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Now again we reach an end point on here that we are going to introduce now one final image at. This is actually going to be a video clip. Remember everything we have done so far with regards to the silhouettes have all been Photoshop files.

At this point, I actually want to introduce a piece of video will actually walk off the screen, as if we just decided to cut the shot and accidentally left a bit in. So that is easily done by coming down to the bottom of the project pane again and we can see in the video files, there is one here called Steve Green 1080. Now this is the size that it was actually shot at, 1920x1080 high definition file.

So again we are going to need to scale it down as we bring it in, but this is going to be dragged across into the top of the timeline and you will see that it was originally shot on a green screen background. Always expand again the height of our composition window there just to make that a bit more visible.

So first off, let us access the scale value once more and just scale this down to pretty much exactly 50% that will do the trick. Now we are going to move this off to the left hand side, just sort of standing just to the left of the center point there.

Now the green background is one thing, we also want to brighten up the footage using the same brightening values that we did for the other image at the beginning. If we scrub all the way back here, remember this first silhouette that we introduced. We used the levels filter to brighten this up.

All of these other ones have had the same effect applied. They are already preset for you, but if we come back to this one, we can do the same thing we did earlier and simply copy and paste this effect from the still to the video.

So come down to the timeline and make sure you select still faces 01, this is one that contains the levels effect. Come up to the effect controls pane which is still here at the top, and once again click on levels and press Command C or Ctrl C on the PC to copy that in to the memory of the computer.

If we now select the Steve Green movie, just going to scrub back along so we can actually see the effect when we apply, okay make sure that is visible. Come up here and select the effect controls and simply paste back in those levels. You can see that brightness should now match the original brightness we have on the still.

Now the thing we do want to do is get rid of this green background. Now that could be done through a key in process which is actually the subject of our whole lesson in the Pro After Effects series and it is way too much for us to actually do here. What I have already got is a movie which is a map perfectly set for this one where the background is black, the foreground is white and After Effects will turn that into a transparency and opacity information.

So let us come over to the project window, we can see down here the bottom of the video files Steve Mat 1080, selecting that you can see this sort of silhouette with white image on the black background. We want to use that now to mask out this layer. Now remember these layers had a couple of changes applied to it.

It was scaled down and it was also moved slightly off the center. If we take this layer and place it down into the timeline, we have to remember what changes we made to the other one in order to make sure that both of them perfectly match.

Well we can find an easier way around that if we simply select the layer here in the timeline and press Command D or Ctrl D on the PC to duplicate it, and then simply with it highlighted still, select the Steve Mat movie hold down you option key or your Alt key on the PC and drag that directly onto that currently selected layer.

When you do, it will replace the content of the layer that keeps all of the other properties that we had assigned to it. So now we have the two that match perfectly, we can come over to the Track Matte column here, this is under the modes and switches which we activated earlier on and come down to the second layer the Steve Green movie, and come over to where it says none and tell After Effects to create a Lunar Matte from the layer above it.

Now, Alpha Channels and Lunar Mattes these will all be explained later on but basically now an Alpha Matte would not work in this situation. The layer does not contain transparence. It simply contains black and white pixels therefore a Lunar Matte is the best option for this particular key.

So by choosing that one Track Matte function, we have now got perfect transparency on that video clip as you scrub back and forth, you can see that eventually I just sort of nod my head in the walk up screen.

Now again we reach an end point on here that we are going to introduce now one final image at. This is actually going to be a video clip. Remember everything we have done so far with regards to the silhouettes have all been Photoshop files. At this point, I actually... click to read more