Animating Stills Over A Video in AE

[jimlolo]

I have a video with an ice cream cone still on a layer above the video. The still is animated through Mocha tracking data from an object in the original video. I want to add a drip of ice cream to the ice cream cone that requires 12 stills to make it look continuous.

These stills will need the tracking data applied to them. I create these stills in Photoshop, with the cone on the bottom layer, then each layer above the cone has a longer and longer drip of ice cream, from no drip to all the way down.

What's the best way to get these stills from Photoshop into AE, and can they all appear in 1 layer, or 1 layer per still?

I also want each still to last 2 frames (i.e. 2/24 second in time).

Thanks.

[Szalam · Accepted solution]

There are a couple of ways to do that.

If they're all layers in your Photoshop file, the easiest thing to do would be to import the PSD as a composition (retain layer sizes). Then, you can just go into the resulting comp, move two frames into it, trim all of your drip layers alt/opt + ] ) - thus they're two frames long each. And then use the Keyframe Assistant command "sequence layers".

Alternatively, if you have all of your drip images saved as separate files (Drip_01, Drip_02, etc.), you can import them all as an image sequence and in the interpret footage dialog, tell them what frame rate you want them to be.

[jimlolo]

Having a problem with lining up the drip with the cone in AE. I have a drip still as a layer. In Photoshop the still of the drip is the same image and canvas size as the cone.

In AE, I associated the drip with the tracking data for the cone. I also copied position, rotation, and scale from the cone to the drip still. I checked and all values are the same between the cone and the drip.

But the drip is put in the upper left corner for some reason.

I did import as a Photoshop composition, and dragged a layer into my AE project. The layer is shown to be a PSD layer. Does that need to be a PNG? If so, how do I do that?

Thanks.`

[Martin_Ritter]

Since the cone is already tracked and placed, you can just parent the drip to the cone, without applying the tracking data twice or copying transition values.

Just place the drop - no matter if image sequence or composition - where it should be in the frame you are looking at and parent it to the cone.

[jimlolo]

Thanks.

Down to 1 last issue:

So I have a 4 layer composition in which I would like to slow down 3 layers:

Layer 1 - the background

Layer 2 - a PNG of an ice cream cone animated from tracking data

Layer 3 - a sequence of 15 PNGs, showing melted ice cream dripping down

Layer 4 - mattes to put hand back over the ice cream cone, tho the dripping ice cream is never covered.

The drip is too slow compared to the rest of the layers even when I set them as single frame PNGs.

How do I slow down parts of Layers 1, 2, and 4 (the area around the drip)? Having some trouble.

Thanks.

[Martin_Ritter]

You are working with tracking data, so the timing is kind of fixed.

Instead of making everything slower, I would make the drip faster. This is very easy, just right click on the layer, search for time and in the submenu time remap.

This gives you 2 keyframes, one at layers start, one at layers end. If you move the last keyframe in time to the left, the layer gets played back faster. This obviously will skip some frames.

If you will make everything slower instead, the best way is to use time remap, too. Make sure, the layers in question are precomps (otherwise there is no time option), create a new keyframe where the slow down should start and another where it should end and move the last 2 keyframes to the right until you have the timing you want.

Good luck!

[jimlolo]

A bit confused. The drip is 15 layers, each with a PNG, 1 frame in length. So it's not 1 layer, but 15.

How do I speed those up? Would that be the same as just removing every other PNG and putting them closer together? If so, that's not smooth enough.

As for slowing the other layers down instead, having trouble there too. I have a base layer, a cone PNG, and the matte layer which sits on top of the drip. So I can't combine them into 1 layer, right? I need to put the drip under the matte layer.  Do I precomp each individually and copy the time remap key frames to each? I guess not as that didn't work out.

Still confused.

[Martin_Ritter]

Ahh, I though the drip was already precomposed.

To speed it up, you need to put all those 15 layers in a composition and place this instead of the 15 layers in your main composition. You can just mark those 15 layers and press CRTL+SHIFT+C.

If the outcome is not smooth enough, you can try frame blending, but I thing the outcome will still not be good enough. See it by yourself.

For the other way around, you have to gather all layers into a precomps, as much as possible. You can put the base-layer into precomp 1. Than the drip in precomp 2 (even if not necessary at this point, I would precomp this, too, for the better handling). Than cone layer and matte layer in precomp 3. If this is not working out, put the matte layer into precomp 4. So you actual just replace all layers with their precomps to get the time-remap option.

Time remapping have to be the same in all precomps (instead of the drip, of course). You can just create all keyframes needed (see my other post about that), then mark all of them and move them at once.

If this not turns out the way you want, please make a little screen capture of the issue and your composition window. I can only guess right now, what your project and outcome looks like.