[Jeff Hinkle]

Looks like in your Character palette, your text height is set to 0%. So your text is there, it’s just really, really flat. Pop that back up to 100% and you should be all set.

[Jeff Hinkle]

With a similar background/foreground issue like this, I’d go in and do it by hand. Use the Pen tool to draw a mask around her body, just roughing in the hair (stay inside the contours of her hair). Command-click the thumbnail in the Paths palette to make a selection, then select your model layer in the Layers palette and click on the Add Layer Mask button. This will give you a transparency mask for your model. If the edges seem too sharp, you can do it again but contract the selection by 1 pixel and apply a 1-pixel feather before making the mask.

The hair’s not going to look too good, but we’ll get to that. Shift-click the mask in the Layers palette to turn it off, showing you the entire image, then go into your Channels palette, select your layer mask, and turn on its visibility. This will put an overlay color over your image, showing you where the image will be transparent and where it will be opaque. You might need to double-click the mask layer to change the overlay color if it’s too similar to your background.

Then, still in the mask channel, with a soft-edged brush, go in and start painting in the hair you just masked out. Use white to paint in visibility, black to paint in transparency. You can use a larger brush for the large areas, smaller (say, 2-pixel) for strands and flyaways. Having a pressure-sensitive tablet is a HUGE help in this. Setting opacity to be determined by pressure will give nice faded edges on those errant hairs. And don’t feel you have to be 100% exact with this. Get it close but you can give them a haircut with no one noticing. How long this takes depends on the model’s hairstyle, how frizzy her hair is, and how anal you want to be. Go back and hit the ends of the hair strands with a soft-edged black brush to kill any hard edges.

Once that’s done and you’re happy with the basic mask, duplicate your image layer and turn the mask back on (shift-click it in the Layers palette) and turn off the mask visibility in the Channels palette. Turn off your original layer so you can go back to it if you need. With the transparency on, add a layer below your model and fill it with white. You’ll probably see a lot of stray background colors in the hair you painted back in. Switch to the Clone Stamp tool, make sure you’re editing the image and not the mask, and sample colors from the hair and paint into the strands. This will blend in the natural hair colors, but you won’t see any of the overspill thanks to the layer mask. When you’re done, you should have a natural-looking isolated image.

[Jeff Hinkle]

In your Project Window, you should have a comp named the same as your Illustrator file (unless you renamed it, of course), and a folder named [COMPNAME] Layers. Open that folder and you should see all your layers from the Illustrator file. Right-click one, choose “Replace Footage > File…” and navigate to the new location of your Illustrator file. Make sure “Import As:” at the bottom of the window is set to “Footage.”

Once you’ve selected your AI file, you’ll get another dialog box. Under “Layer Options” select “Choose Layer” and from the pop-up select the layer with the same name as the one you originally selected in the Project Window. Hit OK and all the rest of your layers should magically relink and appear in your project.

[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.