Adobe After Effects - Day 9 (February)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Today I finished adding all the lyrics (text) to my entire one minute video. I also noticed a few things I didn't like and tweaked it a bit, like I just slowed down / sped up some clips so it can truly match the music.


After that, I rendered the video. Adobe After Effect files are pretty big like sometimes it is 4+ GB if I rendered it normally, but since I used the encoder CC, it drastically decreases the file size.

I wasn't sure how to fix the quality though, like make it fully HD, but this is the final product of my project.


BEFORE VIDEO (LAST POST):

AFTER VIDEO (FINAL PRODUCT):

In the before video, I only finished the first half of adding text, in the final finished video, I added all the text and finished.

WHAT I LEARNED:

• I learned a really cool thing where I can speed up/slow down clips. This was super helpful to me because sometimes the clip I want is too short in duration for example, I would need to slow it down so it can match the duration I need it to be at.

All you need to do is right click on the layer of the clip you want to adjust and then click Time > Enable Time Remapping

- After that, two key frames will pop up, depending on which way you drag it, it'll either slow it down or speed it up.

EXAMPLE OF WHERE THE SETTING IS

WHAT I WILL BE DOING TOMORROW / NEXT TIME:

Next time I will start on a new video edit. Since this basically counts as my 'beginner introduction' video, I want to do something different that's cooler.

I saw this glowing scribble effect on youtube, and want to learn it for my next edit. This is my inspiration video/tutorial video.

Adobe After Effects - Day 8 (February)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Today I started adding 'lyrics' or basically just text to my video. I had to watch a tutorial on how to do it as I didn't know how. I wanted to start off simple considering it's my first edit with program, so the text 'effect' I ended up recreating doesn't have very much cool effects added to it.

- I basically just added super simple texts that fades in and out together along with the transitions..


BEFORE VIDEO (LAST POST):

AFTER VIDEO: 

The difference between the before post and after post is that in the last post, I had no text on the screen, but this time I have 30 seconds aka half of the video completed with 'lyrics'. 

WHAT I DID TODAY:

• I know this is obvious, but I learned how to add text! It was super easy adding it in, but making transitions with it was as hard for me when adding the transitions for the regular video clips. (as I'm still adjusting to the idea of key frames)

But either ways, since I used fade in and out for the regular video transitions, I did the same for text so it wasn't super hard.

Basically all you need to do to add text is go to the navigation bar at the very top then click Layer > New > Text

LOCATION OF ADDING TEXT

- or the shortcut CTRL ALT SHIFT T

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Tomorrow I will completely finish this video. All I need to do is finish adding the final 30 seconds of the text, maybe fix a few things like for example random blank cuts or something.

Then I will try to render the video as high quality, but still low file size so I can upload to blogger.

Adobe After Effects - Day 7 (February)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Today I completed adding in all my transitions. They were super simple fade transitions but it actually took longer than I expected as it's my first time using such complex software. (especially with all the key-frames I'm still trying to master it/get used to it)


It may seem as if I didn't put a lot of effort into the transitions as it may look kind of plain (and it's literally only one type, but surprisingly it took very long, and I feel as if this was a good first edit choice to introduce me to the basics.




BEFORE EDIT (LAST POST):

AFTER EDIT:

In the before edit, you can see that only half of the transitions were imputed, but today the after edit contains all the transitions.

WHAT I LEARNED:

Continuing from the last post, I talked about how I learned about keyframes and their jobs. Today I learned a shortcut that helped me a lot because without I'd be kind of confused.

• It is the 'U' key. All it does is basically let me see all the keyframes that I've created/made. Before when I added keyframes then exited, I couldn't find where the keyframes were and transitions just happened randomly, but when I found out about this shortcut, it saved me a lot of time.

• The second thing I learned was that there was an automated button that lets the editor adjust the clip automatically to the composition size. 

For example, when I added in videos sometimes, it would be smaller than the composition itself, leaving black borders because the video wasn't big enough to fit. But when I right click on preview video > transform > fit to comp height, it just transforms the video to perfect size.

EXAMPLE OF THE VIDEO NOT FITTING WITH THE COMP

WHAT I WILL BE DOING TOMORROW / NEXT TIME:

Next time I will start adding text. My goal is to kind of make a lyric video, it's not exactly a lyric video but in simpler terms, you can think of it that way.

Adobe After Effects - Day 6 (February)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Today I added transitions to my video. I added half of the transitions in, meaning that 30 seconds out of 1 minute is finished. I just added in simple fade transitions but it took a while because After Effects is a pretty difficult program to navigate, and I am learning it while doing it.

After Effects is different from other video editing software because the other ones I used before were super easy and you just drag and click for effects, but After Effects is all about key-frames and timing, so it took me a while to figure it out. (still trying to)


BEFORE VIDEO (LAST POST):

AFTER VIDEO:

WHAT I LEARNED:

• The first thing I learned was about key-frames. Key-frames pretty much control all the effects that could be possible in After Effects or pretty much most editing programs.

Once I set a key in a specific location then add an effect, it will perform the 'effect' desired.

Since I can't explain keyframes super well here, here is the video that I watched that goes in-depth about it.

WHAT I WILL BE DOING TOMORROW / NEXT TIME:

Next time I will finish adding transitions to my videos. I have half of the video to finish and I know for sure that just doing the transitions will take up the whole class.

Adobe After Effects - Day 5 (February)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Today I finally finished organizing and moving my clips around to match the timing of the music. This took surprisingly longer than I thought, but I didn't want to make a super slow edit so I tried to mix in 2 clips with like one beat. 

It's hard to explain but you might be able to spot it in my final edit.






THIS IS THE BEFORE VIDEO (VIDEO FROM LAST POST):

THIS IS THE AFTER VIDEO FROM TODAY:

WHAT I LEARNED:

• The first thing I learned about was preview resolution. I learned that when you're previewing your video in the timeline, you can change the quality of it and usually if your computer is bad and can't handle the program, you could change the preview settings to low so the computer can actually load it.

(If it's set on high and your computer can't run it, then it will just lag throughout the whole preview.)

• The second thing I learned was that you can press CTRL and press multiple things at once and it will drag all of them at once, this is super helpful if you want to shift the whole timeline over a few seconds or something.

WHAT I WILL BE DOING NEXT TIME / TOMORROW:

Next time I will be adding the transitions in. I will try to finish adding all the transitions in one class, but I'm not sure how long it will take me approximately..

But one thing for sure is that I will be adding transitions next blog post.

Adobe After Effects - Day 4 (February)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Today I started organized my clips to match the song lyrics. I was only able to complete about half of the song length that I was using, which was 1 minute. I also ran into a problem with After Effects that I still have not been able to fix. The audio stopped corresponding with the clip, the audio would skip over parts so I had to remove the audio, and just edited the video first with no sound.


So basically my exported video will still have no sound added yet, just like the last few posts.


THIS IS MY BEFORE VIDEO (LAST POST):

THIS IS MY AFTER VIDEO (NEWEST EDIT):

WHAT I LEARNED:

• The first thing that I learned was pressing shift to 'snap' the clip. What I mean by that is if I press shift and move a clip around, it will immediately snap exactly to another clip without overlaying it. I constantly used this and it was super helpful when I found out about it.

• The second thing I learned was about exporting size. When I tried to upload my exported videos to the blog, it wouldn't allow me to anymore because the video sizes were too big, and the capacity was 100mb. I learned a new way to export the video that I can somewhat alter the mb.

Instead of rendering like I would usually do, which was go to Composition > Render Queue

I instead went to Composition > Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue

and then adjusted the settings from there.

WHAT I WILL BE DOING TOMORROW / NEXT TIME:

Next time I will aim to finish organizing my clips to match the song lyrics. I also noticed that I might not have enough clips or the right clips that I'm looking for, so I might have to download new ones.

Adobe After Effects - Day 3 (February)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Today I finally finished cutting the clips I needed. I imported 3 more videos, which brings up the total to 5 videos that I am using for this edit. There was no new concept that I did today, but I did learn new things instead. 

This is the before video (edit from last post):

This is after I 'edited' it (or just added more clips):

(Once again I drastically decreased the render quality for time purposes, and I also muted the music because I didn't need it yet, but I will bring back the music in the next render.)

WHAT I LEARNED:

• The first thing I learned about was the render bar. Above the timeline there is blue bar that you can drag and it basically means the 'render zone' aka the parts that will be exported. My whole timeline was 6 minutes and if I didn't move the render bar to match the length of the videos, there would be an unnecessary black screen for the rest of the time.

WHAT THE RENDER BAR LOOKS LIKE

• The second thing that I learned was composition length. In the beginning when I created my composition, they asked me how long I would like my composition to be. I wrote 1 minute and from there my whole timeline only spanned out to a minute. When I added a video that was 3 minutes for example, it would get cut off and I couldn't go through the whole video. I learned that I could adjust the composition length by going over to the left side then right clicking the composition button to change the length of it.

