>>ALAN: Hey everyone! Let's talk about the visual effects process inside of After Effects. Now this
is going to be a three part tutorial series and each tutorial will cover a different part of that
visual effects process. And the three parts are: Staging, Compositing, and Integration.
In this first tutorial, we're going to talk all about staging, which is the first part in the
process. Staging allows us to take our different 2D elements and place them into our frame
before we do any of the compositing work. This is a great way to make sure that your
composition looks good and that your image will be pleasing before we start doing all
the heavy tracking and rotoscoping data. Throughout these three tutorials we'll
be working with the same clip to allow us to see that process from start to finish.
And the best part is we won't be using any plugins to do this. So let's get started
breaking down the visual effects workflow inside of After Effects. I'm excited. Are you excited?
[MUSIC]
To get started with staging we need two things: a clean export of a video clip and then various
images that we've isolated on a transparent background in Photoshop. In this exercise,
I have an opening shot to a short film that I've been working on. It's a guy running into a field,
kind of in a hurried manner. And then I have three isolated elements that I want to stage
into my video clip. And I isolated all of these in Photoshop prior to this exercise.
Now as you find different elements that you want to stage into your video, getting good
isolations in Photoshop is absolutely critical. Bad edges, white lines, not fully removing the
background - these are things that could really ruin the integration of these elements later on
in our different tutorials. So make sure you spend the time getting good isolations on these elements
in Photoshop! Now, once you have these things, the video clip and your various isolated elements
I'm going to go ahead and right-click on my footage and I'm going to choose 'New Comp from
Selection.' This makes a new comp in my timeline that matches the settings of my video clip.
Next, I'll drag in my three elements: my tower, my building,
and my isolated car. So the act of staging now is purely using Position and Scale - and
occasionally Rotation - to place these three images throughout my shot. Now staging could
take a long time if you have a lot of elements to place and staging in this case will take a matter
of minutes because we only have three images to place throughout our shot. So I think the car
should go somewhere over here. I think Chernobyl should go somewhere over here and scaled down -
maybe rotate a degree to match the horizon line - and my tower should be scaled down
and put back here with those trees. And let's scale the car up a little bit more.
Now, I always do this at the starting frame of my clip and I do that because as we start to track,
it makes sense to start where there's nothing coming before it. Because sometimes, if I were
to maybe track starting here, I would need to then make sure that it looks natural going backwards as
much as it does going forwards and sometimes when you start to work with tracked planes,
it doesn't work so well in both directions - so I always like starting this from my first frame.
Then I only have forward to worry about. Now, if your knee jerk reaction is like mine,
you're already bothered that these aren't composited into our shot:
the tower should be behind this grassy hill, the the car doesn't really look like it fits much, and
this building back here well it's just sitting directly on top of this pillar and some of these
reeds. This is what Stage 2 - Compositing - is for. Right now, we're just staging this, and,
we're done. It's a pretty quick step but a really important one because as we move forward, and we
start to track things and we start to rotoscope things, we want to have all of our elements in
place so that way we have less work to do when the more complex effects start to kick in. So,
with our staging done let's move on to the next tutorial - Compositing. Until then, happy staging!