Week 9 Animation and Editing Tips

Animation and Editing Tips

  • Animating faces / animating Photoshop layers and drawings

How to import files from Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, and even audio clips, into Adobe After Effects
How to animate your photoshop layers

Understanding-keyframe-Interpolations
Adding-adjusting-keys
Motion-sketching – “is a tool that allows you to add a bit of motion capture with your cursor inside of After Effects. The main advantage here is that you can get some fairly organic motion as it records your mouse movement in real-time as well as being able to quickly rough out position key frames. With a sketch in place, we can use the smoother inside of After Effects to simplify the key frames and fine-tune from there”
Using the Wiggler in After Effects to add dynamics to movement…
(Above via Lynda course : After Effects Guru: Keyframe Assistants <<– has lots of tips for how to create more nuanced animated movements.)
Creating-looped-animation-expressions

  • Splitscreen

Cinematic uses of the split-screen effect can point at some of the ways multiple clips can play against each other within more immersive projection mapped settings:

The Art of Split Screen (Article with interesting links and examples)
The Aesthetics of Displays: How the Split Screen Remediates Other Media – Malte Hagener
A blog dedicated to split-screen visuals (many interesting clips and resources in its archives)
“I’m a big fan of the typical split screen: the frame is divided into two or more areas, and each area shows a different scene or a different view of the same scene, so that multiple images are shown at the same time. More generally, I’m interested in the simultaneous use of multiple layers of imagery – side by side, superimposed, and otherwise visually orchestrated – to add depth and richness in narration, meaning, emotion and representation of time and space.”
This split-screen music video for Pharrell + Cat Power – highlights some of the possibilities inherent with having multiple video surfaces to play with.
Split Screen video channel at vimeo
Double Trouble – Special Issue on Split and Double Screens

  • Adjusting lines
    Via Lynda – Creating-write-paths : “Animating paths and strokes are an essential technique for altering shapes or other elements as if they were being written on or erased off”
  • Transform shapes
    Via Lynda: Shape-layers – “are a crucial component of a motion graphic artist’s toolset. The procedural and non-destructive nature lets us experiment and animate the various properties that create them. In many ways, it’s a lot like a small version of Illustrator directly inside of After Effects.”
  • Distorting / warping / transforming faces
    “After Effects includes a vast array of Distort effects, both native and third-party plug-in, for distorting (morphing) an image. The Warp effects include the ability to correct or stabilize images with Rolling Shutter distortion.”

Transparency in Clips for Overlays (Using Alpha Channels)

As we start to think about compositing with the projection mapping software, having media with some transparency can be very helpful in enabling interesting compositing. This could be with still images (PNG files) – or video files (many options available – see below):

What are Alpha channels? (another definition)

“Creating an overlay or title sequence that you want to make sure keeps the alpha channel on export? Here are some of the best video codecs and image sequences that will make layering clips a breeze. Whether it’s a simple title card or a complex VFX action explosion, these codecs with alpha channels can make layering video files easy.”

Video Compositing: How to Work With Alpha Mattes and Alpha Channels

Exporting with an alpha channel in After Effects
Exporting with an alpha channel in Premiere


Recommended codec for use in Madmapper = HAP (ie your computer will run better if using video files made with this codec) :

“Hap is a video codec that performs decompression using a computer’s graphics hardware, substantially reducing the CPU usage necessary to play video — this is useful in situations where CPU power is a limiting factor, such as when working with multiple high resolution videos in real-time.”
(Read more about HAP and why it works well in real-time video applications… )
HAP installers: for mac – HapQuickTimeCodec.Mac.v12.pkg and windows HapQuickTimeCodec.Windows.v12.msi

Once installed, this will also include option for exporting clips as HAP ALPHA – meaning export with transparency.

https://resolume.com/manual/en/r4/dxv https://resolume.com/software/codec
DXV_Codec_3_0_1_Installer.exe (Windows) DXV_Codec_3_0_1_Installer.dmg (Mac OS X)

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