[Darby Edelen]

The answer is: never use OpenGL for final renders. Even if all OpenGL features are supported, that feature set is not as complete nor functionally equivalent to the CPU based renderer.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Anything in particular you’re looking to do? If you’re looking for general information then I like the book After Effects: Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Did you scale the path, the transform of the path, or the shape layer? If the first then I’m just as confused as you 🙁

Here’s a work around though. Paste the path into your shape layer and into the position property of a null. Parent the null to the shape layer and then scale the shape layer as needed.

Now apply an expression to the center property so that it follows the null. Something like:

l = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”);
fromWorld(l.toWorld(l.anchorPoint));

I can’t test that expression right now but I’m pretty sure it’s correct.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

They most likely marked values on their zoom ring with tape and kept notes of these values.

Trackers can solve for panning shots but its a different kind of solve than one with parallax and will significantly hinder the solvers ability to estimate a focal length accurately.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

The “Set Matte” effect should work for you.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Honestly the JPEG compression of the attached image is resulting in more color variance than anything else I can see.

Can you describe more? What are you doing, what are you seeing?

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Lots of ways to approach this!

There are several color correction adjustments that would work for this purpose: Levels and Curves come to mind in particular. If you lower the white output level on the red channel, for example, the white splatter will become more Cyan in tone (a mixture of Green + Blue). By changing the white output levels of the individual channels you can push the white of the splatter into any color.

An easier option, since this is a black/white image, might be using Gradient Map which maps the colors of a gradient across the luminance of the image. You could change the white side of the gradient map to cyan, for example, to get a cyan splatter.

Another alternative would be to fill a new layer above the splatter with whatever color you want the splatter to take on, set that color layer to the Multiply mode and then merge it with the splatter layer.

Also, 9 times out of 10 reaching for the paint bucket as a first step is going to give you pretty fugly results. I avoid it unless I’m working on masks.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

To add to what Walter has said: the reason you’re not getting any depth tracked on this shot is because there is no parallax.

Panning or zooming does not change the parallax in a shot, and the parallax is the only thing that a computer can use to estimate the focal length of a lens or depth of a scene. Parallax only occurs in a shot when the camera moves

This means you can’t really solve this shot in any 3D tracker. On the upside, you shouldn’t have to solve it in a 3D tracker because your shot doesn’t have any (much) depth. A 2D tracker that supports position, rotation and scale should work for you. Mocha AE is a popular application that works well with AE. I don’t know much about it though so you’ll have to do your own research there 🙂

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Both of the videos you posted function on exactly the same principals. The biggest difference is that in the 2nd video he’s using a mask as a garbage matte to limit what bright part of the shot should be flaring.

The flare is based on the luminance not the mask. The mask is just limiting the area of the frame that could potentially be considered a flare.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

The best way to achieve this is to link all of the properties you need to animate to one Effect > Expression Controls > Slider effect. You have to use expressions to do this. Something like this applied to each property:

x = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
linear(x, 0, 100, 0, value);

The above would allow you to keyframe the slider from 0 to 100, as the range goes from 0 to 100 the value returned by the above expression would range from 0 to the current value of the property.

You can use other values for the last 2 arguments if you don’t want to use “0” and “value.”

Darby Edelen