I don't use this option at all, but I know that it will only be available if the footage is actual used in a comp.   Check this first.   *Martin ... View more

It simply doesn't matter which recent GPU you put into your system. None of them will improve AE performance in a remarkable way. Only 3rd party addons which are GPU based will benefit. I'm working on a GTX1080 and the card is hardly used by AE.   AE is optimized for Windows, Intel, NVidia (Cuda in particular) - but will work on your Apple as well. You should focus on single thread performance of the CPU. The higher the clock speed, the better. 4 cores at 4Ghz will be faster then 8 cores at 2 Ghz for example. And you should put in as much RAM as possible. I'm working with 64GB and I'm already pushing the limits when doing 360° stuff. If you have enough RAM, your final renders will be way faster if you use on of the available render managers. Check aescripts or google for that.   *Martin ... View more

Beside Myleniums answer, I doubt that this will work at all, since Adobe dropped support for a lot of codecs and containers for AE. Existing render managers usual render the comp as image sequence and second pass it to ffmpeg to make a video file. Since those managers are available, there is hardly a reason to write your own.   *Martin ... View more

Revert back to the previous AE version and never ever update AE during a project. Switch off auto-update for Adobe apps, just as you did for windows.   *Martin ... View more

No, that's not what I mean.   With step out, I mean what happends when double clicking on a nested clip, but in reverse.   When I double click, it opens the nested clip in the edit window/timeline window and I see all the tracks and the CTI (current time marker) is right in the same position as in the main sequence relative from the in-point of the nested clip.   Now I want to go back to the main sequence, so it closes the timeline of the nested clip, brings me back to the timeline of the main sequence and CTI is in the same position as it was in the nested timeline.   Here is a short video of how it works in Avid: https://youtu.be/L45AnVH4NkQ?t=67   *Martin ... View more

For clearance:   You downloaded the zip to dekstop, unzip, open and everything was fine. Next you downloaded the zip to another drive, unzip, open and files are corrupted.   So second download was corrupt?!   *Martin ... View more

You have to include your assets to the download - I just see missing files.   But I see linear keyframes, which might already be the issue. Learn a bit about easing in AE. Also, a smooth animation is all about timing. Combine fast motion with slow motion, as a general rule of thumb.   An finally, have those in mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_basic_principles_of_animation   *Martin ... View more

AE runs on CPU mainly, only some effects and 3rd party plugins use GPU at all. Server CPUs (mostly Xeon) are far from being an ideal solution for AE, because of the very low clock speed per core. AE needs very high single core performance in order to run potential as fast as possible.   Good hardware choice starts at 4GHz per core, higher is better.   You might can overcome this limitation a bit by using command line renderer (aerender.exe) and launch it in parallel for different render ranges. However, each process needs it own space in RAM, therefore you won't get far with only 30GB. Have a look at RenderGarden, RenderBoss or some of the others, or start to write your own manager.   *Martin ... View more

This will only effect the startup/asset loading time of AE. If you are working with thousend of assets, or gigabytes of assets, this might be useful. However, no effect on preview rendering time. It would be helpful to put AE cache on this SSD, or to get another SSD just for caching. Cache on HDD is noticeable slow.   What slows down AE when animating a character is the heavy use of expressions and working with vector layers. I usual animate in 1/4 resolution to get acceptable preview rendering times.   *Martin ... View more

Let AE render the preview in full resolution and with all effects. If the preview rendering fails at a certain frame, investigate this spot. Most likely, there is an effect which your computer cannot render properly. Find a workaround for this spot and you are good to go.   *Martin ... View more

After Effects is for creating video content. You won't get the tour done in AE, but check out Muse or Animate.   *Martin ... View more

Shape layers are a bit tricky to align, if you don't pay attention.   On a shape layer, you have the LAYER position and the LAYER anchorpoint (just like in all other layers, too). But next to this, there is a SHAPE position and a SHAPE anchorpoint, aswell.   Make sure, all of those values are the same for both shapes. You can also try to use the rectengular with rounded corners to make a sqaure become a cycle. Just animate the radius of the corner.   *Martin ... View more

