[David Byrne]

You’re welcome!

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK

[David Byrne]

I’m not sure exactly if the issue you are having is to do with mouse / pen / touchpad interface, a lag with after effects or user error – however –

Select your layer (Number of layer on Keyboard numpad or just with mouse) and press M to reveal any masks, you can delete, select and unselect them within the timeline rather than the composition window. You can also do this by selecting your mask in the composition window too. Pressing M reveals the Mask. Pressing MM reveals its properties.

Press F2 to unselect everything if you need to access the Move tool. Press V on Keyboard to access move tool and G to access pen tool. Pressing Q cycles through the defined Mask Shapes (Rectangle, Circle, Star etc).

Definitely get used to using Keyboard shortcuts, they will save you hours of work on every project.

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK

[David Byrne]

I may be missing something but the maths doesn’t seem to add up here –

11520 x 5400

80 screens of (I’m assuming) 1080 x 720 would not look like your graphic above.

If we split 11520 by 16 (as on your graphic) we get 720 which would mean the width of each of those screen should be 720.
If we then split 5400 by 5 (as on your graphic) we get 1080.

That would give us 80 screens but in a portrait (Vertical) screens as seen below- so before we go on, what is your graphic referring to?

I’m sure I have something mixed up but please give the dimensions of each screen (if portrait lets say 720×1080 – start with width end then height). Also what is the frame rate?

You mention 1280 x 720 but with that Master Comp resolution this would give you the following image of 63 screens, and 9 half screens:

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK

[David Byrne]

There are a few things going on – the footage has been time remapped to freeze frame, the guy has been cut out of the backgorund, and been desaturated (Tint).
Then the footage has been turned into a 3D layer. A camera has been added to the scene and either has been animated to move forward or the footage has been animated to move to camera, as some background layers move back. The background has been changed to the red painted look and then some paint stroke layers have been added in at different Z space to give some parallaxing with the footage.

This is quite basic After Effects stuff, and to get to this look you would be better trying to learn the basics and then build up to this, which you should be able to achieve quite quickly if you are patient enough to get stuck into learning and following tutorials and practise, practise, practise!

A good starting point is here at Video CoPilots Basic Training.

Following on from which there are tons of great tutorials out there on this site, Red Giant, Video CoPilot to name just a few.

All the best with it, and if you get stuck – well, you’ve come to a great place which has helped me and many others over the years.

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK

[David Byrne]

With render errors it can be a number of factors- sometimes there is a corrupt file or layer within the project causing issues. Others there is simply too much for AE to do and it crashes the render.

One quick thing to try – try changing your render to a quicktime Mov rather than mp4, and if successful, you can encode your mov to mp4 using media encoder. It may be that rendering and encoding to mp4 all in one render is causing problems.

The safest way to ensure the render would be to render to a sequence. I use PNG sequences often, make sure they are saved in a subfolder so that your render folder doesn’t fill up with hundreds of files. The advantage of sequences is that even if a render crashes, the frames rendered up until that point are reusable, unlike a mov or mp4 render.

If there is a still an error, you can now restart the sequence from where it stopped. You can then try again. If your render still cannot get past a troublesome frame, you know the issue is around that frame.

So – if it does get past the frame, and finishes the sequence, you can bring that into media encoder or even after effects again and render out in the format you prefer. (Ensure you make sure that you interpret the sequence frame rate correctly, it may default to 30 or something you don’t want).

However – if there is a problem, try to look at layers that start at that troublesome frame, or effects that happen around then. It could be an extreme amount of depth of field, plus a ton of particles from a third-party plug in, or could just be a simple bug from an effect that has known issues.

Its a bit like detective work, slowly eliminate the red herrings until you find the culprit! Then there will be other options – look online for known issues, or sometimes it is worth breaking up a render, for example rendering the background layers of an animation first, then adding in extra passes of effects and grading for example. Sometimes it will require a few passes to get it out.

It’s worth doing though as this practise can in fact help you avoid 20 hour renders by breaking them up and allowing after effects to not get overwhelmed by the amount of calculations it has to do to create each frame, and is particularly worth knowing when working with heavy vfx projects at high resolutions.

Hope this helps, feel free to ask any questions and I’ll get back asap,

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK

[David Byrne]

I agree with Dave and Blaise – if it looks good, it works! VFX artists and animators using thousands of tricks that aren’t ‘correctly’ simulating what the real world equivalent of shooting the same shot would be, and they often have spectacular results.

Also worth considering that in a way you have done the ‘correct’ thing. You tracked the result of camera shake – ie what you saw through the lens of the camera, and then applied it to what you see through the lens of your AE camera.

To get the correct camera shake for the camera, in theory you would have to have had a second camera film the movement of your phone – Then apply this phone movement to the AE camera! Due to the nature of the lens angle, size, speed and motion stabilisation software in the phone, actually replicating that would’ve likely turned up vastly different results, either exaggerated or reduced in effect.

(Though it would be interesting to see some tests).

‘Does it look right?’ is often more important than ‘Is it technically right?’. Worse – technically right can often look ‘off’ to the eye, and needs adjusting!

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK

[David Byrne]

No worries! Happy to help – as far as I know to date he hasn’t released Reverse Radial, though I saw him say on twitter or on one of the VCP forums they probably will one day, but it needs a lot of work, and that was a while ago! He might have figured that Point Zoom covers that ground too, so maybe not worth the effort.

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK

[David Byrne]

Hi there

Andrew Kramer talks about this here:

And Red Giant have a plugin that should cover you, if you want to buy it here

Though it will certainly be possible to create this effect using built in tools, it will take a bit longer to figure out –

There was some talk about this effect a while ago on these forums…

Do let us know how you get on if you decide to do this with built in effects!

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK

[David Byrne]

FYI you didn’t attach the file! But I found you’d uploaded it – remember to copy the link from any uploads into your message –

This seems to be exactly what you’re looking for, I remember it from ages ago, and wouldn’t you know it, its from creative cow –

Analyzing Motion : Creative COW : After Effects Tutorial – by Carl Larsen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVWhBlYrFKM

Hmm… if link doesn’t work, copy and paste in the address bar, it should be fine.

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK

[David Byrne]

If you maximise the panel itself, you can then close it and then reopen it to reset its position – so this worked for me too! So aside from changing Screen resolution as I recommended above – this has to be the fastest way to fix it – select the troublesome panel, press cmd and \ then close the panel. Reopen it and it should be back to its normal size and with the top bar available. Great recommendation, thanks!

Cheers!
David Byrne
Animo Motion Graphics
Freelancer, UK