Robert Headrick
Forum Replies Created
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I’m assuming the photo is not one that you took, otherwise you would already know the key information like focal length, distance between lens and objects, etc. What you’re probably experiencing is that the objects you’ve created in After Effects are placed incorrectly relative to each other. If that’s the case, then even if your camera settings in AE exactly mirror the way the photograph was shot, you’re still not going to come up with a perfect match. The camera in AE has to be set to the exact same focal length as in the original photograph, all of the items in your comp have to be sized correctly relative to each other and relative to the camera, they have to be placed at exactly the right distance from each other and at exactly the right distance from the camera in order to get what you’re looking for.
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Thanks for adding the screenshots. This does shed some more light, and I can understand why this would be frustrating. So far I haven’t been able to duplicate the issue. Every time I create a dynamic link, After Effects gives me one composition with multiple layers as a results. I suspect there’s a setting somewhere that’s causing it to react differently for you, but I’m just not sure yet what it is.
Confirm one thing for me, just to double-check that we’re not using different methods for creating the Dynamic Link. Describe in a detailed, step-by-step list how you created your sequence in Premiere Pro, what types of clips you have there, and what exact steps you’re taking to create the Dynamic Link.
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Instead of replacing the placeholders with footage directly, precompose your footage and replace the placeholders with those precomps. Then you can do your retiming, editing, etc within the precomp without messing with any of the motion keyframes that are happening in your main comp. You can use time-remapping on the precomp, or an easier method (if I’m understanding correctly what you’re trying to do) would just be finding the point on the timeline where you want the sound byte to start, going into the precomp at that point, and adjusting your clip so that’s where it starts.
Essentially what you need to be doing is to separate the motion keyframes from what you’re doing with timecode and edits to your footage. Precomping creates that separation for you.
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Angelo is right. The best way to make this work would be to go backwards. That’s actually a really good tip for almost any AE workflow. Start from the endpoint of what you want everything to resolve to, and work backwards from there.
As far as trying to solve your problem without going back and redoing the work, I would experiment with changing the focal length of your camera and the distance between the camera and your layers on the final keyframe. If you’re completely in love with the results of what you’ve done so far and can’t bear to change it, then you could try setting keyframes so that the changes don’t occur until the last second or so of the camera move. This is a similar concept, get to the end and mess with the camera settings until it works, then go back and add keyframes that maintain what you’ve already done up until that last change needs to occur.
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Is it even necessary to export to Animation or Uncompressed if the final video is only going to be shown on the web? I would imagine if that’s the case then you’d be compressing it down at some point regardless, and if it looks good when exporting to H.264, couldn’t you just keep it that way?
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It sounds to me like your animation is complete and you won’t be changing it any more, and the only problem left is syncing audio. If that’s the case, I would say do it outside of AE in something like Final Cut or Premiere that can handle audio better than AE and provides the non-destructive slicing capability that you’re wanting. Export your AE comp to ProRes or another uncompressed codec, bring that into your NLE, then splice and re-time audio from there.
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He actually is getting a comp in that video, the difference is that since he’s only dynamically linking one clip from his timeline, you’re seeing inside that comp (same as you’ve been getting with your tests, where within each “sub comp” you’re seeing the source video, unedited). If he were to continue clicking additional clips in his Premiere Pro timeline and selecting File –> Adobe Dynamic Link –> Replace With After Effects Composition, each one would add a new comp to his AE file, and inside that comp would be the single video clip that he had sent over from Premiere.
This is the normal, expected workflow if you’re going through your timeline and individually picking out single clips to send to After Effects one at a time.
It sounds like what you’re wanting to do is send your entire Premiere Pro timeline (or a large chunk of it, at least) into a single After Effects composition where each clip is its own layer and they are arranged with the same order and timing as in your Premiere timeline. To do that, select all of the clips that you want to send, then select File –> Adobe Dynamic Link –> Replace With After Effects Composition. This will create a single composition in After Effects with each clip represented by two layers (one video, one audio) and your edits intact. Be aware, though, that not all effects in Premiere will carry over into After Effects, so those might not be maintained.
Each additional time that you select one or more clips in Premiere and replace them with a dynamically-linked After Effects composition, it will create a new comp in After Effects, with each of the clips that you had selected appearing inside that comp as its own layer or layers (depending on whether you sent audio as well). The only way to have all of them appear in the same composition is to select all of the clips at once, rather than doing it in stages.
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Esther,
Sorry I haven’t been responding as quick! Things got a little busy for me the past few days.
To answer your most recent question about the position values getting messed up when you altered the rate in the expression, I’m not sure what’s happening. If you’re looking at your text layer at any given point in the composition, you should expect its position to change since you’re making it move faster, but the layer should still start at the same position at the beginning of the comp. If I’m understanding correctly, you currently are parenting your text layers to a null, which has the expression as its position value. Then the text layers and the null have been precomposed, and that precomp is being nested into your overall composition to represent the scrolling credits, allowing you to more easily adjust the point at which the credits begin to roll.
In some very brief testing that I just did, I was able to alter the rate in the expression without “screwing up” any of the position values of anything. Some things I would suggest double-checking: that your text or other layers are properly parented to your null; that the expression is on the Position value of the null and not anywhere else; that you haven’t accidentally introduced any additional lines or typos into the expression; that you have manually adjusted the position of the null on the very first frame of your precomp so that the scrolling starts at the right place; and that you haven’t altered any of the overall values of the precomp within your main comp (for example, applying the expression to the null inside the precomp *and* to the position values of the precomp itself would probably create weird results).
Looking up at your previous question, about adding an easy-ease to the end of the movement, that may be beyond my skill to figure out. With the way this expression is built, I believe it would involve coming up with a mathematical equation that would gradually decrease the amount being subtracted from the position value until it came to a stop. I tried a couple of basic things just now but only succeeded in altering the speed at a certain point in time, not slowing it down to nothing. However, a good workaround might be to simply use time-remapping on the precomped layers within your main comp. Right click the precomp, choose Time –> Enable Time-Remapping. This allows you to set keyframes at certain points in the composition (for example, at the point where you want it to begin slowing down, and at the point where you want it to stop), and then drag those keyframes apart to cause more time to pass between those two points.
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Just change the rate (currently at 6). Smaller than 6 will make it slower, greater than 6 will make it go faster. A tip that was mentioned on the blog where I originally found the expression said to try and keep your rate at an even number just in case your footage ever gets interlaced (otherwise you might encounter weird image issues related to frame rate while scrolling). The 0 is the horizontal position value, so essentially right now it’s just centering your layer. If you want your credits to be slightly to the right or left, then you can adjust that number to do that. But an easier way will be to just manually move it like you did when you originally positioned the layer.
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Since you’re using precomps at this point, and you’ll be applying the expression to the precomp rather than directly to the layer, this will be very easy. Just go inside the precomp and position your image wherever you want it to be relative to the specific text, and that’s it! Your motion is being applied to the precomp as a whole, so the image will move along with the text.