Teaching Myself Adobe After Effects

After I decided that one of my scenes was gonna be shot like CCTV I realised that I had no idea how to do this, and that my (slightly) limited Premiere Pro knowledge was not gonna cut it in terms of the professional look that I wanted. I researched the effect I wanted and found that I would have to use another of Adobe's software products After Effects to create my desired effect. I had absolutely no previous experience or knowledge of the software, so I was very apprehensive about the whole thing. To start off I watched a whole bunch of Beginner After Effects tutorials on Youtube. I tried to mimic  a couple of the basic effects on some tester footage. It didn't really turn out that great, but I was grateful for the small amount of experience. 

After that I watched multiple "How to make your footage look like CCTV footage" tutorials. In the end I combined a few tutorials to create my end effect. 

Basic things were difficult as I literally had zero experience with the software, so I had trouble importing the footage and putting it onto the timeline to edit. After troubleshooting however I got there in the end. 

Following the online tutorials I put a vinaigrette onto my footage, and then added a night vision filter. To this I re coloured the footage to be greyscale. 

Here I added a timecode to act as the time on my footage. As this is not its intended use I had to cheat a little by upping the starting frame by a ridiculous amount so it would show the time of day that I wanted it to, instead of the actual timecode of my footage. 

Next came the difficult bit. I made a new shape layer on my timeline, and then used the rectangle tool  in the colour black, and made a box the same size as the timecode. I moved it across to the other side of the frame, using the rulers as markers so I the would it be perfectly in position. Then I used the text tool over the box and created a fake camera name, making sure it was the exact same font, colour, and size as the timecode. 

(This was my crazy timeline at the time)

I then duplicated this box and put a fake date inside, again being careful to use the same text settings as both boxes before. 

Finally to make the CCTV footage really believable, I lowered the frames per second from their normal 25fps to 4fps. I played around for a long time trying different numbers and seeing how they looked, if they were TOO jumpy or not enough etc. 

I ran into some problems when I tried to export my finished clip. I couldn't export directly to a video file format, or to adobe premiere. I encountered many error messages, and had to spend a lot of time online troubleshooting. After a while I got the Adobe Active link to work and I sent it into my master Emma film in progress  premier pro file. 

From here I exported normally the beginning of the film, just to include the clip.