[Darby Edelen]

AE must render everything that you see or hear. When you RAM Preview a comp AE will render the video and audio, when you click in the timeline to a certain frame it will render that frame of video but not the audio (as a single frame of audio is a little worthless).

You can hold down command (Mac) or control (PC) as you scrub through the timeline to hear a ROUGH sampling of the audio, or press . on the numpad to hear an audio preview (defaults to 10 or 15 seconds long). Aside from these techniques, RAM Preview is the only way to see and hear exactly what your comp will look/sound like!

[Darby Edelen]

The action safe (10% in from the edges) is a guide and not a solid division between visible and hidden. It should be assumed that anything outside of the action safe will not be visible, but that doesn’t mean it should be empty space! If someone has a TV that can view more of the area outside of the action safe than another TV (it really does vary from TV to TV) or they can ‘overscan’ then they will see outside of the action safe. Anything outside the action safe is assumed to be hidden, but may not be… consider it a bonus for some people.

The title safe (10% in from the action safe) is also only a guide, but one that you should follow religiously when placing text on screen. Everything within the title safe will always be visible on a TV, and should be relatively free of distortion if the user has an older pre-flat screen TV.

[Darby Edelen]

It sounds like I’m doing pretty much the same thing you are, I work in AE and PS to make DVD Menu art. I’m paid about $14/hr US Dollars.

[Darby Edelen]

You’ve got a pretty good grasp of the concept of nesting compositions. Here’s how I would specifically go about this project:

Create a precomp* for each of the individual body parts, each of these compositions only needs to be as long as that body part’s animation. Then put each of these pre-comps into an intermediary comp (another pre-comp) and loop them with time remap and a loopOut() expression. You should then have all three body parts looping through their respective animations in this intermediary comp. Make this intermediary comp 60 frames long (60 is evenly divisible by the number of frames in all of your looping animations). Then place this comp into your final output composition and loop it.

FYI, the answer to ‘Should I build these with precomps vs comps?’ is: both. A precomp is just a name for a normal composition that is nested in another composition, the precomp functionality in AE allows you to automatically nest layers into a new composition that will then be placed in the composition you pre-comped from (confused?). For example, if you imported a circle from Photoshop and placed it in your main comp, then decided you wanted it pre-comped you could use the pre-comp function in AE. If you already knew you wanted it ‘pre’-comped then you could’ve created a new composition for the PS circle, placed it in this ‘pre-comp’ and then put the ‘pre-comp’ in your main comp.

[Darby Edelen]

Depending on how you’re doing your ‘zooms’ the answer will be slightly different. If you’re just scaling a photo up then something like:

start = transform.scale; //starting scale percentage
rate = 1; //percent to scale up per second

rate = [rate, rate];
rate * time + start;

for your scale property would work, this would scale the image up by 1% per second beginning at whatever the scale property for the layer is set at. It’s simple but it works.

If you’re using a camera you’d want to apply a similar expression to the zoom property.

[Darby Edelen]

[Ajones8126] “one person ripped off their head and it became someone elses? Also somebody ripped their body off”

I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about… Right now I’m envisioning some sort of Genghis Khan themed party venue for little kids. It helps a lot to include a link to the commercial in your post so we don’t have to try (and fail) to exercise our psychic powers.

Attempting to search for “Chuck E Cheese Commercial Decapitation” didn’t turn it up on the first page, although I was pleasantly surprised at how many times Chuck E Cheese and decapitation did appear together…

[Darby Edelen]

You can’t parent a layer to a mask, you can only parent layers to other layers. A layer with a parent will follow its parent’s transformations (position, rotation, scale). If your glass layer is video footage (it sounds like it is) then the layer’s position/rotation/scale properties are not animated as the glass moves and the tennis ball will not move.

You could try using the Motion Tracker to track the position/rotation/scale of the glass, this will be easier if it has some very identifiable characteristics (a logo on the glass?). I would recommend then applying this tracker data to a null object.

You can then parent the tennis ball to the null object, so as the null object follows the transformations of the glass, the ball will follow the null object and you will still be free to animate the tennis ball’s position/scale/rotation to give it some random floating motion (or whatever look you’re trying to simulate).

This all depends on you being able to get a good track on the glass though.

[Darby Edelen]

The list here

https://www.adobe.com/products/plugins/aftereffects/

will give you a good idea of what’s available. Depending on your workflow and what you hope to accomplish, some of these will be much more useful than others.

[Darby Edelen]

[blakep] “I need to somehow, feel the action.”

Yup, start working on it =P If you hit a wall and can’t find your way over it, come back and tell us what you’re trying to do and how you’re approaching it.

[Darby Edelen]

There was a post in the YouTube comments that they used some sort of specially outfitted camera that gave them zoom/axis rotation data that could theoretically be very useful in rotoscoping out boards. I don’t know how this person had access to information about their workflow, but it could be a piece of the puzzle.