It’s not uncommon to want to draw a mask around an object in a scene…and then that object changes position from frame to frame, as either the camera or the objects itself moves. The movie below demonstrates the Rigid Mask Tracker tool: It helps track that object and move your track points to match. It’s not always perfect – you might need to do some hand-tweaking afterwards – but that’s a lot easier than having to track or even redraw every single frame by hand.

These movies were previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.

(And since we’ve mentioned the 3D Camera Tracker, we’ll throw in a bonus movie at the end that shows a tweak to that effect.)

Show & Delete Track Points

Warp Stabilizer automatically scans your footage to find features it feels will help it track and reconstruct the original camera move. However, sometimes it latches onto “track points” that are moving in relation to the rest of the scene, and which therefore may throw off the track. Here’s how to see the points Warp Stabilizer has found, and choose ones to delete.

Reverse Stabilization

You can use Warp Stabilizer to add a new feature into a scene. To do that, you need to remove any motion in the scene, add your new feature, and then add the original camera move to that new feature. Those steps (as well as a few other real world workflow tips) are shown here.

Apply Motion

You can also use Warp Stabilizer VFX as a tracker, and apply that motion to another layer. That trick is demonstrated here.

Preserve Scale

One type of movement that can throw off Warp Stabilizer is when you are walking through a scene, rather than just panning or holding a camera in an unstable fashion. This movie shows you how to spot glitches in stabilization of this type of footage, and how to correct Warp Stabilizer VFX’s motion.

Bonus Movie: 3D Camera Tracker – Ground Plane

Adobe refined the 3D Camera Tracker effect in the initial Creative Cloud release of After Effects. In this movie, we refresh your memory on how to use Auto-Delete Points Across Time, and then demonstrate the new Set Ground Plane and Origin feature, discussion when and where it comes in handy.

These movies were previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.

This feature came in a couple of different forms. It was added to the Roto Brush Tool, which we already covered in detail earlier this year. It is also available as a standalone plug-in – Refine Soft Matte – that can be applied to any footage that has already been masked or matted using other tools. We cover both below.
As is always the case, when we created these movies we worked closely with Adobe’s engineers to understand precisely how these tools work “under the hood”, and what is the preferred workflow to get the most out of them. Following these steps will save you a lot of time and grief compared to just “winging it” and trying out this tool without first studying and understanding it.

Refine Edge Tool

This movie demonstrates how to create an initial Refine Edges brush stroke, including viewing options and touching up your initial strokes.

Propagating Refine Edges

After you have an initial Refine Edges brush stroke define, it needs to be updated from frame to frame to take into account changes in the underlying footage. After Effects does its best to do this automatically; this movie shows how to detect when it is going off course, and how to correct it.

Fine Tuning Refine Edges

Once you’ve defined the region After Effects is supposed to work on to create beautiful edges, they may still initially look ugly. Take these steps and use these parameters to improve the end result.

Roto Brush Changes

When Adobe added Refine Edges to the Roto Brush tool in the initial version of After Effects CC, they changed some of the terminology inside the effects dialog. This will update you on those changes.

Refine Soft Matte

You can use the Refine Edges technology for mattes created by means other than Roto Brush, including keying and ordinary masking. This movie shows you how to put the standalone Refine Soft Matte effect to work.

By the way, the Roto Brush Matte section of the Roto Brush tool also exists as a standalone effect: It’s called Refine Hard Matte. This allows you to feather and reduce “chatter” (random movement) in normal binary mattes.

These movies were previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.

(CS5 also saw the introduction of a couple of features that have since been discontinued, including Forge Freeform and Photoshop Repousse. If you’re still using an old version of After Effects and would like to see the movies on Freeform and Repousse, let us know in the comments and we’ll include them in this series.)

Roto Brush provides a software-assisted way to create an alpha channel to cut out actor or other feature from the background – even when it has soft edges. When it works, it provides as substantial time savings over masking by hand. However, it is not an instant gratification effect, and can be very frustrating to use and get good results from. We were among the beta testers for this feature, and worked closely with the developers to come up with the recommended workflow, which is covered in the six movies below.

The last (seventh) movie covers later changes in terminology for some of the parameters in Roto Brush, so make sure you watch that. In short:

• Smooth is now Feather
• Feather is now Contrast
• Choke is now Shift Edge

1) Overall Workflow

This explains how Roto Brush works, and lays out the steps to follow to get the best results when using Roto Brush:

2) Creating a Base Frame

Roto Brush needs a starting point to extrapolate from. This movie describes how to select a good base frame candidate, as well as how to create the best base frame to inform Roto Brush’s processing:

3) Propagating the Base Frame

Once you have good Base Frame, Roto Brush “propagates” that information to frames before and after the Base to update the Segmentation Boundary as the subject moves. Here’s how to optimize the Propagation settings, and make corrections when Roto Brush goes astray:

4) Propagation Gotchas

Several things can throw Roto Brush off, including objects that enter or leave the frame. Here’s how to deal with those:

5) Refining the Matte

Once you have a good Segmentation Boundary that follows your object from frame to frame, you need to refine the resulting matte (alpha channel), including dealing with motion blur, color contamination, and “chatter” as Roto Brush gets indecisive about defining an edge:

6) Application Ideas

So now you can more easily separate a foreground object from its background. What you are going to do with that? Here are some ideas:

Roto Brush Changes!!!

When Adobe added Refine Edges to the Roto Brush tool in the initial version of After Effects CC (after the movies above were created), they changed some of the terminology inside the effects dialog. This will update you on those changes.

These movies previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.

The tool to deal with this challenge in After Effects is known as Variable Mask Feathering. Here’s how to apply it:

These movies were previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.

