[Filip Vandueren]

Any Javascript/ECMA-script site or book should give you a good clue as to the basic syntax of the language.
Coming from PHP it shouldn’t be too difficult.
Be sure you understand After effects by itself, because what good is it trying to understand what the Object Model is of the app…

Once you know After Effects, the manual is pretty clear about most objects and methods.
A few excpetions are a.o. “Layer Space transformations” and the Noise-, loop- and Wiggle-functions, they’re completely alien to Javascript.
Dan Ebberts has some great articles and tutorials about those here, and on his site motionscript.com

Anyway,
The problem you’re describing seems like something that could be done with temporalWiggle.
I’m assuming you want the actual positions to remain the same, only the timing of the loop to be altered.

If you apply temporalWiggle to a property like position, the result is based on the keyframed values, but results can go back and forth in time.
Or try precomposing your animation, enable time-remapping on the precomped layer so you can keyframe time.
Set up a loop there (I mean, with keyframes in the time-remapping) and then wiggle or temporalWiggle that time-value.

[Filip Vandueren]

Any Javascript/ECMA-script site or book should give you a good clue as to the basic syntax of the language.
Coming from PHP it shouldn’t be too difficult.
Be sure you understand After effects by itself, because what good is it trying to understand what the Object Model is of the app…

Once you know After Effects, the manual is pretty clear about most objects and methods.
A few excpetions are a.o. “Layer Space transformations” and the Noise-, loop- and Wiggle-functions, they’re completely alien to Javascript.
Dan Ebberts has some great articles and tutorials about those here, and on his site motionscript.com

Anyway,
The problem you’re describing seems like something that could be done with temporalWiggle.
I’m assuming you want the actual positions to remain the same, only the timing of the loop to be altered.

If you apply temporalWiggle to a property like position, the result is based on the keyframed values, but results can go back and forth in time.
Or try precomposing your animation, enable time-remapping on the precomped layer so you can keyframe time.
Set up a loop there (I mean, with keyframes in the time-remapping) and then wiggle or temporalWiggle that time-value.

[Filip Vandueren]

Either shoot it on green/blue-screen so you can chrome-key to insert a (fake) background-layer, which you can fade out,
or you’ll have to rotoscope it by hand, frame by frame, and put the rotoscoped copy on top of the original, then fade-out the original.

Depending on the style, you may get away with sloppy/grungy masking.

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi there,

try doing a search on “ribbon” or “arrow ribbon” in the archives.
You’ll find tons of tips and some tutorials.

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi there,

try doing a search on “ribbon” or “arrow ribbon” in the archives.
You’ll find tons of tips and some tutorials.

[Filip Vandueren]

Have you tried going into the secret pref’s (hold shift while going to the prefs) and then making the ram purge every 5 frames or such.

[Filip Vandueren]

interestingly if you command-click (ctrl click on PC I guess) the layers one by one to expand your selection,
you can choose the order in wich they will be pasted.
So if you click 1-4-3-2, then hit copy, and hit paste, you get that particular order, top to bottom.

It’s not bug, it’s a feature

[Filip Vandueren]

1. the fastest you can do is type Ctrl-shift-o (Opacity), type 50, then return. Not the way Photoshop does it, but reasonably fast.
Also ctrl-shift-R, ctrl-shift-P for rotation and position

2. no, keyboard shortcuts are not passed through to effects, except the ones that take overthe whole screen I think.

[Filip Vandueren]

try using a roughen edges effect with these settings:

Edge Type: Roughen
Border: 50
Edge Sharpness: 0
Fractal Influence: 0

or (multiple effects needed)

1. Add any Blur (‘Box Blur’, ‘Fast Blur’, ‘Gaussian blur’, whatever)
2. Add a ‘Levels’ effect where you set “Alpha Input Black” = 128
3. Add a “CC Composite” effect

The blurriness of your first filter takes care of the feather radius
This has some side-effects if the layer you are starting from allready has a soft-alpha (but I’m guessing it doesn’t in your case)

BTW: To easily mask the entire layer, select the layer, then double-click on the rectangular mask tool in the toolbox.

[Filip Vandueren]

You should try isolating the diff. elements to seperate layers in Photoshopk, then animating those in After effects.
Or depending on the image, rebuild it from scratch using Photoshop and/or After effects’ effects like Fractal Noise or Ramp, so you can edit the effects rather than just changing the position/opacity of sep. layers: this may get a more organic look.

Then again: if you do it using only layers and keyframing; it will translate pretty well to a Flash movie which is perhaps what they want as delivery format? ?