Lessons

Lesson Info

Example of Compositing

This is the project that I kind of teased at the beginning and what I'm going to do is show the full video first on then we're going to come back and I'm going to show you how it was assembled and and kind of touch on all of the different things that we learned that are used in this particular project and this is the fake news fake election night video that worked on with the team for a company called bio rad and that's one of my clients and this was teo to kind of announce a new product that's coming out in a very clever way the audience for this is scientists and researchers and people like that but we had to try to keep it clever and used pretty much every trick in the book it was primarily built all in after effects with maybe seventy eighty layers we did some back editing with premier but this project will show you to the extent of all the things we kind of touched on today all brought together in one project in a really kind of outrageous way. So let me go ahead and play this and...

there is audio for this one from space have taken over the white house and the frequency of flying feline sightings appears on ly to be increasing as the storm approaches and now back to our live action news election night coverage joined now by political analyst and protein purification expert dr sylvia spiegel welcome dr spiegel this appears to be shaping up as a one sided fight. Oh, absolutely. Adam this is a one sided fight. It's elven what my name it it's eldon akron it's here on the screen as I was saying, adam, our polling shows conclusively that we're looking at a landslide victory for the incumbent and frankly, I can't see it going any other way tonight you know, the real keys to winning this elections edward are and always have been a market leadership and obviously superior knowledge in the area of protein purification and well there just so shiny dr to hear you tell it the incumbent seems to have generated a nearly insurmountable lead in this race. So tell me, dr spiegel, what would it take for this young green upstart toe overtake thee obvious market leader? You know, they're not going to be able to touch the big guy uh he's unreachable no it's a slam dunk tonight we're going to paint that map read and we're looking at global domination quite frankly from schenectady to uppsala thank you, dr spiegel for your insights as usual now, even with this a parents tsunami of polling data among the throngs of voters wishing to stay the course with the candidate that they've known for years even if he is a little unresponsive or inflexible or not available when you need him there does appear to be a tiny little grassroots movement among the more open minded voters of the green tea party so we thought we'd send a reporter out just to say that it and we turn our attention now to our very own reporter emily chavez rum rahman nama jonah who has been following this movement very closely. Emily good evening, arnold. Well, it appears this movement it's gaining some traction despite the media hype for the big money candidate in fact, some protein purification voters believe that a truly scalable solution it's not a laughing matter. In fact, one green tea party activists has recorded his own music video which has gone viral singing the blues about thie inertia parties complex platform but the bigger story tonight well, it's actually counting the votes before we call the election for the old guard I'm standing here in front of a suburban office park polling station waiting for voters to emerge and here's one now ma'am excuse me where the pundits right? Were you shamed into voting for the market leader? Sir? Did you vote for the incumbent like the pundits claim? They said the establishment they would threaten you in front of your colleagues if you voted green no so you didn't succumb to the pressure no man, I voted green all the way way all did right was a no brainer I mean any candidate that offers me flexibility scalability yeah and intuitive and a modular system and from a company that offers me everything I need from our research that's going to get my vote yes every time right people yeah yeah don't underestimate the power of the people man so there you have it if this group of voters is any indication it appears the tightest turning away from the inertia party and toward the green tea challenger as the man said don't underestimate the power of the people man reporting live this is emily chubby but I'm not krishna our live action news back to you edwin thank you very much emily so dr spiegel slam dunk for the inertial party the electorate can be so fickle uh but as I've been saying all along um uh this is exactly the outcome I would expecting no actually that's not what you've been saying well I most clearly stated earlier scale ability and flexibility thoughtful design and an intuitive interface are what the people want um but counter to the media people will sometimes make their own choices how true thank you doctor speak okay let's take one more look at the big map eighty percent of the precincts are now reporting and with the exception of one small area here in red in central jersey most regions previously entrenched in the inertia camp are turning green and I'm now getting word hang on yes, yes, we can officially call it tied apparently has turned the combination of scale, ability, modularity and intuitive design turned out to be a winning platform for the green tea party these people may indeed get what they want after all that wraps up our live action news election night coverage for the complete story please visit us online I'm alvin akron thank you and good night. Okay, so, uh let's let's take a look at some of the content from that as well. I'll open it back up so I can scrub through and just kind of briefly explain what elements were used. Obviously we used both premier and after effects on this but most of the composites were made and then all the edits and cuts all the composites were made in after effects all the animations were made after effects, and then we were actually rendering those out complete or semi complete and then doing all the edits and cuts in premier later. So it's a little easier to manage it that way than it was because there were so many changes made a long time. So some of this content came as a modified templates like some of the news package can actually buy some of those news packages from pond five and other sources in their editable templates that you can go in teo aftereffects open it up and after effects and go in and change color so like I changed the color of the globes I did some masking and some other different things to make the shapes of some of these different on dh some of that was just all done in after effects like I split that one into and made you know two of them side by side these frames were actually done in photo shop and those were brought in as ping files so in something like this with them together that was a composite of a composite of a composite so I had him uh see this one should be them together without the frame and we just cut masks out just so we could get placement just to see what that was like and so again everything was masked s o there several runs of those type of clips thie this one I believe that's her it goes to both of them together so again we did a lot of layers and layers and layers of composites for something like this the green screen was a matter of just it's just simple green screen that's how it all started that's how we shot it we shot them both in the same studio at the same time just so they could play off each other and really talk like they're talking really time we use two different cameras shooting the both characters and that way we were able to get get that good interaction now this is him on the full screen doing talking about the big map blah blah blah oh again, that was kind of showing their fairly close and I ended up taking out the shadows that were in there I thought we'd keep him in and I faked in the shadows in the final version back here at the end I faked those in just with with different layers of mask layers and they're asking about that in the chat rooms they're really excited about hearing about that good okay, well go into a little more detail about that I don't have the project file here because this thing is so huge I think it ended up being something like I don't know thirty or forty gigabytes and it was just more than I could bring with me for the cheney so we'll get to that how I did that here in a second fact, maybe I can actually we'll have time where I can pull him in put him on the background of some sort is I've got the green screen channel there and I'll show you how that's done very easily again a lot of running gags in here everybody's messing up everybody's name which was kind of a gag sight gags was every time we did a cut we changed her background you probably saw that as well scrub through so she's in front of red square and then she's in front of the pyramids and so that was kind of funny the whole thing was a rip on our news media these days where the graphics overtake the whole screen and as this guy's talking the graphics come in and here's upin this just down there s o a lot of sight gags like that that's all animations based on the same techniques that I was showing you with the the bouncing ball in the pineapple it's using key frames you know it's all key frames bouncing in and moving in moving stuff in everything that moves and animates in here other than this scroll on the bottom the crawl that's actually just a simple crawl in premiere you just set the start in the andy throw a text file in and it does that so that's a that's an easy cheat but everything else all of this the three d text that was an extruded tech in after effects and so you know, a lot of that stuff was all just built in there so it's all masks maps, matting things to make things turn green and all of that so again it was just layers and layers and layers so to answer how did I make these shadows in here? I tried at first to do it with three d layers I was going to go that route first and have the map be behind him turn on a couple lights in after effects and try to make it work that way and it was is a little too real and a little too problematic so I ended up just doing a cheat and let me show you how that cheat was achieved so let's quit that what I'll do is I'll open up aftereffects and I'll bring in that one green screen file of him against the map eat my glasses for this and it's in here and I believe it's this one here it up and let's also bring in a another background file from tried one of these we'll just uh we'll put him in front of here okay? So I've got this I'll just make a quick cop from that movie file and let's go to fite so we could see the whole thing so he's going to come on screen and this is probably a different take than we had of the one in the video so this audio probably be a little different but let's just tighten this up because we don't want to look at too much of it I'm going to bring this image down below and scale it with s for scale okay so now when I see him he'll be against that background we want the background to look like a background because obviously he's