[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

No, that’s not normal. When I turn on multisampling, the image in AE looks better than in Element preview.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Tried purging all memory and disc cache?

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You can keyframe the source text value. That way you can reuse the same layer for any number of animations, needing just a couple of layers.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

(A particle system such as Trapcode Form would be of great assistance in this.)

If you want to do this without extra plug-ins, perhaps an expression that offsets the timing of the animation randomly?

For example, a valueAtTime expression for animation keyframes connected to a random number (used as time offset) based on layer index number would do the job. You would still need 40 copies of the layer, but the expression would add the randomness to when each layer animates.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

This comes to mind:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/procedural_crumble/

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Hi Milos,

I forgot you can’t directly connect Particle World to a null, so I did the twirl with expressions. I can’t tell from the video what it is meant to look like, but this should get you started. Modify the expressions and other settings to taste.

9173_particleswirl.aep.zip

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

The emitter would be parented (with some horizontal distance between them) to a null that both rises and rotates along y-axis. The emitter emits particles as it goes. This creates a helix shape.

You can also animate the distance between the emitter and the null to get a tapering helix, etc.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Link would be good. I couldn’t find any examples.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

A particle system such as CC particle world with the emitter animated in that manner.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

You don’t have to set everything to pass for 7 seconds, but if you have something that you want the viewer to see clearly, that is pretty much the minimum. For anything going faster, you will have to use so much motion blur to make it smooth it will definitely be very blurry. You can (and indeed should) have object that create parallax, just that it is better make them “unimportant” objects, such as telephone poles and other things that don’t matter if they are not in sharp focus.

Since it seems your preference is clarity over motion, I would definitely go this way.

If you were trying to show fast motion, rather than having text that the viewer is expected to be able to read and other details you rather keep sharp, you could have the picture pass the frame in half a second with extreme motion blur and it could still look “smooth”, just that you wouldn’t be able to tell exactly what there is in the image.

So it is not a rule for all situations, more of a good general guideline for panning motion.