[Mike Clasby]

As far as I know, your right I believe about resizing many Masks at once, but you can resize masks one at a time by setting keyframes for Mask Shape. Set a keyframe, and down the timeline, Double click the mask and you get a freeTransform box (like in PhotoShop) to Scale (x, y or both) and Rotate mask shape.

[Mike Clasby]

“The text would be the spectrum so it would need to look kind of fuzzy.”

Don’t really know what that means, can you post a link that’s close?

If you want the different letters in the words to react individually as an audio spectrum, I know Trapcode’s Sound Keys can actually apply different parts of the audio (frequencies I think) to scale and such, so you apply Sound Keys and take use Range1,2 and 3 for the scale for different letters in your word. You could use multiple instances of Soundkeys to actually do say 10 samples, giving each to the scale of a different letter.

But I don’t own Soundkeys… so I’m no real help there.

AE’s Convert Audio to Keyframes just works off Amplitude (loudness) so you can scale all the letters at once, but not each letters as part of the spectrum (as you can in Soundkeys). If you want to scale the word as a whole, see this page from Dan:

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/basic-audio.html

Just move the anchor point to the middle and bottom of the word, with the Pan Behind Tool so it will scale from the base.

This expression modified from Dan’s will scale only the Y scale so the Text bounces up and down, not growing out to the side. change the last line to this:

[scale[0],scale[1] * stretch]

Still not sure of the look your going for.

[Mike Clasby]

“Audio Beat Counter” is what you want on that page, direct link here:

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/audio-count.html

[Mike Clasby]

Do you want each letter to appear on the beat?

If each letter were it’s own layer you can do what you want with Dan’s page, here:

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/toc.html

[Mike Clasby]

“…is there a chance to let each letter of the word individually switch through the alphabet randomly…”

I’m not sure what you mean. Do you mean you want one letter to run the cycle, then the next, etc. ?
If so, this should work.

You need to put the expression on each of four text layers and change the expression, then move the markers so they stagger in the timeline.

So on the layer you have do this (You might want to do this in a duplicated comp or duplicated layer at the least so you don’t destroy what you already have):

1) Double click the text layer and change the highlighted text from ” 1324″ to just “1”, this will then be the first number in the end result 1324.

2) Change the “pear” in line 11 to just “p” as in p for pear.

3) In lines 16 and 41 change the “numChars = 4” to “numChars = 1”.

You should now have one character “p” that goes through that same cycle ending up at “1”.

Duplicate the layer (Ctrl D), then reposition (Shift-drag or arrow keys) it to the right of the first letter.

1) Double click the text and change the “1” to “3” to get that final 3 in the 1324 you wanted.

2) Change the “p” in line 11 to just “e” as in the e in pear.

Duplicate the text two more times and reposition them, then change the settings to make “a and r” morph to “2 and 4” same steps as above.

OK, this looks exactly like the setup we started with, what the … ????

Now in the layer “e/3”, the second layer you changed, leave the first marker at the beginning of the layer, but slide all of the other markers to the right of that last marker in the first layer (p-1 layer). Just drag them right. This should give you a “p that morph to a 1” in the first layer, followed by an “e that morphs to a 3 in the second layer. So the first layer finishes, before the second layers morphs, etc.

Is that what you want?

PS – I’m sure the grid stuff can be dropped from the expression but changing the numChars seemed easier. Also I really like the “holdFrames = 5” in lines 17 and 42 changed to 1 or 2, then they really rip through the sequence.

Chow.

[Mike Clasby]

This little expression from Dan should work:

delay = 10; //number of frames to delay

d = delay*thisComp.frameDuration*(index – 1);
thisComp.layer(1).opacity.valueAtTime(time – d)

It came from here:

https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/follow-the-leader.html

witch is part of his main site, sort of the online Holy Grail of Expressions:

https://www.motionscript.com/

[Mike Clasby]

If the point you’re tracking is very close to the edge of the screen you might still have to place footage in a larger comp to be able to place the track points where you want them. The Feature and Search regions are restricted to the layer window’s size, so it’s impossible to set them on a point to close to the edge unless they’re in a larger comp. It sounds like you avoided that, thought you’d like to know.

[Mike Clasby]

Hold down Alt ot Option when you reset that track point and the Attach Point stays put. It’s explained in detail here:

Tracking obscured objects in video

https://studio.adobe.com/us/tips/tip.jsp?p=1&id=399&xml=aft6tracking

[Mike Clasby]

The newer PhotoShop has Photomerge:

Search “Photomerge”, at Adobe here:

https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/family/

Here’s the first one from the search.

https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/10.0/help.html?content=WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-75e7.html

I got a free version of Cannon’s photostitch, do you have a CD that came with an old camera?

Or Goggle “photo stitch” or “photo panorama software”.

This looked interesting, Autostitch, there’s a demo version that times out, I don’t know if its water marked or not:

https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html#autostitch

[Mike Clasby]

Just remembered! If you have PhotoShop Extended, you can stabilize Video with the “Align” function, saw it in an online Seminar, here:

https://pacific.adobe.acrobat.com/p66856872/

Or scroll down to John Dickinson’s post below, since the thing to make links is cranky.