[Erik Waluska]

You can export from After Effects to Flash and create interactive web content. I don’t have any experience with it myself other than a lesson from one of the “Creating Motion Graphics” books years ago (recommended), but I recall it wasn’t super difficult but did have to be done a specific way to work correctly. Here’s the Adobe Help Page to get you started, then try googling “after effects to flash” for some more info. HTH

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia

[Erik Waluska]

You’re on the right track, you just need to use a spotlight parented to the null as the emitter. The light’s layer name has to start with “Emitter” for particular to use it. The cool thing is that if you use a spotlight the particles will point in the direction of the light and also the spread of the particle stream is controlled by the light’s cone angle. You can even control the number of particles per second with the light’s intensity, and there’s an option under Particle>Set Color to use the color of the light emitter.

Check out this project file:
6729_circlingparticleemitter.zip

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia

[Erik Waluska]

Probably the easiest way would be to import your illustrator shape, pre-compose it and the layers you want to mask (the shape should be the top layer), and set the shape’s blending mode to Stencil Alpha.

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia

[Erik Waluska]

The two images you posted appear to be the same, both after effects standard workspace. You may have seen Premiere Pro’s layout and thought it was After Effects — they’re kinda similar, sort of.

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia

[Erik Waluska]

If I understand what you’re doing, I think you could put a copy of the circle thing under the keyed actor and another copy on top. The copy underneath would save you from having to mask the entire hand because the chroma key would do that. For the copy on top you could just use a loose garbage matte to cut out the middle of the circle where the hand will be, just leaving the outer edge and glow of the circle showing. Then you would only have to mask the edge of the circle where the hand crosses it. Does that make sense?

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia

[Erik Waluska]

What problem are you having with the blending modes, specifically?

One thing you could try is the “colorize” option in the “hue/saturation” effect. If that’s not what you’re after then maybe provide some more info or better yet post some images.

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia

[Erik Waluska]

I think this will work:

Divide 100% by the Premiere speed factor to get the stretch % for AE.

So if your Premiere speed factor is 200% then it would be like this:

100/200=.50

So you would enter a stretch value of 50% in AE.

100/156=.64 (rounded off)

Stretch factor in AE of 64%

The problem you may run into is that I believe there will be frames missing when you stretch the clip out again.

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia

[Erik Waluska]

Or just switch to the screen blending mode.

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia

[Erik Waluska]

Hey Jason,
According to her post, Anastasia is time-stretching the layer to a percentage that is not equally divisible by the frame rate, so AE is forced to repeat or skip frames. The only solution that I’m aware of is some sort of frame blending.

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia

[Erik Waluska]

Glad you got it figured out.

Erik Waluska
EAWmedia