Working with Cameras in After Effects

[Music] hey what's up this is Kayla bored with school of motion and in this after effects tutorial we're going to be talking about cameras this is going to cover everything from camera nodes to depth of field so if you're ready to learn something new let's hop in the first thing I want you to know is that you can download the free project file used in this tutorial over at school of motion you'll just find a link in the description of this video I find that whenever I follow along with a project file I tend to learn better so so that it's free to you over at school of motion so when we're talking about cameras and After Effects we should just go ahead and get the first thing else a way to create a new camera just go to layer new camera or you could do option command shift C and that will create a new camera as well and this camera settings dialog box is going to pop up now when the camera settings dialog box pops up here there are a lot of numbers and charts and this whole thing looks really scary I understand exactly what's going on here and I am still like what in the world this is the craziest looking chart I have ever seen we're gonna get to all of these things but first let's talk about the different types of cameras so in After Effects there's a one node and a two node camera and I think the best way to illustrate these camera types is to look at these charts here so right here we have a example of a OneNote camera and a OneNote camera operates very similarly to a camera in real life in that there is just a single point that the camera is operating around so as you rotate your camera you know pan or tilt your camera the area that you are focused on is going to move with the camera as well and so this is just a more natural way of using a camera and thinking about a camera and so whenever you're new to After Effects a OneNote camera is typically where people start now that is in contrast to a two node camera now a two node camera is a OneNote camera with a point of interest so I'm gonna play this back so you kind of understand what I'm talking about here so unlike the OneNote camera as you move a two node camera around it is going to auto orient itself to a point of interest in fact if we select our camera down here and kind of go to the drop-down menu you see that we have a point of interest this is a two node camera that we are operating with in our timeline right now now the interesting thing about working with a two node camera is that you can actually adjust the point of interest as well so if we play this back here you'll see that as we adjust the point of interest or camera Orient's to the position of the point of interest now this can be incredibly useful if you're working with a logo reveal or titles that have a specific point of interest it can also be a little annoying sometimes if you're working on a project that has a lot of complex 3d movement and there is no specific area or point of interest that the camera should be focusing on so you probably have the question now which node should you use and that's not actually a very easy question to answer because a one-note camera like I was saying before is more natural and you know if you're working on 3d photos or compositing or you want to generate realistic camera shake a one-note camera is certainly a very useful tool but a two node camera can also be very useful you know if you're doing a lot of macro shots or you know orbits where you're kind of moving your camera in 3d space a two node camera can definitely be a great tool my recommendation is to use a one node camera if you just need a quick 3d camera in your scene and if you have something with a specific point of interest that you need to orbit around or have a cool arc movement a two node camera is the way to go so let's now go back to that camera settings dialog box I'm going to go to our fifth composition here and I'm going to go up here to layer camera settings and now we're going to talk about yes you guessed it the focal length but specifically we're going to talk about everything else but we're gonna start with focal length here so in the real world focal length has to do with how wide or house in a lens will be for a specific camera the smaller the focal length so the closer to zero that the millimeters are the wider the angle of view will be and the greater the millimeters the more zoomed in your camera will be so when after-effects the same is true as we adjust the focal length and as it gets closer to zero our camera will become more wide and as we adjust the focal length and move it you know closer to infinity the camera will zoom in just like that great now one interesting thing you'll see here is that as we adjust some of the settings here so the focal length the zoom and the angle of view are adjusted as well now all of these settings these three settings here angle of view zoom and focal length adjust pretty much the same thing there's just different ways of displaying the same information so we can adjust the zoom here and you'll see that focal length and angle of view change and then we can change the angle of view and you'll see that focal length and the zoom change it just all depends on what is more comfortable for you if you're new to photography or filmmaking just having a simple zoom like this will probably be the easiest thing my brain tends to go to focal lengths so I tend to adjust the focal length so one important thing to remember whenever you aren't working with a really wide camera so let's say our focal length is four millimeters I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna zoom in here so I'm just hitting C to toggle the switch is here and you don't have to follow along per se I'm just adjusting things here and I'm gonna go ahead and make sure that our camera is a one-note camera just like that great and as we move around here you see because our angle of view is super wide the edges are getting really distorted and that can be a great stylistic tool basically this is a fisheye effect and again you know if you were working on sports or something that's a little more in-your-face having a wide-angle lens is a fantastic tool to use and have at your disposal but it can definitely warp the edges of your frame and if you're working on a corporate project that needs to be you know really clean that may not the ideal so just keep that in mind if you are working on a super white project I typically like to keep my camera around 50 millimeters which is pretty much industry standard across the board for just the natural way in which an object should look in photography filmmaking or motion graphics so let's move over to our six composition here so now we're going to talk about depth of field and depth of field is one of these concepts that is incredibly useful to know especially in the early days of your motion graphic journey depth of field basically has to do with how out-of-focus your foreground and background is in your scene now this can be an incredibly useful tool if you're trying to simulate realism in After Effects I use it all the time to create 3d macro shots and really make my my logos or my text reveals look really realistic and good now depth of field though is not necessarily the easiest thing to understand early on and so I'm gonna hopefully explain all of these concepts related to depth of field is best I can here so I'm gonna go up here to layer and camera settings and the first thing you need to know is to enable depth of field you just need to click this box right here if you don't click that box that's okay you can do this down here in the camera settings so I'm gonna go down here and all you would have to do is just hit that drop-down menu and then select depth of field to on right here like this now by default the depth of field is probably going to be really shallow and so what you're going to want to do is adjust to different sliders the first slider is the aperture so aperture has to do with the size of your depth of field and what I mean by that is as we kind of adjust this aperture down you'll see that this pink line here has more and more of it in focus if we are to you know up that a lot you'll see that only this little bitty sliver is in focus and so aperture is really important because if you to dial in on a specific spot you want to basically dial in that aperture really high or if you want it to be a little more just like a light blur you can dial down the aperture now so in a similar way blur level will allow you to adjust how blurry the foreground or background in your scene is it's a little bit different than aperture because it doesn't have to do with how long or how deep your depth of field is but it is definitely a useful tool and I typically just kind of adjust these back and forth in my scene to whatever's right and again you know it's it's really important to think about that because you know in After Effects it's more about you know how does it look and am I getting the correct composition that I'm going for and less about getting these numbers exactly right you know I'm not trying to get too whole 100 numbers because that it doesn't matter whenever you're working on motion graphics projects so another great tool when you're working with depth of field here is the focus distance so it's exactly what the name implies it allows you to adjust the distance of your focus so as we rack the distance here you'll see though chicken butt is now in focus and as we rack the focus back to our original text here you'll see that chicken butt will slowly become out of focus I bet you've never heard that sentence in a tutorial before so there are some other great tools down here that have to do with depth of field the IRA shape is probably the most important if you adjust the IRA shape to any of these options here it will change the way your bokeh looks so I'm gonna go ahead and dial that in you can't really see a lot there because our blur level and our aperture are pretty small I'm gonna dial this up quite a bit here just so you can see what's going on and let's kind of hyper focus here on the text and the background there as we kind of change the shape here you'll see that it changes the way in which the spoken looks behind us that is fine and it's totally fine to go in and figure out you know which shape you want for your specific composition just keep in mind that all of these ones here tend to be pretty slow and so I stick with fast right till most the time yeah it doesn't have you know those real circular out-of-focus bokeh elements but it tends to be really fast in fact if you wanted to you could even just work on your scene and when you get ready to export just throw that down to you know whatever shape you're hoping to get to and then go ahead and hit export so that's just something to keep in mind and then all of these other settings here we're not going to get to in the course of this tutorial they basically have to do with how your bokeh interacts and with the background and they only apply to these kind of extra Irish shaped elements here we're not going to get into any of that stuff but it's definitely fun to mess around with those things so let's move on to our seventh composition here so now we're gonna talk about camera movement and actually moving your camera the amazing thing in After Effects is the fact that you can't move your cameras to create awesome visual interest to your scenes so I think we should definitely note that we are using a one node camera right now we're not going to be using a - no - camera for now so I'm gonna go ahead and click OK and we're gonna go over here to our tool bar and you're gonna see that there's this camera icon and there's four different camera options here we're not going to focus on the unified camera tool just yet but let's go ahead and click on the orbit camera tool and just like you saw up there there is a keyboard shortcut if you hit see you can cycle through all of those camera settings so we're gonna be using the one that looks like in orbit here and whenever you are working with a OneNote camera the orbit is probably a bad name maybe free transform might be a better name for it but basically it will allow you to pan until and look around just like you're holding a camera in your hand you can kind of look around the scene just like that so it's a very natural way of moving around your scene so if you go ahead and hit C or you can just go to the drop-down menu we can do the track X&Y and this will basically allow you to truck or to pet a stool up and down throughout your scene so we're just moving along the x and y coordinates we're not moving along Z space at all and then like I just implied here if we hit C we can actually move forward and backwards in z space so it's the little icon that looks like an arrow that's going up and down and we can move closer to our scene and further away now the interesting thing is you'll see that as we move closer to these letters they actually don't get pixelated that's because text layers and shape layers continuously rasterized in after-effects and if you're not too sure what that means go check out our continuous rasterized tutorial it's lots of fun and super nerdy so that is movement on a OneNote camera now there's also two note' camera so if we go to our camera settings here let's go ahead and make it a two node camera and a two node camera if we go back to our orbit camera tool will basically orbit around the point of interest and what would probably be the most helpful is if I go to two views here and I'll move the point of interest back here to where it is kind of lined up with our text here if I go to our orbit tool in orbit around you'll see that we are now orbiting around the point of interest the text area for our scene because our point of interest is where this red text layer is so that is obviously super useful if we if this was our logo we could you know move around just like this and just kind of add visual interest to our scene in that way and so I'm gonna go back to our one view here and I'm gonna select our unified camera - a lot of people think that the unified camera tool is the same as the orbit camera tool and that's not actually true the reason why they think that's true is because if you left-click and kind of move this around it will do the exact same thing as the orbit camera tool however the unified camera tool will actually use the two other buttons on your mouse so that you don't have to cycle you don't have to hit see and cycle to the correct tool in order to move your camera around in 3d space so if you right-click with the unified camera tool selected you'll actually be in the Z camera tool so you'll be able to move in z space and if you hit the middle mouse button on your mouse you will track in x and y and i'm using an Apple Magic Mouse so I do not have that capability but again it just allows you to move your scene in x and y so it's definitely a handy tool if you have a three button Mouse so let's move over to our eighth composition here now earlier we talked about depth of field and depth of field is an incredibly useful tool again for isolating objects in your scene and right now we just have some light blurriness there's nothing crazy going on here but let's say that we wanted to specifically focus on that inner blue circle there you know you kind of zoom in here see the edges are kind of blurry so we're not exactly dialed in correctly now typically what you would have to do is adjust the focus distance of your camera to see if you're getting it just right now that's not quite right maybe we adjust it like that that might be in focus I'm not entirely sure but as you adjust it it can definitely be just kind of an annoying and painful process especially because After Effects tends to pixelate whenever you're racking focus and so the whole process can be kind of annoying but what you can do is if you actually select your length layer and your camera you can go to layer camera and you can set the focus distance of your camera to that specific layer so that you can ensure that it is perfectly sharp for your scene I see videos all the time on line of people that have not used this feature in After Effects and their text will just be like slightly out of focus and it kind of drives me crazy but it's just something to think about another thing that you can do so if we were to move this layer so we're moving this blue shape layer this blue circle now you'll notice that the edges are now out of focus again you can actually link the focus distance to this layer so that it will always follow this this circle so if we link the focus distance to the layer as we move this layer in 3d space you'll see that the camera focuses with it just like that so it can be incredibly useful if you're working on a project with a logo or if you just want to create a cool rack focus effects like this cool so let's move on to our ninth composition so now we're gonna be talking about Auto Orient and Auto Orient has to do with how a layer looks at the camera so if we go to our orbit camera tool here we can see that this scene here and specifically this blue dot is interacting like all the other layers in the timeline but let's say that this blue dot is a logo and we want the logo to face the camera at all times even as we are rotating in 3d space we want this dot to look at us now in order to do that we have to turn on Auto Orient so you can do that in many different ways you can right click and go to transform and go to Auto Orient or you can go to layer transform Auto Orient it's the exact same thing so we're gonna go ahead and select orient towards camera and click OK and now you'll see that that layer is looking right at the camera so as we rotate in 3d space the layer is constantly looking at the camera which is super handy depending on what your composition and your scene calls for we actually have a really handy tutorial over on school emotion about creating a carousel rig and after effects that uses that feature I highly recommend checking it out if you're interested in using an advanced version of this Auto orient feature so let's move on to our final composition we're in the homestretch here what we have right now is a simple ball bouncing if you kind of play it back here you can see that we have a ball it kind of comes in and it bounces so the reason why I included motion blur in this tutorial is because in real life cameras effect motion blur specifically the shutter speed affects motion blur now in After Effects motion blur must be activated so you have to have the motion blur button selected here and the motion blur selected for your layer in the timeline but you also will notice that you can't see the motion blur if you select your camera and go to layer camera settings you won't find any sort of motion blur settings and that's because motion blur is actually affected in the composition panel so go to composition and go to composition settings you'll go to advanced and you can see motion blur so in films specifically classic film film that uses celluloid film there's what's called a shutter angle and a shutter angle is basically how long a frame is exposed to light the larger the shutter angle the more blurry the motion will be so as we kind of adjust this year and let go you'll see that our motion blur kind of turns up here and this is amazing because we can create a shutter angle that's actually beyond 360 which is not possible in a real camera and in the real world but in After Effects anything's possible so you know typically when you're working with motion blur you want it to look as real as possible so a shutter angle of about 180 is probably good to go because you know if you're working on a film set typically if there's no specific shutter angle that you need to be shooting at a shutter angle of 180 is the default and then you can adjust the samples for per frame that will kind of smooth out some of the blurriness here especially when you start getting into some of these higher angled shutter angles here so I'm just gonna set this to 180 and click OK but keep in mind that if you are deciding between using motion blur and not using motion blur try to not use motion blur things tend to look just cooler whenever you don't use motion blur don't fall into the rookie mistake of just overusing motion blur lock down those animation skills and then you can start introducing motion blur into your motion graphics workflow so I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful it was definitely really fun to put together if you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments of this video and of course go download the free project file so you can kind of poke around and mess with all of these compositions if you want to learn more about working with cameras go check out the blog post over at school of motion there's some concepts and things that we didn't get to in this tutorial that you can read about there and if you want to learn more about After Effects motion design or just the industry in general go check out school of motion we have an amazing podcast that interviews motion designers from around the industry we have a blog puts out many articles per week and of course we put out new tutorials as frequently as we can and if you want to take your skills to the next level go check out the courses over on school of motion they are the best way to advance your skills in the motion graphic industry so thank you for watching this has been kala board we'll see you next time

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 169,658

Rating: 4.9519205 out of 5

Keywords: motion graphics, tutorial, Cameras, Camera, After, Effects, After Effects, Adobe After Effects, Node, One, Two, Null Object, 3D, Layers, Movement, Orbit, Unified, Tool

Id: UE6diuZWlc4

Length: 22min 34sec (1354 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2018