[Steve Bentley]

Do you have the new update from last week? We’re seeing this crashing thing a lot. If so go back to the current version but one point upgrade before.

[Steve Bentley]

You can also apply compression to the image (like jpg) in the pdf prefs dialogue that opens after you click save. The default is none so the image is far heavier in mb than it needs to be (usually).

[Steve Bentley]

You have to contract the size of the mask before you feather it. Or if its too late to do that you could use a levels filter to crush the blacks of the layer mask and then blur it back up. You may have to do that few times to get the feather you want. This will reduce detail in your mask though. Better to start with the right size of mask (smaller than the image area you want to feather.)

[Steve Bentley]

I think the issue is the tracer not the cloner or the shader. So lets find out what the effect is or the look is your are trying to acheive because there is probably a better way to do this.

[Steve Bentley]

Without getting into multishaders and clones etc can you describe what this should look like? What are trying to make?

[Steve Bentley]

So like this? – see file.
You will have to add your own images into the mograph shader inside the material.
Change the noise pattern to suit – I have upped the contrast in the noise of the shader effector to really show the cubes going transparent over time but you probably don’t want that

12340_mographshaderwithtrani.c4d.zip

[Steve Bentley]

I’m not a PR guy at all. Can you really use the same project file in both AE and PR?

[Steve Bentley]

If you can overcrank the footage when you shoot you will have more frames to play with if you need to compress or expand time to have the lips line up – not everyone talks at the same rate.
You wouldn’t use the footage in its slow mo state but as a precomp and any time warping done in the outer comp, AE will pluck the frames it needs from the inner comp even if they are technically “between” frames in the outer comp.
When you bring the footage in interpret the frame rate at the frame rate of your film. Then time warp the footage in timeline to be the right length, precompose the layer keeping effects etc in the current comp.
Do the same with the B roll and then line up the two clips up in time, sliding the keyframes of the time warp or enable time remapping to get the timing just right at every lip syncing step along the way.
Then play with your morph.

[Steve Bentley]

If you can overcrank the footage when you shoot you will have more frames to play with if you need to compress or expand time to have the lips line up – not everyone talks at the same rate.
You wouldn’t use the footage in its slow mo state but as a precomp and any time warping done in the outer comp, AE will pluck the frames it needs from the inner comp even if they are technically “between” frames in the outer comp.
When you bring the footage in interpret the frame rate at the frame rate of your film. Then time warp the footage in timeline to be the right length, precompose the layer keeping effects etc in the current comp.
Do the same with the B roll and then line up the two clips up in time, sliding the keyframes of the time warp or enable time remapping to get the timing just right at every lip syncing step along the way.
Then play with your morph.

[Steve Bentley]

It depends on how you want to generate the terrain. Using Element might be the easiest because with its cloner you can clone on a surface and then offset the position so the clone(s) will move up and down to keep in contact with the surface as they change position on that surface.
Some of the auto orient is built into Element but you could get around any other issues with expressions or follow path or orient to path etc.

I don’t think there is way to do with this up and down hill thing with Mir. While you should be able to extract position info for each “point” in the field array, i’ve not played with this so I don’t know if the expressions can see this level of data. But in theory you could link path data (in AE2017 and above) to the Mir data so that you could then use orient to path and follow path to make this work.

This seems like a project that might be better executed in a 3D package. What usually happens is, as you get deep into it, you want to add one more feature (like wheels turning correctly as they rumble over uneven terrain) and then you will wish you had started in 3D. But if you can plan ahead for all requirements it is doable in 2.5D.