Seamless Loops - After Effects Tutorial

hello everybody hey it's Dan stever's so I've got a pretty cool tutorial today over the past two months I've been working on motion loops and these are kind of new things for me I've been at this point I've just done sort of the short film kind of video but I've been working on these motions that are that are great for behind for like concert backgrounds or you know for during worship to put the lyrics behind them to make it a little more dynamic and I've been working on the looping techniques for these and I've kind of learned a lot over the past few months figuring out how to make seamless loops in these videos so I'm going to be showing you a couple techniques of looping any sort of video clip and so let's get right to it first thing you're going to want to do is go to my site and download this free time-lapse pack this is what we're going to be working with here so go ahead and just download that and then once you've got that open it up and we're going to be using under clouds this file called wheat field so go ahead and bring that into After Effects okay so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to make a new composition out of this wheat field clip here so we're just going to take that clip and drag it down to this new composition button here let it go okay so the first technique that we're going to be doing is just like a simple fade so what we're going to do is we're going to go to sort of the middle of the video clip it doesn't have to be exactly the middle it doesn't really matter so what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this layer so now I have two of the same layer and on the top layer I am going to hold alt or option and I am going to push the right closed bracket symbol and this is right above the quotation and apostrophe key so push the right bracket and that's going to bring in the end of our our layer to where our marker is and then we're going to do the reverse on the layer below so we'll select that layer then I'm going to hit alt or option and then I'm going to click the left close bracket symbol so right now uh if we we have a problem because we have two frames that are overlapping and so this would create duplicate frames in our loop and that would create a bit of a stutter so what we're going to do is we're going to grab one of these one of the VAR layers and just drag the handle over until both of our layers are sort of butting up to want to be one another there okay so the way that we're going to make this work is we're going to drag the bottom layer to the left and what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down shift and this is going to snap it to to the beginning of the timeline and I'm going to drag this one over here and I'm going to leave about a second overlap on the top layer so what I'm going to do in order to get this Wheatfield to loop is I'm going to fade this I'm going to fade this top clip in so I'm going to set a keyframe for the opacity I should explain what I'm doing so I hit T to bring up opacity and then I'm setting the stopwatch just to enable opacity I'm hitting zero at that first keyframe and then I'm going to bring it on over I can hold shift and this will snap me to the end of the bottom layer there and then I'm going to hit 100% okay so we just created our first loop out of this video clip so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold shift and I'm going to snap on to the end of the top layer what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit N on the keyboard and the letter N which will bring in the end of our of our work area here so what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to play this and so what we've got here is we just created a loop and so this is just a simple fade so it's nothing fancy but depending on the video clip that you're working with this may this may be an option to get your video clips looping there's going to be some when when this is not going to be the best option like if your video clip starts out really light and then ends really dark like if this were a sunset you know in the end the clip got really dark by the end because if you tried to loop that it would just be clear that it was going from light to dark and then light to dark but on a video clip like this where it kind of stays the same sort of tone the whole time this is a really good option for it now what matters with the loop is the very end and the the beginning and the end frames here so we could actually adjust this middle middle fade here to be as long as we want it doesn't it doesn't matter as long as the end beginning frames are the same then our loop is going to work every time so this is just going to be increasing the fade and this might make it so you don't notice the transition because that's what we're after with these loops is we're trying to make it a loopable video clip so you don't see the seems to it so you don't see that it's like sort of restarting again and again and I'll show you one little little technique that you can add on to this technique so there are there have been some instances where I found that the fade was a little bit too noticeable so what I was able to do is add a mask to it so I'm going to go up and grab the pen tool here so select that select the top layer with the fade on it and what I'm going to do maybe I'll zoom out a little bit more I'm just going to do like a diagonal sort of shape here and I'm going to connect that if I if I turn off the bottom layer and I and I scrub through this right now we're still seeing the whole video clip but what I actually want to do is I'm going to select this layer and hit mm which is going to open up the mask properties and I'm going to set a keyframe for the mask and I'm going to drag this keyframe and hold shift so I get it at the very beginning of the which comment layer here oh yeah and so what I'm going to do when I'm on this when I'm on this last frame here is I'm going to just double click on the mask and then I'm just going to bring it over I'm just going to drag it until it's pretty far outside of the screen and I want to make sure I clear the frame by a good amount because we're going to be adding a feather to this so we don't want it and actually I think I'm going to adjust the beginning here so so it's a so the mask is a little further out so what we need to do right now is the mask is set to add right now meaning that everything inside of the mask is going to be visible but what we want to do is we want to do the reverse of this and we want to set the mask to subtract so this way it's going to be revealing the video clip rather than hiding it so what we're going to do right now is we're going to add a mask feather to this and I'm just going to go big I'm going to go some like 600 maybe 700 so what this is going to do is this is going to create a nice gentle wipe as the video clip is fading in it's going to be wiping across and you know this is just one more way to try to sort of hide the seams on our motion here so if I go ahead and do a preview of this and the new version of After Effects CC 2015 has a pretty cool Ram preview that just lets you push the spacebar so that's a that's what I'm rocking right here is as that so let's check this out so what it's going to be doing is it going to be wiping slowly wiping from side to side and this this creating a mask and doing a wipe as you're fading in is is just one more way to sort of hide the seams and I mean you can you can kind of feel that it's still wiping across there so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to see if I can make this transition just really long I'm going to line these keyframes up they're a little off I'm going to just make this pretty long because the smoother and the slower it is the less it will be noticeable so I think I think this is going to make a really nice really nice you know that that looks really nice I mean if you're looking for it you can see it but if you're not if you're not really looking for it you don't really notice it in you know I might even up the mask feather to like a thousand or something that might make it less noticeable but yeah so that's that's a simple fade technique for looping video clips you just splice the middle of the video frame and then just so here's a motion that I was having a hard time doing me just the simple fade on just was straight opacity it just was looking mushy when I was just fading in between it so one of the solution that I am that I came up with that with with this motion was similar to what I did on the last motion with a mask here but what I did is I started with a mask and I just I just drew a big oval and I had it sort of expand as the as the motion was fading in so this this helped sort of cover up the seam and it's not perfect but but it it's better than the it's better than just a straight straight Faden so this is an example of using a mask in combination with the opacity one of the best filters to use to get a looping motion is going to be fractal noise so we're going to go ahead and do play around some fractal noise so we're going to make a new composition 1280 720 30 frames let's go with 10 seconds long and so what we need for our fractal noise is we need to go up to layer and make a new solid make it the comp size so we are going to add going to go down to noise and grain and we're going to add fractal noise so fractal noise is a super easy filter to loop what we need to do in order to loop is we need to play around with the evolution now looping only works with evolution and I'll show you the drawback to this technique and I'll show you another workaround to play with fractal noise but first we're going to play with the evolution so I'm going to go to the very beginning of the timeline and I'm going to set a keyframe and hit u to show my keyframes and then I'm going to hold shift and I'm going to go to 10 seconds and I am going to let's say 3 make our evolution 3 so right now we have our evolution animating problem is that the beginning and the last frame if you scrub to them you can tell they're not the same they don't look the same which means that it's not going to be looping so what we need to do to in in to enable looping is going out of evolution options and then we're going to turn on cycle evolution and what we're going to do is since a since we set our evolution to 3 at the very end that's what we're going to want to do our cycles in revolution to we're going to set that to 3 if we set our evolution to 10 we would set this to 10 as well you just want to match whatever your ending evolution is so now if I render that last little bit here let's see let's get this going so what this does now is it makes the beginning and the very end frames identical so once it gets to the end here we'll notice the that it loops around but if you notice real carefully once it gets to the very last frame there your if your computer is fast enough you're going to know a little skit notice the skip right there it's just it's really it's really subtle but it is there and the reason it's it's skipping at the end or sort of stuttering is that it's actually duplicating the very last frame so this frame and this frame are identical they're the exact same frame so what we need to do in order to get around that is we're going to zoom into this very last keyframe I'm just pushing the plus button on my keyboard to zoom in to my comp is I'm going to take this keyframe and I'm going to drag it over one frame and what this is going to do is this is going to make it so that so that we're getting a proper loop here and we're not getting those duplicate frames at the end and that's sort of how you work around that that little stutter issue so right here we notice that there is no longer the stutter there so the fractal noise is looping perfectly and you know fractal noise is a really great plug-in to add just some texture to photos like if it's a it's a really easy way to I'm going to take this picture I have here you can just drop whatever picture you want in there but I'm going to set the set the set the mode to let's go to soft light here and so fractal noise is a great way to just add a little bit of movement and a little bit of on a little bit of interest to a still photo it's not the most dynamic thing but but you can use fractal noise in combination with other filters and other sort of animations that are going on in your composition it's probably a little bit too intense right now I would knock this down to like 25% and this way you're getting just real real subtle real real subtle movement so there you go that's a that's how to loop fractal noise but I'm going to set my opacity back to 100 I'm going to change the mode back to normal and delete that photo I just added so we're back to where we were before here's one of the problems with with fractal noise and trying to loop it is I can only play around I can only animate the evolution here if I try to do anything like offset the turbulence and move it that way if I want if I want it to be moving across the screen or something I'm going to run into a problem