Adobe After Effects 5.0- P1 pot

Adobe, the Adobe logo, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, ATM, Classroom in a Book, Illustrator, Minion, Myriad, Photoshop, Script, and Type Manager are trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorpora

© 2001 Adobe Systems Incorporated All rights reserved.

Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 Classroom in a Book®

This book, as well as the software described in it, is furnished under license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license The content of this book is furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a commitment by Adobe Systems Incorporated Adobe Systems Incorporated assumes no responsibility

or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in this book.

Except as permitted by such license, no part of this documentation may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Please remember that existing artwork or images that you may want to include in your project may be protected under copyright law The unauthorized incorporation of such material into your new work could be a violation of the rights of the copyright owner Please be sure to obtain any permission required from the copyright owner.

Adobe, the Adobe logo, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, ATM, Classroom in a Book, Illustrator, Minion, Myriad, Photoshop, Script, and Type Manager are trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated Apple, Mac OS, and Macintosh are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc registered in the U.S and other countries Microsoft, Windows, and Windows NT are either registered trademarks

Post-or trademarks of Microsoft CPost-orpPost-oration in the U.S and/Post-or other countries UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners PANTONE® Computer Video simulations displayed may not match PANTONE-identified solid color standards Use current PANTONE Color Reference Manuals for accurate color All trademarks noted herein are either the property of Adobe Systems Incorporated, Pantone, Inc., or their respective companies.

Contains an implementation of the LZW algorithm licensed under U.S Patent 4,558,302.

Protected by U.S Patents 4,837,613; 5,185, 818; 5,634,064; 5,729,637; 5,737,599; 5,754,873; 5,781,785; 5,819,301; 5,832,530; 5,832,531; 5,835,634; and 5,860,074 Patents pending.

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Printed in the U.S.A.

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Contents

Getting Started

About Classroom in a Book 1

Prerequisites 1

Copying the lesson files 4

How to use these lessons 6

Additional resources 7

Adobe Certification 7

Lesson 1 Creating 2D Elements from Hexagons Getting started 13

Building the first hexagon composition 15

Transforming the image 22

Creating an animated pattern from a simple image 27

Adding complexity to the animation 35

Transforming a precomposition layer 40

Applying a third level of motion and other refinements 45

Reusing your work to create a second element 53

Rendering compositions 57

Lesson 2 Building Elements from Squares Getting started 66

Creating the first element: dancing squares 67

Creating pulsating strips of squares 85

Creating a lens flare 99

Combining components to create box lights 104

Creating the second element: a line of box lights 107

Lesson 3 Animating Circles Getting started 116

Creating line circles 117

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ii

Creating dot circles 125

Creating the first element: multiple rings 127

Creating more elements: multiple lines and multiple dots 135 Lesson 4 Building Star-like Elements Getting started 144

Creating the first element: an audio starburst 145

Creating the second element: light rays 162

Lesson 5 Working with Text and Numbers Getting started 172

Creating the first element: a line of text 173

Creating the second element: text circles 183

Creating the third element: numbers 192

Lesson 6 Building 3D Hexagon Elements Getting started 206

Creating the first element: 3D hexagons 207

Creating the second element: 3D hexagon outlines 227

Lesson 7 Combining 2D Elements in a Composite Getting started 236

Creating a new composition 239

Creating a second composition 246

Lesson 8 Beginning the 3D Composite Getting started 260

Creating a composition 262

Working with cameras 266

Adding the hexagon layer 273

Adjusting the live-action footage 277

Lesson 9 Finishing the 3D Composite Getting started 288

Adding prepared 3D footage 290

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Adding the TextCircle element 293

Adding the TextLine element and setting a position 295

Adding BoxLightsLine elements 300

Rendering the 3D Composite composition 302

Lesson 10 Building the Final Animation Getting started 308

Creating the glowing-ball reflection 312

Building the final composition 325

Putting together the final scene 344

Lesson 11 The Render Queue and Output Formats Getting started 352

Creating templates for the rendering process 353

Creating templates for output modules 356

Rendering to different output media 359

Index 369

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Getting Started

Adobe® After Effects® 5.0 provides the core 2D and 3D tools for compositing, animation, and effects that motion-graphics professionals, Web designers, and video professionals need After Effects is widely used for digital post-production of film, motion graphics, video multimedia, and the Web You can composite layers in various ways, apply and

combine sophisticated visual and audio effects, and animate both objects and effects

