Andy Engelkemier
3
After Effects Coins
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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That sounds like part of Motion V2 called Animo. There are a lot of cool options in there. If you do much motion graphics in AE at all, it’s totally worth it. If you use illustrator much, I also highly recommend getting Overloard by battle axe? Not sure if I got the company right, but anyway it makes life much easier, and faster. Faster is always good.
Motion V2 is worth it just for the really fast ability to control the speed of easing without having to manually adjust curves.
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I forgot to mention that I tried that. It doesn’t change anything at all.
I just tried it again, for good measure though. The footage actually looks wrong in AE also. So it’s not happening Only at direct connect. It’s just not looking correct in AE with the same settings.
I haven’t tried one suggestion I found elsewhere on a semi-related field, but I’m not going to try it because of time.
Their suggested was related to premiere where it was adjusting the saturation/brightness slightly any time a title came on screen in media encoder. Well the way that Premiere handles titles, is it’s actually creating an after effects file for every single title you use. So that means direct connect.
Their solution was to disable GPU everywhere and use only software encoding/acceleration.
Well, even if that Is the solution, I wouldn’t have the time to actually render this project if that were the case. For now, lowering the contrast all the way gives me Pretty similar results, so I’ll stick with that just so we can get this thing done on time. -
It’s not a matter of swaying because it’s necessity when it comes to turnaround times.
Every time I see someone’s cool animation I ask, how long did that take? And it’s usually something like, “well I was working with the client over a few month’s/years so it’s hard to really say.” But I’m over here trying to crank out a finished product in 5 days start to finish.
Inevitably, when I render out things into sequences, then use them, (aside from running out of hard drive space) someone will want to change the font on something through the whole thing and see it again. That’s one reason I like AE. I can have all of that linked.
But that’s why I’m wanting to see some workflow training. My workflow creates quite a lot of issues where Adobe breaks. But any other workflow I’ve seen takes months for a 2 minute animation. Either that, or it’s just video editing, with a couple splashes of motion graphics.
Someone mentioned mogrts to me. Yeah, that’s great, except adobe didn’t build them with Workflow in mind. They built them more for sellers. You can’t replace one motion graphics template with another. So if you spend the time to create one that matches the style of a client, if you want to change the timing slightly, you can’t Update it. You have to create a new mogrt, and then create new titles with that one. It’s like they were intentionally creating that so that people couldn’t work with them efficiently.
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It’s pretty funny, I was searching how to do something Almost like this AGAIN, well because I haven’t had to in over 3 years and that’s how my memory works.
But in case someone else ends up here searching for this as well, I figured I’d share what I came up with:
On a shape layer, I created an ellipse path. I needed a circle on each of 22 layers, but I needed them to be one layer. Rather than positioning them all, then precomping I just did this on the position of one ellipse, then duplicated it. All the other objecst were directly above this layer. Just change the math based on where they are. From what I saw, you can’t specify a layer based on its index number, but you can do some math to the index of “this” (the layer with the expression) layer’s index to get what you need. It seems silly to me, but I’m still far from a programmer. Hopefully this will help someone, or maybe Me when I search for it again in 3 more years. lol
GroupIndex = thisProperty.propertyGroup(1).propertyIndex;
thisComp.layer(index-22+GroupIndex).transform.position;
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Here’s the source text area of the title in Premiere:
https://imgur.com/aWa6ENo
And here is in AE. (it wouldn’t save the image for some reason, so I’ve added links)
https://imgur.com/PD5sk9oIt says text bottom, but I don’t get any details about it. So to change those things I have to do it all in expressions. In this case I only need to change the text, so I just made the expression: thisLayer
Then changed the name of the layer to be the text. Although, I needed 2 lines of text for one, so had to write the expression like: “first line\rsecond line”Sure, I could add text style in the expressions as well, but where are you Supposed to change the text size, font, etc?
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For anyone else that came here, like me, to find that answer, but found this to be more complex than they were looking for, and Maybe some of the expressions are using the older language?
I wanted the source text of one layer to be two lines, and I’m using Essential properties for my titles (aka master properties?)
It should be entered like this: “something\relse”
which will create something and else on two different lines. the \r is a line return. And since it’s all in quotes you can’t uses spaces or those will be included.
Some of the other examples used in this thread, they are assigning variables to values that will be the text string. It’s a Little confusing for newer people because they are numbers, but stored as text. And that’s why I thought it was more confusing than needed, for this. But this was the first answer that came up on google. Correct, but took me a couple minutes, and a few variations of trying \ and / with quotes in different places till I got what I needed. I always find it difficult to know the syntax needed and have never really found a great way to look it up other than just finding a similar example to what you need. But with the language issue, that’s a pain.
Just today I had a title I used that I purchased. But when bringing it into another ae file, it had an error. It was just that the if/else statement was in a single line and nothing more. All I did with split it up on multiple lines and the error was gone. And that was just a complete guess because I remembered someone saying something like that.
So hopefully this answer helps the next person who comes along after searching google.
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Yes, I just got permission to. It is far from an exciting video, unless you are one of the people listed, and get excited to see it I suppose. But it was a good excuse to do this with a master composition. I had a few last minute changes and additions. And things like, “Oh, can you put this person before that one,” make manual entry on each one a huge potential for human error. But in this case, I just move the row in excel, and render again.
I stripped out the music file. Also , AE does not collect files that aren’t actually IN a composition. I’m calling on them using a script, and since that is even based on text, it would only see one at a time. I guess it’ll be good practice for me to just add all the CSV files to the comp, just so they get collected.
I’m also curious if this renders out for anyone in media encoder. The names composition was just blank for me. So not sure if I got something wrong, but it is Not cool that adobe just renders it like everything is cool, but without showing me something, like a potential script error. But it Does render if you open the composition in Premiere and render it there (which is how I had to render out the files to be H.264). I’m aware that I could have alternatively rendered something uncompressed, then compress that file in Me, but that’s slower, unless I wanted multiple versions of the compressed file.
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Can you add the PNG to it’s own nested composition? I would think if you add the png in that one composition for media replacement then it would match? But maybe I’m not following what you’re after.
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2021, and this is still an issue for me. And I’m on a new computer. It’s a shame it’s so slow. Especially since things like a browser handle vector graphics so fast.
I do wish there was something that gave an indication of which layer/composition was giving issues. I have quite a few expressions in this particular composition. But odd things slow it down. But I think in this case it’s continual rasterization.
I’ve created a composition that is just a Name, title, and school. 3 lines of text. BUT, they animate in and out. And I’m using a controller and some if statements to say if it’s left, center or right. I didn’t know of a way to script that all on the same object, so there are actually 3 sets of objects there, and the dropdown if else statements are just controlling opacity. I couldn’t find a way to control a layer on/off state. And controlling the text options and animations all inside one set of object’s if statements seemed like that was going to take a while to get right. And I’m not even sure if it would be faster.
The part where I got creative was creating a text layer there and typing out the name of a CSV file. I then use the value of that to point to the actual CSV file (there are multiple). I added protected regions for the animations, and then I’m controlling the CSV file name, Left Center or Right animation, and the row of the CSV with an expression using index.
Positioning each one in AE was challenging, so I made the composition smaller (cropped) which means I had to turn on continually rasterize so that when the text animates on/off screen it actually animates on/off screen.
So unless there is an option in AE that I don’t know about which allows selection to happen only for opaque pixels, then that saves quite a bit of time in positioning out the master compositions.
But wow, no real special effects or anything, but it takes about 20 minutes to render out the comp. Oh….and media encoder also fails to render it. The master comps are just plain invisible. No clue why. Adobe doesn’t know either. Premiere can render it though. So dynamic link works. But since the render queue can’t render h.264 mp4, I’m stuck running things through premiere to get it to work.
But I’d love to know for sure which things are actually slowing the file down. Like if it’s Actually just the continually rasterize buttons checked. It’s just odd because it keeps up fine when they all come on. Then it just comes to a Really slow grind after a few seconds.
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Aaaand my programmer friend helped me figure it out.
I had “Anniversaries.csv” as the source text. I just eliminated the quotes there and it fixed the problem.
I didn’t think that would work because that makes it ‘Anniversaries.csv’ but I don’t understand when single or double quotations do what.