Here is yet another effect created in After Effects following a tutorial from VideoCopilot.net. If you haven't checked their stuff out before, it's a great resource.
I'm really looking forward to creating some of my own stuff soon, but these tutorials have been invaluable in learning the capabilities of the program and some standard workflow stuff. Anyway, enjoy it!
The camera motion presented kind of a weird challenge in this one. The video uses the "auto-orient" transform feature to enhance the 3d look of the glowing orbs (they're actually 2d planes, constantly oriented to face the camera.) However, as you pass by one of the orbs, the auto-orient feature forces the orb to extend into infinite z distance behind the camera. When you go to render this out, After Effects tells you that it doesn't have enough memory to keep track of a 11000x16000 pixel frame.
My solution: Cut the layers time down to end when the orb goes just out of frame. However, a couple of times, it still created a layer that was too large to render out in doing this. Well, believe it or not, After Effects has a "SECRET" setting under preferences, allowing you to force after effects to clear its memory cache after a specified number of frames, avoiding the "out of memory problem." To access the "Secret" portion of the preferences, hold shift when going to preferences and selecting any of the basic ones listed. When you get into that menu, access the drop down list, and there will be one called "Secret" and then you can change its settings.
I found out about it on CreativeCow.com. Sounded like something out of a video game to me, but it did the trick! Anyway, that's enough for now. I'll probably do some more work in Illustrator and Photoshop next. But After Effects is so fun!
