Pixel Art

After Effects Polaroid Tutorial

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

When your digital photos are displayed like Polaroid, they look more eye-catching. But did you ever used it for videos? This tutorial will teach you to create a simple Polaroid effect which will give your video a vintage look.

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Step 1

Create a new composition – 720*720 of 50 seconds and name it as video.

Step 2

Import your footage to after effects and drag and drop it to timeline. Scale it to fit the screen.

Step 3

Add curves to adjust the footage.

Step 4

Add noise effect and set noise amount to around 11% and uncheck the use color noise option.

Step 5

Add fast blur and set blurriness to 0.9

Step 6

Create adjust layer of comp size and set blend mode to soft light. Add video as the parent for adjustment layer. Add ramp effect to it. Adjust the values.

Step 7

Create a new comp of size 750*900 and name it as Polaroid. Create a white solid and name it as paper. Add the video composition layer to the new composition.

Step 8

Adjust the video as shown below.

Step 9

Add the texture to the timeline. Scale it to fit the comp size and set the blend mode to multiply and change the opacity to around 70%.

Step 10

Next create a new comp for final video.

Step 11

Add new solid and add the Polaroid comp to timeline. Scale and rotate the Polaroid according to your need. Add drop shadow effect to Polaroid comp. Set distance to 0 and softness to 100.

Step 12

Add a light layer. Layer->New->Light. Note you have to change the remaining layers to 3D for light layer to function. Change the intensity and the position accordingly.

You will get something like this

Step 13

Add an expression to the opacity of the Polaroid layer to make it look like projector flicker.

opacity.wiggle(5,50)

Step 14

Add camera Layer-> New->Camera. Choose 24mm –preset.  Change the camera orientation as shown in the screenshot. Do not forget to adjust the position and scale value of the background layer so that it is little bigger than the composition size.

Step 15

Turn off 3D switch for the Polaroid layer (but don`t forget to turn on the switch later) and add key frame to change the rotation. Use graph editor to give it more realistic movements.

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