(magical jingle)
Hey, what's up everybody. Welcome into this Adobe After Effects
tutorial, brought to you by tutvid.com. My name is Nathaniel Dodson,
and today we're going to take a look at this pretty cool transition effect,
which I can only describe as a smooth, split-screen, paralax transition.
Check out the example of it, so you can see exactly what it looks like.
And see if you're interested in sticking around and checking out how to
make this in Adobe After Effects. There you go, that's the effect. If you thought
it was cool, think it's something you like? Well, let's jump into After Effects right now,
and check it out. Alrighty, well this After Effects tutorial is actually going to
kick off here in Adobe Premiere Pro, because what's the sense in creating
a transition if I don't at least show you how to apply it to an actual video
project you're working on? In, let's say, Premiere Pro. So I've got these two
clips here. And we've got a sunset on the beach, and it kicks to just some
young people walking along the beach. And we want the transition to take
place here. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to just move to the split in the
clip, and I'm going to move back one second to 13 seconds here, and what
I'm going to do is overlap my footage, just like that. I'm going to work with
a one second overlap here. Now, what I'm going to do is use my razor tool,
and I'm just going to zip the footage right like that. So, you can see, we now
have these two clips that we can select just like that. And we can ship these
over to After Effects by right clicking on them. We've got them both selected,
by the way. Right click on them, and choose replace with After Effects composition.
It couldn't be much easier. And After Effects is going to say, hey, where do you
want to save this After Effects project file? I'm going to throw it on my desktop
for now, and I'm just going to call it "recd AE," for recorded After Effects. And you
can see here, what we've got - I'm going to just set this to fit on my screen -
we have our two little layers here, and everything here has been brought
into Adobe After Effects. Now, a couple just important things to note here:
as we create this effect, we are, if I come up here to composition, composition
settings. We're creating this effect here, at 2560x1440. So if we wanted to
use this on video that was 1080p. Well, if I go back to Premiere Pro here, and
check out my sequence settings. I need to actually select that sequence there.
And go sequence, sequence settings, I can see that this is a 2560x1440 sequence,
so if you're working at 1080p, 1920x1080, you want to make sure that you're
sending footage from that size file over. The reason I mention it now, is because
this elaborate animation effect that we're going to create, it's going to work for
footage that is 2560x1440. You would need to create a new effect for something that's
1920x1080. But once you do it for that size, we'll be able to swap the footage
in and out, and use this transition for all kinds of different effects. Or, really,
projects, I should say. So I have all these files here in my project bin; the first
thing I'm going to do - I'm going to create a new folder, and just say, "from prem."
It's just, you know, from Premiere Pro, basically. I'm going to leave this comp here,
but I'm going to select all four of these files. I'm going to drag them into that
"from prem" folder. Just to keep things tidied up a little bit. In fact, I can select
this comp, I can right click, and rename it. And I'm going to call this "transition split screen,"
or something like that. Then what I'm going to do, is down here, I'm going to precomp
my two bits of video. So young people on the beach, this is going to be the video
that is going to be replaceable. I'm going to right click on it, and choose pre compose.
And I'm going to name this, precomp, I'm going to name it "footage_replace,"
that way, when I want to come in and replace this footage, and have different
footage swap in, but retain the transition effect, I can right click on this footage and
click nothing here, actually. What I would do, is I would double click into that composition,
and then here I have this video, and you would just drag your new video into
the composition. A little bit of a brain fart there for a second. I'm going to close
that precomp, and I'm going to precomp the sunset beach footage, as well.
Right click, pre compose, and I'm going to name this "footage_background,"
and once more, if we wanted to replace the background, the footage from
which we're moving, we would simply replace the footage in this background
composition. Alright, so the first thing I want to do is create a series of shapes
moving across my frame. And the way I'm going to do this, and ensure that
they are the proper size, and proportionate. I'm going to go view, and I want
to make sure that I show my grid, and then I'm also going to make sure snap
to grid is turned on. So, there's view, show grid, and then I'm going to say, yeah,
snap to the grid, as well. Now, this is a 1440 wide document. And basically,
I want to have forty grid squares going across my document. I don't really care
where they are in terms of the height. I just want to make sure that the width,
there are forty squares going across the document. So, in this case, I would say,
alright, this is a 2560 wide frame. I would go 2560 divided by forty, and that equals 64.
So, I know that each of these grid squares, these cells, need to be 64 pixels across.
So, I come over here to After Effects preferences, and I can come down here
to grids and guide. This would be under the edit preferences menu, if you're not on
the Mac, by the way. And you can see here, for my grid, I have a grid line every
64 pixels. So, that's perfect. It's going to work great for me. It's exactly what I want.
