[Jerry Smith]

I don’t think I’ll have any y-axis rotations, but it’s possible, so that’s good to know. But some people use intermediate frames for mouths, especially when talking, while others have moving keyframed lips. Or just take somebody making a big smile. What is the best(=most professional) way to do that? Intermediate frames? Or scaling? Or the pin/starch tools? Or whatever works?!

(I’m sorta figuring out now why so many animations aren’t very good if you watch them more than twice.)

[Jerry Smith]

Thanks Dave.

What I’m trying to figure out is how the decision gets made whether to have an two illustrations of an, e.g., eyebrow and when to have a one illustration that gets moved. And also who takes responsibility for the exact location of the eyebrow in the second case. My illustrator has done a good animation before with somebody else, so maybe he has answers. But I’m trying to get prepared for our call on this tomorrow. Am I right in thinking there are these two general possibilties?

[Jerry Smith]

Sure thing! I’m sure the wife has some ideas!

[Jerry Smith]

Thanks so much Walter. I really appreciate all your help today. If you have a donut button somewhere, I can send you a six pack of Belgian beer!

[Jerry Smith]

I guess I’m not that smart.

Is there a way to save the expression as a preset so that I can very quickly just apply it to mutliple layers that have keyframes in different places? I seem to be running into the problem of not being able to save the expression without the keyframes and also possibly the problem of AE not knowing where exactly I want the expression to go (It creates a new range selector thingie).

The expression is great and I will use it one way or the other. But now I’m getting greedy and am trying to figure out how to apply it to numerous layers that have different keyframe locations.

Thanks!

[Jerry Smith]

WOW! I’M SO GRATEFUL. THANKS WALTER. THANKS.

I’m going to see if I’m smart enough to save it as a preset so that I can apply it to 40 layers at once.

[Jerry Smith]

Yeah, I thought of that. But not very industrial.

To make matters worse, I’ve already done half crudely with no sync tuning.

Must be some way to set textTotal to 6 in an expression. https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/animating-text.html

[Jerry Smith]

Thanks Dave. Yeah, I can do a small number easily. But with me, there is always an industrial scale backdrop. Literally, there are thousands of them. I suspect I need some sorta expression that somehow tells AE that there are six characters even if there are only three.

[Jerry Smith]

I was going to start a new thread, but I might as well add here this related question: Is there a way of selecting/deleting all muted layers?

[Jerry Smith]

Actually, I didn’t realize that the guy in the tutorial I was following was using PS! OK, thanks for the help. I figure a 900×900 head should be big enough!