The Bezier Warp Effect

The Bezier Warp effect might also be called the Corner Warp effect. It gives you three bezier warp points at every corner—one for the corner itself, and two others to control the sides around the corner. The effect refers to the corner point as the vertex, and the two other points as tangents. And, other than a Quality property, this effect only consists of these 12 warp points. Keep in mind that all of these points can be animated. Because this effect creates smooth distortions around its edges, it’s great for warping virtual paper. The regular Distort.aep project isn’t the best to demonstrate this effect, so for this example, we’re going to be using the Bezier Warp.aep project in the Chapter 7 folder of the exercise files.

Apply the Bezier Warp effect to the PAPER precomp layer. Adjust the vertices and tangents as desired. When you’re done, you should have very organic, paperlike distortions, such as those seen in Figure 7.6. Notice that the upper right corner is even folded over. I did this purposely to show you what this looks like. There’s a little sliver of transparency that also folds over, causing a small hole in your layer. You’ll also notice some blocky, aliased pixels on corners that have been folded over. These little problems might not make the effect worthwhile if you’re looking for bended corners, so it’s something to be aware of.

I suppose the moral of the story is that the Bezier Warp effect is not good for folding objects on top of themselves. But for easily warping the corners of objects (and even animating that warping) the Bezier Warp effect does a pretty good job.

The Bulge Effect

The Bulge effect is very similar to the Spherize effect. Both effects attempt to create a round, bulging distortion on a layer. If you’re looking for a quick and simple effect, go for Spherize. If you’re looking for more control over your bulging, use the Bulge effect.

There are a lot of uses for bulge distortions. You can apply Bulge to an elastic wall or a painting to make it look like there is something trying to break out. You can apply Bulge to the belly of a large cartoon character to animate his belly jiggling while he is laughing. You can animate the Bulge effect as it’s applied to the chest of a character, to simulate their heart beating.

Let’s actually experiment with a few more examples. We can create these from the Distort.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder. First, let’s apply Bulge to the dotted line layer in the Motion Graphics comp. When you apply the effect, you’ll see a circle with four points around its “corners.” This circle determines the area on your layer that will be distorted with the Bulge effect. Instead of using the sliders in the Effect Controls panel, you can move the points on this circle around in the Composition panel. Moving these points left and right will adjust the Horizontal Radius value, and moving them up and down will adjust the Vertical Radius value. You can move the entire bulge distortion area with the Bulge Center property or by dragging the effect control point at the center of the circle. Bulge Height determines the strength of the bulge distortion. Keep this value small for a more subtle effect. Or you can take it to a negative value to create an indentation instead of a bump. The Taper Radius parameter helps blend the bulged pixels in with the regular pixels. If you want to create the illusion that there is a ball under the surface, for example, you would want to keep this value low because there would be a stark transition between the ball and the area that isn’t distorted.

In Figure 7.7, you can see the result of the Bulge effect on my dotted lines. If we were to animate the stroke of this line, the Bulge effect would create the illusion that the dotted lines were zooming towards you. Almost like the magnification of the dock icons on the Mac OS. Here, my settings are 340 for Horizontal Radius, 90 for Vertical Radius, 1.5 for Bulge Height, and 114 for the Taper Radius.

I also usually keep my Antialiasing value at High. This effect renders quick enough on any machine that meets After Effects’ minimum software requirements, that it shouldn’t slow you down keeping this effect at high quality.

Note that at high Bulge Height levels, the pixels on this layer start getting distorted and pixelated. In a moment, we’ll look at Bulge applied to a vector-based shape layer, and there will not be any pixelation.

You can use the Horizontal Radius and Vertical Radius values to create a bulge shape that is more elliptical than circular. In this way, you can create non-uniform squishes and bulges.

Let’s now try applying the Bulge effect to the star layer. Be sure to also turn off the visibility of the dotted line layer. For the bulging of the star layer, I’m going to use the same basic settings I used for bulging the dotted lines. Notice the absence of pixelation in distorted areas, due to the vector nature of the shape layer star. The Bulge effect seems to almost create an eye shape out of our star.

Now, let’s hop on over to the Smoke comp, and apply the Bulge effect to the smoke layer. I made the Horizontal Radius and Vertical Radius values very large. I then moved the Bulge Center off to the side. This created the effect of a blowing wind, coming from the left of the smoke. You see, the Bulge effect (and other Distort effects) don’t have to directly distort an object. Sometimes, they can be used as forces that act upon an object, from wind to a karate kick.

The Corner Pin Effect

If you’ve only played with a handful of the effects in After Effects, chances are that one of them was the Corner Pin effect. As one of the most popular and prolific effects in After Effects, the Corner Pin effect comes in handy often. The Corner Pin effect is almost identical to the Bezier Warp effect, except that here, there are no extra tangents. All that we can adjust with the Corner Pin effect are the 4 corner points. And that’s all there is to the entire effect. But because of its simplicity, it’s quite easy to use.

Most of the time, when people use the Corner Pin effect, it is to use another image to replace a billboard, a window, or some other rectangular object. Because of the way that Corner Pin distorts a layer, it can be used to distort layers to look like they exist in 3D space. Why not just use a 3D layer? Personally speaking, I prefer Corner Pin for many tasks because it’s much easier to adjust the 4 pins of the Corner Pin effect than to get a 3D layer to animate in 3D space exactly the way you want it to.

We’re going to use the Corner Pin.aep project for this effect. In the Monitor comp, we’ll use the Corner Pin effect to recreate another common Corner Pin task—using another layer to replace the screen of a computer monitor.

We want to apply the Corner Pin effect, but not to the Monitor layer. We don’t want the monitor to distort at all. Turn on the visibility of the adobe-pumpkin layer. This is an embarrassing photo of me (yet another one), with a pumpkin I carved for Halloween. No, this image was not faked in Photoshop. I really am nerdy enough to hand carve the Adobe logo into a pumpkin, on a day when everyone else is out eating candy and going to parties.

Apply the Corner Pin effect to the adobe-pumpkin layer. As with other effects, when the effect is selected in the Effect Controls panel, you can see its effect control points in the Composition panel. These control points are especially helpful with the Corner Pin effect.

Using the corner pins, drag the corners of the adobe-pumpkin layer until they precisely match the corresponding corners of the monitor in the Monitor layer. You will probably want to zoom in closely for the most accurate matching. When you’re all done, it should look like the adobe-pumpkin layer is the screen saver of the monitor.

As far as the Corner Pin effect goes, we’re done with this example. But I just can’t leave this project alone without adding a couple of finishing touches.

The first offense (and it’s a bad one) is that this result composites terribly. The adobe-pumpkin photo is very dark, but images on the computer screen are created with light. It should be much brighter. Also, the room where the monitor was photographed is very bright, and all that ambient light would definitely lighten the monitor screen. So, I’m going to apply the Curves effect to the adobe-pumpkin layer. In the Curves effect, I’m going to lighten black (typically a no-no), and then generally increase the brightness of the layer. Figure 7.14 shows the curve I used to create the result seen in Figure 7.15.

