[Brecht Debackere]

Hi Dave.

I was messing around with the waveform plug-in, which did not give me the desired result.
The audio spectrum effect does get the job done though. I should’ve tried that one before posting.

Thanks!

[Brecht Debackere]

Hi Dave, Ken,

Yes Dave, that’s exatctly what I’m looking for!
Hey Ken, yes, I know the standard visualization plug-in in After Effects but I can’t seem to get it quite the way I want it and how I know analog optical sound looks…

[Brecht Debackere]

OK. I’ve finally had time to set everything up and it seems to be working, though not efficiently due to the posted after effects script issue.

Here’s what I wanted to do: use a midi controller for color correction or other effects tweaking.

1. I’ve set up a midi controller in Max/Msp. It registers the knob turns and writes the parameters to a file.
2. I’ve set up After Effects to read the contents of the file; adjusting the appropriate parameters of the effect.

Now, as I mentioned before, the problem is not that after effects is not reading the file, it’s that it’s not updating the viewer, unless you move to a next frame (or previous, generally one that has not been processed yet and is thus not cached)

As a work-around, I’m triggering an AppleScript from Max/Msp which sends after effects the following ‘key presses’: [ to place the layer in-point at the current time. This seems to re-evaluate the script, reading in the new values. Works wonderfully.

This of course is problematic, as it means it would only allow for an effect to be changed at the in-point of a layer, an not at another point in time, as the AppleScript would effectively move the layer…

To circumvent this, I’ve used the ‘KeyEd Up’ script to remap the keyboard shortcut for ‘undo previous action’ (applescript can’t apparently not send the keycode for command-z or any command-combo shortcuts). This works aswell, as I see the layer jump back and forth when turning a knob on the midi controller.

The main issue now is speed… as the moving of the layer and the subsequent undo action takes up too much time it becomes much less intuitive. So the question remains, but might be clearer now, which other possible commands would force after effects to re-evaluate the expression and not show the cached image…???
Purge-all does not seem to have any effect whatsoever, as does disabling ‘use disk cache’ in the preferences…

[Brecht Debackere]

That makes sense… I’ll look around for an alternative; I’ll post post the reason for it later on once I finished setting everything up, maybe that’ll explain things better and might trigger some other ideas.
Thank you for the clarification.

[Brecht Debackere]

Hi all,

Thanks for the replies. I’ve been doing things a little differently, so the AE solution kind of moved to the background.

To answer some of the questions: I’m using AE CS4, I’ve put a keyframe on every frame, the line moves 1 pixel every keyframe, so no interpolation happening there. To be sure I also used ‘hold’ keyframes.
Codecs: I tried several, uncompressed, animation, photoJPG, and several others, so the problem wasn’t that.
I’m making quicktime movies, not .AVI, so I don’t think the problem described on the adobe forum applies. I’ll try making a 32 pixel minimum size version anyways, just to check.

[Brecht Debackere]

I’m trying to avoid having to make tiff sequences. I’m on PC for this, so I have irfanview to convert to tiff. It’s got a pretty smart batch converter so I can run it overnight.
I thought maybe there was a plugin for this or something I was overlooking.

[Brecht Debackere]

Thanks for the pointers, Kevin. I’ve already messed around with the motion blur settings but without satisfactory results. I’ll have a look at the other options you provided.

[Brecht Debackere]

I don’t have any footage, so everything has to be made from scratch. I was thinking in the direction of scripted movement of particle type things. Echo sounds like a good plan! I’ll give that a go. Thanks.

[Brecht Debackere]

Never mind. I got it to work by changing
var myFile = fileGetDialog(“Select a text file to open.”, “TEXT txt”);

into

var myFile = fileGetDialog(“Select a text file to open.”, “”);

apologies.

[Brecht Debackere]

Is there a way to retain the alpha layer when using the contactsheet automation…?

To answer my own question: yes.
The files I have only have an alpha channel, the contactsheet automation flattened everything leaving me with just a white image.
Now :
I’ve created an action which copies the alpha channel to the rgb channels, after the batch is done, I run contactsheet. On the final big image, I copy the rgb channels, create a new alpha, and copy the rgb into it.