[Rhett Robinson]

I like Bret’s idea, which you could animate by using a text preset and changing start/end animation settings, or convert the text to outlines and animate the characters. If you’re really wanting the text to “morph”, you can easily make a tween in Flash, or make a blend in Illustrator and break that into layers.

[Rhett Robinson]

Are you asking because most of your source material is CMYK? I worked in printing for a LONG time, so I have that issue as well… Everything should import fine, which is okay for the vector art (generally), but not so good with photos. It’s not as severe as what use to happen when an RGB image, was printed in color without converting it with color management (most RIPS will automatically convert to CMYK), so you can expect a pretty wide color shift. In most cases it’s easy to fix (set up a photoshop or illustrator action with correct color management settings).

[Rhett Robinson]

Perhaps something from Dan? This is a link to make confetti, which may get your mind moving

https://www.motionscript.com/expressions-lab-ae65/confetti.html

I haven’t done any tests, but I think you could actually substitute your own “particle” in place of a standard solid…

[Rhett Robinson]

Hi Paul,
Why MPEG2? Is your camera capturing onto a a mini-DVD or something? Although a few applications will work reasonably well with that type of format (usually just cuts to prevent further degradation, like VideoReDo), Steve is right, AE doesn’t like that at all, as it’s usually a final format, output for DVD, not for working. MPEG is very lossy, and is a complicated stream that doesn’t work well for editing, and will have to re-encode if you do anything. Depending on what you’re wanting to do, you may want to make a proxy of the movie to import to AE, make your animation, and import into Premiere. In the future, you should have a conversion into one of the formats Steve mentioned, or read up on some of the different codec/compression formats. A good “quickstart” is watching Aharon’s tutorial on compression.

[Rhett Robinson]

PowerPoint will actually handle any type of video that you have the codec for, but the regular standards like WMV or MPG1 are the easiest… we use it a lot for courtroom presentations.

On top of selling them on the power of AE (I generally just relay it as being Photoshop in motion to those that aren’t familiar with it’s powers), you may want to use Sketchup to create some of your AE base material. Even the free version allows for import of 3D (AutoCAD) files, and output videos. You could add the effects later!

[Rhett Robinson]

Sorry, went searching for an e-mail with no luck – if you give me a keyword in it or a cryptic version of your address to hide from spammers – let me know!
Rhett

[Rhett Robinson]

Ooohhh..

I was about to harass you, then I opened up and old project where I worked it, and understand that the timeline isn’t as clear, as you can’t tell which “multiplier” goes with each. I just worked with it until I determined which ones but using this old project as a guide, here goes…

all animated parts in the timeline shown are for the Card Dance plugin, after setting the initial settings shown on the first screen

https://www.ayatoweb.com/ae_tips_e/ae50_e.html#

the order for the timeline as follows

https://www.ayatoweb.com/ae_tips_e/ae50_e.html#

The first 2, multiplier and offset are for Z-position

the next 2 multipliers are for the X & Y scales

the next 3 (z rotation, xy position, z position) are under the “camera position” setting

I adjusted some other things as well, but that should get you through that part…

good luck!

[Rhett Robinson]

Not sure of the question – need more specificity.

As you can see, Ayato usually shows starting values on left, ending values at bottom right… he’s also big on saying to adjust to your liking.

The main things are to know to ONLY turn visibility on your mosaic layer, and use the other to drive the card dance.

[Rhett Robinson]

There are several ways to go about this; sounds like the easiest would be a simple footage replacement in the comp. Duplicate one of the 6 compositions you have in the project window (select it and hit CMD or CTRL “D”). Name it what you will, open that comp, and highlight the photo layer. Hold down the ALT or OPTION key first, go back to the project window & grab the replacement photo, and drag and drop either in the timeline or the comp window.

That’s one.

Depending on your animation, it might be easier to make a composition with all of the photos timed using “sequence layers” and replace the photo with that. However, sounds like you’ve got 6 animation version? It’ll go fast.

[Rhett Robinson]

Okay, so do you really want this to look like “real” time lapse (meaning skipped frames), or is this to just be sped up dramatically? To do the first really well, you are not going to be able to do frame averaging, so although it’s easy to just have AE pick a single frame per second, or minute, or whatever else, the quality of each shown frame will suffer.

From your description, I’d pick the second way (which Steve alluded to), by using the layer time stretch, and making it however short you want. The time stretch function is also available as one of your columns in the timeline, and is definitely not taxing on your system.

Although you still have frames that AE discards, it does a better job and conforms to the framerate you’ve selected for your comp.