[Scott G]

that doesn’t really help, because the foot layer needs to move relative to the null or parent, not relative to the world.

i can’t say “if y value drops below this world-coordinate then clamp it”, because the world coordinate is something like 500, when the position of the foot is only 50 or 60, because it’s relative to the null.

i can’t see how i can use layer space transforms on the parented layer. sure i could get the world position, and use that in an expression on ANOTHER layer (like, to emit particles from the foot if i wanted to do something that crazy), but not the layer itself. does that make sense?

maybe i can duplicate the foot layer, hide the original, and then use an expression to make the position of the duplicate the same as the world position of the hidden original, clamping it when it moves beyond my range.

hmmm sounds like it might work!
will try…

[Scott G]

that doesn’t really help, because the foot layer needs to move relative to the null or parent, not relative to the world.

i can’t say “if y value drops below this world-coordinate then clamp it”, because the world coordinate is something like 500, when the position of the foot is only 50 or 60, because it’s relative to the null.

i can’t see how i can use layer space transforms on the parented layer. sure i could get the world position, and use that in an expression on ANOTHER layer (like, to emit particles from the foot if i wanted to do something that crazy), but not the layer itself. does that make sense?

maybe i can duplicate the foot layer, hide the original, and then use an expression to make the position of the duplicate the same as the world position of the hidden original, clamping it when it moves beyond my range.

hmmm sounds like it might work!
will try…

[Scott G]

i solved the problem by precomping some layers therby reducing the vertical height of my timeline. the more i got rid of the more visible the parenting menu became on screen. weird glitch… but i’m okay now. hope it doesn’t happen again!

[Scott G]

you and me both brother. emails to adobe are on their way!

[Scott G]

so no one else has had this issue?

i contacted fnord and no response. seems like a pretty big bug to me, and is turning out to be a major pain in the behind.

🙁

[Scott G]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the detailed response. This was basically what I was planning to do originally, but I wasn’t sure how subjective this method would be – I can tell there’s going to be a lot of back and forth with the director and VFX sup saying “no too much, oh, now there’s not enough”. I thought perhaps there was a plugin that would replicate settings for different lens types and film stock (or CCD’s?). Guess not… something for Digital Film Tools to work on, perhaps?

Guess I’ll do it the manual way! 🙂

Thanks again,
Scott.

Oh, and thanks Gary also, I’m going to try your idea as well and compare.

[Scott G]

mylenium, it’s previewing i meant, not actually rendering to disk. but even when rendering i’ve noticed that hitting the stop button doesn’t cut out immediately either – you have to wait for the current frame before the stop actually happens. i

as for hitting page up/down, it seems to work sometimes but not others… it depends how intensive the render process is at that point in time. i’ve got some pretty intensive comps and sometimes if i forget to caps before i move around, after effects practically becomes frozen for minutes at a time until it recognises that i’ve page-upped or cap-locked or anything else. there should be some kind of instant kill-switch. i wish.

[Scott G]

random(1, 16)/25 for pal footage.

it was that simple all along…

your tip was still valid, colin! thanks.

[Scott G]

wait a sec… that’s still giving me massive values though, as it’s converting 16seconds to frames, so the value isn’t 16 it’s 400. or something else entirely, the code is spitting out values in the thousands now.

i tried putting in temp+random(0, 0.64) for 0 seconds, 16 frames, but this doesn’t work either.

i can’t figure it out… if i keyframe it i can put in values of 0001, 0006, 0016, but if i random(1,16) surely this should be the same thing? it doesn’t look like time remap requires times of seconds at all…

[Scott G]

wow, i didn’t realise that about time remap. the numbers in the timeline switches window (where you get the readouts for position rotation etc) are in frames, not like 00:00:00:00, so i had no idea it needed values in seconds.

thanks for the tip!