[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

I got that message a few times. In CS4 it usually goes away once you assign more memory to RAM preview.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

It’s kind of hard to understand what you’re asking without images- post a short clip or a few stills and you may get an answer.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Best thing would be if you could actually shoot one drive way with water coming on. Do this a few times and you will have elements to comp on top of your final shot (with some distortion to match perspective).
If not, you need to create some animations of water flowing- in AE Panopticum Water was a plugin that did something like that, but you’ll need to so some research.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Also, scan them at 72 dpi- in AE 72/150/300dpi all look the same. Depending on how much you want to zoom in on an image, you may want to scan them larger than 1280 on the width. As a “rule” 120% zoom is the max you can go without any visible quality loss.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

That X comes from the fact that you are probably using a plug-in in demo mode. Once you buy the plugin and introduce the licence key the red X will go away.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

First, AE is a compositing, effects and motion graphics software.
FCP is an editing software. So based on what you want to do- effects and motion graphics or editing you should choose one or the other.
Secondly, giving us the specs of your workstation ( OS, processors, RAM…) and version of AE may shed some light. Also, mentioning the exact circumstances under which you experienced the error messages will help get answers.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Using kuler color schemes works more for motion graphics than for color grading footage where generally you use one or two main colors ( like transformers/where the wild things are and many other yellow&blue combination). You could use a more complex combination, but it will involve lots of masking to break down the image in layers and then assigning to each area a color from the kuler color swatch.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

All you need to do for issues like this one before coming here is to google ” kuler in AE” or whatever else you’re looking for- probably there’s something out there. Here’s what my search turned out:

https://maltaannon.com/articles/after-effects/kuler-workflow/

https://sketchypictures.com/tutorials/after_effects/kuler_in_ae/kuler_in_ae.html

https://aescripts.com/chameleon/

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

There may be 1001 ways of doing this, but here’s my idea:
1- give the “ghost” a transparent look and a slight glow. This will help identify it as the ghost.
2- us mesh warp to give the entering in the body a more fluid look- I’m thinking to keep the ghost in place (no walking forward) and have it flow in the person head first (with some theatrical arms movement) and finish entering somewhat like a smoke tail. Make the movement really fast in the beginning and slower to the end.
3- on the person, draw a mask that expands on the body from the enter point of the ghost, and apply a glow on the edge, to give the impression of the ghost taking over that persons body.

That’s it- hopefully you can use all or some of it.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania
http://www.ennstudio.ro

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Use the illustrator file you got. Select all hexagons, turn the fill to white and the outline to black and add a black solid under the whole image. You end up with a matte for the tiles. Turn the fill of the hexagons black and the outline white, and turn the solid underneath to white as well and you get the matte for the space between the tiles. You can export a tiff file of both straight from Illustrator and use that for the matte in AE.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania
http://www.ennstudio.ro