Hi, I am daspacepony!
Welcome to Easy Peasy PMVs!
a quote on quote “shoow” that’ll help you make, well, PMVs
If you’re not here to make PMVs, well then you’re still welcome to watch,
just ignore the term PMV and some various pony references here and there
and you’re good to go. c:
First up, some information that you must know.
This “show” largely focuses on Adobe After Effects,
so I probably won’t touch on other video editing software
such as Sony Vegas or Final Cut Pro X.
I’ll try my best for these tutorials to work on any version of After Effects,
as long as it's fairly recent.
PMVs are Pony Music Videos,
which means there are ponies,
in this video,
with music.
Lastly, I have absolutely zero experience in teaching video editing,
and this is my first ever video editing tutorial.
All of this is done with my own personal experience with the software.
For this first video, I’ll be covering some of the basics of After Effects
if you are entirely new to this thing
Alright
You can do whatever you want with it. It’s as easy as that.
And it can store up to as many layers as you want.
Speaking of layers,
You can stack them one on top of another and rearrange them.
So whatever’s on the top, appears on the front,
and those below it, appear behind.
A layer can be anything from an image, a shape, piece of text, an adjustment to layers behind it etc.
and they all have their own type of layers.
After Effects has lots of them:
blurs, distortions, generations, styles etc.
and all of them are customisable.
So let’s start a new project and create a new composition.
Here we have the composition settings.
I’ll only cover the more important settings like…
Width and Height!
Things like how big the composition is measured in pixels
usually I would recommend setting it to 720p HD or 1080p HD
that’s the usual video size you normally find on video streaming sites like Youtube.
Then you have the frame rate
this basically describes how many frames come into the video per second.
Set a too low frame rate and animations become choppy and unrealistic.
And there’s no point setting it too high if your eyes can’t discern the frames
or your computer can’t handle the number of frames coming in one second.
The frame rate of a video largely depends on what kind of video you are making.
But the standard is either 24 or 30 frames per second.
Almost all computer monitors and video streaming sites can handle up to 60 frames per second.
Then you have resolution.
This affects the resolution of the preview during editing.
For example, if you set your composition to be of 1920 by 1080, and set resolution to half,
After Effects will only render half the number of pixels on the width and half the number pixels on the height,
so it will render only a 960 by 540.
This will not affect the final render,
but it will definitely speed up rendering when you’re editing.
Oh and you can change this later on while editing
Set a duration for the comp[osition].
This right here is timecode.
Kinda like a digital clock
but it measures from hours: minutes: seconds: and down to frames.
Set a name for your comp and background color you’re done!
You’ve got blank canvas for you to make *almost* anything you want!
Let’s get started by dragging and dropping a video or image into the Library,
or double-clicking it will do the job as well.
This is called importing.
Then drag it into the timeline or onto the preview.
The video should appear in the preview window.
Now let’s add some effects to this video clip.
Go to the Effects tab and choose an effect,
I’ll go with Tint.
Don’t worry, I’ll cover other effects in another video, for now.
what Tint does is mapping or “replacing” Black or White parts of the video with whatever color you put.
You can add another effect on top of the Tint effect,
let’s get something cool like LENS FLARES.
Adjust the position of the flare by moving this little notch across the preview.
Now let’s add text to the video.
Just click on the Text tool at the top of the After Effects interface
and click at where you want the text to be.
Type whatever you want,
I’ll just type “PMV”.
Choose a font, color, size, etc in the Character Panel.
btw, these things are called Panels.
Don’t worry we’ll go through the rest of everything in later videos
(if i ever get to doing another one)
Let’s preview our work!
Scrub the playhead to the beginning and watch your-
amazing video play.
You might notice a green bar go across the top part of the timeline.
The green area shows which parts of the video have already been rendered into preview by your computer.
As you start playing, the green bar gets going.
Like how Youtube load its videos.
Okay, back to previewing,
Looks pretty good!
Let’s start officially rendering the video so we could upload it!
There’s quite a bit you can do here.
Most importantly is where you wanna save this video to.
Just this link and find a place where you wanna save this.
You don’t really wanna tinker with the rest yet,
but you might wanna change the output module to H.264,
this may help reduce the file size of the video, so it doesn’t take up too much space on your computer.
Once you’re done, render!
And after the bar completes,
you can find your file and show the world what you’ve made!
So yeah. You’ve done it! That’s about it…
Hmmm…
If this video receives well, I might do another one.
Now how about that? ;)
*le credits play*