Encountered problems in AE. Tutorial 5

I was lucky enough to not to encounter anything major. But After Effect crushes every once in a while, and most of the time it does it when the work is not saved. So, go to the after effects preferences and set it on autosave - do yourself a favor.

Then I found out, that sometimes it is much easier to place certain parts of the animation as a separate composition within another composition. For example, my fishes consist of four layer each and I have a whole bunch of them on the screen. In order to avoid a huge clutter, I precomposed four layers that have different mask on that make a single fish as a separate composition. The difficulty is, when you have 30 copies of the same composition,and you need to make one of them, say, different color, do not change properties inside of the composition. It will change them all. Apply changes to the composition separately to the while thing.

When you need to make two masks that would be close together so that there is no gap between them, make one mask, set it on none, and then duplicate it with command+d. Then drag the points away to the area where you need them to be, leaving the adjusting edge intact.

Loop Expression. Tutorial 4

Sometimes we need to place a loop on a certain motion, so that it is repeated over and over and over again. I needed to place such loop on my fishes, so that they would continually move in the water.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ebberts_dan/layer_looping.php

http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/227/7832

The most common loop expression is loop_out("cycle",0) it means that the movement is going to be repeated as is.

Wiggle Effect. Tutorial 3.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ebberts_dan/ae6_exp.php

Expressions are one of the interesting functions in After Effects. For example we can use wiggle effect to create a sense of liveliness and motion.

In order to make an object move randomly we need to use a wiggle expression. Wiggle expression can be placed on any transformation property. It can be places on rotation (and the object will rotate randomly), or position, or opacity and so on.

In order to place an expression on a position we need to command+shift click on the stopwatch. And when we get a line to place our expression we write wiggle(5,25). We can write any number according to our needs. The first number is the amount of wiggle movements or changes in the property per second. The second number is the amount of pixels, or values. 25 means that the range of the change is going to be from -25 to 25 pixels.