Ae expressions mactracker9/22/2023 So now we’re looking at sixty headshots to deliver. There’s the main screen, which is like a giant TV, and the ProTable, which is a long, wide strip in front of the press / announcers table. “The arena has two screens with different dimensions,” they explained. You know, these thingsįor their Mens’ and Womens’ Basketball teams, we were looking at something like thirty players. A couple years ago, a local university athletics client called me up to do post-production on their moving headshots. What Happened When I Embraced AE Expressions? My Adobe Premiere tips were quite a hit, so today I have four super easy expressions to get you started using your first After Effects expressions TODAY!Īt the very least, you should know what expressions are capable of doing, so you can call on an expert when streamlining a process might save you hours of work. To many filmmakers, looking at lines of code may not feel “creative,” but film production attracts people with artistic and technical minds, so I think with me guiding the way you can imagine how these tools can help make our work better and faster. You can find some less advanced material on my resources page, and an introduction to using VFX in small budget films in this lecture. If you’ve just gotten comfortable in After Effects, adding expressions can be an intimidating step – if you aren’t yet comfortable in After Effects, it’s double scary □Īfter Effects is animation and visual effects software sold as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Even when my visual effects and motion graphics skills became pretty advanced, I had memorized only a handful of tricks and was hesitant to venture out. Let's take a look at the main comp.I put off learning After Effects expressions for years. The timing of the actions will be established by the markers placed in the main comp. It's important to note that the timing relationship between actions in this comp is, for the most part, irrelevant. For example "norm>raise" moves the brow from the normal to a raised state, while "raise>norm" does just the opposite. The other actions are given descriptive names. The keyframes at time zero define the resting or "norm" position. The actions were created by keyframing the position and rotation properties of the eye brows, and the tanget positions of a Bezier Warp effect applied to the frown. You'll notice that the top layer is a null that we have named "action" where we have placed layer markers naming each defined action. Note that the brow actually consists of three separate parts: the left eybrow, the right eyebrow, and the frown (wrinkles in the forhead). What you're looking at in the illustration above is the composition for one of the character's body parts, in this case the brow. Let's take a look at a couple of screen shots of how this looks once we get it set up. Since each precomp will define multiple actions in succession, we need to make our expression smart enough that when we trigger an action, the playback of that action stops before running into the next action. There's one other loose end we'll need to take care of. These two design decisions will allow us to create an expression that will work for any precomp without modification. We'll also set things up such that each precomp retains its name as a layer in the main comp (that is, it hasn't been renamed). Once we have things wired up like this, we can animate our character simply by dropping layer markers in the main comp.įor simplicity and consistency, we'll create a layer in each precomp named "action" where the precomp's named markers will reside. In our main comp, each precomp will be time remapped with an expression that adjusts the time so that markers applied in the main comp are synced up with the corresponding action markers in the precomp. The beginning of each action will be flagged with a marker with an appropriate comment. Our actions will be keyframed in precomps. We'll turn on time remapping for each of the precomps and apply a time remapping expression that will shift the time at each layer marker to the time of the corresponding action defined in the precomp. We'll use these precomps in our main "face" comp. Each action will be keyframed in these precomps with corresponding markers flagging the start of each animation. We'll define our different animation "actions" in precomps for each body part. For example, if you have a marker labeled "begin", you can get the time of that marker like this:įor demonstration purposes, we'll look at animating some simple expressive facial characteristics involving a character's eyes, eye lids, and brow. We'll also need to use the capability of accessing a marker by its comment field. Fortunately that capability now exists in AE CS3. There are a number of ways to approach this, but the best solutions require that an expression be able to retrieve the comment field of a layer marker.
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