[Scott Geersen]

Hi Guys,

I’ve also been having this problem, but it’s slightly different so I solve it with nulls.

Aharon’s 2 tutorials cover moving and pausing then moving again, and 3 keyframes in a straight path, but not what to do when you have three keyframes in a curvy path. You can’t use the hold keyframe solution because you don’t want a pause, but you also can’t use the linear solution because your path is not a straight line (changing to linear is really a cheat that you don’t notice because of the straight line of motion.

But what if you want to move a layer along a semi-circle? you have a keyframe at the beginning, one at the apex of the curve, and one at the end, and change all to easy ease so the moving object moves in two “steps”. but it boomerangs around the middle point.

The only way i have been able to solve this is by a series of parented nulls, one for x, y, and z each.

AE needs another type of motion interpolation in addition to bezier and auto-bezier: something that will ease between keyframes with no tangent handles on the outside of the curve, if that makes sense. having to manually remove half the tangent handles (so each point only has one handle instead of two) manually is too irritating.

also, what about a timeline option that could be switched on or off to animate position channels individally without the use of nulls? turn the option off and all channels are “ganged” together and setting a keyframe on one sets keyframes on all. switch the option on and you have 3 channels of motion with no need for nulls.

[Scott Geersen]

yes you’re right. i had assumed i needed velocity anyway and forgot that the particles on a motion path take their speed from the light defining the motion path.

[Scott Geersen]

oops! i thought i was still in the trapcode forum. apologies.

[Scott Geersen]

acutally, i think i’ll still need to go with the super-slow mo footage.
it appears as if, in aharon’s example file, after effects is interpolating sub-frame, because we’re time-displacing a comp and not a pre-rendered sequence.
when i try to time displace a sequence or quicktime, i get massive jaggy edges no matter what i change settings to.
for example, i have a chromakey shot of two people walking left to right. when their arms and legs move horizontally across frame, there’s jaggies everywhere (less so on things like heads and waists which move slower and more constantly).

even on the super-slo mo (750fps) footage i have, i’m still getting jaggies.

i wonder if there’s a plugin that will do this based on pixel motion as well as time? if only there was some way to control the timewarp effect with gradients!

pete’s plugins (free ones) for time slice aren’t much better, and are difficult to control as well.

[Scott Geersen]

ah i see – it turns out i don’t need super slo mo footage or extremely high res after all. thanks aharon!

[Scott Geersen]

yes i realise the person is twisting in her chair – i wasn’t asking how to make someone move or rotate! what i’m trying to figure out is how to get a higher quality of time displacement out of after effects. i’ll be experimenting later today with some high-res and super-slow footage, which i can then time-remap back to normal speed after performing the time-displacement in a precomp.

i’ll try increasing the time resolution as well. i watched your displacement tutorial yesterday just for the heck of it, and maybe my memory isn’t what it used to be, but did you say that the time resolution setting affects playback speed at all? ie, if you have 25fps comp but you ignore adobe recommendations and bump the time res up to 100, does this make the effect go 4 times faster? something for me to try…

thanks,
scott.

[Scott Geersen]

ultimatte seems to crash out for me every time ae7’s auto save kicks in. i have to make sure i turn it off before using the plugin, because if i’m in the separate ultimatte UI, it will freeze (intel mac).
that said, i used it on some hdv footage recently, and it worked for me, when even flame wouldn’t key the shot as cleanly as ultimatte in this instance. it doesn’t work in all situations (you said you had deep shadows… i’ve never had much luck with that) but usually it’s pretty good.

[Scott Geersen]

you can also just scale everything down by 100, which is what i did when importing maya cams recently. i just pasted an expression for divide by 100 into the scale and position parameters of all my layers. takes a while to set up, but it was easier than using the mo-con scripts, which we also investigated.

[Scott Geersen]

digital anarchy seems to be the way to go, one of the guys here has it i think.

i’d still be interested to know how you do it without plugins though… mylenium, i’m not sure i follow what you mean. even if i add extra animators, they still don’t affect spaces?

[Scott Geersen]

thanks very much yikesmike, i was unaware that dan had a layer-space transform on his site!