James Archibald
Forum Replies Created
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Took me about four read-throughs to vaguely understand what it is you’re trying to achieve. You ought to phrase your questions and intended result as coherently and clearly as possible to get the best chance of finding a solution.
This is more of an editing technique than an effect, although the sort of footage you’re working with impacts massively on how big a job it is. If it’s a lock-off shot, you’re in luck because you just need to duplicate your footage for each position and time each hero-position to where you want it to appear, then animate the Opacity property to transition between layers, using garbage-mattes to overlap positions if required.
Moving shots get considerably more complicated. As long as you have a clean background plate you should be okay, but it’ll probably be using the Roto Brush and Refine Matte to isolate your hero, then again animate the opacity property to bring them in and out of the shot.
It’s very difficult to answer more thoroughly than that without knowing anything about the footage.
• Archie •
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Hi Kristopher,
You should be able to copy your mask path data to a new shape layer. Be sure to actually copy the path, not the mask itself or it’ll just paste the mask onto your shape.
Once you have a shape path, you can add the Offset Paths property to it (from the Add>) menu in the layer properties. This will let you scale the shape whilst keeping it proportioned to the original, as opposed to scaling it linearly with the whole layer.
Finally, you can add a stroke property to the shape and enable (and animate) dashes with that, removing the need to use Vegas (Although you can still use that if you prefer).
Hope this helps. I think once you use Offset Paths, the rest will be easy.
• Archie •
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Derp, sorted it. Knew it was simple, sorry, folks.
dice = effect(“Zap Target”)(“Slider”);
t1 = thisComp.layer(“Edge Zap Target 1”).transform.position;
t2 = thisComp.layer(“Edge Zap Target 2”).transform.position;
t3 = thisComp.layer(“Edge Zap Target 3”).transform.position;
t4 = thisComp.layer(“Edge Zap Target 4”).transform.position;
t5 = thisComp.layer(“Pylon 1 – Top”).transform.position;
t6 = thisComp.layer(“Pylon 1 – Bot”).transform.position;if (dice==1) t1
else if (dice==2) t2
else if (dice==3) t3
else if (dice==4) t4
else if (dice==5) t5
else if (dice==6) t6• Archie •
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Even the basic ‘glow’ effect might be what you’re looking for. Set the threshold up into the 90s so that it only affects the brightest areas.
• Archie •
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The roto brush will constantly update or “propagate” its matte every time you change/open your comp. Freezing prevents it doing this, as it’s a time-consuming process. Unfreezing won’t ‘lose’ your roto, it’ll just allow it to propagate it again. If you go into the effect properties of the roto’d layer, you’ll notice that it will still have all your brush strokes and refine strokes logged at each frame you made them.
See the roto brush? It’s pretty cool.In short, you won’t have lost anything – you can unfreeze, make your corrections, allow it to propagate and re-freeze without losing your initial brush strokes.
It’s also worth noting that refining your matte in the roto effect controls does not require unfreezing, but using the refine brush does.
• Archie •
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If I’m reading it right, create a new solid, paste your mocha Corner Pin data onto it so you have a fully opaque screen cover tracked onto it. Take your reflection layer and put it under this solid in the layer order, then set its Track Matte (TrkMat) to ‘Alpha Matte’. This will keep the reflection within the boundaries of the screen without distorting it by adding the track to the reflection itself.
You could also apply the corner pin keyframes to a power pin effect instead, allowing you to manually control the expansion of the track matte, which can be extremely useful for fine tuning screen replacement edges and spill.
• Archie •
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Oooh, unchecking VSync and/or disabling offscreen buffers in the OpenGL prefs has sorted it! Thanks hugely, Roland!
• Archie •
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Hmm, a new development:
If I end the mocha ae process quickly enough after it has locked up, i get a windows error message informing me that “mediaIOserver.exe” has stopped working. I’m not sure if this will help narrow down the issue.I’ve just updated a sister machine in the building to the latest CC2014 and Mocha AE has zero issues on it. Exactly the same hardware, exactly the same TIF sequence. :X
• Archie •
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Unfortunately that was the first thing I tried 🙁
I’ll check if my home system is also suffering from this tonight, but considering the lack of google results it seems to be a fairly unique issue. Dang!
• Archie •
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Hi Jack,
You can animate the hue values of your stroke and fill independently using the Animate tools found to the right of the ‘Text’ field in your text layer’s properties.
Click the > arrow next to Animate and choose either ‘stroke color’ or ‘fill color’ depending on which you’d like to animate.
• Archie •