Steve Roberts
Forum Replies Created
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Luckily, the c-clamp doesn’t change shape, so you can draw a mask on the footage with the pen tool, then set a key for its shape and drag the mask across the screen and/or scale it up so it matches the footage. Only set keys where the speed of the movement changes — you don’t need a key on every frame, or at regular intervals. Set the mask to invert to cut a hole in the footage.
The next question is: what do you put in the hole?
It depends on your footage. Got a still? -
How about duping the text layer and setting the dupe to stroke with no fill?
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Use After Effects.
Look for the “signature” tutorial here on the COW. The process for Chines calligraphy would the same as for Roman text: it’s all about revealing the strokes.
Apply the Stroke effect to the text layer and draw an open mask (a line, straight or curved) along the center of a stroke. Set the Stroke effect to “reveal original” and animate its end parameter from 0 to 100. This should reveal the stroke — adjust the stroke width.
Repeat for the other strokes in the text.If you have a lot of text on a layer, you have a lot of work ahead of you. As I wrote, there’s no automated way to do it, since fonts do not contain any information on how to animate their strokes.
If you have a lot of text, consider faking it by using the Gradient Wipe effect, using an image of a fractal noise pattern or a precomposed layer with Fractal Noise applied. Animate the transition completion to reveal the text.
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Have you used adjustment layers? If so, you shouldn’t. You should apply the stroke effect directly to the layer you want to reveal.
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In addition to bogiesan’s questions … when you import the rendered vid back into AE, drop it into a comp and RAM preview it, do you have the same problem at the same point in time?
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Try precomposing the 3D layers into one precomp, then applying the effect to the precomp.
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It’s difficult to figure out the search terms for this one, but try searching the COW for “film clutter”.
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Hmm … if you’re rendering an odd number of frames in a 59.94 comp, you’ll probably have a field issue when you render to 29.97 interlaced.
AE doesn’t always automatically interpret footage properly. Opt-double-click on the footage in the project window, then step through it with the right arrow key in the window that comes up. If the footage jerks back and forth, its field order was interpreted incorrectly, and you should re-interpret it.
If it plays normally, then it was interpreted normally, and somebody went rogue by rendering it lower field first. If you want to reverse the field order of that footage, bump it up (or down) one pixel in the frame. Ignore the resulting black line.
Let us know …
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Hmm … if you’re in a 29.97 comp and render to (ugh) fields, that shouldn’t happen. Are you in a 59.94 comp?
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Much of the art of tracking lies in pre-production and production. As Paul wrote, trackers would have helped this shot a lot. Syntheyes might not do any better, since you have no foreground objects to show parallax shift. Now you know for next time. 🙂
That said, I recommend you track the entire wall with AE’s corner pinning or Mocha. Apply the corner pinning to a composition. Then shift the position and scale down your image within that composition to fit it on the billboard. If you can’t track the entire wall, try tracking as much as you can, then shift the position of your sign within the pinned comp.
Does that make sense?