Todd Kopriva
Forum Replies Created
-
After you’ve applied a text animation preset to a layer, select the layer and press UU. This shows all of the properties that have been modified. With these modified properties exposed, you can see what the text animation preset is doing, and you can start to tweak the properties yourself; you can drag keyframes around to change timing, modify property values, add new keyframes, etc.
-
I’ll second that recommendation for detonationfilms.com.
To drive the point home: In general, don’t try to simulate something with CGI when you can just shoot the real thing—or, even better, when someone else has shot the real thing and is providing you the footage for free (or cheap).
-
Installing the material on the Content disc is simply a matter of copying the files from the disc to your local hard disk—or leaving the files on the Content disc until you want them.
You can drag and drop the plug-ins to the Plug-ins folder for the appropriate application. You can put stock photos, clip art, and such wherever you like; you may even choose to not install these at all but just pop the Content disc into the drive whenever you want to browse them.
Yes, you can just drag and drop the fonts into the usual Fonts folder.
-
I’d start with the CC Bubbles effect, which is one of the Cycore effects that comes with After Effects.
-
Just pick MPEG-2 from Format menu in the Output Module Settings dialog box.
If you’re not familiar with output modules and the render queue, then perhaps you should read the ” Render and export a movie using the render queue” section of After Effects Help first.
A very, very common beginner mistake is to use the File > Export menu. That menu is _not_ the way that you should render for final output for most formats. Use the render queue unless you have a really good reason not to. (Once you’ve read the “Rendering and exporting” chapter of After Effects Help, you’ll know what those reasons are.)
-
Richard’s suggestions are good, but I’ll toss in another one: You can create one or more paths on a shape layer, apply the Trim Paths path operation to them, and then animate the properties of that vector path. For information on Trim Paths, see the “Alter shape paths with path operations” section of After Effects Help.
For information on animating paint strokes (and a link to information on the Write-On effect), see the “Animate paint strokes” section of After Effects Help.
-
Dave said “It might be because the sequence was made in CMYK and not RGB. AE can’t deal with CMYK.”
After Effects CS3 can import CMYK files. It just converts the colors to RGB on import.
For more information, see the ” Preparing still-image files for importing” section of After Effects Help.
-
From the “Export a single frame of a composition” section of After Effects Help:
1. Go to the frame that you want to export so that it is shown in the Composition panel.
2. Do one of the following:
* To render a single frame, choose Composition > Save Frame As > File. Adjust settings in the Render Queue panel if necessary, and then click Render.
* To export a single frame as an Adobe Photoshop file with layers, choose Composition > Save Frame As > Photoshop Layers. -
The very short answer: Flash is what you use to create interactive movies, and After Effects is what you use to enhance the visuals in movies. Sometimes, you use both, passing the output of one to the other. Both applicationns are good for creating and animating graphics, though some people prefer one over the other.
Here’s an excerpt from the Flash & After Effects document that I pointed to earlier:
“Flash is the more web-oriented of the two applications, with its small final file size. Flash also allows for runtime control of animation. After Effects is oriented towards video and film production, provides a wide range of visual effects, and is generally used to create video files as final output. Both applications can be used to create original graphics and animation. Both use a timeline and offer scripting capabilities for controlling animation programmatically. After Effects includes a larger set of effects, while the Flash ActionScript language is the more robust of the two scripting environments.”
There have been some articles in _The Edge_ that compare and contrast Flash and After Effects. Here’s a link to one:
https://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/september2006/articles/article2/index.html
A lot of character animation is done using After Effects. Angie Taylor’s book, _Creative After Effects_, is a great introduction to making cartoons (among other things) with After Effects:
https://www.creativeaftereffects.com
-
There’s a section in After Effects Help dedicated to this issue:
” Best practices for creating text and vector graphics for video”