WHERE THE COMPOSITION OPTION WAS

• The last thing I learned was a simple shortcut. You could press CTRL SHIFT P for position. (just moves the position of the video around) I use it a lot to cut out the subtitles that are below on the video.

WHAT I WILL BE DOING TOMORROW / NEXT TIME:

Next time I will be organizing all my clips around to match the lyrics of the song. I'm pretty sure that's all that I will be able to get done next time.

This also takes a while because I might potentially have to add in new clips if I can't use what I already have.

Adobe After Effects - Day 2 (February)

WHAT I DID TODAY:

Today, as I stated last time, I just organized my clips around today. But the thing is, I still didn't finish organizing it. My overall goal is to make a full 1-minute video edit, and I'm trying to squeeze in like 6-7 different clips. Today I only got to two videos. What I mean by that is I only got to work through 2 videos to cut out certain clips I want, and there's still a bunch of them I need to go through.

At the very start, I began with just 2 original full-length videos (from the original shows.) Here are the original videos I imported into After Effects (before doing anything.)

WHAT I EDITED AS OF NOW (AFTER):
(keep in mind that I exported it as a low quality video to avoid loss of time, as the higher quality it is it takes longer to export. If you can't notice a difference it's because all I did was choose specific scenes then rearranged them.)

WHAT I LEARNED:

As you may have guessed, I learned a lot of new things today, and went through a bit of trouble at times, but learned from it..

• The first thing I want to mention is the 'trouble' I went through. I realized that After Effects does this thing where every time you import a new clip or whatever into your timeline, they have to kind of render through the whole thing before you can play it properly. What I mean by that is basically if it doesn't fully 'buffer' then the audio will become super slow and sometimes so do the clips. 

I was very confused when this happened because I thought something was wrong with the program. I later learned myself, not sure if it's right still. My suspicions were kind of confirmed when I switched to a good computer. Good computers tend to render it way faster so sometimes you don't even notice that After Effects does that.

For now, I'm not sure if it's some setting that I can fix or not, but it's not preventing me from editing in any way, it just gets a bit irritating sometimes.

THE SMALL GREEN BAR ABOVE REPRESENTS THE 'BUFFER' THING

(in my experience, if the blue line is faster than it, or goes past it, the whole timeline with audio and videos dramatically slows down, like it distorts the audio.)

• After all that, I edited like normal and found a shortcut that was super helpful!

- CTRL SHIFT D = It cuts a certain part out of the clip and brings it onto a new timeline (super helpful when trying to take multiple parts out of one clip)

every time I cut a new clip out it creates a new layer with the clip

• I then learned about the scale tool. I used this a lot because I had to sometimes adjust the video to the composition size, and also at times had to zoom into the video

WHAT I WILL BE DOING TOMORROW / NEXT TIME:

Next time I will still be cutting out clips that I think I will need. The actual organizing part comes after I have all the clips. Last time I said I was organizing, but it's actually just splitting clips.

And I'm sure that's the only thing I would be able to get to the next class because this already took so long, and I only got through 2 videos.

Adobe After Effects - Day 1 (February)

WHAT I DID TODAY / LEARNED:

Today I planned to start editing a new video in a new program called, 'Adobe After Effects.'  But first, I had to download the right videos, then pick the music/soundtrack I wanted and that took a while as I had to also plan out how I wanted the video to go.

Since I already learned last time how to do download things, I didn't really learn anything new today as I did was set up.

In the end, my idea for my new video will be T.V shows from actors to the song called, 'Stressed Out.' And I also plan on adding text with some basic transitions as I am completely new to this program.

-From the title of the song you can tell the theme of the video, it's hard to explain what exactly I have in mind as of now, but when I start editing it, you might be able to catch on to what I'm doing.

So today, I found videos from each actor's T.V show (certain clips) then downloaded it, and also a cover of the song 'Stressed Out' because the original song didn't match the vibes of the video I was going for.

SYMBOL FOR DOWNLOADING

THE SONG THAT I WILL BE EDITING WITH

WHAT I WILL BE DOING TOMORROW / NEXT TIME:

Next time I will start editing in the program right away. I watched a few tutorials before on getting started, and I am aiming to kind of organize my clips around, which will take a while because the videos I am using are all 3minutes + which means I have to scroll through all of it and cut out clips I need.

I'm also trying to make the clips match the lyrics of the song, so I doubt I'll get any farther than organizing clips.