that the the loop is not going to work properly so once it gets to the end here it's going to it's going to pop back so where we just broke our loop here by playing around with the offset turbulence so the way that we could make this into a loop is we could treat this the same way that we did with a in our previous example with just the simple fade so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit command shift C and that is going to pre-comp this layer we want to make sure to move all attributes into the new composition and so we're going to do the exact same thing we did before I'm going to hit option right bracket on this layer I'm going to duplicate this layer I drag the end of the layer out I'm going to what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to do it a different way than I did before I'm going to hit page let's see here I'm going to hit page what am i hitting hitting page down okay page up and page down and that lets you sort of move one frame at a time so I'm going to hit page down until I get to the two where I do where I want it to the marker head and I'm going to hit option and then the bracket so there we go we've set up our loop so I'm going to drag that one end to one side holding shift and then I'm going to drag the other end to the other side and it doesn't matter which one is on top doesn't matter and we're going to put our fade in there so this this is a way that you can get around that that issue with with playing around with offset turbulence or anything in the transform properties with the with fractal noise so this is a this is a way to loop your fractal noise in the same way that we left so one of the cool things about working with fractal noise and things that other than video clips like we were working with before is we can actually easily adjust the timing of these things I can I can adjust how fast or how slow it is and the way that I can do that easily is I'm just going to select both of these layers I'm going to hit command shift C and move all attributes in a new composition and I want to adjust the composition duration to the timespan of the selected layers that's important there if you don't have this option if you're working in earlier versions of After Effects what you can do is a just set that the end marker there and then just right-click on this area above the composition and just go trim comp to work area so there you go so we're going to do that again so select both command shift C all that looks good now I can I can right click on the layer and I can go to time and I can go to enable time remapping and now I've got two keyframes here so what I could do is I can just push this in I could grab the right one and just push it in and what that's going to do is that's going to make this now the duration rather than nine seconds it is now three seconds long so if I want to loop that I'm just going to hit shift until it snaps on to that end keyframe marker there and now you'll notice that the that were that we're black here on this last keyframe and that's because we need to move one frame up so I'm going to hit page up and that is going to move the playback head one frame over and now I'm going to hit n on my keyboard and that's going to move the work area end over now if I now if I play this back now we just adjusted our our compositions so that the loop is now a lot faster we could do the same thing if you wanted to if you like worked on your motion and then you realize everything's going a little too fast I could drag the marker the other way I would just have to increase the duration of my comp here under composition and settings there and drag out the head and then drag over the marker hold shift go page up to go one frame over and now we just made this take about twice as long so this is one of the benefits of working with filters like this is that you can just easily time remap the layers and they will look perfect they will they will not look time remapped at all all right so now we're going to get on to looping particles and first we're going to do it in just the particle playground the built in particle system in after-effects and then we're going to do it in particular and it's the same principle and it works in any of these particle simulators so let's go ahead and make a new composition let's see how many seconds do we want this let's just go with 10 seconds long and we are going to create a new solid and we are going to put going to go down to simulation and go to particle playground and so this makes a little red stream of particles here so the way we loop particles it's super easy and honestly I my mind can't even really comprehend how it works but it does it works and so I just go with it so I can't explain it but this is just how you loop particles so I'm going to go up to cannon and at the very beginning of our timeline I'm going to set a keyframe for particles per second and I hit you and now that since our composition is 10 seconds long what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to 5 seconds and I'm going to set a keyframe for 0 and now I'm going to select both of these I'm going to draw a marquee around them then I'm going to right click on them and on the keyframes and I'm going to go to toggle hold hold keyframe and so what this is going to do is rather than a gradual decrease in our particles it's going to go from it's sort of like a spigot and it's on the whole time and then once it hits this one the particles turn off and so they transition out now the thing that's most important in looping these particles is to make sure that all the particles are off the screen by the time we get to the end of our composition here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the layer and I'm going to hit command shift C to pre compose move all attributes in and pre composing makes this so that we can make changes to our particle layer and we're not going to have to make the same changes twice so what we're going to do is we're going to go to five seconds and actually I'm going to go a frame before the five seconds to 429 because I'm at 30 frames a second I'm going to option right bracket on that layer and we're doing the same thing we did on the simple loop I'm dragging this one over and I'm going to page down and I'm going to option left bracket so that way just like we wanted it before we're not having overlapping frames there so I'm going to take this top layer I'm going to drag it over and hold shift until it snaps into place where it should be holding shift again to snap to the end of these layers