[Jimmy Brunger]

Has anyone had any success using that decay expression with Motion tile instead of Offset? Mo Tile seems to work alot bette with the abilty to accept motion blur, but when I add that expression to the tile center property it goes a bit mental!

I’m not very experienced with expressions, so I could just be doing something simple wrong.

Thanks.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Has anyone had any success using that decay expression with Motion tile instead of Offset? Mo Tile seems to work alot bette with the abilty to accept motion blur, but when I add that expression to the tile center property it goes a bit mental!

I’m not very experienced with expressions, so I could just be doing something simple wrong.

Thanks.

[Jimmy Brunger]

I totally see your point – but thing is I mainly work with still gfx (and therefore use PS an awful lot) and they often get broken out and sent to Editbox for simple animation, if any. I know – why use an old NLE to animate GFX!?! Alot of the ani’s needs to be specifically timed to audio, which all gets done in the edit, as that’s the way the clients usually prefer to work. There isn’t usually time to do the edit first and then add all the gfx after – mainly short timescale TVCs.

I haven’t got my digital audio ingestion sorted yet for my Decklink, but when that and Deck Control is sorted then I’m going to push for a more AE-based workflow and do alot more animation myself. Currently I only really get hold of the more complex stuff and bigger budget jobs where we’ve more time…frustrating!

AE7 is 1,000 times better than the 5.5 workflow I had up until last month! That text layer thing – you’re right! superb.

I think I was just getting greedy! Ta for the tips.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Our editor is slowly curing me I think…with his Craig David/Bo Selecta impressions every five minutes. I can feel my comedy valva slowly being eased off.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Everybody’s happy.

My comedy threshold is indeed far too low. I am constantly shamed on a daily basis by my incessant and unnecessary laughter.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Found quite a good work around for getting vector scaling out of PS documents in AE, without having to mess with Illustrator…

If there’s a layer in a PSD comp that you later on want to scale up in AE, isolate that layer in the original PSD deleting everything except that one, save out of PShop as a PDF and then import into AE and hit continuously rasterize…It acts just like an AI layer.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Very funny.

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[Jimmy Brunger]

I know, I’m whinging a bit – I do love AE, but there’s just a few (seemingly) simple things that are missing that would be useful. I’ve learnt quite a few tricks here on the COW after thinking it just wasn’t possible before and wondered if there were any ways round these probs!

It’s not a vector ‘output’ I’m after, just the ability to make layers bigger than they have come in when they have vector data saved in PS..

Example: I’ve designed a massive layout comp for a TVC in PShop with a client sat next to me and a certain logo or shape is say 1/2 screen size in PS…we move to AE to animate it and the client says they now want it twice the size…I have to go back to PS, find that layer and size it up, save it out and then re-import it and then apply any animation/effect properties back onto it and slot it back in to my comp..just seems a long way round, but I guess that’s the only way for now!

As for the text tools in AE – they are infinitely better than in v5.5 (what I’ve been used to before it) but there are quite a few subtlties with bevels, etc. you can’t recreate in AE, so you need to flatten any text layers which then makes editing them later on a bit ridged. You can re-edit the text back in PS I suppose, but then it renames the layer and AE then can’t find the layer!

Thanks for the reply Mylennium – I guess no app is perfect, but AE is *almost* there for me. Guess I need a direct pipeline to the developers and nag them!! 🙂

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Is that a Mac reference? On my PC version of AE7 the options for comp import are: ‘compostion’ or ‘composition – cropped layers’. I’m assuming it serves the same puropse?

Just odd that it’s worded differently.

It’s bizarre though, because you’d expect ‘cropped layers’ to crop the layers if they go outside the document’s bounds, but it’s the other way round. In what situation would you want the layers to be cut off and the layer bounds to all be the same anyway…Seems an odd option to me.

Does it have a use?

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[Jimmy Brunger]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for getting back to me, but no – nothing in layers options for me…should they not be in the actions palette?

Just had a thought – I have PSCS2 installed as part of the Production Studio Premium. Are they installed on that version aswell?

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