Learn After Effects 2020: FOR BEGINNERS

[Music] how's it going guys joshua lefemi here have you ever seen motion graphics that you've kind of mentally compartmentalized as something that you would never be able to make yourself i mean we see stuff like this all the time maybe it's an intro sequence to a tv show or a really awesome lower third or any type of animation that involves graphics being animated a lot of the time with text i have one answer for you in two words after effects and i have an in-depth tutorial that's going to show you how to use this really powerful but really easy to use software presented by olufemi member one of my good friends and one of my vfx mentors nick he's chilling over in sydney australia if you happen to live in australia as well comment below whether you're team woolies or team kohl's and i'll tell you whether you're right or wrong alright guys so i got two plane tickets one for me and one for you and we're going to take an overnight flight down under to learn from this man of wonder in addition you're going to realize with the more after effects tutorials that you do that you're going to need a source of high quality legal and downloadable graphics to actually use in your animations in after effects this is where envato elements comes in envato elements is a subscription service that gives you unlimited downloads for the most incredible stock footage like fog and cloud overlays aerial footage fire lightning they also have incredible vfx packs premiere pro and after effects templates sound effects royalty free music literally anything that you need as a video editor just by clicking the link below you'll automatically get a free first month you'll see that free coupon for that free first month at the very last page when you're done signing up nick the floor is yours thanks josh uh just gonna dive straight into after effects today um if you've never used it before don't worry it's not as hard as it looks it is daunting to begin with because when i started using after effects i had no idea what i was doing but thanks to some really great teachers and some great video tutorials you can get there and i'm gonna try and hold your hand through this whole process so don't worry we're going to take you all the way from everything you need to know that is going to be relevant to today's project to basically rendering out your own videos so stay tuned we're going to take you all the way through and i'm excited to show you what we're about to do so here we are this is after effects may or may not have seen this program before but hey look basically i'm gonna assume that you know nothing about this program so we're gonna dive right into it the first thing you gotta know is what these different windows are so we've got a whole bunch of these tools at the top here um the one the main things you're going to have to know are this arrow which is essentially the selection arrow if you don't have that arrow selected um it's very difficult to basically select anything the hand tool is a drag tool basically a shortcut to that is just press spacebar so if you're in if you're in this mode and you just want to drag this around all you have to do is hold the space bar and this will come up this is the magnifying tool which you won't really ever use i never use it actually there are keyboard shortcuts for this thing this is the rotation tool again pretty self-explanatory if there's an object there and you want to rotate it this is the rotation tool which goes like this very different to the selection tool which is used to move the objects around the canvas this is a camera tool which we'll cover a little bit later on this is called the pan behind or the anchor point tool now every object has an anchor point which is this little cross hair thing here so when you have the anchor point tool selected it allows you to move that anchor point around and why is that important well it's mostly important for things like rotation and scaling so i'll see i'll show you why that's important right now you look at this object and you want to rotate it so let's grab the rotation tool and it's rotating around the center which is you know what you'd expect it however let's move this pan behind tool and let's move it to this side and sort of close to the edge just have to be around the edge but you'll see what i mean so if we start rotating things it rotates from the edge over there so you kind of think of it like a a pin that you you're pinning things down and likewise when you start scaling things so to scale things you can grab this tool the arrow the selection tool and drag one of these corners down and you can kind of see it drags according to where that is in the center likewise if you use the pan behind tool and you moved it here and then you dragged it drags from that corner there next the next item here is the shape tool the rectangle tool we'll come back actually let's come back to the shape tool because we're not quite there yet this is also the pen tool which we'll get through as well text tool pretty self-explanatory you just grab something and then use type hello there well you know when i when i can see what i'm typing hello there but the text is very small we'll just make that a little bit bigger there you go hello there there you go there is the text i'm just going to ignore these next three tools because i never use them they're to do a painting within after effects and i never use these tools the roto brush tool basically used for rotoscoping and then the puppet tool which is great for animation i didn't use to use it as much but i do use it a lot now we have the project panel here this is this is essentially where you throw if you use premiere this is your bin it's effectively the place where all your assets and your comps and everything you're going to be using for the project is going to live so it is wise to keep this place organized because if you need to look for it it's a lot easier when it's organized we have a whole bunch of things down here as well so this is the interpret footage tab it's not really relevant for today's tutorial so we're not going to go into much depth but it just allows you to uh tell after effects what kind of footage is coming in if it comes in incorrectly or to set frame parameters or field parameters etc it gets very technical so we're not going to go into it this button creates a new bin basically allowing you to organize your assets within the project folder so it's very handy especially if you have large projects and finally we have the new composition button which we're going to use next firstly we're going to make a new comp so here we go that's the new comp button now a comp is basically a new scene or a new sequence for people in premiere think of it like your window to your workbench so people that people can see they can't see all the messy parts but they can see the final work through the composition and so we're going to call this opening title we're going to make this 1920 by 1080 square pixels frame rate can be whatever you like i'm going to pick 24 just because that's kind of just a fun number to play around with and you can have a start time code it's it's uh default is zero basically saying that the you know the timeline starts at zero and then we're going to make the duration um 10 seconds because it's not a very long comp background color can be whatever you like really it doesn't have to be black it can be white if you like but that doesn't actually show up uh in the final composition if you override it with another background which is exactly what we're going to do so i'm going to press ok and here we go here is i'm going to make a new folder so i got a bin lesson 1.1 here we go i have actually already done this so i'm trying to do this again okay so now that we've set the comp up it's probably a good time now to basically save the project so all you have to do is go up to file save project you can press save as or save i just like to press save we'll just do save as because i've already done this um but it'll just bring you to a dialog box and we're just going to name it so we'll just call it um my first after effects project now important to that is to make sure that your auto saves are turned on so i would suggest going to the tab up here where it says after effects and go to preferences and then go to auto save now by default this i don't remember but i think it is turned on now but it is worth worth while checking just to be sure so save every 20 minutes or however long you can say 30 minutes i like to save every 15 minutes actually so i don't know i should change it to 15. and um maximum project versions i'm actually going to make that 10 because i actually like it 10. and you can save it right next to the project or in a custom location wherever it is i like to keep it next to the project because now i know then i know where it is so we're just going to click ok and that is done so right at the vat here you have the this is the comp so if we click on this you can see this is the comp right here lots of checkered squares looks a bit like a giant chessboard um we're going to turn off the transparency grid for a second so that's this little checkered button down here which is already checked for me i usually have it on by default but you know you might not want it so we're just going to turn that off one thing that i always dislike is sometimes adaptive resolution is turned on and i hate it because it doesn't give me an accurate representation and sometimes the quality drops too much com window here is a view window effectively the same thing as premiere this is where all the action happens so this is where you're going to drag and move everything away around this is your workspace so this is where you're going to make all the magic happen you have a couple of settings here that you can muck around with one of the most relevant ones is the quality setting now this doesn't mean the final quality of the render will be this quality it's just so that you can see things after effects when it gets down to nuts and bolts of it can be a very heavy program to use so you just need to be aware that if you need to toggle between quality settings you can do that here at the moment i said an order because at this point this project that we're going to do is not particularly heavy um this essentially is the toggle the mask and shape path visibility and this is more relevant later kind of not obvious right now but i'll show you soon and here we are we have this type we have basically the various guidelines we have title safe action which is this again doesn't render up on screen it's just there as a guide these are just guides all of them we also have we can turn this off and we can show the proportional grids if you want that you can modify those proportional grids as well you can have a general grid as well um and rulers will come up so we'll turn rulers on just so you can see what they are if you use photoshop you'll know very much what these are so if you want to set up your own grid either just drag in the top where the black corners here and the empty corners here and just drag in some rulers for different things as well so we're going to create our first item and so we're going to go here we're going to make sure this is selected the add selection tool is selected we're going to come down here and with the right click we're going to click new and then create our first thing which is a solid it's just going to be a black side we're just going to make it black so just go okay and that is our first item now as you can see here nothing very exciting because well quite frankly it's just a black solid in a black screen we've created our first solid which is great now we're going to create a little bit of a light vignette in the background so what we're going to do here is we're going to click on this solid and we're going to duplicate it and then create a different color out of it so what we're going to do is go up select we're going to select the black solid and we're going to go to edit and we're going to go down and we're going to select duplicate which is command d or control d depending if you're on a mac or a pc now we've just created a black solid which is you know fine but we want to do is we want to edit the color of this solid now we can go to layout and we go to solid settings and you can see it says shift command y or shift alt y if you're on a pc i'm going to click on that and let's just make it a nice you know warm blue there you go you can kind of see it changing right now and there we go now i was talking about mask before right so this is the mask tool now the mask tool is kind of fun because there are lots of different shapes you can pick from now if you just select that and then you select the mask tool you can see it draws a rectangle and it draws a mask around the item that you have what's cool about this though is you can also invert it and select everything except the item that you're selecting so it's it's kind of good if you need to make masks like that now we want to get a circle there's different tools you can use there is the square rectangle tool which gives you rounded edges we also have the ellipse tool which is what we're going to be using now you can see here is it gives you an oval a not even oval uh basically a a squished oval if you just drag it out however if you hold shift like i am you get a perfect circle and then you can double click on it and then you can move it to the center um just to cover the other ones that are there you can see there is a polygon tool which ironically is a pentagon but it gives you a hexagon as the default shape don't ask me why it just does um which is not widely relevant but it is there and a star tool again for those star wipes you want to do now let's grab the circle tool the ellipse tool and we're just going to hold shift and we're just going to drag one out on top of the blue and we're going to mask it and we're just going to double click on it and so this these bounding boxes come up and then we're going to move this to the top just so that you know they're roughly about the center it doesn't have to be exact roughly by the center about half the circle all right now what we're going to do here is when you created the mask you've got a whole bunch of properties so if you see the mask here we've got mask one and you've got a whole bunch of properties here so actually let me just bring this back down just so illustrate the point a little bit better the mask path here the first property here is the mask path now this is essentially just related to animation of the mask now if we were to set a keyframe and i'll explain keyframes in a set but just so you understand the principle here and in animation if you set a keyframe and then set another keyframe where the shape is different for example we move the mask down here you'll see the shape actually moves so that's effectively what the mass path property is therefore if you want to have moving masks square for rotoscoping or you just want to do shapes that move the mask feather seems pretty explanatory just if you dial it up you can see the edges become very feathery the opacity deals with the opacity of the mask or how the the opacity of how the mask affects certain things um and the expansion is well you guessed it expands the path of the mask shape this can all be used in conjunction you can feather it and then expand the mask as well likewise so again super useful um and good to know because we're going to know a lot more about that later so we're going to move this back up again to where we were now what we're going to do is we're going to click on the feather and we're going to feather it out as much as we can around a thousand let's just a thousand we couldn't i'm just saying older versions of after effects you couldn't do a thousand thousand was the max but in this case we're going to go to about a thousand now right now we could drop the mask opacity to get the opacity down but that's just not good practice in my opinion i like using the actual opacity on the object itself so let's go into those properties itself now this is just a general object and most objects will have slightly different parameters a solid object will have different parameters to a text object will have different parameters to a shape object for example but in this case we're just looking at a plain solid object so let's twirl down one of these objects for a second and these are both classified as solid so just keep that in mind so let's talk this down what have we got here we've got the mass layer but we put that on ourselves but what else we got here we have a transform right so here's all the transform properties and likewise we can see oh there we go we can move things around we can scale things up and down we can have the anchor point move up and down as well rotation we have all the nice properties here now that's all great and we also have opacity now the reason why i choose opacity rather than choosing the opacity of the mask which i saw there is because this opacity from a shortcut point of view is way easier to access than this one because you have to twirl down and get to this opacity but watch this there's a couple of cool shortcuts you can use with um with a lot of these masks with with a lot of these main properties the first one you can use is p and that automatically brings up the global positioning property you can also press r and that brings up the global rotation property for this thing you can also press t and that brings you the global opacity property for this thing and that's why you want to try and use the global property as much as you can just so it's easy to get access to um because if it's something like a mass layer it's not that it's impossible to get to it it just takes a little bit longer to get there now we're going to scrub this a little bit to let's drop this opacity to about about there let's say 47 let's say 40. we can type in we can actually type in 40. so you can actually click on it and when this gets highlighted you can actually type in actual numbers yourself or you can just click on it