David Johnson
Forum Replies Created
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A variation of the same method, you could also duplicate the layer, feather mask out everything you want unaffected, use a blending mode like add, screen or soft light and adjust the opacity of that layer.
You could also use an effect like CC_Beam (I think that’s what it’s called) on an adjustment layer and tweak the effect controls and/or adjustment layer’s properties as needed.
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You have to turn on motion blur for both the layer(s) you want it to apply to and the comp as a whole. If you want a lot of motion blur, you may also need to adjust the motion blur settings in the advanced tab of the comp settings.
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It sounds like you just want to animate the glow radius and/or intensity up and back down. You could also use a radial shadow and animate its softness and distance. There are lots of other ways to make things glow in AE, which gets back to Michael’s point that it depends on the look you’re going for.
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You can copy everything in one project into another by importing the existing project into a new project (or any other) with “import as” set to “project” instead of “footage”.
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Sounds like you’re making your changes in the original comp instead of the duplicate … right click on each of them in the project panel and look at the comps they’re used in to make sure you’re changing the right one.
For example, if you duplicate both a pre-comp and the comp it’s used in, the duplicate comp will still have the original pre-comp, not the the duplicate. So, you would need to open the duplicate comp, select the pre-comp layer within it and ALT drag the duplicate pre-comp over the original pre-comp layer in order to replace it with the duplicate. It’s much simpler than it sounds in writing.
Oops … just realized Andy already answered.
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I haven’t used image sequences in quite a while so I can’t speak on that and don’t necessarily have a solution for you, but will mention a couple things that may be helpful …
The render times AE shows are only estimates based on the current frame it is rendering … it’s basically telling you how long the render will take if all subsequent frames are the same as the current one. So, if your project opens with many stacked 3D layers with many effects and masks, then levels off a bit, the initial render time shown will drop dramatically.
Similar to the first point, I’ve recently done AE to FCP projects with similar specs (except the 24fps) and, when I brought my AE render (PNG rather than Animation) into my FCP timeline and went to render the FCP sequence, it initially said something like 20 hours, but it actually finished in only a couple of hours.
In any case, it sounds like your project is pretty render intensive (HD, lots of 3D, etc.) and you’re on a G4 so is it possible your machine just doesn’t have enough processor power, RAM, fast enough drives (for both read and write) or some combination of all those?
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[Jason Boucher] “makes me think it’s a AE CS5 issue”
Could be … I’m still on CS3 for a few more months. Even so, I sometimes have a similar issue when I switch sources (AE to FCP or sometimes even different items within FCP) … the output to the monitor doesn’t switch until I do the “refresh output” command in FCP, but that always works for me and is pretty simple so I haven’t pursued it any further.
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About the banding part, as Andy said, adding grain/noise works. For additional ideas and Todd K.’s good explanation of common issues, check out the threads below and I’m sure there are plenty of others:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/972516#972552
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/953147#953155 -
This is a very basic nudge in the right direction to get you going until you find a tutorial or someone gives a more in-depth answer …
Pre-compose the footage you want to freeze and either export the desired freeze frames as stills or use time remapping to keyframe start and stop points. Then, use an AE camera to zoom in on the freeze frames. Obviously you’ll lose resolution if you zoom in on footage that’s already full-rez so, if that’s not acceptable for what you need, you can zoom out on the main footage, then zoom back in for the freeze frames.
Hope this helps.
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Did you forget to extend the layer to the full length of its precomp?
Is it a 3D layer that’s temporarily getting hidden behind another layer in 3D space?
Do you have OpenGL on and some kind of weird anomaly is happening?
Are you working with an interframe codec and some kind of weird anomaly is happening?