[Erik Waluska]

I’m not sure about your color issues, maybe you could explain the problem in more detail? I also don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to render out a comp with time-remapping unless there’s some sort of issue with the proxy files. Are they H.264 or some compressed format? If so, they may need to be converted to QT Animation or something more AE-friendly. Or you can try changing the Render Settings>Proxy Use to “use no proxies”.

As for the comp settings, there is a great free script from AEscripts called CompSetter that can automate that process for you. Be sure to put it in the Adobe After Effects CS5>Support Files>Scripts>ScriptUI Panels folder because it has a user interface. You can also use the standard script “resize composition” that comes with AE to resize the comps and their contents individually. They have a lot of very useful scripts that may help you as well.

HTH

[Erik Waluska]

You can copy/paste the position keyframes of the null to a mask on the text layer but it will become a flat 2D path, dropping the Z position data and probably shifting the points around in the process. I don’t think there’s any way to do what you are wanting to do inside of AE because the text on a path feature only works with 2D paths. You can fake it somewhat by rotating the text layer itself in 3D space and then changing the orientation of the characters so they appear upright. That would let you move in the Z axis but it would still be restricted to movement along a 2D plane.

The only way I can think of to do what you are talking about is to break up the word into individual characters and copy/paste the 3D null position keyframes to each character layer’s position property and then stagger them in time to acheive the correct spacing between the characters in the word. You can turn on layer>transform>auto-orient>orient along path and see if that works but I think you’ll find it is a little twitchy and you may end up having to orient by hand to get it to behave the way you want.

Maybe someone else will have a better/easier solution.

[Erik Waluska]

Check your fields setting in the interpret footage dialog by selecting the movie file in the project window and right-click>interpret footage>main. Try setting the fields to “none”.

Also, be sure your comp view is set to 100% zoom and full quality and that the pixel aspect ratio correction button is turned off – it is the button that looks like a box with a double-sided arrow over it.

[Erik Waluska]

This tutorial might be just what you need.

The description says:

“Making clothes react convincingly doesn’t have to be an impossible mission of frame by frame keying. Using simple expressions and the puppet tool you can make clothes react automatically to your characters movements.”

[Erik Waluska]

I’m a shortcut nut and I also use the time-reverse keyframes function a lot so this is great! I had no idea you could add your own shortcuts so easily. Thanks for sharing!

[Erik Waluska]

An easy way to do that would be to use a loop expression on a set of opacity keyframes. Just set three opacity HOLD keyframes 10 frames apart with the opacity % set in this order: 100, 0, 100. Then alt + click the opacity stopwatch and type in this expression and hit enter:

loopOut (Type=”cycle”)

Now you can just select and drag those three keyframes to where you want the blinking to start in your timeline. Also, if you select all three and hold down alt and drag either end keyframe you can stretch them out to make the blinking faster or slower.

HTH

[Erik Waluska]

Yeah, I’d love to see that feature or something like it added to AE. My 3D app, Softimage, has a really cool way of doing that. It has a script panel that you can open that just writes the scripting code for everything you do in real time and then if you want to recreate something you can just select the code from the script panel and drag it to a custom tool palette where it automatically creates a button that you can name whatever and then just press it and it will run the script and repeat all of the steps for you.

I would also love to see a node-based expressions system similar to Softimage ICE where you could just connect different nodes that do different things together to build your expressions rather than writing all of the code every time. Check out these videos to see how ICE works:
ICE: An Artist Tour #1
ICE: An Artist Tour #2

I’m going to submit both of these as feature requests so if anyone is interested in this feature please do the same.

[Erik Waluska]

Is there any reason you couldn’t just bring in the Illustrator document as a composition? As long as everything is on its own layer it will come in as a separate layer in AE.

[Erik Waluska]

I’m still on CS5 so I wasn’t aware of the new timecode support but that’s good to know.

[Erik Waluska]

AE doesn’t use timecode, it just counts from the beginning of the comp (in a timecode format – granted). If you want the layers you pre-comp from within the main comp to retain the time relation to the main comp then don’t use the rd_pre-compose script to trim the comps – that just makes the in point of the comp start at zero. You can un-precompose the clips and then compose them normally with “move all attributes…” checked on. Of course, when you go into the pre-comp it will be the duration of the main comp and not the clip.