[Jeremy Allen]

I’m running pretty much the same setup as you, except mine is a Quad and AE7, but I still go through the same hassles while working. After working in Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash for so long, it almost seems like something is wrong with AE when every little thing you do seems to take forever. But I’ve come to learn that’s just the way it is. It takes alot of processing power to make that stuff happen.

Working at half rez and skipping frames seems weird at first, but you just have to get used to it. Aside from what’s already been mentioned, you could also try turning off lights or certain effects after you know they are working like you want them. You could also turn off other layers that you aren’t working on at the moment. Another thing I found useful is to use the “region of interest” when checking smaller animations. That way it will only preview and render a certain part of the comp.

Most likely you don’t want to spend $500 on an extra program, but I’ve heard nothing but praises about Nucleo Pro. Version 1 is available for $50 but I don’t know what the differences are. Hang in there, we all have to deal with it! 🙂

[Jeremy Allen]

So you want the 3d layers to show through the frame, like a picture? I can think of a couple different ways..

1. mask each layer individually with a layer mask.
2. place the “bg” layer between the frame and 3d layers, using a mask set to subtract to act as a hole in the background. Does that make sense? If only the camera is moving and not the layers, that should work..

[Jeremy Allen]

Andrew Kramer talks about adjusting speed and using Pixel Motion to help the frame blending in this tutorial. It may be of some use to you..

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=30

[Jeremy Allen]

Nice explaination there Darby, I didn’t fully understand how that worked either..

On a related note, do you know how velocity and gravity affect particles emitted from a layer? I was trying to do a different version of the popular “text to smoke” effects, only using pictures instead of text and a different kind of particle (same basic principle though). Once my particles were built up, I wanted to blow them towards the camera with a mix of velocity and z wind. From what I could gather, it seemed like only newly generated particles were affected by the wind and velocity, while older particles just died out in the position they were in.

Is this normal, or was I doing something wrong? Basically I wanted all the particles to start blowing once I keyframed the wind and velocity..

[Jeremy Allen]

I can’t really give you a step by step right now, but you might have to do it in 2 passes. Get the key for the talent looking good, duplicate the footage, reset Primatte and then only work on keying out the shadow. You may need to tweak the contrast so the shadows will darken up a bit. Then you would need to mask each layer so only the body is showing for the talent and only the shadow for the shadow layer. It’s a bit of a pain, but sometimes you have to do several passes when pulling complex keys.

I hope that makes sense. Anybody else?

[Jeremy Allen]

If the sound is already synced, I wouldn’t split it up just so I could sync it again in another program. I would use the render Qeue to make my quicktime, and make sure the audio output is checked under Lossless.

[Jeremy Allen]

In a pinch, you could always export the record spinning 1 perfect revolution. Then re-import the footage and use Interpret Footage to loop it however many times you like, kinda like Dave was saying. You’d need to export with RGB+Alpha.

I know that’s not exactly what you were going for, but it would produce the same end result.

[Jeremy Allen]

UPDATE:
I’m getting a little short on time for this project so I figured I would try something else. I put all the pics and the opacity contoller null in the MASTER timeline and parented the pics to a null so I could easily animate all the pics at once. I applied the original expression (the one I pasted in the first post) to all the pics and it seems to be working now, even while they are parented to a null.

I would love to know if this could work at all as I originally had it set up, because as you all know, there are so many efficient advantages to pre-comps. Another reason I was using the comp was to take advantage of the z-scale property. That way I could space out all the pics with one slider very easily. For some reason AE can’t align or distribute 3D layers, so the z-scale property really helps if you need to space alot of layers evenly. And just so you know, I did test the expression in the precomp without using the z-scale and it still didn’t work right.

Sincere thanks to Darby and Dan for your time. And while I’m at it, another thanks to Ron and Kathelyn for creating such a great community at the Cow! This place is indespensable.

[Jeremy Allen]

Thanks for that tip Darby. I did figure this out: If you shift select all the layer properties that have expressions applied, and then option click on the stopwatch for that property, it will delete the expression for all the layers.

For example, you have 20 layers with expressions on Opacity. Click on layer 1 opacity, then shift click layer 2 opacity…keep going through all the layers. Now option click the stopwatch for layer 1 opacity and it will delete the expressions for all the selected layers. But you have to select the layers by the properties, it won’t work if you just select the layer names.

You probably already know this, but maybe it will help some others who don’t 🙂

[Jeremy Allen]

First up, thanks to both of you for your time and patience. I really do appreciate your help. However…

I tried both of the new solutions and strange enough they both seem to do exactly the same thing. They both seem to work at first, but then as I scrub through the timeline, the opacity values only change 3% from far to near. So the furthest pic starts out at 12% and only goes up to 15% at it’s closest point to the camera. So at least the values are changing but not as much as they should be.

Am I trying to do something impossible here? The code makes sense to me and it seems like it should work, but something just isn’t right. Should I just put a camera in the pics comp and do it that way? I get the feeling that this won’t work at all if I parent the pics to a null for easy animation.