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Maintaining opacity during cross dissolves
I’m trying to sequentially cross dissolve between various photos without the background becoming visible through the overlapping portion of the images during the transition. They have motion key frames and mixed aspect ratios and orientations so they don’t fill the screen, which means I can’t merely fade up the front layer to maintain opacity. As best as I can figure, I’d have to pre-comp each photo with the background and then fade up the each sub-comp as a full comp-sized foreground layer–which would be ridiculous to do for the dozens and dozens of photos I need to animate. Is there an easier way? Or am I going to have to do this in FCP, which maintains the opacity of the overlapping portions of the images when they are cross dissolved in a single track.
It seems surprising how much work it will be to animate the equivalent of iPhoto’s stock “Ken Burns effect” in AE and not even be able to maintain the opacity of overlapping layers!
*No endorsement of the term “Ken Burns effect” meant or implied 😉
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6 Replies
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I’m not sure what you mean, so I’ll check with you.
You have multiple photos. (which don’t fill the screen > look like they’re floating/sitting in the composition)
You have them moving/rotating on the screen.
You plan to sequentially show different photos by cross dissolving. (does it look like a stack of photos? ie. you would be able to see the corners of the photo below past the edges of the photo above?)Maybe more questions later.
Cheers,
Michael -
use “alpha add” bleding mode.
normally 50% opaque + 50% opaque gets 75% opaque.
alpha add fixes this to 100%.good luck,
payton -
[Gerard Hughes] “It seems surprising how much work it will be to animate the equivalent of iPhoto’s stock “Ken Burns effect” in AE and not even be able to maintain the opacity of overlapping layers!”
Nope, you’re wrong. Just like Tobias said, use Alpha Add. By default AE does not blend opacity linearly. In addition to the Alpha Add mode, the Effects –> Channel –> Blend effect works the same.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Yea! Thanks for the responses. This should be perfect.
“Nope, you’re wrong. Just like Tobias said, use Alpha Add. By default AE does not blend opacity linearly. In addition to the Alpha Add mode, the Effects –> Channel –> Blend effect works the same.”
I’m glad to be wrong when being wrong will make my life easier than being right. 🙂
I do still think it takes a lot of work–for a non programer like myself–to replicate some consumer level stock effects in AE. I’d like to be able to do simple slide shows with automatic functions that I can overide. AE does have the flexibility to do this, but it takes a bit of work to set up initially. I needed to do a quick slide show with 300 photos for a client and it was a lot faster for me to to use iPhoto to do a slide show with (slight shudder) the “automatic Ken Burns effect” rather than to try and figure out an expression that would auto scale to comp (by height or width which ever comes first) size at In and zoom from the scaled size to 110% of the initial size at Out. I can do it with a click in iPhoto or I can export the album from iPhoto, batch pre-process the photos in PS (for rendering efficiency), import to AE, manually re sort to match the order in iPhoto (grr), sequence layers, do expressions to do some of what I want and render, but I just didn’t have time to do it and figure out an expression that would auto fit and scale based on layer in and out (for flexibility I need to change the duration of the clips without having to set 300 new keyframes.)
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Thanks!
“alpha add” bleding mode.
normally 50% opaque + 50% opaque gets 75% opaque.
alpha add fixes this to 100%.”Didn’t AE used to have a little checkbox for “preserve transparency” that did this?
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i think thats no surprise.
if there is a program that can do just 5 things, it normally does these 5 things faster than a program that capilities are nearly limitless, including 3rd party plugs.
just remember: AE isn
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