[Stuart Elith]

It sounds to me like you are doing it correctly, but that your system can only handle a few frames. If you lower the preview resolution to Quarter, does it get further before it plays back?

With a heavy project, such as HD with lots of layers and effects, it can often be very sluggish. 5 frames REALLY isn’t many, but perhaps that is just all it can handle ?

[Stuart Elith]

Also, you can use Shift+F4 as the shortcut to reveal or hide this 🙂
F4 by itself is the shortcut for ‘toggle switches’ too, which is nice if you don’t keep them all revealed at once (to save space).

[Stuart Elith]

Boujou is known for having scale issues when coming to AE. Search the forums and you’ll find a few threads about it, with various workarounds and suggestions… or google, i know there are a few blogs/forums that have discussed it 🙂

It is a bit annoying, but we just have to deal with it i guess.

[Stuart Elith]

I think I would just pre-comp the whole animation except for the name, then have the name on a separate layer. Then you can just duplicate that comp 60 times and change the name for each. It may sound like a bit of work, but you’re going to have to type each name out separately anyway, so having all the copies doesn’t really matter. And since you precomped the animation, if you do need to change something you can just adjust it once and they’ll all update.

I think that’s going to be easier than any alternative, I can’t think of anything else you can cut down. It really wouldn’t take long, just 10 mins of repetitive Open comp, change name, send to queue.

[Stuart Elith]

1) There are 3 camera tools, pan, zoom, rotate – they will each control the camera in different ways (as the names suggest). Actually they are just adjusting attributes of the camera such as position and point of interest, so you could even control them through the numbers directly, but the tools are easier 🙂

2) For the DOF, Focus Distance is the point which will be in focus (which is a distance from the camera). Aperture is kind of like the amount of stuff that will be in focus, so by adjusting it you can make lots of things be in focus or a really narrow area.

You should really check out the AE help file, as it is very good and will give you more detailed information about all this stuff, including hotkeys, extra info, and some pages have links to tutorials or other tips.

[Stuart Elith]

You SHOULD see the same thing in your RAM preview and your final render… I’m guessing that you have motion blur enabled on the layers, but you haven’t toggled the switch to display it in your comp (and therefore your RAM previews). When you create the render, since the layer has motion blur enabled, the blur is being applied and making it look like it’s timed incorrectly.

If you DO have motion blur enabled on the layers, also enable the main motion blur toggle (at the top of the Timeline palette) and see what happens. You can adjust motion blur settings in the Advanced tab of the Composition Settings (Ctrl/Cmd + K)

[Stuart Elith]

I just did a google search for about 10 seconds and found a few places with “free HD footage”, including this vimeo group.

https://www.vimeo.com/groups/freehd

The footage looks pretty nice, good clean quality that you could DEFINITELY use for practicing. In fact it’s better than some footage I’ve had to deal with for actual production work! If you check their terms and conditions, they may well even let you use it for in a reel, i expect. There’s nothing wrong with using footage you didn’t shoot if you’re not going for jobs in shooting… in post-production everything is given to you anyway so it’s just like a real project.

[Stuart Elith]

I very much agree with this… if you want to show variety in a reel, then do a lot of different things! By doing short stuff, you can spend the time polishing it without feeling like you’re wasting a lot of time on a “fake” project (if it’s not for an actual client).

For example, I took an illustration I had done for a uni class and split up all the layers to put in some simple animation, and it turned out to be a really effective 3 or 4 seconds, without much extra work involved.

[Stuart Elith]

Video Copilot has a great set of beginner video tutorials and a heap of other tutorials, covers motion graphics and visual effects. I almost don’t like referring to it because it just seems to be “THE” common answer nowadays, but it really is a great resource.

And use the after effects Help a lot! Look up topics as you start to learn about them… there is so much in there that can help you learn the in depth stuff, it really is a great help resource.

If you want a book, Chris and Trish Meyers have a few. They are recognised as some of the best after effects teachers i think. I have After Effects Apprentice and it was pretty good for getting the basics in various areas. I don’t usually like books but I think it was useful.

[Stuart Elith]

Jake, in addition to the comments from Dave, I have to question what you mean by “after the export where the video stops and starts and the sound is distorted. This is not a playback problem.”

Are you saying that AFTER you export a project from After Effects, when you go to look at it in a media player (such as quicktime) the playback skips and lags? Because this is a separate problem, not to do with after effects. Computers have to decode videos for playback, and this takes differing amounts of processor power. So on my 8-core mac, I can’t play uncompressed HD footage in realtime (in Quicktime) but if I convert it to a different codec such as H2.64 I can…

But this may not be what you mean, it’s just what I interpreted 🙂