Make ANYTHING tiny! // After Effects Tilt-Shift Tutorial

this video is sponsored by storyblocks in this video I'm going to teach you how to create a tilt shift effect in After Effects that can be applied to any kind of footage I'll walk you through several different examples each with its own set of challenges and even show you how to generate depth maps automatically and then I'll show you some of my favorite techniques for making footage look more cinematic including how to make chromatic aberration with no third-party plugins do me a favor and go ahead and like this video And subscribe if you're not already and let's start building this tilt shift effect this effect is actually really easy to pull off and we're going to use one single blur effect to do it that's the camera lens blur let me bring that up and put it on top of this footage and by default this is just going to blur out the entire image exactly like any other blur totally uniformly however there's this section blur map which allows us to shape the blur based on a gradient or different levels of brightness and that's exactly what we need to create I'm going to do this using a shape layer so I'll double click the rectangle tool with nothing selected and that will generate a rectangle the size of my comp I have my fill set to a linear gradient which is what I want in the color are already set to white and black that's what we need white pixels are going to be what is most out of focus or what's furthest away from the camera and black pixels are going to be what's closest to the camera most in Focus so what I want to do is just make a linear gradient from white to black and I'll call this depth map and I don't actually need to see it I just need to Target it with the camera lens blur effect under the blur map layer I'll choose that now if you're generating your gradient using effects make sure that you use effects and masks when you target your layer but right away we have things that are in Focus towards the bottom of the screen and if more out of focus the further away we get from the camera which is exactly what you would expect with a camera lens but we have some really cool controls here to increase how blurry or out of focus that area is as well as choosing where the blur focal distance is this is basically setting the focus of the lens if you have any experience with photography or shooting video then you know you need to set your focus so that the focal plane is rate where your subject is and that is the part of the image that will be sharp now the reason we're getting this kind of miniaturized effect look and feel is because this type of shallow depth of field is generally not something you can capture with a very wide angle lens you know shot from a drone it's something that you would see with a macro lens something very up close where you're getting really tiny details and because you're used to seeing that when we get this super shallow depth of field on something that's far away it feels much smaller than it actually is now you can be really heavy-handed with this blur really a little bit goes a long way you don't need to Crank It Up super high and obviously the higher you crank this the longer it does take to render so I would say maybe for this shot we keep it around 15 and that makes a pretty dramatic difference now with the depth map if I turn it back on and double click to get those gradient controls I want to kind of align this to the Horizon and I don't actually need to see the layer while I'm doing this as long as it's visible and selected I can double click on to bring those controls back so I basically want to align this with the Horizon because that's the furthest point away from the camera and then move this point somewhere around here so that we have that gradient kind of aligned to that single plane this is a very simple scene even though there is some depth with the building and the trees it virtually is a flat plane and that allows me to shape the depth of field pretty accurately to how would it actually be shot through a camera lens but the reason I set that starting point at the Horizon is because basically everything in the sky in this shot is as far away as the Horizon is so from that point on it can be Pure White and I don't really want any pure black in the foreground because this plane continues to go on so I might dial this back just a little bit so that it extends beyond the bounds of the comp there at the bottom but I can again play around with the blur radius move that blur focal distance around to really lock in what I want to be in focus and we get this very cool miniaturized look and we can push this even a little bit further if we want to play up the artificial Vibe and put a Vibrance effect just before the camera lens blur and increase that Vibrance which is just boosting the saturation a little bit more naturally and it gives it kind of that artificial look where maybe this was a miniature set that was created in a studio instead of actual Drone footage it's a very cool look but since this is such a simple example with just a single plane I want to jump over to something that's a little bit more complicated this shot of New York City and this has many more plans right we still have the ground plane but there's the sky in the background there's this plane here of all the buildings on the side there's another one here and it ends at that point and then turns 90 degrees so there's a lot more going on in a single linear gradient isn't going to give us the same results so we're going to have to build a depth map that fits this scene a little bit better and by the way all the footage that you're seeing in this tutorial is from storyblocks the sponsor of this video storyblocks is a huge royalty-free stock asset Library full of over a million 4K and HD footage Clips templates music sound effects images and more templates are an easy way to quickly enhance the production value of your videos with minimal effort by adding in Motion Graphics like title animations overlays logo reveals and more choose from thousands of pre-made professional templates for your favorite editing program including After Effects Premiere Pro or even Apple motion to take your videos to the next level and speed up your creative workflow you can learn more about storyblocks by clicking the link down in the description thank you so much to storyblocks for supporting my channel and for sponsoring this video now let's take a look at creating a depth map for this New York shot what I want to do here is basically make a gradient for each plane in the scene so let's just start with the left side here I'll zoom out and switch to my pen tool I still have that linear gradient so that's good but I basically just want to draw a shape that matches that plane of the side of all those buildings as it goes off into the Horizon so this will represent that left side I'll switch to my selection tool and double click on that shape to bring up these points right here in the middle these are the gradient controls and I want to put the white pixels in the background the furthest away is where the brightest pixels go and I'll bring the other control over to the left Edge so that the parts of the frame closest to the image are the darkest pixels of that gradient so that we'll call a left and then I'll duplicate this and why don't I just grab these two points and move it over here now I don't want to go all the way to the complete right side of the comp because remember this plane right here ends at this point at the corner of that building so that's what I'm going to align these points up with this doesn't have to be 100 perfect but the closer I put these points to the actual planes in the scene the better the result is going to be so I'm just going to kind of align this there make sure that this is kind of following the same perspective that whole way down the street and we'll call this right and then I'll double click on the layer again with my selection tool to reposition this gradient and I don't want the gradient to end at the edge of the shape layer I basically want it to go off the edge of the comp the same way that it did on the left side because this is a very centered shot down this very symmetrical Street with the buildings that are basically existing in opposite planes but I do need to cut it off right there at the corner and then we'll duplicate this layer again and move these points over off to the side of the comp and I'll have this go straight off the side so it matches the face of that building but I don't want it to be a gradient so I'll alt click to cycle through the fill types until I get to solid and this needs to be the same gray as this point right here I don't want to choose something darker than this because I want it to match the darkest part of the gradient where it ends on that plane so I'll click OK zoom in here and see with the deselected I just need to make sure I kind of overlap these a little bit but now that gray is basically the same from that point over to the right side of the comp and that's what we wanted all right let's make one for the background we'll just call this one sky I'll fill this in with pure white and just make sure that's white and behind the other layers we'll call that sky and then we need one for the ground so let's just draw a rectangle this time and I'll align it kind of where that Horizon point is and I need this to be a gradient so I'll click on the fill type switch to my selection tool and move these points around again darkest pixels closest to the camera brightest pixels are furthest away and I pretty much want this to be perfectly straight so I'm going to make sure I go into my gradient fill start and endpoint controls and just change the X position to be zero on both of those properties so that it is a perfectly linear gradient and all I need to do now is move that below all the other layers and I'll rename this ground so now I've kind of mapped out my own depth map using some gradients mimicking these planes that are in my scene I just need to pre-compose these now so with all of them selected I'll press Ctrl shift C or command shift C on a Mac and I'll call this New York City depth map click OK move it to the bottom and turn the visibility off and then I'll just add the camera lens blur effect to this one so camera lens blur we'll choose that depth map as our blur map and I'll blur that out a little bit more strongly and zoom in to see how this is looking now obviously that is really really extreme maybe I'll just turn that down to around 30 and then I'll push the blur focal distance back a little bit until we get kind of that crosswalk nice and sharp in Focus this actually worked out really well because it is a very boxy scene we were able to use gradients in a very effective way even though there are some elements that would have more depth it doesn't really come across as being inaccurate and we can get away with what we have here so I'm going to just turn that blur radius down a little bit but I do want to point out something right here you see this out of focus spot that is called bokeh and that is a representation of the actual lens of the camera the blades that are on the aperture or the iris of the lens and the shape that it actually physically was when the footage was shot on the camera obviously this is being artificially generated by the camera lens blur effect but it's a very nice touch and makes it look much more cinematic if we go to this Iris properties that's what is controlling this shape and it's currently set to hexagon but we can increase the number of sides all the way up to decagon and then it looks much more circular which can sometimes appear a little bit more pleasing but really I can choose triangle the lowest and this is going to render way faster and just turn the roundness all the way up to 100 to get those perfectly circular Iris shapes and I think that looks really good but we can dial this in a little bit more to make it even more cinematic if we go to the aspect ratio I can turn this down to around 0.6 and these all become ovals instead of circles and this is something you're going to see on more cinematic anamorphic lenses because of the way that the lens works and the images stretch to compensate for Distortion it creates these ovals and it's a signature cinematic look so I'm going to go ahead and leave it there and then turn to fraction Fringe all the way up to the max of 500 and if you look right around the edges we're getting that little bit of highlighted edge around the iris shape if I go back down to 100 you don't notice it as much this again is something that just feels a little bit more organic and cinematic so I'm going to leave my Iris settings like that and now we're working with something that it looks really pleasing and I'll just lock in that Focus right on the crosswalk there and play this back a little bit and you can see that it just gives such a cool quality to this scene and I could always mess around with the depth map if I think that it's getting a little too sharp closer to the screen I could double click into this wall and bring this out a little bit same thing on the ground I could pull that out a bit and see how that affects things it's totally customizable since we're completely creating this ourselves right in After Effects now you're not always going to be so lucky with the footage that you're working with and you might need something that's more accurate and there's actually a really cool effect inside of Photoshop that will generate a depth map for us and I'm going to show you how to do that so let's just disable a camera lens blur for a second and I need to get a still frame of this shot into Photoshop the way I like to do this is using video copilot's free effects console plugin I'll link to that in the description but I can bring that up with control space this is FX console and with this button right here I can copy the clipboard that's just going to copy the current frame as seen in the comp to my clipboard and I can jump now over to photoshop and paste it right into here and then I'll just come up to the filter menu and down to neural filters these are newer filters for Photoshop they're being updated all the time and there are new ones coming out all the time but the one I want is this one down here depth blur I'll enable that and it's going to basically recreate what we just did in After Effects it's going to artificially blur this with a camera lensablur effect with all kinds of controls for how it looks but if we scroll down to the bottom there's a checkbox for output depth map only and that's exactly what it's going to give me the depth map it is using to blur out the image and I can click OK and now I can bring this back into After Effects so I'll just rename this depth map and the quickest way I know to get from Photoshop back to After Effects is using Time Lord from battle ax all I need to do is Select that layer and click render selected layers to After Effects and it's going to hop right over here and there's my still image right inside of After Effects there's no quicker way to do that if you want to learn more about time lord click the link in the description so now that I have my depth map here from Photoshop I can select that as my depth map in the camera lens blur effect so I'll enable this select that depth map and we have something that's very similar to what we had before if I just undo and redo you see it's very close and because this is a locked off shot and there isn't too much movement off of the main planes of the scene that actually worked out really well so definitely be aware of that it's not going to work with a moving shot like this Farm because we can only generate a depth map for one frame but it's nice to have when you have a shot that works well for it and obviously it's not 100 accurate you can't depend on it 100 of the time but it is doing a pretty nice job here but let's say I want to make this even more cinematic since we created these Iris shapes that are anamorphic they're much more cinematic what can we do to push this scene even further well one of the easiest things to do is change the aspect ratio of the footage or your comp I'm currently in a 16x9 9 comp but if I press Ctrl K to bring up my composition settings I can change this to something anamorphic if I know what that actual resolution is the thing is I don't I never remember what the pixel values are so what I like to do is unlock the lock aspect ratio check box and then just type in the ratio which I know is 2.35 to 1. so what I'll do is just take 2.35 and multiply that by 100 and just say 235 and then 100 on the height so that is a ratio now of 2.35 to 1. so I can check this box back on to lock that aspect ratio now and change the width back up to 1920 and there we go the height would be 817 to get that aspect ratio and immediately I get this Ultra widescreen anamorphic feel and I can reposition my shot just by grabbing this and moving it up so that we see more of the foreground here but now we've already got something that feels a little bit more cinematic the next thing I would probably do is color grade this to feel a little more cinematic because stock footage generally is not color graded so that you can take it and manipulate it to fit whatever project you're working with so let's add the lumetri color effect and I'll put that before camera lens blur and just go into the creative Tab and change the look to one of these preset Luts so these ones right here these are all based on actual film so I'm just going to choose one of them and see how it looks that's pretty cool let's change it again each one of these is going to have a different feel so just kind of cycle through it until you get something that you're happy with I think that looks pretty cool I could increase the faded film a little bit to give it a little more of a washed out look I could sharpen everything up a little bit if I wanted to there's even the Vibrance built right into this effect so I could artificially boost that saturation if I wanted it to feel a little bit more vibrant or turn it down the other direction to feel a little bit more washed out and Moody it's completely up to you the other great thing about this effect is that it has a vignette built right in so I can turn that amount down and add in the Cinematic vignette around the the outside corners I can change the midpoint I can increase the roundness so it's more circular it's totally customizable and all built into that one effect so we went from this to this and it just to me feels much more cinematic but because I shifted that footage up and this effect is applied directly to the footage the vignette actually isn't centered in the frame so what I really need to do is cut that out and then make a new adjustment layer Ctrl alt y to make an adjustment layer in this case it's a variant from void another freebie from battle ax you can again find the link in the description if you want to learn more about it but it's the same as an adjustment layer so I'll just paste it right back on and now that vignette is centered around the entire frame and I don't have to worry about it being misaligned but now we've got something that just feels much more Moody and stylized and it takes that original stock footage which if I duplicate this remove the effects and move it to the top just feels so different and has a completely different quality than what we have here but we can push this even further so what I want to do is Select all of my layers and pre-compose this so I'll call this New York City tilt shift and click OK and what I want to do is duplicate this layer two times we'll call the first one R for red second one G for green the third one B for blue what I'm going to do is create chromatic aberration and there are plugins that will help you do this but I'm going to do it the manual way without any third-party tools I want to set the blue and the green channels blend mode to add and then I want to add a shift channels effect to each one of these so shift handles onto the first layer and I want to turn off the red and green so I'll just change these to full off so I'm left with just the blue channel on that layer then I'll copy that shift channels over to Green turn off the blue turn the green back to green and then I'll paste it on the red one more time turn the blue off turn the red to red and now we're back to our original image since they're all being Blended back together now what I can do is zoom in here nice and close so it's easy to see and just click and drag the blue Channel around and this creates an aberration chromatic aberration of those color channels separating and if I grab the red Channel and shift it the other direction we're going to see that now this is really extreme I don't want that so let me undo and actually what I'd like to do is bring a new null object into the scene so Ctrl alt shift y that'll create a void which again is part of the Void freebie from battle ax but it's the same as a null object right in the center of my composition now if I parent these layers to that void and bring up their position it's all going to be relative to that null object so it's all zeroed out what this allows me to do is shift everything symmetrically so I can say two pixels on the X for the blue Channel and then say -2 for the X on the red Channel and know that each channel is shifted two pixels in either direction and that's what I want for this start of my chromatic aberration but I want more chromatic aberration around the outside edges of my frame and I'm going to do that by applying another effect so let's just type in CC lens in the effects and presets and bring that out right after shift channels now this is a very extreme effect by default but what I want to do is just change the size all the way up to the max of 500 and zoom in here what you'll see is that the further away we get from the center of the frame the more that blue aberration is apparent and that's because of this convergence if I turn it down to zero we're not going to see any difference but as soon as I increase it it's going to shift that out a bit so let's just leave it at zero and copy that effect over to the green and the red channels and I'll start with the red because this is the one that I want to go out furthest so I'll click and drag this and maybe we'll set it to around 20 and then I'll grab the green and we'll knock five off of that so we'll say 15 for the green and the blue will say 10. so now if we zoom in here and take a look at something where we can see lots of color there's more red on the left side more blue on the right side but the closer to the center of the comp that we get the less apparent it becomes and it's just that two pixel shift that we actually changed on the position value in the middle and if I just duplicate this layer take off that ad and put it at the top and remove all the effects I can turn this off and back on so you can see the difference that it makes so it's giving a little bit of lens Distortion it's giving that nice chromatic aberration which is more extreme on the edges than it is in the center and again just gives it a very cinematic feel and gives it that nice little aesthetic around the edges to just feel a little bit more analog than that original stock footage now let's jump over to another example where the camera is still locked off but there's more movement going on in the scene you see all these trees that are shifting around in the wind through this time lapse that's really exaggerated this is an issue it's not something that I can really take the time to keyframe by hand with pads and I can't use Photoshop to generate a still image since that would be shifting in and out of the depth map so I kind of have to compromise here so why don't we jump back to the original and just grab the depth map from that comp and paste it in here and then we'll go into the New York City scene and grab the camera lens blur from that comp since that's all set up with a nice cinematic look and we'll put that on this clip make sure to choose our depth map under the blur map layer and we're getting something that does look pretty nice but we can improve this a little I first need to align my gradient to the actual planes of this shot so I'm going to move this around so that the background is at that Horizon point and that the foreground is somewhere around here and that helps shape that depth map a little