[Darby Edelen]

I’m not sure that I know exactly what you’re describing but it sounds like the behavior you’d see when using Trim Paths on a shape that’s using a Fill.

Trim Paths is generally useful on shapes that only have Strokes.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I agree with the other responses on the thread, but I wanted to add something.

Use Cinema 4D’s motion tracker; it’s better than AE’s. In terms of ease of use, speed of solution and flexibility I think it’s the best camera tracker I’ve ever used.

Strong words I know, but trust me: it’s better than AE’s tracker and you can always send the solved camera back to AE if needed.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

It looks like something you can do with a blending mode. You might try the Color or Hue mode on a layer with a 4 color gradient effect above your footage.

You could generate the color on the top layer in other ways, but the 4 color gradient is an easy and flexible up option.

Another blend mode to try is Soft Light, but keep in mind that any color that’s lighter/darker than 50% brightness will lighten/darken the footage below.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

There is a separate menu for “Render Settings” that usually defaults to Best Quality. This is in the After Effects render queue, I’m not sure if it’s available if exporting through Adobe Media Encoder.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You can choose quarter resolution in the Render Settings of the output.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

The only way I know of to generate motion vectors data that can be visualized in After Effects is using Re:vision FX’s Twixtor:

https://revisionfx.com/products/twixtor/after-effects/

However, it sounds like you don’t need vectors but just an approximation of the amount of movement. In which case you might try applying these effects in this order:

1) The Time Difference effect set to Absolute Difference
2) A blur effect
3) An optional Levels effect (to control the minimum amount of ‘motion’ detected)
4) The tint effect
5) The Echo effect
6) The Colorama effect

This will not produce as accurate a picture of the motion as an actual optical flow method like Twixtor but it should give an approximation.

This will only work well with a locked down camera and is also susceptible to noise in the source footage (the blur helps some).

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

My suggestion is to keep the top layer set to stencil alpha and apply a Shift Channels effect to the lower layer and set Alpha to Full On.

Even the Preserve Transparency switch can leave color fringes.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You should be able to find the absolute x-scale of a layer no matter how many parents it has with this expression:

length(fromWorldVec([100,0,0]));

The y-scale would be:

length(fromWorldVec([0,100,0]));

This only works with one axis (X, Y or Z) at a time.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

You can provide any arbitrary time value (in seconds) to the valurAtTime() method:

t = thisComp.layer("Time Remapped Layer").timeRemap;
valueAtTime(t);

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

With the ‘solid’ property enabled on the external compositing tag an AE solid will be oriented facing along the Z-axis (the orientation of the axis is all that matters, the way the mesh is facing has no impact). Your screen element’s Z-axis is pointing up when it should be pointing out of the screen.

If you start from a plane primitive then the orientation of the plane should be set to +Z (or possibly -Z, I forget) in order to match in AE.

If you want to keep using the screen you have you can use the Mesh > Axis Center > Axis Center… dialog. With the face of the plane selected enable Alignment in the Axis Center dialog and set Axis to Z and Alignment to Normals. That should fix the main orientation issue.

The other problem you describe is because you’re switching from one animated model of the iPhone to another model with a different animation. The screen follows the first model perfectly but the second model’s animation is different so the screen does not follow along.

-Darby

Darby Edelen