[Andy Engelkemier]

So I’m Sure I’m just doing all sorts of things wrong, but I can’t for the Life of me, figure out why this isn’t working.
I’m rendering out to standard H.264. I tried checking the “Render at Maximum Depth” box, but no change. The preview there still looks correct, but when I look at the file…..blue.

So “A” is a screengrab from the mp4 output. “B” is how that frame (or close to it) should actually look.
I added “C” so you could see what’s causing the blue flower looking thing.

I only get the right effect when in 32bit mode with Linearize and Blend turned Off, as shown. I tried rendering with them on as well, and Yay, no blue, but they don’t get the right look.

Again, there’s no footage here other than one still image being used in the background.
And I have Zero concern if this is Technically correct or not. I just want to learn how to render what I’m seeing. I mean, that’s what we’re all after right? I found what I’d like something to look like, but I can’t get it to actually render out.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Walter looks like the dude I need help from. I read through this and it seems like you’re referring some to imported colors vs ouput colors.
The thing is I’m having troubles with things created Inside of AfterEffects. I didn’t import anything.

I wanted a nice light flash effect on something. 8bit wasn’t cutting it. And I remembered a trick using 32bit. Using 32bit, you can do things like glow and blur, and if they are above a value of 1 (255RGB) then the effect gets more realistically applied.

The issue is, I too am having problems outputting what I’m looking at. It looks GREAT…..on screen. It looks like real lighting. As soon as I render it, the effect is gone. Adobe has never been great at converting colors, in my opinion. Or has never been great at giving Us a choice in how we want them converted. Like….maybe CMYK, 0,0,0,0 should equal RBG 0,0,0 instead of 27,27,27?

I’ve tried blending colors in the linear workspace, but that clamps it Really ugly like. I just want what I see.
If a value is over 1, I just want white. So 4,4,10? That’s not blue on screen. It’s white. I just want what I see, clamped to 255. But I want to keep all the other linear colors how I see them. I don’t want it to convert the contrast, because that looks bad.

So I’m looking for a reasonable way to get what I’m looking for.

Yeah, I could render out to a 32bit image format. Then run them through photoshop with an action…..OR, if I just know how to set the dang thing up correctly, I could just render it out so that it renders what I’m looking it. I mean, i knows the RGB conversion, because that’s what I’m looking at on my screen. But then when it goes and renders it, a value of 4,4,10 is blue, and a value of 4,4,4 right next to it is just white. It seems to be doing the rest of the light calculations how I would expect, which is odd.

Any help here? I thought about just adding an adjustment layer, and seeing if I could just clamp the colors to limit the output, but I don’t think that would work.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Shoot, I thought you were about to teach me something that was going to blow my mind.

I mean, always helpful of course. If you’re ever in Kalamazoo, I’ll buy some beers. Every time I’m stuck, I usually hit your site before even googling, and the answer is usually there. Most of which is over my scripting head, but still helpful.

[Andy Engelkemier]

That sounds like something I would use, but I’m not sure I understand.
I don’t know what the “parent” part is indicating. Is that meaning that the layer is actually parented? Because putting position there wouldn’t make sense to me, unless maybe you’re after adding some math to it.

I was after having a ground shadow and wall shadow follow my layer. But then I’d duplicate those layers, and replace them with a different object. But the expression doesn’t change to the newly duplicated layers, so I was looking to accomplish the same thing with index.

So the ground shadow would be linked only to XZ, and the wall shadow would only be linking to XY.

I didn’t like the effect anyway, but still like to know different ways of doing things. Especially when they are more efficient.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I think so, yes. thank you.
All the examples I could find we calling just an index number, using the index to call on another property. So I couldn’t figure out how to order things.
I suppose it’s always comp.layer.property.subproperty?

I need just one example of the longest one possible, so I could see the order of things in order to properly call on things.

Thanks

[Andy Engelkemier]

That may be helpful to some, but doesn’t help me in this case because the offsets are timed to audio. So they aren’t the same distance apart. Also you can’t sequence based on the beginning of the layers. You Can force time between, though, by entering a negative value in the overlap settings. That’s something many people don’t think of, so is useful.

But in my case it looks more like this….

___________________________________________
* *
____________________________________
* *
_______________
* *

Where all the key[0] are the same, but key[1] all have different values. I want to adjust all of the key[1] values only. But none of them line up. You can edit them all at once only if they line up, as far as I know.

