Rasterising Text and Pre Composing

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Post a screen shot of your layers and timeline.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Olly Lawer]

OK, will look to do that.

Just tested out with another layer and that one was fine also! Just the one set. I wonder if it’s because the comp contains more than one layer?

Olly Lawer

[Olly Lawer]

Don’t worry. Figured it out.

I didn’t realise that if you want to scale up in the main comp, you have to rasterise the layer too. Solved by animating in the pre comp and then applying the transformations in the main comp. Transformations wouldn’t work in the main comp if the layer was rasterised!

At least I found a workaround. Annoying tho.

Olly Lawer

[Walter Soyka]

[Olly Lawer] “I didn’t realise that if you want to scale up in the main comp, you have to rasterise the layer too.”

Just a little terminology correction: you are talking about “continuous rasterization.” The vector art is continuously rasterized, so scaling it up doesn’t cause image degradation. If it were merely rasterized (as would be the case if you don’t enable continuous rasterization), then once you push its scale beyond 100%, the image will degrade because it is not resampling the vector art at the higher resolution.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Olly Lawer]

Sorry…still getting to grips with the terminology.

I cheated in the end by creating another comp with just the layer I wanted to zoom into (a coffee mug in this case that was part of another comp). The new comp I made 1920×1080 in size and increased the coffee mug to the full comp size, turned on continuous rasterisation and then dropped that into the main comp with the original comp (lower resolution coffee cup with other layers). Then just resized the new higher sized comp with the coffee mug and laid over the lower quality coffee cup and reduced the opacity of the layer underneath when I got to the bit in the animation where I zoomed in.

This is no doubt a very messy way of doing things, but it did mean I didn’t have to fuss about animating the coffee cup again with the new larger comp.

In future, I guess it is best to drop each layer into a separate new comp and make as large as I need to (preferably comp size) with the layer being comp size. Then nest each of those separate comps into a comp that I want for that particular set of animation then nest that comp into the main comp with all the other animated comps.

Or bring each comp (the separate illustrator files within the comps), animate, then pre-comp the lot to tidy up.

The reason for doing all this is that I understand that 3D space transformations don’t affect continuously rasterised layers, but by making the illustrator files large and turning on continuous rasterisation within the comp, but when that comp is nested seems to solve this problem. I still have great quality and all of the ability to animate the nested, non continuously rasterised layer.

I guess asking the illustrator to create each illustration the full size of the comp I’m working to (in this case 1920×1080) would be a good start!

Happy for someone to tell me i’m doing it all wrong and there is a better way!

Olly Lawer