[Joe Clay]

Hi Jason, that’s odd. Maybe you can achieve it by precomping your main comp and doing the magnification on top of it. I’m not sure why it wouldn’t work. Other effects that would do a similar effect will all have the same issue because they rely on a center point.

One way that should work guaranteed, but won’t be 100% accurate, is to take an adjustment layer and add magnify to it. Make the size cover the entire comp. Don’t scale it too much, and it’ll look correct. Add a shape above it to fit under the magnifying glass layer. Set the adjustment layer to use that shape as a track matte. Then parent the shape to the magnifying glass. That should work perfectly.

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv

[Joe Clay]

About the best you can do is use Layer > Auto-trace and set it to work area instead of current frame, but it looks like crap. But if the text is small enough, or maybe not so detailed, it might work for you. It’s worth a shot.

On a side note, that extension sounds cool. I might have to check that out.

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv

[Joe Clay]

Check out Andrew Kramer’s shockwave tutorial. It’s not exactly the same, but I’d say it looks a lot better.

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/shockwaves/

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv

[Joe Clay]

It’s easier if everything stays in the center. So I’d say keep the circle part of your magnifying glass centered in your precomp. If you have a handle or something sticking off of it, make the comp bigger so that it fits.

However, you can do it by moving the anchor point of the precomp. You just need to unparent the adjustment layer from the magnifying glass precomp first. The expression will throw an error. Ignore it. Move the anchor point of the precomp. Then parent the adjustment layer back to the precomp (making sure that the visible part of that layer completely covers the part you want to magnify). And the expression should work again.

I’ve saved over that old Dropbox link with a working version you can play around with.

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv

[Joe Clay]

Awesome! You’re welcome!

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv

[Joe Clay]

OK, you have about two options.

1. Turn off continuously rasterize. It’s probably not desirable if you’re trying to magnify something in the main comp.
2. Keep your magnifying glass precomp, or whatever it is. Move your magnify effect to an adjustment layer in the main comp, and parent it to the rest of your precomp so that it can just follow it. On the magnify effect’s center property add an expression:
parent.position;

You can also attempt to use .toComp but I can’t ever seem to get that to work. It’s unreliable.

Also, I’ve never used magnify. I didn’t know it existed. I find it odd that it duplicates the layer instead of just making it larger. I usually use a transform effect for that. This behavior could be useful though.

Anyway I put an aep in dropbox for you. And the explanation of why this happens is below.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ln8s36siuw7v77k/Magnify.aep?dl=0

Let me try to explain the reason this happens. Say your main comp is HD (1920×1080) and your precomp is (500×500). If you leave the effect center at it’s default in the precomp it’ll be 250,250. When it’s brought into the main comp with continuously rasterized set, those numbers are put into the main comp but they’re not translated to it’s space. So you’d think you’d find the center at the center of your precomp just in the main comp, but it’s been moved to the main comps space. It’s center is still at 250,250, but the center of your main comp is 960,540.

I hope that makes sense. If not I can try again. It is a complicated subject for me to even explain.

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv

[Joe Clay]

There’s another issue to the percentage of us using Macs/Hackintoshes with certain NVidia cards. It’ll kernel panic when GPUsniffer runs (which is how it determines what your card is capable of). I’m on a thread where this has happened to someone with a Mac Pro using a non-standard NVidia card, and I have the same issue with Premiere. In his case, he can remove gpusniffer from the package contents and get it to run AE. Premiere won’t just shut my computer down if I remove it, but it won’t let me run the program because I then “don’t have a video card” according to Premiere.

So if you’ve got an NVidia card in your machine that didn’t come with it, you might want to be cautious about overwriting your programs. And I was so anxious to finally be able to edit my Raven footage in Premiere instead of Davinci on this machine. I haven’t tried on my MacBook Pro yet, but I assume that would work at least.

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv

[Joe Clay]

If you’re talking just about that thinner to thicker thing that’s going on, you can use simple choker on the text layer directly. Choke it down, then bring the choke back to 0. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s pretty close.

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv

[Joe Clay]

Interesting, I wrote a plugin with similar functionality. It has some bugs I haven’t been able to fix so I haven’t released it yet. :/

Anyway, you might be able to get away with a few directional blurs, and some masks on the opposite side of the text. You’ll probably have to precomp it to do that.

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv

[Joe Clay]

As Dave said, a screengrab would be helpful. I did it once, and what I did was have the character climb the ladder from one position until it resets and I moved the ladder under him. Then I just undid the ladder’s movement in the main comp so the guy moved instead. I don’t know if that helps, but I’m not sure what you’re getting stuck on. :/

Joe Clay
Workbench.tv