I'm going to hit n to bring in the work area end and now we have a dual render here we have a seamless loop of these particles here and like I said I don't really know how this works but I don't really care because it works well whoo so what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to break this loop I'm going to play around with the particles until it breaks and then I'm going to show you how to fix it so if I double click and go into the pre comp here I'm going to play around with this stuff here it's to be honest I don't actually I don't actually use a particle playground I've always just used I've always just used trapcode particular it's a lot it's a lot more powerful of a plugin you can do more with it but this one's free so it's hard to argue with free so let's see here I'm I'm just going to play around with the force may be the force random spread I don't know I don't know whatever see here so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to play around with the particles until I get to a point where the particles are no longer completely gone by the end of the by the end of our composition here so one way I could solve this is I could grab this middle keyframe here and I kid a let's see yeah man I'm gonna have to drag it all the way over to the end here I think that I screwed this up here so let's go with I'm gonna undo this stuff until I okay so so I think I broke it too much see this is the problem with me not me not using this plugin enough here so if I turn down the gravity there we go all right so I just add rested the gravity I'd put it down to 50 here so now the particles are no longer out of the frame by the time we get to this the end of our composition so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just take this last keyframe here and I'm going to drag it over until I get it to a point where all of the particles just disappeared so this is one way to keep your particles going but you'll notice if we go back to our composition here what we're going to get now or we're going to get like little spurts so it will loop but it's going to look like little spurts and maybe that's what you want but my guess is it's probably not what you want so I think in order to make this loop properly we're going to have to go back into our composition here and we're at ten seconds right now for this composition so I'm actually going to make it 20 seconds and I'm going to drag at the end of the end of the layer I'm going to go to the 10-second mark ten seconds and I'm going to drag my second keyframe back to that point there so we'll see if the keyframes are now fully out by the end of this composition and they are so but see you run into a problem if your particles are showing at the end of the layer but you also run into a problem if they go if they disappear too quickly so what you want to do is you actually want to find the point where you can drag over the keyframe until until the particles are sort of you want your particles to be remaining until roughly the end of the timeline so so that looks good there so now we need to go back into our main composition so like I said just make sure your particles are sort of going sort of right to the end there so go back into the main comp now we we're going to delete the top comp will state we'll leave the one with the marker set to zero there I'm going to change my composition settings here to 20 so we just need to do the same thing that we did the first time that we did this we need to set our marker to 10 and I'm going to page up and then I'm going to option right bracket duplicate with command e drag the layer over going to page down option left bracket and then I'm going to scoot this layer over until it lines up I'm going to shift and hit n at the end of that composition so now we got our particles looping again even though we made our particles take longer in order to get the loop working correctly we just had to increase the length of our composition so now we we've got this layer looping so let's check it out once the render is done here she'll be working good we did everything correctly look at that so we've got our our nice little fountain of little red jelly beans and there you go so that's a that's a perfect loop of that now if you use particle playground you can make something awesome looking and this is just the technique to loop it so I'm going to jump in and make a new composition and we're going to do the same thing with particular it works exactly the same so I'm actually going to do this very fast just to show you that it works properly and add my particular change it to box crease that increase that see here we don't even want to do here let's go to our particle do the opacity over life there we go I've got little particles there fading in looks great so I'm going to do the same thing I'm going to set a I'm going to set a keyframe for my particles per second change that to zero toggle hold keyframe particles come in particles leave but the particles are leaving too fast so I'm going to drag this over until I get it to where the particles are particles are not leaving before they ought to but they're still in at the end so I need to drag it over until they are gone so I'm going to pre-comp this great doing the same exact thing I did before oh let's see I did something wrong there because they are not lining up let's see here that's what you get when you try to work too fast so how's your day going hopefully well okay so now we should be getting our loop here and so I just did the same exact thing that I did in particle playground I just this time I did it in trapcode particular just make sure that your particles sort of go to the end but don't overlap in the end so there you go there's there are looping particles that's just another technique you can do a motion now with looping fractal noise and looping particles and now this is just one more option okay so what about if you want to loop not one of those filters but what if you just want to do an animation with some masks animating masks and loop those so that's what I did in this motion here I just have some masks and they're slowly moving across the screen and so we're going to loop some masks right now so we're going to go to new composition you know the drill by now all that looks good and we're going to go to a new solid and we'll make it a white solid here now what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a thin little mask here at the bottom and I'm going to twirl down my mask properties and I'm going to set a keyframe for the mask path now I'm going to go to four seconds and I want to go to hey is my wife texting me so let's see I'm going to go to I'm going to double click on this mask here that's going to select all of it I'm going to shift drag it up and let's see here I'm going to deselect that I'm just going to grab the top of the mask and I'm going to make it really really wide up the up here at the top now I want it to go out of the screen completely that's important but I want it to get big so it's starting small on the bottom and now it's getting bigger as it goes towards the top here and that looks pretty good so this is going to be the basis of our looping mask animation so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pre-compose this layer and I always I'm a big fan of pre composing because if you're going to duplicate a layer a lot of times it's best to pre compose it first because if I wanted to go in and make changes to that mask animation I could do that easily by having it precomposed if I add tons of layers with that mask animated on it I'd have to adjust all of those layers and that would be a pain in the butt so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to one second now this is important that we get these times really accurate so we're at one second here I'm going to duplicate this layer I'm going to grab the layer move it over hold shift and that's going to snap it to that one second mark I'm going to go over two seconds I'm going to command D and I'm going to do the same thing and now I can select all three of these layers duplicate those drag them to the top and I'm duplicating by hitting command D and now if I go to the three second mark I can just shift drag those there now if I just select all of those oh my gosh is getting crazy I can just take those drag those to the top and go over see what am I out at six right now six seconds so now I've got all these layers basically doing the same thing there okay so what I'm gonna do is I'll just set the end of my my time let's do an even 12 seconds there put the end marker there I'm going to hit n to bring in the work area I'm going to right-click on the work area bar up here and I go trim comp to work area and we'll select all these layers now I'm going to command shift C to pre compose them move all attributes adjust composition duration looks good so what I want to do right now this is this is where it takes a little bit of detective work is I'm just going to go to the let's go to like the four second mark just to make sure that we uh that all of the masks are going to be in where they need to be for the loop so I'm going to hit B to bring in my work area begin beginning point there now the way that I'm going to find a loop point for this is I'm actually going to take a snapshot so there's this little camera button here and this is actually a super handy tool then I use it a lot of for different reasons here but I'm going to click it and that will take a snapshot and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hunt over here until I find something that lines up with it perfectly so if I hit if I hit f5 what that's going to do is when you hit f5 that's going to show the snapshot that you just took there so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to find the exact frame where it where it matches up and I'm hitting page up and page down and then I'm hitting f5 until I find the frame oh and I found it right here so I'm hitting f5 to show my snapshot but it's not changing at all which means I'm on the exact frame so now like like we've been doing on all these examples though we don't want the exact frame what we want is the frame before this frame so I'm going to hit page up which is going to go the frame before that frame and now I'm going to hit n to bring in the end of my work area so now I have got a perfect loop here so this is essentially what I did on on that motion that I showed in the beginning I just did it with triangular masks so you can you can do it with whatever kind of masks you want now I think it's I think it's moving a little fast for me so what I'm going to do is I'm going to let's see here there's multiple ways we can do this I will just shift drag till I snap onto the front option left bracket shift click option right bracket and now I'm going to right click on that layer I actually sorry I'm not I'm going to command shift C to pre compose and adjust duration of the time span of the selected layer now I can just right click on that and go to enable time remapping and I can drag this front keyframe what I want to do is I'll want to get my marker over here because keyframes can't just snap to the beginning of a of the comp so I'm going to grab that and now hold shift and that'll snap it to the beginning I'm also going to hit B to bring my work area you start there and then I can also hit alt left bracket so alt left bracket just sets the layer time at the beginning you could also just drag it if you want so now I just I just slowed down the the movement of everything so it's a little less distracting when you're working on these if this is meant to be a background to song lyrics or something you're not going to want something that moves super fast you're going to want something that sort of sits back and doesn't distract from the lyrics so there you go this is a this is a way to loop masks and so there are times when I'm working on emotion and I'm just not liking how it's looking and so one of the techniques I've used in a the past two motion packs that I put together is mirroring and so I'll show you a motion here and I just I wasn't really feeling the movement of it maybe it was just that it kind of was kind of I don't know too much or kind of like made you made people get like motion sickness or something I don't know it's something about it wasn't working for me so I went ahead and I added this effect and we'll you can find it under distort mirror now you can always find effects under the effects and presets and it's often a faster way to work so if I just typed in Mir it it'll ah it'll come up with mirror there so what I need to do is I need to get the mirror point into the center of this composition here and since our frame is 1280 if I set it to 640 and now we created a mirror so what it does is it sort of reflects one side you can you can try it both ways so this way the the the motion is is going this way oh I didn't even show you how it looked in the beginning today oh I know I did yeah so it just kind of swirls around here but by adding the mirror onto it now it's sort of now it has some