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iPAD masked animation driving me nuts!
Hey
I really hope someone can help coz I’m slowly losing my mind after 5 hours trying to animate a simple mask.
I have a shot of an iPad with a hand scrolling through videos, on top of that I am trying to composite a few videos that appear as though they are scrolling on the screen. The problem I have is animating the masks I have made for cropping the video and for the finger whenever it passes across the composited video. This worked fine for the first video and for the beginning of the 2nd but when the 2nd video should leave the screen the masks keep “slipping” even after I’ve saved immediately before preview or scrubbing through timeline. I have checked 1 million times if I am accidentally moving the footage layer beneath or if the masked video itself is being moved but that’s not the case. The strange thing is that some frames are still in synch when other keyframes are completely off. I can scrub through the timeline and everything looks perfect and then render and see playback is fine but then I save or come back a minute later and everthing is messed up again, the first composited video is still fine though.
Please save my sanity, I have 1hr 30mins to get another video masked and composited (and exported).
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8 Replies
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Here is a screen shot of my problem, you can see where the mask has slipped. I am key framing Mask Path and also the layer position to manually track the ipad screen. I have gone back and keyframed frame by frame both Mask Paths and layer Position locking each mask and layer as soon as keyframing was finished but again the problem returned once I had completed everything and had it all lined up correctly. I’m sure I’m doing something really simple wrong but for the life of me I cannot figure out what the issue is.
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I found this video by Greyscalegorrilla which seems to relate to my problem but I have switched all keyframes to linear and the problem still continues.
https://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/tutorials/most-common-animation-mistake-in-after-effects-and-how-to-fix-it-wobbly-keyframes/ -
This is one of those projects where for me to help, I’d need to see what’s happening. If it’s not a problem, can you upload the .aep file and I’ll take a look at what’s happening—no need for the assets, just need to see what’s happening with the keyframes(use the last icon in the reply dialogue). I’m on my home system, so it needs to be in a CS6 or earlier version.
Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb. -
Thanks Johnny, it’s appreciated but unfortunately I’ve run out of time and we’re having to do a work around by building our own ipad mask and animating everything, deadline is fast approaching so that seemed the quickest way in the end. Thanks for offering your help.
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No problem, good luck with your project.
Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb. -
Thanks man, in my desperation I actually tried using premiere pro using a rudimentary mask from the title tool and exactly the same thing started to happen with the keyframes coming out of synch, maybe it was the video codec or something weird but it seemed not just to be an AE issue.
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[Dan McGarry] “maybe it was the video codec”
could be… h.264 would not be a codec that i’d use in ae (or any interframe codecs like hdv, xdcam, mpeg-2…)
you’ll find that ae works best with intraframe codecs. some common ones for video are apple’s prores, avid’s dnxhd and quicktime photo-jpeg, but there are others.
after your deadline, you can check to see if the footage was an issue by converting the h.264 to photo-jpeg (or similar) and see if you have the same problems.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks Kevin. I did as you suggested and changed the file from h264 to photo jpeg. At first the problem remained even after I redid all the keyframes. Then I think I discovered what the problem actually was although I still don’t understand why. It seems that because I was animating the masks in the composition view rather than the footage panel one mask(subtract)kept disappearing from the composition when 2 masks were not overlapping. I was creating more masks whenever my subtract mask disappeared and for some reason by animating the subtract new masks I was changing the keyframes of the old subtract mask that was not visible. I don’t understand why but was able to solve the problem by deleting all the new masks and keeping the original subtract mask, when the 2 masks no longer overlapped in the footage panel I made the correction there and the composition was unaltered but the subtract mask was now visible and the keyframes stayed as they should be. Does anyone know why adding new animated masks would change the keyframes of old masks? And how can someone animate a mask in the footage panel when you are only able to see one layer at a time and you need to see the other layer as reference for your mask?
Sorry for the long winded explanation I hope people can understand what I’m on about.
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