[Marc Brown]

Shrug. It took a couple hours of Googling but I finally found the missing ingredient (the premise that camera keyframes can only be viewed from outside the camera.. which is frankly not intuitive, but whatever.. now I know).

[Marc Brown]

Ahh, there we go. Yes, that did the trick. I figured it would be something built-in. Thanks.

Now I just need to figure out how to keep AE from decelerating and re-accelerating motion every time it comes to a keyframe. There has to be a way of forcing it to maintain smooth motion. Even Audition is more intuitive when it comes to these curves.

[Marc Brown]

Never mind. Expressions, yeah yeah. Sorry. ;p

[Marc Brown]

I really did try getting a scan of a sheet of paper. My results were always imprecise in ways that made them unusable. My biggest success looked a bit like this:

https://www.ondisplaymusic.com/images/notebook_paper_bkgrd.jpg

but even that was ultimately no better than what I was able to achieve artificially. The most likely culprit behind my failures was my digital camera, which exhibits limitations which would be anomalous in today’s Best Buy or wherever.

For what it’s worth, my poor pc has had much better luck dealing with multiple copies of a layer with smaller dimensions. I’ve decided to overcome other limitations by initially scrolling along the y axis and gradually transitioning to x.

Now to figure out how to tie the spotlight to the camera.

[Marc Brown]

True enough. Stuck with AE7. It can import a SWF but it evidently doesn’t do it correctly.

[Marc Brown]

Good advice. As to why I didn’t simply create a bitmap of fractal noise, well, I had it in mind (assuming I could work out how) to use the fractal noise in some way to enhance the perception of depth. Right now, the paper layer is completely flat. It would be nice if I could subtly bump-map the layer, based perhaps on the fractal noise, and have this change be realized, visually, by the spotlight I have shining on it. It would be subtle but apparent, and would enhance the sense that the paper is scrolling by a fixed camera.

I’ll look into duplicating the layer I’ve got. With luck, it won’t be as cpu-intensive as having a layer of the needed width, and hopefully the repeat nature of the noise won’t be apparent.