[Steve Roberts]

Sorry, I couldn’t get anything to play on that page, so I’m guessing.

In general, I believe that people arrange objects in a big 3D comp, then move the camera around to find things. A complex thing may be a sub-comp, or precomposition. Then if there’s a cut, we’re looking at a new comp, new camera.

[Steve Roberts]

The Re:flex plugin comes with a manual and tutorials, if I recall.

[Steve Roberts]

Well then, it might be a better idea to apply all effects to one layer and keyframe the values of the effects to zero. Sometimes, if you have keyframes for an effect and you want to reset the effect to zero at some point, you can move to that point then hit “reset” for that effect in the effects palette.

At any rate, you now have options.

[Steve Roberts]

What was the codec of the original footage?

Pre-render means render to a file and import. Is that what you did? If so, to which codec did you render?

[Steve Roberts]

Now if you needed to do this in Flash, I’d say you could use Actionscript to scale and position the images nicely. Shouldn’t be too hard … a bit of trig … (cough, choke)

My point being, if you need to do this for the web, with this level of interaction, the best way would be to skip AE and use Flash, for small file size and interactivity.

Yeah, like using Flash once every three years makes me an expert. 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

Search the COW for “morph”.

The best morphing plugin is Re:flex. For other methods, search the COW.

[Steve Roberts]

I can see into your office! Bwah-haw-haw-haw!
Bourne:“Get some rest, Pam. You look tired”.

Naah — in general, Myriad seems to be the “uninvited” font around here. Illustrator seems to show no knowledge of the original font sometimes, so it just lists the substitute: Myriad.

[Steve Roberts]

1. add the footage to the comp.
2. make a new solid, making sure it lies above the footage layer.
3. make the solid partly transparent, so you can see the footage below somewhat.
4. select the solid, then the pen tool.
5. draw a mask on the solid around a desired footage area that you can see … such as the talent.
6. make the solid 100% opaque
7. make sure the Modes panel (column) is visible in the timeline. F4 is the toggle.
8. select the footage layer, and under TrkMat, select “alpha matte”.
9. The solid should disappear, cutting a hole in the footage below.

It should be in the Help, under “Track Matte” as I wrote.

[Steve Roberts]

On a Mac? Might be Myriad maybe.

[Steve Roberts]

Yes — unless the background is a solid colour not present in the foreground, you have to mask. It’s called “rotoscoping”.

When you track, you generally track a visible point (or more) in a footage layer, and apply that tracked motion to another layer, so that layer moves the same way the tracked point did.

So if you want a mask to move that way, it has to be on a separate layer, that is, a solid. That’s okay, since if you want that mask to cut out the footage layer, you just set the Alpha Matte of the footage layer to be the masked solid above it. Check the help on “track matte”.

I’m not sure we’re done yet — let us know if you have any more problems.