Web and Video

I found a good tutorial on YouTube by Chad Perkins (of the brothers Perkins …) - it tells you how to export your video from Premiere to iPod.

If you want to put your video on an iPod or cell phones or YouTube, you’re one of those cool podcasters, just own an iPod and Premiere, whatever - this is a good tutorial for you:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1PmGWji4Szk

Chad also outlines how to export from After Effects too, and shows you some of the differences between the two programs.

I like his source footage too. Gotta love that actually-good free domain stuff. Good clip, Chad.  And a good video tutorial.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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One of the funnest.. ahem… most fun new features in After Effects CS3 is the Puppet Tool. It makes animation incredibly easy. If you’ve tried to do character animation before.. especially with something like Flash.. you’ll know how hard it can be to create all those keyframes and then add motion tweens and shape tweens and try not to break them down the road and so on and so forth.  But the Puppet Tool makes it much easier - you’re pretty much clicking and dragging to make things happen, and often you can end up with something that looks really cool.

We already have a couple tutorials on using the Puppet Tool, but another one can’t hurt.  This one combines Motion with After Effects to create an interesting result.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/geduldick_jim/Motion_AE.php 

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Intro to After Effects CS3 was led by Steve Whatley. Steve works for Adobe as a solutions/systems sales engineer. This was an excellent intro to After Effects - I really think that if you haven’t worked with the product at all, this session would get you up and running for sure. It was a nice refresher course too - I’ve only used AE from time to time over the past 6 years (6 years ago I used it a lot), and I feel a bit more confident in my skills again

No slides! YAY! This is entry level After Effects session - assumes you don’t know anything about After Effects.

How do you use the application… how you deliver doesn’t matter. If you know Photoshop, this is a piece of cake. You’re going to add filters, move things, and so on - you just have the ability to animate that stuff.

Workspace layout - look in Project folder. You will typically have folders and compositions. You start with an empty project and then you create a new composition.

If someone wants real video and put it on YouTube or whatever - you can select from a Preset in the new comp dialog - makes all the settings for size, aspect ratio, framerate, and so on. Thing about AE is you determine ahead of time about how long you’ll think it’ll be - set the duration in the new comp window.

Web video is all square pixels. Photoshop is square pixels, IL, and so on. If you want something different, you change it in the new comp window- width and height too.

Makes a timeline and comp window when you click OK.

Timeline is like a layer window in Photoshop - same scenario. Right click in comp window, and create a new solid (like creating a new layer). Determine size, or select “Make Comp Size” button.

You can change solid settings Layer > Solid settings.

Can name your solid layers, or switch back to Source name clicking it in the Timeline if the original name is important (swap).

Tilde key is your friend. You put your pointer over a panel, press the tilde and it will fill the workspace. If you have tons of layers or assets, this can be really helpful.

Twirl down parts of the timeline (arrow pointing right, click it and attributes become visible — like a tree).

Anchor point - sits in the middle of the selection/layer — where the object rotates from.

Attributes in the timeline are hot-scrubbable (you can scrub and change values).

When do animations, typical to start in Photoshop or Illustrator. Build what you plan to animate. Build it what it looks like when you’re done moving it. In animation, lots of cases you’ll work backwards. IF exact placement is critical. If at 6 seconds I want something “to be there” you scrub to that location and set a keyframe (click clock in timeline).

Then you scrub back to the 0 second point, and move it,. You look on the path and see an “extra heavy dot” and you can move the handle to create a curve. Then the object will animate along that path you have created.

zero on keyboard is shortcut for RAM preview.

Have attributes independt of each other, so youcan set things like scale independently. So you can set a keyframe for scale at 2 seconds between 2 seconds and 5 seconds, position changes between 0 and 6 and so on.

The green bar is content being rendered first and playing back at real time.

3 gigs of RAM or better if you use AE a lot. 2 gigs of RAM if you’ll use AE sometimes.

The blue bar between the timeline layers and the numeric seconds determines how long the animation is — work area.

You can select and copy and paste keyframes to other layers and so on.

Ease in and ease out - linear keyframes are also what do this. Helps you create animations that create the illusion of “landing softly” (there are lots of places you can refer to this in more detail, fair readers). Right click > Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease In and so on. Ease out to “take off slowly”, Ease in to “land softly”. Ease out the beginning keyframe, and ease in at the last keyframe.

Importing footage.
Double click in Project panel or Ctrl+I. Importing Photoshop install folder > Samples > Flower.psd.

