Hey, what's up everybody!
I'm Ryan Hansinger
and today we're going to be discussing
how to use a null object in After Effects
So, let's get into it!
*upbeat music*
Once you've opened up after effects you're going to have to import all your video and your special effects in here
And then drag them down into your composition
Once you have it down into your composition go ahead and click right click
new
and null object
You can also find this up in the layers tab layer new and then you'll find null object here as well
So we have our null object. Now what we want to do
We're going to put a fireball in her hand and try to track that fluidly as it goes through the video
So in order to do that, 
we want to find a good starting point
And I want to attach it right about here
And I want to attach it to like a 
high contrast place in the video
and so I'm looking right around this sleeve. 
This little dark spot here.
We're going to click on our video
And then go to track motion
That's going to bring up your tracking point here.
So we're going to zoom in a little bit grab our tracking point
And we're gonna move that over
Right on
Right in here this little shadow
We're gonna expand this outer box. This outer box is what looks ahead to the pixels coming up to anticipate the tracking
and then what's
This inner box. We'll take the
Is what this inner box is what we're looking at to actually track. This is what After Effects is actually tracking as we move through.
So now we're ready. We've expanded our boxes. We've given it After Effects the best shot we can
And we hit
analyze forward
and cross our fingers
Let's stop it there
Back it out so we can kind of get a better
Look at what's going on?
hit
forward
and what you want to do sometimes what I'm doing right now is just helping it along because
If it moves too fast, it can easily lose track of the tracking point.
Even now we might want to move that
Forward just a little bit
To try to get that
The best opportunity hit analyze forward again
Doing good doing good
I'm gonna hit pause so I don't lose that
And then hit it again
Doing good, I know right now her hand is about to do this big motion
So I'm giving it a little bit more help I'm  pausing it just a little extra
as we move through
So far so good
Uh, here's where she might
Oh doing pretty good. Okay and see it jumped a little there. So let's go back
boom
And so it should be still down here
And then the next frame that one's not bad, but let's bring it in just a little bit
Cool and then analyze forward
analyze forward
Let's see how it got stuck there
So what we're going to do
We're just going to hit control z back it up a little bit and then we're going to hit analyze forward again and keep moving
so back it up control z
hit analyze forward
analyze forward
And see we're on the wrong spot. So back it up twice
And we're gonna hit it manually we can use this little analyze frame forward
And that's gonna help it even more
especially
It got a little difficult because she started turning her hand and our little tracking points started moving out of the area
So we're just gonna keep clicking
And now we have a little bit more of a stable spot. I can hit the play button
And we should be good to go
Let that play out for a few let it hold until the end of our sequence
Until the end of what we want to analyze and
I think we're about good
So we hit stop and before you exit out of here hit apply
Hit okay
Awesome
Now we have our video tracked
Now what we want to do is bring in our effect. So i'm going to go up here. We're clicking our it's a yellow aura
So we're going to bring that on and scrub back to
Where we oh, there's our fire
fire
Fire!
All right, so we're going to bring this forward a little bit to where we want to come in
And I want it to come in right about here
but obviously
We got a big flame
so
We're going to go down here. We're going to hit s to scale it down and we're going to bring that down some
Move it forward
Scale it down and then we can hit position and we're going to bring that over
And still a little big so we're going to hit s again we're going to scale it down
Hit p bring that position
and
Last but not least. We're going to grab our little cinnabun thing
Which is called the pick whip grab your pick whip and drag that over to your null layer
And now we are all linked up. Let's take a look
Hey, not bad, not bad
Cool that looks pretty good
So now I'm gonna bring in one other cool effect. Uh, this is the fire at cam
It's gonna throw the fire at the camera at the end just to add a little something
Cool so I'm going to bring that in
To
I want her hand to punch through it
So I want this right here hit p
We're going to bring this little fire start up here
And you're going to notice as it goes through this is going to be fire the screen
as it
blasts out
now
You'll notice it doesn't quite fill the frame. So we're going to hit
s to scale that
And we're going to scale it up
Until it's outside of the frame right over here
Cool
now
the last thing we're going to do we're going to take
our cinnabon pick whip
over here to our null object
so that links up as well now all of this is going to be
linked
Hit p for position it's a little off at the start we want it to hit right about there
And now you have this fire
Awesome everything's looking really good a couple other things that can make this video even better for you
You can go in and click the yellow aura
and if you want you can hit control d
And duplicate it and that will give it a little more of a thicker fire
As it goes around and since we duplicated everything, it's still attached to our null object. So it's going to move around
nicely
with our first flame
Another option you can do if you really want since everything's attached already. You can hit p
Hit this little stopwatch here make a keyframe
and change your position outside of
Where her hand is so you can have it starting away from her hand and then drag into her hand as she's pulling it around
So put a keyframe there. Let's drag that to the beginning
of our clip
Move it forward
and then change the position again creating a new keyframe
It looks pretty good and I want that to go ahead
I want that to be applied to our other
Two layers, so i'm going to delete those
click on our yellow aura with the new
positions keyframed
And then duplicate those
so now
All three of them are going to move
together
If you want to take this one step further
You can go click on each layer
Hit position and drag these keyframes forward a little bit
And go to your third layer drag that forward a little bit so now they all start at a slightly different place
And they come in
One at a time
And if you don't like fire at all, you can always take all three of these
Get rid of them
And you could just write
Fire.
Now you can attach that to your null object hit p
Bring up the position
And now you have
Fire
Cool so there's some different options you can play around with for null objects, but that's the basics of it.
Um,  It does take a little bit of time. But really if you
Kind of go through everything all at once it maybe takes like five minutes if you really want to break it down
And take your time with it. It does take a little bit longer. I think the analyzing
The tracking is probably the toughest part everything after that is just connecting to your null object
But you know, you just kind of help it out it's way easier than manually doing the entire thing
You can do all of these special effects in premiere pro
Just doing keyframes. So that's an option as well
You can just move your object one frame at a time setting new keyframes for the position
But this using a null object is so much easier believe me I've done tons of videos where I've just moved keyframe  by keyframe
and learning how to do a null object made things so much easier because then you can also just attach
Multiple things to the same null object and everything just moves super smoothly in sync
it's a great little tool so hopefully this helped, uh, if you have any questions or you have
anything else you want to see regarding this video, uh, just throw it down in the comments if you liked what you saw hit like
And hit subscribe more videos coming to you soon. Thanks for watching. I'm, Ryan Hansinger. We'll see you next time
