[Walter Soyka]

Cheers!

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

[Walter Soyka]

ProRes 4444 is a great mastering format. Talk to your Pandora programmer; they will probably want Hap Alpha encodes (for better performance).

I’d recommend render to ProRes 4444, then encoding that to whatever delivery format they require.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Got it — so you do need those background pixels.

Unfortunately, I think you will need 3 copies of your comp — one for background, one for midground, and one for foreground. Before you start duplicating, I’d recommend a scheme for identifying/grouping the layers. If you use label colors (for example all FG Red, all MG Green, all BG blue), then you can click the label next to the comp index/name and choose “Select Label Group” from the context menu to get the whole group. (Alternately, you could use the Name or Comment fields, including FG/MG/BG in each layer name or comment, then use the search field to make it easier to select only the elements in that render layer.)

You can set the “Cast Shadow – Only” on one layer, copy the property from the timeline, multi-select the rest of the layers you want as above, and paste to save a lot of time.

To apply the alpha from a single layer across a whole bunch of them — like restricting your FG layers to a surface in the pixel map — you can cut out the surface from the mask, put the mask as the top-most layer, then use the Stencil Alpha blend mode.

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

[Walter Soyka]

The video is marked “Private,” so we can’t see the problem you’re describing. Can you adjust its sharing settings?

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

[Walter Soyka]

Sorry if I’m being dense, but can you describe a little bit more about the workflow here so we can understand what problem you’re trying to solve? Why do you have split up your scene by depth? What will the next person in the workflow do with these outputs?

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

[Walter Soyka]

It looks like you’re extruding the logo by taking a bunch of layers, stacking them in z-space, and spinning that whole precomp with collapse transformations on.

Think of a layer in After Effects’s Classic 3D renderer like a piece of paper. It’s essentially 2D. It’s got width and height, but no depth. The renderer lets you manipulate these 2D layers in 3D space, so we often refer to this as 2.5D. However, when you’re pointing a layer’s edge directly at the camera, you can see that it’s infinitely thin, and in your project on the frames you’ve marked “Problem,” that’s exactly what’s happening: the stack of layers in your extruded logo are pointing their edges straight at the camera and you can see right through the gaps.

I’d recommend building a shape in Ae for your logo that you can use with the CINEMA 4D renderer for true 3D extrusion:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/cinema-4d-composition-renderer.html

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

[Walter Soyka]

We can use expressions, specifically sampleImage(), to drive the fill color based on the brightness of another layer.

I’ve set this up in a sample project here:

13681_togglelogofill.aep.zip

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

[Walter Soyka]

Could you post your SVG, AI and PSD files so I can compare them?

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’re working on a high-res 5K screen. Ae is aware of the high DPI display, and it’s still showing you the comp viewer panel at 1:1. That means that the 1920×1080 HD frame normally takes up only a small portion of your full display.

Your viewer is zoomed to 400%. If you zoom out to 100%, it should look crisp.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Can you post a screenshot of your complete UI, showing the timeline and the problem in the comp panel?

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