[Steve Bentley]

FX console from VideoCopilot – free and you’re space bar will get worn out you’ll use it so much.

[Steve Bentley]

Also make sure you are doing this at a high bit depth. With only so many levels of gray to go round in 8bit (inside what amounts to the “mask” that keeps things apart) the curve on the crushed levels is too short and the roll off to black or white (opaque and clear) happens too quickly. 16 bit or 32 bit will add in so many more levels to run through before the edges close up.

[Steve Bentley]

If the plane is a primitive, you first have to make it editable (the C key) before doing the operation Claudio suggests.

[Steve Bentley]

First check the camera that you are viewing the C4D scene through (the active camera with the white checkbox in the object manager). Its also good practice to turn off or delete cameras you won’t be using so the wrong one doesn’t get exported.

The render doesn’t really need the external compositing tag, that’s more for when you bring the data into AE. (assuming you are rendering out of C4D and not letting AE render the C4D stuff for you.)
You do need to bring the exported data from C4D into AE so that you have a camera that is the same (and the position of the objects). But the renders are just frames or movies that are “flat” and fit to your comp window in AE.

Make sure you comp size matches your render size in C4D and your frame rate in both C4D and AE – 29.97 is not “close enough” to 30. Make sure your aspect ratios match too.

Are you using any motion blur in either C4D or AE? If so, try a short render without and see if that helps.

Make sure to turn off any cameras you had in AE and only use the camera that came in from C4D.
Make sure you are in camera view in AE and not one of the other views available (front, Axon, Iso)

Failing all that, if you can trim the C4D project down to just the camera and the objects that aren’t lining up and trim the AE project down to the same, you can upload it here and we can take a look.

[Steve Bentley]

That phong tag that comes in with things like primitives in C4D already has it’s break angle set and turned on. When you add a phong tag to something like an imported STL, its’ not really doing anything yet because the angle limit checkbox is off. Turn it on and play with the angle. You may have to increase the default value of 40 to get things looking smooth.

[Steve Bentley]

Any number of the deform plugins will do that – ripple, wave etc. But you can also do it with the mesh warp, bezier warp or use the reshape effect. You may have to precomp the text and if so you may have to use the “continuously rasterize” button to keep the edges clean.
Precomping the text will allow you to drag it (in the subcomp) through the deforming “field” area without having to worry about also shifting the warp. That way the warp can move and change independently of the texts motion.

Heck, you could even do this with the displacement effect and use a linear gradient as the map (black to white and back to black again)

[Steve Bentley]

I think you pre cut down the frames though in the previous attempt. No? The only way to get the proper motion blur is to use Twixter or RealSmart Motion blur.

[Steve Bentley]

Let AE do it for you with either TImeWarp or Enable Time Remapping. I think the aforementioned Twixter will probably do a better job but I can’t guarantee it. Every clip has its own unique issues.

[Steve Bentley]

I’m not sure. I’m still using that one in the link with my R19. I haven’t cracked R20 yet as we’re in the middle of a project and I don’t want to rock the upgrade boat. It might not be able to take advantage of some of the new features but I haven’t noticed any issues yet. (apart from ones that were always there). The best use I’ve found for it is putting splines behind other objects and letting them glow out from behind whatever is blocking the core light. I haven’t found anything that does that quite as well. The glowing “fog” has so much depth with WhiteLights and wraps blocking objects really well. Octane will do it but its pretty noisey. I’m sure if you wait long enough it would produce a frame but who has time for that.

[Steve Bentley]

Every frame of the speed up will need information from the frames that get “compressed” down in time to make up that frame and the smear that is the simulated blur. It won’t look like any frame that has come before so therefore its a “new” frame. You’ve already tried just cutting out frames and going with whats left and that didn’t work so again the frames we see will need to be “new”. There will be less frames than in the original but all the new frames need to be combinings of the old.