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Well, hey everybody, I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com,
and today, we're going to take a look at this roto scoping, freeze frame
effect here in Adobe After Effects. Here is a little something, something
of what it kind of is going to look like when we're finished.
(ball being kicked)
There you have it! We're going to cover that effect in After Effects.
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Guys, let's jump into After Effects and check this thing out right now.
Okay, so here we are in Adobe After Effects, and I have a single video
clip here, and I'm going to right click and choose to create a new
composition from this selection. Now, you want your composition
to exactly match the frame rate of the video that we're going to be
applying this effect to, because the roto brush, which we're going to be
using in a little bit, that's the way it works.
That's kind of the way it lets you go in and do it's thing. It can be a
little finicky, but it's really, really cool what it does for you.
So, first thing I'll do, is I'll just right click and create a new -
I'm going to create a new solid, and this can be any random color
you want it to be. I think I'll make this - eh, I'll kind of
make it like an orange-y color. Something that's a little faded
orange, like that. I'm going to hit OK. And I'm going
to drag this orange beneath. This is just to give us a point of
reference if we punch a hole in something, we'll be like,
Oop! I'm seeing a big, orange circle there, I know I've cut a whole in it,
I think it'll help with the explanation process later.
I can't quite remember how, but I'm just following my notes here.
So, (chuckle) we'll see if we actually use it later on.
Now, we've got this first video clip. I'm going to hit the
ENTER/RETURN key to rename. And this one I'm going to name it,
"base-video," and I'm going to duplicate it, CMD/CTRL+D.
I'm going to hit ENTER/RETURN again, this one I'm going to name,
"kick-freeze," and then I'm going to hit CMD/CTRL+D,
and the third copy of this video, I'm going to name,
"kick-keyed-front." So, a few layers of effects go into making this
thing work, and we're going to cover it all right now.
So, let's go ahead and hide "base-video," and we'll also
hide "kick-keyed-front," just so we can work on isolating the
actual frozen position that we want.
So I'm going to double click here on the "kick-freeze" video clip,
I'm going to double click, it's going to bring me, you can see in here,
to this layer panel. Which is not our initial composition, we're within
the layer here. And I'm going to move out to about the 2:17 mark,
so I'm just watching this timer right down here.
I'm just going to move out to about the 2:17 mark, I happen to know
that that's where I want this thing to be frozen - right there!
Right as his foot is coming in contact with the ball, this is the
frame that we would like frozen.
And now what I'll do is go Layer>Time, and I'm going to choose
freeze frame. It's going to apply this time remap, which
is basically going to lock this frame as, essentially, the entire
video clip, it's sort of like doing a frame hold.
And now, I'm going to hang out out there around 2:17 again,
and I'm going to grab this tool here called the roto brush.
And what I'll do with this - I'm going to zoom in on my video
a little bit, you want to be at least at 100% with your video, or
you can go a little bit beyond. I'm at 200% here.
My brush is a little bit too big, so you can hold down your
CMD/CTRL key and drag up or down in order to increase or
decrease the size of the brush. And the idea with the brush is
you just kind of draw kind of up across the middle. I like to
make what amounts to a loose outline of my object that I'm looking
to encircle. So you can see, I've done this, and After
Effects has gone ahead and said, "Alright, I think I see the object
that you're looking to encircle." But because I dragged over the
yellow sky a little bit, it included all of that. And it missed
his entire arm, and part of the ball. No problem. We can just
draw here, and say, yeah, grab that part of the ball. Yup, that
looks good. And then, oh, by the way, over here his arm, this is all
stuff that we want as well. It's a little messy, picking up a little
bit of the gravel, but not too bad. Yeah, we do - we do, in fact,
want his shoulder, and a little bit of the wrinkle in the clothing there,
great. And this whole bit between his legs, hold down the
ALT/OPT key and just say, yeah, this is - this is a bridge too far,
we need to get rid of that, and... I think that's pretty good! I mean,
you could trim this up here on his leg, right down there.
Just make sure this is all kind of cleaned up, and you can go
over it, ALT/OPT to get rid of a bit of the, the sort of selection,
if you will, and the just regular click and drag, to go ahead and add
to that selection. I'm also over here in the effect controls panel,
I'm just going adjust the feather to like 7, I want to push it up a
little bit, just kind of smooth and blur it just a touch more.
This really does not at all have to be amazingly perfect, because
we're going to be reducing the opacity of the piece that's
frozen in time enough, that I don't think you're really going to
be able to see too much of the - a really messy edge, if we have
an edge that's being particularly problematic.
In fact, if you are having an edge that's particularly
problematic, there is a nice, little tool here - the refine edge
brush tool. Hold down CMD/CTRL again, and just click and drag to
make the brush a little bit bigger, and we can just paint over
edges like this. And you're going to get this weird edge,
but basically what's happening is the white area is going to
become part of the roto scope selection, the black area is just
going to be kicked to the curb. So I'll say, yeah, go ahead and
clean up the edge of his arm there, yep, that all looks pretty good.
And you know, here on his hand, where it's a little messy. We'll see
what that can do for us, cool. We can try the bottom of the shoe,
as well. And it's important that in this stage, spend the time
now to get a decent selection. Because as we tweak the roto later,
all of this is going to kind of, it's going to have a bearing - or it's
going to have bearing, I should say, on the way our roto scope looks.
Now, one thing you may have noticed, or maybe you didn't.
We've got all of these little arrows, right? To the - to the left
and the right of our little playhead marker here. Well this is the area
in which the roto scope brush has begun trying to track his
object - er, his movement. But remember, we froze time with this
time remap, or really the time freeze, so there's never going
to be any change. So once we get our initial selection, it is what we
want it to be. So I'm going to go ahead real quick, and I'm just going to
keep extending it. I'm going to drag this little playhead all the
way to the edge. Give After Effects just a moment to mess around,
in fact, if you have to, you can grab the roto brush and just click once,
like right solidly in the middle of an area we have selected,
and you can see how it's extended our arrows. And I'm assuming
there's got to be a better way to do this, I just haven't run into it yet.
I'll just click a single time here, and it'll extend it. I do know from
Adobe - from Adobe people, they only have the roto brush extending
a certain amount in any direction, because they just don't see why
anybody would need to go further than that. Well, here's one reason why,
maybe you're making just a nice selection like this.
And there we have it. We have our arrows extending generously on
both sides. And I really didn't need to take it to 7 seconds, I just
wasn't really thinking. Sometimes, I mean - I know I'm dumb
most of the time, but sometimes I'm particularly dumb. And at
this point, I should have known, that right after 2:17,
we're basically going to fade this out immediately. So I only
really needed to go to four seconds max. But anyway,
I've got this arrow selected over this whole area, we're looking good.
We can close this layer here with "kick-freeze," and you can
see here, we've got him isolated above what we now see as
our orange background, right? So making it very clear, yep,
you've got him isolated, there's nothing else you can see.
So what I'll do now, back in the original composition, I'm going
to turn the base layer back on. And you can see our guy is just
kind of floating above the - the actual proper soccer player in the back.
And they both meet beautifully and harmoniously at 2:17, which
is exactly what we want to happen. What we need to do, is make him
a little more semi-opaque. So let's move about 10 frames in,
I'm just going to type in the number ten here in my timecode, and
we're going to hit the letter T, which is going to bring up our
transparency option, and I'm going to drop - well, I'm going to set
my opacity to, I don't know, let's try like 50%. Something like that.
And I'm going to drop a keyframe right there. And then I'll move
back to the very beginning, so this is at frame 0. And I'm
going to set the opacity to zero. So what'll happen is, this sort
of ghost version of him will float in, or just fade in very quickly,
and then the video will continue to play, and the two of them will meet up,
and we need to make it so that as soon as he strikes the ball,
the ghost version of him disappears - you never see it again.
So what we'll do, we'll move out to - you can see here is our timer,
we need to get to 2:16. So 2:17 is exactly where they line up,
you can see here it is they're not quite lined up, but they're close.
So, with opacity, I'm going to drop a keyframe - whoop! I don't want
to drop a keyframe by hitting the add/remove keyframe button
like that. And the opacity here is still at full 50%, and then
we move one keyframe down the timeline, by hitting CMD/CTRL
and the right arrow key. Now we're at 2:17, our layers are
perfectly aligned. All we need to do now, is drop our opacity to
0%. That's going to make our little clip just disappear.
Now, there are ways you can trim it off, of course, but we're here
in our animation flow. So I figured, I'll just let that ride.
And just a quick render here, and we can test and see what it
looks like here. So, there we go, looks pretty cool. The only
problem is, of course, the ghost-y version is appearing above
the guy kicking the ball. That's why we have this "kick-keyed-front,"
because we actually want him to appear in front of the ghost
version while the base video does its thing behind all of this.
