Getting Started in After Effects with Evan Abrams - 1 of 2

[Music] [Music] good morning everyone good morning and welcome welcome to adobe live welcome to getting started in after effects i'm your host for this morning evan abrams thank you for joining me and uh spending some time uh this morning jumping into this app it's gonna be a lot of fun uh i i hope i hope it's gonna be a lot of fun and uh it'll be uh an interesting time um for those of you who are watching uh we are streaming out onto youtube we're streaming out on behance.net live if you're watching us on youtube please come over and join us on behance so i can see what you're up to in the chat i love love to know what's going on in particular i'd love to know you know who you are where you're from and what you would like to do in after effects in motion design and all that great stuff i'm always interested to find out today is of course starting with a little getting started in after effects so if you're a beginner to after effects if you're brand new to the app if you've never opened it before maybe it's the first adobe app that you're opening uh don't worry um that we're gonna take it slow if you have questions let me know in the chat if you have concerns get at me in there and i can see just briefly people on on youtube really enjoying uh the intro to to this stuff it is it is phenomenal the team the team that worked on that did a fantastic job but since this is a kind of beginner's stuff we're taking our first baby steps uh baby steps into stuff um before we get started though before we are right into it i do want to let you know we have a rich full day of activities here on the adobe live program a lot of things coming up a lot of things going on so let us have a little peruse of the schedule that's going to be going on we have a bunch of things a few daily creative challenges like one coming up in photoshop after this at noon noon my time anyway it's an hour and a half but then we're gonna be looking at uh meg lewis we'll be showing you how to find your personal illustration style which i think is great um we are gonna then have an illustrator creative challenge then we're gonna see some designing a galactic podcast app i love podcasts so talon's gonna walk you through some of that stuff in xd of course followed by your xd creative challenge and then we've got some design in the dark a wonderful wonderful little game a bit of a cross between uh reality tv and design so i hope you enjoy that program i like it a lot uh it's a lot of fun so please uh please stick around for the day uh with those things um let's jump back in here uh and i'll i'll explain a little bit more about what we're up to today um we're going to be making social media posts um and that's a nice kind of beginner i don't want to say beginner too much because what we're going to be touching on are fundamentals that you would use throughout your career whether you're a beginner and intermediate and advanced the fundamentals remain the same so we're going to be touching those most fundamental building blocks of motion design of creating motion of creating interesting things maybe working with some fairly basic building blocks photos text shape layers and then tomorrow we are going to get into uh adding video into the mix but like i said if you are unfamiliar with after effects then this is the place for you and uh hopefully we can get you more familiar more confident and uh making interesting things so i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen so we'll be get able to enjoy that and uh as we do you know i want to say i want to say hi to to richard hello dorina hello christina a human from earth good to see uh people from uh brazil from france oh it's fantastic it's gonna be great and uh kenneth williams don't worry we got you hopefully today we can we can help demystify um some after effects for you so here we go let's jump into the screen and granted things can things can be intimidating in here i will admit there's a lot of things happening we have control over both space and time to crazy dimensions um but uh we'll see uh we'll see how we can we can make it happen okay so let's start from the beginning what are we going to be doing here we are going to be uh making something that looks like this very simple stuff you've probably seen a bunch of these on your timeline on on twitter on facebook this kind of thing is uh is quick to produce you can make it out of just about anything and in this case this morning i thought we would start off with uh some coffee facts i no longer drink coffee but i know many many motion designers who do and uh you know figured we would uh we'd tell you some interesting content about that but in particular we are going to be looking at organizing such a file we're going to look at making the individual parts and we are going to be talking about text and layers and properties all that good stuff it's going to be great so just want to give you a little preview of where we're going in particular um and hopefully there's a good variety in here to to get you making stuff um so to start with we are looking right now at what i like to call an assembly space so you see these um these beige uh blocks right here um so we have um these various beige blocks they have this little icon next to them it looks like a circle a triangle a square and a little film strip so these are called composition all right so uh compositions are like containers so if you're coming from the world of premier this is kind of similar to a sequence so composition sequence very similar or if you are on a photoshopper illustrator this might be similar to the concept of an art board right this is a a thing that uh contains right this contains stuff um and oh mallory i didn't realize we were we've been having a lot of coffee talk on the streams i probably should have looked into that for our planning i also want to shout out to our mod uh tim who is hanging out with us here this morning uh please please do confirm if we've been on a real coffee kick recently um but like i was saying about compositions so these are like containers they contain things and they can help make our our timelines a lot more um organized right so on here we only have to worry about these seven items and moving them around so if you want this to happen uh later or sooner you can slide them back and forth in time you can even grab a composition and kind of move it around so i'll just move it over here move it over there these are like we said containers and if we go inside one of the containers you can see oh there's even more layers oh boy what's going on in here well there's some interesting stuff we have text layers we have image layers things seem to seem to come off the edge of the edge of the comp is it that strange there are layers that don't have anything visual about them at all um that that simply control properties um and yeah they're they're kind of all over the place but see we've got a bunch of layers in here they're they're moving and changing over time and you know this is if i hit the u key it brings up all of the keyframes that we've changed over time so by altering the properties of these of these layers by altering something about them we get to see things change over time so that's kind of uh a wonderful way uh to think about it that to create animation all we have to do is change something about the layers over time and that will cause things to animate right and we sometimes call these as gareth points out uh pre-comps so things that are pre-composed um now setting up kind of a differentiation between a pre-comp and a comp and a post comp and uh and all this stuff um just no containers containers right um and uh kenneth is asking can't you do all this in premiere great question and this kind of where i was where i was going uh with this first opening spiel um is that in premiere we lay out clips horizontally right we put things horizontally next to each other you know mostly and that creates a timeline of things and in after effects we stack things vertically creating shots individual shots that are more complex in their motion um because they're sort of designed for different things um and so accomplishing this stuff is certainly possible in premiere we can do a lot of things uh in premiere but when it comes to key framing when it comes to moving things when it comes to having nuance of motion of layering stuff on top of each other we would end up with um this would be six maybe maybe it would be like five tracks in premiere let's say so it's certainly possible all things are possible um i like to use the analogy that sometimes i use um a screwdriver as a hammer um and uh often it is more efficient if i just grab the hammer is probably the way i like to think about it we have access to all of these apps that specialize in things and uh after effects happens to specialize in uh nuanced motion nuanced changing of things uh over time which is fantastic that's why it's one of my favorite things to do also because i rarely had any footage around so let's start in on some of these examples and get into some of the the ways in which we work in here and the first thing i want to talk about is if you are planning on doing an assembly of things um in after effects you want to think about two things or maybe it's both one thing the idea of going upstairs or downstairs some people are are walking up the stairs type people some people are walking down the stairs type people and uh what we uh what we know about about this the idea is just how you're going to organize your transition from one thing to another now what we could do here um is to [Music] to think about going up the stairs as in things are going to be added on meaning each of these layers needs to animate on over top of the previous layer so when you're thinking about your project when you're when you're coming into an organizational perspective you know each of these animates on over top of the previous thing so as you can see we have our transparent background in here and that's what this checkerboard means that's that just means transparent so something we're starting from nothing on the screen and then something arrives and now the screen is full of this so what that means in the assembly space is that this will totally cover the previous thing so we need to cover it and then change so when we're thinking about when we are thinking about um how we want to organize our projects that's something to think about we might instead be be going down the stairs in which case each of these layers would terminate and we would probably want it to animate off we would need an animating off situation if we want to go down the stairs so hopefully that kind of makes sense um angus don't worry about being late we don't take attendance around here um uh gareth is asking do i have any recommendations for good free extensions for easy easing um my favorite place to do easy easing is the graph editor and hopefully we talk about it uh today um uh today enough to give people the confidence to work in the graph editor uh without the need for external um easing and whizzing and and whatever uh scripts which are great they're lovely um but i um do not use them um because i like the graph editor and what goes on in there so yeah hopefully that makes sense um with the stuff and hopefully that that covers off what we've been talking about um but yeah um let's see oh we've got some questions coming in early which is great so reverb mike uh do you need the lower layers to continue after the next number animates on so actually no we can actually terminate once this is fully realized here right we can terminate this bottom layer so we don't actually need them to uh to keep going for illustration purposes it helps to explain the stairs i think when we when we build it up like this um so hopefully that that makes sense um and then uh what do we have here uh um kenneth is asking about the the concept of assembly space i suppose um and that is a great way to think about we're gonna make these individual scenes then we're going to assemble them together in a certain way because if you require sort of interesting transitions between one to the other you want to have a place where it isn't you know these layers and then all of these layers and then all of these layers we could end up with in this very simple project on a space that is full of 50 layers 100 layers to create this kind of thing which ultimately we want to compartmentalize and simplify for ourselves so if we can simplify things let's do that so that it is a little bit easier um good okay so hopefully that uh that gets things going let's start us off with some very easy stuff um well easy stuff everything's relative i guess um it's gonna be challenging for for somebody so let's go ahead and i'm going to create um we're gonna make our first let's call it our uh title card if you're making social stuff um you're going to want sort of a hook at the beginning so maybe we call this the hook even that's what we call it and we want to create something that's going to put big text up in front of people right away and we want to kind of pop things on coming right at you um so let's kind of mix some some things in um so we are going to go into my assets folder where i like to keep things i like to make folders and and bring assets in here and in particular all of the assets that you'll be seeing or most of the assets anyway come from adobe stock so adobe stock is a great place to find things to play with and to to work with especially because the the good people of of the stock department now have this much expanded free tab so go to adobe stock you know slash free and you will find many many free photos and videos and vectors and backgrounds and food and you know all this great stuff so you could just go in here we're going to go to the free photos archive as you can see beautiful photography available so if you need um some parts to play with hopefully that kind of makes sense so if we were to look up say coffee here we would end up with a lovely amount of imagery some some more intimate than others i suppose um but as you can see a lot to play with a lot to choose from that looks very delicious now i'm becoming hungry um but that's where we pull a lot of these assets from so if you're like i wish i had photos to play with i wish i had videos i wish i had vectors go to adobe stock check out the free zone and what i kind of love about this is that you know after we peruse all of the free stuff keeps going keeps going then it's like oh by the way we've got three million more that you might like in the rest of the collection so definitely check that out okay so that's enough of a plug for the adobe stock people hope they enjoy it um and yeah so let's uh get into this stuff um we want to make one we're going to call it the hook here and we need to fill this with things because right now it's completely empty we can just drag elements we want from our asset zone or you can even just drag them uh from a finder window or an explorer window you know you can just drag a file in here we and then you know there it is now i have many mugs again so there we go then we've got these many mugs that's been brought into our our space so now i'm going to take many mugs drag it onto our timeline and would you look at that it's quite large looks like we're really zoomed in on this thing and that can certainly be confusing um but um have a look up here and you'll see the size of many mugs dot jpeg it's this big this is our our project panel that tells us about what we're selecting and the composition we've made here if we go to the composition settings so you can change any time this is a 1080 by 1080 30 frames per second composition now since we are uh making this thing for social you know you'll have different constraints so you might use you know some of these presets maybe if you're doing something for broadcast you might be in the hdtv section you might be in the hdv section you might be in the film 2k 4k etc section maybe ultra hd is where you're at but you know the frame size of your composition is going to depend on what you're doing with it later so your assembly space like we talked about will probably be the same frame size and frame rate they're going to export away when you when you when you're done right whereas the various components could be any size you know any of these precomps could be bigger smaller like be anything their containers and containers can be whatever size and shape that you require um so just remember that you know in this case we are working with 1080 by 1080 30 frames per second because of the nature of the of the work we intend to do okay so since this is so big we would need to scale it down we can do that in a few ways we can grab the edges here and scale it squeeze it i'm holding down shift so that i can strain the properties here and we can move it around we can do all kinds of things with it the world is our oyster here um and i'm just gonna position it a little bit like this we don't need all of the thing we just need just need some of it a little corner perhaps of this image is all we really need um to bring this thing together for us okay we got one thing out there that's great um and what we're gonna do is uh we're gonna create some text we're gonna do that by calling up the text tool so grab the horizontal type tool we click out in the world and then we can start typing type whatever we like um coffee facts um and over here you'll have your character panel if you don't see it you can go window character to call that up and now we can start to stylize our text we can make the text whatever we like to see um and we'll just say let's start with say 100 points on the font and when you're designing these kinds of things we know the environment someone will probably absorb this will be on a mobile device on a phone so it can be helpful to routinely zoom in and zoom out just to make sure that what you're making plays and is readable or it reads from far away or you might want to move in close and make sure that the details are happening you can control that with a scroll wheel um so you can see we're going closer further wee-wee um like that and the first thing about making this kind of readable is making it contrast from the background so i'm gonna go ahead and let's see pure white does that do anything kind of if we made that quite large and maybe a thicker font here like this excellent and we might say hey let's just make this two lines like so kabam now it's nice and big and bold and in your face um we might even think that like this is the way to go um so this is where we get into some fairly subjective stuff about what we want to see in front of us so as a rule uh you tend to want to make sure that people can read and understand this stuff and that's always going to be very helpful for you and how do we want this to show up what is the journey we want to take people on here in our hook we want to try to hook people with this okay so from motion design perspective we want contrast so contrast is going to get us what we want so i'm going to create another element in here i'm going to double click on the rectangle tool well i have nothing selected and we end up with oh oh look at this it's a it's a solid that has now filled the frame now solids are one of the basic building blocks of things that we that we end up making just about any things i love them a lot they are vector layers meaning you can scale them infinitely without degrading them in any way and we're going to go here i'm going to take this shape layer move it below my coffee facts layer okay that's okay i suppose now i'm going to take my shape layer here and we're going to modify its properties so if i twirl into the rectangle if i twirl into the rectangle path you can see here that we have a rectangle size option and this will allow me to change the size of this rectangle and right now both both the dimensions are changing together but if i unlink them if i don't make them constrained i can now do each each edge separately change the horizontal change the vertical as i think someone said earlier on and now let's see i'm going to want a little bit more contrast so let's go like this if if anybody here knows the no name brand of products maybe we are working for them today [Music] so i'm going to call up my align window here to align things in the middle center and so we can get everything nice and aligned uh and jody this will be available to watch later for all time and all space so how do we want to bring this thing on when we are thinking about bringing something on bringing it in here um what we'll do is we are going to i think scale this on we want it to come out of the middle so i'm going to hit s with a layer selected that'll call it scale you could also just twirl into it twirl into the transform and then find the scale right here we're going to set some keyframes so let's talk let's talk keyframes a keyframe is setting a time and a value so if i click the stopwatch here you'll see we have a little diamond that showed up shown up that showed up on our timeline and i can move that around so let's say i move it out here to 15 frames so this is saying that at 15 frames in this value will be this so the value for scale will be a hundred we have decreed it uh by this keyframe now we move back to zero the zero frame i'm going to say take the scale and bring it down to zero would you look at that we've created a second um a second keyframe the keyframe is at zero and now as you see over time the difference between the two it's going from one to the other and this motion is what we call linear motion we know it's linear because we can look at these keyframes and there are a couple of little diamonds and that means linear linear means um it's we're going to see a straight line from one value up to the other value we or or i guess in this case like this and thankfully we don't have to imagine it we can click this little button here and go into the graph editor now graphs i know i'm sorry i know it's early on monday and i'm hurting you with graphs i i apologize but don't worry it's going to be okay we're going to be fine right now we are looking at uh let me just clean this up a little bit here we are looking at a straight line across now what does that mean well according to this it means 200 per second that is the speed at which the value is changing so that's because we're looking at a speed graph if i were to look at a value graph the change of value over time you see this nice linear relationship this line this slope that goes up it's telling us what's happening over time all right so hopefully that kind of makes sense now if i were to take this here and i were to go keyframe assistant easy ease or just hit f9 with it selected you'll see the shape of this changes to an hourglass and our graph will have changed let's go into the graph here you can see oh it's a nice easy slope in here oh what does that look like oh that looks it feels a little bit smoother as it's coming together right and what we're going to do now with this is we are looking at a value graph i'm going to grab this handle and give it a pull i'm going to change the slope of this line so now you can see that it is coming in very fast and then getting very slow it's much more relaxed ah kind of like that and then we're going to take this keyframe down here we're going to easy ease that one by hitting f9 and then i'm going to drag its handle i'm going to create a shape that looks like this oh what an interesting shape well what a the now is kind of making it even more kind of explosion onto the scene right it's a little bit more forceful as it's coming on so coffee facts is going to be coming on now we could apply a similar thing to coffee facts back here we could take the scale we could copy that and we could simply paste it onto coffee facts so that then this will be scaling on at the same time boop i'm probably asking well evan why is coffee fact so small and the reason is because i had scaled it up previously so i i overwrote i overrid we've overridden the uh the scale that i had on it previously so now i can take this keyframe and i'll just i'll just scale it back up just scale it up to where i want it to be like that oh look at that that's great so now we we have this kind of a thing so this is kind of a fun feeling of motion perhaps perhaps that's what we want something a little bit simpler you can do is if you want these two to simply scale up together you can attach them to each other you can make one a child of the other we have that power in this program so we can go here we can go to coffee facts we can grab this little parent pick whip and we click and drag to the layer below and or whatever layer you like and now they are parented together so parenting is another kind of key concept um that we want to to get into but now you'll notice as one scales the other one's kind of attached to it and we only had to set the one set of keyframes on here coffee facts loving it loving these coffee facts so hopefully that is going to be good now unlike the original i find this to be a little bit banal actually so i'm going to duplicate this layer i'm going to rename one of them so you can hit return to rename this and call this yellow box and this other one here i'm just going to simply change its color to be white perhaps and as we can see because i've moved it in time the white box comes on and then the other box comes on and what i'm going to do here is let's name this white box good i'm going to tap the u key twice tap tap and uh what we're gonna do is is take this here and we're gonna increase its size a little bit out to the side increase the size up and because the property that we changed on here the property we changed was the scale our animation is going to remain intact so now we've got these kinds of please pardon my my sound effects um it helps me to figure out what we're doing so this has kind of um that poppiness that might be grabbing some attention because when it comes to social