[Darby Edelen]

Adding noise to a gradient, or dithering the gradient (which essentially adds noise but in a more intelligent manner), will cause the straight lines you see to have more of a diffuse characteristic. So instead of seeing bands of quantization in your colors, the colors become more integrated as the pixels of each color move across the line and form a diffuse edge rather than a straight edge (there is still the same number of colors/the same quantization, it only appears less banded).

Changing to 16bpc should actually increase the number of colors that can be represented from 16,777,216 to 281,474,976,710,656 =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Ultimate Bart] “that mokey software: https://www.mokey.com/products/mokey/
looks great, but is stand-alone and can not be used in AE. i think it works well”

It can’t be used inside of AE, but after having the wires removed in Mokey the footage can be imported into AE no problem if you want to do more to it. Mokey is a stand-alone program, but it’s meant to exist in a workflow with other programs.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

You can also use a light as an emitter, if that works better for what you’re trying to do. The benefit is that the light has it’s own 3D position within AE, so it’s a lot like having a Null, but you don’t have to worry about expressions to link it to the Emitter position.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

You can work in 16bpc to smooth the gradient further, or add noise/dithering to the gradient to make it appear smoother.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

Imagineer makes some products that would work well for wire removal, Mokey comes to mind.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

When you stop scrubbing, is the image still dark? Are you using OpenGL for previews?

This sounds very strange to me, I don’t know what’s causing it but any other information you can give us about your settings would help.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

Humans tend to perceive yellow as ‘brighter’ than blue, even while the brightness values may not be any different. While desaturating using Hue/Saturation is mathematically correct, Tint is more perceptually correct for human vision.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Little Black Bird] “try desaturating your clip 100%”

I thought I should mention that you should not use Hue/Saturation to desaturate your footage. For illustrative purposes, here are the standard SMPTE bars:

Here are the standard SMPTE bars with saturation set to -100 in Hue/Saturation:

And here they are with the default Tint effect applied:

Any questions? =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

I’m sure there are tutorials out there, I found this one through Google in 2 seconds:

https://www.adobe.com/designcenter/tutorials/grapheditor/

I’m not sure if it’s the best one, but it was easy to find =)

As for the graphs, I think the most valuable thing you can remember is that there are two different kinds of graphs. The Value graph (which graphs the value of the property) and the Speed graph (which graphs the rate of change of the property).

Remembering back to my High School math days, the speed graph is the derivative of the value graph, or in other words: the speed graph represents the slope of the value graph (the rate of change) at any particular point in time.

You can also recall that the slope of the speed graph will be equal to the property’s acceleration at any given time (the derivative, or rate of change, of the speed). So if the speed graph is a flat horizontal line (regardless of the value) then the property is animating linearly (no acceleration). If it is a drastic downwards line then it is decelerating quickly, if that line is curved then it begins its deceleration slowly, quickens in the middle and ends slowly again.

It’s a pain, but mathematical concepts often help understand how these things work =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

I should add to that that Particular should be applied on a 2D layer, it handles the 3D internally and if you put it on a 3D layer you’ll end up with the post-card-in-space look. I believe AE warns you of this, but I thought I’d reiterate it =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA