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Welcome to the wonderful world of Track Mattes in AE! If you have AE 6.0 or later, try this:

1) Create a solid. Apply some kind of noise effect to it — fractal noise would be cool, or some other kind of noise if you have it — and maybe give it some kind of coloring effect. Want to get tricky? Hows about animating some of those parameters with keyframes? It really doesn’t matter, because you’re just looking for something that is NOT one dull, boring, solid color. Unless you’re partial to solid colors, in which case, it’s okay.

2) Create a text layer. Any text, any typeface. Don’t use outlines. And don’t make your text the same color as you made the solid! Place this layer above the solid.

3) Going back to the solid layer, go to the Modes Pane in the timeline. Don’t know what that is? Look it up in AE Help: that’s why it’s there… to help. Under the TrkMat column, do an Alpha Matte of the text layer.

4) Poof! You’ve got the stuff you see in the solid inside your letters of text! Cool! Now, think about this: instead of a solid, what if your layer was video footage? You’d have video inside those letters. What if it was a precomp instead of a solid? Heck, it could be darned near anything!

Track Mattes are great to know how to use, and AE’s help is pretty darned… well, helpful on the topic.

Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV

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Don’t think “Computer Effect”…. think “Practical Effect”.

Since this effect has been done for MANY decades, you know they didn’t do it with software. It was more along the lines of real book with the pages turned by an off-camera pressure hose and air nozzle, carefully aimed, locked into a jig and connected to a pressure regulator.

Once you get the position of the nozzle AND the air pressure dialed in, you can then repeat the effect. Yeah, it takes hours to get to that point. But how long do you think it would take to do the same thing in a 3D application?

And why a 3D app instead of AE? Because AE’s particular flavor of 3D doesn’t allow surfaces to bend — they have to be planar objects, which you then manipulate in 3D space. Your book would look like your pages are made out of cardboard, which doesn’t bend, instead of paper, which easily bends.

If you want to see how the cardboard-page AE version of a page turn looks, Serge Hamad has a tutorial on it in the AE section of the Creative COW.

Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV

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I have ALWAYS followed this rule of thumb, and it has never let me down:

If you have a choice between exporting and rendering in AE, it’s better to render.

when you render, you have a greater choice of codecs. You have a choice between rendering files with transparencies or not rendering transparencies. You can render just an alpha channel. You can crop and (even though it’s not recommended) scale. Even more valuable are things like embedding the AE project in the rendered file, and automatically importing the rendered file back into the AE project. Let’s not forget this, either: you can make your own custom render settings and output modules which you may need for specialized circumstances.

I’ve always regarded exporting as the lazy person’s option for file creation in AE, for the reasons enumerated above. Unless, of course, you have no other option than to export.

Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV

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Look in File>Project Settings. Change it to what you need.

Please note that if within the same project you work with PAL footage in PAL comps at 25fps, and also NTSC footage in NTSC comps at 29.97 fps, you’ll be changing this seeting a lot.

Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV

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The keyboard shortcut for setting a position keyframe is option-p on a mac; i think it’s control-p on a windows machine. For opacity, it’s option-t.

There are a whole bunch more of them. I STRONGLY suggest that you look them up in AE Help. That’s why it’s there… to help, y’know?

Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV

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That’s gonna happen once you get a line thinner than 2 pixels. One thing you can do is to add a little blur to the footage. A gaussian blur set to .5 vertical only ought to do the trick.

Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV

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It’s pretty easy. It’s all based on the fact that in almost all standard-def NTSC cameras, the horizontal resolution is 720 pixels across.

For each photo, figure out the smallest 4×3 section you’ll want to see on the TV screen. Then measure it horizontally in inches, divide 720 by that measurement, and you’ll know how many dots per inch you need for your scan of the picture.

Here’s an example: I have an 8×10 picture. I want to zoom into a head & shoulders shot of a guy in the picture. I measure it, and it will be 2 inches across. Now I do the arithmetic: 720/2 = 360. I’m going to need to scan at 360 dpi. Oh, what the heck, I’ll scan at 400 dpi, a little extra resolution can’t hurt.

Here’s another example: I have 3×5 snapshot, and I need to zoom into somebody in the background. I measure it… cripes, 3/4 of an inch! Well, let’s do our division: 720/.75 = 960! Yipes! Well, it looks like a scan at 960-980 dpi.

Here’s a third example: another 8×10 picture. I just need to lose some junk on the edges of the shot, and I’ll be good to go. After measuring, I’m going to need something 7 inches wide. Okay, 720/7 = 102.857142857143… so we’ll call it 120 dpi.

And that’s all there is to it!

Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV