[Jason Jantzen]

precomp the keyed footage. Then on the precomp use the rotobrush to get a quick roto around your people, but of course, exclude the pole in your roto. That’s how I would do it.

If they’re not moving around much, you could also just do a quick mask and keyframe it like a roto.

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Jason Jantzen]

I’m not sure if I follow correctly, but the small square is magnifying and the big square isn’t? Is the magnification happening only in the small square?

What I’ve always done is create two layers for this kind of thing. One layer much bigger than your canvas (hopefully large resolution) and a second layer where you’re animation takes place. The small square that magnifies will reveal the much bigger version of your image. So you’d have to create a track matte over the big version of your image that follows your square for magnifying.

There’s a tutorial over that here – https://mattrunks.com/en/tutorials/after-effects/magnifying-glass

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Jason Jantzen]

whenever I do it, it’s usually about 10-12 keyframes max. so like 10-12 stages of animation. think 12 fps old school flash animation days. that’ essentially the amount of detail you need here. the time it takes you to set up shape replicators and keyframe the offsets and such is about how long it takes to create each frame of that animation. Granted, there is a large degree of finesse required to make it smooth and beautiful. That’s the difference between “animator” and “AE artist”.

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Jason Jantzen]

I remember using Smedge at Run Studios in Kirkland Wa. I’ve seen many many renders go through there using that method with no problem. Of course, that was CS6.

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Jason Jantzen]

Two ways to animate that. I’m guessing the poofs of smoke are keyframed shape layers, but they could also just be frame by frame. I didn’t see the paint splatters you were talking about, but most likely just frame by frame keyframed, or hand drawn. A lot of animators like to incorporate a little frame by frame animation drawn in Photoshop, but you can also just animate each frame in AE to get a similar look. The big difference is frame rate, so you might animate every other frame instead of each one to get the right look (use hold frames).

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Jason Jantzen]

oh cool, I see now. How do you ease between targets? I saw the linear expression towards the bottom and I changed that to ease, and it seems ease a bit, but is there a way to easy it more?

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Jason Jantzen]

that’s pretty cool, but I can’t seem to figure out why the expression makes the child layer jump. It starts out in the same position as the parent, then when I set the expression, it jumps off to the lower right. When I move the parent around, the child appears to move exponentially as well. Any thoughts on what’s going on there?

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Jason Jantzen]

Dan Ebberts posted a reply to this exact question like two days ago. I know you’re not the same person, but here’s what he came up with. Add a position animator on the text layer and move it down below the base line of the original text position. Set a track matte to obscure the text start position and add this Expression Selector to your position animator

delay = .03;
slideDur = .6;
myStart = inPoint + textIndex*delay;
easeOut(time,myStart,myStart+slideDur,100,0)

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Jason Jantzen]

This is a cool idea!

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj

[Jason Jantzen]

This is great.

Not sure where to post this, but I also noticed that all the disk cache from 12.0 hangs around filling up your cache drive. And if you’re like me, it’s a small SSD that fills up fast. Probably best to just format the drive and start fresh anyway.

Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj