[John Cuevas]

Not sure about the edit, but you can map the entire smart tools to toggle on and off. For me, I hit “shift-s” and the smart tools activate(whichever one’s I’ve last used), hit “shift-s” again it it’s turned. Saves a little mousing time.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

It would help if you could post an example.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

My apologies, I happened to have a horizontal edge wipe and looked at that and it does have softness control. Never occured to me that a diagonal would not. Sorry about that.

Andrew is a 100% right that you can use animate to create custom transitions.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

FYI, in case it wasn’t mentioned, but in your composition window thre is a button at the bottom, with arrows pointing outwards over a little box that will also toggle pixel aspect ratio.

Happy After Effecting!

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

Open up the effect editor and twirl down “Border”. You can change the softness and width of your edge.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

In the timeline window there is also a Draft 3D button that when enabled will turn off shadows.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

I edited news and currently work with a former reporter(asked her too) and if reporting is what you are planning on doing, really I can’t imagine you needing any AE skills.

That being said, it never hurts to know how things work and I think what would be most important would be to understand formats and such so that if you do deliver something to a graphics guy or editor you are giving him the proper files at the right sizes and not causing him or her to do more work than neccessary.

Good luck on your future endevours.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

Open up the “echo” effect that is applied to your text and change the Echo Operator from “Add” to something like Max, composite in front….

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

From reading your post and the file names, it seems you have imported multiple projects into one project. Duplicating entire folders will work, but you need to be sure you have opened up the correct final file and are changing the text in the correct precompositon.

Check the “Mini Flow Chart” located in your Comp window, it’s the first button after the search box. From here you can click the precomp that feeds the final comp your text.

Also the script I suggested is part a “Name Your Own Price”
You can pay anything you want, the amount displayed in the cart is only a suggested amount” plan. You can change the price to “0” if you want.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

It sounds like you duplicated “scene 1” within the composition itself, which just gave you 2 comps of “scene 1” with different names.

You need to go to the project window and duplicate “scene 1” there. Now you have 2 different compositions, “scene 1” and “scene 22”. change the text in scene 22 and you should be good to go.

If you find yourself doing this alot(copy preomps, within comps), check this out:
https://aescripts.com/true-comp-duplicator/

Johnny Cuevas, Editor