David Johnson
Forum Replies Created
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I work on both Macs & Windows machines daily, but am sticking with CS3 for now. I’ve never seen that issue on either platform, but since no one else answered, I thought I’d suggest posting that in the Adobe forums and also contacting Adobe support directly. Good luck.
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I’m not sure I understand your question … I think you meant those as rotation degree values (not frames) … if so, just make them a few degrees apart. I say “a few” because how many depends on the degree of rotation between any other two frames in the animation. Related to that, they shouldnt be the same because that’ll create a one frame stutter at the loop point instead of a fluid loop.
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Correction to my previous post … the name of the company I was thinking of is Intergraph and the plugin set was called VizFX (they’re still in the software business, but haven’t made AE plugins in years).
Radium Glow is also a good plugin if its worth the money to you. I’m pretty familiar with almost all AE plugins ever made and can’t think of any other third-party plugins that are specifically for glows, although there are some intended for other things, but can do glows as a by-product (i.e., Trapcode Shine, etc.)
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I always enjoy Dave’s humorously accurate answers, but it might help to clarify what he was getting at … using AE for cuts editing is like using a sledge hammer to drive nails so you might consider using video editing software, which AE is not, although it naturally shares some capabilities with video editing software.
Try splitting the layer (including its audio), then delete the portions you don’t need. You can find “split layer” in one of the menus and I think the short keys are CTL+ALT+D or Option+Apple+D.
It might also benefit you to know that AE is not the type of software one learns through intuition alone … you will have to use the manual, help files and endless other resources available for AE at some point(s) so it’ll save lots of time to do so from the beginning.
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I’ve occasionally run into this with various recent versions of PS and found that, if I switched to precise cursors in the preferences, closed the preferences window, then went back to it and switched to normal, it would fix the problem for a while … yes, its a hassle, but it worked for me.
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This was quite a few years ago now but a company called VizFX use to make a set of AE plugins that included several types of soft glows, but I don’t think they’re around anymore and their old plugins aren’t compatible with current AE versions. With that sai, I’ve found that if I tweak the settings of either AE’s standard glow or Radium Glow long enough, I can get just about any kind of glow I want out of them.
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I doubt you’d be asking if you had access to the Boris Continuum Complete third-party plugin set, but just in case you or anyone who does just hasn’t thought of using it for echo fx, the BCC Motion Trails plugin makes doing this very easy and also gives you lots of additional controls to do all kinds of variations of the same effect.
And, if you wanted to get really fancy, you could also use any particle system plugin that can generate custom particles.
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There may be a better way if I thought about it longer, but having done this many times as a deadline crunch time approach, I know it works reliably …
Basically just name a copy of all the PSDs the same and give AE access to different ones at different times so that, each time you re-open the project, everything is in place without reloading any media or changing any comps. You obviously need a way to distinguish and not overwrite same-named files and I’ve done it different ways, but one is to just put the various PSDs inside ZIP or SIT files with distinguishable names, which is really only a single right click away on either platform so its not so bad even if you have tons of PSDs.
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1. I’ll leave this one to someone else since my answer would be long and dependent on things I don’t know (i.e., the format of any live footage you might be using, you’re intended output, etc.).
2. I start every project thinking in terms of reverse engineering … what do I want the end result to be and what are the last-to-first incremental steps that will lead to that result? As part of that, I ask myself, is there any reason to use raster text from Photoshop versus vector text in AE, although depending on which version of AE you’re using, you can also apply “convert to editable text” to Photoshop text within AE. Reasons can include a great deal of detailed text stylizations that might be easier to do in Photoshop. Note that, without the “convert to editable text” AE function, which to me says that I should’ve created the text in AE in the first place, the things you can do with raster text in AE are far more limited (i.e., harder to animate individual characters or words, scale up, change text, etc.).
3. Very dependent on questions 1 & 2, if you do make the text in PS, make it at least the same resolution as you plan to work in AE (or even larger) and test final output with small sections before doing your whole project and getting to the end only to realize the text is too small or something similar.
I hope this helps.
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Done. The very least any of us can do for the valuable contributions to AE users you make here and elsewhere, Todd … many thanks.