The technique is to have a shape (male and female character in this case) used as alpha mask on top of a simple shape layer, which is animated in size, or position. Search for "alpha mask".   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce-z4Xrxczo   *Martin ... View more

Caches files are by default only used while working on the project, not for the final rendering. Since AE tend to re-render the preview even on the most light changes (removing a marker, for instance), the cache is rewritten all the time. It really just speed up preview rendering if you are working on the same scene for hours. As Mylenium said, it's not that important at all.   My AE cache is on a NVMe disk, which can tansfer data with about 1GB/s. Most of the time, I see transfer speeds of 60MB/s, but occasionally the speed is up to several hundreds of megabytes per second. The transfer speed of your network will be fair enough, but if the fileserver cannot handle multiply access of very small data in large amounts, you might end up with a bottleneck.   My advice for you is to monitor the cache drive on all computers for a while (i/o speeds, access times, ... ) to get an idea what is going on there. Then you can test the server stats against those values and eloborate if it is worth trying.   Or you just remap the cache and if no one complains, everything is good. 😉   *Martin ... View more

I'm not going much into detail here, but things should get easier if your shapes original size is equal the size of your picker comp. A scale of 100 is something you'll probably never use, but the math will get way simplier, just like you did on rotation.   *Martin ... View more

But you still can download a demo version and give it a try and see by yourself how the software is performing.    *Martin ... View more

Lowest system requirements for the latest CC version is 16GB of RAM. Intel integrated GPU is not supported, as far as I know. And I highly doubt that anything will run properly on an i3.   *Martin ... View more

I think there is no limit, crank it up as much as you like. I have 256GB SSD (232GB usable after formating), and 230GB for AE cache.   It will get full sooner or later, no matter how much space you allocate to AE.   *Martin ... View more

The designed workflow is to use Adobe Media Encoder for exports. There you'll find all container and codecs.   *Martin ... View more

You simply did it wrong.   That's the correct way:   1. The layer you want to loop have to be shorter than your composition, otherwise the loop is pointless. 2. Activate time remap, go to the last keyframe, step back one frame, set a new keyframe, delete the last keyframe 3. apply the expression 4. extent the layer by dragging it's end to the right   *Martin ... View more

50 hours is total reasonable, yes. You should invest in more RAM and Rendergarden or the other ones, to speed this up. But yes, 4K 360 material is a good AE killer, even on a high end computer.   I cannot make sense out of your picture, it hardly look like a requirectengular projection, but I can be wrong. For preview, the GoPro VR Player is quiet good. You can switch projections and 3D modes (SB, LR, ...) very easy.   *Martin ... View more

This is not possible.   Think about it: You are creating a video. Every pixel is set. What you want is an overlay, which moves with the rotation of the users head. So its position is not set in the video, but variable.   You need to solve this in the video player itself and might have to create your own video player app for this.   *Martin ... View more

Nothing happend? This already means something if off in your code.   Just to clearify: you run the script inside of AE?   And yes, there should be a dialog box popping up with the value of posH. Or something like [object], or even NaN, Null, undefinded. When working with alert, you might add .name, or .value, .length to your variable to get a useful information, like e.g.: alert(mySelectedLayers) -> [object] alert(mySelectedLayers.length) -> 3   Put the alert beneath this line: var posV = app.project.activeItem.layer("Desk").transform.position[1];   It should work. Then go on, put it into the for-loop and check the result (turn of your speakers, you'll get a lot alert when putting it into the for-loop).   *Martin ... View more

You mean something like alert(posH);  -  duuude?!   ... View more

The video tutorial leave out a lot of other thing to take into consideration, when it comes to faster (preview) rendering.   Here are some of the points:   Lowering resolution will only work for preview renderings. If not changed manually, AE will always take the best quality for the final export. This can dramatically increase rendering times, as well as bring the computer to a stopp, because it ran out of ressources. It's highly adviceable to spot check the work in full resolution before the final render.   Lowering resolution will only work this way, if the preview resolution in the preview panel is set to "(auto)".   Lowering resolution has a drastically effect on the visuals. Not only the image gets pixellated, also effects are rendering different. Artefacts can occur quickly, driving beginners crazy because they don't know where those came from (thanks to videos like this).   Working with a lower resolution is only adviceable when designing timing, never it should be used when designing imagery and effects.   Next to lowering resolution, the preview panel offers the option to skip frames. Skipping frames effectivly cuts down the preview rendering time. Skipping 1 or 2 frames is fair enough to still work on timing roughly, skipping more then 2 should rather be used for very rough timing or imagery.   Working with precomps is adviceable instead of putting all layers into one comp. It's easier for AE to handle a lot of precomps and a lot of hierachy levels, then handling a lot of layers at once. Also, it helps to keep all layers in sight. The more you see, the less mistakes you do and the more you can trust on your workflow, the less you need to check with previewing.   Heavy expressions, which are not necassary for the visual outcome, can always be deactivated with a checkbox. AE is not going to calculate the expression, when it is switched off this way. The code is basically:   check = // pickwhip checkbox here if (check == 0){ // expression goes here } else { value;};​ This can be used to deactivate several expressions at once, effectivly creating an "edit mode" with fewer effects and faster preview rendering times. This can be expanded to layers opacity and effects opacity, too.     When working with AI layers, deactivation continuous rasterization if helpful to speed up preview rendering times. Of course the artwork isn't that crisp anymore, might even gets heavily pixellated. Therefore, CR has to switch on again before final rendering. While creating the animation, arraging elements, timing you can often work with pixellated graphics. There are scripts available for sure, which let you switch CR on and off with one click.   Hardware is also to take into consideration. AE runs best on a fast CPU. Intel is generally more adviceable than AMD, but the latest generation of Threadrippers are doing a good job. Faster clockspeeds are preferable then a high clock count. GPU is hardly used by AE. NVidia is more adviceable then AMD and there is no need, if not total incompatibility, for the latest generations. A GTX 10xx series card is just fine. RAM is critical to AE. The more the better, actually, there is no limit. For serious AE work, at least 64GB are adviceable. Keep in mind, that OS alone will take around 4GB just to run. Never assign all memory to AE, the system can crash. Fast drives for caching and project assets are highly adviceable. It's good pratice to seperate cache from project files and assets.   Don't gain your knowledge from 15'' tutorials, which are actual 36'' and only spend 20% on the topic - gain your knowledge from professionals who work in the field. AE is just to complex to learn all the details quickly.   *Martin ... View more

You can help yourself pretty well if you alert() your variables, to see their actual data. You can use alert() as well to check, if the loops are running correctly. alert() whatever you need to know on runtime - that's how I find my bugs.   *Martin     ... View more

As Mylenium said, you should get deeper into the tangents to increase the look of the path. This requires a bit fine tuning, instead of keyframing status 1 to status 2. Go to the point where the line looks worst and adjust the tangents there. And repeat this necassary.   The next thing is easing. To get a smooth motion, you need to ease those keyframes. Get an overview about AEs easing options online (in the help section or just google it - this is basic and there should be plenty of ressources). There are differnt kinds of keyframes for different applications. Learn the differents and when to use what. Spend your time this is speed graph editor. It is confusung at the beginning, but starts to make sense after you played around with the curves for a while. Alternativly, get a script like Flow.   If easing alone won't do it, you might retime everything a bit and add keyframes to stretch or shring speeds. For example, you have 3 keyframes: 0, 50, and 100%. You put KF1 at 0f, KF2 at 20f and KF3 at 25f. This will give you a smooth start and a fast end. You can create keyframes for 0, 40, 50, 60, 100%. You put all keyframes 5f apart, and now the middle part is slower than the rest. To get a smooth end, you can just add a keyframe at 90% and move the last keyframes far away. So you have one speed for 0 to 90 and another, slower speed for 90 to 100.   You can literally spend hours working on easing, but this is exactly what makes the different between a chunky motion and a designed motion.   *Martin ... View more

If you work on timing, there is no need for a crystal clear image, if you work on imagery, there is no need for realtime playback. Most of the time, I work with quarter resolution, sometimes I also skip frames. Also, I use the render area a lot. Mostly it is just a few seconds, sometimes even just a few frames. I press 0 on numpad to render this area only and watch the preview of this part, alternate the values and watch again until I'm happy with the result.   *Martin       ... View more