Part 7 - Final Touches and Rendering

[♫music] [Classroom] [Basic Compositing & Animation in After Effects CS5] In the previous episode, we looked at working with Photoshop documents in After Effects. In this episode, we'll be building out your final composition with some finished adjustment layers to kind of give it an overall look and feel. We're also going to readjust some of the timing, to make it sync a little better to music. And finally, we'll be rendering out your finished video as a self-contained file. Let's get started. So go ahead and open up the AE_TitleSequence folder. Then click on the AE_Lessons folder and double-click on lesson07 to open up Lesson 7. What you have here is all 5 scenes, composited together in 1 master comp, called Power Foundation. At the bottom of the layers, you'll see the Power Foundation audio layer. You'll want to reveal the Audio Waveform so we can find sync points between the audio and the video. First, expand the audio layer by clicking the little Triangle button to the left. Then expand the audio feature, and enter into the Waveform. The Waveform is now revealed on your Timeline so you can see some of the sounds. This is a great way to find sync points between audio and video. We're looking for things like spikes in the Waveform, which signify a spike in the audio. It could be a snare drum, a bass drum, or any other type of swell in the audio. In order to play back audio, we could use our RAM Preview button which is the Zero key on your numeric keypad or you can use your Audio Only Preview, which is the Period key, just to the right of the Zero key on your numeric keypad. Go ahead and press the Period key on your numeric keypad once. [♫music] This will initiate playback. You can press it again to stop the playback. [♫end music] Another way to play back audio is to hold the Command key or the Control key, if you're working on a PC. Then click in the Time Ruler to scrub left and right--to play back audio as you're scrubbing the current time indicator. This is another great way to find a perfect point to add a new transition or sync point for the video. What I'm looking for here is a moment to have things land. So I'm thinking about ways to spot out the audio before I start changing the transitions. The best way to do this is using markers. Markers are a great tool in After Effects that allow you to jump between key points inside of the animation. You can add markers to your Timeline or to layers. In this case, I'd like to add markers to my composition. One way to do this is to hold the Shift key and then press one of the keys on your keyboard with the numbers on it. This could be anything from the 1 through the 9. If I hold Shift and press the 1 key on my keyboard, it will add the No. 1 marker-- which means that, at any point, I can recall that marker by just clicking on the "1" key, and it will put my current time indicator to the "1" marker. There's one more thing I'd like to point out. There is a distinction between your numeric keypad and the numbers found above the letters on your regular keyboard. In this case, we're using the numbers above the letters on your keyboard. What I'm looking for is to adjust the timing of this animation so that it lands on a beat. Specifically, let's scrub this. Notice how the movement of the text lands just after the wipe happens. Well, there's probably a beat coming up soon after, so I'm going to scrub my Timeline and look for a moment where it lands on a snare drum or on a beat. [♫drums] I think I have one, right about here. What i'd like you to do is take your marker, and slide it over to 2 seconds and 9 frames, right around where the beat begins. Now it's important to enter inside of the pre-comp to adjust the timing for the text of this animation. So what you can do is either double-click on the faucet_drops composition-- and this will enter you inside of the composition-- or from the Power_ Foundation composition, you can hit the Shift key once. This will bring you to what's called a Mini Flow Chart, which allows you to connect to any of the compositions which are currently being used in the master composition. In this case, we want to connect to the faucet_drops composition. So just click it once. Notice that, when I was parked at 209 in the Power_Foundation composition, it also keeps the same time, within this faucet_drops composition. What we're looking to do is have that second keyframe where the EarthPicturesPresents layer land right at 209. So please select the EarthPicturesPresents layer, then press the U key on your keyboard to reveal the Position keyframes. You can select the 2 keyframes at the beginning of the animation, then click and hold on the second keyframe to slide it. Then, holding the shift, it will snap to your current time indicator. Let's go back to the Power_Foundation composition to see if this lands a little bit better on the beat. [♫music begins and ends] I'd like you to continue this step, by adding markers to your Timeline, and spotting certain spots in the audio where you can change the timing for the video. This time, however, we're not going to use the Shift and numeric keys but instead, use the asterisk key on your numeric keypad. This will allow you to place markers on your timeline, on the fly, during playback. So go ahead and begin an Audio Only Preview. [♫music] Put your finger on the asterisk key to get ready to place that marker. [♫end music] What it's going to do is place a marker on the Timeline, as playback is happening. It's important, though, to know it's only going to place a marker on the selected item. If I have a layer selected, the asterisk key will add a layer marker. I'm going to undo that last step. If nothing is selected it will, in fact, add a composition marker-- and that's what we want. The next adjustment that I'd like you to make is between the faucet_drops composition and the Light composition. Go ahead and select the faucet_drops composition. Then hit the U key to reveal the keyframes. Notice that there's the 2 keyframes at the end, which signify the transition between one layer and the next. So now what I'd like you to look for is a moment within the Light Bulb scene where there's a beat, and we can adjust the text timing. As you can see, the text is already onscreen by the time it makes that movement. So instead of having it onscreen already, we want the text to move after the movement for the 2 layers happens. So go ahead and find a moment within that Light Bulb composition, after the transition occurs. [♫music sporadically playing] I think it's about 621--is the moment. At that moment, you have a second snare beat after the Light composition begins, so I can double-click on that composition, to go inside of it. Then select the text layer, and click the U key on your keyboard to reveal the Position keyframes. You can then highlight all of these Position keyframes by creating a Selection box around them or simply click the Position Value, which will select all the keyframes on that attribute. You can grab the middle keyframe, slide it over; hold Shift, and have it snap to the current time indicator. Now let's jump back to the Power_Foundation composition. This time, click the Shift key, then click on PowerFoundation. Let's do a RAM Preview. [♫music begins and ends] I think it looks pretty good, for these 2 scenes, and this is a very important step for the overall process. It's what makes a good graphic into a great graphic. Now we can continue this process through the various scenes, and I would suggest you do this later on. Now let's add some overall effects to the whole composition, by creating an Adjustment layer. To create an Adjustment layer, you can go to the Layer menu; then select New, and select Adjustment layer. Notice the Key Command listed there on the right. So what is an Adjustment layer? It's a really cool feature in After Effects, and similar to what you see in Photoshop. It's an effects layer that allows effects to be applied to all the layers beneath it. In this case, what I'd like to do is add an overall vignette-- which would be kind of like a soft blur to the edges, as well as a slight contrast feature. This can be done by selecting the Adjustment layer, then going to Effect, Blur & Sharpen, and select Fast Blur. This will apply the Fast Blur effect to the Adjustment layer. Now the Fast Blur effect hasn't been changed at all, and the Blurriness Value is currently set to zero so you're not going to see anything change until you adjust the Blurriness Value. Go ahead and adjust the Blurriness Value now. I'm looking to make it blurry--enough so that it's soft, but not so much that you can't see the image. And remember, we're not going to end up applying this to the full image-- only to the edges--I'll show you how to do that in a minute. I think about 20 looks good. Also, enable the Repeat Edge Pixels selection. This will ensure that the edges are not darkened around the composition. Then go ahead and add the Curves Effect. Just right mouse click within the Effect Controls panel, then go to Color Correction, Curves. This is the Curves effect, and what I want to do is lower the darkness and increase the brightness. This can be done by clicking, with your mouse, towards the bottom of the line, then dragging down to make everything, overall, a little bit darker. You can move up towards the top of the line and click and drag upwards, to make it a little bit brighter; therefore, higher contrast. Now what you want to do is to apply a Mask to the overall Adjustment layer-- so it's only applying these Adjustments to the edges of the frame. To do this, go to the Rectangle tool; click and hold, to enable the Ellipse tool. With the Ellipse tool, click and drag within your composition to create a circular or oval-looking shape with your Mask. This Mask is currently set to Add mode. You'll see this on the Adjustment layer. Instead of using this Mask as an Add Mask, let's adjust this to a Subtract Mask by clicking the pull-down, then selecting Subtract. Now these effects are being applied only to the edges of the composition. To see what it really looks like, you can deselect to hide the Mask. I think it looks pretty good, but the edges are kind of harsh. So expand the Mask and find the Mask Feather attribute. Bring this value up so that you have nice, soft edges around the Mask-- I think about 100 would be about right. Now what you can see is that there's soft, darkened edges around the entire composition. Let's scrub through, to see what this looks like in some of the other scenes. It really looks pretty good with the Recycling scene, seeing some of that darkness around those edges. What about some of the other scenes? Ah--it's really nice in this scene as well because now you're seeing a softness around the edges, towards the grass, too. This makes it look a little more like a camera lens, or maybe a Lo-fi camera lens, if you will. Go ahead and collapse the Adjustment layer in the main composition. We're going to add 1 more Adjustment layer, but not to the master composition. Instead, double-click on the layered_wind_turbines composition to enter inside of it. Here, I'd like to add an Adjustment layer, which changes the look and feel of this scene from day to night. Go ahead and create another Adjustment layer inside of this composition by right-clicking at the bottom of the Timeline panel. Then select New, and select Adjustment layer. This will create a new Adjustment layer for this current composition. For this Adjustment layer, select the Effect menu; then Color Correction, Hue Saturation. The Hue Saturation effect is really interesting. It allows you to shift the hues, saturation, and overall lightness of the layer. So we've applied the Hue Saturation effect, but I don't really know the timing for this effect. So I'm going to go back to the Power_Foundation composition and just get a sense of when I want this to begin and end. I'm imagining that after the text makes its primary move into the scene, we're going to have the scene, overall, change from day to night. So I think at about 2215 it'd look good. So park at 2215 on your master composition. Then go back to the layered_wind_turbines composition and place a keyframe on Channel Range, with a Hue Saturation effect. So go ahead and add a Channel Range keyframe in the Effect Controls panel. We're doing this within the Effect Controls, but these adjustments can also happen within the Adjustment layer. This, in fact, is the best way to adjust things, in time. Now let's figure out when we want this animation to end. So go back to the Power_Foundation composition, and press the End key on your keyboard. Then return to the layered_wind_turbines composition, by clicking Shift, and going to layered_wind_turbines. Now, add another Channel Range keyframe by clicking the Diamond button. Let's adjust the hue and the overall lightness and saturation. I'm going to go ahead and do this within the Effect Controls. So go ahead and adjust the dial for Master Hue, and make it a little bit more purple. I'm looking at a value at about 42. Go ahead and adjust yours now. For saturation, let's have it get a little more desaturated, over time. So adjust the master saturation value down-- so that it gets a little bit closer to black and white. Finally, for master lightness, let's drag that value down a little bit-- so it gets, overall, a little bit darker. Now it's starting to feel like nighttime. Let's see what it looks like in the master composition. For this, we don't need to preview the whole composition. So once again, click at about 20 seconds, and hit the "B" key on your keyboard to trim your work area bar, to begin at 20 seconds. [video preview] [♫music begins and ends] Now let's return to the wind_turbines composition and add some additional effects. Now we're going to add the Lens Flare effect to the overall Adjustment layer for the layered_wind_turbines composition. So select the Adjustment layer, right-click with your mouse, and go to Effect, Generate, Lens Flare. This will add the Lens Flare effect. I think this is a great effect, but don't overuse it. Let these effects drive the meaning behind your composition. In this case, I want this Lens Flare to blow up, right when the Power_Foundation layer lands. So with this particular effect, you have a couple of features that we're going to adjust. First of all, we're going to adjust the Flare Center, which is found within the Effect Controls or can be adjusted on the composition panel. It might be easier to just grab it on the composition panel and move it down. Go ahead and do this by clicking on the Flare Center point on your composition panel, then moving it down to line up with the Power Foundation text. It's important to adjust the timing for this Lens Flare to begin and end according to the timing of the Power Foundation text layer. So go ahead and collapse the Adjustment layer; then expand the text layer. I'm looking at the Position Value here and thinking, the moment that it lands is the moment that we want to see that Flare go up in value. So we're looking for the second keyframe on the Power Foundation layer Park on that keyframe; then scroll up, back to the Adjustment layer. Expand the Adjustment layer, and let's adjust the timing for the Lens Flare effect. To save some space, it might be good to collapse some of the effects that you're looking at now, such as the Hue Saturation effect. Then expand the Lens Flare effect. So go ahead and add a keyframe to Flare Brightness. This will control the brightness of the overall flare. We also want the flare to slide from left to right. So go ahead and move back about 4 or 5 frames, by clicking the Page Up key on your keyboard. Place a keyframe on Flare Center, and adjust the Flare Center to be a little bit on the left side of the Power Foundation layer. Advance forward, probably about 8 or 10 frames; then adjust the Lens Flare Center to be on the right side of the text. Let's scrub across it to see what's happening. It looks like the Lens Flare is sliding from one side to the other, which is what we want. But we also want the opacity of this Lens Flare--or in this case, Flare Brightness--to ramp up, then down. So park on the first Flare Center keyframe. Then place another keyframe on Flare Brightness, and decrease the value to zero percent. Then advance to the second Flare Center keyframe and adjust the Flare Brightness here as well. We want it to be zero again. Now let's look at it. Ahh--looking pretty good--we're having it move across and ramp up in brightness. This is what we're going for. There's one more thing that I'd like to add to this composition before we go back and look at the master composition. This is the fog rising up from the background. This can be done by collapsing the Adjustment layer and collapsing any other layers that you may have open. We're going to add what's called a solid layer. A solid layer is really simple--it's just a solid color layer. So to add a Solid layer go to the Layer menu, under New, Solid. You can also click the key command of Command+Y or Control+Y if you're on a PC. The color for this layer needs to be white so go ahead and adjust the color value to place the small circle icon in the top left-hand corner, making sure that it's white. Also notice that you have an HSB value, which stands for Hue, Saturation, and Brightness. Brightness is 100 for white; and obviously, saturation and hue are zero. To confirm this change, click the OK button. Now you can click OK for the new solid layer, and the new solid will be created. To make this layer look like fog, what I'd like you to do is add a Rectangular Mask. So go ahead and select the Rectangle tool from the toolbar by clicking and holding on the Ellipse tool and enabling the Rectangle tool. Then click and drag, from left to right--just about center in frame-- and drag all the way down. It's important to also know that I'm not going right up to the edge of the frame, but I'm leaving a little bit of room around the left, right, and bottom of this layer. Then expand the Mask value in your Timeline and increase the Mask Feather value by clicking and dragging to the right Notice that we have 2 Mask Feather values. This means horizontal and vertical feather. If I wanted to, I could unconstrain proportions by selecting the Link button, or deselecting the Link button. This will allow me to adjust the X or Y value independently. The X value doesn't really need to be blurred so we'll go ahead and change that back to zero, and leave the Y value at something like 175. This give the look and feel of a fog, but the fog comes from underneath the grass. So let's adjust the layer order. You can collapse the layer, then slide this layer beneath the grass layer. It's pretty bright, and it's kind of dense so we're going to have to adjust the opacity of this layer and have it rise up from underneath the frame. So go ahead and press the "T" key on your keyboard. Then hold the Shift key and press the "P" key on your keyboard. Now we're looking at Position and Opacity. I think the timing for this animation should match the timing for the Adjustment layer, moving from day to night. So select the Adjustment layer and hit the "U" key on your keyboard, then jump to the first Channel Range keyframe. At this point, we want the Opacity and Position value of the white solid to begin. So place keyframes on both of those attributes. The Opacity should be a lot lower--I'm thinking about 40-50 percent-- and the position should be quite a bit lower. So let's go ahead and move the Y value by clicking what currently says 360, and sliding it to the right to move it down. Now that we've added a Position and Opacity keyframe, the next step is to have the Opacity ramp up a little bit, and have the Position of this Fog layer move up in position. I think we could use the full duration of the composition to do this. So go ahead and click the End key on your keyboard to put you at the very end of the composition. Then let's rise the position for this layer, by changing the Y value for the layer-- by clicking and dragging to the left with your mouse. And then, increase the Position value from what it's currently set to, to about 360 on the y-axis; also, increase the Opacity value to 60 percent. I think it looks pretty good here. Just from scrubbing through the Timeline a little bit, and getting a sense of what it looks like. But I think, really the best place to see it is not inside of this composition but instead, inside of our master composition, Power_Foundation. So click Power_Foundation. Then let's preview the entire composition. We'll need to adjust our work area bar, so click the Home key on your keyboard and hit the "B" key to adjust the beginning of your work area bar. Go ahead and begin a RAM Preview. [Earth Pictures presents] [a film about ENERGY] [directed by Tiger Kirchman] [starring Kate Marquez] [power FOUNDATION] [♫music added to RAM Preview] Well, before we conclude this composition and begin the rendering, I think it'd be nice to have everything fade out at the very end. So advance to the ending, by clicking the End key on your keyboard. Then expand the layered_wind_turbines layer by revealing the transparency or Opacity attribute. This is done by clicking the "T" key on your keyboard. Add a new Opacity keyframe at the end of the composition, and reduce the value to zero. Then go back in time 20 frames, and increase the value for Opacity to 100 percent. This way, the final conclusion is that we see it turn from day to night, and then it fades out. This is a nice way to end everything. So before we begin rendering, I want to do a little bit of quality control on the whole composition. This can consist of a variety of things. Playback is very important. Watch it, get a feel for what you see. Also, cruise through different compositions, and make sure you have Motion Blur enabled wherever you need it. I know there's one place that I need it, so I'm going to double-click on the wind_turbines composition and enable Motion Blur for the white solid, the grass, and the clouds. This way, Motion Blur occurs with those items as well. Now that we've enabled Motion Blur in this composition, let's go back to our master composition and just scrub through it to do a little bit of that quality control work. What we're looking for here is key moments-- like if there's Motion Blur on or off for the Earth_Pictures layer, and it looks like it's on. We'll check this in a couple of different places. You can always re-render it, if you look at your final render and it doesn't look right. So I'm scrubbing through it. It seems like Motion Blur is on for all the layers that we want. I don't see any instances where I could change this, but if you do, go ahead and change it. All right. So it's about time to output this movie into a self-contained file. So go ahead and collapse all the layers in this composition to sort of clean things up. Then, with the Power_Foundation composition selected either here on the Timeline area or within the Project panel-- when you send something to the Render queue, it will send whatever item that you have currently selected. So here, I have my item selected within the Project panel. Then go to the Composition Menu and select Add to Render Queue. Your item will now be located within the Render queue. So what is rendering? Rendering is a process of making a self-contained file from all of the stuff we've done so far. This includes all of the keyframes, the animation, everything we've built within After Effects is now going to turn into a self-contained movie, which we can use in various other applications-- or even post it to any destination. For this particular render, the first render I'd like to make is going to be using the Lossless preset. Lossless simply means that there's zero loss in quality--highest resolution. Now the trade-off is that a Lossless movie is going to be a very large file size. There's only 1 thing I'm going to need to adjust inside of this Lossless setting-- and that's adding audio. So go ahead and click on the word "Lossless"-- then enable audio output, by checking the Audio Output box. You can then click OK to confirm this setting. So now that we have our full-resolution movie, we're going to output one other movie, which is going to be a smaller file; and therefore, more suitable for distribution on the Web and other places. So go ahead and click on the Plus symbol in the Render queue. This will add an additional output module, meaning that we're going to create 2 movies from a single-source animation. Go ahead and click the pull-down next to the word "Lossless" and select h.264. So now you've got a second setting. The first one--the Custom Quick Time-- is going to be our full-resolution, and large file. The second one is a little bit smaller file, and a little bit lower in resolution. The only other thing I might want to change is the name so that I have a little bit more definition around the types of files that I'm creating. Select the PowerFoundation_1.mp4. Then adjust the name of this file to read PowerFoundation _h264. That way, I have a specific title which reflects the type of file I'm creating. This is also where you can specify the destination of where the file is going to be saved. In this case, I'm going to go ahead and save it to the desktop. So click Save. The difference between the Lossless output and the H264 output is simply the file size and quality. The H264 will be smaller in file size, but perhaps lower in quality. Now that you've configured your Render queue, go ahead and click the Render button to output your files. Now that you've initiated the Render, you'll notice a couple things, such as estimated time remaining and time elapsed. The rule of thumb is that the speed of your system and performance of your system will directly influence the time it takes to render your movie. Great--now that your file is done rendering, go ahead and minimize After Effects so we can look at the finished file. Notice that you have 2 files there: PowerFoundation.mov and PowerFoundation.h264mp4. I'm going to go ahead and preview the h264 version. On a Mac, you can simply do this by clicking the Space bar. [♫music] [Earth Pictures presents] [a film about ENERGY] [directed by Tiger Kirchman] [starring Kate Marquez] [power FOUNDATION] [♫end music] Once you're done watching it, you can just hit the Space bar again to minimize the window. Well, that just about concludes the Final Episode. You've seen some great techniques using After Effects, from keyframes and masks, to Effects and Adjustment layers. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. After Effects can do so much more. And I suggest you keep learning. For more information about After Effects, visit the After Effects Channel on Adobe TV. There's also a lot of great resources online, and we'll have a list for you at the end of this video. Again, my name is Adam Shaening-Pokrasso and I enjoyed teaching you. I hope you enjoyed learning. Thanks. 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