[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Please send an e-mail to Greg or myself (ar(AT)adolforozenfeld.com) for a trick that will surely solve your problem.
It can’t be posted in a public forum 🙂

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Absolutely.
Most modern Sony video monitors (generously including in the category my 7 year-old PVM) have an auto-calibration feature. You feed them bars, select auto-calibration in a menu and that’s it.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

A properly calibrated computer monitor won’t look exactly like a video monitor.

But AE can take advantage (new in CS3) of your computer display’s ICC profile to simulate the tonal rendition of an SD/HD video monitor.

Basically, you have to enable a project working color space, make sure that AE is using display color management (view menu) and then turn on Simulate Output (also on view menu).

LCD monitors can’t be accurately calibrated by using the typical calibration wizards with color and gamma sliders (like the Mac OS colorsync utility or Adobe Gamma). You need a hardware device with the right software. I have the Spyder2Express ($80 or less) and it is more than acceptable for AE work.

If you have a quality display and you use a device like the one I just mentioned to build an accurate monitor color profile, then the simulation is really, really close to a “correct” video monitor.

It’s a deep subject. Adobe posted a terrific document on AE CS3 Color Management:

https://www.adobe.com/designcenter/aftereffects/articles/aftereffectscs3_color_mgmt.pdf – Similar pages

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

I don’t think I e-mailed anything 🙂
You probably received an e-mail notification of the reply I posted here.
In that case, the reply is available in this thread.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

There’s no “wrong” method and every one has a favorite way. But this approach has two well-known problems.
On one hand, you have two “competing” speed graphs instead of a collaborative relationship. You end up with something that scales faster than it moves, or viceversa.This conspires against the “silky smooth” feeling.

Second problem, because the nature of interpolation in computer graphics is to use the shorter route between two values, you may find that you’re satisfied with the start/end states, but experience unpredictable results in the middle of the animation. In a worst case, on given scale/position combos, you end up seeing the margins of the graphic.

Because of all this, the usually recommended method among animators is visually adjusting (not animating) the anchor point so that it adds “weight” to a particular zone. When you animate scale, the apparent location of the image will drift naturally towards that feature, with the same speed graph that affects scale.

While the ideal thing would be having a pan behind tool like AE has (to offset the anchor point visually while the clips seems to stay still), you can do it with just an extra step: relocate anchor point so that it is in the relative location of the clip you want, and then move the clip before animating so that its’ position is corrected. Then you can animate scale smoothly as was mentioned before.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Sure, I’d love to learn the solution that worked for you.

Regarding the help documents… There Adobe documentation team is conducting a survey about them right now.

https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/PremierePro/3.0/index.html

At the bottom of each page, you’ll see a button to “take a survey”.
It’s your opportunity to make yourself heard.

IMO, they have improved a lot recently. And also it’s worth noting that theor job is much tougher than people writing specialized books with with all the time you need after release. Many times they have to document features which are far from being finished, and then go back to fix it according to the final feature set. Not to mention simultanoeusly doing all the localizations and such things.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

[jkb242] “if I move the anchor point by moving the anchor point H and V sliders, the anchor point continues to remain in the center of the frame while the entire picture moves downward to allow the anchor point to be centered to the face.”

I don’t want to be too smart here, but I swear this is one of the cases where appearances are deceptive. Would you believe me if I told you that your clip is staying exactly in the same place?
Every spatial transform (scale, rotation, position) takes the anchor point as gravitional center, sort of speak. In the case of position, this means that if you offset the anchor point, it’s that point the one that will be located at the current XY position values. So PPro is doing the right thing, in a literal way. Which may not be what you expect.
In AE, you can have two different behaviors. One is the “literal” anchor point offset, which produces the results you know. The other one is using the Pan Behind tool, which visually produces something that looks like the clip stays in the same place and the anchor point moves to a new location (but in actuality, what it does is modify both position and anchor point values at the same time, so that the new position value neutralizes the anchor point offset).
Unfortunately, Premiere Pro doesn’t have a Pan Behind tool AFAIK. It would be a very useful addition.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Not so curious and probably not in a list for a future version 🙂

Let me explain: The whole point of having layer styles in AE is that they behave identically as they behave in Photoshop. If they didn’t work this way, you simply would not get a predictable result (or the same exact result, more precisely) when bringing a PSD with editable styles (which was the main focus of the feature, applying them directly is kind of a bonus).

Now, it’s in the very definition of layer styles that they have a fixed (and very specific) rendering order. Please note that AE already had effects for drop shadows, glow, gradient overlays or solid color overlays, etc. If you could work around this rendering order, they wouldn’t be PS layer styles…. Layer styles have rather complex blending operations that are not compatible with the intersections in 3D layers.

You can use the workaround that was correctly suggested, but it’s not really because of a “flaw” in the implementation of feature.

A frequent, related question is also why can’t you reorder layer styles in the timeline, to alter their stacking order… no need to explain why now, right?

One thing that is really worth checking out: Even if there are not direct UI control for them, AE supports many of the Advanced Blending operations in PSD files. For example, conditional blending (blend if). By using this, you can “insert” (say) a text layer behind a person’s red shirt, even if this person moves. Because PS now handles video…. and because AE can import PSD files with video… 🙂

Best,
Adolfo

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

As has been explained many times here, most of the 8 GB (or 16 or even 24 GB if you had as much) are used by the AEselflink instances that are spawned when you enable simultaneous processing. If you go to the Mac OS Activity Monitor during an AE render or RAM preview, you’ll see that these background processes do take most of your memory.

As for it slowing down, most people find that it makes it way faster. The first time you invoke RAM preview on every session it does take some time to launch the AEselfLink instances, though.

Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
ar(AT)adolforozenfeld.com

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

[Blast1] “Did they mention whether it was a free upgrade?
“

Giles didn’t provide specific information. Personally, my impression was that he meant an update for Premiere Pro CS3, rather than an upgrade.

Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
ar(AT)adolforozenfeld.com