[Graham Quince]

That’s a very odd preset – I’m trying to work out what it would be used for.

The Hide Last Character animator looks like it is there so you can wipe the letters on by animating the Start property.

I think the Stroke is being applied in the Text preset, rather than use whatever stroke the text is. I haven’t seen the flickering you’ve mentioned though.

Office Lights appears to be working the same for me as in the preview. I noticed in your project file, that it looks like both comps had the Silhouette preset applied as Office lights comes with a couple of sliders.

[Graham Quince]

There’s a couple of ways I can think of

Method 1 involves Fill (to turn the pin black), CC Radial Blur (to make a blurry shadow shape) and CC Composite (to restore the original on top of the other effects)

Method 2 uses Red Giant’s free Grow Bounds (so that the blurring won’t be limited to the shape’s boundary), Fill (as before), CC Scale Wipe (gives a better shadow when positioned right), Fast Box blur to soften the shape) and CC Composite (as before)

[Graham Quince]

Getting a good key is an art form in itself. Did you know there’s a preset for keying? Search for “keylight + ” and this gets pretty good results. If you’re getting semi-transparent images, you’ll probably need to change the keylight view settings to screen matte, and then use a levels effect to strengthen the whites and blacks. Then you can use this layer as a luma matte for a duplicate of your footage without any effects.

If that all sounds too complicated, I think this video is a pretty good starter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kfFggpdpis

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[Graham Quince]

I take it you’re rendering out using Match Source – High Bitrate for the H.264 video? I take it the ProRes QT version looks like the preview in Premiere?

Have you tried rendering directly from After Effects – in the last release Adobe reintroduced H.264 rendering from the render queue.

[Graham Quince]

Do you want the lines to cross over, like in the image with the S or not, like the second image?

Second image option – I’d suggest a second layer/shape underneath a white shape. The underneath layer to have a single thick stroke, then just keyframe it.

Lines crossing option, I’d be tempted to use two shapes and offset, one for each side.

[Graham Quince]

Hmm, that’s a good one. I think you may be forced to not use motion blur, then apply CC Motion Blur to the precomp or render out the footage and time remap that.

[Graham Quince]

I’ve had a similar disappointment, but I did come to realise that my set up (which is pretty similar to yours) is a lot more stable. I upgraded from a 5-year-old computer which was struggling to output a video. While using AE I’ve not “felt the improvement”, but I don’t think I’ve had a single failed render in the last 10 months.

So I guess that’s where a more powerful computer makes the difference.

[Graham Quince]

It sounds a little like the challenge I faced when I wanted to create an eclipse with a lens flare appearing at the edges.

https://youtu.be/d2NsHJOR-to

But if not, then take a look at the ease() expression.

You’ll need a controlling variable, maybe just a slider, then it’s

ease(MySlider,0,100,squarePosition,ParentPostion)

This will ease the square from it’s starting position to the parent’s position over the slider’s keyframed from 0 to 100. There’d be a lot of fiddling to get it right, but I think that’s what you’re after.

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[Graham Quince]

I love that tutorial. Matt Smart really nailed the look.

Just to elaborate on Andy’s bit about the text, I made a tutorial a couple of years back showing how to link 3D text to geographic coordinates, if that’s any help:

https://youtu.be/ckpnfHp3Yb8

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[Graham Quince]

Key up and key down functions can be notorious difficult to capture once, quite often they’ll record double presses. If it is consistently doubling, maybe the simplest approach is to add 0.5 each time instead of 1.