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After Effects - Animated Infographic Video & Data Visualisation

How to add video backgrounds to your infographic video

Daniel Walter Scott

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In this video, we're going to look at adding Video Backgrounds but also, watch, he faded out a little bit. And the Icon's along the top. Even better, this video is not long enough so we're going to extend it at the end so it covers the whole video by freezing the last frame. All right, let's go and do that now in After Effects.

So what I'm doing is I'm starting with an old project. This is kind of the end, we go out with this Icon. Remember, this is kind of moving around and zooming in a bit, with these Icons popping up. So I'm going to get back there, I'm doing a 'File', 'Save As' just so I don't wreck it. I'll call this one-- I'm going to put it in my Desktop under 'AFX Files', I'm going to call this one 'Video Background'. Hit 'Save'. And what I want to do is, I don't want to do this camera work where it moves around, so I'm going to click on the camera, delete it. And because the camera's gone, I don't need these 3D shapes now. If you're just working without—

I'll turn the Motion Blur off as well. Turn it off for the Project. Just to make sure I made things running nice and smoothly. And now hopefully maybe in my Preview, I'm going to turn the Resolution to 'Third'. Hopefully now, when I preview, the camera's not moving around, I can see the whole thing again. I'm going to go even lower. Also, I'm going to go from ‘2-Views’ to ‘1-View’.

Now, if you are just starting this video you don't want to start with any of that, you can just start afresh, that's fine. What I'd like to do is put a video in the background. Doesn't sound that hard, we're just going to import a video. Now if you don't have access to Adobe Stock you can just go into the 'Exercise Files', and under '01 Icon Pop' there's this one, 'Sleeping man turns slightly towards…'. You can bring him in. What we're going to do though, is we're going to export Adobe Stock. And how it's built into After Effects. And we're going to show you some tricks on how to kind of make it work without animation here.

So what I'd like to do, is over here, see this little search bar here, it's quite small. I can type in 'Sleep'. What it's going to do is, it's going to go check out Adobe Stock. Now Adobe Stock charges for its videos and images, so go check it out. If you get a subscription with it you get something like 10 images a month, or 20 images, I can't remember. It's not that bad, I pay for it anyway. And I can't remember off the top of my head what it is.

Now by default it's going to give you both video and images, probably a lot more images. And if you want to use any of these images, watch this, I just kind of drag this in. Give it a second, the lower res is because of the watermark. So you can actually just work with these until the client signs them off. And then, back in my Libraries, if I delete that, there's a cool option in here that says-- right click, and say, 'License Image'. Because I am a paid subscriber it's going to actually license it. And it's going to become high res, and the watermark's going to disappear. It's quite a handy little inter-connection.

So that's one way of doing it. I don't this want image, and I don't want you, gone. You, gone. So I'm going to use that same thing. I want that to disappear, go away. There he is there. So in Search, I'm going to type in 'Sleep', and what I'm going to do is, this one, where it says Results, I'm going to click on just 'Videos'. I'm going to decide which one is going to work for this thing. I feel like this one-- can you see, I'm not holding anything. I'm just moving my mouse back and forth, and it kind of previews it for me. So what I want to say is--

Drag it in. Great! It's not slightly big enough. You can download 4K versions if you need to. I'm going to make it just slightly bit bigger. Move him down. That's perfect. Hit 'space bar'. I'm going to right at the beginning, hit 'space bar'. And there's this guy. So you might just leave it here, and that's how to get images in from Adobe Stock. And just put them in the background. Now, in the background means, to be all the way in the background.

We're going to do a couple of things. Couple of little tricks, just so that you know. So back there. So I've got my Text to start appearing at the top. It's a little bit hard because of this Adobe Stock watermark. But we have to live with that. So what I'd like to do, is to start up, and after some time I'd like it to actually blur out in the background so that it's not taking away from my Icon. It might get blurry the whole time. I'm going to have mine kind of a nice start, focusing, and then blur out as it gets to getting into these Icons here. So, what I'll do is, about here, after the Text kind of disappears I'm going to add an Effect.

So over here-- I'll close down Preview. 'Effects & Presets'. In here, I'm going to grab the world famous 'Gaussian Blur. Everyone uses it. And I'm going to drag it onto what? It's hard to work it out. So I'm going to drag it into the Layers down here. The sleeping man. And you can Keyframe effects just as well as you can Keyframe any of the things down here. So this is my Effects Controls. It's very similar, you can see the little stopwatch. It's the stuff down here.

So what I'd like to do, at about here, I'd like to turn on the stopwatch. I'm going to move along a little bit. How far? We'll practice. And I'm going to crank up the Blur. How far does this go up? You can just click and drag it. Just kind of keep an eye on it. I want to get my Blur, so it's kind of in the background. Sleeping Dan. That looks good. So that when my Icon start going, I guess you're not going to be distracted by the video. So let's preview it, let's see if it works. Preview. Yes. And watch the background. Here you go. You kind of may get an abstract kind of background thing. That could be the whole time. You wouldn't have to put Keyframes in. Just make it blurry the whole time.

One of the next problems, when dealing with videos it might not be long enough. So, like this video here, it gets to a bit, plays along, but then watch what happens. Disappears, and we can see the background again. So a cool little trick you can do with videos is you can right click them, go to 'Time'. There's one in here that says 'Freeze On Last Frame'. It kind of extends itself all the way along. And look what happens now, it goes past there. And watch him, he's moving. He stops moving, and just freezes for the rest of the video. So he's animated up here, doing his little roll over thing, but later on, he just freezes and pauses for the rest of that video.

Cool. So we learned some new things, we learned Adobe Stock. And we looked at how to Fade it out and add Keyframes to Effects. And then treat that video all the way along to the end and hold that last frame. All right, that's going to be it for this one.