[Blaise Douros]

I have re-read this question about six times, and I can’t figure out what you’re asking. Are you asking whether you can tie the time remapping property to a clip’s opacity? Are you asking whether you can change the time properties of multiple clips in bulk?

[Blaise Douros]

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the issue; are you not able to manually reconnect the Dynamic Link objects?
Normally, if this happens to me, I right-click on the offline Dynamic
Link in the timeline, select “Link Media,” navigate to the .aep that it points to, and
it reconnects. Does it not work to do this?

If you create a new Dynamic Link as a test, what happens? Does it simply not work?

[Blaise Douros]

A little 2.5D trickery may be the ticket here. Create a solid, and a circular mask path for you to reference. Then place the little dudes around the circle. Parent their position to the solid. When you spin the circle, they should spin with it, retaining their position.

Now flip all the layers to 3D, and create a camera. Select all the little dudes, and set them to Orient To Camera. Rotate the solid around the X axis, so it tilts back. Now you can use a rotation around the layer’s Z axis to make the circle spin around, and the little dudes will now rotate in 3D space, following the motion. Now just make the solid invisible, and you have a carousel controlled by the solid’s Z rotation. The dudes will automatically occlude correctly, because they’re in 3D space.

I have used a similar trick in this video, at 2:02 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BST6q4pnAhs

The carousel rotates vertically rather than horizontally, but you get the idea.

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Blaise Douros]

Hey Pete! Welcome to the forum. Generally this is a help and how-to forum, but I don’t think anyone will object if you’re offering some paid work–asking for someone to do your work for free is a much worse offense.

As for your questions: it would probably help if you had some kind of example of the look you’re trying to achieve, or a clip to post along with a description of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Learning AE vs. hiring a pro: What do you have more of–time, or money? If you have endless time, AE is a fantastic tool that will serve you well to know. But: it will take you SERIOUS time to get up to speed well enough to accomplish anything that looks good. I’m not talking days–I’m talking months, maybe years. AE is fabulously complex, made more so by its ability to be customized with javascript expressions. There is no motion designer on the planet who has a comprehensive understanding of AE: some people use it for motion graphics, some people for VFX compositing.

I don’t say any of this to be condescending about your abilities; I have been using AE on and off since version 5 or 6 way back in the early 2000s, and I consider myself only an intermediate user (with decent skillz in certain specific areas) at best. There are people on this forum that outclass me in every way, and I bet every single one of them will tell you that there are areas they don’t know as well.

Now, if you have a deadline and a budget, the answer is simple: hire one of those fine people. There are a lot of them here in this forum, and they will work through your brief in a matter of hours or days, and be done before you can even finish your first tutorial project! If it’s a straightforward enough brief, I might even be your guy 🙂

[Blaise Douros]

If the Z280 is too big, the FX6 is DEFINITELY too big. Why not go with the Z90? That’s about as small as a camcorder gets, and it has autofocus and SLog3.

[Blaise Douros]

It’s still not clear what your use case is–are you trying to do the map thing, or the building thing?
Either way, this is entirely possible using After Effects.

If you’re doing the building thing, you just need to make sure you’re getting a good 3D Camera Track. Mocha AE isn’t the right tool for this–forget about using it, and focus on getting the 3D Camera Tracker to work. Make sure you enter values that match the FOV of the camera, turn the contrast up, whatever you need to do. If the track is good, all you have to do is drop the mask in, extrude it as Brendon stated above, and you’re good to go. It doesn’t matter if the scenery comes in and out of frame if the overall track is good–once you place it, it should stick.

If you’re doing the map thing, then you’ll need to make the extrusion happen in the pre-comp where that state lives–again, as Brendon stated above. Then, in the main comp, select “Collapse Transformations” so that the rotational properties you apply to the flat plane will propagate down to the extruded pre-comp. No need to use Mocha for this, either, I think.

[Blaise Douros]

You may need to render out a separate pass of the footprints (if you haven’t already). Make sure the matchmoving is good on your footage. Then, I would suggest using blending modes as your main compositing tool; essentially, you’d be compositing the shadows onto the existing snowy surface to create the illusion of depth. I do this regularly, painting wrinkles onto still imagery of cloth and garments in Photoshop; most of the “contours” we see are just combinations of shadows and highlights on the surface, and the smaller textural details aren’t as important unless we’re really close up to see them. You can use a combination of blending modes and masking to get the desired effect.

[Blaise Douros]

You should be able to reduce the number of Echoes you use on the motion-blurred frames–I’d recommend trying the Screen transfer mode for smoother results, perhaps. You don’t need 1000 echoes to get all the way around the circle–what you need to find is the minimum viable number of Echo effects that combine well with the motion blur to get a desirable effect.

And if the motion-blurred version doesn’t have enough of a “leading” element, just comp back in the original version, again with a Screen transfer mode, to have a bright element at the head.
I guess what I’m wondering is whether your time might be better spent building it as a visual effect, rather than a render-intensive version of processing a bunch of frames. Like, for example, tracking the position of the light bulb, and using it to anchor a generated light trail, or something. Otherwise, I’d just set up the Echo effect the way you want it, and let it render overnight.

[Blaise Douros]

I think you may be over-thinking this, and that you might already have half-stumbled on the answer.
Take the time stretched version (the one that’s 11 minutes long) and pre-compose it. Now in the new comp, apply a new time stretch effect that speeds the footage back up to real time, and enable Frame Blending. This will take all the new frames you’ve generated in the 11-minute pre-comp, and combine them into a “motion blurred” version.

[Blaise Douros]

Once you’ve set the Ground Plane and Origin, what happens if you set the position of the Solid to 0,0,0? That should set the position of the Solid to the Origin you’ve specified (I assume you want it to match the Ground Plane you’ve set in the image you posted?

The other thing I like to do is to jump into the 3D view and see if the camera is actually moving the way you expect it to–sometimes the Tracker can spit out a weird, reversed result that isn’t reflective of the actual motion.

It also looks like your footage has been graded–one thing I like to do, in order to get higher-quality tracks, is to pre-comp a copy, and then mess with the brightness and contrast to give the tracker a better image to work with (graded footage isn’t always ideal for tracking). You can always delete the pre-comped version after you’ve pulled a good track.