[John Hammond]

Or try right clicking / command clicking the heading bit in the time line where it says ‘layer name’ at the top. Now under ‘Columns’ select ‘switches’ to turn the switches column back on.

John Hammond

[John Hammond]

You could try some in-camera effects..

Like some focus pulls.. maybe simulate in AE or a 3D app first, get your animation curves looking nice and then create dope sheets for animation.. so each frame you capture you turn the focus wheel around a little. Or you could make some kind of dolly rig to move the camera around between frames.. Thats what I would be messing with anyway, if I ever had the time to do stop motion!

[John Hammond]

hmm.. I had something similar once where after pasting a path into the motion keyframe track, it didn’t follow properly. It was following the right motion shape, just not over the actual path. It turned out i had to put my anchorpoint in the right place on the layer that was following first.

[John Hammond]

That’s great,

Thanks for your help. Hopefully one day I’ll be able write an expression like that out of my own head!

[John Hammond]

resolution wise, an example using still photos would be:

take a photo from way back.

Take a photo from mid-distance.

and take a photo right close up.

In after effects, animate each one so they are zooming towards camera (maybe just animate the scale).

then, place each animated photo on a timeline one after another, and animate a cross fade between each one.

It could be tricky to get it all to match up: you are battling against lens distortion, differneces in lighting from each shot, the scene changing in each shot (ie a busy street).

I think this principle can be applied to video, with CG and chromo keys and all the rest, if required.

[John Hammond]

as for making camera follow you ‘end point’ keyframes – maybe use the expression pickwhip to link from you camera position up to your ‘end point’ value in the animated stroke.

-highlight the camera’s position keyframe track, go animation/add expression. the pickwhip is the little @ symbol thing

Im just guessing here – might be worth a try

[John Hammond]

You can copy and paste between paths drawn with the pen tool, and the motion path of your layer.

select a path (mask shape) in your comp, go edit/copy. click the ‘position’ parameter of you layer in the timeline, and go edit/paste to paste it in as a motion path.

hope that makes sense.

[John Hammond]

Thanks Darby,

I tried this code out at home last night and it worked pretty great!

At first AE told me “class ‘light’ has no property or method named anchorPoint’ expression disabled”. The light didn’t have an anchor point property so I created a null layer as a child to it, and changed the expression to reference ‘null’. – At least I think this is what’s going on.

This seems to work great!
I’d be lying if I said I understood everything that’s going on – I’ve got a basic idea but I don’t understand all the maths.

Is it something like.. take the difference between the world XYZ 0,0,0 and the null’s anchor value, normalize as in make into numbers between 0 and 1. I wont pretend I understand the last line, but somehow turn this into degrees.

How come my null’s anchor point always stays at 0,0,0, yet it is driving the expression? It would seem logical that the null’s position x,y,z would drive it, as I can see those numbers change in the timeline when I scrub my animation.

Thanks a lot this has given me a great insight, I have a long way to go in expressions yet!

John

[John Hammond]

The best solution might create it all in Flash -small file size and good quality.

However, I don’t know flash so I might be tempted to create the video in After effects and export to .FLV, and then embed this into a Flash project. –Its hard to say without knowing what the client wants.

I think the best thing to do is ask the client’s technical people exactly how they will be sending it out.. as a PDF, HTML email.. link to a flash file.. or what? There’s a lot of variables and a lot to get wrong.

An example : I was asked to create a series of videos in AE with a lot of text. I made it to DV resolution as agreed. The client then wanted it to be embedded small on a webpage and also on a mobile phone. If I had known this I would of created it with this in mind so the text doesn’t get real small when it’s scaled down!