[Steve Roberts]

How about adding an expression to the keyframed property?

Maybe:

100-value

or

100-opacity
(if it’s opacity)

(soory, I’m not at the AE station)

[Steve Roberts]

1. trim the ends of the light layer in the timeline, or
2. animate the intensity of the light layer using keyframes.

The manual should give you the details. Look for sections on working with layers, animating with keyframes.

If you don’t want the lit layer (not the “light” layer) to disappear when you dim the light, try adding a duplicate of the lit layer into the timeline with “accept lights” off. Animate the opacity of that layer so it begins to appear as the other one dims … if you want that effect of course.

Since you’re a noob, I’ll fill you in on a couple of things: most people here prefer that posters read the manual and search the AE online help before asking questions. The COW is not a substitute for the manual or the online help. However, we do understand that newbies don’t know all the search terms that apply to their situation. (“track matte”, for example) In such cases, the newbie will often be given the search term, then directed to search the COW posts (to your upper left on this page) or to search the AE online help or manual.

This is an extremely high-traffic forum. If it were filled with basic questions, the more difficult questions would get lost and the more experienced posters and leaders would lose interest.

In other words, try the manual, the online help, and some experimentation to get to know the program before you post.

Hope that helps,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Help us out here, James. We don’t have enough information to solve your problem.

What is your workflow?
– AE-to-Premiere?
– how are you rendering out of AE? Codec? Frame size? Output module? (try the render queue, not file>export)
– What are your sequence/timeline/codec settings in Premiere?
– What is your final deliverable?

What do you mean when you “produce it and watch it on a TV it looks fine?” What do you mean by “produce”? Do you mean that your AE output looks fine after it’s been through Premiere, then output from Premiere to DV tape?

Throw us a bone, man …
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Place the solids in random, misaligned positions in the comp. Make sure they are unevenly spaced, and different widths and heights. Try making two layers much closer than the other in one (X) direction, then try doing it in the other (Y) direction. Every solid should look different in shape and size.

Try one of the buttons.
Then hit undo to make their positions uneven again. Or just drag them out of position.
Then try it again with another button.

There’s no tutorial for this.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Cleek on zee leetle head next to zee leetle camera to see zee snapshot.

… but if you want to actually save an image from the comp, you should use File>Save Frame As.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

No problem.

Keep these tips in mind:

1. Render through “make movie” rather than file>export if you can. I only use file>export for .dv stream and SWF export.
2. Quicktime’s Animation codec is the preferred codec to preserve quality when you are sending the file to another app for further encoding, such as a DVD MPEG-2 encoder. Animation codec movies won’t play smoothly on most hard drives, though. It’s an imtermediate (not deliverable) codec.
3. Photo-JPEG (quicktime) at just less than 100% is a good storage codec, and is playable on most hard drives nowadays.
4. Note that the Animation codec preserves quality, whether that quality is good or bad. The same goes for any codec in a way: no codec can improve the quality of a movie, and plenty of them (“lossy” codecs) are designed to degrade the image somewhat for the sake of a small file size. That part is often unavoidable, but codecs are getting better every day.

Onward!
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Well, then:

If you’re on Windows, render using “Make Movie” to open the render queue. Set your render settings to Best, but 15 fps. Open the Output Module settings, set Stretch to 320×240 and render to Windows Media under “Format”. You can mess around with these settings under “Format Options” to tweak quality once you’ve done a few.

If you’re on a Mac, do the same thing but render to Quicktime Movie format in the Output module, and to the Sorenson codec under Format Options. Ideally (in my opinion), you should render to the Sorenson Pro codec for best quality with small file size, but you have to buy that codec.

Hope that gets you started,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

It all depends on what you want to do with it once it’s out of AE:

Play on a hard drive only?
Play on CD?
Play on the web?
Burn to DVD?
Send to a non-linear editor?
Broadcast on TV?
Record to DV tape?

Let us know,
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Nope, there’s no other manual.

But if you want a great set of supplementary texts, buy Trish and Chris Meyer’s Creating Motion Graphics books.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Aligning should be self-explanatory.

The distribute buttons indicate that the tops of layers are evenly spaced, centers are evenly spaced, and so on.

Create three solids in a comp and drag them to different locations. Select them all, click an align or distribute button and see what happens. Undo and try another button.

Steve