How to use adobe after effects cs4 basics of investing

Plus, 3D compositing gets more control with a Unified Camera tool for viewing every angle, as well as independent animation of X,Y, and Z frames. You can also import FLV media. Joining some effects, the new Cartoon option gives an anime look and feel to live footage, similar to what you may have seen in films such as Sin City and Waking Life. Bilateral Blur is supposed to soften the edges in scenes without losing details around edges.

The Turbulent Noise Effect is built for whipping up clouds, fog, and flames without needing stock footage. Adobe Device Central continues to broaden the number of mobile device skins with which you can preview your projects. After Effects provides the speed, precision, and power to be visually innovative, yet still meet production challenges, with the utmost quality.

Whether you want to color correct footage, add special effects or even generate exciting motion graphics, After Effects can do it all. In this VTC course, Dwayne Ferguson, a professional animator and television art director, will show users step by step, how to get the most out of this powerful application.

Users will learn the interface, cameras and lighting, animation and more. Exciting hands-on projects at the end of the course will help reinforce skills. Work Files are included. There are quite a new features in After Effects CS4 that I think you're really going to enjoy, and that will also enhance your productivity. For one, you can now import 3D layers right from Adobe Photoshop, so if your workflow is like this you create a model in Autodesk Maya for example, and you paint textures, you export as an OBJ file you then bring that into Photoshop and decide to tweak the textures a little bit, change the shading, and then bring it into After Effects, you can bring that model into this application now and literally rotate it and position it somewhere inside of your comps so that it fits and can be animated just as though you were in a 3D application.

I'll show you how to do that a little later on, but I think you're really going to find that quite useful. You can also work on something that looks like regular film and turn it into either a living comic book, or you can use it to create still for a graphic novel. This is called the Cartoon Effect. If you ever saw the movie """""""""A Scanner Darkly""""""""" with Keanu Reeves, it has that kind of effect.

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Take a few minutes to follow the step-by-step instructions in this tutorial. Next, follow along with this very simple set of three videos , which show you the basics of importing media, trimming footage, animating with keyframes, adding effects, and exporting to Vimeo, YouTube, and other common formats using Adobe Media Encoder.

Actually, I recommend those books in their entirety for beginners. This overview page also serves as a good starting point, and this set of tutorials is continually being updated by folks here at Adobe. Whenever you have a question, try searching for an answer using the After Effects Community Help search. A keyframe marks the start points and endpoints for actions in your animation. A parameter is the value of the object, file, or layer you can adjust with keyframes.

To edit parameters and add keyframes, go to the layer you want, click the arrow, to reveal the transform function. Anchor point, position, scale, rotation, and opacity are all parameters that are controlled with keyframes. By creating two new keyframes in each layer further in the timeline, we can change the Position parameter to slide the text off-screen.

You can apply the steps below to accomplish what we did in the example, along with any other parameter to which you want to add keyframes. Select the layer you want to animate. Choose the parameter you want to change. Move the playhead in the timeline to where you want to keyframe to appear. Click the stopwatch icon to the left of the parameter to create a keyframe on the timeline. To create another keyframe, scroll to the desired endpoint of the motion, adjust the parameter to the desired position and a second keyframe will be created.

Visually, this will help you know how far to move the value of your desired parameter up or down to get the desired effect. Beyond creating keyframes, there are a few more functions you can implement to create even better animations. Motion Blur Of the many advantages of animating objects in After Effects, adding motion blur is one of the simplest and most important.

Motion blur is important because, without it, your animation may look a bit choppy. This effect adds just enough blur to make your movement look more natural to the eye. Select the motional blur switch for whichever layer you want to enable it. In the example project, play the animation with motion blur on then off.

This will show you just how big of a difference this feature can make. Each keyframe can be adjusted to make your animation function how you want. For a more in-depth look at interpolation, check out this Keyframe Type article from the School of Motion. This changes the diamond shape of a new keyframe into an hourglass shape. With the click of a button, your animation will be much more smooth, starting out fast and then slowing down, easing itself toward the keyframe.

To see the visual representation of this, click on the graph icon at the top of the Layers panel to open the Graph Editor. For each parameter, you can see all the keyframes and the curve that represents the speed of the movement between keyframes. Moving the handle allows you to change the flow of motion. In the example we created, it starts slow, then speeds up for a smooth organic motion.

Nesting Compositions One of the most powerful aspects of After Effects is how you can use compositions inside of other compositions. Essentially, if you have an animation created and want to then edit that composition as a layer within your bigger composition, you can do that simply by going to the Project panel in the top left, and dragging any new compositions to your Layers panel. Masking A mask allows you to control the visibility of a particular layer, typically by creating a shape or specific cutout.

This is powerful because it allows you to cut out layers, combine different elements together and create unique transitions. In our Example Project, you may have noticed that the text has some animation happening while it is sliding in. This is an example of using a mask in a composition, within another composition. You can double click either layer in the Lower Third Animation composition to reveal the composition where the masking is taking place.

To create a mask, right-click the layer and choose mask, then new mask. A new drop-down layer under the main layer will appear. Creating Text and Shapes Another powerful tool is the ability to create text and shapes right in your project. Being able to create and manipulate them right in After Effects, can save you time going back and forth between other design programs.

Afterward, you can adjust the font, style, spacing, and more with the effects panel to the right. In the Composition viewer, you can use your mouse to draw the shape. This is the Triangle Animation Composition. In this composition, we created a multi-point shape and then applied several different transform parameters together to create the desired animation.

All of the same fundamentals we went over apply for keyframing and adjusting graphics in the graph editor. We applied keyframes for opacity, position, and rotation overtime to get the desired effect.