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

[Music] so [Music] [Music] good good morning everyone good morning and welcome to another day of adobe live now in stereo that's right tim we got it we got it locked down we had a little audio trouble yesterday but we are on we are we are on it today oh as much as my voice is um i'm your host this morning evan abrams uh motion designer um graphic designer um mover of pixels from ottawa ontario thanks for coming out thanks for hanging out with me this morning in this getting started uh in adobe after effects this morning if you're new to after effects if you haven't opened it before or maybe you've uh maybe this is the first program in the in the creative cloud that you're getting into today is for you we are going to be uh dipping into uh more after effects stuff more beginner friendly more fundamental things in after effects so hopefully it's gonna be uh it's gonna be a good time um and uh yeah so if you have any questions because this is for beginners do ask me in the chat we are streaming out on behance.net and also on youtube if you are watching this on youtube please come and join us please come and join us on behance.net uh so we can we can see your your questions your chats what's going on we'd love to see uh that stuff uh over there speaking of stuff and things uh we have a rich full day of activities coming to you today um just like yesterday just like almost every day of the week uh we have excellent things here on adobe live so let me just uh pull up the schedule so we can all enjoy what's coming up later in the day so after your your morning with me you've got a creative challenge uh coming up where you're gonna be making some album covers perhaps uh and then we're gonna have a part two of finding your personal illustration style with meg lewis uh after that 12 30. and then we've got illustrator creative challenges we've got more xd uh creating a podcast app which is going gonna be great with talon and uh oh my goodness then xd creative challenge and then we round out the day with design in the dark um a wonderful blending of reality tv and design uh it's pretty fun it's pretty funny um and you know the people on there are having a good time with it because um design can be stressful uh client focused work um uh can be it can sometimes be uh stress elevating but i think they have a great humor about it and and i love that they kind of uh take that approach all right so let's get into what are we doing today um today i'll be taking you through more fundamental things in after effects and we are gonna see uh what kind of things we can get into here um and uh yeah we are going to be um we're gonna be doing some great um hopefully great things we're gonna be continuing on with our theme of doing kind of social media posts with this and hopefully it'll be illuminating to some of the more essential uh things that we do uh in after effects when it comes to motion design yesterday just to recap let's have a look at the screen and we will enjoy what we were doing uh yesterday yesterday we talked about quite a number of things we made um we assembled together this kind of social media video using you know various slides various scenes a lot of text a lot of shape layers talked about modifying properties we talked about animating them getting into the graph editor and we talked about this process of what we called going up the stairs where each scene kind of animates on over top of the of the previous one right so this scene is coming on over top of the previous one building on adding adding adding to what we have um and today we're going to look at a few things we are going to look at um going down the stairs the reverse of that process we are going to look at some video ideas and we are going to continue on there were some great questions yesterday that i want to kind of address today um about text animators and uh that it was gonna be um so things about text animators things about mats things about masks so hopefully uh that's gonna be good for everyone yeah joel i i do think of myself as an animation massager i'm constantly massaging these keyframes [Laughter] but i want to say say you know hello to everyone who's coming back today we got gareth in the house kenneth williams is in here our mod tim mo best holding it down um so if you have any any stream related quandaries hit him up um reverb mike good to see you back good to see you sean so good people from all over the world wherever you are please uh do let me know who you are where you're from and either what you're doing in motion design or what you'd like to be doing um and what you'd like to be learning you know we're all kind of on a journey uh of discovery here so there we go and that's right it's this could be real upstairs downstairs uh downton abbey style um period piece here so what do i mean when we're talking about fundamentally when we're talking about up the stairs down the stairs like i said up the stairs means we are animating on elements that overlap and come over top of things it's usually what we're meaning when we say we're going up the stairs that newer elements are found at a higher rank in the in the layer stack than older elements right and when we are going down the stairs if we were to go down the stairs it would look differently we would have the older elements hanging out here and then we would drop down the stairs to the other elements so the things that would happen at the end of the video would be found lower in the layer stack so what we want to do here is to think about how we leave a composition how are we exiting from this comp to arrive at this one as you can see mysteries of the sea and then it goes away and then this thing arrives so this is sort of a different methodology to think about these things and uh hopefully it's going to be a good uh a good thing and angus this is my this is my wonderful mug from bose oktoberfest uh here they have an in-house design team that does great job on this stuff we'll see we'll see what we get into um but yeah we're seeing some great stuff in here um uh wanting to make uh kenneth is saying that they they want to make uh animation you can use at the start in the end of all videos so we often call that kind of a top and tail um and sometimes um we we want to think about animating on animating off in those things so if you're thinking about elements like bumpers or stings or whatever terms we want to use for those hopefully we can get you techniques here that will help make those things um possible [Laughter] and yeah something that i will say uh for anyone watching this um don't worry don't worry if you have to duck out you have to go do something uh all this stuff is archived for all time and all space around here so it's gonna be uh it's gonna be here for your viewing pleasure um all the time and today we're also gonna be talking about using video in interesting ways um so let's get into it let's dip into some new ideas today that are a little bit different um from what we did um what we did yesterday uh good good to see you here roland always always a pleasure man all right let's get to it um and just a just a heads up to anyone uh hanging out on the youtubes please come over to be hands so we can we can see and enjoy uh your chats in here so do let us get started um creating this first kind of thing this this uh revealing of text here a simple revealing not much to it but we're using uh some techniques that we didn't talk about yesterday when it comes to shape layers and i think we simply must get into them okay so we're going to go create a new a new composition whenever you're working in after effects some of this may be a little bit um a little bit of a recap from yesterday but we assume that some people are are kind of new here today so compositions in after effects like we talked about yesterday are containers and composition is kind of like our art board or it is our sequence this is the the unit that contains uh elements that we're going to work on and in general i get a lot of questions about well what frame size what frame rate should it be well they should be in keeping with where this is going to go so if we are going to create something for social that's going to be a square video we want this to be square and we want the frame rate to be in line with the frame rate that whatever platform we're going to post this on understands so in some cases it's 30 some cases 24 maybe that that dropped frame 29.97 we're going to go with 30 today keep it consistent we're going to work with square compositions because i really enjoy things that are square and symmetrical i'm a very square person so maybe that makes sense and uh let's start it off we're gonna we're gonna talk about um trim paths uh to start with another wonderful tool that you're probably going to want to know about the ability to trim paths and if we want say a line to come out from the middle of of the comp and then and then we have two lines move apart from each other and have text in between some of the techniques we learned about yesterday will help us get there and i'm going to start by drawing a line with the pen tool we used a lot of rectangles yesterday we can use parametric shapes but we're going to use a line today and i want to make sure that i am drawing uh perfectly horizontally across my my canvas here so i'm going to click hold down shift and click over here now shape layers can get confusing right that where things are doesn't seem to always line up with where we think they are and and that kind of thing but for us today this is going to be simple there's not going to be a lot of like repeaters and all that crazy stuff i'll keep it simple but i've drawn a line out there and we don't see anything right so there might be um something what's going on what's wrong here well what's happening is that this is a line but it doesn't have a stroke on it the stroke as you can see up here in this contextual bar that changes depending on what you're selecting you may need to make your stroke larger so that you can actually see it if it has a stroke of zero we're not going to see anything right so let's go ahead and maybe set this to like 20 pixels that looks pretty good to me and what i want this to do is to animate on in some ways so whenever i'm talking about um animating things on and we want this to to arrive we want it to go from being nothing to being something okay so in here we can add modifiers to our shape layers and we can go here you can go into this little add thing here and i think maybe they're called deformers i can't remember what the official the official name of these this list of things is but just like yesterday we were talking about text layers and how we can you know animate things about them using a little little twirl down like this here we can add things uh into here oh no now today reaverbike's cracking me up uh if anyone knows all the lyrics to the different strokes theme song let me know um so in here i'm going to add something called a trim paths now trim paths is going to allow us to see some or all or none of whatever strokes we have out in the world so if i were to animate this say from zero percent up to a hundred percent and we set keyframes by uh clicking on the little stopwatch here so that uh you can you can set a place in time and and a spot so here here at one second i've set a keyframe on this property meaning that at this point in time this property is a hundred percent and at this point in time this property is zero percent and that after effects uh figures out what's going on in between to go like that so we've got oh fantastic we've got this line drawing from one side of the screen to the other this can be very helpful if you'll permit me to go on a little bit of a tangent right here and uh oh yeah shape shape operators shape operations is that the is that the thing okay so if you were to draw perhaps a more interesting path you know squiggling all over the place you know we can then use that trim paths right and trim paths here to trim that path like a roller coaster look at it go and it doesn't just work on paths like that if you were to say make a rectangle let's say we're gonna make a rectangle maybe it's a rounded rectangle ooh look at that cool rounded rectangle and then of course we add a trim path to that wouldn't you know it and now we can oh yeah look at that it's behaving exactly the same so trim paths can be a nice way to sort of add this thing in and yes yes you could have you can have uh butt caps round caps projecting caps you can have miter joints round joints all the all the wonderful stroke things uh that you would ever uh ever like um okay so that tangent aside [Laughter] it's both it's a geometry class always around here so we now have this line that is animating on okay but what if we wanted it to animate from the middle we wanted this path to kind of come out from the middle well that would be pretty easy as well see we can keyframe both the start and the end of this thing so here's what we're going to do we are going to just drag this out here so at the end we know that we want 0 and 100 and at the beginning we're going to set both of these to be 50 so 50 is in the middle of the line and there you go now the line is expanding from the center pretty easy stuff simple simple things to think about and we're going to ease these two keyframes by hitting f9 we're going to go into the graph editor which we talked a little bit about yesterday because the graph editor allows us to have more nuanced smooth motion and early understanding of the graph editor will save you a lot of headaches in the world and i think it is very i think it's one of the more essential spaces to get into if you like animation if you like motion design make friends with the graph editor it will it will save you a lot of frustration the graph editor is where we are manipulating the speed over time or the value over time depending on which graph you're looking at so we're looking at a speed graph here and we grab these handles and we give them a pull so that things are going very very fast at this point that you can see here i'll just zoom in there we go we'll zoom in here so that we can see it's very very fast at this point and then gets very very slow until it's not moving at all at this point all right and so we are going to go here we're going to go whee like that so because we've pulled this handle we've given this handle a big pull both the handles that they are starting fast and then slowing down so i think that's a nice relaxed kind of motion that we would want and then we're going to have this line move up so we're going to call up the position by hitting p and you don't have to hit p as we've said yesterday you can twirl in here we can twirl into the transform the transform of that shape layer and we're going to move that layer up so we're going to set a keyframe on position then we're going to move ahead a little bit and we're going to just drag that up we're going to drag it up here these green lines here these green lines that i'm using to line things up are my proportional grid you can toggle that on and off over here i like to use the proportional grid because it helps me keep things in proportion um and you know keeping things proportional is is kind of essential uh for good design um at least for those of us who are adherence to grid systems because i am an unimaginative person um and so in in this way uh we are keeping things regular uh by moving things around no i i really enjoy keeping things normal um and so i'm going to ease these ease these keys move them a little bit and again we are going to pull the handles give the handles a pull so they're kind of moving like that so it is expanding and moving great but we want two lines we want a couple of those um and we are going to sort of make make those things happen oh also a lot of dune quotes today awesome so i want a second uh path and so i'm going to duplicate this one and i'm just going to because we are here at the last sort of keyframe on here i'm going to drag it down which will alter that keyframe and there we go i'm going to create it you know just push it right down there so now these got wide and then full apart fantastic maybe i'll speed that up by pinching these two together it gets wide gets tall excellent stuff there we go and so now we want text to reveal in the middle of this okay i'm going to turn the grid off now because i'm pretty sure i've got things where i want them and i want text to show up in the middle all right so i'm going to just go ahead and drop some text in here and let's see let's see what to say uh in the text i don't know usually you want to start a video with something um that hooks people's interests i don't know like 10 uh 10 fish facts you won't believe that's a thing i see on the internet a lot um telling me what i won't believe um you don't know my capacity for imagination but we'll just we'll just plop that here in the middle and in fact if you want to align things uh we're gonna go window we're going to grab the align panel so we can quickly align it middle center of things [Laughter] man oh i wish dune would come out sooner that's that's a that's a property that i really enjoy so now we need to reveal the fish facts we need to well i mean we need to reveal the words that say fish facts i don't think there's really an impetus to tell people more facts about fish but we talked about yesterday um some great ways um that we can reveal things we talked about mats we talked about masks and we're gonna do a little refresher about those today um and so masks are something you draw on a layer and uh so we can see parts or hide parts so i've got my text layer selected i'm just going to draw a rectangle on it um something i'm going to i want i want to point out this is new um so if you're if you're on an older version of after effects it's not going to look exactly the same as this one but if you can if you have a close look at my cursor that's kind of floating around you see that it's got this little icon next to it so it's like a cross and then it's got the the little icon next to it and on here you know when we've selected a layer you can see that it looks like this it's got this little mask icon if we have nothing selected it's got a little star next to it and um the the star means we're gonna draw a shape and if it if it's the uh mask icon we're gonna draw a mask right so that's how you know that's what i'm about to draw in the space and i really love this little quality of life feature here so i'm going to draw a mask and as you can see what the mask does is by default it is set to add so it is adding to the space it's adding what we can see and by default if this is what you add to your selection everything else is not selected so we don't see the rest of the thing so we can take this mask we can take this path and i'm just going to use the free transform here to make it the same size as this box and we are then going to keyframe the mask path so that it goes from being large to small small to large you know it just needs to expand out from here to there and it'd be great if it expanded at the same speed as these lines are moving so i'm going to go in i'm going to easy ease these easy ease these keys and what i want to do is just make sure that all of these have the same uh curve to them as they as they expand so that way we know that that mask is gonna line up and hello it's those ten fish facts you promised me um so that works out pretty well for us now why would we use a mask why would we use something else um that could be kind of um kind of a big question you know there are many methods we can use to bring these things on and why would i use masks why would i use track mats why would i use one thing versus another thing and a lot of it is subjective a lot of it is based on whatever case you're getting into but let's look at a little drawback here what if um i decided oh you know what i need to put this on two lines and i need to make the text larger okay that's cool so now i think i will just reposition this kind of in the mid oh no what's happening now um you can see that that the mask moves with the layer so the mask is attached to the layer meaning if i move the layer around the mask moves with it because it is relative to the layer it belongs there so if i want to move this around and uh i want to to get it in a better position the mask is not helping me with that because then i'll have to go back and move things you can use the pan behind tool to move things within the mask which i think is a perfectly reasonable use of the pan behind tool and now things you know line up a little better so that's you know that's not the end of the world uh if you have to do that um however masks may not be the best way to reveal this layer right but like i said we have options we have so many different options in in after effects to deal with with all the options in the world you know if there aren't three ways to do to do one thing then it might not be performing its functions so if we want to reveal this with another layer say we can use what are called track mats or just just maths in general maths can do all kinds of things but in this case we are going to create a rectangle i'm going to change the rectangle's fill to be a terrifying pink color oh boy that's really bright that's hurting my hurting my eyes maybe but that's fine it's it's here i like to use a nice bright color to remind me that i don't really want to leave this on because it's not congruent the rest of the design although i actually really enjoy um vibrant vibrant hues uh so there we go so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to make the size of this thing changing the size of it down to be like this okay and i'm going to animate it over time so i'm going to take this layer i'm going to animate the size so we are going to go from a size of 0 up to this size we are again we're going to make sure that you know all of these keyframes are of the same speed you know so that this is so they're kind of consistent uh as things go so weep you can see that we now have this rectangle kind of in the middle and then we take our fish facts and we say hey why don't we go ahead and and just make um i'll just look at the layer above me and and that'll decide where i'm visible right um and i am i am happy to see the amount of of of enthusiasm people have for wearing proper ppe in the chat that is that is actually very refreshing uh for me um so here we go we got we got our fish facts and we're revealing it again in a different method right but this method because the two things are not connected i can scale this i can put this over here i can i can do whatever i like with this because they're not um locked in they're not connected to each other and um they're not dependent on each other i could move this around all over the place i could totally replace this with things so this is going to give me a little bit more flexibility to have this kind of mat set up for things now is it perfect no but it is another way when when some um some methods uh don't work out super well uh but but yeah uh hopefully this is hopefully this is gonna be uh helpful uh to folks now let us add another layer of of things we were working a lot with photos yesterday and so today we are going to be working with um some video now did i leave i didn't okay um a lot of the video actually all the video that we're going to be working with today is going to be coming from adobe stock now one of the frustrations when learning uh after effects when learning um about video stuff is having good quality materials to work with so i i really applaud uh the people at the adobe stock team for opening up a lot of free things so if you go here into adobe stock you go to the free tab you can find a lot of free photos free vectors free videos um a lot of great things in here so if we just go ahead and let's dip into free videos real quick and we see oh boy look at this we got some fun motion backgrounds we got a lot of aerial shots travel people um i'm interested more in nature here's a man walking into the ocean interesting choice um but we can go ahead and exclude people we can say only show me what's available in 4k and now would you look at this look at these wonderful shots out here these fantastic assets um available to us to do things and experiment with so all of that is gratis for you um so please uh please enjoy and also you know i i really love the way they kind of license stuff uh on here so um you know hats off to the adobe stock team for um kind of making that possible um and giving us um more tools to play with um on here but we're going to take a flyover of the ocean and we are going to drop that down below everything here and as you can see you know how much more dramatic is it now right that we are we are moving along having having a flyby over the ocean that's nice then we've got these fish facts that we won't believe now one thing that that is interesting is that the movement of of the objects behind actually helps the text stand out a little bit because they're stationary whenever you have um points of difference um between things that's going to make them more uh stand