Robert Headrick
Forum Replies Created
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There’s a button at the bottom of the timeline panel that will expand or collapse your options. Click it, and it will hide your motion blur/3D/rasterize/etc buttons and instead display a column allowing you to edit the blending mode for each layer. Click the button again to switch the columns back.
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Awesome!
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A couple questions: What type of layer are you trying to edit? Are you using the Standard workspace? (to check this, go to Window –> Workspace –> Standard) If you’re using the Standard workspace already, go ahead and click Window –> Workspace –> Reset “Standard”. Now look up at the top of your center panel that contains your composition view. You should just have one tab that says “Composition: Comp 1” (or whatever custom name you gave it if you’ve named it already). Now when you double-click a layer in your timeline down below, it should open up a new tab right next to the Composition tab that will say “Layer: [name of the layer you opened]”. That’s where you can edit a layer directly rather than working in your composition, and where you should be able to use the brush tool, among other things.
Let me know how that goes.
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To use the brush tool, you need to be working directly on a layer, rather than on your composition (this answers your second question as well). Double-click your layer either in the composition timeline at the bottom of the screen, or directly in the composition window. This will open the layer up in its own tab, and from there you can use the brush tool.
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Those are presets, and the difference has to do with your frame size (NTSC DV is 720×480, for example, and NTSC D1 is 720×486), pixel aspect ratio, and frame rate. Basically all of the different attributes of a composition that you can set. The presets just give you different standard compositions that are already set up for you.
The format that will go on a website is going to vary depending on what sort of player you’re embedding in. YouTube, for example, will accept a pretty wide variety of file types and sizes. Same with Vimeo. If you’re embedding it into your own custom player for your own website, then you just need to go with whatever specs work for that.
A DVD, on the other hand, is pretty specific. For that you’re going to drop down to standard definition for sure, among other things. But since DVD isn’t your only deliverable, what’s best will most likely be to create everything in After Effects at the highest quality level, and then convert your finished file to DVD format later on using Media Encoder or Compressor or whatever program you’re more familiar with.
Without knowing more about your specific situation, I wouldn’t want to make too strong of a recommendation, but if you’re just looking for an extremely general suggestion, I would say to create your composition with these settings:
Width: 1920
Height: 1080
Pixel aspect ratio: Square pixels
Frame rate: 23.976Again, specific situations call for specific composition settings, but this is my standard setup that I use if the choice is up to me.
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You might also try tiling with an effect, though I’m not sure off the top of my head if that will help or hurt the processing requirements of your comp. Create a smaller solid to start with and use CC Repetile to extend the edges as far as you need them to go, and see if that works any better.
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Alternatively, you could adjust your rotation values for each letter individually so that it rotates to exactly the point it needs to be to disappear from view, rather than setting it to 90 degrees and then trying to compensate with the camera. If you combine that with trimming the start of the layer to your first rotation keyframe, any slivers that do appear on that first frame won’t matter because it will just feel like part of the reveal.
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John is right as far as what you should be trying if you’re looking to do a page turn effect. Creating a duplicate layer and then rotating it is just going to look like you broke a piece off and it’s spinning, it won’t look like the entire layer is a page that’s turning. I would start with the CC Page Turn effect and see if that gives you what you’re looking for.
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Yep, everything is ProRes.
Canvas background is set to black. Another weird thing, the first thing I tried to do was trash the FCP preferences and reopen, which didn’t seem to make a difference. But later I closed the project down and left for lunch (about an hour or so), and when I came back everything seemed to be working normally again. It’s currently doing okay, though I’m not sure what I did to fix it.