[Steve Bentley]

thats funny – on my phone that showed up with your layers sequenced but on the cow “from this” looks just like “to this”.
Anyway. I think I get it.

If you follow my instructions for sequencing the layers to get each layer offset from the rest that will look after the keyframes. But it will also shift the footage so here’s how to correct that very quickly.
Put you time marker somewhere so that it intersects the active part of every peice of footage in your comp. Select all the layers and then hit the multiply button on your keypad or go to the layers menu and select add marker. This will put a marker on every layer at the same spot in time. Dont move your time marker until you are done the next steps.
Then do the sequencing things I described before – this will shift all the keyframes by the same amount. So layer 2 keyframes will be x frames later than layer 1, and layer 3’s will be x frames later than layer 2 and so on. But it will also shift the footage in time.
Then Select all layers (if they aren’t already).
Make sure you don’t have any keyframes selected.
You can use the pan behind tool (y) to slide all the layers back so that each marker lines back up with where the time indicator is (and was when you put the markers there in the first place). This won’t move the keyframes of you use the pan behind tool instead of the arrow tool.
This is easier if you can initially trim all your footage to a common length (head or tail doesn’t matter). And then once sequenced you can shift/snap all the layers to that point in time again without moving the keyframes.
The time indicator will also snap to the markers on each layer as you move them.

Doing what you are after is doable with a script – it doesn’t move the keyframes but it just offsets the data. But it would be so much typing it would be easier to manually move them all.
The might be a script on AEscripts.com, but again by the time you get it working you could have done it by hand or by the method above.

[Steve Bentley]

So just to be clear – do you want to stagger the keyframes from one layer to the next or just move them all at once and shove them down x number of keyframes?

[Steve Bentley]

If you want to shift all the keyframes at the same time, just open the layers so you can see the keyframes and the drag select them all and the move them all at the same time.

If you want to stagger them (or sequence them) so that something happens in layer 1 for 1 second and then that same something happens in layer2 but 1 second after the first, you can select all the layers you want to stagger (select from top down and the top layer will be the earliest layer) then right click on one of the layers and choose keyframe assistant. In there you will find sequence layers. Turn that on and pick the amount of overlap you want the offset to be. So if all your layers art 5 seconds long and you choose an overlap of 4 seconds, each layer will be 1 second later than the one before.

I final way, assuming you cant move the footage in time is to just copy and past the keyframes from one layer to another – wherever you put your time marker is where the keyframes will get pasted in the next layer no matter where they were in the layer you copied them from.
Just remember to delete the old keyframes if you already have them there. You can also do this within the layer itself – copy keyframes, delete keyframes, move time slider, paste keyframes.
You can do this to multiple attributes at the same time. AE knows that position data needs to go to the position attribute and trani data needs to go to trani attribute.

[Steve Bentley]

If you precompose the two (or more) text layers then in the outer comp you only have 1 layer to deal with and edit.
Then when you want to change the text you can dive into the inner comp and change the text without affecting the edit.

But for two lines of text in one layer, you can just hit enter at the end of the first line and keep typing and then adjust your spacing between the lines in the character attributes panel. Once you click somewhere else the two lines of text will be treated as one object in AE. So then you can pass that one layer through a masking layer or apply a blur or transition to that single layer made of two lines of text.

Is that what you are after?

[Steve Bentley]

So the blur and the wipe at the same time?
Or did you mean to say the two text lines at the same time?

Assuming blur and wipe at same time.
I think you are always going to need at least two layers: either one for the clean text and wipe and one for the blur text and wipe.
Or one for clean text and wipe and one for a blur gradient that the text layer would reference through a blur effect.
Or one for the text layer and blur effect and one for a luma matte that is also the moving grad for the blur effect.

There might be one of the transitions that does a wipe on and blur at the same time. The gradient wipe would do it but you still need another layer to hold the reference gradient.
It might a third party plug in that combines both wipe and blur.

We’ve been getting a lot of “I want to do this with one layer” questions lately. Is there a reason you can’t use two?

[Steve Bentley]

to create your own flames, use a brush shaped like a thin bar, slightly thicker on the ends. Then have that brush rotate as you paint in fairly directional paths. Use a blend or transfer function that builds up like screen or multiply and use a fairly low transparency or flowrate. As the brush rotates the edges build up and give you that cool intenside edge and gossamer middle.
There is also a package called Flame out there (free even) that will generate whispy’s for you.

[Steve Bentley]

Watch out for those UVs when you start texturing – where the ends of the sweep meet so ends the UV map coords. So after you do your deform there will be a seam if you do a UV mapping on the new object. I say this because toruses (tori?) are hard to map well and UV is the usual suspect to do this right. Even using a tube primitave with the fillet set to the same as the height will get you your donut shape (but with out the animateable properties of the sweep) but will still have the seam at the slice point.

[Steve Bentley]

The display going to sleept shouldn’t be an issue (it’s down stream of the video card) but if the computer goes to sleep with it then…. In Windows its in the control panels under power management. Just set the computer to never sleep. If you have a hard drive controller you can tell it to never let the hard drives park too.
ON Mac it’s system prefs/ energy saver – same thing, no computer sleeping.
If you have a virus checker you might want to turn it off for the render is it might be kicking in every night and hogging resources.

[Steve Bentley]

The aliasing around the alpha might need to be there depending on alpha type. If you use “straight” then AE puts aliased pixels outside the smooth edge of the matte. But if you aren’t putting it over a background yet where the cookie cutter effect happens it can look kinda weird.
Premult alphas don’t do this but technically apply an alpha twice, once during the render and then again when put over a background (that’s over simplified but gets to the meat of it). But if never prerender the text and just slide a back ground inthere you will never see either of these issues (unless the alpha object in the font is damaged or bad)
If you get anything too small, there just aren’t enough pixels to describe the object plus is antiasliased edges so it can look minecrafty. A circle scaled to a grid of 2×2 pixels can never be a circle.
Also, rending on white type on black make the anitaliasing work the hardest as it has to blend from the farthest extremes of black to white, instead of say white to medium purple. You might also want to not do them at 100% white. In most video systems this is a no-no anyway and this reduced white will help out the aliasing. Many designer types will tell you text should never be full white or full black anyway as it has more elegance this way.
If you precompose the multilayer text file and scale it you might need to turn on contiunuously rasterize (the sun icon) in the outer comp to keep the resolution.
As as other posters have pointed out, some fonts just don’t have good versions of small sets inside their suitcases. I just finished working with a client’s font who’s italic was an aliased mess even at headline font sizes
You could also try setting the text in Illustrator and then outlineing it and then bring those files into AE – use the sun icon button here for sure.

[Steve Bentley]

Let us know how it works with AE. I have the same card and have no end of problems with shredding in the preview port (yet it plays the outputted movie in QT or WMP just fine)