[Stuart Elith]

A good option is :

1) Type your word
2) Press the numpad Enter (must be this one) to confirm the text
3) Click to start your next word (puts it onto the next layer)

There’s no changing of tools or heading back to the timeline for this. The text tool will stay selected after step 2 so it’s pretty quick.

Sometimes I like to type out my whole sentence/phrase and then just cut all the words except for the first one, paste the rest, cut all but the first and continue. It’s repetitive but probably no more than typing each one, and it feels more streamlined to just focus on one thing at a time, but the difference is probably minimal!

[Stuart Elith]

Hmm, I’ve never noticed it before (and couldn’t replicate it just then)… definitely doesn’t sound like a “feature” or preference setting to me, and therefore not something you can change within AE.

May be something to do with your OS or something like that… no idea where you could look :/

[Stuart Elith]

You are correct that if the final output is going to be SD, there may not be much noticeable degradation going from SD to HD to SD again. In fact, there may not be ANY because the changes in resolution are happening before anything is actually rendered… but i’m not really sure. You could always render out a little test with some footage you have lying around to have a look.

What I would do (and this is just because it is one less step) is simply get your HD template, and drop the whole comp into an SD comp which has your footage. Then you’re skipping the upres downres part completely 🙂

Although just thinking about how those templates work, you may have to put it in the original comp for it to slot in place properly.

[Stuart Elith]

this is mostly just academic for me, I don’t tend to use the timecode jump… but i had a look anyway 🙂

I was expecting to click on it (so it brings up the box), then put my cursor after the last number and type something like “+ 0.22” to jump forward 22 frames. That didn’t work at ALL, gave some very large changes.

I learnt that if you don’t deselect the timecode (i.e when you press the button, it brings up the box with the timecode selected, LEAVE it like that) then type +0.22 or whatever, then it works as expected.

[Stuart Elith]

Regarding creating a high-quality still (for publicity or whatever)…

Remember that it will always come back to the assets you use – if they are high resolution to start with, it’s POSSIBLE to get a high-resolution output.

So lets say you have a still image (of high resolution) which you have used in your Standard Def comp… you are right that if you just render out a frame from this (even if you use Collapse Transformations) it will still be using the SD resolution, which isn’t great.

One option, if ALL your assets are high enough quality, is to make a new comp of a bigger size (you can specify any custom resolution you like) and enlarge it here.
So you could drop your SD comp into a new comp of 2000 x 2000 px (for example) and scale the comp up to fit, then collapse the transformations and the high quality assets will be restored. However, of course any low quality stuff will still be bad. Effects will work with different resolutions so you won’t have a problem with those, but you might find some problems with things like particles – if you just scale up the comp, the solid INSIDE the comp is being scaled, so the particles will scale up correctly but start to look bad (as they are being treated like footage). Sometimes hard to get your head around (and I may have even got it wrong just then!) but it’s worth pushing on with 🙂

[Stuart Elith]

do you mean 100 instances of the same footage? if so, you can just re-load the footage in the Project window using the new source footage.

If each layer has different footage, then I can’t see how this would be possible, as AE wouldn’t know which footage to pull in for each layer.

[Stuart Elith]

Ahh, that’s genious Todd! I never thought about doing that. What an excellent tip.

When I have had the same situation in the past, my method was to use the masks as a track matte path, which I could then precompose and use… so if I needed to edit the original, it would update. However it didn’t let me have different feathering amounts per instance, which was quite a pain. It got the job done, and is nice in complex roto jobs, where there might be 10 or more masks for one layer. This expression technique would work too but would create a lot of filler.

[Stuart Elith]

I don’t think you *fully* understand him, as he has given you the answer… collapse transformations.

Precomping takes whatever is inside and kind of treats it as a new piece of footage (probably not an accurate way of describing it, for various reasons, but it might help you understand the resolution thing). So when you have made a small precomp and put it into a new one, it’s now thinking of that precomp as a piece of footage with its dimensions, NOT as the source file… this is GOOD in many cases, for example it can optimise speed when you’re working with a small section of an asset, but in your case you are noticing the quality loss.

Here’s where Collapse Transformations comes in. Read the help page to see what it does, and then try it out 🙂 It will allow you to get the quality you want in the final render (but it does get tricky when you combine it with 3D stuff and effects, sometimes it takes some wrangling to get what you want without side-effects).

[Stuart Elith]

The boujou -> AE workflow isn’t quite as smooth as it could be…

I haven’t had a chance to try out these methods yet, but they sound good. Seems to be a good little conversation going in each thread.

https://mograph.net/board/index.php?showtopic=1618

https://finthrow.blogspot.com/2007/02/3d-camera-tracking-data-import-into.html

[Stuart Elith]

Marty, the part I don’t understand is why you want the image to change at all… it sounds like you’ve put an image into each of the film squares (you said you put 100 images in place). Why can’t you just make each of those images the correct frame and treat them as still frames so they don’t change?

Since I probably haven’t understood you properly, there may be a good reason why it has to be that certain way. To work out how long each still should be on screen before changing, can you just take a look at how many frames it is on screen for, then make it change some time after that?