[Steve Roberts]

… and if you watch the Godfather of Soul’s motion carefully, you’ll see places where it changes direction. This is where you place your mask shape keyframes, allowing AE to interpolate the mask’s shape between those keyframes.

I hope that made sense …. remember the fewer keyframes, and fewer mask vertices, the better.

[Steve Roberts]

That’s easy.

(Using a mouse with a scrollwheel, you can stop the video and scrub through it using the scroll wheel … to study the motion. )

Make a card with the backface design. Drag it into the comp and make it “3D”. Place it in the leftmost position. Copy it, move it to the right, and 1 pixel towards camera in the Z direction. This places it in front of the first one. Repeat until you have them all lined up for the first shot.

Next, set rotation keyframes on the Y-axis for the the first card so it does the flip. Copy those keyframes and paste to the next layer. Drag them a bit to the right in time to stagger the motion. Repeat until done. Preview.

So now you should have completed the flip, but with blank cards. If you look at the sample video, you’ll see that the letters do not rotate. This is because the animator used a mask (or gradient wipe maybe) to reveal the line of text. You could add the text to the comp over the cards layer, then draw a rectangular mask around it. Set a key for the mask shape at the end. Go back to the start, and drag the right edge of the mask to the left, so it hides the text. When you preview, the mask should expand to the right, revealing the text. To make the reveal look better, you should use hold keyframes between those two to reveal the text as each card flips, or whatever looks right.

Give it a go.

[Steve Roberts]

You can’t parent that.

You can, however, make an object move along a path by copying that path (mask), then pasting it into the object’s position keyframes. If Vegas used a mask for its shape, you’re in. If Vegas used the logo shape’s alpha, you’ll have to auto-trace the logo to get a mask, then copy that mask, then paste into the moving object’s position keyframes.

[Steve Roberts]

“Common” means nothing. You have to ask the specific station or network (to whom you are delivering) what it wants. When it wants a specific format, it will accept no other, no matter what happens to be “common”.

So. In my experience, they will accept Betacam or Digital Betacam, but some cable networks are accepting digital formats such as MPEG-2 or WMV. Yes.

So find out what format you need (in advance) and if necessary, rent the relevant deck until you get steady work in that format. If you have no experience running a Beta (or especially a DigiBeta) deck, I recommend you take your AE render to a post house and let them lay off to tape, running the thing through the scope, making bars and tone, slate, and so on.

Don’t start setting up a studio by purchasing expensive hardware without having the specific, paying need for that specific hardware. You might just end up having an expensive Beta deck (check bhphotovideo.com) sitting around, not being used, while you can’t afford the rent.

[Steve Roberts]

You could make a gradient, then apply the gradient wipe effect to the object, choosing that premade gradient as the gradient map. Note: if you create the gradient in AE, you have to render & reimport it, or precomp the gradient.

Or you could draw a mask (on a new solid) that follows the path you want the fill to take, then apply the Stroke effect to that solid. Animate the end point of the stroke, and make this solid the track matte of the layer you want to reveal. Make the stroke fat enough to cover the object to be revealed.

Anybody else?

[Steve Roberts]

Just go straight to the source:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

But relating to your situation, here’s a workaround: quit the project, delete the old footage then give the new footage the same name as the old footage. Then reopen the project.

[Steve Roberts]

Depending on the speed of your motion, the problem may be the result of an unavoidable optical phenomenon. Search the COW for “judder”. Try a year back.

[Steve Roberts]

Yep. Not out of the box.

You could search the COW for “dynamic parenting” and check the Expressions COW or http://www.aenhancers.com .

[Steve Roberts]

Yes, good question. If they can be curved, you can make a comp made up of videos, then drag iti into another comp and apply CC Cylinder to make a cylinder. If you’ve made angled lines of videos in the sub-comp, you get a helix.

For more info, Google “what the helix going on”, and “Maffitt”.

[Steve Roberts]

Well, there’s the “send to” workflow between the two.

Given that using both FCP and AE on an editing job can be frustrating workflow-wise, I might just learn Motion for the simpler stuff. Yes, I have the Duck, but it still requires committing once you’re in AE. Hm.