[Danny Parsons]

Hi Dan,

Thanks – the whole “% 1” thing makes sense to me now, and I’m sure the new, generic expression will come in handy again sometime…

Whilst I have you on the line, I wanted to ask before doing so, whether you’d have any objections to my copying your site to disk (using something like this free application: http://www.httrack.com) for personal use. I like to keep my work-box offline, and so it would be great to be able to follow your examples, paste your code, etc. – and still have all of the site’s links interact properly, as though I were online…

Thanks again,

DP

[Danny Parsons]

Thanks Darby,

Your expression is working fine for what I’m currently doing. I am, however, having a little trouble when I play around with adapting it… Let’s say I wanted the opacity to peak whenever the slider hits a multiple of ten, instead of any whole number, with the same linear fall-off… I’ve tried a few things to no avail, and I think the main problem is that I don’t quite understand what the second line of the expression is actually doing (“x = x % 1”)… I’d thought that the “%” operator meant “return the remainder of x/y”, but in this case y = 1 – so I’m having trouble understanding where any remainder (or anything else meaningful, for that matter!) is actually coming from…

Thanks again for your initial response; any further elucidation would be great though…

Cheers,

DP

[Danny Parsons]

On the Timeline panel, click on the little tab that displays the name of your composition, then drag the cursor down slightly. The area that displays your switches/current time will turn blue. Release the mouse button; you’ll now see your two comps stacked one above the other…

You’ll most likely want to link the cameras’ POIs as well as their positions…

DP

[Danny Parsons]

Starting with a Shape Layer then adding the ‘wiggle paths’ option would produce a similar effect to the Turbulent Displace technique. You will, however, still need to auto-trace…

I’m not sure why this function is currently only available for shape-paths and not for masks, but it would certainly be nice to see this feature added some day…

DP

[Danny Parsons]

Thanks Dan,

That’s done the trick perfectly.

DP

[Danny Parsons]

The Photoshop ‘Selective Color’ adjustment uses CMYK (although it can still be used on RGB images). After Effects only works with RGB, so any color-correction filters use the RGB model.

If you’re using PS CS3 Extended, you could open the video file and apply the Selective Color adjustment within Photoshop, or if you’re using an older version (or the ‘non-Extended’ version of CS3), you could still batch-process an image-sequence in PS before opening it again in AE.

Cheers,

DP

[Danny Parsons]

Depending on what you’re after, you may be able to just use CC Cylinder, and set it to render the inside only…

[Danny Parsons]

I know that there ARE such things as greenscreen treadmills… No idea what they would cost to hire, and I wouldn’t expect it would be particularly easy to convert one yourself (or cheap, for that matter: you’d probably have to cover the whole tread in greenscreen fabric, which itself is expensive)…

You could try using a regular treadmill, then create a loop (try morphing techniques) of the subject walking that’s just long enough so that people won’t notice that it’s a loop, but just short enough that you don’t decide to shoot yourself before you finish rotoscoping around her feet on each of the necessary frames…

Good luck,

DP

[Danny Parsons]

And I guess that more or less sorts out my frame-rate problem as well!

Whilst it would have been nice for any further animation added in the main comp to also be at the low frame-rate, I’m happy to choose this new expression over any of the relatively time-consuming makeshift ‘get-arounds’ I’ve come up with since conquering that initial hurdle (I’ve got a lot of scenes in this same style to get through).

So any ingenious suggestions that would achieve my ideal are still welcome!

For the meantime though: Thanks again, Dan, and thanks, Mike, for inadvertently pointing me towards a forehead-slappingly obvious solution!

Cheers,

DP

[Danny Parsons]

There are a number of ways to generate a timecode display within AE