The 3D Camera Tracker effect can analyze a piece of video and determine the exact placement and movement of the original camera used to shoot the footage. We're going to use that effect to place some text into a scene, making it appear as though it's been sitting in the environment of the scene itself. The footage in this project is of an airport runway. And I want to add the number 05 to the runway right in this area here. So, to start that process, let's select the (Runway.mov) layer in the Timeline, then go up to the Animation menu and choose Track Camera. Immediately, After Effects CC will start analyzing the footage in the background. This allows you to work in any other composition in After Effects CC while the analysis is still happening. If you want to get an update to the status, go ahead and look in the top of the Effect Controls panel under the 3D Camera Tracker, and you'll get a real-time update unless it's finished. Once it's finished, the effect will be highlighted here in the Effect Controls panel, and you'll see these crosses in the runway here. Now, if you hover your mouse over these crosses, you'll notice there is a target that appears. And the target determines where you're going to place something in the scene. Now, I'm looking at this, and the target is very distorted. So, let's look at some of the settings. If we go to the top of the Effect Controls panel, under Shot Type, Fixed Angle of View has been chosen. That means the lens wasn't zooming in and out during the shot, which is correct. But when you notice some drastic distortion like we saw with the target, you may want to go in and specify the angle of view. So, I went online and searched angle of view with my model of camera that shot this footage. And it just so happens the angle of view, or the field of view, for my specific camera was 73 degrees. So, I'll specify my Horizontal Angle of View and set it at 73.0 degrees and press Enter. Notice it doesn't have to reanalyze anything. It just recomputes the analysis. Now, when I hover with my target, it still got a little distortion, you know close up here, but it's nowhere near what it was before. And when I'm out here, there's far less distortion. So, I'm going to hover around this general area and I want my target to look like it's actually sitting on the tarmac. If you notice, as I'm moving my mouse around the scene, I'm getting three points that create a triangle. And so, if I click, those three points will be selected. If you hold down Shift and click on other points, you can use those to further refine exactly where the elements are placed in the scene. Now, it's not that important that you have the exact same points that I do, I just want you to make sure that the target looks like it's actually sitting on the tarmac. Hover your mouse over the middle of the target. And you should notice the mouse change into the Move tool here. Once you see the Move tool, go ahead and drag the target anywhere you like in the scene where you'd like to place your graphics. Once you have it in a location you like, right click or Control click if you're on the Mac, right over the center of that target. And then choose Set Ground Plane and Origin. So, whenever you insert something with the 3D tracking data, it will automatically be inserted at the origin. So, it's really important to go ahead and set that. Once it's set, move your mouse back over the center of the target and then right click or Control click again. And this time, I want you to choose Create Text and Camera. To edit the text, go to the Timeline and double click on the T icon for the Text layer. Then type 05 and grab the Selection tool to set the type. Now, let's go to the Character panel on the right and change our typeface. Click once on the Font drop-down menu and rather than previewing fonts, let's type Arial, arial, press Enter to set the new font. Let's press R to open up the Rotation and Orientation settings. Click and drag on the Z Rotation parameter until you get to a setting of 91 degrees. In order to reposition this, I'm not going to change the position, I'm going to change the anchor point. So, press A to open the Anchor point and usually I would scrub on these parameters as I reposition, but I already know exactly where I want things to go. So, let's change X to -25.0. And press Tab to move to Y. And we'll set -27.0 for that and press Enter to set. Now, the text is very large, so I'll press S to open up the Scale. And your scale number may be slightly different than mine, so just try and visually match it. I'm going to set my scale to 580.0, and press Enter. And then to blend the colors in a little better, let's go over the Character panel and grab the Eyedropper. And then sample a gray from the side of the runway. So, after you've picked your color, press V to grab the Selection tool. And let's press R to open the Rotation/Orientation one more time. Because I'm looking at this and the angles here are a little tight. So, let's change the Z Rotation on the Orientation to a setting of 95.0°, and then I'll click in the bottom of the Timeline to deselect everything and press the Spacebar to play everything back. So, remember, if you have the chance, pay attention to what camera the footage was shot with. That information can sometimes come in very handy.

The track mask feature in After Effects CC can make quick work of blurring out unwanted elements from your footage. In this tutorial, we're going to blur out a license plate. To get started, let's select Layer 1 in the Timeline and press the Spacebar to playback. You may notice there's a fair amount of movement in this shot, so we might have to make some minor adjustments as the track is occurring. I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback and move my Current Time Indicator back to the beginning of the Timeline. We want to start by applying a mask. So, go up to the Tool panel and grab the Pen tool. With the Pen tool active, let's go to the lower left corner of the Composition panel and change the Magnification to 200%. And then press and hold the Spacebar down to switch to the Hand tool temporarily. As long as you hold the Spacebar down when you click and drag, you're just repositioning things using the Hand tool. Then just let go of the mouse, and let go of the Spacebar, and there's your Pen tool back. Now let's start adding points around the outside edge of the license plate. Let's start in the upper left corner and click around through each of the corners, staying kind of close. And then when you get back to the first point, make sure to click on that to close the path. If you need to reposition a point when you hover back over that point, you can click and reposition. So, I'll just reposition the edges of the mask, off the edges of the license plate. There we go. OK, this looks pretty good. Now we're ready to start tracking. Since we're on frame 0:00:00:00, we only need to track down to the right. To track, select the layer and press M to reveal your Mask 1. Right click on Mask 1 and choose Track Mask. That will open the Tracker. Here we want to look at the Method. I'll click on the drop-down and we can just choose Position, Scale & Rotation. To track to the right, let's choose the innermost Play button that points to the right. So, go ahead and click Play, and let's watch the track. You want to keep a close eye on the track as it's occurring because if any of these points start to drift too far away from their current position, you'll want to stop playback by clicking on the Play button one more time. Thankfully, this track seems to be doing well so far, so I haven't had to stop. OK, now I'll stop here because I want to adjust the points. Make sure and press V to grab your Selection tool, and click outside of the mask to deselect all the points. Then you can go around each individual point and adjust accordingly. Now you should be a little careful every time you stop to make adjustments to the mask. Because the mask Tracker is adding a keyframe for every single frame. So, here I'm going to move my Current Time Indicator between the last two keyframes. And I'll use J and K on my keyboard to toggle back and forth between the last two. And you can see, there's a pretty big shift here, but it's not going to be that bad because it's going to be a blur and that means it won't be that noticeable. Now let's go back to the Tracker and keep tracking to the right. And you'll want to repeat the same process we just did at various times throughout the rest of the Timeline. And through the magic of editing, I'll go ahead and join you, once this track is complete. All right, so I'll move my Current Time Indicator back to frame 1, and then go up to the Effect menu, down to Blur & Sharpen. And let's choose Fast Box Blur. Let's go up to the Blur Radius and scrub to a value of 9.0. And then go back down to the Timeline and I'll collapse Mask 1, open it up, and then just Feather the mask. So, click and drag and we'll feather the mask about 12.0 pixels, and let's change that mask back to Add, and open the Effects options here in the Timeline. Open up Fast Box Blur and at the bottom, click the Plus button next to Compositing Options. This way the mask is only masking the effect and not the layer. Feel free to click anywhere to deselect and then press the Comma key on your keyboard to zoom out to 100%. Then press the Spacebar to watch your video. It's always wise to watch your video at 100% before you decide whether or not you like the results of your work.

 

Keying uses a specific color or luminance value to determine transparency. Now the process of removing that specific color or luminance value from an image is actually called keying or pulling a key. And while there are several tools in After Effects CC you can use to pull a green screen key, the Keylight effect is by far the best place to start. So, I'll select Layer 1 in my Timeline, and then go up under the Effect menu, Keying and choose Keylight (1.2). The first thing you need to do with Keylight applied is set a screen color. So, in the Screen Colour area, come over the right and click on the Eyedropper to grab it, and then just click in the green background area to sample the green color, press the Spacebar to begin playback. And you might notice some white noise here in the lower right corner. To get a better view of what the key actually looks like, we need to look at the matte, which is a black and white representation of transparency. I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback. Let's go over to the View drop-down in Keylight and choose Screen Matte. So, any pixels that are 100% white are fully opaque. And any pixels that are 100% black are fully transparent. Any other variance is semi-transparent. Since I see so many grey pixels, I'll start by increasing the Screen Gain to a setting of 110.0. Increasing the Screen Gain allows for more variance in the green color. Another way to heighten the effect of the key is to increase the Screen Balance. So, I'll change that to a setting of 95.0, just to increase that a bit and notice that's helped with some of this area here on the inside of my matte. At this point, I want to go down to the Screen Matte area, to further tweak the adjustments to my matte. Clip Black will help remove grey pixels from black areas. So, I'll increase this to a setting of 10.0. And notice a lot of that noise that was in the corner is now gone but I have introduced some here in the white area. So, to help clean up the white area, let's decrease the Clip White setting. So, I'll decrease this to a setting of 85.0. At this point, let's go back to the View drop-down and change it to see Final Result. And while this looks relatively okay, I'm going to go down to my Timeline and turn on my BT_Stats_Background.psd, because I want to see what the dog looks like over top of the background. So, the first thing I'm noticing, is I need to actually slide him off the screen a little bit. So, I'll select Layer 1 and I'll press P to open the Position, and I'll just scrub along the X axis to position him off to the side here a little. And viewing it 100% magnification, this looks kind of alright. I'm going to press the Spacebar to begin playback, just so we can double-check and see if there's anything else I need to adjust. Sometimes you might want to increase the magnification just to double-check. So, I'll press the Period key on my keyboard and I can see there's a little bit of noise in his coat but not too much. I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback. Also, another thing you want to check out is the edge of the key. And I can see I'm losing a little bit of detail along the edge here. So, the first thing I want to do is change my Clip Rollback. So, I'll set this to a value of about 1.0. And notice that's added a little bit more detail back into the side. Screen Shrink/Grow. Let's scrub on that to see what it does. Well Grow definitely grows the matte and Shrink shrinks the edges and so I'll actually shrink this, but I'll just shrink it a little bit to a value of -1.8. Screen Softness will add a little bit of softness back into the edge of the matte. I'll just go ahead and press 1.0 and see how that looks. That's definitely softened up the edges, which I think is a slightly more appealing look. You may want to click on the View drop-down menu again and change it back to Screen Matte, just to see the result. And there are definitely some black pixels in my white matte. So, we need to go ahead and despot the black pixels. So, let's go to the Screen Despot Black setting in Keylight and click and drag to the right. I'll set this to a value of 4.3. Now let's go and change the Screen Matte back to Final Result, and press the Spacebar. Now I can still see a fair amount of noise in the coat. So, in order to fix that, I'm going to go to the Replace Method here and change the drop-down from Soft Colour to Source. And adding the source back in has definitely alleviated a lot of that noise. Now I'll press the Comma key to zoom back out. Now we could continue to tweak this but the most important thing to remember when pulling a green screen key, is that you don't have to get the key 100% right in one shot. Most successful composites are created when you combine multiple tools and techniques.

