Now, that's really the end of all of the elements of this effect,
but what I want to do now is some finishing effects to make
this look like it was a little bit more created in the 80s.
They didn't have HD resolution back then,
they didn't have digital displays like this.
What can we do to degrade the look of
this entire effect and just give it a little bit more of that retro charm?
Well, let's change the colors a little bit so they're not so
perfectly crisp and clear and bright even.
Let's add a New Adjustment Layer.
I'm going to rename this one Color Correction.
I'm going to drag that, let's say above the effects below the vignette.
I'm going to add a curves effect, bring that out.
This is one of my favorite tools for color correction.
I want to basically make the contrast a lot softer.
I want to take contrast away so that
the brightest parts of my image are not quite as bright.
I'm going to grab this top right handle,
which is the highlights of the image,
and just bring it down a bit.
We're just taking that brightness down.
At the same time, I want to increase the brightness of the darks.
I don't want to go crazy with this and wash it out completely,
but just give it a little bit of a lift so that we wash out the overall image.
Then I could grab this point on the curve and just increase the highlights a little bit.
Maybe grab down here,
bring those darks down just a little bit more.
Now, we've got a more washed-out look.
But I also want to adjust the colors a little bit.
Let's switch from adjusting
all three color channels and isolate just the blue channel for a second.
If I zoom in here and you look at these brightest pixels,
and then I grab the highlights of just the blue channel and bring it way down,
you see that makes everything really yellowy.
I don't want to make it that yellow,
but if I drop it down just a little bit,
it's going to add a little bit of yellow to those whites
and just make it look like it's aged a little bit.
Then if I go to a darker portion of the image and
grab the darks of that blue channel and lift it,
then it's going to add more blue to the overall image.
Again, I don't want to go crazy,
but I'm just going to lift it up a little bit so that
my darks have more of a blue tint to it.
This is without, and this is with.
Just with one single curves effect,
we've really drastically changed how the overall color grade looks on our effect.
I think that fits this 80s retro vibe a lot better.
I'd also like to make this look a little bit more cinematic.
Why don't we add in some film grain?
I'm going to go back to the effects adjustment layer.
We're going to add an effect called noise HLS.
You might be familiar with just the standard noise effect,
but the noise HLS effect gives us some more controls that I really like.
I'm going to drag that out.
We'll put it below the glow so it happens after the glow.
Then I'll just zoom into one section of the comp.
This gives us controls over how the noise is applied,
whether it's uniform, squared, or grain.
But then it allows us to apply that noise to the hue, the lightness,
or the saturation of the overall image instead of just everything all at once.
That's why I like this effect.
If I grab the hue,
I can increase the noise.
You see that's adding noise to the hue.
It's basically shifting the hue values in this noise pattern across the image.
By undo that and change it to lightness,
then it's not adjusting anything to do with color.
It's just the brightness values of these pixels.
Some are darker, some are brighter.
Then finally we have the saturation.
Same thing here instead of adjusting the lightness or the hue,
it's just taking saturation away or adding saturation in using that noise pattern.
I want to just use lightness.
Let me increase that so we can see it nice and clear.
Then I'm going to change the noise from uniform to grain.
I just like the quality of this grain.
It has a nice shape to it,
but it also gives us a grain size property so we can really
fine-tune how much grain is showing up and how chunky that grain is basically.
I'm going to turn the lightness down I don't want it to be crazy noticeable,
but just something that gives it a nice gritty texture.
Maybe around 12.
That's without and with.
It is pretty noticeable, but that's okay.
I want 100 percent, it's a lot less noticeable.
Once this has been compressed and uploaded to the Internet,
it's obviously going to have a lot less drastic of an effect on the overall image.
But one thing about this effect,
it's not very apparent right now because of how long every frame is taking to render,
but it doesn't animate by default.
I actually need to animate
this noise phase control to be able to have animated random noise on every frame.
There's a really simple expression that'll allow me to do this automatically.
I'm just going to hold the Alt or option key on a Mac and click on the stopwatch,
and then down here start typing my expression.
The expression is just random and After-Effects will auto-fill it.
Then in between the parentheses,
I just put in a value and this will be how
random this value will change every frame of the timeline.
I'm just going to type in a big number,
10,000, and click off.
Now, it's just going to generate a random value anywhere from
between 0 and 10,000 every frame of the animation.
That's going to give us an animated noise pattern.
If I just go one frame at a time,
you can see that changes every single time.
That green is done.
Next up, I want to add some lens distortion.
I'm going to go into my effects adjustment layer again.
I'm going to add an optics compensation effect.
I'll put this up at the top of the layer stack.
I want everything else to be applied after this effect,
but what this allows me to do is basically add a lens distortion to the overall image.
This is the opposite direction that I want it to distort though.
I'm going to check this box right here, reverse lens distortion.
That's way more distortion than I need.
I'll probably put this around 30.
I'll turn that off and back on so you can see how that just distorts
the image around the outside edges in a radial way.
That just simulates lens distortion. Looks very cool.
Finally, let's add some black bars at
the top and bottom to make this more of a cinematic aspect ratio.
I'm going to make a new layer,
come up to layer, new solid.
I'll make the layer black,
and I'll call this aspect ratio.
Click "Okay", and then pre-compose this layer Control Shift
C. I'll just rename this aspect ratio and click "Okay."
Then I'll go into that comp,
and I want to make these black bars at a 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio,
which is a super-wide ratio.
To do that, I'm going to make another solid layer, new solid.
To figure out what the pixel value would be,
I'm going to do a very simple trick.
Remember, I said that the ratio is 2.35.
To one, I'm just going to say
235 -100 and you can see right here my aspect ratio is 2.35.
Then I'll just lock that aspect ratio and change the width
back up to 1920 and After Effects does the conversion for me.
The height needed to be 817 pixels for that aspect ratio within a 16 by 9 comp.
I'll click "Okay" and then I'll use that layer
as Inverted Alpha Matte for this first layer.
If I turn on my transparency grid,
there we have the black bars in that aspect ratio.
Go back to the Main comp.
There we have those black bars.
I'll make sure it's at the very top and go ahead and lock that.
Now I have this cinematic aspect ratio within the traditional 16 by 9 HD frame,
along with all of the other effects to
create something that looks really retro, really cool.
You can stop at any point with this,
but I just love layering effects on effects.
I'm going to keep going. I have a few more things that I want to
do to this to degrade the look a little bit.
Right now, it's still pretty clean and crisp.
It looks very digital, which is fine,
but I want it to look like it was digital in the 80s.
I want to soften everything up a little bit.
I'm going to go back to my effects and just
collapse these ones so I have more room up here.
I'm going to bring in a Fast Box Blur,
bring that in, repeat the edge pixels and then change the radius to a very small number.
I don't want this to be even a whole pixel.
If I do that, then it's going to be way too soft.
Maybe 0.5, and that'll probably be plenty.
Then I want to sharpen it up again because right now it just looks blurred.
That's not the effect that I wanted.
I'm going to use an effect called unsharp mask and apply that right after the blur.
Actually, I think I'm going to move both of these effects above
the noise and the glow because effects are applied from the top down.
I want the lens distortion and then I want this soft sharpened thing that I'm doing,
then the glow and then the noise because I always want to be able to see that noise.
I don't want this blur and sharpen to affect that noise.
That film grain that we created should be applied last.
But anyway, what's happening here?
We're applying just the softest little blur,
and then we're using an effect called unsharp mask to sharpen it back up again.
Which it doesn't really look like it's doing all that
much right now if I turn the amount up,
what this effect is basically doing is looking for points of contrast
in your composition and giving it even more contrast.
If I really crank this up,
the maximum value is 500,
then turn it off and back on,
you can see that even in this blurry image that we just artificially created,
it will really crunch that contrast up a lot and it looks like a degraded image.
If I turn those two effects off,
this is where we were,
turn this back on, that's where we are now.
Now, we can also increase the radius.
If I increase this to two, three, even six,
you can see that that's basically increasing the distance
that this effect is sharpening based on the points of contrast.
Add an amount of 500,
that's obviously a turn.
If I make that radius really big,
then we're just going absolutely crazy.
This isn't the look we're after at all.
There is a threshold value.
We could increase or decrease that if we wanted to.
But honestly, I'm just going to reset this,
turn that amount up pretty high,
and then maybe change the radius to two at the most.
Even that is too much actually,
let's just stick with one.
Turn that off and back on and that's really giving us a lot of contrast.
As always, these are subjective effects.
If you don't like the way that makes your graphics look, don't apply it.
But I'm happy with the way that that's working.
If I just turn the effects and the color correction in the vignette off.
I mean, look at how far we've come with this,
just turning those on and off.
It's really degrading the image,
making it look like it's an older graphic that was not created in the 21st century.
It just gives a really cool aesthetic quality to the overall image.
But let's go another step further.
Let's add another effect to this effects adjustment layer.
We're going to use that same turbulent displace that we
used to animate the fog in the background, put that in.
Instead of using the displacement of turbulent,
I want to just go to horizontal displacement.
Basically, I want to add a little bit of horizontal distortion to the overall image,
but in a really, really fine amount.
I'm going to turn the size way down,
probably all the way down to the minimum of two,
and then turn the amount down as well.
I don't want it to be a turn of displacement,
but if I turn that off and back on,
you can see right here on this line that it's basically just roughening up the edges.
Maybe I can increase the size to four.
Honestly, that's too much, I want this to be subtle.
I don't want it to be distracting just like everything else.
But I do want to animate this.
Fortunately, we have under the evolution options, a random seed,
which if I adjust,
just completely gives us a new noise pattern or turbulent pattern to distort on.
I'm going to just add an expression, Alt or Option,
click on that random seed and we're going to do that same random expression as before.
Type in random and after-effects gives us that auto-fill.
In the parentheses just put 10,000 so we get
a random number between zero and 10,000 on each frame.
I'll preview this for a little bit so you can see what that's doing.
There you go, you can see it's just adding a little bit of distortion there.
Maybe I could turn the size up to something like 10 and the amount down to say three.
Now it's more of a wavy distortion that's a little bit taller,
could probably increase the amount to maybe six.
These are just values that you've got to play with and get
a feel for to see if it's something that you like.
I think that's adding a nice quality to it,
it makes it look like it's on an old VHS tape.
I'm happy with that.
One last effect I want to do to cell that VHS tape look or
old film look actually is to add an offset effect.
I'll drop that in.
Just like the Fast Blur and the unsharp mask,
I'm actually going to drag both the turbulent displace and offset effects above
the glow so that the glow and the grain are applied after.
What I want to do is basically shift this on
the Y position up and down to simulate the film gate
slipping that you would see in movies that were actually shot on
film just because the nature of film are running through the gate of a film camera.
To do that, we're going to add an expression to the shift center to property.
I'm going to "Alt" or "Option", click on it.
This expression is a little bit different.
We're going to need to create an array because this
is an array property with two values here.
Opening square bracket, and we'll just type in value
another opening square bracket and the number zero to target that first property.
Remember, zero is the first,
one is the second.
Then separate the array by a comma and for the second value,
I want to use a wiggle expression which just basically
vibrates or oscillates this value by an increment that we determined.
I'm going to type out wiggle after-effects
again auto fills that for us and puts parentheses.
Then we have to define the frequency of this wiggle and the amplitude of this wiggle.
The frequency I want to happen,
probably half of the frame rate.
We're working at 24 frames per second.
I want it to happen 12 times a second,
which is a pretty quick wiggle.
It's basically every other frame.
Then I need to add in at the amplitude.
I'm going to add parentheses to separate these two.
The amplitude will be how much this value can actually wiggle.
I don't want this to be a lot,
10 pixels is probably too much.
Why don't we just start with five and see what that does.
There's one last thing that we need to do to this expression so that it is
only applied to this part of the array and we don't get an expression error.
That is simply adding another square bracket and the number one.
We're referencing the Y value.
Then finally we need one more closing square bracket.
The reason I know that is because with my cursor next to this square bracket,
these two are highlighted green,
meaning they go together.
If I click on this one right here, it turns red.
That red indicates that there is not a closing square bracket.
If I apply this effect,
we're going to get an error because of it.
I'm going to go to the very end and add one more closing square bracket.
Now that's green. This one is green as well and I can
click off and our expression is successful.
I'm going to preview this so you can see what's happening.
Now my frame is bouncing up and down it's vibrating.
I think it's way too much.
I'm actually going to half this frequency from
every 12 frames to every six frames and see how I like that.
Okay, I think the frequency there is better,
but it's still moving too much.
I'm going to change the amplitude from five pixels to two pixels,
and see how that looks.
Better but honestly, it's still too noticeable.
I want it to be more subtle.
I'm going to change this down to one pixel and that will probably do it.
I'm just trying to give it a little bit of vibration up and down,
but I don't want it to be too noticeable.
If I zoom out to look at this at 100 percent,
we'd just get that little tiny vibration,
that little bit of horizontal distortion,
and I'm pretty happy with that.
Let's take a snapshot so we can compare it to before we added any effect.
That was our aftershot.
Let's turn off the vignette color correction and effects and the aspect ratio.
Then just show this snapshot to see before and after.
You can really see what an effect,
all of those distortions and degradations that we're
applying gives to the overall composition and the effects that we've created.
I'm really happy with the way that this ended up.
Let's take a look at it in full motion so we can really see how it all came together.
Awesome. This is all of our hard work paying off to create a very retro looking effect,
which is completely procedural and you have lots of ability
to get in there and fine tune this to be whatever you want it to be.