[Brian Bennett]

I was having this same problem. I couldn’t figure out how to render out an object with and Alpha Channel background and then I found out from my instructor at school what I was doing wrong. Tim Shetz is absolutely correct. I was rendering using “Make Preview” instead of “Render to Picture Viewer”. As soon as I rendered using “Render to Picture Viewer”, it worked perfectly. Hope this helps:

Settings:

QUICKTIME
1920 x 1080
Animation codec
Lossless
millions+

Alpha Channel is checked
Straight Alpha is checked

Render using “Render to Picture Viewer” NOT “Make Preview”

[Brian Bennett]

Hi Mike, I just stumbled on your post because I was having the same issue. Then I figured out what was going on and how to fix it. Hope this helps.

Basically, when copying and pasting a motion path from Illustrator or Photoshop or even from another layer within After Effects to a camera’s Position, you have to copy it to both the Position and the Point of Interest. If you copy it to just the Position, the camera is going to fly along the motion path, and the Point of Interest is going to remain wherever the camera was originally positioned, causing the camera to “Go Crazy”. Just paste the motion path to the Position & the Point of Interest and you should be fine. Set your views to 4up Views and pay attention to the Point of Interest to really see what I’m talking about.

Additionally, since the motion path will most likely not have z information, the camera’s z information will probably be set to ‘0.0’ by default… so if you want to zoom into or away from your stroke, you’ll have to move the stroke or object back or forth in z space & not the camera.

Good Luck.

bbennett2001