Introduction

Why This Book?

This book is about creating visual effects—the art and science of assembling disparate elements so that they appear to have been taken with a single camera, of making an ordinary shot extraordinary without making it unbelievable. The subject matter goes deep into core visual effects topics—color correction, keying, tracking, and roto among them—that are only touched on by other After Effects books, while leaving tools more dedicated to motion graphics (Text, Shape layers, many effects, and even a few specialized tools such as Motion Sketch) more or less alone.

I do not shy away from strong opinions, even when they deviate from the official line. My opinions and techniques have been refined through actual work in production at a few of the finest visual effects facilities in the world, and they’re valid not only for “high-end” productions but for any composited shot. Where applicable, the reasoning behind using one technique over another is provided. I aim to make you not a better button-pusher but a more effective artist and technician.

The visual effects industry is historically protective of trade secrets, often reflexively treating all production information as proprietary. Work on a major project, however, and you will soon discover that even the most complex shot is made up largely of repeatable techniques and practices; the art is in how these are applied, combined, and customized, and what is added (or taken away).

Each shot is unique, and yet each relies on techniques that are tried and true. This book offers you as much of the latter as possible so that you can focus on the former. There’s not much here in the way of step-by-step instructions; it’s more important that you grasp how things work so that you can repurpose the technique for your individual shot.

This is emphatically not a book for beginners. Although the first section is designed to make sure you are making optimal use of the software, it’s not an effective primer on After Effects in particular or digital video in general. If you’re new to After Effects, first spend some time with its excellent documentation or check out one of the many books available to help beginners learn to use After Effects.

On the other hand, I have noticed recently that even beginners often understand more than they used to about the compositing process in general and about Adobe software in particular. In both cases it is the rise of Photoshop as the worldwide standard tool for image editing that has provided amateurs and students alike a leg up. Photoshop users have an advantage when working with After Effects as it, more than other compositing applications, employs a user interface whose specific tools and shortcuts as well as overall design mirror that of Photoshop. If you’ve hardly touched After Effects but feel confident working with digital images and video, try diving into the redesigned Chapter 1 of this book and let me know how it goes.

Organization of This Book, and What’s New

Like its predecessors, Adobe After Effects CS5 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques is organized into three sections. Although each chapter has been refined and updated, the broad organization of the book remains as follows.

• Section I, “Working Foundations,” is predominantly about the After Effects UI itself. I don’t drag you through each menu and button; instead I attempt to offer some advice to novices and pros alike to improve your state of flow with the software. This means that we focus on workflows, shortcuts, and principles of how things work in After Effects when compositing.

I encourage you not to assume that you’re too advanced to at least skim this section; it’s virtually guaranteed that there’s information in there you don’t already know. In this edition I’ve also attempted to make the first chapter friendlier to new users.

• Section II, “Effects Compositing Essentials,” focuses on the core techniques at the heart of effects compositing. Color matching, keying, rotoscoping, and motion tracking are the topics that are essential throughout the rest of the book and in your compositing experience generally. There is also a chapter that handles the camera and 3D, one on expressions, and one about working in 32-bpc linear color as well as handling film and high dynamic range images.

• This section is the true heart of the book. In this edition I’ve added new and expanded examples to elucidate high-level principles. Chapter 6, on keying (which I long considered one of the strongest), received a thorough rewrite, as did Chapter 7, which focuses on rotoscoping. Chapter 11, on working beyond the standard 8 bits per channel, 2.2 gamma pipeline, has also been heavily edited for greater clarity.

• Section III, “Creative Explorations,” demonstrates actual shots you are likely to re-create, offering best practices for techniques every effects artist needs to know. Some of these examples are timeless, but where applicable I have refined what was there, either because of new insights in my own craft or because I thought of more and newer techniques to share.

In all cases, the focus is on explaining how things work so that you can put these techniques to use on your own shot, instead of taking a simple “paint by numbers” approach to prefabricated shots.

The biggest change in After Effects CS5 is that the software now makes use of 64-bit memory addressing. This does not change a whole lot about how you work with the software, though, other than making it far less likely you will encounter out-of-memory errors as you work and far more likely that you can make better use of a multiprocessor system with an up-to-date graphics card.

The addition of Roto Brush certainly changed the landscape of Chapter 7, on rotoscoping, although it has not obviated the need for tried-and-true techniques to refine a matte.

Artistry

When I was working on the first edition of this book I used to ride my bicycle home up the hill out of the Presidio, where The Orphanage was located, and think about what people really needed to know in order to move their work to the level of a visual effects pro. Here’s what I came up with:

• Get reference. You can’t re-create what you can’t clearly see. Too many artists skip this step.

