[David Biederbeck]

Perfect. Thanks for the quick response.

[David Biederbeck]

Feel dumb to not have deducted that process… but normally I would just do this sort of thing in AE.

Thanks again

[David Biederbeck]

If by plugin you mean xbreaker, before breaking it apart select “enable upon impact” instead of its standard setting

[David Biederbeck]

I’m not sure I exactly understand your question.
But… Regarding your object buffer problems:

Take the object buffer pass, and place it beneath your exported tiff sequence or video.
Then choose one of the mattes, I think it is alpha matte. Work your way down the line of the four, pressing control Z if it doesn’t yield the result you are looking for.

This will block out the object you selected to buffer.

[David Biederbeck]

Beautiful, thanks.

[David Biederbeck]

I have tried that, by pushing C, which creates a null, with each individual spline within an extrude nurb beneath it.

Then I used the xbreaker script both on the null, and on the individual splines and it still did not work.

[David Biederbeck]

They way I read it previously I didn’t see that you were not new to smart objects.

It is interesting that your view looks nice at 100% in PS.

Honestly, that being the case leads me to believe that it is photoshop, not illustrator.

I’ve got nothing for you except for making sure that you are using the best possible save as quality for PDF.

[David Biederbeck]

I could be wrong, but I believe when you save as, it references the smart object and creates a pixel-based representation of that object, inevitably creating some pixelation.

The beauty of vectors and SO’s in PS is that you can change the size etc and it references the AI file to create as nice as possible of a pixel version of that object. However, when you save as a jpeg it will always need to create pixels out of your vector.

As for cleaner saves, Png, Tiff and Pdf are always going to be better than a jpeg.

[David Biederbeck]

There are a multitude of ways to decrease the length of the project. I too am relatively new to AE, so i am sure someone will give you a better process than the two options I am about to give, but suffice it to say that you should be able to find a way that will work for this project file.

Time Remap – quick and dirty
If you are not too concerned with the quality you can always insert the composition into another composition, right click, select time, then enable time remap. Slide the end remap-keyframe to nine seconds and the entire video will play more quickly and finish at 9 seconds. Make sure frame blending is on.

Distribute keyframes accordingly –
open up the project template and start sliding the keyframes earlier in the timeline so that timing suits your needs. Be careful though because once one layer is moved, everything following will be affected, especially the camera. It will take a little more time, but have much more rewarding results.

Hope this help!

[David Biederbeck]

Thanks Dave. I just updated. Thanks.