[MUSIC] >>ALAN: Now that we know how to convert
our layers into 3D layers in After Effects, let's talk about cameras. Now cameras inside of
After Effects aren't physical real cameras but they act just like it. Virtual cameras in After
Effects are amazing, and, it could just be my own bias as a video producer by trade that I love
having this kind of access, but the ability to control and keyframe a virtual camera through your
composition making your 3D layers come to life, is a wonderfully fun thing to do. So in this
tutorial, I'm going to teach you how to make a camera and then how to control that camera to
make your 3D layers come to life. To teach you about cameras in After Effects, I've given you a
.PSD file of a hillside scene that I designed. Go ahead and download that now and let's import that
into After Effects as a Composition. To do that, I'm going to double-click in my "Project"
panel, find my .PSD and then click "Import." Again, it's going to ask you what
kind of import kind you want, so let's change this to "Composition"
not "Footage." "Composition." Hit "OK." This gives us a folder of all of our layers in the
.PSD and it gives us our composition. Go ahead and double-click the hillside composition and let's
open that in our timeline. So here's the scene: a bunch of different 2D layers, all
listed out here in the timeline panel. What I want to do is, I want to
turn each of these into a 3D layer, distribute them throughout z-space, and then
create a camera to kind of fly through this hillside scene. To start, let's go ahead and turn
everything but the sky into a 3D layer. To do this quickly for multiple layers, you can click and
drag your mouse through multiple check boxes. Now, visually nothing changed. But
if I come down to my "View" pulldown, change this to "2 Views - Horizontal," I can now
start to distribute these layers in z-space. I'm going to zoom out here to give me some more room.
Now, I want my front hill to be at the very front, so I'm going to drag this forward a bit and
then I'll grab my y-axis and drag it up. I'm going to keep my "Hill Light," which is this
one here -- I'm going to keep this where it's at, kind of dead center in the composition. I'm going
to take my "Hill Left" and "Hill Dark Right" and I'm going to push these back. Don't panic
if it starts to go behind different things because, again, because it's
3D we can easily start to change the layer order in z-space.
I'm going to push these back a bit good and I'm going to take my "Mountain Left"
and "Mountains Right" and push these back even further. Now you'll notice an issue here: the
boundaries of our layers - since we're pushing them back in z-space and the layers get smaller
- we start to see the boundaries of our layer. And this is an issue because we don't want to see
the boundaries of our layers. And this is where we can start to scale things up to compensate
for this. So for my "Hill Dark" right and left, I'm going to select both, hit "S" on the
keyboard -- I'm going to scale these up. Now, I'm scaling, I'm not moving them closer. So
they're just getting bigger, thereby keeping their look the same. I kind of like my "Mountain Left"
and "Mountain Right" the size they are but I am going to distribute them a little differently. I'm
going to grab my x-axis here and move the left one over and grab my y-axis and move it up a
little bit -- and that looks pretty good. So now I have some dimensionality to my image but,
by-in-large, it looks the same. Now, before I go any further, I want to animate the sun in this
scene. So I'm going to click on my sun layer, I'm going to push it way back, even behind these
mountains. I like the size of it here but if you wanted to make it a little bigger you could easily
scale it up. Now, I want to make this sun kind of rotate in the sky, as if it were like a time lapse
of the sun rising. So I'm gonna grab my Pan Behind tool - my anchor point tool - and select the
"Sun" layer. And then I'm gonna grab the anchor point and I'm gonna drag it down here. This will
allow it to rotate. If I get out my Rotation, I can grab my z-rotation -- you can see now the
sun will rotate in the sky around that anchor point. So at zero seconds, I'm going to start
the z-rotation at, like, negative 26. Start a keyframe, come over to the -- I don't know -- 3
second mark and make this do its full rotation. That's a little fast. I'll drag this
last keyframe out to the 5 second mark. Good! Now, I want to introduce you to
cameras. Let's go and go up to "Layer," "New," and come down to "Camera." Now, this Camera
Settings dialog box will look fairly daunting, especially if you're not really familiar with
what camera terms mean; things like focal length, area of view, zoom, and depth of field --
those would kind of be foreign terms to you. I'm not really concerned with these right now
though. I want us to create a basic two-node camera - that's opposed to a one node camera -
and I'll explain the difference once we create this. So I want to create a two-node camera.
