[Kevin Camp]

you could simply add a black (or dark colored) solid in-between the text layer and the footage/image layer and set the opacity to around 50%.

or you could add a color correct effect like exposure to the footage/image layer and decrease the exposure property. there are lots of other color correcting effects that you could use: curves, levels, brightness & contrast, etc.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

if an animator is using an expression rather than keyframes, you’d need to modify the expression to ‘reverse’ it.

then last line of the expression is often the value that is being calculated… it might be possible to simply add a minus at the front of that value to get the inverse, but i’d need to see the expression to know for sure.

it’s also possible for animators to animate the start or end properties rather than the offset. so you’ll likely need to look at each animator on a case-by-case basis.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

excellent. setting the default value to 0 and then breaking the condition was pretty clever.

i had used else 0 in my earlier attempt, which was why it set any words prior to the last word back to the origin color…

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i did try something like that with a for loop, but it seemed to cancel out the highlight for the earlier words… i.e., if 1+4 was entered, when it highlighted the 4th word, it set the first word back to the original color…

but you may be thinking of a more robust way of handling that.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i think so… but you’ll need to have an animator for each possible word. so if you think they could have ten words, then you’ll need ten animators….

try this:

create a text layer named ‘hilite’ (you can name it something else, but you’ll need to adjust the expressions). this will be the field they type the numbers into.

then on your text layer with the text, add a fill color animator, set the ‘based on’ property to ‘words’, then add an expression selector, and add this expression to the amount:

hilite = thisComp.layer("hilite").text.sourceText.split("+");
txt = text.sourceText;
if ( textIndex == hilite[ 0 ] ) 100 else 0;

assuming you have text in that text layer, if you type a 1 in the ‘hilite’ text field, the first word should highlight.
to have more words highlight, duplicate that animator. change the amount expression in that animator to this:

wrds = 2;
hilite = thisComp.layer("hilite").text.sourceText.split( "+" );
txt = text.sourceText;
if ( hilite.length > wrds - 1 ) {
	if ( textIndex == hilite[ wrds - 1 ] ) 100 else 0;
} else {
	0;
}

now if your text field has 3 or more words, and you type “1+3” in the ‘hilite’ field, words one and 3 should highlight.
to allow more words to highlight, you just need to duplicate that 2nd animator, but change the value of ‘wrds’ to one number higher each time you duplicate the animator… so 2, then 3, etc. until you have enough animators to cover the maximum number of words that you think they would type.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i’m unclear if you had rendered from ae as an image sequence, but if you did, i think you could just delete the bad frames from the sequence, then add the updated comp to the render queue, click ‘best settings’ or the current render settings and click the option to ‘skip existing frames’.

ae should then only render the bad frames that you deleted from the sequence.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you could take the PNG into photoshop, choose image>image size… and set the width to 30,000 px. then choose view>pixel aspect ratio>custom pixel aspect ratio and set that to 6.3604 (190812/30000). save that off and import into ae. ae should keep that pixels aspect ratio and treat the 30,000 px wide image as 190,812 px wide.

obviously, scaling an image to that degree will likely have considerable loss of detail, so depending on what’s in your PNG, this may not be an option.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i haven’t tested this on all presets, but in this case it would appear that time reversing the offset keyframes and then setting either the ‘mode’ (in the advanced settings) from add to subtract or the ‘shape’ from ramp up to ramp down should reverse the order.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

I’ve heard that DV50 and DVCPRO50 are the same, but I cannot confirm that. A test or a call to the other party would be the best plan.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

yep. what they used there was basically just an animated matte on a still. the creative part is creating the matte.

i’d start with making a square comp, add a square layer and animate the scale from 0-100%. at that point you can start to build the matte layer and then comp back to that square comp and add more to it.

so you can take the square comp into a new ‘normal sized’ comp, rotate it 45% so it’s a diamond, then just duplicate it and arrange the duplicates to fill the screen. in the timeline adjust the timings of those duplicates so they seem random (or however you want them to look).

you can then take that comp into a new comp with a footage layer and use the matte comp as a track matte for the footage layer to see how that reveal works.

at any point you can go back to the original square comp and change or add animation to it and see how that effects the reveal comp.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW