So, Sapphire's Infinite Zoom
is a fantastic way of creating
interesting and intricate motion backgrounds.
In this tutorial, we're gonna be looking
at the basic controls of Infinite Zoom.
And then we're gonna come in and see
how we can adjust certain different parameters
to create a number of interesting effects.
And we're gonna start with this squiggle animation,
which actually is gonna begin life
here as a simple rectangle.
(upbeat music)
Now, I'm working in After Effects,
because some of the projects have quite a lot of layers,
but the way the Infinite Zoom works across
all the different hosts is essentially the same.
So, whether you work in After Effects, Premiere,
Avid, Resolve, or any of the other Sapphire hosts,
you're gonna be using the same types of parameters.
But let's start with our square.
And I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna go
to Sapphire Distort, Infinite Zoom.
And we now get our basic Infinite Zoom.
And I can travel through this box by key framing up
the zoom, and I can add a bit of rotation in it,
by obviously using the rotation controls.
And just so we have something that's bit more interesting
to look at, when we go through and change up our parameters,
I am going to come in and set my zoom
and my rotate to Auto Animate using Expressions.
So, I'm just going to Alt + Click on my Zoom,
and when I Alt + Click on my Zoom Control,
it's gonna allow me to type
an expression down in the timeline.
And I'm just gonna base this off of time,
because I just saw this moving forward at a constant speed
depending on where we are in the timeline.
So, I'm just gonna go time + 1
because I want the minimum value to be one.
So now, if I bring this in, we've just got a slow,
steady move through our Infinite Zoom.
And I'm gonna do the same sort of thing
with the Rotate as well,
I'm just gonna come in and I'm gonna go time,
we're gonna want this bit faster,
so, I'm gonna time*25.
So, we just got a very straightforward move
through our Infinite Zoom tunnel.
So, let's add a bit of interest now to our Zoom.
Basically, anything that happens to our layer
is gonna affect how the Zoom looks.
So, if I scale this up or down, you know,
we could get a bit of scaling within our source material.
In this case, it's not gonna make a big difference
simply because we've already animated up the Zoom,
so, the scale is always gonna be down
from the bottom to the the top.
Just make a few other changes just to our basic shape.
I'm gonna come in and I'm going to round my corners out.
So, I'm gonna go, come into the shape itself,
just add a bit of roundness to my corners,
then I can make this a complete swirl if I want to,
which could be kind of interesting, actually,
I'm gonna add a bit more interest to it as well,
by adding in a Repeater in here.
This is again to the shape layer,
just open up this and instead of moving it,
actually that's,
that is kind of interesting,
but instead of moving it just in
in the position there,
which is what I've got there,
I'm gonna come in and maybe just
change the scale and rotation up a little bit,
so scale it down to what 94% and change the rotation up.
Just to add a slightly different pattern.
And that's looking kinda nice.
Now, so at this point, I can come back
into the Infinite Zoom controls
and I can start to maybe play around with these
and sort of tweak these up a little bit.
So, I can change things up like Shrink Per Level.
So, this has the effect of making the twists
either further apart from each other
or
closer together.
If I move Shrink Per Level closer to one,
they get very, very close together, indeed.
Obviously I can't go all the way to one,
otherwise it would just be the same
image, but that's at .9,
er that's gonna give me a really lovely
moire effect on a TV.
So, let's bring this down.
I have this maybe around about .36,
that's kind of not, maybe a little bit closer,
we're slightly tighter spiral, maybe about .443.
So, we got a nice sort of tighter spiral there,
and I can again change how that spiral looks
by changing up my Twist amount.
In this example, it's not gonna make
a huge amount of difference, because we have a very,
very simple shape that isn't sort of twisting too much.
And so, we've got our start to a hypnotic effect.
So, I'm kinda happy with where we are
with the Infinite Zoom.
One of the things I enjoy doing with this effect
is actually adding animation or making some small changes
to the source clip itself.
And because we're working with a shape in After Effects,
I can come in, and I can add another parameter,
which is my Wiggle Paths.
And this will start to wiggle up.
Let's make this a little bit bigger,
with a little less detail, maybe.
This will start to wiggle up the the paths that we have,
make that wiggling second to make that nice and smooth.
So, we get a sort of almost hand drawn animation effect.
And, of course, turn these corners back again,
maybe take the correlation down,
and then come back up
and add another Round Corners over the top.
Maybe I'm wiggling a bit too much,
so, just bring that to 10 a second instead.
So we start to playing around with that
and get some interesting effects.
I'm gonna move quickly onto a slightly more complex shape.
This is a still from a video,
let's make sure that this is actually on a freeze frame,
and we are, good.
And I'm gonna, again, apply Infinite Zoom to this.
And this one I'll have going clockwise
instead of counterclockwise.
And I'll actually do the same sort of thing
just to to add some animation to this, as well.
So, add an expression, make this go bit faster,
so we'll go "time*2" on the zoom.
And I will come into my Rotate.
And we'll make it a bit easier to to adjust it
a little bit by just leaving the original value here
and just going "+time*25" again.
Actually we'll do minus 25 to send it
going in the opposite direction.
Yeah, that's kind of fun.
And because of my expression, I actually have the original,
I can just easily adjust where I want my
starting point to be
And we'll still get the same sort of move.
That's kind of interesting.
Now, if I move my Twist back a little bit,
you see something interesting happening here,
when we're using Infinite Zoom on a video track,
we can easily see the video frame,
in this case its black going over the top
of the white there.
So, actually what we want to do is create a bit
of transparency around here.
So, it's not using all of the video frames,
we actually kind of get a softer transition
between each of the copies of the video we get.
And this is where I use my mask from path.
So, I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna use my Ellipse tool.
With my layer selected, to actually just create up
a simple, straightforward After Effects mask.
I can set this to to none.
And I can choose my mask from path over here as well.
And that gives me th- a similar sort of effect.
I can feather this up as well.
So, we get a little bit more of a smoother transition.
Let's twist this over again.
We've now got this sort of hypnotic effect
where we've got the edges a bit more
blended in together, as well.
Now built into all of the Sapphire effects,
we do have Mocha as well.
So, if I came in and did a similar sort of thing
and do a mask shape here in Mocha,
we can actually use the Mocha shape
to drive the shape with inside Infinite Zoom.
So, if you're working in a host
that doesn't have a native vector masks,
you can always come in and use Mocha to create up
your shapes instead, which I think is rather cool.
Alright, let's leave this masked nightmare,
and get to our next clip.
And this clip just starts life actually as a black solid,
that I've then come in
and added a texture Chroma spiral to it.
Auto animating using the same time expressions
we've used several times before.
I then use the extract filter just to create
a quick luma key on top of it.
So, we can see that that's where we started
and that's where we're ending in terms of transparency,
and added a Polar Warp, and a couple of wipe clocks.
Just to smooth out some of the transitions
between those two, just take away some of the areas there.
So, now we've got this strange, abstract animation.
And I've not really done too much with this
from the default values that we saw previously.
All I've done is keyframe the rotation in the zoom,
as we've done before, I added a little bit of twist in there
and change the shrink levels.
So, we have slight more distance between
the different strands between the different repetitions.
Then just add a vignette and a glow.
And we end up with something that's a lot more interesting,
very, very quickly,
and in this case, it really is the glow that adds in
something a bit more special.
Remember, anytime we can come back in here,
and if we wanted to make this
a little bit more organic as well,
maybe come into something like the distort category,
maybe doing something like a Wave set or very low amount.
And we'll take a look at how that affects it.
Then you see the small change in the base shape
can have quite a considerable effect on the end result.
I'm liking that. And we take a look at our next example.
This is actually one of the first ones
we saw at the beginning of the video.
And again, we're getting something quite complex
out of a starting point that's simple and straightforward.
I've just got the Sapphire laser beam effect
bouncing back and forward between these two points.
Nothing too special.
But when we start combining effects together,
it gets a little bit more exciting.
Again, I've used one of my favorites
the Kaleidoscope Polar effect,
adjusting up the Z-distance just a little bit,
and then feeding that into the Infinite Zoom afterwards,
to get me a nice spiral animating through.
And because we got the build up of both the animation
of the laser beams coming in.
Plus the animation of that Kaleidoscope effect,
we get this much more complicated movement
coming through our twist and our twirls.
And who doesn't like a little bit of glow on that.
And to learn the recipe of this glow,
just go and take a look at my other tutorial
Building a Bigger, Beautiful Glow with Builder.
