[Paul Roper]

Not exactly sure what’s causing this, but I’d guess it’s the highlight controls under the depth of field settings. Change them back to their defaults: Diffraction: 0, Gain: 0, Threshold: 255, Saturation 0.

Then, if you want the bright highlights-depth-of-field effect, GRADUALLY tweak these numbers to get the desired effect.

[Paul Roper]

Maybe you’ve already checked this, but is it rendering the “work area only” in the Time Span section of the Render Settings? That is the default setting. Either change this to ‘Length of Comp’ or set your desired start and end times in the timeline (press B for beginning and N for eNd).

[Paul Roper]

Are you talking about final renders or RAM previews? There’s a setting in the Previews panel to start a RAM preview from the current time. Turn this off. Not that this will affect the final render.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

Do you have “Draft 3D” turned on in the preview window? (It’s the cube with a * next to it in the timeline). If this is ON, you won’t see effects such as lighting and depth of field in the preview, which WILL appear when rendered. Might it be possible that the letting isn’t actually translucent, but just over-illuminated by a light?

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

It’s hard to give advice without seeing your footage, but I’ll give it a go.

I assume you’ve got your white-object-on-a-black-background “matte” footage on the layer above your “fill” layer, and “Luma” set on your track matte mode.

The first thing I’d try is just applying a levels effect to your matte layer; assuming your blacks are black and your whites are white, you can grow/shrink the edges a little by adjusting the gamma setting.

Alternatively, if you want to try something more drastic, use the Minimax effect – a Minimum operation will shrink the matte, Maximum will grow it by the number of pixels specified in Radius.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

I have had this exact same problem, but only when working on complex projects with dozens or hundreds of assets. I assume it’s because if I do a RAM preview with Multiprocessing on, AE has to load the AE render program (“aeselflink” in the Activity Monitor) plus a copy of my project 24 times; once for each processor core. I normally only use multiprocessing if I have a small project which is very processor intensive, eg. the comp I’m rendering is very high resolution, with extreme motion blur, depth of field, etc. but without dozens of assets which take time to save and load.

If you turn of multiprocessing in the preferences, AE will still use all your processors but won’t have to do the background process palava.

I assume that if you turn up the RAM allocated to each processor, so AE uses fewer processors, then the problem will lessen, due to AE only having to load, say, 4 instances of your project.

Interestingly, I have another Mac Pro which, 90% of the time, is only used for ‘watch folder’ renders. I always have this set on multiprocessing, and it does not suffer from the background process delay when it starts a render – it just flies through it at an incredible pace. It keeps the 24 “aeselflink” render processes always loaded and ready to go. Which is nice.

[Paul Roper]

Did you try my method with the expressions? That wouldn’t give you random numbers. It will give you exactly what you need.

[Paul Roper]

….My European bias has assumed that you want the text to read from left to right; if you want the text to travel the other way, right-align it and change the minus to a plus:

[value[0]+time*200,value[1]]

[Paul Roper]

Create and edit your text in a simple application like TextEdit or NotePad. Do not use any carriage returns/enters. Select all, copy.

In After Effects, create a new composition at the appropriate size & frame rate, with a duration of 1 minute.

Using the text tool, click in your composition. Paste. Your text should appear. It should hopefully disappear off the edge(s) of the screen.

Align it left (using the Paragraph panel) and set your font/colour etc. in the Character panel.

Position it where you’d like the text to first appear.

In the ‘Position’ of the text layer, option-click (alt-click on a PC) on the keyframe stopwatch. “transform.position” should appear. Delete it and then paste this:

[value[0]-time*200,value[1]]

over transform.position.

Do a RAM preview to check the speed. Change the “200” in that expression to alter the speed; 400 is twice as fast, 100 is half as fast. You can still move the text around just by dragging it to set the start point without “breaking” the animation.

– Paul

[Paul Roper]

It’s under:
Effect > Text > Numbers

Just apply it to a solid. In the effect controls, set the ‘Type’ to number, then keyframe the ‘Value/Offset/Random’ number. But this only goes up to 30,000, so you’ll need to do some kinda layer duplication to get the effect you need.

or….(much better)….

Create a new empty text layer (double-click the text T icon).
Add a slider control to it (Effect > Expression controls > slider). Click the twirly arrow to show the Slider Control in the Effects part of the timeline.
Open the Text twirly arrow to reveal the Source Text keyframe stopwatch. Option-click it to apply an expression. Pickwhip from the Source Text to the Slider you’ve just created.

You can now keyframe the slider, and the text will show the amount. But you can only make your slider go up to 1 million, so if you edit the expression in the source text from:

effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)

to

effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”)*1000

you can then set your slider to 307006.55 to make the number display your gargantuan 307006550. It won’t have the commas, though. To display “1”, you’ll have to set your slider to 0.001.

Make sure you use a monospaced font – it will look much better when animating up/down.

– Paul