Start Compositing in After Effects - Full Tutorial!

hi there my name is Jake and today we're going to be doing an After Effects tutorial with production crate talking about combining different stock elements and a few compositing techniques to create a cool explosion shot so let's go ahead and take a look at what we're going to be creating [Music] oh [Music] all right so lots of fun we've got the big walking robot and the explosion and the shock wave we got this uh cool drone as seen on the uh production crate website this big walking robot also the scary thing is also from the production crate website it's just 10 of these guys stacked on top of one another to look a little extra scary pretty much everything that we use in this tutorial is all going to be able to be found on the production create website such as our hero explosion so make sure you go check out some of these assets we'll talk more about these later as we get into them in the tutorial so without any further Ado let's go ahead and get right into it alright so here we are in Adobe After Effects the first thing we want to do is import our footage as well as this render of our big robot if you're going to be following along these are both available online for you to download so let's click import let's grab our footage drag it down here for a new composition and we're ready to get started if you scrub through you see John he's walking and boom big explosion in the background if you zoom in here you can see our shot is not on a tripod it's not completely locked off so we're going to need to track our background so in order to do that we need to come over here to the right and look for our tracker window if you don't see that come up here to window and look for the check mark next to tracker so with our footage selected let's click track motion and let's find a point of high contrast in the background I'm going to choose the tip of this tree here and then I'm going to click this play button which says analyze forward now as soon as that's done we're going to need to create a null object to apply this data to so let's come up here to layer new and choose null object now let's click the edit Target button to make sure that our null is selected if you don't see our new null here just click the drop down and select it from the list hit OK and now we have to click apply and then click OK again on X and Y now our movement from our background has been transferred to our null so we're going to be able to parent assets to this and anything we put in our frame will look like it's locked to our footage so that's going to be very helpful as we move along all right let's go ahead and add in our giant robot so that way John here has a threat that he's stopping with the explosion and doesn't go from being a hero to just some sort of criminal so I'm gonna go ahead and make this a little bit bigger place it on the horizon line and now there's a couple things we need to do to make this a little bit more integrated as you can see it's just kind of floating on top of the frame so we need to use that null that we created in the last step to stick this to our background so I'm going to find the parent link section which is kind of right around here and if you don't see that you can toggle the switches with this button because sometimes it's hidden I'm going to grab this which is called the pick Whip and drag it to the null and now our robot should be stuck to the background next one thing that happens when things are big and far away is there's some Haze on them they're not always so contrasty like this so I'm going to need to add a curves adjustment and match the colors a little bit now quick warning in this tutorial I'm going to be using a free plugin from Video Copilot called FX console you can find this online download it install it it's totally free I recommend it it has sped up my workflow tremendously so what that's going to allow me to do is hit control space to bring up a little search window and search for Curves and hit enter and apply any effects I want that way now if you don't have effects console or you don't want to install it you just need to come over here to the effects and presets tab click in the search window and search for Curves over here and drag it to the effects controls on this side it's the same I just find effects console to be a little quicker and smoother so I'm going to be using this for the tutorial so again control space search for Curves hit enter and curves should pop up here so let's grab this bottom Point drag it up a little bit higher until the contrast seems to start matching now I'm going to go to the red Channel add in a little bit of warm tones go to the blue Channel and pull out some of the blue tones that's looking pretty good we're going to leave that right there for now so now the next thing I want to do is grab our explosion assets from productioncrate.com so I'm going to type in explosion into the search window and I'm going to grab a couple of these ultimate explosions so how about this first one it's labeled 21 click download save and how about this one here this looks pretty cool 23. download safe now back here in Adobe After Effects we're going to go to the project window double click in the empty space you can see the two explosions we downloaded so I'm going to grab those both and click import now I'm going to drag out our first one number 21 into the composition window I'm going to go to the moment where John here reacts and I'm going to bring the explosion so that way it goes off at a time that makes sense with our actors reaction so I'm going to place this here above our giant robot and again we need to parent this to our null so let's grab the pick whip connect it to our null and if we hit play that's already looking pretty cool now let's take a moment to match the color of our explosion to the color of our shot similar to how we did with our robot so I'm going to click our explosion control space add a curves adjustment again let's bring up this bottom tab so the contrast starts matching I'm noticing there's a lot more blue in the explosion than there was in the robot so let's go to our blue Channel let's start pulling down some and I'm going to go to the red Channel and boost that just a little bit think that's looking pretty good for now the other thing I want to point out is in our original shot from the short that we showed earlier there was actually kind of a double explosion effect so there was the primary one that went off at his feet boom and then a second later another one exploded behind the mech so I'm gonna go back to the project panel grab the second explosion that we had bring that down here and I'm gonna actually put it below the mech so it's now on layer three I'm gonna drag that out so it kind of starts going off right around here around frame 40 and I'm going to put that off to the right maybe right there again we need to parent this to the null so use that pick Whip and I also want to copy the curves adjustment from explosion 21 so let's come over to the effects controls click the curves click Ctrl C and then I want to select explosion 23 and hit paste now before we go too much further let's zoom in here and take a look at this first explosion it's actually going on top of our actor and we need to fix that so grab your footage hit Ctrl D to duplicate it and put the copy on top of the explosions now let's grab our rotobrush tool at the top double click this copy that we just put on the top and let's start selecting our actor so you're just going to draw these green lines and try and grab all of him if there's any part that you don't want hold alt and that will allow you to subtract it now once you've got a pretty good selection hit the space bar to start playing it and check out how it's capturing our actor this is going to work just fine for what we need it for so once you're confident you can hit this freeze button and wait for that to finish now once that's finished it's going to turn this bluish purple color indicating that it's no longer trying to update every time you hit play it's locked on our current selection so let's click back over into our composition window at the top and if we solo layer one you'll notice that we have our actor chopped out so that's going to come in handy for a lot of these assets that we're placing and you'll notice that our explosion is now underneath him so what we have right now doesn't look too bad and it could work but there's a lot more we could do to this to make it more realistic that would just kind of spice up the shot overall so let's grab a handful of more assets that are going to be useful the first of which I think are going to be some small dirt explosions to cover up this harsh Edge down here at the bottom and integrate it more with the ground which is kind of this brown color so I'm going to come back here to the production crate website I'm going to type in dirt and let's go ahead and grab this one small dirt blast let's download that and I'm also going to grab this one here small dirt blast angled because that's kind of a cool little directional piece so again back over to the project panel double click let's grab our two dirt explosions that we found click import and I'm gonna grab the first one bring it out here below our Roto layer and I'm also going to give our Roto layer a new color just so we know that this one always stays on top so I'm gonna grab this dirt parent it to the null just like all the other assets let's scale it down some place it here at the feet where the explosion goes off and let's slide it on our timeline so it starts at the same time as our explosion that's looking pretty good I'm also going to hit control space add a curves adjustment and let's match the color of our ground a little bit so less contrast a little more warm tones pull out the blue and the mids and we'll go ahead and call that good now one of them does just fine because this Edge is now feeling a little bit more organic if we zoom out compared to how it was before however I know I'm going to want to cover most of this edge with a variety of different sizes of our assets so what we can do is click this hit Ctrl D and then just slide it to a different spot maybe we'll make it a little bit bigger duplicate it again and we're just going to go around doing this a couple times another tip I can give you guys is if you duplicate one of these layers come over to the project panel select the other dirt asset that we imported and click and drag it on top while holding alt it will swap out the clips keeping the parent information as well as the curves adjustment so that's just like a quick little shortcut for you so that's looking pretty cool we've got a bunch of these placed in there and the edge is starting to look a little more organic however we just have these dirt spots sitting on top so again we're going to be thinking about this in terms of layers we've broken up our bottom Edge but now we want to break up some of these dirt textures so let's grab another instance of some cool smoke and place it on top of that so again back to production crate let's go up to the top and let's try dust I'm going to click into this debris bursts category which has some of the assets we were looking at earlier and I found this really cool one down here this desert Sandy explosion 3 and I think this is going to work well for us so let's download that import it into our After Effects project bring it out onto our timeline below the Roto layer parent it to the null position and scale it and I know I don't want this bottom part where the explosion initially happens so I'm going to come up here select and hold and grab our rectangular mask tool and let's mask out the bottom of this asset change the mask from add to subtract hit F on the keyboard to bring up the feather properties and let's feather that out some so the edge is a little more organic grab our selection tool and let's position this I think that looks pretty good right around there now let's match it to the color of our ground so I'm going to add a new effect we haven't used called tritone so let's grab the eyedropper for our mid-tone color and select one of these darker areas on the ground maybe we can adjust this color manually until it feels right that's looking pretty good and we can even cheat this a little bit by hitting t on the keyboard and lowering the opacity sum somewhere around 75 percent should be good so that's looking pretty nice this Edge is definitely a lot more organic than it was before but we have this small issue where our dirt layers just disappear halfway through this effect so a quick way to make them last till the end of our composition is just to grab all of them at once right click go to time and then choose enable time remapping then what we need to do is grab all of these ending keyframes and slide them out beyond the end of our timeline and then grab the edge of all these clips and slide those out too so now they're not going to disappear as the timeline plays they're going to stay until the very end now one of the last things we need to do is work on the different parts of our shock wave and