How Notepad Became a Crucial Piece of Software for UCF: Abstract Messiah's Post-Production

So, many of you have probably seen this before, or maybe even used it. Me, personally, I was gobsmacked that it actually worked, and wanted to share it with you.

We had a bit of a problem working on post-production for UCF: Abstract Messiah. I'm doing the final assembly of the movie, edit and effects and everything. I'm using After Effects CS3. Vapes is doing color correction; he usually prefers Vegas but he does have AE, so he's been doing it in there.

Problem: He has CS5, a newer version, and After Effects can't save with backwards compatibility.

Train of thought: One time, I went to paste some text into notepad. However, I got distracted along the way and worked in AE, copying some keyframes from one layer and applying them to another. I then went to Notepad, not realizing that I'd cleared my clipboard, and pasted... and out came perfectly clear "After Effects Keyframe Data". A small sample of moving a layer around and changing its scale is below, though TF.N can't keep its formatting. At the time, I thought it interesting, but didn't think of the applications.

Adobe After Effects 8.0 Keyframe Data

Units Per Second 29.97
Source Width 1000
Source Height 1000
Source Pixel Aspect Ratio 1
Comp Pixel Aspect Ratio 1

Transform Position
Frame X pixels Y pixels Z pixels
0 640 360 0
2 584 328 0
4 410 336 0
6 434 416 0
8 564 454 0
10 810 366 0
12 736 278 0
14 640 358 0

Transform Scale
Frame X percent Y percent Z percent
0 100 100 100
4 90 90 98.9011
8 120 120 100.84
14 100 100 100


End of Keyframe Data

Last night, Vapes and I were again banging heads on the color correction issue. I didn't want to upgrade if it could be avoided, and finally I remembered my Notepad accident. "Worth a shot," I said.

Procedure: Vapes copied all of the keyframes for an effect and pasted them into a Notepad document. He then e-mailed the document to me, where I applied the same effect then copied the keyframe data in.

[image=http://pressenter.phispace.net/UCF/Temp/CC%20Test%201.PNG]

Eureka. Keyframes where they belong, doing what they're supposed to.

This is really handy if you've got multiple people working on different versions of After Effects, it's saving me money and it's saving us the time of having to transfer CC information manually. Copy, paste, send, copy, paste.

Again. Some of you have heard of this, I'm sure, and maybe even used it, but it's new to me and I felt it was worth sharing.

 

Vaportrail Films: CS FOUR

The point of differing versions still stands, Vapes But yes, CS4.

 

Yep.
This is probably how I'll do it from now on, even when the same versions are in use. Seems like it'd be a lot easier than having to worry about importing different project files and all that garbage. For another test, I just made a quick mask on a white solid with three unique keyframes and copied them, then deleted the mask. I clicked on the white solid layer and hit paste, and bam. All three keyframes, rarin' to go.

So, yes. This will work for lightsabers. As long as everyone's working off the same source footage and project settings and paste from the same starting point, this is a handy little technique. The only trick is that instead of a single project file, you'd have to save a .txt file for each mask/effect/etc, but provided you're organized with your filenames, it shouldn't be any real trouble.

 

Masks don't seem to work in CS3; I've looked at the text file he sent me for said sample masks and I just can't make head or tails of it, how CS4 is figuring it out. Copying it into CS3, my white solid gets a mask but there's no keyframes for path, feather, anything. But CS3 and later (and probably earlier) can at least figure out simple numerical data.

 

Already knew this, but since you never asked, I guess you just had to figure it out