[John Cuevas]

Can’t save it out of AE that way. If you have already done the work, you might be able to copy the paths and paste them in Illustrator. I know you can paste from Illustrator to AE, so it should work the other way around.

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]

200 layers with DOF and Motion blur is extremely taxing(not even taking into account the layer size of each of those images.)

First off, turn off multi-processing, you don’t have the horsepower to really take advantage of it. At most you might be using 2 CPU’s. For HD, IMO you need around 24GB(that’s not exact science, it’s an opinion) or RAM for multi-processing to be effective. Resizing probably isn’t helping matters either.

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]

Sorry, I should of named the animators and explained what I did. Animator 1 ramps up the scale along the path. I added a scale animator and set the scale to 21%, the ramp is achieved by opening up the advanced properties and changing the shape. If you turn off animator 2(toggle eyeball) you will see animator 1 just gives you the finished effect. Animator 2 is about the animation.

Read more about Shape

For Animator 2 is pretty straight forward. I added a position animator and then to the that animator I added a scale animator. Under advanced I changed the “Based On” to words because I wanted everything to be effected at once. So as the offset moves, it moves the “word” though the position -1250 and 0%(starting values) text to final value(the final shape we created in animator 1).

Animators aren’t my strength and what you were trying to do was actually fairly complex(least for me). If you want to learn more, check out the Andrew Davis Tutorials on animators, he covers quite a lot. After Effects basics tutorials by Andrew Devis. The text stuff starts at Tutorial 37.

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]

Precomp the “next” page, open the precomp and change the scale of the page to be (-100,100), effectively flipping the page. In your main comp change the pulldown for “Backpage” to the precomp. You will have to adjust the fold position(most likely to -90) and and animate the fold position.

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]

Here’s a CS5 version of what I did to achieve the effect, if you have any questions let me know.

5219_alphachannelcreationfolder.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]

what version and computer are you using? I can save back to CS5, if it will help you.

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]

What you need to do is create an alpha channel with what you have. Fortunately, you are working over a black background, so this it’s pretty easy to do. There are tools within AE, but the quickest way will be to install the free plugin from knoll Unmult.

Once you have it installed, duplicate your layer and apply unmult to your layer. You will have an alpha channel now, but it will need to be adjusted. Change your color mode of the comp to from RGB to Alpha, and apply a levels effect to your layer. Change the levels channel to alpha and adjust the “alpha input white”. From your example I cranked it all the way down to 47. Now you can add an adjustment layer and apply CC Light Sweep. Animate the light sweep and use the alpha layer we created as a track matte to constrain the light sweep to just the text.

For the white to red effect, I duplicated the original layer again and added the effect Channels > Set Matte and for “Use For Matte” I chose the Red Channel. If you look at the individual channels the red has the greatest contrast. Then I used a levels affect again to affect the alpha channel(Alpha Input White = 157). Finally I used a Simple Choker with a negative value to expand the red a bit, play with this to taste. Finally I animated a red solid with an angled mask(to match the light sweep) and a large feather and used the layer as a track matte. Composite all together and it creates the effect you described, if I read what you were describing correctly.

Here’s my work project: 5215_alphachannelcreationfolder.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 it’s just a rectangle for now, save the project and upload it here(last icon in the message box). I’ll open the project and take a look at what you are doing.

By the way, UW Alum, On Wisconsin!

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]

I was able to create something similar using some text animators, I’m not sure it’s exactly what you want/need. But it might be a starting point for you—or another COW person who knows text animators better than me. If you create a long enough string of text, it would look like it’s going forever.

5210_scalingtext.aep.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]

Is the text moving on the path or stationary?

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.