[Christian Kim]

thank you everyone for the insight. always great to see how other people work.

yep, i also use post motion blur to help reduce “flickering” or jitter.
and use lanczos filter for animation (blur filter to my knowledge).

i guess the i had this question while thinking about increasing fidelity of the animation (making things looking crisper, more detailed).

any tips on increasing fidelity?
also tried using POP which comes with colorista2 with some success (it acts like sharpen, but uses colour contrast i think).

thanks to everyone your time : )

[Christian Kim]

Hi Oskar, thank you for your input!

would really appreciate if you could share some info when you do find some solution or answer to this problem.

I am sure the function has just been modified to different combination of keys, as its very unusual for adobe to discard a function (specially such a handy one).

[Christian Kim]

well,there would be lot of useful situations, and i think it definitely functions different to copy+paste (not just quicker, but does different things). for example..

say i have three comp, which is staggered like below

for sake of simplicity, i would want to use time remap to basically hold from 40 for say 30 frames. resulting keyframe would look like below

however, if i were to [copy] the last 3 keyframes and paste, rather then doing what i want it to do, create 3 staggered new keyframes like above, but does below,

copies the three objects and pastes, not the keyframe.

however, my understanding is, if you were to selecte those 3 keyframs from first screenshot, and alt+drag to the right, they should create a duplicate of the selected keyframe, maintaining their offsets between each other, and be moved to position where i let my mouse drag go.

however, currently, what seems to happen is that it just redistributes the keyframe relative to each other (as in does not duplicate, but just rearranges selected keyframe)

this is very useful in it self, but read somewhere that ALT+drag is suppose to duplicate keyframe, and was wondering if it is cs5 chage? or there is different key combination etc etc.

[Christian Kim]

thank you for your reply Robyn.
its good to know that its not just me.

so your default behaviour when draggin+ALT is ..
either nothing (single keyframe)
redistribute (multiple keyframe)
?

knowing adobe, very unlikely they have discarded the function, but just tweaked it so its available with different combination perhaps?

however, i have tried all combination i can think of using CTR, SHIFT, ALT, but no luck.

so currently, i just ended up doing manually just to meet the deadline, as in copy single keyframe, move them etc etc.

funny thing is i read on recent forum about this..

thank you in advance to anybody who can help us out.

[Christian Kim]

Thanks Chris!

yep, i thought about doing just that, using expression to drive 3d Points and using beam to connect the dots. think this would be perfect for the second effect (where there are only few lines).

however, thought would be quite daunting if i wanted to achieve something in scales of first example.

hmm guess for this, i might have to resort to 3d packages.

just that i have recently fell in love with compositing/posting, and am so amazed how much you can do in 2.5D in after effects!

and thought there might also be a smart way around this using after effects : )

well if anyone else have other suggestions, i will be gratefull : 0

[Christian Kim]

thanks Gary Hazen for your input.

i guess this “effect” is quite easy to achieve in 3d packages (in my case, i will be using max i guess) probably using combination of wireframe render + particle flow for the dots.

but i guess i was hoping some [post] method using combination of trapcode form to generate 3d dots in 3d space, and other effect to creat random lines between random points?

if anyone has “after effects” solution to this would be great : )

thanks!

[Christian Kim]

i see, thank you for your confirmation Dan.

i was very impressed with the expressions, and guess i was asking for too much. on one hand i understand why it can’t be done, though on the other, i don’t think it will be technically impossible (as other script languages support relative referencing, even flash actions script can also if i remember correctly, though action script is in a different league from expressions)

thank you for your input Dan!

[Christian Kim]

Thank you very much for your response Dan.

I figured this was the case, but just wanted to make sure i hear from the “cows mouth” (pun intended).

if i may ask you, or who ever reading for some suggestions then.

are there really no way of making somewhat of “smart comp” where i can have the look and feel set up in the “smart comp”, however the single instance can be modified by expression or use of XML.

example of usage could be that i have an animation with 100000 text flying around. however, i wanted to make sure that when the client asks for the font to change, i won’t have to literally manually edit 100000 “precomps” to change the font. i was hoping there was a way of making a “smart comp”, where i could just swop out the [text string] in and out using expression or XML sheets etc etc.

i am guessing no, as it seems in after effects, [comps] are literally handled as “baked” instances?

thank you Dan and the community in advance for any help : )

[Christian Kim]

Hi guys!

i was searching for the same thing, and ran into this thread.

you guys are absolutely right, it would be very convinient if there was some kind of [ouput module] or ability to do line by line testing.

i have been using similar method of using text, sliders.

would be good just to find out such module does not exist, then i can stop wasting time looking for it : )

[Christian Kim]

Thank you So much Todd!

you are absolutely right. if i take a step away from it. it all makes sense. just when looking at the actual values and try to do simple math it made me tunnel visioned.

thank you for the link! will read into it.