From the course: After Effects CC 2021 Essential Training: VFX

What is transparency? - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects CC 2021 Essential Training: VFX

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What is transparency?

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- [Instructor] What is transparency? Transparency is essentially what enables us to create visual effects by taking one portion of an image and combining it with another. By cutting out what we want or don't want, we create an isolated feature that we can then manipulate further in the context of our shot. You might have heard the terms opacity and transparency used together or interchangeably. They're basically opposites. In After Effects, if a layer has a 0% opacity, it's 100% transparent, meaning that you can see right through the layer, in effect, making it invisible. Likewise, if you have a layer that's at 25% opacity, you have 75% transparency and so forth. The trick here in visual effects is creatively deciding where to apply this transparency. We can create transparency through a number of means, including cutting out areas by masking or using the image's color or brightness information. In visual effects, every shot is different and will have its own set of unique challenges. In turn, each artist will problem solve differently and thus arrive at different solutions. This chapter is aimed at introducing some of the essential methods of generating transparency. Understanding these techniques and training your eye to identify when to use them will greatly help your compositing and visual effects skills.

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