[Kevin Camp]

loopOut(“Continue”) is great for something that you want to have a continuous speed.

set a keyframe at the beginning, then move about 10 frames down and change the offset about 10 pixels. add the expression and the offset will ‘continue’ for as long as the layer is.

to adjust the speed of the offset, just move the second keyframe a little (or adjust the offset value, but i think it’s easier to drag the keyframe).

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

if the 5 second composition can be replaced by a clip, pre-render the 5 second comp in one of the projects, then replace the 5 second comps in the other projects with the render.

pre-rendering has a post-render action that will automatically import the rendered clip and replace the pre-rendered comp with the clip. it won’t delete the comp, so you can make changes in the future and simply pre-render it again.

or, you could import the other projects into single project, replace any shared comps with a single instance of the shared comp and then you’d have all your projects within a single project… make a change to that 5 second comp once, and it will be reflected in the others…

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

a 3d app would be better suited, but you can get close with ae…

try this:

create a new comp that has the 1s and 0s in it. the 1s and 0s will need to run vertically in the comp and the comp should be really tall, about 10x as tall as it is wide.

bring that comp into a new comp and add cc cylinder, which will roll that comp into a 3d tube. adjust the rotation x property so you are looking through the cylinder and adjust the position z property so the closest edge of the cylinder barely fills the screen.

now add the circle effect after the cylinder effect, set the blending mode property from ‘none’ to ‘normal’ and adjust the feather and radius to create the glow and to hide the far end of the cylinder.

then add an adjustment layer and add the mesh warp effect. set the rows and columns to 2 and then drag the center point of the mesh to the left and it will start to look like your example. continue to fiddle with the mesh warp bezier handles and you can get pretty close to the example.

if you wanted look like you are moving through the torus, you can add the offset effect before the cylinder effect and animate the shift center property.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

If playback is fine in qt on the bad machine, it might be an issue with adobe’s qt agent that handles the 64 bit to 32 bit conversion…

Is there any difference if the clip is local vs network?

Or is there any difference if you use dnxhd as the codec vs prores?

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

how’s the file playback in quicktime?

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

cc glue gun might work for you…

add cc glue gun to the footage layer, and then add cc composite.

set cc composite to composite original ‘behind’ and uncheck the RGB only option. this will put the footage layer in behind the glue gun effect (or you could just duplicate your footage layer, which ever you prefer)

in glue gun, animate the brush position to move from the eye down the face as needed. also, set stroke width, density and reflection as needed.

in the style settings, you can change the style to ‘wobbly’ to make the tear less of a smooth line, adjust wobble width and height as needed, and you’ll probably want to set the wobble speed to 0.

if you want to adjust the opacity of the tear (and you used cc composite after the glue gun effect), you can add the transform effect between glue gun and composite and reduce the opacity setting.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

that’s a hard one to troubleshoot…

have tried running activity monitor and watching that when you see these hangs, and compare what you see there with what you see on another mac? you can sort the processes by CPU usage by clicking that column header… you might be able to see if there is a particular process that is causing the issue.

i have seen a similar issue, but it was only with the Cineware plugin. the only fix i found was to reformat the main driver and reinstall OS X and all the software… pain in the ars, but it did fix the issue.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

card dance can do some of this.

when you apply it to a layer, it will cut it up into a grid of 3d ‘cards’. you can then use ‘gradient layers’ to manipulate position, rotation and scale. you can use wave world to create an animated wave-like gradient layer in a pre-comp to get a pretty realistic wave movement for the cards.

it can’t do cubes, or any type of extrusion.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you shouldn’t need to ram preview prior to rendering…

you might try selecting edit>purge>all memory and cache prior to rendering.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

yes, you could trigger the animation when the audio levels drop bellow a set level, you’d need to first cover the audio levels to key frames (select footage layer, then animation>keyframe assistant>cover audio to key frames), then point your expression to the audio keyframes.

However, the animation might trigger at a short pause between sentences, so ultimately you’d be manually setting up many of the comps, and you’ll also have to manually convert the audio to keyframes for each new footage layer… so not exactly automated.

you could use the layer markers that you have to set the timing of the animation, but if you only have a few keyframes, to move, then it’s about the same amount of work to slide those.

the best option I can think of would be to set the animation to trigger based on the duration of the footage layer, but you’d still likely need to manually trim the footage layer.

so say you trim the end of each footage layer to end one second after they have stopped talking. you could set up an expression like this on the position property to trigger the position animation to start one second prior to the end of the footage layer:
target = thisComp.layer("presenteropen");
backtime = 1; // value in seconds
animStart = target.outPoint - backtime;
if (time > animStart) valueAtTime(time - animStart + key(1).time) else key(1).value;
you can set the backtime value as needed — say you want to trim the footage layer to 1.5 seconds after they stop talking, then you’d set backtime to 1.5

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW