After Effects - Advanced Menus

[jacobjef]

Has anyone written a guide on the use of Adobe After Effects? Great software (and complex as he!!) to use when making your own menus.

[TRILIGHT]

I've not seen one anywhere, Jacob. Myself or someone else might write one someday. Right now, I simply don't have the extra time to do so. Besides, when it gets into things of that nature, it has a lot more to do with understanding the software (comes from the manual, other books, and practice), the particular project being done (no one knows about your original project but you), and your own creativity (and no one can help you with that one!). Attempting to write an all inclusive guide as with some of the others here on the site, would be rather difficult to do.

[Arky]

As Trilight said, jacobjef, After Effects is so flexible that it would be difficult to make a comprehensive guide. When MikeAtHome and Myself originally posted our methods with Premiere and Edit DV/Cinestream (see the sticky at the top of the Advanced DVD forum) for basic Picture-In-Picture for animated motion menu backgrounds, I asked at the time if anyone would be interested in me taking the time to write an After Effects version of the guide. NOone - and I mean not one single person, ever took me up on the offer and so I never bothered. I am no After Effects master, but I do tend to use it whenever I need a top-quality PIP background. I don't use Cinestream anymore, and I personally don't like Premire. It's not that I often need anything particularly complex - it's just the pristine animation quality which After Effects will produce that sways my decision towards the software. If you want to create a standard PIP in After Effects then I will happily oblige with a mini-tut, but I'm afraid it won't be exhaustively detailed, because when I offered that tut, all that time ago, I was at uni and had the time to spare. Nowadays, however, I work full time and have other projects outside work to do at the moment as well!

Let me know what you wish to achieve.


Arky ;o)

[Arky]

mini-tut done :)

At the present time, it is simply for a basic multiple PIP, but the render quality is nevertheless superior to Premiere, so it's worth taking the time, if you can find the inclination. I think I may improve the guide to include details on how to achieve key-framed bezier-curved motion paths for PIPs, but you will have to bear with me because I am working fulltime throughout the Christmas period, (including Christmas Day and New years Eve/Day!! :( :( :( )

PM me if you need the current basic version. (1.8megs, I'm afraid! :( )

Sadly, Yahoo Briefcase no longer allows public file sharing unless you subscribe, and 1.8megs is way to big for a Doom9 forum attachment.


Arky ;o)

[hendrix]

Animated menu is just an .m2v with or without an .ac3 file with a subpicture. I make my animated menus with After Effects with a PIP effect with a simple subpicture made with Photoshop. Save my .avi file and CCE it to an m2v file and Import it into DVDMaestro.
that simple :D

hendrix

[fletch]

Nice Tutorial Arky :)

You mentioned adding info on key-framed bezier-curved motion paths for PIPs. That sounds very interesting, I might have to experiment with AE tonight. I am not that familiar with AE but I use Premier all the time.

Cheers

Fletch

[Arky]

Yeah, I'll try and add this info to the existing tut some time during the Christmas period, if I can spare a few hours.

It's not difficult, really. Crudely put, if you follow my existing tutorial through to the end, but then go back on yourself, and move the timeline cursor from, for example, 00:00:00 to 00:01:00, and then alter the position of one or all of your "button" layers in the compositing window, you will see that for each (altered/moved)layer's associated track on the timeline, a keyframe will automatically be created (as a consequence of having altered the position of that layer in the timeline window, at the timecode where the timeline cursor was sitting). In this manner, you can repeat the process every second-or-so and tell After Effects to construct a bezier motion path between the keyframes, which will smooth the motion path, just as Premiere does. The difference, as I mentioned in the tutorial, is that the output quality will dramatically exceed that which Premiere is capable of, when creating composites. Using After Effects, there should be no 'jaggies' whatsoever, as the PIPs move around the screen, and absolutely smooth motion, in contrast to the relatively (but not attrociously) juddery motion of Premiere's output (I'm talking relatively here, I'm NOT saying that Premiere's output is 'poor' - just that it's not up to the exacting standard of After Effects, which is fair enough because Premiere is first and foremost an editing, not a compositing application). Try it - I think you'll like the results.

Oh, BTW, don't forget that you can just as easily alter the scale (zoom) of your 'button' layers using keyframes - it doesn't just have to be the position you alter. Do one or the other or even both. In the scenario i described at the end of the tut, the 'button' PIPs would not only move from the top left corner of the screen into their final destinations, but also gradually zoom larger as they travelled their course (say, from 5% => 20%). It all adds to the overall impression of the final composite in a positive way. I did do this exact project about a year ago, but have long since deleted the assets. If we can find a common set of assets, which both of us have access to, I'd be more than happy to setup a project file for you to insert the assets into and render on your own machine. An ideal example of such assets would actually be to each find a plugin which we share in common, which could be used to create the necessary 'identical' assets (Tinderbox 1.1 or similar, perhaps?). i suppose I could create the project using blank bitmaps, though, but that'd mean you'd have to rename your true video assets to match the names of the fake assets ('placeholders') in my After Effects project file. Well, I'm too tired to babble on anymore. I'll help you as much as I can, to achieve what you want - time constraints permitting :)

As i say, I'll add PIP motion-paths properly (with pictures) to the tutorial, within 10 days or so.


Arky ;o)

[TRILIGHT]

I messed with After Effects a LONG time ago before I ever got into DVDR. It's been a while since then and since I've had a chance to give your tutorial a good look, Arky. I just messed with it today and all I can say is "SWEET"!!! It is SO damned easy to make these type of motion menus with After Effects, it's not even funny! Thanks for the tips, Arky!

[Arky]

Glad it got you using the program. AAFX can be a real pig to learn, but for this particular type of work (PIP) it's as easy as... well, it's pretty damned simple, let's just put it that way!

Don't forget that you can very easily create 'picture frames' for your PIPs within Photoshop (EyeCandy is helpful, though not essential, for creating drop shadows if you desire them), import the image as your background, into AAFX, and then match your PIPs to the 'picture frames' of your background image.

Let me know how you get on with your flickering issue, as per your PM.


Arky ;o)

[TRILIGHT]

Well, it wasn't too hard to get up to speed on since I've done most motion stuff in Premiere (what a pain in comparison!) and I'm also familiar with keyframing in Flash and AE behaves similarly. Still not sure on the flickering.

[BassPig]

Originally posted by Arky
mini-tut done :)

Sadly, Yahoo Briefcase no longer allows public file sharing unless you subscribe, and 1.8megs is way to big for a Doom9 forum attachment.


Arky ;o)

So where can we find this tutorial nowadays?

I have the book "Creating Motion Graphics" and am slowly slogging my way through it, but for some reason AfterEffects just doesn't click with the way my mind functions. I'm learning slowly, but not finding that I can intuitively figure things out. Good tutorials that get to the THOUGHT PROCESS used in AfterEffects would be most effective!

[TRILIGHT]

I might go ahead and write a tutorial on what I did recently with some of my TiVo stuff. I had each small window "fly" in as if coming from behind the viewer, spinning and changing opacity until they ended up in their final positions. Once there, the title of each faded in on screen in sequence before the actual "loop" was set up for the menu itself. Not TOO hard to do but the result is really effective. ;)

Anyway, my best advice when it comes to programs like After Effects and Flash are to "think linearly". Now this is not to say they are "linear editors" (as opposed to non-linear editors). That's a whole different story. They aren't "editors" at all so it's best not to think of them as such. However, if you "think linearly" then you should at least be able to get your head around it enough to jump out of that box and do things non-linearly later.

The idea is that things on the timeline will occur in order as they appear. This might sound like a simple concept but it is not always easy to get your head around this. This is why I like the automatic rendering AE does as you move the timeline slider around. You get to see how things will appear at that point instead of always having to work with a wireframe or something. Anyway, let's say you want clip2 to appear onscreen 5 seconds after clip1. Simple enough. Just move your timeline slider 5 seconds into clip1 on the timeline. Drag your clip2 into the scene and viola! Your clip2 start position is 5 seconds into the total play time! You can also drag your clips forward and backward or expand or compress their playtime depending on how you drag the edges.

AE is definitely cool and I've not even done anything seriously advanced with it yet. Let me know if you have any specific questions you'd like to see included in a guide and I'll be sure to include it. Thanks again for getting me hooked on AE, Arky! The software rocks! :)