[Stephen Pickering]

Maybe enlarge it in Photoshop first? Then reduce it in Premiere Pro if needed.
-Stephen

[Stephen Pickering]

Thank you John and Chris,

I suspected 60p (59.94) would be the way to go but I didn’t think I would be able to get good results directly out of Premiere Pro. So, if have to convert again in AE I thought 24p is closer than 60, hence my thought to convert to 24 in the end.

Directly to 60p sounds like a much easier solution. Thanks!

-Stephen

[Stephen Pickering]

Thank you Alex, I appreciate your quick feedback. That’s what I was hoping to hear. As we start doing more we’ll look into a better setup but I’m glad to hear this should work for now, even with the slower bandwidth.

Thanks again,
Stephen

[Stephen Pickering]

This will work great. Thank you so much!

[Stephen Pickering]

Works perfectly Dan, Thanks!

[Stephen Pickering]

I believe I had changed it to something like:

beginTime = effect(“Checkbox Control”)(“Checkbox”);

But it looks like your expression works. Thank you very much. Can you tell me what the “.key(1).time” does?

Is there any way to make a checkbox that turns it on again? I’m working on a venetian blinds effect. The expression above is for the “sway” which is the result of the blinds closing. The blinds will open and close multiple times so i would need to repeat this decaying pendulum sway multiple times.

Thanks Dan!

-Stephen

[Stephen Pickering]

Thanks Dave,

I appreciate your help on this. I’ve read about h.264 being hard for AE. Even without the video (just the stills) it was sluggish which I realized was due to the lights. The nature of the project was multiple layers of a single composition (split up like blinds using masks). Each layer both accepted lights and cast shadows.

My workaround was a bit of a cheat which actually worked really well in this case. I rendered out the animation with just white layers (accepting lights and casting shadows). This created a video with just shadow. Then I turned off the lights in the original composition and simply put the rendered video on the the top layer with a multiply mode and 32% opacity. I also needed to compress the curves a little. While it was not perfect it worked really well and allowed me extremely fast render times which let me hit my deadline.

I really appreciate your time to help on this Dave!

Take care,

-Stephen Pickering

[Stephen Pickering]

Thanks Dave,

The system this project is currently on is a PC with Windows 7 64bit
Intel Xeon X3440 @ 2.53 (8 cores)
16GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 video card (I know this is not a supported card)
After Effects CS6 v. 11.0.2.12
Multiprocessing disabled, 13GB RAM reserved for AE, ray tracing off, “Classic 3d” on.
The video footage is h.264 (.mov) from t2i, however I think I will end up just using still graphics instead of video for this opening.

I know these specs are poor so I’m not expecting great performance, but I thought there might be some gurus out there who know the effects are that kill performance (or tricks to simulate render-intensive settings without the real thing).

Thanks Dave,

Stephen

[Stephen Pickering]

I think I found the answer here: https://blog.vincentlaforet.com/2012/06/25/tutorial-after-effects-cs6-3d-camera-tracker/ Not exactly what I’m trying to do, but gives a good overview of layers instead of just 3d text.

[Stephen Pickering]

Thank you all for your ideas. I knew about the animation presets, but for some reason didn’t think about modifying them. I ended up using the “fade up lines” preset. It simply fades each line using only 2 key frames (which does not allow me to “cue” the individual lines. However I was able to simply add some additional key frames in the “Range Selector” properties of the effect and accomplished exactly what I needed.

Thank you for putting me in the right direction.

-Stephen