[Paul Roper]

Aha! Thank you.

And no, I’ve never keyframed colour values either.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thanks for that Kevin. But, there a couple of things…
As you can see from the screenshot, no matter what values I put into the width and samples of the smooth function, there seems to be a very strange relationship between the input value and result. As I’ve highlighted, sometimes I get a complete inverse of the value.

Also, if I perform any mathematical operations on the variable before the smooth function, AE generates an error (br.smooth is undefined); ie:

br=thisComp.layer(“sparky 3”).effect(“CC Particle Systems II”)(“Birth Rate”);
br.smooth(.1,20)

…is fine, whereas:

br=thisComp.layer(“sparky 3”).effect(“CC Particle Systems II”)(“Birth Rate”)*18;
br.smooth(.1,20)

is not. I got around it by putting the *18 on an expression slider and passed that to the smooth function instead.

But the main issue is that I’d like to have the result spike nicely like the particle birth rate (ie. the light ‘cuts’ to full intensity) THEN fade off, rather than the smooth increase and decrease that the smooth function gives me. I think for now I’ll probably just manually keyframe it…but that’s always such a clunky way of doing things when I know I can get AE to do the work for me! But the only way I can think of doing it is by some elaborate if…then setup along the lines of:

if (birthrate at current time) is a lot more than (birthrate 1 frame ago) then
{
intensity = 900%
initiate some kind of Math.exp to fade it off
}
…or something along those lines.

Yeah….manual keyframing for now I think!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Thanks!

I find Illustrator even LESS intuitive than InDesign! I so wish the Illustrator team at Adobe would just take a look at what the Photoshop and After Effects team are doing – just simple stuff like being able to scrub the point size of text, or being able to right-click in the Layers palette to do stuff. It is so frustrating, knowing that there are people at Adobe who can program this stuff – they could probably just copy & paste the code from one of the other programs. Every time I use Illustrator I find a new stupid “feature” or omission. The more I use it, the more I hate it! Bring back FreeHand! Or at least update the program – CS5 to CS6: A dark workspace. Yippee. What an upgrade.

(rant over!)

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

If you can live with the same colours appearing each side of the line, then you can just add multiple strokes to a line, making each one pregressively fatter as you go, like this:

…which is actually a whole bunch of strokes over each other.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

You can actually do most of this in AE, and I almost always do whenever I’ve got a few comps with text – I assume that the client will want to change the text color/size etc.

First, make a master control layer with a null and add some expression controls: colors, sliders – depending on how many things you want to automate in your text.

Then, on your text layer, you just need to add an animator to the text, and within that, add fill color, stroke color, stroke width, tracking, scale, etc. Then option-click the relevant value (eg. fill color) and pick-whip the master control’s color or slider value. If you do this with all your text (or just copy and paste this animator), then everything will be linked to your palette of colors and values on your master null. Your text doesn’t have to animate to make use of animators!

You can’t change the font using this though, which is a pain. You also can’t change the point size of the text, but you can change the scaling which kind of achieves the same thing.

I use this same ‘master control’ technique for a whole load of things – line widths, line colors, etc. I find it REALLY helps when I have dozens of comps and the client wants to ‘just change the line width by a couple of pixels’.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

ProRes 422 doesn’t support alpha channels – you’ll need to render it using another codec, such as ProRes 4444 or an image sequence. Just make sure, when you render, to click on the render setting, and make sure it’s set to RGB+Alpha in the Channels pop-up.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I have seen shots like that done where, as you suggested, the actors do just stay VERY still for the shot (luckily each one is only on camera for a few seconds) and then the ‘floating’ elements (flames, popcorn, foam, etc.) are tracked in, using 3D camera tracking (which could be done in AE) and a 3D application to model the elements to insert.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

You could pre-comp your footage (after you’ve applied the garbage matte and Keylight) – select ‘move everything to the pre-comp’ in the pre-comp options. THEN apply your stroke – that should do the trick.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

You’re actually doing nothing wrong – it’s just that there’s no detail on your paper. If you add a Grid effect above your displacement map, you’ll see that it’s adding plenty of distortion.

A displacement map doesn’t act like a displacement map in a 3D app – it doesn’t actually move the surface in 3D space. It just shifts the image pixels around.

Hope that helps.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

It might be much easier to ignore the sound effects in After Effects and add them in editing software (Final Cut, Premiere, etc).

– Paul