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Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide - Adobe After Effects

The Motherload. This program let's you really do the magic. As with Premiere I'll just link the full image here, so you can see the whole view (the picture is too big to insert here): Here's the Pic!

As you see, maybe a bit more HiTech, but basically it's the same as Premiere with a few major differences. All the tool windows are to the side and you can just slide open the one you need. The timeline works a bit differently but we'll get to that.

The Project window works like in Premiere. Now import the Premiere Project File that you worked on. The double click on the composition (probably named Sequence 1 like in mine) Now you should have something like what mine looked like.

To move around the timeline here's a few pointers. The upper (and smaller) bar with the two blue bobs at the end moves round and zooms the timeline. The bigger and lower one is the Work Area which you can use to set the bit you want to preview using the controls in the toolbar. Note that pressing play under the monitor does not render the effects (at least properly) and usually can't even manage to keep up to real-time.

Now we're getting to some good stuff. Click the small triangles to open the dropdown property menus. In this case we only have the basic properties, but once you add effects, those controls are also seen here and you can change their values from here. With these controls you can either just set the values and setup Keyframes and animate them. If you click on a value you can set it by hand or click and hold to set it with the mouse.

The little clock symbol indicates keyframes. If you click on it, it will set a keyframe at the current time with the current values.
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Let's start working. First we need to set the Minority Logo animation's Blanding mode because for one thing it contains just black in the end and also because we want the following footage to be blended in the film blur effect that it has in the end. so just right click that track and select 'screen' for the blending mode.

Now let's add an Adjustment Layer. Adjustment layers are empty layers to which if you add effects, they affect ever layer below them in the composition. In this case drag the Adjustment Layer (grab it's name) just under the Logo Anim layer because we do not want to add any effects to that.

Now make sure you have the Adjustment Layer selected and press F3 to open the Effects window to where the Project window was (don't worry, they just share the same window and are on separate tabs, you can still find the project window there).

When you right click the effects window you'll get a list of all the effects that are installed on your system. This combo is something that I’ve probably used in every minority-video I've made. I just like Glow so much. Glow is the Lens Flare of the 21st century. And the additional contrast helps to bring it out a bit. You can use what effects you like and fiddle with their settings...

Glow rules:

To add text just open the Text tools window and select the Text tool from the top bar. Then click where you want to type. AE creates a new layer for the text. Works just like in Photoshop or whatever, except here we can use the dropdown for the layer and do some nifty animations.

Again here I let you fiddle around with everything for your self. Once your masterpiece is ready, it's time to render it into a video. Select the Render Queue tab at the top of the timeline. Then select the Main composition in the project window and drag it onto the render queue. You should get this:

Select the Render Settings first:

The most important thing to change is the Time Span because for some reason AE always thinks you just want to render the Work Area. So change this to Length of Compilation). Also make sure all the qualities are set to Best/Full, then OK.

Next select the Output Module:

As video output select “No Compression” because we will do this later in VritualDub. If you edited audio in a separate program don't check Audio Output. Note that it's best to output audio as uncompressed anyway, and usually for Video for Windows it won't even let you select a compression (don't ask me why :/ ). Click ok.

Then you should be ready. As a safety tip click Save at this point. Then Click Render and go out for coffee. It'll take a while...

When it's done, save again and close AE. Time to move to encoding and distributing...

Pinkkis' World of Warcraft Movie Making Guide - Virtual Dub Mod

Startup VirtualDubMod and load the video that came out of After Effects. You'll note that this file is even larger, something like 8gb for a 6-7min film depending on your resolution and fps.

After this click Stream->Stream list and you should get a window like this (empty at first, or if you had audio in your output from AE skip the adding phase but set the compression):

Click Add and get the final MixDown you made in Audition. Right Click and set Full Processing mode. Then Select the compression. Lame is a good MP3 codec, but there are others. Select a 160kbps 44.1khz stereo, or what ever tickles your fancy. Then close these windows and go to Video->Compression. Select Xvid from the list and click configure:

Now this is why we do this separately. To get maximum quality we run through the file twice. you can use the default values, but select Twopass - 1st pass as the Encoding type. Click ok, ok, and the go to File->Save As and save somewhere. This file will be removed by itself so it don't matter how you name it or whatever. VirtualDubMod will now "Encode" it once but the xvid codec is just checking the video for stuff to optimize the encoding. Once this is done, go to the video compression settings again and this time set Twopass - 2nd pass like the picture says.

Click the left button to make it say Target size and then enter an estimate as bytes. I've found that it's good when it's 8-9 megs per minute. Remember that the audio will be added to this. This is just for the video. Now you're ready for the final render, do it the same way as the first pass.

Gratz! You've now made a wow-movie, just fire up a media player and check it out. If it's good, you can delete the overly large files now since you probably won't need them anymore. One last thing to do:

Just remember that I own and don't feel too bad if it's not as awesome as mine are. Practice, Practice, Practice and you'll get there.