I went to my first FlashBrighton event last night (not really sure how I managed to last this long without going to one yet) and it wasn’t about Flash! It was enthusiastically presented by the amazing Angie Taylor, author of Creative After Effects.
I’ve never used After Effects before, and to be honest I thought it was just for making film credits. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Angie only managed to show us a teeny bit of what After Effects can do, and that was a huge eye opener in itself.
With After Effects, Angie tells us that it really helps to have some kind of action plan before you start. It’s not that easy to just open a blank project and start working. But if you really don’t have a clue where to start, open up some of the presets and start investigating. ‘Fractal noise’ is a great filter to learn and play about with, as it can do cool things like smoke, fire, water. Play with all the elements of a filter to find out what each element does, but remember to reset once you have finished. Angie said that After Effects is great for coming up with ideas you hadn’t really planned on. So, if you are in the middle of a project and you figure out how to do something wicked, you can save it as a preset for reuse later on.
Photoshop layers
After Effects lets you edit layer styles brought in from Photoshop. A ‘composition’ will bring in all Photoshop layers for you to play around with. There are also blending modes like in Photoshop but with an added extra – a blending mode for each layer. You can also edit text layers from Photoshop and add presets (make sure you convert to editable text though).
The composition window is like the stage in Flash and is the main section of the screen. It uses a timeline like in Flash or film editing software, but defaults to using a timecode (hours, minutes, seconds) rather than frames. Of course, you can choose to work in frames instead if you like. There are loads and loads of preferences and settings to play around with, so it will probably take a while to set your preferred way of working, but the choice is yours.
The stopwatch tells After Effects that you want it to start recording everything that changes about that property from the point you are at. Animatable over time. If you move to a new timecode, then drag an object, it automatically creates a keyframe for you, so you don’t need to manually add keyframes.
Motion paths
The best thing to do is set motion paths to show ‘all keyframes’. Pressing CTRL and ALT allows the curser to change in order to create curved motion paths. This reduces the need for extra keyframes and also smoothes the animation.
Keyframes
There are two types of keyframes in After Effects; spatial and temporal.
Spatial keyframes – define the motion
Temporal keyframes – define the timings e.g. easy ease in/out
The key is to first sort out your motion, then do your timings.
Motion blur
You can set this in Composition > Composition Settings > Advanced. This may not be called motion blur in older versions; it might be called shutter angle. Here you can increase the iterations of the blur.
Using audio to animate
Angie showed us an example of where audio has been used to set animations. It was all massively clever. Create keyframes from your audio by using the magical keyframe assistant, which creates keyframes for you based on audio levels. Can use amplification and frequency. Pickwhips and expressions are great for animating to audio. Plus, if you have to change the soundtrack to your animation, you don’t have to go though and reanimate to fit the new song – it does it for you. woop woop!
Puppet tool
Dancing Budweiser bottle. The puppet pin tool lets you select bits you want to move. It places a mesh over the object and it kicks ass. Plus, you can automatically record motion (motion stretch).
Rendering
Don’t use file > export because you’ll have to render per format. Instead, go to Render Cue because you can render once and add multiple format settings. Make your own templates – ‘make template’. This makes an .ARS! this stands for After Effects Render Settings.
Note: Filmstrip file format is cool.
Always have a fixed camera when filming if you can, as it speeds up compression. If you want a shakey effect or camera movement, you can add all this later on after you’ve compressed.
The amination codec is the best to use for archives as it looks for changes rather than rendering every frame – so it’s good for a lot of Flash-type animation.
Angie talked to us a bit about Open GL. I’m not really too sure what it is, but apparently it’s good for previewing but not rendering. And you need to make sure you update your Open GL card. I think it speeds up the preview process. She recommends Open GL Interactive for beginners, as you can keep it running.
Keyboard shortcuts
PARTS or STRAP
Position
Axis
Rotation
(T)Opacity (think transparency or opaciT)
Scale
Alt P – stopwatch
0 (on bar) – preview button (works like the spacebar – beware, not always realtime)
0 (on num) – RAM preview
UU (uber key) – opens up anything that has changed from default value, so you can play with all the presets
Resources
http://www.trackcode.com
http://www.artbeats.com – great resource for royalty-free footage. Angie said it “provides me with footage I’d either be shot or arrested for getting myself!”
