Welcome to Studio x, a channel where we teach CG visual effects and video editing techniques. Let's go ahead and see what you will be learning today. To get started, open up after effects and find your footage and just drag it in. Let's put it in a new composition by going into this option here. And I'm just going to trim this video slightly to where the motion actually starts. This is pretty good.

And you can just right click and do trim comp to work area and it's gonna automatically trim the video to that workspace. So let's go ahead And make this full resolution. And don't forget to save your project by hitting Command S or Ctrl S. I'm just going to call this 3d tracking tutorial. Because that is basically the idea for this video. So and this effect was actually inspired by as you can see from Little Wayne's music video where they just have a lot of particles flying around. I will link that video down in the description if you want to check it out.

So what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to select your footage here. And you're gonna go, you're gonna find the tracking window. Usually it's over here, but if you can't find it, you can go to Window and choose tracker from the list and you're just gonna hit track camera and wait until it analyzes your video and spits out track for you. So there you go. You can see that it basically The track that for you and you have all these tracking points all over the place and you can move around your camera and then you can see that it sticks with the scene. So you can see it's the same pretty well.

So for the center to kind of figure out where the particles are gonna be, I'm just gonna, you know, pick like the nose or something and just choose if you right click on it, it will give you a couple of different options. And we're just going to go with no and camera. So he no object is just invisible. And it doesn't render out as anything, but you can use it to get information like, like position in 3d space and things like that. So now that we have our scene ready, we need to just prep the footage slightly. So by pottage I mean just kind of make it look good.

So in this case, when I was recording this really quickly I kind of missed the focus slightly, but we're going to do is you're going to blur the background completely to stylize it a lot more similar to the video here. So what we're going to do is duplicate this video by hitting Command D. And you see it made a duplicate. And we're just going to go to Layer pre composed, and I'm going to call this depth and hit OK. I'm going to drag this to the top of the composition, and I'm going to hide it because we will not be looking at it. But you're going to need to go into the composition by double clicking on it. And you're going to draw a mask.

So let's go ahead and make this full quality because you're only going to need to not really go too in depth here. And you can see there's this little little exposure meter. You can just, if your footage is too dark, you can click on it and it makes it brighter in the composition. So when you're rendering, it doesn't make a difference. And if you Click on it, it will toggle original exposure and, and the one that you set there. So I'm gonna click on the pen tool, and I'm gonna have roto Bezier turned on, and I'm just gonna do a pretty rough mask of where the chair is because that's kind of the last point of focus that I will need to have is going to go over the head here because it is a depth map, you don't need it to be exact, especially for a video where it's not the main focus.

You know, I'm just adding particles in here, but I want the background to look pretty interesting and not take away from the scene. So I'm just gonna hit m on the keyboard to bring up the mass properties and I'm just going to choose none, because you still want to see the, you want to see everything in the scene as we're doing a couple of keyframes and you're gonna need to keyframe the mask path. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna jump a couple of frames forward and just kind of adjust the keyframes here. So I'm just gonna grab everything, just kind of position it on the head, and I'm just gonna keep playing it really quickly on maybe do four four keyframes in total, just to kind of get the mask to follow. Follow along. If you haven't seen the rotoscoping tutorial, I will link it down below and you can also press on the title card up top.

And it will basically go over the basics of how to rotoscope correctly and what are the best ways to rotoscope so you can just go ahead and watch that video. So now you can play it through and you can see that it's pretty rough, but it's gonna work for the sake of the tutorial, and it's probably gonna work for the final video as well. So all you need to do now is choose Add, go into effects of presets and find still. And what you're gonna do is you're just gonna make it you're just gonna make it white. And you can go into mask, feather and feather, it's slightly Yeah, like 32 probably gonna look good. So you can just go in here, and you can see when you turn that on, it basically fills in where the person is.

So in order to use that, you're gonna right click and choose New Adjustment Layer, and I'm going to hit enter to rename and go dlF for depth of field, and I'm gonna put it right on top of my video. And you can either use a lens blur, or you can do, what I'm going to use is there's a plugin called it It slipped. I'm not sure if I pronounced it correctly. But it's amazing plugin for creating, staked up the field or using depth passes. It's usually what I use in almost every single video, it's probably my most used plugin ever. And what you can do is, you can see you can choose the depth map, and you'll use the depth that I selected here.

And if I'm going to go into IRS, I can change up the way it looks so I can decrease on that process. It turns it into a triangle. I used a Zeiss lens that had nine blades. So you can see that that's kind of what what it would look like. And now we'll go to normal blur. And you can see that if I strip blurring it by like 1020 30%.

What you're going to need to do is actually select the sharp zone So it's not working, I think we might need to add a black solid to the back. There we go. Yes. So you can see that that immediately works now and this is the sharp stone that you have. So let's go back to our depth of field and choose normal blur into how that looks. So now you can see it really isolates the background from the person and it looks pretty realistic.

So and you know, the better you do your edges, the better it's going to look so you can kind of slightly see that you're having some some issues over here. This looks fine. And in the final video, you're gonna see it looks pretty good. So basically, that's what you can do and then I'm just gonna set this to 15. So it's not super extreme, but it isolates you from the background. What I'm also going to do is if I go to highlight selection, and I turn that off, and I turn that option on, you can actually choose the starting brightness.

And that's basically gonna give you a better blur on the highlights. Like you can see on this keyboard here, if I turn it off and on, you can see it gives you a nicer, like, okay, so you're done with that. So let's brighten this image up slightly and add some better blurring. And then let's go ahead and add the particles, because the way that you're going to need to make the particles is kind of make them fit into the scene. So if you do it, if it's the first thing that you do, then we're going to be modifying it all the time to try to we're going to be modifying it all the time when you're adding new effects to kind of make the skin look better. So let's go ahead and just duplicate the main Video and isolate it so we can look at it.

And I'm gonna drag it on top of the depth of field, because we're going to be using this layer to create a nice, like highlight blur and just kind of blow out the background slightly. So what you're gonna do is search up Luma and get a Luma key and just drag it on, and we can delete the 3d camera tracker, because he does this, we don't need that on this extra layer. So I'm just gonna go ahead and start pulling the threshold for being at the darker areas. And I'm just gonna do it to the point where you kind of don't see it on the face. So we can kind of keep it keep some on like the money and stuff. And then we're gonna choose fast Euler Repeat Edge Pixels, and you can blur this to like 60 pixels.

So if we get rid of the invisible background, you can see it on the dark. So basically with the Luma key You're isolating only the white areas. So let's just look at the glow and the background and we're going to do is you're going to choose screen. So you can see that adds this glow, we might even make it slightly bigger. That looks good. And we're gonna hit T on the keyboard to pull up the opacity for the layer.

And we're going to put this to 90, and then we're going to duplicate it, push it to 60 but make it a decrease the blurring slightly to like Ed, and then we're going to do it again. And we're going to decrease the opacity to 30 and then blurring to also probably about 30. So what that does is gives you more intense blurring and it different intensity levels as well as different clarity levels. So if you can see If you just have the this one blur, set all the way to 100%, you can see that it's getting just those details compared to the overall image. And that's usually the way I like to work is. So you can have a multi layered blur.

So that looks pretty good already. So you can see we just have everything on compared to the original photo, but we are getting a way, a way nicer image. So now we are ready to move on to the particles. So just right click and go new solid. And I'm going to call this particles and I'm actually going to call this front particles and you will see why. So let's go ahead and just drop this under the 3d track.

Now before we continue, don't forget to subscribe to this channel and smash that like button. Did you subscribe yet? Great Let's keep on moving. And I'm just gonna go into the presets and look up particular, you can also do a similar thing with one of these or two of these, like particle systems too. But I like particular because it's got a lot more things to play with. And nowadays, almost everybody has particular at this point.

So it's just a pretty, pretty popular plugin. And you can just go to presets and choose and use floating dust. And if you don't have any of these options, all you can just do is just go to, I'll show you in the actual menu. And if you don't have any of these options, all you got to do is go to particle and choose sphere. And these are the settings you can just copy them and the emitter you're about to move that point around. So to really see what going on in the scene, I'm going to go to particle master and change the size to something like 10.

So you can start to see the particles in the scene. And because particular works really well with 3d environments and 3d tracking, you can see that it would automatically spin around with or person was literally doing nothing at all already. So the thing that we need to do here now is what you're going to do is increase the amount of particles. So let's go ahead and make this like 100. And you can see they're all kind of stuck in one zone. And in the beginning, there's none in the scene.

So so to make them show up in the beginning, all you need to do is go to emission extras and do pre run and I'll set it to 100 which is 100 frames. And you can see that there's some particles in the scene but they are way way off. I'm gonna go to my tracking now and hit p so I can see the positions. Sometimes they don't work together. But that kind of could give you a pretty good estimate of where things should be like on positive and negative values, so you can kind of just move this around and try to get it in the right spot. You can see that these values are actually pretty accurate.

And now this like cloud is just like stuck on her. But what I will want to do because these are the front particles, I will go halfway so if this is at 6000 and you know 1000 is right in front of the camera, then I will go somewhere about 3000 and I will 3000 and I will stretch out the emitter size. So you can just stretch that out. And maybe I will do 2000 instead 2000. And I'm actually not gonna link them, I'll keep them individually. And I will just extend the Y so that it covers all of the stuff on the top and the X to stretch out through our entire scene.

So we have it all the way in the beginning. And the end because the camera does a pretty, pretty wide angle around the entire thing. And we can just bring up the particles to something more. So let's go to like 200. So they start filling up the scene a lot more. And what you're also going to do is you're going to bring up the size, so let's go with 20 just so you can really see them.

Let's even go to 30. Let's go crazy on here. And what we can do is all So again, take the fresh lift, or you can just use the lens blur if you don't have this plugin, and I'm just going to apply it here. And so before we apply depth of field because we had a map for this, you're not going to be using a map because everything is on the front. It's basically all the particles are in front of her. So if you're going to just take the out of focus plugin, and for Iris again, we're just gonna go to nine and I think Ron did pauses right like point seven or something.

And let's go ahead and start blurring this and seeing how the particles look. So in order to get a really good particle blur, what we need to do is we just need to blur this a lot, but we need to go into our particle and get rid of the feathers. So we need to put this to zero. That way, we are not feathering it multiple times. And for opacity, we are going to change is down to like 70. So it's not super crazy intense, maybe like 60.

And I'm just gonna slide the opacity random, just so the particles are, you know, different different shades. Basically. Maybe I'm not gonna feather it as much, because this is pretty crazy. So I'm just gonna bring this down to, you know, maybe 20 or some. Yeah, that looks pretty good. So now this is the easier part, this is what you're gonna do is you're just gonna duplicate the particles.

And let's turn off the actual once IV worked on and I'm going to call this back part. And, as you can tell, you're just gonna throw it in the back. So I'm gonna turn off four, out of focus. And what I'm gonna do is, once again, if you remember the original was 6000. So now what we need to do is we need to go past that. And because our emitter size in the space is 3000, if you make this 9000, the park, the front particles are going to be just touching the chair and going past it.

Well, technically, I mean, we're all just doing this to look nice. But as an example, and you can see that we need to stretch out the x axis a lot more and the y because because it is farther away from the camera, you're basically this space is not big enough. So we need to spread the X a lot farther. And we can just bring up the y. And if you're holding Shift, while moving these values, you're moving them in way bigger increments than normally. And what we need to do now is this is, again, where our depth maps Depth Map comes in handy.

You can just duplicate it and I'm going to call this mask. And because it is black and white, you can use it as a mask to cut particles. So you're gonna need to bring our front particles to the top. Because they are above, you know they're in front of the back. And for the back particles, all you need to do is right click on the mask and choose or not right click, you just choose the track mat here. And if you can't see this option, you can just toggle modes and switches.

And you're going to choose a Luma matte. Actually I was wrong Luma matte inverted, and you can see all the back particles are now behind the chair magic. So that looks awesome. Let's turn on our front particles now. And you can see that if you're pushing it through, you're getting all the back particles and all the front particles. Looks awesome.

Now what we need to do is give it some color correction. I like a lens flare, and you're going to be good to go. So I'm just going to go and add the lens flare first. So don't forget to save your project as always go to Layer new solid. I'm going to call this flare. I'm going to bring it all the way all the way to the top and go to Effect video copilot optical flares.

Lips. For this effect, I like using Russian just because it's like a nice and warm light while having, you know, complimentary color streaks. So it looks pretty good. And we're gonna set this to screen. And you can see this is this is how it looks. But the also wants to add it into the 3d space.

So what we're going to do is layer new light and hit OK. And basically what we can do is we can copy the position from our no go to key position on the light and just paste it. And I'm just gonna turn off the player for now. And you can see that's where our tracking point was. So, uh, because we have the original camera tracker on the beginning of the scene movie, Kunduz pull out another null object from this computer. So this really bright spot on, on, on little Wayne, he's right click and choose Create now and we can call this late track. So we can hit P and just copy the position for that.

Put it for the light. And you can see now you have a light. That is exactly where we're little Wayne is at all times. So if you turn on our flare, you can choose the positioning mode to be track lights, and you can see it tracks it to the light and this looks pretty Good, but I would just want to make it slightly bigger because it is farther away. It's like 115. And I can see that throughout the scene, we're getting the flare at all times.

So that's already looking way better from the original footage. So you can see the original footage looked super boring and like this. So what we need to do now is, let's go ahead and do some color correction to this. So I'm going to save the project and go to Layer new adjustment layer. And I'm going to call this Lux and I use magic bullet looks for this if you couldn't tell from all of my other tutorials. So I'm just gonna go to edit and just pull in the effect I normally use.

Okay, there we go. And what I'm I normally just dropping all of my effects in and then I work on them one by one. So I'm going to do shadows and highlights. I'm going to do pop Four way color, chromatic aberration exposure. I really like using lens distortion. I'm gonna pull in a lens vignette.

And then at the very end, we're gonna add a ton. So let's go ahead and turn all of these off and work with them one by one. And that's usually the order I like having them in. So let's pull out some shadows to get some details on the shirt here. And we're going to use pop and just crank it to like 40% to get some details back in. So you can see it makes the image kind of crispy.

And the flares actually going to be on top of the on top of that color. So you might as well just go and do that right now. So just bring a play on top it looks so it doesn't get affected. So let's go back and actually play with what we need to be affecting. Okay, so you can see now we can actually work with the, with the actual color. So let's pull out the shadows to the point where we can see the shirt.

Let's go to a four way color and make this really color contrast. So I'm going to pull the shadows to blue. I'm going to pull the mid tones to warm and you can see that just kind of makes me need to pull these out slightly it just so it's not as dark so you can see that you know, it makes the the shadows a lot more blue chromatic aberration. I'm just gonna crank this and just get some what this does, if you don't know basically splits the RGB channels and you can choose you know any of the colors there. But this is usually what happens when you're shooting with like a big lenses are like a shitty lens. And that kind of happens on the corners just because the glass is refracting light differently.

But I like the way it looks. You know, I use it for style. So that looks pretty good. Now let's go to exposure and just, again, brighten this up slightly lens distortion. So I usually work on this backwards, so I have the distortion negatively on the corners. And what that does is especially when you're doing any kind of spinning motion around the actor, if you really crank this, it gives you this weird dreamy effect because everything looks like it's floating for round the camera, which makes it look really nice.

So I actually might keep this really cranked probably not as much, but this this this might give this an interesting look. And then a vignette, you know just to get your eye on the center of the frame. And then do a ton at the end and just play around with the balance slightly. So you can see original footage and color corrected makes it a lot more vibey I would say, you know, gives a lot more nice aesthetic, and with the flares well. So now you can see, it looks nothing like original footage. So that's basically it.

And at this point, all you can do is just add an anamorphic crop as well if you want to. So you can just make a new solid and just slide the width like crazy. And then just double click on the rectangle mask, change this to subtract. And you can just push the expansion numbers down and you can see that you can get an anamorphic crop this way. But in reality, all you need to actually just drop your video into a new composition that is cropped to your correct ratio. But this is just an easy way to do it.

So, um, that is basically it. So if you got the result you want in we'll look at that now you're a pro. So if you liked this video, be sure to subscribe to this channel and leave a like on the video. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next tutorial. Bye