[Michael Szalapski]

The easiest solution would be to just make the layers 3d and position a light or two to make real shadows.

That being said, if you precompose the moving layers and apply a drop shadow to the precomp, that’d work too.

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(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

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[Michael Szalapski]

It’s a very short loop. You would use something like Liquify to make it move and then cross fade to make it loop.

– 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’d just shoot the footage. It’s way more fun to throw fruit at things than to sit there clicking away on a computer.

Heck, if you have a new iPhone, you can shoot 720p at 240fps or full HD 1080p at 120fps and, if you light smartly, you can get some GREAT footage out of the iPhone (considering that it’s a tiny magic glass tablet and not a camera).

If you’d rather shoot with a real camera, you can get the same frame rates with the Sony x1000 and it’s on sale this week at Best Buy for, like, $155 off at Best Buy! The GoPro – HERO4 Black 4K Action Camera is also on sale this week for $100 off at Best Buy, but the image quality is better with the Sony.

If you want really serious slow motion for a pretty good price, you could look into the FPS1000 series of cameras. It was a thing on Kickstarter and seems to be doing alright you can get 1000fps for under £2,000.

Alternatively, you could rent a Sony FS700 to get some really great cinematography.

That being said, doing everything in full 3d offers some very tempting possibilities, but it will take quite a bit of work to get it looking right.

– 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’re trying to stretch a 1920×1080 image to be 360, the quality is not going to look great at all if your comp is also 1920×1080 because you are trying to blow it up way too large. Could you go into a little more detail about what you are trying to accomplish so we can make better suggestions?

– 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 format and codec are you trying to encode? I’d suggest doing an image sequence or a QuickTime with the PNG codec from the After Effects render queue and then taking that into AME to make your final deliverable.

– 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]

Apple’s offerings right now for professional workstations are an embarrassment. I used to love Apple, but not for professional video work anymore. (I still like their phones/watches/other personal stuff though. And, for photographers, the iMac is still pretty great.)

I would suggest waiting until Apple announces something decent again or getting a Windows machine. You can get great bang for the buck with a PC. I just built a Windows workstation with more computing power than you can even order from Apple for around $1,000. Granted, that was with used parts, but it works great! You can order a brand new PC workstation that’s about half the cost of the same specs with Apple. And it’s more upgradeable in the future!

– 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’s an align panel in After Effects with options to distribute layers.

– 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 think it’s still present in CS6. If so, CS6 is included in your Creative Cloud subscription. Save as CC version 12. Then open it in CC (version 12) and save as CS6. Open it in CS6 and export! ?

This page shows the hidden place to install old versions: https://blogs.adobe.com/adobecare/2015/06/16/how-to-find-and-install-previous-version-of-adobe-apps-in-cc-2015/

– 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]

This actually wouldn’t be too difficult. Find any of your favorite disintegration/text to sand/logo to smoke tutorials and adapt them! If you have Particular, it even has a very handy bounce physics mode to get the sugar hitting the table in a somewhat realistic fashion.

You’ll just need to plan your shoot well to make things convincing.

– 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 have to precomp your Element layer with the Z-depth buffer/pass/whatever E3D calls it and move all of the attributes into that precomp. (And you’ll need to have the camera in there too. This is where the copy with property links menu option is really handy – this way you can make changes in your main comp camera and have it happen in the precomp too.)

– 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.