[John Cuevas]

Take this with a grain of salt, I don’t use Premiere but Avid(I do use it with AE a lot though).

My workflow for this is to make a new sequence for each clip I am going to bring into AE, labeled export 1, export 2…. Reasoning is that most likely the export1.mov will be deleted sometime in the future(despite having terabytes of drives, it still is finite). If sometime in the future I need to go back an adjust one of those clips, I can digitize my future, go to “export 2” sequence and just make another quicktime.

As you are new to this, let me suggest to you that you when working on projects, no matter how simple you work on always organizing them in such a way that will make it easy to recreate/update them with as little pain as possible. Recently, I was asked to update a video I worked on 7 years ago, because it was organized and I had all the elements I needed to fix it and spent only 2 hours changing the video…recreating everything from scratch would of taken a day, maybe more.

There isn’t a standard foolproof method of organization, find what works for you though and try to use that every for every project. Also, when you start working with others you want to make sure that if someone else has to use some of your work they can figure out what you’ve done and can recreate it also.

Hope this was helpful.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

Sorry, I tried to upload a screen shot of the effect and expressions, but didn’t work.

Expression that works:
4 color gradient

Point2: effect(“4-Color Gradient”)(“Point 1”).valueAtTime(time – .5)

Does not work:
Point 2: effect(“4-Color Gradient”).param(propertyIndex – 2).valueAtTime(time – .5)

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

Increase the threshold to 100%

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

If you have CS5, you probably have media encoder, I would use that, a very handy little program.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

I know I have read it on Andrew’s forums, but I couldn’t find the post anymore. Anyway, SureTarget has a problem when there is only 1 target, it jumps around, blinks…add a 2nd target and your problems will be solved.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

Go to https://www.videocopilot.net/ and check out the SureTarget Tutorials. They created a preset/plugin that is incredible for doing exactly what you saw.

Tutorials: 82, 83 and 101

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&loc=en_us&extid=1178970#

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

Create your composition, add solid, apply particular.

Emitter
Particles/sec = 10
Emitter type = box.
Emitter position XY = middle of comp, bottom of comp(ie in a 872,486 comp = 436,486)
Direction = directional
X Rotation = +90
Emitter size x = width of comp
Emitter size y = 50
Emitter size z = 10

Particle
Particle type – Glow Sphere
Size = 50
Size random = 50
Color random = 86%(there a bunch of different ways to get random color, sample from a gradient, precompose a layer that samples the color….)
opacity random = 25%
Transfer mode = add.

These settings will give you a pretty good start, experiment from there, particle life, opacity over life…

Good luck

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

Todd, I just said exactly that. Just without the cool website, pictures, precise definition and the authority that comes with actually working for AE.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com

[John Cuevas]

Screen shot would help, but it sounds like you may need to do this on seperate layers.

The guitar would be on the top layer and masked out. The bottom layer would contain your other footage keyed out. You could then precomp the entire thing.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.thinkck.com