[Todd Kopriva]

You can copy and paste paths from masks to shapes, and vice versa. Copy the Path property itself from the shape and then paste into the Mask Path property of a mask. (You can link these same properties using expressions and the pickwhip, too.)

I assume that you have a good reason for animating a Stroke effect on masks as opposed to stroking the shapes and using Trim Paths and other path operations on the shape layer, but I’ll mention that that is often a good way to do this sort of work in After Effects CS3.

[Todd Kopriva]

Select the text layer and press UU to reveal modified properties. You should see a Range selector with an animated Offset property. It’s that Range selector that determines which characters are affected when. The Randomize Order property seems to be set to On. If you want non-random order, you need to set this to Off. Then modify the Start, End, and Offset properties to get the behavior that you want.

Is that enough detail?

[Todd Kopriva]

There’s a sample project here that does this: Glass Globe

[Todd Kopriva]

There’s a whole section of After Effects Help dedicated to tips on improving performance: “Improve performance”.

I hope that something in there helps.

[Todd Kopriva]

Terry’s right. The Timecode effect is an older, less versatile way of animating timecode numbers than using the text animation and expression features of After Effects. Even After Effects Help tries to steer people away from using the Timecode effect and the Numbers effect.

Here’s a link to a forum post where Dan Ebberts and Rick Gerard discuss an expression for animating a string of numbers counting; you’d just have to replace the commas with colons or semicolons to make something like this work for you:

https://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc33f4d/0

[Todd Kopriva]

If I’m picturing what’s happening correctly, this section of After Effects Help might help: ” Designate the first vertex for a Bezier path”

[Todd Kopriva]

Michele Yamazaki has a quick tutorial here for blurring out a logo using motion tracking:

https://toolfarm.com/tutorials/motiontrack.html

[Todd Kopriva]

You say that you’re exporting with Best Quality settings, but you don’t say what codec you’re using. Be sure that you’re using a lossless codec for compression for both output from FCP and After Effects. Exporting a Quicktime movie from After Effects using the Animation codec is a very common way of maintaining quality in this workflow.

JPEG is a lossy codec, by the way.

[Todd Kopriva]

There’s a whole section of After Effects Help dedicated to tips on improving performance: “Improve performance”.

I hope that something in there helps.

[Todd Kopriva]

my $.02:

Personally, I’d do as Steve suggested but leave the 4s (characters) separate, having one eat each of the 2s. I think that that makes an even better mnemonic device, because the viewer will remember that the number of 4s is the same as the number of 2s.