[Ridley Walker]

I see clearly it at 3 o’clock on the circle around the heart and at 9 o’clock on the line to the left of the heart.

It looks like something to do with the opacity or blending mode. What format is the video?

I’m really just guessing here but if the video is a long GOP format like an MTS file or any compressed format it has to be reconstituted into frames during the render. That could generate the jitter if the overlay blends in any way with it.

What happens when you move the overlay to another location in the video?

[Ridley Walker]

I’ve just experimented with a similar shape-based trim paths animation but did not composite it over a video background. I have no jitter at all through a 35 frame animation of the path.

When I look at your screen grab, I’m not sure I see what you’re referring to, for some reason I cannot view the video.

5529_jittertest.aep.zip

[Ridley Walker]

I wasn’t suggesting that was the issue, merely that the version you indicated was not up-to-date.

[Ridley Walker]

[Kevin Knutson] “Using AE: 11.0.1.12
“

Current version is 11.0.2.11

[Ridley Walker]

You mentioned using the Stroke Effect, I assumed you had used a mask on a Solid layer. Perhaps you’re using a Shape layer with a pen stroke.

You can use the Shape path stopwatch to keyframe changes in the path.

Or you can use the Puppet Tool to place puppet points on the path and animate those.

[Ridley Walker]

If you’ve used a mask path on a Solid then you need to animate the Mask Path to keyframe the changes in the path. Click the disclosure triangle next to the layer, then click the disclosure triangle next the the Mask (or just select the layer and use the keyboard short cut M) and enable keyframing by clicking the stopwatch for Mask Path.

[Ridley Walker]

[Scott Green] “After just speaking to Apple they tell me the Mac Pro’s are soon going to be discontinued so it makes no sense whatsoever for me to buy one from Apple when I can get a cheaper one from eBay.
“
I’m not sure who at Apple told you this, since the CEO, Tim Cook, announced that “something” for professionals would be coming in 2013. There are plenty of rumours as well about an impending new machine. See: https://www.macrumors.com/2013/02/06/apple-tells-reseller-that-the-new-mac-pro-is-arriving-in-spring-2013/

However, you can tie yourself in knots trying to read the tea leaves and predict what Apple *might* do and when.

I’ve owned the 8 core 2008 Mac Pro and now own a 2010 12 core. You should check out the benchmark scores for each machine, but I’d say the 2009 which uses the Nehalem processor would be a better buy if you’re seriously considering one of those used machines.

You can compare benchmarks here: https://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks

There are 3 primary bottlenecks to rendering, the speed of your processor, how many cores and threads can be run concurrently, how much RAM is available to each process, and how quickly your hard drive(s) can read and write.

[Scott Green] “Let’s say a video takes 4 hours to render on my Macbook Pro, how long would it take a video to render on the 8 core Mac Pro?
“
The nature of your After Effects work determines where the bottlenecks lie. Todd Kopriva has a terrific FAQ on getting the best performance out of After Effects, see: https://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2011/02/optimizing-for-performance-adobe-premiere-pro-and-after-effects.html

I should add that with the advent of CS6, an nVidia graphics card with many CUDA cores is necessary for speedy renders using the new ray traced 3D engine.

[Ridley Walker]

What you’ve described is know as inverse kinematics. There are several good methods for making this work.

See: https://motionscript.com/design-guide/ik.html

and: https://duduf.net/?page_id=151

I use DuDuf IK all the time, it is a great free addition to After Effects.

[Ridley Walker]

Before After Effects… this sort of thing was achieved with high speed cameras and optical printing, multiple prints of the negative would be overlaid and printed.

[Ridley Walker]

As Darby says the interface looks like a strange mixture of the Composition panel and the Layer panel.

Try this from the Window menu select Workspace > Standard.

Then again from the Window menu select Workspace > Reset Standard.

This should restore the panels to their default locations.