This is one of those classic movie effects, especially in horror movies. There’s your soon-to-be victim, looking at themselves in the mirror. They finish what they’re doing, turn to walk away, and the reflection stays there, with a stupid evil grin on its face. It’s a cool effect and one that’s very easy to do in After Effects or Premiere as this video from Ian Sansavera of Learn How To Edit Stuff shows.
How to stretch and bend time with long exposure video effects
Long exposure effects with video can create some very cool results. This particular video from cinematographer Dan Marker-Moore is a particularly good example of that. Dan’s known for his outstanding time slice work, and very cool time related video effects. And in this video project for Toyota, he does not disappoint.
It’s a very interesting long exposure type effect, that uses multiple frames of video to create a sort of time warp, amongst other things. Using nothing but standard After Effects with no 3rd party plugins, he creates a fantastic looking final result.
How to create the Hitchcock Vertigo dolly zoom effect with any drone
The Hitchcock zoom, Vertigo effect, dolly zoom, it has a bunch of different names depending on who you ask. But it’s all the same thing. Moving the camera away from your subject while zooming in. Or, bringing the camera closer to your subject while zooming out. It’s a very difficult technique to master, but today we have digital options to make life easier and simulate it in post.
In this video from Tom’s Tech Time, we see one way to create this effect using footage from just about any drone. Of course, the higher the resolution, the better the overall quality will be, but the principle can be applied to any of them.
7 great tips for working with photographs in Adobe Premiere Pro
People are using photographs in videos for all kinds of reasons these days. Sometimes it’s to supplement a behind the scenes shoot or a vlog. Maybe you’ve shot a few thousand stills to turn into a timelapse. Or, perhaps still photos is the entire content of your video slideshow. Whatever the reason, creating videos from stills is still confusing to many people.
If you don’t want to create something completely from scratch yourself there are services like Animoto. But if you want a little more control, something like Adobe Premiere Pro will give it to you. This video from filmmaker Jason Boone offers 7 great tips for working with your photographs and stills timelapse sequences inside Premiere Pro.
How to effectively use Warp Stabilizer to make your shaky footage rock steady
Even if you’re trying to be as rock steady as possible with your footage, the camera almost inevitably moves in a way you hadn’t counted on. Sometimes you’ll just shoot it again, but there may be no opportunity for that. You might not even know there’s a problem until you’re back home reviewing the footage.
Sometimes, there’s no choice but to fix it in post. Adobe’s Warp Stabilizer that comes with After Effects and Premiere has always been something of a mixed blessing. It’s a fantastic tool that can often fail miserably. Mostly due to user error. In these two videos, we find out how to fix it.
Advanced video stabilisation with Premiere and After Effects
One of the most off putting things for viewers of video is shaky footage. The best way to keep the camera steady is to use a tripod, but sometimes we want to add a little motion. Quality sliders can still cost a fair amount of money, and not everybody has a gimbal or other stabiliser. We just have to go regular handheld. But this often leads to bumpy footage. So, what can we do?
Adobe Premiere Pro has a built in Warp Stabiliser, but it doesn’t always do the best job. When it works, it works extremely well, but it often falls over and gives results we really didn’t expect. In this video from Miesner Media, Theo takes us on a round trip from Premiere to After Effects, and back to Premiere again, resulting in perfectly stabilised footage.
How to create the dolly zoom effect without a zoom lens
The dolly zoom, also known as the “Vertigo Effect” or “Hitchcock Zoom” can be an amazing technique to add tension or drama to a scene. It’s a process whereby the camera is dollied in toward your subject while the lens zooms out wide. Or, the reverse, where the camera moves away from your subject while the lens zooms in.
It’s a difficult technique to master, and almost impossible if shooting on your own. You have to move the camera, adjust the zoom of the lens, and try to keep your subject in focus all at the same time. This video from Lewis McGregor shows a technique to create a similar effect without doing any zooming whatsoever. But, there is a caveat. It won’t really work if your camera only shoots 1080p.
Motion tracking in After Effects with Mocha for perfect tracks every time
Once limited to the realms of Hollywood, motion tracking has become easily easily accessible today. Adobe After Effects comes with three trackers. There’s the original 2D tracker that AE has had for a long time and also the 3D camera tracker introduced in CS6, which analyses your footage to recreate your camera’s movement.
After Effects, however, also comes bundled with the Mocha planar tracking application. It’s a separate application, not a plugin, so it gets easily missed by many users, but it can succeed where the others fail. In this video from Surfaced Studio, you’re going to find out how it works.
Adobe just dropped a CC2015.5 update with “Face-Aware Liquify” and a bunch of other cool features
Today, Adobe finally unleashes an update that many users have been waiting for. As well as giving us back the Legacy Healing Brush, this update to Adobe’s CC2015 suite of applications brings some great new features to Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere and other applications.
We’re going to look at some of these new features, and thanks to the folks at the Photoshop Training Channel on YouTube, you’ll find out how they work.
How to spawn clones of yourself in video with Adobe After Effects
As more DSLR owners shoot video, it’s natural that they’re going to start experimenting with visual effects. In this video from Tobias at Surfaced Studio, we’re shown how to clone ourselves in video footage using Adobe After Effects.
While you might not want this exact effect in your own work, the video is still worth watching. In it, we are shown some very handy techniques for keying out green screen footage, and compositing them onto new backgrounds.
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