[Curious Turtle]

I strongly doubt that a version this old has been tested and approved to work on Vista 64. In fact I don’t believe that Adobe has even certified CS3 to work properly. You could try working in XP “Compatibility Mode” by changing the Properties on the program in Windows. I suspect you’re on a hiding to nowhere though.

Todd Kopriva has written up some useful tips for CS4 in a 64bit environment.

I don’t think you’ll have much joy with V7 though.

All the best,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color

[Curious Turtle]

Dan Ebberts has an awesome expression that also lets you link brightness to Z position to save you from keyframing brightness. Apply this to Flare Intensity:

INTENSITY
l = thisComp.layer("YOUR DOT LAYER");
r = (l.transform.scale[0]/100)*(l.transform.scale[0]/100);
s = value*r;
c = thisComp.activeCamera;
p = l.toWorld(l.anchorPoint);
f = c.cameraOption.zoom;
dist = p - c.toWorld([0,0,0]);
vec = c.toWorldVec([0,0,1]);
dist = dot(dist, vec);
s * f / dist;

You should link the Flare Center to the layer’s anchor point.

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color

[Curious Turtle]

Use a Color Correction > Tint effect and map white to whatever colour you want.

Easy!

EDIT: Just saw Kevin’s answer. His method is a bit more robust if your line art is not absolute white or black.

Cheers,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color

[Curious Turtle]

If what you want to do is to add some randomness to your movement, then the wiggler (actually more specifically, the expression wiggle(), as that offers more control over the effect) is just what you need. If you need all your layers to follow the horizontal position of a master null, then it won’t help.

If you want all your layers to have a constant horizontal position of 0, then: [0,value[1]] will do.

Give the first expression a go, and if that doesn’t work then explain exactly what it is you’re trying to achieve.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color

[Curious Turtle]

Your best way is to use an expression.

Something like will do the trick:

x=thisComp.layer(“YOUR TRACKED LAYER NAME”).transform.position[0];
y=value[1];
[x,y]

Copy that to all your other layers’ position parameters. I can’t remember if AE 6.5 had the “Copy Expression Only” option in the Edit menu, so that may take more than a couple of clicks.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color

[Curious Turtle]

You want to be changing the Output Module first. This is where the file type is established.

Take a look at the manual and there’s a detailed section on exporting and setting up Output Modules. I highly recommend setting up templates for your commonly used export format.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color

[Curious Turtle]

If you know how to work the tracking tool then you are mostly there. You can offset the tracking area and the track center, but this may be more hassle than it’s worth. It’s often simpler to track smaller sections of your footage to multiple null objects and parent those together. This will create one long tracking layer that you can parent your cloud to.

This does mean that you have to track objects on the same plane (roughly speaking, the same relational distance to the camera) otherwise your track will not work. You’ll have to manually adjust it so that it looks right.

Does this help? Take another read through the motion tracking part of the manual if you need to.

All the best,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color

[Curious Turtle]

I think what’s happening here is that you’re 25P footage updates half as often as your 50P. It’s half the framerate, so that’s why it’s stuttering.

If you can’t render the 3D sequence out again at 50P, and you really need your final comp to be 50P, then you’re going to have to get After Effects to make up those intermediate frames.

Here’s one way to do it:

i) Use Time > Time Stretch on your TGA sequence layer, and set it to 50%. This will make your 25P footage play back at twice the speed. But if you step through, it’s only playing each frame once. This is good.
ii) Precomp the layer.
iii) Use Time Warp, Twixtor or your favourite time remapping plugin that uses pixel motion, to stretch the layer back out. If using time warp, set your Speed to 50%.

This will stretch the layer back out again, and the timewarp plugin will fill in the missing frames. Note that this is no way as good as rendering back out your 3D at 50fps. It will get you out of a jam.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color

[Curious Turtle]

How big are you PSD files? Are you consistently scaling them down well below 100% without ever needing to go near 100%?

After Effects uses the entire frame of a clip, even if it can only see one pixel of it in the comp. This can quickly bog down a system if you work with hi-res images.

If this is the case, scale your stills down in Photoshop prior to bringing them into AE. If that’s not, then give us a few more details of the project.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color

[Curious Turtle]

Basically Alt-click in the Flare Center property and paste in Darby’s expression.

If your Red Light layer is not called “RedLight” then select everything in the first line after “l =” and pickwhip your Red Light layer. This will type in the correct layer name for you.

Simple as that.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Curious Turtle Pro Video
Training | Editing | Support
Out Now – Film Wash Color Effects Vol. 3
for After Effects & Apple Color