Motion menus on DVDs are usually a movie animation created in AE, when you click the menu, Encore says play this movie and then play the real movie.

When you import, you get some questions. Import Kind - Footage. Layer Options. Choose Layer if you want a select layer, or you can merge the layers (flatten layers before you bring it in). OR you can import as a composition. You can retain all the styles and filters and stuff when you bring it in. Choose Cropped layers to bring in all the layer styles you want to change over time. Click OK.

Brings in all of the layers, and an immediate composition to the size you created in Photoshop. Now go to composition and double click.

Trim comp to work area.

Select the layer, press “P” for position in timeline — dont’ have that big list of things when you twirl down a layer.

Make sure something happens before another thing stops - keep up that level of interest.

Click button below … Toggle Switches/Modes. Click to right of layer name, and you get modes in pop-up menu — normal, dissolve, multiply, etc. Blend modes. Press Shift and + or - to go through list.

Adding effects.
Going to add Soundbooth becuase there are 1500 sound effects you can use. First add a lens flare and then a sound effect.
Add a new layer. Adding a solid or an adjustment layer. You can put anything on an adjustment layer.
Move layer to start at about 4 second mark, and then add effect. Go to Effects and presets panel, and type in “lens” to find the lens flare. You can drop it onto a selected layer, and it will add it.

Then you see the effect control window, and you can add as many effects you want onto that. SElect the effect in this window, and you can adjust the center point by clicking the center button, change size, and so on.
If you go to the timeline you can see keyframes too (only difference).

A black layer and put a screen - turns into transparent.

Reset the workspace using the menu in the upper right hand corner. If you get lost or something, you can use this menu to get back to the standard/default.

Then you can export out to SWF or FLV and so on.

If you need to do something other than web (ipod, psp), and there are presets that you can use.

Steve then quickly ran through some of the other features in AE, many of them new in CS3. There was a very favorable reaction to the Vanishing Point/Photoshop > import to CS3 feature (we have a video on this in the CS3 video workshop on design center). He also showed the Puppet Tool, which is very cool too (and also has a video tutorial in the workshop).

(5 votes, average: 4.2 out of 5)

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Notes from the session on interactive video with After Effects (AE) and Flash (Fl) at MAX 2007, by Michael Coleman (AE product manager).

These are messy for now. I’ll clean them up, but do watch Michael’s blog on blogs.adobe.com for more details, source code, and the project soon.

Purpose: Show a workflow where use After Effects and Flash together to create an interactive experience.

Create a microsite video viewer. Want to combine footage with bike rider information on a site. The rider info should be accessible throughout the video experience. And you can show the hide and the data in a heads up display, which is essentially a pop-up.

Using the Aquo assets (which are the assets used in Adobe demos and Video Workshop).

Will be creating 3D text - can let each character have 3d rotation, and so on. Will be modifying animation presets (you can modify for your own needs), motion tracking (of an object through a scene), parenting (one layer can inherit the mvt of another layer - don’t have to copy/paste keyframes, can just lock together), track mattes (vx term of using alpha layer of one layer for another layer, keep motion related), markers (put a note in time, comment, FLV cuepoints), FLV encoding with render queue (can do batch rendering of FLV).

Flash concepts: importing PSD and video, basic ActionScript (AS), event cue points, basic interactivity. How to write AS to listen for cuepoints.

Showing final piece: 3d text spinning around the rider, click it and there’s a display of data. Driven dynamically by cuepoints in the video. Can automatically change it.

– Importing video into AE –

D-click on Project window (quick way to import), finding footage.

Creating a new composition - drag footage onto new comp icon, and it will set it up with all the right settings (aspect ratio, framerate, etc).

Viewing raw footage.

– Adding text –

Starting with animation presets. Going to presets panel, and checking out 3d text folder. Goes to Browse Presets, and browse them visually in Bridge (you can see previews). Selecting text in a circle, and add it to the comp by d-clicking it in Bridge.

Changing the rotation - click the “r” key in the timeline and it narrows down the options so you can quickly find rotation. All live, dynamic text so you can change it afterwards.

Positioning the text so it’s around the rider, double click it so you get Free Transform controller.  Previewing. Text stops, but want it to stay animating, and doesn’t match the rider’s mvt yet.

Going into the text layer again. Select a layer, and press “u” key - shows you everything in layer that has keyframes on it - shows you everything that’s animated, so you can see path options. Making the animation the whole length of the comp so it animates.

Using motion tracker to let you attach something with motion and attach it to something in video with motion. Added a motion tracker to the layer - place it on an object that you want to follow though the scene. So you can set an attach point (the rider in the video), and then you add a search region - tells AE where to look for the object (speeds things up).

Setting motion tracker options. Then set analyze movement, and it quickly looks through the shot and tracks the object. Then we hit the apply button to apply it to the other layer with text. So now the text is following the racer. Want to tweak the text.

To tweak, selecting all the position keyframes, and shift the entire thing down - so then AE adjusts all of the values at the same time. So, going to comp window with all selected, and drag the text in the comp downwards and so on. Preview again, and the text still follows the rider.

Text needs to go around the rider - right now it’s rotating on top of the rider.. text is in front of the rider. Now the background layer goes partially in between the text. So now you’re making that layer 3d. But now the text sort of hides behind the rider. Switch view to “top” on the now 3D layer. So we need to create a mask around the text so it looks as you’d expect.

Going to create a new solid layer. Put a mask on the solid layer, a round mask. So you mask out the rider so the text can go behind her. Cmd T to free transform and position the mask on the rider. Makes the text look like it’s going behind the rider. Feathering the mask, so it’s a gradual fade instead of just clipping off.  But now you need to have the mask track the rider so it is animated/follows the rider too. Use parenting to do this - so the mask inherits the movement of the text layer.

In the timeline, parenting column, and you select the layer you want to parent. Now if you preview again, you can see the mask tracking the rider as well.

Create a track matte - layer as alpha channel on top of the layer that’s being matted. On the background rider MOV, use the alpha matte from the mask layer, and applies it to the video. Then they can be animated independently.

Then you add another copy of the video to the back. Everything on the video side has now been put together - motion graphics done.

Before we leave AE, we need to create FLV cuepoints. All layer markers can be saved as an AS3 cuepoint. You can add the name, cuepoint, parameter names and parameter values in the Layer Marker dialog in AE. Or, you can create a script that takes keyframe data, and automatically create markers for them.

Selects a tack point, scripts > select properties (something) - creates a marker for every frame. Now it prepopulates the cuepoint parameter names and values for each one.  Now all markers out as FLV cuepoints.  (Will not overwhelm flash with that many cuepoints). Note - current script does not input names. You’d need to insert names at the moment. However — There will be an update for that script soon - and Michael will post this on his blog. Will also post this project, and you can drop it into your AE installation. Now you will have to go through each marker and put in the name.

Using Adobe Media Encoder in After Effects to output FLVs. Will have the H.264 updater soon so can output using new video codec for FLV, but for now can do VP6 out of AE.  If you want, you can output different versions of the same video - can do more than one output module per render item.

Going to Flash. Creating a new FLA. Importing a PSD to use as a background. Bring in the video onto a new layer, and using the File > Import Video. Selecting the FLV that was encoded from AE, and then setting a skin if you want Putting the video onto the Stage, and centers it. Giving the component an instance name.  But now we want to add the “heads up display” (click the text and see a pop-up with racer data).

So for the display pop-up, importing another PSD with the graphics. It’s an image with text and stuff. Then adding some AS to hook it up.

Creating a new actions layer. Which is copied and pasted from a text file

Basically importing the fl.video. Creating some variables for properties, object and value.

myVid is listening for an event, which is a cuepoint. When you hear the cuepoint, you execute a certain function. The function iterates through the cuepoint data, and it listens for the cue point name. When you see that name, the next lines divde the value up to X and Y data, and assign it to the racer data x and y. Also want to add a second event that handles a click. It listens for a mouse click, and when you do, toggle the dataview, which turns on and off the racer data pop-up.  (it’s about 35 lines of code, and it will be up on Michaels blog).

testing the SWF now. When you click you see the heads up display. Then you move the pop-up back in Flash authoring.

You could take it farther by having the pop-up be a dynamic SWF that brings in live data or something.

That’s it!

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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This tutorial covers the essentials of motion tracking in After Effects CS3. You learn how to select a region to track, and then you learn how to have an object follow that region. In this tutorial, you have a block of text follow a sailboat that moves across the screen.

It’s a basic concept to learn, but very handy in creating neat effects in your compositions. Head over to the DVPA site and check it out:

http://www.dvpa.com/public/537.cfm

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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In this tutorial, Jacquelin Vanderwood shows you how to create realistic curtains that wave using Adobe After Effects CS3.

Waving Realistic Curtains tutorial

It is a fairly simple tutorial to follow, and includes screen shots of all of the steps you need to take. It also includes a ZIP file download of the original source files.

(7 votes, average: 4.14 out of 5)

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