After Effects Tutorial - How to Create a Retro Style Animated GIF in After Effects & Photoshop Pt 2 Video Lecture | Create stunning 3D Graphics with Cinema 4D - 3D & Animation

all right so here is our fully cooked
animation you can see it right here and
that's without any effects or anything
at all so what we're going to do is
apply some fun effects to make this look
very distorted very washed out very like
old VHS VHS tape here in After Effects
so the first thing I'm going to do is
apply all my effects effects with an
adjustment layer here and the first
effect I'm going to use is let's just
get a hue/saturation adjustment and what
we're going to do is just kind of like
saturate this ever-so-slightly like
bringing down some of the color so we
want the colors to be a little bit
washed out next thing we gonna do is you
know once your VHS your tape kind of
gets played enough it gets blurry it
loses that magnetic those Valley
magnetic strength and the picture goes a
little bit fuzzy right so what we're
going to do is use some cross floor why
I like to use cross floor is because you
control both in the vertical in the or
the horizontal and the vertical here the
length so you can kind of add different
lengths of blur depending on what you
want so something like
looks like kind of glowy that looks kind
of cool let's give a little bit more
blur in the X than the Y so maybe like
10 and 4 that looks pretty good so we
got a little bit of blurriness going on
then what I want to do is you know like
I mentioned before with with some of the
stuff is you need some of the channel
like the color channel separation stuff
happening because that's you know very
popular in a lot of 80s stuff where you
kind of have the split RGB so what I'm
going to do is go and grab we're gonna
blur some of the channel the color
channel so I'm going to go to channel
blur
and just bring this over here and you
can kind of play around with what looks
best so we can blur the red Channel and
get this really cool red haze going on
or we can get you know some greenish
haze or maybe even some blue so actually
blue looks kind of cool we get some like
yellow tint in there or you can you know
maybe combined a few of these so this
looks pretty good maybe one or two in
you red actually maybe a lot more in the
red I don't know let's maybe split the
difference here get a little bit in the
red maybe five and say like 15 in the
blue and maybe we can bring down the
blurriness of the cross blur there
because it's getting a little too blurry
I think so now what we can do is go
ahead and turn on these repeat edge
pixels actually
let's turn it on for the cross blur bike
actually like these fringes on the
outside here well we'll keep that so the
next thing I'm going to do in my effect
mixed colada here is I'm gonna go in and
grab a blur so stylized or I'm starting
grab a glow I'm just gonna crank up the
radius fairly high here because we just
want some like glowy color and let's
bring the threshold down so now we got
this really cool nice kind of hotspots I
can really blur this out and maybe bring
the intensity down just a little bit
it's the subtle kind of thing so that
looks that kind of pumps up the color
liking that now let's go and talking
about pumping up color let's go into our
curves and just start like adjusting the
curves here so we can kind of crush the
levels here a little bit and really add
some contrast we can go into our red
Channel and kind of pump up some of the
reds a little bit go into our green so
right now I'm just kind of like tweaking
things and seeing what kind of adds some
cool color like introduce some greens in
here maybe and it's going to blue since
we have a lot of Blues this is gonna
really help out a lot so we can have
like some reddish kind of composition if
we really crush the blues here it looks
kind of cool
maybe something like this but I still
want some like blues in here cool so
that's let me just close up all this
stuff
we got a glow we got our curves next
thing I want to do is if you have it
it's not essential but I like to add
some star glow here and you can see that
really adds a lot of you know this looks
like 80s already but this is too much
80s we need to bring down the 80s of
this so I'm gonna go into the pre
process of star glow and up the
threshold so only the brightest spots
get that kind of star glow added to it
so like right about here like I like
that the hottest spot on the chrome on
the cone has the star glow effect and
I'm just gonna bring the streak length
to a very subtle value like four because
you can see like before and after it's a
very subtle but it adds that kind of
like nice glint blur and we're gonna go
into my color maps and change this from
green so you like enlightenment I think
it's a little bit more purplish and then
the color map B let's do something like
electric and I think that electric
boogie woogie woogie song is like 70s or
60s so I won't sing that song even
though I did we're in the wrong decade
so here's a star glow before and after
it's just very very subtle and the final
thing I'm gonna add to our little look
here is you know we need some grain
we need more fuzziness added to this
more noise so we have the noisy
reflection here that we had from
rendering out in the cinema 4d and I'm
gonna add just some noise in to the
whole entire thing
and after effects using just noise and
just giving it like a small value of
like 5 so that just adds a little bit
more grungy and good luck graininess to
our composition and if I render this out
we can see that this looks you know kind
of like an old washed out VHS and that's
looking pretty cool and we can see the
difference between the totally untreated
perfectly clean nice crisp edges render
from
cinema and then we just crap it all up
make it all VHS and rundown and worn
down as the 80s were like 30-something
years ago right I'm 33 so yeah 30 years
ago so this looks kind of old using all
these effects so the next thing we're
gonna do is render this out
and we're gonna make an animated gif out
of this inside of Photoshop so I'm just
gonna go ahead render this guy I like
rendering as a PNG but you can kind of
render this as anything and render this
out and then we'll jump into Photoshop
all right so here we are in Photoshop
and we're gonna grab our rendered
eighties composition here that we
rendered from After Effects and you know
really you can bring anything any kind
of animation that you made but the key
thing for gifts is again you want the
animation to be fairly short if you're
doing a loop the shorter it is the less
information the smaller the file size
and you can also cheat this by importing
it and actually rendered this out as a
30 frames per second so the default what
we can do is bring this in as a 15 frame
per second animation and this is going
to import it as an animation that's two
minutes or two seconds long and why that
is is because since this is 30 seconds
and we said to interpolate it as 15 it's
going to double it and it's actually
