[Michael Szalapski]

Try converting your video file into something like a PNG sequence and using that in C4D instead. 😉

– 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]

What problem are you having?

– 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]

Have you considered updating? You’re missing a number of bug fixes in the recent update.

– 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 QuickTime H.264 implementation was buggy and unsupported the entire time it was there. It should never have been there in the first place.
Apple is deprecating a lot of stuff lately, so the newest version of AE is missing several codecs that used to be available.

There is currently no way to do H.264 directly out of AE natively in the latest version. You have at least three options.

1. You can get AfterCodecs (which is a really nice thing to add to your toolkit; you get much higher quality at lower file sizes and you also get stuff like ProRes on Windows!)

2. You can render an intermediate file with a production codec (DNxHR, Cineform, etc.) out of AE’s render queue and use the Adobe Media Encoder to make your MP4 (which is what you should have been doing anyway; it lets you do multipass encoding which AE’s render queue the way you were using it never could).

3. You can send an AE comp directly to the Adobe Media Encoder.

I used to do 2 all the time. Now I do 1. I was never a fan of option 3, but some people love it. One of the advantages of just sending your AE comp to AME is that you can send it off to render and then continue working on your next project while it renders in the background.

– 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]

Take your two video clips and put them into a new comp with the cut points exactly in the same place. Then give yourself a bit of head and tail on both clips and make them crossfade. (Animate the opacity of the top layer.)

Then, back in your main comp, put your crossfading comp in there matching up (so that the video files play at the same time.

Apply the Displacement Map effect to both of your original video clips.

On the first video clip, set a keyframe for the displacement amount in vertical and horizontal at 0.
Move forward in time to the point where the transition ends and adjust the value of the horizontal and vertical displacement amounts to the max amount.

On the second video clip (at the time where you want the transition to end), set keyframes with the displacement amounts at 0. Move back to the time of the keyframe on the first video clip and set keyframes for the same amount of horizontal and vertical displacement that you gave the first layer BUT NEGATIVE. That is, if your first layer goes from 0 to 100 in horizontal displacement, make your second layer go from -100 to 0.

Animate the opacity of the top layer.

You’ll need to experiment with the timing and displacement amounts (as well as consider adding a blur to the comp that’s driving the displacement).

– 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]

What have you gotten so far?

– 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]

There is no way to do what you’re asking in AE. HOWEVER, you can cheat it. Just make a bunch of duplicates and offset them a pixel or two in z-space. It’ll have approximately the same effect as being 3d as long as you don’t view them fully on the side. It’s a clever little trick. ☺

– 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 you next your compositions in a 60 fps comp (and make sure they aren’t set to preserve the frame rate of nested comps), all your timing will be the same, but at a higher frame rate.

– 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 created a background very similar to this with Trapcode Mir.

You could do it without buying third-party plugins though. ☺

You would need to use Cinema 4D Lite (it comes free with After Effects. You’d make a plane, triangulate it, and then distort it.

– 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 easiest thing to do would be to use the path functionality available in expressions. You can either make paths from point to point with the vertices tied to the dots. Or you can set the dots to certain positions along paths.

– 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.