Movie Bumper: Editing Compositions & Adding Audio

Topics covered in this After Effects tutorial:

Sequencing Multiple Compositions, Overlapping Shots & Using Blending Modes, Adding Audio

Exercise Preview

Exercise Overview

In this final Movie exercise, we’re going to combine the three scenes we’ve animated in the previous exercises into a 15-second bumper that introduces a Movie feature presentation rated PG-13. We’ll add audio to make it complete, then render it.

Previewing the Final Movie

1. You should still have yourname-Movie Intro.aep open in After Effects. If you closed it, re-open it now. We recommend you finish the previous exercises (4A–4C) before starting this one. If you haven’t finished them, do the following:

   • Open Movie Intro-Ready for Rendering.aep (from the Movie Intro > Finished AE Projects folder).
   • Save the file as yourname-Movie Intro.aep in the Movie Intro folder.

2. You’re about to preview a video with sound. Make sure your speakers are on so you can hear the audio. You may want to plug in some headphones if they’re available.

3. On the Desktop, navigate to Class Files > After Effects Class > Movie Intro > Final Movie and double–click Movie-Movie-Intro-Sequence.mov.

4. Play the video and notice that the tiles animation happens first, followed by the Movie Feature Presentation gradated text, then the PG-13 rating animation. If you scrub through slowly, you may notice that some of the compositions bleed into each other.

5. Replay the video as many times as you need, then close it.

Adding Audio & Organizing the Project Panel

Let’s organize this project’s assets and add the audio file to our project.

1. On the top left, make sure you can see the Project panel. If instead you see the Effect Controls panel, close it by clicking the small x to the left of its name.

2. If any of the folders in the Project panel are expanded, close them now. If anything is selected, click in an empty area of the panel.

3. Cmd–click (Mac) or Ctrl–click (Windows) on the following folders that After Effects automatically created when you imported the layered PSDs and AI file: Movie Feature Pres Layers, Movie-rating-page Layers, and yourname-Movie Tiles-120 Scale Layers.

   NOTE: Remember that whenever you import a layered file using one of the two Composition options, After Effects will automatically create a folder for those layers.

4. Drag these down to the Create a new Folder button at the bottom of the panel.

5. Rename the new folder Assets and keep it selected so that the audio file we’re about to add will get nestled into this folder.

6. Press Cmd–I (Mac) or Ctrl–I (Windows) or do a File > Import > File.

7. Navigate into Desktop > Class Files > After Effects Class > Movie Intro > Assets, and double–click on Movie-feature-presentation.aif to import it.

8. The Assets folder should expand so that you can see the asset has automatically been placed inside it. Perfect! That’s because we imported it with this folder selected.

9. The compositions we created in the three previous exercises are about to become pre-comps inside a new main composition. Let’s rename them with names that describe their position in the sequence we’re about to create (to match 01-Movie Tiles). Select Movie Feature Pres and press Return (Mac) or Enter (Windows).

10. Rename it to 02- Movie Feature Pres and press Return (Mac) or Enter (Windows) again to apply the name.

11. Rename Movie-rating-page to 03-Movie Rating Page (press Return/Enter to start and end renaming).

12. Click on the 01-Movie Tiles composition and Shift–click on 03-Movie Rating Page.

13. Drag these down to the Create a new Folder button at the bottom of the panel.

14. Rename the new folder Pre-comps.

Sequencing Multiple Compositions

1. Let’s create the master composition! Still in the Project panel, expand the Pre-comps folder and once again click on the 01-Movie Tiles composition and Shift–click on 03-Movie Rating Page.

2. In the Project panel, drag the three selected compositions down to the Create a new Composition button at the bottom of the panel.

3. In the pop-up that asks you what you want to do with these three compositions, choose the following options:

   • Under Create, keep Single Composition selected if it isn’t already.
   • If Sequence Layers isn’t already checked, check this option on.
   • Uncheck Overlap if it isn’t already.

   Click OK, and After Effects will automatically create a composition for you.

4. We want to change the name to something more memorable. Go to Composition > Composition Settings or press Cmd–K (Mac) or Ctrl–K (Windows).

5. Change the name to 00-Movie-MAIN and click OK.

6. Return to the Project panel and drag the new 00-Movie-MAIN composition out of the Pre-comps folder to an empty area of the Project panel.

7. Back in the Timeline, scrub through with the playhead and notice the following:

   • The tiles, Movie Feature Presentation, and rating animations are sequenced with no overlap. Once one animation ends, the next one begins.
   • In the second pre-comp with the Movie logo animation, once the logo and text fade out at 10;10, the screen is totally black for almost a full second until the PG-13 sequence starts. We need to fix this!

8. We forgot to shorten the second composition when we originally worked on it, so let’s cut it to size now. Click into the Timeline. If this didn’t deselect all the master composition’s pre-comp layers, press Cmd–Shift–A (Mac) or Ctrl–Shift–A (Windows).

9. Still in the Timeline, double–click on the 02-Movie Feature Pres layer to open this pre-comp’s Timeline tab.

10. So we can determine where to cut it, let’s see where the last keyframe is. If they aren’t showing, press Cmd–A (Mac) or Ctrl–A (Windows) to select all the unlocked layers, then press the U key.

11. In the Presentation layer, find the last set of keyframes . Hover over one of them to see a gray tooltip that displays the timecode, followed by its value. The timecode should say 5;05.

12. Press Cmd–K (Mac) or Ctrl–K (Windows) to open the Composition Settings.

13. Change the Duration to 506 (to keep the last frame at 5;05) and click OK.

14. At the top of the Timeline, click on the 00-Movie-MAIN tab name to return to the main composition.

15. Back in the 00-Movie-MAIN composition (the master comp), press the End key (or Fn–Right Arrow) to get to the last frame.

    Yikes, the composition is over 16 seconds! This is intended to be a bumper animation (a short announcement before a program or before/after a commercial). Bumpers simply remind or inform viewers what channel and program they’re watching, so they’re usually no longer than 15 seconds. We need to edit it down to 15;00.

16. Let’s work backwards a little bit. Park the playhead at 15;00.

17. In the Timeline, select the last shot in the sequence, the 03-Movie Rating Page layer.

18. To get the layer’s right edge to snap to the playhead, press the Right Bracket (]) key.

Animating Like an Editor: Overlapping Shots & Using Blending Modes

Now that the second shot (the gradated Movie Feature Presentation logo and text animation) overlaps with the last shot (the PG-13 rating vector text and shape animation), we can also stand to have a little bit of overlap between the first and second shots.

We can combine each of these shots nicely using different blending modes other than the default Normal. As we do this, let’s make use of the In column so we can be mindful of where each pre-comp’s in points are. We call this animating like an editor.

1. Go to the top middle of the Timeline. If you don’t see the In column, Ctrl–click (Mac) or Right–click (Windows) on one of the column names. Go to the Columns menu and check on In to make the new column appear on the right.

   You should see that the 03-Movie Rating Page layer now starts at 9;21.

2. Move the playhead to 4;28. You should see the last three tiles fading out. It’s a good place for some overlap.

3. In the 02-Movie Feature Pres layer, go to the In column and click on the value.

4. In the Layer In Time dialog that pops up, set it to 428 and click OK to move the layer’s start point to 4;28.

5. To see a problem with the way our layers blend together, do the following:

   • Slowly drag the playhead from 4;28 until around 5;10. You should see the Movie logo pop out of nowhere immediately after the first shot is completely finished.
   • Select the 03-Movie Rating Page layer and press I to get to its in point at 9;21.
   • Once more, slowly drag the playhead until around 10;10 to see that we have the same problem: the PG-13 rating comp doesn’t show up until the Movie logo and text animation is fully finished. This looks even more disjointed than the last transition because the viewers can’t see most of the PG-13 entrance animation!

   We want these transitions to blend together seamlessly so viewers can see the end of the shot that’s ending at the same time as the next shot starts animating in. We can accomplish this by changing the blending mode to Screen.

6. In the Timeline, look directly to the right of any layer/source name. If you don’t see a Mode menu, click the Toggle Switches / Modes button to show the modes.

7. Select the first two compositions (the ones that transition to other shots): click on 01-Movie Tiles and Shift–click on 02-Movie Feature Pres.

8. In any selected layer, go into the Mode menu and change it from Normal to Screen.

   The Screen blending mode will drop out the black, which is perfect for layering! For more information about blending modes, visit tinyurl.com/use-blend-modes

9. Slowly drag through with the playhead to see the two scenes where there’s overlap. You should see the following nice results:

   • As the final few tiles at the top right are almost all the way faded out, the gradated Movie logo near the center of the composition frame starts its fade in.
   • As the Movie Feature Presentation text starts fading away and falling down, the rating sequence starts animating in on top of it.

   NOTE: While overlapping animations may not be desirable for every video you create, it looks quite nice in this case of these two transitions between shots because the direction of motion is consistent. In both cases as one pre-comp fades away and falls down, the other is also moving down as it fades up.

10. Let’s update the duration of our composition. To get to the Composition Settings, press Cmd–K (Mac) or Ctrl–K (Windows).

11. Set Duration to either 1500 or 15. (which will both get you a 15-second comp) and click OK.

Adding Audio to the Composition

1. From the Project panel’s Assets folder, drag Movie-feature-presentation.aif to the Timeline, dropping it below the three other layers.

2. In the Movie-feature-presentation.aif layer’s In column, click on the value.

3. In the Layer In Time dialog that pops up, set it to 2 (for 0;02) and click OK.

4. Press Spacebar to preview from the beginning. The first time it plays back the audio usually won’t sync, which is why we set a preference earlier to mute the audio until the video can be played in real-time. So it may take a little while until you can ensure the audio syncs well with the picture.

5. Do a File > Save and let’s get ready to render!

Rendering High-Quality Video

This time, we’ll export a very high-quality video, out of After Effects itself.

1. Go to Composition > Add to Render Queue.

2. Next to Output Module, click on Lossless.

3. In the Format menu, select QuickTime.

4. Make sure Video Output is checked, then under it click the Format Options button.

5. To create a very high-quality output, set Video Codec to Apple ProRes 422 (Mac or Windows, in AE 2019 and newer) or DNxHR/DNxHD (Windows, older versions of AE). If you’re on an older version of AE on a Windows machine, you should also change the Resolution to DNxHR RGB 444 10-bit.

6. Click OK, then OK again.

7. You’ll notice that in the Render Queue, your Output Module has changed to “Custom: QuickTime” because we customized the settings. Next to Output To, click on the file name or Not yet specified.

8. Navigate to Movie Intro > Renders, name it Movie-Feature-Presentation-Bumper.mov and click Save.

9. In the upper-right corner of the Render Queue, click the Render button.

10. After the rendering is complete, switch out of After Effects and go to your Desktop.

11. Navigate to Class Files > After Effects Class > Movie Intro > Renders.

12. Open the Movie-Feature-Presentation-Bumper movie and watch your new masterpiece!