[Kevin Camp]

yep, depending on the field order chosen, even frames will become one set of fields and odd frames will the the other.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you would bring the 720p50 into a 576 25fps comp, scale the footage to fit (if desired) and then when you render you’d click the render settings and choose to field render (pick the order) and the output will be interlaced.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

I’m not near AE right now, so i can’t tell for sure what your trying to do…. But You may find this trick helpful. You can make a plate that is the exact size of your text by ganging up several effects on your text layer.

First add fast blur and set it to 5 or so.

Then add the shift channels effect and set alpa to full.

Add an effect to change the color, like fill, ramp or 4-color gradient, etc.

Then add cc composite to put the text on top of the bar.

At this point the bar will change size depending on what you type. You can adjust the size of the bar with the blur. You can separate the height and width by duplicating the fast blur and setting one to vertical and the othe to horizontal. You can adjust the opacity of the bar by adding transform prior to cc composite and setting the opacity there.

Hopefully that can help you out. If I get a chance I’ll take a look at your project.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

The only way I can think or would also round all the corners. If your cool with that, then give this a try.

Make an adjustment layer above the alpha layers and add a blur effect (fast blur, gaussian, etc) and set a blur amount. Then add a levels effect and tighten up the alpha levels so the soft edges get sharp.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

There’s a function called Math.floor() that will round a value down to there nearest integer. So your expression would look something like this:

Math.floor(time)+5

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

actually, let me take back that ‘stencil alpha’ option… since you have multiple alpha layers, that probably won’t produce the result you are looking for. each alpha will subtract from each other, and i think you want them to ‘add’ together.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

there are two fairly easy ways if you don’t have a solid background (ie, you can see the checkerboard pattern)…

you can have the keyed ‘alpha’ layers at the bottom of the comp, and then any layers above those layers that you want to take on that alpha shape, you just need to place above those layers and enable the cryptic ‘T’ option for those layers in the their layer modes (it’s right between the layer modes and the track matte options).

or you can reverse the layer order, having the alpha layers above the layers to be knocked out, but set the alpha layers blending modes to stencil alpha (towards the bottom of the modes list).

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

twirl down the shape layer properties and find the stroke property, it that there is a setting for lien cap. set it to rounded

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

pretty much… the clips may need to get scaled down depending on their size relative to the comp size. another potential issue is that the placement is rigid, and if he needed to reposition the grid, he’d want to convert the expressions to keyframes then parent them to a null and move the null… probably should have mentioned that…

i can’t really take credit for the expression, it’s just a slight variation of one of dan ebbert’s (from a tutorial that’s about 10 years old)

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

here’s an expression that will line up layers in a grid based on column and row variables. apply it the position property of one clip, then choose edit>copy expression only, select the rest of the clips in the comp and paste.

numRows = 5;
numCols = 20;

row = Math.floor((index - 1)/numCols);
col = (index - 1)%numCols;
xScale = scale[0]/100;
yScale = scale[1]/100;
x = col*width*xScale + width*xScale/2;
y = row*height*yScale + height*yScale/2;
xOffset = (this_comp.width - numCols*width*xScale)/2;
yOffset = (this_comp.height - numRows*height*yScale)/2;

[x,y] + [xOffset,yOffset]

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW