[Michael Szalapski]

I agree with Dave. I might like the video and audio for reference, but I’d only output your AE bits and import them back into Vegas rather than rendering the whole thing out of AE.

Now, this changes if you decide you want to do compositing or coloring in AE, of course.

Also, while we’re at it, if your project is HD, don’t forget the words of Dave LaRonde:

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

If I hear what you’re saying, you want to see a thread form a logo then pull back out to being a straight thread.

But you don’t want it to just be a solid line, you want it to look like an actual thread with texture and form.

If you absolutely must use AE, you might try the puppet tool for this. I’ve never tried something like this myself, but I imagine if you create a long thread in Photoshop (or a precomp), you could use the puppet tool to move it around. My AE machine’s tied up in a render at the moment, (thus my presence on the forums) otherwise I’d try it and see.

Of course, a true 3d application will be much better for this.

Oooh, ooh, I forgot, you could do it with an actual thread and stop motion! It’ll look much more realistic and have that touch of warmth that only stop motion can bring.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Welcome to the wonderful world of AE.

To learn how to use the program, the manual is a great place to start, but lots of people find it better to combine reading the manual with doing some tutorials. Videocopilot.net has a great set of basics for beginners.
The COW of course has a whole tutorials section.

If you have any questions, feel free to pop in and ask, but might I suggest the AE beginner’s forum instead. Many of the same experts are there, but they’re expecting newbie questions in that forum.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

As I mentioned in my previous post, you can uncheck the option under modify so that Colorama doesn’t have any effect on the alpha, but I realized I didn’t answer your question.

[Kurt Hudson] “Why is it that colorama effects alpha like that?”

Because you told it to do so.

You just weren’t aware that you were telling it that.
Each color point on the Colorama output wheel also has an alpha level. So you can tell it to be red AND 50% opacity at one point and blue AND 67% opacity at the next point.
As long as you have the modify option checked, telling it to modify the alpha, it’s going to.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

The character intros can be done very simply; three shape layers (or solids), a text layer, some lights and a camera (maybe).

Let’s take Crane’s intro as an example:
Outline of Crane (1 solid/shape layer)
Yellow beam(s) of color (1 solid/shape layer)
Red background (1 solid/shape layer)
Text layer (probably created in Illustrator, but can be done in AE)
That’s it.

The layers are set as 3d layers with a light or two.
Then there’s a subtle position animation on the layers (possibly camera instead) and the text is either scaled down or moved back in z-space quickly. Motion blur turned on.

I believe there’s a drop shadow on the text not just a cast shadow from the lights, but it’s hard to tell on my iPhone’s screen. There is probably some nice texture and stuff added in too, but again; I can’t really see it on YouTube. It’s all fairly basic stuff though.f

If you don’t know how to do some of what I said, please read through your AE manual (it’s really helpful), check out the tutorials here at the COW and check out the basics at VideoCopilot.net.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Found this with a quick search.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I may have been right as to why it wasn’t feathering, but I didn’t come up with the right solution.
USE COLORAMA!!! Just go under the modify twirl-down and uncheck Modify Alpha.

And precomposing will also work if you make sure you that Colorama is in the precomp and the mask is applied to the precomp. Instead, what you did (that didn’t work), is that the mask was in the precomp and Colorama was applied to the precomp.

And even if you decided you didn’t want to use Colorama anyway you still wouldn’t be stuck with Threshold. Apply Hue-Saturation or Tint or Channel Mixer or any of your favorite ways to make a layer black and white, then use Curves or Levels and crush it! It’ll look much better than Threshold with a lot more secure.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I agree with Steve. You would use AE to help blend the two shots together, but a carefully planned shoot (including measuring distances and angles) is more important to making it look good.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Colorama effects alpha. Try using some other form of coloring.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You could also do it by using corner point under the distortion effects. Make your triangle with the corner pin effect and tie the pointy corner of the triangle’s corner pin to your tracker with an expression.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.