Secret VFX Trick to Elevate Your Edits (After Effects Tutorial)

hi today I'm going to be showing you how to today I'm going to be showing you how to track and composite an after effects that lets you do stuff like this without the motion tracker and without any 3D tracking involved let's get right into [Music] it okay right before we jump into After Effects I just want to show the three different examples we're going to be walking through the first one is some b-roll footage that I shot and I think this is a really good example to show the workflow and and how the effect works the second one is going to be some of the footage from the intro that you already saw a little section of that to show how the face tracking works and then the last one is going to be some compositing on some footage of some signs we're going to do some sign replacement and use the effect to track that into our scene and I'm giving for the first and third Clips the actual download to the clips if you want to follow along as we're doing this so let's just jump right into After Effects this is the base shot we're going to be working on so I'm going to play through and show it I already have it colored and set in the composition now there's a couple things that I want to show and we'll see later in the problems why this is important to do but the first thing we're going to do actually is we're going to pre-compose before we do anything I'm going to right click this and go to pre-compose and we'll just call this Vienna footage base pre and I'm going to make sure that move all attributes into the new comp is selected so the second one as well as this checkbox has to be turned on the adjust composition duration and click okay again I'll show why this is important later in the problem section of the video but it's important to have our composition first pre-med next we're going to bring on the Beating Heart of this effect which is warp stabilizer there's a couple ways to add it you could bring it up as an effect so if I just type warp stabilizer we see it's here or you could also just right click on your footage and go to track and stabilize and click warp stabilizer VFX when I click this it'll automatically start initializing you'll see now it's tracking through the numbers and it went pretty fast cuz this is in 1080P sometimes if you have bigger resolutions like 4K it takes a little bit longer so we see that we've just stabilized this right and it's a lot more stable but that's actually not really the effect we're going for we're going to use warp stabilizer in a way that is not too commonly used what I'm going to do here is ignore these settings for a moment moment and I'm going to come down to the advanced tab over here and turn on the track points so I'm going to select show track points and we'll see that the track points show up on our clip we'll also see that when this is selected the stabilization turns off so it's as if the effect isn't on it but what we're interested in is seeing these actual track points and if I increase the track Point size here from 100% to something larger so just so it's easier to see we can see that we have all of these kind of jumping around and a good amount stuck on our subject for this actual example I want to be sticking some text above our subject's head counteracting the movement of the the actual train and whatever she's doing so that it looks like it's actually tracked in place normally if you were to use either 3D tracking maybe it would work on a clip like this or if you were to use the motion tracker that might also work but you might have some issues with it I find this to be the easiest and quickest solution so with these track points on already what we're going to do is go through and delete all the points that we don't need we don't need it to focus on any of these track points around here on the window on this person here in the front on anything on the wall we only want the track points that are stuck to her head here that way when it starts to stabilize it only looks at those points so the way to do that with the track points turned on is just click and drag around the points that you don't want and you'll see they highlight yellow here and when I just select a certain section and hit the backspace button or delete on Mac they'll disappear it'll quickly restabilize and then we can just do the next set now this doesn't need to be perfect you don't need to get every single point I'm just going to delete most of them and I think that should probably be pretty good and as we start to scrub through you can see that points pop up and get recreated that's because it's tracking different sections of the clip so we basically just need to go through and make sure that for the most part most of the points are just on the head [Music] here scrubbing through I got most of the points there's a couple that pop up here that you know I might as well delete it's not super important just as long as most of the points are on the head the more time you spend on this deleting unimportant points the better your track will be but but I feel like this is probably pretty good doesn't need to be exact there are a couple things I want to show like there's some points here where you might see here like this little uh cyan Point kind of slides a little bit and this purple one slides a little bit these are going to be problem points because they're tracking based on this person's hand movement so I'm going to make sure I delete both of these I'm just going to select them individually make sure I delete them points popping in and out is totally okay and the ones that are stuck are obviously the ones we want to focus on but the ones that are jumping around or have some weird sliding effects like this pink one right here has a little jump you can see it kind of jumps there I want to delete things like that because those are going to be some somewhat problematic points if we go over here now and turn off the show track points we'll now see we have a little bit of a different stabilization and it's a little bit weird if I play through it it's very much stuck to the head and we can see the whole clip moving around it it's an odd stabilization but that's because we haven't changed the rest of the settings in the effect the first thing I'm going to change is go from smooth motion to no motion and I'm going to change Subspace warp to position scale and rotation and then I'm going to select Preserve scale so now when we play through we have it now a little bit more stuck on the head without any of that warping the next thing I'm going to change and this is the important setting here is instead of stabilize I'm going to select the drop down here for stabilize and set it to reversible stabilization just like this and now when we play through we can see we have the clip kind of rotating and moving and we see like empty sections around the clip as you can see here these little black sections over here we can see it rotating when she nods her head this looks really odd but this is the first part of our effect now the way to use this there's two ways to do it the way I like to do it is just to keep it in the same comp I'm actually going to right click down here and make a new adjustment layer and I'm going to select our clip again go to our warp stabilizer and copy it and go to our adjustment layer and press contrl +v or command V on Mac and we'll see that a an error pops up a big red error pops up because we need to change it from reversible stabilization to reverse stabilization and now when we press play we'll see we have an unstabilized clip it's as if we didn't even do anything to the clip however anything we put now inside in between these two layers will now be stabilized to what our clip was so let's actually do that I'm going to right click here and make a new text layer and I'm going to drop this underneath the adjustment layer and I'm going to turn off the adjustment layer for a second because this will help us place it so I'm going to move this over here kind of scale it down just for now and we can change this to whatever we want we're just going to use this for now and rotate it a little bit to match her head now when I press play we can see that the distance between the text and our head stays relatively the same so when we turn on this adjustment layer that takes our stabilization data and undo it then we can see our text is stuck to our head and even brings on that little knot which is super cool we could put whatever we want here you could put a graph here you could put any sort of Motion Graphics and it'll be stuck to her head what's great is it doesn't have to just be above her head we can also rotate this and move it you know onto her head when we press play it's now on the back of her head if instead you want to go with the route of pre-composting and not using the adjustment layer I want to show one really important setting I'm going to take this our pre- comp that has our warp stabilizer on it I'm going to right click it and pre-compose it and we'll call this Vienna track pre and make sure again move all attributes in the new comp and this checkbox the adjust composition duration is selected and click okay now we're going to jump into our Vienna track here and I'm going to copy our warp stabilizer and go back to our Vienna comp and paste it onto the pre-m and set it again like we did with the adjustment layer I'm going to set this to reverse stabilization so when we press play it's now revers in the stabilization but you can see still that we have these black sections it doesn't show properly like it did with the adjustment layer and that's because the only thing you need to select is on the clip go to the collapse transformation button which is this little starlike icon you just need to click it on the layer and it'll get rid of that what this toggle basically does is it allows our composition to basically see inside our pre-m to see all the transformation data so definitely make sure you turn this on and when we press play we have the same thing where basically looks like there's no stabilization on it so where you would add your graphics now is instead of underneath the adjustment layer we would actually go into our pre-m over here and you can make whatever you want so again if we make our text and Shrink this down and put it above her head when we now go back into our main comp we can see that it's the same thing attached just like the adjustment layer either works I prefer doing the adjustment layer cuz it avoids having to pre-comp an extra time but do whatever works for you in your project the next one I have here is the second example which is the intro footage it's a smaller section of it just because it was a pretty long clip but it's all essentially the same thing so I'm going to rightclick this and go to track and stabilize and select warp stabilizer VFX but I'm going to hit cancel for a second because we're not ready for it to analyze there's one thing I want to do before it analyzes and I'm going to toggle down the advanced tab here just like we did before and select detailed analysis now I know this one works the best for this clip just because I did the intro already but sometimes if your clip doesn't have quite enough data or you're finding that there's not enough points then using the detailed analysis can work really well so as I was talking there it finished analyzing and if we show the track points and I increase the track Point size we can see that we have a solid amount of points ready right here on our clip and if I scrub through we can see there's a ton here on the face which is really good because that will give us a nice solid track now I'm going to delete that because I just wanted to show the points we need to still precompose our footage first because that's really important and then I want to show something that you could actually do inside that footage base pre-m so let's right click our clip go to precompose and let's call this intro footage base pre make sure both of these are selected and click okay and we can see that it's now the length of our composition if I open this here what I'm going to do first is make something called a garbage mat so I'm going to right click right here and make a new solid and just make this a black solid just like this and I'm going to turn this off I'm going to grab the pen tool so you could hit G on your keyboard or just select the pen tool at the top and with our black solid selected I'm going to select just roughly around my head just something like that and I'm going to scrub through and make sure that my head stays mostly in this mask you can key frame it if you want so if you hit M on your keyboard and select the stopwatch icon right here to make a key frame if you need to you can move around The Mask just kind of a few intermittent points so maybe I want to make sure it tracks a little bit better this is a really really quick 30second mask just to make sure that it stays on Target and we can see that we have the mask animated around in this case I didn't really need to do that once you have your mask set and tracked roughly in the area that you want it to show we need to change this from add to subtract and let's actually turn on the layer so when I turn it on we can see that we've covered everything else and now only my head is showing and the reason we're doing this is because it's just a quick way of sort of deleting some of the points that would show up on the background that we were going to delete anyway it just kind of saves a little Quick Step and so when we come back into our intro footage comp we can see we have the black stuff missing here and only my head Focus so when I right click this and I go to track and stabilize and go to warp stabilizer VFX and we go to Advanced and toggle detailed analysis when it finishes and we turn on these show track points we can now see that there's no points around here on the outside because we covered that and what we can now do since this is already stabilized is go go back into our intro footage and turn off the black solid and coming back here those points are still not there just like the last one I'm going to do basically the same workflow I'm just going to increase the track Point size so I can see them a little bit easier and I'm going to scrub through the composition and delete the unnecessary ones I really only wanted to track on basically the upper half of my head just like in this section so I'm going to go through I'll fast forward and you'll see me select all these points right [Music] now that took about 1 minute something like that for a clip like this I'm now just going to scrub through make make sure I delete any trouble points so something like this purplish point right here is kind of sliding up and down definitely want to delete that so let's actually turn off our track points and let's change those settings again I'm going to change this from smooth motion to no motion Subspace to position scale rotation and then change objective to reversible stabilization and now I'm going to right click and make a new adjustment layer and we're going to copy our warp stabilizer from here and paste it onto our adjustment layer and make sure we change it from reversible to reverse stabilization and now when we press play we can see we have our base basically nothing stabilized footage but of course we know now we can put anything in between so I'm just going to right click and let's just put a new text here and I'll just type skygraphx stays attached to the head and you can see even when I move a little bit to the right there the text stays and we have that tracked with it even when I do that little head tilt so this is a really really quick and easy way to track this would be really great for an intro shot of a video or if you're saying like a certain quote or important sentence you could track things on you or on whatever you want and it's really not that long to do okay the last one here is the sign and this is the most quote unquote complicated one but it's really not too complicated this will just involve us going a little into Photoshop to do some very basic painting but I'll show exactly how to do that right now the first thing is let's do our pre-m let's do the same workflow first we're going to right click and go to pre-compose make sure these two are selected click okay and then I'm going to right click and go to track and stabilize and select warp stabilizer VFX the analyzing finished but before we do the track points I actually want to see the stabilization of this so this time I'm actually going to do it the other way around I'm going to select smooth motion and change it to no motion Subspace warp to position scale rotation and make sure you select preserve scale which I don't believe I did in the last example in the intro footage but I guess for that example it wasn't necessary I forgot to do it but in the case that you have some weird scaling issues make sure you have your preserve scale option checked now when I press play we can see that it's actually already pretty stuck I don't think we need to do too much with the track points there really is no motion already let's turn on the track points though and let's increase them so we can see them and I think because this clip is relatively simple there's not a lot of extra movement like there's no person walking by or anything we don't really need to do much but honestly if we turn off the track points we can see like this is already pretty stable so I'm going to go through and do a really quick cleanup but some clips like this don't really need too much work it could already be done off of just the basic stabilization so what we're going to do here is I basically want to paint out part of our clip that we want to put our own stuff on top of so I want to remove the two subjects here and remove the text and the little bike icon the best way to do that is to take a frame from here bring it into Photoshop and use some stuff like generative fill to remove them which is what we're going to do before we do that though because some of this bottom sign is cut off I'm going to change it from stabilize crop and auto scale just to stabilize only that way it zooms out a little bit more and we can see the full sign it doesn't actually matter because we're going to be reversing it anyway but for our case so that we can make sure that we see the full subject I'm just grabbing one of these frames so I'm going to scrub through until something like that looks good I'm not worried about the black bars cuz we're going to mask this out anyway after we finish it in Photoshop so to save a frame from here I'm going to go to composition save frame as and select file and it'll open up the finder I'm going to save where I want to put the base image so I named it Geneva base image and it says Photoshop here but I'm not worried about that we're going to click save and change it from current settings to best and where it says Photoshop I'm going to click this and change this to JPEG and make sure under format options that we are set to maximum quality click okay click okay and and just hit render and it'll save that single frame out it's instant cuz it's just one frame we're now going to jump into Photoshop and I'll show how to paint this out really easily the image is imported into Photoshop let's get to painting this will be really quick especially if you have the newer versions of Photoshop which have generative fill I'm going to select the lasso tool here so clicking holding this select the lasso tool I'm going to select just roughly around our subjects kind of as close as we can with a little bit of margin it doesn't need to be perfect you could of course spend more time if you want but for our case this doesn't really matter because it should do a good job just as long as we're selecting with enough outer margin so that it grabs everything and now that we have our selection all I'm going to do is Select generative fill and click generate and we'll see that it did a fantastic job already we have three options all of them work I say the last one is the best one but it matched our lines and the texture of the sign so that was literally all we needed to do by the way if you select with your lasso tool any section and you don't see the contextual taskar here if you go up to window make sure that contextual task taskar is turned on so just select this and it'll turn on just like that so I'm now going to do the same thing with the bottom sign I'm just going to select all the way around all of these just like so and click generate leave it blank and click generate again and there we go we have a perfectly blank sign for both of them so that's it we're done in Photoshop I'm going to select file and go to export export as and I'm going to save this again as a JPEG make sure the quality is Max and save it in the same spot that I did before all right looking in our file explorer here I have the base one right next to the edited one we're going to import the edited one I'll just bring this into media and let's bring this into our Geneva composition so I'm going to click and drag this and drop it on top and let's turn it off for a moment because we still need to do the reverse stabilization so let's make our adjustment layer I'm going to right click make a new adjustment layer make sure it's at the top select our Geneva footage base that we tracked before copy our warp stabilizer and paste it onto the adjustment layer and make sure that we change it to reverse stabilization we did also forget to change this to reversible stabilization so I'm going to do that on the bottom one and there we go so now we have our basically not stabilized footage but again that's because we have the sandwich set up so when we turn on this we can see that it tracks and stabilizes with it now this looks really weird because we haven't positioned our sign yet and the first thing I'm going to do is mask around this sign so I'm going to hit G for the pen tool and I'm going to do my best to do kind of just a as clean as I can a quick mask around the sign and I'll fast forward through this right now I did a quick mask around the sign being as precise as I could what I now need to do is just make sure that it's lined up so I'm going to hit t for opacity and I'm going to lower down the opacity on this so really easy way to do this is if you hit Y for the Anchor Point move tool and we select the Anchor Point which is over here and you click and drag it over to one specific point so I'm going to zoom in here to this little corner Circle I'm going to make sure that this is lined up just right and it is already which is good but in the case that it was something like this and let's say that you have it you know maybe scaled wrong and you're trying to position it just right so it's scaled and and positioned just right this is a really great way to do this if you line up up a specific point so in our case this top left corner Circle and you move the Anchor Point with the Y tool and move it over here now anything you do on rotation and scale will do it around this section so it's good to start on one point that has a solid reference and then you can scale this down and it'll scale down according to that point which just makes it a little bit easier if we zoom into the other side to make sure that it's just the right scale there and we can see that the texture lines up really nicely so in the case that your images don't line up or whatever that's a really good way to make sure everything is perfect in place let's bring our opacity back up to 100 and now if we Zoom back out and turn on our adjustment layer if we hit play we have our same shot as before with the track but now we have a blank sign so let's do the same thing with the other sign I'm going to turn off the adjustment layer I'm going to duplicate our Geneva sign and hit M for masks and delete the mask cuz we don't need that first one let's now do it around this circle now this one I'm going to do a little bit more rough cuz we didn't edit these pixels here I'm just going to do kind of a rough circle around the shape of the sign so let's Zoom back out and let's turn on our our adjustment layer and now when we press play again we have both signs completely cleaned up this is our base canvas this is where we get to have fun with it what I'm going to do here is pull in an asset I got from inato elements and let's for now turn off the adjustment layer again I'm going to scale down this asset right here this is just a walking asset I got and if we hit play we can see that he's just walking in place on our sign let's also add a couple basic effects I'm going to bring up a fill effect just the simple fill and let's change this to White and then let's also throw in a posterized time effect and I'm going to set this to something like six to make it a little bit choppier so now when I press play we see we have our animation on top of the sign but if we zoom in here we can see that our assd here is really crisp and clean compared to a lot of the texture and the sort of white discoloration of our sign so to do a little bit of fixing on that let's just do a couple quick compositing tricks on our fill I'm going to change the color with the eyedropper tool and I'm going to select the white of our sign and that'll match a lot better the actual color of this I'm then going to make a duplicate of our Geneva sign the blue one here and bring this above our asset I'm then going to drop a tint onto this to make it black and white and I'm also going to select the track mat here to show only on our silhouette man here and make sure that the man is turned on as well so we'll see that now we have the texture only showing on top of the man now if we change the blend mode from normal to something like multiply and then add on our levels effect we can actually pull the right side over until it gets to just about the right color that we need with some of that texture passing through so now we have texture from the sign passing through onto the man and it looks a lot more composited into the actual scene of course you could always lower the opacity if the texture feels too strong so just hitting t on our signs layer I'm going to drop the sound to something like 80 and we'll see that looks really nice the next thing is some text animation so I'm going to right click and make a new text layer and let's do something kind of dramatic cuz why not a little Nathaniel Drewes let's do two lines right here just like this the question is where are we going because where exactly is this guy walking to I'm not going to animate it in this composition I'm actually going to to select both right click and pre-compose and this will make it just a little bit easier so we have a little bit more control after animating them and let's name this sign text pre and make sure we move all the attributes and this as well click okay and let's now jump to the comp and do some really basic text animation now you could of course animate the text any which way that you want I'm going to do something pretty basic that uses the transform effect cuz it's one of my favorite ways to animate text what I'm going to do is bring on the transform effect just like so and let's actually key frame the position now if I hit U and we move move this over a little bit let's bring this down to start somewhere let's start it really low somewhere like here and select both of our key frames hit F9 to easy ease and then go to our graph editor and make sure we're on the speed graph and now I'm going to select the right one and pull it to the left and the left one and pull it to the left as well so it starts fast and eases in now something I like to use is a plugin called text Exploder and if I select it to words and click apply it'll then split it into the three different words and we can now offset these a little bit so a couple frames so we have the question is offset that's one way to do it there is actually another way to do this effect using a preset built into the newer After Effects I believe CC 2023 and Beyond has these newer presets for animating text I'm going to bring up my FX console but this will also be in your effects and presets search and let's just type slide and and we'll see slide and pop in under presets shows up when I select this our text will disappear and when I hit play we can see that it pops in from the top now we can tweak this a little bit so that it actually comes in from the bottom if we change the offset to something positive like way down here we now have a similar animation to the one that I just did now I'm going to leave it in in My Method but that is another way to animate text really easily it's a really great preset for quick text animations if you want to do that instead I'm now going to do the second line the same way that I did the first one I'm going to select one of our layers here and copy the transform and paste it on the first frame of our second line and then go to our text Exploder and select apply and it'll split the words and then let's just offset this by a couple frames each now when I hit play we have the question is where are we going great back in the main composition I could bring this over and scale it down over our sign but there is a little bit of a problem because there is actually a little bit of perspective in this sign so the way that I would rather do it is instead of using scale and rotation on our composition I'm actually going to use something called CC Power Pin so I'm going to bring up the effect CC Power Pin and I'm going to turn it off I'm then going to bring in the corners to roughly where our signs Corners are and if we zoom in here here I'm going to make sure that they line up so that the edges of the sign match the yellow lines of CC Power Pin now when we do that we have the effect off so it's not affecting anything but if we turn it back on we'll see that our text is now squished in the constraints of our sign of course this is too squished because it's skewing it downwards but what we can do now is actually add a transform effect and bring it just before CC Power Pin and if we uncheck uniform scale and increase the scale height we can see that we're now scaling it to the size that we want so I'm going to scale both of these a little bit just so it's a little bit larger and make sure that the proportions are right one really easy way to check if the proportions all right is if you go back into this composition and let's make a new solid and call it grid and throw in the grid effect like that what we can do is we can actually make this a square grid which will help us see a little bit easier the perspective on our scene if I change these secondary numbers the corner numbers to plus 100 on both of these so this is 960 and 540 if I set this to 1060 and 640 we'll see we now have a perfect square grid here if we jump back into our Geneva composition we can see that we have our squares here with the right perspective on the sign and what this can help you with is scaling it so let's say I had it more like this we can see that this is Too Tall that these aren't squares anymore so this is a nice little reference to make sure that you're pretty close on your animation we can now jump back into our pre-m and turn off the grid this was just for reference but that's one way to see with CC Power Pin when you're compositing I just renamed the layers and also color coded them so it's a little bit easier to see we have the blue sign with the man and the man texture right here let's bring our sign texture above our white sign so the green layers are right here together and let's turn off our adjustment layer for now let's add a fill onto this and if I solo our base layer with the solo icon here and I select our s text I'm going to use the ey dropper tool and select some of the dark area from our sign so we get just the right color we unsolo this we can see that our s text is now this kind of bluish gray color and if we set this to something like multiply we have the texture passing through and it looks really nice we want to make sure that it actually mats into just the sign so we can do that really simply by clicking our layer and under track mat using the pi whip clicking and dragging it over the white sign and make sure that our white sign is turned on and now we'll see that it only shows up on the white sign here let's also throw on one last effect here which is posterized time and set this to something like 12 for the text and when we hit play we have that kind of nice and choppy slide in on the text for both of them when we Zoom back out and we turn on our adjustment layer with with the reverse stabilization and we press play to watch through we can now see that we have our fully composited question animation here on our sign of course don't feel limited to only using text and assets like this you could compos the stuff onto people's faces you could do extra fancy animations with shape layers on the sign whatever you want to do all right let's talk a couple quick problems that you may have run into when using this effect the first one is if you aren't seeing your track points if I click here I don't see the track points on this even though the effect is on just make sure that you have the effect selected when you have the show track points otherwise it won't show and sometimes after effects will Auto turn off this button right here it'll be like this and the points won't show up if that happens just make sure that this button here is turned on the next problem is if your warp stabilizer gets stuck during the analyzing process like the number freezes all you have to do unfortunately is save your project close out and restart After Effects and reopen it and try stabilizing it again it happens every so often it's not always consistent but if that does happen and your stabilizing isn't working just close after effects and reopen it the next problem and the one that I ran into for so long I could not figure out the answer to this is the exact reason why I say it's always super important to precompose your footage first before doing any of the stabilization and making sure that you have those second options on the precom selected the reason is if you have a clip that is shorter than its full length so here I have the intro footage again but you can see that I trimmed off a lot of the end and a lot of the beginning when I try to throw on the reverse stabilization on top of the reverse ible stabilization because the adjustment layer is longer and because we trimmed our clip it just completely breaks it does not work and the same thing happens even if you do the pre-m method where I precompose this into here and I throw on reverse stabilization on the pre-m it's because it's reading inside this composition the clip is actually trimmed so it's important that this needs to have been pre-med first into a footage base making sure that the beginning and end are trimmed and that you set this to adjust the composition duration to the clip length then you do the stabilization on that pre-m and then you can do the reverse stabilization on top of that following the original workflow is really important otherwise you might run into issues where it just does not work or completely breaks and I ran into so many instances of that until I finally figured out that it's a clip length issue hopefully you're able to use this in some compositing or some fun tracking stuff make sure to tag me on X or on Instagram I'd love to see what you make and if you're interested in more stuff like this make sure to subscribe cuz I'm planning on making a lot more videos like this so yeah good luck and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Skymography

Views: 106,920

Keywords: animation, motion graphics, animator, after effects, design, designer, tutorial, how to, reverse stabilization, reversible stabilization, visual effects, vfx, compositing, hidden trick, tracking, tracking in after effects, face tracking, easy, text animation

Id: 1g32rmNTdrE

Length: 28min 27sec (1707 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2024