How to MORPH in After Effects - Easy Tutorial

hey hello and welcome to this really fun tutorial by promotion because today i'm going to show you [Music] how to create a really cool morph so to follow me into after effects so in here real quick if you have any question about this morphing tutorial about after effects or visual effects in general then just leave me a comment down below and i promise i will answer all of your comments hey and i saw that many of you gave me a thumbs up for my videos which is absolutely great but i also saw that some of you gave me a thumbs down which is fine but let me tell you something if you give me a thumbs down then please write to me in the comments why you did that because in that way i can improve so now let's jump directly into the tutorial so let me quickly show you what i have filmed here i have filmed a part one and a part two and when i scrub through this this is me standing in front of a white wall in my living room and i did that to mimic the famous morphing shot from michael jackson's black or white music video and then i filmed the second shot and when i go down with the transparency by the t for transparency you see that they at the moment don't align but i had of course the timing already in mind so i could stage all of this so at the end you see when it starts i'm looking straight into the camera until the timing is over and then the heads move again so let's maybe also just focus on that part where both of the clips are visible so i hit b for begin and n for end right click on here and trim comp to work area because this is now the part that we want to morph so now you may think that morphing is a really really special effect and indeed it is in a shot like this but you also need to be aware of that morphing is a pretty common technique these days to morph from one shot into another for example a cg shot morphing into a real film shot for example if superman is landing on the street and you see him coming down from the sky so it's the 3d model that is actually landing on the street and then you set up the real shot on the street where the actor is standing there in the same pose and for stuff like this morphing is pretty awesome because you can in a really organic way bring the two shots together without even noticing it let me quickly also show you something and therefore i'm going to import this morph cut video here and when i scrub through this you see that this looks messed up but later on i'm going to show you how i use that for the hair because you can see this technique works really perfect for the hair this is an effect that is available in premiere pro so we are jumping into premiere pro later for this really cool morphing trick hey that could also be a pretty cool glitch transition but back into the main composition i have filmed two actors and they are aligned pretty perfect and actually that took quite a long time to bring it to that stage so now let's start with the morphing so what is morphing actually so it is a mixture of fading the clip bringing up the opacity and also warping the two images and basically this is what a morph is doing it blends two images and warps them at the same time so let's prepare this we have our plate at the first frame and at the last frame our effect should end so let's quickly go into the composition settings and set our start frame to zero and i'm going to the exact middle here and set a marker because i watched a few morphing tutorials out there and many of those made one big mistake they warp the image from beginning to end but this is not what i want to do so let me quickly set the two keyframes for the opacity so at first zero and at the end it's 100 and let's also make this middle point a keyframe so we have 50 percent here but that means in the first half of the shot my face is more visible because the second clip has an opacity from 0 to basically 49 but in the second part the woman face is more visible and now that it looks more organic i only want to warp the face that is less visible in other words i'm warping the woman face so that it aligns with my face over the first half and the second half i'm only warping my face the face that you see the most all the time will always look most human-like and not warped and this will make the whole effect look more realistic because you will always see a human face there warping from one to another and not a strangely warped face so let's do that so we go to the middle at first and now i'm trying to warp the woman face let's call this woman and call this flow and now i want to warp the face of the woman into my silhouette basically and i'm doing that with a liquify tool so i'm going to bring out the liquify drag it onto the top layer and now before we even start with the liquify tool let's quickly take a look at the tool but without actually working on that complex morph shot because i want you to really understand what the liquify tool is doing before we are using it so therefore i have created this really simple scene and i will apply the liquify effect onto my head by the way i have isolated the head so we can really just work on that and the rest of the layers i have hidden for now with that hide icon here and it's just the mask and the background so let's give ourselves some space here and let's have a look at the liquify tool so when you open it up you have different tools to choose from and we will go back to them once you have an overview what the effect is really doing so let's open up the warp tool options and here you can define a brush size as well as a brush pressure so by default the first tool is selected so this is the finger that simply smears so when i brush over this you see it smears and when i bring down the brush pressure it just smears less so let me do the same stroke on the other eye and you see just less has happened when i bring this up to 100 and paint the same stroke once again you see it just has more impact so let's quickly reset this and go to the next option you could define a mask here and basically if you draw a mask around a specific part that mask is simply not affected so if you only want to smear the eyes to a specific point you can draw a mask around them and then they are only affected until they reach the mask now you come to the viewing options and this is just that you have a better understanding of what you're doing you can see the mesh and then when you distort it you see it on the mesh for example if i would just smear something in here i would not see it on a white background but i can pretty good see it on the mesh and here you have just some options for small medium large as well as different colors so that you can see it better on different backgrounds of course you can keyframe the mesh and this is what we will do later on and you can also offset it and play with the distortion percentage which will simply also drive the effect from zero no effect at all and you can actually push this over 100 percent so once you have done everything you can still make it less obvious or more even though you have maybe painted hundreds of different strokes so now let's reset it once again because i wanted to tell you a little bit about the tools so by default the first tool is selected but there are also other handy tools like for example this shrink and this expand tool so shrinking does shrinking and by the way the longer you hold down the mouse button the more it will be affected and the other tool does exactly the opposite and maybe just one more but really play with those tools because they are really really fun to work with but just a quick tip i use those spiral tools on picture retouches all the time and let me show you how i do that i bring up the brush size really really big go down with the intensity with the pressure and then i just click on my mouth here and also on the other side and now if you don't take a look at the eyes but i just slowly start to smile a bit more and obviously you could overdo it and this is just for you to understand what you can do with that perfect and this is exactly what we are going to do today we are mainly focusing on the first tool and then we will just warp one face into another so in here this would be me warping my face into this rectangle shape and later on we will simply work one face into the shape of the other and therefore i'm also going to show you how to create those helping outlines with a really nice effect in just a few minutes okay but before we get too crazy in here let's jump back to the main tutorial and start with the liquify tool and i actually want to work with that first tool here let's maybe make it a little bit bigger and now what you could do is just smear over it but i'm not sure if you can really see that this good because you can't really tell which is my mouth and which is her mouth and so on so let's make this a little bit more easy and therefore i'm clicking onto my layer and apply the find edges effect when i solo just my face you see now you get those nice outlines and this really helps a lot when you want to align everything now so let's go back to our tool and you see and let's actually make it way bigger and now let's see we want to smear everything into that shape and now the lines really come in handy because you can it's basically like like a painting book where you simply paint to the lines nothing easier than that same over here now we just bring it into the lines of course we also do this with the mouth and obviously the more accurate you are the better the result and let's also try to bring the hair into the position and bring that top part down so that it just somehow fills in the same space but also as i told you before we are going to have a look on how to automate the hair process in combination with premiere pro because that's also the reason why i had her having the hair up and only opening it after the effect is done because this haircut looks way more similar to mine now if you just take a look at the shape okay maybe the chin could go down okay so this is pretty close and if you take a look this is what she would look like with my proportions so now let's set a keyframe for the distortion mesh and we go back to the end and just reset it okay and remember we said at the beginning where my face is most visible i also want to warp the woman face into mine so let's bring up the opacity just to see it and let's also quickly go into our liquefy tool and warp everything into my shape and for the end part we are then going to warp me into the woman and not the other way around so always the layer that is less visible is the one that you want to warp because a warped face doesn't look that nice okay let's quickly do this and as i told you the more accurate you're doing this the better the result will be in the end so let's maybe just bring this down to half resolution to speed this up a little bit so now let's set the opacity back to zero and also get rid of the find edges effect or simply disable it because we will use it later on and let's quickly preview this and you see it already works pretty good at the beginning because as i told you we have warped the face now so when you see my face until the middle this works already pretty good but at the end you see we have a lot of stuff that is not really working and this is because now when we see the face of the woman the most we need to warp my face so let's just do this we can simply copy the liquify effect over to my layer of course we need to get rid of the keyframe and reset it real quick now we can set a keyframe again i'm not going to touch this now but let's go to the end and we are warping myself into the woman at the end because in the middle the woman is already warped into my position okay so to see it better i'm bringing down the opacity of the girl apply find edges effect and start liquefy all of this and what sometimes helps is to just lock the layer that you're not working on so that you're not by accident warp the wrong layer so let's do this let's set this back up to 100 opacity and of course disable the find edges effect and let's have a look on what we have created so far and with just three distortion keyframes one for the girl in the middle and the beginning and one on me at the end we already have a pretty cool result and now this is just fine tweaking if you find a spot where something is not aligned perfect like in this case for example the mouth here then just have a look okay my face is most visible so i'm now going to the woman and adjust it or maybe over here now you see we can see her better so now i have to distort my layer so i'm going onto the flow layer and maybe work a little bit on the ears here as well as on that side and i would say that already looks pretty cool and obviously yes it is not totally right but obviously yes we need to work a little bit more in that and a quick tip the eyes will really sell the effect so if you just make sure that the eyes are aligned perfect then you are good to go but honestly it took me like five minutes to create the three key frames and i only have 20 frames in total so let's just skip every other frame and set a keyframe there and then we will have an absolutely stunning result and this is where i leave it in after effects at the moment but hey take your time and go through all of the frames it's really worth it because it's all in the details so now for the perfect morphing trick the trick that changes everything let's jump into premiere pro i have already prepared an example video and let me just drag and drop this onto this new sequence icon and this will automatically create a sequence with matching settings this is what i have recorded hey hello and welcome to this really fun tutorial by flowmotion and now i don't really know what to say but but that doesn't really matter because today i'm going to show you a really cool effect called morph cut and this is just pretty typical if you do interview scenes or talking head scenes normally your interview partner doesn't give you answers that fit 100 so you have to cut out a sentence over here and then you have to cut out a few words on another part and you don't always have the chance to for example add b-roll on top of it to hide the cut because sometimes it's just visible like in this shot so everything makes sense until here this really fun tutorial by flow motion um okay so let's just cut after flow motion and the shortcut is c for cut and then doesn't really matter because today i'm going to here i am back on track so let's also set a cut here and simply delete the middle part by hitting delete and also click on the gap and delete the gap as well so now this is what we have tutorial by flowmotion because today i'm going to show yes now the text is perfect but of course you can see that jump cut because and this is exactly where the morph cut comes into play because it was developed exactly for that to now morph from take one to the second take to make it look seamless and this is super simple over here at the effects just type in morph and by the way if you don't have the effects here just click on the effects workspace here and if you don't see that simply go to window workspaces and click on effects and now everything should look like in my window so now we have the morph cut and we simply drag and drop it between the two video files because if i drag and drop it over here nothing happens and the same here so you really have to bring it between the two clips and now you see the indicator and just let go and automatically starts to analyze let's just zoom in a little bit and you can also do that by holding down the alt button and use your mouse wheel and quickly muting myself but you can still see i'm talking until that point and here i start talking around here so i can trim the transition and i can also move it to one side or the other side which makes this really powerful and flexible because now i can really fine tweak it and while this is analyzing if you want a finer control over the morph cut you can also tweak that in the morph cut settings and you see the settings when you click on the morph cut itself there you have them and here for example you can change the duration but as i showed you you can also do that over here with the handles on the sides and you can play with the alignment so start at the cut or start at the end and you can also show the actual source over here and you can always re-analyze it so now it has finished to analyze let's have a look what we have here hello and welcome to this really fun tutorial by flowmotion because today i'm going to show you a really so have you seen that when i scrub through this you see it actually morphs from one clip to the next one so if you just take a look at my face you would not notice that there's a cut in between here and i use that effect in almost all of my interview shots and believe me i do a lot of those so now that we know what this effect can do i brought out the two clips again have set the cut in between and now let's bring out the effect morph cut and i just drag it in here and now it just takes a few seconds to analyze this great and there we have it and you see it has not really worked for the face at all but that doesn't really matter because the hair actually works pretty good there's no semi-transparent areas and it's really warping from one into another and hey this alone could be a really really cool effect but let's quickly render this out by going to file export media and i'm rendering this as a apple prores 422 call it here hit save export and that just took a few seconds and let's just import it here and by the way i'm just double clicking into the projects window here import and i can now bring this on top and two things i have done at first pretty easy you could just mask out the hair part and obviously we also need to feather this mask and maybe even adjust it and it would be even better to keyframe the mask but let's just have a look at this so now you see while our warping and blending goes on the way we have created it the hair is now automated by the morph cut in premiere pro of course i think you would need to adjust some of those masks a little bit but hey here's another thing that i have done so just duplicate the hair and i'm soloing this real quick and let's bring out a keyer in this case color key and i'm taking the linear color key now i can simply click on the skin tones and fine tweak this a little bit and to get rid of the white i can simply duplicate the effect and pick the white i could also play with the settings here but in that way i have like finer control for both of it you see with this one i can now blend in the hair but with the top one i can blend in the part where it interacts with the skin so this is really handy and let's unsolo this and you see now we actually have a separate asset with only the hair well you can now really play with the assets that you have created to really get an organic look for this and you can also go back into premiere and simply adjust the morph cut a little bit and that will create a completely new asset for you and this is also where i'm going to leave you because now you may want to take some time tweaking some of your keyframes and really make this a perfect shot and if you like this tutorial then feel free to give me a thumbs up a like or a comment and hey even better subscribe to my channel because in that way youtube will show this video to way more people out there and then i can also do more of those tutorials and i really love doing those but for now i wish a lot of fun morphing into someone else in after [Music] effects [Music] you

Channel: flomotion

Views: 79,976

Keywords: aftereffects, flomotion, tutorial, motion, graphics, easy, beginner, morph, morphing, morpheus, michael jackson, black or white, black, white, morph cut, premiere, premiere pro, liquify tool, liquify, find edges, interview, talking head, cut, jump cut, shapes, shape, music, music video, green screen, new features, after effects 2021, professional, advanced, tips, spill, black & white, after effects, after effects tutorial, how to, set up, making of, behind the scenes, vfx, visual effects, cg, cool

Id: OUMve8N4mj8

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021