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Dallas Kruse
Participating Frequently
April 2, 2014
Question

Overlaying cartoon animation onto live video ...

  • April 2, 2014
  • 1 reply
  • 41980 views

Hello All,

Noob here. 

I am learning AE and Ai.  I have been doing massive research on things I need to learn and have a few questions. 

I've been using Illustrator to draw up some 2D cartoons and then learning how to animate them and incorporate them into music videos.  Small stuff like cute flying birds, suns, flowers, small characters, etc.

I have tons of Q's so maybe it's best to ask this question first ... are their good tutorials online regarding this subject (creating, drawing, animating cartoons to use as stand alone cartoons and also to embed over live footage)?  I'm aware of Lynda.com but wasn't sure if they have this sort of tutorial.

My next Q is ...

If I've illustrated and animated a character (flower, or bird, or cartoon person dancing) ... what's the best way to incorporate that into my live clip?  Let's say i have a girl singing and want the bird to fly across the screen, or onto her shoulder.  Would I do this in After Effects? Or would I export from After Effects and then do the overlaying in Final Cut Pro (which I'm using to edit my videos)? 

I exported a 10 second cartoon I made of flowers lip syncing to the audio track that I'm doing the video for and when I rendered, the background was white.  I wasn't sure how to composite that onto my FCP video and so here I am....

What's the normal workflow when doing this?  I'm confident I can figure it out but just want to know the best way/normal way to do it.

Setup

Apple Mac Pro

Mountain Lion

Adobe CS6

(After Effects, illustrator, photoshop)

Final Cut Pro 7

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    1 reply

    R
    Community Expert
    Rick GerardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 2, 2014

    AE is just layers... Put your cartoon on a new layer and your video on the layer below, then adjust or animate the position as needed.

    If you have camera moves in your live footage then you are going to have to do some camera tracking or motion tracking to keep things lined up.

    If your cartoons have been created on an opaque background then you'll have to re-do them so the background is transparent.

    This is no different than overlaying text on video as shown here in the first video:  Basic Workflow

      D
      Dallas KruseAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      April 2, 2014

      Rick,

      thanks for the reply.

      My thinking was ... like as in Photoshop, one can export a PNG file and overlay that onto video or other medium with the transparent background being "invisible".  I was thinking that by creating a cartoon in AI then animating in AE and exporting a certain way that ONLY the cartoon would be visible and not the extra background negative space (sort of like a hand drawn cell animation)...

      but I guess I'm thinking of it the wrong way.

      THe cartoons were drawn in Illustrator with a transparent background and what I normally do is Import the AI file as a composition and then all the layers show up in AE and then I can puppet animate from there.  I'm sure I'm doing it the LONG way but that's what I've discovered just by trial and error....

      Andrew Yoole
      Andrew Yoole
      Inspiring
      April 2, 2014

      If you have maintained transparency properly in your Illustrator work and animation, you can output video files with an alpha channel.  The alpha channel defines which parts of the video are transparent.  Coomon formats for this are Quicktime Animation codec, or Quicktime PNG codec.  There is an Output Module in After Effects by default called "Lossless With Alpha".

      But there are few advantages to compositing within your editing software in many cases.  9 times out of 10 I find a better workflow is to do the actual compositing (layering the animation onto the video) within AE.  A standard workflow would be to finalise your edit in FCP or Premiere Pro as much as possible, then use that as your base to composite the animation on top in After Effects.

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