[Todd Kopriva]

The quick answer: You’re right on the specifics… but your friend has a point, too.

As Andrew suggests, the real performance gains of keeping your projects broken up into multiple, smaller project files are not decreased rendering times; they are gains from avoiding the pain of having one corrupt project file ruin all of your work, et cetera. Workflow improvements are as valuable as render time improvements in saving you time and effort.

Regarding the specific question of whether render time increases because you have a bunch of other compositions and footage items in your project other than the one that you’re rendering: You could test this and settle the debate for yourself. That’s the only way that you and your friend are going to be really satisfied of the truth, right?

I just did a test, and I verified the answer that I (almost certainly) knew to be true: Having a lot of compositions and footage items in the Project panel and Render Queue panel does not affect the render time of another composition.

——————————————-
Todd Kopriva
Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’
After Effects Help on the Web
——————————————-

[Todd Kopriva]

Jonas Hummerstrand has a good blog post about this error and how to avoid it

——————————————-
Todd Kopriva
Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’
After Effects Help on the Web
——————————————-

[Todd Kopriva]

[moldyboot] “reciting the help file….. pure genius

glad it helped”

I’m glad it helped, too. 🙂

Todd “the guy who wrote the Help document” Kopriva

——————————————-
Todd Kopriva
Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’
After Effects Help on the Web
——————————————-

[Todd Kopriva]

I just answered this in the other After Effects forum.

[Todd Kopriva]

First of all, here’s a very incomplete list of big things added since version 4.0, with links to the high-level Help pages on the Web:

– 3D layers
– text layers and text animators
– expressions, which are pieces of JavaScript that you can use to animate things and link properties together
– a scripting interface
– color management
– painting and cloning tools
– parenting and null layers, both of which features help to animate many things by connecting them to one
– animation presets, which allow for saving, reuse, and exchange of combinations of effects and animations
– improved render automation and network rendering
– Clip Notes review features
– lots of new output and input formats
– new customizable docking workspaces
– lots of integration with other Adobe applications
– motion tracking and stabilization
– Puppet tools
– Brainstorm
– shape layers, for creating and animating vector graphics within After Effects
– lots of new effects

I’m sure that I missed a lot, but—yowza!—that’s a big list.

I recommend reading After Effects Help on the Web, not the Help document installed on your computer or the printed User Guide. Even if the Help content itself isn’t what you need, the Help pages on the Web contain hundreds of links out to video tutorials, blog posts, forum threads, and other useful resources. Here’s a link: After Effects CS3 Help

If you’re not finding the information that you need in Help, you can leave a comment at the bottom of any Help page by clicking the Add Comment button and ask for additional information. The same applies if you find errors.

One good resource for free video tutorials is “Adobe Creative Suite 3 Video Workshop”. The Video Workshop leans a bit toward the newer features.

I also really like Aharon Rabinowitz’s video podcast and Andrew Kramer’s stuff at https://www.videocopilot.net/.

John Vondracek has a series of introductory video tutorials on motion graphics in After Effects.

If you prefer printed books, I recommend _After Effects Apprentice_ from Trish and Chris Meyer. (See the CyberMotion website.) The Meyers have a few more advanced books, too. These books are considered by many to be indispensable tools for learning After Effects. I have all of them on my desk. Also useful is the _After Effects CS3 Professional Classroom in a Book_, which walks you step by step through many features and workflows.

See the “After Effects resources” thread in the Adobe user-to-user forum for recommendations and discussions of many other resources.

Of course, as you’ve already determined, this forum is a good place to ask questions. If you can’t find some information, ask here. We’ll try to point you to what you need.

[Todd Kopriva]

How are you animating the value? Are you setting keyframes on the Value/Offset/Random Max property?

If Type is set to one of the Timecode variants, the value is taken from the layer’s time (duration from In point), so you’ll see the number change without keyframes.

[Todd Kopriva]

[Darby Edelen] “I guess the problem I have with Trim Paths is that it gives a result wholly different from “Stroke.” It cuts the path leaving a hard line from the first vertex to whichever point on the path it has ‘trimmed’ up to. My question was: is there a way to use Trim Path in a more stroke-like manner, it seems that you implied there was.”

It sounds like you’re seeing the result of leaving the default fill on the shape. You can turn the fill off or delete it to just see the shape’s stroke. Then, when you animate Trim Paths, you see something more like a write-on effect.

My Trim Paths example was just one example of how you could do something with shapes that people often did with previous versions by applying effects to masks.

[Todd Kopriva]

[Darby Edelen] “Is there a decent way to apply a Trim Paths operation to a letter that consists of two or more paths? An ‘O’ for example? I’d like to play with shape layers more…”

When you use Create Outlines, letters that consist of multiple paths (like ‘o’ and ‘e’ and ‘i’) are created as merged paths, so the Trim Paths operation sees the letter as one path.

You can also group shapes and then set the Trim Multiple Shapes property for Trim Paths to Individually or Simultaneously to control how grouped paths are trimmed. You can group and ungroup shapes pretty much the same way that you do in Illustrator (Ctrl+G or Command+G to group), and the path operations work a lot like the path effects in Illustrator.

Here’s a link to the section in After Effects CS3 Help that discusses converting text to shapes: ” Create shapes from text characters”

[Todd Kopriva]

[morgancreative] “Wow… why did they do that? Well, another reason not to upgrade to CS3.”

Personally, I like the new behavior better. For most purposes, I’d rather animate shapes and have the path operations like Trim Paths and Wiggle Paths available than use mask paths. Just my opinion; I suppose whether you like the old way better depends on what you’re doing. At least there are ways to copy and link between the path types.

[Todd Kopriva]

I just modified the Offset from 100 to 0. (The default was from -50 to 100.) I then changed the Shape to Ramp Up. This gives me the behavior that it seems that you want.