We can keep it called "Camera 1" and to make sure that my camera is the same as yours
let's come up to the preset here and let's set this to 50 millimeters. A 50 millimeter
lens is a very standard lens and so by choosing 50 millimeters we create a fairly neutral
camera. For those of you that do know cameras, the fact that we can change the sensor size,
we can change the focal length, we can change the angle of view, we can change the zoom, we can
even allow depth of field -- the fact that we have these properties available to us in our virtual
cameras in After Effects really truly gives us a virtual camera with all the settings that
we've come to know and love on our real cameras. So a two-node 50 millimeter camera called "Camera
1." Keep everything else the same and hit "OK." Now, this creates our virtual camera, it creates
it as a layer down here - I'm going to drag this to the very top - called "Camera 1," and we
can see now the physical camera inside of our top view. If I zoom in here and navigate to this
little rectangle, this is the actual camera - this little rectangle here. And this large triangle
off of it is the field of view. Now, it's called the two-node camera because we have the camera as
one node, and then we have this point of interest, which is node number two. A one-node camera is
just a camera with a field of view - no point of interest. One-node cameras are much more difficult
to control, although they do have their place. But to start, focus on learning a two-node camera
first. Now I want to point out that cameras don't have any type of mode, track matte, or switches.
So we can't make a camera 3D - cameras inherently are 3D. And we want to make sure that all of
our layers that we want our camera to impact are turned into 3D layers. So our sky is not turned
into a 3D layer, which is fine because I don't want the sky to have any sort of z-space. The
sky just needs to exist when you move your camera. When you're driving, the sky never gets
closer to you; it always remains at infinity. So by keeping the sky a regular 2D layer, it
won't be impacted by our camera controls. Also, if I select my camera, I have most of the
keyframeable properties that I know and love: position and rotation. Now I can't scale a camera
and I can't change the transparency of a camera, but I can move it and rotate it. Now, I
also have the actual physical camera here inside of my composition panel. If I get out my
Selection tool, I can physically grab one of these axes - or the physical pink box if I were to zoom
in here - and I can start to move this around. When I start to move this around, notice
several things: I know your eyes are drawn to the Active Camera to the right, but look
at my point of interest in my top view here. It's stationary. So you can see how the camera
is always locked on that point of interest. That's why two-node cameras are handy. Now,
go ahead and look over at the active view. Notice what we did here - we're starting
to actually see z-space. We can see our layers distributed across that space and we
can move our camera around and notice that, but, that's not all too different from our Orbit
Around tool that we learned in the previous tutorial. I'm going to go ahead and hit control
z to return my camera to its starting point now I want this camera to slowly push in, which
means we're going to animate it through z-space. To do this, I'm going to hit "P" on my keyboard
and I'm going to start my keyframe stopwatch for Position at 0 seconds. I'm then going to
drag my playhead forward to the 5 second mark and I'm going to push my camera through z-space
- and I could do that either with my z-axis down here, or I could grab the physical z-axis in my
composition panel. I'm more of a visual learner, I like grabbing the actual axis handle. I'm
going to push this through. Now because we gave our layers depth, there should be a kind
of parallax effect happening here, meaning, as it's pushing, the more distant mountains
are advancing slower than the front hill. Notice that if I push too far, it will literally
go through layers and that's not really what we want to do. It's kinda like in those old video
games, if you kinda pushed through a wall you'd see it, like, the back end of a mountain -- it
would look all weird. We don't want to do that. So if we need to, we want to move the camera.
Now, this is where camera movement can get a little tricky. We have our motion path here and
we can actually add splines and curves to this camera path by grabbing these handles. And
this means, now, the camera is going to move uniquely -- it's going to follow that curved path,
which I kinda like - it kinda snakes around. And notice how our sun is doing its thing back there.
