Animation and Compositing Techniques

So After Effects is really intended to work with two different things, two different things, okay? Animation, specifically motion graphics animation. When I say animation, I'm not talking about like cartoon animation. There are cartoons that are animated in After Effects.

For example, if you've ever seen the FX show Archer, that is drawn in Illustrator and animated in After Effects, but that is extreme, and BoJack Horseman, but that is extremely rare. After Effects is not commonly used as a cartoon animation program. There are other programs for that.

So when I say animation, I'm not only talking about motion graphics animation, okay? Images, text, video combined together, okay? Most show openings you've seen use After Effects. A lot of the on-screen sports graphics you may have seen, if you watch sports, use After Effects, that sort of thing, okay? If you ever watched the Star Trek and Star Wars films with J.J. Abrams, all of their screen interfaces are animated in After Effects, okay? So that's only the animation, okay? Now, but the other use of it is specifically related to video, and it's called compositing, okay? So in video, sometimes you might see graphics that move along with the video itself. Perhaps you were a fan of the television show Person of Interest.

Person of Interest, opening, their intro, all of this stuff, all this machine vision stuff, this is After Effects, okay? In fact, they have graphics moving along with people. They move along, all this is After Effects. There's something called motion tracking, specifically, okay, it's a compositing technique allowing you to combine graphics into a shot video, okay? It's kind of cool.

So that's the other use of it. Maybe you've seen shows that use green screen removal or two programs to do it. That's very often After Effects, okay? Which is the other use of the program.

So the video work, the compositing work, okay? Now, while we have a dedicated class on that, it's called After Effects Compositing, by the way, it is the kind of thing that a lot of people, even if they're not doing it a lot, may need to do. So for those of you who use Premiere Pro, Premiere Pro has a way of removing green screen called the Ultra Key. It's okay, is gonna be my comment.

It is not considered professional level green screen removal, but for a video editing program, it's actually pretty decent, okay? After Effects is considered professional level of that. There was a TV show on MTV years ago called the Green Screen Show. It was entirely green screen keyed out in After Effects.

Actually, I knew one of the guys who did it, who worked on it, so that's how I know that, by the way. So it was kind of cool. Now, for the record, I will admit this, this green screen was made to be really nice, really easy, so it really works.

The quality of the removal is based on the original video that was shot, so if the video is really bad and horrible, it's gonna be a lot more work. We have that in the class bill for that, okay? But this is basically a decent green screen, and for the record, it's taken entirely from stock footage. So it's entirely a stock footage green screen, okay? And free stock footage, because honestly, I'm cheap, so.

Free stock footage. Okay, so I'm gonna close this project, and I believe there's a starter one for this. Green screen removal, there's a starter project, green screen removal started, okay? And all it is is just an imported file, by the way, okay? I'm gonna save this as my file.

Algerian green, okay. And in the video folder, there are only two files, putting on headphones and simulation. If you wanna see what they look like before you add them to a comp, you can double-click on them, opening a footage window, space bar previews.

That's putting on headphones, that's simulation. Both of these are free stock from a website called pexels.com, one of the places listed on the list I gave you, okay? Okay, so back to putting on headphones, I believe, actually. So this clip, if I look at it right here, is 15 seconds, eight frames.

The frame rate is 23.976, you can read that all up here. So you have millions of colors, and that's the size, okay? Oh yeah, so I wanna crop off parts of this. The footage panel can do that for me.

So when I'm previewing the footage panel, it's basically a preview window, but it can trim off the beginning and end of a clip. So maybe you don't wanna use this part, and maybe you don't wanna use that part, that sort of thing, okay? Here's how you do that. First, you move your current time indicator in the footage panel to wherever you want to set your end point.

You can do it manually, that's the position right there, or you can click on this box and type what you want, 15. 15 frames. That button right there sets the end point to the current time.

So the end point, the active area, the bright gray area, now starts at 15. By default, the end point is the physical beginning of the file, the physical end of the file, okay? So I wanted to actually cut this down to 14, 14, mark out, which now gives me just a shorter duration. That's all it does, honestly.

It's kinda cool. So you can move it wherever you want, mark out, and set the out point. Move it to wherever you want, mark in, and sets the end point.

As long as you got more than one frame, you're fine. I wanna make a composition just for this, okay? I'm gonna right click on that clip, new comp from selection. You can also drag it into an empty timeline, that'll make a new comp from it, like so.

So composition, file it was made from. It takes, I'm gonna pull it out of the window. It takes the width and height, and it makes the composition match the video file.

It takes the length of the video and assigns that as the duration for the comp. So it's a very quick way of making a comp match exactly the settings of one of your videos, okay? I'll grab simulation, drag it below. People who stand in front of the camera are called talent, whether they are or not is debatable, but that's what it is.