• Simplify. To paraphrase Einstein, a good solution is as simple as possible, but no simpler.

• Break it down. If even the most complicated shot consists of small, comprehensible steps—perhaps thousands of them—any visual problem can be solved by patiently being reduced to the point where it’s simply a question of performing the steps in the correct order. Easier said than done in many cases, certainly, but there’s still a huge difference between difficult and impossible.

• Don’t expect a perfect result on the first try. My former colleague Paul Topolos (now in the art department at Pixar) used to say that “recognizing flaws in your work doesn’t mean you’re a bad artist. It only means you have taste.”

This is how it’s done at the best studios, and even if you’re not currently working at one of them, this is how you should do it, too.

Compositing in After Effects

Some users may be coming to this book unfamiliar with After Effects but experienced in other compositing software. Here’s a brief overview of how the After Effects workflow is unique from every other compositing application out there. Each application is somewhat different, and yet the main competitors to After Effects—Nuke, Shake, Flame, Fusion, and Toxic, to name a few—are probably more similar to one another than any of them is to After Effects, which is in many ways a lot more like Photoshop.

Here are some of the features that can make After Effects easier for the beginner to use but can constrain others:

• Render order is established in the Timeline and via nested compositions: layers, not nodes. After Effects has Flowchart view, but you don’t create your composition there the way you would with a tree/node interface.

• Transforms, effects, and masks are embedded in every layer and render in a fixed order.

• After Effects has a persistent concept of an alpha channel in addition to the three color channels. The alpha is always treated as if it is straight (not premultiplied) once an image has been imported and interpreted.

• An After Effects project is not a script, although version CS4 introduced a text version of the After Effects Project (.aep) file, the XML-formatted .aepx file. Most of its contents are inscrutable other than source file paths. Actions are not recordable and there is no direct equivalent to Shake macros.

• Temporal and spatial settings tend to be absolute in After Effects because it is composition and timeline-based. This is a boon to projects that involve complex timing and animation, but it can snare users who aren’t used to it and suddenly find pre-comps that end prematurely or are cropped. Best practices to avoid this are detailed in Chapter 4.

Of these differences, some are arbitrary, most are a mixed bag of advantages and drawbacks, and a couple are constantly used by the competition as a metaphorical stick with which to beat After Effects. The two that come up the most are the handling of precomposing and the lack of macros.

This book attempts to shed light on these and other areas of After Effects that are not explicitly dealt with in its user interface or documentation. After Effects itself spares you details that as a casual user you might never need to know about but that as a professional user you should understand thoroughly. This book is here to help.

What’s on the DVD

Jeff Almasol’s scripting chapter is in an appendix, found on the disc as a PDF. It is the most accessible resource available on this complicated and much-feared topic, walking you through three scripts, each of which builds upon the complexity of the previous. Scripting provides the ability to create incredibly useful extensions to After Effects to eliminate tedious tasks. Several of these are included in the scripts folder on the disc as exclusives to this book.

In order to focus on more advanced and applied topics in the print edition, Dan Ebberts kicked JavaScript fundamentals to a special JavaScript addendum, also included as a PDF. This is in many ways the “missing manual” for the After Effects implementation of JavaScript, omitting all of the useless web-only scripting commands found in the best available books, but extending beyond the material in After Effects help.

If you want to find out more about some of the plug-ins and software mentioned in this book, look no further than its DVD-ROM. For example, the disc includes demos of

• SynthEyes from Andersson Technologies

• Camera Tracker and Kronos from the Foundry

• Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Looks, Knoll Light Factory Pro, Key Correct Pro, Magic Bullet Colorista 2, Trapcode Lux, Trapcode Horizon, Trapcode Form, Trapcode Particular 2, Warp, and more

• ReelSmart Motion Blur and PV Feather from RE: Vision Effects

• Lenscare from Frischluft

You’ll also find HD footage with which you can experiment and practice your techniques. There are dozens of example files to help you deconstruct the techniques described.

Finally, there are also a few useful and free third-party scripts mentioned throughout the book; for more of these, see the script links PDF in the scripts folder on the disc.

The Bottom Line

Just like the debates about which operating system is best, debates about which compositing software is tops are largely meaningless—especially when you consider that the majority of first-rate, big-budget movie effects extravaganzas are created with a variety of software applications on a few different platforms. Rarely is it possible to say what software was used to composite a given shot just by looking at it, because it’s about the artist, not the tools.

The goal is to understand the logic of the software so that you can use it to think through your artistic and technical goals. This book will help you do that.