- Emotes are a fantastic way of being able
to give your audience additional ways
to react to your content.
But do you know what's even better
than standard static emotes?
Looping animated emotes. (text smacking)
Recently, Twitch has rolled out an update
that allows all Twitch affiliates and partners
to upload animated emotes to their channel.
So in this video,
I'm going to show you exactly
how you can turn those standard static emotes
into looping animated emotes
that your chat are going to love, spam,
and probably meme on far too much.
Everything that we use in this video is completely free.
And the skills that you'll learn can be applied
to all sorts of designs that you'll do as a content creator.
So let's do it.
(calm music)
Just before we get started,
I'd like to give a quick thank you
to the sponsor of this video, Epidemic Sound.
I am constantly getting asked
where I get all the DMCA safe music that I use
for my YouTube videos, for my live streams,
for my Instagram, even for my podcast.
And for the last four years,
that answer has been Epidemic Sound.
They have a massive library of over 35,000 different tracks,
all made by incredible artists
in all different kinds of genres.
From blues to bagpipes, hymns to hip hop, or ska to salsa,
I have never struggled to find the right kind of song
for the content that I'm making.
Do yourself and your content a favor
and sign up for a free 30-day trial
of Epidemic Sound's library by using the link
at the top of the description.
So in this video,
we're going to be making three different types
of animated emotes.
And although I haven't asked him yet,
I'm actually going to be using my podcast co-host Ben's face
(text smacking) to make all
of these animated emotes.
We're going to be making a simple dancing or jamming emote.
We're going to make an emote for those POGChamp moments
where you want to be papped by the paparazzi.
And finally, we're going to make a feelsbadman style emote
with the rain falling and slowly fading to black
when things just don't go to plan.
Obviously the idea here is that you use your own face
as the base of these emotes
and then you're going to be giving your audience
three different animated emotes
that they can spam in your chat.
Software-wise, we're actually going to be using DaVinci Resolve
as our editor of choice today.
The reason being that it's completely free
for absolutely anybody to download,
but if you already own Adobe's Creative Suites
or something like Final Cut Pro,
you can still follow along with this tutorial,
just bear in mind that some of the effect names
that we'll be applying might be named slightly differently,
but it'll just be a Google away.
(calm music)
So if you haven't yet downloaded DaVinci Resolve,
you can do so for free from the Black Magic website.
Once you've got that installed,
you want to create a new project,
name it something that we'll remember like animated emotes,
and then open that up.
Within our new project,
we want to make a new timeline
by coming up here to file, new timeline.
And there's a few settings here that we'll need to change.
DaVinci Resolve likes to start its timelines one hour in
in case you ever need to add any footage to the start,
but we don't need that in such a simple project.
So just change the start time code
to zero, zero, zero all the way across the board.
Next we want to uncheck the use project settings box,
which will open up this format tab where we can go across
and we actually want to change our timeline resolution
to custom and then enter
into the resolution here 256 by 256.
The last thing to change is just the frame rate
from 24 to 30 and then you can click create.
Twitch officially supports GIFs up to 60 frames in length.
So by using a 30 FPS timeline,
we know that we have two seconds to work with
for our animation to complete.
Once you've got your timeline set up,
we can come down here and open up the edit workspace,
which is basically the usual timeline view
that you might be used to from of the video editors.
Right, so first let's make our dancing
or jamming emote as it's by far the most simple.
The first thing you need to do is import the media,
the image that you're going to be using for the dancing remote.
So you should see this media bin up here.
If you don't, just toggle the media pull option up here
and then right click and go to import media.
Find the image that you want to use and then click open.
Next, we can drag that image down
onto the video track one of our timeline.
And since this is such a short emote,
we can zoom in quite a bit so that we get a better view
of exactly what we're creating.
Like I said, it's a short emote,
so we don't need anywhere near this long.
If we scrub across here on the timeline,
so that the time code reads about 20 frames in,
we can actually trim our clip to that point by using shift
and the square close brackets
and that'll trim that it back to be 20 frames long.
I'm just going to zoom in a couple of more times here
since we've got so much room to work with
and we then want to set our in and out points
for the sequence.
So scroll back to the start,
use I for in point,
scroll to the end and then use O to set our end point.
And then we want to loop the animation
just by clicking this button.
That means that when we're previewing the clip,
we can watch it and it'll keep looping,
which is obviously what's going to happen
when we upload this emote to Twitch.
Now before we actually get to animating Ben
and making him bounce up and down for the emote,
the first thing we want
to do is actually get the framing right
because these emotes are going to be so small
when they're displayed in Twitch chat.
So you want to make sure you're using
as much space as possible.
So with the clip selected down here in the timeline,
we want to come up here and select the inspector box
and then just play with the zoom and positioning
to make sure that we have Ben's face
in the center of the frame.
So the animation itself is going to be really quite simple.
Let's scroll along the timeline to around 10 frames in.
You can always use the right and left arrow keys
to select a certain frame.
So 10 frames in,
we're going to add a position key frame at this point.
Next, let's go back to the start of the timeline,
so key frame zero,
and we're going to actually raise the position up
so that Ben looks like he's bouncing down into place.
If we now play this back,
you can see that it's just a very boring animation
of Ben sort of coming down into place and then staying put.
We can also display these key frames
by clicking this little button below the clip
and then we'll see our exact key frames.
So if you ever need to adjust these, move them across,
you can do so there.
Next we can trim the clip to just be these 10 key frames.
So come up here to 10 frames in on the timeline
with the clip selected, do our shift
and close square brackets
and then we just have the simple animation playing
over and over again.
Last couple of things to do is to hold down the alt key
and drag this clip up onto a second video track.
And we actually want it to start when the other one ends.
So we have the exact same clip now playing twice.
And the final thing to do is just to flip this second clip.
So with the second clip selected, we can come up here,
click this little flip horizontal button
in the transform controls
and then now if we play this back,
you can see we have our animated GIF.
How simple was that?
Obviously, feel free to play around with the key frames.
If you want things quicker, want things slower,
you can adjust the key frames as you see fit
that doesn't have to be somebody bouncing downwards.
It can be coming in from different angles
or whatever you want to do,
but hopefully, this has given you a good idea
of how to make a really simple sort
of bouncing, energetic emote for your chat.
(calm music)
The next emote we're going to be making
is the paparazzi style one.
So again, we start by importing the media
that we want to use in this emote.
We can keep working on the same timeline here
because we're going to be rendering out each of these
as videos separately.
So dragging newly imported media onto the timeline,
just start it far enough across right.
I like to start mine at sort of even second intervals
so I'm going to find where one second into this timeline is
and just make sure that it starts there.
We also want to move our in and out points across
to this new sequence.
So with our timeline at one second in,
I'm going to press I to move the in point.
And then if we scrub across,
maybe zoom out once,
this one's going to be a little bit longer,
around a second and a half is what we want to make this one.
So we come across here to two and a half seconds in
and then click O on our out point.
And we can also trim the clip to that point
with shift and closed square brackets.
Again, we're going to want to play around with that positioning
and sizing to make sure that this displays nice and large
when we're using it in such a tiny form on Twitch
so play around with the zoom and the positioning
if you need to.
This one looks pretty set up for me already.
Now to create that fake paparazzi camera flash,
we're going to use an effect.
So make sure that you have the effects panel showing.
You can do so just by clicking up here to display it.
And then if we click the search box,
we want to search for the brightness flash,
and then we can drag that onto the start of the clip
so that it shows this sort of transition animation
over the start of the clip.
By default, this brightness flash is going to go on
for far too long.
So we can drag actually the right-hand side of this
so that it's around 10 frames long.
If we now go to the start of the timeline,
you'll see that this brightness flash
is actually causing the preview to show black,
which we don't want.
We want to start with the video of Ben's face
and kind of the flash halfway through.
So we can actually drag our whole clip to the left.
And if we let go, we can see as this affects the preview.
So we want to start around here
where it's sort of halfway flash
but you can still see the face behind it.
Next, we want to trim the endpoint to around 10
or so frames after the flash has finished.
So we can use the shift and close square brackets again.
And this is actually the main bulk
of the work done for this emote.
All we have to do now is duplicate this,
position it in place,
and change the actual positioning of Ben's face
within the frame.
So similar to our first emote,
we're going to hold down the alt key on our keyboard
and drag the first clip up onto the second video track.
And we want to position it around about here.
So sort of halfway through the end bit
that doesn't have the flash on.
Next, what we're going to do is select our second clip
and actually adjust the transform,
which you can do by clicking
on this little chevron button here and selecting transform,
which will turn this box white
and actually allow us to adjust the rotation
and the position and the sizing of Ben within that preview.
I'm just going to adjust the preview down here to 200%
so that I can still scale it.
And we're going to rotate Ben by using this little handle here
and maybe just enlarge him a little bit.
And remember, this is just applying to the second clip.
To loop through the playback,
we can move our playhead back to the start at the in point,
and we're going to use control, alt, and forward slash,
and that is going to continuously loop.
And we can see the first two sections
of this sort of paparazzi clip.
The last thing that we need to do is
just add one third flash,
I think we'll probably rotate Ben completely upside down,
and that's our GIF complete.
So exactly as before,
let's drag our second clip up
by using the alt key,
position it so it's roughly the same,
and then with that clip selected on the timeline,
hovering over it, we're going to use the transform controls.
I think we're going to flip Ben completely upside down,
zoom him in even more
to really show off that horrendous pose.
And then if we play this back,
control, alt, forward slash,
we can see the paparazzi clip is pretty much finished.
(calm music)
Onto our third and final emote:
the rainy, sad one.
Now for this one,
you're going to need a little rain animation
that I've linked down the description below this video,
or you can always get it from the Gaming Careers discord
in the free downloads channel.
So just with the previous two emotes,
we want to import our media.
This time, selecting both the rain loop,
as well as the image that we want to use.
So you can just control click to select two things,
click open, and then we're going to want to drag these down
into our timeline.
So let's scroll across,
find a nice empty space of timeline.
We first want to take our image
and put that on video track one,
and then we want to take our rain loop
and put that on video track two.
And again, I want to work from a blank slate.
So three seconds in on my time code here,
I'm going to highlight both layers, do shift,
open square brackets to trim to the start point.
And this one's to be two seconds long.
So we want to go across two seconds,
which will be two seconds after three seconds
and then shift close square brackets
so that we've trimmed it to that point.
And again, we can set our in
and out points by using I and O
so that we make sure when we're looping through this,
we're watching the right timeline.
The next thing we want to do is add an effect
onto video track three.
So come across to the effects library,
click search, and type in adjustment.
We should find this one called adjustment clip,
which we can drag onto video track three.
And then of course, we can select it and trim it
so it's the same length.
If we now loop through the playback,
you can see that we have this rain animation
on top of Ben's face,
but we want to add two different effects to this.
We want to firstly do a slow zoom in into Ben's sad stare.
And the second thing we want to do is fade from full color
to black and white.
So first of all, let's deal with the slow zoom in.
So with the adjustment clip selected,
we want to come up here to the inspector
and see this dynamic zoom option.
If we just single click somewhere in that box,
it's going to open up an extra option that we're going to need,
but first let's enable the dynamic zoom.
And then if we loop back through the playback,
you can see that rather than zooming into his face,
it's zooming out, which might be a look that you like,
but I would rather it zoomed in.
So all we have to do to do
that is just click this swap button
in the dynamic zoom option.
It's going to swap around
and now we have the slow zoom into Ben's face.
If you want to adjust the framing,
maybe get even more zoomed in or less zoomed in
or zoom in on a different section,
you can actually adjust the dynamic zoom.
Again, if we click on this little chevron down here,
rather than using a transform control,
we open up the dynamic zoom control.
You get two different boxes.
The green box being where it starts
and the red box being where it ends.
So if you want to zoom in more,
you can just adjust the red box,
maybe focus a little bit more on the face.
And then if we loop through the playback again,
you can see that we have more of a zoom in
onto Ben's eyes now.
So the last thing to is add that fade
from color to black and white.
And for this, we're going to be opening up Fusion,
which is effectively like DaVinci Resolve's version
of After Effects, but it's actually built into the software.
So if we right click on our adjustment clip
and then click the open in Fusion page,
that's going to open up Fusion.
You don't really need to worry about nodes
or too many other things here.
This can get super complicated,
but I'm going to keep it really easy.
We want to open up our effects tab
just by highlighting it here and search for color,
the American spelling, and then find color corrector.
Just click that once, you'll add the node
between our media in and media out.
Again, you don't really need to worry
about any of this thing.
And then we want to come over here to the inspector
to actually adjust our saturation.
So since we're going to be key framing the saturation
to actually get it to go from full saturation
to black and white,
we want to open up the key frames box here.
And this shows us again, our timeline.
We want to add a key frame a little way into our clip
with the saturation at full.
So find the saturation slider here in the color corrector,
click to add a key frame,
and then scrub across to around 70, 80%
of the way through the clip
and we're going to adjust our saturation all the way down
to zero which is going to turn everything black and white,
and that's all you need to do in the Fusion page.
You can head back now to the edit tab.
And if we loop through the playback,
we should have the slow zooming in
and slow turning to black and white of our final emote.
