[Chris Wright]

warp, pinch, or any distortion effects as a seperate layer from text if you don’t want to buy good fire filters. keyframe them and them go buy a fire plugin for $$$$$

[Chris Wright]

2 words, aspect ratio

[Chris Wright]

Here’s Twixtor’s rebuttle…

Twixtor is often 2 or more times faster against both AE’s “pixel motion” and its Timewarp filter. Often Twixtor is even faster than 2x than the Timewarp plugin; it depends on the settings and whether or not you are adding motion blur upon speeding up a clip.

Twixtor has a feature that allows you to not generate inbetweened frames on either side of a cut edit in your source clip (and, for dissolves,Twixtor has a way to turn off the motion estimation for just the transition based on where the transition is located in the source).

Twixtor works in floating point. AE’s “pixel motion” works in floating point, but the Timewarp filter with changeable settings does not.

Twixtor has the ability to remove motion blur upon slowing down footage. Timewarp will not remove motion blur; it only adds motion blur (a feature which Twixtor has as well).

Twixtor does frame rate conversion very simply and is built in to the plugin. Pixel motion works as expected in this regard, but the Timewarp plugin assumes you will time-stretch the footage in a comp that’s the same frame rate as your source (as far as I’ve been able to figure out). I presume you can do the time-stretch math yourself… Precomping and retiming in the original source frame-rate and then put that into a comp with the required output frame-rate… a bit more work for the workflow.

Twixtor Pro also has many features to help you fix problems when they occur in the tracking. Most notably, when the tracking goes “bad”, Twixtor allows you to use AE’s splines (masks) and point positioners to show Twixtor Pro exactly where things are moving from frame to frame. There are no corresponding features in Timewarp or AE’s “pixel motion” setting. Twixtor Pro also allows you to specify up to 3 separation mattes in order to help the plugin track individual objects separately. Pixel Motion does not do this and the TimeWarp plugin only allows you to specify one foreground separation matte.

———————
In my experience, Twixtor is 10x faster rendering and less complicated, but slow effects from interlaced can get slightly flickery because it doesn’t have as many tweaking options for smoothing scanline iteration tweens and luminance. Download its demo and decide yourself money vs time, rendering vs time learning new product. time=money=time

[Chris Wright]

Stylize->motion tile, keyframe 360,240 1st frame, then go to end of comp and type in something like 6,000, 240.

You will get continuous tiling film of the same footage going right to left and u can use a pre-comp from that and…

If you intend to loop a visual footage item continuously in your project, you only need to create one cycle of the footage item in After Effects.

In the Project panel, select the footage item to loop.
Choose File > Interpret Footage > Main.
Type an integer value for Loop and click OK.

Precomp all that and animate the transform, play around and see what you like.

Now you have looping, tile sliding and whooping! *whoop* whoop!*

[Chris Wright]

The presets are not strong enough for your large separation of layers. Use manual settings of large focal lenths makes larger depth of field, smaller f-stops also do that like f-22 or higher etc.,

[Chris Wright]

Draft 3D Disables lights, shadows, and cameras’ depth-of-field blur. To turn Draft 3D mode on or off, click the Draft 3D button at the top of the Timeline panel.

or…

Try these 3d-camera settings and set all layers to high quality and view the changes…

Angle Of View,Enable Depth Of Field,Focus Distance,Lock To Zoom ,Aperture,F-Stop,Blur Level,Film Size,Focal Length,Units,Measure Film Size

[Chris Wright]

composition shutter is default 180 or render out shutter is 180, which might be blurry.

[Chris Wright]

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS3\Support Files\Plug-ins\Effects

[Chris Wright]

It’s all about bitrate vs resolution. You can have a high resolution with low bitrate which would actually look better if low res with high bitrate. Pixel to noise ratio determines jaggies. Try a good deinterlace method then sorenson squeeze. It does the half framerate trick which makes the file size so small, you can stream fluid video with 256kbps slow DSL and it still looks fantastic, no jaggies.

[Chris Wright]

Your video looks like it might be using opengl wrong.

Go to edit->preferences->previews> accelerate effects –
change from opengl to adaptive resolution or check opengl info button which will open up a place to increase your 200 mb or so opengl. If disabling opengl works, either through ae or Display properties->troubleshoot->hardware acceleration
then you either don’t have enough 3d mem or you might have an old opengl card which doesn’t support ae7. As long as your export footage looks fine, that’s the important thing.