T354 Week 6 - Spring 2008

Announcements:

Please keep your work 100% original. Your projects should not rely on other people's visual work. It should highlight what you can do- not what others can do. You must rely on your own creativity and design skills- not existing images and clip art. You can only use photos, drawings and videos if they are yours.

Agenda:

• Look at artwork
• After Effects (continue/review animating text, anchor points, track mattes & audio)

After Effects (continued)

Review

• Text - text layer tool
• Fading to black
• Nesting comps & Pre-composing
• Setting a work area
• Rendering out work area or length of comp
• Making small, half-sized movies

Review text layer tool, basic text and path text.

Typography

How can you get text into an After Effects composition? There are three basic ways. Each has its merits.

Photoshop: You can use the text tools in Photoshop, then import your work into After Effects. This is quick and easy if you are working with pre-existing Photoshop files. Remember to import Photoshop files as compositions to retain layer positioning. The down side with using Photoshop text graphics is that you can’t scale the text up past 100 percent without getting jaggies, as it imports the text as bitmapped graphics. You are also limited in the parameters you can animate and manipulate.

After Effects: There are several ways to generate text in After Effects. In the tool palette, you can use the text tool to create a new text layer. This is a good way to generate large layers of text for applications like credit rolls, or paragraphs of text. Note that the text layers you create with this tool can be re-shaped using the drag points. You can also use either Basic or Path Text. To do this you must first create a solid (make sure it's big enough) - then choose "Basic text or “Path text” from the effects menu. This gives you scalable, vector graphics with parameters you can animate. The down side is that you are limited in the amount of text you can make.

Illustrator: Adobe Illustrator provides fine control over kerning, leading and other typesetting parameters. Perhaps the greatest benefit is that Illustrator lets you convert the fonts on a computer into vector artwork that you can take with you to any computer- even if the font isn't installed on the second computer.

Using Illustrator might seem a bit complicated at first, but it is well worth the effort, especially when trying to create animations with large areas of text. Here's an outline of the process:

• First create a document the size of your text block. (You can use picas for points) It doesn't have to match the proportions of a TV screen, but should be sized to hold the entire block of text you'll be working with. For instance if you were making a long credit roll, you might want to make document that is 720 x 3000 pixels in size.
• Use the text tool to define the text block and type or import your text, paying attention to tracking, leading, kerning etc.
• After you are satisfied, save your Illustrator file so that you can go back and make changes later.
• Select your text with the selection (arrow) tool so that all the text becomes highlighted. Then choose "make outlines" from the drop down menu. This will turn your text from a font into vector artwork.
• You can make crop marks by using the rectangle tool to define the area that contains the text. Then choose "make crop marks" from the drop down menu. This will turn your rectangle corners into crop marks and define the part of the image that will be imported into After Effects.
• Save your new file (make sure you don't write over your first one)
• Import into AE. Since the text is imported as a vector graphic, it will scale very nicely.

In-class Exercises:

Star wars. Put completed, half-sized "star wars" movie into your Week 6 folder. Please make sure it's called starwars.mov.

Thursday------------------------------------------------------------------

Audio

While After Effects is not ideally suited for manipulating sound, it offers a handful of useful audio tools. Considering that sound is perhaps the most important component in animation, it's important to understand at least the basics.

First off remember to copy your audio into your local media folder *before* you import it and try to work with it.

After Effects does not work well with compressed audio (eg. MP3s). Make sure all of your audio is in PCM (digital audio) format.

Layer Markers

It's often necessary to time movements of visual elements to the rhythm of music or to have explosions coincide with sound effects. If you've worked in After Effects you've probably noticed that it won't necessarily play your audio when you hit the spacebar or do a RAM preview.

For a real-time audio preview, press the period/decimal point key on the numeric keypad. It will sacrifice visuals to provide an audio preview. You can then set markers by tapping on the asterisk key. You can slide them around to fine tune them. They can be deleted by right-clicking or control clicking them.

If your audio doesn't play long enough, check your audio preview settings in preferences.

Simple Exercise:

Import some audio into your project and into your timeline. Then you can click on the arrow putton to expand the view and show level. Note you can set keyframes and adjust the volume. If you view the audio monitor you can also set levels and keyframes there as well.

• Try previewing the audio.
• Tap the asterisk key while it's playing to set layer markers.

Audio Spectrum and Audio Waveform are two cool effects you can use with sound. Note: Audio Spectrum and Audio Waveform effects must be applied to a layer other than the audio. Solid layers work well for this.

If you want to use Audio Spectrum or Audio Waveform:

First make sure you have an audio layer in your comp. Then create a new solid layer. Apply the audio effect to the solid layer. (Effects -> Render -> Audio Spectrum / Audio Waveform.) Make sure the "Audio Layer" pull-down selector is pointing to the audio layer. Try experimenting with the controls.

Track Mattes

What is a matte? A matte is a layer or a channel that defines the transparency of that layer or another layer. (Like an alpha channel in Photoshop) Some like to think of it as a cookie cutter.

Track mattes need two layers to work. One layer acts as a matte or cookie cutter, the other layer provides the filling.

Track mattes can be used to insert an image into a defined shape. For example you can insert moving video into some text or the shape of an oval.

About Alpha Channels in After Effects:

AE considers each image to be 32 bits RGB+Alpha. That’s 8 bits per channel (4 x 8 = 32)

When the alpha channel is black, the corresponding pixels of the RGB image are transparent.

When the alpha channel is white, the corresponding pixels are opaque, or not transparent.

When you import an RGB image with no alpha channel into AE, it gives it one anyway. It’s all white, so the image is not transparent.

If the matte you want to use has or resides in the alpha channel, use the “Alpha Matte” option. If it is a grayscale image, use the “Luma Matte” option.

To use Track Mattes, follow these rules:

• Make sure you can see your modes in the timeline. If you can't see the "mode - track matte" panel, then right click (if you have one), or control click the top menu bar in the timeline. You will get a pop-up window. Select panels -> modes and your mode - track matte panel should appear in the timeline window.
• Place the matte layer (cookie cutter) directly above the layer that will serve as the fill.
• On the fill layer, set the track matte popup menu to use either alpha or luma of the matte layer. Note that "inverted" is an option. Use this if you want to reverse the fill (fill outside the cookie cutter rather than inide it).
• The matte layer will automatically have its visibility turned off.

Track Matte Exercise:

In this exercise we’ll superimpose a picture onto some text which will in turn move over another picture.

• Start a new Comp: 320 x 240 15 fps, 8 seconds long
• Import two pictures or movies (make sure they are at least 320 x 240 in size)
• Place both pictures in your timeline window
• Make a new solid, bigger than your comp: 700 x 300
• Use basic text to type in MATTE or a word of your choice. Set the point size to be big, about 225 or so.
• Make sure your solid/text layer is the top layer and that the movies are at the bottom
• Select the “switches/modes” button at the bottom of the time layout window to access the transfer modes.
• Experiment with the different track matte options for the movie layer. For instance, try to matte a picture into the text.
• Once you’ve mastered this see if you can figure out how to add drop shadow to the text.
  • Fine tune your track matte
  • Add some audio.
  • Render it out as an iPod movie (or MPEG-4)
  • Make sure it's called trackmatte
  • Place it into your week 6 folder

Homework:

• Read Meyer book chapters 9, 10 & 11
• Create a functioning and well-timed animated countdown. See how creative you can be. It could be simply a piece of video artwork in itself, an intro to your portfolio or used for your company's video productions. Remember to keep it 100% original. Make sure your comp is full size (DV for example), but render it out as a small iPod movie to turn in (eg. 320 x 240). Criteria:
  • Must contain audio
  • Must have at least one track matte
  • Turn in an iPod movie with an accompanying critique form
• Turn in your proposal & script or storyboard for your your midterm project. Be sure to think about its purpose, overall length, duration of the various components and audio.

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