[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If you have white lines on black background, you can simply put the original image on top and change the layer to Darken or Multiply blending mode. You may wan to lighten the original image some so it doesn’t go too dark.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

To get a bouncing box you’d likely want the whole motion to happen through an expression where you give the initial speed, direction, gravity and ground height and let the expression create the motion.

A box that stops when it hits the ground is not a bouncing box at least not in the sense of how a ball would bounce. It might be a jumping box in the sense like a frog jumps. But there is a problem with this approach in that when you bring the null back up above the ground plane, the box will immediately jump to the position of the null, it won’t continue from where it hit the ground.

Well, I guess I’ll have to answer your question with a question: Do you want the box to bounce (i.e. immediately ricochet back into the air when hitting the ground) or do you want it to jump, hold, then jump again?

For a really simple solution, you could do it with a time-based expression which uses time as the x position and the absolute value of sine of time for the y position with suitable multipliers. That would give a perfectly bouncy result. You could also make the multipliers decrease over time to get a diminishing bounce as the kinetic energy dissipates.

Thus, in it’s simplest form something like this for box position:

x=100*time;
y=750-250*Math.abs(Math.sin(time));
[x,y]

wherein the horizontal speed is controlled by the multiplier for x (100 in this case), the ground position is 750 and the height of bounce is 250. The example is a slow bounce. If you want the bounces be more frequent, add a multiplier to the time (inside the parenthesis) in the y expression.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

One relatively simple way to achieve this is to use Illustrator to offset the path (if you have Illustrator).

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

From the sounds of it you can copy the entire set of paths for the motion of the null, at least from a shape layer. Did you give it a try?

Update: I don’t see a way to copy multiple paths in one go for the position property. Meanwhile, I got the sample clip you sent. It looks like the hand has been animated separately from the drawing to appear like it is drawing, it doesn’t look like it is fully accurate to the drawing itself. Which is fine if you’re going to do a sped-up drawing like this. The eye can’t follow it that exactly so it looks like it matches up as long as it is relatively close.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I don’t have experience with this exact issue, but the first thing I would do is take a good quality photo of the LED wall when one of you images is displayed. Then you can compare it with your original of the same image with both of them displayed at the same time on your computer monitor. This way you’d be able to tell what the actual differences are.

I would go with a one-pixel-to-one-LED ratio while designing, as that is going to be much more accurate.

Then you would want to have a method of converting that original to a “preview” of how it will look on the wall. This is where your reference images come in.

My feeling is that you’ll want to resize the image, add a black “grid” overlay to add the gaps between the LEDs, then duplicate and blur the result and curve/saturate until it looks as close to the photo reference as possible.

Which brings up the question: is one LED RGB or are there three separate LEDs? That would make things even trickier.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

The mountain should be a simple matter of lowering it to appear to touch the center of the roof. I don’t think perspective transformation will make any difference.

For the wall pattern, I would first crop the image with the “perspective” checkbox enabled so that you can straighten out the verticals and horizontals or the mortar to coincide with the image edges. Then you can copy/paste the pattern onto the house and use free transform to make it look correct in perspective. You’ll need to copy the pattern image and use two or more copies horizontally so that it is wide enough to cover the wall before copying and pasting it to your house image.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If the stabilization has actually completed and the solving camera banner doesn’t go away, I’d try quitting and restarting AE.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I have an untested theory that you could use trim paths on a shape layer to create a moving dot, track it and attach the hand to the tracking results.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Scratch that, there is a much easier method: Use a Null with a wiggle for the position and draw the four quadrants solids (track mattes) with some extra on the outside to account for motion, then link them all to the same Null.

Of course you can animate the Null in some other way, doesn’t have to be wiggled.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You could do this with two white solids, one which is half the width but full height (plus some extra for the motion) and covers half the screen vertically (left or right), then another solid half the height but full width (plus room for motion) and covers half the screen horizontally (top or bottom). If you put wiggle expressions to the solids and precomp the two (as separate precomps) with a black background (a black static solid in each precomp for background), you can then combine them in lighten/darken blend modes for a total of four different track mattes for the four quadrants of the screen.

Since you are using the same two precomps as the basis for all quadrants, the animations will match up.

I hope that is understandable…