and just muck around and see what you like all right now we're going to do one more thing we're going to add another color now colors that complement this warm blue are magenta so we're going to try that as well so we're going to do is we're going to go to edit and we're also going to duplicate it again or if you like you can just press command d or control d if you're on a pc now likewise if you were going to do the solid we're going to go to the solid settings again and we're going to pick another color now it's obviously overlapping with the blue and that's not great so what i'm going to do is now carefully we're not going to select the we're not going to select the object which is you can see here is if you select the object you can see this nice nasty line at the top here and that's because the mask is working within the constraints of the shape itself and what i mean by that is that if we were to turn off the mask m is the shortcut to get to the mask you press m and then we turn off the mask you can kind of see the whole this is this whole object here this this solid object is only effect what's visible is only affected by what's in the mask so we're not we're not pushing around the solid we're pushing around the mask so if we turn that back on again and then we pull we double click on the mask the solid stays still but the mask will travel and that's where we get things like this is where we can kind of muck around with things so just keep that in mind if you see if you see edges that are really sharp and they shouldn't be in your composition it's probably because the solid has moved so we've got our background sorted let's let's get into the text tool now the text tool is this tool up here the big t pretty obvious um now we're just going to type in some letters so all you have to do is just go on to your main timeline here and grab click on that and then click here and automatically this cursor comes up now you can type whatever you like there is a character window that is here and it is not here where you can find it is going to window and right underneath here there is a character window and that will pop up somewhere in your timeline likewise i would suggest having paragraph and effects and presets you'll need you'll need both those things up as well i've got the text here and we're going to call this after effects tutorial i know super original don't don't at me guys all right now let's change this to a font that i actually like so we're going to go itc oh my god it doesn't have to be this one i just like this one because it's my jam the problem here is that um you know you're working on a project and maybe you think oh i don't like the name of this this maybe i want to change it or maybe i want to reuse this so let's call this after effects is the best now you spend all that time centering it and centering it but it's kind of annoying because it's not now it's not centered again and you're like oh and why is it not centered and it's like and maybe just one of the words to say after effects and it's like well now it's not centered again so what can we do well if there's a couple properties up here there's the paragraph properties here and there's the character properties here so what we want to do is we want to double click on this and then select the center now the reason why you want to select center is that when you start moving things around now let's just say we we let's bring up our process here so remember i told you about the grid and guidelines we're going to bring up the title safe and that tells you directly where everything is in the center so let's say we line it up in the center here now now that it's centered um when you do re-type things [Music] everything is basically centered in the middle justified in the middle that's basically just like a word document right if you want to make quick adjustments i would suggest sort of making all your text stuff justified to the way that you would like it so if it is going to be in the middle make sure it's justified to the middle if it is justified to the right like if we do this and justify to the right and you know that it's always going to come from the left to the right then you know do it that way otherwise likewise if you want to do it from left right to the left do it that way so that when you when you do change the text it's always going to be lined up to there but in this case it's always going to be lined up to the middle so we're going to bring it to the middle now if you want to quickly get it to the middle the quickest way to do it is to hold down command or alt and press home right and that brings it straight back to the middle and that's just a really easy way to do it now if you can see here the anchor point unfortunately is actually not in the middle of this thing and to be honest you could center it using this tool which is fine but you don't really know if you've got it right dead center and i dare say i don't really have it right in the center now i'm using my wheel mouse to zoom in and out but you can easily just use the comma or plus button at the bottom next to just above the spacebar to zoom in and out and use the spacebar to move around hold down the spacebar and the mouse to move around to get right into the nitty-gritty of things but i'm just using my mouse just so you're aware to zoom in and out you can set that up on your mouse as well it's not a big deal i'm using the mouse wheel but plus sorry full stop and commas to zoom in and out of your timeline you could also use the magnifying glass but honestly don't do that um all right so this is this is not bad but just say you know for whatever reason and it will happen just say the anchor point is out here for some reason and you need to get it back to the center i don't want to actually do this every single time because that actually happens more often than not more than i'd like so i'm going to try and center this and i can only give you the shortcut for this because i actually don't know where it is in the menu i couldn't find it but if you hold down option command or alt and home it will actually bring the you'll actually bring the anchor point back to the back to the center and that is dead center of the object of what you selected works for pretty much everything there's a couple instances where it might not work but for pretty much everything else it does work so you're welcome anyway so here we go let's call it after effects tutorial all right uh let's do a little bit of kerning on here so let's just make the letters a little bit wider so you know just so it just looks a little bit cooler now let's just bring this up just to touch i actually think that text is just a little bit big so let's just bring it down just to touch you could alternatively do it using the scale property so if you press s you can actually scale things through that as well but i just like setting my type set correctly first and then mucking around things afterwards because i don't like scaling things because scaling things uh it's really potato potato really but that's just the way i like to do it that's my personal preference so you're welcome to do it with the scale as well but i prefer you type setting at first and then doing other tweaks later um all right and now we're going to make a second title so we're just going to duplicate this so command d or control d and we're just going to drag this down and i'm going to call this our first tutorial and i'm just going to shrink this down again make this like a like a subtitle and bring this up here all right so there you go that's kind of uh that's kind of how you set those titles up now what we're also going to do is just put a little bit of an effect on here now we're going to put our first effect on so if we go up here there's an effects and presets uh tab up here which has a lot of things in it and you know you it i i dare say there is actually nobody who actually knows all about every single plugin that's in here there's a lot of mysterious plugins here and i'm still i'm still discovering a whole bunch of them but there's a lot of great built-in ones here and one of the ones i want to introduce you to first is one called gradient ramp now i'll show you what that is once i get it so gradient ramp i've actually got i got to type the whole thing because it's hard to find all right so gradient ramp here we go so at for the most part gradient ramp is well it's a gradient ramp if you ever use something like this in photoshop you'll see what what it is but effectively it just makes a ramp for you on any object effectively with an alpha channel or even without the alpha channel if it's just a solid it'll just go from black to white straight away and i'll just show you really quickly on an example so let's just make gradient ramp this is an example here if i make a new solid and um to make a new solid super quick if you just want to if you want shortcuts alt y will get you a new new solid and you just make your color super quick now let's drag that gradient ramp onto here and you'll see exactly what it does from the top the top color is the start color and the bottom color is the end color and that's essentially all that is it's just creating a gradient ramp from top to bottom that can be thrown on pretty much anything all right so now you know what that is let's go back to the opening title so we've got the opening we've got the gradient ramp here just to kind of give it a little bit of a cooler ramping look on the tutorial now we might want to actually reverse that i actually want to make it look like the light's coming from the other way so what's really cool with gradient ramp is you just swap the colors and that's pretty much it a little bit dark at the bottom so i'm just going to pull the last color out just a little bit so the black isn't so deep it's hard to read i'm going to drag this effect straight onto i'm going to copy this effect so we can just go if we just select the effect here go edit copy and then go on to the second piece of text and we go edit paste you could easily use control v and uh control uh control control v and ctrl c just like you know in word to do it now you can kind of see the ramp points have moved so what we're going to do is we're going to pull these down so they're nice and uh kind of what we want to see and there you go we've got our first um there we go now we're not then we're not looking too bad all righty so let's get on to the next section which is basically um creating uh a type on effect for the second title now that is really straightforward and something that just kind of you know just just adds a little bit of you know quick animation um there's a whole lot of text presets that i'm not going to go into here but a lot of them um semi-useful a lot of them not i would say i knew i hardly ever use pre-text presets for anything i usually design my own because i'm a bit special that way but i would uh there is one preset that i use quite a lot and it's just simple and it's tasteful and it's just a typewriter preset so if you look up for typewriter here we go typewriter animate in and we're going to drag it on and you can kind of see here it disappears which is not great but if you press play or spacebar here's what happens you can kind of see that here it is it's playing back now that's a bit slow um now i want to speed that up so how do you do that okay so what's happened here just so you understand in a very generic sense is that i've just i've just dragged an effect sorry not an effect i've just dragged a preset onto this piece of text which the text knows how to interpret and if you go to the text if we twirl this down and i was telling you how it depends on the object this is a text item it has different parameters and what you didn't see beforehand was that this animator was not there so it's just added an animator onto the text and just added a couple of keyframes which is quite windy which is all designed and so um as you can see here the keyframes are there so we want to do is drag these keyframes in just a little bit so it types a bit faster and there you go it's typing a lot faster um i will explain keyframes in a sec but just so you understand just these little diamonds are called keyframes and these are essentially telling the telling after effects how to go from one point to another so the first point here is that it's telling you it doesn't want any letters and then the second point here is telling you that it wants all the letters so it's just figuring out okay what i need to do to get from the first from no letters to all letters and it goes from left to right there's a couple more parameters in there that basically tell the tell the animator how to behave but for the most part that's all you really need to know so there you go that is our first animation in this after effects tutorial now the second one i want to do is to basically make this top title appear out of nowhere almost like it's rising out of the ground not the bottom of the screen but just imagine there is a piece of ground plane here and it's rising out of nowhere so what we need to do for that is create a an object called a matte now an object a matte is very much just a very simple shape that we're just going to create using a shape tool so not a solid you could use this doing a solid but i'm going to use a shape tool in this instance so here's the shape tool we're going to drag we're going to grab the rectangle tool and we're going to go and there are a couple there are two parameters up here we've got the fill tool and the stroke tool so what we're going to do here is we're going to grab the fill tool we're going to fill it in with something something really obnoxious like green is good because it means if we see it on screen it means that we forgot to turn it off and that's exactly what we want to do and up here the stroke is set to 0.5 we don't care about the stroke right now what we're going to do is going to turn it off so click on the word stroke there are a couple parameters here we've got no no stroke we've got a solid color a linear gradient and a radial gradient for the meantime we're going to click no gradient not sorry no stroke and so it is empty now let's create our rectangle so what to do is go from a corner that is outside the screen and then we're just going to drag it all the way to the other side now what you want to do is make sure that the green is covering the bottom of that word it doesn't be exact but good enough and make sure it's covering the top of that as well now see what i'm saying by obnoxious we're not going to see this green and we want to make sure we never see the screen so that's why i always make them obnoxious colors because i don't want to see them and if i do see them i don't want them accidentally popping up in my comps so that's why i have them there now this after effects were the the text for after effects is here so what we're going to do here is we're just going to use the the left click and we're just going to hold it and drag it up so it's above the word our first tutorial now we've got a couple of parameters here now if you can't see this we've got mode and track matte and so we got mode transparency and trackmat so we got these three things if you can't see them you may need to toggle this switch here or alternatively you need to turn on one of these bad boys here um you probably need to have this you'll just have to click around until you find it but that's that's exactly what we're looking for and so you've got the word normal and then you've got the word none that's basically the default for any after effects item that comes in and they all have it apart from a handful of things this one doesn't have it the reason why this particular item doesn't have it is not because it's a shape layer but because it's the first in the list as you can see here after effects now does not have a track mat above it and you'll see why in a second so what we want to do is effectively i'm just going to turn the opacity down just so you understand what i'm saying um what we want to do effectively is that the word the word after effects will only appear within this green square but if it's outside the green square is what we want to do so if it appears down if it if it if it's down here it won't be visible so what we're going to do is get the shape what we're going to do is tell the word to inherit the sh the area above it and telling it that the area above it is the only place it's allowed to be visible in any area outside the area is invisible and you do that by using this thing called a track mat and so if you go here where it says none click the first option which is alpha map and you'll see that the green square will suddenly disappear and voila now that's just that's just now now that the after effects tutorial now that the text artifacts tutorial has inherited the property of the one above it um it's now aware that okay i i see the shape above me and now i know where i can be and where i can't be so let's set our keyframe here so we're going to press p to bring up the position uh properties of this particular text tool so press p and now we're going to set a keyframe so this little stopwatch here is a quarter of well it's it allows you to set a keyframe so we're going to set one around here around the 121 actually that's a bit too fast let's make it around the 15 let's make it around 13. so we're going to set right around the 13 frame mark we're going to click here and now we're going to go back to the very beginning so it's at 0 0 0 and we're going to grab this positioning tool you can kind of see here we can just drag it and just drag it all the way down now you're going to see it's a little bit crooked so we don't want that hold shift when you when you do drag it down and it'll either it'll just go straight down or if you will go this way it will go straight across but it'll only go in one direction so only one axis which is what we want and kind of see here what i'm saying it disappears so when you do play it back and we press spacebar you can kind of see it appears out of nowhere now if you rather me clicking through and watching it over and over again like that which is super annoying i like to set up my playback so it's very short now one thing here on the timeline here this big gray bar is called the work is basically the work area and so it's too long in terms of what i want to preview and if i only want to preview here to here i don't want to wait for it to play all the way to the end and then come back because that's 10 seconds so if i just want to preview a certain area let's just drag this back here and now when we preview it'll just play back that section just so we can kind of see what the motion is like it's a little bit easier sometimes you just want to watch stuff over and over again just to get an idea of um effectively how to do how the animation is looking all right that's not looking too bad there's a couple of things we can definitely fix with this so let me introduce you to one of the coolest things in after effects and that is about easing keyframes now what is that what does that even mean well in a nutshell this the way that the text comes up is really rigid it doesn't look very nice it kind of just comes up and just goes clunk right like clunk it's not pretty we want to basically introduce it so that it gradually comes to a stop that's what they call easing keyframes now as an example i'm just going to show you two examples here we've got linear keyframes and ease keyframes now i'm just going to turn off the ease keyframes for a second just so you understand what i'm talking about so here you can kind of see the ball is going from left to right it looks like it almost doesn't quite bounce at the walls but it's very jarring it just goes left to right um almost like you know there's no there's no momentum there's no energy transfer it's just going backwards and forwards in a very linear fashion however if we do intrud if i do put e's keyframes on this you kind of see that it kind of slows down towards the ends almost like it's trying to come to a stop and that looks a little bit more organic from an animation point of view and it's kind of what we're trying to go for now if you kind of see these both together side by side it's very obvious to see that the ease keyframes are a lot more appealing than the linear keyframes and you kind of see if we do a frame by frame comparison you kind of see the frames in the linear one are all constantly at moving at a very constant rate across the screen whereas the ease keyframes slowly speed like uh further apart um towards the middle and closer together at the end so that's what we want to do and so to get easing keyframes and i'll just show you really quickly what these look like as a comparison so if we're to look at the keyframes of these two things you kind of see right this is the keyframe for the linear one you kind of see the transfer energy is exactly the same at the top as it is at the bottom if we look at the eased one you can kind of see it slowly starts out gets a little bit faster and then slows down at the top and then gets faster at the bottom and comes down fast slow at the bottom and that's kind of like a natural progression kind of like thinking like a bike rider you wouldn't see a person riding a bike uh starting like this having going at the same speed at the bottom of the hill as it would be at the top of the hill and coming down there'd be a difference in transfer of energy right so that's why i feel like easing keyframes is usually better than non-easing keyframes i'm sure there'd be circumstances where you would need linear keyframes but i haven't seen them yet anyway so here we go so the easiest way to get linear ease keyframes here is to drag drag these two uh to drag so sorry to select these two uh keyframes you just left click and draw a box around them and then we're gonna right click on them and we're gonna go keyframe interpolation oh sorry and we're going to go keyframe assistant and we're going to go easy ease and watch this actually that doesn't look very obvious but it is better it's very subtle but it is better yeah that is definitely better than what we had before so that's that's a that's a very long way to winded way of saying try to easy ease all your frames because they look way better all right now all right so we've got the text animating on we've got the nice reveal coming on now let's just um we're going to basically make this easy to move around so that we can make this one object that is tied to another object and we're going to create our first parent object so what we do is use this thing called a null layer and a null object so we're going to create a new null object so new layer null object and put it on there it's that's it by default it comes in dead center i know the box is not dead center but that anchor point is dead center just trust me on that so what we're going to do here we're going to click on these three items you see this little swirly thing what i want you to do is drag that swirly thing and drag it up to the word null for or whatever the null object tends to be now what this means is that now this null object can be draw you can drag this item around and it doesn't affect anything else like all the animation you set up will not be affected because now you've got a null object that parents everything around the only thing it does unfortunately anything it does affect is the is the gradient ramp so just keep that aware there is a technical limitation with the gradient ramp in that it doesn't seem to stay mapped to the coordinates of the particular object it's it's sort of like a um it's mapped to the global positioning of the comp which is a bit annoying so just keep that in mind because if you do move it up you're going to have to go through and re like you're going to have to basically remap the the effect again which is a bit annoying but that's the only thing but other than that if you didn't have an effect like that on it it would be awesome anyway so here we go so that's great now i'm going to create the circle background that we saw in the intro so first off we're going to switch these around we're going to make this empty and we're going to make this a a fill and we're going to select we're going to make it one now let's also go in here and let's make a new comp let's call this circle widget everything else would be the same by 1920x1080 24 frames a second let's make it around 20 let's make it around 20 seconds all right sorry if you named your comp and it was wrong just you can just uh click on it press enter and then you can just rename it so let's call it circle widget all right now we want to create a perfect circle let's do that so we click on this item we go and we just hold down the shift button and we drag it out now remember that shortcut i told you before com option option alt home will uh sorry we want to basically we want to make sure the anchor point is completely uh centered because in order to be able to rotate around the perfect access it needs to be directly in the center so make sure it's option home option command home will basically make sure that it is completely centered the origin point is directly in the middle of the circle and then press option uh and then press command home to bring it directly to the center all right now this is a shape uh shapes a little bit different to solids in that they have it's a vector and it's continually continuously rasterized which is awesome for lots of different reasons if you see here the ellipse tool has a lot of different parameters you can do for example the ellipse path has a size function which is really great you can muck around the positioning but i wouldn't recommend that right now it has a stroke function there are a whole bunch of things you can park around with here um you can muck around the stroke with as well you can also add a couple dashes if you wanted to i mean really make those dashes really stand out you could see there's a whole bunch of things you can do with the shape tools which is really fun and you can also fill you can do gradient i mean you can also do gradient fills if you want for example i was talking about the gradient fills you can work around this sort of stuff where you set the gradient points in the you can set the gradient points and you can do fun stuff like that we're not going to focus on that right now but you can kind of do that stuff anyway all right let's just turn that off the gradient fill off because we don't need that so along with that it comes a whole bunch of other functions that are built into the shape layer and one of them is these animating tools as well we're going to focus on one of them at the moment which is called the trim path tool and we're just going to click on that so what does trim path do it does exactly what it sounds it trims the path so we're going to go to around 14 frames 15 frames oops that's 15 frames i'm going to set a keyframe here on the end property now we're going to the beginning and we're going to make this zero so watch what happens draw zone perfect that's all we want now i don't want to draw a full circle because i want it to keep animating after it's drawn the full circle so let's draw it to about 75. so what's going to happen is that it's just going to draw a three-quarter circle great that's what we want to see [Music] now because this is already um centered what's great about this now is that when we do spin it around it is spin in right dead center which is perfect so what we want to do is we want to basically keep this spinning around uh indefinitely now we could set a keyframe very easily just go all right here we go we're going to spin this keyframe around and it'll keep spinning around and for probably for all intents and purposes that are probably enough for this animation but you know i have a tendency to want to cheat these things because i don't like keyframing if i can help it so what can we do um i don't want to keyframe it definitely especially if things have to change or whatever reason so i like things just rotating by themselves and the easiest way to do that is to use expressions now don't be afraid expressions aren't the end of the world it's a little bit of coding but super easy and that's one of the best things about after effects is that you can code your problems away all right so here we go we're going to hold down on the option and we're going to click on the road we're going to click here on the um the stopwatch and you're going to see what happens it turns red the the parameter turns red and uh nothing really happens like nothing happens right that's because we haven't set in we haven't told it what to do yet but this essentially opens up the hackers window for us so what we're going to do is we're going to type in the word time lowercase time no capitalization and we're going to see what happens now you can't really see it but it is rotating very slightly now if you look at the parameters here it has changed it's gone from zero and if we come out to the eight second mark it's gone to eight uh eight degrees now why is that well because what we've told the computer to do is to inherit whatever is happening at the current time so if it's eight seconds it's saying it's gonna be eight uh it's to be eight root uh so eight degrees which is fine but it's a little bit slow so what we can do in crete to increase that by a factor is we'll times it by a factor of say fifty so that is the star if you hold down shift 8 and then multiply it by 50 and press enter this is what happens now it starts to speed up a little bit more you can see the numbers rapidly changing according to the time so that is basically the current time times 50m because time is always moving the object will always be moving now we're going to make this a little bit more interesting we're going to duplicate this so comma option or alt d now we're going to just shrink down the circle just a touch we're going to go to the first parameter of the ellipse path and then we're going to shrink it down just a little bit and we're also going to make it a little bit thicker so we're going to go to like a 4. and not just that we're going to change the trim path uh to the end the last point of the trim path to around 30. now let's make it 20. all right cool let's have a look at it now so that's fine what i don't like is this circle traveling in the same direction as like spinning in the same direction as the other one so how can we fix that well let's have a look at the rotation property again so press r to bring up the rotation property for the object and you can kind of see here we're going to twirl it down and then we get the expression so here we go now if you're a mouse buff you probably know the answer to this but what we're going to do is we're going to make it go in the opposite direction so instead of multiplying by the positive factor of 50 we're going to multiply it by a negative factor of let's say 30 just to make it a little bit different in both directions and here we go now you can see there we've got our little circle widget happening in the background and we haven't done any keyframing we've programmed at all look at you your little hacker did this all yourself all right now let's go back to the opening title now let's drag our little circle widget in here so we're going to drag it in betw underneath the word our first tutorial just so it's there and as you can see here that's kind of what we've created which is kind of cool because if you kind of isolatedly you can isolate things here if you see thing here the first little round check button here that's a solo button you kind of look what we've got that's all it is with an alpha channel on the back and if i turn the alpha channel on you'll see that it's transparent you can't really see it very well but the circle is there and it's sitting on transparency so you dragged it on and it's a transparent background that you can just kind of throw in there however you like and that's pretty straightforward pretty pretty decent all right so basically we've got this set up um now we need to add an extra little bit of movement to the situation and this is what we're going to add to the composition to basically give it a little bit more coolness so what i'm going to do now is start introducing 3d now it's not as daunting as you think it is you just need to understand how it works and then it's pretty easy to get your head around it so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to switch this toggle setting till we get to you can see these things here it looks like a guy hiding behind a wall and these there's a 3d box there's a an overlay adjustment thing there's these little circles and you see the word fx come up here now we want to turn everything here from the circle widget to the null object and the way i'm doing that is holding down and pressing shift holding down shift and then clicking on the null and select everything in between now we click on that and it will actually turn everything on so that turns everything into a 3d layer so what does that mean well let's have a look at it from the side so if we go here we can actually see it says active camera front left top back let's just look at the top now right now you have to kind of use your imagination here but everything is sitting on one layer here so if you can imagine this is this is just a 2d world but what we want to do is actually move things so that if you can imagine we're going to move the footage of the circle widget towards the back so i'm going to see if i can split this into two views so you understand what i'm talking about so we're just going to try and uh what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that this stays the top and this one will make sure this is the active camera so this is what i'm trying so you can kind of see here i've selected the circle widget um footage that we just had and it's just a card think of it just like a card right we've basically stacked all the cards and they're all stacked on top of each other right now in the same in the same dimension see what happens though when i drag this see this is the footage i've dragged you see this little widget here this is the zed widget and what i'm going to do is i'm going to start pushing it back as you can see here it starts getting further and further away from us and that's because if you can kind of see the composition from a top point of view the object is moving further away from the object in front which is these three objects so just so you understand this i'm going to switch to a custom view let's hope this switches this one custom view now if you kind of see here in a 3d situation um just for the points of this demo you don't really understand you don't really need to understand how to do this but you can kind of see the three-dimensionalness of what's happening here i've pushed that element back and so now that element in the back is actually according to the computer sitting at a space behind it so that's what we kind of want so if we go to the top view again what i'm going to start introducing now is a camera so we're going to click here in the empty space and go new camera and we're going to select a two node camera and a 50ml and we're going to click ok now if you kind of see here on the top view oops on the top view there's the camera there these lines here indicate the focal range that i can see so everything that it sees here it sees within its vocal range and as we saw here this circle widget so this this camera is essentially seeing everything in uh in in what's in this vocal view it would actually go further out this way the lines came out and the the top line here is basically where it's focused so if we click on the camera icon here let's pull up the position properties of it right now so if you press p now this is the only tricky thing is with cameras you gotta understand how this works so you press p you also have to you also have to hold down the letter a oh sorry not hold down press shift a and that brings up the two things you need to think of now if you look at here i'll just bring it all up there is a few different items with the camera there's the point of interest there's the position orientation rotation rotation