[David Bogie]

[Adam White] “It occurs most frequently when viewing video with fast motion and/or camera pans or movement. My first thought was that it’s a problem with the refresh rate, but this happens on both the iMac monitor and additional monitor, so I’m not really sure of how to resolve this. “

Ah, well that’s not “tearing” so much as a horizontal displacement. What I do not see in the rest of the thread is if you have confirmed this is in the media or in the display of the media. If it’s the files, the artifact will appear in exactly the same place every time you play it back. if it’s a drive or display or card issue, the artifact will move in time and in position.

I’ve seen this when capturing analog tape that has tracking or severe timebase errors that I easily fixed with a timebase corrector. I have never seen this with digital media.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Probably.
there are many way to do this, though. Animating a mask, or a series of stacked or intersecting masks, is the most direct.
Setting keyframes for mask position using mask nodes gets weird because the mask edges tend to move in unexpected ways. That’s why experienced animators tend to use paint effects to create holdbacks using animated strokes. This is not easily explained but it is not a difficult procedure. Several tutorials exist to help you through these things.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

“Tear” doesn’t help us very much. if you search for the term you’ll see why. You’ll need to tell us exactly what “tear” means to you or, better, post a frame grab.
On whites? Reds? High or low contrast or every image?

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

This makes a few assumptions I refused to make based on the OP’s apparent lack of experience and fundamental working knowledge. The task of importing footage direclty into AE, for example, implied in the OP set off my alarm. P2 drom another app might have been processed upstream before it got to AE.

Possibly overly philosphical point, someone working with P2 footage needs to figure this stuff out. Posting a fundamental question here should not be easier or faster than learning how to look it up in the manual.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

It’s all quite confusing but it’s all covered in the extensive online manual for AE. Look up “pixel aspect ratio.”

How did you capture the media?

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I would have simply started with Card Dance.
Very slick, Brian. I am in awe of AE scripters.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The question appears on at least one other AE forum.

I don’t see enough information in the OP to help you much but my alarms always go off when folks use “export” from AE instead of “render.” When using CS4 with Premiere, the route to and from AE is effectively and efficiently accomplished with links, not new media. Do you have enough experience with CS4 to know how the applications work together?

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Aaron Kiersky] “Good idea about the character palate, “

My palate is geared toward espresso served as ristretto.
But the palete, or palette, if you’re French, gives you access to the keys and the keyboard view gives you the mapping.

I can use most of the keyboard combination to get the more common ligatures in many fonts, they appear in Text layers.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

It would be nice if you identified blind links as office-safe or not. Some of us live behind zero-tolerance firewalls that will not tolerate many types of online content.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Yes and no.
It depends on if you have the specific typeface and if the particular text generator you are using sees them. It’s a complicated situation. Use the character palette to find the ligature you want. You shoudl be able to use the Insert Character function directly from the palette but sometimes you actually have to use the keyboard combination to get it to appear. Sometimes you have to use Illustrator to create an outline graphic of the text objects.

bogiesan