That's why we animated it first. You can always animate after you've added a camera but it can be
a little weird because your point of view changes. So I always like animating when
it's flat. Now, by moving straight I'm hitting this kind of large green hump right
here. I want the camera to avoid that, which means I need my camera, then, at its last keyframe, to
move over on the x-axis - to move to the side. So I'm gonna take this and drag it to the left
a little bit but I can start to see the the bottom of the layer boundary of my mountains
and I don't like that either. To fix this, I could do one of two things: I can move the
whole camera down a little bit on the y-axis, or, I could move my actual mountain layer
and readjust. Either work. It really just depends on how attached you are to the current
layout that you see in your active camera view. We have to be careful though - and this
is something that's hard about two-node cameras - when I moved that last keyframe and
I moved the x-value over, it kind of starts the camera off in a weird position at the starting
keyframe even though I never changed the data here. Cameras are notoriously wiggly. If you start
to adjust one thing, it changes it somewhere else. And this is something that null objects are
going to fix in the next tutorial. But for now, we want to make sure, then, that we compensate
and we drag the camera to a good starting point. If you need to, you can adjust the Rotation
a little bit: the x-axis rotates up and down, the y-axis rotates side-to-side like a pan, and
the z-axis is going to make you do a barrel roll. >>PEPPY: Do a barrel roll! >>ALAN: So I'm gonna adjust my pan, and
move the y-rotation over a little bit and move all my layers over just a
hair -- and now that's realigned. So now, when I come back to my position... ...I can start to see that mountain boundary, so I am indeed going to grab
it and actually bring it down. So that looks pretty cool. And that's the
basics of cameras. Cameras allow us to move through - using keyframes - a 3D space. And all
we're doing is we're traversing z-space. If I change my "Top" view here to be "Right," we can
actually see, then, the camera traversing through the space and we can see the layers
that it's hitting as it's going. Now, if you ever wanted to change the settings
of a camera, you can click on the camera in the Timeline panel and come up to "Layer" and then
select "Camera Settings." And then our Camera Settings dialog box pops up and you can change
anything about this. Now, we're not going to, but just know that you can. If I hit
"Cancel" and come down to my actual camera and then toggle the layer down twice,
we start to see a "Camera Options" toggle down which also gives us most of the settings in our
dialog box but as keyframeable options. So I can, indeed, turn on "Depth of Field."
If I do this, I can start to change the focus distance. And notice how the camera,
inside of my right view -- we start to see the focus distance changing. So by decreasing this, I
can change the focal plane of the camera's lens. And then I can change the actual aperture.
Now unlike most cameras, where the aperture is measured in f-stops, ours is measured now
in pixels. The smaller this is, the sharper things are. The larger this is, the more blurry
things become. So now, as the camera's moving... ...layers will come in and out of focus
as it moves. And I can keyframe my focal distance - effectively racking focus as I go.
So here is my "Front Hill" -- I can keyframe my focus distance here -- and I could rack
focus over the course of 5 frames to... ...my "Mountain Back" and now, the lens literally
racks focus over the course of five frames. Depth of field goes a long way in making
your 3D animations inside of After Effects feel more cinematic because cameras have depth
of field! As your camera gets closer to things, you have to change the focal distance of the lens,
otherwise things will go in and out of focus. And so adding depth of field and playing with
these different settings - the aperture, the blur level, even the shape of the iris - these are
all things that can make your cameras more robust. Now we're not going to be delving into the depths
of the camera settings in this class. Those you that know cameras, these settings might be a bit
more comfortable to change. Those you that don't, feel free to play with these and develop a
cool look. We won't be using things like depth of field in this class, but if this is the only
tutorial you watch with cameras in After Effects, I want you to be aware of these settings. I'm
going to go ahead and turn off my depth of field, toggle up my camera, and now, I have a nice moving scene through z-space, adding a
lot of depth to my previously 2D layers. [MUSIC]
