How to Freeze Time in After Effects

Hey what’s up? Andrew Kramer here, videocopilot.net and we have got a great video tutorial here for you today but also we have a brand new DVD called Designer Sound Effects. And if you come over to videocopilot.net, check out the product trailer, 500 movie trailers sounds effects and awesome, awesome stuffs. So check it out, there is also some cool tutorials, critical shutter effect, learn how to mix and create these cool promos that you see all the time. So go to videocopilot.net, I am sure there are banners everywhere—you can not miss it. Not to mention the new blog, be sure to check that out. Okay so, in this tutorial we are going to create sort of a time freeze effect like this. [Demonstration] Okay, pretty cool. I will point out that these sounds effects are in fact from Designers Sound Effects. How important is that? Now you probably recognize and this is Sam Loya in the video here and he does a great job falling down without the pad on the floors, so that was great. Also this effect has been seen in different places heroes, movies, shows, and all that good stuff. But my earliest memory of this effect is in the show called “Out of This World.” And it was about this little girl who apparently was half-alien or quarter-alien, I do not remember, but check out. Her powers, is the ability to freeze time for other earthlings—interesting. She puts her little fingers together, damn! I loved that show, and a wide that when up the air. Anyway, let us go and gets started. First thing, let us take our Sam freeze footage, drag it into a new comp, and what we have is two shots—we have shot one, walking and falling in real time. And we have shot two, examining. Now, the trick to the shot is being on a tripod, okay. Number two, having the foreground be the thing that is falling or the glass and milk that is spilling, that is got to be in front of your background. The reason why we get into effect the imaginary figure that out, also you want to make sure that you do not cross the planes. So, he occupies this space and he would occupy the space behind him or his walking forward so in front of him, but the point is you want to make sure you have that sort of plan out just a little bit. So, let us go and cut this. We have two shots, CTRL Shift D, splits that right in half. Now, let us find when we want to freeze these shots. So, what I am going to do is take our second shot, and overlay it and bring then we bring the opacity down. hit T, we will bring it down to 50%. So, what we are going to do is move this and try to find where we want to stop time. Now, if we do it here, we are not going to see his face because the boxes are going to be in front, I can not see his face. So, maybe for do it right here, we can see his face, get his reaction and still have a really dynamic shot. So with that in mind, were going to right click on the footage, choose time enable, time remapping. It is also, if you are in 6.5, it is up here somewhere, I do not know. Time enable, time remapping. Then we are going to set a key frame for that point in time look, it is at exactly four seconds, easy enough. Then, we going to the end of the edit and put a little key frame there also. So now we have two key frames, then right after four seconds, we are going to go one frame down, page down, we are going to set another key frame. So if I zoom in here, two key frames, right next which other. There we going too select the second and the last key frame, and minus and plus on a keyboard, we are going to move this over. So, what is going to happen is if you look at the time here as I scrub through, goes in real time, it is playing one, two, three seconds, gets to four seconds—it stops, time standstill. Then after this key frame, time resumes again. And because we kept this together, it will plat in real time, they will not have any frame problems. Let us just extend this clip out, and okay. So now what we need to do is time this animation so, let us turn on our second layer. So, we will call this, Second Sam, we will call this background. And what we want is second Sam to come in just before it freezes. Basically, you do not want him overlapping him until he is a 100% frozen at this point in time. So, here is okay because by time he gets there he will be frozen. And it is interesting effect having them both walking and at the same time, I am sure you can see the possibility for doing cloning—another kind of effects if you do a split screen like we will show you shortly. So, freezes, he walks away, and again we need to make sure he is out of behind him before the animation plays on. So, let us move to about here and then extend this freeze time. So, place time freezes, he is not overlapped him, overlaps, he is out of the shot, real time goes back in the play, we are good to go. So, let us hit N on the keyboard and trim this comp, so we are good to go, now the compositing part. What we need to do is to hit you, we could see our key frame and were we going to duplicate the background and were a call this “The Foreground” and where going to put this on top of this stack. Then, we take the pen tool, hit that till the key, it is the key next the one on the keyboard, we want to basically draw an outline around the area that should be on top, otherwise known as “The two boxes and Sam.” So, what is going here, the good thing, we only have to do this for one frame. So, take the pen tool and just start going down. This is where you can work hard or you can do it fast, it is up to you depending on how much time you want to spend. I will just run through this pretty quickly. I do not know why it was a pink mask. It should be option—they only pick manly colors, sounds like a feature request. Yes, so just go through this, drawing the points. And also if you want to get a round curve, just click and drag, otherwise just a click or create a sharp edge for the boxes, I figured that will be good. And then we get to the person again and we can do this, and we know that he does not overlap in this point so we can frame do this part. Now another cool trick while working on masking is if you turn, let us see. If you turn adaptive resolution off, it would try to update, you know, by creating a low resolution image and it will make it easier to see the edge that you want to create. So I usually shut that off while I am working. Now what do we have? We have this, and we have this background, so what we want to do is—well first, let us clean this edge up a little bit. If we select the foreground, hit M. We can bring the mask in just a little bit, apparently there are two masks, I must have duplicate them, I will delete that. What we can do is hit MM and we can expend the mask or we can contract it, so negative 0.5 and that maybe will be clean up this little edge here. But you know, it does not matter too much but feel free to go in there and use arrow keys and move those points around to clean that edge but I leave that to you guys. So now we have the composite, so what we want to do is go back and find exactly when it freezes, right here, and trim this top layer to only start at that point. So we do not see it and then it comes on. And then again, a frame before the last key frame, we will trim it also. So that it is there and it is gone and we get it when we need it. Then, let us bring the opacity up for the second same layer—the mystical Sam. And so far we are getting there, kind of walking around, walking away. So now we need to bring the other background layer into this. So, with our second Sam layer, we can take the mask tool and where just going to create, I am going to solo the layer, we are just going to create a garbage mat around his person. So, just create a big mask, hit M, mask shape, key frame it, move forward and where just going to kind of follow him and keep it tight because the closer around him, the less we have to worry about any other things being problematic. So follow him out, and follow him out of the shot. And likewise MM, we can expend it just a little bit and then feather it out maybe 25 pixels. In that way, it blends with the edge of the other layer. Then if we turn the background layer on, what we can see is that our character now will be shown and just at the time when it freezes, it does not matter that the background, that was frozen as well. So what I mean is, we do not have to be so perfect with this garbage mat, but for this case, let us bring it off just a little bit so that we do not lose the hand during the live action, real time part. So the point is you just want to make sure that mask does not create any semi-transparent parts and that is sort of the reason why he needs to be out from behind him while you animate that, otherwise you going to see a jump. So anyway, let us see who we are at on this, I am going to hit zero preview. Okay, wow! I did not realize it was going to look that good with such a little work. This is a pretty straightforward effect, I mean, come on they were doing it back in the 80’s with “Out of this World” and I am sure some you guys remember even longer ago. Again thought, you can go and adjust the mask, bring the edges in, I mean, it is up to you. But this is a pretty cool effect and I am sure you guys can think of some really great ways to use it. Now, those sounds effects are on the Designer Sound Effects Collection. You can see just a few of them to create sort of that reverse sound. And that is just one of the few uses of those great sounds. Check out the promo video and all that the information you guy. I think, it is a very powerful collection whether you do compositing and motion graphics, you need that stuff. So that is my pitch, probably not the last one, but then a good one. Anything else I can think of for this tutorial, I mean, it is looking pretty sharp, remember the high shutter speed, remember to be on a tripod and sort of plan the shot out so you know what your going to do. But other than that, I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and I know I had a great time working on it. And, hey videocopilot.net—be sure to checkout the blog, leave a comment, make fun of me, all that good stuff, it is great. My name is Andrew Kramer; videocopilot.net. We will see you guys next time.