Patrick Algermissen
Forum Replies Created
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You could try precomposing the audio layers into an “Audio Comp” and using that in your main comp as well as your precomp.
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com -
Another suggestion, just for the sake of completeness:
1) Select your first layer.
2) Press the ‘O’ key (that’s “oh,” not zero) to move to the out point of that layer.
3) Start dragging your second layer.
4) Hold down the SHIFT key while dragging. This will cause your second layer to snap into place.The other suggestions are better, but this is a useful method to know as well.
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com -
Hmmmm…. I’m mostly out of ideas at this point, especially not knowing your specific project.
Maybe you could try rendering as an image sequence, and rendering only parts of it at a time. Is it just one frame, or one section that’s giving you trouble? If so, you could render the areas around it as an image sequence, say PNG, and then try rendering the problem frame(s) as single still images, that you name properly to be part of the sequence.
Another thing may be, since you say it works great in the RAM preview, you could make a RAM Preview and try rendering with “Current Settings” instead of “Best Settings,” which I believe would just write your RAM Preview to a file. I could be wrong about that, though.
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com -
You could probably get the random bars by using fractal noise with the blocky noise type, and doing a vertical-only stretch to get the blocks to become vertical bars. Then you could use the layer as a luma matte, so the white bars would show your video and the black bars would be black bars.
However, I don’t think there’s a way to automatically do what the video is doing around the bars, so you’d have to set all those layers manually.
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com -
Is it something about that particular frame that is crashing it, or is it just your memory filling up at that particular spot?
You can see if it’s the frame or not by rendering out a still of that frame and seeing if it crashes.
If that goes OK, try rendering it out as 2 or 3 shorter files, maybe closing/reopening AE in between each one. I had one shot last year that looked great in RAM preview, but for some reason my layers would get out of sync in the final render when I rendered out the whole thing. I had to break it up like this in order to keep everything on track. Never figured out what caused it, but I at least figured out a way around it.
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com -
I’m assuming here that your room and animated camera are rendered out from Max.
That being the case, if you have access to the Max project and can re-render it, then there are a couple of things you could try:
1) Take your wall texture into AE and do your animation on that (not on your final render, just on the flat wall texture). Then render this out, and use the resulting video in your Max scene as a wall texture, so that your text animation appears on the wall.
2) Alternatively, you could do another render of your Max scene where you have placed 4 good contrasty points exactly where you want the text animation to happen (right up on the wall). Then you could use those four points to do a corner pin track in AE to line up your animation. If your scene takes a long time to render in Max, then you could hide the geometry and just render out the tracking points.
If you can’t re-render the scene for whatever reason then you’ll have to find something to track and try to pull off some kind of corner pin effect.
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com -
I ran into similar flickering problems on my last project. Not just order flickering, but also random holes showing up in my mattes, half layers disappearing, etc. I think it was a memory issue. Usually things like soloing/unsoloing the layers (as you tried), Purging everything, closing/reopening the program, or rebooting the system would “solve” this. Ultimately, I just need to get more RAM.
Don’t know what your system specs are, but you may need the same.
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com -
This is a tricky one. I agree with Dave that a reshoot would be best, preferably with the kid on a treadmill (if you can do that without endangering the kid, of course). That would allow you shoot as much walking as you need within a limited space, then you could animate the kid’s position to make it look like he isn’t walking in place.
If you are stuck with what you’ve shot, then one common trick is to put a foreground element in the scene so that you can repeat the footage as the baby passes behind it, hiding the jump cut. This can be tricky to line up such that the baby doesn’t appear too thin, too wide, or like his body is doing two different things at once.
Hope this helps!
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com -
My understanding is that the Text Presets just apply various Animators to the text layer, so you should be able to edit the results of a preset by modifying the animators added there, adding new ones, or removing ones that are there (depending on what you want to do). Similarly, you could effectively remove the preset from a layer by deleting all the animators.
Some presets may also add effects, which you could modify/remove through the effects panel.
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com -
Off the top of my head: If you’re using After Effects you could probably start by investigating use of the Shatter effect, maybe in combination with the CC Ball Action.
You might could also get some interesting cracking by using a solid/precomp with Advanced Lightning as a Track Matte for the band layer. You could also use a time-staggered duplicate of the lightning layer as a displacement map, so the band starts to warp a little bit before cracking open.
Just random thoughts. I hope you find them useful!
Patrick Algermissen
Poem Pictures, Inc.
http://www.PoemFilms.com