The next thing we need to do is adjust the color of the adobe-pumpkin layer to match the color of the monitor layer. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the monitor is an apple monitor. In real life, these are gray aluminum. In this image, the monitor appears very yellow. We need to adjust the adobe-pumpkin layer to also look more yellow. So, I’m going to apply the Color Balance effect, and slightly reduce the blue values (to add yellow). You also might want to warm things up by adding magenta. You can add magenta by slightly reducing the green values.

We could, of course, spend much more time getting this to look perfect. But we’ve got bigger fish to fry, so we’ll end this by just adding a couple of layer styles. I’m going to apply the Inner Shadow layer style (which you can access by right clicking on the adobe-pumpkin layer and choosing Layer Styles>Inner Shadow). This is to recreate the tiny shadow that is caused by the protrusion of the monitor’s edge over the actual screen. I also added a Gradient Overlay layer style, reversed it (so that black was on bottom and white was on top), and drastically reduced the Opacity of the Gradient Overlay (to about 30%). This helps to simulate the glare from the lights in the room. While it’s not perfect, the results are significantly more believable than they were before. If you’d like to deconstruct what I’ve done here, I’ve included my work in a project called Corner Pin FINISH.aep in the Chapter 7 folder of the exercise files.

The Displacement Map Effect

The Displacement Map effect is a little challenging to get the hang of, especially if you’re not acquainted with using grayscale maps as effect controllers. If you need some more help with that topic, you can quickly jump ahead to Chapter 23 and come back. The Displacement Map effect is essentially worthless without maps as controllers.

The Displacement Map effect is similar to (but works far better than) the Displace effect in Photoshop. It uses maps as references to displace—or move—pixels around. The Displacement Map effect can use the lightness, red channel, green channel, blue channel, saturation, and other image properties in controller layers. That makes this a very versatile effect.

So, what is this effect used for? Sometimes, you just want to disrupt pixels. Let’s say you’ve got some footage of people on the beach, and the director wants you to change that shot into a day-for-night shot, and also wants you to create a bonfire next to the people. We covered day-for-night shots in Chapter 6, and we’ll cover how to create fire from scratch in Chapter 11. But what about the distortions that are created in the air above a fire? In this case, you could use the Displacement Map effect to create those distortions.

I have a trick that I like to use Displacement Map for. You can take a photo, paint a quick and rough displacement map, and then use that to bring the photo to life—rotating the subject a few degrees. This is great for quick cuts of photos. Years ago, Ken Burns revolutionized documentary filmmaking by moving the camera around photos, making them come alive. Years later, filmmakers started putting the subjects of old photos on separate layers in Photoshop and panning around them with virtual cameras. Using Displacement Map however, you can add seemingly 3D twists and turns.

To see this in action, open the Displacement Map.aep project in the Chapter 7 folder. Go to the Chad displaced comp. There is another comp in this project, called displacement wave. This comp will not be shown in the book because the effect is difficult to detect with still images. But you can use this for more practice with the Displacement Map effect.

I’ve set this comp up already for you, for your ease of use. But it’s very important to set up Displacement Map jobs correctly, or else the effect might not work properly. So, let’s warp on over to Photoshop, where I created the map we’ll be using to displace a photo.

First, I started with a photo of myself.

Next, I duplicated the layer, which you can do by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J(Win)/Cmd+J(Mac). Then, I reduced the Opacity value for the top layer to about 30%, and locked it by pressing the padlock icon at the top of the Layers panel. We’re going to paint a displacement mask, and I want to use the top layer as a reference, but I don’t want to accidentally paint on it. Then, on the bottom layer, I paint with black and white according to the depth of the image, or its proximity to the camera. For example, my nose is the object that is closest to the camera, so it is pure white. The green background is the object farthest from the camera, so it is pure black. All of the other depths painted accordingly. Notice how, in Figure 7.21, my eyes are darker than my cheeks, because they are farther away from the camera than my cheeks are.

You might also notice in my displacement map—as seen in Figure 7.21—that this is a terrible rendition of me. You might be wondering “why didn’t you just convert it to grayscale, moron?” That’s a great question. But we really do want the map soft like this, or else there will be tearing when the layer is displaced. The map looks awful by itself, but trust me on this one folks—it will work great as a displacement map.

Next, comes the import into After Effects. If you want your displacements to be precise (such as in our case with this photo), it is absolutely critical that your displacement map and your photo be the exact same size. The best way to ensure that is to import the PSD file as a Composition (NOT Composition—Cropped Layers), so that your layers and their accompanying displacement maps are imported at the size of the document.

Now let’s play Dr. Frankenstein and bring this photo to life. Back in After Effects, apply the Displacement Map effect to the Chad layer in the Chad displaced comp. Initially, the results look bad. This is because the effect uses the layer it was applied to as the displacement map. So, the first thing we want to do is to change the Displacement Map Layer drop down to the chad DIS layer. The chad DIS layer is our displacement map.

You can use the Displacement Map effect to displace a layer horizontally or vertically. In this case, we’ll be displacing my face horizontally and ignoring the vertical settings. But for future reference, vertical displacement is helpful for things that are moving upwards, such as our earlier example of fire on the beach. In that case, horizontal displacement would not be very useful. I’ve also used horizontal and vertical displacement together for a soda ad that needed the bottle to rotate, but all I had access to was a photo of the bottle at a diagonal angle. I used both horizontal and vertical displacement to make the bottle rotate diagonally.

Speaking of vertical displacement, we need to turn it completely off. Take the Use For Vertical Displacement drop down list to Off. Then take the Max Vertical Displacement value to 0. And yes, you do need to do both.

Now, take the Use For Horizontal Displacement drop down to Lightness, as we’ll be using the brightness of our displacement map to control this effect. Using subtle changes to the Max Horizontal Displacement property, we can now animate the displacement. To get the most out of this effect, I usually animate this property from a small negative number, to a small positive number. Figures 7.22 and 7.23 show the extremes of the animation. I’ve actually exaggerated these values a little so that the changes are obvious. This exaggeration has caused some ugly distortion on the edges of my head. But I personally allow a little bit of ugliness at the extremes (the lowest negative and highest positive max displacement values) because the ugliness will only be visible for one frame, but it will allow for a wider range of movement.

If the edges start to pull away from the sides, you can select the Wrap Pixels Around option, which will copy the pixels from the other side to fill in the gap. The results of this option aren’t always great (depending on the similarity of your edges), but they often look better than not having it on.

The results here are fairly realistic and creepy. We’ve essentially brought some life to this photo, and it didn’t take long at all. Through the skillful painting of our displacement map, we avoided having to even make a selection, let alone cut up any layers!

The Liquify Effect

The Liquify effect is one of my favorites, and it acts very similarly to the Photoshop plugin of the same name. It has great practical application, and it’s the ultimate cure for boredom. Think of the Liquify effect as turning a layer into clay. In the Liquify effect controls, you are given access to tools that allow you to sculpt a layer as digital clay. As you can imagine, this is great for a million and one reasons. You can diminish unattractive features. You can also exaggerate facial features—like eyes—to create a creepy look. Or, as we’ll see, you can use it as the ultimate science-fiction/fantasy character creation tool.

Let’s see how this works. Open the Liquify. aep project from the Chapter 7 folder of the exercise files. Apply the Liquify effect to the baby layer in the Liquify comp.

In the Liquify effect’s controls in the Effect Controls panel, you’ll find a set of tools to use on your layer.

The default tool is the Warp tool (its icon looks like a finger), which allows you to push pixels around as you might with your finger. Just click and drag to pull pixels as you please. If you want to change the size of your brush, open the Warp Tool Options area in the Effect Controls panel and change settings like Brush Size or Brush Pressure. Note that some keyboard shortcuts for painting work here as well, such as holding the Ctrl(Win)/Cmd(Mac) key while dragging your cursor in the Composition panel to dynamically resize your paintbrush.

Immediately below the Warp tool, you’ll find the Bloat tool, which is like a mini-Bulge effect. It puffs up areas of pixels, making them appear bloated.

The tool in the top right spot of the tools area is the Pucker tool, which does the opposite of the Bloat tool. The Pucker tool acts as a vacuum, sucking in and pinching surrounding pixels.

The other tools are less important and more self-explanatory. The only other tool that it’s crucial to be aware of is the Reconstruction tool. It’s the tool located directly below the Pucker tool, and it looks like a paint brush with some dots under it. When you paint with this tool, it removes all applied distortions, returning the painted pixels to their regular state.

The way that the Liquify works its magic behind the scenes is that it creates an invisible mesh around the object, and then distorts the layer as the mesh is distorted. You can click the stopwatch for the Distortion Mesh property to animate your changes to the mesh. Or, you can animate all changes at once with the Distortion Percentage value. I can take this value to 50%, which will reduce the amount of all distortions by half.

What might not be as obvious is that you can actually take this value above 100%, which will further exaggerate the applied distortions.

Because of the flexibility of this value, you can create some very interesting results by applying a Wiggle expression to it. If you wanted to make a surface boil, or have other random distortions, this might be the fastest way to do it.

The Magnify Effect

The purpose of the Magnify effect is to make a portion of an area larger, without the spherical distortion that we see in the Bulge and Spherize effects. This effect is used to zoom in to a particular area, which is great for demonstrating products in marketing ads, or for the medical/biological field, where things often need to have a closer look.

If you’d like to follow along, I’ll be using the Magnify.aep project in the Chapter 9 folder of the exercise files. In the example here, I’ve created a magnifying glass (out of two shape layers and some layer styles), and we also have an Artbeats video clip of a city flyover on another layer.

We’re going to use the Magnify effect to magnify the Artbeats city footage. We’re going to create the illusion that we’re doing some spy-esque reconnaissance work on some of the people in these buildings. We’ll match up the size of the magnified area to the glass in the magnifying glass. Then we’ll connect them using expressions, so that we can just move the magnifying glass around (or animate it doing so) to see different parts of our footage magnified.

Apply the Magnify effect to the Artbeats footage on the CED113.mov layer. Before we play around with the magnifying glass, let’s turn off the magnifying glass layer to just see what the Magnify effect looks like on its own. It’s a little difficult to see the results with this footage until we change the settings.

In the Effect Controls panel, you can change the shape from Circle to Square. You can move the magnified area around with the Center property. You can intensify or reduce the amount of zoom with the Magnification parameter. After increasing the Magnification and moving the center of the Magnify effect, the

effect results become easier to see. Note that if you want a layer to magnify beyond its boundaries, you’ll need to select the Resize Layer checkbox at the bottom of the effect.

The Link drop down contains interesting options. If you change this value from the default to Size to Magnification, it will link these two properties. Size still acts independently, but when you adjust Magnification, the size of the magnified area also increases. This drop down will also allow you to link Size & Feather to Magnification.

One other property that deserves coverage is the Scaling drop down. If you increase the Magnification property a lot, it can become pixelated. You can change the Scaling value to Soft to smooth out the results. You can also change it to Scatter, which creates a grainy result.

Usually, I don’t mention the Blending Mode drop down, because it’s obvious what it does. But with this effect, realize that this drop down can help you create a distinct look for your magnified area. You might use the Magnify effect to create a POV shot through a rifle scope, for example. You may want to use a different blend mode to make the scope view stand out more from its background.

Or, if the scope view is what you’re going for, you could also just change the Blending Mode from Normal to None, to isolate the magnified area.

The Mesh Warp Effect

The Mesh Warp effect is almost like the Liquify effect discussed earlier in this chapter. Both effects create a distortion mesh that is used to control the pixels of a layer, so that they can be distorted. Both effects create fairly organic distortions when used temperately. The difference is that in the Mesh Warp effect, you don’t have any extra tools. Instead, you edit the mesh directly.

Open the Distort.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder of the exercise files. Apply the Mesh Warp effect to the dotted line layer in the Motion Graphics comp. As soon as you apply the effect, you will see the distortion mesh.

Note that as you’re distorting the mesh in this effect, that there are several ways to distort the mesh. When you click on a grid intersection (a corner), you can move that corner around to distort the layer. This is the most simple and flexible way to adjust the mesh. Also, when you have a corner point selected, you’ll notice four bezier handles coming off of the corner point, which you can also pull and adjust to fine tune the distortion.

The parameters of this effect in the Effect Controls panel are very simple and straightforward. First, you control the resolution of the mesh by adjusting the Rows and Columns properties. Having a mesh with high resolution (i.e., high Rows and Columns values) will result in smoother distortions. However, having a low resolution mesh is much easier to adjust and correct.

You can also adjust the Quality although again, I don’t usually notice any difference in performance by adjusting this property. So, I usually keep my Quality value at 10 (the maximum amount).

As with other mesh-based distortion effects, you can animate the distortions you make to the mesh in the Mesh Warp effect by clicking the stopwatch for Distortion Mesh.

The Mirror Effect

The Mirror effect is a simple effect that creates a mirrored reflection of your layer. The main feature of this effect is that it hides any portion of the layer that intersects with its reflection. This is is great for creating reflections from a literal mirror, and it can also produce some really cool kaleidoscope effects by applying multiple copies of the effect, each with its own Reflection Angle and Reflection Center values. You might be wondering if the Mirror effect can create those cool iTunes-like reflections that you see everywhere nowadays. Unfortunately, it can’t. The Mirror effect doesn’t give you any control over the masking—or even the opacity—of the reflected object.

Open the Distort.aep project and apply the Mirror effect to the dotted lines layer. There are only two properties in this effect. Reflection Center determines the center point of the virtual mirror. The Reflection Angle value allows you to rotate the reflection around the Reflection Center. Note that the default settings appear to make nothing happen because the Reflection Center is on the right edge of the layer by default, and the default Reflection Angle is vertical.

All in all, the Mirror effect is definitely not the best way to create a reflection, as you might infer from the name. But it’s not called the Reflection effect, it’s called Mirror. And mirroring is something that this effect actually does quite well. If you wanted

a simple mirrored look, it might be challenging getting the pivot points spot on. But this is a task that is very easy with the Mirror effect.

If you do need to create an iTunes-like reflection that has faded opacity and a falloff to boot, you can get the same effect by duplicating the layer, and then applying the Mirror effect to the duplicate layer. Then, precompose the duplicate with the Move All Attributes option selected. Next, in the new precomp layer, mask out the original portion of the layer, isolating the reflection. You are then free to lower its opacity and apply another mask that has feathering to create the transparency falloff.

Another common motion graphics trick that Mirror really helps with, is when you’re creating a “bundle” of stuff, as seen in Figure 7.49. This is a screen shot of a project I did, and Is used the Mirror effect to duplicate the dragon(s), the treble clef(s), the robot(s), and the guitar(s). Often, you’ll want objects to be symmetrical on each side of said bundle like this. The Mirror effect is great for this as well.

The Offset Effect

The Offset effect is another simple effect. It just allows you to tile an object by offsetting it. It differs from simple position because it repeats the layer like a tile, as demonstrated in Figure 7.50. We’ll be continuing on in this effect with the Distort.aep project.

Keep in mind that if you like what you see with the Offset effect, you really might want to check out the Cycore effect, CC Tiler, which has the same parameters as the Offset effect does, but it also allows you to scale the tiles, which creates the illusion of a sea of duplicate clips that all play back at the same time. The CC Tiler effect also renders quickly, even when rendering many scaled-down, virtual copies of the same layer.

There is also an interesting feature that allows you to see the original layer—Blend With Original. As you increase this value, it becomes like an opacity value for the original, and also indicates how much transparency is removed from the Offset copy. An example of this is seen in Figure 7.50.

The Offset effect is obviously great for things that need to tile. If you were going to create a news ticker at the bottom of the screen that you wanted to keep playing over and over, you could just make one instance of the ticker, and cycle it with the Offset effect. This same trick could be used in a similar way with cars on a freeway, passing stars in the sky, the numbers on an odometer, and so on.

But because of this little Blend With Original value, we can also use the Offset effect to quickly create multiple copies of an object by duplicating it. By lowering the Blend With Original value, your layer seemingly becomes two layers. With every duplicate of the Offset effect, you create another instance of the composite result of all previous applications of the Offset effect. So, as you duplicate the Offset effect, the number of instances of your original layer increases exponentially. I wish my checking account had an Offset effect.

The Offset effect can also be helpful if you’re looking for some simple symmetry. In Figure 7.52, I applied the Offset effect to the star layer, and offset it on the Y axis. That’s it. No copies of the effect, and no adjustment of the Blend With Original value.

In the Smoke comp, I’ve applied two instances of the Offset effect to the smoke layer. I’ve also used Blend With Original to create a larger wall of smoke. You could get this same effect by duplicating the layer several times. But remember that with the Offset effect, we can control multiple instances of the smoke at once.

The Optics Compensation Effect

The Optics Compensation effect is a unique effect in this category. Most Distort effects distort a layer for visual effect. The Optics Compensation effect fixes the distortion at the corners of footage, caused by certain camera lenses. So, Optics Compensation is a distortion effect that fixes a distortion problem. I guess in this case, two wrongs do make a right.

Open up the Optics Compensation.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder if you’d like to follow along. This footage is a still shot I took with a fisheye lens over Snoqualmie Falls in Washington State. As you can plainly see, the fisheye lens has caused a lot of distortion in this image.

The Optics Compensation effect can be used in two ways. It can add lens distortion, or it can remove it. If I increase the Field Of View (FOV) value to about 106, you can see the added distortion it creates. This even shrinks the corners of the layer, and creates a pincushion effect.

This extra distortion might be a cool trick for another day, but right now, we need to get rid of this lens distortion, not add to it. The way to get the Optics Compensation effect to remove our lens distortion is to select the Reverse Lens Distortion checkbox. Selecting this option and changing the FOV value to about 70 gets

this image so straight that it looks like it just graduated from a military academy. Either that or it saw a chiropractor.

All joking aside, the real purpose of this effect is to aid in compositing. If we did have to composite a character—or some other object—into this scene, we would have a difficult time making a believable composite because of the lens distortion. That is the reason that this effect can add lens distortion or remove it. Of course, the example I have here is exaggerated so that you can see the results. But even a subtle inconsistency in field of view can cause a composite to look artificial.

The Polar Coordinates Effect

I love graphics that feel like they’re zooming towards you, and that’s why I love the Polar Coordinates effect. What Polar Coordinates actually does, is allow you to fold your layer such that the left and right side meet at the top. Picture those plastic, glow-in-the-dark necklaces and bracelets kids sometimes wear. When you purchase them, they are straight, but you wrap the two ends around to connect them, making a circle. Polar Coordinates does the same thing with layers. As we’ll see, when you do this with certain layers, the effect makes all sorts of cool vortexes and other graphics that give the illusion that they are coming towards you.

Let’s open the Polar Coordinates.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder of the exercise files. This project is identical to the Distort.aep project we’ve been looking at in this chapter, but it also contains another comp developed specifically for this effect called Anime Background. Later in this section, we’re going to use Fractal Noise and Polar Coordinates to create an anime cartoon-style background.

First, let’s start with the basics. Open the Motion Graphics comp, and apply the Polar Coordinates effect to the dotted line layer. There are only two settings here—Interpolation and Type of Conversion. Before we look at what these do, we need to understand two terms—rectangular and polar. Rectangular basically means left to right, and polar basically means around in a circle. Another way to describe this is to think of this effect converting X and Y (rectangular) coordinates to radius and angle (polar) coordinates. The Polar Coordinates effect takes a layer of one type (rectangular or polar) and converts it to the other type. Type of Conversion property determines whether you are taking a rectangular layer and wrapping it around itself (polar), or vice versa. The Interpolation parameter controls how much a layer is converted.

In the effect controls of the Polar Coordinates effect, change the Type of Conversion to Rect to Polar, and increase the Interpolation value to 100%. This will create a circle out of the dotted line. You’ll also see the great downfall of Polar Coordinates, in that it almost always degrades the quality of the layer. This happens even when the pixels aren’t stretched very much. In cases like this, I usually avoid those effects like the Plague. But, the distortion created by Polar Coordinates is so unique, that I still use it frequently. I usually just use Fast Blur, or start with a layer twice as large and then scale it down, or I use some other method to cover up the pixelation caused by this effect.

Note that we can also get interesting results by using Interpolation values other than 100%. Figure 7.58 shows the same example as 7.57, but with the Interpolation value at 33%.

Now that we know what it does, it’s pretty easy to imagine what the results of applying Polar Coordinates will be on simple lines. But what about when we apply it to the star layer? The results aren’t so predictable.

Usually, I set the Type of Conversion drop down to Rect to Polar. But this star is somewhat radial (circular) in nature. Let’s unwrap this circular object and make it rectangular by changing the Type of Conversion drop down to Polar to Rect. As you can see from Figure 7.60, this is a great (and quick) way to create icicles, and other spiky surfaces.

As I previously mentioned, I usually keep my Type of Conversion setting to Rect to Polar. I almost never use the Polar to Rect setting because the results are unpredictable when used with most objects. However, if you’re looking for a simple, artsy background, “unpredictable” may be just what you’re looking for.

When I applied the Polar Coordinates effect at the standard settings (Interpolation at 100% and Type of Conversion set to Rect to Polar) to the smoke layer in the Smoke comp, it created the illusion of a puff of gas being emitted with force from a small opening. Insert your own lowbrow joke here.

Remember that the Polar Coordinates effect, along with several others in the Distort category, operate at 32 bpc. I’ve included a comp in this project called HDR, if you’d like to experiment with it.

Let’s move on to our project to create an anime background. Open the Anime Background comp in this project to see the Fractal Noise we’ve applied here.

Apply the Polar Coordinates effect to the fractal layer, and as usual, take the Interpolation setting to 100%, and the Type of Conversion to Rect to Polar. This creates a cool anime-style background. It also shows how easy it is to create motion graphics that feel like they’re rushing towards the viewer.

Unfortunately, the pixelated ugliness caused by the Polar Coordinates effect is more than I can tolerate in this example. Because of the nature of this example, we can turn these edges razor sharp by (ironically) applying a blur effect. Apply the Radial Blur effect to the fractal layer, increase the Amount value to about 95, and then change the Type to Zoom. Because this effect blurs pixels in the same directions as these lines, the pixelated edges are smoothed, and we have a beautiful result. Using blurs to enhance edges? Yep. Don’t forget that the key with effects is to know what they do, so that you can use them for unconventional purposes.

Combining these effects is so fun, that I just can’t help myself. I should be focused on writing this book instead of playing around with After Effects, but adding effects is like an addiction, and I just can’t stop once I’ve started. Family members tried to stage an intervention, but I’m beyond hope. So, I’ve indulged in my visual arts addiction by applying the Bilateral Blur effect (with Colorize checked, the Radius value set to 10, and the Threshold value at 200), and then duplicated it. Then, I applied the Glow effect and adjusted to taste. I then capped it all off with the proverbial cherry—the Levels effect, which I used to darken the shadows and midtones.

Remember that this texture is still “live,” meaning that I can bring this vortex of light to life by going all the way back to the Fractal Noise and animating the Evolution value, or

other properties. I’ve included my final results in a project called Polar Coordinates FINAL.aep that you’ll find in the Chapter 7 folder.

The Reshape Effect

The Reshape effect allows you to distort a layer into another shape. This is done by creating one mask (the Source mask) that defines the boundaries of the current layer, and another mask (the Destination mask) determines what shape the layer will become when it is reshaped.

The Reshape effect is most commonly used, perhaps, as a morphing tool. It’s not necessarily a good morphing tool in most cases, though. You’ll never use the Reshape effect to recreate the morph seen in the movie Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when Theoden breaks the spell of Saruman and returns to normal. But as we’ll see, it is capable of matching edges well, and even allows you some manual control in this department.

You can also use the Reshape effect in character animation. For instance, you can reshape the layer of a character’s mouth to form certain phonemes. The Reshape effect also allows you to use a third mask as a Boundary mask, if you so choose. The Boundary mask restricts the reshaping to a certain area of the layer. So if your character’s mouth and face are on the same layer, you’re not out of luck because you can use a Boundary mask to isolate the distortion to just the mouth.

Open up the Reshape.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder. This project contains a few comps. We’ll mostly be working with the Reshape comp because I’ve done a lot of the setup for you. If you wanted to start from scratch, I’ve also created a comp called Reshape Start from Scratch.

In the Reshape comp, we have two layers. The Creepy Stranger layer contains the glowing silhouette of a shady looking character.

The Ghost layer contains an old school ghost I drew in Illustrator. We’re going to morph the Creepy Stranger layer into this Ghost layer, as if the creepy stranger is really a ghost. Hey, it could happen.

Critical to this trick working out correctly, we need a mask of each layer, on each layer. In other words, on the Creepy Stranger layer, we need a mask of the creepy stranger and a mask of the ghost. And, we need both of those masks on the ghost layer as well. This is because we’re going to morph the stranger into the shape of the ghost. But at that point, it will still look like the stranger, just in a different shape. So, we’re going to morph the stranger into the ghost shape, and the ghost from the stranger shape, back into the normal ghost shape. Then, we’ll cross dissolve them together, and hopefully create the illusion that the stranger is becoming the ghost.

Note that if you need to make a mask of an outline of a layer, you can use the Layer>Auto-trace command. You can also copy the mask of one layer’s outline—by selecting the mask in the Timeline panel and pressing Ctrl+C(Win)/Cmd+C(Mac)—and then paste it (Ctrl+V(Win)/Cmd+V(Mac)) to apply it to the other layer. Also, be sure that the Mask Mode value in the Timeline panel for each mask is set to None, so that the masks don’t remove any portions of the layers that they are applied to. In the Reshape comp here, I’ve already created and copied the masks for you, so you’re all ready to go. The Creepy Stranger layer mask is called guy mask, and the Ghost layer mask is called ghost mask.

Next, you need to apply the Reshape effect to both the Creepy Stranger layer and the Ghost layer. Set the Source Mask drop down to guy mask for both layers because they will both start in the shape of the stranger. For the Destination Mask, we need to set both to ghost mask because both layers will morph into the ghost shape at the end.

To get the layer to distort from its Source Mask shape to its Destination Mask shape, animate the Percent value. Elasticity determines how smooth the movement is. The default value is Stiff, and gets more smooth as you go down the list, until you come to Super Fluid. And let me tell you, there is a huge hit on render time every time you go up any degree in smoothness. With Stiff selected as the Elasticity value, my Mac Book Pro renders this simple example at almost 3 frames per second. When I use Super Fluid Elasticity, it takes almost 8 seconds to render one frame. You can imagine how much that would multiply with other objects animating, a standard amount of layers, anything in the background, HD video, and so forth.

Another important aspect of the Reshape effect is correspondence points. A correspondence point is a point on one mask that corresponds to a point on the other mask. This tells the Reshape effect where a certain part of a mask be when it’s done reshaping. If the stranger’s hat were to morph off to the right and become the arm of the ghost, it would not be a good distortion in this example. So, we would create a correspondence point connecting the top of the stranger mask to the top of the ghost mask to tell the Reshape effect where that point should go.

We don’t have to create correspondence points for every spot on the masks. We only need to create them where there are problems, and in many cases, Reshape will correctly guess how to morph the layer. You can create as many points as you want, but each pair of points will slow down render time.

To create correspondence points, Alt(Win)/Opt(Mac) click somewhere on a mask, then Alt/Opt click the corresponding point on the other mask. Once you’ve created a correspondence point, you can click and drag on it to move it along the mask. The Correspondence Points area in the Effect Controls panel shows you how many pairs of correspondence points you have. Note that you can only see correspondence points when the Reshape effect is selected in the Effect Controls panel.

The final step is to animate the fading out of the Creepy Stranger layer, and the fading in of the Ghost layer. This produces a cross dissolve, and if performed correctly, can help us create the appearance that the stranger is becoming the ghost.

The Ripple Effect

The Ripple effect creates an (almost) auto-animated ripple-type distortion. If you had a photo of still water and wanted to make it look like the surface of the water was rippling because someone threw an object into it, you would only have to apply the Ripple effect, increase the Radius value, and render. That’s it. The Ripple effect creates its distortions by creating concentric rings of distortion that emanate from center, called the Center of Ripple in this effect.

To see the results of this effect, I’m going to apply the chads water—glistening pool.ffx animating preset to a solid layer. You can find this preset in the Animation Presets folder in the exercise files. This animation preset creates somewhat still water, which will be great for distorting with the Ripple effect.

Before we apply the Ripple effect to the solid that this animation preset was applied to, we first have to precompose the white solid layer so that the Ripple effect can be seen in the fractal water. After precomposing, apply the Ripple effect to the precomp of the water. Increase the Radius value to about 50 to start seeing results. The Radius value specifies how big the rippled area is.

You can change the Center of Ripple value to create a different place that the ripples emanate from.

Since this effect essentially auto-animates, you can control the speed with the Wave Speed property. Control the size of the ripples with the Wave Width value. Control the depth (intensity) of the ripples with the Wave Height value.

The Ripple Phase value is like an offset for the wave distortion, in case you’d like the wave to look differently at a particular frame without changing any of the other settings.

The Rolling Shutter Repair Effect

The Rolling Shutter Repair grew out of the Warp Stabilizer effect (covered later in this chapter), but it has more power for correcting this issue than Warp Stabilizer does. Its purpose is to correct the rolling shutter distortion common in cameras with CMOS sensors. As these cameras move too quickly, the footage appears to wave and bend. This wavy distortion is colloquially referred to as “jello cam” because of the way the footage appears to wobble like jello. This affects cameras from the iPhone video camera to Canon DSLR’s to the venerable RED One.

In the Rolling Shutter Repair.aep project in the Chapter 7 folder of the exercise files, you’ll find an example of this. It’s kind of hard to show in a book because subtle, fixable examples don’t show up well as a still. And extreme examples can’t be repaired by this effect. But if you try this effect with this project (or your own footage), you’ll see a difference. In this original footage, I was panning while shooting video with my iPhone handheld. So the “jello” in this shot is fairly strong. In Figure 7.76, you can see this effect most noticeably in the trees, which are slanted towards the right. The house in the background and the target/post thingy in the foreground are also leaning similarly.

Apply the Rolling Shutter Repair effect to this layer. You’ll notice an instant correction. But the default Rolling Shutter Rate value of 50% is best for less rolling shutter than we have. Typically, 50–70% is ideal for rolling shutter from DSLR cameras. But for the iPhone, Adobe recommends punching this value all the way up to 100%. Once we do that, our trees straighten out quite a bit, and our shot looks much better, especially when played back.

Note that there are some choices if you’re not getting the results that you’re looking for (which is pretty common with bad rolling shutter shots). You can enable the Detailed Analysis button if you’re using Warp as your Method. You can also try Pixel Motion for the Method value.

Additionally, if you have a shot that your camera was turned sideways, you might want to look at the Scan Direction option. Almost all sensors go from top to bottom, so the default value of Top® Bottom is great. But if you rotate the sensor while recording (which is especially common with phone cameras), you can adjust this value accordingly.

The Smear Effect

The Smear effect is very similar to the Reshape effect, except that the Smear effect is not intended to morph a shape into another shape. The purpose of the Smear effect is to simply warp and smear pixels around. The controls are much easier to understand and use than those in the Reshape effect. As with the Reshape effect, we need to create masks to tell the Smear effect how to do its job. We create a source mask to tell the Smear effect which part of the layer will be distorted. We also create a boundary mask to set a limit as to how much that portion of the layer can be distorted.

Open up the Smear.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder. This contains a comp with a rocket image. We’ll be using Smear to distort the trail of fire coming out of the exhaust of the rocket. I’ve already created two masks for you on this layer—an elliptical mask that will be the source mask, and a rectangular mask that we’ll use as a Boundary Mask.

Next apply the Smear effect. Before you worry about what’s going on, first change the Source Mask value to Mask 1, and the Boundary Mask value to Mask 2.

The Smear effect allows you to deform the portion of the layer inside the source mask in three basic ways: moving, scaling, and rotating. When you first apply the Smear effect, you might have noticed an additional shape that matches the shape of the source mask. This area is like a smear controller, as the pixels in the source mask will be pulled towards the pixels in the smear controller. The position of this smear controller can be adjusted by the Mask Offset property.

Use Mask Offset to move the pixels in the source mask. Use Mask Rotation to rotate the pixels in the source mask. And use Mask Scale to adjust the scale of the pixels in the source mask. Notice, however, that these properties only work to the degree that you’ve increased the Percent value. Think of the Percent value as the master distortion control in this effect. The Elasticity and Interpolation Method parameters (which we covered in the Reshape effect, earlier in this chapter) are also here to help you customize your distortions.

The Spherize Effect

The Spherize effect is the much simpler version of the Bulge effect. Both effects create a bulging, round distortion around a specified center. The Spherize effect only allows you to control the size of the spherical distortion (with the Radius property), and its location (with the Center of Sphere property). So, use the Bulge effect if you need more control. Use the Spherize effect if you need a quick and simple bulging effect.

The results of using the Spherize effect are essentially the same as the results of using Bulge. To see these results, see the Bulge effect earlier in this chapter.

The Transform Effect

The Transform effect contains the five basic transforms that we have for layers: Anchor Point, Position, Scale, Rotation, and Opacity. It also adds the ability to adjust Skew, Skew Axis, and the ability to adjust and animate the Shutter Angle, which controls the amount of motion blur. All of these properties (including Shutter Angle) operate independently from the other corresponding settings in the layer and composition.

You might be wondering why anyone would need another set of layer transforms. There are actually a few good reasons. One is that it is often advantageous to have two sets of the same property. Let’s say you had a layer with a light bulb, and you wanted it to flicker while fading out. You could use the layer’s Opacity property to flicker the light, and then apply the Transform effect to have another Opacity value, which you could then use to fade out the layer.

Another great benefit of this effect is that it can sometimes substitute for precomposing. Let’s say that you had several layers of graphic elements that you wanted to resize (or, perhaps, move or scale). If you didn’t want to precompose those layers, you could create an adjustment layer above the graphic elements layers, and then apply the Transform effect to the adjustment layer. Any adjustments to the Transform effect on the adjustment layer will affect all layers below it.

