[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I would assume they are the image frames into which the images are placed, in which case they should be around every placed piece of artwork, rather than just some. Not that I’ve checked.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Yes, that would be Optical flow in Premiere, Pixel Motion frame blend in After Effects or Twixtor. Skip a number of frames and let the effect try and build the in-between frames.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If you want to achieve this within AE, I would check this out:

https://aescripts.com/pixelscore/

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Complex stuff.

This might make the task easier:

https://www.marco-belli.com/3d-earth-connections/

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If you replace the “time” property with a slider that you animate as if it was time moving (or not moving, for pauses), you have control over it with keyframes.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I’m sure there’s a way to calculate that as well, however, it is too complex an issue for me to tackle here.

I would suggest making a precomp where you have the colors that you want to use in the same shape as the tiles and use that both to pick the color with sampleimage as well as to overlay on the tiles for color (in color mode, for instance).

It’s a bit more complex to figure out where in the precomp the point in the middle is (not much, likely you’re moving a point up and down negative the same amount as you’re moving the layer in the main comp), certainly nowhere near as complex as calculating the bounds of each layer and figuring out which ones to blend by how much.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Something like this

nMarker = thisComp.marker.nearestKey(time);
mTime = nMarker.time;
mIndex = nMarker.index;
if (mTime>time){
mIndex--
}
seedRandom(mIndex,true);

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

The layers are there but hidden by the “shy layers” button (the blue head peeking over the wall icon). Click to disable shy layers.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

If you make a line break in the comment, only the first line will show in the timeline. So, if you had a comment like

“1
this is a very long explanation of what this marker really means in this composition”

you only see the “1” in the timeline.

Thus, I expect, someone with scripting experience should easily be able to make a script that adds and removes a line break to “hide” and “show” marker comments.

If you do it that way, even without the script, you can hover over the marker to see the full text.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Yes, you’re right, I had that backwards, I thought you wanted a single combined shadow for multiple layers.

If I were to do what you demonstrate there, I would duplicate the layers before adding drop shadows, move all to top, add shadows to the bottom set, precompose the set with shadows and the set without shadows and use the one on top (without shadows) as a track matte.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer