[Steve Bentley]

Where’s the fun in that? No brick walls with blood on them, no little dents, or QWERTY stamped backward in your forehead.
Thanks Roland,
Who knew? (well I guess you did!)

[Steve Bentley]

For slow moving particles often its tough to keep them from building up, so if you have a look you like that moves quicker but you want it slower, just set the frames per second in the render dialogue higher and then interpret the footage back to your standard frame rate in AE. So if you set it to 60fps you will get twice as many frames when interpreted to 30fps and at half the moving speed.
This also lets you turn up the particle count because they are on screen for half the time (or less, and that means you can max out that much sooner) and that usually helps with the smoothness too.

[Steve Bentley]

So a couple of things you can do – there’s the enable x beside the lights objects. You can turn those off manually or tie them to a node in expresso so all of the ones you want to go off do so at once. You can also make them part of a group or a selection and toggle them that way.
Lights can be assigned to specific objects (or to not shine on specific objects). In the last tab of the light attributes is the assign tab and in there you can put as many things as you like and choose include or exclude – this way they can be inside the vehicle but shine only on objects outside the vehicle – no tags needed and they can be on for the main render if you like.

[Steve Bentley]

Do you have an image of what the “accordion” should look like? That might help us steer you to the right solution.

[Steve Bentley]

(slaps forehead). Thanks Dan, that’ll do it. See, you get into a rut and sometimes you can’t see the forest for the… er, Color Balance.

[Steve Bentley]

You could do this with a single expression (depending on the move you want on the objects.
Use the index number of the layer above the layer you are on (thisLayer.index-1). Assign the position of the current layer with the position of the layer above.
Or use the the index of the current layer as a multiplier of the position of the first layer. So as the first one moves each layer moves x times more.

once you decide on the expression you can paste that to all layers

[Steve Bentley]

So A is the parent of B and B is the parent of C and C is the parent of D? that kind of thing?

[Steve Bentley]

I wonder if they mean “Linear” instead of Planar (as in a linear color space), or I wonder if the Planar media player has a special codec or requirement. Usually these branded media players use a run of the mill codec with a wrapper, just like an mp4 can be a wrapper for an H264.

[Steve Bentley]

You can select all, then deselect your intended parent and then use the parent select pop up menu on one of the selected layers, choose the parent in this list and all will take on that parent.
FYI moving a parent in time will not move its children in time.

[Steve Bentley]

Its going to really depend on what the media player/playback is. Some can only handle an HD file, some can handle a 4k file. Some look after the overlap for you and some use the projectors to overlap. Some can handle huge pixel files and look after the split and overlap.
Usually the first question is can the multiple media players sync, or do they have a multi head out on their video cards. that usually determines whether you have to split up the files or the system will carve up a single larger file.
As much as we’re used to generating 20k pixel wide content, I’d say about half the time (much to our disappointment) the client opts for a single HD output and just splits it and blows it up among the projectors.