So once more, we'll turn this layer on, and everything goes away,
all the effects that we just did because we're covering it up.
I'm going to double click to get within this layer, we're here
within this layer. And we can, on more time, use the roto brush
right here - roto brush. And we'll just make a selection over him,
so I can just draw a line right down the middle of him.
Well, actually, that got a lot of him there, didn't it?
And hold down CMD/CTRL, drag down a little bit, and I can just
clean this stuff up by holding ALT/OPT and just painting that
little bit away. Hold down the SPACEBAR to get your move tool.
And I'm - just play through this a little bit, and I can see,
you can see, we're not getting the ball. I want to make sure the
ball is included. Now, I only have to make sure he's roto
scoped up until the 2 second and 17 frame mark, cause
at that point, the whole video is just synced up perfectly, and
he can disappear. So I'm just going to make sure that everything
that needs to be included here is included.
And, of course, clear anything out, ALT/OPT and just get rid of
that gravel back there. You know, again, we're trying to get it
close enough. That's kind of the name of the game, here.
Just close enough. So I hit SPACEBAR again, we're playing
through it. I'm just watching, I'm watching, I'm watching..
I'm going to zoom back in here. And I can see, I've got all this
extra stuff selected. I don't know that I like that. I want to
move back a couple of frames, because all of that's going to look
really bad over the other effects. So I'm going to hold down
ALT/OPT and I'm going to say, yeah, just try to - try to get some
of that yellowish stuff out. But I do want to keep the bulk of the rest
of the ball. Kind of something like that.
Make sure we pick up the tip of his shoe. And After Effects is just
building out the appropriate animations for us. So it's taking
and just doing all that heavy lifting, boring, roto scoping - er, not
really boring, but just tedious roto scoping stuff for us.
You can see how it's automatically readjusting everything for us
as we go. So I'm going to back this out. The ball -
we probably don't need to worry about the ball when it's all the
way out there, because I don't think it'll be covering up anything.
We definitely want to get the toe of his shoe there.
And of course, the rest of his leg. Just like that.
And again, as long as it's pretty close, you don't want to get too
much gravel though. That's going to look really bad.
Or have a chunk of his leg missing, that also, I found,
tends to look pretty bad. We can move this back a little bit
further and see. Yeah, we still don't have his leg back here.
So we'll just, you know, After Effects should be filling in between
the frames here a little bit. Like, you know, in between here
and there, we should be getting his leg.
Alright, so we still don't have his leg here, moving backward.
I'm going to undo that, because I picked up a little bit too much gravel,
I'm going to try coming through the foot. And then down
the leg here. I'm going to move down a little. I'm going to pull
this back, to the point where we're editing where we were. I'm going
to cut off the gravel. I'm going to say, yeah, just can we pick up his foot?
How about his foot? How about the foot?
And I think there we have it. We really only need to get up to 2:17 done
reasonably. And I'll close this out now. And because all of this
is timed up together, what we're going to get is a video that really
only shows this keyed out guy jumping in the front,
up until 2:17 when everything melds back to kind of the base video
at the beginning. Now, as I'm watching through this, maybe we'd go
back in there and just feather the edges a little more.
Again, everything is kind of the same color because it's the
same exact video track. So, I'll just go ahead and say, yeah,
look feather this like 10, something like that should be pretty
good for us. And you know, he'll move through, and boom!
And right there, at 2:17, everything becomes normal again.
Let's close out, we're in this layer, not our original composition.
So I'll just close out the layer, and now if I do a quick, little
pre-render, we can play through this, and you can see, that in
fact, we get that full effect. Now, of course, what's happening here
is, this top clip is just simply that keyed out guy, or that
roto scoped out guy, really, that we just did. And he's there just so
he looks like he's on top of his ghost-y shape.
If we shut him off, then of course, the ghost is the "kick-freeze"
frame, and then base video is just the underlying video. Just
making sure that everything is filled in and looking good and as
soon as that clip fades away, we're just back to the regular video
again, and everything looks normal, as it should. You would never
know that there was any crazy effect like that, that we just created.
(ball being kicked)
And that is really it for creating this little roto scope, freeze frame effect.
Guys, if you enjoyed this video, make sure, again, that you subscribe
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A nice, little community over there that's just waiting for you to
join and come along with us!
For working with the roto brush, and all the other stuff we covered in
this tutorial. From duplicating layers, and semi-opaqueness, and just
timing stuff up to look just right, that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.
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