[Michael Duff]

are you using a format that supports alpha channels? like QT Animation or TGA?

check the alpha channel on the stage by pressing the “show alpha channel” button at the bottom of the comp window (in AE7 its under the button with the red/blue/green circles)

[Michael Duff]

“What is the difference between camera Point of interest and camera position?”
camera position is where the camera is in space – POI is where the camera is looking

“Why wouldn’t you just use rotation to determine your point of interest?”
you can, just set the auto-orient to off. But sometimes it’s easier to just animate the POI – say the camera always had to look at a specific object, just set the POI on that object then you can move the camera around and it will always look in the same direction. OR maybe you want the camera static and then have it pan accrosss to another object. Instead of having to animate the rotations, just move the POI.

” How can you move camera position and camera point of interest together in the timeline window?”
ummm, I’m not sure, but you can in the composition window I think by holding down ctrl or alt while you drag.

[Michael Duff]

https://www.bearcage.com.au/duff/particletest2.mov

thank you very much! this is doing the job….although my balls do drop off at the end 😉 a bit of timeremapping should dodge me around that

…… and you’ve opened me up to a whole new world of persistent property mapper

[Michael Duff]

hi guys, thanks for the suggestions although I still haven’t had much luck…. foam just didn;t seem to create the physics that I wanted,,,, and I couldn’t get PPM to do exacly what I wanted. I think maybe I will have to do it in real 3D as I don’t have particular.

Anyways, here is a simplified render of my scene – you see the particles just never die!

https://www.bearcage.com.au/duff/particletest.mov

Thanks for the help

[Michael Duff]

so layer 1 is an adjustment layer with an effect on it? if so, it will affect all layers underneath it – why don’t you precomp layers 2 and 3 and then apply the effect to the precomp?

[Michael Duff]

nothing in AE has any “real” thickness. plug-ins like invigorator do the best job at faking it. Alternately you can try duplicating the layer several times and moving each layer back one px in Z-space. Then parent all the duplicates to the top one.

OR you can fake it using the shatter effect, I’m sure there is a tutorial here on the COW about using this method.

[Michael Duff]

…. and don’t forget to de-interlace before you go into C4d. C4D doesn’t have any options for interpreting fields (as far as I can find)

[Michael Duff]

well I find AE is very good for animating text – but the problem is going to be how you get it into flash and keep a decent filesize….. because it will not be vector based like flash is….

[Michael Duff]

hi, yeah it’s on windows. ummmm, the I think it was a DVCPro50 codec, it was the only one I could find online, I think it was a matrox one(?)

so the Avid download includes a DVCPro50 codec?

Thanks

[Michael Duff]

actually AE5 doesn’t have text layers. You need to make a solid (Ctrl-Y), then apply the effect “Basic Text” it should be near the bottom of the effects menu. There is also “Path text” which has some more options, and “number” which is good for animating countdowns or timecode.