[Jerry Smith]

Thanks. I should have been more specific. In different projects, I have different solid backgrounds. They are pretty much just like the blue background here on this creative cow web page. How can I take each one and give it a nice glassy look? I played around with a gradient. I played around with a light flare. But I’m not sure what is the BEST way to do it. And I’m not really very good with After Effects despite being 1000 hours in. 🙁 So, if you could spoon feed me what effect to use and how to use it for an arbitrary color, that would be what I need.

The background is 2D and doesn’t move. I have some moving infinitely thin rotating (3d) translucent white solids on top. I would like to give them a similarly glassy look.

I did a search, but all the glassy effects that come up are much more advanced 3d things. I’m just going for the super high tech look that you see on cell phones like in the link.

Thanks!

[Jerry Smith]

I am my client and my client is very demanding!

Sooo, you have me worried. Sounds like shades of grey are indeed really risky.

[Jerry Smith]

Thanks Kalle,

I really appreciate all the help. That did the trick.

Although I do wish there was some way to lock the horizontal and vertical and then scale it to an exact number. I was able to get it close enough doing x, then y. So now I got nice motion blur! YAY!

[Jerry Smith]

Hmm… Well, there are 7 masks added together. And all of them need to be scaled 88.35%. Is there a way to do that?

[Jerry Smith]

Actually, I can’t get it to work. The layer has to be scaled down to 88% so that the mask is the right size. But once I do that, it gets cut off if non-rasterized. I tried creating a precomp that was twice as big. But then the mask comes out twice as big. Strange.

[Jerry Smith]

How can I change the size of the solid layer? I tried scaling the solid in the precomp version up to 1000% to no avail. The mask itself is scaled to 88%.

UPDATE: OK, I see how I can probably get it to work. Thanks.

[Jerry Smith]

I was kicking myself after reading your reply because that is actually the one thing I should have come up with myself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. And it is actually even worse because both rasterized and unrasterized the mask gets cut off.

[Jerry Smith]

Well, to be honest, a long time ago, this project began as video for a computer. But then the whole mobile thing happened. It’s only in the last five months that I realized I had to jam everything onto a little screen or give up at least half the market. I was not happy about that! If streaming is more secure, I’ll do it. That’s your strongest argument. I wanna keep my stuff off youtube forever. But I don’t understand why they have so much memory if people don’t use it. I never thought about download times. Hmm…

I don’t think they would leave. They just paid! They must know the Apple store will not let them down.

[Jerry Smith]

I don’t own a smart phone. They don’t have any memory? My ipod is ten years old and has a zillion songs on it. How much memory is in an iphone or ipad? Both hard drive and RAM?

I’ll give streaming more thought. Thanks.

[Jerry Smith]

Well, the “plan” was/is to have my own video player playing an obscure codec and to stay away from the whole itunes universe. But obviously, I don’t have a clue yet how I’m going to do it. I may end up streaming, but was planning not to.