[Jeff Hinkle]

One thing to keep in mind before you start eyeing the iMacs: their AMD graphics cards are not compatible with the 3D raytracing in After Effects CS6 (and the cards can’t be replaced). While you can technically do the new 3D stuff without an NVIDIA card, it is going to be unbearably slow waiting for it to render. If you want the option of using the 3D raytracing, you might need to look at a Mac Pro instead.

[Jeff Hinkle]

That’s so weird. I just had to do this today for an old copy of CS3 for my company. I grabbed the trial from ProDesignTools, input the serial number we had on hand, and we were off to the races. I know you say you tried that and it no longer works, but did you follow their instructions exactly? You have to first log into the Adobe site with your Adobe ID, then start to download CS6, cancel that, then bounce back to ProDesignTools and then the links will work. Without logging in to Adobe first, the links all give a “file not found” error. I just gave it a quick test and the CS4 Production Premium started downloading.

Good luck!

https://prodesigntools.com/download-adobe-cs4-and-cs3-free-trials-here.html

[Jeff Hinkle]

Mocha is a motion tracking system and I’ve used it a little bit. Certainly no expert. While you can use it to motion track a matte, it’s best suited for shapes and hard edged objects. If you were trying to matte, say, a building, or a window pane, or a billboard, and replace the contents with different footage, Mocha would be the way to go. But since your example has a man walking, I have to imagine his shape is constantly changing (arms appearing front and back as they swing, legs scissoring, head bobbing) which is going to most likely be beyond Mocha’s capabilities.

[Jeff Hinkle]

Have the exact same issue with CS4 on a Mac. I’ve never found an actual cause for the problem–like you say, it seems to crop up randomly–but I have found that purging the video memory (Edit>Purge>Video Memory) seems to at least make it go away for a while. Maybe that’ll work on your box, too.

[Jeff Hinkle]

We’ve used the DownloadHelper add-on in Firefox for grabbing from YouTube. It’s free and gets the job done.

[Jeff Hinkle]

Do you have access to/are you familiar with After Effects? This sounds like a job better suited to that program. If you’re not very familiar with AE, no need to learn a lot of new procedures. You could use the same sort of process you’re doing now (masking out your element with the Pen tool) but with the benefit of not having to redraw the path every single frame. You set a keyframe for the mask path on various frames and AE will handle moving the path between the keyframes. You’ll still wind up with a fair amount of drawing, but far, far less than redrawing the entire path from scratch on every… single… frame.

[Jeff Hinkle]

This might do the trick for you.

Add a Slider Control to your layer. Call it something like Degree Control.
Option- (or Alt-) click on the stopwatch for Rotation. Add the following expression:

angle=effect(“Degree Control”)(“Slider”); //feel free to pickwhip this
frequency=60;
spin=Math.sin(frequency*time)*angle;
spin

Now add keyframes for Degree Control for your maximum and minimum rotation at the points in time you want them to be. In your case, 5 degrees at 00:00 and 0 degrees at 00:24.

Math.sin will bounce between the positive and negative values of the Degree Control. You can speed up or slow down the rotation by changing the number for frequency in the second line.

This won’t give you EXACTLY 5 degrees, then 4 degrees, then 3 degrees, etc. but it will give you a decaying oscillation, which seems to be what you want. I’m a bit of an expressions newbie myself, so there’s no doubt a more elegant solution, but this should get you rolling.

[Jeff Hinkle]

I’ll be crossing my fingers (we do that in English, too) for my iMac as well. Here’s hoping!

[Jeff Hinkle]

No worries. Glad I could help.

[Jeff Hinkle]

If I’m understanding your problem correctly, precomp your layer with the Radio Wave effect and choose “Move all attributes to new composition.” Then apply masks to the resulting comp.