[Roei Tzoref]

very happy to assist you Mr. LeRonde 🙂

[Roei Tzoref]

you are probably using the Wotate tool (W shortcut). if you click on one of the 3 axes as you Wotate, you will be constrained to that axis. if you are not seeing your axes you must show the layer controls (view->show layer controls). and you can always use the good old timeline and expand your rotation properties to see your X,Y,Z Rotations or Orientation and do this by scrubbing values instead.

[Roei Tzoref]

you can re-import your project and you will have independent comps. and you can use this script – True Comp Duplicator script here: https://aescripts.com/true-comp-duplicator/

[Roei Tzoref]

Resolution
1300X1300 is pretty large. I have a 24″ 1920×1200 monitor and it doesn’t even fit my screen. maybe you need half of that? make sure what the site your uploading to recommends not just in file size but also resolution

encoding options
Are you using a trial version of CS4? this could explain why you don’t have any of the mpeg codecs in the format menu. your options are either to activate your software or to use another software to encode your file. using the Quicktime and H.264 is not a good option since this codec is not that good.

Where do we go from here
what you should do is render again your whole composition as Quicktime Animation. then take this file to an NLE software (Premiere, Vegas) and use a preset for H.264. if you don’t have that, you can use a 3rd party encoding software like Handbrake.

[Roei Tzoref]

I forgot to mentioned another fun part here which is the rotoscoping of the guy… you would probably have to cut him out of the original footage too if you want more options to this effect. so this means in it’s most simplest setup:
Layer 1 – the guy cut from the background in the transition frames
Layer 2 – the patched parts of the clean BG tracked in place
Layer 3 – the original video

[Roei Tzoref]

if I am understanding your questions: 720/400 means 1.8 aspect ratio. so it will be a little wide than HD 1280×711 (instead of 720). If I need to upload this file to any of the video publishing services (vimeo, youtube) I would use the HD preset because if you upload a 1280×711 (or 720×400) file, you will get a little black bar anyway at the top and the bottom of your video. read here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6375112

[Roei Tzoref]

[Melanie Fisher] “I’d use AME but unfortunately I don’t have access to it.”
if you watched the tutorial, I explain that you don’t really need AME if you are using CS4. you can encode directly from Ae to an H.264 format.

[Melanie Fisher] “after resizing it down to 1300×1300.”
1300X1300 is still not standard resolution, and unless you have a specific reason to show viewers a square video, you should avoid it.

[Melanie Fisher] “I rerendered again today after fiddling with settings and ended up with a .mov file of 167MB with audio! Which is great! I compressed it through clipchamp and now it’s only 5MB. “
since you are still not encoding your file, you will have a large file size. like I mentioned previously, you need to encode it using a playback codec like H.264. this will create a file with the extension of mp4 and not mov. this will be the first indication that it’s not so big in size.

[Melanie Fisher] “I need to upload this to a blog and the max MB per file is 100MB”
note that duration is also affecting your file size so you may have to use lower bit rate settings in your H.264 settings to get 100 MB file. if you want to save time here, you can render your file to a lossless version (Qt Animation for example) and this will create a hugh file but don’t panic. re-import that file to Ae and render and encode this file using the H.264 settings. this means that you don’t have to re-calculate the rendering data of all your layers,effects and animation all over again, but just the already rendered file. using a 2 step process like this is a good way to experiment with different encoding options with heavily rendered files and save time.

[Melanie Fisher] ” it appears very, very dark for some reason.”
this could be the result of your improper rendering workflow. really can’t say. first do this by the book and then we will see what happens.

[Roei Tzoref]

there are a several ways to achieve what you want but it’s not going to be that easy. you need to have this shot without your guy and cleaning it requires tracking the footage, cleaning the guy from it, and attaching it back as a clean background. since your camera is moving and you have perspective in your shot, it’s going to complicate things even more. now when you have a guy on the background on one layer, and the background clean on another – you can decide how exactly do you make him disappear which is relatively easy.

there attempts to pull this off come to mind:

1. you can try Mocha Remove module to remove the guy:
https://vimeo.com/104991815
https://vimeo.com/120759421

2. another more straightforward approach would be taking a few frame from the footage with the guy in it, cleaning it very carefully in photoshop, and returning it to Ae and attaching the clean background to the footage via 2D tracking. you would have to track different areas because you have perspective in your shot. the tree and the floor would be two of them.

3. another approach would be same as 2 for cleaning the shot, but to use camera projection to project the clean images on top of a 3D tracking data. like in this example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J1iwmjnpWo

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[Roei Tzoref]

I find it hard to visualize what you are dealing with or your setup. screenshots of your Composition and Timeline would be helpful. try to narrow your problem down to simple setup so we can figure out what is wrong exactly. a quick guess – if you use time remapping on a precomp – make sure you trimmed the workarea of the precomp to the beginning and the end of the animation, otherwise you could be viewing a frame that has no layers in it yet.

[Roei Tzoref]

As for the audio, if you render through Ae to H.264 (you can up until CC2014 to render from Ae to H.264) – check the output module settings main window at the bottom that audio is checked. the default is NO.