Master Class: Tips & Tricks on After Effects, Premiere Pro & Motion Design

[Adobe & Creativity] [Coming up next...Tips & Tricks on After Effects, Premiere Pro & Motion Design] Welcome back. I noticed some of you are checking out the Twitter feed, and you're asking some questions here, and I did have one question come up on the screen here I just wanted to quickly answer just to prove that we're doing this live. There is no delay. There's no special tape that's running. This is me, live, talking to you. Somebody was asking about just what the differences are between blue screen and green screen. And really, the 2 elements in the past, blue screen was something easier to extract from a feature film. [Karl Soule] [Adobe Evangelist, Adobe Systems] It had a cleaner color. Nowadays, since everything is done digitally, if you have any solid color background, you can really remove it. Blue and green are still used mostly because human skin tone, the range of human skin tone doesn't exist in a blue or green spectrum. But I've seen some shots where people are extracting a model from a scene, and they've used a bright yellow background because they had blue and green lights on the model, so it really doesn't matter which one you use these days. Most software can pretty much pick and choose between either color. It just gives us something that we can easily extract from an image. There you go. Now, what I'm going to be talking about here for the next 20 minutes or so is I wanted to introduce a concept for After Effects artists, and I know there's a lot of After Effects artists out there who have been asking about the Mercury Playback Engine, and they want to come up with a way of working faster inside of After Effects. After Effects is this really vast tool for animation. It has many different functions dealing with animation, but people want to be able to work faster. So, I've had a lot of questions about ways that they can speed up workflows. If you own Production Premium, if you've bought the Production bundle and you have Photoshop and After Effects, you also have a very, very valuable tool that is a real-time playback engine for animation. It works with Photoshop files, it works with Illustrator files, it has advanced keyframing capabilities. Every time you hit Play, it just plays your timeline, and it has output options which are designed for things like mobile phones and tablets if you need to output your graphics for these different devices. That tool is called Premiere Pro, so if you want to work with--a lot of people say "Wait a minute." "Premiere Pro, you're talking video editing." No, I'm talking about using Premiere Pro as a tool for an After Effects artist because the 2 programs are really tightly linked together, and a lot of people are not aware of this fact, so I wanted to show you a quick demonstration of how I can start an animation over inside of Premiere Pro, and then work my way over into After Effects when I need the more advanced animation functionality available to me in After Effects. To get started, I'm going to start using Enrique's wonderful graphic that's behind me here. I have it opened up over here in Photoshop, and I'm going to do a quick animation with this starting in Premiere and then working my way to After Effects. To start with, I've gone ahead and created just a blank After Effects project, and I've saved this, and I've created a nearly blank Premiere Pro project. I've gone ahead and added in a video clip here. I like to combine elements. Again, the idea of combining organic elements with computer-generated elements I think creates some really nice looks. This is actually some--believe it or not, I took lasers. Nothing as sophisticated as Hussin and the LIDAR we were just talking about, but I took some lasers, shined them through a crystal along with some blue lights onto a wall just to create this graphic. It created a really nice pattern for me here. And I'm just going to take this clip and drag it and drop it down onto my timeline here, and now I'm going to go ahead and import my Photoshop file. I can go in here. Here's my Design for Impact logo. We'll go ahead and import this, and Premiere has some very sophisticated ways of importing a Photoshop file. We can choose to import the layers as an individual sequence. We can merge all the layers together. In fact, that's what I'm going to go ahead and do here is just merge the layers together and click Okay. And so now I have the Photoshop file, I can just drag this and drop it right onto my timeline and extend it out here. And the great thing about this is Premiere actually has an element, a little piece of software in the background that's actually a connection with Photoshop, so it is the Photoshop rendering engine that is displaying the graphic here inside of Premiere Pro. What you see in Photoshop is what you're going to get in Premiere. Now, I'm going to take this graphic and in my monitor here, I'm just going to pick it up and kind of size it and move it over here and get my final end position where I want this to be kind of over these different laser elements here. That's looking pretty good. Now, we're going to do the animation in the Effect Controls panel, and I'm going to quickly go in here and just twirl down some of these different controls that we have here, and the best thing is, these controls are taken directly from After Effects. In fact, the keyframes have the same advanced functionality that After Effects keyframes have. Very quickly, I'm going to go ahead and just expand this out a little bit here, find a mark at