ads when it comes to social content attention is the only thing you really need to worry about because if you don't have their attention they won't absorb the content and then what are we even doing so let's proceed with a little bit of smooth motion in here we've got our we've got our bursting motion here let's have some smooth ongoing motion in here and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to i want this to scale up a little bit behind like we're maybe pushing towards this array of coffee cups right and i'm going to do that like we talked about you can alter the scale but if i oh if i scale this that's not really working the way i want oh my goodness that is scaling around this element here that we call the anchor point so i want to move that anchor point so i'm going to grab the pan behind tool now pan but pan pan between pan behind is an interesting uh phrase for this it basically allows us to alter something about the layer without moving the layer okay so i'm going to click on that anchor point and i'm going to start moving it around now your anchor points over here what do you think about that well i think i'm going to scale from over there that's what i think so i'm going to take the anchor point i'm going to move it into the middle center of the composition you can get things to snap by holding command so kaboom now it's there and now wouldn't you know it ah we can scale from the middle yes yes good so i'm going to set a keyframe here i'm going to set a keyframe at the beginning and at the beginning let's make it a little bit bigger and so we're going to yeah that's working out for me so we're getting a little bit of a drift happening all right that's right patricia we are gonna we're gonna get the evans sound effects pack out really soon um so here we go we've got this thing kind of slowly drifting we're doing a bit of a slow drift uh as this thing changes over time that's great that's fun that's cool i love it um and what we're gonna do now is try to apply the same logic to our our our words our text here so i'm going to create a new null because as we talked about if we parent things to something we can make them all behave together so i'm going to parent these boxes to the null i'm going to grab its scale and so let's see as we are zooming into this um i'm going to kind of go back in time here and bring this down a little bit down down down so now coffee facts is getting larger as the image is getting smaller and that is going to be our hook like that slow drift slow drip nailed it nailed it tim you are holding it down as always there we go so there we go i think this is going to be our hook for the start here now when you're making social content you're probably going to have kind of predetermined colors predetermined fonts that all goes with the branding of whatever entity is putting this out so if this were pepsi if this were nike if this were you know a large brand you'd have codified colors and fonts so for today we're going to obey a few rules as we work through the rest of this stuff this has been this has been the setup phase and now we're going to start doing the work um so we're going to be working with roboto roboto roboto uh font and some various weights of that so we're gonna play within that family um to keep things harmonious and we're gonna really only play with three colors we are gonna play with this this yellow here um this this white and perhaps black um very bold bumblebee colors i suppose um black and yellow black and yellow um so hopefully that's going to be uh good for us to work with i find that when you want strong contrast you're gonna want white black um and one color or maybe two colors but you want to think about how can i get contrast away from away from whatever photos we're going to be putting behind because we can get some visual confusion happening but hey let's move on to some other techniques all we've done is scale things up so let's go with number two and i'll say this if anybody in the chat has interesting coffee facts they would like for us to use in our stuff i have a list of coffee facts that i already wrote down um from my earlier uh research by which i mean reading a few listicles um so if you have any coffee facts share them with us in the chat i would love to know uh about about that any coffee fact indeed and we'll try to turn it into some pithy um pithy points here for our social media but uh so i'll just call this fact number one so you know this is scene two but it's fact one and this has to appear on top of it's gonna come on top of whatever is underneath it right so we need elements to be uh appearing to be showing up and so the way we have established in this that we make things show up is by scale which i think is fine um so rather than redoing i don't i don't want to do more work than i have to so i will simply copy this yellow box command c and paste it in here command v and bleep wouldn't you know now it's showing up i love it i love it don't like to do more work than we have to so there we go we want it to scale up to 100 so okay these are good coffee facts coffee is good for your liver oh interesting okay didn't know that i'm gonna i'm gonna write some of these down we're gonna write some of these down uh so that we can so i can make use of them here speeds up metabolism metabolism um good for liver good for liver that's right me of all people uh making coffee uh ruined evan's stress response um enables old folks to work the same hours as young folks okay that's good all right coffee's made from a berry pit yeah that was one of the first facts that i dug up on here this is good keep them coming we'll copy and paste them out of there so i'm going to modify the size of this thing um to be 1080 by 1080 so that this is going to fill the whole frame boom we've done it we filled the whole frame so then we're able to swap out behind what's going on so let's really quickly let's call this assembly actual um and this this one goes in the example bin so in the assembly space here um what we're going to grab in here is the hook and then fact one will come in on top of that and we'll just arrange these so this comes in coffee facts and then we've probably read that enough so then it's time for this to happen whoa so that could be the way we want this to come on of course yellow square coming out of yellow square come on come on we can do better we can do better so i'm going to duplicate this move ahead a little bit and take this first one here i'm going to make this a white square so we're going to keep that theme going like that so if we go back to the assembly space how does that work cool and then we don't have any more need for that first um hook hook layer all right so there we go boop now we can probably put a number in here numbers are great so i'm going to grab the text layer drop it out here put a one one dot maybe not a one now size size wise how big do you think this should be quite large i imagine so we could say this is going to be one we might do like a little number one we can do a lot of interesting things with the text if we wish for example you have a little superscript option down here and we can kind of shrink that down i suppose so it lives in in the in the pit of the one i suppose you can do a whole lot of things you can work with that um and we can we can make that uh work out so we've got our number one we're gonna put it right here um and that's gonna show up now one thing uh i'll say is i'm gonna turn on our transparency background here how do we get the one to not just be hanging out we want this to be growing up just like just like this over here but i'm going to keep them kind of separate for now and i want one of them one of these shapes to reveal the other shape and we can do that in many many ways we're going to cover a bunch of them today the first one i'm interested in touching here is going to be the set matte effect now a matte is a fairly critical concept so we've man we've hit so many great concepts this morning already a mat is basically one layer giving information to another one layer giving orders to another layer so a matte in this case is going to be used to say where can we see you other layer so this layer number one has an effect on it called setmat and the setmat will be changing where we can see it okay so we're going to say take the matte from um what do we got here yellow box 2 i suppose that's this one here and we can we can rename this to just yellow box and then we're going to rename this one to white box we want to keep everything so we know what it is so we're going to look at the yellow box so basically it's saying well who should be where should i be seen in in the world right and