Animation TIP - Vector Redraw in After Effects

In this tutorial we're going to look at what happens when we scale something up nice and big. It rushes towards the screen, and it gets all pixelated. I'm going to show you how to make it like this. All vector and clean. And basically we just turn that button on. But, let's do it in our little tutorial. It seriously is, just doing that button.

So we're going to do this with a little example file. So we're going to a 'New Composition'. We're going to call this one 'Vector Redraw'. And we'll leave it all like this, 5 seconds, we're going to change the background color too. I'm going to click on it, change it to white. Just to save time, we should put a solid in because what's going to happen, if we change the background color to white, when we export, it's going to go black. So we're just cheating now. So 'Vector Redraw', and what I'm going to do is I'm going to double click. Remember that's the shortcut to import.

We're going to bring in the Bring Your Own Laptop logo. There it is there, I'll put it in my Files folder. These Offset guys, get in there. And in here, Bring Your Own Laptop, bring it in. So that's cool, and I want to Scale it up. So what I'll do is, up here, I'm going to hit 'S' for Scale. So the time they're going and when it gets bigger, maybe about half a second I'd like to Scale it right up, just going to go…

Kind of like it's flying towards the camera. I don't know why I do these sound effects, I don't have to really. But the problem is, can you see? A, it's ugly because we haven't added Easing yet, but you see, when it gets really close to the screen it has pixelated, looks really crappy. It's Vector, so it should be fine. All you need to do when this happens is, this little check box here, see this little sparkle, you can see there, it says 'Continuously Rasterize'. It's going to redraw it every time, on every frame. Why wouldn't that be on by default? It's quite system demanding. So if you've got lots of Vector shapes, all flying around, and there's no need to redraw them every single time, it doesn't, unless you force it to, by clicking this little gap in here. And it goes nicely.

Couple of things we're going to do to finish this off. You can skip now. We're just going to set it up a little bit I guess, and practice our use of the Graph Editor. And what I'm going to do is maybe just apply Easing to both sides of this. I like to apply Ease even if I'm going to use the Graph Editor because what happens is, once you jump in to the Graph Editor, got them both selected, it kind of gives you some handles to work with. If you don't - and I undo - it's just a flat line. And you got to click on these points, and then go in here, and say I'd like to create an Easy Ease in this one. Create an Easy Ease in this, and that's fine. Do it either side, I don't mind.

Now the cool thing about this is that because we're only doing one thing these guys are tied together, we don't have to split them. Remember, in an earlier tutorial we had to split the X and Y, which is down there, but it's grayed out at the moment because these guys don't need splitting. And all we want to do is play around with these handles. And whenever it comes to like-- so what we've done up until now, we've kind of made it slow at the start, the beginning, and fast in the middle. What I'd like to do in this case is, I want it to be slow at the beginning, and go slow, and as it goes along, it's going to get faster and faster. So, let's have a look at this now.

I'll bring my Play Head here. So it just kind of starts, and then gets faster as it comes towards you. Is it brilliant? I'm not liking it at the moment. I'll play around with it. Now it's getting better. Go back to the Graph Editor. It's kind of doing what I want. Now he's messing about. Yes, it's cool. Turn the Motion Blur on, it's up there, turn it down here. So when it starts really moving it starts doing the whole blurring motion, but it's actually a nice blur, rather than just pixelating. And there's a lot of time when it's down here, it's actually redrawing nicely as well.

So that is Vector Redrawing. Making sure that your graphics, any graphics in Illustrator, don't become blurry when they get scaled.