[Darby Edelen]

I’d like to help, but your post is a little too vague. Do you want the layer to be the center of the camera’s rotation? Are you already rotating the camera around something and you want another layer to be a backdrop for this?

[Darby Edelen]

If you’re using motion tracker, see if you can get a good track for the scale property.

[Darby Edelen]

Is the entire layer flickering?

[Darby Edelen]

There are a lot of tutorials on this up on the COW and around the ‘net. Try a search. I can tell you that you’ll be using either Write-On or Stroke to reveal the layer… I prefer Stroke but some folks seem to like Write-On.

[Darby Edelen]

So your concern is that linear blending is working correctly in AE when you’re blending different layers (opacity/motion blur) but not when you use something like a directional blur on a single layer?

Was your source image created in a linear color space? Are you converting it to linear?

Check this out for more information on working in linear:

https://prolost.blogspot.com/2006/02/by-way.html

https://prolost.blogspot.com/2006/02/linear-color-workflow-in-ae7-part-1.html

https://prolost.blogspot.com/search/label/Adobe%20After%20Effects?updated-max=2006-03-16T00%3A46%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=20

The discussions of linear compositing start about a quarter of the way down that last page and continue to about half way down.

[Darby Edelen]

I think you might actually want to use a premultiplied alpha in this case, as long as you properly interpret the alpha when you import the sequence.

It looks to me like the RGB channels you’re getting from Max don’t quite fit for a straight alpha. You want to get rid of that white outline around your text in the RGB channels. There may be a render setting in Max (I’m not too familiar with it) that you should change. Usually straight RGB images look very strange when you view them without their alpha, the RGB channels should spill over beyond the bounds of the alpha, but you have an odd white outline.

[Darby Edelen]

[spikeyjohn] “the custom particle is a still picture”

The custom setting for particles uses a layer as the particle. If the layer is animated then the particle will be animated.

[Darby Edelen]

[Peter O’Connell] “When I choose “blend colors using 1.0 gamma” in the projet settings” It works fine for crossfades and such, but not for blurring individual layers or motion blurring them.”

You could try downloading a linear color profile. There are some available for free online, see if you get better results with those. Are the blurs not looking correct when you render or just when you preview?

[Darby Edelen]

Maybe it somehow got corrupted… I wonder if Edit > Purge > Purge All would’ve solved it as well?

[Darby Edelen]

Okay, so I played around with it a bit more and figured it out.

To get the Arbitrary Map out of PS you have to go into curves and set it up as you want it (arbitrarily… of course). Before you click the ‘Save…’ button make sure that you have the pencil tool selected in the Curves dialog. If you Save without the pencil tool selected then it will save a curves (.acv) file, when you select the pencil tool it saves an arbitrary map (.amp) file.

Now, the confusing part was how to get this file into the Glow effect in AE. The AE documentation says that when you select the ‘Arbitrary Map’ option a standard ‘Open’ dialog should pop up, but this doesn’t happen… unless you hit the ‘Options…’ button of the Glow effect. When you hit ‘Options…’ you get an Open dialog that will allow you to select any Arbitrary Map (.amp) files.

Note: I tried saving out an .acv file and renaming it to .amp but the Open dialog in AE wasn’t fooled.

Glad I finally figured this one out, hope this helped.