Adolfo Rozenfeld
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Sure.
But you don’t “import” it. You copy from Illustrator and paste it in After Effects!
Just a few things to bear in mind:
* By default, the clipboard format Illustrator uses is not compatible with AE. In Illustrator, you have to go to Preferences > File handling and Clipboard and make sure the “other” clipboard format is also on. If you don’t do this, copy and paste from AI to AE won’t work.* Contrary to intuition, if you want the contour of an AI object as an AE mask, the AI object has to have any color BUT transparent stroke. If not, if the stroke is visible, it will paste two masks instead of one. It could be good in specific cases, but not what you usually want.
* Finally, since After Effects could do so many things with the Illustrator data on your clipboard, you have to let it know you want to paste as a mask. You do that by creating any mask (a generic, rectangular mask will do), select it, and only then paste the path. Otherwise, AE will paste as a motion path for the position proeperty. Not what you want.
* If a keyframe already exists for mask shape, AE will paste the Illustrator path as another keyframe and interpolate between them. Realy cool.
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
You could smooth the motion…. with The Smoother 🙂
The Smoother (Window > The Smoother) simplifies animation based on a threshold level. Keyframes with values under that threshould (compared to the previous keyframe) are killed. The others survive. The higher the threshold, the more keyframes are killed and the less “nervous” the animation becomes.
But you know what? That kind of jumps on a tracked object usually are evidence of defective tracking. In my experience, some adjustments to the feature region (or choosing a different tracking reference), limiting the search region (so it hides distracting information from the tracker) and checking the contrast detection method (luminance versus RGB), etc finally end up giving you a good track. And I had to place video on cell phones too 🙂
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Add filter > Time > Scrub
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
See thread about five posts below yours 🙂
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
It’s completely understandable. Motion has an innovative paradigm for animating text. It’s very powerful and, while not “hard” (it makes easily taks that used to be really hard), for good and for bad it’s unlike almost anything else. So it takes a little effort to learn to think like it 🙂
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
I didn’t say a Solid shape but a Solid Color generator. Essentially, a plain rectangular object with solid color and same size as the project. It could also be a gradient (not a shape with gradient fill, but a specific gradient generator, similar to color solid but… a gradient!). So, while you can’t turn a mask into a shape, you can copy and paste it to a solid or gradient object. Visually, the result is similar to a shape, because the solid or gradient generators would become masked. No outline, though. IMHO, Motion really needs an option to stroke the contour of masks, again, like AE does. And if AE does something, like it or not, it’s a standard in motion graphics and a standard among motion graphics professionals 🙂
Anyway, a quick and easy way to copy a mask from one object to another is: make sure the Layers palette is visible, then option drag (this is, drag while holding the option key) from one object to the other. You could do copy and paste too, but option dragging is one step instead of two, right? 🙂
Hope this helpsAdolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
All current Mac models are very competitively priced, IMO, if you consider the hard specs AND the R&D costs for Mac specific features. The technology that lights a laptop keyboard depending on level of ambient light, the one that turns off the hard drive when it detects the laptop is falling, the remote control that drives consumer applications, the magnetic connector that releases the machine so it doesn’t fall when you go over the cable and so on have to be invented, researched and tested. Given that, and the latest Intel processors and chipsets, the current Mac systems’ price is a steal. The exception is probably the iMac, but such a stunning design is probably worth the price for people who want it.
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Julian: The first rule of living in web forums like these is avoiding “platform wars”.
I obviously prefer Macintosh systems, for a number of reason. But I don’t know if it would be right to go there in this forum.
Without going into better or worse, I can say:
With Windows you can run the whole Adobe Production Studio, as you know.
With a Mac you can run After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator (among many other options, of course). Premiere doesn’t exist on the Mac anymore and Encore was never released on the Mac. This is simply because most Mac users (myself included) prefer Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. Notice than on a Mac you can run the Apple applications and the Adobe applications I mentioned before, and reboot under Windows XP to use whatever Win application I want.
I think I have been fair and avoided conflicts, haven’t I?
All the best!Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
In which cave you been the last six months, Julian? 🙂
Just kidding.
The current implementation is for Win32, I imagine. Windows XP, basically. But that is related to the fact that until the Mac Pro, all Intel Macs so far used Core Duo, which is 32 bit only. The dual boot system, called Boot Camp, works like a charm. It provides support for Apple specific hardware (keyboard, isight, trackpad, etc.) in Windows XP. There is also a virtualization solution called Paralells Desktop that allows you to run Windows applications inside of Mac OS X. But Open GL support and such things don’t work as well as in Boot Camp.A related, interested subject is that Apple previewed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It works natively in both 32 and 64 bits. No need for a dedicated 64 bits version. And the same application can automatically run as a 32 bit or 64 bit app depending on which processor you’re using. Anyway, you surely are aware that 64 bit computing doesn’t provide a huge speed increase per se. Current processors have had 64 and 128 bits vector processing units for some time. And most video and audio applications are optimized for those already.
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
Absolutely.
But seriously… moving from Mac to PC now that new Macs can run both Mac OS and Windows natively? 🙂
Anyway, the projects will work. The most problematic part is typography. It’s very common that font files change names and you get errors for fonts as if they weren’t there even if they are. If you work with Opentype fonts, it won’t be a problem:they are cross-platform. But Postscript or Truetype can be more problematic (Macs can use Windows fonts, but not the other way around).Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com