We briefly touched on applying effects in Lesson Three when we applied the Basic and Path Text Effects to a solid. There are loads of effects you can use in AE, especially if you have the AE Pro. (I highly recommend getting AE Pro if you don't have it). There are also a TON of third party plug-ins you can buy for AE.
A great Web site to research, find plug-ins, download demos, and purchase plug-ins for AE is Toolfarm.com. They also have tutorials. Double yay!
You may see some effects in my screenshots that you don't have and most likely they are sold separately. There is one suite of plug-ins called Trapcode you should treat yourself to. These plug-ins are beautiful, fast, and fairly inexpensive compared to some other suites. Everything they make is amazing. You can download demos and tutorials for the plug-ins from their site.
There are too many effects available to talk about each one. But I'll profile a few and that should get you started. You should set aside some time and play. There are QuickTime files for the profiled effects in the Renders folder.
Fast Blur
Make a new text layer and select it. Go to Effect>Blur & Sharpen>Fast
Blur to
apply a Fast Blur Effect. Fast Blur is used a lot in car ads.
By the way, if you know what effects you're looking for you can search for them in the Effects & Presets Palette. Open the palette and type in Blur to see all your blur effects.
Set a keyframe for 0 blurriness at 1 second.
Move to the beginning of the timeline. The shortcut to move to the beginning of the timeline is the Home Key and the End key will move you to the end of the timeline. Change the Blur Dimensions to Horizontal and set a keyframe for a blurriness of 800.
Do a RAM preview. This effect is used extensively in broadcast graphics, especially in car commercials.
CC Light Sweep
Turn off or delete the Fast Blur effect. Close out any other comps too as they might inhibit your playback for this next effect.
If your text is white, double-click layer and change the color to something darker. (Click on the color square in the character window and choose a new color from the Color Picker). Once that's done, make sure the layer is selected and go to Effect>Render>CC Light Sweep.
If you don't see any CC effects you may not have installed them from the AE install disk. Quit AE and install them now.
Expand the effect in the timeline. Move the Y-axis Center down to match the center of your text and scrub the X-axis value to see the light sweep over the text. Make a keyframe at the beginning of the timeline where the X-axis value is off to the left of the text layer and not affecting the layer.
Now go to 1 second and make a keyframe where the X-axis value is off to the right of the text and is again not affecting the layer.
I changed a few global properties in my effect until I was happy with the results. You'll notice I changed the Light Color, Width, Intensity, Edge Thickness, and Direction. You'll only learn what you want by playing with the parameters.
Do a RAM preview. Pretty.
Basic 3D
Turn off or delete the CC Light Sweep effect. We won't be addressing true 3D space in this course but there is a useful 3D-like plug-in called Basic 3D. Make sure the text layer is selected and go to Effect>Perspective>Basic 3D.
You can use this effect to add a bit of perspective to a layer.
Or you can animate it to make it appear in 3D space. Here are the settings I used to create the Basic 3D Quicktime.
If you love what you've done with the Basic 3D effect you may want to save your settings as a favorite. Select the effect in the timeline and go to Effect>Save Animation Preset. A window will open from your Presets folder. Name your Effect and click OK.
You'll now be able to access this effect from Animation>Recent Animation Presets. You'll also see it in the Effects & Presets Palette, just like you did when you saved your text preset.
Select the Basic 3D effect in the timeline and delete it. Go back to Effect>Perspective>Basic 3D to apply the effect again. This should open the Effects Controls window located under Effects>Effect Controls. Now from the Effects Controls Window, choose the Animation Presets menu where any presets using the 3D effect will be displayed. Select your preset from the dropdown menu and behold: your preset, keyframes and all, is applied to the layer.
More than one effect can be saved in the same preset. We haven't addressed using more than one effect at a time, but now you know for future reference.
That should be a good start. Have a look at the other effects and play around with the animating parameters. If you want more info about the effects there's a pdf file called AE Help on the install CD that you should copy to your computer:
This is a great supplement and different from using the Help menu from AE. Notice there's a separate pdf for the Cycore Effects (CC effects).
Some advanced effects such as the Audio Effects, the 3D Channel Effects, Keying, Matte Tools, and some of the Simulation Effects (Particle Playground, Wave World, Caustics, and Foam) are perhaps best ignored for now. These are complicated effects that we'll address in a Level II AE course.
We discussed earlier that sometimes animators apply masks to layers but set the mode to None because they want to use it for an effect, not to change the alpha channel.
You know what that means by now. There are some effects that use both masks and paths. Here are a few:
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- Stroke
- Scribble
- Vegas
- Fill (closed paths only)
- Smear (closed paths only)
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Let's take a look at the first two.
Stroke
Delete the text layer and make a new solid layer. Select the elliptical mask tool and draw a circular mask on the layer. Change the mask's mode to None. With the layer selected, go to Effects>Render>Stroke.
In the Effects Control Window, change the path from none to Mask 1. Notice that under Paint Style you can composite the stroke on the original image (in my case a green solid) or on a transparent layer where you'd just see the mask. Scrub the start value to see the stroke write on.
Set keyframes in the timeline to animate the stroke you are writing
on. When the start and end values are both set to zero the stroke will
complete the circle. Also, play with the spacing. At 100% the stroke
becomes a series of dots. Have a look at the Stroke_Animation.mov file.
Don't forget to have fun with this. You could animate the color of the stroke. And you could animate the mask as well as the stroke. Have a look at the Stroke and Mask Animation.mov file.
Scribble
Scribble is new to AE 6.5. Remove the stroke effect from your elliptical mask and go to Effect>Render>Scribble and do a RAM preview. Cute.
Play around with the various parameters here especially the Edge Options. These are available if you fill type to something other "inside."
What's it all about? Look at the Scribble.mov file and see.