T354 Week 6 - Spring 2013

Announcements:

Please keep your work original and make sure you showcase your design skills. Creative portfolio projects should highlight what you can do- not what others can do. Make sure you allot adequate time to design and execute your project. Please try different treatments and subjects and try a variety of different styles.

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.

I often create mockups in Photoshop which I import into AE and serve as guides. The text can then be replaced with text generated from within AE.

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.

Note: A few favorite text effects: Basic & Path Text have been moved to "Effects ->Obsolete", as they are now available through the text layer controls. If you want to use them you must first create a solid (make sure it's big enough) - then choose "Basic text or “Path text” from the "Effects ->Obsolete" 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.

Follow a path - Make a few words with the text tool. Now make a curved line with the pen tool on the text layer. Toggle the arrow down to reveal "path options". Choose your mask as the path. Now animate the "first margin". Pretty cool, eh!

Illustrator: Adobe Illustrator provides very precise control of stroke, fills, kerning, leading and other type-related parameters. Perhaps the greatest benefit is that Illustrator lets you convert fonts into vector artwork using the "create outlines" command. How many times have you been working on a document on one computer and opened it on another to find that the font is missing? When you convert the font to vector artwork using the "create outlines" command yo can take it with you wherever you go.

Creating outlines from text in Illustrator:

• Create a new document the size of your text block. Start with "Basic RGB and use either points or pixels, as they are interchangeable. 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 for DV, you might want to make document that is 720 x 7000 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.
  • To modify your text, you'll want the Character Tool (COMMAND T), which should also give you the Paragraph Tool (OPTION COMMAND T).
  • You also might want to assign a stroke and fill. You can modify these colors later in After Effects.
• 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 (SHIFT - COMMAND - O). 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.

Making Scrolling Credits

After Effects is a perfect tool to make rolling credits. Here are a few pointers:

• Start out with a tall comp to place your text into. (If you were making this for broadcast 1080i, you might have a comp sized something like 1920 x 20000 29.97 30 seconds long.)
• Create an output comp (E.g. 1920 x 1080) and nest the tall comp inside it.
• Simply animate the position (Y value) as desired.
• When you output your movie, you'll need a codec with an alpha channel. I'd likely use the Animation codec with alpha channel. (RGB+).

Star Wars Opening - In-class Exercise:

• In this exercise you'll make rolling text similar to the opening of Star Wars. While you should feel free to take liberties with the text, you'll want to re-create the approximate size, speed and angle of the wall of text. Getting the right size and speed take a little finessing.
• Make this in 16x9 in an HD format (E.g. 1920 x 1080, 1280 x 720)
• Put your completed, H.264 "star wars" movie into your Week 6 folder. Please make sure it's called "starwars".

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 (WAV or AIF) in the proper sample size.

NOTE: If you need some audio/video clips for today's exercise you can download some here (245 MB Zip file).

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 three simple rules:

• Make sure you see your modes in the timeline columns.
  • If you can't see the "mode - track matte" panel, then right click the top menu bar in the timeline. You will get a pop-up window. Select Columns -> Modes and your mode - track matte panel should appear in the timeline window. Alternatively, you can click on the arrow in the top, right-hand corner of the timeline to get the same thing.
• 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). Note that the matte (cookie cutter) 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 D1 4 x 3 Comp: 720 x 486 29.97 fps, 15 seconds long
• Import two movies (from the Movies folder on your CMG CD)
• Place both pictures in your timeline window
• Use a text layer 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 720 x 486 H.264 movie
  • 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 opening title sequence. It should last 10-15 seconds. Remember to keep it original and showcase your design skills. Make sure your comp is full size in a format you can use, (HD 1920 x 1080 for example), but render out a square pixel H.264 version to turn in.
  Criteria:
  • Must contain audio (don't forget to fade it out along with the video)
  • Must have at least one track matte
  • Must contain at least one animated mask
  • Turn in a movie with an accompanying critique form, Be sure to identify how you used the track matte, and mask (along with the usual information)
• 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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