 

Green screen footage that has been keyed sometimes displays a little extra noise around the edge that's hard to remove using the Keylight effect alone. However, we can quickly remove noise from the edges of the footage by utilizing something called a garbage matte. Let's check out our project so we can see what we're working with. Move your mouse to the lower right corner of the Composition panel, just outside the edge, and then hold down the Z key. That'll automatically select the Zoom tool. Click and drag to draw a rectangle around this lower right area and then let go. You can let go of the mouse and let go of the Z key, and press the Spacebar to begin playback. And it's very hard to see but there is noise down here. To see it more clearly, I'm going to press the Spacebar to stop playback. Select Layer 1 in the Timeline then go to the Effect Controls, and under the View drop-down menu, change it from Final Result to Screen Matte. There's the noise. If I press the Spacebar again for playback, here you can see it a little more clearly, kind of dancing through the scene. I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback. To fix this, let's zoom back out in the scene. We can use the Comma key and then the Period key, but notice it's not centered. So, to quickly center our zoom, hold down the Shift key and the / button. To create the garbage mask, go up to your Shape tools and click on the Rectangle tool. If you don't see that click and hold and make sure you choose the Rectangle tool. Then come down to the Timeline and make sure Layer 1 is selected, and then we can just draw a rectangle, starting in the upper left corner. Down, past the lower right. And you want to give a little extra space, so you don't accidentally cut off the edges. Press MM on your keyboard, and if you didn't press it fast enough it may hide everything so I'll do it one more time, MM. There we go. That will open up the Mask Feather options. So, here I'm going to increase the Feather setting to about 20.0, which is going to give me a soft transition along the edge of my mask. Now I can't see that because I'm in the Screen Matte view. So, let's go ahead and change the view back to Final Result. Now when we press the Spacebar for playback, we no longer have that noise in the lower right area. Now as I'm looking at the shot, I'm noticing there is some green screen that's peeking through right here. So, I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback, because there's a way we can fix this using a garbage mask on another layer. So first, I'll modify this garbage mask. So, press the Comma key to zoom out and then go up to your Toolbar and click and hold on the Pen tool. Select the Add Vertex tool. Then let's add three points along this bottom line. One, two, three. Make sure you click directly on the path. And then go back and grab your Selection tool from the Toolbar. I'll grab this middle anchor point and drag it up. And I'll drag this next one over. Now I'll drag this other one over as well. Select Layer 1 and press Control + D to duplicate. If you accidentally clicked on the mask, you may have duplicated the mask, so make sure you've selected Layer 1. Now press M to open the mask for Layer 1. And I'm going to solo this layer, so this is the only layer we're looking at. So, click the Solo button here on the left side of the interface, and I want to change this mask. I'll first delete this old one. So, click on the words Mask Path and press Delete. I just want this one area back in over top of the other footage. So, I'll go back up to my Shape tools here, and I'll just grab the Rectangular Shape tool because that's close enough. And I'll click and drag a rectangle around this one area. Press V on your keyboard to grab your Selection tool, click outside of the mask to deselect, and here I can just click on this lower left one if I want to bring that point a little further over. OK, let's turn off Solo for the moment. And you'll notice we have this over top, which is fine. It's not much of a difference but if I toggle the visibility off and on, you can see this is where the green area is, on Layer 1. So, what's great about this is now, I can go in and adjust some settings in the Screen Matte option. So, under Screen Matte, I'll choose Screen Despot Black, and I'll set it to 0.0 and press Enter. And now I get the colors back in that image. Just to make sure that everything is nice and smooth, I'll press MM, and again MM, there we go. And I'll just add say a 5.0 Mask Feather on this mask. So, when we click off of everything to deselect and then press the Spacebar to begin playback, you can see we've cleaned up the edges over here and we've cleaned up the edges here. We've utilized two different garbage mattes, one cut off the majority of the extra stuff and then the other one we just used to fill back in with other settings for a new Keylight layer.

 

One way to create drama in a shot is by retiming your video footage. In this tutorial, we're going to explore some different ways to retime video in After Effects CC. And specifically, we're going to focus on three methods: Interpret footage, time stretch and time remap. Let's start by opening the 01_Retime - Interpret Footage composition in the Project panel. So, double click on it and you'll notice in the Timeline I have a piece of footage that's 59.94 frames a second. But with the composition selected, you can see up here the composition is 29.97 frames per second. If I press the Spacebar to playback, you'll notice it's playing in real-time. By default, After Effects CC will render at the composition's frame rate settings. So, if I want this footage to playback more slowly, I need to change it somewhere else. I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback, and open the Footage folder in the Project panel. Select the Juggle.mp4 - 59.94 video file that's in there and press Control + D on Windows or Command + D on the Mac to duplicate. Let's right-click on the new duplicate copy and go to Interpret Footage, Main... Under Frame Rate, let's enable Conform to frame rate, and change it to 29.97, which is half of 59.94. Go to the bottom and click OK. Now, let's rename this clip. Press Enter, and then we'll rename the end of it 29.97, and press Enter. Let's see what this looks like. Drag the video clip to the top of the layer hierarchy in that Timeline and sure enough, now it's 30 seconds long. If I press the Spacebar, it's going to take a second to load up the frames, and then there we go. It's playing back at half speed. The beauty in this is the fact that After Effects CC isn't having to create any additional frames out of thin air. It's just playing each individual frame, since we shot it at 59.94 and we're only playing it back at half the speed. I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback. Let's open the 02_Retime - Time Stretch composition. Double-click on it in the Project panel and select Layer 1. Right click on Layer 1 or Control click if you're on the Mac and go up to the Time settings and choose Time Stretch... My favorite thing about Time Stretch is its ability to specify a duration. So, go to New Duration, and let's set this to 20 seconds. So, if I type 2000, that's 20 seconds long, and the retime will start at the Layer In-point which is exactly what I want. And I'll click OK. If you press the Spacebar, it's going to go ahead and load up those frames. Now notice, it's playing back more slowly. I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback. Let's go back to the Project panel and double-click on the 03_Retime - Time Remap composition. Go down to the Timeline and select Layer 1. And you can right click on the layer or Control click if you're on the Mac. And go to Time and choose Enable Time Remapping. Immediately, you'll get two keyframes. What these keyframes record is that frame at that specific point in time. So, if I move my Current Time Indicator to about 4 seconds in the Timeline, I'll say 0;00;04;01. And I go over to the left side of the Timeline and click the Add Keyframe button here between my two navigation arrows. I have now locked that point in time to this keyframe. So, if I want the first four seconds to play back over two seconds, I'll just drag this to the left, and now when I go back to the beginning and press the Spacebar you can see she's going to be playing back much more quickly, and then slow down afterward. To get a visual representation of this remap, I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback, click on the words Time Remap in the Timeline and then enable the Graph Editor. Go to the second button from the left in the bottom of the Timeline and click on that and I want you to choose Edit Value Graph. Here I get a graphic representation as to how the retime is working. Now let's see what happens if we moved the keyframes here in the value graph. Click on the second keyframe and drag it up. And indeed, it is changing the value of that keyframe. Now it's going to play the first six seconds of video in the first two seconds. Let's investigate the steepness of the line. If I move my Current Time Indicator back to the beginning and press the Spacebar, the steeper the line, the faster the footage. The more flat the line, the slower the footage. Now I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback. And just grab this third keyframe and drag it down. And you can see the line is now going in a downwards fashion. When I press the Spacebar now, you can see it's definitely playing backwards. So, if you're lucky enough to be involved in the production process, whenever you know you want to slow footage down, it's always wise to shoot at a higher frame rate. The more frames you have equal greater flexibility during post-production.