How To Freeze-Frame Effect In After Effects CC
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In this After Effects video editing tutorial, Will Bartlett teaches you how to create a freeze-frame effect to freeze a subject and track it to the footage. It's a popular effect that's not too difficult to learn!
GENERATED CAPTIONS:
Welcome back to another video. In this one, I'm going to teach you how to do the freeze-frame effect inside After Effects CC. As you can see, there's a frozen frame of me that's cut out and tracked into the scene and it's surprisingly not that difficult to do. Let's jump into after effects I'm going to grab the footage I'm working with and drag it into a new comp. I should note that this type of footage will work best with action style footage such as what we're working with here - skateboarding. So keep that in mind. If you don't have that type of action in your footage it probably won't work out too well.
All right so once your composition is set up and you've watched through your footage a few times to get an idea of where you want the effect to happen stop on the spot where you want the effect to show up from there. Select your layer and then duplicate it you can press command+ d on Mac or ctrl+d on the PC and then zoom in a bit. You can do that by keeping the mouse in the composition window and scrolling forward with the mouse scroll wheel. Now to do this effectively, you need to cut out the person so the top layer is going to be our mask and the bottom layer will be our original background. To do that let's use the pen tool.
We'll zoom in a bit more and the idea is to create a mask around the subject so that part can be tracked to your footage and then end up being frozen. Masking like this can take quite a while so I will spare you the time and fast forward and then we'll complete our mask by clicking the original one. Now I've isolated myself but I don't have the skateboard isolated yet so let's duplicate another layer and then by holding the spacebar and clicking and dragging with the mouse in the composition window you can move to a different area without moving the frame as I mentioned we haven't masked out the skateboard yet so let's do that to our second duplicated layer. First I'll get rid of that other mask we created and make sure we're back on the pen tool and then we'll do the same process and I'll speed it up again.
We'll change it to the fit view and then if we turn off the bottom layer. You can see that we've completely isolated the top two layers let's go ahead and rename them for better organization and then we'll go back to our main selection tool. We'll then turn our bottom layer on and then we'll turn the top two layers off. With the top two layers turned off we can now track the bottom layer and have tracking data that we can attach the top layers to later on now. Before we do that let's set a marker in our composition so that we've marked where our freeze frame will be. So we'll press shift and then 1 and now we've created a marker there.
Let's also at that point in time select the person layer. Right-click and go to the time freeze frame and then we'll do the same to the top layer. I'll turn the top two layers back on so you can see what the freeze frame effect is doing right now before we track. So in order to keep that right where we want it right at the start of the ledge, we need to do some motion tracking. I'll turn the top two layers back off and we'll select our background layer and go up to animation, and then track motion.
Let's zoom in a bit and this is our track point this is what we're going to be using to motion track our footage. If you move your mouse cursor to the middle of it you can click and drag it around and move it to a different position. Once again, let's readjust our frame by holding space. The idea is to place the track point in an area that will stay in the frame as much as possible, but also on a spot that won't have anything that interferes with it.
Since the footage just has some position movement as it pans from left to right which means it doesn't have any rotation or scale, we will just leave the position checked and then the right button here will analyze one frame to the right. So I'd always recommend doing that for new tracks to make sure you're tracking properly. We'll do it one more time and it looks like it's going to be a good track. Let's hit the play right button to analyze forward and then I'll press that button again to stop it just so we can readjust our frame and then I'll press it again. Then we'll go back to our marker position in the composition and analyze backward and then I'll scan through the footage to see if I like the tracking data. It looks pretty good so I think I'll keep that let's go ahead and turn back on our two masks and make sure that our playhead is on our marker and we'll go back into the layer where our tracking data is. Then we will apply it, press ok, and that will add the data to the tracking data null object that we created.
We'll go back into our composition and we'll parent both layers to our tracking data then the effect is almost done but you can see once I do the kickflip and land on top of the ledge, the freeze frame is still there which is not what I want. So we'll simply just trim both the mask layers. In the beginning, you'll see that the track didn't do a good job and that's because the ey logo was out of the screen so there was nothing to track at that point. So let's go ahead and manually fix that.
We'll click on our tracking data and then press u on our keyboard to open up all the key-frames and then we'll delete these three so that we keep the last frame that has a good track and the very first key-frame in our composition. We'll move the playhead to that first keyframe and then adjust our null tracking data layer to our best guess at where the logo was. So I think that looks good and let's give it a play.
All right so that's how you do the freeze-frame effect inside After Effects CC, and if you're looking to learn more we have over 60 filmmaking tutorials on our channel so subscribe to see those, and also hit the bell to be notified when we release a new video each week. If you like this video give it a thumbs up and leave a comment down below it only takes a few seconds and it'll help us keep creating filmmaking tutorials like this one for you. That's it for this video thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.
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