[Todd Kopriva]

If you’re just getting started with text animation, you might want to try browsing and applying some of the text animation presets. When you’ve found one that is similar to the result that you’re trying to achieve, you can tweak it to suit your needs. Or, even better, you can examine the layer’s proeprties after you’ve applied the animation preset and use this to learn how to make your own animations.

Perhaps the easiest way to learn how to do complex animations in After Effects is to apply an animation preset and then press U or UU to reveal only the animated or modified layer properties. Viewing the animated and modified properties shows you what changes the designer of the animation preset made to create the animation preset.

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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 tip on the “Remove 3:2 or 24Pa pulldown from video” section of Help that might address this issue.

“One of the formats used by Panasonic P2 cameras is 24p over 60p using pulldown, but it’s not a regular pulldown cadence, and After Effects doesn’t automatically identify it correctly.

Use one of the 24pA cadences, even though this format doesn’t really use 24pA. It should all work out anyway.

The cadence appears to be 2:2:2:4.”

I got my information for the tip from a bug report, so I can assure you that all the right folks know about this issue.

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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 are several tips about improving performance in the “Improve performance” section of After Effects Help.

If anyone has any additional tips that aren’t in that section or the pages that it points to, please consider leaving a comment.

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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 I understand your question correctly, the example in the “Example: Match camera focal plane to another layer” section of After Effects Help may help. It matches the Focus Distance property of a camera layer to the distance to the anchor point of a layer.

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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]

After Effects automatically separates fields for D1 and DV video footage items. (You can manually separate fields for all other types of video footage in the Interpret Footage dialog box.)

For more information, see the “Separate video fields” and “Interlaced video, noninterlaced video, and progressive scanning” sections of 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]

You can export a BMP image sequence using the export components installed by QuickTime in the File > Export menu.

Choose File > Export > Image Sequence, and then choose BMP from the Format menu in the Export Image Sequence Settings dialog box.

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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]

Your Flow property is set to 0% in the Paint panel. Set it to something higher.

See “Paint tools and paint strokes” for more information.

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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 must use thin horizontal lines, you should blur them just a tiny bit. It’s better to soften the graphic element a little bit than to have it flicker like mad.

Usually people are careful to use graphic elements with horizontal lines no thinner than a few pixels (in this case, scan lines).

But the only way to be 100% sure that your graphics aren’t going to suffer from twitter is to preview them on an interlaced video monitor.

There are some tips in the “Best practices for creating text and vector graphics for video” section of 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]

You can use the Convert Audio To Keyframes keyframe assistant to get you much of the way to this result.

Aharon Rabinowitz has a good tutorial about this keyframe assistant here on the COW.

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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]

Did you follow the instructions in the “Track or stabilize motion” section of After Effects Help?

Specifically, did you use the Stabilize Motion command? The difference between the Stabilize Motion command and the Track Motion command is that with Stabilize Motion the tracking data is used to compensate for motion in the tracked layer.

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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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