[Ken Latman]

If your willing to do it in Apple Motion, Noise Industries has a free plug-in to do it; http://www.noiseindustries.com/

[Ken Latman]

One other consideration in the debate would be the fact that Motion does not run on a windows PC.
Though I am a mac fan, your students may want to explore one of the applications out of class and AE would provide somewhat of a level playing field.
You can always use Motion projects within AE and treat it as a plug-in for those quick particles and behavior type effects.

[Ken Latman]

Have you looked at this post?
https://forums.creativecow.net/archivethread/2/599569#599735

I think this is along the same lines.

[Ken Latman]

From my understanding the mandatory digital broadcast effort by US broadcasters is just the delivery method in which the content is coming to your TV set.

Does the church have it own television broadcast tower? If your just creating content, the station that is pumping out the signal will be digital. I can not see why you would need to “upgrade” all your equipment so it is digital. It would make it easier I would assume but then again it would be nice if we all had the latest and greatest tech.

Ask the station you are broadcasting from first if you need to make major upgrades to keep your program on the air.

[Ken Latman]

Jon,

I did try something similar to those lines. I would get the entire set of objects rotating, duplicated everything to a new track, and then make the objects I didn’t want to see that were not supposed to fly off, invisible.

I kept coming across ProAnimator crashing. I’m not sure why. It looked as if once I got to a certain file size for the ProAnimator I could no longer use that file. Around the 600k mark (I frequently save as I work) the program would crash and I could not relaunch the file I created.

It wasn’t perfect and took a little longer, but I winded up doing was running a render three to four times for each part and compositing the files in AE.
1) Disk spins with all elements
2) Letters spin on disk with the disk invisible then comes to a point and parts fly apart
3) Disk spins with no elements for a longer time
4) Disk spins and then comes to a point and flies to the camera.

This wasn’t ideal but I couldn’t get the application to keep going as I stated in the previous method.

[Ken Latman]

I just came across this same problem. Is there a work around for this issue? I have three objects that I wish to rotate on the same axis so they stay in line with the camera. It doesn’t look like I can make groups and do this effectively.

[Ken Latman]

Please ignore last post. My object faceting was set to low for preview mode.

[Ken Latman]

I don’t believe ProAnimator as a standalone application uses multiprocessor support. If your using it as a plug-in, AE should be using it in multiple processors if you have that turned on or have Nucleo Pro.
It might as a standalone application address more RAM that AE currently does.
How long are your compositions? You might want to breakup your animations into smaller chunks. That is one work around.

[Ken Latman]

Is there a limit to the number of layers you can have in the Illustrator document to bring into ProAnimator as a layer cycling object?

My illustrator file has 45 layers that I want to cycle but I’m not getting the whole animation when I bring it into ProAnimator.

I am creating a pie slice that goes from 1% to 80% for the most part in 1% increments.

[Ken Latman]

Thanks John!
That does point me in the right direction. I forgot to look into layer sequences.

Now it only seems to take a long time to make all the slices animate with creating multiple layers for a pie chart. The blend method doesn’t really work in this case.

Does anyone have a suggestion for the Illustrator part in building the sequence automatically?

If I were an Applescript master, I think you could make a action that would allow you to build the layer sequence out.