If you're working with your standard 1080p. 1920x1080, so it's 1920 wide. 1920 divided
by 40 is 48. So, you go a grid line every 48 pixels, in that case. I'm going to say
OK here. We can shut off these background video tracks, if they're distracting, and
just work here. Because we're just going to create a series of shapes. I may
back this out a little bit more. Let's go to 50%, something like that. And I think
what I want to do, is create eight rectangles across my entire document.
Now, I don't need these to be exactly perfect. I'm just going to begin at one side,
and I know that all eight of them need to be five cells across. Eight times five is
forty, and we know we have forty little cells running across this. So, I'm first going
to make sure that I don't have layers down here selected, because if I grab my
shape tool, and I start creating a shape, and I have a layer selected, it's going to
create a mask. Alright, so we've got snapping turned on, so I can just go ahead,
and say, Alright, five wide, and there we go. About that tall. That's great. Now, I want
to deselect, so I don't create a second shape, or mask within that shape layer.
And I'm going to go ahead, and draw out another shape. Make sure that we're five
cells wide, great. So I've got two shapes, and I'm going to have three shapes here in
just a moment. Be very cognizant to deselect every time I go back to the well
for another shape. And I can just collapse all these layers, as well, just to keep
things tidy. I'm going to go, drag another shape out, there we go. Five cells
across. And shape number six, voila. Five cells across. Let me collapse more
shape layers in my layers panel. Make sure that I'm not selecting anything,
let's go five more cells across. Voila. Deselect that. And then, last but not least,
our last little rectangle, five cells across. So, you can see here, we have eight
shape layers in our layers area. They're all five cells across. And they all have an
anchor point exactly in the center of our frame, regardless of where the shape is.
You can see, this shape over here on the left, anchor point right there in the middle.
This shape over here on the right, bam! Anchor point still in the exact same
spot in the middle. That's great. And, by the way, as you're creating your shapes,
you can use the hotkey, and I should have mentioned this, CMD+SHIFT+D,
that would be CTRL+SHIFT+D on the PC, to quickly deselect whatever you
have selected. That way you can drag out a shape, CMD+SHIFT+D,
drag out another shape, CMD+SHIFT+D, and so on and so forth. So now what
we're going to do, is we're going to create the animation, and then we're going to
worry about masking it, and creating our transition. So we're going to work with
our two outermost shapes first. So that's shape layer 8, and shape layer 1. I'm
going to hold down my CMD/CTRL key, and I'm going to select both 8 and 1, and
then I'm going to hit the letter 'p,' which is going to open the positioning
options for those two shape layers. Now, what I like to do, is move out to about
fifteen frames, right there. You can see, fifteen frames. Voila. And I'm going to
drop a keyframe, by just hitting this little stopwatch, which is going to toggle
animation. Now, because I've got both layers selected, it's going to drop that keyframe
for both layers. Very easy, very nice. And then I'm going to move back to frame
one, and basically, I just want to change the y position. This 720 number here,
I want to just scroll that back so these white shapes are up above the frame.
So I'm just going to pull that back... I'm going to pull it back even further. I think
I got to get to -720, or so. You know what? I'm going to square it off at -760. And
we'll just make a mental note of that. We're at -760. And now, if I play through this
video, boom! We just have these white shapes over the course of fifteen frames.
Half a second, in our case, because our composition settings are, you can see,
about thirty frames per second. 29.97, basically thirty frames per second. So it's
going to be a half second. Bam! Those white shapes drop down. Now, I do want
to hold down SHIFT, and just make sure I select all four of these keyframes. And then
I'm just going to simply hit F9, that's going to apply an easy ease to this. Which
just makes the animation a little smoother. Gives it a little bounce and snap into place,
makes it look a little bit more professional, and just nice. Now, what we're going
to do, is we're going to repeat this process for layers 2 and 7, layers 3 and 6,
and layers 4 and 9. So I'm going to select these two layers, I'm going to hit the letter 'p.'
In this case, I'm going to move out maybe to frame 17. No, let's go frame 19,
I'm sorry. I want to go four frames past 15, we're going to drop a keyframe here.
