[Tom Morton]

I must admit I’m not 100% sure on what you’re asking – as I understand it, you want the background to be seen in the reflections, but it’s not – and you don’t want the floor to be seen in reflections but it is?

I’ve opened up the project and it renders as I would expect tbh. I may be wrong but I had thought that compositing backgrounds don’t show in reflection because they don’t have an actual 3D position – they are floating without a reference point because they always remain at the back of the scene relative to the camera. It is as the name says, just for compositing.

The floor is reflected in the sphere like it should – this is an actual object that is located in 3D space, so it can be referenced by all object by default are shown in reflections and in the view. And in the blank space not covered by the floor and background, you can see reflections of the HDRI.

Please see screenshots, first one is default render which seems correct to the scene.

If you don’t want to see the reflection of the floor, you need to select the compositing tag on the floor and uncheck “Seen by reflection” – please see second screenshot.

[Tom Morton]

I don’t disagree, I haven’t had any major problems with this edition, and glad that it’s working for others.

However, for me it’s too little, too late. One of my goals for this year is to completely switch over to Davinci Resolve – I’ve been dabbling in and out of it lately, and this year I’ve taken the plunge and imported some current Premiere Pro projects into Resolve and started working on them. This was driven partly because I spent half an hour with Lumetri trying to color correct some footage, couldn’t get it right, brought it into Resolve and made it look perfect in 10 minutes with no prior knowledge of how to use it!

Adobe have lost my trust really, they continue to not listen to user requests, continue to launch poorly built, untested products, and I feel they are no longer trying to chase the professional market. This post is a great example, it’s so rare to get a stable product release that it’s caused you guys to post about it! So while I’m glad for you guys, I don’t regret my decision! 😁😁

[Tom Morton]

The layer type is personal preference mostly. If you keep it as an AI file, and you update the AI file in illustrator, those updates will pull through to your After Effects project. That can be good / bad depending on your workflow. Some effects work best or only work on native layers, but that’s only a problem if you’re using those specific effects. If it works with you then go with it, no massive drawbacks i’m aware of.

[Tom Morton]

Regards the solid composite effect, I see why you thought this, but note the difference in my attached screenshots.

When you drag in a non-native file such as an Illustrator project file or Photoshop file, the layer size (grey squares on the corners) is limited to the file dimensions, this is effectively being interpreted like a raster image that has been imported. An effect like the solid composite will fill in the whole layer background, but the layer dimensions are being restricted.

If you convert that AI file into into a native After Effects object like I’ve done in the top layer on the screenshots, this will become native vector layer that doesn’t have layer bounds. Now when you click on it, you’ll see the object bounds (blue squares on the corners), but the layer background is essentially covering the entire composition now. This holds true for all vector shapes in After Effects. In the same way the outer glow won’t be affected by the bounds for layer shapes.

The reason you’re not seeing the Outer Glow is because this is a layer style, which sits below Effects on the hierachy. So After Effects is first adding an outer glow, then adding a composite solid on top of the outer glow, then showing the shape on top of that. If you disable the Solid Composite, you should see your glow appear.

You can either turn off solid composite and just add a background solid color below the shape layer, or you can try using the Stylize > Glow effect and ensure it is above the Solid Composite effect.

Layer order matters everywhere in After Effects – parents, sublayers, groups, effects, masks, precomps – all layers are rendered from the bottom upwards – so the highest layer is in front of all the other layers.

[Tom Morton]

I might be missing something but aren’t all of these things just normal behaviour?

1: I don’t use solid composite much, but I thought the main purpose was to fill the whole background, I’ve never wanted it to only fill the bounding box.

2: for the grow bounds effects, this is just for raster effects where the original layer preview is cached. This can result in the effects having a cutoff point because the cache is only the size of the composition. Using this effect enables AFX to calculate more of the layers preview, and I don’t think it ever changes the visible bounding box, it’s just in the “backend” where it’s calculating what to show you. (This might help you more: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/after-effects/using/utility-effects.html#grow_bounds_effect )

3: and for outer glow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this constrained by a bounding box in any application. Imagine you had a square, the bounding box would be the same size as the square and if the glow was limited by the bounding box you wouldn’t see the glow at all.

I think maybe you’re trying to treat the bounding box like it’s own layer, and it’s not really, it’s just an indicator of the size and position of the object you’ve selected… does that help at all?

[Tom Morton]

No, AFAIK Premiere only uses one or other (hardware encoding vs software encoding). From past experience I’ve also found that if your GPU isn’t on the supported list then whenever you have GPU problems, the support team just point to that and say “Oh well, it’s not on the supported list, why did you think it would work?”

You can see the list of supported graphics cards here: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/premiere-pro/system-requirements/2023.html#graphics-cards

Even though Quadro cards are supported, Premiere doesn’t seem to get as much out of them as as the GeForce cards IMO.

Also, although Premiere will use the GPU for rendering, having a powerful CPU can also make a huge difference in interpreting visual effects, scrubbing video, caching preview files and much more. If you’re ever going to touch 4K files, I would recommend using at least an i7 processor, and if you work with 4K every day, or above 4k then personally I’d be looking for an i9 with at least 10 dual cores.

Hope that helps, PC specs are all very subjective and it can be difficult to make a decision…. all the best with your choices 🙂

[Tom Morton]

Plus 1 on downloading the Nvidia drivers. For my Dell tower PC, if I let the Dell update software do it’s job, it will try to install the wrong version of the Nvidia driver, which Premiere Pro doesn’t like. When this happens I visit the Nvidia website, find the correct driver and install and this usually does the trick. PITA I know but this stuff does happen with Adobe!

[Tom Morton]

I see a lot of posts where editors are moving away from Premiere because of it’s poor support and poor reliability and I’m firmly on that bandwagon too. If you’re thinking of learning a new NLE to step up, I personally would recommend you learn Davinci Resolve and not Premiere Pro. It will save you years of hassle, it’s cheaper and as far as I’ve used it, faster and more intuitive to use. Although the 3D side is more limited there’s still a lot you can do with it.

[Tom Morton]

Not much detail here so not 100% sure I know what you’re looking for but have you tried the Morph Camera? Add two static cameras representing the start and finish of the camera animation, select them, then go to Camera > Morph Camera. A new camera will be created that will animate between the 2 camera positions you added first. The new camera will have the “Morph Camera” tag added automatically, select this and you can animate the speed of the and mode and so on.

[Tom Morton]

I love illustrator but I’ve never got on well with the tracing function. I’ve never got good enough results out of it to use it professionally and every time I’ve tried I’ve ended up drawing the item manually instead.

Personally if it was me I’d start again with a blank canvas, add the design as a raster background and then draw over it manually. There are a few benefits to this method: you’ll get a cleaner, more accurate shape without any artifacts, all the lines will be perfectly straight and equal width, and any vector files you export to (such as SVG) will be much smaller and less complex.

Another advantage is that the tracing has turned the outline into a compound, filled shape which is much harder to animate. If you trace it manually instead using lines with an outline (no fill), you can import and animate them individually very easily in After Effects using the “trimpaths” property and other effects.

Recommend using the Pen tool [P] – you can click to add points or click and drag to add bezier points. you can also hold Shift to constrain lines to 45-degree increments. Once you’ve drawn a shape, use the Direct Selection tool [D] to select and move the points about to fine tune them.

Otherwise you could use the Polygon tool (right click on the Rectangle tool [M] to find) and create a couple of perfect hexagons. Click and drag, but before releasing, if it’s not a hexagon shape, press up and down arrows to change the amount of points in the polygon. Then add lines using the line tool [\] to connect the hexagon points.

Hope that helps to get you started! If you get stuck, you may find it helpful to watch some tutorials on the specific tools I’ve mentioned above.