[Kevin Camp]

you can use a layer as an emitter, and particles from that layer can take on color from that emitter layer.

so by animating a layer emitter that has the colors that you need, with setting that leave a trail of particles (essentially setting particle velocity to 0), i think it could work for you.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

the main problem with templates is when you have a client paying for something that they want to be theirs…. for the most part, templates that you find on the web can be downloaded an used by anyone. so if you use one for a client, there’s nothing preventing someone else from using it for another client. so if your client sees that, they may not be too happy if they thought they were paying for something that was just for them.

and that client could be your boss, or it could be prospective boss if you had those on your demo reel.

however, if what you are working on doesn’t need to be unique or exclusive to that product, then using templates can save you a lot of time.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i don’t know of an easy way to convert hex to RGB color (it would be nice to have a hexToRgb() function….).

since you can enter hex values in the color picker, could you have several color controls on your master color layer that you could add you hex values, and then have the expression compare the master color to those?

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

if you are looking to create your own using text animators, try this:

twirl down the text layer properties, click the ‘animate’ menu to the right of the ‘text’ property group and select ‘enable per character 3d’.

from the same menu, select position to create an animator for that property. then, from the ‘add’ menu to the right of that animator select property>rotation to add that property to the same animator.

also from the same ‘add’ menu choose selector>wiggly to add a wiggly selector, and you can delete the default range selector from the animator.

for a basic setup, try setting the z rotation for the animator to be 90 and the position to be 50, 50, -2000. you’ll likely want to modify those later, but those should get you started.

if you scrub thru the timeline now, your letters will be randomly moving around.. not quite what you want. to stop that random movement, in the wiggly animator settings, set wiggles/sec to 0. now they will be locked into a random state.

to animate them from random to ordered, key frame the max amount to go from 100% to 0%, and key frame the min amount to go from -100% to 0%. now they letters should come together from the random state to the ordered state.

since the wiggly selector effect the position of the letters in both negative and positive directions, you can animate the z position of the text layer (transform>position) to go from beyond/behind the camera to the final position, timing that with the keyframes that you have for the max and min amounts.

you should have something that resembles the example, continue to modify the settings to get what you need.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

try this:

txt = text.sourceText;
words = txt.split(‘ ‘);

n = 0;
if ( marker.numKeys > 0 ) {
n = marker.nearestKey( time ).index;
if ( marker.key( n ).time > time ) {
n--;
}
}

if ( n == 0 ) {
"";
} else {
words[ Math.min( n, words.length ) - 1 ];
}

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

Re-wrap is good, but only when transcoding a file from one wrapper to another, but keeping the codec and compression the same…. like converting an mpeg-2 in a .avi wrapper to an mpeg-2 in a .mov wrapper. You wouldn’t use it to convert a prores .mov to an h.264 .mp4.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

[Chuose Osemeka] “I noticed that I some how rendered a MOV file and it was smaller than I usual.
When I checked the bitrate it was smaller.
“

.mov is just a container, as such, it can contain media that is encoded with a number different codecs. i.e. you can have a .mov that is encoded wth the lossless animation codec (which usually create very large files) or a .mov that is encoded with the h.264 codec (which creates much smaller files), and there are many other codecs available for quicktime files.

rewrapping is for when you have a file (in a container like .mov or .mxf) that is encoded with a codec that is available for another container. say you have a .mxf that is encoded with avid’s dnxhd codec, but you need it to be .mov. you can rewrap it from .mfx to .mov.

wrapping has two advantages. a big advantage is if the codec is a lossy codec (like h.264, and many others) it won’t lose any more data by re-encding it. it simply rewrites the media data to the new container format. another advantage is that since it’s not re-encoding, it is much faster.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

as dave points out, when rendering in AE the alpha channel is derived from transparency within the comp. without that transparency, it will render a solid alpha (white).

if you have a matte layer, you can either send that matte to the colorist as Dave mentions, or apply that matte to your comp and render a sequence with the alpha.

there are several ways to apply the matte layer in a comp, in this case i think i’d put the matte layer as the top comp layer, then from the layer blending modes set it to ‘stencil luma’ or ‘silhouette luma’ depending if the matte is white on black, or black on white. then you can render that transparency as an alpha.

if you want to render the alpha as a separate file(s) with a RGB file(s), you can set that up as a second output module when you render… essentially render once, but to 2 separate outputs.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you can save the layer style as a preset. then you can apply that preset to layers as needed.

a little more work than having a default setting, but you can apply the preset to multiple layers at a time.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

The way I’d try it, I’ have my line art in either photoshop or illustrator (illustrator if possible), and then do the colorizing on separate layer within that app.

import those files as comps to get control over the separate layers, and then use footage of ink spreading as mattes for the layers that I want to paint-on screen.

i think you can make those 3d, along with a paper texture to get those nice camera angles with dof.

there are a few places where it looks like they used a particle system to ‘brush-on’ some color. trapcode’s particular would be well suited for that, but you could likely use particle world. start by using a soft or cloud-like particle, no gravity, high viscosity and animating the emitter/producer.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW