[Michael Szalapski]

Yeah, I don’t particularly like Keylight’s de-spilling. Thus the animation preset that uses the Advanced Spill Suppressor effect instead! 🙂

– The Great Szalam
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[Michael Szalapski]

Not without a lot more information from you.
Exact version number of After Effects, computer specs, what you were doing when the error popped up, what plugins and scripts you’ve installed, etc.

– 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]

Thank you for sharing what worked for you! 🙂

– 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]

How did you apply the clone stamp?
What, exact, version of AE are you using?

– 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 don’t even need to do anything like that anymore. After Effects now supports MANY more markers in the composition! You just tap the * key on your numeric keypad and it will lay down a composition marker if no layer is selected. You can run an audio preview, for example, and tap that key as the preview is running to mark out the beats of a song.

– 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]

Did Steve’s suggestion help? If not, could you explain in more detail what the problem is?

– 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 should be able to have a wider area in focus by messing with the Frischulft settings like radius.

– 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]

Element is not superior to C4D.

Cinema 4D lets you have actual, real reflections instead of the faked ones in Element.
You can also do actual 3d modeling in Cinema 4D.
You can also have more than 8 lights.

As far as interactivity goes; you can set it up so that Cineware and the Cinema 4D file responds to your composition camera just like Element. You complain that the Cineware effect renders “a 3d scene that can be implemented in AAE but only as a 2d video layer”, but that’s also exactly how Element works. They’re the same in that regard.

The benefits Element has are that it renders really, really fast (and it has some cool particle animation stuff).

– 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]

It seems to me like the video is having read errors at that point. It can happen when you’re using MP4s in AE. Try using the Adobe Media Encoder to transcode the original video file to something like Cineform or DNxHD and replace the MP4 in AE with the new file.

– 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 tried the Advanced Spill Suppressor in the keying menu?

Also, in the animation presets, under Image-Utilities, there is a really handy preset that applies Keylight, Key Cleaner, and Advanced Spill Suppressor all at once. I’d recommend trying that as a starting point on any keying job.

– 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.