[Paul Roper]

This script:

https://aescripts.com/ft-effect-instance/

will create an “instance” of an effect (a copy of the same effect, with all parameters ‘pick whipped’ to the first). You can easily then go in and edit (delete the expression) for the few parameters you wish to manually edit.

[Paul Roper]

They do magically disappear and reappear. If you’re interested, try this:

Create a shape layer, say a rectangle. You will get “Shape Layer 1”, containing “Contents”, containing “Rectangle 1” containing “Rectangle Path 1, Stroke 1, Gradient Fill 1 and Transform: Rectangle 1”.

If it’s not already, change the fill to a gradient fill.

Drag Rectangle Path 1, Stroke 1 and Gradient Fill 1 out of the group “Rectangle 1”. No matter what you click on and with which tool, the start/end points of the gradient do not appear. You can edit the values directly in the timeline, but the points never appear on screen in the comp. If you then create a new group and drag those same shape components into it, lo and behold there’s you edit points again.

I’m using CS5.5 on a Mac, if it makes any difference.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

You’ve kinda answered your own question – DON’T use After Effects to output an H264! You will, undoubtedly, get quite a few answers along these lines…..
DON’T use After Effects to output an H264!
DON’T use After Effects to output an H264!
DON’T use After Effects to output an H264!
DON’T use After Effects to output an H264!

After Effects is not optimised for video compression – if you need a compressed video file, output from After Effects using one of the Lossless/uncompressed/non-temporally compressed formats such as ProRes 422 or Uncompressed 10-bit, then use one of the many compression programs to create your final, compressed movie.

So, make a lossless AVI render from After Effects (this shows that After Effects is rendering OK, it’s just the compression process that’s screwing things up) then you can try many different compression codecs/settings as you like in Apple Compressor, Cleaner, Adobe Media Encoder or whatever compression software you use, without having to go through the unnecessary step of re-rendering.

There are probably about 5 posts per week on this forum from people having problems outputting a render to H264 or some such codec. I wish Adobe would actually REMOVE the option to do so – it is a complete waste of time!

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

You have attempted to enter the mysterious twilight zone of FXScript. For some unknown reason, FXScript and everything related to it seems to have simply “stopped” a few years ago. I’m trying to create a few simple effects, and I’m about to give up on FXScript because there is just no documentation available any more, other than https://www.fxscriptreference.org/ which is just a list of the functions with very little description on how to actually string the things together.

Oh well. Another technology left out in the cold to die.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Me too – hunting around for the wipes….did a search in Motion’s “help” (search:wipe results:none). One of the many, many reasons why I detest Motion (and have used it for a grand total of about 1 hour throughout my 15 year career in motion graphics) and adore After Effects.

[Paul Roper]

Forgive me for stating the obvious – but I assume the whole image is on the artboard in Illustrator? Anything not on the artboard will be ignored by After Effects. And I also assume it’s RGB not CMYK. After Effects does not like CMYK.

[Paul Roper]

Your comp should look something like this:

[Paul Roper]

Unfortunately you can’t directly access individual vertices (points) on lines/curves/shapes…even though seemingly EVERYBODY (including me) asks Adobe for it!

But, all is not lost.

You can use the Effect > Generate > Beam effect instead.

1. Put your footage in a comp.
2. Add a null
3. Add a black solid
4. Track the footage, with the Null set as your motion target
5. On the black solid layer, add the Beam effect
6. Make sure you can see the Position keyframes on the Null layer – there should be LOTS of keyframes (from the motion tracker)
7. Open up the black solid’s Beam effect in the timeline
8. Alt-click the Ending Point to add an expression
9. Pick-whip the Null’s position
10. Set the Length of the beam to 100%
11. Set the thickness to something thin, the colour to white and the start point to wherever looks good.
12. Do a RAM preview and enjoy
13. Do your best impression of a lie-detecting cockney geezah!

[Paul Roper]

You could give the Color Stabilizer effect a try – it is designed to even out colour changes on footage such as time lapse. It should help with the lighting changes.

Without seeing your source footage, it’s hard to advise on the rest of the problems, but you could try duplicating the layer, applying an overall yellow colour grade to the underlying layer, then keying out the stripes in the top layer to let the yellow layer show through, then make this top layer black & white. It should achieve the same effect as ‘leave color’, but you’ll have more control over the keying – you could use multiple keyers if needed, plus after effects has a load of matte tools to grow/shrink/and generally finesse your matte.

[Paul Roper]

Hmm….I’ve just tested that expression and it doesn’t generate any errors for me – it evaluates OK, but I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to achieve by it. If you want the checkbox to control whether or not the………………….

….ah – just seen you’ve solved it!