as you can see because it is only interested in taking its orders from that first box you know then it can only be seen where the yellow box is which for us is very useful uh when making these kinds of things so there we go this thing has has showed up shown up oh man i'm doing it again um but there we go so bam it's it's a big big number one and then i think i'm going to move this up into a corner we move it up here over there any corner we like but we want to scale this into the corner and as we talked about parenting we can use layers to control each other um and reverb mike is asking why not use a track matte why not just use a track mat so we'll cover track mattes in a little bit uh but a track matte is using one layer to define the visual space of another layer if i wanted to do the same thing here here i'm going to turn that set mat off so that we're back like this we could do that i could just take this yellow box make a duplicate right so now we have two copies of the yellow box they're both behaving exactly the same way and i'm going to say number one let's give you what we call a track matte you can see here this says turkm turkment um and you get to select uh the layer above you so trackmat means let's look at the layer above us and we're going to say hey let's make an alpha matte out of that layer that's above me oh i've disappeared where have i gone well now it's behaving exactly as we did before right this is the concept of mats so this is another way to apply a matte this has just required us to add another layer in here which sometimes can be beneficial um because let's say for example we wanted to go beep weep you know we do uh a few of these um uh weeping and you know we go do do do i'm just gonna mess with this curve a little bit like so so now you know now they're offset and they're different but because i i don't want to make more layers than i have to that's why i usually end up using uh the track matte instead so that's kind of where i'm where i'm at um with those things so setmat trackmant ooh what what other things will we explore uh in this in this getting started series so many perhaps some masks will be coming up um and yeah it behaves very much like a mask oh what is a mask you ask don't worry we'll get there that's a tease that's we call it t's for later but we talked about using null objects new null to control other objects right and as you can see what's happened i can't see the one anymore because it remembered it was looking for a track matte but we don't have one anymore so i'm going to set this up here in the corner the null is going to go live up in the corner hello and i'm now going to take all of these layers i'm going to parent them to the null and this null after this has popped on is now going to scale up into the corner i'm going to open up a proportional grid as i do this scale so that i can kind of lock in a little bit like this maybe like this i don't know so the proportional grid here right the proportional grid here um is uh a bunch of lines so proportional grid you can call it up here you can call up your title and action safe which are some ideas from the days of broadcast television when televisions had bevels or bezels around them so you wanted to keep things inside this box so that everyone on every tv could watch it um i don't have that problem with online content because we go right to the edge of the container um but but these gridlines help us to make pleasing compositions by giving us sort of a rule system uh to work to work from and then we're gonna go here after effects preferences grids and guides and so you can set up whatever kind of grid or guide system uh you desire so right now i'm separating eight and eight maybe we do six and six right so then we can enjoy that kind of a grid system if you like so i'm just going to put that up here in the corner so there we go that's going to scale up into the corner so i'm going to set keyframes to make that happen going from 100 up into the corner so we're gonna pop on and then it's gonna move into the corner okay so i think i need to massage these curves here a little bit and what we're gonna do here that's right that's right tim it's not a stream with evan until we open up the grids i'm like tron um so in here we are gonna grab these we're gonna easy ease them we're going to go to that graph editor and try to produce some smooth motion i'm going to look at the speed graph here so we can kind of appreciate what's going on so let's see it comes on and then it goes up into the corner and i want to pull this hand a little bit and pull this handle a little bit so that it it's a little bit more extreme it's going to be very relaxed and then becoming more extreme and getting relaxed again so we're thinking about smooth motion this is usually the curve that's telling us something will feel gentle this part of the curve here is where things are going to feel extreme because instead of at a peak and pulling of these handles is what makes us have that kind of motion so i hope that that makes sense right wait is tron the good is tron the good guy or the bad guy in that movie i've never seen tron so i i don't even know i only know it as a piece of pop culture um on account of being 32. so here we go we've got this thing it's going up into the corner great now as we've talked about if this is revealing stuff behind we need to put something back there and i like that thing about the berries um so i've got some assets about bean bush so we're gonna bring bring the bean bush out here lovely look at these cool beans cool beans indeed and so there we go so let's see let's see we need to make sure that this layer starts here because that's when everything is completely covered so and now we're like on to a different scene right so hopefully that that kind of makes sense with where we're where we're going uh with this stuff right like that so if we go back into our assembly space you can see what's happening we're going to go from this scene and now we're fully in this scene hopefully that um makes sense and the way we um the way we made this stuff uh work um this kind of an interesting transition which is a little bit difficult to achieve in something like premiere um you know we're using a graphical transition to a new space um which i think is great that's what we want um but our fact our fact is coffee is a fruit um so that is our our factoid of the day um or for this one that's our that's our fact um so let's see let's see what would be a great way to show this off here just want to make sure boop there we go so let's say we stick this right in the middle center and would it be nice if we had an image of coffee on the top and an image of fruit on the bottom these these wonderful beans on the bottom so we could create uh such a situation if we wanted to so i'm going to turn this layer off for now and what we want is to define where we can see one image or another image so let me see let me see here [Music] this is just an image of beans so we're going to bring these beans out a wonderful image of beans i'll just maybe rotate it a little bit find the kind of angle and specific density of beans that i'm interested in like that i'm going to bring this below everything okay so beans loving it loving the beans we need to define where we can see the beans and so i'm going to go new solid solids are a different kind of layer and they're similar to shape layers but they don't hold vector information on them unless you start drawing masks they're usually used as as sort of things that you will then dump effects onto or you'll use them in our case as a matte of some kind so i'm going to name this matte layer yes you're a matte layer now and to help me identify as a matte layer i like to make them just a really garish loud color so i make no mistake that i don't want to see this one at all oh boy i'm seeing a lot of dune love that's great i'm a big dune head so so we talked a little bit about a little a little taste of track mats and in this case we're going to track matt again so i'm going to take the beans and i'm going to say hey use the track mat of that matte layer above there you are beans nice to see you and now wherever i move this we are going to sort of wipe that on or off now granted you could use instead you could use instead always more always more ideas ooh that's a very cool thing as well you could use instead an effect if you wanted like a linear wipe for example we could use a linear wipe set that to 50 completion on the linear wipe and ooh oh doesn't that isn't that confusing what's happening with this well what's happening is that effects are layer relative um or some of them are frame relative hard to tell sometimes