[John Cuevas]

Under the comp window is a little checkerboard box-click this and it will delete/restore background color/transpaency.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Honestly, reading that, I don’t know whether to laugh or get mad.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Used to…..

All my quad processors and 16 gigs of RAM have given me is the freedom to make my projects X fold more complex—All that power and I still do a lot of overnight renders.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Incredibly broad topic. Using the help in AE brings up this…good place to start:

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7f3aa.html

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

It sounds to me that you used the “BKG color” as part of your graphic, rather than a solid. Test this out by hitting “shift+cntl+b” and change the color to red. If the black part of your graphic that you need changes to red, you don’t have anything there, there’s nothing to create an alpha channel.

Fixing this is as simple as creating a solid”shift+y” and modifying it so it fits your graphic correctly…ie masking it to fit into the lower third, track matte.

Also there is a turn background off button under the comp window–little checkboard icon. If you press that, you’ll see exactly what will be transparent or not. Push the green-red-blue circle pulldown and you can also switch to the alpha channel to see what you’re exporting.

Good luck

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

We’ve had some good and bad interns along with some interesting stories. Easily the #1 “I can’t believe he did that one” goes to a kid we had a few years ago.

We’re on a shoot with our oldest & one of the largest clients we have. Everything from my end is going well, we’re setup and conducting an interview—basically a time for the intern to stand there and watch now. Get to a point to stop tape and reload when I look around and I can’t find him…bathroom? No. Coffee Bar(we were shooting in their lobby, 30 feet away was a free coffee bar)? Nope not there either.

I start looking around for him and he hadn’t wandered too far…he’d sat down in someone’s cubicle, started up there computer and had gone online to check his email.

He didn’t get the full-time position.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Your quality will look the same upon rendering as long as your quality settings are Best/Full.

The diffence is this. Your monitor is only can display so many pixels—Looks like you’re around 1280x, maybe 1600x. If you choose “fit”, the composition will scale to fit inside the composition window, you’ll see the entire thing. In your case to make the 1280 fit inside the window, it scaled it down to 87.9%, but caused some distortion.

At a 100%, if your comp window is say only 900 pixels across-the 300 pixels on either side will be cut off in the preview, but your quality will be at it’s max. The infomation is still there, you’re just not seeing it.

You could play around with a graphic and test this out…set to fit and make the graphic stretch from all the way across the screen. Now change to 100% and you’ll see that the sides of it are cut off.

Glad I could help.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Your comp window is set at 87.9%—probably due to screen space limitations. Change it too 100% and see if that makes it look better.

Generally, for better looking working in your comp window, you need to be at 100% or 50%, when you use the “fit to” it will give you some weird scaling that will cause some distortion. Fit is good if you need to see everything for placement of objects and such but you sacrifice quality.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

This tutorial will do pretty much what you are trying to accomplish…only problem, you need Trapcode Particular to do it.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/birnholz_rob/red_giant_3d_montage.php

You can accomplish the effect without though, particular just makes it a lot faster.

If you don’t have or can’t buy particular…it’s not a very hard effect to set up. Once your photos are prepared(sized,framed…) take them all and drop them into a timeline. Enable the 3d switch(cube shape-last one on layer). Go to Layer > New > Camera and check “Enable Depth of Field”. Now just twirl down the position properties of the pictures and move them all about in X,Y,Z space. If you twirl down the camera properties you will find you can adjust camera aperture and blur—so play with those to your liking. Finally set a couple of keyframes for the camera position and it will move through the photos.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net

[John Cuevas]

Not sure how you have attempted to do this, but the way I would go about it would be to make a spray painting wipe in AfterEFfects. Would be a white solid that I would animate coming in. Render that as a QT with alpha channel and import into avid.

Lay the matte into the timeline, step into it and replace the fill with the video that you want to spray into place.

If you don’t have AE, how are you trying to create this effect?

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
http://www.ckandco.net