symmetry to it so it it feels a little more stable and maybe a little less distracting than the than the other way if I set the reflect angle to 180 I can now get them get them so they're going up so if I so it's the difference between this and this you know so this I feel like kind of makes me want to fall over because everything is going swirling in the same direction but this way it kind of has some gravity to it has some I don't know it feels a little more solid so let's go ahead and go back into our comp and let's play around with this mirroring idea so if I drill down into the the comp until we get to the mask that we first precomposed here so since our the composition that we already created there was already it's already symmetrical so what we need to do is break that symmetry so we get a we could go into the rotation of this layer by hitting R we get a set it to 45 degrees here so now our our mask is sort of going this way and you know where it's kind of it's not we're fine we're seeing the edges there and then it's kind of ending here but we'll just we'll go with it you can play around with it on your own if you want to keep experimenting so now that we've got this going one direction here which is a great band so now we've got all of our as a joke they're terrible we've got all of our all of our masks going one way here so now if we wanted to just really create some symmetry here I could drop the mirror onto our top composition here set it to 640 so now we've got now we've got something a little a little more interesting here I don't know it's kind of kind of cool-looking I mean so you can play around and you can get some different looks what happens if we make it go the other way now they are now they're going up rather than um rather than down so you know this is a this is an easy way to get some cool looks I tried I've done mirroring on clouds on masks on particles there's a lot of there's a lot of weight different ways that you can mirror things and have them have all right so we're going to move on to coloring your motion and this is very important because it doesn't matter how nice the motion how nice the animation is if it it just looks ugly so one of my favorite sites to get free photos from the site called unsplash and I've used a couple of their images for motions and they're just free photos you can do whatever you want with them you can make stuff to sell or do whatever you want so go ahead grab some some a couple pictures from this site and bring it into After Effects and we're going to play around with them so I'm going to create a new composition again and I'm going to drop one of the photos that I got into my composition and it s to sort of scale it down so it fits so when I'm colorizing photos often one of the first things I'll do is all is all added tint to it and maybe I'll set it to 50% and this just sort of sucks some of the color out of the photo so that it's a little easier to work work with when you're sort of pushing and pulling the colors so I'm going to create a new adjustment layer you know one of the most classic ways to do color correction is through curves so you know you can I can drop the whites here I can sort of bring up some reds and make it warm let's see I can pull down the blues to sort of increase the warmth of this this look here I can go to the greens and maybe I can um see you know I can pull out some of the green in the highlights and I can put in some of the green and the lowlights there so this is just uh this is like the tried and trued way of adjusting colors in you know Photoshop After Effects that sort of thing you know but there's there's other ways to do color correction and I found some ways some little some little cheats that got me some really cool really cool looks so I'll I'll show you those now so I'm going to create a new adjustment layer and you know one of the one of the plugins I found to be really helpful is this Video Copilot free plugin called color vibrance and I'll try to put a link to that in the description it's at first it doesn't it doesn't really seem like it's that powerful but I'll show you what happens when you sort of combine instances of this effect so I'm going to add Video Copilot color vibrance to my photo here and let's see here so I think the first thing I'll do is I'll go into my color and I'm gonna try a color that's not so intense I'm going to well we can try leaving it at this green and I'm going to bring down the bring down the the intensity of it so the where the where the key comes in with this plug-in is by doing different instances of this so I'm going to select this and I'm going to hit command D to duplicate that layer so I'm going to select this color now I'm going to try I'm going to try a different color here so by trying a different color and by sort of playing around with the intensity of it the the the different instances of the filters sort of interact with one another and you can get some really cool looks here so now that I have two of these maybe I'll go back to my green and maybe now all now I'll play around with this and see if I can uh I don't know I'll just play around it until it until I think it looks nice let's see here let's try maybe some Reds so just play around with it and see what comes from it so this is really nice here I like this I like this look a lot so I got it by by doing a green and then by adding a purple on top of it so it just it has a nice look to it and maybe I'll add a vignette so I'll add a new adjustment layer curves I'll drop that down there you go now I'm going to put this adjustment layer underneath the other adjustment layer I'm going to double click the ellipse tool you can change the shape of your lips tool by clicking and holding down but since it's on ellipse I'm going to double click now I need to set the mask to subtract I'm going to hit mm to bring up the mass properties maybe I'll set it to 400 so now we've got a mask there so it sort of brings the focus in a little bit and you may notice if you're getting some banding issues if you see like stripes going across your image here what you want to do to fix that is that you can in your project pane here you'll see it says 8 bits per channel so if I hold option and click on that it is now 16 bits per channel which which is going to get rid of some banding issues when you're working with gradient colors like this so if you see any banding just set it to 16 there's really no reason to go to 32 not unless you're doing very specific things with super bright colors so this is this is one way to