[Walter Soyka]

Yes, I think you’ll need to comp at 32bpc — not just for the extra precision, but also for the ability to express and retain overbright color values across color conversions from larger color spaces to smaller ones.

I’m not sure what LUT you were given, but After Effects does ship with a number of ARRI LogC3 wide gamut ICC profiles now; maybe that’s more appropriate to what your production is shooting than Universal Camera Film Printing Density?

[Walter Soyka]

Oh, and Adobe quietly added a feature to export and import guides a few releases ago. These features are available through the View menu.

[Walter Soyka]

Very possible! Here’s the code for a script to do exactly as you describe. Let me know if you have any questions.

app.beginUndoGroup("Create guides");
var HORIZONTAL_GUIDE = 0;
var VERTICAL_GUIDE = 1;
app.project.activeItem.addGuide(HORIZONTAL_GUIDE, 10);
app.project.activeItem.addGuide(HORIZONTAL_GUIDE, app.project.activeItem.height - 10);
app.project.activeItem.addGuide(HORIZONTAL_GUIDE, app.project.activeItem.height / 2);
app.project.activeItem.addGuide(VERTICAL_GUIDE, 10);
app.project.activeItem.addGuide(VERTICAL_GUIDE, app.project.activeItem.width - 10);
app.project.activeItem.addGuide(VERTICAL_GUIDE, app.project.activeItem.width / 2);
app.endUndoGroup();

[Walter Soyka]

I’d probably use expression-driven null layers in this case. Can you post a reduced project or at least a screenshot showing how you’re trying to use this?

[Walter Soyka]

I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re getting at. You have a single precomp that you want to re-use multiple times, but you want to replace one of the colors for your different uses?

There’s a new feature in Ae — essential properties — that makes this much easier than it used to be. Here are some helpful links:

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/essential-properties.html

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/master-properties-after-effects/

[Walter Soyka]

Can you use an Add or Screen blend mode to accomplish the layering you want?

[Walter Soyka]

I’ll need to drill down a bit on the math formulas for the blur, drop shadow etc. I am assuming the formulas are intended to have those effects come in as a ratio of the actual image and not a hard number that results in some attributes being too blurry, shadows too big/small, etc.

That’s right.

In Premiere, you’re effectively normalizing the values in all your effects with “Scale to Frame Size” set; that fits the image to the frame and then says “ok, this is the new 100%.” In Ae, this would be like scaling to fit, then precomping without “collapse transformations” enabled.

Back in the script, since we can easily do the math, we’re concatenating transforms. Rather than transforming to comp size, rasterizing at comp size, and then transforming again, we’re combining the two transforms with no rasterization in between. This gives us less loss of quality, but also less consistency.

Because the scale of each image could be different, we need to make sure that all values for effect properties which are expressed in pixels are scaled according to the image itself. This will make them affect all images equally, no matter what size the image itself comes in.

[Walter Soyka]

Here’s a script that shows how to automate this kind of work. After you unzip the JSX file, you can install it as a script or run it from the the File > Script menu.

You’ll have to import all the images you want to process and select them in the project panel before running the script.

Note that there are a few variables up at the top that you can change to modify the behavior of the final animations.

I’ve commented throughout so you can get a sense of what’s going on. The only thing that’s probably a little wonky-looking is my use of “match names” for the effects and their parameters; we’re using those so that they work irrespective of localization (language) of the user.

I’ve done this more to provide some education than to do your homework for you, so please look it over and feel free to ask questions so you can understand how it’s all working!

(I should add — there’s zero error checking in here. It will not fail gracefully if you use it any way other than as-expected. That’s ok for a quick demo, but it’s not a great development practice for real-world work. Normally I’d check for errors throughout and provide user feedback in case anything unexpected occured!)

octavio-v1.zip 2 KB Zip - Click to view

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[Walter Soyka]

I know that the scripts offer features beyond what you’re looking for, but they’re still perfect for what you need.

You can build the template in Ae once, set both layers to be replaced with footage, then use CompsFromSpreadsheets with a list of the filenames and output comp names. After you’ve built the Ae template, you could get your 70 outputs with literally just a couple minutes of work.

[Walter Soyka]

This is not going to be super-intuitive, but instead of the Numbers effect, you can use a Text layer, an Angle control (because sliders don’t go to 1 billion), and an expression.

1. Add a text layer.
2. Add an Angle Control effect to the text layer.
3. Keyframe 0 and 1000000000 as you like on the Angle Control.
4. Untwirl the text layer, then Alt+click the Text > Text Source stopwatch.
5. Enter this expression:

var numberAsText = "" + parseInt(effect("Angle Control")("Angle"));
var separator = ",";
numberAsText.replace(/\B(?=(\d{3})+(?!\d))/g, separator);

The first line gets the value from the angle slider as an integer and changes it to text. The second line says we’ll use a comma as the separator, i.e. so you get 1,000 instead of 1000. (If you don’t want a separator, you can clear out the comma, leaving nothing between the two quote marks. If you want to use a period, change the comma to a period.) The third line is a little crazy, but it uses something called a regular expression to insert the separator every three digits, starting at the end.

Here’s a project with all this set up so you can see.

1_billion.aep 71 KB After Effects Project Files - Click to view

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