Creating Multi-Screen Projects in After Effects

In this lesson we’ll take a look at how to animate multi-screen video displays in After Effects. Download Project File: Enroll for Free in the 30 Days of After Effects Series: --------------------------------------------------------------------- Partial, Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇 Joey Korenman (00:17): Hey there, Joey here at school motion and welcome to day 23 of 30 days of after effects in this video. What we’re going to talk about are strategies you can use when you have to design something, that’s going to go on multiple screens. This is sort of a motion graphics job. That’s becoming more and more common because every single screen phone, televisions, computers, digital billboards, all of these things need motion, design content created for them. Sometimes there’s multiple screens and you need content to go across them or be in sync across multiple screens. There’s a lot of situations that you might find yourself in where this type of thing is useful. And it can be tricky if you don’t have some good strategies, don’t forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site, let’s hop into after effects and get started. Joey Korenman (01:06): This is the main building where all of the motion design classes take place at Ringling. And there’s been talk rumors for years of getting some really cool screens to put on the front of the building. And, you know, it would kind of be nice, a nice advertisement for the school would also be really cool venue for student work, but it hasn’t happened yet. So I took it upon myself to, uh, create this little mock-up and what I want to walk you guys through is how to set up an after effects project. If you’re ever doing something like this, uh, which is becoming more and more common, um, so that you can animate it very easily, get your deliverables very easily and be able to show a client what the heck it’s going to look like very easily. So let’s start by pretending that this is actually just footage of, you know, the building at wrangling, right? Joey Korenman (01:54): These screens are not really there. I tracked them on, but, um, you know, but this is, this is the building. And if these screens were there, you’d be able to go in and take footage of them. And the reason you’d want to do that, if, you know, for example, Ringling was your client, they came and they said, Hey, let’s, uh, we want you to create some content, you know, like a cool five second loop or something for the screens. Well, here’s how it’s gonna work. You’re gonna get something like this from, from your client. And, uh, in general it looks something like this and, and really what it does is it just tells you the specs of each screen. All right. So now if you’re looking at this, you can see there’s 1, 2, 3, 4 screens. Okay. But looking at the specs that, that we were given, you can see that there’s actually only three files that you’re going to end up delivering and they all have different resolutions. Joey Korenman (02:48): And the third screen has this, this extra little wrinkle to it, which is you’re, you’re going to actually give Ringling, uh, you know, uh, basically a two K almost, uh, by two file, but only certain portions of the image in that render are going to show up on the screens. And this is actually very common. Um, when you have weird shape screens, if you, if you go to times square and you see, you know, there’s probably more video screens there than anywhere else in the world. And a lot of them are weird shapes like this. And when you deliver files to play on those screens, you’re generally delivering something like a square quick time or a rectangular quick time, but there’s a portion of that image that will play on the screen and the rest will just be ignored. So if you were given something like this, okay, and there’s another wrinkle too, which I’ll talk about once we get an aftereffects little bit more, but I want you to just keep this in mind. Joey Korenman (03:42): These two screens here, these are easy 1920 by 10 80 1200 by 12 by 10 80. Uh, this is pretty easy. Okay. Um, and by the way, this is not drawn to scale. Um, I’ve made all this up, so this isn’t totally accurate. Um, but these two screens would be really easy to set up in after effects because they’re based on the same resolution, right? 10 80, this, this screen here is based on a different resolution, 2040. And so it’s quite possible that the density of the pixels in this area are going to be different than on these two screens, which means you’re going to have to do some fancy footwork to make sure that you could seamlessly have, you know, a line draw across all three of these screens, um, and still be able to deliver the correct dimensions to your clients. So it gets a little bit tricky.