[Ryan Hill]

I think that’ll work.

[Ryan Hill]

Dave, is there somewhere I can see a list of all your stock answers? 🙂

[Ryan Hill]

That’s basically what I would do, if I understand you correctly, but I don’t know why it wouldn’t work.

Are the text layers using 2D or 3D positioning? Are the start and end of the beam really not moving at all? What if you look at the numerical values, are they changing but a small amount or not at all?

[Ryan Hill]

It looks like there is at least some depth data in there. I noticed the snowflakes aren’t a consistent intensity, but get brighter as they approach their target. I think this means they’ve built the image out of lights, then used those lights to light the particles.

In what way did your attempt look bad?

[Ryan Hill]

You can export a small flv file if the animation is limited in certain ways. Any 3D layers or layers with filters applied, will be converted into an image per frame, which makes it larger. If you take a still image and apply just 2D position and scale animation to it, it will only need to store the one image + the animation data, which will be really small.

[Ryan Hill]

I notice between the 40 seconds and 60 seconds, when the popcorn is popping, the camera is panning but not translating. I presume the panning was faked on computer, which makes it easier to animate the popcorn. Near the start of that sequence, there’s a quick zoom out and blur, maybe to cover a transition? Or maybe the popped corn was on the table the whole time and they erased it, but it wasn’t clean enough to pass unless it was out of focus?

[Ryan Hill]

Hmm. In this thread someone mentions using that converter and having out-of-sync audio.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/240/185

It’s version 5, and now they’re on version 9, so maybe they’ve fixed it, but I’m trying out a demo, so I’ll see.

[Ryan Hill]

It’s kind of hard searching for this stuff, since there’s a lot of crappy converters that are link-spamming their search results.

But this one looks promising:
https://convertmovie.com/videoconverter/formatref.html

[Ryan Hill]

It’s going to be a lot of trig to figure it out.

Each link in the chain will pass through four states.
1) On the first gear
2) Passing from the first gear to the second
3) On the second gear
4) Passing from second back to first

If you can solve the total length of the chain, you can solve the speed each link will move around the chain’s path in terms of the speed each gear rotates.

To solve the chain length, you need to solve the length for each of those four parts. The angle around each gear that the chain passes along will add up to 360, so if the larger is 190 degrees, the smaller will be 170.

The tricky part to me is how to figure out what those two angles should be.

[Ryan Hill]

I don’t know about expressions. I’d probably just parent each square to the one it folds into and then rotate it 180. Maybe if you needed to do hundreds it would be worth it to figure out an expression.