[John Cuevas]

Work with Avid and AE a lot…if you are creating QT Refernces you need to be exporting at 720 x 486, not 480. When Avid exports to 480, it doesn’t crop it scales down and that will completely mess up the fields. Even if AE interprets it correctly, it’s not going to come back to the AVID correctly. If you scale it up to 486 in AE, it’s missing data and gives you that “soft look” you mentioned.

So export a QT Refernce with native dimensions. I’ve never had AE interpret a 1.21 Avid QT export correctly, so you will mostly likely need to use interpret footage to get to be 1.21.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

Probably in the tutorial, you were only using one light, but there are situations where you will set up multiple lights in a comp to create shadows and to affect layers along with particular. Without a naming convention all of the lights would be emitting particles, which isn’t what you would probably want.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

Pretty sure you have to keep pressing “cntl-d”, but head over to videocopilot.net. In one of the tutorials he created a script that does exactly what you want, he calls it the “sequencer”(Tutorial 103 has it), very handy.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

Yes, easily. Put your custom particles in a composition(works best if the size is no bigger than 200 x 200), then place that precomp into your composition with the particle layer. Under particle type change it to either “sprite” or “textured polygon”.

Textured polygon offers a lot more options, but there are instances where sprites might work better.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

One pro to consider. I’d been editing for nearly 7 years when my boss offered to pay for a couple of Avid certifications. Thought why not and took the classes. While the certs didn’t make me a better editor, they did make me a more efficient editor. Picked up quite a few techniques and workflow things I would not have discovered otherwise.

So from that POV it was worth it.

As far as hiring anyone, I’ve never looked at anyone’s resume to see what certs they had.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

Dave usually says it best:

Not to be disrespectful, but how much experience do you have working in After Effects?

This is NOT the kind of application that lets the novice user jump into the deep end of the pool. It’s one of those “learn to walk before you run” types of applications. If you try a quick start you’ll only wind up confused and frustrated, and that would be a shame.

So here’s a very good place to learn to walk:
https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/01/getting-started-with-after-eff.h...

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

Have the same issue since CS4, it’s very random. I’ve tried purging, cleaning up my clipboard, nothing fixes it but a full restart of my computer.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

Video I did for a company sometime ago, the first minute was a treatment of pictures and video detailing the problem the company would solve. Might be of interest.

https://thinkck.com/video-e-work.asp

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

The explosion is caused by the “force” properties. If you change your view back to “forces + wireframe” you will see a big blue ball. This is what breaks apart your layer. You can contol the shatter by either decreasing the radius until it doesn’t touch your object or by moving the force. You will then need to keyframe it into the layer you want to shatter.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor

[John Cuevas]

First change your the view pulldown from “wireframe + forces” to rendered. Twirl down “Shape” and change the pattern from “bricks” to “custom” and then choose the layer itself in the “Custom Shatter Map” pulldown.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor