After Effects: Looping Banquet Video

Posted on October 28, 2007 | Filed Under Streaming Media, Video Production

I’ve been backing up and cleaning out old projects and ran across this video that I created for an end-of-season banquet for my kids gymnastics program. Their gym recently opened in a new location with their previous coaching staff being the new owners, hence the idea of continuing a legacy of a successful gymnastics program. The video features team and individual pictures taken during the previous program’s 30 year history. You can see a brief excerpt from the video following the break.

This video was encoded at a low resolution to maintain reasonable quality at a low data rate.
A full size image taken from the video is available here.

This was a fifteen minute looping video that played quietly in the background while everyone mingled and ate their meal. An awards ceremony followed and finished off with a season highlights video that I quickly threw together in iPhoto. It was a great night for the kids and their families.

I produced the video using a combination of Photoshop, After Effects, Cool 3D and Digital Juice. I started by selecting a nice animated background from the Digital Juice Jump Backs collection of stock animations. I’ve mentioned the Digital Juice line in the past and can’t say enough about how much they can add to the perceived quality of a video project.

Next up was creating the 3D spinning logo. I used ULead Cool 3D for this. It’s a great low-cost 3D animation program that is designed for just this sort of thing. I created the logo using the two needed fonts, applied a little edge beveling and shiny surface materials and knocked it out in about half an hour. I made the logo perform a complete 360 degree spin, expecting to manipulate it once I was in After Effects.

I wanted to precomposite as much of the video as possible. Rendering a fifteen minute After Effects animation can take a really long time with even the simplest compositions. You should keep scaling and effects to a minimum at render time whenever you can get away with it. In this case, I decided I would take care of the photo compositing, scaling and effects in Photoshop and save multiple composite images to be moved around in AE.

I launched Photoshop and proceeded to create a new image. I placed all the photos in a long vertical strip, evenly distributing them along the way. I merged them into a single layer and applied bevel and drop shadow effects, created layers from the effects and again merged everything into a single layer. I then duplicated the layer and moved it so the bottom of the first layer bumped up against the top of the second layer and merged them to a single layer. I needed a duplicate copy of the images to set up the seamless looping of the video. I’ll explain the details later in this post.

I saved the Photoshop image at this point and made additional copies that I reduced to 75%, 50% and 25% respectively. I shifted the pictures down and wrapped them at the top on each version so the images would appear to be offset in each subsequent version. I also cumulatively lightened and blurred each scaled version so that they appeared to be progressively faded and out of focus as they became smaller.

Once the composite photo layers were prepared, I launched After Effects and began to pull all the pieces together. I imported the Digital Juice background video, Cool 3D logo video and composite Photoshop images. I created one 5 second composition and two 15 minute compositions.

Starting with the 5 second composition, I placed the 30 second Cool 3D-produced logo video as a layer. I placed a second copy of the 3D logo in the composition and shifted/trimmed it up so that the last second of the 30 second video was playing during the last second of the 5 second composition. I assigned keyframes so that the five second layer would transition from 100% to 0% opacity (fading it out) and the one second layer would transition from 0% to 100% opacity (fading it in) simultaneously during the last second of the composition. The result was a reasonable transition of the rotating logo so that its front face was always shown.

Next, I started working on the first 15 minute composition. I dropped the DJ background video in the composition and set it to endlessly repeat. I placed the second 15 minute composition as the next layer, then placed the 5 second logo composition as the top layer, also setting it to endlessly repeat.

Now it was time to composite the photo layers in my other 15 minute composition. Since I wanted the video to loop, I needed the first and last frames to be virtually identical. To do so, I created keyframes that changed the layers’ y coordinate values across the 15 minute duration. I started with the top of the images being aligned with the top of the screen and finished with images being moved upward approximately half their length. This resulted in the duplicate set of images being in the same position on the last frame as the original set on the first frame. As a bonus, the smaller lightened/blurred layers moved slower throughout the animation because they had less distance to travel, creating the illusion of depth that I was looking for.

The project was wrapped up at this point. I rendered the 15 minute composition that merged everything together and had the results you see above.

A selected still image from the Legacy Gymnastics banquet video