(calm music)
Okay, so we finished creating
our three animated emotes within DaVinci Resolve.
The last important step really is about exporting
and converting them into a format
that places like Twitch and Discord accept.
To do this, we need to go across to the deliver page here
within DaVinci Resolve.
You might just want to zoom in a bit on your timeline
so you can actually see the three different animations
that we've created,
and you want to make sure that the render mode here is set
to in/out range so we can actually set the in and out points
for each GIF that we're going to be rendering.
So let's start with our first GIF that we created.
So we scroll across on the timeline,
set our in and out points using I and O,
and weirdly DaVinci Resolve seems to add an extra frame
at the end where you set your out points.
So I just recommend coming one frame in
and then pressing O again,
just so that it loops exactly
without any black frame weirdness.
And then we can come up here to our render settings.
You want to select some custom render settings.
And here in the file name and location,
you just simply choose
where you want this rendered video to go.
You can leave the render set on single clip,
and obviously, we want to be exporting the video.
Now the format and codec options are quite key
because we're rendering out the couple of these GIFs
with transparency.
So for format, we want to set quick time and for codec,
we want to select the GoPro Cineform codec
and change the type from 10 bit to RGB 16 bit,
which unlocks this export alpha option.
So make sure you have export alpha checked.
Frame rate looks good at 30.
Resolution is what we set it to
at the beginning, 256 by 256.
Quality set to best.
That all looks good to me
so we can now click add to render queue,
and you can see that goes up into the jobs
for the render queue here.
Next, we can just repeat the exact same process
for our second GIF.
Set the in and out points.
Remember to bring it one frame from the end.
We just want to change the name basically.
And all the other settings are the same.
Finally, for our third export,
there's only one setting that you need to change.
And that's just purely
cause we're not using a transparent background.
You can uncheck the export alpha.
Again, name it whatever you want.
I'll just call it Ben Sad.
Uncheck export alpha cause we don't need it
and then add to render queue.
Once these are all added to your render queue,
you can come over here to the queue
and just click on render all.
It shouldn't take long since all
of these animations are so simple.
(calm music)
So we really almost there now.
We just need to convert these MOV files into GIF format.
For that, we're going to be using easygif.com.
Go to that in your browser,
click on video to GIF
and browse for your first exported video,
which was the dance one,
open that, and then click upload video
Once that's uploaded,
we just have a few controls to adjust here.
We can leave size on original.
Frame rate we want to set that as 25
and for method for the first two emotes
that have transparency,
we need to change this to the preserve transparency option,
but obviously, for the third emote,
the sad one where we don't have any transparency,
you can leave this set at FFMPEG.
Once you've done that,
you can click convert to GIF
and it'll begin the process of converting that
to a GIF with transparency.
One last step here is we need to optimize this GIF
by clicking on the optimize button.
There's two reasons for this.
Firstly, we need to make sure
that we get the file size below one megabyte,
which is Twitch's limit for uploading an animated emote.
But secondly, you can get some weird ghosting issues
if you don't optimize your GIF.
So even if it is below a megabyte
like this one is currently,
it's still worth clicking on the optimize button
and just doing some light compression,
an option of around 30, clicking optimize GIF,
and then this is the final GIF
that shouldn't have any ghosting issues at all.
If your optimized GIF is still
above the one megabyte threshold,
then you're going to need to use a higher compression level
to get it below a megabyte, basically.
This one is well below the one megabyte threshold.
So now that it's optimized,
we can click save to download it to our computer.
It's going to be named something super generic,
like easygif.com, GIF made online, or something like that.
So make sure you rename it,
put it in a folder where you can find all
of your animated GIFs in the future.
Obviously now just repeat the same process
for the other two GIFs,
get them all saved onto your computer,
and then head across to the Twitch dashboard.
In the viewer rewards section,
you have an emotes page where you can click
to upload a new animated emote.
Simply browse for it on your computer,
open it up, and then Twitch will handle all
of the different resizing.
And you can even, here,
see previews of what it will look like in both light
and dark mode on Twitch in chat.
The last thing to do is simply give your emote a name.
It's going to use your prefix, obviously, and then a name.
And this is what your chat are going to continually spam,
probably meme you with,
and you'll forever regret giving them the tools
to meme you with your own face.
If you enjoyed this video and learned something new,
please do give it a thumbs up.
It massively helps out the channel
and I'd highly recommend checking out this video next,
which shows you exactly how you can select specific messages
from your chat to show on stream.
Peace.