I thought I remembered seeing a video once where someone showed how to adjust them all at once without moving the timeline around.
One other solution is to just move them at a point After all the previous keys. Then just drag that key[2] to replace key[1]. That’s still not ideal though.

I wonder if it was some sort of plugin though. I just recently found Motion 2, and it’s Fantastic. Just the one tool saves so much time from curve editing a bunch of things at once.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Simple choker give me pretty much what I was doing, but with less steps. So thanks. I wouldn’t have thought of that one. I don’t use that tool much, so it’s overlooked by me.

In my case today I found the illustrator file. So that was easy, just convert all those objects to shapes, and use the shapes which has offset path as an option. I just animated the offset.

I had a fill, and needed to convert it to a stroke. AfterEffects doesn’t have a stroke option for which side the stroke is on. But you can sort of cheat that using offset path. Just add an expression so the path offset is your path thickness divided by two, and of course multiply that by negative 1 so it goes the right direction. That way it’ll be inside no matter what thickness you make your stroke. Although, your expression will break if you hit zero I think.
That did the trick in this instance. Hopefully that method will help someone else down the road. For any geometric shape I definitely recommend just making a quick shape to use as a mask to erode the object.
And a note there, offset isn’t there by default. You have to add that by using the little arrow in the top right just under the layer name (to the right of “Contents”

That’s also where you’ll find the Trim Paths, that seems to be generally overlooked by Most of the people answering questions on the internet on how to draw on/off a path. That’s how to do it, not the stroke effect. The stroke effect makes corners look Terrible if they are 90deg or smaller. Trim paths has it’s own issues with corners, but it’s not nearly as bad.

[Andy Engelkemier]

There are ways of doing it, just not built into the software.
For one, if it let you adjust 2 values at once, problem solved. So really it’s just a matter of the product designer not thinking of something. It wouldn’t really be a “magic wand.”

A magic wand would be something like taking video of text and having AE automatically create a camera from it, convert all of the text to 3D text as a replacement, and adjusting the footage to appear as if it has no text on it.

Doing something like, “allow me to change position and anchor point at the same time,” is more of a “why the heck didn’t someone think of that” sort of thing.

Realistically, all they have to do is allow you to select multiple properties (they already do) and adjust one of the values, and at the same time adjust the other values in the same amount (what they are missing). This would also be useful in other ways. Say you want to adjust only the Z position of 15 layers at once without parenting them. Select, adjust, done….instead of having to select them one at a time and adding the same value. Parenting might break some things elsewhere.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I wasn’t clear enough.

I hinted at the fact that this is the way I’m already doing it in the title “numerically” but I didn’t explain that.

That’s actually Not fast. Faster is zooming in a ton and using the pan behind tool. The bad part though is that the info doesn’t update as your moving, so you have to frequently let go.

I need to move position in opposition to the anchor point, which is exactly what the pan behind tool does. If I just move the anchor point property the object moves. but I only want to move the anchor point.

[Andy Engelkemier]

So I got it to work. I hadn’t done that before, and ran into some things I thought I’d share for other people.

First, not sure why people don’t use the windows shortcut. This will make this easier. Instead of saying this:
(Windows) \Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\
Say this:
(Windows) %AppData%\Adobe\After Effects\

Just copy from percent, to the slash. Hit Win+R (that opens Run) paste, and hit enter. No need to go searching around for usernames and whatnot.

I didn’t quite catch why Walter here numbered the scripts. I thought I was just going to assign the script to the hotkey. But it doesn’t quite work like that. You assign a hotkey to the slot the script is in. So it’s best to keep your hotkeyed scripts in order. As soon as I noticed that, it was a “duh” moment.

Also, PageUP and PageDOWN. NOT PageUp and PageDown. It’s case sensitive. Those of us that don’t script often probably wouldn’t key into that right away. I was determined to get it to work so tried a few times.

Also am I missing something? Each time it didn’t work I would close after effects, make a change, then open after effects again. That’s sort of time consuming. Any way to just force it to read the scripts and all that again? Probably not, but thought I’d ask.

Also, this is just as snappy as if it were not a script. Well, it might be different, but it’s nominal if at all. I hit the key over and over quickly and it keeps them all. I wasn’t sure if if would lag and skip one. It lags, but remembers, just like the normal hotkey.

It would be Really cool to be able to adjust the number on the fly using another hotkey built into the script. But I’m not sure you can store global variables easily.

Hopefully those notes help anyone searching later having troubles. If I didn’t have some extra time today I probably would have given up immediately.