Pro Moviemaker Winter 2019

ACADEMY

SOHO EDITORS

RIGHT Creating a loop is a key skill when animating objects like a bouncing ball

are it might be too fast, so separate out the keyframes tomake themotion slower. 12  Many of these presets make text appear and disappear, others make text dance and jiggle inmore varieties of ways than you’ll ever need. Unless you want to build your own text animation from scratch, this is the best place to start. That’s the very basics of how to get a composition up and running and adding key frames. Next, we’re going to look at how to make themovement lookmore fluid. animation, I was taught about the bouncing ball. This is the cornerstone of all animation. It’s not just about movement, it’s about timing, weight, character and emotion. Clearly, we are not getting into all that here, but we are going to look at two very easy but important parts of animating in After Effects. This is easing animation – adding acceleration and deceleration to motion. Andmotion blur –which detects movement and applies the correct blur amount and direction. With a new composition, take an image of a ball (for this example, I had already cut it out from its background) and place it in the composition. Move it near the top of the frame and turn on the keyframes for the position. This drops a keyframe in the timeline. Then, move your playhead forward ten frames andmove the ball straight down so it touches the bottomof the frame. 14  We want to create a loop. So select the first keyframe, copy it, move the playhead 20 frames, then paste it. This will make the ball drop down then return to the exact place it began. Played back, themotion is verymechanical – this is where we add gravity by easing the animation. 13  Bouncing ball When I started learning the art of

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“When you have finished your creation, you can export it as a high-quality video file”

When you right click onmost things in After Effects, it brings up themenu for the selected item. On a keyframe, it brings up themenu and at the bottomof the list is the Keyframe Assistant. Inside here, you can select Easy Ease, which will ease keyframe parameters. The appearance changes to something like an hour glass, indicating the type of keyframe it is. If you do this on the last key frame as well, then play back, you will see the ball now has a sense of gravity as it accelerates when it drops and decelerates when it returns. In this case, I wouldn’t want to Easy Ease themiddle keyframe, as that would slow themotion down before it hits the floor. Some keyframes you want to remain normal (linear) keyframes, while others will look better after being eased. 15  Motion blur While there are several effects for manually addingmotion blur, the fastest and often best results are to use the nativeMotion Blur, which is one of the last switches on the layer. Simply select this on the layer that has movement, navigate to amoment where the layer is moving fast; you should see the blur. With a bouncing ball, it’s going to blur more as the ball falls and blur less when the ball returns to its high position. Any layer

that you addmovement to can haveMotion Blur enabled, and it will naturallymake the motion look smoother andmore natural. Note that it won’t addmoremotion blur to footage, as it’s the footage that is moving and not the layer. An effect called Pixel Motion Blur can be used to addmoremotion blur to footage. composition, you can either export directly as a high-quality video file, or send to Adobe Media Encoder to create just about every other export possible. If you are an Adobe Premiere Pro user, you can import your composition directly in Premiere Pro using Dynamic Link. Depending on the complexity of your composition and the spec of your computer, most simple compositions won’t require any rendering at all. Learn evenmore With these simple steps, you can get just about any artwork or imagemoving. Even just a simple bit of movement can draw the eye over a static image. If a picture says a thousand words, then amoving picture can say somuchmore. That’s why After Effects has become one of themost popular applications to learn and one of themost in-demand skills for filmmakers, designers and editors tomaster. Soho Editors offers an Introduction to After Effects course, where you can get a full hands-on walk-through of this tutorial, and muchmore. Exporting When you’re finished creating your

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PRO MOVIEMAKER WINTER 2019

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