So this doesn't seem like it should be an overly complex thing to set up, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do it. I'm still kind of a novice when it comes to expressions...   I have a crane-like object rigged up, carrying a payload that sways back and forth a bit to simulate the inertia of a large, heavy object. I'd like to add a "shadow" underneath the payload object; it needs to match the x-axis movement of the "payload", but ignore the y- (and z-) axis motion. The tricky part is that the "payload" is parented to a "hook", which is parented to the head of the crane, which is parented to part 1 of the crane arm, which is parented to part 2 of the crane arm, etc. etc. The "payload" itself has no keyframes and no moving properties itself -- the motion is driven entirely by the various other layers parented througout the chain. My workaround is to brute force it, throwing everything into a subcomp that I track using Mocha, then strip out all movement other than the x-axis, but there must be a better way to do this. Any suggestions? ... View more

We've been running CC2021 for a few years now, as it's been relatively stable and bug-free. Adobe forced us to "upgrade" by shutting down the speech-to-text servers for captioning, and, as expected, CC2023 is riddled with bugs and contains some absolutely hilariously poorly-thought-out UX issues. **long, slow clap** The issue we're currently wrestling with is that drone footage from our DJIs won't export. Playback is smooth on the timeline, but when exporting through either AME or Premiere, the clips appear frozen, or extremely choppy (like, 0.5 or 1 fps). Drone footage is UHD 59.94fps h265. The exact same footage located on the exact same drive plays back properly in every standalone video player we have (including on phones). It plays back and exports properly in Pr v15 (CC2021). This is NOT an issue surrounding "high hardware requirements for h265" or "long GOP decoding requirements" or "the efficiency of DJI's encoder". This is a straight-up Premiere fart-up. Please advise on how we can get Premiere Pro to actually do the one job it is expected to do: export professional-grade video content. Re-encoding all of our drone footage to an intermediate codec is not a solution. Disabling hardware encoding for all of our exports is not a solution (and doesn't solve the issue, anyway). This is a common problem on several of our machines (both newer and older than mine), but let's just use the specs for my personal workstation -- Windows 10 Pro v 22H2 Premiere "Pro" 23.1.0 Ryzen 3800x 64GB RAM GTX 1080 ... View more

I'm trying to figure out how to best explain this; hopefully, I'll be able to describe what I'm looking to do without getting too confusing. I've been beating my head against the wall with this off and on for years, now. Every once in awhile, I go down a rabbit hole online and start searching for answers, but haven't had any luck. Here's what I'm looking to do: I'm essentially looking to make easily customizable gradient ramps, so I (or other users, if I'm creating a template or MOGRT) can change a single colour value, and adjust a series of gradient ramps throughout the comp. So, let's say I've got a BG layer with a gradient ramp on it. To keep it simple, the start colour is FF0000, and the end colour is 660000 -- pure red, ramping to a darker version of that red. I know I can easily pickwhip both the start and the end colour values to separate Color Controllers on a "Master Color" layer (let's call the controls "Primary" and "Secondary"); from there, if I pickwhip the colour values of various other elements throughout the project to the "Master Color" layer, and easily change the colours throughout the project. If the branding changes from red to green, I just have to modify the "Master Color" > "Primary" and "Secondary" controls to be green, and a darker shade of green, and boom, all of a sudden the BG, text elements, highlights, etc. all change to green instead of red. The tricky part is that I'd like to automate and simplify this, so I can add a bunch of different colour variations throughout the project, and have them all update by changing a single colour value. So, for example, within my project, I have pure red set as the starting point on "Master Color" > "Primary". In the project, I have a few elements that use a moderately darker shade of that "Primary" red, a few that use a moderately lighter shade of that "Primary" red color, and a few elements that use significantly darker and lighter shades of the "Primary" color. Maybe I have a few contrasting highlight elements that use the same general shade as the "Primary" red, but shift the hue into the yellow or purple range. That winds up being a lot of colour controls, if they all have to be broken out individually, and, frankly, relying on clients or template end-users to pick a nice selection of colours is maybe a bit of a stretch. SO, what I'm hoping is that there's a way to create expressions that all reference a single colour controller, and either add or subtract values from the individual HSL values. Hypothetically, I'd add an expression to the Start Color of my gradient ramp that takes the unadjusted values from "Master Color" > "Primary"; the End Color value would have an expression that is, like, H + 0, S + 0, L - 30  (automatically creating a darker shade of the "Master Color" > "Primary" colour value); my contrasting elements would have a Fill effect with an expression linked to "Master Color" > "Primary", with, like, H + 50, S + 0, L + 0 (automatically creating a colour with a different hue of "Master Color" > "Primary" colour value); my highlight elements would have a Fill effect with an expression linked to "Master Color" > "Primary", with, say, H + 0, S - 40, L + 0 (automatically creating a colour with a lighter shade of "Master Color" > "Primary" colour value). Users just have to modify a single colour, and the entire colour scheme is updated across the project. I think I might almost have the answer using this expression, which seems to break out HSL into individual values, where I can modify the "+ 0" values to create what I'm looking for, but I can't quite figure out how to set the initial value by grabbing the colour values from a separate "Master Color" control layer somewhere else in the project. Also, if someone could explain what the different breakouts in the array modify, that would be awesome. I think hsl[0] modifies the Hue, hsl[1] the Saturation, and hsl[2] the Lightness (?), but I don't really get what hsl[3] does? hsl = rgbToHsl(value); assemble = [hsl[0] + 0, hsl[1] + 0, hsl[2] + 0, hsl[3]]; hslToRgb(assemble) Hopefully that's not too confusing and in-the-weeds. If anything doesn't make sense, please let me know! Thanks in advance, all of you expressions masters out there! ... View more