[Paul Roper]

Huh. That’s really crappy. I remember being impressed by the wobbly stretch and squash that could easily be automatically applied to any object in Softimage about 20 years ago! I’d have thought C4D would have something similar. I know Maya has.

[Paul Roper]

Thanks for the reply.

But that’s just plain silly that we’re on version 11 (12 if you count the Controversial Cloud version) and there’s an attribute that just doesn’t work.

[Paul Roper]

Ah! The weekly “how do I make a timeslice effect” question! I assume you have a reasonable budget or a lot of time – you’re going to need it! you can either:
1. Shoot the scene as normal, but ensuring the static people remain absolutely still, to give the illusion of a frozen frame, like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teoSDTJDjF4
2. Model the static elements (people, etc) in 3D, and animate the camera moving through them and comp your live action (moving) people on it.
3. Get hold of a few dozen digital cameras (you’ll need one per frame of your shot, so assuming 25fps, you’ll need 100 cameras for a 4-second shot), set them up precisely and trigger them to all take a shot at precisely the same time. This is how the timeslice effect is done properly.
4. Get someone else to do it, such as: https://www.timeslicefilms.com/

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there really is no easy way of doing it. It’s certainly not just an effect or plug-in. It’s amazing how long this technique has survived – I remember first seeing it in a (Chemical Brothers?) music video around 1993 and being very impressed.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

You’ll have to link the rotation of the gear with its x-position:
1. Remove any expression from the gear’s rotation, it there’s one in it.
2. Alt-click the rotation and add this expression:

transform.position[0]

3. Move the gear left & right; it will rotate.
4. You’ll probably have to modify the speed of the rotation; you can do this with a bit of guesswork; if it’s going too slowly, add a multiplier on the end, for example to double the speed:

transform.position[0]*2

…or to make it rotate at 25% speed:

transform.position[0]*.25

You could alternatively add an expression slider and use that instead of the “.25” or “2” to give you a speed control slider.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I recently made some gears using the technique of a load of Vs along a circular path, similar to one of those old tutorials mentioned in this thread. Getting the speed of the gears correct is very simple. Don’t worry about the diameter of the gears – it’s actually irrelevant. All you need is the number of teeth per gear.

The rotation of “small gear” meshing with “big gear” will always be:

thisComp.layer(“big gear”).transform.rotation*-(20/15)

…where “big gear” has 20 teeth and “small gear” has 15 teeth. Put that expression in the rotation of the “small gear”, change the “20” and “15” to the number of teeth of each gear, and you’re done. If you want to drive a big gear with the rotation of a small gear, just swap the teeth numbers:

thisComp.layer(“small gear”).transform.rotation*-(15/20)

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Huh….odd – I just edited that Keyboard Maestro macro – I told it to repeat the “Filter Clipboard” command (to strip the styles) seven times, and now it works!

[Paul Roper]

You might want to move that to the AE Expressions forum – that’s where all things expressiony and scripty live.

But I suspect the answer will be along the lines of “unless you are very experienced at programming in C or Javascript, then it’s not going to happen”. I could be wrong!

But there are almost certainly ways you could apply the glow effect via a script.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

You might want to move that to the AE Expressions forum – that’s where all things expressiony and scripty live.

But I suspect the answer will be along the lines of “unless you are very experienced at programming in C or Javascript, then it’s not going to happen”. I could be wrong!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

There may be a script to do something like this on aescripts.com – I don’t know of one, but it’s a good place to start.

Alternatively, just render them as-is, and use a program such as Automator (on a Mac) to batch-rename them (you can easily set it to do a find-replace – set it find 002_ and replace it with nothing).

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

You’ve probably tried these already, but here goes:

1. After you’ve imported your PNG sequence, right-click it and choose Interpret Footage > Main… At the top, the alpha should be set to either Straight or Premultiplied. I’m guessing this alpha section is greyed out, meaning AE’s not seeing the alpha.

2. Do you have Photoshop? If you have, open up one of your dodgy PNGs and check the transparency. If Photoshop doesn’t see any transparency or alpha (check both the layers and channels palettes) then the image does not have any and the problem is with the program you used to create the PNG. If it DOES see transparency/alpha, then you could do a batch process in Photoshop to convert all the PNGs to some other format that supports alphas – such as TIFF or PSD.

3. Post one of those dodgy PNGs on here so other people can take a peek and offer more advice.

– Paul