Hi, everyone. Paul Schmutzler here with
a new tutorial for you today for After
Effects. This tutorial will introduce you
to what you might call a plug-in called
Photomotion. Photomotion is available
for download and purchased through the
Envato market. If you've never used Envato,
Envato has several different
libraries that you can choose stock
footage from. Stock images, stock music
and they also have a library of motion
graphics templates and tutorials. And
this is one of those that you can
purchase on the Envato market. Photomotion comes from Integnity, which is a
British company. Photomotion would
loosely be described as a plugin for
After Effects, but it's really an entire
project that's specifically designed to
be able to lead you through some really
complex and great-looking animation and
compositing. Integnity just recently
released version 2.0, and that's what
you're looking at on my screen right now.
You can see that they now have two modes.
If we go into start, there's Photomotion Speed and Photomotion Pro. The
differences are pretty significant. Photomotion Speed is meant for users without
a ton of experience. It makes it really
easy to do some simple, quick animations
to your photos. And Photomotion Pro
enables you to use all of the bells and
whistles of photo motion, including 3D
projection and lots of additional
animation including 3D text and other 3d
elements that you can layer in with your
photos. Now I'm going to show you a quick
demo here from Integnity to give you an
idea of what photo motion can do and
then we're going to walk through a real
quick project that I've put together for
this.
[MUSIC]
So that demo gives you a good idea of
what Photomotion is capable of. Now any
of you that are After Effects experts
are looking at that and saying, "Wow, that
looks really nice, but I can already do
that why would I buy Photomotion?" Well
if you're saying that Photomotion might
not necessarily help you a lot, except it
may make things a little faster for you.
But if you're like me, and compositing
and 2D animation is a little bit of a
it's kind of your weak spot, then this is
really gonna help you make some
fascinating animations much more easily
than you could by going online finding a
tutorial and figuring out how to do
every little step of it yourself in
After Effects and teaching yourself
along the way. So you might call it a
crutch. I call it just a way to get
things done faster and much more easily.
So I actually used Photomotion Pro for
this project because some of the effects
I wanted to do just weren't as easy to
access through the Speed version. So I'm
gonna jump into Photomotion here. And
basically every time you click one of
those things, you're opening a
composition in After Effects. They're
already built here you can see on the
left. There is all the different files
that are built into Photomotion in
these folders. But all you need to do is
follow what's on screen in your
composition window. We'll add the photo
first, and you can see it's very simple.
It tells you everything to do. Right here
on the screen you can see "add your image here."
And then down below, it tells you to add
your image above this layer. And then it
also says to shift parent here. And the
idea behind that is we're gonna use the
parent button here and drag it to this
layer from our image while holding the
shift button. Before I do that, I want to
show you how I set up the photo in
Photoshop. This is an image I took a few
years ago off one of the barrier islands
on the Georgia coast.
It's an Egret just launching out of
these shallow waters into the air. I love
the timing of it. I love the beautiful
white feathers and just seeing him just
launch out of the water and just a
beautiful creature. So what I did was I
wanted to make this bird look like he's
actually a separate element in the scene
and be able to move him. This is just a
still image off my DSLR, but we can make
him look like he's more alive than this.
So I built a mask around him. And
that was simply by making a selection
and then turning that into a mask. You
can see my selection here by command
clicking on a Mac on the layer and
there's my selection. And then my mask is
right here adjacent to it and you can
see the white is showing where the mask
is. So what I did was I used that as a
layer and then in Photomotion... We'll go
back there now.
So let's import our image into the files.
And for this image, we are going to
import this as the whole thing together.
We're not going to choose just a layer.
We're going to merge all the layers. So
there's our Egret image, and we're gonna
drag that onto here right
where it says to, in between these
layers. And then I will hold shift and
parent this to the layer above. And what
that will do is tie everything I do to
this layer to the Egret PSD layer. So now
if I scale this, it's gonna scale that
layer below it. So I think 115 percent
should do it, so we're not losing
anything left and right and getting
letterboxing. Now we'll go back to
projections set up. The next thing I want
to do is add my mask. So we'll click once
on mask settings, and that will bring up
all the settings for the mask. How about
that? On the left here, now this is a
little overwhelming, but bear with me.
Basically all we want to do is enable
mask number one, because we don't have
more than one mask in this image. So
click the check box. Nothing is
necessarily going to change, except you
see now there's the mask layer in your
projection. We'll come back there. Let's go
back to masks for now. You can see now,
look, there's a pink box next to here
which shows you that it's enabled. So
I'll click twice again, and I'm gonna add
the mask. Now here's where you could
create your mask in After Effects, but
since I've created one in Photoshop, I'm
going to import that. So double click
here. I will import the egret image again,
but this time I'm going to choose a
specific layer. Layer one is
what has the mask on it. So I'm going to
leave that, click okay. You can see
there's the mask right there.
So my mask is now imported. Go back here.
And I will import the image to this mask,
which again is the same thing. And again,
you have to shift-parent to the layer
above it. This is simply what enables
Photomotion to kind-of take charge of
the imagery that you're adding into this.
Now you can see that my mask shows as pink,
and we've got the green light on both of
these boxes here. These correspond to the
blue boxes on the left, so now we know
we've done it right. So let's go back to
our projection setup. Now we can adjust
the depth. You can see our egret now
shows up as pink. Now we're going to add
what will really give us the depth of
field or the tunneling in the image in
the final animation. So I'm going to go
to cage settings. Click back over to my
effect controls. Now here's where you can
start to go wild. You can change the
width of your cage and the height and
then, of course, you can adjust where it
is up and down. And I'm going to try to
put it around the bird basically. And
then I'm gonna bring the mask closer by
going here and adjusting the mask
settings. I'm gonna go to - let's try 800.
Okay, so that gives us separation between
the green box which is essentially the
the end of the tunnel or the back of
your projection the pink box being the
mask or the mask is now closer than the
back of than the image on the background.
Now, the last thing you want to do is
because I want to actually move this
thing side-to-side and have the bird
reveal what's behind it. Of course, if
it's a flat image, all you're gonna see
is black or white or nothing. So we have
to add what's called a clean plate. The
clean plate is something I also created
in Photoshop, so I'm gonna switch back
over there real quick and show you how
that works because it's a really cool
process and really shows off how well
Photoshop complements
After Effects when it comes to
compositing. So I've turned off the Egret
layer that's already clipped out just to
show you what it looked like when I
initially made the selection. So we've
got a hole that we have to fill. There
are several ways to do it, but what I did
was I kept the selection and then I
expanded it just a little bit. So go to
select, modify, expand and just a couple
of pixels as all you need. I chose five. Click OK, and you can see it
just went out into the color again. Now
we don't have to worry about all this
ridiculous detail and the waves and then
the trees and beach in the background
because Photoshop with their amazing
content aware fill is going to take care
of that for us. So go to edit, fill. And
then under the fill options, just choose
content aware, and that uses an algorithm
to determine the surrounding pixels
recreates them as best I can and voila
you have what could pass is pretty much
a perfect fill. Way better than me trying
to use the clone stamp for a couple of
days. And then when I turn the bird back
on there he is in all his glory
right on top of that clean background. So
now we're going to go back to After
Effects and import this clean plate. You
can see here that Photomotion has a
built-in way of creating its own
background if you don't want to import a
clean plate. It's only gonna work for
really clean, simple images. So solid
color backgrounds or maybe even a
repeating pattern, but in general you're
not going to be able to use that on any
decent photo. So you're gonna want to
create that clean plate yourself. You'll double click here to add the
custom clean plate. And we're going
through the same process we've been
doing with other things. Import the image,
and this time we're gonna choose that
background layer. Background copy is what
we want. And then click OK. There you can
see the clean plate. There's no bird. Drag
it down here again. Shift and parent it
to the layer where it says to. And then
you can now go back to clean plate and
see
voila custom clean plate. It sees it's
activated. You can see it in place here.
Go back to your projection setup. All
right, so we've got everything set for
how we want our projection set up. Now, we
go to animate things. The main thing you
want to change in your animation is
going to be your camera, at least for my
image here. So single click on camera
animation. You can see your effects come
up here. There's many things you can do
to it. We're going to keep this pretty
simple, but you can affect the in and out
which of course is going to be a huge
thing because that really shows the
depth off of your image. So you can
adjust that as much as you want, and you
can see our bird is moving with it right
now. We'll get to that in a second. I'll
make it move a little to the side. And
then I can also rotate just slightly. So
I've made a few adjustments to the
camera animation. Nothing too major. The
other thing you can change is the camera
focus, which includes depth of field. You
can even turn on the distances so you
can actually see what the distance is
between your masks if you have multiple
objects in there. It gets really
interesting when you get to the
compositing settings, because this is
where things like blurring the
background or blurring your foreground
really makes these animations look
realistic. I'm actually going to scale
the background in the negative, because I
want to give the appearance that this
bird is flying out of the image. Now if
if I had thought through this a little
more carefully I could have taken this
in a Photoshop, made the image smaller
and actually created more background to
this image so that I could zoom out even
farther and actually look like I'm
revealing more of the ocean. Most of the
settings in the animation are already
turned on for keyframing automatically,
but some like the composition settings
you have to turn on when you make those
changes.
I've not turned those on yet so this is
still my initial animation. I want this
to be about 5 seconds long, so I'm gonna
go ahead and skip ahead to the
five-second mark on my timeline, turn on
keyframing for these couple of things
and then start animating. Another thing I
can do here is add a little bit of blur
to the edge of my mask. In this case, I
don't think that really works for what
I'm trying to accomplish here, but I'll
turn it on a little bit just so you can
see what it looks like.
So now the feathers and the legs are all
actually being pulled in from the edge. I
could use that a little bit here if I
created a mask just for the feathers
because it could give a little bit of a
blur as if the feathers are moving
at the tips there. And maybe even the
legs just slightly. But in this case I
don't want that so I'm going to reset
that. Now if you've ever used puppet
controls to maybe do a cartoon or
something where you're moving particular
pieces of an object on screen, then
you're going to be happy to find that
those are fully supported in Photomotion. So double clicking on additional
animations gives you the ability to use
displacement maps and the puppet
tool. Double clicking on the puppet tool
enables you to use that. I'm going to put
a pin here on the end of this feather
and the end of this feather. Now it
appears when I move these puppet pins
around that the whole image is moving.
Don't worry about that. You can see it's
masked off. It shows you the background,
but it's actually only moving that
object on the mask. So going back to
animation, we should be able to see now
how that animation affected everything.
So you see the bird has moved to a
different position now, and if I scroll
to my five-second mark you can see now
that he rotates on the image. The next
step allows you to add a whole lot of
other effects that I won't get into. But
there are motion transitions that are
built in alpha channels with all kinds
of cool geometric shapes. There's light
transitions as well as light leaks and
optical flares. You can add all kinds of
3D text. Particles that are already built
for you like snow and rain. Digital
glitches for some crazy effects. And then
a logo reveal with all kinds of great
depth of field and moving effects for
bringing in a logo to brand your videos.
And of course color corrections with
some built in different grades that you
can use on your final image. The last
step is simply to render out the project,
and it tells you where to go to find it
it says open the folder called 02
render. Since we're using Pro, we go to
the Pro folder. Keep going down into the
sub folders until you find our scene one
which is shown here on all the different
compositions we're using. We use the
16x9 format.
There's our render right there ,and
you simply add that to your render queue,
change your settings and render it out.
And what you get should look something
kind of like this.
So that is just scratching the surface
of what Photomotion can do for
your After Effects projects and
compositing. Check them out on the Envato
market at Envato.com.