standing in front of it so let's do our posit here gotta select that layer and go to keen key light going toe grab that and I'm just going to do just a crude mix here really quick so we can get to the question of hands me this could pull that down and pull that back on dh do a final there we go okay? And it looks a little rough because of our resolution setting right here but say I want to create a a drop shadow on him I can come up here to layer layer styles and do drop shadow and come down here, open it up and I look at my distance I can move it like so I can uh move the angle up and about I can, uh, do a little spread on it or I could just the size gets me the feathering on it I'm going too far my capacity I can pull down, I can't even come in here and it's on multiply now, which is what I want uh for this one so I may pull that down even more so you can see and aiken, I can repeat that several times to create my drop shadow and it does make it look like they're actually against the back backdrop that's it that's just a really quick cheat again I'm all about cheats you know what gets the job done quickly and that's going to give me the results I want, you know, sometimes it isn't just the process it's the result in the results you know, work so that's really that's what that's about? I am going tio go tio some questions and see if we can field questions now and try to go back and filling holes if if we miss somebody along the way or left him in the dust somewhere. Okay, perfect way to end the day you certainly thanks love being here it's like I get my own questions in australia is last that this is one of your questions. It is because you were just talking about it, right? So what's the ability of aftereffects to import layered files from photo shop. Well, that's uh, if you've got something, has multiple layers in it, then it's just when you import it, then you just choose to either bring it in as a composition or bring in all the individual layers one at a time so I don't have one, but I can make one really quickly let's just make a layered file and photoshopped let's do it very simply this way let's, just duplicate our layer there and all do this just a couple times here so I can move these around, uh, grab another one, grab one more and so I've got say all these balls on different layers, so if I go back I hit save and then I go back over to aftereffects and let's start we can just work in here and just get a new cop we'll just start with the new cop that the and I want to bring in that whole layered files I'm going to go find it and that will be back here let's go back to here that's in our very first morning here and ball bounce footage and there it is so I can bring this in as footage and it's going to wantto either have me pick one layer where it's going to want to merge all the layers I'm going to bring this in as a composition and that's going to say er give me that? Yes, I wanted just everything in the way you bring it in and what this does is it brings in a composition the size of the photoshopped file itself so I can actually use that and animate something in there if I wanted teo or I can bring in this individual the layers if I go to my cop that I just created and I can look in here and say, oh there's all the layers from that that, uh, file and if I click down here see the little thumbnail appearance shows me what all those layers are so each one's a different ball and no different layer and that's going to be the background layer the bottom one so I can grab all of these just shift and drag him in here and there's all the different layers of that photoshopped file and you can turn him on and off you can do all your different which moves and everything so that's that's bringing in a whole bunch of layers from your photoshopped file in a quick and easy way awesome! Thank you sure all right, another question from old school how does one light a green screen properly? Is there an ideal number of lights, etcetera typically there's that z really good question and actually a whole workshop I'd like to cover someday, but it's it's basically you want to have even lighting so it's however many lights that you need to light the green screen evenly if it's a small little green screen that you're just going to be doing somebody's little head shot somebody's just talking talking head you could have a little portable green screen two lights is usually enough toe like that if they're especially if they're nice fluorescence lucchino flows or something is he nice broad even lighting waken get into ah whole topic about lighting green screens but again it's lighting the green screen first, making sure it's all even and then getting your talent out in front and lighting them completely separately and just forgetting about the green screen when you go to light your your talent because you want your green screen set first and then light your talent. So question came up about exporting and saving. Do you have as faras exporting is concerned? You have a preferred format from your clients that they tend to want things in well again that's all over the map really depends on what you're doing with it, like showing earlier. If I wanted to export my animation like I do with the jumping pineapples, I exported those as a rent actually a rendered it as a m ovie file with alfa, so it was rgb plus alfa so that way I was retained all of my transparent data, just like we're showing here with the balls there's, nothing behind there's, just all transparent data. Eso fue you, export it with rgb plus alfa, then you're going to get a nice movie with all everything motion blur everything