[Matthew Woods]

I’ve actually used Syntheyes and AE together several times, and it works well. I think what you are doing wrong is parenting your tracking layer to the Null generated by SynthEyes. The nulls don’t actually move, they represent points in space in the scene and the camera moves, so parenting to the null isn’t going to change anything. What I usually do, is copy the position data of the null in the scene I want place my object near, and paste that into the 3d position property of the layer I want to add to the scene, then scale that layer appropriately. Also, make sure that your composition is set to view through the camera that Syntheyes created.

[Matthew Woods]

It looks like the overflowing light may be just an animated radial blur. Try making two copys of your animation. Keep the bottom one unblurred for the sharp edges of the silhouette, Change the blending mode of the top copy to “add” and apply a radial blur to it. Then animate the blur center, blur amount and opacity of the top layer to create your light spilling animation.

[Matthew Woods]

I’d try playing with CC Particle World. The “Textured disc and Textured Square” particle options let you assign a custom image to the particles. You could then make a very wide particle emitter and put it below your screen shooting upwards. Turn off gravity so you have no change in velocity. You’ll have to spend awhile playing with the physics and animation properties to get things to move how you want, and I doubt you can get an exact match for the movement of CC bubble, but you can probably come close.

[Matthew Woods]

It sounds like you might be able to do this in Photoshop, save as a 3d layer then bring into After Effects. When talking about its 3d functions, Photoshop CS4 claims to be able to “add depth” to layers and text. I assume/hope that means an extrude function but haven’t seen a demo of it.

[Matthew Woods]

I’d try parenting the layers all to a null, adjust the anchor point to match the radius of your circle, and the z rotation values of the layers in increments of 360/n where n is the number of your layers. I think you can then have your null align to the path.

[Matthew Woods]

Have you guys tried trashing the preferences? Sometimes those can get corrupted and can cause frequent crashes. Trashing them is easier than reinstalling. I keep a backup copy of my AE prefs. Corrupt media can also cause AE to crash. In Michaels case it sounds like this may be the case because it seems to be crashing at the same point in the timeline. I had some problems with a corrupt quicktime clip once that played fine in QT player, but caused AE to crash. Simply re-exporting it from quicktime pro as lossless animation solved the problem.

-Matt

[Matthew Woods]

Another trick I have used if you would prefer to keep all your layers in the hd composition, would be to parent any unparented layers to a new layer or null. Then change the composition settings to your hd format, then scale/move your new parent layer until things fit how you’d like. You can then unparent and get rid of the new layer if you so choose.

[Matthew Woods]

What resolution is your composition? AE CS3 crashes all over the place with multiprocessing and more than 6 processors if the composition resolution is above 2k. See this article:

https://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402403&sliceId=2

Depending on how often you work 2k or above, it might be worth following the instructions to restrict the number of render processes to 6.

I normally work in 1280×720, so I haven’t done this and don’t normally have a problem, but I run in to trouble and have to disable multiprocessing when I occasionally do have to work with something larger…. it sucks and I hope they fix this soon.

-Matt

[Matthew Woods]

It sounds like your text is probably drifting when everything is in the same comp because you are doing 3d transformations on the text layer to match the building perspective which is actually not 3d, but a perspective image on a 3d plane. When you continuously rasterize a 3d precomp, it remembers the 3d data from the precomp and no longer treats the precomp as a plane. This can be handy, you can actually build a precomp of a cube and rotate it in 3d, but in your case its working against you. The easiest way to accomplish what you want is probably to keep everything in the same comp with your camera, parent your text layer to your footage layer, and make sure your text plane’s z position and rotation values are all set to 0 (the same plane as the parent footage layer). Then use a distortion effect like corner pin, or transform to match the perspective of the text to that of the building.

[Matthew Woods]

Not quite sure the effect you are looking for, but you could try precomposing it, then time remapping the precomp to have the shatter fly back together. To get your “ripple” you might try having to copys of your shatter precomp on playing forward, and the other reverse then animate a soft circular mask to transition between them.