[Gary O’brien]

Yeah it’s a complete pain. I found that typing in the numbers directly rather than scrubbing helped me sometimes too, but then the next time it didn’t seem to make any difference….

Since posting originally I have upgraded my PC with new Graphics card, mobo and processor. It works fine now, but then it is essentially a new machine now! A tip I found was to set any masks on the footage to “none” , and then select that mask inside Keylight as an “Outside Mask” and invert it. It seems to behave better that way (I still do it this way even now)

I hope your luck holds out on your current project anyway!

[Gary O’brien]

I tried this and thought you’d cracked it! I was just about to message you to express my ever lasting gratitude, but then AFX crashed again in exactly the same way…..

[Gary O’brien]

Ahh – that sounds promising. I’ll give it a try myself over the weekend and see if I see any improvements here!

[Gary O’brien]

Yeah, it’s a complete pain. I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one experiencing this.

A while ago I even rolled back to a previous version of AFX that used to be fine, but the problem wasn’t fixed. As such I moved back to the latest version.

Nursing it along a bit, I get the best results when I follow these steps:

convert the footage to a lossless avi

Precompose the footage

Apply any masks to the precomp and set them to “none”

Apply keylight to the precomp and use the outside mask, checking the “invert” box

Minimise scrubbing the plugin values in favour of typing them in.

Crossing my fingers….

Pretty ridiculous set of circumstances, and the fact that the problem seems so rare makes me doubtful they’ll be a fix handed down anytime soon, or ever.

Also, I tried submitting a crash report, but as AFX doesn’t give you an error other than “has stopped working” I didn’t get very far with it.

If you find a proper solution, please let me know!

Good luck!

[Gary O’brien]

That’s great mate! Thanks a million 🙂

[Gary O’brien]

Thanks!

Yeah, I’ll make do that way for now. I guess a few copies of Element won’t be so bad in one comp, as long as it doesn’t get too cumbersome as you say.

[Gary O’brien]

Thanks, I couldn’t get that expression to work unfortunately, it caused the ship to rotate a further 90 degrees the moment it hit another keyframe in the motion path…

For now my work-around is to have two versions of the comp, one with, and one without AOAP activated. I’ve added them both to a third comp, and I just do a hard cut out of the first comp to the second once the ship has risen up, but before it needs to change heading as it moves off.

Not a particularly elegant solution, but it works for now at least…

Thanks for your efforts though. I may revisit this some other time as it’s a bit of a head scratcher.

It’s a shame AOAP isn’t keyframe-able, but I guess that’s just not how the thing is set up to work.

[Gary O’brien]

I was a little out of my depth to attempt that.

I’ve kept a bicycle pedal horizontal whilst it rotates before, by using a *-1 expression on the rotation value.

I tried that here, but the AOAP still overrides it, and I end up with it flying away pointing vertically down at the ground.

Any ideas on a more complex expression that might let me achieve what I’m after?

[Gary O’brien]

Hi Dave,

Thanks, yeah I tried that idea. When AOAP was ON, during take-off AFX introduced an annoying wobble where I guess my keyframes are fighting the Auto Orient, but it looked fine flying horizontally. Or with AOAP OFF, the take-off works great, but the horizontal flight just looked kinda hokey as the orientation simply didn’t match the curved direction of travel on every frame, no matter how hard I tried to match it by eye with keyframes.

Hope that makes sense.