[Erik Waluska]

Thanks, guys. For some reason I’ve just avoided this effect in the past (could be the cheesy used car dealer commercials that always use it that scared me away) but I guess it’s time to give it a go and see what it can do.

Thanks for posting the shatter map, that will give me a good idea of what it’s supposed to look like. I’m going to go blow stuff up now…

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Glad to hear you got it working. I finally did see the image you posted, I just copied the url into the browser instead of clicking the link – duh.

Yeah, the shatter effect is a little tricky sometimes. I’d be curious to see what the shatter map you used looks like since I’ve had very little success using custom maps with this effect myself.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

I have no idea why it would be doing that but you could try to key the “mask opacity” property instead of the “mask path” and see if that works any better.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Declan,
A quick search for “could not parse the file” on the Cow forums turns up some nearly identical threads – all of which point to the file being CMYK instead of RGB. I know you said you converted it but…

https://forums.creativecow.net/search.php?q=could+not+parse+the+file&f%5B%5D=2

If that doesn’t help then please provide some information about the file you are trying to import.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

No problem. Glad to hear you got it working.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Jordi,
Is your composition set to 30fps or 15fps? It should be set to 30fps for the live action video to play smoothly.

Also, the screencast will probably look a little jerky anyway if you play it back at normal speed since it is only 15fps footage. Interpreting it to 30fps just makes it play back twice as fast – and it will probably look smoother as a result.

You can use the 15fps footage in a 30fps comp, just don’t expect it to look as smooth as the 30fps video.

Hope that helps.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Unless someone has experienced this exact problem you will probably have to provide more details about the problem you are having, like the type of file you are trying to add to the timeline, etc.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

I didn’t quite understand the last part of your description and the link to the image seems to be broken. Could you give more details and/or try to post the link to the image again?

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Alex,
If you turn off auto-orientation you lose the point of interest property, which makes sense if you think about it since all auto-orient is doing is pointing the camera at stuff automatically based on the position value you enter. So if you turn off auto-orient, then you just have to manually point the camera at whatever you want it to look at by using the rotation properties of the camera.

A good technique is to parent the camera to a null and use the null to control the camera position, then animate the rotation of the camera to control what it is looking at. The null just gives you an extra level of control because you can animate the null and then additionally animate the camera’s position in relation to the null so you can do cool things like rotate around an object in a spiral while keeping the camera pointed toward the center of the spiral and so on…

There are lots of tutorials on the Cow and other places like VideoCopilot on this subject.

Of course, you can just animate the camera’s position and orientation or rotation. It just depends on what you need to accomplish.

As far as the graph editor goes, any of the above mentioned properties can be tweaked in the graph editor.

If I missed your point then please elaborate.

Hope that helps.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Just set the quality for the layer to the draft setting (the jagged backslash symbol) and AE will not interpolate the pixels.

-E