[Stephan Walsch]

Hi Michael,
there is a shortcut to do this: ctrl+alt and then num pad + or – to decrease and increase opacity. add shift for 10% increments.
Cheers!

——-
Freelance
Motion Graphics / Grading
Berlin – Germany

[Stephan Walsch]

I think particular isn’t the right choice if you want to have the whole graph respond to keyframe changes, since it’s created in sequence. especially keyframing the frequency will definitely create jumps. amp should be fine though. If you’re using cs6, there are still some bugs with particular and the disk cache, so emptying that from time to time could help.

you could approach this from another angle by using shape layers but at this point I would need to know a bit more about what exactly you are trying to achieve?

Cheers!
Stephan

——-
Freelance
Motion Graphics / Grading
Berlin – Germany

[Stephan Walsch]

Try setting the upper masks blending mode to “alpha add” (at the bottom of the list).
This mode is for exactly these situations where you combine two layers with masked that are inverted copies of each other.
Cheers”
Stephan

——-
Freelance
Motion Graphics / Grading
Berlin – Germany

[Stephan Walsch]

I actually do this morphing a lot and it works well in certain situations. make a subcomp 2 frames in length. the first frame is from the first clip 2 frames before the cut, the second frame from the second clip 2 frames after the cut. you can experiment with this distance. so you now have a sequence 2 frames long that really should be 4 frames long. stretch this using AE timewarp or twixtor and it will morph over your cut. of course quick movement or too great a difference between cuts will break this.
Cheers!
Stephan

——-
Freelance
Motion Graphics / Grading
Berlin – Germany

[Stephan Walsch]

auxillary particles sound okay, try really cranking up the gravity so they fall down fast and then cut them off with a mask at the bottom.

this will be a big performance hit though…

If you only want bars with alternating height next to each other just duplicate a bunch of solids and wiggle their Y position. If you wiggle with no frequency they won’t move:

——-
amp = 100;
w = wiggle(0,amp);
[value[0],w[1]]
——-

Cheers!
Stephan

——-
Freelance
Motion Graphics / Grading
Berlin – Germany

[Stephan Walsch]

Sounds a bit as if you’re overexposing the layers. try lowering the lights intensity.
And regular AE noise will do. I didn’t mean to recommend the AE grain plugin which will do the job but is painfully slow..
Cheers!
Stephan

——-
Freelance
Motion Graphics / Grading
Berlin – Germany

[Stephan Walsch]

change your project to 16bit and/or add a slight amount of grain to the solids.
Cheers!
Stephan

[Stephan Walsch]

Mask the entire layer with a mask over everything first the subtract with a second mask. this does what you want. the mask order is important in this. so have the “add everything” mask at the top.
Cheers!
Stephan

[Stephan Walsch]

actually the steps are all the same width, and you can change that width by changing the factor right after time. the problem lies in my expression moving through the noise field in way to large steps. let’s fix this:

———-

amp = 100;
freq = 4;
soft = 5;

value + amp*noise(Math.round(time*freq)/soft)

———-

changing amp will change the height of the spikes, freq changes their width and soft changes how “related” they are to each other. I would recommend linking those three to expression sliders. Play with the “soft” parameter to get a better result. you can move the whole graph by simply changing the Y value of your light emitter.

don’t let soft be 0 😉

Cheers!
Stephan

[Stephan Walsch]

hi James,
mega weird “not really a lot of expressions” approach:

-download the awesome (and free) BLOKK Font at blokkfont.com
-create a text layer under your current text, set it to be the blokk font
-change size and color to your liking
-link the text of this layer to your actual text above via expression

this should do what you want
Cheers!

Stephan