[Filip Vandueren]

Just type your text, in the timeline twirl it open and you’ll see “Animate” with a popup triangle next to it, choose tracking there and you get the property so you can key-frame it.
Please read the manual-section regarding animating text, because a lot has changed in After Effects’ text-capabilities since 5.5

[Filip Vandueren]

See if one of your three channels has less noise than any other, if so, Use only that one, for example by using the shift channels effect and then use Colorama or tint to re-introduce your duotone look.

You can also try duplicating the layer, set the duplicated layer’s transfer mode to darken, then use a lur or median, or perhaps the best choice:

dust & scratches:

first set the radius as small as possible but so you get rid of all the white noise. (it’s in essence a median)
then slowly adjust the threshold untill you start to see the noise again, for me it’s usually between 8-24%,

for example: 16 -> now the median is only applied to pixels that differ more than 16 levels from their neighbouring pixels, so soft grain and tone variations survive but harsher specks with more contrast get medianed out.

By using the darken mode, you make sure that black detail survives, and only white bugs gets squashed.

[Filip Vandueren]

Since osX 10.4, the Os can access and distribute 8GB of ram (the max you can put in there) over the different running processes.

But any individual App can only access 2GB.

So no matter how much Ram you get, After effects only uses 2Gb.
I’ve got 8Gb, and that’s a good thing when I’m running a lot of powerhouse apps that are hogging minimum of 1Gig.

Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Logic, Illustrator, CInema 4D and After Effects running, and all of the sudden, tyhat big green Pie in the Activity Monitor Ram usage dissappears 😉

[Filip Vandueren]

AE is not really a 3d app.

You’ll need some Zaxwerks plugin or their full package.
Or a 3D app like Maxon cinema4D

[Filip Vandueren]

Sounds like something you might achieve with the “Card Dance” filter.
it has a pretty extensive section in he helpfiles, check it out.

[Filip Vandueren]

You might want to check in the Max forum, many guys over here work on macs and many use Cinema4D.
I’m one of them 😎 , but I think that your project would be very useful for Max-users.

Also, the Max / After Effects readers in this forum, porbably haven’t read this post, since it is not at all obvious from the thread-title that it’s a discussion about importing 3dsMax scene files…

[Filip Vandueren]

You might want to check in the Max forum, many guys over here work on macs and many use Cinema4D.
I’m one of them 😎 , but I think that your project would be very useful for Max-users.

Also, the Max / After Effects readers in this forum, porbably haven’t read this post, since it is not at all obvious from the thread-title that it’s a discussion about importing 3dsMax scene files…

[Filip Vandueren]

Let me know how it went or if you have other problems.

[Filip Vandueren]

Let me know how it went or if you have other problems.

[Filip Vandueren]

As a workaround::

you can extract the Z-depth to greyscale values, precompose that and feed it into a filter that uses greyscales to Blur selectively.
There’s a third party-filter somewhere called Rack-focus that does that.
I’m sure there are some Lensblur filters out there with the same functionality

After Effects comes with ‘Compound blur’, which does not use a “centered Focus point” like rack focus, it always blurs 0 pixels at black, max pixels at white (or vice versa), but you cannot say : “don’t blur at 50% grey, but do blur at 0% black and 100% white”

The workaround for that would be to create a “solarized’ greyscale map.
I’ve created an example-project that does that, with two depth matte filters, and a channel combiner to turn the alpha-matte into a greyscale.

It uses a few sliders and expressions to make the process easier to control, but they’re not really necessary.
You get sliders for “Focal Plane”, “Focal Thickness” and “Focal plane feather”

download the comp at: https://www.vandueren.be/forumstuff/3dfilters/