[Walter Soyka]

How are you making the collection of dots that you’re masking?

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’re not already using expressions on your properties, you could do this:

1. Create a new null, name it “RETIMER”

2. Add a Slider Effect, name it “time”

3. Add two keyframes for time: one “0” keyframe at the beginning, and one “10” keyframe 10 seconds in. (Replace that last keyframe with whatever timescale is appropriate for you, but be sure to use a value in seconds.)

4. Add this expression to every property that you want to be affected by the global retimer:
valueAtTime(thisComp.layer("RETIMER").effect("time")("Slider"));

5. Animate the value of the “time” slider as you like.

Voila, time remapping on select property values only.

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Trevor Asquerthian] “But I can’t see how any of them will allow one timeline to be edited whilst being played out of a second workstation.”

Why not? Both Adobe team projects and Avid bin sharing allow multiple editors to work on the same project at the same time. (I presume Resolve’s collaboration feature works similarly). You’d edit on one machine on shared storage, then open the sequence for playout from the other machine as a read-only instance.

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

[Walter Soyka]

Unlike Dave, my studio actually uses Ae CC 2018, so I can speak to it from experience. I’d consider it a big step up over Ae CC 2015.

One big caveat, though: the latest version drops support for legacy QuickTime codecs. Most common production codecs are now supported directly by the Adobe apps, but if you’re using an older codec, you should stay on the previous release and consider re-evaluating your workflow going forward:
https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/quicktime7-support-dropped.html

(A little backstory if you’re curious why QuickTime support is going away: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1129010#1129012)

Ae CC 2018 should read Ae CC 2015 files without issue. (But this should have been your experience going from CS6 to CC 2015, too. I’d be curious to hear about what kinds of issues you rant into.) Note that you can install multiple versions of Ae side-by-side, so you can test for yourself how well it work by using the Advanced Options in the Creative Cloud installer, and unchecking “Remove old versions:”
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/help/creative-cloud-updates.html#Advancedoptions

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 use an Unmult effect (there are free versions from Red Giant Software and Mekajiki) to remove the black background.

https://www.redgiant.com/user-guide/universe/unmult/ (GPU)
https://www.redgiant.com/support/legacy-installers/ (CPU)
https://www.mekajiki.com/free_tools.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]

This sounds like a big ask for any one non-specialist system, but what using two machines (one for editing, one for playout) with shared storage in an Adobe Premiere Pro team project, Avid bin sharing, or Resolve multiple user workflow?

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 be curious to see the tutorial you reference, because what you’re describing shouldn’t be happening.

“Leave all attributes” should preserve the layer size. “Move all attributes” will make a precomp that’s the same size as the containing comp, though you could resize/reposition this after the fact.

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 could try Dependencies > Consolidate All Footage. I’d be curious to see if that works after you’ve already re-linked one set of media.

If you’re able to preserve the relative folder structure of media on disk when you relink it, you should only have to relink the first one and Ae should find the rest automatically. Is that not working right for you?

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’s possible that your converter application is introducing the issue. Have you tried the WebM plugin for Adobe Media Encoder?

https://www.fnordware.com/WebM/

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

[Walter Soyka]

[Nick West] “Is it preferable to have my AE as 32bit? I only ask this because the EXR’s are only 16bit and I noticed that some effects do not function in a 32bit comp.”

Ae means something different by 16-bit than EXR does.

Ae uses integers to represent pixel values at the 8- and 16-bpc settings. That means that black happens at 0, and white happens at 255 (8bpc) or 32,768 (16bpc), and nothing can ever be darker or brighter. When you use 32bpc in Ae, it uses floating point numbers to represent pixel values. Black is 0.0, and white is 1.0, and you can represent colors darker than black and brighter than white.

So switching from 8bpc to 16bpc to 32bpc in Ae always gives you more precision, but 8bpc and 16bpc work in the same fundamental way (clipping extreme color values), while 32bpc works in a different way (allowing extreme color values).

In more practical terms, in floating poing (Ae’s 32bpc), you can blow out the highlights with one effect, then restore them later with another effect. With the integer color depths (8 and 16), those blown highlights will not be recoverable.

The EXR format has the ability to use 16-bit “half float” floating point numbers. Black is 0.0, white is 1.0, and you can represent colors darker than black and brighter than white. It’s less precise than full 32-bit floating point, but still fundamentally different than an integer-based color depth.

As you point out, there are a number of effects in Ae that do not support 32-bit, floating point processing. These still work in 32bpc comps, with the caveat that the 32bpc image is stepped down to 8 or 16bpc (whatever the effect allows), and will be processed at that integer-based color depth, then stepped back up to 32bpc for compositing or the next effect.

Values below 0.0 and above 1.0 will be clipped, and precision will be reduced. Use these effects sparingly, and consider using the HDR Compander effect when you need to preserve highlight detail. You’d compress the range before an integer effect and expand it afterwards.

TL;DR. Not all 16-bit modes are created equal. You should stick with 32bpc in Ae for CG comp to correctly handle values outside the normal range, and you should be careful when you use an 8-bit or 16-bit effect.

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