Todd Kopriva
Forum Replies Created
-
My guess is that you didn’t choose Move All Attributes Into The New Composistion when you precomposed the layer with the effect.
Remember that the order of operations for non-vector layers is masks, effects, transformations. So in general a mask is not going to apply to the effects, because they come later. That’s why you need to precompose—to change the rendering order.
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
> Y’know, the AE documentation is sort of unclear whether Brainstorm is limited to Shape Layers only or if it works on ANY layer.
It works on any kind of layer, on almost any property.
from “Use Brainstorm to experiment and explore settings”:
“You can use Brainstorm on any property that has numeric values or options in a pop-up menu in the Timeline panel. Examples of properties on which you can’t use Brainstorm are Source Text, Mask Path, and the Histogram property for the Levels effect; however, you can use Brainstorm on the properties of the Levels (Individual Controls) effect.”
I’m a little perplexed by the request to apply random effects. I would expect that you’d have _some_ idea of what you wanted to do with your movie. Randomly applying, say, the Tone effect or the Arithmetic effect isn’t something that would help me in my creative process.
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
That’s pretty close, Steve. I have a plain-English description of the process in the first few paragraphs of “Rendering and exporting overview”.
Here’s a somewhat different version that addresses your question more directly:
Each frame is rendered into an uncompressed buffer based on the render settings. This is the hard part that can takes multiple minutes per frame on a heavy composition.
These frames are handed to the output module, where each frame is cropped, encoded, and otherwise processed based on the output module settings. This tends to be the easy part—which is why it’s sooooo valuable to note that you can attach multiple output modules to one render item; you can render once and output to multiple formats, etc.
Now here’s a wrinkle: If the encoding is done by the Adobe Media Encoder (which happens under the hood for MPEG formats, FLV, and a few other things), the ouput module does some processing and then hands its output to AME for encoding. This is where some mismatches in frame sizes and such come in if you don’t follow the instructions in the Comments field of the Output Module settings dialog box.
Regarding wrappers: Yeah, that’s basically it. The video data is encoded and written to what is essentially a track inside of a wrapper—whether QuickTime or F4V or whatever. The container is created early in the process, though; it’s not as if the video tracks are created and then a wrapper is put around them.
Regarding lossless encoding: The frames are very much “touched”. They are just touched in a way from which all of the image information can still be retrieved. For example, I can encode a one-hour movie of a 1000×1000-pixel pure red image by saying this: “Repeat [255,0,0] for each pixel for 1000 horizontally and 1000 vertically for each frame from 1 to 108,000 frames.” That’s a highly efficient lossless encoding of a movie that would take hundreds of gigabytes to express without compression. The Animation and PNG codecs—and some others—have high-quality settings that do a lot mathematically to the image data, but all of the data is recoverable.
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
Oh, and you can import one After Effects project into another.
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
A combination of Reduce Project and Collect Files will probably do what you want.
You can save a copy of your project, reduce it down to just the compositions you want to transfer, and use Collect Files for that subset.
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
Steve is the voice of experience. 😉
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
You can also turn on snapping by holding the Shift key as you drag layers in time. For example, you can snap a layer’s In point to the time of another layer’s Out point, as you are trying to do. See “Place or move layers in time”.
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
Here’s the first and most important thing to know about footage interpretation: It’s all about telling After Effects about what the characteristics of your footage are. If After Effects has guessed right, then you don’t need to do anything more with footage interpretation.
For DV PAL footage, After Effects should get everything right, without manual interpretation steps.
One of the things that it will do is separate fields. This is crucial if you’re going to do much of anything in After Effects with layers based on the footage.
You should also check to make sure that you render settings are set to render fields as appropriate for your output format.
BTW, the biggest problem that I see with animations shown on devices that use interlacing is twitter—the flicker that comes from vertical detail (like thin horizontal lines) alternately disappearing and reappearing from one field to the next. There are some tips for avoiding this here.
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
Not directly, no. FLV files themselves don’t contain interactive elements. If you’re playing the FLV in a browser, then it’s got to be contained in (or linked to in) a SWF, and that SWF can contain the extra smarts to superimpose a clickable link on the video.
On a related note: You can include cue points in an FLV file, and then some ActionScript code can operate on those on the Flash side.
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment. -
> What would you do in my situation?
I’ve been in your situation. And I’ve said something like this: “That’s just extra, irrelevant image data in the areas that are transparent. Don’t worry; it won’t show up in the composite. Straight channels aren’t meant to be viewed by humans—they’re meant to be consumed by computers.”
———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.