Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating Tilt Shift in After Effects

We've worked through this whole process, so I've got one pre rendered here and this one has already let's see here I've got it right? Yes, that one's already had, uh, the lens correction done on it, and we'll take a look at that. Okay, so now what if I want to add another fun twist to this and give this a tilt shift type of look, you know, there's a photo shop, you've got great tilt shift options, and I'm not sure I don't use light room, so I'm not sure they probably think they do too like rooms got him s o there's some fun things you can do there, you can make a till shift in after effects with using a adjustment layer and a mask, and then you can move that mask around to anywhere you want, so instead of it just having, you know, like this horizontal line of focus through it, everything else is blurred, you can actually spotlight the area that you want focus, so that has more of this vignette in effect around it, so you've got kind of a sweet spot in the middle, so let's, uh, let's go...

up here to our, uh, layer because again, it's like photoshopped, we have layers here, so I'm gonna go layer new, I'm going to adjustment layer okay and this is a quick way of doing it. I'm going to show you another alternate way in just a bit, but the quick way of news got this adjustment layer what the adjustment layer does is it works just like in photo shop anything that's below it gets affected by that layer so if I add an effect ah blur effect in here so yeah, come over here to my effects presets I'm gonna type in blur and I get to see all my different blurs and in this case I want the camera lens blur there we go, it's right here. I'm gonna bring it down here to adjustment layer there we go. So now I've got this great camera lens blur. I can crank up the blue radius, make it look really fuzzy and ugly. One thing I always do is turn on the repeat edge pixels so I don't get this dark of vignette ng out here, so I turned that on that takes my blur out there, away from from everything. So one thing that we've got in after effects is the ability to make a mask on any layer and so I could make a mask on this adjustment layer using the, uh, pen tool you click on the pan tool and we're all used to using busy a curves and making masks and and uh drawing out things in photo shop and illustrator so I'm just gonna make kind of a no vel out here big and doesn't have to be perfect cause I'm gonna feather the heck out of it um, so I just kind of want this big oval oval ish type of ellipse whatever you want to call it um again doesn't have to be doesn't have to be perfect, so by default our masks will masked the inclusion it means you add whatever is inside the mask by default in after effects uh if I theworld down this little carrot next to my layer, I'll see here's another one says masks I'll twirl that down there's my mask, I keep twirling keep digging in and then I'll see I've got all these options in here. Well, the first thing I'm going to do is take this because I don't want the middle to be fuzzy I don't want my my point in the middle to be to be out of focus. I want everything around it too because that's that's the idea of of tilt shift I'm going teo click on this what's his ad I'm going to go to subtract so now everything outside of that mask is out of focus or has the effect applied to it on everything inside is nice and clear, so what I have to do here is the mass ask feather here um it depends on what resolution you're working in. This is a ten eighty so I know that I've got over a thousand pixels for the whole with of the, uh, screen here the whole width of the composition and so I've got to figure okay, I want a really wide feathering edge around that mask, so we think about that you see ah, half of that's about five hundred's a half of that's about to fifty let's go two to fifty and that will give me my feather around here so I got a nice smooth edge around that masked by click off off the layer you'll see it you don't see any lines going in there, so that allows me tio make that mask and leave it in there. Now if I'm not moving around too much or if my subjects stays perfectly center in the middle of my flight path that's a little harder to do with the drone trying to track something and keep your subject perfectly centered sometimes they're moving around and sometimes that's the beauty of it you may be going straight and your car motorcycle every chasing horse could be moving all around you wanted suggest that you're following it with your eyes then you want to be able to move that mask around if we just kind of scrub through here and look me click office we could see scrubbed through here and we can see that for the most part the subjects are fairly centered, but, you know, she's running off this way were centred on him, it might be nice to kind of include her, so it gives us the feeling that we're focused on the same plane were kind of cheating. Well, we're not kind of tv, we're really cheating. We're not it's, not even a tilt shift territory isn't using a mask and a and an effect here, so yes, we're cheating it's okay to cheat, so let me click here on the little stopwatch next to the mask path the mask path tells us that's, that's, the shape that's, the shape data that's what we drew in the first first point eyes with the pen tools, the mask path, so I'm clicking on that, so I've got it selected and I'm going to move back here to the beginning where I wass and right next to mask path there's this little stopwatch here, I click on that and it makes a little key frame, and again, this goes back to the basics of making key frames. If you're not up to speed in after effects, please don't fall fall asleep, just make a note to yourself to go watch jeff foster's aftereffects for beginners here on creative life. And you'll learn all about that okay so I've got this we'll start with this little uh key frame does it's that says all your settings right here in this point in time are what you see is what you get so if I want to do something like move this up just a little bit so I put just the horse is kind of in focus the center of the focus there and then I scrubbed through here and they're still unfocused there so maybe I'll move it just nudge it just a little bit down here and then because I don't want to be too obvious that I'm moving around too much so then I'll slightly bring it back down here on dh since it's really feathered it shouldn't show too much that we're moving it around because again your eyes can fool you you can you can fool the viewer some and I may even want to stretch it out a little bit here so let me just change the shape and see that's another thing I'm not just moving the mask around I can actually change the shape in between because watch that shape as I scrub back here see it goes from that oval and it stretches out stretches right about there so that's cool and then we have got this blend between here this this fade so between here and here since it's already been an edited clip I've got to bring this this this mask down so I'm going to bring it down down here and again it's all cheating it's all smoke and mirrors there's nothing real here folks it's all fake but it's fun and our end result it's pretty cool because it looks like we've got little miniature horses on a tabletop when we're all done here and that's kind of fun who doesn't like miniature horses on a table top you'd have to be dead to not like that um okay so we're moving around following the horse around and get a little bit of the barn may be in there too it's a little toy barn on the table top is made out of cardboard we go and horses moving around still moving around and starts moving right about here so I'm gonna move it down just a little bit click the whole thing is it's gonna move a lot here pretty soon right down there follow follow and yeah this this is ah somewhat monotonous uh project but that's what that's what aftereffects is it's pure monotony because you're animating basically you're you're creating animation here were animating a mask and uh if you're if you have the patients of a monk you can actually learn after effects and do animation and have a great time um if you have no patience at all I'd say uh go grab a beer while it somebody else does it and um go do something else, go fly and give them the footage to have fun with so okay, so we're just about done here with this little bit and there they go off they go so I've created our little mask, our miniature, your horses on there and they're really cute because they're only about a centimeter long and they're flying around were flying around him we've got we've got a little lipstick cam that were following around to this miniature set there they are so you have a lot of fun with, you know, some simulated tilt shift stuff I think I've got that rendered to hide that ah finished finished finished finished finished I have already done yes, it is already done here let's see the final result in real time? Um, I believe I probably made my mask a little bigger for that so there's our little miniature horses running around having a good time but that's a fun effect that's something you don't see a lot in video, you see it a lot in photos people do the little tilt shift thing there's even apse on the iphones and everything but to see it in video kind of takes you by surprise and especially if it's aerial footage because it's a point of view that most people don't see, you know, because you're you're creating something very special here so with that I I think I think that's a fun effect to leave on this project project file will be in in the bonus section for people who buy the course so this and a couple a couple of the things in premier pro so you can go in there reverse engineer it as you learn after effects you'll be able to come in and see oh that's how he did that use your own aerial video footage uh copy everything I did in that project and apply it to your own and make miniature things going on in the world it's really fun you know there's there's something somewhat related to this as russell brown was walking out way looked at that big moss sculpture that's in the lobby here creative life and every time I see that I think it's an aerial shot over the amazon and so we're thinking wouldn't it be cool to come in here and do a dolly shot in on that thing and then superimpose that over some aerial footage you know going in and then going going a little deeper and deeper and then he starts seeing you know, people in the trees and stuff going on down there I just think that would be a really fun thing to do because it when you start seeing the world from an aerial perspective you start seeing other things in a different way even though it's on a vertical plane your mind starts thinking, oh, that's that's a shot from above, and this is a really physical objects. So, uh, it's just funny. I don't know, I just had to throw that out there, but it it does make your mind kind of my kind of go now. I like that because it is it's a different perspective, which is what it's all about. We started to talk about right and the beginning of the course, so well, should we see if anybody has any any final questions, but sure. Final thoughts here, anyone after two days of jam packed information in your head, I think their heads exploded sometime ago way back here. All of the course, I haven't seen much of like color correction specifically for, like the vision cameras and the gopro video. Any tips that you've come across, like adding sharpness of contrast just to bring that go po image from a flat standard video look to get a little more death and feel, yeah, I usually do that in in premiere, and one thing that I do use that isn't isn't here because it's a third party plug in is kalle arista, um and that's part of the um yes, thank you, red giant and now it's red giant universe because you it's kind of the different system now you don't just buy stuff you they've kind of gone the adobe route where you subscribe to you have access to different things, so check out red giant, they've got some great third party plug ins and so does boris. Boris continues complete, I will plug them because you don't owe me anything. I don't owe them anything, but I just those are plug ins, I use another one you'll hear me talk about in my, um in my workshops is ari vision effects, really smart motion blur? And if you've got video footage and you want to add cem cem, nice smoothness and motion blur to something say you've got a locked off shot, maybe shot in like sixty frames per second it's just like too sharp everything's just to clear there's not enough realistic motion blur maybe you need to add you that shot you've got you shot in thirty, thirty francs per second or sixty and you need it to go the match footage that was shot twenty four we'll just down, converting it to twenty four may get the frames tow line up, but you don't have any natural motion blur using riel smart motion blur will bring that back because you can dial it in just a certain amount, so that's a great plugin, but I almost always use color arista's because it's a has all of those different different affects levels in there it's a three three way color corrector I mean you can go to speed grade they've got three way color collectors built into aa lot of different color correction built into premiere and some of it's some of it's really good I just never use it so I mean other than going in and doing what russell's done playing with history rams doing curves what that's I guess that's what's beautiful about the adobe software though is if you're already comfortable in one space you're comfortable and photoshopped you may be comfortable going toe after effects to get some of that stuff because a lot of the effects kind of have some of the same names and settings there's a lot of times where all use just levels and people go, why are you just using levels that so you know you're an old man? Well, yeah it's because I've been doing it for, you know, twenty five years. S o so that's where I'm comfortable and I know how to tweak all of those rgb channel so a lot times all these levels and crush the blacks pop everything against the gopro they've got their own cinna where software I've played with it a bunch and yet khun do some things and if you're not really profession in after effects or premier on do you want to use their free software used the center where software because that does give you the aa lot of those levels controls. So what you do is you can remove the barrel distortion from the gopro fish eye. You can, uh, there's no stabilising but least even color correct and do that and spit it out and spit out an m o v o r not sure if it works on the pc if they spits out of a w m v a and a b I but anyways it's free that's free software so you can go down downloads gopro's app right from the website too. So that's one way of getting color correction before you bring it in, so I I I'm sorry I don't have a demo to show you for that, you know, right here by hopefully that's some guidance to help you with that we have covered just in an amazing amount of of content in two days we've been working ah, long time we've been working on this for a least three months to bring this workshop here and try to get all the logistics of everything happening, and during that time let me tell you a lot of the technology you saw yesterday I was just in somebody's mind maybe a few a few months ago some of it wasn't even available. Some of some of the copter, some of the, uh, the gimbels some of the technology is advancing so fast. I mean, some of the some of that technology even colin, showed us yesterday on the droid planner. I mean, that's still in beta that's not really even out yet. I mean, you can apply to be part of the beta program with through three d robotics, but you you just can't go out there and get it and it's working, they're still working on their still writing code. So it's beautiful that we've had this this exposure and six months from now, we're gonna have a whole new set of technology, and I hope we can, you know, do an update or something, then because it would be great. But in the meantime, I'd say, uh, go to the facebook page, which is a community page, and by tonight I'm gonna make sure it's accessible to anybody is open to the public and people composed in there and ask questions, and we'll try to manage it. And everybody in the thing with communities on facebook is, you know, if you belong to any of them, people help each other in there, too, because you know, like rice, russell's said, you know, he may know everything. He may not know everything about photoshopped. He just knows techniques and things that he does with it, and all of us are kind of that way. We can all be experts at the whole genre of things because there's people, we've got guys here in the audience that build their own copters. I mean, I'm not doing that. I look at something I don't know if this is this a transmitter for that are receiving for that, or I'll have my antenna's connected quite right. I have to ask experts for that kind of stuff, too, which is why we have communities that's where we have development communities. We've got manufacturers that were tied to that information's going to come back through that channel through that facebook channel again that's drone workshop on facebook. So I think that's a great place to leave it as a great place for people to come and join in, and we're going to keep it moving forward.