Hey everybody and welcome back to Premiere Gal if you guys are new here
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I make new video editing and production tutorials on this channel so a lot of
you guys have requested an After Effects beginners course or a tutorial that will
give you guys the basics and After Effects is such a big software there's
so many things that you can do with it it's Adobe's big effects software engine
and so the difference between Premiere Pro and After Effects is that Premiere
Pro is more like a hub it's where you're building an entire story right and After
Effects is used to create different compositions parts of the final video
that you'll build in Premiere Pro so for example if you want to create some cool
3d animating text you would create a composition and After Effects and you
would pull that composition into Premiere Pro and it's one part of the entire
video that you're building in Premiere Pro so I use After Effects all the time
I'm the Premiere Gal as a lot of you guys know me as but I also create lots
of tutorial and After Effects Adobe Audition Photoshop and everything
because the truth is you need to use all of these Adobe Creative Cloud apps to
produce your video if you use the Creative Cloud video software so in this
tutorial I'm basically just going to give you an overview of all the tools
in After Effects that you need to know about and I'm gonna do a little demo of
how to create a cinemagraph in After Effects because I always think it's good
to have something practical the you guys can follow along and show you how to do
something concrete and it'll help you understand how to use the tools better
so let's jump in After Effects and let's get started. By default when you opened up
Adobe After Effects you will get a start window just click on a new project and
it will default to an untitled project to save it just go to file save as and
then save as again and save it to your project folder I'll give it a name After
Effects demo now you can see that the project has its new name up at the top
now it's time to import any assets that you might use in your project such as
videos music photos illustrator or even Photoshop files there are multiple ways
that you can import your assets you can go to file and import or you can just
hit command I or control I on a PC to open up the import dialog box another
way to import is just by dragging the files directly into your project panel
from your folder it's really easy to do but my favorite way to import is just to
double click in the project panel here and it opens up the import file dialog
box so here you can import pretty much any
type of file and I'm going to import a video file and a photo file these files
I got from Envato elements where you can download unlimited photo stock video
video templates and design assets for as low as $16.50 per month so once you have
all of your files inside of the project window here you can also organize them
you can create folders for each category of asset if you like so let's go ahead
and click on this folder icon and let's create a new folder for video and let's
also create another folder for photos then you can drag each type of file into
the corresponding folder I'd also recommend creating a folder for
compositions which brings us to the next topic how to set up your first
composition if you're a user of Premiere Pro a composition is like your sequence
your timeline so just click on this icon here and this will enable you to create
your first composition I'm going to choose a composition dimension here in
this dialog box of 1920 by 1080 which is HD and 30 frames per second you can also
choose the default background color as well another way to create a composition
is simply by right-clicking on any asset from your project panel for example if
you want to add a video to a composition you can right click on the video clip
from the project panel and select new comp
from selection you will see that we now have a new composition here and it also
gave the comp the name of the asset itself so if you select this comp and
you hit enter you can rename it to anything that you want the same works
for any asset you choose here in the project panel just hit enter and you can
rename it to anything that you want so I'm going to call this composition Comp 1
by doing it this way it'll also make this composition the exact duration of
the video clip itself so if you need to change the duration of your composition
just right-click on the comp tab here and select composition settings and here
you can type in a new time code next to duration so if you want it to be 10
seconds we can just replace this to be 10 and so now I'm going to illustrate
how to create a cinemagraph in this demo to give you an introduction to
adding assets to your comp how to move layers how to create masks how to create
stills from your video add effects and animate layers and lastly I'll show you
approaches to exporting your final effect so what is a cinemagraph well a
cinemagraph is the type of gif it's a looping piece of movement but it only
isolates a portion of movement in the image so for example with this video
clip here if I hit the spacebar you can see it's a shot of tea being poured and
what we can do is we can freeze the background and just isolate the movement
of the tea pouring out of the spout so here is a composition with the final
product in it and you can see that we were able to achieve the effect where
the teapot is frozen as well as the background and just the tea is moving so
the first step is to isolate just the portion of the clip we want to create
the cinemagraph from so to do that we need to scrub through and find a moment
of the shot about a second or so where the tea spout is moving at a minimum we
don't want too much movement happening or else it'll be too noticeable when we
create the mask later on and you will see so once you find this moment here I
think that this part is the stillest out of all portions what we can do is we can
pull the layer back here to meet this new point and then we can move the
entire layer to the beginning of the comp so it starts at this new point then
we can move this handle here to end at the moment we want it to loop in this
handle you will see that there's two of them here this is our work area and if
we hit the spacebar to play it back it's only looping that one second that we
isolated in this work area and the reason for that is if you go to preview
and you see this loop button here is turned on if you turn that off you will
play it back and you'll only see it play once so if we turn that back on it is
looping again and we want this to be looping on because
gifts are looping in movement so it's easier to see how it looks in the final
product if that is turned on so we have our background video in the shot but now
we need to make a still image of the shot which will be placed in our
background below this layer and then I will show you how to create a mask
