[Darby Edelen]

I don’t go to NAB anymore 🙁 I used to go every year when I worked for a smaller company, but now I’m trapped in the corporate cubicle. I’m going to argue my case for next year’s NAB, and I’m going to start… NOW!

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Also ‘ee’ will reveal only properties with expressions applied. You can use these in combination with shift to add or remove from those properties revealed. For example, press ‘u’ to reveal animated properties then press ‘shift-ee’ to hide properties with expressions applied.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

The graph editor in the timeline is the way I would do this. Using ‘Edit Speed Graph’ it’s easy to see where the speed is constant (flat line) and where it is accelerating (sloping upward) or decelerating (sloping downward).

If you simply make the last keyframe easy ease then you will end up with acceleration in the early part of the animation to make up for the deceleration at the end of the animation, so you’ll need to tweak the graph.

I’ll attach some images of a sample graph editor workflow I would use for this. Using the graph editor takes some time to get accustomed to, but it’s time well spent 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

What version of After Effects are you using? CS 5.5’s Warp Stabilizer should be able to help with this shot.

Or if you have access to The Foundry’s Camera Tracker, there’s a workflow you can use to stabilize footage with that.

Otherwise I think the solution may be painful. For example, you can move the point tracker to focus on a new feature without moving its attach point. You could select new track features as the old ones leave the frame. However, this is complicated by parallax, things at different distances from the camera will move at different rates. Still, there may be a potential solution there.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You can do this with the Channel > Set Matte effect.

You’ll need one Solid layer to define your matte. This layer will need to have continuously rasterize enabled. Then apply the Set Matte effect to your text and set the “Take Matte From Layer” property to your new matte layer.

If you want the text to disappear when it passes behind the matte then check “Invert Matte” in the effect.

Once you have the effect set up you can copy it and paste it on all the text layers.

You can turn your matte layer’s visibility off to hide it. You can also make the matte a 3D layer if you want to orient the matte in 3D or have its position respond to the camera. One caveat is that it will matte the text even if the 3D layer is placed behind the text in the scene.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

If the object is moving relative to the camera then you should be able to use AE’s native motion blur. Is there some reason that won’t work?

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

What kind of stabilization are you doing? The Warp Stabilizer in CS5.5 allows you to specify how “smooth” you’d like the stabilization to be.

If you’re doing old school point tracking then after you’ve stabilized the clip you can use the smooth() expression on the layer’s anchor point to reduce the stabilization:

smooth(.2, 5);

The first value (.2) is the width in seconds of the smoothing. The second value (5) is the number of samples across this (.2) duration. You should always use an odd number for the second value so that there is a sample on the current frame (5 is usually good enough).

The way this works in this case is a little counter intuitive. Higher width values for the smooth will actually result in less smooth stabilization. Smaller width values will result in the stabilization being closer to its original (locked tripod) look. The value you’ll want to use will depend a lot on how shaky your original footage was and how much of that shake you want to maintain, use higher width values to maintain more of the original shake, and lower to reduce the shake. I find .2 to be a good starting point.

If you like you can specify this width value in frames instead of seconds by adding a framesToTime() function call:

smooth(framesToTime(6), 5);

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Are you previewing at Full resolution? What effects are we talking about here? Are there blend modes being used in effects in the pre-comps?

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Motion Sketch will place its keyframes at the beginning of the work area until you let go of the mouse, or the end of the work area is reached.

With that in mind what you can do is change the start of the work area to the time you’d like the motion sketch keyframes to be created from (the shortcut for setting the work area beginning is “b”).

Also, Motion Sketch creates keyframes that can be moved on the timeline (or in space) just like any other keyframes, so you can revise your timing later. It’s hard, for example, to get two separate Motion Sketch paths to meet properly without moving one of the groups of generated keyframes.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I’d check these things in this order:

1) In the “Preview” panel (Window > Preview) make sure that your “Skip” value is at ‘0’ under RAM Preview Options. This panel by default may only show playback controls, you can click on the bottom of the panel and drag down to show additional controls.

2) Make sure that your Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing settings make sense. Unless there’s a tight deadline, I don’t recommend using more than half of your available cores for rendering and reserving 1/4 to 1/8 of your memory for other applications.

3) In your Preferences > Previews make sure that the Viewer Quality > Color Management Quality is set to “More Accurate Except RAM Preview.”

If these don’t help then I’d recommend checking other some times problematic settings: Is OpenGL off? Are there any external video monitors?

…Restart your computer? I’m running out of ideas 🙂

Darby Edelen