[John Cuevas]

I tried a luma key, to drop out a lot of the darks, then 2 keylights to remove the skin and yellow shirt..I lost a little of the cord in the shirt though. But I was just messing around for only 5 minutes. Take a look, maybe this will give you some different ideas. Often with this type of work, you need to use multiple techniques, include some roto work.

7304_glow.aep.zip

You’d also have to do some more masking to remove her now glowing arms…:)

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Try the Generate > Beam Effect, then add a glow.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Not exactly sure how you created your circle, so I built one in a precomp, a shape with a radial gradient(TRANSPARENT CIRCLE). Duplicated that layer and set the lower one to luma matte to create the transparency(LUMA MATTE). Duplicated again, and turned off the fill and added a 30px stroke(GLOW LAYER). Duplicated the radial gradient layer, placed it above the shape layer and changed the transfer mode to Silhouette Alpha, so that the stroke layer would only glow outwards(Glow Silhouette). Did all this just to isolate the glow layer.

Added audio, selected it, and used Animation > Keyframe Assistant > Convert Audio to Keyframes.

To the stroke layer, I added a layer style glow. And then adjusted the scale of the Glow Layer & Silhouette layer, and glow size to determine my max glow size. Then on the glow layer style layar I added this expression:

myAudio = thisComp.layer("Audio Amplitude").effect("Both Channels")("Slider");
minGlow = 10;
maxGlow = 100;

ease(myAudio, 10, 30, minGlow, maxGlow)

The 10 and 30 are the the audio lows and peaks. So when the audio is at 10, my glow is at 10, when the audio reaches 30, my glow goes to 100. You would need to adjust these numbers for you audio. Anyway that’s one way you could do something like this. Check out my example file, if anything is unclear. 7301_glowaudiofolder.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

If this is just for yourself, sure work in 576i, but I always suggest you work in your deliverable format, so if this is going to DVD or somebody, work in that resolution—less headaches down the road.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Computers use square pixels, so AE uses square pixels too. So when it displays pixels as square, it looks 4:3. There is an aspect toggle button on the bottom of the comp window next to the view pull down window, a little square with 2 arrows going in different directions. Press that to toggle the aspect to a representation of 1.46.

You can see the difference, by making a perfect circle(circle tool + shift), then toggle back and forth between the 2 views. When you are in the square pixel view, your circle will have smooth edges but be squished, when you toggle to the 1.46 view, the circle will be normal sized but jagged edges. In the end, as long you export correctly, and import it into your NLE correctly, everything will look good.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Looks pretty good to me. Very passable, unless you move in a lot closer than we see in that shot, I don’t see the issue.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Just did a test, 3D text, attached to null, zooming using null anchor point and it looks fine. As you can see in this example.

7294_zoomingintotext.aep.zip

Either post a screen grab, so we can see your settings, or post the project(without assets) so it can be quickly analyzed.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

You would need to post a screen grab for me to be sure, but when you are “zooming” into the text, are you zooming up the composition, “cntl” + “+”, to sizes like 200% and 400%. When you scale up the comp, you are just zooming into the 1920×1080 pixels and it will look aliased. So make sure your comp is at 100% scale, full resolution.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

When you are adjusting the curves, you are adjusting points between(in RGB) 0-255. In your image, everything is either, 0 or 255, there is nothing in-between to adjust. A ramp has a gradient, that has information in the areas of 1 to 254, so they can be affected by the curves affect. In your image, the only one that will have any affect on either the full RGB or one of the channels will be the point in the upper right, cause that’s the 255 point, and all the levels are at 255 right now, if you move that one around, you will see a difference in your results.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Just for fun, you might want to try a test render with a different codec with multi-processing turned on, maybe only a few seconds. In the past, I’ve run into similar errors rendering quicktime across the network.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.