[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

What are the factors that you are dissatisfied with in your animation?

Depending upon where you are with it and where you want to go, some of the following thoughts may be helpful or irrelevant.

I personally have some trouble with dealing with walk cycles. I have used programs like ToonBoom to learn hand drawn animation and I find that creating a realistic walking (or running) figure is quite difficult. Using reference works such as Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Human Figure in Motion” can be very helpful. You might not even have to buy a copy… the front cover shows seven frames of a man running that may be exactly the run cycle you need. You can probably find an image of the cover on Amazon.

A factor critical to getting the right “feel” for the movement is adjusting acceleration and deceleration of movement. The curve editor is ideal for dealing with these. As the figure begins to move, they should accelerate into the movement, then perhaps keep a rolling speed and then decelerate. The way the legs and arms move may involve careful tweaking of acceleration into and out of each swing. I find it very helpful to get up and walk to get a better “feel” for what the legs and arms actually do while walking or running.

Not having worked with the puppet tool much, I really don’t know what I am talking about, but my feeling is that the it will not be the way to animate this. If you are using an icon style figure made from geometric shapes, you may be better off making the body one layer, each leg and arm another layer and the head yet another layer. Placing the anchor points at the joints, you may need to animate it like a paper doll. The problem with the puppet tool is that it creates a bendable mesh that moves fluidly rather than in the hard, geometric style of an icon. I suppose you could use “hold interpolation” of your keyframes, but it depends upon the look you seek. Also you might be able to reduce the number of triangles the puppet tool uses and thus have more rigid control, but in the end, building the figure in layers might be better if that is the quality of movement you are looking for.

If you do build the figure in layers, it seems to me that the most efficient way would be to create a comp wherein you animate the figure going from a stand still to running in place. You might be able to loop the run cycle with loop expressions, but it might be easier to create a standing-still-to-running comp, a single-run-cycle comp, and a running-to-stopping comp of your figure. You can then drop these into a new comp wherein you create multiple instances of the single-run-cycle comp to have as many running steps as you need. At this point, the figure should be running in place, not across the screen.

Once you are happy with the run cycle, drop this into your final comp wherein you move the figure across the top line of text.

It sounds like you might have already tried some of these paths so forgive me if I’m stating the obvious. In any case, if you can further describe what you are trying the achieve, we might be better able to help.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

You may want to re-render the files to a different codec such as Animation (Huge files) or Motion Jpeg (Not so huge, but not so good either) These should be readable on your Windows system.

Obviously if this involves a lot of footage, this could be a problem.

Here’s a couple of threads I have found on the subject;

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/162/866253
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/120/859050#859050

https://www.dvfilm.com/raylight/decoder/index.htm

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

Under the File menu, select “Collect Files” This will copy all your files associated with that project to a new directory. It will also create a project file that points to the copied footage. You can then move that to a new system and have all your material for your project.

It will not, however, copy effects or fonts so if you need those, they will have to be installed on the other computer.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

I don’t think using a DV codec is going to help you. They almost always look blurry. If you use the Meridian codec your comp MUST be 720×486 – nothing else works. If you have set up your comp as 720×480 the Meridian codec will fail. Mostly when I have provided animations for Avids I use lower field dominant renders, but if the editor is working with DV, I find I have to create upper field renders.

Also, if you are rendering with an alpha channel, do a straight render rather than a pre-multiplied render. Avids do not understand pre-multiplication and will create a dark ring around semi-transparent areas in your animation.

Of course if you have used the Lossless Animation codec and are still getting blurry text, it may be an issue of the Avid, not After Effects. In once case I was creating animations for a Final Cut project shot in DV and the animations looked blurry and terrible. Apparently FCP dumbed down the animation to DV quality no matter what it started out as. The fix was to upres the project to the quality of the animations.

Could this be what is happening in Avid? You may want to ask this question on an Avid forum. I’m sure the issue comes up a lot. There may be setting in the Avid for dealing with maintaining graphics quality while compositing into a DV project.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

I think I asked this same question about two years ago. The answer turns out to be pretty simple…

Under Force 1, animate the Depth variable from a negative to a positive number (or vice versa) and that should send a wrecking ball through your layer.

The problem is the effect defaults to shatter your layer the moment it starts. Only by changing the depth of the force element can you accurately animate when it occurs.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

Open the quicktime file on the Mac and hit Command-I to display the information window. This will tell you what codec the file is compressed with. You will have to either get the windows version of the codec and install it on the windows system or else use another codec that you do have on both systems. (Animation, for example.)

Hope this helps.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

I’m not sure if this is an answer to your question, but I’ll offer my thoughts just because it’s likely to add to the surplus of confusion in the world.

I had tracked footage of an iPod Touch with a photo that needed to be replaced. It starts off screen and rises up into frame. Although I used Mocha to track it and it did a great job, it was not possible to exactly track the bottom edge that started off screen. So what I did (this was in Shake, but the same process would work in AE) I tracked a top corner of the iPod screen and then, moving to a frame where I could see the whole screen, created a thin, solid that was the same vertical length of the screen and attached it to the tracker. Since it was attached to the top corner of the iPod screen, it moved with the iPod, extending to the bottom of the screen, even when the screen moved below the frame. This acted as a ruler that would show me the distance beyond the bottom of the frame that I had to move the replacement image’s corner pin points.

Working backward, as the screen descended below the bottom of the frame, the “ruler” (placed on the edge of the iPod screen) showed me where I had to place my corner pin points. In Shake you can use a viewport node to show beyond the edges of your frame… You might be able to do the same thing in AE by temporarily enlarging the pixel dimensions of your comp.

You might need to rotate the “ruler” so be sure to set its anchor point to the same place as the tracker point.

Of course all this assumes that there is some other point that you can use as an offset tracker point. If you don’t have another point that will let you “proxy track” your real point, then you may just have to move it around until it works. Obviously if the person in your shot is moving a lot, then you won’t be able to use a point off of them to measure where your real point should be.

If you need to just move your tracked points around on screen in AE, I’m not sure you can do it directly on the “Attach Point” keyframes. But if you select all the “attach point” keyframes that the tracker creates, you can copy and paste them to the position keyframes of some other object. You should then see a motion path in the viewer. You should be able to grab the points you want to move and adjust their position on screen.

This may not be what you are looking for and it might leave you more confused than enlightened. If so, my work is done here.

Anyway, there might be a simpler way to do this, but it was what occurred to me at the time, so that’s what I did.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

The PDF approach could work really well. I too find Live Type to be horribly slow when it comes to credits.

What I have done in the past is to format the credits as in Illustrator file and then scroll them in AE. This has tended to work smoothly and renders quickly. I assume a PDF would do much the same thing.

The nice thing with Illustrator is that you can easily layer this over footage, a texture or a faded or blurred logo.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Ah… Lightning… That makes more sense. It would help if I actually READ your post properly.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

I ran into a similar problem. Are you by any chance using a Wacom Tablet? Some time last year I started running into this sort of problem on AE 7 on a Mac G5 running OS-X 10.4 with whatever Wacom driver was current at the time. As far as I could tell it was some sort of conflict between Open GL and the tablet. This would only happen if I was working on a complex scene that contained a camera. The problem seemed to happen when I moved the camera. For a while, I had to switch to wireframe mode while moving the camera.

The the screen would black out, I would have to save and exit AE and things would be fine when I restarted, but if I wasn’t careful, the problem would occur again.

I never found an adequate solution and I’m not even sure that the above was really the cause. At any rate, I haven’t run into the problem in a while and this may have been due to any number of changes; AE version, new Wacom drivers, new OS, new computer.

One thing you might try doing is to throw away your preferences for AE. I don’t know where they are on Windows, but on a Mac with AE 8, they can be found at Your User Name/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Efects/8.0/Adobe After Effects 8.0 Prefs

Usually when I do this, I just re-name the preference file and check to see if that cures the problem when I restart AE. If not, I can easily revert to the original file.

Hope this helps,

Lars