[John Cuevas]

Where are you getting hung up?

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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 can’t do that without a precomp. You can though, just select all four layers by holding down shift and clicking the first layer and the fourth(that will select all the layers in between) or by holding down “cntl” and selecting each layer one at time. Then just move all the layers at once.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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]

The .aep file is just your AE project file. At its more basic, it’s a database that keeps track of your assets, how you use them in a composition and the effects you layer on top of them, it’s generally going to be small. The mp4 is the output. Factors like composition size 1920×1080, frame rate, bit rate and complexity of each frame all contribute to the final size of the mp4.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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]

Looking at your updated project Doyle, well done.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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]

I went with the Intel Core i9 9900K 3.6GHz Eight Core 16MB 95W, because it’s has the fastest individual cores I could afford, rather than get a CPU with more cores. Added a GeForce RTX 2080i GPU and my machine flies for the work we do. Also run Avid on it too, handles most 4K fine.

I’m far from a computer guy though—I research what does AE, C4D and Avid need and just start allocating my resources from there.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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]

I got mine recently from Puget systems—they really keep up with Adobe/Avid/Cinema 4d and know how to put together systems for those applications.

I didn’t get this exact one, but one very similar and it flies for rendering and 3D work.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-After-Effects-CC-144/Buy_166

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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]

Multiple solids/shapes layers with a card wipe effect applied. Turn the back layer to off, transition width to 0 and a small “Timing Randomness”(change the Random Seed on each instance of the effect) to get the basics of the effect. Lastly you need some sort of gradient to get it to start from the center and move outwards. Then just play around with the rows and columns size until you reach the desired result. Check out this quick and dirty example project I made.

Used to be able to upload example files to the Cow, but I can’t get that to work now—I made an example file you can download from Dropbox

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/h4zsbb78cgm52n0/AABZ8ZNmxU12aHRGhNkhjzkFa?dl=0

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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]

They do not, when you asked if you could change the shape into ‘either/or’ I though you meant from the moment the particles were created, not an evolution.

I think you need to use a more robust particle system where you would make a precomp of a bubble changing into a star. Then using that precomp as the particle, where each particle plays the animation once from birth. You can do this with CC Particle World. Check out the quick project I made. I leave the morphing from bubble to star to you.

13817_particlesystem.aep.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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]

I think you would need two layers of foam one for the bubble and one for the stars. You can create a star in a precomp, bring it into your foam comp and then under the ‘Rendering’ flyout change the texture to “User Defined” and select the star as your texture.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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]

Sorry, your project was not the CS5.5 version, but the 2002 AE 5.5 version. I don’t have anything that goes back that far anymore. Unless you find someone who has kept all of their old software, I’m afraid you will have to rebuild the project.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
ThinkCK

“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.