And once I'm happy with that,
we'll stick on a colorful background,
which is just the Sapphire cloud smooth,
and defocus it with the Defocus Prism,
and we end up with our final effect,
where the heart of it
is just a simple laser beam and the Infinite Zoom.
Now, our basic shapes
don't even have to be that interesting.
My basic shape here is actually just the letter H,
which if I come into my character palette,
I've just zoomed 530% in the horizontal
and if I add Infinite Zoom to this one,
I've made a few changes to it.
The first one is trying to get
the shrink level really, really low.
So, I've taken this to about .11,
just to kind of really separate out,
the different zoom layers
as much as I possibly can.
I've also changed the spiral strands
to 2 Counterclockwise,
instead of just having one spiral strand there.
The next thing I want to do
to make this interesting,
is actually to use the Wrap function.
And we can use the Wrap function to either Tile
or Reflect to change what happens
to our shape when it's outside of what we can actually see,
in this case, when you've got such as simple pattern,
Reflecting or Tiling looks really, really nice on it.
And so now once we're here, the only thing
we really need to do is actually animate it up.
I'm just gonna animate up the zoom center,
on this one. And I'm just moving the zoom center around.
And because we've got the reflection turned on,
we get this really exciting effect
that looks like flyover of something and
we've created the depth using that shrink per level here.
So, if I change up my shrink per level,
we can change up how we affect or how we see
those different layers as we move across them.
And this is slightly more non-traditional
use of the Infinite Zoom,
and it's one that I really, really love.
And because I like to add a little bit of texture
and animation into my shape as well.
I've actually got a texture layer,
which is the Texture Weave just animating again,
from left to right.
I'm not doing anything too exciting with this.
I'm just gonna use this as a Track Matte
as a Track Luma Matte,
just to give us a little bit of texture
within our shapes there.
And this just helps to break up some of that uniformity.
As we see this animating through.
As we move on to our final example,
we have that same idea of creating
some sort of animation within our source clip
that we're then gonna use when we come in,
to do the Infinite Zoom.
So, if I add Infinite Zoom to my text now,
everything here is pretty much the same
as we've seen previously.
So, we've got animation going on the zoom,
we've got animation going on the rotation.
The only thing that I've done that's slightly different here
is I've used the Shift X to actually move
this whole animation over a little bit.
And the reason I've done that
is because when I pause the Infinite Zoom,
by just stopping the animation of the zoom and the rotation
that I wanted this text to be in the right place.
So that's why I've taken the Shift X
and just move that into the right space there.
There's a simple case of coloring it using PsykoStripes,
adding bit of shape using the EmbossGlass
and blurring things up using the BlurMotion,
and use the BlurMotion here to simulate
a bit of motion blur, making sure that my center XY
comes from the same point as my zoom center.
So what that is is just my zoom center
minus the shift gives me the center XY there, nice and easy.
And then because we're talking about something digital,
I've added a bit of digital damage to the text.
Now if we take a look at the background.
Find a bit of the background there.
The background is actually the same idea,
I've just copied and pasted the exact same things:
Infinite Zoom, PsykoStripes to colorise
and BlurMotion to add motion blur
from my text to the background.
The background itself, if we have a little look at this
is just a very, very basic set of stripes,
which is actually just texture cells.
With a wipe over the top of it,
Wipe Dots over the top to give me that.
Adding in the infinite Zoom on to that,
adding in the background over the top.
Adding in my favorite, big beautiful glow.
Again, link in the description
about where you can find that one,
and we end up with another result that is different
to what we've seen previously with the Infinite Zoom.
One of the things I really like
about Infinite Zoom is that even though
there's only a limited number of parameters to change,
just making small changes to a few of them
can actually create completely different end results.
And I hope this has inspired you to pick up
Infinite Zoom and start to play around a little bit.
If you've created something cool with Infinite Zoom,
don't forget to link it in the comments below.
If you have any questions about Infinite Zoom
or any of the other techniques I've shown in this video,
then ask them down below as well.
I do read them all.
If you learn something or found this style
of video interesting hit the "Like" button below as well.
It really really helps out.
And remember you can grab a free trial
of Infinite Zoom and all the other Sapphire effects,
by going to borisfx.com.