Using After Effects cameras in VR production - After Effects Tutorial

- If you work with 360 footage, After Effects allows you to work with cameras, to add elements to your scenes, and even track text and graphics into them. In this movie, we're going to take a look at the benefits of adding cameras, in After Effects, to enhance your 360 footage. So I'm here in my Chapter3_11 composition. And we actually have a piece of 360 video inside of it. We can tell by the, weird type of distortion, appears. But this image is meant to wrap around a sphere. And we want to be able to interact with this footage, like we would in a headset. And After Effects allows us to do that through the use of cameras. With my composition selected, I'm going to head up to the window menu, and start to work with some VR workspaces by going to the window, all the way here to the bottom until I see the VR Comp Editor. This might look a little bit different for you, 'cause I have a little bit more scripts here installed on my system. I can see there the VR Comp Editor come up, and I'll just dock it to the left of the composition window. And have a little bit less real estate. What I'm going to do, is add something called a 2D edit. 3D edits are great, if you're trying to perform tracking casts, or you might want to have a piece of text feel like it's part of your scene, as a camera person pushes through the 360 environment. But for this footage it's actually static. And the graphics or text that we might want to add to the scene happens to, basically, there is no camera movement. So if I go to Add 2D Edit, first thing I need to do is make sure I am referencing the right composition, which I am, Chapter3_11. I'm just going to change the comp width in this case here. Just to 2048 to match the width of this comp. And using a two note camera and the default aspect ratio I'm going to add a 2D edit. And a bunch of stuff happens in the timeline, and your Project Panel. We now have, three actual compositions. We've got the original, an edit composition, and an output composition. To switch between the two, you pretty much want to use this panel. So if I wanted to go to the output render, there's the output, here's my Edit Panel. The cool thing about the Edit Panel is you can see here in this composition, I've got a VR Master camera inside. And I can, using my orbit camera tools, by pressing the C key, decide where I want to look. So I'm looking here, and see that there is a nasty camera in my scene. So what I'd like to do is just a simple patching job here on this camera. So I'm just using my Unified Camera tool to move to that area. And I'll clone this out like I would anything else in After Effects. I'm going to right click on this layer. And first of all I'm going to choose to open the layer. I can see I'm at the layer level by this little strip here at the bottom. And what I'm going to do is now select my clone tool. So I'll go here, click on the clone stamp. And here in this window I'm going to hold on the Command key or CTRL on a PC and make my clone stamp that much bigger. The area that I'm going to use to clone from, happens to be this line here. So I'll, Option or ALT-click it. And then start to draw around my new area here. So obviously I could do a little bit more to improve on this cloning job, but this gives you an idea of how easy that was, to select a point, and then move further in your comp and then paint over it. I might just click here, and fix this up here a bit as well. I just want to show you what's up here, specifically in the Output comp. So I'll click Open + Output + Render and you'll see that half of my actual cloned out area is now gone, because I was working in the Edit section. I can hop back into the Edit section. And, in this case because this shadow is so long, what I want to do is actually create even another 2D edit, change the camera and clone out that rest of the material, and then go to the Output area, where I'll see the two cloned areas combined. But I can use the same view if I wanted to, to add text. So if I added text it would be at this part of the scene. In fact I'll just Command T. And say "360 text" so that you can see this. I'll press Command Return, press S for scale And, positioning this just around this cloned area. And heading to the output render you'll see your 360 text is in place in that scene. So After Effects, through the use of cameras, makes it really easy for you to navigate across your 360 space, whether that camera is moving, or static. This was just an overview. If you're looking for more on 360, I've got a course that goes over Premiere Pro and After Effects 360 workflows that you should check out, that will go more in depth, with some of these features.