substandard

Simple, clean, organized. Short precise descriptions. Keep your type small and elegant. San-Serif. No textures or colored backgrounds. Yeah it's true, that they're going to hire you for your work, not your resumé. But if your resumé sucks, why should they look at your reel?

In that case most of the interest comes from the design itself. If the hand-animated masks resolved in something ugly, the animation wouldn't save it.

Yeah, you're missing something. I think it's great. It's good clean design, loosely references playhead controls, but not too literal. When you say it's not modern, if you're suggesting it should be shiny or extruded, you are a fool. It seems I'm getting more catty with my posts lately. Sorry.

When choosing your settings uncheck 'Reorder Frames.' Might take care of it.

This site has a few scripts that might help. http://aescripts.com/ A) Use the Throttle script to restrict multi-proc to leave some processors free for working. Or set up a multi-machine render, and use BG-Renderer to launch multiple terminal renders. Option B is slightly better. Never use multi-proc on image sequences.

Be careful where you throw stones X-Rite. I usually don't jump in on criticism wars, but seriously come on. When your portfolio is a powerpoint presentation, you're not allowed to talk about the big boys.

I can tell you that this sort of thing happens all the time. As animators and art directors move from company to company they end up putting a previous company's work on the new company's reel. I can't tell you the legality of it, but I think that the worst they can do is issue a cease and desist order.

I believe the name you're looking for is the 'Dots Flying Down and Landing Wipe.'

Delay=2; Delay*=thisComp.frameDuration; thisComp.layer("layerA").scale.valueAtTime(time-Delay)

Your probably going to be surprised that your render time increases exponentially with a cascading expression. I don't know exactly what kind of effect you're going for, but Dan Ebberts tutorial on motion trails might help you figure out an alternative.

You still need to go through the 'Collect' dialogue to prepare a watch folder, but you don't need to copy the assets. In the 'Collect' dialogue there is a option that says 'None (Project Only).' This will prepare the watch folder with just the project file still pointing to the original assets.

A friend of mine once handled an unpaid invoice by calling to say she would stand outside the front door, and explain her situation to everyone that entered the building. When she arrived there was a check waiting for her.

On the subject of animated alphas, I animated a logo write-on in after effects. I'd like to extrude that out and then round off the edges in C4d. I tried to use the render as an alpha texture on a plane and extrude that, but it didn't even come close to working. Am I going about this all wrong?

Is this an open invitation? I wouldn't mind getting to know some locals.

Unless there's a feature I don't know about, 3dStroke doesn't actually use 3d splines. It uses flat splines and wraps them around a center axis. I think particular is the only way your going to be able to do it.

You may have used stabilization keyframes for your track, which I believe would cause this opposite movement. I'm not completely certain, but you may be able to get away with parenting your tracking null to a null in the exact center of the screen, and then using this simple expression -value (that's a minus symbol before the word value). That may reverse everything back to normal, but it's difficult to tell for sure without seeing your project.

really beautiful stuff.

Sounds like one or two AC/DC references are in order.

I'm gun-shy.

Yeah, it doesn't look like he laid out the interface properly to read the text, but it get's the job done.

I found this on AE Enhancers a while ago. Works fine on my Mac CS3. SearchEffects_v1.3.jsx.zip

Thanks. That was actually expressions too. I used masks to slice a precomp into 20 or so layers and coded each subsequent layer to follow a keyframed path offset in time. And dissolved the photos while the pieces were moving. You could probably do the same thing, or very similar with echospace. I've never actually used it.

I have an expression preset on my site that will allow you to control time remap with a rotation control. I imagine you could probably also pickwhip a null to that rotation control, and parent a camera to that null. http://www.subpixel.tv/expressions.html

Wow, Lucky break. I downloaded the update last night. But shutdown before the installer actually ran.

Here's my latest reel edit. I've made some changes and reorganized to be more cohesive (at least I hope). Let me know what you think. All criticism and comments welcome. I'm specifically interested in hearing from Binky. http://www.subpixel.tv/08/movies/2008-A_Hildebrand-reel.mov