bit that might be a little bit too extreme I'll pull this one down a little bit so it's more linear and not so angled but I think that'll work and then I can set my depth with the blur focal distance property so I'll push that back to where we can kind of see the river here and this isn't 100 accurate but it still does give that miniature tilt shift feel and really you can get away with it but there is actually a way that you can generate depth maps for footage it's through a third party tool called depth scanner you can get it on AE scripts and I'm going to show you what a difference that makes for this type of shot let me duplicate this remove the effects and I'll call this one depth scanner and I'll apply the depth scanner effect to it so I'm just going to bring that out onto my layer and immediately it generates a depth map this is a GPU accelerated effect if you have a GPU that it can take advantage of I do so I'm using it but you saw just how quickly it was able to generate that depth map and it works like magic I'm seriously impressed at how well it works and there are lots of settings to manipulate how this actually looks if you ever have any issues but I don't think we're going to need to do that I'll just duplicate this layer and bring it on top and change the depth map to that depth scanner layer choosing effects and masks this time and now I can set my blur focal distance and it's much more accurate than what we had before so I'll just push this back a little bit you can see that the trees now are out of focus we have this focal plane right here that is in focus and if I play this back you see that it really doesn't take all that time to render if you have have a nice GPU even combined with the blur effects it really does a great job and you can see that depth map is moving around with those objects doing a really great job of estimating what the depth of the scene actually is if you want to learn more about depth scanner check the link in the description that is an affiliate link so if you do want to purchase the plugin and you want to support my Channel please use that link in the description and just to show you some more examples here's a shot of Prague we can do the same thing depth scanner on top it immediately generates that nice depth map this scene is flat enough that you could probably get away with the linear gradient but there are some changes in depth that this plugin is able to pick up on and it does an incredible job at an incredible speed so let's just copy that camera lens blur over again choose the right layer set the blur focal distance and we immediately get that tilt shift look it's so cool and it does it so quickly and jumping over to this next shot I have some stock footage of some suburbs it's just another drone shot flying over I applied the same tilt shift effect this time using using the depth scanner plugin to generate a depth map that is much more accurate than if I would to just use that linear gradient but I combined that with the RGB split that we created in the other comp if you have that lens Distortion the chromatic aberration a little bit of a color grade but I also added in some time warp using the time warp effect to create something that looks like this that just feels really nice and snappy it even kind of Loops because of how quickly things are moving with the motion blur you almost don't see that point where it jumps from the start to the end I was really happy with the way that that turned out finally we have this shot of Melbourne and I just thought this was another really good example let's do this process one more time bring out the depth scanner plug-in immediately it generates that depth map I'm always blown away at how it just instantly generates that depth and how quickly and accurately it's able to do it I'll rename that depth map duplicate rename it footage get rid of that effect and let's just copy and paste the camera lens blur from another one of our comps onto this one choose the correct layer with effects and presets and again set the blur focal distance I thought this one looked really nice with that Skyline it just feels so tiny while still being really big I really like the way this one looks let's add a lumetri color to this one as well go to the creative Tab and choose another one of these film looks we'll just pick one that has nice colors I like that let's turn up the faded film just a little bit and increase the Vibrance to give it a little pop and the contrast is a little extreme on that one so I might just turn the contrast down maybe turn the exposure up so we see more of the city less of the sky and then jump down into the vignette tab at the very bottom decrease that so we get a nice vignette around the edges and just like that we've miniaturized Melbourne it's a really really cool look let me know down in the comments if you have applied a tilt shift effect to any projects that you've used and if you use this technique be sure to tag me at Jake in motion I love sharing your work on Instagram and anywhere that I can as always don't hesitate to ask questions down in the comments don't forget to like And subscribe if you're not already so you can stay up to date with all of my tutorials thank you so much to all of my patrons if you're interested in supporting more tutorials like this one please check out my patreon in the description thank you so much to storyblocks for sponsoring this video and thank you for watching I'll see you in the next one what's up

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 346,743

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Motion Design, Adobe After Effects, tilt shift, after effects tutorial, tilt shift effect, tilt shift effect after effects, tilt-shift video, tilt shift video tutorial, tilt shift video, video effects after effects, tilt shift miniature effect, tilt shift timelapse, after effects tutorials motion graphics, tilt shift photography miniature effect, adobe after effects tutorial for beginners, adobe after effects tutorial

Id: y5kGht3azTQ

Length: 26min 41sec (1601 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023