[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Paul,

with the budget you have in mind, the only good investment would be indeed, as James suggested – adding more RAM. At least in AE, GPU has close to zero influence, apart from few effects, which are optimised for GPU utilisation a bit further. The best possible improvement would be getting higher end CPU/higher clock speed, which suits your motherboard’s socket.

Leaving aside direct hardware upgrades – not sure whether you already using it, but the CPU’s with ‘k’ after the model name, signifies that it is unlocked version. Simply said – it can be overclocked to higher processing speed. The old days of overclocking are over – its a lot easier to do this nowadays through BIOS, without a need to be real geek ☺ Just google out the guide, and you will be able to increase the clock speed to use the full capacity.

It would be interesting if you make a comparison of render speed of some project, before and after the overclocking. I am sure you will notice some improvement. Again, if you haven’t done this yet 🙂

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Frank,

could you clarify the following:
1. What should happen to text when you animate the box?
2. What box animation you want to apply and for which transformation property?

This will help to understand what you are trying to achieve fully.

Thanks.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Cameron,

do the following:

1. Duplicate ‘Mouth_Shape’ layer twice. Call it ‘Mouth Matte’
2. Link its ‘rectangle size’ to original ‘Mouth_Shape’ (in case you distort it, duplicate mattes will follow.)
3. Turn off ‘Set Matte’ effects.
4. Place each of ‘Mouth Matte’s’ above ‘Tongue_Shape’ and ‘Teeth_Stroke’
5. Set their layer ‘Track Matte’ to Alpha.

Scaling now will be possible in pre-comps.

If I am not mistaken, with ‘Set Matte’ effect, rasterization does not work due to processing order of effects/pre-comps.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Sorry, assuming you define ‘curText’ as below!

curText = thisLayer("Text")("Source Text");
newLines = curText.split("\\r").length-1 + curText.split("\x03").length -1;

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

In case anyone face situation where ‘Shift+Enter’ break causes problems – add into equation ‘\x03’ for start and end newLines calculation.

Craig – its not possible to adjust ‘font’ directly. But to this Text Animator, you could add stroke width (as long as stroke is applied to text), skew, etc – and that would allow you to make visual differences for selected range of text.

newLines = curText.split("\r").length -1 + curText.split("\x03").length -1;

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Hey Anne,

if its really super complex – you could consider rendering pieces to .mov with RGB+Alpha channels data, but not to .mp4. Simply because, rendered as .mp4’s you will loose transparency of items and laying all of them back together wouldn’t be possible.

Honestly, I think you should give it a try to render whole project at once – and only if it fails consider broking things down into pieces (as it would cause you some additional managing problems itself, so why to bother from the beginning :))

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Martin,

once footage is imported, in the project panel:
1. Right click and select Interpret Footage > Main…
2. See if its set to Straight.

Hopefully its not yet and you will be able to recover it easily (:

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Adel, see if any of these could help you:
a) If comp is already created – edit that comp’s settings to extend length significantly. Then you should be able to see full layer picture, from In to Out. Later, you could set new work area duration and set comp length.
b) If you hit ‘]’, you will be able to see the end point. Just be careful – in case if InPoint is time-relevant for your edit.
c) If possible, simply create new comp from that item, and it will be precisely full length of the video footage.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

Jem – just a plain guess. Try rendering it out with Render Queue in AE, as now (based on screenshots) you are doing it through AME. Just in case Media Encoder fails to link properly with Omino Snake.

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.

[Tomas Bumbulevičius]

To have decimals, you don’t need to ‘floor’ the result. In general, it would be:

num = 5.567;
parseFloat(num).toFixed(2);

Result would be: 5.57

In your expression as below:

rot=thisComp.layer("FW3.tif")("Transform")("Rotation");
parseFloat(rot/360).toFixed(2);

Find out more:
After Effects Tutorials: motion design, expressions, scripting.