If I place a half-res clip in the comp and scale it up to 200% to fit the comp, for some reason this makes the border of the entire comp slightly transparent. I can see just a little bit of the grid through the edge, and this also appears in the alpha channel if I view that.

This only happens when the footage size exactly matches the comp. If I modify the scale, it goes away.

Importantly, this still happens when other layers are below, so it's not just a matter of not filling the frame, the layer is somehow also breaking the alpha for the entire comp. In my screenshot, I have a solid behind the layer. When the layer is on, I get the transparent border. When I turn the scaled layer off, the border goes away.

Hi guys,

I'm getting really frustrated about the fact that my After Effects seems to behave in a different way than it should do, when it comes to creating a solid object, using the beam effect on it and then trying to track the Starting Point on a null object. When you watch it on the online tutorial, the top of the line goes right on the anchor point of the null object. Unfortunately, mine goes randomly on the screen, but nowhere nearly the anchor point of the null object.

If this doesn't make any sense to you, I've uploaded a video on youtube to showcase my problem. In the video I've also included the online tutorial, just to show how it can work for other people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIDI7FWSOi4&feature=youtu.be

Furthermore, even when the line does go on the anchor point of the null object, there's still something that doesn't work as it should do. Let's say I wanted to have a target tracking a certain part of the subject's body. That works just fine. Then I want the null object to track the same tracking point. When that happens the lines which are following the null object go all over the screen again. Why is that ?

I need help with this...

I have a layer over my video to do drawing frame by frame. The drawing is basically little firework-like animations that go over my waveform that contains firework sounds. It's important that I sync it up correctly so I need to switch back to my composition and play it back in real time. But when I switch back to my composition, I believe it shows an older cached preview.

Worse yet, is if I delete a brush stroke from my drawing layer, it doesn't SHOW that it's deleted, in fact it just stays there in the layer preview until I save and restart After Effects.

Restarting After Effects does not solve the first problem.

This is how parenting works when you copy/paste a new set of layers. It creates parents relative to the new layers you've pasted. That is smart, now if only effects worked the same way! For some reason the default behavior on plugins is to revert the layer inputs on effects like “set matte” or “create nulls from paths” to the source layer that the effect is applied to after pasting.

I frequently use both of the aforementioned effects to make templates, and I'm constantly copy/pasting sets of template layers into new comps, but every time I do I have to manually reconnect the layer inputs which becomes and enormous pain when doing it 20+ times.

I attached a reference of what I'm talking about in case it wasn't clear.

The original comp is showing a set matte effect that is on layers 4-6. It's taking the matte from layer 7, "box1 matte4". When I copy/paste these layers into a new comp in the second image, you'll see that the set matte effect has been reset to layer 4, "feet" which is the same layer the effect is on. Why can't it remember the relative layer references?? It remembered all of the parenting, but it can't remember these for some reason.

PLEASE figure out a way to implement this. It's a huge time suck and I'm not sure why anyone would want it to function as it does currently.

ExpoGlow

Would love to see the glow plug-in get an overhaul. I assume this is in the top 10 most used effects (it sure is for me) and there is plenty of room for improvement!

First feature would be to add an "exponential" checkbox with a gamma slider. This would of course make the glow fall off with an inverse square ratio - but with the addition of the gamma slider it could be user controllable. It is important that this effect is 32bpc "under the hood" so that we get accurate highlights - even in an 8bpc and 16bpc project (the output would of course be clipped in these cases).

Secondly when dealing with HDR projects the glow effect goes quite haywire. Not sure what math is going wrong but highlights tend to EXPLODE when they are super-white and I more often than not have to build by own glow with levels, blur and blending modes. Adding in a soft "shoulder" slider for 32bpc compositions would be a very nice way to handle this. Just one slider which mimics the shoulder node in Magic Bullet Looks, for example.

And lastly there seems to be something off with the current glow filter in terms of color and saturation. Try getting a nice golden glow and 99.9% of the time you get a hellish red color. I'm assuming this has to do with the (arguably) broken gamma and color workflow in AE. Whatever it is please make it so that glow colors are a bit more predictable, and add a "Saturation" slider to the glow effect!

Bonus:
As a bonus if one of the Adobe devs wants to dive in to incorporating Fractal Noise and Roughen Edges into the glow I think it would be time well spent ;) I'm quite happy with how Red Giant did this with Trapcode Shine. The ability to have 3D parallax is very nice and I use it quite often.