[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

So: How do you have it set up to begin with?

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Glow: Do you mean how it has “less” glow at the corners? The way glow works is it blurs horizontal then vertical, so you are going to end up with a darkening at sharp corners, especially at this horizontal/vertical angle. To overcome this, you can duplicate your rectangular solid, add a mask expansion of half your desired Glow and the Gaussian Blur the full amount of the Glow. (i.e. use Mask expansion and Blur instead of Glow).

Mask: Create the mask on a separate layer that doesn’t have the other effects (Stereo Mixer and Warp Stabilizer) applied and use it at a track matte. One or the other (or both) of the Effects are the culprit for the mask offset.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You can turn the “digital” bars into spheres with CC Ball Action. The tapering size is a trickier matter.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Practical example:

If you have a comp with two text layers, one called “text” with the text “EASY AS THIS”, you can set the Source Text of the other layer to the character code of the second letter with this expression:

mytext = thisComp.layer("text").text.sourceText;
mycharcode = mytext.charCodeAt(1)

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

As far as I can tell from your screenshots, that is the actual edge of your layer, not just the mask. So you should make the mask smaller than the layer, for instance by choking it to avoid AE drawing the semi-transparent edges as black.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Sorry I didn’t think it through: You can’t keyframe a layer control. So it would be a combination of Dan’s method of turning the slider value to a selector plus getting the x position of said layer.

You can simplify the matter by leaving out the leading zero so that the layer name is TITLE_1, TITLE_2, etc.

Thus, the code for ball position based on a slider would be:

pos = transform.position;
num_layers = 3; // highest layer number
layer_num = Math.floor(effect("Slider Control")("Slider"));
target_layer= "TITLE_"+layer_num;
if (layer_num>0 & layer_num<=num_layers) {
x=thisComp.layer(target_layer).transform.position[0];
new_position = [x,pos[1],pos[2]]
} else {
pos}

Dan would write it much neater, though 🙂

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

With your code, if you change the line

Test = 02;
to
Test = "02";

you will have the layer that you have applied the expression to move to the X position value set by the Slider on layer TITLE_02, with position Y and Z values of 0.

Now, I assume you want the (ball) layer to move to the same x position as your selected layer. If so, I’d put a Layer Control on your ball layer and use the following code for ball position:

pos = transform.position;
layer_to_match = effect("Layer Control")("Layer");
x=layer_to_match.transform.position[0];
new_position = [x,pos[1],pos[2]]

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You could add a slider to the layer with a wiggle expression and then use an expression to set opacity to 0 when slider is below a certain threshold value, otherwise 100.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If you add a description in the File>File Information… dialog in Photoshop, it shows up in the metadata in Premiere, when saved any file format that supports metadata, such as .psd.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Hi David,

To see if the the site server is automatically reducing file size, compare it with the file you uploaded.

In almost every case I sharpen images for Web use, as they tend to go mushy at these low resolutions even if the site doesn’t do anything further with it. 500 pixels is not that much image information. I ruthlessly run the Sharpen filter (not unsharp mask) when resizing for web to maximize detail. In some cases even twice, fading the second sharpening pass back 50% (Edit>Fade…). Basically until it looks sharp but not overdone.