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In this final step of the project we are going to use the Step 4 project we've
created in the last movie to add some effects to these layers.
Effects are one of my favorite parts of After Effects. I do everything from
create blurs, and create patterns from scratch, to color adjust, and a whole
number of things. We are going to add a total of five effects to these layers
and it will make a big difference. First, let's start with the Rings layer; I'm
going to select the Rings layer. I'm going to do a search in the Effects & Presets
panel for an effect called Fast Blur. And with the Rings layer selected,
I can just double-click Fast Blur here in the Effects & Presets panel to apply
it. These rings are beautiful, but I want them to be like an essence like they
are thinking and radiating thought waves coming off of them as they are meditating.
So I definitely want these to be significantly more blurry.
So I'm going to take the Blur value up to, I don't know, really high, somewhere
around 70 or so, and now instead of being definite rings there are kind of
these little ethereal wisps of knowledge emanating from our subjects here.
Next I'm going to select the Sun layer. I don't like the original coloring, the
Fill and the Stroke. I could change that by changing both of these properties,
but I could do a little bit more quickly by adding the Fill effect. So as we do
a search on Fill, make sure it's not the Eyedropper Fill, we want the Fill
effect, double-click to apply that, and it fills both the Fill and stroke of
the Sun with a solid color. I don't want to use this default Red though, so I'm
going to go over here the Effect Controls panel to adjust my effect, and I'm
going to click the Color Swatch next to Color to open up the color-picker
dialog box and let me move out away here actually so we can see the sun, and
then I'm going to click in some numbers here for RGB.
For Red I'm going to click-in this 255 here, and I'm going to type in 190, I'm
going to hit the Tab key and I'll type- in 170, hit Tab again and type in 120,
I'm going to click OK. Basically I was going here, it is kind of
a flesh tone to resonate with what we already have on screen, I'm going to click
OK here. So already this is a significantly improved project.
Next, I'm going to move out in time a little bit so we could see all of our
text, and I'm going to do a search for the Glow effect.
Now you might be seeing a whole bunch of extra junky in Effects & Presets panel
when you do a search for Glow. And if you go to the fly-out menu, you can click
Show Animation Presets to turn that off. When Show Animation Presets is turned
on, you get all the Animation Presets here in the search area that contain
Glow, and again that could be kind of distracting, so I would like to turn this off.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select our text layer, I'm going to
apply the Glow effect, so that you can see we could apply effects not just to
shapes but to text as well. You could also apply to this video, which is even important.
Now the Glow effect we have added is a subtle one, but it basically makes this
just a little bit more intense and bright. Almost like its glowing white.
The default settings are pretty good; you might want to increase the Glow
Radius value here just a little bit more, may be to about 20 or so. To see the
before and the after you can click this Effects icon to the left of the name of
the effect, so here is before the glow and the after the glow.
Finally, let's come down to our Video layer, we are going to add a couple of
effects here. First we are going to add the Circle effect.
Now as many effects, such as the case here when you apply an effect it
completely replaces the layer you have applied it to. Our purpose of course is
not to do that, but to create some color around the outside edge of the circle
created by the sun. So here are some values to type in. I'm going to click in
Radius; I'm going to type in 625. Next I'm going to change the Edge value to
Thickness & Feather * Radius. We'll then take the Thickness up to 15, let's
open up Feather here, let's increase this Feather value so you get something
that you like, not really a specified number here. Feather is one of those
things that's kind of more of a matter of personal preference that looks good.
Next I'm going to change the color by clicking this Color Swatch here, and
we're going to give the numbers to type in here, for Red we are going to
type in 180, for Green we are going to type in 0, and go ahead and hit OK.
Next from the Blending Mode dropdown, select Add. Once we do that this
basically blends the Circle effect into the footage we've applied it to. So now
you can see what you are doing if you like to go back to this effect and adjust
some of these settings like Feather or you could actually Feather the inside of
the Edge to, or whatever you want to do to customize this effect to your liking.
Finally, I'm going to add an effect called Hue/Saturation once you type in hu.
That should be the only search result that comes up, so I'm going to
double-click to apply Hue/Saturation. Hue/Saturation, if you are familiar with Photoshop
is very similar to the Hue/Saturation you will find there. You could
adjust the Master Hue of the entire composition here. That's kind of an
interesting effect. So actually now what I'm going for in this instance though,
so I'm going to Undo this, and instead of adjusting the Master Hue, in other
words the Hue for the entire layer, what I'm going to do is change the
Channel Control from Master to Blues, that way I'm only adjusting the Blues in this
footage. Then I'm going to take the Blue Hue by clicking
this right number typing 60 and hitting Enter and basically what that does
it shifts the Blues that were in the Circle effect and on the Footage layer, a
little bit more purple now. So everything has a more cohesive feel. So now
as we hit the Home key and hit the Spacebar we can see our final project complete.
The beautiful glowing text, it's all ethereal and new age-y and these cool
thought waves that kind of fly out here, the sun's rotating. All of this was
created in just a few simple steps using After Effects.
Let's go ahead and hit the Spacebar to stop our animation, hit the Home key,
and let'*** the Spacebar again to preview what we have so far.
In real-time here as we play this back now and look at that. Our text sprouts
up like thoughts, absolutely beautiful. And again, this only scratches the
surface of what we are going to be looking at in this training series. I know I
didn't explain a lot of how and why as we were doing this; I just gave you some
numbers to fill in, but we will be explaining a lot of that as we go through
this training series. If all you got out of this project is that
After Effects is fun and easy then I did my job.
So now let's actually back up step and start from scratch really learning After Effects.