[Paul Roper]

I think it’s impossible to copy/paste track keyframes (clip keyframes copy OK, but cannot be pasted to a track). I’ve never done much audio in Premiere before, and it absolutely sucks! I’m now trying to duplicate an audio track…apparently you can’t. Really?! All I want to do is try out another music option, so my options are:
Duplicate my current music track to create a new track, complete with track keyframes in tact. Delete the music clips and add new music clips, whose volume will obviously obey the track keyframes. But that’s not possible.
Or
Create a new audio track, put my new music on it, then copy the track keyframes from my old music to the new track. But that’s not possible either.

Unless I’m missing something?

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
http://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

…aaaand still no soft-edged wipe, in 2019…still using the Linear Wipe Effect and multiple video layers as a clunky workaround.

…Maybe I’ll revisit this thread in another five years??

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

AARGH! I found the error! AE was expecting the RGBA values to range from 0 to 1, not 0 to 255! D’oh! All fixed now!

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

Just to continue this 11 year old thread, I am once again trying (without success) to use switch / case in an expression. The expression is to control a colour on a layer by a Slider control, so if I set the slider to 1, the colour is white, slider = 2 makes the colour dark blue and slider = 3 makes the colour orange.

Firstly, I tried this:

Choice = Math.floor(effect("Colour")("Slider").value);
switch( Choice ) {
case 1:
[255,255,255,0]
break;
case 2:
[20,27,77,0]
break;
case 3:
[249,56,34,0]
break;
default:
[249,56,34,0]
}

…then I converted it to a string to see if that helped:

Choice = "" + Math.floor(effect("Colour")("Slider").value);
switch( Choice ) {
case "1":
[255,255,255,0]
break;
case "2":
[20,27,77,0]
break;
case "3":
[249,56,34,0]
break;
default:
[249,56,34,0]
}

…then I just went with the ugly multiple if…then route:

Choice = "" + Math.floor(effect("Colour")("Slider"));
if ( Choice == "1"){ [255,25,255,0] } else
if ( Choice == "2"){ [20,27,77,0] } else
if ( Choice == "3"){ [249,56,34,0] } else {[255,0,0,0]};

…but none of them work at all! Any ideas, anyone?!

Thanks,
Paul

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

Well, that’s annoying! I Google “after effects 3d reflection only” and am brought to this thread, where I asked the same question well over 5 years ago! Oh well…maybe I’ll just do the job in C4D.

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

I’m not in front of C4D at the moment, so this is from memory.

Open up the material with the offending texture map. Click through to locate the bit where you would normally load the texture map. Then click on the texture map name to open its settings (not the three dots … next to the name). You should then see your black point set to 0 and your white point set to 1. Swap these values, and that inverts your image.

More details here: https://lesterbanks.com/2018/09/black-point-white-point-c4d/

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

Huh. I found that if I twirled open the group, selected all its contents, grouped them again, and then dragged that group out of the previous group, Ai then recognises this group as it should. Weird. It’s like Ai didn’t get the memo when I first grouped things a day or so ago. So now I need to go through my existing groups, regrouping everything.

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

Indeed – CineForm does look good. I’ve never bothered even looking at it because it’s called “GoPro CineForm”, which led me to believe it was probably a lower-end format for editing those “Hold My Beer” videos destined for YouTube, especially with that vague “Quality” slider going from 1 to 5. But my test proved me very wrong – see the results of my test below, comparing the formats we’ve been discussing, if you’re interested:

(QuickTimes rendered out of a 32-bit AE project, with everything set to the highest quality each codec supports, imported into a 32-bit AE project, scaled to 800% with no interpolation, then I exported a frame as a Trillions of Colors TIFF and saved it as a max. quality JPEG in Photoshop to display here):

…and here’s the same thing, with a Levels adjustment layer added to emphasize the nastiness:

(The MB figures below are file sizes for a 2sec 1280×720 movie in each codec. The movie was just that static frame).
So we can see that in terms of quality, the 1991-vintage Animation wins, but it doesn’t support Trillions of Colors of Floating Point. 69MB.
DNxHR’s attempt at anything with an alpha channel is gobsmackingly awful. Why does this POS codec even exist? 77MB.
DNxHR’s RGB444 codec is not too shabby – but its lack of alpha channel support means we can throw it out of this test. 41MB.
CineForm: If I need the additional colour depth, I think I’ve just found my new favourite codec. The compression winnets aren’t to bad, even in the massively exaggerated version with the adjustment layer. The file size is fractionally bigger than Animation, but this is Trillions, not Millions of colours. Thank you Walter! 71MB
ProRes 4444: Obviously showing more compression winnets than CineForm, but about two thirds of the file size. A bit surprising when I’ve come from many years of Mac use and believing that ProRes 4444 was hardly compressed at all. 45MB

Or, as Eric suggested, I just use image sequences with far more control over compression.

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

Yes Matthew, that will render out an alpha channel, but the picture quality is awful – it uses 422 chroma sampling, so chucks away half the colour information. The RGB444 codec is the only one to bother with if you want to retain decent quality, but you can’t use an alpha with that at all. Which is just SO ridiculous! There is no situation where you’d export something with an alpha and not do further post production work on it, so it’s essential to retain the quality.

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/

[Paul Roper]

No Dave, I will do a test on my MacBook Pro over the weekend, but my big workhorse is a Windows system, so no ProRes available.

An update on my “downright broken” claim – that was the fault of VLC player, which apparently cannot play back (properly) an RGB444 DnxHR file. When I brought that same file into AE, it played back fine, and looked very good. No alpha channel obviously, so fairly useless in this context. The awful HQX422 thing (WITH the alpha channel) still looked like an old VHS when played in AE.

So I guess my only options are to either dust the cobwebs off the Animation codec, or buy After Codecs, and hope it doesn’t go the way of Miraizon’s ProRes codecs which I’d previously used successfully.

motion graphics | VFX | web design | etc.
https://paulroper.com/