but the point is that this thing here is doing its best job to linearly wipe this layer i prefer in this case to use the matting powers because we might end up parenting things to this mat we might end up doing other things but also because keeping things frame relative keeping things relative to the objects moving around can make a little bit more sense sometimes and it can be a little bit less confusing for folks yeah okay and oh boy we've got about uh just over half an hour left to hang out uh together and so um good good people of uh of youtube if you're watching us on youtube please come and join us uh on behance.net i'd love to see your questions i'd love to love to see what you're up to so let's see uh what we can do here um with this matte layer we are now going to animate it to go change its position so its position is going to change and its position is going to change to go up like this so just like we did with scale you know you can just grab things and change their position if you like you can grab them and move them around setting keyframes on the position is going to let us manipulate layers around and it's going to the curtain rises on bean theater here so as it's moving up i think what i would love to do is take this bean bush here and i'm going to uh set some keyframes on the bean bush as well let's see let's see oh there's a nice there's a nice shot of a couple of the perhaps arabica beans i'm not sure but maybe that as one of these goes up the other one is also kind of rising up as well and this bunch of coffee beans i'm going to alter its position as well while this is happening so we're going to go from here then we're going to move forward and the coffee is is going to go up and let's see maybe this doesn't need to move as far [Music] let's see let's see yeah we'll just push this up so everything is kind of getting a little bit of a push uh as this thing is moving up into the frame right so hopefully that that makes sense um so we are going to grab these things here we're going to grab these i'm going to ease them hitting f9 so remember we've got all of these keyframes working together happening at the same time it's part of the same kind of motion so then i'm going to go into the graph editor and i'm going to just grab these handles like this make them more extreme more extreme handles and let's see let's grab these and make them a little bit more extreme in this direction oh maybe not maybe let's take these and let's make them linear so it gets even more extreme oh no that's not it so we might play back and forth with a lot of this stuff and and sort of stretch these keys out a little bit make it take a little bit more time but here we go one into the corner and then we split the screen in half so we might move this out a little bit like so great so i think the narrative we want here is one up to the corner then tell people that coffee is a fruit and then divide the screen in half coffee is a fruit love it love it so hopefully that makes sense okay so coffee is a fruit how do we want this text to show up so far we've been manipulating everything simply based on its properties but text can be a lot more um unique a lot more interesting we can do way more things with it the first thing i want to do with it is try to make sure that it stands out a little bit from the background so now it is standing out a little bit more um you know it's got a little bit more contrast maybe i don't know um let's see let's see let's go like this yeah maybe that's the way to go and what i want to do is darken this image up here so we can use an effect on that layer on this layer to make it darker i'm using a curves adjustment effect from over here the effects and presets panel and from this if you're familiar with curves from photoshop perhaps you will know that you can simply just start making things darker like so as you like kaboom look at that that curves is working this is basically a curves adjustment showing this is graphing the um uh input and output um light and darks if curves is not for you maybe you're not a curves person you might be a levels person and we'll put levels over here kabam so we'll put a levels over there and with these levels here you can see the graph a little bit stronger this makes a lot more sense this graph you can see everything that is dark so if we increase this we drag this over you see yep we have you know the sun's going down on the coffee beans or you can take this over here and you can make it brighter brighter brighter and you can take the midpoint and make it darker brighter and so on like that so we can just go ahead like that [Laughter] gareth we don't need to disparage the drop shadows my goodness there was a time when we were all making drop shadows we were all young once certainly so yeah there we go we've got a little bit more contrast coming off so hopefully we can read coffee a little better right and also please do let me know if you're if you're more of a curves person if you're more of a levels person always good to find out where people sit on that as you get to know them all right so um the other thing we wanted to do is to bring this text on using what are called text animators now if this is scary if this is a scary part don't worry we can go into our animation presets we can go into the text area of animation presets over here and we have all of these folders of ways we might say animate in some text so here we go we can just we can just let's just grab some and see what happens okay so i'm gonna just move this layer ahead and let's drag central spiral on and see what that means um that's kind of horrifying so i don't totally uh like that one we could do something so like drop in by character right and you see you know eventually that happens and what's going on in here is that this has set some keyframes out um which we can then pinch in to make a lot faster so that's nice um and this is kind of a good place to start so if you're not super familiar with um text animators it can be good to start by dissecting some of the um some of the things that are happening that can be helpful so in here we've got here we're going to dial in here um into the animator here and you can see what we've got we we are essentially changing the position so what let's see oh if we changed that what would happen oh okay so now i can have this come from over here now look at that so if i if i'm adjusting the position look at this kabam that's looking pretty good that seems like a good adjustment for me and then if i go into the advanced let's get advanced and say well instead of being based on characters maybe we could be based on words what would that look like coffee is a fruit oh okay that's a good good modification for us i think that's been i think that's very good i keep making a little bit um tighter there we go um we take this maybe move the whole layer back quite a lot so we're going to come up and then let's not waste any time at all coffee is uh fruit bam bam just like that and then and then uh here we go okay coffee is uh fruit wonderful and we might adjust the timing on that now we were talking about smooth motion talking about nuances of motion that's where these things come in here ease high and ease low they're going to help us be a little easier in our in our stuff so we're going to take the e's low and we're going to increase that so now we have that kind of a little bit smoother kind of motion uh with this as it comes in okay great i'm happy with that i can i can live with that now we aren't easing this keyframe we're not using the keyframe of what's called the range selector all right and that is because this is simply selecting which um which things are being changed which parts of the text are not being changed you know which which parts of this text layer are being affected and if we were to ease that we're just easing the selection of things right so you might want to do that you might not want to hard to tell um so here we go coffee is a fruit and then we go up like that so like i said at the beginning we can tap the u key to see all of the keyframes we've set and now we might pinch these closer so that so that when fruit arrives that's when we get the reveal of these wonderful coffee cherries ah look at that look at that wonderful coffee cherries right there i love it i love it now what if we want to reframe where this is at right what if we wanted to um see uh sort of scale this up maybe we want to scale this up oh okay and now we want to try to get that fruit more in the middle right well then we call open that anchor point and we start to manipulate we manipulate that anchor point and so that you can see the layer is kind of moving around it then we end up with this coffee is a fruit there you go so there we go hopefully that is helpful um darina is asking can you split the text appearance for example coffee will come from the right and then a fruit will come from the left absolutely absolutely we can we can do something like that i will caution however that as the deeper we go into text animators that might be more of a that might be more of a tomorrow thing for us to dip into um because we start getting into combining range selectors and we start getting into um even even more deeper nuances of the stuff so i think let's let's table that for tomorrow make sure you come back tomorrow and we will get even deeper um even deeper into the text animators tomorrow um so that we can uh we can delve into those um but but here we are in the assembly space we want to check our work coffee facts one coffee is a fruit nice so from fact one let's make fact two so this is gonna be number three fact fact two and if this were say a product video or a how-to or um like step-by-step cooking then it might be instead of facts these would be steps or these would be uh arguments or these would be news headlines right these could be all kinds of of things right we're just happening to fill this with facts so fact two i just duplicated fact one so let me let me go back you can select anything and you can do command d on the fact right and what we could do here is is then rename this so we can rename it you know more facts and we're going to go into number three here and we are going to just make modifications uh of this to get us where we want to go i'm going to start by deleting everything we don't need bam and sort of starting fresh a little bit and so we are going to start by changing this to the number two beautiful beautiful i'm gonna go back to sort of the beginning here and make sure that this is properly aligned onto this layer nice there we are we're on fact number two and i think fact number two what did somebody said uh in here i gotta scroll up in here there was something about um scrolling back scrolling back uh i wish there was a search function in here so i could find what i'm after it was someone a coffee that consists of partially digested coffee cherries which have been eaten by the civet that's wonderful um some duty coffee um here we go coffee originated in arabia in the 15th century so how wonderful would that be always good to remember people where things come from still a mystery how we can get 99 cent bananas here in canada so i don't know how global supply chains work but boop so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to paste this fact out the fact is the fact is so long what a long fact this is um it just it just takes up too much space what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the text layer and i'm going to click and drag a box instead of just clicking i'm going to click and drag a box and now i'm going to paste our fact i'm just going to swap my microphone into there and now we have bounded text so the bounded text here i'm just going to resize the text box a little bit try to get this into the bounds here that i want kabam like so and i'm sure historians um can can let me know um specifically where you know where coffee originated from i'm very i'm always curious about sort of where where things come from where they're going you know why why we take for granted um such things um and you know i was i'm always surprised at like you know where did pasta come from oh i thought that was an italian thing but you know noodles originated somewhere else or um the potato uh doesn't come from europe at all um so like these things i find fascinating uh to to learn about um so since we now have this bounded text if i were to make the text larger and you see it starts to bump as it bumps into the edges of things um then it starts to resize and get on different lines oh mercy um i'm going to align this over on the side like so and as you can see we are now going to hide this below the things [Laughter] our bananas are the worst mike let me just say i've i've tasted bananas of the world and yeah ours are so brutal okay so we were talking a little bit about um animating text so i think we should animate some more text um we should put um let's see let's see something behind here i've got this wonderful image that i think i would like to put back here great so we're gonna put that uh back here cool um and as you can see uh we have the conflict between the image and the text the text is hard to read because of the image right so what we would like to do is probably place something behind here so that's a little bit easier to look at and as you know we we do this wonderfully by just putting a box back there that's what our branding demands that we do so i'm just going to copy these and paste them right here and oh boy it looks like we're going to need to resize these uh-oh so we're gonna go here and i just want the um the size okay and so i'm gonna type size into this box up here and that calls up the specific property we're interested in looking at if for example there isn't a quick keyboard shortcut for us to just hit and then it works right and so what we're going to do here is we are just going to make this a little bit taller so let's say we we're going to grab these we're going to make them taller taller taller grabbing both of those getting taller there we go so i'm going to take this layer here i think and let's see let's see let's where's my align panel middle center please and okay now we'll just go back in here maybe make this smaller smaller smaller and we might need to tighten tighten this up a little bit like so i think that's looking great and as you do so now we've got you know the one thing standing off from the others which i think is totally fine now we would probably want to move this ahead and so now we've got that kind of explosion of graphics coming out and like we said there there are ways to reveal layers we've done um we've done mats we've used the set mat we've used the track matte we could do that again here right um what i'm going to do also is just take these and take their their opacity and kind of bring them both down a little bit opacity is just making things kind of see-through so whoosh like that and let's animate this on and in fact here here at the end we're going to make a text animator from scratch and what we're going to do is we're going to say animate make one from scratch animate the scale please now we're asking to animate the scale of things so if i dial this scale down look at that everything's getting tinier tinier and we have to get a little bit granular here so we're going to go into the um the more options and we're going to look at the grouping alignment of things now what does that mean well it means these see these little x's here that's where things are scaling too anchor point like we talked about i would like them to instead only have the one anchor point please so it's going to align them all along the middle and it gets better it's going to get better i'm gonna set the scale down to zero and then in the range selector the range selector is saying okay which things are going to be scaled down to zero and then i can simply just start to shrink that and we it's like the letters are shooting out of the middle of the of the layer like that so that's fun i'm going to go into advanced i'm going to change this from characters to words so the words are going to be shooting out of the middle like that so that's what we're going to do i'm going to then just keyframe the start of this to be going from selecting everything to selecting nothing and would you look at that the sound effects are critical to doing this there we go so and how about that something else we might want to do is we've got this animator going we could then add to this the property of opacity dial that down to zero so now all of these things start with an opacity of zero um so here we go like that again we're gonna go into the range selector we're going to e is low on this stuff because we want to have that consistency of smoothed kind of motion out here and now we end up with that oh lovely lovely stuff and it doesn't matter what we type into here right this is the power of the text layer that we could decide to type something totally different into this layer um and you know i'm having a change of heart on this yellow box i'm going to delete it or sorry i'm going to delete this external one and we're just gonna make this one white i've had i've had a change of heart on that um so we could type in a totally different fact like um it makes it helps what was it old people work like young people um by which i mean too many hours right so you know that's a that's something you could do and wouldn't you know it it behaves exactly the same it behaves in the same way that it's animating exactly the same even though we have changed the content of the thing so this is kind of your first steps towards creating templates and to not having to do as much work um because because labor is bad no no i wouldn't poopoo anyone doing hard work but if we can work smarter let's do that so there we go i just need to then touch up so that this layer kind of begins its life here kabam like this let's go ahead and do one of those soft scales uh over the whole uh the whole time here so let's say we we move ahead a bit and maybe we are what do you think zooming in zooming out that's hard to say which is best we're really ken burns it up out here if anybody knows what i'm talking about with ken burns the idea of narration and just moving in or out on photos um so there we go let's go back to our assembly space so we are going to go into in here to the assembly space so let's see we've got coffee facts number one coffee is a fruit loving it now i've read enough of that and we can drop this down two and we don't need this layer anymore wonderful there we go congratulations we've we're already halfway there and a lot of our work can be repeated and regurgitated right so hopefully that uh it's gonna be great all right all right let's see here let's see um what we can do here oh man and paul jumping in here hello hello adobe evangelist good to see you hanging out good morning to you well thanks paul it's great to hear um you know it's it's uh it's always it's always good to get to get the nod from one of the best so you know it's uh the the feeling is mutual um i learn a lot about a lot about photoshop and composition and stuff every time man every time i see you doing stuff all right so let's let's continue with uh our third fact um and what techniques can we get into because we've we've only we've got a small amount of time here to try to knock out um another one so what i want to do um what i want to do is show you really quickly how we can take number three here so i duplicate number three into number four another fact right and so i'm just going to drop another fact out here on to our assembly timeline so we're going to we're going to read about coffee originating in arabia and then we are going to have another fact and of course we go in here and then we change this to a three right and we make sure that's kind of in the middle center and we want to change um the elements of this right we want to change uh the an element of this but we don't want to make new keyframes we don't want to do anything strange like that so let's go into the assets let's select the layer we want to change and we're going to hold alt while i grab say let's see let's see the espresso machine hold down alt and then drag this down see how the cursor has become a plus okay so i'll do that again if i'm just dragging you you see the plus here that's fine you know and you can see this blue line which is where it's going to go but if i hold down alt the blue line goes away right so hopefully you can see the blue line there it means you're about to insert this layer there but i hold down alt and suddenly i'm i'm putting it there so let's see we go like that you know maybe we don't want that one we want this one oh no we don't want that one let's go back to this one and then it's it's pretty easy to swap out this stuff the motion is still the same because the keyframes remain the same and um that um i don't know kind of kind of makes sense uh hopefully that you can swap things out um so that uh so that you're able to um [Music] you know not repeat too much work and that you're able to then you know spend more time making creative decisions less time on the fiddly bits of swapping things out and around so hopefully that makes sense and i see yeah saying that something originated in arabia is probably the most uh um unhelpful i feel like that's a large geographical area anyway maybe it isn't maybe it's a very small specific area i don't know my my uh history my global history very well um but but but we need a new fact we need a new coffee fact in here um and um i think one of the one of the interesting things that i had read about here was um is it like uh average average americans americans spend and then it was like this much on coffee each year and would you look at that oh no our text has gone off the frame so let's resize this down to try to get it let's try to get it back in uh the box and i would recommend that you make if you do have sort of an element that things need to stay inside that you make sure that you are resizing your box to fit uh that thing there we go so now we've got that coming together one last thing that i want to point you to when you are working with text layers so i i'd want to put a little asterisk over here um because if you're ever going to make sort of a bold um calculation like this um then um what you would need to do here um is probably cite a source so first off i'm going to squeeze squish this a little bit smaller and i'm going to go down here and let's see let's see we are going to cite a source so i'm going to go here and i'm going to say like i think it's like a it's a it's a 2016 study that i've never seen the primary research on but people keep pointing to it so maybe it's true i don't know i'm just a source question mark people throw this number out a lot and it seems to just get repeated and repeated so so so so here's what we're going to do i'm going to go to paragraph and i'm going to bump it to be on the other side of the box now we can put in the middle box over here and over there so you can you can have different paragraph formatting within the same text box now i'm going to go to the character here i'm going to make this smaller i'm going to take us from bold to regular right so now it's it's like this or or maybe we want to do like an italics like that and you know you could hit return to try to get it where you want or like i said we can go into the paragraph and we can alter things about the paragraph so that now we have we have this kind of a situation and furthermore remember we already animated we already animated um the um the scale of this thing so even though we've made all these interesting paragraph changes all these strange things it's still working out fine so we're coming into the end so let's kind of do a little recap about uh what we've done this morning we have been talking a lot about sort of the fundamental building blocks of after effects we've talked about bringing in photos manipulating them manipulating the properties of things over time so you know as you can see in this early example we are we are manipulating the scale of a lot of things we talked about parenting we talked about a workflow where we go up the stairs right our upstairs workflow so we uh we are as you see it's making the shape of stairs that go up up because each of these layers is coming on they're animating on over top of what's what's been there before so that causes us to go up the stairs tomorrow we are going to be looking at going down the stairs and we are going to be looking at adding video in here we are going to be looking at a little bit of maybe um slow motion happening maybe we're going to get into that so do hang around for tomorrow i hope you do um and of course of course stick around for the rest of the day's activity photoshop daily creative challenge is coming up next and then after that meg lewis will talk about finding your your personal illustration style uh which is gonna be amazing i i think a lot of people you know help find your voice but we've got streams coming up in xd in in illustrator and and i'll stick around to the end end of the day as people are jumping into fresco and i think you will you'll really enjoy uh the stuff there so designing in the dark uh very fun and excellent thing so a rich full day of activities here on adobe live uh i've been evan abrams i'm still having abrams uh find me on the internet at ec abrams if you like to learn things about after effects but that's it for me i gotta get out of here so i will uh i'll see you tomorrow 10 30 eastern time and yeah stay creative be kind to each other and i'll see you around the internet bye for now you

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 9,246

Keywords: Editing video, editing audio, motion graphics, how to make a video, video and audio, sound mixing, Adobe Audition, Adobe Premiere, Premiere Pro, After Effects, editing tips, one, Evan Abrams, Getting Started

Id: EUngmc1hUz0

Length: 86min 5sec (5165 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020