gonna slow it down and that actually
works with a lot of faster movements you
might want you might actually want this
this kind of slow effect or we can
actually just right click on this layer
and just crank up the speed to 200% and
we'll get our speed back
and kind of lose some frames lose half
of the frames in the process just kind
of keep that in mind
so depending on what you choose whether
at double speed or full speed like this
we can now make this into a animated gif
by going into file going to export and
we're gonna save for web I don't know
why this is legacy because gifts are
really fun and cool right now I'm very
popular they should really update this
but that all aside we're gonna go save
for web and it's gonna bring up this
menu here and we're just gonna kind of
run through kind of compressing this and
kind of optimizing your animation for
gif formation so we have all the
different color reduction algorithms up
here I like to stick to either adaptive
or perceptual a tutorial for making
gifts is kind of incomplete just because
of the fact that your workflow is gonna
change depending on what kind of image
you have so the more complicated the
image sometimes perceptual might work
better and have better results and
sometimes adaptive will so it's all
really dependent but it's just about
learning what things to kind of tweak
and keep in mind to kind of test things
out and see what works for your image
because like I said every image is going
to be different so you can see that
perceptual at least to my eye doesn't
look as good as adaptive you can also
keep this is going to be a big thing to
keep in mind is this estimated file size
here so even though adaptive looked
better perceptual so we got three point
nine three point eight so you only lost
you know a tenth of of a megabyte so or
100k so really you want like I'd rather
get the quality in there because what's
what's the 100k like who cares
so another thing you're going to want to
keep in mind is this web snap and what
this web SMAP does is limits your color
table based on like web colors letter
safe web colors so the more you crank
the
sup the smaller your file size is gonna
be but we're gonna have this crank a
little bit and get the spinning beach
ball of death you're gonna see how it
really degra day
degraded your image so usually you like
to kind of I like to stay personally
like somewhere in like the 30 to 50
range once you get over 50 I feel like
the image quality really degrades so
let's try 33
and see what this looks like and that
looks fairly good and we still got three
point nine usually like dribble and
intra blur and stuff like that they
usually want you to stay under five
Meg's if you're uploading the dribble I
think it's eight Meg's but every service
is different but I like to try to keep
it under five just as a rule so right
now we have some pattern dither and what
did is is basically adding noise to kind
of get a smoother gradient and that's
just because of how your eyes work it's
trying to blend those gradients together
with noise so if we have no dither
you're gonna see this banding and that's
basically what did does is it kind of
adds noise to try to blur that banding
so it looks a little bit more seamless
or smooth so right now we're we're set
to diffusion and diffusion kind of
allows you to set your own loss enos and
this is sometimes good sometimes bad
this actually looks pretty bad so but
again look at our size here 1.2 so we
really dramatically like we more than
half our gift size but we really really
made this look not so good so we're
gonna bring the la cena sound usually
diffusion and loss enos does not look
very good personally I don't like it
just adds a bunch of noise I have better
success with the pattern because it just
kind of applies a pattern of noise it's
more uniform and I think it even though
it fuzzies your image it looks a lot the
quality looks a lot better everything is
a lot more smooth everything's more
uniform and you can see if we try to
zoom in here actually I won't zoom in
but hopefully you guys can see there's
like a pattern of noise that's applied
as like an overlay almost to help with
the banding we also have just regular
noise like onion ofor nose so right now
we have 3.9 Meg's and actually just
adding some uniform noise really didn't
hurt that much and our colors is the
last thing I'm going to talk about well
I'm just gonna go back to pattern just
because I like the pattern noise a
little bit better this is another thing
if our if our file size is really really
high you might want to see how many
colors you can get rid of so right now
at 256 it looks pretty good and we can
go to 128 and kind of see how that looks
and really what I like to do is just see
how low I can go and also see how much
image space I saved and just try to
weigh the benefits of both like if you
know that degradation in quality wasn't
terrible but I only saved what like 700
kilobytes so at the end of the day I
think for this for this gif I just try
64 I think for this gift since at at the
highest level of color 256 where we're
still under five Meg's I think I'm just
gonna stick with that I'm just gonna
stick with 256 B also you know if this
was above like sometimes the animations
can be close to 10 Meg's you want to try
to experiment with what size you can get
away with sacrificing quality and all
that stuff and actually you notice 256
to 128 there's really not that much of a
difference so you maybe you want to go
with 128 but you know what we can we're
fine we're under 5 let's do that and the
last thing is this looping option so to
have this loop as a seamless animation
we're gonna change this looping option
from once to forever so we're gonna loop
forever so there we go we're gonna save
this out and just save it wherever you
want to save this at ease animation and
we'll save this out and then all I have
to do is once this is done
you bring up
bring up my files here
fools go to my retro and then here's our
gif and we can open it in Google Chrome
and there it is there's our looping gif
so right there and so that's basically
how you can create a 80s style animation
using cinema 4d creating everything in
here and then bring it into After
Effects and applying a really blurry
blurry VHS look where the colors are
faded the image is a little bit blurred
we had some noise and then alt bringing
it all the way into Photoshop and
creating a gift so hopefully that makes
you equipped to start making your own
80s retro goodness and if you make
something as always I really want to see
it so share it and if you have any
questions be sure to hit me in the
comment section and be sure to check out
a kid mograph Gustavo in James white
signal noise they do a lot of this
really cool style of design and
animation so keep following them they're
big inspirations for this tutorial today
but hopefully this gets you into making
some ad stuff and having fun so I'll see
you guys in the next tutorial I'll see
you later bye everybody