[John Cuevas]

For 29 bucks you can get BadTV

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]

Create a new composition the length of your music track in the dimensions you need. Take all your photos and drop them into your composition. Move forward 2.3 seconds, which is about 40 frames. Press “Cntl + A” to select all your pictures, now press “Alt + ]” to set the end point for all your pictures.

And to make things really easy, go to the Animation Menu -> Keyframe Assistant -> Sequence Layers. If you select no overlap, you will cut between each picture. You can choose to dissolve also, but it will change your math a bit.

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]

Choose all the keyframes you would like to reduce, then go to window -> Smoother. Smoothing at a tolerance of 1, should do the trick.

A more robust(but costly) option is Trapcodes Soundkeys. I believe the demo version will allows you to sample 10 seconds of audio, so if your work is less than that, you are all set.

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 don’t want to scale down your 2784×1856 to 1920×1080 because that is changing the ratio of the photo. Try using the fit to width command cntl+alt+shift+H. That will scale the picture down to 1920 but keep it’s aspect ratio the same.

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]

to make previewing and editing a bit faster.

AE isnt an editor, so I hope you really aren’t editing much in AE, cause it will just frustrate you. As far as previewing goes, the only realtime preview in AE is the RAM preview and the duration of that is determined by the amount of RAM you have and the size of the clip(1920×1080, 720×486). To perform a RAM p-preview, select your preview area with “B”(beginning), “N”(end) and press zero on the number keypad. You will see a green line move across the comp as AE caches your frames and it will play when it’s done.

Couple of links you should check out:
Preview video and audio

Getting started with After Effects (CS4, CS5, & CS5.5)

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 might want to take a look at this tutorial, not true refraction, but it might give you some ideas:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/james_colin/glass.php

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 think you will find more help in the after effects expressions forum, scipting shares some of the same language I believe.

This forum is for people new to AE who encounter problems.

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]

By chance are the numbers in a precomp?

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 noticed one more thing, if you change the project color depth from 8bit to 16 bit it looks a lot nicer. 32 doesn’t work at all though.

Anyway, I’m glad I was able to help.

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 great Ali, you did a real nice job with that.

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.