then we can add some camera shake and then I think we'll be about done so let's start on this big outer blast first and you guessed it we're heading back to production crate to search for a Shockwave asset so let's type that into the top and we're going to be able to make use of this first one here air Shockwave burst one so go ahead and download that back in After Effects double click to import find air Shockwave and import drag that out onto our timeline and we're going to want to put that below all of our previous assets just right above our footage let's drag that over so it starts at the beginning of the explosion and scale it down a bit and just like every asset before it we need to parent it to null one now by default this asset is pretty see-through so let's go ahead and fix that by adding a curves adjustment so I'm going to add curves go to the alpha Channel and let's boost that up a bit there it is we're able to see that a little bit better now so a couple things to note uh the first of which is that we're losing it on the edge over here so I do actually need to scale it up again so let's bring that so it at least extends outside our frame reposition it so it's on the explosion itself that's looking pretty good and now you're gonna notice that it extends off into the sky which is obviously not ideal so let's cheat that with a little position keyframe so I'm going to go to right around here hit p on the keyboard create a keyframe by clicking the stopwatch go to the end of the clip where it's about gone and let's slide it down some now if we play that back that's looking pretty good to me so now that we have this placed I'm actually going to turn down the alpha Just a Touch and then I'm going to duplicate this right click on the second copy go to time go to Time Stretch and set this to 200 so now this is going to play twice as slow so it kind of gives us this double shock wave effect which I think looks pretty cool now this second copy that's playing slightly slower what I want to do is add a box blur to that so type in box and it's this first one fast box blur I'm going to set this blur radius to somewhere around like 25 and that just gives us a subtle Aftershock which I think looked pretty cool in the original example however you're going to notice that with the slowed down clip there is this like frame stuttering so in order to fix that what I'm actually going to do is click this button here this empty check box two times one two it creates this little arrow symbol which is going to do some frame interpolation so now it'll take longer to load but it'll play a lot smoother now the last part of this big shock wave is actually just created from a solid in order to brighten up the initial explosion so I'm going to hit Ctrl y on the keyboard to create a new solid set the color to white click OK and now I'm going to scale this up a little bit bigger than my composition window just so there's room for it to slide around parent it to null one same as everything else and let's click and hold and select the ellipse mask tool hold Ctrl to draw a circle out from the center of this explosion if you want the circle to be perfect you hold shift and let's make it about this big now with that solid selected let's hit mm on the keyboard to bring up the mask properties and let's go to the beginning of the explosion and shrink the mask expansion down until the circle is gone set a keyframe move forward 10 or 15 frames and let's bring the mask expansion all the way up so the circle fills the whole frame now next what we can do is duplicate this mask by hitting Ctrl D set the second copy to subtract and then slide the second keyframe of the second mask over some to create this ring shape now let's go back up to our toolbar and grab the rectangular mask tool zoom out some here and I'm going to draw a rectangular mask roughly around the Horizon and then set that to subtract so we've created this interesting shape that extends from the explosion now let's feather it out some more so it looks more organic hit F on the keyboard to bring up the feather properties of all of your masks and just start increasing those to taste somewhere around 100 pixels looks pretty good to me now let's hit t on the keyboard to bring up the opacity and let's set that somewhere pretty low maybe around 20 percent and it's subtle but there's the big outer part of our shock wave so let's move on to the dust that flies at our actor across the ground and that's going to be made up of three different assets so it's going to be this one here the dusty Shockwave front download that scroll down here this one called Shockwave perspective three download that and then let's come up here to the top and type in dust go to the specialty category and then it's this first one here titled atmosphere towards cam so let's grab that as well so let's go back to After Effects import our three new assets and let's first bring out this Dusty Shockwave front I'm going to put this below our Roto layer but above everything else parent it to null one which by the way you don't have to use the pick whip if your list is getting long you can click this drop down and just find your null let's slide it over so it starts at the beginning of the explosion same as everything else scale it down some bring it to the base let's drop the opacity by half let's add the tritone effect and again select that mid-tone color grab something from the field but because this asset is so bright and it has lots of these highlights let's grab that color as well and select one of these lighter Dusty colors next let's grab our Shockwave perspective three I'm going to put this below all of our other assets parent it to the null slide it over so it starts at the beginning of the explosion and let's scale this one up really big so it fills the frame and let's also squish it some so it appears to be more flat put this at the base of the explosion and similar to our other Shockwave asset from earlier we're gonna have to cheat this with a keyframe so let's go to the beginning hit P click the stopwatch and let's slide all the way until it looks like the shock wave is finished moving and let's slide it down some now I'm going add the tritone effect to this one as well grab that highlight color and again click one of these lighter areas and maybe that's just a bit too dark so I'm going to go and manually edit it to be just a touch brighter somewhere around there looks good and lastly let's go ahead and grab our atmosphere toward Cam and let's put it on top of everything but right below our Roto layer parent it to