out more and hopefully hopefully that's going to be helpful so if you find oh a photo isn't really doing it drop some video behind something and the motion will pull more attention and might even make things a little bit more legible or readable however something i'll say is that when you have movement in the background you want to also have movement of some kind you know feeling too static that can be okay it's fine um but really what i want to do is is add a little bit of motion to this text so or this title so i'm going to go new null object i'm going to parent everything to that null object so that as the null object changes everything else changes with it and then over time i'm going to just scale this up sort of in a linear linear way let's say we'll we'll take 10 seconds to kind of scale this up a little bit like so maybe we even need to scale it a little bit at the beginning let's see so now it's kind of slowly drifting towards us right that it's causing a little bit of motion as it goes and i think that's gonna do it for me good so with this completed we want we we've decided that we want to use a down the stairs methodology uh when we are layering these these things over top of each other so we need to make this scene um pack up and go away it needs it needs to pack its bags and go home basically um it needs he needs to take its ball and get off the court so how do we pack up this thing and remove it right we could run all the keyframes in reverse we could um maybe apply like a star wipe to it i like a good i like a good star wipe um so if i wanted to sort of make this uh disappear on us to to wipe it all away to make it go away there are many methods we might use to do that here is uh one that i find very nice i'm just going to go ahead and create another one of these mats um i'm going to call this like the uber mat um and i'm going to make this orange now why why why would i call it something like an uber mat well because this is going to actually control how much of this layer we can see how much of anything we can see in this comp and that is because we've talked about masks we've talked about track mattes here is another way that layers can control how much of other layers you can see and we're gonna go here we're gonna go to this space and we are gonna go and change this down to stencil alpha and right away oh thank goodness evan you made that layer go away i'm so glad you did that stencil alpha what does that mean what's happening well this layer is now stenciling using its alpha what we can see so only in places where this layer has alpha information or opacity are we going to be able to see any of the other things below it how wonderful is that right so now if we start manipulating this layer say at five seconds maybe it's scale maybe it's rotation so if we just set some keyframes for that and we're just going to go ahead maybe 10 seconds will take 10 10 seconds to get you down here and i will just shrink this down like so like that we can get a little bit more um intense if you like we could we could start rotating this get a little compound motion spiraling away okay bye there there it goes ciao um and so we can we can pack up this whole situation because it now ends on being completely transparent so anything that will be found under this when we when we pre-compose it and we put it somewhere else we'll show through because this is all the transparent uh zone out here so we're packing it up uh with that now granted we're just using a rectangle you could use all kinds of shapes like a beautiful star wipe if you'd like but it could be literally literally anything uh that you like here so hopefully that that makes sense um as as this is going so it's a very basic way to control where layers are are going and what's happening right so hopefully that makes sense um and and gareth that's a good question what do i mean by compound motion so yeah generally when multiple things are our multiple drivers are contributing to the movement of one thing so for example um we have um this thing is scaling down and it is rotating right that's two things that are happening at the same time if we went ahead and had a separate driver on here right and we were to say like okay we've got one one set of things happening to the scale right so it's it's going like whew like that or maybe um actually let's make it uh try to go the other way like this so it's starting out slow and then going quicker you know if you were to then have sort of a um uh let's see what we usually do uh with compound motion is something like i think another sort of classic example of this is this layer here itself is scaling right this this null is scaling up so it's helping to drive movement of these layers and these layers themselves have motion happening on them right so this is helping to sell these to to make these a little bit more nuanced um so it's this multiple driver effect uh that happens so you're compounding uh these ideas um we usually see this a lot sort of in character animation that if my if my shoulder is is locomoting my arm and my elbow is also locomoting my arm right that the compound result is is is smoother to have these multiple drivers making the hand do something as opposed to the shoulder goes then the elbow goes that's more robotic so we're trying to be more organic having what we would say in traditional animation is overlapping uh motion at least in a character context um but these aren't characters so don't really really fit as well um so hopefully that concept uh makes sense so that was a little bit of a wee bit of a tangent there uh to get into um now something else that i would probably want to do here um as this thing is sort of going um i might like to scale this sort of up down as it's going so i'm going to grab the scale of the flyover and i'm going to scale it up so it's going to get bigger as this other thing is getting smaller identical curves perhaps so it's like that's pushing up towards us as the thing is getting smaller so that could be an interesting feeling because we are going to assemble this day to assemble um and so um is that even how high you spell assemble i don't know build i for some reason i am not great at spelling assemble maybe it only has one s i'll just call it day two project all right so we have are our trim paths uh thing so it's gonna come in here and wouldn't you know it look how long this layer is right because this comp is 45 seconds long right but we know that at a certain point this layer is done so it can help to put markers in here and markers you can drop on your timeline by hitting the asterisks so we're just going to put our playhead there drop a drop a marker marker marker a bunch of cool markers so now if we drop the trim paths on would you look at that it's a couple of there's a couple of markers living on that layer how fun is that and so now i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to trim this layer to terminate at that point but we know that the the going away is is going to be um happening here [Laughter] oh oh patricia i don't know if i need to watch more avengers but these markers can help us to line things up because we know that the the going away part will happen here and um that'll be that'll be going away oh boy and uh yeah so hopefully that is going to be going to be good um and yeah um let's see let's see let me just take a dip over to the uh the various chat see if there's any questions coming in um any further questions oh i see some some people uh uh chatting it up in the youtube if you're hanging out on the youtube um please come come on over and and check out the the behance come to behance.net but anil good to see you good to see you hanging out um and uh hello hello um and uh thanks for the correct spelling always always good to know how things go language is costly evolving so now we need to put things under this we need to place things under this thing in order for us to reveal them right so let's make uh let's make another um another piece for us to enjoy um and hopefully hopefully it'll be good and jay is asking do i do magic tutorials um i don't know i'm not sure if i've if i've ever done um that might be somebody else um my brother does a lot of close-up magic and i don't necessarily enjoy no i think i used to do more vfx stuff um and my career is shifted to do more motion design stuff um yeah magic i know uh i don't know camera tricks and the