[Shawn Romano]

My ultimate solution was to use a third-party lens flare kit. I’m an experienced AE user, and nothing I tried seemed to change the bundled lens flare’s shortcomings in this area. I’m using CS3, so I hope that Adobe corrected this problem for CS4 and future releases.

[Shawn Romano]

Thanks, Dave. I am certain that the file was playing at proper framerate, because the other elements in it were animating smoothly. The jerkiness is most visible when the flare’s centerpoint is animated very slowly. To see a stripped-down test, watch this. You can see the flare elements on the right side of the screen illustrating the issue: https://driftminer.com/tests/flare-test-01-h.mov

[Shawn Romano]

Thanks Tony, this is a good thought. I will look into it. I hope it’s not the case though, because my camera is relatively new and hasn’t gotten a ton of use since I purchased it a little less than a year ago!

[Shawn Romano]

Hah, yeah I figured that would probably be the solution. Should I use the front view and the Create Polys tool to accomplish this? Any resources you could point me to for the basics of modeling with polys? Thanks for the input.

[Shawn Romano]

I understand that, which is why I’m asking if anyone has a solution. This seems so simple – there has got to be a way to create a single, clean polygon mesh that will displace properly.

[Shawn Romano]

Man, I wish it was that easy, but that was the first thing I tried. No dice. The edges still get messed up.

[Shawn Romano]

Man I was so close! Pretty much a no-brainer. Thanks so much.

[Shawn Romano]

Thanks, that helped a lot. I still have to mess with some settings to get it right but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

[Shawn Romano]

Thanks so much Dan! With a bit of tweaking, this is working quite nicely. Here’s what I ended up using:

d = thisComp.layer(“Camera 1”).transform.position[2];

minScale = [1.5, 1.5];
maxScale = [100, 100];
dAtMinScale = -7000;
dAtMaxScale = 10;

linear(d,dAtMaxScale, dAtMinScale, maxScale, minScale)

[Shawn Romano]

If I might inquire, what do you mean by “Quickime H.264 is the bottom of the pile for quality”? I assumed that it was one of the better compression codecs, seeing that it is a Blu-Ray format and all. Is there a superior compression technology out there?