that's in there is all going to come through and then you khun sandwich it on top of something else, a solid background or over top of video. A lot of times, you'll see graphics on tv where maybe you've got a a logo bouncing across the screen, but it comes out on top of the guy talking or you know they're text or whatever so things that need to move in layers you always think in layers do you think about physical space and one of the quotes that was was that was one of the winners today was thinking about rials space if you think about your set if you are you think about your production as a set then you've got layers of things people everything's in three dimension you know if you're only working in two dimensions such as editing you still have to think in three dimensions what's going in front of and behind you know your main character or backgrounds or text or titles or animated graphics everything's got its place it's in space and it's just how you stack those how you you know how you create those generate those and how you edit them all together all right I have a question here from really cool from new york it's a very basic aftereffects question I get that the layers to the left of the timeline are layers so what are the list of projects above that? Are they inside the file like turned off players waiting to be used and you ok, I would assume they're talking about this project window here and this is kind of like a holding bin this's where you've imported stuff that you may or may not use um and these are things that I've imported specifically for this particular project now if I import say let me import a couple things I don't need just for the heck of it so let's go back teo did it do let's see what's got no let's go back in here and let's look at something in here let's just grab the let's grab these two elements here okay? So those air in there but I haven't used them in any of my cops I've got this compare with the guy in the green screen so we've gotta have his movies in there then I've got this cop here that has the basketball layers in it then I've got that one which actually is a compromise using but I've got some extra files in here that I haven't used so looking down here in the timeline the timeline belongs to the comp thatyou have active so whatever I'm seeing here, all of the layers down here in this timeline belong to this comp they don't have anything to do with any other comp so I've got another cop over here with these basketballs in all of these layers belonged to this calm they don't have anything to do with the green screen guy, but now I've got stuff up here that I'm not using at all I've got this pineapple in the wood table stuff that's just means that's in a holding bin that's means I've imported it and I may use it or I may not on dh that happens a lot psycho I need some options or whatever I just need to get rid of stuff well you can come up here to file and then reduce project or remove unused footage and typically I'll just use this I don't like to reduce the project usually because sometimes that deals with data and everything so I'll just say you know I've got all of this stuff in here I'm not using I want to remove the unused footage and then it comes up and it tells you to footage or folder items were removed you can undo if you wish which means it just got rid of the two extra things that I had in my holding been I'm not using it so why have him in there? They're not really taken up much space but it does mean that when I save my project I better make sure that those air attached to or the next time I open it or move it on another hard drive or the assets moved to another place it's going to come up with a warrant and warning you've got missing stuff and it's like I'm not even using it so it's really important to clean up clean house before you finish before you save before you hand it off to somebody else specifically and as I showed before one item that I really like special and I'm pulling stuff from several different sources is this collect uh, collect files option. So if I collect files and of course you got to save it first. But we went through that before re collect the files. It consolidates all your foot age, creates a new project, puts it in a nice, safe place all within one folder and everything's together in one place. Really nice and neat. Yeah, I was wondering about importing sequences from premier. Do you have to, like export as a movie file? Or can you export a sequence with? Well, I don't have one to share, but there is this option here. Teo. See import adobe premiere project so you can take on adobe premiere pro project, bringing the whole project that brings in all the assets and everything with it so that's actually pretty cool. And when you import other after fax files, I did that earlier, too, where it brought it and also linked all the assets to that. So you, khun import premier pro projects and after effects, other aftereffects projects and it brings them in kind of creates a new cop for you so it's pretty cool and you can do just the opposite to you. Goto, premier pro bring in and aftereffects project and some people will do that just so they could get a quicker preview of what's happening and after effects then it takes to do a ram preview in after effects. So it's, kind of a cheat if you got especially if you got dual monitors and you've got a lot of space to do it, you can bring in import aftereffects project. Put it on your your sequence and premier pro, and you could do a quick preview of your aftereffects project. Sometimes it's, quicker if you got really deep project. So it's kind of cool.