[Spencer Tweed]

Your original expression looks fine to me. Maybe try looking for something else…? There’s a lot that can go wrong when linking between comps – and a lot that can go wrong when referencing a position. Is anything parented? Any 3D layers? Try isolating what’s going wrong.

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

Can you post your expression? Can’t tell without seeing the code…

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

Hey Don,

It’s a little bit unclear to me weather you need help with the key or the spill… I’ll give you advice for both and maybe I can help you out!

In the world of keying/spill suppression you always want to separate out these steps, particularly in Keylight which has a VERY sensitive and aggressive spill suppression algorithm. You also want to often pull your matte in multiple keys (though this isn’t always necessary). It’s a bit hard to explain this in text without showing you but I’ll do the best I can!

Basically you apply keylight to your footage and get a good looking key (looking at Screen Matte in the View dropdown). Then if you need to do any roto on top with either a black layer or white layer, or even a second key if needed (which it sounds like you will). Then without switching your View dropdown pre-compose the whole lot – keys and rotos.

Now pull your original un-keyed footage back into your comp and start your despill. I recommend two approaches – first apply Keylight, select your Screen Color and change your Screen Matte -> Clip White to 1 (thus only despilling and not keying at all). Second if that doesn’t look good (it rarely does) try this free plug-in: https://cinegobs.com/uncategorized/release-spill-suppression-for-after-effects-64-bit-cs5. The last is a magical plug-in that will work 90% of the time!

Now put your pre-comp (which is now your matte) on top of your newly despilled foreground and set your despilled clip to “Luma Matte” your pre-comp.

Boom! A little light-wrap, some further color correction, and you should be good to go!

– Spencer

PS with really spill’d footage you might also need to do a degrain. I would do this on your clip, pre-comp it, and do all of the above with your pre-comp instead of the raw source. I also sometimes just pre-render out the degrained plate to speed things up.

[Spencer Tweed]

That’s cool, never knew about that trick!

The shortcut for mask opacity is “TT”. Unfortunately when trying to hide it you will also toggle the layer opacity…

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

Experience and watching millions of tutorials! The best introduction is VideoCopilot’s basic training tutorials:

https://www.videocopilot.net/basic/

I try to watch a tutorial and then find a different project to apply what I learned to. Or if I go to start on a project and I’m not sure how to do it I’ll usually surf around to find a tutorial for something similar, and then figure out how to adapt it to what I want to do. As far as the small tips and tricks – you pick those up over the years. For example want to set a keyframe on any property that has a shortcut? hold shift+alt like shift+alt+p to key the position of a layer. That’s a totally random tip I heard on a tutorial years ago, and I just used it in a project 5 minutes ago!

Also, I’ve read the whole AE manual through digital cover to digital cover. It took me a few weeks but it was well worth it.

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

You want to get rid of them entirely? Not possible… However if you hit the shortcut for the item while holding down Shift and having the layer selected, they will be toggled on and off. Try shift+T to hide the opacity, for example.

Anchor point is “A” position is “P” and opacity is “T”

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

Figured it out (sort of) with action listener. Just listened to the shortcut and turned that into a function, then I pass the layer as an argument. Kind of cheesy, but works for what I need.

– Spencer

[Spencer Tweed]

Nice expressions! I modified a bit to suit my project and smashed your expressions together:

nums = PICKWHIP_VALUE_HERE;
amtOfZeroes = 10;
numOfDecimals = 3;

//------------------------------------------------------------

nums = nums.value.toFixed(numOfDicemals);

isNeg = false;
if (nums < 0)
{
nums = Math.abs(nums);
nums = nums.toFixed(numOfDecimals);
isNeg = true;
}
numsArray = nums.split(".");
numsFloat = numsArray[0];
while (numsFloat.length < amtOfZeroes)
{
numsFloat = "0" + numsFloat;
}
if(isNeg)
{
numsFloat = "-" + "0" + numsFloat;
}

numsFloat + "." + numsArray[1]

[Spencer Tweed]

I need this for a project I’m on so I went ahead and smashed all of these expressions together. Yes, it will also do what you want with the decimal places!

nums = PICKWHIP_VALUE_HERE;
amtOfZeroes = 10;
numOfDecimals = 3;

//------------------------------------------------------------

nums = nums.value.toFixed(numOfDicemals);

isNeg = false;
if (nums < 0)
{
nums = Math.abs(nums);
nums = nums.toFixed(numOfDecimals);
isNeg = true;
}
numsArray = nums.split(".");
numsFloat = numsArray[0];
while (numsFloat.length < amtOfZeroes)
{
numsFloat = "0" + numsFloat;
}
if(isNeg)
{
numsFloat = "-" + "0" + numsFloat;
}

numsFloat + "." + numsArray[1]

[Spencer Tweed]

Yep, random right? Been using AE for years and I’ve never seen this.

The font is kind of a random one. I also noticed that it some how doesn’t anti-alias. Luckily that’s fine because it is a blocky, digital font and looks fine pixilated, but I have no idea how a font can tell AE to not anti-alias itself!

Very weird.

– Spencer