[Paul Roper]

Well, it’s disappointing to hear that Mac OS10.8 doesn’t fix it. It seems to come and go – today, I have to do the switch to AE (no windows appear), alt-click on the desktop to “hide” AE, then switch back to AE almost every time. Occasionally if I just switch to AE, one monitor’s windows will appear, but not the other.

It’s a pain in the arse.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

This post won’t really help in your workflow, but I have faced the same problem:

Last year I was in the unfortunate position of having to key some footage from a C300. It was shot in the same studio with the same lighting setup as dozens of previous shots (shot with a Panasonic HPX170 or something like that) which always produced a beautiful key, regardless of subject – fine hair, motion blur – whatever.

No matter how I wrestled with Keylight plus some other keyers, I could not pull a decent key from the C300 footage. And we tried getting the output from the C300 in every way imaginable, with everything set to highest resolution, widest color space, various sharpness settings from none to lots, etc. But our conclusion was that for greenscreen work, the C300 is completely and utterly shit. Not what you wanted to hear, but don’t feel alone in your frustration with this camera.

Looking at the specs of the camera, it should theoretically produce easily-keyable results. Maybe someone else will chime in with a more constructive suggestion – we wasted many days trying to get the thing to work, but just had to live with crappy results – we couldn’t reshoot with a proper camera.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Select your null layer, and add an expression slider by choosing Effect > Expression Controls > Slider Control.

In your timeline, open up the null layer to show this expression slider control.

Select your other layer. Press p to show the Position. Right-click the word Position and choose ‘Separate Dimensions’. It will now show the x and y (and z if it’s a 3D layer) separately.

alt-click on the stopwatch next to ‘Y Position’. An expression will appear. While the text in the expression is still highlighted, drag the pick-whip (the little spiral thing) onto the word ‘Slider’ on the null layer. This will replace that expression text with text describing the null layer’s slider expression. Press Enter (not Return) to confirm the expression. Drag your slider around to see the other layer move.

That’s it.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

It’s possible that the jittery playback is a result of the speed of the drive(s) it’s stored on. Lossless compression produces huge files compared to compressed formats, and you need very fast drive(s) to shove that amount of data through. If you’re sure that drive speed is not the issue, open the movie and step through it frame by frame. If you find any duplicate frames (eg. in QuickTime or FCP you’re pressing the right arrow on the keyboard, and you find you’ve pressed it and nothing changed) then yes, something odd has happened in After Effects. If on the other hand, each press is accompanied by the expected frame change, then it’s the speed of your drives that’s the issue.

You could, instead of using lossless, output from AE using one of the ProRes codecs. They generally play back OK, produce a smaller file and are so slightly compressed as to be unnoticeable.

Unless you’re going to be outputting to tape, you could just ‘live with’ this stuttery playback in the knowledge that once you output your final compressed version, it should be fine. You could do a test, by compressing your stuttery movie into something like H264 and playing that back. If that plays fine, then you can be sure that your uncompressed version is fine. Then delete that H264 test version – you definitely don’t want to be editing/compositing with that.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

It depends on what you want to achieve – if you just want to find out the dimensions of this one layer, just bring up your rulers (command/ctrl r), and keep an eye on the info palette while dragging some rulers onto the composition, and do some subtraction to find the result.

However, if you need to do this many times and pass that value to another layer or something, you’ll have to write an expression. Unfortunately the .width function does not take into account masks, so using thisComp.layer(“intel_temperatures.tif”).width will not be useful. You could use the sampleImage function (it’d look something like: thisComp.layer(“intel_temperatures.tif”).sampleImage([200,200],[.5, .5])
…which gets the value of the colour (and more importantly in this application, the alpha value which will tell you when you’ve reached the edge of the image) of the pixel(s) of a layer at (in this example) x=200, y=200, with a sample radius of 1 pixel (extending .5 pixels in each direction).

You’d have to make a fairly laborious if….then loop to sample each pixel. It’s too complex for me to go into now, but there are quite a few tutorials out there. Or maybe if you repost the question in the expression section, you’ll get lucky and someone will help you further.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

That noisiness is caused by your raytracing quality set too low – nothing to do with plugins or camera depth of field (although if you turn off depth of field you’ll notice it less, but any motion blur will also appear noisy).

To fix it, go to Composition Settings (command or control K), clcik on the Advanced tab, click on Options… and set your Raytracing quality to a higher number. The higher the number, the slower the rendering but the better the image. You’ll have to decide how high you can go vs. how long you can wait! Don’t go crazy – I’d guess from your image that it’s probably on about 4; maybe go to 8 or 12 – anything much higher and you’ll be waiting for hours for your render to complete!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

What about alt+p (or other property) on a PC?

[Paul Roper]

…so if any of you guys select a layer and then press alt+p, nothing happens?

[Paul Roper]

I checked out that course, and yes, he definitely does say alt+p, but it totally works on my machine (a Mac running AE CS6: 11.0.2.11 and MacOS 10.7.5). If I have no layers selected, and press alt+p, it sets a position keyframe for all layers. If I have one or more layers selected, it sets a position keyframe for those layers. Same with alt+r for rotation, alt+t for opacity and alt+s for scale. Holding down shift achieves exactly the same result.

Seems very odd that we’re getting different results.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Hmmm…..alt + p works for me to add position keyframes.
alt + s for scale keyframe, alt + r for rotation keyframe.

– Paul