[Music] ebsynth is one of the most exciting and
powerful visual effects tools I've used in a long time. What it basically does is lets you make
changes to a single frame of a video, and then tries to apply those
changes across the entire thing. It's definitely a game changer. I'm gonna go over three examples that
all use ebsynth a little bit differently so that hopefully by watching this video,
you'll be ready to make some awesome stuff. As always, the videos are time stamped
to make it easier for you to jump around but you should watch the examples in
order because they sort of build on each other. Alright let's get started. Here we have a short clip of Harry and
Neville and they're both looking great, of course. But what if we wanted to dress them up a
little bit and get them looking a little more fancy? Well with ebsynth doing most
of the legwork, it's pretty easy. The first step to do this and anything
else you want to do with ebsynth is to convert your footage into an image sequence. JPEG or PNGs will both work, but
PNGs are going to retain more quality, and obviously the more quality you give
ebsynth to work with, the better your output will be. Now after we've exported our footage into an image
sequence we need to pick a frame to make our changes to. You'll want to pick one that has the
clearest view of what you'll be changing. For this sequence I want to remove
their ties so any frame will do really. After I chose my frame I dropped it into
Photoshop and got rid of their ties using a mixture of Content Aware Fill, the Clone
Stamp Tool, and some other stuff. This isn't a Photoshop tutorial so I
won't really be diving too deep into it, but I'll definitely make some Photoshop tutorials
soon because I've picked up a lot of tips over time that I know are pretty useful. Anyways, after getting rid of their ties I
found a photo of a white shirt on google and tried to match it to their shirts so
that I could add the buttons back onto them. Now that that's done, once you've
finished editing your chosen frame you need to save it to its own folder but make sure it
has the exact same file name as the original frame does so ebsynth can keep track of everything. Now that we've got both the footage as an
image sequence as well as our edited frame, we can open up ebsynth and go
over how it works in a little more detail. The first thing we'll do is drag our image
sequence folder onto the video input. When we do that ebsynth should also
pick up the project folder automatically. Next, drag the folder with our
edited frame onto the keyframe input. And now we have to tell it where to give us the output
image sequence for when it's done doing its magic. By default it's just going to make
a folder in your project folder. But I like to set one up myself to
keep things a little more organized. Now let's touch on some
advanced settings really quickly. On the ebsynth website there's an FAQ
section about what these advanced settings do, and I'll link it below so you can take a look at
it yourself but I didn't find them super clear... so after toying around and rendering a
test for high and low values of each option, I arrived at some decent
values for visual effects purposes. I have the Mapping set to 20, De-Flicker
set to 3, and Diversity set to 1000. What I'm noticing is that the
higher the Mapping is, the more it tries to keep everything where
you told it to be in the edited frame. For example, here on the left you can see the stripes are deforming
way more than on the right because I've set the Mapping lower. The next setting, De-Flicker, is very important. The higher we crank that, the more consistent it'll try to look
over time by comparing itself to the frames before and after it. If we set this too low, we'll see a lot of flickering as
it places less of an importance on looking consistent, and more on matching the underlying frame. For editing and visual effects purposes
we care more about consistency. Lastly we've got the Diversity, this setting seems to control
how much ebsynth should smooth out or blend the result. You can see here on the left with a low
Diversity his hair is looking really sharp, but on the right it's extremely blurry. I'm guessing this option is for if you're
getting results with really sharp edges. Most of the time though, I'd say you're
probably going to want to stick to the lower end. Now I'll just set my synthesis
detail to high and we're good to go. You can also manually set your output range
here, if you want, but it should set it automatically. Alright with all of that out of the
way, let's hit synth and let it render. When it's done, let's open up After
Effects and import the rendered sequence. Making sure the image sequence option is
enabled, just select the first photo in the sequence and it should import the whole thing. Next we'll want to make sure the sequence's
frame rate matches the original video's frame rate. If it doesn't, it's really easy to fix. Just right click it, Interpret Footage, and
then set it to the frame rate it should be. Also rename it while we're
at it so you stay organized. Now we can just put the render over top of our
original footage and check out what we've got. If you remember the finished example,
you might be wondering why I didn't Photoshop a bow tie on them both as
well before giving the keyframe to ebsynth. Well you can think of ebsynth as letting you spray
paint something onto the objects in your footage. Covering the ties up with a shirt works well
enough, but adding in a bow tie is a bit trickier since there isn't something in the original
footage to spray paint the bow tie onto. Well, other than the shirt itself
which gives this weird result. What you'll find with ebsynth is that it's an
awesome way to get you 80% of the way there, but you actually have to put in that last 20% if you're
going to be using it for visual effects or edits. So after using ebsynth to do the hard work of
tracking on the clean shirts over top of their ties, the last 20% of the work is me motion tracking Harry and
Neville's ties, applying the motion to separate Null Objects, positioning and parenting them to the Nulls, and then making sure
their Anchor Points are where the center of the ties knots are. The reason I moved the Anchor Points was
because I knew I'd have to make the bow ties 3D layers and manually animate the subtle
rotation to match their body better. And in After Effects... and every other... program...