colorize this now I'll show you even just one more step that we can add to this to play around with more colors so I'm going to add even another adjustment layer now I'm going to go to color correction and go to Colorama and it get it this is a pretty wild filter and at full strength it just looks awful but if we change the mode to color and if I hit T to bring up the opacity now if I drop that down let's do like 25% so now if I turn on and off this layer you can notice that it's kind of playing with the colors a little bit it's sort of adding it's sort of adding some colors into these waves here so what I can do now is I can go to the input phase in Colorama and I can go to phase shift and now if I drag this it's gonna it's just going to push and pull my colors just a little bit and and it just it just tweaks your colors ever so slightly but it really adds a lot of depth because it's adding it's adding new new colors in a inside all these other colors so just play around till you find something that you like and you know you can play around upping the opacity but if you go too high with Colorama it's really not going to look good it's going to look best at about 25% maybe even 20% it's going to look best when it's subtle you know we can try and dropping another photo in under all this and just see just see what it does to that photo so I'm going to drop another photo in and maybe I'll just play around until until I get something I like for this one so maybe I'll just try pushing in and pulling the colors here maybe I'll turn off Colorama for now just pushing and pulling and we're just trying to find something nice here you know you could just you could do this all day just playing around with different colors uh-oh here here's a here's something to know about vibrance is it crashes a lot so it just crashed on me and it tends to crash the most when I'm playing around in the color so what I would tell you is to save a lot when you're using color vibrance now color vibrance doesn't seem to crash when like once you set the colors but it seems to crash a lot when when you're playing around in the colors so it so just crashed after effects for me so that's a great so right now I'm going to show you how to combine defects with fractal noise specifically because fractal noise is a really powerful plugin but it's even more powerful when you combine it with other with other filters or plugins so I'm going to go and make a new composition we will just make this we do it 10 seconds long let's do a new solid and we're going to add our fractal noise here okay so what I would like to do with this fractal noise is I'd like to create some bars out of the fractal noise that sort of pulse so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just set the evolution here 10 seconds let's set it to like 5 now if we want it to loop we just go to our evolution options cycle evolution and we'll set it to 5 now remember if we want it to loop properly we have to scoot that over one frame so we don't get duplicate frames ok so we've got our fractal noise going here so what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to add a mosaic filter to it and I'm just going to open up my effects and presets here I'm just going to type in mosaic and we're going to add that to our layer here now mosaic you can adjust this is sort of like the cops effect when you got like a naked redneck running through the streets they're going to be putting this over his little uh his junk so you don't see it so but there are other uses for the mosaic other than obscuring things that no one needs to see so what I can do here is I can um if I make the horizontal blocks to one now I'm only getting the mosaic going across this way and this is a nice look but it's it's too subtle right now what I need to do is I need to play with the fractal noise until I can get these bars to pop a little bit more so what I'm going to do is I'm going to ink the contrast maybe then I'm going to maybe decrease the brightness I'll also go into the transform and increase the scale here that can often uh often help with these let's see maybe the scale should be like 200 okay so now if I play this now I've got these sort of pulsing bars here which which is a which can be a great element to add to to a motion here so this is a this is one option here we can we can push this a little further we can actually rotate our um our layer here 45 degrees now I think I'll make this solid a little bit bigger so that it covers our frame maybe I need to make like 2500 looks like I need to do just a little bit more let's see so just get it uh so it covers the composition here now we can we can add a mirror effect here so I'll add a new adjustment layer and then I'll do a mirror effect here so we're just combining filters here to get some different looks change that to 640 okay now I now I just generated this super quick just sort of pattern here and you know you could use this layer and now I could I could overlay this layer on a on a thick on a picture so it's you know it's moving pretty fast if I wanted to slow down the pulsing I would just have to slow down the evolution I would set it to 2 or 1 or something like that but for this demonstration it's fine let's go find one of those photos there and we'll just uh we'll just drop it in and then we'll drop it in will change the tangent to overlay or something like that so so now it's being overlaid on this photo and also notice that the photo is being mirrored to which which could be a good look depending on what you're going for if you didn't want the the photo to be mirrored what you'd want to do is just select the mirror the adjustment layer with the mirror and then our bars here and then pre compose them and now we Allah set it to overlay and now we're not we're not getting our photo mirrored so if if you did want to mirror it you have that option but if you don't then I just pre-compose it so this is a good option a good way to use fractal noise ok so now we're going to use fractal noise with the with a filter called vector blur and we're going to make some cool fog with that so we're going to make a new composition I'm going to add a solid I'm gonna add fractal noise to that and let's see I'll I'll increase the scale maybe to about 250 and let's go ahead and we're going to go to blur I'm going to vector blur and let's change this type to a direction fading I'll show you what it looks like if you just keep it natural it sort of gets this I don't know even know how to describe it sort of looks like water reflections may be like