[Max Haller]

Is there a reason you need to do this with a bunch of sliders and expressions vs just placing a null where you’re trying to get the anchorpoint to be?

Whenever I do animations with text bubbles or call out boxes, I just place a null object at the tip of the arrow that sticks out and parent the callout box+text to that. That way you can do your scaling animation directly to the null. Also there’s a really useful extension called Move Anchorpoint 2 (There’s v3 but its not free, v2 is free) I use that all the time to quickly snap the anchor point to where i want it.

[Max Haller]

Im not sure that’s really motion blur, it might just be that you want to increase the frame rate or space out the keyframes more.

[Max Haller]

https://aescripts.com/handycam/ is a good plugin that’s fairly cheap and easy to use. I used it for a series of 2.5D photos recently and it has easy DOF controls. Parenting the spotlights point of interest to your object is a good idea like Graham said. I believe you can do the same with 2 node cameras too. That might help if your doing a lot of complicated camera moves.

[Max Haller]

You might have the most luck just reinstalling AE. You can copy your scripts and plugin folders so you don’t have to add them individually again. It sounds like there’s a corrupted file or something like that. It generally installs pretty quickly these days.

[Max Haller]

Ive had issues with the cinema 4d renderer doing that to PSD files, try clicking on where it says Cinema 4D and changing it to the Classic 3D renderer. That fixed the PSD problems for me, might work for your problem.

[Max Haller]

The simplest way i can think to do this is to make a text layer which will be the timer text. And a Null layer which will have a Slider Control effect added to it. Then Copy and paste this expression into the source text property of the timer text layer:

Math.floor(thisComp.layer("Null 1").effect("Slider Control")("Slider"))

Then it’s as easy as animating the slider to whatever values you want to display. So make a keyframe with the slider at 30 at frame 0, and then 30 seconds later keyframe the slider to have a value of 0. This will have the text count down from 30-0 over 30 seconds. then 10 seconds later you can just set another keyframe for the slider with a value of 10, and the text will count back up from 0 to 10 over ten seconds.

If you want the slider to display”00:30″ instead of just “30”, the easiest way is to just make another text layer that contains”00:” and place it in front of the text that you’re animating with the slider.

And yes you can reuse that over and over in your future videos. If you want them all to display the same intervals you can just render out that comp with alpha and use it as a video layer that you’d place over future videos.

[Max Haller]

Expressions have to be computed on each frame so that is probably weighing the project down. The less layers the quicker it should run. You said after about 4 scenes the project starts running slow, so maybe use multiple projects that have less than 4 scenes each and combine at the end if you need to.

[Max Haller]

If you take the black and white comp and drag it into a new comp you can stretch the time of the whole comp from there.

If you right click on the bar in the layer panel that says things like “|Mode| TrkMat| Parent & Link|” you’ll get an option to show a category called “Stretch.” Once you show that column you’ll see a blue 100.0% and you can drag that to slow down your black and white comp layer.

[Max Haller]

I’d check the order the paths in the layer window. It sounds like maybe they got inverted somehow? Not sure what else would cause an issue like that. You’ve probably already checked that, but if not start there. It’s usually set up like A minus B so order matters

[Max Haller]

This won’t get you the 3D curved aspect, but I’ve used the beam effect to generate a line between null points before. Essentially you just parent the start and end position to the nulls. Not sure how to go about the curving of the line from there. From maybe some combo of precomping and lens correction/ sphere/ bulge effects.