Working with effects - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] We've seen a few effects so far in the course, including echo, Mocha AE and others. There are different kinds of effects that can be added to a layer or a pre-comp that can distort it, recolor it, blur it and so on. Here in this movie, I've included an exercise file for you to examine but you don't need to follow along step by step as I do here since this is an overview look at how you might use different effects. So using this first composition as an example, one of the things that we can do is add effects to layers but we can also add an effect to the entire composition by way of an adjustment layer. So I'm going to use a shape layer as an adjustment layer. So making sure that nothing is selected in my composition, I'll double click on the rectangle tool and that's going to create a brand new shape as you can see here in orange. Then I'll tap on this button here. And what adjustment layers do is it's basically a placeholder. It allows us to add effects to this particular layer and that will then in turn effect all the other layers beneath it. So for this, I'm going to come over to my effects and presets, and I'm going to look under the perspective family of effects and I'm going to tap on this CC sphere effect. And you can see, we have this instant planet looking thing. Under our effect controls, we have CC sphere and we have a couple parameters here that allow us to adjust how big it is. Under the rotation property, we can make this spin around. This is a handy effect for creating animated travel lines across an image of the world to show the start and end of an airplane journey for example. Now one thing to note about effects is that they render in a certain order. They basically go top down is the process. So to show you what I mean, I'm going to come over here and under the distort family, we've got, oh, let's say the turbulent displays. Let's double click that. And right now After Effects is taking this adjustment layer on all the information inside of this comp and it's creating a sphere and that feeds into turbulent displays. And so this is what us to get kind of this undulating sphere effect. Now we're getting into a little bit more organic territory but watch what happens when I take this turbulent displace and place it above CC sphere. Now we're getting the displace onto the contents of the sphere and not the sphere itself. So again, the layer order in which you apply these effects matters a big deal. So experiment with that. In this next composition, we've seen this before our little triangle bounces into turn into circle and so forth. And we have this animated background here, all these lines that kind of undulate. I'll hold down Tab on the keyboard and that's going to bring up the mini composition window. I'm going to go step upstream to my pattern two composition. And this is what's responsible for that texture. I've got one shape layer with a repeater to create the lines as well as a turbulence displace to create the distortion. I'm animating the evolution property and I'm doing so with an expression. So with my lines selected, I'll hit the E button twice and that'll expose any expressions that are applied to that layer. Under the evolution, you can see I have no key frames, but instead I have an expression here that tells After Effects to take the time of the current place in the composition, multiply it by one 20 and that's the value to use for the evolution. Next I'll hop into this extract comp. Previously we looked at key light as an effect to create transparency based on colors. We can also pull transparency from brightness values using the extract effect. Now here, I've got some footage of some smoke and because it's all black and white, I can actually tell After Effects to ignore all the black pixels and just focus in on the white ones. So here in my effect stack if I select my layer, you can see, I have an extract levels and tint. I'll turn on my global effect and we'll go step through these one by one. When I turn on this extract effect, I've got it set up in such a way that After Effects will discard all the black pixels. If we come over here to our alpha, you can see now that this value here isn't really working so hot. We still have some gray values. If I come over here to my extract and turn this off, you can see that we have no information here, no transparency information. When we turn on the extract, we're starting to get some but it's not entirely too clean just yet. I've added a levels effect and this is going to alter some of the alpha channel here. You can see that by turning this on, I'm altering the contrast of the black and white pixels and I'm just going to move this left most triangle until all these pixels here fall into black. So somewhere in there. Let's come back out of our alpha channel view and switch back into RGB. And now we have this smoke that has an alpha channel but I'm going to add in one more effect here called tint. And when I do this, you can see that I can actually change it in to be a different color. I'm going to use this as an element inside of this flyover shot. And here if I zoom in, you can see I've got this Jeep kind of cruising across the desert. And I thought it'd be kind of cool to take this smoke, maybe we scale this down and have this Jeep kick up more dust. I'll take the anchor point tool so I can move this down towards the bottom of the smoke. I'll hit W on the keyboard to switch to the rotate tool and I'll move this smoke off this way to kind of match the perspective of the Jeep. Now obviously this is not tracking along. We can animate that for sure. But you can see how we can take footage and add effects to it to create a new element for compositing our shot. I'll switch over to this grand central portal composition. And this is a combination of several different effects. We've got some particles, we've got some motion tracking, I've got Mocha AE here to cut out a mat for this van. We've got the tint effect again to color this purple color. Let's take a close look at the particles. I've got a composition here and here are some native particle systems that are built into After Effects. It's an effect called CC particle systems. If we come over to our effect panel and under simulation, you'll find CC particle systems. I'll toggle both effects off and you'll see that they live on a regular shape layer. Let's re-enable this first effect. With the particle system, I'm telling After Effects to create these little particles that are little stars. Under the particle type I can change this out to line. Another cool one is this tri polygon the quad polygon. That's kind of neat. But basically it's all emanating out from this one straight line. And I can tell that line to be longer or shorter if we wanted to make this into a sphere or a ball. We have the physics here as well so that we can make gravity. We can make this as it emanates out, it's falling toward the ground. I'm going to undo those two. And we'll switch this back over to our star. Basically I just want this out in a straight line because the next effect I'll add in is something called polar coordinates. And I'll bring this back to zero before I turn this on and you can see how this affects things. When I turn on the polar coordinates and start to drive this value up, it's taking all of that information and basically wrapping it around into a big circle. And because the original particles are shooting straight up and down, now that I've applied this effect, the particles are shooting outward from the center. If we come back into our grand central portal, you can see I have this particle effect actually has two layers. I have the background particle here and I have a foreground particle and I have a van in between and that's what allows me to take this van and push it through quote, unquote, this portal. So this was a small sampling of various effects that you can use in your own project. Some real creative approaches can be unlocked through some experimentation and I recommend exploring what effects can offer you in your own projects.