[Steve Roberts]

To draw a mask, you use the pen tool. If Rotobezier is checked, it’s easier to draw organic shapes. To animate the mask shape, set keyframes under the “mask shape” property.

It’s all in the help.

[Steve Roberts]

Quicktime Animation, 8-bit uncompressed or Photo-JPEG if space is a concern.

Those are my habitual choices, anyway.

[Steve Roberts]

A 3D app with metaballs should do it. Or shooting a Lava Lamp.

I’ve found that Mr. Mercury, though blobby, doesn’t offer transparency and refraction. Some of its prsets offer joining of blobs, but I would find it hard to control in a Lava Lamp situation.

However.
Try these settings on a red solid:
– velocity 1.5
– birth rate .4
– longevity 5
– gravity .3
– resistance .16
– animation: fire
– blob influence: 2.2%
– Birth size/death size .9
– ambient 36
– diffuse 0

It’s cheesy, but it might get you by. Your mileage may vary.

[Steve Roberts]

Yep. Or parent them both to a null.

Make them maybe 1 pixel apart — you might have to tweak that distance.

There was a plugin that did it more simply, but it was flawed — at any camera angle other than straight on, the layer was cut off. Bad.

[Steve Roberts]

MPEG-2 is lossy, but VBR 2-pass is okay.

However, you should have started with a better codec than DV. Garbage in, garbage out. Try Uncompressed or Quicktime Animation before compressing to MPEG-2.

[Steve Roberts]

I think you have to go back to the last auto-save. There are no other options of which I am aware.

[Steve Roberts]

You could draw a mask using the pen tool, then animate the mask shape …?

[Steve Roberts]

That bar of which you spoke sets the length of the “Work Area”, by the way.

If you made changes to the comp, you can try Undo — AE has multiple Undo.
Or you could try “revert” to revert to the saved version of the comp on disc.
Or you could try opening one of the Auto-saved versions if you have it enabled, and if you have a recent version of AE.

[Steve Roberts]

If you do get a Dell, do it through your business. Business support is much better than Home support.

[Steve Roberts]

Just wondering — does it do this with more than one codec?
What is the codec of your D1 footage, by the way?