Help with creating a jumpback!

[Hoch2888]

thank you very much, i appreciate it.

[Hoch2888]

Actually, not really what I was going for. I already have a created image (the fact that it is a film strip does not matter)…. basically I want to animate my image so that no matter how many times my 4sec video is looped, it always flows (like a jumpback does)

[Matt Hall]

Typical way to do a loop is to place your comp in another comp and split it somewhere in the middle. Then take the second half and place it at the start, and cross fade into the first half. Then make it end on the last frame of the first half.

[Darby Edelen]

If the goal is a loop from the beginning then it shouldn’t be too hard to plan for that.

You just need to make sure that everything is (looks) the same at the end of the 4 seconds as it was at the beginning. If you have a filmstrip, for example, just make sure that the frames on the strip have a loop in them and line your AE animation up to begin/end at that looping point.

An example could be 4 looping frames, if you start on frame 1 with frame 4 above it and frame 2 below, then animate the strip to move upwards past frame 2, 3, 4 and back to 1 (with 2 below) in exactly 4 seconds then you have a 4 second loop. Of course the last ‘frame 1’ visible is not the same frame as the original ‘frame 1’ but that doesn’t matter as long as it looks the same.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Hoch2888]

I’m having the hardest time trying to line up the same image. The goal is to make it look like one single image that moves off into the distance, at the same time, to never have it end. I can’t get anything to line up and stay lined up. Any old project files or suggestions that you can guide me too?

[Darby Edelen]

[hoch2888] “Any old project files or suggestions that you can guide me too?”

Numbers will be your best friend in this scenario. I’m not sure exactly how you’re doing this, but for my sake I’ll keep my example simple.

Say it’s a tall Photoshop file that you want looped moving from the bottom of the frame to the top. Let’s make this file 72×960 pixels. In a standard NTSC DV comp this will be twice the height of the frame. Now let’s say that there are 4 frames you want to loop. In your PSD you’ll need 8 frames from top to bottom in the sequence A-B-C-D-A-B-C-D. These should be spaced evenly so that the first A-B-C-D sequence takes up the top 480 pixels of the file and the second takes up the bottom.

When you import this file into AE and place it in an NTSC DV comp you will first want to set the anchor point to [36, 0], the middle of the top of the layer, just to keep the numbers simple. You’ll want the layer to meet the top of the comp on the first frame so move it there [360, 0]. Now animate the layer from there to [360, 480] over 4 seconds. Voila, loop! You can do anything you want to the keyframes between the first and the last at this point, you just have to make sure that the first and last frames match (same scale, rotation, x position).

Now you can put this composition in another composition and set it to loop, either via Time Remapping or the Interpret Footage dialog.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Jeremy Sexton]

I forget what the Effect is (motion tile, maybe?) but Kramer uses it in his Room/Text tutorial. Basically, what I would do is make the film strip and then use the motion tile to have it actually go on forever. Then you could say move it 100% of the height backwards and it would look like it did when it started.

Does that make sense?

[Darby Edelen]

The benefit of having it animate once, and then looping it (you could even pre-comp and pre-render as I often do), is that AE will not spend as much time rendering.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA