[Erik Waluska]

It appears to be some light leak effects composited over the video, probably with a blending mode.
I’ve seen some free offerings out there for real and created light leak video clips you might be able to use.

[Erik Waluska]

If you have each solar panel in its own layer in your AI file then you can bring it into AE as a composition and choose the “retain layer sizes” option. You’ll have to change the anchor points of each one so that it’s on the edge that you want to use as the “hinge” for the fold out animation. Just use the Pan Behind tool (shortcut is Y) to drag the anchor point in the comp window. Depending on how you’ve drawn your AI art, scaling the panels in x and/or y may work better and/or be easier than doing a 3D rotation for the flip.

[Erik Waluska]

Have you already shot the footage? If not, I would suggest you shoot the replacement head shot as a static shot on green screen, key it out and then pre-comp it and apply a soft edge mask to the neck area to blend it into the original actor’s neck. Then you could use Mocha to track it onto the body. If you shoot the crane shot that moves up the actor’s body to their face from farther back and zoomed in rather than close up and wide angle it will reduce the amount of perceived perspective and make it look a little flatter. That should help the static replacement head shot to match the original shot better. Unless you have a motion control camera rig or something so you could repeat the exact same camera move on both actors.

[Erik Waluska]

BTW, you could also create an action to do the prep work like unlocking the background (alt+double-click to unlock), creating a new layer and placing it under the line art, setting the blending mode of the line art, etc., which should also save a bunch of time.

[Erik Waluska]

You can do this easily by creating the mask shape and Ctrl or Cmd clicking the layer’s thumbnail in the layer panel to make a selection or if it’s a shape layer you’re using then Ctrl or Cmd click the vector mask thumbnail to make a selection. In any case, once you have the selection then select the map layer and click the new mask icon at the bottom of the layer palette. By default it will reveal the map in the selection area, to reverse just click on the mask thumbnail in the layer palette and invert the mask with Ctrl or Cmd + I.

[Erik Waluska]

I’m assuming the line art is just black lines on a white background? If so, you could try this:
– Switch the blending mode of the line art layer to Multiply
– Create a new layer for your color fill and place it under the line art layer
– Use the magic wand tool to select an area you want to fill with color
– Go to Select>Modify>Expand and enter a small number like 1 or 2 to expand the selection
– Set the foreground color to the color you want to fill and hit Alt+Backspace (Cmd+Backspace on Mac) to fill the selection with color

You should now have a perfectly clean fill with no fringe because the edge of the color fill is covered by the black line art on top of it. You may have to play with the expansion amount to find the right value for the thickness of the lines. To save more time create a simple action to repeat the selection expansion by making a selection and then opening the Actions Palette (Alt+F9), creating a new action, pressing the record button and expanding the selection by the amount you want and hitting the stop button. Now instead of having to go through the menu every time you can just hit the play button for that action and it will expand the selection. You might even be able to create an action for the whole selection, expansion and fill process, depending on how much each image differs from the next. Just keep in mind that the action records where you click when you select with the wand tool and will repeat it in the same place.

HTH

[Erik Waluska]

I’m not totally sure what you’re trying to do but maybe try pre-comping the layer with the animated mask and then applying the swirl effect to the pre-comp instead of the layer itself.

[Erik Waluska]

You can set the default keyframe interpolation in the general preferences by checking or unchecking “default spatial interpolation to linear” and AE will always create new keyframes with that interpolation.

Bezier handles are only visible on selected keyframes in both the graph editor and the comp window, so unselected keyframes may appear to be linear. Also, bezier handles can be very hard to see in the comp window, even on selected keyframes, when the animation path is straight instead of curved because the handle perfectly lines up with the path and the only indication it’s there is a slightly larger dot along the path that indicates the end of the handle.

HTH

[Erik Waluska]

In your RAM Preview options, check the “from current time” box so playback starts where you are instead of at the beginning of the timeline.

As for the side-by-side workflow, you can place a copy of the pre-comp containing the video footage inside of your animation comp and then open the video pre-comp and lock its comp window (lock icon in the upper left corner). Then click the tab in the upper left corner of the comp window and choose “new comp viewer” to display your animation comp next to the video footage. Then drag the tab for the video comp’s timeline to the right side of the animation comp’s timeline so they’re side-by-side. Since the video comp is inside of the animation comp they will stay synced together when you scrub in the timeline.

HTH

[Erik Waluska]

True, but if they have a newer version of AE than you have you might not be able to open the project when they hand it back, assuming that is the workflow. They will also need to have any third party plug-ins that you used, if any, and visa versa.

Another thing that might cause a problem is that if you are giving them a mac formatted hard drive they won’t be able to read the files on a PC unless they have macdrive or similar software. I have macdrive on my PC and use a mac-formatted hard drive to exchange files with my mac at work and with files from my friends macs and it works great but it’s about $50. You can format in FAT32 and both mac and PC can read that, but there is a 4GB file size limitation.