the null slide it over so it starts at the beginning of the explosion let's reposition it some and I'm going to go to where the explosion is at its biggest hit t on the keyboard and let's change the opacity to 50 click the stopwatch and let's go to the beginning of the explosion and set the opacity to zero so that's just going to slowly fade on over time and look like some dust has been kicked off the ground by that residual shock wave same as our other asset the color is just a little bit too white so we can actually select that go to the effects controls grab the tritone hit Ctrl C click back on our atmosphere asset and hit Ctrl V and I also want to brighten this one up manually too now I'm feeling really happy with this and I think we've pretty much got our asset bases covered so let's go ahead and pre-compose all of this so we can add some camera shake some glow some color correction and then we'll call it good so grab your top layer scroll all the way down to the bottom hold shift and select your last layer and then hit Ctrl shift C on the keyboard to pre-compose I'm going to call this come deposit so now all of this has been brought into a pre-comp that we can access later and it's going to make this a lot easier since we're just dealing with one layer now all right now let's go ahead and take care of the camera Shake we're going to be using a script from production crate so you can head over to the website and download it from the link here now back in After Effects in order to run the script we need to go to file scripts and choose run script file navigate to the camera Shake script and hit open this little dialog pops up with tons of great little options I'll just show you some that worked for me select your composite layer go to the moment where the explosion first starts change it from Shake to jolt I liked jolt number two and let's turn the amplitude up to somewhere around three and a half the frequency down quite a bit maybe around like 0.7 let's change skip keys to two that'll just make it a little more gradual and I'm going to turn off auto scale just so I can show you how to fix this manually as another little quick tip now let's hit jolt and this is just a warning telling you that it's going to take a minute to load so it's okay just hit continue and we can also now exit out of this dialog now if you play this back it's looking pretty cool we have this nice big bump when the explosion goes off now the reason I turned off auto scale is because sometimes you might find yourself in a situation where your footage has been slid off the screen and you're left with these black borders where there's no more footage to be shown now you can just scale this up but then you're going to be losing some of the footage that you worked so hard to make look cool so that's not always an ideal solution so there's an effect that we can use to quickly solve this called motion tile so let's add the motion tile effect then we need to select mirror edges then we need to change the output width and output height to something that's going to cover those black edges so call it around 150 each now let's go ahead and add the glow but if we just put the glow effect on our footage we're going to affect the sky and some of the ground and a lot of these other bright parts of the frame too so what we need to do is isolate just the orange in the explosion so a quick way to do that is to duplicate the composite solo the top one and let's add the key light effect to it and this is usually for green screens but we're going to use it in a weird way right now so grab the screen color select one of your oranges then toggle open the screen mat and we need to play with these settings until we can mostly isolate just the orange now that's looking pretty good to me let's add a fast box blur set the blur radius to around 100 pixels and then let's add the tint effect and set the white color to Something in the orange fiery range something maybe around there we can unsolo this now and set the transfer mode if you don't see the transfer mode again we can toggle switches to unhide it set that to screen and there we go we just have a very quick subtle glow effect applied just to the oranges in our explosion and last but not least let's go ahead and add some color correction so I'm going to go to layer new adjustment layer and to this adjustment layer on top I'm going to add a curves adjustment let's go ahead and bring our mid tones down some bring our highlights up to add some contrast maybe we can go to the blue Channel and add some blues in the shadows but pull it out of the highlights and mid-tones and maybe we can do the same for the Reds except let's pull it out of the shadows and add it to the mid and maybe we can throw the vignette effect on this turn the amount down some and then maybe a levels adjustment right on top to dial in our contrast just a little bit more and if you want you can maybe throw a hue and saturation adjustment on top of that and let's change the channel control from Master to Reds and let's make our explosion a little more orange maybe five degrees on the Hue angle and a little bit less saturated and if you hit this visibility icon you can see the before and after I think that looks pretty cool and I think that's where we're going to leave it for the tutorial this turned out pretty cool in my opinion if there's uh one thing that we can take away from this it's to think in terms of layers right so you need to put down your base explosion or whatever your hero asset is and then just build from there think logically the explosion goes off what's next how about some dirt the shock wave comes flying out how about it kicks up some dust on the ground then there's some residual smoke and so on and so on never constrain yourself to a single asset and always be thinking about these as puzzle pieces you can put together to make something bigger but anyway thank you all for watching hope you enjoyed the tutorial and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: ProductionCrate

Views: 591,632

Keywords: productioncrate, footagecrate, rendercrate, soundscrate, graphics crate, mo-graph, motion graphics, mo-graph artists, motion graphics artist, vfx, vfx artist, visual effects, visual effects artist, free vfx, free music, royalty free, royalty free vfx, royalty free music, after effects, adobe after effects, adobe ae, 3D, 3D modeling, free 3d models, after effects script, free after effects script, film, filmmaking, independent filmmaking

Id: sfkaCESPE5c

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Sat May 06 2023