[Darby Edelen]

I think this tutorial is essentially what you’re asking for:

https://www.creativecow.net/articles/dewaele_tielman/simple_ring/index.html

[Darby Edelen]

[emfolzen] “My question is – Is the reason the type is jagged in widescreen preview, because I am veiwing the project on my “square pixel” laptop (17inch powerbook)? So the final export should view fine on 16:9 screen.”

Yes. Photoshop and AE are scaling the pixels by 120% horizontally to recreate how the footage will look on an NTSC Widescreen device. You get ‘jaggies’ whenever you scale digitally (as opposed to softening in analog which resampling attempts to do in the digital world). In the final output your ‘scaling’ will be done at the per-pixel level and it should look much better.

[Darby Edelen]

[Peter Hickson] “I have been able to link the two layers, but the expression changes the values of my linked layer rather than moving them relative to the master layer.”

comp("CompName").layer("LayerName").position will give you the position of the layer named ‘LayerName’ in the composition ‘CompName.’ However, I’m a little concerned that your question might be more complicated than that…

The position value returned will be the position of ‘LayerName’ inside of ‘CompName,’ so if you’re using one of these (or both) as pre-comps inside another composition and trying to get position values for the layer in the ‘CompName’ relative to the composition it’s appearing in then it gets a little more complicated:

thisComp.layer("CompName").toComp(comp("CompName").layer("LayerName").position);

…should do it!

[Darby Edelen]

[mikke1556] “What i want to do is have the glow from the particles “shine into my clip” (which is a green screen video of a person) and have the person glow from it.”

The quickest way to do this would be duplicate your particle layer, blur it and use it as a matte for a levels adjustment or a white solid set to Add blend mode. Pretty much all of your AE based solutions are going to begin with a similar process.

The major downside to overcome with this process is that the ‘light’ won’t interact with the depth of your keyed subject. In reality, a light on the right side of the face should cast a shadow from the nose on the left side. Getting this effect in AE would be very difficult.

[Darby Edelen]

I can’t know if this is it for sure, but if a 3D layer intersects with any other 3D layers then you’re going to get weird clipping results.

Try rotating your 3D picture in a comp all by itself and see if you get the same result.

[Darby Edelen]

Sure, happy to help =)

[Darby Edelen]

[zowie repoza] “This is a mystery to me, as I certainly never intentionally “locked” the original layer–nor do I seem to be able to unlock it.”

Ah yes, the lock… I’m not sure if there’s a more elegant way around it, but I usually just duplicate the locked layer, it’ll show up as an editable layer.

[Darby Edelen]

[zowie repoza] ”
I get the “alpha” looking good (VERY white and VERY black)–but when I Load Channel as Selection and go up into the menu bar and pull down the Layer options, “Layer Mask” is ghosted.”

It sounds like you haven’t switched back to your original layer. Photoshop is going to apply a Layer Mask to whatever layer you have selected, and it can’t apply a Layer Mask to an alpha channel. Make sure that after you have your selection you go back to the Layers palette and select your original layer.

Also, note that you can make changes to the Layer Mask after you’ve applied it. If you alt-click on the Layer Mask thumbnail (to the right of the Layer’s thumbnail) you can view the Layer Mask, make adjustments, blur, whatever else. Note that you don’t have to alt-click the Layer Mask to do this, you can just select it in the Layer Palette, but it helps me to know what I’m working with (the Layer Mask instead of the Layer).

You’ll probably find that there’s some fringing around your masked layer. A good tool to work with is the Filter > Other > Minimum, this is effectively like a matte choker that will collapse your mask down some (Maximum is the reverse). I don’t recommend using a setting higher than 1 or 2 though. Also you can use a Gaussian Blur to feather the edges some and then a Levels adjustment to subtly redefine the edges.

Also, when you’re making the final changes to the mask, it helps to look at the layer instead of the mask.

[Darby Edelen]

[barry the cat] “so I dont think the lights would work in the 2D comp.”

If you’re using a pre-comped 3D scene with Collapse Transformations on (not on the layers in the pre-comp but on the pre-comp in the final comp) then AE will consider it 3D material and it should respond to lights.

I have to admit I don’t work with vector graphics from Illustrator all that much, but the text in AE definitely responds the way I’ve described.

[Darby Edelen]

[shroomly] “could it be my preferences at all?”

Check your RAM/Cache preferences, I like to have about 60% available for my Image Cache.