Adobe After Effects: 3d Spotlights
Posted by brooks in After Effects, Screencasting, video on Jan 20th, 2010 | 7 commentsOne of the more frequent questions I’ve gotten as the result of the Screencasting as Art project is “how do you pull off those lighting effects.” It’s a valid question and one I wanted to do justice by. So here’s the latest cinematic screencast detailing how to create and manipulate 3d lights in Adobe After Effects. Along the way you’ll learn how to:
- Configure your After Effects workspace to handle working with elements in 3d space.
- Manipulate the x, y, and z position of your lights.
- Adjust cone angle, cone feather, light intensity and light color.
- Animate the position and light properties.
The video runs 7:05 – feedback welcome.
Screencasting notes:
In this video, I again focused on narrative structure, pacing and humanizing the videos, but I paid special attention to making the production value of the talking head footage much higher. I once again relied on my trusty Flip Mino HD, but decided to try and frame things up a bit better and feed the Flip some light (the Flip really struggles in low lighting conditions). So after convincing Santa Claus (my wife Nancy) that I needed a soft box or two, I set up in front of a bare section of wall in my living room and filmed a couple of talking head segments off the cuff. They turned out well and, much to Nancy’s chagrin, have led me to set up shop in the living room permanently. ;-)
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7 Responses to “ “Adobe After Effects: 3d Spotlights”
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[...] I highly recommend you check out a much more recent tutorial I did that illustrates how to use After Effects’ built-in 3d spotlights. [...]
Very nice, especially adding the ambient light to dim everything before adding the spot. And the talking head does look much better! One qualm though – the music in the title sequence is still much louder than your voice in the intro, so I have to keep my finger on the speaker volume buttons.
@Harry – yikes…I leveled all of the sound clips in Soundbooth. Do you wear headphones? I’d like to get to the bottom of this (maybe I manually need to adjust the music clip down a bit). Let me know.
I’m listening on desktop speakers with a subwoofer. It might be a good idea to lower the music a couple of dB to make up for the much broader spectrum of sound, which makes it feel louder.
Getting into geeky detail, I think the room reflections in the talking head shots make your voice a bit muddy, so I turn the volume up to hear better. That’s when the music gets to be a little hot. If you have a way to deaden the room, like putting up heavy blankets to absorb sound reflections, or else bring the microphone closer to you, that would help increase the clarity of your voice.
Hey guys, sorry for being off but what theme do you use? did you create it by yourself? I really love the theme here.
Fantastic mate, thanks a million, have been looking for a good 3D spotlight effect tut for a while now.
Brooks is the Cosmic Authority — 5 months I have been searching for what he has provided. What is Apple’s problem?? Brook should be hired by Apple at 7-figures!!!!