rotations happen around the Anchor Point. Now after animating the 3D rotation it was looking pretty
decent but I wanted to blend the bow ties in a little bit better by adding a Drop Shadow and animating its
direction to match the other shadows in the area. Then I added blur so that the sharpness
matched the rest of the footage, Levels to color correct a bit, and CC Light Sweep to
apply a faint highlight to the top edge of the bow tie, and a faint shadow to the bottom edge
since the lights in the scene are above them. Lastly to composite the shirts a little bit better I added some
blur and the Match Grain effect, and this is what we're left with. Now while ebsynth is pretty
awesome at tracking onto surfaces, it will run into issues when
those surfaces change too much. It could be because we're seeing a very different angle
of them or because the lighting changes drastically. For these sort of problems what we
can do is run ebsynth like we usually do, and then once we notice a spot that it stops
working well for us we make another edited frame and run ebsynth again to get a new output. After that, we just take our two ebsynth results and
blend between them as best we can in After Effects. And just by repeating that process, we can get ebsynth
to work its magic on more complex shots like this one. Making this was pretty easy. For the keyframe I just shaped Harry's face
into a frown using the liquify tool in Photoshop then I cut out the areas I changed
and saved it as the keyframe. Then inside of After Effects I added a Matte Choker to
each output to soften up the edges and help it blend. And next I just played with the opacity of each layer
so they blended between the three ebsynth outputs. For the final touches, I slapped Sharpen and
Match Grain on all three outputs and called it a day. Now let's get to our last and trickiest
example, which was de-aging Slughorn. Not to be a young dude, because
that would require a lot more effort... but certainly less ancient looking. For this one I made my initial keyframe by
de-emphasizing his face wrinkles and flabs a bunch as well as going through a pretty annoying
process of using the clone stamp and some other tools to give him some of his
hair back and recolor it. Now you may have noticed in the past
two examples when I created a keyframe, I would only save what I had actually edited, leaving a transparent background
on the rest of the image so that ebsynth's output would also give me a
sequence with a transparent background that I could pretty much just throw on top of
my footage without having to mask anything out. For this example though, it's not as easy as that because my edited portion had a
level of transparency to it as well as it being hard to define the edges
of certain boundaries like his hair. Long story short, ebsynth was having a
hard time dealing with a semi-transparent edit, so I had to opt for just running the whole frame ebsynth. Which means to composite it in after effects
I'd have to manually mask out his edited face and animate the mask
throughout the whole example... and listen, honestly sometimes
manual masking is the best way forward... but partly because I'm lazy, partly because I
give myself a time limit on creating these examples. And partly to show you more of
what ebsynth can be used for... we're not manually masking his whole face out. What I did was using the same frame I painted a white over
top of Slughorn's face and made everything else black. After setting it up and running it through
ebsynth, I now have a handy little Luma Matte that I can use to include the face of de-aged
Slughorn without having to manually mask it out. The only problem is that it
doesn't cover the hair as well. So in the end I still had to manually mask, but
ebsynth took most of the workload off my plate... so... still pretty good. Now if you didn't know whatever's
white on a Luma Matte will show through so the easiest way to go about
including his hair in the final composite is to add white to the Luma
Matte where his hair should be. The simplest way I could think to do that was
adding an effect called Solid Composite to the layer, making sure it's set to white. Now since the whole Luma Matte is white,
we could see our entire ebsynth render which kind of defeats the purpose
of having a Luma Matte at all, but really quickly I'll create a mask to go
around the hair and what we want to do is make it so the Solid Composite that's adding in
all this white, only adds it to our mask. And that's actually really simple. So double clicking the Solid Composite effect, we just
head down to the Compositing Options and click the + which turns our mask into an effect mask
and does exactly what we need it to do. With that set up, I just set the mask from Add to None
so the mask is ignored and we can see everything again, went through and animated the mask to cover his hair, then set
it back to Add and feathered it out which left me with this. One thing I noticed about the ebsynth result is that although
it did well handling his face as it changed throughout, the hair got a little smoothed and undefined by the end. So what I did was create another keyframe
for the last frame of the video as well. After that was done, I blended between the two ebsynth outputs
using a slowly animated Luma Key set to Key Out Darker. This way instead of just animating the whole opacity
to change (which gives a gross result by the way) it basically fades in starting with the lighter
values and moving towards the darker ones. This way the transition is a little easier
on the eyes and looks less muddy. Next I realized his big old jowls were
not really fitting for his younger face, so what I did was create a new
Adjustment layer with the Liquify Effect on it I basically went through and pushed it up
with the Deformation Mask being animated. I'd basically just move forward a
couple frames until it looks really bad, then use the reconstruction brush to undo all
my liquefying, then re-warp his jowls back on up and after doing that across
the footage, it looked like this. Not too bad. Except for the warping... on his bow tie... which I hastily just hid by cutting out a frame of
his bow tie and tracking it over top of his real one to try to hide my shame and laziness. Lastly I added Sharpness and Match Grain
on the ebsynth outputs and that's it! Slughorn is suddenly like 30 years younger. All of these examples were made
back to back in the span of like two hours which is insane considering
how decent they look. Ebsynth is definitely a very powerful tool that I'm
sure will help you make some really awesome stuff. It's insane that it's free and I'm sure
it'll just continue to keep getting better. So, if you end up making anything with
ebsynth please feel free to tag me on twitter (academyofedits) or instagram (theacademyofedits)
so I can see what awesome stuff you make. If you're new here and you're not already
subscribed, then consider checking out some of my other videos and
subscribing if you like what you see... because I'll keep making them if you keep... watching them..?
