[Andrew Yoole]

David, you can download a bunch of muzzle flashes, explosions etc. for free at
https://www.detonationfilms.com/free_stuff.htm

They’re only DV quality, but some are quite usable.

If you have the budget, Trapcode’s Particular plugin does some fantastic smoke and particle stuff, really worth the investment.

You can also use CC Particle systems in AE6.5 for smoke – it’s preset based, so not perfect, but used judiciously with some blur you can get away with a fair bit.

[Andrew Yoole]

If they’re all lossless files and you set all your comp and interpretation settings correctly then you won’t lose any discernable quality by joining them an re-rendering another lossless file.

Consider Quicktime Pro, however, which will allow you to very quickly cut and paste all five clips into one without any need for decompression/recompression. Best 39 bucks you’ll ever spend, but if you’re using PC wait until the new version is available.

[Andrew Yoole]

If you have the drive space, avoid using the DV codec until the very last stage (going back to DV tape!) Use Quicktime Animation (100% Quality) for all your intermediate rendering steps. You’ll get much better image quality, especially if you’re using chromakey.

[Andrew Yoole]

1. Compatibility with other AE users – AE is not backward compatible.

2. Incredible value. The Cycore plugins are worth 3 times the upgrade price on their own, let alone Color Finesse, Grain Removal etc etc.

3. Increased productivity. Animation Presets allow you to store templates of commonly used animations including all keyframes, filters etc. Plus hundreds of text animators viewable in the Text Animation Gallery are included.

[Andrew Yoole]

Double-click on the layer name in the timeline window to open layer view. At the bottom of the layer view window choose the effect from the View menu – in your case, lens flare. From here you can edit the path just like you would a motion path – even paste a mask or path shape for editing.

[Andrew Yoole]

You are seeing interlace flicker, which can be caused in a number of ways. How is you’re footage captured? I suspect it’s from an interlaced camera source, possibly a DV camera. The mismatch of interlaced source and non-interlaced output is tricky, and the best way to overcome it is to deinterlace the source footage. The best way to deinterlace your footage is with Magic Bullet (at a hefty price)

https://www.redgiantsoftware.com

but you can also use the free plugins on offer from Pete Warden

https://www.petewarden.com

You can also deinterlace footage in a NLE like Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro.

Don’t confuse deinterlacing with field interpretation. If you interpret field order and render frames, you’ll actually just remove one field from the source footage (which is harsh deinterlacing). If you interpret source footage as frames, you’ll end up with flickering like what you’re seeing now.

[Andrew Yoole]

The key here is to overlap your animation so you don’t notice the loop point. For example, say you want a 10sec animation loop. Design a 12 sec animation and precompose it. Duplicate the precomp and offset it on the timeline by 10 secs, with opacity fading up over 2 secs on the second layer. Don’t render the first 2 secs of the comp, just the final 10 secs.

Just a note – the site you linked to took almost 2 minutes to load the first page on a quite decent broadband connection. If I were an average customer, I would have got bored and moved on before the page finished loading. It looks nice, but you either need to reduce the content size or find a faster web server.

[Andrew Yoole]

The key here is to overlap your animation so you don’t notice the loop point. For example, say you want a 10sec animation loop. Design a 12 sec animation and precompose it. Duplicate the precomp and offset it on the timeline by 10 secs, with opacity fading up over 2 secs on the second layer. Don’t render the first 2 secs of the comp, just the final 10 secs.

Just a note – the site you linked to took almost 2 minutes to load the first page on a quite decent broadband connection. If I were an average customer, I would have got bored and moved on before the page finished loading. It looks nice, but you either need to reduce the content size or find a faster web server.

[Andrew Yoole]

There’s a thread a couple of days ago in this very forum which should be mutually beneficial.

https://www.creativecow.net/forum/read_post.php?postid=111648376588802&forumid=2

[Andrew Yoole]

If there is any level of transparency in your precomp and the background colour of one comp is different to the other, you’ll notice the colour difference.