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I can use photoshop, but can After Effects do this?
I am working on an animated lyric video for my next single and I have a couple of questions on what steps to take next, whether to use Photoshop CC 2014, or After Effects, how to decrease file size, and most importantly how to decrease man hours!
The main idea of the video, is that in the video I am typing the lyrics on my computer, and what I am typing goes in line with the lyrics of the song—almost karaoke style—the way I am doing it is by recording my (Mac) screen with QuickTime, so the output file is .mp4.
The reason why I would consider Photoshop over After Effects is twofold: 1. I am already familiar with Photoshop, and I have never dabbled with After Effects, so learning After Effects well could take me weeks/months (but if I have to, I guess I will, but would like to release the video soon) and 2. With Photoshop (and what I like the most about it) I can separate the clips into individual layers or frames, and that way I can manipulate each layer thoroughly by deleting/adding things (photoshop them, essentially), and delete the non-productive frames/layers (as in the ones that while my fingers are shifting from key to key, there is dead time and space, of say 4-7 frames that are identical, until a new letter pops up, so in order to decrease sizing as well as make it more accurate to type at the speed of the words, I would like to delete these 4-7 identical/non-productive frames, and have the video be more continuous—which I know may be a little anal on my end, but I just think this looks more natural and flows better in comparison to just simply fast forwarding the video so it matches the lyrics, because I have gone and increased the speed of video to match the lyrics, but it looks really “fast-forwarded” (obviously) but also, a bit cheap).
I will go ahead and claim that I don’t know if After Effects has this ability to split, analyse and delete frame by frame, if it does, please do let me know!
In terms of photoshop:
I did a test, and I must say that I am mighty confused and frustrated by Photoshop video. I think it really taxes my RAM, and opening a video might take me 10 minutes for it to load, then to export, wheeeew, maybe 40 minutes to export a 4 second video. Also, importing a 4 second clip makes it into hundreds of layers (let’s say, 30-60fps x 4 = 120 or 240 layers) then if I transform it to 1920×1080, the file increases to 4GB, and the most I could get it down to was to 500mb by a lot, a lot of layer deletion, which then when it was all said and done churned out a 1-2second clip.So it did exactly what I wanted it to do, it just took forever, maybe 5-6 hours for 1,2 seconds. Though the interesting part, is that the Photoshop file is huge, but when I export, and the video was created it was only 6.7MB.Anyway, I’m wondering if using After Effects will decrease my woes?
And if so, any tips on how I can achieve exactly what I know I can do in photoshop, through after effects.
Thanks!
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2 Replies
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Short answer: After Effects is way more capable of handling moving images than Photoshop — by miles and miles.
You can remap time in After Effects on a single footage layer to speed up or slow down the typing.
You might be able to find a tutorial that talks about Time Remapping and achieve this. The main problem being that if you don’t know the basics of After Effects and something doesn’t seem to be working, it can be very difficult to figure out what went wrong. So you would want to get at least the basics of After Effects under your belt first. Interfacewise it is not that dissimilar to Photoshop, but on the other hand, some things work very differently.
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Since you’re editing video, you might consider Adobe Premiere Pro. It will be significantly more realtime/responsive/interactive for timing than After Effects would be.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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