[Steve Roberts]

Then, once you’re done, if you need to change the speed of the whole thing, hide the graphs, show the keyframes, select them all, then alt-drag the first or last key to keep them spaced proportionally.

[Steve Roberts]

[Nate Hanson] “When designing a “lower third” graphic, do you professionals out there typically create it at a higher resolution than you need, and then scale it down to fit the video?”

Nope. Why would we create it at a higher resolution?

[Steve Roberts]

Copy the mask and paste it on a copy of the desired road footage. Move the mask around until it’s where you want it. Place this footage layer over the car layer.

[Steve Roberts]

In the Effects palette/window (F3), for the Stroke effect, deselect “all Masks” and select “mask 1” from the Path drop-down list there. Set the paint style to “on transparent”. Make sure the effect is selected, and hit cmd+D to duplicate it (ctrl-D on Win). Select the dupe, choose Mask 2 and set Paint Style to “on Original Image”. Dupe Stroke 2, then Stroke 3, and so on, matching each Stroke to a mask until each Mask has a Stroke.

The first one should be “on transparent”, and all the subsequent strokes should be “on original image”.

One layer, multiple masks, multiple strokes.

Now then. I was wrong regarding the speed. Forget what I said about that.

Here’s one way that works: make the graphs for the stroke End keyframes visible in the timeline. Assume the longest stroke is moving at the correct speed. Move the Current-time indicator (CTI) to the point in time where the shortest stroke should finish — if it is 1/4 the length of the longest stroke, move to 1/4 the time between 0 and 100 … where the longest stroke is at 25%, I suppose. Hide all strokes except the longest and shortest.

Drag (to the left) the rightmost (100) graph vertex for the short stroke until it’s at the CTI. Its graph slope should be steeper than the long stroke’s graph slope. Adjust that vertex in time until the length of the short stroke matches the length of the long stroke at that point in time. Do a preview to make sure the speed matches.

Next, do the same with each stroke’s vertex so all strokes are the same length at that point in time. Do a RAM preview.

Let us know how it goes.

[Steve Roberts]

The computer doesn’t know what is “head” and what is “background” in the footage. All it sees are lights, darks, and colours.

So you have to tell it what is head, and what is background. If the person were shot on a greenscreen, you could tell the computer “green is background, everything else is foreground — cut it out”.

However, this was not shot on greenscreen, so you have to use the pen tool to draw a mask around the person’s head. This is called “rotoscoping”, or “roto”. The process is in the help under “animating masks”, or something like that.

Once you read up on that, here’s a hint: only set mask shape keyframes when the direction of shape movement changes. let AE interpolate between.

[Steve Roberts]

That means that each line would take a different length of time to go from 0 to 100. For example, if it takes line A one second to go from 0-100, it would take line B, twice the length, two seconds to go from 0-100.

So. You need one instance of the Stroke effect for each mask (dupe the effect in the Effects palette), and you need to adjust the keyframes so they all have the same speed. To do this, make the speed graph visible in the timeline, for each pair of Stroke keyframes.

There may be an Expression solution, but I can’t think of one.

Anybody else?

[Steve Roberts]

Foam. Inside AE.

[Steve Roberts]

You could make an image of the cracked glass, making each section a different shade of gray. Then you could use that as a displacement map for the footage. Each section would shift the footage slightly.

You could download this map.

And yes, if the shards were sharp, the footage would be out of focus. 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

That’s one of the big advantages of The Queue.

If you have to render two separate files/movies/whatever, adding a second output module to the same Render item is the best way. One Render Setting, multiple Output Modules. When you push the render button, AE renders a “pure” frame at the Render Settings, then compresses (or otherwise alters) the frame twice to suit each Output Module, then it moves on to the next frame.

This is faster than setting up two render queue items, because the rendering time is actually spent in the Rendering of the initial “pure” frame, not in the compressing to the desired file format.

Of course, for example, if you need a progressive version and an interlaced version, you have to set up multiple items in the Queue, since they both have different Render Settings. Such is life.

[Steve Roberts]

First, import the footage.
Next, alt-double-click on it.
Next, select file>interpret footage>main.
In that dialog, separate fields and guess pulldown.
In the window showing the footage, step through it using PageDn. If you see any interlacing at all, go back and choose another interpretation.
Repeat stepping and choosing until you see no interlacing.
Now you can stretch the footage.

Note: if the footage is made up of several cuts, the interpretation may be different for each cut. In that case, you’d have to a)cut the footage up in an NLE and import it, then find the pulldown for each cut, or b) duplicate the footage, re-interpret each dupe with its own pulldown appropriate to the desired segment of the footage. Add a comment in the comments column in the Project window to indicate which clip from the dupe has the correct pulldown.

If that didn’t work, tell us more about the footage, where it came from, how it was shot, was it film, is it stock, and so on.