so first let's scrub the playhead to the very beginning of the video clip and if
you toggle down you will find transform tools so you can change the scale of the
clip using this control you can also change the videos position if you move
the x coordinate or the y coordinate you can also adjust the opacity if you want
it to be more transparent or you can rotate the image if you like and there
of course are keyboard shortcuts for all of these for example if you select the
layer and you hit S it'll just show you the scale so you can easily adjust the
scale this way and you can also hit P and I'll show you the position controls
if you hit T it'll show you transparency and if you hit R it'll show you rotation
so every asset that you use an After Effects has these transform tools and
it's something that you should know that it's always there so now that we have
our clip in its new transform state that we want now we need to make our still
image of the background so let's make sure that the playhead is at the
beginning of the clip because that's the first frame that we want to make is
still from and now the layer selected we're going to go up to composition save
frame as and then file and what this will do is it'll add it to a render
queue as a Photoshop file so you can click on this Photoshop file and you can
change it to a different format if you want you can turn it to a PNG file you
could also turn it into a JPG so I'm going to change mine to PNG file so
let's save it here into our media folder so now what we can do is we can drag
this PNG file into our project panel and once it's here we can drag the PNG
beneath the video file in our composition and you can see here that
these layers work just like Photoshop the layer at the top
we'll always be seen on the top in the composition window here and if I turn
the video layer off you will just see the still image of the video beneath it
so what we need to do next is just isolate the movement of the tea pouring
out of the video layer above so let's turn on the video layer again and now we
can zoom in to the tea spout using the Z key on our keyboard and zoom in to the tea
and if you press H you can use the hand tool to reposition it in the center of
the frame now we will use the pen tool here to begin drawing a mask around the
tea to start the mask just click to create your first point and then you can click
again to create your first line of the mask and if the color is too hard to see
with the current video that you're working with you can change the color of
the mask just toggle down from the layer and then from masks just click on the
color and choose a new color that's easy to see so I'll choose a red color now
continue to draw your mask and a tip that I have is that if you click and you
hold out a new point it'll make a curved path and this is something that you can
practice and get better and better at so I'm just going to continue to make
points and draw around the liquid part here and then to close off the mask to
finish it just click on the first point that you made so we now have our new
mask but as we play it back you will see that the background for the most part is
still but we need to move the mask path to fit the movement of the liquid so we
need to animate it then from underneath mask on this layer we need to hit the
stopwatch button to begin animating the mask path okay and this will create our
first keyframe and now we can move our playhead and to see where we need to
modify the mask so if we start to see that the liquid moves a little bit what
we can do is we can click on mask and then we can use the pen tool to adjust
the mask path to move with the movement of the liquid
and then let's keep doing that so let's scrub ahead and let's move the mask path
again until we don't see the background photo in the shot and the path moves
nicely with the liquid so once you're done doing that what we can do is add a
little bit of feathering here so the mask is less noticeable so now when we
play it back it's just a looping shot of liquid being poured from the tea so if you
want to add some color correction on top here or create some cool effects what we
can do is right click in the comp to create an adjustment layer so this
created an adjustment layer just make sure to move this adjustment layer on
top of both eclipses in our current composition so that way any effects we
apply to it will affect all the clips beneath it so next let's go up to the
effects panel here and you can search for any effects to put onto this
adjustment layer and if you do not see your effects panel be sure to go up to
window and open it up so for example After Effects has a ton of free cool
creative image presets so from the image creative folder I'm going to pull in any
of these looks on the adjustment layer until I find one that I like the most so
I'm going to try this look here and I really like it and it's applying the
filter to both the still the still image as well as the video in my composition
so everything looks great and if you want to export this as a gif this is how
you do it go to file > export and add to Adobe Media encoder queue you can also
add to render queue but it's easier to go to Adobe Media encoder queue because
you can open up more settings to play around with and just as a reminder this
will only export the render comp work area that we have selected
now this export will appear in Adobe Media encoder and from format you want
to click on this and what this will do is it will open up a new export dialog
box and if you've used Premiere Pro before this will be familiar to you
because it's the exact same one and this is where you can select a new format
such as the animated gif in our case and we can also give it a new output name
and save it in the correct location and if you need to change the size of
your final export let's say you export it and it's too big of a file and you
want it to be a smaller file size you can reduce the dimensions of our gif
here from the video tab so to do that if you want to cut it in half in this area
here next to 1920 you just hit slash to to divide it in half and then this will
export now at half resolution so then hit OK and then be sure to hit the green
play button from encoder to start exporting and now we have our awesome
cinemagraph so that is my introduction to Adobe After Effects if you have any
other Adobe After Effects requests be sure to leave a comment below and inside
of my description box just below this video I will include a playlist to all
of the Adobe After Effects tutorials I have on this channel already including a
recent one where I showed you how to edit Adobe After Effects logo opener
templates which you can get from a Envato market and Envato elements and I will
include a link to my recommended templates in the description box below
so that's all for this week thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see
you guys soon bye