[Terry Coolidge]

As bogiesan indicates, your question is pretty vague. You could mean a million different things. But if you just want a solid layer to be mostly transparent and give the impression that you’re looking through a window, you might find/create an image that represents what might be reflecting in the window (whatever the environment should be behind the camera) and use that as your “window” layer.

[Terry Coolidge]

I figured it out. Not sure I could tell anyone how I did it, but I managed it some how. I locked a composition in the viewer, then opened another one, and then started dragging tabs. Eventually it worked.

Perhaps someone would still like to offer an explanation so that I might then feel like I (and others) could repeat the feat.

😉

[Terry Coolidge]

I don’t believe you can change the font of the “Timecode” effect, but you could check out Dan Ebberts’ page for creating a “universal up/down clock.”

https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/up-down-clock.html

This is what I would pursue if I were you.

[Terry Coolidge]

I’ve run into goofiness when trying to compress on top of Animation compressed QuickTime files, so I would recommend rendering as a raw image sequence or else an “uncompressed” QuickTime movie and then compress into MP4 with the H.264 codec. Just my opinion.

[Terry Coolidge]

My recommendation would be to render out from After Effects as an image sequence (I choose Targa sequences). I then use QuickTime Pro to open the image sequence and export it out as an MP4 using the H.264 codec. I have not had success trying to render directly out to H.264 compressed output from AE, but the flexibility of working with image sequences is preferable anyway. QuickTime MP4 files compressed with H.264 are a great fit with Mac OS X. Depending on the target machine that will be playing back the Keynote presentation, you can have large files (1024 x 768 for example) and use high bit-rates (2k/s, 3k/s, 4k/s, etc.) for very high-quality video.

[Terry Coolidge]

My recommendation would be to render out from After Effects as an image sequence (I choose Targa sequences). I then use QuickTime Pro to open the image sequence and export it out as an MP4 using the H.264 codec. I have not had success trying to render directly out to H.264 compressed output from AE, but the flexibility of working with image sequences is preferable anyway. QuickTime MP4 files compressed with H.264 are a great fit with Mac OS X. Depending on the target machine that will be playing back the Keynote presentation, you can have large files (1024 x 768 for example) and use high bit-rates (2k/s, 3k/s, 4k/s, etc.) for very high-quality video.

[Terry Coolidge]

Fantastic!!!

Thank you very much! Amazing that a button could be right there (in an oft-used part of the interface no less) that I really wasn’t familiar with. I may have known about that toggle a loooooong time ago (it seemed vaguely familiar), but I must admit that when you pointed me to it today it was almost as if a new feature had been added to AE that had never been there before.

Thank you very much. Exactly what I needed. God bless the COW!!!

[Terry Coolidge]

Sounds like you are invoking the “Collapse the Layer Switches pane” command. I’m not sure what the keyboard shortcut is for that, but there is a GUI toggle switch in the lower left-hand corner of the Timeline panel. Looks like a stack of squares with a check mark in the top-most square. Try clicking on that and see if your numbers reappear.

[Terry Coolidge]

I was just about to come back here and post that I meant to say “Light Burst” and not “Light Rays,” and lo and behold… Aharon already pointed that out.

🙂

Thanks Aharon!

I meant to ask for a comparison between Trapcode Shine and CC Light Burst 2.5. Sounds like I have found out what I wanted to know, but if anyone else wants to chime in, feel free.

[Terry Coolidge]

What are you trying to use the Illustrator path for? Are you wanting to use it as a motion path? If so, you need to select the “Position” property and THEN paste the Illustrator path. You’ll end up with position keyframes that match the shape of the pasted path. Just pasting a path onto a layer will not work… unless…

Are you wanting to bring in an Illustrator path as a mask? Simply selecting a solid and then pasting an Illustrator path should result in a new Mask being applied to your solid using the Illustrator path as the shape of the Mask.

Not sure why your path doesn’t seem to be on your clipboard.