[Elad Menashe]

I’m no expert in the, I doubt whether one can undo mosaic and blur as long as those were heavily used, since those filter cause your footage to ‘lose’ data.
I think your friend watched too many Alias and/or 24 episodes 🙂

Regards
Elad

[Elad Menashe]

For onion backwards skinning:
1) Duplicate the layer and apply Time Remapping.
2) Create an expression for the time remapping:

numOfFrames = 1;
d = numOfFrames*thisComp.frameDuration;
thisComp.layer().timeRemap.valueAtTime(time – d)

(expression may vary, I’m not in front my AE)

3) change the layer opacity.

There are easier ways:
* Duplicate the layer and shift it in time one or more keyframes and change its opacity.
* Use the Echo (or Echo Time) effect

[Elad Menashe]

If you want the masks to join why not use the “Add” mode instead of “Difference”?
Note that it doesn’t actually join the masks into one mask, only adds to the visible area.

[Elad Menashe]

Make sure you move the mask and not the layer.

As a practice do the following:
Create two masks on a layer and try to move only one of them, if both are moving you are moving the layer.

To select a mask press Shift+Click on one of its vertices and then Alt+Click to select the entire path.

[Elad Menashe]

Another way to slow down the Shatter effect, is to raise the viscosity value.
Note that the viscosity doesn’t work as the time parameter in Trapcode Particular, meaning if you raised the viscosity and the shatter parts have lost their velocity, reducing the viscosity will not restore their original velocity and the shatter parts will only be affected by the gravity, in that case you should add another force to drive them.

[Elad Menashe]

There are a few ways to do that:
Option A) Create an adjustment layer above the layer you want to blur, animate an ellipse mask to cover the face, and apply blur to the adjustment layer.
Option B) Duplicate the layer which contains the face, on the top layer add the ellipse mask and animate it over the face, apply blur to the top layer.

* you can also try track mattes
* in case there are several faces to blur, create mask per face and animate each, make sure all masks mode is set to “Add”

Hope that helps
Elad

[Elad Menashe]

Displacement map will only translate your pixels according to the map, without any effect to the pixel color.
I’d recommend Zaxwerks 3D Flag for the job.

[Elad Menashe]

My guess is the Pin Corner effect on your machine is in Spanish.
Try the following, instead of pasting in AE, paste the data on a notepad, and edit it so the name of the Corner Pin effect will match the Spanish name.
In case that doesn’t help, try posting that question in the Imagineer System forum.

Elad

[Elad Menashe]

There are many reasons, getting camera movement, data from external programs, or merely transferring date from older/newer version of AE to another.
If I’m not mistaken Aharon Rabinowitz had a tutorial about that exact thing.

That said, I think I might have answered my own question.
Thanks for the warm up

[Elad Menashe]

I do not create keyframes with a text editor, I change existing (copied from AE) keyframe data and try to paste it back in AE with no luck