[Mike Park]

I am no expert on codecs, but I think that it is a problem with the interpretation of the transparency in the codec and the way the players read it. I am guessing that h.264 encodes the file with a default setting of dither and that is why you must manually change it in the player, which then writes the change to the file when you save it. There may be a setting under the codec panel in AFX to change the interpretation, but I have not found it. Check your player to see if you have any similar tools.

[Mike Park]

I have not had any problems with the Animation codec, but this is a common problem for the H.264 codec. The fix is in changing the way quicktime reads the transparency. Check out my response to the post above re this issue with h.264 and see if that fixes the problem.

Best of luck

[Mike Park]

Sure,

This has been discussed quite a bit.

First, open your mov file in quicktime. Click “window” “show movie properties” Select your video track and under the “visual settings” tab, change the transparency to “blend” and change the value from 50 to 100. Then, change the transparency to “straight alpha” and click the high quality check box on the right side. Then close the dialogue box and click file, save, to save the changes. The mov file should play with proper saturation and contrast.

Best of luck

[Mike Park]

Basically, there are 2 really easy ways to do this.
First way. Create a new solid the size of your comp. apply a black and white gradient and have the white on the bottom up to the 2/3 mark and then feather into black. Place this layer over your text layer and change your text layer track matte to luma. This will drive the opacity of your text layer based on the luma value of the layer above. make sure the solid layer is not visible.

Second Way. Precompose your text layer into a new comp and then add a mask to it by clicking the name of the precomp in the comp and selecting and double clicking the rectangular mask tool. This will create a mask the comp size. Drag the mask down until it cuts off where you want. Hit “f” and unlink the feather x and y and feather y only. Make sure the mask extends below your comp so it does not feather the bottom portion.

Hope this helps
God bless 🙂

[Mike Park]

If you are talking about camera shake due to the physical movement of the camera, yes, you can eliminate that to some extent. All you need to do is use the tracking tools in afx and stabilize the motion. There is a great tutorial by Andrew Kramer on this very subject here:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=105

Hope this helps

[Mike Park]

Change the focal length of the 3d camera to something like 35mm. You probably have the length at a exaggerated setting which is causing your distortion. I am assuming the image has a “fish eye” look of some sort.

Hope this helps

[Mike Park]

Sure, if you have Trapcode Particular as your particle system. All you need to do is keyframe your physics time from 1.0 to 0, which will stop your particles and effectively freeze time. Then fly through the particles. When you want your particles to resume, simply keyframe the physics time back to 1.0
As for how this can be done with CC particle world, I don’t know of a way at present which will stop the particles and allow you to fly through in real 3d space.

Best of luck

[Mike Park]

try this tutorial by Grant Swanson

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/swanson_grant/mystic_text.php

I don’t know exactly what the opening to heroes looks like, but this sounds like what you need.

Cheers

[Mike Park]

It sounds to me like you are looking to simulate a bright lens flare effect. As far as I know, just pointing a standard light at the camera in AFX will not accomplish this. I would try making a new adjustment layer, applying a lens flare effect and then pickwiping the position of the flare to the target of the light. Then, when the target crosses the camera, it will give the illusion of blinding the camera.

You could also use expressions to simulate this effect by tying the proximity of the light target to the camera to the size of the flare or another white solid to simulate the “blinding” effect

Hope this helps

[Mike Park]

People are probably talking about the 3d stroke plugin from Trapcode and they would be right. That plugin is perfect for what you are trying to do. You apply it to your path and animate the percentage along the path to follow your leaf object. You can taper the line at one or both ends and actually move it in 3d, although it seems like you only need 2d. It is the best way to go, if you have the plugin.