Just started learning AE

jeff jassky

jeff jassky

Active member
Just started with AE yesterday and I'm already falling in love.

You know the feeling when you learn new technique? I'm just excited to be learning AE and wanted to show off my first motion graphics creation.

view either
Higher quality MOV:3Mb

or

Vimeo:compressed

but basically i started with a photo of asphalt in photoshop, duplicated it to make a large parking-lot type of area, drew the yellow lines in a curvey road shape, imported it in to AE, turned it in to a 3D layer, added a camera that tracked along a vector path to give it the effect of driving over the road, enabled DOF on the camera to blur foreground and backgtound, enabled motion blur to mimic a slower shutter speed and make it look a bit more realistic, did some time remapping type of stuff for the slow motion, and added some camera shake in the fast parts.

I borrowed the audio from Macgregors http://www.vimeo.com/3875550 to play with :)

-Jeff
 
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That looks really good!

That was your first time in AE? Keep it up, man! I didn't even know what adding cameras meant until a good 6 months into my AE usage.
 
Thanks, guys :)

Quicktime pro worked perfectly. Got the file size down to like 3 megabytes while maintaining decent quality. I put it on Vimeo and they compressed it a bit - http://vimeo.com/7916658

Actually the vimeo version is slightly different in that the logo is now 3D and has a shimmer across it as it rotates.. otherwise the same.

I should mention that I have a lot of experience with Photoshop and Flash so I'm familiar with a lot of the filters and the concept of keyframing so I'm sure that helped a lot :)

Thanks for checking it out!

-Jeff
 
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I want to start learning AE as well. But my Photoshop /Illustrator knowledge is very weak. My strength is Final Cut. Something like your project shown here is very intimidating, but I understand your explanation.

My question is: How did you do your logo?
 
Well the logo was designed beforehand in adobe Illustrator. The font is kind basically a custom font and the SU/track design was also done by hand. Unrelated to after effects. The text effects (the gradient and inner edge glow type of thing) on the logo itself was done in photoshop and imported in to AE as a PNG.

The shimmer and OUTER glow as the logo rotates was done in AE (not photoshop or illustrator) by using an alpha matte. Basically i duplicated the logo layer, desaturated it, cranked up the levels so the entire thing was white, blurred it slightly to give it the glowing look and used that as an alpha matte for the shimmer. To get the shimmer I used a transition>wipe type of thing. Keyframed the "complete" parameter to actually animate the wipe/shimmer. It was actually two wipe effects 180 degrees from each other but they were linked together in an expression so you only have to animate one of the wipes for them to both wipe together (just offset them a little bit from each other) Also that layer blend mode was set to "add" to get that really blown out/overexposed look on the shimmer.

If you want I can provide the AEP file for you and you can play around with it. I also used magic bullet looks to provide the nighttime/diffused/vignette. but you could do the same thing strictly in AE with a few added layers.

lemme know if you want the AEP.

-Jeff
 
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Here are the original files...

4154042558_3d1109705a_o.png


4153282741_6844fca047_b.jpg


You can see I didn't spend much time on the road thing at all. basically a photo of asphalt duplicated a bunch of times, the yellow lines.. didn't even make the texture all that uniform and I even left that big blank strip of white for no reason. that's in the file - you just can't see it because of the video camera angle.

-Jeff
 
pretty sick considering your new to AE. I've been at it for a year, off and on, and cant get my head around it. still learning tho.
 
Thanks Jeff for the insight. It is way too complicated for me to even consider studying it. But let me ask you something: should I get the basics in Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash down first before I move into After Effects, or should I just jump right into it? (considering my lack of knowledge in all those programs - the only thing I am any good at is FCP)

Thanks
 
AE can be intimidating. One of the best things that came with CS4 is the month subscription to lynda.com I think in CS4 alone there must be a couple hundred hours worth of tutorials.

Another helpful resource is a guy from YOUTUBE called 'thenewboston' - Great place to start.
 
As far as learning photoshop, illustrator and flash first - the one that most closely relates to AE is Photoshop. Illustrator and flash only share minor things with AE.

You can kind of dive right in with AE with some tutorials and see what happens. You don't NEED to know any other software. Just look for basic tutorials like on keyframing, managing layers and how effects are applied/managed.

Basically "keyframes" are nothing but points in time where you want to modify a value. for example if you wanted a fade from black you could make a black solid layer on top of everything.. put a keyframe at frame 0 with opacity at 100%, move forward a number of frames and set a keyframe and set the opacity to 0%. That will give you a gradual change over time. but yeah check out the tutorial links in the sticky threads.. they'll definitely get you on your way. don't worry about photoshop/illustrator/flash to begin with unless you have a need for those tools later on.

-Jeff
 
jeff jassky said:
don't worry about photoshop/illustrator/flash to begin with unless you have a need for those tools later on.

-Jeff
Click to expand...

Yeah, I started with AE, and I'm just now really using Photoshop after 4 years. I honestly wish I'd learned PS first, though, as it would have made my AE time a lot easier to understand, and I could always go back to PS to build things if I needed to. I built everything EVERYTHING in AE, so it got a little tricky sometimes.
 
Ok Cool thanks Jeff. I do use alot of keyframes in FCP so ok I guess I'll give a couple of AE tutorials a shot and see what happens.

After reading Hawk's post, maybe I should learn PS too.... hmmm... so little time!
 
Whatever you decide to do, stick with it. It can get overwhelming looking at the Interface for AE coming from FCP. Watch some VC tutorials by Andrew Kramer (www.videocopilot.net). Start at his earlier stuff like Camera Shake or something instead of the tutorial where he zooms into the body. Watch it completely once through, then follow along with him and build one like his. It helped me learn a lot.
 
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