Adobe After Effects 7 - How to Use Layer Effects and Motion Blur Video

By: Guest More than a year ago

Verry cool video thanx!

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Adobe After Effects 7 - How to Use Layer Effects and Motion Blur

Now I am just going to twirl up these layers because we do not need to see those details anymore, but the next thing I want to do is add a couple of drop shadows into this. The animation looks like it is made of layers so it would be nice to give the impression that this is a white layer on top of this one, and this is a layer on top of the background. The quickest and easiest way to do that is to apply drop shadows. Now there is a pretty easy to do inside of After Effects. I am going to select the white solid one first, come straight up to the effect menu and go all the way down to perspective and towards the bottom of that list you will see drop shadow. Now this will activate the effect controls pallet up here in the left hand side. You will see it sits in the same area as the project window but you can still switch back and forth between them. Let me just make a couple of changes here. First that I am going to do is drag the direction angle around holding down the shift key until it snaps up into zero, and you will see that that changes the light angle so the shadows now actually coming up from the bottom, and that works very well because none of the other edges on this layer are visible on screen. You can also adjust the opacity. Let us make it a little bit lighter about 35% and I will just increase the softness to round about 15 or 20 pixels just to gently blend of that edge in. now I want exactly the same effect with exactly the same settings on the city layer in the background. I do not want to apply all of those things again. Well you can just simply copy and paste effects between the layers. With that selected here in the effect controls window, I am just going to press Command+C or Ctrl+C on the PC to copy it into memory. Come down here to the timeline and select the city layer. You will see that the effect controls pallet here now tells us that we are focusing on the city layer. With this pallet now selected just clicking on it gives us this yellow board and that tells us that it is highlighted. You can then press Command+V or Ctrl+V on the PC to paste exactly the same effect in to that layer. Once again quick scrub through the timeline, you can now see the drop shadows and making this image look more 3D. Now I am just going to drag the time indicator here back to around 28 frames along in the animation. This is sort of a partway through this bounce here of our city background. What we are going to do is bring in another layer now. This one is going to be a Photoshop layer. If we come across to the project pane on the upper left hand side, scroll down until we see all of the Photoshop files, and the very first one here “Steve faces 01.psd” just like any other layer. Click and drag it so it comes down in to the timeline, and once again drop it at the very top. Now this is actually a still taken from some high definition video, and you will see it comes in very large compared to the standard video format composition we are working in therefore, we want to scale it down to fit our image. Well if we hit the S key, we can activate that scale property and start dragging and you will see that it does not de-scale from the center of the layer. Now you can set this to whatever size you want. I am going to take it to around 55% and then I want to position it towards the right hand side of my screen, but it do want to make sure that I am within the safe areas. Those will appear on television sets without bleeding off the edge. Well down here in the composition window there is a button that will allow you to access title and action safe areas. As soon as you turn that on you can see both of those marked around the outside of the comp. So picking this layer up now, I can make sure it positions itself definitely with the shoulders in that area, and the head within the title safe area as well at the top. So that is pretty good. I also want to animate this on screen now using the same sort of bounce that we had in the city in the background. So you should be familiar with this process by now. I am going to hit the P key to gi

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Now I am just going to twirl up these layers because we do not need to see those details anymore, but the next thing I want to do is add a couple of drop shadows into this. The animation looks like it is made of layers so it would be nice to give the impression that this is a white layer on top of this one, and this is a layer on top of the background.

The quickest and easiest way to do that is to apply drop shadows. Now there is a pretty easy to do inside of After Effects. I am going to select the white solid one first, come straight up to the effect menu and go all the way down to perspective and towards the bottom of that list you will see drop shadow.

Now this will activate the effect controls pallet up here in the left hand side. You will see it sits in the same area as the project window but you can still switch back and forth between them. Let me just make a couple of changes here. First that I am going to do is drag the direction angle around holding down the shift key until it snaps up into zero, and you will see that that changes the light angle so the shadows now actually coming up from the bottom, and that works very well because none of the other edges on this layer are visible on screen.

You can also adjust the opacity. Let us make it a little bit lighter about 35% and I will just increase the softness to round about 15 or 20 pixels just to gently blend of that edge in. now I want exactly the same effect with exactly the same settings on the city layer in the background. I do not want to apply all of those things again.

Well you can just simply copy and paste effects between the layers. With that selected here in the effect controls window, I am just going to press Command+C or Ctrl+C on the PC to copy it into memory. Come down here to the timeline and select the city layer. You will see that the effect controls pallet here now tells us that we are focusing on the city layer.

With this pallet now selected just clicking on it gives us this yellow board and that tells us that it is highlighted. You can then press Command+V or Ctrl+V on the PC to paste exactly the same effect in to that layer.

Once again quick scrub through the timeline, you can now see the drop shadows and making this image look more 3D. Now I am just going to drag the time indicator here back to around 28 frames along in the animation. This is sort of a partway through this bounce here of our city background.

What we are going to do is bring in another layer now. This one is going to be a Photoshop layer. If we come across to the project pane on the upper left hand side, scroll down until we see all of the Photoshop files, and the very first one here “Steve faces 01.psd” just like any other layer. Click and drag it so it comes down in to the timeline, and once again drop it at the very top.

Now this is actually a still taken from some high definition video, and you will see it comes in very large compared to the standard video format composition we are working in therefore, we want to scale it down to fit our image.

Well if we hit the S key, we can activate that scale property and start dragging and you will see that it does not de-scale from the center of the layer. Now you can set this to whatever size you want. I am going to take it to around 55% and then I want to position it towards the right hand side of my screen, but it do want to make sure that I am within the safe areas. Those will appear on television sets without bleeding off the edge.

Well down here in the composition window there is a button that will allow you to access title and action safe areas. As soon as you turn that on you can see both of those marked around the outside of the comp.

So picking this layer up now, I can make sure it positions itself definitely with the shoulders in that area, and the head within the title safe area as well at the top. So that is pretty good. I also want to animate this on screen now using the same sort of bounce that we had in the city in the background.

So you should be familiar with this process by now. I am going to hit the P key to gi

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