rotation and then there's these are the parameters which is the zoom depth of field focus aperture we're only going to focus on these two the aperture and the focus distance sorry the focus is aperture and whether to turn depth of field on now depth of field is essentially what it sounds like you turn the depth of field on you can it is useful to have it off in certain circumstances but in this case we're going to turn it on so right now the aperture is very very low and at the moment it doesn't look like it affects anything but however if we do turn the aperture up you can kind of see that the background the circle which is further away from the camera is starting to go out of focus and that's because the focus point is actually on this particular piece of text and not on the circles in the background however we can chat we can choose where we want to put the focus point on by clicking on this button here and if you look at the box on the right here you'll see that the a little a little line comes out and it's actually going towards our element in the back and then you can kind of see oh there you go the background is actually in focus can you kind of see the difference right so that's kind of the mechanics of the camera at a glance essentially and what we're going to do now is actually we're going to use the camera to actually do a move on the footage that we have right now so let's just go up to the one second mark you're just going to trust me on this one i don't really know how to explain it but you need to click both of these things so you need to set a keyframe on both of these and we're going to go back to the beginning and this is where the camera tools up here become very handy so there are three tools there's the orbit track and the zed tool now this is the unified camera tool i don't really use it you can use it i'm sure there are people who do but i don't use it that much i like using the individual tools because it makes more sense to me and right now what we're going to do is we want the camera to track from the back so if you can imagine this from the top view we want it to start from here and then move up to this position here so we're going to do that so if we look here i'm going to click here in this space where it looks like nothing's happening i'm going to click here and i'm going to as you can see as i start dragging it down the camera is moving back and so what you would expect is that if you kind of watch the if you kind of watch both positions you can kind of see the camera as we move forward the camera is moving uh as we scrub forward you can kind of see the the camera is tracking forward which is just adding a little bit more movement on what's happening there and likewise you can put a key easy ease keyframe in so we're going to easy ease that in so it looks like it's not coming to a dead stop now what we're going to do is we're going to once we've had it come on we're going to see if we can make it transition off so so we're just going to zoom what we're going to do is we're going to zoom straight past everything so again let's bring up the position let's bring up the the transform properties again and let's what we're going to do is we're actually going to copy these so copy these keyframes because we want the camera to stand still and then what we're going to do is we're going to paste these keyframes right here so so it feels like it stands still and then what we're going to do is make it move off so we're going to make the camera track through the text and we're going to do that again by using this tool again picking the track zed tool or the z tool for you americans out there and we're going to go straight through the texts and i'm actually going to turn the easy easing off this one so i want to do is um hold these two and i'm just going to go keyframe oh sorry not keyframe assistant i'm just going to hold the option or the start button and press that oh sorry the alt button and press that and it converts it back to linear keyframes so and then i'm going to press and we're going to shrink this back down or you can press n to just bring that back you can do it that way or you can just press n and that shrinks it back to that area and then we can kind of see what we've done here all right so we have our base animation basically done so that's a good sort of foundation that we kind of build from here so we're just going to add a few more extra flourishes to just really make it pop so what we're going to do now is we're just going to jump into this circle widget comp so we're going to highlight the circle widget and we're just going to double click on it and we just jump in here and we're going to grab the outer mouse out of most circle here and we're just going to copy it so edit copy or control c or apple c i mean control c or command c and i'm going to paste it in here and that's just going to be control b or command v all right so it just pastes itself back into the center of the thing now we're just going to turn on the 3d layer so we're just going to click on this little cube box to turn it on as you saw up there it brings up a little widget i'll just just show you what happens so it doesn't it's it's flat here as you can see because we're looking down from a 3d perspective um it the 3d is not registering because in this viewpoint it just looks like a flat shape no matter which viewpoint you're in so if we were to switch this over to the left point of view it would still come up as a flat shape which just tells us that it's not a 3d shape however if we do go back to the top view and we do turn this on it automatically flips it so now it's actually a 3d shape and now it's got that little widget on it with the z um or the z widget on it all right so what we're going to do is we're going to pull this forward so you can do it from here or you can do it from the coordinates here so we're going to pray press p to get up our positioning shortcut and um we're just going to move these three coordinates so in 3d space the three coordinates here is the x the y and the z space so the x just refers to this plane going left and right the y plane goes up and down and the z plane goes backwards and forwards in space and we want to bring it forward in space so we're going to bring this to the left so the numbers get go into the minuses and then we're going to bring it to the right and then we're going to pull it down you could alternatively just do this with your mouse as well likewise you can just pull this backwards and forwards like this and then use the y and x widgets to do the same thing or you can just do it manually like this so there we go we've got a little bit of a depth thing here and so what we've got is three elements in space just to kind of give it a little bit more interest for the viewer that you know there's a lot of depth here um we can probably even make it a bit wider just to kind of give it a bit more interest here so we just have a look at the whole thing you can kind of see that it just gives a little bit more interest um a few foreground elements that kind of thing all right now just to finish off this this little uh animation we're just going to add the pen tool and just put a line right in the middle here just to kind of give it a little bit of a design look so i'm just going to get out of this to view just so that we can just have a look at this go back to the active camera just so we have a nice looking view of this now if this for example if you think this is too soft at the front here and this is too soft at the back you can actually dial in the depth of field so if you twirl down and we go we'll turn up the transform properties and we go to the aperture if you dial down the aperture let's say we dial it down you kind of see everything starts to come into focus and the more the aperture this the lower the aperture the more focus everything will be which just means the depth of field plane is getting wider and wider but if you do want that shallow depth of field you can just dial it up as much as you want and you can move that focal plane around if you want to try and really dial in where you want that focal plane to be so i hope that makes sense and you can keyframe that focal plane as well so for example if we wanted it to be in focus from like if we wanted it to be in focus the whole time we can actually set the focus distance so we'll set the focus distance to where it should be it's just there and if we dial it back we can actually dial in the focus distance and roll this back so that it is in focus somewhere around there you go so we can say that it's in focus the whole time we'll set a wordpress f9 to get the keyframe easy ease and then we'll press play and have a look so there you go it's more in focus more of the time rather than it being out of focus but i do like how it sort of starts out out of focus so i'm going to leave it as that but yeah and the depth of field is where i want it to be so there we go now the final tool is the pen tool now the pen tool is nice because you get to customize the shapes that you want at the moment