[John Cuevas]

When you did your roto, did you move forward to the end of your footage to let the roto propagate all the frames of the shot?

Rotobrush isn’t the easiest effect to use and has a lot of gotchas, here’s a pretty in-depth tutorial

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]

Unfortunately, writing on text fluidly is always a custom job. Here’s a tutorial on the Cow on how to do it.

Here’s a more involved one from AETuts

If you do some google search’s you will probably find a bunch of others.

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 don’t see a way to have Foam loop a custom particle, so we need to create a particle that has a loop point and then loop that particle forever(or at least as long as the duration of your composition. Using the time remap and a quick expression, you can create a seamless loop for your “Circle” precomp layer.

Open up the “Circles” precomp and delete “Circles 07”. Select 1 through 5 and duplicate them(Cntl + D). With them still highlighted move them up so they are the the top layers of your composition, now drag them all at once so that “Circles 07” starts at 3:12. Go to layer 10, to the frame where layer 11 starts(5:23) and press “shift 2”, this will be the last frame of the loop. Now we need to find the next frame. It’s “Circle 06” at 3:00, press “shift 1”

***These points don’t have to be the loop points, I chose them cause the circle was full size at this point and made for a pretty easy loop.

Open up the Abstract circles composition, select the “Circles” layer and at any place on the timeline, press “*”(multiplication symbol on the number keypad), this should put a layer marker on your “Circles” layer. Right click the marker and select “Update Markers from Source”

Now enable time remapping by pressing “Ctnl + Alt + T”. Add keyframes at both of your layer markers. There should be a start and end keyframes, delete the End keyframe. Now go to your keyframe at “Marker 1” and copy it. Now go to the keyframe at “Marker 2”, move 1 frame forward (6:00) and paste the first keyframe. Now Alt + click your time remap stopwatch to add this expression. loopOut(type = "cycle", numKeyframes =2). The expression tells it to go back and loop starting at the 2nd keyframe.

Finally, Press Cntl + K to extend change the duration of your composition and extend all your layers. Here’s the final project I came up with. 4431_funkyanimationsloop.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]

Here you go:

4427_workshopintrocs5.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]

One method to accomplishing this would be to use masks and track mattes. Duplicate your text layer and mask out one word. Now take your ink bleed layer and place it below your masked text layer and change it’s track matte to alpha. When the ink bleeds on it will cover up the white layer of text below.

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]

Another way to do it would be to set up your key. Make that the top layer of your composition. Place the layer you want to fill your alpha as the layer below and set it’s track matte to alpha. Now your fill layer will use the layer’s above alpha channel as it’s own alpha channel.

Lastly place your background as the bottom layer.

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 nice(but old) tutorial on how to do it.

Another solution is to run the script The Loopmaker on your layer. The script will loop any amount of selected layers from the furthest in-point and the last out-point by pre-composing and doing a dissolving loop. It will then apply an expression to the looped comp so that it can be stretched infinitely from either the in or the out-point.

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]

The products from Mettle.com are pretty really cool and add a ton of flexibility & versatility to AE.

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’ve had problems with glows/alphas too, particularly when using a straight alpha. What I’ve done in the past is to change my background color(Cntl + K) to a color similiar to my glow, ie…if I have a blue glow I’ll change my bkg color to a similiar blue. Finally when rendering I’ll change my alpha to pre-multiplied.

Perhaps others here will have a better recipe for glows/alphas, but this has worked pretty well for me to get a glow in the alpha channel into an Avid.

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 need to explain your setup a bit more, when you say you applied the expression to an “image”, are you just working with one layer? The method I used works when you have multiple objects parented to a single controller in the middle of the comp.

If you have one layer, you would need to break the layer into individual components, parent them to a control in the middle of the composition(null) and then apply the expression.

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.