Hey everyone Kelsey here and welcome back to Gal! Today I'm going to be showing you how to create
really cool animated outlines around your moving subjects and the animated outlines can have some
really cool glow effects so for this tutorial I'm first going to show you how to use the rotobrush
tool to separate your moving subject from the background then how to convert that rotoscope
into a mask and then how to apply a stroke and some glow effects to that outline now you can
do this effect on any moving subject it can be a moving car it can be a skateboarder it can be a
runner a dancer anything the same effects apply for this clip i'm using a stock video clip from
art grid of this basketball player if you want to follow along with this clip i'll put a link
to it just down below and before we jump in a huge shout out to Vidiq for sponsoring today's video
Vidiq is great for helping me optimize the seo the search engine optimization of my videos so it's
more searchable so if you're interested in trying it out you can use my link below and i'll tell you
more about how i use it at the end of the video so let's go ahead and jump on it so the first step
and the most important step is to isolate your subject from the background to do this we need
to use the roto brush tool first make sure we are in the full resolution mode so that way
the roto brush tool will work better then you're going to double click on the clip to open it up
to view as a layer it's important that you view this as a layer or else the rota brush will not
work now we're going to press z on the keyboard to pull up the magnify tool and then we're just
going to click to zoom in on the subject here now we can go and click on the roto brush tool
and here we can then click and quickly draw over the player and you'll see that the roto brush tool
will start to auto detect the edges if it selects any unwanted areas you can press the alt key on a
pc or the option key on a mac and when you select over those areas it will remove it so if you need
to zoom in farther just press z again and you can zoom in closer to the subject so you can better
select your subject and a really cool trick to change the size of the brush tool is if you press
the control key on a pc or the command key on a mac and then click your mouse and move forward
it'll make the diameter of the brush bigger and if you drag the mouse back it'll make the diameter
smaller so this can be useful if you're trying to fit into a smaller area of the selection to
zoom back out you can press z and the alt key to see how it looks and now that this first outline
is selected now press the space bar to play and now after effects will rotoscope the subject out
frame by frame automatically so it does a pretty good job at auto detecting the outlines
as it moves forward in time but you may have to pause and deselect any unwanted areas with your
roto brush i'm going to fast forward through the roto brush analysis until this process is complete
you'll see that i had to do some refinement by the hoop with his hands because the skin tones
are very similar to the basketball rim color so depending on the complexity of
your shot and the colors in your shot it may take more time to complete your rotoscope
so once it's done we will have our perfect pink outlined roto and now we can go back to the
composition and you'll see that it's just showing the video of him and the basketball there's
no background it's just transparency in the background since we want the background as its own
layer let's go ahead and duplicate this layer here by pressing command d on a mac or ctrl d on a pc
so now from this new duplicated layer we want to open up the effects and we can actually delete the
roto brush tool effect on this layer and now the background is back and with this layer selected
let's also press enter to rename it to background just for organizational purposes now if you want
to turn on the visibility of the background layer just click on the eye icon to turn it on or off
and let's turn it off for now so now what we're going to do is we're going to turn
this roto layer into a mask to do that you're going to go up to layer and select
auto trace from this window you're going to select the work area in your timeline it's important here
to make sure that you have work area selected because you want to auto trace the entire work
area not just one frame and for this clip which is about seven seconds it took about two minutes
to complete the auto tracing once it was done you'll see that the roto was turned into a mask
if we press m on our keyboard you'll see that it will reveal all of the masks that were created
because we only need the main outline mask which is mask number one you can delete all the other
masks so what we need to do now is create a new solid layer from which we can copy the
mask to so to copy the mask make sure your playhead is at the beginning of the timeline
then press command x on a mac or ctrl x on a pc to cut this first mask now go to layer new solid
and let's make a black solid and let's be sure to call it something that will remember like mask and
effects and then we can paste the mask onto the solid layer by pressing command v on a mac or
control v on a pc so now that the mask is on the solid layer it's going to serve as the outline
for the stroke and glow effects that we will apply to it since this is a black solid let's
remove the black by right clicking on the solid layer and then changing the blend mode
to screen to remove the black and since the rotoscoping is done we can actually turn off
our roto layer just below because it's no longer needed now that we have the mask on the solid
layer and now let's turn back on the background layer and as we scrub through you can see that
the mask is not lining up with the subject in the video and that's because i had previously
scaled up the background layer to 122 to fit the frame so all this means is that we have to go to
the mask and effects layer press s on our keyboard to bring up the scale and let's scale it to 122
percent and now it's perfectly aligned so now let's go ahead and add a stroke effect to the mask
go to effects and search for stroke double click to apply it to our mask and effect solid layer
now from effect controls select all mask from this effect and then you can choose any color
that you want for the stroke let's try green and let's increase the size of the stroke
from here you can go to effects and search for glow and you can apply the glow effect to the clip
but i actually prefer to use a free plug-in effect called saber by video copilot it's a plug-in that
you must install while after effects is closed but once you reopen it it'll appear in your effects
so what i'm going to do is double-click to apply the saber effect to the mask and effects layer now
from effect controls underneath saber we need to customize this effect the first thing we need to
do is select the core type and change it to layer mask so that way the saber outline will go along
the mask outline and now this is the cool part where you can play around with some of saber's
presets so for example you can choose solar to get more of a cool sun effect or you can try the mist
preset for a nice blue ice outline i'm going to use the ghostbuster preset and from here you can
customize the preset however you like so you can play around with the glow intensity to make it
higher or lower or if you want to make the outer line smaller or bigger you can adjust
the core size so now when we play it back you can see that the outline the ghostbuster outline
is around the subject the whole time he is dribbling and going up to the hoop but what if you
want the outline to animate around him and move around him as he's moving or let's say you want
it to get more intense as he dunks i'm going to show you how to do that using keyframing so from
the mask and effects layer in the composition you're going to open up the saber effect
and go down to customize core in here we are going to animate the start and the end offsets
so to start let's move the playhead back to the beginning and let's bring the offset down
to zero so the effect is not visible then let's turn on keyframing by selecting the stopwatch
now move the playhead forward and let's bring it up to a hundred percent
now from the start offset bring the playhead to align with our second keyframe that we just made
then bring the start offset to zero and then turn on the stopwatch then move forward just a bit
and bring it back up to 100 and now we have this looping motion around the outline as he's moving
and then to repeat it and make it more interesting i'm just going to lasso and select all of these
keyframes then copy it by hitting command v or control v on a pc and then i'm going to
move forward and paste it and now when we play it back you can see we have some interesting movement
looping around our subject and at the very end i'll make one more keyframe
so that way the outline will stay as he's going up to dunk and now when he dunks the exact moment if
we move to that exact frame we want the intensity of the core to increase so that way the outline
gets thicker and the glow is more strong so i'm going to turn on the keyframing next to core size
then i'm going to move one frame over and increase the core size to around 2.5 and then
when he lets go i'm going to move forward and do the exact opposite i'm going to set the keyframe
right before he lets go and then i'm going to move one frame over and reduce the core size
back down to 1. and now at the very end if we want it to fizzle out the outline to go back to norm
let's go back to the start offset set a keyframe then move the playhead forward just a little bit
and then increase this back up to 100 to make the outline disappear as a flicker movement so you
don't have to animate it exactly like i did it i just wanted to show you that you can use the start
and the end offsets to create some cool motion and this was the final effect i was able to create
So that's all for this effect and now here's a little bit about today's sponsor Vidiq if you're
a Youtuber or if you manage a youtube channel VidIQ is a great way to help you optimize your
videos to make sure it's getting more views so how does it work it's actually a chrome extension that
integrates with your youtube channel so when i'm logged into my youtube channel what i'm able to
do is see recommended keywords and I'm using a boost plan so it gives me recommended keywords
that would help my video get more views and as i add the keywords it gives me a score so i can know
that i'm getting closer to the optimal 50 out of 50 seo score so the closer i get to that score the
better my video will appear in searches two more things about VidIQ that i find super useful is
one the thumbnail comparison so if I'm uploading my thumbnail and i want to see how my thumbnail
looks compared to other videos related to my topic i can then search by a keyword and see
what my thumbnail looks like compared to the other competition so that way i can say would
people actually click on my thumbnail compared to somebody else's video after all your youtube
video is like the book cover right so it's the first thing that somebody sees before they decide
to click so it's really important to compare to see if it's up to par to the competition
one last thing that's really cool about VidIq is that you can use it as a research tool
so if you're doing pre-production to figure out what content you want to make you can use VidIQ
to search for trending topics so that way maybe you can make content related to a trending topic
to get more views more subscribers and get more people aware about your channel so if you're
interested in trying out VidIQ i've put a link in my description box below and let me know if you
guys have any questions about it thanks for VidIQ for sponsoring if this video helped you out be
sure to give it a big thumbs up and also hit that notification bell and subscribe so you guys are
notified when I publish new content that's all for today's video and i'll see you guys next time bye!