about the 1 second mark here, and I'm going to go ahead and animate the position. And we'll go ahead and use this control here. I'll go ahead and kind of zoom in on my keyframes here so I can really see the in point and the out point here. On this first keyframe, I'm going to go ahead and pick this up and just move it off the screen. You see we get a little motion path in my program monitor here, and just to move very quickly here, because I know we have limited time, I'm just going to quickly add a second point in here so as this flies in, it kind of comes over to the corner. Now, if I twirl down the position, we actually get the velocity readings here, and this is something that After Effects artists use in something called the Motion Editor over in After Effects. It's visible right inside of Premiere Pro for this property. Right now, I can see that this motion--if I want to play this back, all I have to do is rewind and hit Play, and it plays the motion, and the keyframes right now are very linear. The motion is very linear. It doesn't ease in or ease out from one point to the next. But it's very easy to add that functionality. I can just right-click on a keyframe and choose temporal interpolation and set ease in, ease out, or I can even do Bezier curves on these keyframes. If I zoom in here, you can see how that's really changed the motion path here. And I have handles that I can use to kind of control the motion from keyframe to keyframe here, and you can see the keyframe shape has changed to the hourglass exactly like After Effects. But the difference is working inside of Premiere is-- any time I make these changes, I don't have to RAM preview something to make it happen. All I have to do is hit Play on my timeline. It's real time, so any time I'm animating these different properties, I don't have to worry about rendering or waiting for a RAM preview to happen. Now, I'm going to go ahead and add some additional effects on this. Premiere has a whole wide range of different effects that can be applied to a Photoshop file. Premiere basically treats a Photoshop file the same way it would treat a video clip. I can come in here and add a blur effect. We'll just add a Gaussian blur effect here. I can scroll down here, and we have a blurriness property. And again, if I grab my playhead here, and I want to jump to a particular keyframe, I can use the same keyboard shortcut. If I hold down the Shift key, it'll walk to a keyframe in a different property. We'll go ahead and set the blurriness for this. I'll go ahead and scrub back to the beginning of this, and I'll go ahead and just really set the blur property really high here-- let's scrub about halfway--so we can see that this is really blurry. I want it even blurrier than that. Let's set it to about 600 here. And I'm moving fast here, but you can see now we've added kind of a blur effect to our animation, and I can continue to build further onto this. I'll go ahead and add something called Basic 3D, which gives me a rotation and a swivel and tilt control here. Again, we'll walk to my final keyframe, quickly animate the swivel and tilt property, and for this, I want it to fly in at kind of an angle, so even here where it's kind of blurry, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to set the swivel to this direction. Actually, let's go the other direction, and we'll tilt it kind of up a little bit. And so now we have this flying in, and I can go ahead and grab keyframes. I can copy and paste keyframes around. I can move keyframes to different locations. We'll go ahead and kind of expand that out a little bit. Now we have this sort of bounce as the animation comes in. This is how I can start to build an animation inside of Premiere Pro using all of these different properties. Now, Premiere, again, I've mentioned that this is tied in with Photoshop, so if I need to make a change to this, turn off a particular layer, all I have to do is right-click on the Photoshop layer and use a menu command called Edit Original. And when I do that, this will jump me right back over into Photoshop, and I can go in and start to look at the different layers here just in case I want--maybe on the word "Creativity" I'll add a little bit of additional outer glow because my friend Jason Levine, one of the other video evangelists, says you can never have too much outer glow in this world. I'll go ahead and save that, and if we switch back over to Premiere Pro, you'll see that this has now added that outer glow to the word "Creativity." It's updated from the original Photoshop file. If I wanted to--actually, I tell you what. I think that's a little too much outer glow. I'm not going to mess with Enrique's design skills. I think he did a fantastic logo here, so I'll just go ahead and save that with the outer glow turned off, and it again jumps off of the logo here in Premiere. Now, I want to start using some advanced functionality over inside of After Effects, but you can see how quickly I can build these keyframes inside of Premiere. Now I want to use something called wiggle over inside of After Effects. I don't want the logo to just sit there and be this static element. It doesn't have energy yet. We want to add some energy to the shot. To do that, I'm going to use After Effects. And all I have to do to send this over to After Effects is right-click on the clip and use a menu command called Replace With After Effects Composition. And when I do this, it does a number of different steps all in one single click. The Photoshop file in the timeline is actually now called an After Effects project. It's a composition from After Effects inside of Premiere, and if I jump over to After Effects that's kind of blinking on my bar at the bottom here, you'll notice that we have a new composition over here in After Effects and look. There's my animation brought over to After Effects. If I twirl down the different properties for this, you'll see that all the keyframes that I generated over in Premiere actually come across into After Effects, including the Gaussian blur effect, Basic 3D effect, the transform controls, all of these different keyframes come across, and even keyframes where I've gone in and played with things like Bezier curve handles, they actually show up in the motion graph editor, and I can see I have that same motion graph. I can continue to refine my animation inside of After Effects. In a lot of cases, you're kind of going back and forth between After Effects and Premiere. It can be the fastest way to build a particular comp in a particular animation. I'm not the one who came up with this, by the way. I just want to do one quick shout-out. There's a woman by the name of Angie Taylor who actually wrote the book on motion graphics design. She's a wonderful artist, and she was the first one who kind of bent my ear and told me about this idea of using Premiere as a tool for motion graphics artists. So, it's definitely something that as I've started to show this to After Effects artists in the past, it really is kind of an eye-opener of how these two applications are really so well tied together. Now, while I'm over here inside of After Effects, let me quickly come in here, and I'm going to add that type of little wiggling motion to my graphic here inside of After Effects. There's different ways of doing this, but I'm going to be creating something called a null object. A null object, it's represented on the screen by a little square. A null object is something that is invisible. It's sort of an anchor point that I can tie animations to. Let me go ahead and twirl down my null object here, and I'm going to take the position control and use a trick called creating an expression. This is a way of using a little bit of programming to create procedural animations. What I'll do is I'll Alt click or Option click on the stopwatch, and I get a little text field here, and to make this wiggle, all I have to do is type in the word "wiggle," parentheses, tell it how many times I want it to wiggle, and tell it how much I want it to wiggle. Then just click off of that, if I scrub through the timeline, you can actually see the square will actually move around on the screen here. Right now, that square, again, it's just a little invisible element. It's not attached or tied to anything, so now I have to tie this to the Photoshop file. What I'm going to do is take the Photoshop layer and use a little tool called the pick whip. This is a little tool that actually acts like a little whip. If I let go of it, it creates a little animation on the screen of a whip here, and this allows me to tie different layers together. I'm going to tie the Photoshop file to this null object, and now when I come in here, I have to RAM preview here in After Effects, so we'll go ahead and RAM preview this. But you can see now we've added this little motion to the effect over here in After Effects. I need to see how my final composite is going to work, so I'm going to go back over to Premiere, and the best thing about this is when I started this process, it replaced the Photoshop file with an After Effects composition here in Premiere. All I have to do to see this is come into Premiere, press Play, and this will go through and actually play out my composition. Play out my composition. Play out--there we go. It's thinking about it. I think I've angered the Premiere gods here. It's not doing what I want it to do. Let me try switching back over here, just double check, make sure--yes, I've got everything set up over here. Let me switch back over to Premiere, and so here is a different example here. I've jumped over to a different project, and this is one where I've actually, again, I'm still working with a live After Effects composition. This is one that I created the other day here, and the last piece of this is the fact that I can still come in here and add additional capabilities. I can add additional animations to my final composition here. In this case, what I've done is taken the After Effects composition, changed it from a normal blending mode to a pin light blending mode or a vivid light blending mode, and I can continue to come in here and play with color. And again, I have all this additional control as far as real-time control of the object that doesn't require RAM previewing. It will continue to work with an After Effects project over inside of Premiere Pro, and I can continue to animate it and continue to work with it. Now, the last step in this process is the simple fact I can go through and I can output in a number of different formats from Premiere Pro that After Effects typically doesn't work with. If I need to take this and take it out to mobile devices, if I needed to take it out to a Lenovo ThinkPad like what Paul and Cy have been showing today, we have that capability. We can do that very quickly and very easily inside of Premiere Pro. It's a real time saver being able to jump back and forth between Premiere Pro into After Effects, back over into Premiere Pro. It's a really valuable and really viable workflow for doing motion graphics animation. And with that, I'm going to hand things back over to Paul Burnett.