From the course: How Do I Do That in After Effects

Creating an echo time effect in After Effects - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: How Do I Do That in After Effects

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Creating an echo time effect in After Effects

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- The echo effect is a bit limited in use but can be quite fun. What it allows you to do is to create motion trails caused by the footage overlaying on itself. Effectively, you can create repeats or instances of the footage and then offset it and what it does is allow the person to occupy the frame in multiple instances. Here we have a nice simple shot of a woman over a plain background. This'll make it a lot easier to see. The echo effect works best if your camera is locked off and stable. Come to your effects panel and type in echo. Take echo from the time category and drop it on your footage. Now, initially, it's going to get a bit bright. That's because it's adding it up. Let's set five echos here and set the intensity at .5. Now it's creating a ghostly music video effect where all the footage is brightly adding up. Let's go a little bit lower in intensity, .2. Now you can see it a little bit better and there's that slight delay on the footage, creating an almost ghostly like effect. There's lots of ways of doing this. For example, let's try to composite in front and we'll adjust the starting intensity to .5. Now what's happening is that instead of using a blend mode, it's just using a little bit of an opacity trick and you see it's creating a forced motion blur on her movements. Adding to some fun twirls and spins but if we increase the time delay here, it can actually get quite interesting. Let's go .2 seconds. Now you see more of a trail. How about .5? And you see more of ghost and offsets with the different copies. Now, my suggestion is you play with this. The composite in back doesn't really work with solid footage as well but it is quite useful with green screen. Here though, it's doing okay with the simpler white background and what I like is that it's keeping the cleaner version of the footage with more details layered on the top so that the ghosts are a little bit more behind and don't overlap quite as much on the details. You see the face is a bit clearer. Let's adjust the starting intensity here. And you see without it, it's difficult to see the echos. So you do need to play with that a bit. Let's go down to .75. And a little less decay so it fades a little quicker. There we go. And you see a very experimental effect. The number of echos, the time and the blend mode will all create some very interesting results. Feel free to experiment with different modes and different timings and you'll see some pretty cool options. In this case, minimum is doing a nice job. Now it's preserving more of the color with less areas being blown out. And you see it's creating a bit of a spin effect here as the layers combine. What's cool here too is that you can start and keyframe these values. So if you want to start with more echos, let it be there for a little bit. Then what you could do over time is pull the echos in back to one or even zero. And you'll see a interesting effect. So as the footage spins, and layers with itself, the number of trailing copies will start to keyframe and be reduced. Now, you can do a lot of fun things with this but it's definitely experimental. Be sure to take a look at the different options that you have and have some fun with it. It works particularly well for sports footage and music footage.

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