[Erik Waluska]

I never even thought of using “foam”, that’s a great idea.

[Erik Waluska]

Awesome. Glad you found one that worked for you. That site is great, I always check there first for things like this. Here are a couple of other scripts/plug-ins I found a while ago that you might also find useful for what you’re doing:

Change Time PreComp
https://armoredsquirrel.com/blog/?page_id=69
Change Time PreComp Select your comp.
Enter in the new time in the dialog.
It will retime every comp and precomp to the new time and change the outpoint of any stills or solids you have.

De-Compose
https://www.batchframe.com/extras/#De-Compose
De-Compose allows you to quickly and easily extract all of the layers out of a nested composition and place them into the parent composition while maintaining all the effects and other properties.

[Erik Waluska]

That should be fairly easy to do with a script. Maybe check aescripts.com, they may already have one that does this.

[Erik Waluska]

At the default settings with Particle Playground applied to a solid (or any layer really) you should get this result when you scrub forward in the timeline…

At the beginning of the timeline you won’t see any particles, just the producer point…

Try to start with a new project and create a new composition, add a solid layer and apply the effect to the solid and scrub in the timeline to see if the particles are showing. If not, there must be something else going on that’s preventing you from viewing the particles but I can’t think of anything that would cause that problem. Maybe try trashing your preferences file, that fixes a lot of weird little buggy issues with AE. https://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS37cb61f8f3397d86-164c9f19127035dd253-8000.html

I don’t know what you are trying to do with Particle Playground but it’s not the greatest or most intuitive particle effect. You might try CC Particle World or a paid plug-in like Trapcode Particular instead. Particle World comes with AE and is actually pretty powerful and not too difficult to use. There are plenty of tutorials out there on both of those particle effects.

HTH

-E

[Erik Waluska]

What type of layer are you applying the effect to? A solid? Is the layer underneath of another layer so you can’t see it maybe? Did you scrub forward in time in the timeline and still don’t see any particles? What can you see?

[Erik Waluska]

Hey Dale,
I’ve done the same thing but with the boat just going straight across left to right and used the distance cutoff setting, which worked okay. For what you are trying to do the distance cutoff won’t work. I would suggest just masking the bottom of the boat. You’ll have to animate the mask manually if you want the waves to lap against the side of the boat. That’s the only way I can think of to do it but maybe someone else will have a better idea…

[Erik Waluska]

I didn’t know AE would not interpret the HDV footage correctly, I guess that would be one of the “other” problems with mpeg footage.

The frame rate is referred to as 24p but it’s really 23.976 so you should use that frame rate for the comp. Actual 24p is just for film.

Depending on where you are distributing the final video you may eventually need to convert to 29.97 or other frame rates depending on the platform the video will be viewed on – TV, web, etc…

[Erik Waluska]

Hi,
Your camera shoots in either Hi-def HDV (mpeg) format or standard-def DV (AVI). I assume you are shooting in 1920×1080 hi-def so the footage will all be in mpeg format. This is not a good format for compositing in After Effects because of the lossy inter-frame compression. You can do it, it just won’t have the best quality and you may run into other problems. I would suggest converting it to another format before importing it into AE. But if you want to take your chances with the mpeg footage, when you import the footage into AE it will automatically be interpreted so you just drag the clip to the new comp icon and it will create a new comp with the correct settings for that footage. The only thing to watch out for is the fields setting in the interpret footage dialog because AE sometimes sets it to “lower field first” when it should be “none”. If the footage looks jagged then try setting it to “none” and see if it looks better.

It may be tedious but you should really read the manual if you want to understand your equipment. Also check out the wiki on HDV here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV

HTH

[Erik Waluska]

“This” what?

[Erik Waluska]

I’m not totally sure I follow what you’re trying to accomplish but check out AEScripts.com, they have a ton of scripts for sorting, moving, abusing layers in various ways.