[Mylenium]

I’d mask-animate it. If you track a matte object, there’s a good chance it will not match at least a few frames due to the DOF on the leaves. When using masks you don’t have that problem (though it’s of course more painful to do by hand) and can match the mask feather for each frame as well.

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[Mylenium]

Either use blend modes or get an unmultiplying plugin such as XMult, Knoll Unmult or Walker Effects Alpha tools. A cheap way would be to use a duplicate of the layer as a luma matte.

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[Mylenium]

There should be a script floating around somewhere on AEnhancers, methinks. If not, it might by possible by modifying the e-mail and render script that comes with AE.

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[Mylenium]

You can easily create bunched strokes using Fractal Noise. just stretch them in one direction by making e.g stretch in X direction 2000% and in Y direction only 1%. Transform them to a radial shape using the Polar Coordinates effect. Wobble them up using Turbulent displace, apply an additional Glow effect if you must. Blend the onto the background using Add or Screen mode.

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[Mylenium]

[jimmybee500] ”
Just OT a little bit…can AE only make use of 4GB on a 64-bit system?”

No. AE is a 32 bit app and can never use more than 4 GB for simple mathematical/ technical reasons. Once it will 64 bit native, this limitation of course does no longer apply (whenever that may be).

[jimmybee500] “If so, 3GB can only be used by editing the 3GB switch on a 32-bit system? IS that right?”

Yes, using the 3GB switch is the only option to expand memory usage on 32 bit systems.

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[Mylenium]

Ahem, here we go again. It’s called RAM preview because it uses your systems RAM (or memory to use a non-tech term). Once the RAM is full, there is no way to squeeze in more frames it’s as simple as that. You can only increase the length by switching the preview resolution to half, quarter or lower (because they result in smaller pixel buffers, they use less RAM for each frame) but depending on the length you may neverr be able to preview your entire composition. Ultimately the only real solution to the problem is to get more RAM if your computer and OS support it, but even that is limited by AE only making use of up to 4GB at most.

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[Mylenium]

Just mark your sequence with a counter/ slate as RoRK said. Other than that leave the audio processing to “the other guys”, they surely will know what to do. If you have an audio editing program such as Audition, you can embed markers and timecodes in your audio file, but unfortunately this does not work for AE, so your options are limited.

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[Mylenium]

Either resize your images in Photoshop or use Tools such as Digital Anarchy’s Resizer to scale them. AE itself only does bilinear, which is just fine in most cases, but with such large scaling amounts leads to some pixels just being swallowed rather than being properly interpolated.

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[Mylenium]

Go to your user directory (e.g. on windows Documents and Settings/TonyTony/Appliccation Data/Adobe/After Effects/7.0) and copy the XML files.

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[Mylenium]

No, not really. Hand-keyframe it and be done. Sorry, but anything one could do with expressions is probably way too complicated and may still not look right for your needs. If you really insist on some automation, search the COW for “wiggle”. Be warned, though, it will look more like a tremor, not the soft shake you get e.g. with a dampened camera crane.

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[Pour Myl