Aharon Rabinowitz
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Hope it helps.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
I have a tutorial on my particleIllusion DVD that *sort of* covers some of this, but not quite. Let me see what I can do…
OK. This assumes that your stroke effect is animated with 2 keyframes, and doesn’t change speed. If you have more than 2 keyframes, and that causes it to change speed, this will not work.
– Select the layer with the stroke effect.
– Hit M to reveal the mask path.
– Select the word Mask Path.
– Choose Edit > Copy
– Create a new Solid layer the same size as the stroked layer (I assume it’s the same size as the comp).
– Select the new solid, and hit P to reveal the position property.
– Select the word position and choose Edit > Paste
This create position values that create a motion path that matches the Stroked mask shape. The position keyframes are created as roving keyframes. If you don’t know about that, watch my tutorial here at the cow covering that.
– Next, on the new solid, drag the last position keyframe to line it up with the Stroke effects last End keyframe.
If you check you will see that they are animating together. The new solid’s anchor (center) point should be a perfect match for the front of the stroke as it’s drawn on.
– Next, Alt(option)-Click on the new solid’s position property stop watch – this adds an expression.
– Hit Enter on the number pad to confirm the expression.
Even though the expression changes nothing, it’s still there and we need it for the next step.
– Next select the position property for the new solid (which selects all keyframes) and choose Animation > Keyframe Assistant > Convert Expression to Keyframes.
This creates a keyframe at every frame. We need this so that particleIllusion will get every single frame of animation from AE. Otherwise it would only get part of the data and the motion would not match.
– Select the word position (which selects all position keyframes) and choose Edit > Copy.
– Then go into pIllusion, and paste keyframes as you normally would.
That should do it.
You may find that you need to offset the video when you bring it into AE. I have a feeling that you may want to have the video start playing about 1-3 frames before the stroke starts animating. Particles take time to appear, and the stroke may appear before the welding sparks. But if you have the stroke start animating 1-3 frames after the particleIllusion footage, that should fix it. I might be wrong, and you may not need to do this.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
Dave, I have to disagree with you on this. Depending on the codec, AE will slow down dramatically when rendering to a compressed format. Compression is very processor intensive. AE has to render the image and encode, and that can double your time in certain formats and codecs.
Sorenson squeeze is a great tool for compression, and it works alot faster than AE while giving you better quality and smaller file sizes.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
I’d report this to adobe. Send them the file too.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
your audio may not actually be synced in AE.
Try reducing the display size to 50% and the quality to half, and see if it still is ram previewing synced.
I have found over the years that what looks synced in AE isn;t always, and reducing the resources needed to play it back will show the problems better.
In the short run, you could always just shift your audio down in time to match. It’s not the best solution, but it is the fastest.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
I think you need to do 2 things here.
1) Create a 3D composition with everything set up the way you want.
2) Animate bot the camera and the layers to get the look you want. In other words, you’ll probably have more luck if you rely on more than the cameras motion to do the work for you. I’m not talking about major motion of the layers – just subtle stuff to correct anything that doesn’t look right after the camera makes it’s move. But do the layer animation and the camera animation at the same time.
make sense?
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
First an obvious question: Can you open the project in premiere?
If not, it’s corrupt. But I doubt that’s your issue.
Check to see that AE can import all of the footage. One of those could be the problem. So do a File > import for each piece of footage in AE.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
Try removing some of the extreme points manually and then give it another go with the smoother.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
Choose Window > The smoother
Then Select your keyframes, and use the smoother. It will smooth out the motion path for the tracker by removing keyframes. Based on the tolerance you set it can remove a little or a lot.
My understanding is that the number you use decides how many pixels off the current value it can vary, and by doing that it can get rid of keyframes that are not necessary anymore.
On the other hand, is it possible your footage is interlaced? If so, that might explain the jitter. You need to tell the motion tracker that the footage is interlaced so it can account for that.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web -
First off, you should be rendering, not exporting.
(Composition > Make Movie)
Not all programs read AVI with Alpha Properly. I’d suggest you render as a QuickTime with Animation Compression, setting it to export RGB+Alpha, and make sure you use “Straight (Unmatted)” and not “Premultiplied” – watch this video for info on that:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/straight_vs_premult.php
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web