Erik Waluska
Forum Replies Created
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Sorry Sabine, I said “she”, I was confusing this poster with another I was replying to earlier.
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That’s true except she said she is zooming in and out with a camera, not scaling the text, so layer styles will not work in this case. Scaling the text instead of using a camera is one option, but you will lose any perspective lens distortion produced by the camera. Personally, I have experienced all sorts of weird buggy problems with 3D layers that have layer styles applied so I recommend avoiding them.
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Yeah, you would think it would be easy to find good maps but it’s not. Stay away from the digitalvectormaps.com products, they’re crap. We bought one of their world maps before and ended up getting a refund because they advertised the maps as being totally vector and say you can scale them as big as you want. The only parts that are vector are the outlines and the text, the rest of it is all raster and pixelates at anything about 100% scale. Here are a few links to check out:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&loc=en_us&extid=1045387
The CIA site is my favorite. All high-quality, detailed, accurate, public domain maps of everyplace on the globe. The pdf files are partially vector and you can open them as layered files in Illustrator and modify/stylize to your heart’s content…
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/refmaps.html -
I would just pre-compose the timecode from within the comp you want to use as the source of the timecode and then drop that pre-comp in whatever other comp you want to use it in.
Or, you can build an expression-based timecode clock and link across comps to the one you want to use as the source. Check this out…
https://aenhancers.com/viewtopic.php?t=21 -
Trash your preferences file. Just hold ctrl+alt+shift on a PC or command+option+shift on a mac while starting AE.
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“making a second layer underneath in a different color”
Yeah, that’s you’re best/easiest solution. The drop shadow effect is not “camera aware” so it doesn’t react when you zoom in/out, it stays the same size while the text size changes. It’s possible to write a couple of expressions to link to the camera Z position, etc. but it won’t give you any better results than just adding a duplicate text layer underneath the main one. Another option would be to add a parallel light and turn on 3D shadows, then turn on the 3D switch for your BG layer, enable “accept shadows” and move it back in Z space until you get the shadow distance you want. It’s a lot more trouble than duplicating the text layer but it is camera aware and the perspective of the shadow will change based on the position of the camera, which you may like better.
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That’s impossible to answer without knowing more about your export settings. Can you provide more info?
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There are quite a few tutorials and other resources out there, just search google for “after effects countdown timer” or something similar.
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Is it all animation or does it include video? If it’s all animation then just pre-comp the whole thing and time remap it or stretch it. If it contains video then you will probably need to re-edit the video clips to extend them or add in some additional clips to fill the gaps.
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If your video is encoded with H.264 then it could be the notorious Quicktime gamma shift. Check this article on Video Copilot for a fix:
https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2008/06/fix-quicktime-gamma-shift/