[Sabine Waring]

Thank you so much, that is exactly what I was looking for!!

[Sabine Waring]

Thanks for your comment, I tried splitting the circle and rebuilding it using an array, but it is not giving me the result I want.

I made a little graphic to demonstrate what I am after:

I tried animating the amount of sides in the array to open up the circle, but this does not open up one big hole but holes between all the sides =(

[Sabine Waring]

Hi Craig, thank you for your answer, it was really helpful and enlightening. I’ll definitely pay more attention to resolution from here on out!

[Sabine Waring]

Which may mean the issue is how Vimeo is handling the file.

I think h.264 might be the issue, because when I tried converting that 640 x 351 animation codec file on my own computer to h.264, I had jagged lines on here as well.

If you’re doing animation why not use HD 1280×720 and upload at that frame size and avoid scaling. The scaling on Vimeo of your source file might be part of the issue.

I animated the whole piece in only Pal Widescreen. :/ I’m running AE on a four year old MacBook with 3GB of Ram, it is struggling with anything in Pal resolution already, any attempt I made to produce something in HD failed gloriously.

How would that avoid resizing? Also never use odd frame sizes. Most codecs don’t like odd numbers. 640×360 is 16:9 but you’re better off doing 1280×720 so you can viewers can use Vimeo’s HD mode.

I meant resizing as in resolution resizing, not converting. =)

Am confused now, I started this using the Pal Widescreen preset in AE, which is 1050 by 576. When I resize this with Aspect Ratio controlled, then it doesn’t end up at 640×360, but at 640×351. :/ Just tried to fit it into 640×360, but it obviously gives me black lines at the top and bottom.

[Sabine Waring]

Walter, that works perfectly, thank you so much!!

I don’t know a lot about expressions, I really really need to start working on that.

[Sabine Waring]

I know what you mean, but the issue is that I am also using Text Animators on the text, I can’t do that with a precomp containing two text layers. I’m gonna have to animate everything on one text layer, duplicate it and reposition it and do the whole process over if I change just the tiniest thing in the animation on the first layer.

Guess I’m just gonna have to suck it up. Thanks for all your help though. =)

[Sabine Waring]

I actually did try the layer style drop shadow first, and then the drop shadow effect.

The issue is the same in all cases, even if I scale the layer with layer styles instead of using a camera.

This is so annoying, having to make an additional layer for every single one is gonna complicate the whole animation process so much.

I keep thinking there must be some way to force AE to render the effect before applying transformations.