And then I'm going to come back to frame four. This is where this animation will
begin. And we're going to set this to, what was it? -760, right? And because we
have both layers selected, you can see that both shapes are up. Let's hold
down SHIFT, and select all these keyframes. And we're just going to hit F9, and boom,
our next animation is done! So, now if we play this, you can see,
we get everything coming together. Boom. We get this double drop effect, that's pretty
cool. And maybe what we'll try to do, we'll try to keep some of this offset, but in
order to really make things interesting, maybe what we'll do is take the frames here
at the end, and really push them close together. So, maybe they'll end up just
one frame apart in terms of how and when they finish. That'll vary the speed, and
just everything about the transition a little bit more. I think that'll be a neat little
effect to have. Alright, I'm going to take layers 3 and 6. Hit the letter 'p' to open up
positioning. I'm going to jump out here, just one frame beyond, at frame 17, we're
going to drop our keyframe to activate animation. And maybe here we'll just move
two frames out. We're just going to really mix things up here. We want this to
look structured, yet kind of organic, at the same time. I'm going to make sure I hold
down SHIFT, select all my keyframes. Hit F9 to easy ease this, and let's check to see
what we've got. Boom. So, you can see, we're getting this really neat looking effect,
where it's like everything is just kind of wa-blam! Slamming down into place.
And last, but not least, layers 4 and 9. Hit the letter 'p,' and let's jump out here,
let's go out just one frame beyond. We're going to activate animation for this,
and this one we'll just start one frame after right here. And we're going to set this
to -760, as we have been the entire time. Hold down SHIFT, make sure we select
all of those keyframes. And then hit F9 for an easy ease. And now, if I take a look at
this. We get this really cool-looking animation of these boxes, just falling out the sky,
and it looks pretty natural. Now, we can introduce additional organicness, or
more of a natural feel by adjusting where our keyframes start and stop. So I can drag
this one back a little bit. Maybe I'll drag this back one. Drag this back one. The two
center, I want those to stay together at all times. So I think I'm going to be okay
with that. And what I'm going to do, is I'm going to move these back just a little bit.
So I think something like that. Let's see what this looks like. Just really going to
mix things up, and make it - give it a little bit more of a wave effect. So just mixing
up the keyframes a little bit like that, just adds like an element of randomness to
this. Alright, I'm going to select all my shape layers here, I'm going to hit the little
flyout arrow there. And just collapse everything. Tidy up our layers panel, we're going
to start opening stuff up in just a second again. But I just want to make it look
nice for the moment. So, we can turn on our footage background now. I'm actually
going to get rid of "footage replace," because - well, yeah, I'm going to get rid of it,
just for the sake of what we're about to do here. But what I want to do, is I want
to drag out a copy of "footage replace" for each of these shape layers, and we're
going to mask it to that shape layer. So, check this out. We're going to go "footage
replace," drag one down here beneath shape layer 1. And I know you're thinking,
"you just deleted it, why are you dragging out a new one?" It's honestly just
to walk you through the entire process soup to nuts. And then we have this toggle
switches button down here. Maybe this is what you're layers panel looks like.
You want to hit this little toggle switches button, because we want to get this
track matte option. And here, for "footage replace," the one we just dragged out,
we want to set the alpha matte to be shape layer 1. So that's this animated layer
right above it. Bam. And now, what's going to happen is, as that first shape animates
in, it's going to just animate one strip of the video dropping like that. Very, very cool.
But we're not finished yet. We're going to - I'm going to speed up the footage here,
and I'm just going to quickly mask all of the remaining footage replaces here to
all these other clips as you're seeing me do here in the sped up video. And I'll
be back in just a second, and I want to show you one last really cool thing that we're
going to do, to really help complete this effect. Alrighty, so if I just quickly scroll
through this, we can see that we have our video now transitioning from that beach
shot, to just this shot of the people walking down the beach. How can we make this
cooler? How can we make it even better? Well, let me show you here. I'm going
to make my timeline a little bit larger, number one, so we can really see what's going
on. Check this out. I am going to toggle down my initial "footage replace" here,
in fact, I'm going to select it, and I'm going to hit the letter 'p' to bring up my
positioning again. I'm also going to toggle down the shape layer here. Now, our
shape layer - remember, we animated the position of the shape layer. You can see,
we've got the blue stopwatch, that means, yep that's been turned on, and animating's
been turned on. If I look out here on the timeline, sure enough, two keyframes, great.
Check this out. With position here, I'm going to hold down ALT/OPT and click on the
stopwatch for this position. And what it's going to do is open up my expression option.
I don't really need to write in the expressions though. I'm just going to use this little
twirly, twirly-gig doodad, it's called the pick whip. And I'm going to drag it and
drop on the word position. Not on the numbers out here. But rather, on the word
"position." And what's going to happen, is this "footage replace" layer is now
going to animate along the y-axis, as this shape mask slides down, it will look like
a slice of video is sliding down, as well. So, see how the rest of this video is just simply
being uncovered? Well, now this slice of video over here on the far left, it's actually
sliding down with the mask. So that's going to help our video to have a very
disjointed effect. But then right at the end, as all these pieces drop into place,
all the video will come together perfectly. So it's going to be a really, really cool
effect. So, once more here, I'm going to open up "footage replace," I'll select it.
Hit the letter 'p' to bring up position. Open up my shape layer. And there I've got my
positioning, right there. I'm going to hold down ALT/OPT and click on the stopwatch,
grab the pick whip, and link it to the position. And then I'll just collapse those
two layers. Now, I'm simply going to speed up the video here, and I'm going to
go ahead and knock out the rest of this stuff. And just pick whip up the rest of
these layers, so we can really see what the completed effect looks like before we
send it back over to Premiere. Alright, there we go, I've got everything linked
up. You can see, if I open up "footage replace," our positioning, it's linked now. It's
starting at -760, and it's just basically saying, look, it's going to follow along
with shape layer 8 in terms of the position of the transform. We're not going to
get into how all the expressions work in this video. But basically, now you're going
to see as this begins, we have our video looking like it's all sliced up. Like, see how his
arm is all disjointed? And her legs are here, and her legs are down there? But then,
as the whole video comes to a conclusion, everything just kind of - bam! - drops right
into place. Clicks right into place. Looks great. I'm going to shut off the grid, because
that's just annoying and in the way right now. But you can see how we have a really
cool, little effect of our video, just boom! There you go. There's the transition, just like that.
All we have to do, is save the document, which I just did and I'm going to return
to Premiere Pro. And we can see that we've got this pink linked comp thing here,
and that's just from After Effects. And if I play through this now - you can see,
by the way, it's red, it's not rendered. But we're going to give it a shot and see
how it looks. We can see, that there's our transition. Boom! Seamless. Right
there now, in Adobe Premiere Pro. We just created that transition. Now, what if
we wanted to change this transition and use it in a different video project?
Well, number one, we would go to After Effects, and we would save it as,
and then I would save it as, you know, some other transition, or something. And I would
save it, and then this could be my file that I go and I copy a bunch of times, and I use
it in this project, and that project, and the other project, right? That's up to
you, however you want to handle your file management. But let me show you how
easy it is to swap out the footage. Because you might be looking at this and saying,
"Eight - eight video files I need to swap out? This is crazy!" Well, no, this is why we
just made this simple precomp, where I can go in and drop the footage out and
add new footage and be done with it; because all we have to do here, is well, I'm going
to jump out to my finder. I've got two space shuttle shots here. I'm going to drag these
and drop them into my project. I'm going to double click on - well, let's start with
"footage background," and I'm going to say, look, shuttle shot one, yeah, we're going
to bring you out to here. And I'll drop that on the timeline, we can see it's only, whatever,
six and a half seconds, not quite seven. That's fine. We can delete sunset beach from
this precomp. And now, of course, this shuttle image, this is only 1080p, but no
worries. We can layer, we can choose transform, and choose fit to comp. It's going to just
scale it up, and make sure it works for us, and looks good and everything like that.
That's cool. I can close this comp. Let's delete our footage background here,
and we'll just drag out a new copy of footage background. And you can see, we've
got our space shuttle right there. Let's close up footage background, let's open
up footage replace now. And all we need to do, is replace our .mov here. So I'm
going to drag out the second space shuttle shot. I'm going to go layer, transform
scale, or fit to comp, I should say, there we go. I'm going to delete the young people
on the beach shot. I'll save my file. Close this. And now, back here, we're not going
to have to change all these precomps out like we - I deleted just to refresh the
background. You can see here, if I play through. We automatically, now, have that new
footage just being dropped right into place. So, really, really cool. And it's quite a
simple thing. Now, obviously, the more your footage is timed and sized correctly,
the easier all this is going to be. But that's all stuff that you're just going work out
on your own. How you manage your files and things like that. The point is,
you can create an effect here, in After Effects. Save it out as a separate file,
and very, very quickly swap the footage in something like a precomp, and have
a rather complex transition like this - I mean, this is mildly complex, I would say -
where you have all these different layers of video that are moving at once, and just
by replacing one file, you go ahead and replace all these instances of the video
here across this transition in Adobe After Effects. So there you have it, it's a little
bit of a process. But the nice thing is, of course, once you've done it. Once you
can just swap that footage in or out, and apply this effect to all sorts of different
clips, and all sorts of different projects, and you've got a nice, little transition that
you created yourself. If you enjoyed this video, guys, make sure you go ahead and subscribe
to my channel, so you never miss any video editing tutorials - past, present, or future.
If you're into Discord, you can check us out over at discord.me/tutvid, where the conversation
goes on and on and on. And also, if you're into Instagram, or you have Instagram,
you can follow me over on Instagram, @tutvid. Guys, for messing around with
some precomposition, some layer masks, and some motion tweening, and easing,
and just all the little things that we did to build out this effect here, in Adobe After
Effects, right now, in this video... that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.