I'll just call it background. You don't have to rename what you want, but I rename them so I can know what they are. That's fine.

Okay, every time I've told you to use the effects, I have told you, go find the effects, do not use the preset. This is the one time I'm gonna use the preset, okay? So first of all, that is her, and that is the amount of green around her. Look at that, it's a lot of green around her.

She moves a little bit. So my question is, can I maybe trim off some of that green? Yeah, sure. I can use the rectangle and I can draw a mask that trims off some of the green.

I have to make sure I don't cut her off because if I'm too aggressive with that, I'll cut off something I need, okay? Like that, I was too aggressive with that, okay? So selection tool, double click on one of the points. I can just pull it up, okay? Sometimes I can get rid of like maybe 30, 40% of the green just with a mask. Other times I cannot.

Could I take my pen and trace it around to animate that? Yes, but that would usually be way too much work for a green screen removal. Normally I just need a really rough kind of cut out some edges. The reason is sometimes you see extra stuff at the edges.

Like literally I've seen like light stands, I've seen the thing holding the green screen. All I need is the green screen behind the subject, the person in order to work. So sometimes you see extra garbage on the frame, okay? In this case, it's just limiting the amount of green to remove, so if there's discoloration maybe on the edges sometimes, if I can crop it out with a mask and I don't worry about it.

Okay, then I add the effect, it's called Key Light. Every time you've seen a preset, I said, don't use the preset. This time I'm saying, use the preset.

The preset contains the Key Light effect which removes the green and the Key Cleaner effect that refines the edge around her and the Advanced Fill Suppressor which will neutralize the green tint that you get around people sometimes. So I apply the preset to her layer, okay? Key Light is not made by Adobe, it's made by a company called The Foundry and they're British, so it's got the O-U-R spelled. Okay, that's what we were wondering, that's why.

Okay, the instructions on this, pretty straightforward. First thing, take the eye dial for screen color, click on the green. Sometimes it says Command-Click, Control-Click because it'll get a little wider range of color removed.

And sometimes that's one button press, it's gone. In this case, I can still see like a green film here, okay? So it's not completely gone, but it's pretty decent, okay? Then it tells you, change the view, which is the preview to its intermediate result is what it is, Screen Matte. This is actually what it does.

Anything that's white is fully opaque. Anything that's black in this preview is fully transparent. The goal is for her to be white and the background inside the mask to be black.

Yeah, that's the goal. So how can you do it? Couple of choices. Screen Gain is tolerance of the green removal.

So if you don't remove enough, you can do it. Don't raise this very high because eventually you'll start removing her, like that. And it's actually kind of funny.

So you might be able to just raise that a little bit to get more green removed. So if I move that maybe like 125, that actually did a pretty good job of getting rid of most of that, okay? The Screen Matte Category is actually what's generating this black and white preview. This is the equivalent, by the way, of a layer mask in Photoshop.

Black is transparent, white is opaque. Okay, or transparent as a mask in Illustrator, if you use that. Sorry, one of the Screen Matte Properties.

Click Black. You got something here that's almost black. Oh, look, almost black.

Raise that number, it goes away. You got something that's almost white. Lower that number, it goes away.

That's what I'm trying to get rid of. I raise that a bit, that goes away, okay? Do I have anything in here that's almost white that needs to be white? I don't think so, but I can always lower that a little bit and just tweak it if I do, okay? The other choices, Clip Rollback, String So You Can Grow, no problem at all. Usually it's those two you'll want to change.

If I go back to the Preview, which is, again, Intermediate Result, if I see a fringe around her, an edge, Screen Shrink and Grow Negative would pull the edge in. By the way, for the record, you can literally cut her away if you're not careful. By the way, you can animate that so someone appears like that.

I'm not saying it's a good thing, but let me say what it does. So usually if you're gonna adjust that, it's very small numbers. If you go positive, it gives her a halo of the green color, which I don't want that.

So in this case, it was fine. Leave it, no problem at all, okay? But usually it's those two just to tweak the edge, and this is a pretty decent one, so it's good. The next effect, Key Cleaner, can be used to enhance the edge.

I'm just gonna turn on Reduce Chatter, which softens the edge. Advanceable Suppressor is disabled because you don't turn it on until after you've done the rest of this. What it will do is if you look close at her hair, there's a green tint along her hair.

Turning that effect on, there's a little empty box right there in front of the effect. Gets rid of that tint. Now what I have is that new background behind her.

It's kind of cool. That's Green Screen Removal. Okay.

Now again, it was a good Green Screen Removal. I didn't have really messy things. It's not always this good, okay? But that is the basic process.

There's tons of tutorials on it. Honestly, this is the most common effect in the program for Green Screen Removal. There are others.

That's basically what it is. It's that.