we've only been using pre-determined shapes but if you use the pen tool you can actually make your own shape so we'll go up here to the pen tool you press g as well you've got a couple of different options we can make this a solid so just so you understand we can actually just make a straight solid if we want to what to do is just create a shape and it can be whatever shape you want which is kind of great and so it doesn't have any of the parameters like the uh like the other shapes where you can muck around with the parameters and make it a particular shape but you can muck around the points and make it whatever you want and these points are also key frameable so they can move around you can actually set a keyframe and then move it around and you know it'll actually change over time which is kind of fun but that's not what we want to do what we want to do is just create a straight line and so we're going to turn this solid off and we're just going to turn the stroke on [Music] what we're going to do is just draw a straight line underneath what we're doing here so we're going to start around there and we're going to hold down shift because if you don't hold down shift you may click down here by accident so we're going to hold down shift so it's a perfectly straight line and click there and it's a perfectly straight line now as you look here what we want to happen is that we want the line to appear under right underneath and because it's not a 3d object it won't so we're going to turn the 3d on and magically it'll just appear in the right position now the reason why it just magically appears and we don't have to adjust anything is because it's dead set when we when you automatically turn on the 3d default it's dead center of the comp so in this instance it is in the right place because we have set it up that way so but if it's not you have to kind of move it around and if you need to see where to move it around to get in the right space you can go to one of these views like for example the left view it's like if it happened to appear and it wasn't in the right like for example if it was back here you just have to move it to the spot where for example if you want to move it under word after effects you can kind of see this is where it is and so what we're going to do is move that here until we get it in line with everything else was it that yeah it was that one all right so let's go back to the active camera i hope this is not going over you guys heads it is i know it's your first tutorial but it's not as high as you think it is all right so i've just turned the stroke down to one um and we're going to do that we're going to do the trim path thing where we're going to add the trim path function to it so you can actually look at the line has been drawn on so we'll go to about here because we want the line to draw around about here and we're going to roll down and we're going to go add trim path and we're going to go forward about i don't know maybe a few maybe about 10 frames and we're going to twirl down the trim path thing here which is under the content so if you go to contents and then trim path will be underneath the shape here or if it accident if you can't find the trim path it may have jumped into the shape here so if you have the shape selected and you add trim path it can jump into the shape which is by what happens when you do select the path otherwise if it's unselected it'll just jump outside which is fine either way so we're going to do is set the end path to 100 which is the endpoint and we're going to set the end point so we're going to go to the beginning and we're going to set it to zero and that is going to be pretty much it and there you go you see it and if you don't like if you want the line to draw on a little bit longer you just pull the keyframes out so here we go let's have a look that's looking pretty tight and it should just draw off and it should just go off by itself all right so your project is pretty much ready to go um you finished it you want to send it out to clients so what do you do how do you get this out of after effects to do your bidding basically well there's a couple of things you can do um the easiest way is to just use the media renderer inside after effects so what we do is make sure that you select what you want to render if you don't want any of this thing at the back here um you can see here that our com i'm pressing plus and minus to basically get the the timeline to zoom up and zoom down so if you don't want any of this stuff at the back here my suggestion is to just this this work area uh bar you just want to make sure that it starts at uh you press b to where you want to start so at this point you want to start at the beginning press b to start to to make the end point for where you want to start and press n to where you want it to end so the letter n and if it was for example if the work area was out here would render everything out here as well which is all the empty space but which we don't want but we just wanted to finish off around there just where it just ends and so we're going to press the letter n to set the out point once we figure out what we want to render and that we're 100 sure that this is what we want to export out of the timeline we'll just go to composition and go add to render queue and it'll bring up this box here now so at the moment the default is lossless and so we don't want it to be lossless because the lossless codec is a bit out of date i don't know why it's the default in after effects but it is currently now it depends on what system you're on i'm going to use prores in this particular instance but you can use whatever codec you feel is comfortable for you i think on um i'm not 100 sure what they use on pc at the moment but if whatever codec you prefer to use you can use that you can use mp4 you can use um you can use avi whatever whatever codec is supported in your computer now what you do here is make sure this is set at best setting and also select pull this down and we're going to make a template and this is going to bring out this new dialog box don't it's not too scary now what we're going to do is make our own template so we're going to go rin video codec whatever that might be in this case it happens to be prores so we're just going to call it prores and now we're going to edit it and i'll bring up a whole bunch of module settings in this instance i'm using quicktime as my wrapper and i'm going to pick the video output and format options at the moment it says animation now i want that codec to go to prores 422 lt um and press ok now everything else here is fine audio will just be the default as it is and we're just going to go okay now up here the movie default would have been lossless so it would have been that we're going to change that movie default to a video codec pro biz which is the one we just created and we're just going to go okay now that is set to go as that codec now you have to tell it where you want it to render to otherwise it will just render into a default after effects folder and you'll never be able to find it so what we're going to do here is click on this title here and we're just going to pick a place that we're going to send it to now in this case i have folder already set up and we're just going to press save and then we'll just ought to do is just press render and we'll let it go and that little sound reminder tells you that it is done and if we go back and have a look here at what we've actually rendered the video file will be in there thanks for listening guys i'm really excited to see what you guys come up with if you want to post it somewhere and send it to joshua i would love to be able to see what you guys come up with um if you have anything else that you want me to try and figure out i would you know like effects from a movie or a kpop video or something along those lines i would love to know and i would love to figure it out for you guys so hit up joshua send it to his instagram account come to my channel if you want as well which is just linked somewhere in this video and i'll see you next time yo i think nick's voice could soothe the most savage of beasts thanks so much for watching you can check out nick's instagram here and check out his website here he is literally one of the best vfx artists you could ever hire we've done a lot of vfx work together thank you so much again for watching guys make sure to check out envato elements below and as always remember to keep it chill

Channel: Olufemii

Views: 812,746

Keywords: how to video edit, video editing, video production, tutorial, video editing tutorial, olufemii tutorials, olufemiitutorials, easy video editing tutorial, video editing tips, video editing basics, how to edit a company video, how to edit, how to learn after effects, after effects, adobe after effects, learn after effects, after effects masterclass, after effects for beginners, beginner after effects tutorial, after effects 2020, after effects animation

Id: B7452a8ybiM

Length: 70min 0sec (4200 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020