This problem is known as “rolling shutter” – and way back in After Effects CS6, Adobe added a plug-in to remove this artifact. Maybe. The movie below covers how the plug-in works, what problems it can solve, and what types of shots will break the plug-in’s attempts to repair it:

These movies were previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.

In the early days of After Effects we had corner pin tracking, where you tracked the four corners of the target, and warped the new object to fit inside those tracked points. The problem often was that those four points had their own individual jitter and other inaccuracies, causing the pinned object to wobble. Then when mocha was added to After Effects, it brought a more sophisticated idea of tracking a plane with the idea it was supposed to be rigid (not rubbery with each corner moving individually), and calculating the motion, scale, rotation, and skew of that plane.

After Effects CS6 introduced a true 3D tracker that automatically detected and tracked multiple points in a scene, and from their relative movement reconstructed a 3D world complete with camera movement. You then decided where the new plane was located in this 3D world, and the 3D camera move did the rest.

Below are a series of five movies we created back in 2012 that demonstrated the workflow, including advanced compositing tricks. The one major thing that has changed since then is the choice of 3D rendering engine: the Classic Renderer is still available, but the Ray-traced 3D Renderer has been replaced with the CINEMA 4D rendering engine. Fortunately, this new renderer has a very similar user interface and features, so it should be easy to translate instructions from one to the other.

1) Applying the 3D Camera Tracker and performing the initial track:

2) Refining the track, including deleting bad track points, and optimizing the calculations:

3) Choosing Track Points to use to place your new planar object, and creating the camera and dummy layer to use:

4) Replacing the dummy layer with your own footage, and choosing a rendering engine, finessing the composite using Blending Modes:

5) Creating a “shadow catcher” layer to create a more realistic composite:

Bonus Movie: 3D Camera Tracker – Ground Plane

Adobe refined the 3D Camera Tracker effect in the initial Creative Cloud release of After Effects. In this movie, we refresh your memory on how to use Auto-Delete Points Across Time, and then demonstrate the new Set Ground Plane and Origin feature, discussion when and where it comes in handy.

These movies were previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.

In 3D, it’s easy for everything to be equally sharp and well-lit regardless of distance from the camera, which does not match our normal experience with cameras or our own eyes. To help make 3D scenes look more realistic – or at least less synthetic, Adobe added the following suite of features (plus a utility to automatically do something many power used to do manually):

Light Falloff

On earth, lights do not illuminate objects over an infinite distance – air attenuates light the further it travels away from its source. The Falloff option for 3D lights allows you to determine where it starts to dim, and how quickly its illumination falls off.

3D Camera Depth of Field

After Effects’ 3D camera has long had the ability to automatically blur the layers (and portions of layers!) depending on how close to or far away from the virtual camera. Unfortunately, the initial implementation had very poor quality. If this turned you off of the feature forever, you should revisit it, because Adobe improved it to have a smoother blur, to simulate different iris settings, and to treat specular highlights differently as they’re blurred.

Depth of Field Utilities

Even though AE’s 3D camera supports automatic blurring of a scene based on depth of field, it can be tricky (or at least time consuming) to set up how the camera is focused. Therefore, Adobe added a number of utilities to automatically set the Focus Distance (the distance between the camera and the sharpest point in the scene), or even have it track a layer automatically.

Create Orbit Null

A fun motion graphics or visual effect trick is to have a camera orbit around an object. This used to require the animator to either do a lot of tricky keyframing, or to set up a specialized “camera rig” made out of null objects and then animate each of those elements. Adobe has added a utility to create this rig for you – and we show you how to use it.

Camera Lens Blur

Sometimes, you want to add cool, realistic camera depth of field effects to scenes that have already been shot, and which do not have a 3D camera in After Effects to animate. This effect allows you simulate the look of a real camera with different iris shapes and more.

These movies were previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.

1. Creating a Stereo 3D Camera Rig

Creating stereo 3D video requires using 3D space in After Effects, to get different perspectives for the left and right eye. This video explains the terms “stereo” and “3d” in this context, then shows how to create a Stereo 3D Camera Rig in After Effects. This uses a script added to AE that creates a chain of compositions, which we dissect and show how to use:

2. Stereo 3D Controls

Running the script noted above also adds two custom effects: Stereo 3D Controls, and 3D Glasses. The first one allows you to set how exaggerated the 3D effect will be, and what point in space the left and right cameras are looking at to set where the “screen” is:

3. 3D Glasses Composition

The second custom effect sets up which compositions are used for the left and right eyes and other important viewing options. We also talk about how to deal with color balance in this world where the two eyes are tinted differently from each other:

4. Focus and Convergence

Focus – and giving the eyes and brain clues as to what is near or far (such as depth of field effects) – are important for creating a Stereo 3D experience that is believable, versus one that just gives the viewer headaches. Here we dive into the tweaky details:

These movies were previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.

Adobe tried developing their own audio program in house – Soundbooth – but about a decade ago decided to buy the popular (and mature) Windows audio program CoolEdit. They made it cross-platform, renamed it Audition, and included in their suite of software, including an editing command in After Effects (as well as in Premiere Pro) to take a source file and round-trip it through Audition.

In these two movies, we’ll show you how to do this round-trip, and demonstrate a few of the common audio enhancement tools in Audition you might want to take advantage of.

Simple:

This movie demonstrates replacing audio effects in After Effects with processing in Audition, including taking advantage of the Favorites and Presets in Audition.

Advanced:

Here we did a bit deeper, including handling clips with both audio and video, as well as one of our favorite ways to improve voiceover tracks.

These movies were previously appeared on Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning. They’ve retired this course from their library, so we’re making the movies from it available publicly for free. You can either scan our page on ProVideo Coalition to see the other free movies we’ve posted over the last couple of years, or check out the Crish Design channel on YouTube.