[Kevin Camp]

Make sure Render Settings is set to ‘Best’, not ‘Current’ in the render queue.

[Kevin Camp]

Played around with this a little more, and found several issues with my method.

You can fix several of the issues by adding one more animator to the text layer that has Minimax applied to it… add a new animator for character value and set it to 95 (this should be the underscore character for most fonts).

Then in that second animator’s advanced settings, set ‘character alignment’ to center.

You can also set the Minimax ‘direction’ to horizontal.

This seems to produce a better underline. It still has mild issues with words that begin or end in narrow characters like an ‘i’.

[Kevin Camp]

I’d try using a copy of the text layer with the Minimax effect as a matte for the underline.

Try this:

Create an underline that goes under all your text, could be a shape layer or solid, it just needs to be a single, separate layer that a track matte can be applied to.

Duplicate your text layer add the Minimax effect and set the radius to a value that will be large enough to encompass the underline.

Add a text animator for opacity to this text layer and set opacity to zero. twirl down the range selector > advanced properties and set ‘based on’ to ‘words’, ‘units’ to ‘index’ and ‘mode’ to ‘subtract’. The set the the start value to 2 and the end to 3 to select the 3rd word.

At this point only that 3rd word should be Minimax’d.

Move the underline layer below the Minimax’d text layer and use that Minimax layer as a track matte for the under line to mask out an underline below just the 3rd word.

You can link the character animator’s start and end values to more easily select the word to be underlined.

I think that will get you close to what you are looking for.

[Kevin Camp]

Keylight has spill suppression built in.

My guess is that when you look at it in intermediate, that spill suppression is disabled in the preview.

Then you’re adding another effect to do the spill suppression while keylight is not suppressing the spill (in intermediate), and you have things looking good with that other suppression effect.

Then when you switch to Final Result, Keylight is doing the spill suppression and changing the colors of the footage and that causes the other spill effect to get confused and that messes things up.

I’d either keep Keylight in intermediate (thus disabling it’s built in suppression) or remove the other spill suppressor. It would seem too many spill suppressors is not a good combination.

[Kevin Camp]

You’d want to use the Tracker to motion track the face on the fighter, then apply the track to the face layer.

Here’s a link to Adobe’s description: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/tracking-stabilizing-motion-cs5.html

It’s a bit dry, but if you search the web for After Effects Tracker Tutorial you’ll probably find some decent tutorials to help get you started.

[Kevin Camp]

There is an old effect called sinedots, that probably does not work any more, but used to create an animation similar the old Curves and Colors screen save in Windows.

You could also animate mask points and use the stroke effect and echo effect to create something similar, but it would be rather tedious.

You could also try this:

Create a circular shape layer, set the fill to none and the stroke to a color and about 2px thick.

Click the ‘add’ menu for the Contents of the shape layer and add Wiggle Paths, setting the Size fairly large (like 500), the Detail low (like 1) and the Wiggles per Second to something low (like 0.5).

Add the Echo effect and set the Echo Time to about -0.1, number of echos to 5-10 and if you want, set the Decay to around .9 or .8.

It should resemble your example, and you can definitely keep tweaking settings, or maybe start with a custom curved path with fewer or more points…

There are probably 3rd party effects that can do a better job

—- EDIT —-

Also, in the Wiggle Paths settings, set the Point to Curves : )

[Kevin Camp]

You could simply keyframe the position property of the animator.

I think any other way would involve multiple animators, one for each line and that would be considerably more work : )

[Kevin Camp]

I see your ex.png today (for some reason it did not show up last night, it was a broken image link).

That stack could be created with a single shape layer and ‘repeater’… Try this:

Double-click the rectangle shape tool without any layer selected in the comp (this will make a new rectangle shape that is the same size as the comp and with the anchor in the center of the shape layer.

Twirl down the shape layer properties to get to rectangle>path>size and enter the size needed (ex: 200×75) and set the fill color and stroke as needed.

Now add a repeater by clicking the ‘add’ menu in the ‘Contents’ row for the layer and choose ‘repeater’.

twirl down the repeater options and set ‘composite’ to ‘above’ and twirl down ‘transform: repeater’ and set the position attribute affect the repeating shape on the y-axis (ex: 0, -10).

now scrub the repeater’s ‘copies’ attribute and the stack should grow and shrink accordingly.

you should be able to tie a slider to control the stack and the value similar to your current setup.

The you’d just duplicate that stack (and values, etc) to make more of them. And to change the look (fill color, stroke) you can select all of the stacks and set the fill or stroke as needed for all of them at once.

[Kevin Camp]

You can have a slider control layers and properties in another comp.

Since you have a slider in the money comp and it is all set up and working, you may only need to control that slider in the master comp. Try this:

Bring the stack comp into a new comp, name it ‘master’ and add a slider to the nested stack comp (note: you can name it anything, but it will need to match the following expression).

Back in the stack comp, add this expression to the slider that controls the stack:

comp("master").layer(thisComp.name).effect("Slider Control")("Slider")

Go back to the master comp and adjust the slider. It should control the slider in the stack comp and thus should control the stack.

To have multiple stacks controlled independently, you’ll need to duplicate the stack comp in the project window and then add them to the master comp and then add a slider control to each nested stack comp.

[Kevin Camp]

Assuming the animated wavy line is footage, can you motion track it?