like anyway let's let's make more things let us make more things fish fact so this is going to have a wonderful fish in it here's a fish this is from what i understand this is a lionfish uh when i lived in is it is this a lionfish i don't know maybe this is a i feel like it is similar to well when i lived in the caribbean um for a little bit um these were an invasive species and i did not like them at all because they will poison you with their spines um so yeah maybe so hopefully these are i don't know i'm sure they have a home somewhere i like i like those fish facts fish can breathe underwater loving it okay so what we're going to do is we are going to pop up some things we did some call outs yesterday callouts are those wonderful little bits of graphics and text that tell us a thing so let's make one of those here and let's see let's see we're gonna grab our rectangular tool um let's see i'm just gonna make like a black square and let's see let's see the size of the square is going to be let's start it off that might be too big but that's fine so we're going to bring this thing on and then we're going to move it um somewhere else that's right i did i i lived on um the island of saint vincent uh in saint vincent the grenadines um wonderful island chain um that certainly not without its troubles and many of which are caused by environmental um displacement so um so we've got this thing uh coming on and we talked about yesterday manipulating our graph so that this is more extreme as it comes on and then smooth out so we go into our we ease a keyframe we go into our graph editor we give this a pull like so and then we end up with this kind of motion that i really enjoy um and then let's see let's see because we're doing a bit of rotational stuff going on let's have let's have a bit of that as well so let's see we are maybe going to do a similar thing so we're going to there we go so this is going to come on this needs perhaps a number on it um fish are not to scale i like that that's fun so i'm going to put a number one on here and position it there and we're going to parent this layer to the other layer as we talked about yesterday parenting very useful because it means one thing will now control the other one and it'll be much less work for us if these two things hang out together um but speaking of of that kind of thing we talked a little bit about compound motion so i'm going to take this text layer i'm going to put its anchor point in its middle center and as one scales up i'm going to do something with the scaling of the other oh what an interesting idea and here i'm going to let's say let's scale this up to like a thousand at the start um and let's see we are just going to bend these keyframes to be a lot more like this so now we have though this layer is parented to this layer so they're behaving together this one is also behaving contrary to it so this creates this kind of emotion so let's see see if we like that kind of a thing that's okay that's not terrible right and what we can do here um maybe we instead want this to uh start much smaller and kind of grow so now the two things are kind of working in parallel to each other they're both scaling vertically but there's there is a bit of maybe parallax between the two of them that kind of feeling so that could be something so like we were talking about the concept of compound motion is you know you're making me scale and i'm gonna scale me and we're gonna we're gonna have these different drivers of scale that that ends up having more nuanced movement to it so it doesn't do us much good to have this thing hanging out up here so let's go ahead and after an appropriate amount of time we will move this thing along right we're going to grab its position we're going to grab its scale we're going to set keyframes on those and we're just going to move it down move it down using the power of grids i'm going to just scale this down maybe let's go 50 of the size and drop it down here let's get even smaller let's just let's just put in the box here let's put baby in a corner um like so so we're just going to drop it into the little box here and then we will have the the fish fact come out to the side here let's do that so we're gonna ease i'm gonna ease up these things we're gonna go back into the graph editor here yes give those handles a pull so now we're gonna see that it goes like that so we are gonna go gets big and then get small and we'll probably want a little bit more time in between here a bit more time here like that there we go so this thing is now moved uh down here um and oh newer that is a very depressing fact um about um oh no i've got a spinning wheel [Music] something loading there we go now we're resolved so it's very depressing um fact about plastic anyway um so yeah let's continue on uh with this stuff and like i said if you have any questions about the process do let me know and yeah let's uh let's warn people about these terrifying spines do not touch um that's probably good advice don't touch this fish um poisonous poisonous poisonous there we go this poisson is poisonous that's only funny to me um so uh but we are gonna try to position this here and then let's see let's see um maybe we go instead of this let's go down to medium maybe and maybe we will bring this down a little bit and as you can see we probably have some balancing issues right that we need to we need to work out here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to try to position these two things a little bit more there we go that is feeling quite a bit better even margins on both sides i'm happy with that oh there's there's plenty of plenty of uh people par parallel francais over here which is great so how do we want to bring this text on we talked a little bit yesterday about text animators um which are a powerful suite of tools when you twirl into text and you go animate and then you pick something about the text to change and i'm going to change the position of it and what we're doing is we're just going to go ahead and just grab all of this and we're going to move it all to be on the other side of that square okay awesome cool so now everything's over there great and what we're going to do is we're going to take the range selector and we're just going to select less and less of it so right now all of it is being selected by the range selector meaning that all of it is being pushed you know 705 pixels over in that direction right it's all over there because we've selected all of it and if we were to just select less of it it would start to get where we want it to go right isn't that isn't that fantastic um so so we'll see about um about how we can make that happen now there are a few ways and i'm going to show you yesterday we were using the square shape of this thing now today we're going to use the ramp up look there's a bunch of them in here there's so many interesting things we can do so square is basically saying hey everything that i'm selecting inside this range selector we're going to apply this to it now uh if i were to animate using that i will just simply take the start here and i will move ahead and i'll just shrink that i'll just bring the start to the end so that nothing is selected and we get something like this which i think is is fine if i don't want it to come on with each character at a time i can change it down here to words i can change it down to have each word happen one at a time it's still not great it's still not super good so i'm gonna take the ease low here and i'm gonna i'm gonna try to ease the way these things come on is okay i think that's that's kind of fine um and you know that's that's okay but but it doesn't really flow right it's kind of just like clunk clunk clunk joel is all about that expression selector um and as this is a a getting started stream we will pretend it doesn't exist for today it's a very dicey um little thing and something that i don't i don't dip into uh a lot um myself i don't know i don't know if i'm the best person to to speak on the the functions and uses of the expression selector um i wonder who even i don't know i i always try to think about who's using it and what are they using it for um but anyway that's a that's some inside baseball um for today we're gonna keep it simple and the the only more advanced thing we're gonna do is not use the square instead we are going to use the ramp up and you'll notice as soon as you make that change uh this thing is not even animating remotely the same as it was before now why would that be why would that be happening let's find out together shall we so what is happening when you apply the ramp up to things is that the um the shape here so the range selector right now i'm selecting uh 50 from 0 to 50 of this of this stuff right i'm selecting you know half of it and what i want to do is is use the offset to push that range selector through the text to cause the change i want because on one side of the range selector is everything has been has had this applied to it but on the other side once it's been pushed all the way through once it's been pushed through um the uh the situation you know it's all been gone right that change has been processed through so that's kind of what we're doing here with the offset so let's process this through so we're going from you know the range selectors all the way off and now we're going to process it through like that and i think that is working pretty well for me feels a lot smoother anyway so that's nice but one thing i don't like about this is that even if we were to drop it behind the square there we can still see it and i don't like that so i'm going to take my mask and i'm going to draw a rectangle around the area i would like to see and we've got it handled like we talked about at the beginning the mask itself is relative to the layer that we've placed it on and the animators the text animators are moving the position of the text elements within the layer they're inside there and so by applying this mask that is like a window into the layer then you know things are just sliding into that area where the mask is at and that is working out quite well for me um so hopefully that um kind of makes sense right uh hopefully that um [Music] that can that kind of kind of help uh for folks um so let us continue on how would this look in context okay let's take our fish fact and we will apply it we'll put it underneath this because like we said we are um we are going down the hill and so we're going to bring our fish fact down here we're going to put it under and whoop that looks pretty good because the motion of this thing kind of feeds into the motion of that other thing we did and what we might do what we might do in here is to just take these layers here and give them a pull a little bit just pull them pull them forward in time so that they kind of line up a little more so it's like this is crashing into that it feels like that's what's happening even though that's not even at all what's happening um after effects is um i know i pooh-poohed close-up magic not even 20 minutes ago but after effects has a lot in common with um the realm of illusion perhaps um and um what we're gonna do here is i'm gonna take a little bit of an aside here to talk a little bit about how things in after effects can appear to be the same but are structurally different and and and what that's all about right so let's say for example we want to um composite two things over top of each other i have some footage of a forest cool and let's see let's see let me grab real quick here here is some uh 4k footage of some fire right very large oh boy big big scary fire um and uh which is of course something that that you know threatens uh woods and wildlife more and more these days if i can just harp on our need for that kind of thing um and what we're gonna do is i want some text here so i'm gonna just type in the word fire and um i'm going to make this uh kind of chunky text going to make it quite large and we're going to go like this all right so i've got the word fire and what i would like is to have the word fire full of fire right so i'm gonna go to fire 4k movie here this this video and i'm going to go track matt and use the alpha matte of the text so now you know the word fire is simply full of fire right hopefully that um kind of makes sense um that as we talked about with track mattes you know we can we can fill one thing with the other this layer is is looking at the layer above it and deciding oh yes that is where that is where my pixels are going to be seen you could also use alpha inverted of that so we're punching a hole using using these things so hopefully that kind of makes sense the way the way that kind of goes i find that using video footage in this way can can cause some really interesting results and in particular if you start using very large chunky thick text uh you can get some interesting uh interesting looks here especially when um the uh footage um is is kind of moving when you have various moving elements happening so you know you see these trees are moving and and stuff is working out like that so what did i mean by the magic trick though let's talk a little bit about about that situation okay so if we wanted text to be full of the word fire so we've got fire and it's there we go so we've got this is referencing that and that is causing this here is the matte right and this has now created this this textural element i can move this around great if i wanted to then um slip something in behind here um i don't know um we could we could put anything back there right anything we anything we desire could go behind this element like that um this is working this is a setup um that kind of works um and do what we could do then what if though you wanted the order to be a little bit different in this so i'm going to accomplish the exact same look but i'm going to mess with how it happens and so we're going to go here we're going to remove that track mat and we're going to take the mat and we're going to just switch the order of everything around and now the forest is going to have an alpha inverted track mat and look at that we've accomplished the exact same image the same um sort of composition and we'll see if we can if we can do something about this but what's neat about this now is if you wanted to drop something behind the fire what it is is it's back here right it's it's back in this space right um and so we end up with uh uh sort of um the ability to drop things behind because we've created a hole right this is actually a hole in that so when we're talking about the kind of um challenges uh that happen in compositing and we're thinking about well what goes on top of what what goes behind what you know you know why would i use one method or another method you know a lot of this stuff comes down to um subjective ideas of of layer order and what you want to be um dropping on them right so for example uh gareth is saying what if we put some drop shadow on this right well if we were to do this right if we were to place some drop shadow you know it's a little bit more difficult because this is actually a hole so for example here with this if i were to put a drop shadow oh look at that i don't see any drop shadow at all what's going on with that well because there's there's not really much to see because because of the order in which things are applied to each other so you know even though this is cutting a hole in that there's there's no there's no thing there um which is a little bit weird isn't it um so if you wanted to say put a shadow inside how would we go about achieving that in particular say well show me the shadow only perhaps maybe that's going to get us uh closer to where we want to go we would want to um if you want to have a definition around the outside right like it's it's all about sort of um sort of figuring out the way that you want to order these things and what you want to do with them so there's a lot of creativity that can come from this and it is a lot more it's a lot more like a collage than um than other things right so yeah if you wanted inner shadow all these all these ideas um but let's let's see about sort of making something kind of interesting um out of this to kind of play with uh the parallax of this stuff all right um oh you would like to try some layer style well we could always try to operate these things so the layer style and we're going out a bit of a tangent now uh because i don't really intend to to dip into this stuff the the order of operations is a little bit different so we've now dropped a drop shadow on this and you'll notice that look at this it is doing what we wanted right the the the one thing didn't do it but this is doing it um so uh increase our distance a little bit so now you can see it's kind of like we're looking through it definitely makes it feel like we're looking through the whole of one thing and we are now looking into the world of another so hopefully that kind of um makes sense uh the way that kind of works right so there you go so any who's loving loving the suggestions from from the crowd um but there are a few things that i want to talk about uh because we've got we've got another um uh sort of 25 minutes together um there are a few other things that i wanted to dip into here with you um to talk about so that we make sure that we we get to all of these ideas so we've talked about going down the stairs we want to talk a little bit more about um making use of video in these things so in this particular project these two pieces of footage don't feel particularly um unharmonious with each other right so if you if you look at these two pieces of video and we just play you know between the two of them you know they're not so different from each other when we're talking about video we start to look at things like white balance we start talking about things like color correction and color grading um and the important thing here is that if you're creating a piece even if it's even just for social media posts or whatever you will probably want footage that feels harmonious with each other right and you know we got a bunch of blues here then we come in other slightly different blues but we're still in the blue zone right um here these clips look so different from each other that it is distracting so you would want to try to harmonize clips if you can harmonize your elements unless your your intention is for it to be jarring in this way like this seems so much more muted and washed out than sort of the vibrant uh fire situation that's going on therefore we should use some tools to try to bring these things into harmony and i like to just use the color correction lumetri color that i'm going to drop onto the forest here this could be a little a little bit of an introduction to the idea of of color correction um i'm only going to touch the basic correction tab here to to try to um increase the contrast say um in what we've got here so i'm going to crank crank crank cranking that up so you can see it's getting much more contrasted um as things go right and let's see let's see let's bring uh bring some of the darker elements down down down there we go that's that's moving good um maybe we'll bring this up a little bit bring that down so we're still we're really we're really over cranking our our contrast but as you can see it's starting to bring a lot more uh sort of vibrancy um into the space here um and so hopefully that um kind of makes sense and um we are uh now a little bit more uh harmonious in our elements all right so hopefully that's hopefully that's good and it kind of makes sense um with why we would do that that we would want kind of the contrast to kind of you know push push those things around and um i think lumetri has been in uh after effects for a while right so you know we can we can keep increasing things like the highlights whoa whoa we're getting crazy out there um so there are a lot of a lot of pushing you can do um with this stuff and that is even before you get into things like the creative um mode here or or we get into um various specific curves you can go really deep into color correction and stuff um and uh and that kind of thing so just this is a little a little touch on it um so that you know um kind of how how that stuff is gonna be doing um so you know since i we're assuming everyone's kind of a beginner um uh watching this we don't wanna go too far in there but something i did want to get into is um making something creative with this kind of thing we talked about um separating the elements and and and doing something interesting with them so what i'm going to do is create a weird amount of kind of parallax between them and we'll see kind of how that feels as we do it meaning i'm going to affect the scales of these things uh to create something um kind of uh maybe unique and interesting right that we are going to keyframe all the scales i've pushed all of their anchor points to be on top of each other so for this layer here i've moved the anchor point and oh i can't really see it because there we go now now you can hopefully see it a little bit better or uh unless i'm trying to make there we go i think hopefully you can see it you can use your pan behind tool to move the anchor point and hold down the command key to snap it into the center so hopefully that's going to be good all right so here we go we are going to uh grab these things and we are going to just affect their scale um over time right so let's see um let's say this matte let's make it smaller smaller smaller smaller let's take the forest and see here let's make it a bigger bigger bigger like this and then let's take the actual fire itself and we'll make it um uh smaller smaller smaller like that now these are all scaling at different rates uh which is going to cause kind of a strange uh feeling between them um and hopefully hopefully a good one right a good a good amount of strangeness um that's going on so hopefully that kind of makes sense uh with what we're doing there um and yes a question from uh elizabeth um uh all of the things everything is always available uh check it out on on behance check it out on youtube and uh hopefully that will be good so uh we've talked a lot about mats we've talked a lot about masks we've talked a lot about text layers um there was another question from yesterday that i did want to get into we need to make let us make one more um one more uh nature fact uh for people to enjoy um so let's see i'm gonna grab um let's see what do we got here clown fish i've got i've got a clip of clown fish in here um and i'm going to make clown fact um clownfish here boop so now we get to enjoy uh this footage of a clown fish looks nice fleming are swimming around the anemones um and let's see i'm just gonna drag it this way no no show me show me where it's up here yeah that's that's nice that's better don't don't hide from me clownfish we want to see you okay um so someone was asking yesterday about if i had a text layer and you wanted to animate different parts of the text layer in different ways so let's see let's see i'm going to take my text layer i'm going to draw um with it selected with the text tool i'm going to draw that selection box out and we're gonna create um a nice big paragraph block here uh clown fish are not as scary as clowns all right so because this is paragraph text when i scale this up it's gonna it's gonna bump like so um good so clownfish are not as scary as clowns true i hope i hope forever true um but uh there we go so we've got we've got this paragraph of text and the question was what if i wanted um what if i wanted some of the text to animate in one way what if i wanted um some of the text to come in from another way right and uh you know hopefully that's gonna be hopefully that's gonna be good um and we're gonna we're gonna see how um how this kind of works out the text animator like we said um generally applies so we're gonna we're gonna animate and let's say it was some from the right some from the left okay so i've got animator one here and i'm gonna you can rename this and i'm gonna say from the right and i'm just going to i'm going to size this up because we are going to dive a little bit deeper in here and so from this if we want to push everything to the right so here we go we're going to push to the right all right goodbye and in the range selector i'm going to put this at say 50 so there you go this stuff has returned to the middle so if i want these to come in from the right i would simply need to shrink the range selector here the range selector right we've selected um the first 50 of the stuff and we've pushed it off to one side okay and so now if i want it to return to the middle i simply need to shrink the range selector so that the start returns here like that so you can you can see i hope uh these two little red things here that are right so it's it's bringing that together okay i'm gonna go into the advanced and i'm going to go down to um based on not characters but words because that might help us here great so we've got things coming in from the right and what we want to do is to bring it in the other half from the other side right how would we achieve that well we can go ahead and duplicate this here this was an animator before so it was called just animator one and we renamed it to be called from the right i'm going to call this from the left and from the left we simply need to change um what is being selected really and so let's see uh from the left so this is going to be like minus 890 right and what i need to do is make sure that i am uh selecting the right amount of stuff here so everything from um from one side to the other is now going to sort of come together so let's see so that's all still working out like that and i'm just going to collapse this very similar to our our idea to our ideas uh when we were using the trim paths right we are ending up with um these two selectors that are now mushed together right they're selecting nothing but the point at which they're they've come together is right right in the middle and one of them you know goes up to select everything above and the other one's going down to select uh what's below right and so now it's like that yeah so there we go now now 50 of it is going this way fifty percent of it is going that way now granted um the the the the oopsie that i've made here is that we probably don't really want it to be hanging out at 50 right that's not the place um what we would want is um for it to be divided kind of into a couple of lines so what we're gonna do is i'm just gonna try to massage this a little bit to get it kind of um get it in the right spot right and um we'll see about about uh making that kind of uh happen it can get a little bit dicey here um only because hold on now i can't see everything hold on let me just make this small so that we can see what's happening um it gets a little bit dicey because we want to make sure that we are we are selecting all the things we want to select um if that makes sense so here we go let's select here we go so 62 seems to be the interesting spot so 62. is that going to be correct and then we bring it into 62 and 62. hopefully this is correct there we go so that is kind of working right now it's a little bit imprecise and it's imprecise because hold on we are going to grab these we're going to reset them grab these i'm going to reset them because we are using index instead of um we're using the index of the layer instead of um the so we're using the percentage instead of the index we wanted to we want to be using the index oh boy been talking i've been talking for too long i'm starting to lose my words so we're going to base it off of the index now this is something important to remember about um text layers when we're talking about index so notice that the numbers have changed they're not percentages anymore it says from 0 to 8 oh 0 to 8 what what is what's 0 to 8 well it's based on words so it's 0 to 8 words okay okay cool so for this first range selector let's select all of the words that we want right let's select um all of the words that we want there we go so we've selected all of these words i'm going to zero out these positional changes here just so things aren't bumping around as we uh mess around with this stuff so as you can see this one is now correctly selecting all of the things we're interested in and now down here let's make sure that this one here is likewise selecting only the things we're interested in right selecting you know um from five to eight right so there we go so we're going from from here to there um so hopefully that's good oh no we're having a lip sync problem eh oh that's weird it's probably because my you know various avatars and stuff are breaking down [Laughter] so uh let's see let's see we have about 10 minutes here so i'm going to try to rip this pretty quick so like we said this range selector is selecting this stuff and what we want to do is push it away so we're going to push it you know 800 pixels that way these ones down here we want to push 800 pixels the other way and then we are simply going to shrink um we're just going to shrink their selections um so that it's no longer a thing right and so this one is going to shrink like this this one is going to shrink like this and there you go clown fish are not as scary nailed it nailed it okay so hopefully that kind of answered the question from yesterday that we actually kind of got to um today i hope that was satisfying i hope the person that asked is is still around as well i don't totally um uh remember um uh uh who who was uh who had this quandary so i hope that that um does in fact answer uh the the question um that uh that worked um and uh yeah so hopefully that is good so let's do a quick recap of what we talked about today uh before we uh before we move along to the other programming that'll be happening uh here so we talked about on day one we talked about all the things we all the things we got into so here we're gonna go day one go into the example on day one we talked a lot about animating properties we talked about that today too but on day one we were talking about this idea of going up the stairs by having elements that animate on and then hang out and then and and they just build and build and build on top of each other we talked a lot about text animators we talked a lot about um uh parenting we talked about um some masks and mats as well and then today we kind of continued uh some of those ideas so today we talked about the concept of of going down the stairs right and the idea of of a composition that will be leaving it'll be taking its ball and going home and revealing what's underneath um so that we can we can have that kind of a movement if we want now granted uh we we should probably also talk about that sometimes you want elements to arrive and leave they they show up and they leave which will mean that your stairs are kind of like upstairs downstairs upstairs downstairs you know you're kind of going on this um more zigzaggy journey with elements in here but uh elements that arrive and leave are useful for moving into a premier context or creating templates out of so that'll be some more advanced stuff but i hope this has helped you kind of get started in these two methodologies then we also talked about um a new other ways to reveal layers so we talked a lot about masks today we talked a lot about mats today we talked a lot about trim paths uh trim paths were a big thing at the start here where we talked about yes you can you can trim just about any line you like um and it'll hopefully behave the way you expect um but trim paths is basically revealing along a path how much of the path will we stroke will we put strokes on um and so we went into that we went into using track mats we talked actually quite a bit about about track mats in this context track mats plus video equals fun times so i hope that it has been a sort of fun times for you and that kind of brings us to the end of the stuff well i hope that i hope that my my mouth is now synced up to the audio that you're hearing um i want to thank you all very much for hanging out with me today for for getting started in after effects i hope that this has helped you um with some good kind of beginner ideas some good fundamentals for you to go there and start making uh creative social posts some creative anything really logo reveals um you'll be doing all kinds of interesting text stuff and hopefully that that is that it's going to help if you would like more of me in your life i'm at ec abrams on the internet you can find me out there on twitter on instagram on behance i'm on here uh doing stuff every weekend so if you want more after effects in your life come hang out with me uh 10 o'clock on weekends here on behance dotnet if you want to just find me on there and follow you'll get notifications for when i'm doing live streams of the chill mograph brunch and also the make my logo move project um if you want more after effects tutorials you can find me at ec abrams on youtube anyway twitter instagram it's the same thing everywhere for me um but that'll do it thank you all so much for hanging out for being with me like i said we have a rich full day of activities coming up after this so do stick around your daily creative challenges are coming along and uh yeah it'll be it'll be great anyway be kind to each other stay creative and i will see you around the internet bye for now you

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 6,440

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: XG--I9ZPoAU

Length: 86min 15sec (5175 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020