Animating a screen capture or screencast

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Course contents
SECTION: 5
Inspiration 4:15
SECTION: 13
Swinging text 10:36
SECTION: 14
Puppet tool 5:54
SECTION: 15
Effects & presets 6:56
SECTION: 17
What now? 3:56

Questions

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Course info

53 lessons / 6 hours

Overview

Motion graphics are an essential part of video creation and editing. From moving titles across the screen to stabilising your footage to smooth out the bumps or replacing a sign in the background. Ubiquitous, subtly powerful, and for the beginner, a bit mystifying. You need to learn motion graphics. You need a tutorial that will help at every step of the way, without leaving you drowning in details.

If you’ve ever made a video, you’ve probably already discovered that it’s all the little extra infographics, titles and animation that make your project look professional – and you’ve probably already wondered which is the right After Effects tutorial that will let you access the potential.

After Effects is the industrial strength tool for putting the motion in your graphic designs and content. It can also appear to be pretty deep, so getting guidance from a pro that understands how to teach, as much as how to use, After Effects is going to be the key that unlocks your potential.

How about a motion graphics tutorial taught by a working professional who just happens to be great at teaching too? Daniel Scott has been working with animation and motion graphics for over a decade and is the founder of Bring Your Own Laptop - they've been helping people learn design and animation all over the world for just as long.

 



 

Daniel, an Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor, will take you one manageable step at a time through motion graphics in a series of small practical projects that come together to unlock Adobe After Effects, animation, and infographics. These tutorials give you the complete foundation that you can build on for years to come. Learn the principles and the specifics of producing content, in a way that you'll understand and remember. And stay awake.

Just 3 hours long, and very hands on, you’ll take on specific tools and techniques one at a time so you can easily comprehend each aspect of the tutorial, and see all the parts of creating motion graphics before you get intimidated by the scale of what you can do. From zero to hero, as we like to say.

You get downloadable exercise files that match the course, so no time wasted trying to match project settings or finding material to work with. And you can use the end results in your own projects or portfolio – you can customise them to suit your needs as you grow in understanding.

To learn motion graphics is to unlock the door on the magic that makes your video or web content stand out in the crowd. Daniel is going to provide you with the motion graphics tutorial you’ve been looking for to get more than your foot in the door – you’re going to be able to create beautiful animation and infographics. You’ll be empowered to use After Effects the way it was meant to be used, and to create your own creative content, even during the tutorial itself.

What are the requirements?

  • This course is for absolute beginners

  • You'll need a copy of Adobe After Effects CC 2015 or above. A free 30 day trial can be download from Adobe here.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • Create beautiful motion graphics

  • Animate compelling infographics

  • Choose the correct video settings.

  • You’ll learn how to exporting your video easily.

  • You’ll be able to create slick type animations.

  • Rendering your video for Youtube & Vimeo.

  • Create titles for interviews.

  • Add music to your motion graphics.

  • Trim & editing video.

  • Add watermarking your video.

  • Fixing shaky footage.

  • Color correct & fix any bad footage.

  • Add a vignette to your video.

  • Learn how to use your skills from Illustrator & Photoshop

  • How to use green screen footage

  • How to mask like a pro.

  • How to animate infographics like bar graphs, line graphs & pie charts.

  • How to use camera to make 3D type.

  • Animating static images using parallax

  • Plus basic character animation.

  • + More…

What is the target audience?

Yes:

  • This course is for people who want to start earning money as a motion graphics designer.

  • This course is for beginners wanting to learn to use After Effects for motion graphics and infographics.

  • No previous After Effects or animation skills are necessary.

No:

  • This course is NOT for people who have a good understanding of After Effects already. This is for new people only.

Course duration 5 hours+ your study.

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hey there, what we're going to do now is look at-- we'll look at cameras a little bit more, but we're going to animate Screencast, or Screen Capture. You're watching right now, a Screencast, or Screen Capture where I'm showing you how After Effects works. What I'd like to do is sex him up a little bit for the intro video. I'll show you one that I've done for another course. This one here. I'll mute it, okay. It goes along, talking, talking... but then I get into showing demo, and all that sort of stuff. Watch this. Can you see this? It's kind of the screen's bending over backwards, now it's kind of moving fast, forwards it. I want to just do this for the vignettes, and try make it look kind of cool.

To do that-- let's go off and do it. So you, my friend, go away. Back in After Effects. So, let's make a 'New Composition', and let's bring in my Screen Capture footage. This one here called 'Screencast'. Let's make a 'Comp' for it. This one's got some audio on it, so let's turn that off. My Screencast here, at the moment, does nothing. If you're not on '4 Views'-- back to '1 View' down here. This is the safety zone, we're going to have to switch to '4 View' zone. We're going to insert our camera, let's go and make a camera. It's going to be a Two-Node camera, I'm going to leave it all as it is. We go to 'Camera' now.

Now there’s normally a warning that pops up and says, "Hey Dan, you forgot to make any sort of layout 3D, so the camera can see it." So in this case, we need to turn this layer on. Our Screencast needs to be seen by the camera. With it off, the camera can't see anything, blind. With that on, it can see that guy. What I want to do now is, I want the camera to move around. So we're going to move to '4 Views'. Maybe down this view here, the 'Front' view, we're going to switch this one from 'Front', so I've clicked down here. From 'Front' to the '1st Custom View', and you kind of see a nice angle there. You might have to zoom in and out to see it. Zooming in and out, I use my scroll wheel on my mouse, but you can hit 'Command' '+', or '-' to zoom in and out, or 'Control' '+' or '-' on a PC.

So, what we're going to do is, what we did before is we animated the point of interest. Now we're going to animate the camera, and leave the point of interest alone. So we're going to keep it centered on this. You watch this Screencast, it just goes through. You can see, it just needs adjusting some bits. Some people love to do things in Photoshop. What I need to do now is 'undo' the 'Transform' options. And we're going to ignore point of interest. We can play around with position. If I move position, can you see, both of these views here, I can drag this one up, this down. Remember, holding 'Shift' will increase speed.

It will always look at this, which is great. But I can move my camera to all sorts of places. Zooming in and out, left to right. I'm going to 'undo' until it's back to where it was to start off with. Where do you want it to move it to? That's totally up to you. I'm going to drag this down so we can see this view a bit more. So you can see it a bit better as well. I'm going to go to 'Full' view. Looks nice.

So, at the beginning here, I'm going to set my position. Actually, doesn't really matter what you do first. I'm going to have it on a nice little angle. So I'm going to start maybe over there. So I hold down 'Shift' while I'm dragging this first X-axis. I'm going to zoom it in a bit closer. Close to this last Z one, so I'm going to zoom. I'll move down a bit, so I can see with the camera down a bit. I'm going to kind of whiz past it like that, and maybe do some other stuff as well. Pretty exciting. So what we'll do is, take my first key frame, we got kind of an angle, and then I'm going to move it to the end, and I'm going to change it.

So I got my first key frame there, and then along here, I'm just going to-- what am I going to do? I'm not exactly sure. I'm going to do it kind of left, and away. Maybe look down at it. Oh, this is creative gold. May be there. You're going to move between this key frame, and this key frame, and just try to get it so it looks nice. Maybe mine, look at that, kind of nice, and moving. I'm going to go back to 'Quarter' view, make sure mine plays all way through. It stops playing, it's just because I've ran out of juice to keep going. He's adjusting, look at the little adjustments going on. How cool is that course? You can do it.

So that is how to do Screencasting. Now, what we might do is, just to make it look a bit nicer, I'll add in a vignette. I add vignettes to everything. I'm sure it's going to be naff as soon as-- I don't know, they've been around a while, the vignettes. People still like them, I like them. So I'm going to twirl all that up to keep it nice and simple. We could do it to the Screencast or to the camera, but it's easier to do vignettes, through 'New', 'Adjustment Layer'. Like an empty layer here. His whole job is to accept this thing called Lumetri Color. So, in 'Effects & Presets' just type in 'lume', and then hopefully that will cut down to that one. Drag it to the right layer, 'Adjustment Layer'. And all I'm going to do is, I'm going to probably just grab the amount. Drag it left. See this darkens the edges over here, I'll make it even more. A little more. I like it. Mine's got around pretty slowly so I'm going to have to go back to 'Third'.

Ah, look at the vignette around the outside. Beautiful! All right. There, that's how to animate your Screencasts. What I'll do is, I quite often, as I make one project, do one screen shot, do another one, and then stitch them all together later on to kind of turn it to this little thing with all the different bits. We might be doing different angles. All right, I'll see you in the next video.

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