Adobe After Effects CS6 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio by Mark Christiansen – PDF Drive

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Of these differences, some are arbitrary, most are a mixed bag of advantages and drawbacks, and a couple are constantly used by the competition as a metaphorical stick with which to beat After Effects.

The two that come up the most are the handling of precomposing and the lack of macros. This book attempts to shed light on these and other areas of After Effects that are not explicitly dealt with in its user interface or documentation. After Effects itself spares you details that as a casual user you might never need to know about but that as a professional user you should understand thoroughly.

This book is here to help. It is the most accessible resource available on this complicated and much-feared topic, walking you through three scripts, each of which builds upon the complexity of the previous. Scripting provides the ability to create incredibly useful extensions to After Effects to eliminate tedious tasks.

Several of these are included in the scripts folder on the disc as exclusives to this book. In order to focus on more advanced and applied topics in the print edition, Dan Ebberts kicked JavaScript fundamentals to a special JavaScript addendum, also included as a PDF. For example, the disc includes demos of. SynthEyes from Andersson Technologies. Camera Tracker and Kronos from the Foundry. Note that all. Finally, there are also a few useful and free third-party scripts mentioned throughout the book; for more of these, see the script links PDF in the scripts folder on the disc.

The goal is to understand the logic of the software so that you can use it to think through your artistic and technical goals. This book will help you do that. The worst scientist is he who is not an artist; the worst artist is he who is no scientist. It helps you create believable, fantastic moving images using elements from disparate sources, and do so with the least possible effort.

Effective visual effects compositing uses your best skills as both artist and engineer. As an artist, you make creative and aesthetic decisions that are uniquely your own, but if you are not also able to understand how to implement those decisions effectively, your artistry will suffer. If I had to say what most often separates a great result from mediocrity, the answer is iteration—multiple passes—and solid technical skills enable these to happen most quickly and effectively, so your creative abilities can take over.

If this book opens at too advanced a level for you, see the Introduction for more resources to help you get up to speed with the basic operations of After Effects. But the basic principle is that After Effects lets you go beyond what you can otherwise do editing footage by actually changing what appears in the scene itself. Figure 1. Your author was in fact paid to create the 3D model as a viral product endorsement a few years back.

You can actually drag them anywhere onto the After Effects user interface UI , and they should end up there. It now generally means the background onto which foreground elements are composited, although the foreground can also be the plate, and there are other kinds of plates such as effects plates.

Drag those elements into that folder. How After Effects looks at program startup depends on its most recent usage, if any. Does the user interface seem complicated? Now breathe a sigh of relief, since I can tell you that there are a few in there I no longer even use—Wiggler and Smoother being two that have been effectively rendered obsolete by expressions Chapter In any case, I would never recommend leaving so many controls open at once. Now try tearing off the Info panel—hold down Ctrl Cmd as you drag it by its tab away from its current position.

You can do this with any panel: It is now undocked. This may be too much hot-rodding for you right away, so now try dragging it over a few of the other panels without letting go. You can drag it elsewhere or Ctrl Cmd drag and drop it to tear it off again.

You can combine it with the Preview panel to save space: Drag the Info panel over the Preview panel or vice versa using the tab at the upper left. The Window menu contains all of the panels, and each can be toggled here. I have done whole After Effects animations that have no source elements at all, but these are typically type animations with solid, shape, and particle-based effects created right in the application—in other words, they are more motion graphics than visual effects, which are almost always based on source footage—on the effects plate.

Listed are its pixel dimensions x , pixel aspect ratio 1 or square , duration in frames or time, depending on your project settings—more on all of these later , frame rate, and color depth. This image includes an alpha channel to store transparency data, which is covered in depth in Chapter 3. To get to work, place your elements in a composition, or comp. With no extra effort you automatically set a comp whose size, aspect, duration, and frame rate match those of the source.

Now add the Red Bull can. There are a few ways to do this. You can simply drag it into the Timeline panel to where you see a black line above the existing layer and drop it. I: Working Foundations Just like in Photoshop, simply positioning one layer above another in the stack—in this case, the Timeline panel instead of a Layer panel creates a composite image.

Chapter 3 introduces the full variety of options beyond this nobrainer, and even illustrates how this simplest of composites actually works. Preview and Refine Now is a good time to preview the composition and see how it looks.

Here you can make use of the Preview panel, at least until you learn the one essential shortcut from it—0 zero on the numeric keypad which is on the side or, on a laptop, embedded with the function key shortcuts stands in for the RAM Preview icon.

Beginners often mistakenly hit the spacebar to play compositions in After Effects. With faster and faster systems, this increasingly works, but only a RAM preview buffers the composition into memory and locks its playback to the correct frame rate, and only it includes audio playback.

It brings the panel up full screen for easier examination. The shot needs work. What do you see? Press it again and even the top menu bar toggles off, filling the entire screen. I: Working Foundations Figure 1. You can also double-click in an empty area of the Project panel.

Prefer your workspace customizations to the defaults? Choose New Workspace in the Workspace menu and enter a new name to overwrite it; now After Effects will reset to your customized version. An image sequence is less fragile than a QuickTime movie; if there is a bad frame in a sequence, it can be replaced, but a bad frame will corrupt an entire movie. You can interrupt and restart an image sequence render without then having to splice together multiple movies. It is particularly good at incrementing new versions of multiple sequences all at once, selecting subsets of frames, and finding multiple sequences in a single folder.

Things get more complicated if you are dealing with multiple image sequences in a single folder. By holding the Shift or Ctrl Cmd key as you select more than one frame, however, you can.

Want to be rehired repeatedly as a freelancer or be the hero on your project? Chapter 4 offers suggestions. Render the first and last 3D frames only, with their correct final sequence numbers, and import them using the Import dialog with Force Alphabetical Order unchecked.

You now have a placeholder of the correct length that is fully set up as soon as the file is rendered. As you advance in your skills, by all means avoid the bar like a recovered alcoholic—the top menu bar, that is. I often refer to context-clicking on interface items. Display context menus by right-clicking the mouse Windows or Ctrl-clicking Mac. The icon shown for an item in the Project panel indicates its source application.

Any source can become unlinked if it moves or changes its name or location Figure 1. You may have used the Find Missing Footage check box in older versions, and you may wonder where it has gone. Because every project is likely to be moved or archived at some point you are making backups, right? Let the computer do what it does best and automate a cleanup of your sources. If you check Reduce Project as well, the unused source is also removed from the collected project. You even get a warning dialog telling you how many items were removed—not from the disk, only from your project.

Need to combine two or more projects? Import one into the other just drag it in , or drag several into a new project. The imported project appears in its own folder labeled with the source name. Advanced Save Options After Effects projects are saved and overwritten completely separate from the elements they contain. This script takes nested folders with the same name as those closer to the root and merges them, while consolidating duplicate footage. Project Settings As shown in Figure 1.

The Color Settings section includes the project-wide color depth 8, 16, or 32 bits per channel , as well as color management and blend settings.

Chapter 11 covers this in ample depth. Audio Settings affects only previews; lowering the rate can save RAM. I never touch this.

Instead of opening Project Settings, change Display Style by Ctrl- or Cmd-clicking on the timecode indicator in the timeline; change color depth by Alt- or Opt-clicking the bpc indicator in the Project panel. This applies to imported image sequences, not compositions. The other Color Settings are elucidated in Chapter Interpret Footage This book generally eschews the practice of walking through After Effects menus, but a well-designed UI helps you think, so focusing on the material in this section allows access to the best analytical tools.

Decisions about how footage is interpreted are both vital and somewhat tedious. This makes the Interpret Footage dialog Figure 1. Alpha interpretation. Frame Rate. Fields and Pulldown. Pixel Aspect Ratio under Other Options. Alpha determines transparency settings, Frame Rate is essential with an image sequence, Fields and Pulldown and Pixel Aspect Ratio under Other Options convert footage optimized for playback.

The Color Management tab purple gets a complete treatment in Chapter The Interpret Footage icon in the Project panel is the easiest way to open the Interpret Footage dialog. Alpha Effective compositing requires a thorough understanding of alpha channels, but only when something goes wrong with them. You can easily avoid these types of problems:.

If the alpha channel type is unclear, click Guess in the mini Interpretation dialog that appears when importing footage with alpha. This often not always yields a correct setting. The giveaway is the contrasting fringe, caused in this case by the failure to remove the black background color premultiplied into edge pixels.

The left image is unmultiplied; the right is not. If you are in any doubt about that, set it to Ask User to avoid forgetting to set it properly. More information on alpha channels and how they operate is found in Chapter 3. After Effects does not interpret an alpha unless you specifically click Guess; if you merely clear the dialog Esc it uses the previous default.

Frame Rate I have known many experienced artists to be bitten by careless errors with frame rate, myself included. You can also override the QuickTime frame rate, which is exactly what After Effects does with footage containing any sort of pulldown see next section. After Effects is precise about how those timing settings are handled. If your true frame rate is The current frame rate and duration as well as other interpretation information is displayed at the top of the Project panel when you select a source clip Figure 1.

The caret to the right of the filename reveals specific compositions in which it is used. Movie formats, which these days usually means QuickTime. A bad frame in a rendered image sequence can typically be quickly isolated and replaced; a bad frame will sink an entire QuickTime movie, sometimes costing hours of rework. Still image formats have more predictable color management settings than QuickTime. If QuickTime is fast food—convenient but potentially bad for the health of your project, causing bloat and slowness—then image sequences are a home-cooked meal, involving more steps but offering more control over how they are made and consumed.

One surprise for the novice is that video images are not typically made up of whole frames containing square pixels like stills. The result is half the image detail but twice the motion detail.

However, on larger or longer-form projects, they will preserve your work more effectively. If not, the backup option which still works is trial-and-error. Do the following:. Create a Pixel aspect ratio PAR is another compromise intended to maximize image detail while minimizing frame size. The pixels in the image are displayed nonsquare on the broadcast monitor, with extra detail on one axis compensating for its lack on the other.

Your computer monitor, of course, displays square pixels, so any clip with a nonsquare PAR will look odd if displayed without compensating for the difference. Therefore, After Effects includes a toggle below the viewer panels to stretch the footage so that its proportions preview correctly Figure 1.

Think again. If subjects look anamorphic—long and skinny—toggle this, and if it looks OK, After Effects is handling it for you; no need to render a square pixel version. Source Formats One oddity of the PNG format is that it specifies that an alpha channel is saved and interpreted as Straight, with no explicit option to change the default, although After Effects lets you override this.

After Effects is capable of importing and exporting a wide array of footage formats, yet only a small subset of these occur regularly in production. Table 1. Which formats will you use most? More on these formats is found in Chapters 11 and 12, which also include information on working with camera raw CRW images.

Photoshop Files Although the PSD format does not offer any type of compression, it has a few unique advantages when used with After Effects. More about why you might want to work with video in Photoshop for its paint tools is included in Chapter 7.

More about this feature is found in Chapter 9. Once your source footage is imported and organized Chapter 4 , the next step is to place it in a composition. Composition Settings Figure 1. Choose Retain Layer Sizes to ensure that each layer has its own unique anchor point—and is not cropped. My advice is to begin with your plate: the main footage, whether a background shot or a foreground yet to be keyed.

To ensure that composition settings are exactly as they should be with the least effort, try one of the following:. Use a prebuilt project template that includes compositions whose settings match the intended output; you can even create and save your own see Chapter 4.

Create a new composition by dragging the plate footage often the background plate to the Create a New. Composition Settings also contains an Advanced tab. This pertains to temporal and spatial settings Chapter 4 and motion blur and 3D Chapter 9.

View Panels and Previews A 2K plate is the minimum typical horizontal film resolution: approximately pixels, or more precisely pixels in width. HD video is pixels horizontal resolution. Resolution and Quality First, keep in mind that you might never work at full resolution, but you should almost always leave layers set to Best quality. There are several effective ways to speed up previews and interactivity without ever setting a layer to Draft quality, which creates inaccurate previews by rounding off crucial values.

I: Working Foundations In rough order of preference, you can. The default setting of 1 plays every other frame Figure 1. To quickly change the display resolution in the Composition panel, use the keyboard shortcuts shown in Table 1.

TABLE 1. The default difference is a Skip setting of 1, which previews every other frame but can be changed to the pattern of your preference. Activate the Hand tool H, spacebar, or middle mouse button to move your view of a clip around. To zoom in and out, you can use. Zoom tool Z and Alt Opt Z. Only the layer data needed to render that area is calculated and buffered, lengthening RAM previews.

With the cursor over a specific area of the frame, hold the Alt Opt key as you zoom to keep that point centered. Want to keep this view? Crop Comp to Region of Interest in the Composition menu.

The frame goes black as soon as you make an adjustment. OpenGL in After Effects can have undesirable side effects; most power users tend to leave it off most of the time. Deactivate Live Update Figure 1. On by default, this toggle enables real-time update in the viewers as you adjust controls.

Deactivate it and updates occur only when you release the mouse. Hold Alt Opt as you make adjustments. With Live Update on, this toggle prevents views from updating. Activate Caps Lock. Enable OpenGL. Enable it, and OpenGLInteractive mode in a viewer panel is accelerated in certain cases, for example, when positioning layers in 3D space.

There are two OpenGL options, Interactive and Always On; the former will help you with fast scene setup, especially in a complicated 3D scene, and the latter will give you the look of OpenGL at all times as you work.

I: Working Foundations In general, the more responsive you can make your user interface, the better will be the result because you can make more decisions in a shorter period of time. Just leave time to double-check the result if you are in the habit of disabling screen viewers.

Multiprocessing Multiprocessing, which allows After Effects to use all of the processor cores on your system, is disabled by default. Ideally, your system should have more than a couple of processors and at least 4 GB of physical memory RAM. The great thing about multiprocessing in a bit application is that it actually works.

Gone are the days when this option tied up your system while it started and created a bunch of render cores that locked up system resources, forcing a restart. Try it yourself—preview a processor-intensive animation with this option off, then on, and notice the difference when you click 0 on the numeric keypad or with the render time required. There are a couple of other adjustments you can make to tune this option.

Initial results show that After Effects actually runs faster with fewer than the full number of cores on a system with eight or more cores. Reserve two for other applications and see if you get a speed boost.

Note that few other Adobe applications share the same protected memory pool as After Effects. The green line atop the Timeline panel shows which frames are stored for instant playback. This locks away a portion of your drive for use only by After Effects. A blue line shows frames loaded in the Disk Cache Figure 1. The cache is not saved between After Effects sessions.

Loop options Preview panel. Hidden among the playback icons atop Preview is a toggle controlling how previews loop. Use this to disable looping, or amaze your friends with the ping-pong option. From Current Time Preview panel. Tired of resetting the work area? Toggle this on and previews begin at the current time and roll through to the end of the composition. Full Screen Preview panel. Self-explanatory and rarely used, but a cool option, no?

If you have an external video device attached with its own monitor, you can use it to preview. Third-party output devices, such as Kona and Blackmagic cards, are supported as well.

To create a basic gradient background, apply the Ramp effect to a solid layer. You can even insert background or reference footage or a custom gradient background that you created Figure 1.

Several other modes and toggles are available in the viewer panels. Some are familiar from other Adobe applications:. All of these are toggled via a single menu beneath the viewer panel the one that looks like a crosshair. To pull out a guide, choose Show Rulers and then drag from either the horizontal or vertical ruler. To change the origin point 0 on each ruler , drag the crosshair from the corner between the two rulers.

You can. An outline in the color of the selected channel reminds you which channel is displayed Figure 1. Image courtesy of Mark Decena, Kontent Films. Effects: Plug-ins and Animation Presets After Effects contains about default effects plug-ins, and third parties provide plenty more.

Personally, I use less than 20 percent of these effects around 80 percent of the time, and you probably will too. And even cooler, once you thoroughly understand the core effects, you can use them together to do things with After Effects that you might have thought required third-party plug-ins. Opened a project only to discover a warning that some effects are missing, and wondering which ones, and where to find them? You can also choose to display only effects with higher bit depths when working at 16 or 32 bits per channel—see Chapter 11 for more on that.

Save to the Presets folder the default location and your preset will show up when After Effects is started. Here are a few things you might not already know about the process of outputting your work.

Convert raw footage by dragging it directly to the Render Queue panel, no composition required one is made for you. This is a quick and easy way to convert an image sequence to a QuickTime movie, or vice versa. Each Render Queue item has two sets of settings: Render Settings which controls how the composition itself is set when generating the source image data and Output Module which determines how that image data is then written to disk. Composition corresponds directly to settings in the Timeline panel; here you choose whether to keep or override them.

The more complex options, such as Proxy Use, are described in Chapter 4. This is useful for splitting image sequences between sessions see Chapter 4 for details on how to use this feature.

Need to render several items to one location? Set up one item, then add the rest. The location of the first becomes the default. The main decisions here concern Want the best looking half-resolution render? Use Stretch in Output Module, instead of half resolution in Render Settings which typically renders faster. This is an immense time-saver, as each frame is rendered once and written as many times as you like.

Several elegant and easily missed problem-solving tools are embedded in output modules:. Multiple output modules per render queue item avoid the need for multiple passes Figure 1. Separate output modules can be changed at once by Shift-selecting the modules themselves not the render queue items that contain them.

A numbered image sequence can start with any number you like Figure 1. Scaling can be nonuniform to change the pixel aspect ratio. Postrender actions automate bringing the result back into After Effects. Chapter 4 tells all. A numbered image sequence must contain a string in the format [ ] somewhere within its name.

Each sign corresponds to a digit, for padding. The Color Management tab takes effect with many still image formats. Chapter 11 tells all. Save output modules early and often using the Make Template option at the bottom of the pop-up menu. If you intend to render with the same settings even once more, this will save time. Unfortunately, these cannot be easily sent to another user. It works cross-platform and at percent quality, it provides chroma sampling, and at 75 percent, see Chapters 6 and 11 for details on what that means.

Online review typically should be compressed outside of After Effects; such aggressive compression formats as H. Assemble the Shot Naming Conventions Part of growing a studio is devising a naming scheme that keeps projects and renders organized. Use standard Unix naming conventions replacing spaces with underscores, intercaps, dashes, or dots.

Put the version number at the end of the project name and the output file, and make them match. Pad sequential numbers adding zeros at the beginning to keep things in order as the overall number moves into multiple digits. Seasoned visual effects supervisors miss nothing. Fully trained eyes do not even require two takes, although in the highest-end facilities, a shot loops for several minutes while the team picks it apart.

This process, though occasionally hard on the ego, makes shots look good. After Effects offers a number of output formats and can be useful for simple file conversion; you need only import a source file and drag it directly to Render Queue, then add settings and press Render. Some of these amount to a gotcha:. Color management of QuickTime remains at this writing a moving target, with MOV files appearing differently when they are moved from one platform, application, or even monitor, to another.

High Quality in QuickTime Player is unchecked by default. On the other hand, QuickTime is a great review and delivery format that benefits from having been well designed at its inception and having stood the test of time. If the project can still be found on the available drives, it will open in the source After Effects project.

Keep an eye on the Info panel Figure 1. Loop or rock-and-roll previews or as Adobe likes to say, ping-pong previews. Zoom in to the pixel level, especially around edges. Examine footage and compositions channel by channel Chapter 5. Turn the Exposure control in the Composition viewer up and down to make sure everything still matches Chapter 5. Approach your project like a computer programmer and minimize the possibility of bugs careless errors. Aspire to design in modules that anticipate what might change or be tweaked.

With the Timeline panel at the center of the compositing process, you can time elements and animations precisely while maintaining control of their appearance. The Timeline panel is also a user-friendly part of the application that is full of hidden powers.

Column Views You can context-click on any column heading to see and toggle available columns in the Timeline panel, or you can start with the minimal setup shown in Figure 2. Lower-left icons : Most but not quite all of the extra data you need is available via the three toggles found at the lower left of the Timeline panel.

Figure 2. No matter how big a monitor, every artist tends to want more space for the keyframes and layers themselves. Layer switches and transfer controls are the most used; if you have plenty of horizontal space, leave them both on, but the F4 key has toggled them since the days when x was an artist-sized display. Time Stretch toggles the space-hogging timing columns. To rename an item in After Effects, highlight it and press Enter Return instead of clicking and hovering.

The game is to preserve horizontal space for keyframe data by keeping only the relevant controls visible. Color Commentary When dissecting something tricky, it can help to use.

This script manages the process of adding tags to layers and using them to create selection sets. They allow you to temporarily isolate and examine a layer or set of layers, but you can also keep layers solo when rendering whether you intend to or not.

Shy layers are a fantastic shortcut in an often-cluttered Timeline panel. Even if you keep the number of layers in a composition modest as you must for effective visual effects compositing work—see Chapter 4 for more on how , a composition containing an imported 3D track from such software as SynthEyes or Boujou may arrive with hundreds of null layers. I tend to make these shy immediately, leaving only the camera and background plate ready for compositing.

I often apply unique colors to track matte layers so I remember not to move them. Layer and composition markers can hold visible comments. Composition markers are added using Shift and the numbers atop your keyboard or using the asterisk key with nothing selected.

I sometimes double-click them to add short notes. I: Working Foundations Navigation and Shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts are essential for working speedily and effortlessly in the Timeline panel. Time Navigation Many users—particularly editors, who know how essential they are—learn time navigation shortcuts right away. Others primarily drag the current time indicator, which quickly becomes tedious. I and O keys navigate to the beginning and end frames of the layer.

About two-thirds of the way through the shot came a subtle but sudden shift. If other layers are present and visible, you can also place the layer in order by dragging it between them. Here are some other useful tips and shortcuts:. J and K navigate to the previous or next visible keyframe, layer marker, or work area start or end, respectively.

To reset the work area to the length of the composition, double-click it. Numeric keypad numbers select layers with that number. Locked layers are not selected, but shy layers are selected even if invisible.

The bracket keys [ and ] move the In or Out points of selected layers to the current time. Add Alt Opt to set the current frame as the In or Out point, trimming the layer. The double-ended arrow icon over the end of a trimmed layer lets you slide it, preserving the In and Out points while translating the timing and layer markers but not keyframes.

The semicolon ; key toggles all the way in and out on the Timeline panel: single frame to all frames. The slider at the bottom of the Timeline panel zooms in and out more selectively. It can be annoying that the work area controls both preview and render frame ranges because the two are often used independent of one another.

The scroll wheel moves you up and down the layer stack. Shift-scroll moves left and right in a zoomed Timeline panel view. Alt-scroll Opt-scroll zooms dynamically in and out of the Timeline panel, remaining focused around the cursor location.

Hold down the Shift key as you drag the current time indicator to snap the current time to composition or layer markers or visible keyframes. The Comp Marker Bin contains markers you can drag out into the Timeline panel ruler. You can replace their sequential numbers with names. X scrolls the topmost selected layer to the top of the Timeline panel. There are keyboard shortcuts to each Transform property.

For a standard 2D layer these are. A for Anchor Point, the center pivot of the layer. P for Position, by default the center of the composition. S for Scale in percent of source. R for Rotation in revolutions and degrees. This keeps only what you need in front of you. A 3D layer reveals four individual properties under Rotation to allow full animation on all axes. There are selection tools to correspond to perform Transform adjustments directly in the viewer:.

V activates the Selection tool, which also moves and scales in a view panel. Y switches to the Pan-Behind tool, which moves the anchor point. Quite the sense of humor on that After Effects team.

There is no option to see them together. Below the grid that appears in place of the layer stack are the Graph Editor controls Figure 2. Show Properties By default, if nothing is selected, nothing displays in the graph; what you see depends on the settings in the Show Properties menu.

Three toggles in this menu control how animation curves are displayed in the graph:. Show Selected Properties displays whatever animation property names are highlighted. To work in the Graph Editor without worrying about what is selected, disable Show Selected Properties and enable the other two. Show Animated Properties shows everything with keyframes or expressions. You decide which curves need to appear, activate their Graph Editor Set toggle, and after that it no longer matters whether you keep them selected.

To begin the bouncing ball animation, include Position in the Graph Editor Set by toggling its icon. Basic Animation and the Graph View Figure 2. To get to this point, do the following:.

At frame 24, move the ball off the right of the frame, creating a second keyframe. Now add the bounces: At frames 6 and 18 move the ball straight downward so it touches the bottom of the frame.

Also, the default Graph Editor view at this point is not very helpful, because it displays the speed graph, and the speed of the layer is completely steady at this point—deliberately so, in fact. To get the view shown in Figure 2. This is a toggle even advanced users miss, although it 48 I: Working Foundations is now on by default. In addition to the not-very-helpful speed graph you now see the value graph in its X red and Y green values. However, the green values appear upsidedown! Auto Select Graph Type selects speed graphs for spatial properties and value graphs for all others.

For this purpose After Effects offers the automated Easy Ease functions, although you can also create or adjust eases by hand in the Graph Editor. Fix this in the Composition viewer by pulling Bezier handles out of each of the keyframes you just eased: 1.

Deselect all keyframes but leave the layer selected. Switch to the Pen tool with the G key; in the Composi- tion viewer, drag from the highlighted keyframe to the right, creating a horizontal Bezier handle. Stop before crossing the second keyframe. Why is that? The red X graph shows an unsteady horizontal motion due to the eases.

The problem is that the eases should be applied only to the vertical Y dimension, whereas the X animation travels at a constant rate. This allows you to add keyframes for one dimension only at a 50 I: Working Foundations Figure 2. Select Position and click Separate Dimensions. Now try the following: 1.

Select the middle three X Position keyframes—you can draw a selection box around them—and delete them. Now take a look in the Composition viewer—the motion is back to linear, although the temporal eases remain on the Y axis.

Not only that, but you cannot redraw them as you did before; enabling Separate Dimensions removes this ability. Instead, you can create them in the Graph Editor itself. Show Graph Tool Tips displays values of whatever curve is under the mouse at that exact point in time. The transform box lets you edit keyframe values in all kinds of tricky or even wacky ways. Toggle on Show Transform Box and select more than one keyframe, and a white box with vertices surrounds the selected frames.

Drag the handle at the right side to the left or right to change overall timing; the keyframes remain proportionally arranged. So, does the transform box help in this case? Well, it could, if you needed to. Frames is on Add the Alt Opt key when dragging a corner of the transform box; this adjustment diminishes the height of the ball bounces proportionally over time. Drag all keyframes from the one at the top of the middle arc forward in time a second or two.

Copy and paste that mid-arc keyframe adding one for any other animated properties or dimensions at that point in time back to the original keyframe location, and toggle it to a Hold keyframe Figure 2. You can control a Bezier motion path in the Composition viewer using the Pen tool usage detailed in the next chapter.

Realistic motion often requires that you shape the motion path Beziers and add temporal eases; the two actions are performed independently on any given keyframe, and in two different places in the viewer and Timeline panel.

Animation can get a little trickier in 3D, but the same basic rules apply see Chapter 9 for more. Three preset keyframe transition types are available, each with a shortcut at the bottom of the Graph Editor: Hold , Linear , and Auto Bezier. Adjust the handles or apply Easy Ease and the preset becomes a custom Bezier shape. Copy and Paste Animations Yes, copy and paste; everyone knows how to do it. Once done, copy and paste the data back into After Effects.

Copy a set of keyframes from After Effects and paste them into an Excel spreadsheet or even an ordinary text editor, and behold the After Effects keyframe format, ready for hacking. You can paste from one property to another, so long as the format matches the units and number of parameters. Copy the source, highlight the target, and paste. This is the situation for which Roving keyframes were devised. You may not want to bounce a ball, but the technique works with any complex animation, and it maintains eases on the start and end frame.

Pay close attention to the current time and what is selected when copying, in particular, and when pasting animation data. Layer vs. Graph To summarize the distinction between layer bar mode and the Graph Editor, with layers you can.

However, when you scale a set of keyframes using the transform box, keyframes will often fall in between frames whether or not this option is enabled. Timeline Panel Shortcuts The following keyboard shortcuts have broad usage when applied with layers selected in the Timeline panel:. U toggles all properties with keyframes or expressions applied. UU U twice in quick succession toggles all properties set to any value besides the default; or every property in the Timeline panel that has been edited.

E toggles all applied effects. EE toggles all applied expressions. You 56 I: Working Foundations want all the changes applied to masks and transforms, not effects? Lose the masks? But UU—now that is a full-on problem-solving tool all by itself. It allows you to quickly investigate what has been edited on a given layer, is helpful when troubleshooting your own layer settings, and is nearly priceless when investigating an unfamiliar project.

Highlight all the layers of a composition and press UU to reveal all edits. Enable Switches, Modes, Parent, and Stretch columns, and you see everything in a composition, with the exception of. You have to see it to believe it: a nodal interface in After Effects Figure 2. The gray nodes are compositions, the red source clips, and the yellow is an effect, but there is no way to apply or adjust an effect in this view.

Its usage has largely been superseded by the new Miniflow bottom , which focuses interactively on the current composition. This view shows how objects layers, compositions, and effects are used, and in what relationship to one another. Click Property Name to select all keyframes for a property. Ctrl-click Cmd-click an effect stopwatch to set a keyframe. Read on; you are not a keyframe Jedi—yet. With multiple keyframes selected you can also. Keyframe multiselection in standard Layer view but not Graph Editor is inconsistent with the rest of the application: you Shift-click to add or subtract a single frame from a group.

Ctrl-clicking Cmdclicking on a keyframe converts it to Auto-Bezier mode. Spatial Offsets 3D animators are familiar with the idea that every object or layer has a pivot point. After Effects is generally designed to preserve the appearance of the composition when you are merely setting up animation, toggling 3D on, and so forth. Therefore, editing an anchor point position with the Pan Behind tool triggers the inverse offset to the Position property.

Parent a layer to another layer and the child layer maintains its relative position until you further animate either of them. Those shortcuts are a handful; context-clicking the layer for the Transform menu is nearly as easy. The Position offset is for that frame only, however, so if there are Position keyframes, the layer may appear offset on other frames if you drag the anchor point this way.

To reposition the anchor point without changing Position:. Change the anchor point value in the Timeline panel.

Use the Pan Behind tool in the Layer panel instead. Hold the Alt Opt key as you drag with the Pan Behind tool. Any of these options lets you reposition the anchor point without messing up an animation by changing one of the Position keyframes.

You can also animate the anchor point, of course; this allows you to rotate as you pan around an image while keeping the view centered. For the bouncing ball, you could move the anchor point to the base of the layer to add a little cartoonish squash and stretch, scaling Y down at the impact points.

Parenting remains valid even if the parent layer moves, is duplicated, or changes its name. A parent and all of its children can be selected by context-clicking the parent layer and choosing Select Children. Parenting can be removed by choosing None from the Parent menu. You probably knew all of that. You might not know what happens when you add the Alt Opt key to Parent settings:.

Hold Alt Opt as you select the None option and the layer reverts to the Transform values it had before being parented otherwise the offset at the time None is selected remains. Hold Alt Opt as you select a Parent layer and its Transform data at the current frame is applied to the child layer prior to parenting.

This last point is a very cool and easily missed method for arraying layers automatically. It behaves like the Duplicate and Offset option in Illustrator Figure 2.

The trick is to create the first layer, duplicate, and offset; now you have two. Repeat this last step with as many layers as you need; each one repeats the offset. Motion Blur Blurred Vision Motion blur occurs in your natural vision, although you might not realize it—stare at a ceiling fan in motion, and then try following an individual blade around instead and you will notice a dramatic difference.

There is a trend in recent years to use extremely high-speed electronic shutters, which drastically reduce motion blur. It is the natural result of movement that occurs while a camera shutter is open, causing objects in the image to be recorded at every point from the shutter opening to closing. The movement can be from individual objects or the camera itself. Although it essentially smears layers in a composition, motion blur is generally desirable; it adds to persistence of vision and relaxes the eye.

Aesthetically, it can be quite beautiful. The idea with motion blur in a realistic visual effects shot is usually to match the amount of blur in the source shot, assuming you have a reference; if you lack visual reference, a camera report can also help you set this correctly. Any moving picture camera has a shutter speed setting that determines the amount of motion blur.

Shutter Angle controls shutter speed, and thus the amount of blur. Any changes you make here stick and are passed along to the next composition, or even the next project, until you change them. Shutter Phase determines at what point the shutter opens. Samples Per Frame applies to 3D motion blur and Shape layers; it sets the number of slices in time samples , and thus, smoothness.

Adaptive Sample Limit applies only to 2D motion blur, which automatically uses as many samples as are needed up to this limit Figure 2. The reason for the difference is simply performance; 3D blur is costlier, but like many settings it is conservative. Unless your machine is ancient, boost the number; the boosted setting will stay as a preference.

In this abstraction the dark gray hemi-circular shutter spins to alternately expose and occlude the aperture, the circular opening in the light gray plate behind it. The angle corresponds to the radius of the open section—the wedge of the whole pie that exposes the frame Figure 2. Electronic shutters are variable but refer to shutter angle as a benchmark; they can operate down in the single digits or close to a full mechanically impossible degrees.

After Effects motion blur goes to degrees simply because sometimes mathematical accuracy is not the name of the game, and you want more than degrees. Shutter Phase determines how the shutter opens relative to the frame, which covers a given fraction of a second beginning at a given point in time.

If the shutter is set to 0, it I: Working Foundations Figure 2. The default —90 Shutter Phase setting with a degree shutter angle causes half the blur to occur before the frame so that blur extends in both directions from the current position. Otherwise, the track itself appears offset when motion blur is enabled. Enhancement Easier Than Elimination Although software may one day be developed to resolve a blurred image back to sharp detail, it is much, much harder to sharpen a blurred image elegantly than it is to add blur to a sharp image.

Motion blur comes for free when you keyframe motion in After Effects; what about when there is motion but no blur and no keyframes, as can be the case in pre-existing footage? Directional Blur, which can mimic the blur of layers moving in some uniform X and Y direction. Radial Blur, which can mimic motion in Z depth or spin. Timewarp, which can add motion blur without any retiming whatsoever Yes, you read that last one correctly.

You can retime footage or mix and match speeds and timing using a variety of methods. Absolute Not Relative Time After Effects measures time in absolute seconds, rather than frames, whose timing and number are relative to the number per second.

Think of a musician playing 3 against 4; one second in After Effects is something like the downbeat. Enable Frame Blend for the layer and the composition, and After Effects averages the adjacent frames together to create a new image on frames that fall in between the source frames.

Frame Mix mode overlays adjoining frames, essentially blurring them together. The same underlying technology is also used in Furnace plug-ins for Shake, Flame, and Nuke.

Confusingly, the icons for these modes are the same as Draft and Best layer quality, respectively Figure 2. Pixel Motion can often appear too blurry, too distorted, or contain too many noticeable frame artifacts, in which case you can move back to Frame Mix, or move up to the Timewarp effect, with greater control of the same technology later in this chapter. Nested Compositions Figure 2. If you put a composition with a lower frame rate into a master composition, the intention may be to keep the frame rate of the embedded composition.

This forces After Effects to use only whole frame increments in the underlying composition, just as if the composition were pre-rendered with that frame rate. Posterize Time often breaks preceding effects. To get the last visible frame you must often add a keyframe on the penultimate frame.

The philosophy is elusively simple: A given point in time has a value, just like any other property, so it can be keyframed, including eases and even loops — it operates like any other animation data.

Pixel Motion is an automated setting described earlier, and Timewarp builds this up by adding a set of effect controls that allow you to tweak the result.

Individual, automated motion vectors describe how each pixel moves from frame to frame. With this accurate analysis it is then possible to generate an image made up of those same pixels, interpolated along those vectors, with different timing.

The result is new frames that appear as if in between the original frames. When it works, it has to be seen to be believed.

Timewarp with the same Pixel Motion method. All methods can be used to speed up or slow down footage, but only Time Remapping and Timewarp dynamically animate the timing with keyframes. Time Remapping keyframes can even be transferred directly to Timewarp, but it requires an expression see note because Timewarp uses frames and Time Remapping seconds. Timewarp is worth any extra trouble in several ways:.

It can be applied to a composition, not just footage. It includes the option to add motion blur with the Enable Motion Blur toggle. To apply Timewarp to the footage, enable Time Remapping and extend the length of the layer when slowing footage down—otherwise you will run out of frames. Leave Time Remapping with keyframes at the default positions and Timewarp will override it.

This helps eliminate or reduce motion errors where the foreground and background move differently. You can even further adjust the reference layer and precomp it for example, enhancing contrast or luminance to give Timewarp a cleaner source , and then apply this precomposed layer as a Warp Layer—it then analyzes with the adjustments but applies the result to the untouched source.

These tools make use of Local Motion Estimation LME technology, which is thoroughly documented in the Furnace User Guide, if you ever want to fully nerd out on the details.

Here are a few tweaks you can try on this footage, or your own:. Not only does a higher number drastically increase render time, it simply increases or at best shifts artifacts with fast motion. This is because it is analyzing too much detail with not enough areas to average in.

Smoothing relates directly to Vector Detail. The Foundry claims that the defaults, which are balanced, 71 Chapter 2 The Timeline work best for most sequences. You can raise Global Smoothness all vectors , Local Smoothness individual vectors , and Smoothing Iterations in order to combat detail noise, but again, in this case it changes artifacting rather than solving it. The final section of the book delves into creative explorations, demonstrating professional effects that readers might want to re-create.

Included with the book are HD media files and After Effects project files used for many of the techniques in the book, as well as demos of plug-ins that you can use to experiment with in your own effects.

Mark Christiansen christiansen. Mark has done work directly for the Adobe After Effects development and marketing teams, is a founder at provideocoalition. Mark is also founder of New Scribbler Press. Download Chapter 4 Optimize Projects. All bonus chapters and sample files for this book appear online. The book does not come with a disc, so any references to the disc are erroneous. To download the files, follow the directions in the section called “How to Download the Files” in the book’s “Introduction.

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Adobe after effects cc visual effects and compositing studio techniques free download

 

Add To My Wish List. Register your product to gain access to bonus material or receive a coupon. The eBook requires no passwords or activation to read. We customize your eBook by discreetly watermarking it with your name, making it uniquely yours. This is the only book to focus exclusively on the creation of visual effects for After Effects, and is a one-stop resource for anyone who wants in-depth explanations that demystify the realm of visual effects and how they were created, thanks to veteran author Mark Christiansen’s friendly and accessible style.

A thoroughly packed, informative read, this masterful guide focuses on explaining the essential concepts, features, and techniques that are key to creating seamless movie-quality visual effects.

Users who are comfortable with After Effects will find a helpful review of the fundamentals—managing footage, viewing and editing layers, animating type, and more—so they can learn how to work smarter and more efficiently. Readers of all levels will learn core techniques for effects compositing including color matching, keying, rotoscoping, motion tracking, emulating the camera, and concluding with using expressions in After Effects.

The final section of the book delves into creative explorations, demonstrating professional effects that readers might want to re-create. Included with the book are HD media files and After Effects project files used for many of the techniques in the book, as well as demos of plug-ins that you can use to experiment with in your own effects.

Mark Christiansen christiansen. Mark has done work directly for the Adobe After Effects development and marketing teams, is a founder at provideocoalition. Mark is also founder of New Scribbler Press. I would like to receive exclusive offers and hear about products from Adobe Press and its family of brands.

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Adobe after effects cc visual effects and compositing studio techniques free download

 

This is the http://replace.me/8862.txt book on the market to focus exclusively on the creation of visual effects for After Effects users, and. English Pages Year Selecting color spaces, resolutions, and frame rates — ch. Generating alpha with keyers and mattes — ch. Those creative professionals seeking the fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe After Effects CS5 choos.

Visual effects and motion graphics pros of all stripes – from broadcast professionals to VFX supervisors to Web designer.

