[Stuart Elith]

What has already been suggested sounds good.

Another option (if that doesn’t work out) is to simply rename the files after rendering. This could be a bit of a pain if you need to keep revising the renders you are doing, but if you keep working until you are happy and then just need to deliver the final files, you COULD just rename them at the end. There are batch renaming techniques for both Mac and PC (on Mac, look into Automator, which is very useful for this).

But I agree it would be best to address it from within AE so you don’t need to add the extra step and chase which files pertain to which sequence, and so on.

[Stuart Elith]

I don’t think you can do this (and it annoys me too!).

Maybe one for a feature request to Adobe…

[Stuart Elith]

here’s just a random smattering that come to mind immediately :

T,S,R,P,A – to reveal the attributes of a layer.
U and UU – to reveal keyframes/modified attributes
Cmd+Shift+C – Precompose
G – Pen tool

, and . – zooming in and out of comp window
– and + for zooming timeline window

[Stuart Elith]

Something that may help (if you choose to go with time-remapping) is to take a still of the scene and just keyframe its position over the top, using the same start and end positions. This will provide you with a perfectly smooth pan which you can then reference for realigning points of the footage to match up with it.

(alternatively, I might even try cheating with a still as the final!). You could even add a bit of lens distortion around the edge of the frame to add a bit of imperfection, and a X-axis wiggle of a few pixels so that the pan isn’t PERFECTLY smooth. Probably wouldn’t be acceptable in most situations though 🙂

[Stuart Elith]

1. Looks like a film burn to me (you can google this, there are clips you can buy, or you can recreate it a bit yourself, there is a tutorial somewhere that addresses it). Basically it’s put in Add mode over the top and it blows out all the highlights and makes the colors all hot.

2. A zoom blur. There’s an effect for it in AE. I think they’ve put a blending mode on as well to make it glow/lighten more.

3. Do you just mean the white blurry thing over the top? It is probably something like fractal noise, but could be anything, even just an image, it’s only there for a few frames and moves around a bit. Again, a blending mode like Add or screen would put it on top easily.

If you aren’t familiar with AE, you’re going to have to learn quite a bit of the basics so that you can use the program… and make sure you learn about the blending modes for these effects.

[Stuart Elith]

Hi lou,

Just a few thoughts :

1. While you’ve done a good job matching the color temperature and black levels, I think overall it’s a bit dark, especially in the lower right. I think that maybe you’ve put a texture or fractal noise over the sign to make it look old/worn? Perhaps it’s a bit much. A sign like this that started out as a flat color would show some signs of aging, but I think it would be much more subtle, not with big dark patches. Try pulling the darks up a bit.

2. The blur is too much, I think. That’s the first thing that I noticed. if you have a look at the door/window details (which are on the same plane of depth) they are actually quite sharp. I am still working on ways to make a CGI element look low-detail (like video, even HD, only captures some level of detail) without always relying on blur. You could try duplicating the whole sign, offsetting it slightly and reducing the opacity of both instances… this gives a kind of fringing without so much softening/blurring.

3. Now that I look at it, I think it’s a bit too pink/yellow overall. See the pipe and decorative stone thing on the right… the whites are still pretty white, and your sign looks like it SHOULD be pretty neutral in color. I would pull a bit of the color out of the highlights.

4. On the very right edge of the sign, is that a drop shadow onto the bricks? It looks a bit wrong to me. I can see that the windows and other elements do cast a bit of a shadow, but i think those ones aren’t so wide.

5. On a different note, can I suggest that you adjust the kerning of the type a little? Particularly between the A and T of attic, and give a bit more breathing room from the I to N of Inn… that’s what i’d do 🙂

Hope these comments are helpful, I think it is coming along well!
– Stu

[Stuart Elith]

This is precisely where newbie questions belong, so no forgiveness needed!

Time stretch basically stretches an item over a longer (or shorter) period of time, so if you stretch the layer it will play the SAME thing over a longer period. This is most obvious with a video file… a 3 second piece of footage, when stretched to 6 seconds, basically plays at half the speed.

I can’t entirely work it out by reading your post, but is the static logo on it’s own layer? If the animation ends up just sitting on a still image of the logo, you can simply drag the end point of the logo layer out, and it will stay on screen for longer. Using time stretch on this is possible, but will have the same effect. I usually access time stretch from the Timeline – if you right click on one of the column headings (such as Layer Name) in the timeline, you can choose which columns you want to display, and if you select Stretch, it will show up with each layer. It starts at 100% and as you drag the number up or down, you will see the layer extend or squash in the timeline.

Otherwise, you could look into the Time Remapping function. You should look at the manual for all the details as it can be a bit of a head-muddle when you first look at it, but it’s very handy for retiming things. In your case, you could enable time remapping, set a keyframe at the point where you want things to stop/hold, and then delete the keyframe at the END. This basically sets a Freezeframe from that point, so that the rest of the layer animation or footage doesn’t play.

Maybe too much info for you here, but those are some options, and good to learn about if you are planning to become adept at AE.

[Stuart Elith]

Richie, that first image you posted probably isn’t achievable in AE (or I can’t think of a way, at least). You have extrusions in each axis, as well as different rotations of those extrusions, so it is a true 3D object.

The second one can be made with a plugin such as FreeForm (which costs some hundreds of dollars, but eh). You can use a displacement map like some fractal noise to push a layer in Zdepth. Trapcode Form will do a similar thing.

The trapcode plugins are complex, but once you play with them for a while they are quite user friendly and a pleasure to work with, in my opinion. I would MUCH rather use Particular for 3D particles than switch to Maya, align my scene and render particles, then re-import to AE (and rinse and repeat if I don’t get it right).

[Stuart Elith]

Push, very strongly, for a reshoot, i would say!
Brian is right that you may be able to use techniques to help isolate the people and work from there, but the results still aren’t likely to be as good, and will probably need lots of adjusting and much more time.

If you get them shot on greenscreen, you just need to key out the background and then you can apply whatever effects you want to get a whole variety of silhouette-type effects.

[Stuart Elith]

Also check out the tutorials at https://www.videocopilot.net, they had one recently called HUD display or something like that, which is just what you’re after… HUD means heads-up display, which is what those things are 🙂