[Stuart Elith]

Not a direct answer to the question, nor am I the original poster, but Color Finesse comes with AE so you wouldn’t have to buy it… it’ll be under Synthetic Aperture in the effects menu.
I think maybe you have to install it separately (?) but if so, it should be on your install disk.

[Stuart Elith]

I agree with you. Sometimes when I’m working on complex timing particularly with lots of keyframes, it’s very frustrating to have to shift bits along, and if you forget something then you can have a very nasty time trying to get everything rearranged. I usually have my layers in roughly timed order (so that all the stuff from near the start of the shot are together) so at least if i need to move everything after a certain point, most of the layers are nearby.

I think what you’re suggesting is also what I might suggest as a workaround – precomping a whole bunch of stuff so you can crop and shuffle it. But even that can be a bit clunky. I think it’s just part of the AE experience.

[Stuart Elith]

If you twirl down the effect there is a “transform : stroke” thing underneath all effect options of the stroke, and Position is within that. Might give you some funny results though because the clone sample location is separate, may give an odd illusion if you don’t move the sample area with the stroke. Will depend on your project i guess.

[Stuart Elith]

Without seeing the footage, the general technique I would suggest is to track the object in question, then mask in a patch to fit it. This could be a patch of video (so that you get the same feel in terms of grain, focus etc) or start with a solid and add your own noise (i often go with a solid just because i can’t find a section of video that will work across a whole shot). Playing with the mask in terms of how much you blend/feather it can help integrate it more with the original cup.

And noise is definitely your friend.

[Stuart Elith]

I’m not 100% with what you’re asking, but if you want a mask that doesn’t move with the layer it is attached to, I think you’re out of luck. Mostly, we WANT the mask to move so it’s great, but when you don’t, I think your best option is to use a Track Matte.
This is basically where you use one layer as the alpha for another. So in your case, you could create a solid and put the mask you have drawn on that layer.

To apply a track matte, place the layer directly above the layer you want to mask, and then choose Alpha Matte.

Otherwise another option you have is to use pre-composing – animate your image as you like, then make it into a Pre-Comp (see manual if you haven’t encountered this before) and then you can mask the pre-comp without worrying about the movement within. 🙂

[Stuart Elith]

I am a little sketchy on the details but I *think* you can do this with one tracker.
Part way through a track, you can change the track point of it by holding a key (alt/option?) and dragging the + to a new point. This is different to just dragging the square, which repositions the track data… this way is just adjusting the place which is being sampled.

Although now that I write it out, I’m thinking it may not work because that’s mostly based about tracking motion still. Stabilizing is similar in concept but could be different, not sure.

[Stuart Elith]

If you were going to go with the ball version, I think I would probably animate the ball bouncing up and down and pre-comp that… then you can just animate the side to side movement for each line without having to worry about getting the height consistent all the time.

You’d have to find the right timing for the words, because the ball should only start moving sideways after a bounce, for the most natural movement. (slightly hard to explain, but i think if you animated a sideways move starting when the ball was mid-air it would look awkward).

[Stuart Elith]

Also if you add Shift to the shortcut it will move it by 10 frames each time.

And another similar one which I find very handy is to move selected keyframes by one frame (or 10 with Shift added) – Alt + left or right arrow key.

[Stuart Elith]

In fact if you are using parenting I think it would be easier/cleaner to parent them all to one letter… so instead of parenting T to S, E to T and so on, just parent ‘TEVE’ all to the ‘s’ and just control the S.

Even better, create a null object and parent them ALL to that, then you can also keyframe the letters individually in case you want some variation/tweaking.

[Stuart Elith]

I found this nice snippet of code – I tried to write one myself but I’m only just starting out with expressions so I quickly found that I wasn’t quite up to it yet. The trick is to use the math function Sine which creates values that go back and forth and can easily create circular motion.

So go here : https://motioneffects.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/after-effects-expressions/
And use the first expression listed… you just need to define a few parameters and then use the expression on all the icons (they will all sit in the middle of the comp and you just offset them using the “phase” value.