Now completely updated to cover the new features in CS4, this handbook guides users through the concepts and features th. No part of this book may be reproduced or wdobe in any form by any cashflow game free for, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of the book, neither the author nor Peachpit shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described in it.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks.

Where those designations appear in this book, and Peachpit was aware of a trademark claim, the designations appear as requested by the effdcts of the trademark.

Mark has used After Effects since version 2. He has written four previous editions of this book as well as Hechniques Effects 5. Mark is a founder of Pro Video Coalition adobe after effects cc visual effects and compositing studio techniques free download. He has created video training for Digieffects, lynda.

His site provides numerous free scripts, reference material, and links to other scripting resources. He is a frequent contributor to the various After Effects forums and has a special interest in expressions and complex algorithms. Dan is an electrical engineer by training, with a BSEE degree from the University of California, but has нажмите чтобы увидеть больше most of his career writing software. Some fundamental things about the book, like its basic structure, have not beginners adobe for free 2017 captivate, but other aspects have been radically revamped for this one.

That parallels the development of Основываясь на этих данных Effects itself. After Effects is compelling enough on its own to make it worth becoming an expert. Thank you in particular to Adobe for loaning the time and energy of Todd Kopriva to work on this edition.

When the last version of this book effectss out, The Orphanage, the facility fre my After Effects chops found a setting in which we could push compositing in this software to the maximum, was still very much alive. Maintaining that standard has been possible only with the collaboration of others. In the last edition, I brought in the best guy I knew to explain expressions, Dan Ebberts, and a counterpart on the scripting side, Jeff Almasol, to contribute chapters on their respective specialties, and those remain in this edition.

Collaboration is key to this work. In gathering new material for this edition I had a few collaborators who were willing to shoot material, either with me on a day out thanks Tyler McPherron or remotely gratitude to Chris Meyer—yes, that Chris Meyer—and to Eric Escobar. Peschiera, Shuets Udono, Eric E. Yang, and Kevin Miller. Thanks to both of you for adobw taking a bunch of ideas Adobe after effects cc visual effects and compositing studio techniques free download put out there, from the ridiculous to the even more ridiculous, and coming up with a design that feels fresh and lively without causing any corporate powers-that-be to collapse.

This is the best edition yet of this book thanks to the efforts and commitment of the many good people at Peachpit, all of whose best qualities are embodied in one Karyn Johnson. Without you, the pieces would not have come together in the way they did, the book would not be written the same, and the entire process would have been a whole lot less fun. Your humor, patience, commitment, and professionalism make this process of publishing a book relevant and vital, and you are truly able to bring out the best in others.

Finally, thank you to you, the people who read, teach, and respond to the material in this book. I just read it, with an eye to updating it. Everything I wrote then is even more true today. Certainly in adobe after effects cc visual effects and compositing studio techniques free download cases this is due to drastically reduced budgets. Nothing inspires creativity like limited resources. Laptop computers are every bit as powerful as tower workstations from two years ago. Our phones have HD video cameras and our favorite visual effects application comes bundled with a competent roto artist in the box.

The victory will go to the xi Foreword artists who generate adobe after effects cc visual effects and compositing studio techniques free download emotional reaction by any adoge necessary. Two years ago it was fun to think about bringing the sex to your work. Use what you learn in this book to make beautiful things that challenge and excite people. The tools have gotten better. All that sex and violence. I get enough of that at home.

Apart from the sex, of course. Spielberg called and he wants the world to believe, if only for 90 minutes, that dinosaurs are alive and breathing on an island off the coast of South America. Your job: Make them look real. Movies are not reality. The reason we love them is that they present us with a heightened, idealized version of reality. The couple are really, really charming adobe after effects cc visual effects and compositing studio techniques free download impossibly good-looking—in fact, one of them is Meg Copositing.

Before the surgery. Oh, and music is playing. Nothing at all—and we love it. Man, she looked good. She looked good. But mostly, that T-rex felt real because she looked good. She was wet. It was dark. She had a big old Dean Cundey blue rim light on her coming from nowhere.

In truth, you could barely see her. But you sure could hear her. They make things feel right even if they skip over the facts in the process. Move a gun half an inch and it sounds like a shotgun being vusual. Get hung up on? Instant dial tone. Modern computer displaying something on the screen? Of course there should be the sound of an IBM dot-matrix printer from They bring the sex.

So do cinematographers, makeup artists, wardrobe stylists, composers, set designers, casting directors, and even the practical effects department. And yet somehow, we in the visual effects industry are often forbidden from bringing the sex.

Our clients pigeonhole us into the role of the prop maker: Build me a T-rex, and it better look real. Not just good—impossibly good. Unrealistically blue-rim-light-outanowhere good. Sexy good. Sgudio you ever argued with a client over aspects of an effects shot that were immutable facts? Do читать полностью ever get frustrated with clients who try to art-direct reality in this way?

Well, stop it. And you know what else? Was It Good for You? The sad reality is that we, frew visual effects industry, pigeonhole ourselves by being overly preoccupied with reality. We have no one to blame по этому адресу ourselves. Want me to xv Foreword do one at 48 frames?

The problem is that the damage is already done. So when you attempt to break our self-imposed mold and bring the rree to your client, you will face an uphill battle. Then all the talk of realism went away, and the shot got oohs and ahs. Your client reacts to your work emotionally, but they critique technically. When they see your shot, they react with their gut. You may think that those are the worst kind of comments, but they are перейти на источник best.

Bringing the sex is all about cheap tricks. Lights On or Off? There are some visual effects supervisors who pride themselves on being sticklers for detail. This is like being an architect whose specialty is nails. There will forever be something more you could add, some shortcoming that could be addressed. Anyone can nitpick. And this is always the sex.

Cownload yeah: Star Wars. Audiences only care about the sex.