Steve Roberts
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks, Justin.
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Do you want them to be arranged into a rough “40”, or to fit completely inside a smooth-edged “40”?
If the latter, then you might want to use a “40” as an inverted track matte, dissolving on (as the images dock into place) so the rough edges of the images are slowly faded out to match the smooth edges of the “40”. You might need to precompose the images animation, then use this matte over the precomp.
Does that make sense?
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By “scale”, you mean “animate Z-position”?
If so, one way is to arrange them in a “2” and set keyframes late in the timeline. Make sure you’ve created a camera layer and all layers are 3D. Then you go back to the start, add a side view and drag each layer back so it passes behind the camera. That’s old school.
Alternately, you could apply an expression to the position of the layers. The expression would refer to a slider effect (applied to a Null) that you animate to 0 from some negative value you determine through testing. All layers would refer to this slider. Move the camera to a position where this works — a high negative Z-position value worked for me.
Here’s the expression you’d use for each layer:
temp = thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
[position[0], position[1], index*10*temp]At the beginning, all layers are behind camera, offset by their layer index*10. When the slider approaches 0, all layers’ Z-position approaches 0. The X/Y positions of the layers do not change.
Other COW members may have better expressions. Let me know if that works.
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If you’re using Trapcode Particular, you can choose an Obscuration Layer in the effect’s settings. Just one, though.
Otherwise AE is not set up to allow 3D-effects-on-2D layers to interact with 3D layers. You’d have to carefully plan your animation, then, when all motion is determined, edit>split the appropriate layers and switch the layer order when necessary, or use Track Mattes to hide certain layers and show others.
This is when people start to learn 3D apps. AE has its limitations, and many of them center around 3D-ness.
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No worries.
Just to be clear, in case this comes up again with somebody else: where did you find this “safe mode” switch?
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Because HDV/MPEG uses interframe compression, AE has to work harder to generate each frame in its usual manner. I suppose it hasn’t been rejigged to deal with interframe compression more efficiently. So it slows down.
Yep — moving to an intraframe codec such as Animation, Uncompressed 4:2:2, Photo-JPEG, PNG (and so on) will work more efficiently in AE.
If we viewed AE as a compositing app and not an editor, it would be easier to forgive such limitations. 🙂
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No, for the reasons we’ve stated before. Open GL is the only thing that speeds up graphics-card-based rendering to screen, but Open GL on AE isn’t well implemented, so most AE users switch it off.
The only reason to upgrade the card would be to use apps such as Motion, Color, Cinema 4D and others. Not AE.
It would be a waste of money, and once you’ve realized it, you’d kick yourself when you couldn’t afford something you really need like more RAM or a third-party plugin.
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I like to take the footage, interpret it, remove pulldown if necessary, then drag it onto the “new comp” button at the bottom of the Project window. This ensures that the new comp has the same settings as the footage. Of course, you can also lengthen the comp if you want.
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Well, here we’re looking at 15fps movies, so we can’t judge the stutter from those clips.
Search the COW for “judder”. The only way out of it, keeping the exact same move, would be to render with fields. Anyway, do the search.
By the way, Animation-compressed movies aren’t likely to play back smoothly unless they are compressed to a different codec.