[Todd Kopriva]

> Any ideas?

Yes. Update. In my previous post on this thread I said that the updates fixed a bug in saving projects. This is the bug that I was talking about.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

All keyboard shortcuts are listed in the “Keyboard shortcuts” section of After Effects Help.

Here’s a search.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

There’s a lot of information about After Effects and XMP metadata in After Effects Help.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Heh. Jinx. It looks like Kevin and I mostly agree. 😉

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

from “Render with OpenGL”:

“OpenGL is a set of standards for high-performance processing of 2D and 3D graphics on the graphics processing unit (GPU) for a wide variety of applications. For After Effects users, OpenGL provides fast, high-quality rendering for previews and final output by moving rendering from the CPU to the GPU on the display card. Sometimes, performance improvements due to processing on the GPU are referred to as hardware acceleration.”

So, basically OpenGL to the After Effects user is a way to get faster rendering. But the OpenGL isn’t entirely accurate, so it’s really just good for rendering previews. I leave it in OpenGL—Interactive mode, so that it speeds up rendering when I’m dragging things around, but I still ge the full-fidelity rendering that doesn’t use OpenGL when I’m not dragging things around.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Have you installed the After Effects 9.0.2 update? It fixes a lot of problems, including some crashes.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

If you’re doing this with mocha-AE (which comes with After Effects CS4), then you don’t really need the tracking markers. Those are more for point trackers, not for planar trackers.

Dave Torno did an excellent, in-depth pair of videos that tell how he did the face replacement for a recent Pistol Youth music video.

I talk about this a bit more in this blog post.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

It all depends on what kind of composition you’re rendering. There’s no one answer, even for a given system, since the demands of each project are different (or even the demands of each phase of project).

If you’re working with standard-definition-sized compositions and footage items, then you could probably benefit from enabling the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature.

If you’re working with bigger compositions and footage items, you don’t really have enough RAM to use the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature. For HD work, you want at least 2GB per process, and then the OS and other software take their bite…

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Are you asking about how to use the < ahref="https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS95EA3DE7-B275-4867-9835-3191D02E145Ba.html">Wiggle Paths path operation on a shape layer? Or something else?

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Increasing mask expansion is not the same thing scaling a mask. Scaling preserves shape. Expansion says “Make it bigger by growing outward from each point a certain number of pixels.”

For each point on the original mask path, imagine a circle radiating outward by the number of pixels by which you’re expanding.

I’ve embedded an image below that should show what I’m talking about. The white rectangle is the original mask path. The red circles indicate the expansion radius. Note how these circles define a sharp inner rectangle, which is what you get with a negative expansion; and they define a rounded outer rectangle, which is what you get with a positive expansion.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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