0.15 works well and there you go you can see we've got nice long trails and also this sort of ghosting of our text and one final thing we can do is go back into colorama and just remove the lighter color and just select that light color and drag it away and bring our dark color back up to the top of the color wheel and let's un-solo our slow fade and let's preview this now this is looking nice already but there's a few bells and whistles we can add if we really want to try and sell this effect and polish it up further so let's begin by creating a background and let's create a new solid just make sure that's black let's call this bg drag that to the bottom and the first thing we can do is add a really subtle glow in the background and the easy way to do that is let's just duplicate our background layer call this pg glow and let's add a fill and let's just make this blue now you want it quite dark something like that next let's select our mast tool and let's create a circular mask in the background and hit f to bring up feather and let's just feather off our mask so that we it's nice and subtle okay the next thing we can do to make our trail a little more vivid is to add a glow so let's create a new adjustment layer and we'll call this glow and go to effect stylize glow and some settings that i found work well for this is to set threshold to 40 the glow radius to 75 and reduce the glow intensity to 0.3 now like any old school effects we want to add a bit of noise so let's again create a new adjustment layer let's call this noise and go to effect noise and grain noise and something between 20 and 25 and we can zoom in to see how this looks it looks nice but it's a little bit too sharp so let's add a really subtle blur again let's create a new adjustment layer let's call this below let's go to effect blur and sharpen fastbox blur and we can set the blur radius to something between point five and one and don't forget to check repeat edge pixels now to further enhance the effect we can do a little bit of color correction so let's create a new adjustment layer again and i'll call this cc for color correction and first of all i'm going to add a curves and i just want to bring up the black levels then color correction hue and saturation and we can drop the saturation down say minus okay and the final thing we can do is add some film dust and i found a really quick and easy way to do that is using fractal noise so let's start by creating a new solid and we'll call this dust let's go to effect noise and grain fractal noise and the first thing we want to do is reduce the scale so something around 10 then let's increase the contrast and something between 700 and 800 works well and finally let's just reduce the brightness until we get an amount of dust that looks nice okay something like that looks good now i'm going to zoom in and if you look closely you can see our dust looks quite sharp so to soften this up let's just add another fastbox blur and we'll set this to something like point one and select repeat edge pixels now let's animate this and the easiest way to do this is by just changing the random seed now you could keyframe this or we can do it using an expression so let's all click on our stopwatch and type time and because we want to see our random c change on every frame as though it's actually film we'll multiply the time by our frame rate and if i go through frame by frame you'll see our dust changes and finally just so we can see everything below our dust layer we just need to change the blending mode to add okay and there we go i hope this tutorial is useful for you and now that you have the base of the effect built you can really play around with creating some cool looks thanks for watching and goodbye

Channel: Mograph Mill

Views: 92,307

Keywords: after effects, adobe after effects, after effects tutorial, after effects text tutorial, motion graphics, mograph mill, motion design, motion graphics tutorial, motion design tutorial, after effects echo effect, echo effect, motion trail, after effects motion trail tutorial, animation, graphic design

Id: eB24MMeiz28

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 26 2021