[Erik Waluska]

Great, glad to hear you got it working.

[Erik Waluska]

Here’s an explanation of each setting from AE help:
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS09B6A698-8F9E-4a00-8D1B-07FC62FB2D30a.html

They are basically blending modes applied to the copies. I would recommend screen mode and also duplicating a copy of the moon pre-comp with no echo and placing it over the echoed layer like in the example project in my previous post.

[Erik Waluska]

You’re welcome, Chris. Glad you got it worked out now.

[Erik Waluska]

There is a script called “tidy up” that organizes your project assets into folders for you.

Then you can just run the “consolidate” and “reduce” commands manually after that and your project should be in good shape. Those commands take like 2 seconds each to run manually so I don’t believe that running them via a script would really be of any benefit as far as time savings.

HTH

[Erik Waluska]

It’s working fine for me. If your ray-tracing quality (comp settings>advanced>options) is set to 1 (draft) then diffusion is disabled so you’ll need to set it to something higher. 8 works pretty well without slowing things down too much.

[Erik Waluska]

Apparently you will need the new update for AE, which adds support for that card. Here’s the release info:
https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2012/10/after-effects-cs6-11-0-2-update-bug-fixes-and-added-gpus-for-ray-traced-3d-renderer.html

[Erik Waluska]

Is your moon shot an animation or a live video of the moon? To get the effect you’re after you’ll need to isolate the moon first.

If it’s an animation then pre-comp the moon animating across the sky and apply echo to the pre-comp. If it’s a video, then you would need to isolate the moon with a mask and pre-comp it and then apply echo to the pre-comp.

Then duplicate the moon animation/video pre-comp, remove the echo effect, and put it on top of the echoed pre-comp layer so you’ll have a clean copy with no blending or echoes for the main moon.

One problem you may run into is that the echo effect won’t be fully displayed until you are several seconds into the animation since it’s referencing an earlier point in the timeline to create the copies, so you may need to create an animation where the moon starts out of frame to account for this.

Another option is to just make duplicates of the isolated moon animation/video and stagger them in time, reducing the opacity on the trailing copies as needed.

Check out this project file and see if this helps to understand how it works.

4796_moonechoexamplecs5.aep.zip

HTH

[Erik Waluska]

Yeah, I’m baffled too. Could you upload a screenshot or better yet a project file of just the main comp and pre-comp?

[Erik Waluska]

Is the pre-comp itself a 3d layer but the layers within it are not? If so, try making the layers in the pre-comp 3d. When you collapse transformations on a pre-comp AE looks at the settings of the layers within it, so if they are not 3d but your pre-comp itself is then you would see the layers flatten when you click the collapse transformations switch.

[Erik Waluska]

Try .mpg instead of .mpeg. If that doesn’t work then you might need to convert to a different format.