[Darby Edelen]

Well I’d have to say that they’re rendered with different gamma encoding, but you already knew that =)

Why don’t you render them using a uniform working color space?

[Darby Edelen]

Another thing to keep in mind is that AE works with opacity in mysterious ways. A layer with 50% opacity let’s 50% of what’s behind it through, which makes sense when you consider one layer with 50% opacity alone.

However, this means that if you put two layers, both with 50% opacity on top of one another their aggregate opacity will not be 100% but 75% (they will allow 25% of what’s behind them through, 50% * 50% = 25%). This is an approximation of the way light behaves in the real world.

So if you have 4 layers on one side of your comp that are all decreasing their opacity at the same rate, and 2 layers on the other side that are doing the same (say from 100% to 0% over 2 seconds). We use the inverse of the opacity to determine transparency in the parentheses below (100 – Opacity) = Transparency for each layer:

Side A at 0 seconds will be 100% opaque (0% * 0% * 0% * 0% = 0% transparent)
Side B at 0 seconds will be 100% opaque (0% * 0% = 0%)

So far so good…

Side A at 1 second will be 93.75% opaque (50% * 50% * 50% * 50% = 6.25% transparent)
Side B at 1 second will be 75% opaque (50% * 50% = 25% transparent)

Uh-oh!

[Darby Edelen]

[Dave LaRonde] “1) Tell AE to RAM preview every other frame, so your RAM preview is twice as long. Like you, I’d have to look up the technique in AE Help for details on how to do it.”

Good way to do this is to look in your Time Controls/RAM Preview pane and click the drop down menu that says RAM Preview Options, change it to Shift+RAM Preview Options then change the ‘Skip’ drop down to 1 (skips every other frame) you can also change the preview ‘Resolution’ to half so that you don’t have to change the actual comp’s resolution when you Shift+RAM Preview. I also like to enable ‘From Current Time’ so that your RAM Preview will begin from wherever your playhead is (instead of the beginning of the comp).

If you’re at half resolution and skip a frame and you still can’t render the entire comp, then you can move your playhead forward to near the end of the RAM Previewed section, and preview from there.

Note that Shift+RAM Preview and RAM Preview give you two different groups of settings to work with when RAM Previewing, I keep my regular RAM Preview (numpad 0) on Auto resolution and skip 0 frames and keep my Shift+RAM Preview (shift-numpad 0) on Half resolution and skip 1 frame. This allows me to preview at high quality for those important sections, or quickly for an overview.

[Darby Edelen]

I’d help you if I knew the effect you wanted =) Didn’t see “Lords of Dogtown,” sorry!

[Darby Edelen]

Rather than dissolve the elements, if you want them to dissolve to black why don’t you just fade a black layer up from 0% to 100% on top of the layers?

[Darby Edelen]

You may already be well aware of this, but in this scenario it sounds like you would benefit mightily from 3-4 different instances of your source footage:

1) Source footage color corrected to find any potential anomalies in the screen for tracking
2) Source footage color corrected to bring out the green screen, use this layer to pull the matte (color correction/channel operations are optional, but can help in pulling a key)
3) Potentially another source layer to pull an edge matte (if you’re having trouble defining your edges).
4) Your unmodified source footage to apply the tracking data and mattes pulled from the above layers.

Good luck!

[Darby Edelen]

I like what you did with the radio waves, however the building animating on still looks a little weird to me.

Have you thought about a nice slow craning camera move to introduce the steeple? You could start with the camera close in at the base, slowly back out as you rise up the steeple. This could prove a very nice effect if the vines are 3D layers as well, you could put your own little flourishes on it if it’s too simple for your tastes.

Sometimes simple is elegant though, I would just fade to black at the end.

[Darby Edelen]

I’m not sure if there’s something I’m missing, but I think all of this Write-on craze started with a tutorial someone did here on the Cow with AE 6.5. However, in AE 7 it’s much easier to use the Stroke effect to reveal elements.

I could be wrong, is there some other reason to use Write-on instead of Stroke?

[Darby Edelen]

[Luke Hale] “once a frame”

random() evaluates to a new value every frame.

You’ve already had some more elegant solutions offered, but another possibility is to use this expression:

posterizeTime(2);

before any of your other lines, this will cause AE to only update the values from the remainder of the expression 2 times per second.

[Darby Edelen]

A better option if you have Photoshop CS2 is to select your text layer and Group Into New Smart Object. As a Smart Object AE will see the layer styles and you can still edit them if you right click the Smart Object layer and choose “Edit Contents.”