[Roland R. kahlenberg]

You can’t really go from nothing to something. Put a few underscore characters or any other character that will suit your needs to sort of fill in the blanks.

Then use either Scale or Opacity OR a combination of the two to get things going. To make things look smoother, you may need another Animator or simply add a Selection Range using these two properties.

Chances are that you will require another Animator to control these two parameters.

Cheers
Roland Kahlenberg
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com
customizable animated backgrounds with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Particle Playground should be able to do this – if I recall correctly, the procedure was explained here a while ago. What you need to do is to have a single layer of the brush tip to be used as a Layer Map. Then when spraying the particles (with Canon position used to control the area to be painted), switch off gravity and make the particles stick where they are sprayed with Static Friction.

Cheers
Roland Kahlenberg
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com
customizable animated backgrouds with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Hi Filip, I see what you’re getting at. But the paragraph alignment doesn’t allow for keyframes. I see the paragraph alignment more to set a text layer’s contents – for a single paragraph alignment type (see next para for more info). For animation purposes, I feel that it is more intuitive to use the Text Animators.

Further, if you have a text layer with two or more paragraphs with differing alignment settings, you will still require Line Anchor to dictate the anchor for the tracking motion – for all the paragraphs. Otherwise, tracking will default to the center.

Cheers
Roland Kahlenberg
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

It sounds like you’re using a built-in Firewire connection to transfer your footage from camera to the computer.

720×480 is the pixel resolution for NTSC DV video. 720×486 is the pixel resolution for D1 NTSC video.

Encore 1.0 dopesn’t support QT movies but Encore 1.5 does.

If your workflow goes from AE to Encore, then I suggest that you output directly to MPEG-2 from AE and bypass QT’s Animation CODEC. The MPEG-2 file can be directly imported into Encore without another decompression-recompression pass which will inevitably result in a loss of quality.

Most users use QT’s Animation CODEC, with a quality setting of 94% (or thereabouts – with no keyframes) as an intermediate CODEC (file format) because it retains a lot of the source quality while minimizing the filesize to a manageable variable.

In your case, you don’t require an intermediate file as you can go straight to an MPEG-2 file (for Encore) form within AE.

Output for Web is slightly different as Flash MX use the Sorenson Spark CODEC; which isn’t available form within AE. In such a case, you will need an intermediate file format (CODEC) for Flash to import and then to compress for optimization for Web delivery.

The intermediate file format has to be of a high quality; taking into consideration of the pros and cons of quality and file sizes. As mentioned, the Animation CODEC seems to do a good job for such a situation.

Having said that, I suggest that you compare between outputting two versions of a sample movie – (1) QT with Animation CODEC, and with the DV CODEC that you use to transfer footage into your computer.

There is also the unknown here which is how you get your files into AE. DO you go through an editing software or do the transfered footage go into AE from the camera without passing through any other software/processing?

By now, you would have realised that there is no possibility of finding a correct answer unless a workflow process is first described. But I am hopeful that you may have picked up a few pointers.

There are a lot of variables and circumstances involved in optimizing video for various delivery media and there is also the workflow process that has to be taken into account.

HTH
Roland Kahlenberg
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com
customizable animated backgrounds with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

What we use depends on how our final, rendered movies eventually makes it to tape (or perhaps disc). If it’s a disc then it depends on who will be receiving it and how they will receive and view it.

To cut a long story short, if it’s going out to tape, then the best CODEC to choose is the one that is natively supported by your card. If it’s a simple Firewire i/o, then either QT or AVI should do if you’re on the PC – although I have a preference for QT.

If you’d like a more specific answer then you’ll have to provide more information on how you digitize and output your video footage.

HTH
Roland Kahlenberg
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

You need to apply TWO text animator properties for total control of tracking when using the Text Tool in AE6.5 .

Take note that a Text Layer’s Transform property for Anchor Point has no effect for applying the anchor for a tracking procedure.

Apply the Tracking Animator to control the amount of tracking. However tracking is anchored to the left of your text. To have the anchor anywhere else, you will need the second Animator, Line Anchor. There are 3 values you should be interested in here – 0% (anchored left), 50% (centrally anchored) adn 100% (anchored right). Of course you could make things more interesting by animating the line Anchor property.

Cheers
Roland Kahlenberg
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Essentially, you’ll need a Porperty Map layer that has the text layer [white text (slightly blurred approx 5 for Fast Blur) on black background] as one of its Channels. The you’d use Kinetic Friction to have the particles stick to the Channel with the text.

If this doesn’t make much sense, then look at my COW tutorial, Fun in Particle Playland.

HTH
Roland Kahlenberg
broadcastGEMs.com
– customizable animated backdrops (with AEPs + loads more)

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

It sounds like you’re importing a movie rather than the AEP. If you need the layers from the AEP, then deselect all (F2), then copy all layers (CTRL+A) and then paste all the layers in the target comp.

HTH

Cheers
Roland Kahlenberg
broadcastGEMs.com – customizable animated backdrops with AEPs!

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

A transparency setting of approx 90% helps. Lowering the Saturation setting to between 16-235 prevents chroma crawl (which may look a lot like interlace flicker) and is a good thing.

HTH
Roland Kahlenberg

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

As yikesmikes has mentione, you should look into whether you have an open mask – although I’ve never seen AutoTrace create an open mask before. In fact closed mask shapes is what AutoTrace was meant to do.

Another possibility is to look at the mask shape’s mode properties.

HTH
Roland Kahlenberg

broadcastGEMs.com – the leader in customizable royalty-free animated backdrops