[Brendon Murphy]

You can use a particle system like trapcode particular to send the images flying. Another way is to simply make all the layers 3D and then spread them out on the Z axis. Then fly your camera through the images.

[Brendon Murphy]

The Sample Image utility is what you seek. Dan Ebberts had a tutorial for this back in the day, but it’s now included as an animation preset inside AE. Just type “Sample” in your effects panel and it should come up.

[Brendon Murphy]

This may be best suited to a script instead of an action. Photoshop scripts are generally written in javascript. The ScriptingListener photoshop plugin may help if you are not too familiar with coding; it writes out the javascript code for whatever action you perform.

[Brendon Murphy]

It would be best to write a script for randomizing the fill. The steps it executes could be:

-Use a loop to cycle through all shapes in the selected layer

-For each one, add a fill property if it doesn’t already exist (to the shapes, not the layer)

-Pick a random fill color from an array of predetermined colors

That last step would include something like:

var currentFill = //your shape's fill property
var redFill = [1,0,0,1];
var yellowFill = [1,1,0,1];
var orangeFill = [1,.5,0,1];
var fillList = [redFill, yellowFill, orangeFill];
var randomFill = fillList[Math.floor(Math.random()*fillList.length)];
currentFill = randomFill;

[Brendon Murphy]

Sometimes things like this will happen when there is a 2D layer (such as an adjustment layer) between your 3D layers. For instance, between your shadow catcher and the text layers.

[Brendon Murphy]

I don’t quite understand the role Mocha is playing here. Are you tracking pre-rendered 3D?

If you have each state as a path (which can be drawn with the pen tool in AE or pasted from illustrator), you can extrude the path by using the cinema 4d renderer. Just go to Composition>Composition Settings. Under the “3D Renderer” tab, choose CINEMA 4D in the dropdown.

As long as your shapes are 3D layers, you can go under “Geometry Options” and then increase the extrusion depth.

By default, AE sees a precomp as a flat plane. Even if it is enabled as a 3D layer, it just becomes a 2D plane in 3D space. If you want the contents to be affected by a camera outside of the precomp, you must enable “collapse transformations”(see image).

[Brendon Murphy]

There are indeed several options, depending on the detail and movement of your shot. If the shot is a good candidate for stabilization, it will generally be one of these:

1. stabilizing around a planar track from mocha

2. stabilizing using 1 or two points in After Effects

3. Using the warp stabilizer effect

If the camera is mostly in one place but drifiting a little, 1 or 2 may be the ticket for locking it in place. If it’s a moving shot that you want to smooth out, it will be 3. We might be able to recommend a specific approach if you can upload some stills or describe the shot in more detail.

[Brendon Murphy]

You can create a luma matte to isolate the brighter parts of the image.

-Duplicate your source twice.

-desaturate the very top layer, and the use a curves or levels effect to crush the blacks and midtones (leaving only the brightest parts of the image visible. Blow out the whites to make those areas pure white).

-Set the second layer’s track matte to “luma matte”. Layer 2 now only shows up where the top layer is white.

[Brendon Murphy]

Here’s the usual compositing approach for a shot like this:

-Degrain the footage

-Remove the lens distortion

-Do a camera track

-Replace the BG where the car sits in sections – road, rock wall, foliage beyond the wall, and far mountain. The standard way is to put cards (called “solids” in After Effects) in 3D space where each item is located. Then project a frame of the footage onto those cards. Clone stamp the projected textures to get rid of the car.

-Roto or re-create any detail that overlaps your patch, such as the mountain face and foliage near the middle of the shot.

-Re-distort the shot to match the original

-Regrain the footage

Even better, just put the re-distorted and re-grained patch on top of the original footage to avoid quality loss.

[Brendon Murphy]

It looks like your graphics card is not supported by this version of After Effects. Try downloading the latest update for your graphics card. If the problem persists, you may need to get a newer card. There’s a list of supported cards for Premiere and After Effects here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/user-guide.html/premiere-pro/system-requirements.ug.html