[Mike Clasby]

Double Post, my bad.

[Mike Clasby]

Select the text layer that you’ve animated, then hit “UU” to reveal anything that was done to the layer.

A text preset like “Center Spiral” reveals keyframes for rotation and opacity, and if you slide the right hand keyframes closer to the leftmost keyframes then the animation will be shorter.

Some of the presets are driven by expressions, then you have to read them and figure out what’s going on. But most use slide-able keyframes, so set them closer for a faster animation.

[Mike Clasby]

Have a look at Auto Levels or Auto Contrast, in the Adjust Categories in AE 6.5, but methinks, Color Correction in the newer versions. Help has details, like setting Temporal Smoothing to avoid sampling other scenes. I haven’t really used this much but in theory it should help.

[Mike Clasby]

A Null is much better. I must start using them for that more. Thanks for the reminder, me forgets.

[Mike Clasby]

If you want Photo-realistic, then your talking Big Bucks and a 3D programs, methinks.

You might be able to get away with a combo of CC Ball Action, Scatter, maybe Vector Blur and Y Scale on a masked Duplicate of the layer. It depends on how close you are also. A close-up on the grass will be tougher than a longer shot.

Dup the layer with the grass. With the Pen Tool make a mask shaped like a Horse shoe that will wrap around the extruding building.

Set Mask Shape keyframes from large horse shoe, at the end, to small horse shoe at the beginning of the eruption (double click the mask, you get a transform box).

Add CC Ball Action, Grid probably 0.
Keyframe Scatter from 0 to say 10 (your choice) quickly 3 frames or so, this is to be the grass flying, exploding up.

Add Scatter. Amount to 5-10, to make the particles smaller. Try unchecking the “Randomize Every Frame”, whatever looks best.

Optional: You can even add Vector Blur, Type Direction Fading at 4 or so to make it stringy.

Anyway, once the lawn particle are up in the air, here comes the building thru the hole, the horseshoe shaped mask that is expanding from the Mask Shape keyframes.

To make the debris settle to the ground, animate the scale of the dupped layer. First move the anchor point of the dupped layer with the Pan Behind Tool to the bottom of the horse shoe, so the layer scale up and down from there. Then S reveals the scale and you want to disconnect the scales x and y by clicking on that little “Constrain Proportions” icon (looks like an infinity sign) and then animate the y Scale from 100 to zero (or leave a little if you want a little scattered about) with keyframes (the x scale stays at 100). This will give you a collapsing debris cloud.

You can play with colorama to bet a little dirt (brown) intermixed upon eruption.

That’s the quickie, better needs real 3D or the correct particles for Particular.

[Mike Clasby]

If you have CS3 you’re really in luck, see this:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/drozda_jerzy/CEShapeExtruder/Video/shape_extruder.html

[Mike Clasby]

What does it say in the Project Window, when you select the PSD? At the top next to the little Picture it should say if it has Alpha and what type.

Or

Select the footage in the Project Window, Right Click>Interpret Footage>Main, then let AE Guess the Alpha, or select a different one and see if that helps. Many PSD’s, at least the ones created in AE when you Composition>Save Frame As>File, are Premultiplied.

[Mike Clasby]

I’m not sure of the details of Andrew’s tut, but if you Edit the Target in the Motion Tracker Panel, choose your Flame layer, and hit Apply, then it should paste those Attach Point keyframes into the Flames Position.

Or you can just copy the Attach Points keyframes (make sure your at the beginning of the clip) then paste them into the Flames Position.

Or you can create a quick expression by Alt-Clicking the Flames Position Stopwatch and pickwhipping to the Attach Point Stopwatch. giving you an expression like:

temp = thisComp.layer(“Comp 1”).motionTracker(“Tracker 1”)(“Track Point 1”).attachPoint;
[temp[0], temp[1]]

If you want the Flame to be offset a little from the Attach Point, out this expression in place of the one you just created with the pickwhip.

a = thisComp.layer(“Comp 2”).motionTracker(“Tracker 2”)(“Track Point 1”).attachPoint;
xOffset = -50;
yOffset = 10;
a + [xOffset, yOffset]

Basically we’ve just created a variable “a” equal to that original first line, yours might be slightly different, so change that “temp” in the first line of you original expression to “a”, then add lines 2 thru 4 below.

Put in number how much you want the Flame offset from the Attach Point, it’s -50 in the and +10 in the Y above.

Children Playing with Fire, I dunno… but if he is a real super hero, better not get on his wrong side.

[Mike Clasby]

I can’t replicate your problem.

I’ll visit you in the sanitarium, if you like, but I have no help.

What version of AE are you on? Have you looked at Edit>Preferences>Import, any luck there?

[Mike Clasby]

Precomping is actually a solution to at least half of the problems in AE, at least it seems so. It’s always a good first attempt at a fix.