[Michael Duff]

do you mean motion tracking? AE can track the motion of a group of pixels on the screen and then you can attach something to it (like a blur matte) … but it’s not always as easy as just picking a pixel and hitting go …. you need a distinct object to track to and AE then tries to calculate the motion …. give it a go, maybe it’ll work for you…. but chances are it’ll still need lots of tweaking …

[Michael Duff]

you could duplicate the footage, blur the top layer, mask out the area you want, then keyframe the mask to move where you want it… you wouldnt need to do every single frame… but you would need to do quite a few depending on how much movement there is in the shots… I’d recommend this way if you are new to AE.

instead of duplicating the footage you could use an adjustment layer with the blur effect, then mask out the area you want.

there is the possibility that you could use motion tracking so that you didn’t have to keyframe it… but that can get a it more confusing…

….motion blur when refered to in AE is simply when AE puts a blur onto keyframed objects that move across the screen … like how things look when they move on a real camera.

If you don’t understand these techniques then check out the help section and search the cow for words like “motion blur” “mask’ “adjustment layer” “motion tracking” “track matte” “mosaic” …. if you’re still stuck let us know

[Michael Duff]

use a track matte:

make a solid that fills your comp .. then mask out the shape on that solid… Put this above your text layer … now on the text layer, under trkMat, select “Alpha Matte” …

you can do whatever you like with the text layer and it will only ever show the area that is masked in the above layer ….

you can do lots of fun stuff with Track Mattes … if you don’t understand search for it in the help files and the cow and I’m sure you’ll find some helpful examples.

[Michael Duff]

i feel automatic duck is a must have for what you are doing … it sends across your entire timeline, with transitions and some effects … and it links back to the original media, so you are not duplicating your media… then you can do all your grading .. then render out using the render queue.

without automatic duck … i think you pretty much doing it the correct way .. except I wouldn’t use the desktop to manage your media … create some folders that are easy to understand … the problem with exporting the entire doco as one clip means that you wont have control over individual shots … hmmmm, maybe someone else can suggest a good way to do it without the duck…

[Michael Duff]

a solid is just a block of colour .. so a red solid will just fill the screen with red … but they are handy for much more than that .. use them for building effects on to … masking to make gradients … make shapes, mattes … all sorts of thing …

an adjustment layer is not really a layer that you see … you can apply an effect to an adjustment layer and it will effect all the layers beneath…. for example … if you’ve got 50 layers and you want them all to be blurred you can just put an adjustment layer above them with the blur effect on it ..

check out the help files and do a few tutorials and you will pick it up quickly …

[Michael Duff]

if I understand correctly:
AE generally treats each layer individually, so a text layer is not automatically connected to a picture layer … each layer can function independently .

so you need to line up the text manually … you can do this by positioning the timeline marker to where you want it and hitting the [ key …

maybe it would be easier if you precomposed each slide/jpeg and then inserted the text layer within the precomp …

if you dont really understand precomping and layer structure maybe do a few of the tutorials here at the cow … then I’m sure it’ll all make sense … good luck!

[Michael Duff]

thanks! i knew it would be something simple like that …

[Michael Duff]

thanks Dan! I’ll study through that when I have a big coffee ….. in the meantime I have another, hopefully much simpler, question …

i just want to grab the Y-position of a layer but at a different point in time .. so something like transform.position[1].valueAtTime(time-1)

does that makes sense?

thanks!

[Michael Duff]

there are loads of things you can do… you should search the cow archives and also google for suggestions … you will find lots and lots … also search for deinterlacing …

if you are still stuck then ask again … good luck!

[Michael Duff]

“When I put this footage on the timeline, it was imported as 4:3 and I have to stretch it out to fit the screen. What gives there?”

you need to interpret the footage … in the project window, right click on the footage then go to ‘interpret footage’ … then select the correct pixels aspect.

“only gets about 13 seconds along and then it starts taking away from the beginning of the progress bar to add to the end, so no matter what, I will only get 13 seconds.”

this is a RAM preview…that’s how AE previews things … you can only preview as much as your RAM can hold.. get more RAM, or preview shorter sections….or render out the whole thing.

“This is the only clip in the entire project, only 30 seconds long, and I have tried both uncompressed AVI and regular MPG2.”

Render settings do not effect the RAM preview… just do a proper render using the render queue and then have a look in Final Cut/Premiere/etc etc etc…

—-hope this helps some … ask again if anything isn’t clear… good lick