[Kevin Camp]

the easiest way is to parent them to another layer that doesn’t have keyframes for position and then move that layer.

try creating a new null, parent the layers that need to be moved to it and then move the null. you can even delete the null once you have everything positioned the way you want and the layers will stay in place.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

there are a lot of ways to animate some of the things you mention… eyes blinking could be a simple opacity change, y-scale change, linear wipe or some other effects…. all of which could use a different approach to utilize randomizing expressions, but you could try an expression like this to create a randomized loop of any animated property:
probability = 10; // value as percentage
seed = 0;

if (numKeys>1){
dur = key(numKeys).time-key(1).time;
n = Math.floor(time/dur);
seedRandom(n+seed,true);
valueAtTime(time%dur*Math.ceil(probability/100-random()));
}else
value;
it won’t randomize the values, but it will randomize when and how often to play the animation based on the probability value — 0 = never play; 50 = play half the time; 100 = always play (or loop continuously), etc…

so you could animate the eyes blinking with a linear wipe effect going from 0 to 100 over a few frames, hold for 10 frames, and then go back to 0 by frame 15. the expression will play that 15 frame animation based on the probability value. a value of 10 would play the animation 10% of the time, at random intervals.

you could animate the tail rotation to go from 0 to 10 degrees, hold for 3 seconds and then back to 0 and the expression will pick random times to play that 3 second loop.

however, it would not assign random values to rotate the tail, like first time rotate 10 degrees, next time 3 degrees, etc…

if needed, you can change the seed value to change the random seed… useful if you want to duplicate the bird comp and want different random values, but the same probability and animation values.

note that an animation in a precomp (even a randomized animation) will always be the same, so if you duplicate the nested comp within another comp the animation will be exactly the same. the solution for that is to either duplicate the precomp (within the prject window) and modify the seed value for each expression, or to have the duration of the precomp be much longer than needed, and you offset the nested comps in time within the main comp. I’d probably go the longer duration route (mainly because it’s easier) but you could do either.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

if you have multiple paths, you would need to copy/paste a single path at a time.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

advanced lightning could also be used.

setting the lightning type to strike or 2-way strike will keep it between 2 points (like beam). it has glow settings and of course a lightning like distortion built in.

if the end points are static you’ll want to animate the conductivity state to animate the strikes.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you could add 4 linear wipe effects, changing the angle of each to 0, 90, 180, and 270 to effectively create a cropping controls for 4 sides.

I would normally go the mask route, but the linear wipe method would be closer to what you are used to…

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i can’t open your project since my ae is outdated… but it is likely that quicktime is the problem. quicktime doesn’t loop cleanly, so you often see a hitch when it loops back to the beginning.

to check the render, bring it back into ae. select it in the project window and choose file>interpret footage>main. set the loops option to 2 (or higher) and then drag that onto the new comp icon and play thought the loop point to make sure it is smooth.

if it is, then you are fine. your render is good and it will loop cleanly in ae, or an nle or any device that is capable of playing a loop smoothly.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

the most straight forward way to animate something like this is to parent the 3d layer to a 3d null, offsetting the 3d layer from the nulls position and then rotating the null around the relative axis to give the rotation needed.

to keep the layer facing the camera, select the layer and choose layer>transform>auto orient, and check the option for ‘towards camera’

if for some reason you are not able to use this technique, expressions can also be used, but the null method usually works and is easier to manipulate.

— edit —

i should’ve mentioned that orient towards camera also needs a camera in the comp

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

try importing the problematic project into a new project and then doing a collect files — it will probably ask you to save the new project first, just don’t save over the project you imported (that probably goes without saying, but i’d hate for you to lose anything at this point)

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you would need to let us know what kind of files flipbook can export, and then we could tell you if ae can import them.

but, assuming flipbook can export an image sequence — like tif, tga, or png (all of which support alpha) — then you shouldn’t have any problems getting those files into ae.

if it can export quicktime files (mov), then both the lossless animation and png codecs support alpha and are a standard part of quicktime for osx and windows, so they would also be good options.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

you might try resetting the preferences… the easy way is to close ae, then hold alt-ctrl-shift (win) or command-option-shift (osx) when restarting ae, then click ok on the prompt that pops up.

one other question, have you tried doing a collect files on other projects since you noticed the issue with this project? if not, you might give that a try just to see if this is a project specific issue or not.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW