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Fred Hickler
September 29, 2014 at 5:55 pm in reply to: Brush write on speed : make consistent?

Those both sound like very good suggestions. Plus they spark other possible ideas in my mind as well. Unfortunately, I had to go ahead and use my pain-in-the-butt method just to get the job done on time. But I’m sure this will come up again, as I will be doing many similar jobs in the future. So next time, I will try one of these ideas and report back on how it went.

Thanks again.
Fred Hickler
September 29, 2014 at 12:11 am in reply to: Brush write on speed : make consistent?

I assume you’re talking about the automatically generated keyframes for End 0% and End 100%. I essentially did already do what you suggest, but it is a pain in the butt. I wish I could have it paint on and record the path, but have the option of ignoring the interim speed changes and just use the overall speed.

Let me explain what my goal is and perhaps someone could suggest a better method. I have an illustrator graphic of a curving path of irregular width that I want to draw on. I know I can do this by drawing the path in AE and animating it, but I don’t want to do this, because the source graphic is an AI vector of irregular width that would be too hard to reproduce in AE. What I did was to paint over it and to use the paint effect as a mask. But this results in a path that draws on at inconsistent speed, as mentioned before. A wipe effect or animated mask shape would not work either, because of the curviness of the path. — unless I animate a mask frame by frame – but this is the type of tediousness I am trying to avoid.

So what would the best way to have a curving path draw itself on the screen at a consisten speed, assuming that the path must be an imported AI graphic and not drawn in in AE?
Fred Hickler
September 25, 2014 at 5:57 pm in reply to: Brush write on speed : make consistent?

Does applying a brush with duration set to write on generate key frames? If so how do you display / edit them? I don’t see any.
Fred Hickler
September 25, 2014 at 5:56 pm in reply to: Brush write on speed : make consistent?

Thanks for the suggestion but I’m not writing on text. I am applying an animated brush effect. To achieve this, you set the Duration to Write On, but it is not writing in the sense of text.
Fred Hickler
July 18, 2013 at 2:17 pm in reply to: Avoid “stair step” layers?

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I’ve often thought that it wouldn’t be too difficult for Adobe to develop a feature into AE that would make it a little more NLE-ish, where a single layer could have multiple items in it across time, so the the layer name would be dependent on where the playhead was. The items themselves in the timeline could have their names on them so you you could see what they were, sort of like this:

[—-somevideo.mov—-][———someimage.png———] etc.

It would probably be difficult to make the items overlap in time and be able to add transitions, like an NLE. It’ll probably never happen, but I just wanted to throw that idea out there.

My sequences always end up looking like:
---- ----------- ------- -----
which seems inefficient. But I will try all your suggestions and I’m sure it will help.
Fred Hickler
March 27, 2011 at 12:11 am in reply to: collapse transformations makes inner mesh warp “global”

“its because mesh warp is not based on coordinates, it works from the center of your composition”

However, this is effected by collapsing transformations. When it is off, the mesh stays centered and scaled to the precomp. When it is on, it becomes centered and scaled to the main comp. I find this behavior annoying and think there should be a switch for the user to control whether it happens of not.
Fred Hickler
March 25, 2011 at 9:40 pm in reply to: collapse transformations makes inner mesh warp “global”

“Mesh Warp is a 2D effect, but you’re trying to use in a 3D environment. Odd things ensue.”

Really? Even if none of the 3D switches are turned on?
Fred Hickler
March 25, 2011 at 9:20 pm in reply to: collapse transformations makes inner mesh warp “global”

what’s jagging it? the mesh warp? or the fact that it is “scaling” your vector? if it’s the first, mesh warp has a quality setting. Increasy it to 10, if it’s the later… keep increasing the InnerComp’s resolution (with upscalling the vector layer accordingly) while decreasing its size on the maincomp relatively. You won’t have to collapse it, AE will figure things out.

It is the latter. So I guess I can do your second suggestion. It is just a major pain, as the project is actually much more complicated than the scenario I described.

The whole reason I chose to use a vector shape was so that I could scale and warp it at will without it pixellating. That’s the whole point of vector shapes.

Why does mesh warp behave that way? If there is a logical reason, then I say they should include a “stay local” switch to the mesh warp effect that will make it not do that.
Fred Hickler
February 18, 2008 at 2:34 am in reply to: Search for font usage?

What I am asking is this:

Is it possible to search within an AE project for occurrences of a particular font?

OR – alternatively – is it possible to get AE to show you where in a project an occurrence of a missing font is (not a trivial question in a very complex project)?

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