[John Cuevas]

When you say switch around/twirl do you mean that it rotates on one of it’s axis 180 degrees and on the reverse side is a different word?

If that’s the case, create both text layer and place the anchor point in the center of the text layers. Enable 3D for each layer and animate/keframe the rotation of one layer 0 to 180 degrees on it’s X or Y axis. Parent the 2nd layer to the first. Now as you scrub you should have a back and front layer.

Now open your opacity controls(T)and alt-click the stopwatch to enable expressions and paste this expression: if (toCompVec([0, 0, 1])[2] > 0 ) value else 0. It turns off visibility of layers that aren’t facing forward.

To learn more about this expression go to https://motionscript.com/design-guide/invisible-facing-away.html

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 you are talking about the 3dish looking photos-there are a lot of names for it, but many people call it “The kids stays in the picture” effect. Named after the movie that utilized it(very good movie by the way).

You can do a search here for it or a google search and you will find many tutorials that will go into depth on the technique.

Here’s a decent from VideoCoPilot

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]

It sounds like you downloaded and installed the font yesterday on one machine and are now on a different system, right? Cause how would you initially install the font if you don’t have access to the font folder? The font has to be installed prior to AE startup or AE won’t have access to it. If you copy the project to another computer, AE will know that you used Windsor light, but if it’s not installed you get that error.

If you need that font, you probably need to put it on a thumb drive and ask an administrator to install it for 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]

I believe you have adaptive resolution turned on. Below your comp window, the 2nd box past views, if you open it up it’s probably set to adaptive, turn it to off and AE should stop that behavior.

I generally only use adaptive when I’m really pushing the GPU or CPU.

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]

This is a project that can be done in AE, but knowing a bit about music, to do it in a way that’s easily modifiable is a bit trickier.

Using some scripting I was able to recreate the effect from the video for 4/4 time. In the final comp, it has a beats per minute slider. Enter in the number of BPM and it will update the ball and slider. The thing with this is it won’t play at real speed unless you were to RAM preview it and/or render out a finished animation for playback.

Unless you were doing a one off animation, this really isn’t a project for beginners as working out the timing will cause some issues. So, since you said it’s for educational purposes, I just went ahead and made a 4/4 time project in CS6 and CS5.5 versions: 4917_metronome.zip

If you find you need more 2/4 and 3/4, I could modify this when I get off work.

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 would make the keyframing the exact same for both layers, just with the opacity offset. Once you create your keyframes for one cycle, then you would apply this expression on opacity and rotation:

loopOut("cycle")

ps: I’m not sure what the pros would do, but that’s how I’d handle it.

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]

First off check out these tutorials on Weather Replacement by Aharon Rabinowitz.

Here are just a few ideas/things to think of that come to mind, I’m sure others here will have some more thoughts. To put the Arc in the water, make sure you shoot it in a way so that you can remove that tree. Since you are going to have to paint/clone that out.

For the water, you will need some stormy footage that is shot in a perspective similar to how you shoot the Arc(probably best is to find the footage and try to match the perspective). If the shot is shaky, that might actually help as you could use AE’s camera tracker to integrate the Arc into the shot.

You will need to layer the water, masking out the foreground water to put in front of the arc. You probably will want to mask out the arc also to have a water background plate.

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]

Check out this blog post by Andew Kramer, he has links to others who use the technique and a project you can check out.

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]

There is another method you could use also, that is somewhat what you want. Create your text layer in AE, right click it and choose “create masks from text” Add the Generate > Stroke effect to the layer. Change the Path to “All Masks” and animate the end point. Now change the Paint Style to “Reveal Original Image” or “Transparent”. If you go with reveal original image you can change the stroke size to act as matte and quasi paint on the letter. If you go with transparent you can use the stroked layer as a track matte above your text to reveal the text by increasing the brush size to a number large enough to reveal your text. Also with transparent, you can animate the letters with a fade up or linear wipe as the strokes are being created.

If you do this type of effect, if you do it quickly enough, people won’t notice you really didn’t do all the work of animating every single letter.

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]

Other than the line, what you want to do is very time-consuming. Basically you need to use strokes and write-on effects to be used as a track mattes for your text. It’s not a hard technique to do, it’s just a very time-consuming one.

Here area few tutorials to get you started:

Animating a flourish

Animating a Signature

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.