[Slice11217]

Well, so far here is what I’ve been able to prepare for my co-workers:

-The animation of the ball bouncing in place (two bounces, high bounce and low bounce)
-The animation of the ball squashing and stretching as it bounces.
-Animation presets which can be dropped onto the time remap of the main comp on the ball layer

Here’s what my co-workers will have to do for themselves:

-Time the audio.
-Time the beats of the music.
-Position the ball so that it hits the text at the correct frame.
-Using the animation presets, slide the resulting keyframes so that it matches the downcycle of the bounce.

If I have any time to do it, I may set up the text for them so that all they’ll have to do is bounce the ball. Otherwise they’ll have to do this for themselves. I can’t pre-chew EVERYTHING for them!

[Slice11217]

Well the thing is, the songs in question aren’t all that predictable as far as number of words per lyric line.

The avenue that I’m exploring at the moment is this: I have a comp with a ball animated for a large bounce followed by a small bounce (from here on referred to as “the ball comp”). The bounce itself is comprised of position keyframes and then mask keyframes (to provide a little squash and stretch).

This comp is nested into another comp where the lyrics pop up in time with the audio (referred to as “main comp”). The ball comp is time remapped. What I’m thinking is to create a preset out of the time remap keyframes for the ball comp and name them “large bounce” and “small bounce”.

Then, my co-workers would only need to drag the appropriate preset onto their ball comp and then position it where it’s needed.

I’m hoping that it’s “simple/stupid” enough to pass on to someone else and not have any loss of quality. Otherwise, I’m going to have to do it all in addition to my other work, and that’s not going to be good!

If anyone has any better ideas, please pass them along!

[Slice11217]

Well, before I posted I did a search of the existing posts since I didn’t really want to spend the time typing out the details of my situation if someone had already addressed a similar issue. Long story short, I didn’t find anything that jumped out as addressing anything remotely similar. If anyone happens to know of a post that addresses this issue, please direct me to it.

[Slice11217]

It used to be that you could simply copy all of the Photoshop filter plugin files into the plugin folder in After Effects. This was AE 3 or AE 4. I haven’t done it in a while, but it would be worth a try.

[Slice11217]

Well, we got to the bottom of the whole thing here. Just had to endure a night of perplexed, cold sweat, insomnia. The answer is kinda complicated, but it boils down to a frame rate problem. We’re working with Flash animation at 30fps. As everyone knows video isn’t quite 30fps, and this isn’t too much of a problem for about the first 15 seconds of our comps. After that point the drop-frame starts to rear its ugly head and After Effects tries to compensate by splitting the animation over the two fields. Works OK for anything that’s animated in After Effects since the keyframes are set up to accomodate this, but for the stuff that’s animated originally in Flash, well… let’s just say that it becomes incredibly obvious how Flash really isn’t yet suited to video.

I’m just glad that I now know what the problem is. Thank you for your help, guys

[Slice11217]

Well, we got to the bottom of the whole thing here. Just had to endure a night of perplexed, cold sweat, insomnia. The answer is kinda complicated, but it boils down to a frame rate problem. We’re working with Flash animation at 30fps. As everyone knows video isn’t quite 30fps, and this isn’t too much of a problem for about the first 15 seconds of our comps. After that point the drop-frame starts to rear its ugly head and After Effects tries to compensate by splitting the animation over the two fields. Works OK for anything that’s animated in After Effects since the keyframes are set up to accomodate this, but for the stuff that’s animated originally in Flash, well… let’s just say that it becomes incredibly obvious how Flash really isn’t yet suited to video.

I’m just glad that I now know what the problem is. Thank you for your help, guys

S

[Slice11217]

The motion we’re creating is somewhat typical camera motion, pans so that the back ground moves horizontally in either direction, zoom ins and outs, character movement. By the way, character animation was done in Flash at 30fps, while our After Effects files are all set up at 29.97. -Don’t know if that plays into the problem, but I’ll likely do a test for that at a later time.