| Red Eye Effect |
| Written by Ben | |||||
| Wednesday, 29 April 2009 16:17 | |||||
Hello and welcome to the latest After Effects CS3 Tutorial for FintanMedia.co.uk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF-5uBlhIvA First things first; Import your footage. You’ll need some footage where the camera is stable, the actor’s eyes are clearly in shot and preferably a shot with little movement or blinking. So, Once you’ve got your footage, create a new composition COMPOSITION > NEW COMPOSITION... Apply your own settings and click OK. Drag your footage into the Composition. Right, now comes the tricky bit... The Tracker controls confuse many people when they first start to use them, which is why we’re going to start with a simple track. So, go to WINDOW > TRACKER CONTROLS and click.  This will bring up the tracker controls which should look something like this;  Now we need to create our Null Objects where we’re going to store all of our Tracker Data. So... Go to LAYER > NEW > NULL OBJECT. Now rename this Null Object (Highlight it, and hit RETURN on your keyboard). We’re going to call this; NULL RIGHT. Now create a second Null Object, and name it NULL LEFT.  OK. Now we need to use the trackers. Click on the footage in the Timeline. In the Tracker Control box, click on the button that reads; TRACK MOTION.  Make sure that box the POSITION and ROTATION boxes are checked;  This brings up two boxes on your Footage. First, we’re going to track the position of the right hand eye. Move Track Point 1 over to the Right-most edge of the eye, and move Track Point 2 to the Left-most corner of the same eye. I understand that this sounds a little complicated, so here’s an image to guide you;  When thats done, you’ll need to press Analyze forwards, which is the PLAY-like button found here;  Press the button and once you’ve analyzed forwards, you should get something that looks a little like this;  Now, back in the Tracker Controls box press EDIT TARGET, and select NULL RIGHT. Then Click Apply. You’ll be asked which axis to apply it to. Select X and Y and click OK. You should now see how one of your Null Objects has attached itself to the eye in your composition. By playing the footage through, the Null Object should be locked in Place. Now, you need to repeat this process again for the Left eye. Only this time, When you Click EDIT TARGET; you’ll select NULL LEFT. When that’s done, we can move on. Alrighty. The Null Objects will probably get in the way for the next steps, so we’re going to turn off their visibility. To do this; click on the Eye icons in front of the layers. This will make them invisible on your composition but will still retain all the data we’ve added.  Now create a New Solid; LAYER > NEW > SOLID... Make it a bright red colour and make sure to click MAKE COMP SIZE. Then hit OK. Now, to begin with you’ll also need to turn off the visibility of this layer for a few moments. so hit the eye icon to make it vanish. Make sure the Red Solid layer is selected and select the Pen Tool (G). Now draw a rough outline around the iris of the eye.  Now turn the visibility for this layer back on.  It doesn’t look very good at the moment, so what we’re going to do is turn down the layer opacity. Toggle down the menu for the Red Solid and toggle down the menu for MASK, and MASK 1. Feather out the layer by about 14 Pixels. Now toggle down the TRANSFORM menu. Now drag the opacity down to about 70%. That should now look pretty good.
Now we need to Duplicate this layer. Highlight the layer and go; EDIT > DUPLICATE... As you can see, each layer has it’s own Pick-whip. All you need to do is click on the layer’s Pick-whip and drag it over to the layer you’d like to parent it to.
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 28 May 2009 08:55 |