About Classroom in a Book

Adobe After Effects 5.0 Classroom in a Book® is part of the official training series for Adobe graphics and publishing software The lessons are designed so that you can learn at your own pace If you’re new to Adobe After Effects, you’ll learn the fundamental concepts and features you’ll need to use the program Classroom in a Book also teaches many advanced features, including tips and techniques for using the latest version of this application

The lessons in this edition include opportunities to use new features, such as compositing layers in 2D and 3D space, viewing 3D from different perspectives, creating and editing expressions, editing masks, defining parent-child relationships between layers, animating lights and cameras, using an enhanced interface with new conveniences, and more

Prerequisites

Before beginning to use Adobe After Effects 5.0 Classroom in a Book, make sure that your system is set up correctly and that you’ve installed the required software and hardware You should have a working knowledge of your computer and operating system You know how to use the mouse and standard menus and commands and also how to open, save, and close files If you need to review these techniques, see the printed or online documen-tation included with your Microsoft® Windows® or Apple® Mac® OS documentation

Installing Adobe After Effects

You must purchase the Adobe After Effects 5.0 software separately For system ments and complete instructions on installing the software, see the Install Readme.wri

require-(Windows)or Install Readme.txt (Mac OS)file on the application CD You must install QuickTime 4.0 or later, which is also included on your After Effects application CD

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Getting Started

Install the After Effects and QuickTime applications from the Adobe After Effects 5.0 application CD onto your hard disk; you cannot run the program from the CD Follow the on-screen instructions

Make sure your serial number is accessible before installing the application; you can find the serial number on the registration card or on the back of the CD case

Allocating RAM to After Effects

Creating movies is memory-intensive work for a desktop computer The more random access memory (RAM) available to After Effects, the faster the application will work for you It’s a good idea to allocate as much RAM to After Effects as possible For these lessons, a minimum allocation of 128 MB is strongly recommended

Windows automatically allocates RAM to the application

To do this, quit After Effects if it is running, and then select the After Effects program icon (not an alias) in the Finder Then follow the standard Mac OS procedure for changing the Preferred Size setting in the After Effects Info window For details about adjusting memory usage for your Mac OS, see your Mac OS online Help

For more information about optimizing performance, go to the Adobe Web site and search the After Effects Support Knowledgebase “Top Issues” page

Installing the Classroom in a Book fonts

To ensure that the lessons appear on your system with the correct fonts, you may need to install the Classroom in a Book font files The fonts for the lessons are located in the Fonts folder on the Adobe After Effects Classroom in a Book CD, which is attached to the inside back cover of this book If you already have these on your system, you do not need to install them If you have Adobe Type Manager® (ATM®), see its documentation on how to install fonts If you do not have ATM, installing it from the Classroom in a Book (CIB)

CD will automatically install the necessary fonts

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(Mac OS) If you install a Type 1, TrueType, OpenType, or CID font into these local Fonts folders, the font appears only in Adobe applications

Restoring default preferences

The preferences file controls the way the After Effects user interface appears on your

screen The instructions in this book assume that you see the default interface when they describe the appearance of tools, options, windows, palettes, and so forth Because of this, it’s a good idea to restore the default preferences, especially if After Effects is new to you.Each time you exit After Effects, the palette positions and certain command settings are recorded in the preferences file If you want to restore the palettes to their original default settings, you can delete the current After Effects preferences file (After Effects creates a new preferences file if one doesn’t already exist the next time you start the program.)

Restoring the default preferences can be especially helpful if someone has already

customized After Effects on your computer If your copy of After Effects hasn’t been used yet, this file won’t exist, so this procedure is unnecessary

Important: If you want to save the current settings, you can rename the preferences file

instead of deleting it When you are ready to restore those settings, change the name back and make sure that the file is located in the correct preferences folder.

1 Locate the After Effects preferences folder on your computer:

• For Windows 2000: /Documents and Settings/<user name>/Application

• For Mac OS: /System/Preferences

2 Delete or rename the Adobe After Effects 5 Prefs.txt file (Windows) or the Adobe After Effects 5 Prefs file (Mac OS)

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Getting Started

3 Start Adobe After Effects

Note: (Windows only) If you do not see the Prefs file, be sure that the Show all files option is selected for Hidden files on the View tab of the Folder Options dialog box.

Copying the lesson files

The lessons in Adobe After Effects 5.0 Classroom in a Book use specific source files, such as image files created in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, audio files, and prepared QuickTime movies To complete the lessons, you must copy these files from the After Effects Classroom in a Book CD (inside the back cover of this book) to your hard drive

Setting up a folder structure

Before you copy the source files to your hard drive, create the folder structure that you will use throughout these lessons Because the project builds from lesson to lesson, this structure is very important as you progress, so be sure to take the time to set it up now

On your hard drive, create a new folder in a convenient location and name it AE_CIB job, following the standard procedure for your operating system:

folder, and choose File > New > Folder Then type the new name

and drag the folder into the location you want to use

Inside your new AE_CIB job folder, create eight more folders and name them as follows:

Copying the source files

The source files for the lessons are relatively small files You can install all the files for those folders now The Sample_Movie files are large, so unless you have many gigabytes of free storage space on your computer, it’s best to copy the sample movies as needed for each lesson and then remove them from your hard disk after you finish viewing them

If you use After Effects on a Windows computer, you’ll also need to unlock the files before you use them This is not necessary if you are using a Macintosh computer

1 Insert the Adobe After Effects Classroom in a Book CD into your CD-ROM drive

2 Copy the source files from the following five folders on the CD to the folders of the same name on your hard drive: _ai, _audio, _mov, _psd, and _txt There is no _aep folder

to copy because you’ll use this folder for the project folders you create in each lesson

3 Unlock the files you copied (Windows only) by doing one of the following:

• If you copied all of the lessons, double-click the unlock.bat file in the AE_CIB/Lessons folder

• If you copied a single lesson, drag the unlock.bat file from the Lessons folder on the CD into the AE_CIB job folder, and then double-click the unlock.bat file inside that folder

• If you want to unlock the files individually, right-click the file, and select Properties from the contextual menu In the file Properties dialog box, under Attributes, deselect the Read-only option

About copying the sample movies and projects

You will create and render one or more QuickTime movies in most lessons in this book The files in the Sample_Movies folder are low-resolution examples that you can use to see the end products of each lesson and to compare them with your own results These files tend to be large, so you many not want to devote the storage space or time to copying all the sample movies before you begin Instead, find the appropriate Lesson folder in the Sample_Movies folder on the CD and copy the files it contains into your Sample_Movies folder as you begin work on a lesson (You cannot play movies from the CD.) After you finish viewing the movie, you can delete it from your hard drive

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How to use these lessons

This entire book represents a single project, based on a hypothetical scenario in which Adobe Systems hires your company to create an 18-second movie that they will use for NTSC broadcast and on the Web The designer for this project has separated the project into more than a dozen independent elements that you create and render separately In the later lessons of the book, you’ll bring all the elements together in stages to create the final composite and render it to the various formats your client requires

Each lesson provides step-by-step instructions for creating one or more specific elements

of that project These lessons build on each other—in terms of concepts, skills, and the job files themselves—so the best way to learn from this book is to go through the lessons

in sequential order In this book, some techniques and processes are explained and described in detail only the first few times you perform them

Note: Many aspects of the After Effects application can be controlled by multiple techniques, such as a menu command, a button, dragging, and a keyboard shortcut Only one or two of the methods are described in any given procedure, so that you can learn different ways of working even when the task is one you’ve done before.

The organization of the lessons is also design-oriented rather than feature-oriented That means, for example, that you’ll work with three-dimensional effects and layers in different ways over several chapters rather than in just one chapter entirely devoted to 3D, as you’d find in the After Effects 5.0 User Guide

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aims to give you confidence and skills so that you can start creating your own projects For more comprehensive information about program features, see:

• The Adobe After Effects 5.0 User Guide, which is included with the Adobe After Effects 5.0 software and contains descriptions of all features

• Online Help, an online version of the user guide, which you can view by starting After Effects and choosing Help > Contents (Windows) or Help > Help Contents (Mac OS)

• The Adobe Web site (www.adobe.com), which you can explore by choosing Help > Adobe Online if you have a connection to the World Wide Web

Adobe Certification

The Adobe Training and Certification Programs are designed to help Adobe customers improve and promote their product proficiency skills The Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) program is designed to recognize the high-level skills of expert users Adobe Certified Training Providers (ACTP) use only Adobe Certified Experts to teach Adobe software classes Available in either ACTP classrooms or on-site, the ACE program is the best way

to master Adobe products For Adobe Certified Training Programs information, visit the Partnering with Adobe Web site at http://partners.adobe.com

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Getting Started

A Message from Belief

When Adobe approached Belief, a broadcast design studio in Santa Monica, California, to do the After Effects 5.0 Classroom in a Book, I was truly honored Belief has long been a champion for doing motion graphics on desktop computers and has been using After Effects way back when it was called CoSA In fact, when my partner Steve Kazanjian and I started Belief, we set out to do the impossible at the time, which was

to build the entire studio around desktop machines Today this practice is becoming more common, which is great for artists for there are more opportunities for their visions to be experienced.

Belief has continually tried to share with the design community, and creating this book was a great tunity to continue this tradition We have inspired the exploration of experimental motion graphics with the artists from our studio and around the world with the “Untitled” series Steve and I have taught classes and given lectures encouraging artists to get into this rewarding industry I believe strongly in the potential of After Effects and have been impressed how the Adobe team has continued to evolve the product, adding many new features without alienating their core users I hope this book will not only inspire but will teach users a new way of approaching projects Inexpensive tools like After Effects empower artist visions to dance across movie screens, television sets, and—with the Internet—our home computer screens.

oppor-The key to the Belief approach is to break projects into elements Making a project modular is a way to simplify projects and thus make it easier to handle client changes Creating motion graphics for money is a commercial art form and clients have final say, but that doesn't mean the work you produce can't be amazing I have noticed many students creating animations using only one composition with hundreds of layers Those who have been taught to approach projects this way should try to erase that memory and begin fresh with a new outlook You will soon find as you continue through the book, that a modular element based approach is a much more efficient way of working.

This Classroom in a Book is unique because the lessons are designed in sequential order to create the elements needed to produce one fully realized, complicated animation When you complete the book, you will know many new principles that you can apply to any project you undertake Get ready to open your mind while I leave you these departing thoughts Technique is the key: Don’t learn how to drive from A to Z, learn how to navigate Keep working until you not only complete the lesson but understand what you did and why You may get confused but try not to get frustrated; you're not an old dog and you will be able to learn new tricks! And finally, remember that great animations ALWAYS begin with great design!

Mike Goedecke, Partner Belief

www.belief.com

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3D selection tool 212

3D views 209, 218

3DHexagons.mov

creating 230 using 308, 340 3DHexLines.mov

creating 230 using 308, 340

ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) 7

Active Camera view 218

ACTP (Adobe Certified Training

Providers) 7 Add Expression command 130

Adobe After Effects 5.0

allocating RAM 2 installing the application 1 restoring default preferences 3 Adobe Certified Expert program 7

Adobe Certified Training Providers 7

Adobe Illustrator files 145

Adobe Photoshop files 15, 85

Adobe Training and Certification

Programs 7 Adobe Type Manager 2

AE_CIB job folder 4

allocating RAM to After Effects 2 alpha channels 15, 16, 145

Alpha Inverted Matte "layer"

option 320 alpha-channel button 146 Anchor Point Path command 48 Anchor Point property 21, 49 anchor points 48, 129 animations previewing 27 rotoscoping 337 setting keyframes 25 Stroke effect 123 arrow keys 23 arrows expanding hidden items 17, 21

in Effect Controls window 154 keyframe navigation 47 for window menus 29

X axis (red) 211

Y axis (green) 211

Z axis (blue) 212 ATM (Adobe Type Manager) 2 audio files

importing 145 previewing 147 Audio Spectrum effect 151 Audio switch 149

B

Background Color command 21 background color, changing 21, 100 backgrounds 278, 326

Basic 3D effect 131 Basic Text effect 175 Best (quality) switch 71 Bevel Alpha effect 317, 329

blue defining 336

Z axis and arrow 212 BoxLightsLine.mov creating 110 using 288

C

CameraData.txt 260 cameras 266–273 adding 224 frames 271, 272 importing data for 269 motion-control 264 Point of Interest 272 tools 225

wireframe representation 271 changing

See also animations, editing, effects

background color 21

In points of layers 35 values, techniques 23–24 Channel Blur effect 252 Cinepak 361

circles, drawing 121, 315 Classroom in a Book about 1

copying files for 4 how to use 6 prerequisites 1 clearing all keyframes 26 Collapse command 41 Collapse Transformations switch

41, 295 collapsing and expanding items in windows 17, 21, 154 collapsing transformations 41 Color Dodge transfer mode 254, 332