[Walter Soyka]

Nothing in the After Effects Classic 3D renderer has any depth, so when you look from the top view, the text is infinitely thin and can’t be seen. (This is sometimes called “2.5D” — 2D objects positioned in 3D space.)

Imagine your Ae layers are like a sheets of paper — you can see it when it’s facing the camera, but when you look at the top or the side, it’s too thin to see.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

I’d precompose all the transparency-creating layers, then use the precomp as a luma or alpha matte.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

I couldn’t figure out the clean way to do this — NS_CREATOR_ATOM doesn’t seem to be a registered namespace — so here’s a hacky code fragment to do it instead:

var xmpFile = new XMPFile(filePath, XMPConst.FILE_UNKNOWN, XMPConst.OPEN_FOR_READ);
var xmp = xmpFile.getXMP();

// take the whole XMP object and make it into a string so we can parse it manually
var xmpString = xmp.dumpObject().toString();

// use a regular expression to find the fullPath item of the aeProjectLink struct of the creatorAtom
var creatorFsName = xmpString.match(RegExp('(.*creatorAtom:fullPath = ")(.*)(")'))[2];

alert(creatorFsName);

You should add some error checking to this, because as written, it will fail hard if there’s no project link data.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

You don’t need to use all four points for a corner pin — you can parent the screen to any one of the points, and just use the null’s orientation/position plus the 3D camera to keep the screen in place.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Output modules are stored in one of the files in your preferences. Specifically:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\16.1\Adobe After Effects 16.1 Prefs-indep-output.txt

(You’ll have to replace “username” and “16.1” to match your system.)

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Ctrl+Alt+V pastes layer(s) from the clipboard at the current time in the current timeline.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

You can select a layer by typing its layer index on the numeric keypad.

If you have a layer selected already, you can you Ctrl+UpArrow or Ctrl+DownArrow (Windows, Cmd+UpArrow / Cmd+DownArrow on a Mac) to change the selection to the layer above or below, respectively.

Once you’ve got your layer selected, you can reposition it with the shortcuts you already know.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

Are you saving the MOVs alongside the original AVIs?

I’d try saving your project as an After Effects XML file (File > Save As > Save a Copy as XML…). Open that AEPX file in a text editor, then do a search and replace operation, changing all “.AVI” to “.MOV”

Re-open the AEPX in Ae, and it should connect to the MOV media instead of the original AVI media.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

If you want to use an accumulation technique, you need to consider time.

The expression I shared could be a lot smarter about time, though — starting at the layer’s inPoint instead of assuming that time begins at 0, building in a time offset control if you need to link it to a different clock in another comp, etc.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

After Effects expressions are evaluated instantaneously for each frame, and they don’t have any concept of what happened on the frame before. In order to access previous values, you have to manually recompute and accumulate them.

Code like this will do it:
delta = effect("Delta")("Slider");

var accumulator = value;
for (var i = 0; i < timeToFrames(time); i++) {
accumulator += delta.valueAtTime(framesToTime(i));
}

accumulator

Use this expression on the value you want to accumulate over time and link “delta” to the slider you are manipulating.

Note that the evaluation of this expression slows over time, because each frame must compute and accumulate the values of all preceding frames.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]