Along those lines, you could also use the Transform effect to defy the render order. Typically, transforms (from the layer) are rendered after effects. By using the Transform effect, you could place the Transform effect before (i.e., on top of in the stack of effects in the Effect Controls panel) other effects, thereby changing the render order.

Finally, you could also use the Transform effect as a last resort helper when you’ve run into animation troubles. I’m ashamed to admit that on more than one occasion, I’ve botched an animation because I animated Anchor Point and Position, and the results were terrible. Using Transform, you can add an additional set of animation controls, which can often bail you out of such sticky circumstances.

As previously mentioned, one of the unique components of this effect is the ability to adjust Skew and Skew Axis. Skew is like the object equivalent of italics. It gives an object a slanted distortion. The Skew Axis property determines where the center of the skew is.

The Turbulent Displace Effect

The intent of the Turbulent Displace effect is to create organic distortions using a fractal noise pattern. Because of this, you’ll notice many similarities to the pattern powerhouse, Fractal Noise that we’ll look at in Chapter 11. Turbulent Displace is almost like the Displacement Map effect that’s only using the Fractal Noise effect to create the displacement map, and you can’t see the Fractal Noise itself, only its effects.

Perhaps the most common way to use the Turbulent Displace effect is creating waving flags out of flat layers. We’ll look at how to do that, as well as what this effect looks like with some of the other examples we’ve looked at in this chapter already. There are some cool examples here, so hopefully you’ll find something you can use in your workflow.

First, open the Turbulent Displace.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder. Let’s start in the Flag comp. This comp consists of a solid with the Checkerboard effect applied. We’ll look more at the Checkerboard effect in Chapter 9, but just know for now that it made this checkerboard from scratch instantly. Also notice that the solid that this effect has been applied to is slightly smaller than the comp. This will be important later.

Apply the Turbulent Displace effect to the Flag layer in the Flag comp. Right away, even without making further adjustments, you can see the effect of the distortion on this layer.

The first setting I want to address here is the Pinning property. By default, this value is set to Pin All, which basically means that the corners and edges remain undisplaced. Does that mean they’re just “placed”? Ha! You can see in Figure 7.83 how the center of the flag is distorted, but the corners and edges remain flat. This is a really helpful setting in some instances, but this makes our flag look really fake. Instead, take this value to None, which allows the entire flag to be distorted. The Pinning value allows you to determine a part of the layer to be frozen, as if it were anchored down on a pole or if someone were holding it in place.

You’ll notice that in the Pinning drop down, there are basically two sets of options—the group of Pinning settings at the top are regular and the ones at the bottom have Locked at the end. Let’s take Pin Top for example. When Pin Top is selected, the entire top edge will be restricted from warping. However, it will be allowed to shift left and right a little bit. This would be good if you were going to have an object dangling from another object that might sway a little, such as clothes hanging from a clothesline. But if this were hanging from a flagpole, the flag wouldn’t move so much. In that case, you’d want to use Pin Top Locked, which restricts the pinned side from moving at all.

Our flag is starting to look better. One of the biggest problems in the current example is that our flag edges are flat because the flag is getting cut off at the boundaries of the layer. The solution to this is to select the Resize Layer checkbox, below the Pinning parameter. This allows the distortions from the Turbulent Displace effect to go beyond the regular boundaries of the layer. Now this is starting to look like a flag. And actually, if you wanted to animate this like a flag on a flag pole, you’d probably want to take the Pinning value to Pin Left Locked.

Now, let’s start from the top of the effect in the Effect Controls panel and look at some of the most important settings here. In the Displacement drop down list, you’ll notice that there are different methods here that you can use to distort your layer. Instead of displacing it with turbulence, for example, you can make it bulge or twist. I usually find the default value of Turbulent to be the best setting for most jobs.

The Amount value determines the intensity of the displacement. I find that the default value of 50 is a little high most of the time. For animating this flag, I took this down to about 35 for a softer wave. You can also take this value ridiculously high to create some interesting art.

The Size value is a little abstract. This refers to the size of the fractal noise working behind the scenes to distort the flag. Take this value down really small (to about 5) if you want to create many tiny ridges, as if you were animating something underneath turbulent water. Use large values for large, sweeping waves of distortion.

You can create more intricate edges by increasing the Complexity value. This refers to the complexity of the fractal noise making the displacement.

All that’s left now is to bring this effect to life. You can do that with the Evolution parameter, which causes the noise to just move around. It might as well be called the “Spring to Life” property. In the case of our flag, animating this value will cause the flag to wave. You can also use the Cycle Evolution parameter (which we will cover in the Cell Pattern effect in Chapter 9) to create a seamless loop of distortion.

You can also animate the Offset (Turbulence) property to create the illusion that wind is blowing through your layer, or that flames are rising upwards. Just animate the X or Y dimension of this parameter to achieve the desired effect.

Let’s see what Turbulent Displace looks like when applied to the other objects that we were using previously from the Distort.aep project. Note that these are also included in the Turbulent Displace effect for your convenience. I think the results are particularly interesting with the fractal smoke. Note that this effect also works in 32 bits per channel mode, which is great for creating a fiery look with our HDR star in the HDR comp.

These examples are saved in the Turbulent Displace.aep project, if you’d like a closer look at what I’ve done in these figures.

The Twirl Effect

The Twirl effect is one of the more simple effects in this category. It creates a distortion that looks like someone grabbed your layer and twisted part of it.

If you’d like to follow along, open up the Distort.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder of the exercise files, and apply the Twirl effect to the various layers here. There are three parameters: Angle, Twirl Radius, and Twirl Center. It might seem weird to you (as it did to me) that there isn’t a Twirl Amount property. This is because the effect is brought to life by increasing the Angle value. Then, you can use the Twirl Radius value to increase the size of the twirl, and the Twirl Center value to determine where the center of the twirl is.

Let’s first apply Twirl to the dotted line layer in the Motion Graphics comp. We’ll start simple. Take the Angle value to 90, and leave all other properties at their defaults.

You’ll notice in Figure 7.93 that the edges of the dotted line are unaffected. This is due to the Twirl Radius setting. To have the entire layer join the twirl party, increase the Twirl Radius. Anything over 42 does the trick in this case.

Also note that Twirl can also process in 32 bits per channel. So let’s apply Twirl to the shape layer in the HDR comp. When you do so, increase the Twirl parameter above 360 degrees. When dealing with rotation, one full revolution usually looks the same as no rotation at all. With the Angle value in the Twirl effect, it

doesn’t work like that. The more you increase the Angle value, the more the layer spins around itself, creating a tighter wind. Figure 7.96 shows the result of taking the Angle value to 4× +99 degrees, the Twirl Radius to 90, and moving the center of the twirl down and to the right a bit.

The Warp Effect

If you’ve used the text warping features in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, then you already know how to use the Warp effect. It basically allows you to warp a layer in one of several preset warp styles. Personally, I prefer to use the other distort effects because they give you more control over specific warp styles. If I apply the Bulge preset in the Warp effect, I don’t get any Bulge-specific controls. If I apply the Bulge effect, I get all sorts of controls that are specific to bulging. That’s the way I roll. But that’s just my preference.

Again open the Distort.aep project. Apply the Warp effect to the dotted line layer in the Motion Graphics comp. The default settings for the Warp effect create an arc distortion.

I’m not going to go into what each different Warp Style setting does, because they are fairly self-explanatory. It is important to know that the Warp Axis parameter specifies whether the distortion is oriented horizontally or vertically. The default setting is Horizontal, which basically means that it creates a horizontal arc. Taking this value to Vertical makes a vertical arc distortion;

a completely different result. The Bend property corresponds to the amount of warping applied.

Next, I’m going to switch over to the star layer and apply the Warp effect to that. I’m going to change the Warp Style to Flag. This Warp Style distorts a layer in a wave shape, like a waving flag. Note that this is not a good idea to use for actually animating a flag.

The other properties that we haven’t discussed are the Horizontal Distortion and Vertical Distortion properties. These properties determine how distorted or pinched objects are on one side. For example, taking the Horizontal Distortion value to 100 will pinch the left side and enlarge the right side of the layer. Take the value to negative 100 to create the opposite effect. Taking the Vertical Distortion property to a positive number will pinch the top and bloat the bottom, while a negative Vertical Distortion value will bloat the top and pinch the bottom.

I also applied the Warp effect to the fractal smoke in the Smoke comp, and used the Wave Style, and set the Warp Axis to Vertical to create curved, wispy smoke.

The Warp Stabilizer Effect

The Warp Stabilizer effect is not just a good effect, it’s one of the best reasons to use After Effects. The technology behind this stabilizing plugin is so magical that if it were invented in New England in the seventeenth century, Adobe would have been accused of being a witch. I literally can’t count how many shots that were otherwise unusable that Warp Stabilizer has completely saved.

This is no ordinary stabilization tool. Most stabilizing tools choose a point and then stabilize that point. That’s still helpful in some situations. But what the Warp Stabilizer does is actually LOOK at your footage and it examines what should be stabilized. Typically, in a shot with great depth, a regular stabilizer wouldn’t be of much help because as you shake a handheld shot, the parallax shifts. In some amazing way, After Effects puts all of those shaken up pieces back together. You can have some motion in the footage, and After Effects won’t stop that motion (unless you want it to), it will just enhance and smooth what’s there. It’s seriously incredible. But just like a light saber, it can really mess you up if you don’t know how to wield it.

For our first example, I’m going to use a clip that I actually used in a critical scene in a short film that I just made called GODLIZZA. This short film was an experiment to see if I could make a film without any crew at all, and with the only cast being my children. The film won the Grand Prize in a short film competition at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2012, so Warp Stabilizer must’ve done something right!

Open the Warp Stabilizer.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder of the exercise files, and go to the GODLIZZA shot composition. In this shot, we’ve just entered a baby’s dream world, and we see this imaginary city for the first time. It’s supposed to look like a flyover, but in reality it was me holding my heavy camera between my legs while I walked forwards. And the shot looks like it was held between someone’s legs (it’s really shaky). Just apply the Warp Stabilizer effect and wait. When it’s done analyzing the footage, it’s going to be as smooth as if I didn’t walk with it between my legs.

Now, in all fairness, it’s shots like this (i.e., with a shaky moving camera) that the Warp Stabilizer was designed for, so the default settings work perfectly. But sometimes it doesn’t always do what you want it to do. If your shot is supposed to be locked off (without any camera motion), then you’ll want to change the Result value in the Effect Controls panel from Smooth Motion to No Motion.

Warp Stabilizer also has a cool, lesser known trick. By default, the Framing value in the Borders section is set to Stabilize, Crop, Auto-scale, which indicates the procedures that the effect is going to perform on your footage. Once footage is stabilized, the edges go crazy and look terrible. So the default solution here is to just slightly scale up the footage. You can add more scale with the Additional Scale parameter, or you can choose one of the other Stabilize/Crop options in the Framing drop down, and choose your own scaling value.

But there’s another option that is quite interesting—Stabilize, Synthesize Edges. What this option will do, is try to keep your scaling at 100%, and then when the edges don’t quite meet up, it will try to guess what the edges should be, and fills them in. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, right? Sometimes. But sometimes, as in this case, it actually works pretty well. Figures 7.103 and 7.104 show the before and after of an edge that Warp Stabilizer had to synthesize and how it did. I’m impressed.

There is a big gotcha to the Warp Stabilizer effect that I ran up against on a very important shot. Because it was important, I had to make a workaround, and I’d like to share that with you, in case it might save you some headaches.

In the other comp in this project, princess in bed, you’ll find a shot that I used for an iPad app I’ve been working on called The Princess and the Paintbrush. The camera pushes in on this shot, and it’s a little shaky because I used a crappy slider.

You would think that the Warp Stabilizer would fix this up quick, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. But it actually freaks out halfway through the clip because it’s trying to analyze the movement of the princess as she rolls over in the bed. The secret here is to pre-compose the layer, and make a mask in the precomp that doesn’t have the princess in it, as demonstrated in Figure 7.106. Then apply Warp Stabilizer to the nested precomp layer in the parent comp. Without that distraction, it will totally work! After it has stabilized everything successfully, you can go back to the nested comp and remove or disable the mask, and your shot will still be stabilized in the parent comp! Ha HA! Fooled you, Warp Stabilizer!

The Wave Warp Effect

Finally in this chapter, we come to the Wave Warp effect (not to be confused with the Wave World effect in the Simulation category). I really like this effect. The Wave Warp effect applies different types of wavy distortions to a layer. This effect also auto-animates. Another aspect of this effect that I like is that there are many different types of wave shapes that you can use, and they are all very different. The results are fairly high quality, and you also have control over the Pinning. For creating interesting motion graphics, the Wave Warp effect is a terrific asset.

Let’s take one last gander at the Distort.aep project from the Chapter 7 folder of the exercise files. Apply the Wave Warp effect to the dotted line layer in the Motion Graphics comp. Instantly the line is distorted and will animate when played back. All of the settings here are similar to what we’ve seen in other effects in this chapter (such as the Ripple effect), so we don’t need to cover those again here. But what I do want to do, is to show you how different the various wave types are. Before we do that, I’m going to increase my Wave Height value to 70 to make the wave distortion more prominent.

Normally, I wouldn’t take the time to show you what every single option of a particular property does. But the Wave Type effect changes the results so radically, that it may be a great undiscovered tool for creating motion graphics. Let’s say you wanted to create a series of slashes, or half circles, or waves of noise, or small bars. You might not think of it that way, but the Wave Warp effect is capable of creating all of these patterns and more. Just create a simple line with a masked solid or a shape layer, use a blend mode if desired, and apply the Wave Warp effect and one of these presets to create instant animated textures.