Never heard of H.21 or H.24 before, but you have more export options using Adobe MediaEncoder. You can just add your AE composition to the queue using CTRL + ALT + M. *Martin ... View more

Ha, funny! Two sides of the coin... But both should be possible: walking on the spot as well as slipping, or moonwalking. So it's a good idea to not hard-connect the cycle with the position. Even if this is, what most people want, I prefer the have the option to create unrealistic comic-motion. However, DUIK did not include (as far as I know) the function to move the character according to it's walk cycle at all, and if you really just want the character walk realistically, you have to start counting pixels and keyframe everything. That's when the expression comes in handy. ... View more

If you are not pleased with the result, dig deeper into tracking. The build-in AE tracker is not the best. You may check out Mocha for this. It would be also helpful to see a screenshot the your scene. Kind, Martin ... View more

Do you still have AME CC2018 installed? Something like this happens to me once, when I tried to Dynamik Link between two versions. *Martin ... View more

Seems like you have to upgrade AE or downgrade macOS... ... View more

Oh man, Rick - keep calm! I know what I'm talking about and it's as easy as I said. One don't need to start with the h264 whitepaper (and not everybody got the time to do so) - sometimes you just want to render and upload it. It took about 10 sec. to google up-to-date and official instagram video-specifications and I stated out that the actual IG video standards should be used (https://blog.snappa.com/instagram-video-format/) : H.264 Codec MP4 Container AAC Audio 3 500 kbps bitrate for video Frame rate of 30 fps (frames per second) Maximum file size of 15 mb Video must be a maximum of 60 seconds Maximum video width is 1080 px (pixels) wide The best Instagram video dimensions you should use are 864 pixels (width) by 1080 pixels (height) amount with an aspect ratio of 4:5. For IGTV it's (https://help.instagram.com/1038071743007909?helpref=faq_content) : Video File Type Videos must be in MP4 file format. Video Resolution and Size Videos should be vertical (not landscape) with an aspect ratio of 9:16. Videos should have a minimum frame rate of 30 FPS (frames per second) and minimum resolution of 720 pixels. The maximum file size for videos that are 10 minutes or less is 650MB. The maximum file size for videos up to 60 minutes is 3.6GB. After this, it's just a matter of setting up a comp with the given fps and dimensions, putting the content in it and then export with the settings above. Cheers, Martin ... View more

I dealt with Arabic Text a couple of months ago and almost got crazy while doing so. Actually the words and letters look completely different in different Arabic fonts. Long words shrink down to something that looks like a letter only and that's totally correct (I got a native speaker right next to me back then). I ended up with what ScooterD76 said: fix the words into a graphics (using AI or PS) and work with that. Also note that there is a RTL-option in newer Adobe software, if this is the matter. I also got good results copying the texts into editor (Windows) before inserting into Adobe software. There is also an Arabic Keyboard for Photoshop Website, which creats copy-ready Arabic words: write arabic in photoshop Good luck! ... View more

Many beginners step into a similar problem. Mostly it's in the understanding on how AE works: AE focuses on playing back your composition no matter how complex it is, or how many effects you have applied. But before this can be done in realtime, AE needs to render the frames. Very soon this rendering took longer than realtime, leading to a playback framedrop (I've seen everything down to 0,01 fps). Back "in the old days" you usually hit 0-button on the num-block of the keyboard and than wait for minutes until the preview for a couple of seconds was rendered. Now you hit the spacebar and you expect a playback behavior like in premiere or any other NLE. But it highly depends on your system, hardware, software, and of course your composition, if this is even possible or not. Since CC2015 AE pitches the audio down to keep it in sync with the playback speed. Before CC2015, audio was just muted. You can go back to the "audio muted" option in the preference menu. However, the outcome will be, that after a few seconds you just don't hear any audio anymore. If you only want to hear the audio, you can press the comma-button on the num-block. AE should be capable of playing this without a framedrop. I suggest that you dig a bit into preview-rendering to understand how this is meant to be used. There are several options to improve playback speed - the most common might be to reduce preview-resolution. For more help, please provide the information Mylenium asked for. Cheers, Martin ... View more

I don't know what Instagram prefers (go and check this first) - but I would go with H264, MP4, 5Mbit. Best way to make the export is to use Media Encoder. Just open your comp and go to Menu-bar Compositon -> Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue, or press CTRL + ALT + M. ... View more

I would go with J'n'S since you got more options and possibilities (sliders, switch templates) and it's only 10 Scraps more than Headrig. If you only want to rig face and eye, J'n'S can do it, if you want to rig more, J'n'S can do it, too. Actual, you can have a rig for every single layer (only left eye, only right ear, only upper lip and so on), getting complex rigs with Headrig, too. But, J'n'S seems to be more comfortable, when it comes to greater complexity. ... View more

I would keep all the keyframes as reference. Once you start deleting them, you don't know how your animation used to look like. I don't know any script for this purpose (but it seems to be an interesting way to spend a couple of weeks/months creating one - serious!). Always keep in mind, that you only have to take care of the first cycle. After that, it's only repeating (unless you did fancy walkcycling stuff...). Headphones on, good music and your done in a couple of hours - Good luck! ... View more

I see. You can get rid of keyframes when an property is never altered, as I said before. But I don't know any comfortable way to get rid of all those unnecessary keyframes on the properties, which are altered, since the logic behind baking expression is just to calculate the final value and put this into a keyframes. To get a result with "as much keyframes as needed" you'll need an discrete cosine transformation algorithm (and you sinus wave in the screenshot is just a perfect example of how it works) which replicates the input with as less samples as possible. MP3 and JPEG is working this way. However... I can only think of duplicating every layer and recreating the motion by hand with keyframes, as you would do it without DUIK. This is monkeywork, but you can isolate the two layers in questions, but their opacity to 50% and than it should be a straight forward rotation-and-positioning thing. And once you got the first cycle, you can just copy-paste the keyframes. Cheers, Martin ... View more

Currently working with J'n'S and it's fine so far. The only thing I'm missing is to set up my artwork for up-left, up-right, down-left and down-right. J'n'S (and Bq_HeadRig as far as I can see from the videos) only interpolates between up and left (for instance) to get up-left. This is not working an all cases, especially when you are working with shape layes and outlines and a bit more complex characters than circles and squares. Cheers, Martin ... View more

The idea of "baking" expressions is to make a keyframe to every frame. As far as I know, there is no way to add an "intelligence" to this process which analyzes the expression and create keys only there they are needed. If a property never changes, you can just click on the stopwatch to remove all the keys. Why can't you just leave it the way it is with all the keyframes? Cheers, Martin ... View more

I can't answer your question - even though this library sounds great. BUT, there are several scripts available for years to create and manage an expression library right inside of AE and of course you can copy-paste expressions to an external editor. ... View more

Even if the expression-solution is a great way, this can be done with a simple loopOut(“pingpong”); - Loop as suggested in the first place. The trick to "hold" the loop is to add another - 3rd - keyframe with the last rotation value on it. To adjust the pause, you just drag the last keyframe around. Cheers, Martin ... View more

Yes to both. ... View more

The focus of AE is to playback whatever you created. This includes a simple text moving left and right up to high complex 2D/3D animation with hundreds of effect layers. AE never focused on short rendertimes and real-time playback - and actual it's kind of slow, when it comes to rendering compared with other software like Fusion or Unity. You GPU is overkill at the moment, since AE only use it for a couple of effects and motionblur (at least!). Also, AE runs better on high-rated CPUs instead of many cores. A i7 4-core 4,5 GHz could outperform your killer-machine. RAM is quiet nice - thumbs up! When it comes to final output renders, you can use RenderGarden to increase render speed, especial with our many cores. Concerning the preview, there is not much you can do. I try to keep my comps small, with a few layers only, precomps when ever possible. Also I use a dedicated 250GB SSD for cache. A good practice will be to have the same quality and resolution settings both for the RAM preview rendering (Preview Panel -> set it to automatic) and the still-image preview (Compsition panel). So every time you playback and it crunches through the frames, you won't loose this data, unless you change something - meaning the next time you playback, chances are good to have a bunch of frames already rendered. However, having a stable 7 to 9 fps for preview is actual good. Let it render, and when watch it - that's how stuff works in composition universe. You can also render some layers as movie or image sequence, when you know you won't change it anymore (something like a animated background, which runs in a loop which heavy effects and expressions kills your preview speed, but can easily final-rendered over night, inserted as png-sequence and won't annoy you anymore). Cheers, Martin ... View more

This is for sure a codec problem. I recommend MediaInfo (MediaInfo) to have a detailed look into the file and what codec is used. Report back, so we can help. Cheers, Martin ... View more

There are so many possibilities for this... - some caches somewhere in the system you never heard of, or never thought that they might exist - AE frame cache is not the only one - the media drive is getting slower with every MB is stores - or by time because of some power saving functions - RAM memory is filled up during the first rendering, AE doesn't flush it after the rendering, therefor, during the 2nd rendering, RAM has to be swapped into the virtual memory file on the physical drive, and this goes on with every rendering - GPU RAM fits nice during first rendering but might not get flushed either and need to be rewritten during the following renderings, or maybe get swapped into a file, too - AE maybe create frame cache during rendering (not sure about this), this cache filled up during first rendering and has to be rewritten during all the following renderings - some software which automatically updated recently interferes the renderings on a way, nobody will every understand I wouldn't bother about this anyway. As an AE user, you know that render times are awful. You can test your rendering and estimate the time it will take and plan those ahead. You can also use RenderGarden to cut down those render times in large amounts. RenderGarden is working like charm, especially if you have more than one workstation in your network. Finally you can switch to another application. Fusion is for free in it's basic but rich version and it renders really, really fast. Cheers, Martin ... View more

Use Dan's expression for the anchor point and change it to: w = content("Rectangle 1").content("Rectangle Path 1").size[1]; [value[0],-w/2] w = content("Rectangle 1").content("Rectangle Path 1").size[...]; -> taking the size of the rectangle and store it in the variable w. ...size[] is an array with two values, x and y. To access on of those values, you write size[0] for x and size[1] for y. [value[0],-w/2] is an array for x and y values, too. value[0] is the x value of the anchorpoint. This is a way to use an expression along with the possibility to change a value by entering it or drag it. -w/2 takes half of the y-size of the rectangle and moves the y-value of the anchorpoint by this amount, aka to the top of the rectangle. If you change -w/2 to w/2, the anchor point is pinned at the bottom of the rectangle. It's easier to understand, if you use actual values: Rectangle is x = 100, y = 200. Anchorpoint is at x = 0, y = 0 (in the middle of the rectangle) Coordinates of the top edge are 0,-100 Coordinates of the bottom edge are 0,100. (Coordinates of the left edge are -50,0. Coordinates of the right edge are 50,0.) w = content("Rectangle 1").content("Rectangle Path 1").size[1]; = 200 (y-value of the rectangle) -w/2 = -200/2 = -100 Coordinates for the anchorpoint are: [value[0],-w/2] = [0, -100] = top edge. Cheers, Martin ... View more

Yes, you can and it's quiet easy! As you pointed out, it's a matter of an expression: thisComp.layer("YOUR TEXT").sourceRectAtTime(time,true).width + OFFSET; This snippet gives you the width of your textbox. With the OFFSET, you can fine tune the position. A complete control over x and y values would look like this: x=thisComp.layer("YOUR TEXT").sourceRectAtTime(time,true).width + xOFFSET; y=thisComp.layer(("YOUR TEXT").sourceRectAtTime(time,true).height+ yOFFSET; [x,y]; Cheers, Martin ... View more

Is your question how to deal with expressions or how to access the width of a shape layer? Do you want to SET or want to GET the width via expressions? To set the width, it's as easy as this - applied to Rectangle Path -> Size [500, value[1]]; To get the width, you apply this on an different layer: thisComp.layer("Shape Layer 1").content("Rectangle 1").content("Rectangle Path 1").size[0] I hope, this helps! *Martin ... View more

Go into Rectangle 1 -> Size and there you have all the values, you need. Cheers, Martin ... View more