caustics or something but I'm going to change it to Direction fading and then this is going to create our our fog look so maybe I'll increase the scale to 300 of our fractal noise I think that that looks pretty good for now so let's go ahead and do the evolution set a keyframe there let's let's do like 2 for the evolution let's go ahead and check that out now vector blur really slows down the renders here so just keep that in mind when you're working with it it's a it's kind of a slow plugin ona and we're not getting a loop here because we did not set our loop options here so we got to do the same thing that you know how to do very well now turn that on set it to and then we got to scoot this one over one frame maybe I'll set this to like a quarter resolution so it renders faster so now we've got our fog and you know I use this I use this a lot when I'm trying to sort of create like a mist or a fog or something it just uh it just looks really nice especially when you make it subtle and you turn down the opacity a lot that's when it looks the best so one more thing we can do to this fog here is we can have it sort of rolling across the screen so we'll go to offset turbulence and you know this is going to break our seamless loop so I guess we didn't need to do the seamless loop before since we're playing with the offset but whatever alright so I'm just going to drag drag the offset turbulence on the X so it's a sort of fog is moving across the screen here and that's looking very nice now I find that the the way this fog works the best is if you sort of duplicate the the layer and sort of have two versions of it so I can duplicate the layer I'm going to go to the evolution options and I'm going to turn up the random see just so so we get two different looks for the fog because otherwise your fog would look identical on both layers so what I'm going to do on this top layer here is a I'm going to have this top layer fog moving even faster so I'm going to go to that last keyframe there and I'm going to set it to let's go with like 3000 so now I'm going to go to the opacity on this layer and I'll turn it down to maybe 40% and also turn down the opacity on the bottom layer to maybe to like 50% and so by having two layers moving at different speeds I think it's uh I think my top layer is moving a little bit too fast there so I'll turn it down maybe did a twenty six hundred or something this might be too fast anyways but um so what you get is you get sort of multiple layers of the fog and it gives it it gives it a little bit more dimension so so it doesn't look quite so flat so it doesn't look like it's on a single flat plane now we could a we could um let's see here what are we going to do with this well we'll create a back black drop for us so we'll create a new solid make it black pop it behind this and now we're going to we're going to loop this fog here so by selecting all three layers I'm going to hit command shift C to recompose do the same technique we did at the beginning there you don't need me explaining this by now so drag those layers let's hear all right I'm doing the wrong technique here okay so what yeah we we just have to do the simple fade here so we're going to fade one layer into the next now it's important to put that black solid because that fractal noise had was going to have transparency on it because both of our layers were not a hundred percent there so it's in it's important to have that black solid so that our fade here works properly so now we've got our fog looping here so we've got a nice seamless loop here so you know what I could do with this fog now is now that it's looping so I could grab a photo this photo is from unsplash and I'm going to pre compose these two layers here again because one is fading into the other so if we if we just did change the the transfer mode on these right now you would see a pop right here as it got to the N layer because this layer would be that you'd be able to see through the layers so we want to pre compose these layers before we play around with the with the with the modes with the transfer modes so now now this precomposed I can set it to something like screen let me shrink my forests here I think I found this photo just by looking up like trees or forests or something on on unsplash so now if I if I do a render with with the screen mode set on the fog over this already kind of foggy photo it's really going to sell the effect that you know it's a this isn't going to look like a CG image this is going to look pretty natural here with uh with this fog rolling in so let's just check that out cool you know I think the fog is moving probably about twice as fast as it should but you can play around that and slow your fog down if you if you're not liking the look of it one thing I would like to do here is I would like to have the fog only on the bottom half of the screen so I'm going to select my rectangular mask tool I'm going to sort of draw mask right here then I'm going to hit mm to go on the feather maybe put it to like seven hundred or something like that so that way the the fog sort of fades out till it's top here and we just have the fog moving along the moving along the bottom here and you know that's a that is one good look in motion right there and it loops and you know we can add some color correction like we or some color to it before with maybe vibrance if it's not crashing our computer and making us want to punch our monitor but when it does work it works really well so you know play Mouse so that brings us to the end of this very long very packed full of goodness tutorial so yeah hopefully with all these techniques you'll be able to make some cool looping motions I'm also going to include After Effects project file that is going to let you do a 5 minute countdown on your own there so you'll just be able to open up the project file and you can change the font just select all the layers change the font adjust the just the kerning on it so it looks good and yeah you'll be all set to do some pretty sweet 5 minute countdowns make some motions yeah and I hope you have some fun with it yeah I've been learning a lot of these past few months and I'm sure I'll be learning a lot more about doing these looping motions over time but uh yeah until next time guys it's been

Channel: Dan Stevers

Views: 270,244

Keywords: looping, after, effects, how, to, loop, animations, in, aftereffects, ae, fractal, noise, particles, particular, trapcode

Id: V55hA573yRY

Length: 65min 46sec (3946 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2015