[Steve Roberts]

Thanks, Daniel.

[Steve Roberts]

Another way is to draw the mask directly on the footage layer, since it sounds as if you’ve drawn it on a solid layer stacked above the footage layer.

You should know both techniques, since each has its advantages, which you will come to know over time. If you need to change between those techniques, just select and copy the mask keyframes, and paste them onto the new solid or the footage layer.

But it sounds like you’ve gotten the mask-on-a-solid thing fine.

[Steve Roberts]

If it doesn’t have to be realistic, how about drawing a line (open mask on a solid) then applying the Stroke effect to that solid, animating the end point to make the line grow?

[Steve Roberts]

The upshot of it all seems to be:
1. removing pulldown over cuts is possible, but painstaking work, cut-by-cut.
2. removing pulldown over a dissolve with matching pulldown phases is possible (odds are 4:1 against?), but the same as above.
3. removing pulldown over a dissolve with mismatched pulldown phases is impossible.

The client might have thought it was “push the button and render” situation, but it isn’t.

[Steve Roberts]

Adding to Simon’s reply …

… you look up into the sky, you see blue, but really, there’s nothing there. AE’s “background” is the same. You see green, but really, there’s nothing there …

… sort of. If you render your movie with an alpha channel as Simon suggests, the color will disappear when the movie is viewed in an app that can view transparency (not QT Viewer). However, if you render without an alpha channel, the background color will appear.

For “alpha channel”, look in the AE help.

[Steve Roberts]

Indeed.

If you have a specific staging-equipment-related question, you should check out the Staging and Events COW.

Other than that, the old caveat applies: find out from the client on what type of machine the video is being played, not projected. Betacam video deck? DVD player? Hard drive? This is the most relevant, though not only, question.

[Steve Roberts]

Some definitions of “hosed” are here.

[Steve Roberts]

Original suggested action:

“Unless there’s a plugin, I’d apply a white-black radial ramp to a layer then mask it with a curved shape. This I’d use over the original graphic in screen or add mode.”

“To a layer” means “to a new solid” in this case. Applying effects to solids is a very common technique in AE. Example effects are lens flare (to a black solid, add or screen mode), fractal noise and ramp. In general, a “generate” effect is often applied to a new solid.

[Steve Roberts]

Yes, fields would help, because you’re essentially “upping the ante” and increasing the frame rate to a speed where the oh-so-clever eye can’t keep up, and starts to perceive motion as a result. How-e-ver … you’re on the web, so you can’t do that.

Motion blur hasn’t worked for me, because I get stuttery blurry images.

But to be honest, if I take off my motion graphics eyes and put on my “producer’ eyes, it looks fine. It’s a limitation of the medium and beyond the solutions that you’ve read here, there’s nothing you can do about it. Show it to some people without telling them what they’re looking for.

Anyway, I’d distract the eye by adding some animation within the flying spreadsheet (gotta love corporate work!), maybe just animate the scaling up (zooming in) of the “instant progress reports” (IPR) text as it flies by, or maybe cycle between different values in the spreadsheet, but maybe grayed out a bit to not compete with the IPR text.

And I’d lose that Y-axis dip as the spreadsheet flies by — the motion path seems to sag. Looks like an error, sorry.

[Steve Roberts]

Dave’s solutions are all valid, but the reason I so glibly suggested searching for “judder”, is that your post described your animation as a steady horizontal motion. Like it or not (sorry!), the experience of many suggests that regular, simple horizontal motion appears to skip, jerk or judder, and there’s nothing that can be done at normal frame rates.

It has been suggested in the COW that this is an optical phenomenon, where the motion is smooth enough and regular enough to interfere with the usual short-range apparent motion, often called “persistence of vision”. It has also been suggested (though not in the cited paper) that the regular horizontal motion is slow enough and regular enough for our eyes and mind to actually discern the individual images in the clip, which is, after all, what we are looking at.

If you concur, then you might want to a) distract the viewer with changes in speed, motion path or additional animated objects so they don’t get too used to the motion, b) speed it up a little or c) ask the client what he/she thinks before going to all that trouble. They may think it’s fine.

Hey, it shows up in panning & tracking shots in movies all the time, such as Inside Man (pan across a wall in a security office?) and The Bourne Supremacy (the bridge shot right after “Gilberto de Piento).