hello everyone and welcome to another after effects tutorial my name is tyler bradway and this
is Creativid Studios. Today we're going to be trying to do something that kind of looks
like datamosh -actually it looks a lot like datamosh- completely within after effects and
with no third party plugins. we're going to be using the content aware fill set to its surface
method. yeah, so um, i hope you guys will like this tutorial. uh let's get started. all right
let's jump into this tutorial. as you can see, um i have the footage. so i have one clip of this
wacky ass woman and then there's also this creepy, creepy pool guy. to get this effect, we're gonna
be using the content aware fill there's a panel for it. and if you can't find the panel in your
configuration, go to window -and it's somewhere over here- content aware fill. all right, so um,
we're not gonna do it quite yet. first we gotta kind of like set up how we want this to be. all
right, i want the frame of the data mosh to start on this frame, so let's create a reference frame.
now that's going to open up photoshop and we don't have to do anything to this, we just have to hit
save (do command s), and it saves it as a reference frame. we don't have to close
photoshop -we can close it- it doesn't matter, it's saved. so we go back into after effects,
and you can see it created a layer. so now let's zoom in here and move this old guy over one frame.
i'm gonna hide the top layer. we have to mask out the area which we want the smearing to occur.
i'm gonna turn my masks to none, so that i can see what i'm doing while i'm working. i masked his head
and shoulders, and it's very rough. so let's, i'm gonna split this layer just, so i have a duplicate
of this layer (command-shift-d). and i'm just gonna bring it below here. and i'm gonna hit m and just
delete these. um, so on this layer, you'll actually want to set the masks to subtract and then we'll
add a refine soft matte. so we add that on there. all right, so i adjusted the refine matte. i have a
tutorial on refine matte. if you want more detail on how this effect works, you can check that out.
we're gonna have to pre-render this one clip because, my god, this is going slow. my
computer is dying right, now. um, so let's... we gotta pre-compose this just to kind of isolate it and
we're gonna move the attributes. and we'll call it "creepy guy" whatever your second clip is-
whatever helps you remember it- and then this is "pc for pre-render." pc just means pre-comp.
and then i'm going to double click it, go into it, hold shift, and drag
it, so it snaps. hit b on your keyboard and then hit n on this side,
and that's going to snap the work area. we can just hit "file - export - add to render queue."
for this, i have a preset uh... "prores 4444 rgba." i'm going to click into it just so you can
see what the settings are. it's a quick time. you're going to want to make sure it's rgba,
trillions of colors. so make sure your uh your project settings are 16 bit, or else you only have
millions of colors. and then for "color" we want "straight unmatted." oh and the video codec is "apple prores"
now, for the output *export wherever you want to*. all right, it's done rendering. i'm going to import that file. double click in
here to open up the browser. and then open up the folder where it is. and just hit open.
and then hold shift and drag it to snap it to the work area. and i can hide this top layer because
we don't want it still processing that. because we rendered it with alpha, if i toggle on the
transparency grid, you can see it's transparent in the areas that we masked out. so let's come
back over here and i'm just gonna sort of trim this up. within our timeline, we'll hit b
on this first frame where our reference frame is. hit n and so now our work area is just in here. so
for the fill method it can't be object, or edge blend, it has to be surface.
the whole reason this effect works, is because of this option. make sure the range is just our work
area, so it stays within this area. so let's hit "generate fill layer." so right now it's analyzing
and i don't want to click literally anything because i am like superstitious. if you - if
you do a bunch of these, you'll see sometimes it just doesn't make sense, like, why it doesn't work.
and in general it looks like, if you keep the size of the area that you masked
around, uh, maybe a quarter to a third of the entire frame, then it works the best.
oh, god, oh, my lord. but yeah, so that's the, uh, that's how that works. now, we have to add a
transition between this shot and this shot, and then this shot and this shot. we're gonna
extend this clip a little bit after it's already showing the data mosh. so we're gonna use a track
matte that we'll make from a solid and fractal noise. so we'll do that. command y, to make a solid.
hit okay. it doesn't matter the color because we're just going to apply fractal noise to it.
and for the fractal type, we're going to switch this to
basic. and we're going to keyframe the brightness; hit the stopwatch next to brightness, and since
this matte is going to be for this, uh, this layer, we're going to want to make it start at black and
go to white. so we'll make the brightness negative 100- because we didn't touch the contrast. so
negative 100 is going to be black and then we do 100 for white.
and so, if you scrub through here, you can see it transitions, but it it doesn't look great. it looks
like a fade, and it's kind of organic, and we want it to be glitchy and digitally, not organic.
so to do that, we're going to want to increase the contrast a shoot ton. so let's hit posterize.
type posterize, and we'll just reduce it to-- 2.2 works for this. it's not two, so you have some grays,
doesn't really matter. so we have this transition. it goes from black to white. now, let's pull it down
underneath our fill layer. we'll set it to luma. all right, but you can see there's this, uh, this
weird edge halo around the precomp (masked layer). and that is because our fill layer is actually a lot more
expanded than we realize. so um, so for the fill, we're going to want to, uh, set its matte to be
the inverse of what our pre-comp was. so we want everything in our content aware fill to be
exactly lined up with these corners (edges). to do that, we'll add set matte onto this.
if we solo it, we can see we have to set the layer to the pre-comp. we want to leave it on source
and we want to invert it. and once it's out of the transition, like around there, let's split this
(command shift d). and delete this set matte (just to get rid of the fringing so it's not there anymore).
and we can see it still has a little bit of an edge, so to get rid of that we're going to add
a simple choker. and we'll choke it one pixel. and there's still an edge, so just duplicate it.
okay, let's take a look at this first transition part.
that looks pretty good to me. i'm actually going to scale the glitch
horizontally, because i think that looks cooler. alright now, let's duplicate our gray solid (command
+ d). and move it to the very top. let's zoom out and we're going to move our second clip- the creepy pool
guy, or whatever clip you're using. and we're gonna extend it over our fill a little bit. we're gonna
hit u on our keyboard with our matte selected to bring up our keyframes for the fractal noise. and
we'll just line it up and set our matte for the the second clip to luma matte, just like before. great,
let's play it back. and there we have it. that's our "like datamosh, but it ain't datamosh, but it's
close enough" effect. so thanks for watching, guys. subscribe for more and i'll see you guys later!