--- Tips for using "Corner Pin Displays" --- The Corner Pin Displays included with PowerBlox include corner tracking information that allows you to place your own footage within an animated "Display" element. They're called Corner Pin Displays because they utilize the Corner Pin distortion effect in Adobe After Effects. Each corner of your footage is tracked to match up with the animation. Within the folder of each display, you'll see a Quicktime movie file, an After Effects 5.5 project file, and four corner tracking files with the extension ".aek". The Quicktime movie file is the animation that your footage will be placed within. If you open the After Effects project, you'll see there is one Composition with two placeholders. One is where the animation will go and one is where your footage will go. These placeholders appear as color bars. You need to replace these placeholders with the real animation and footage. BEFORE YOU SWAP OUT THE FILES, MAKE SURE THE PLAYHEAD IS ALL THE WAY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TIMELINE!!! This may seem trivial, but if you do the swap with it somewhere in the middle of the timeline, you're likely to get "leftover" frames in the RAM preview that will be misleading. Simply do a -->Replace Footage -->File on each placeholder and replace it with the desired file. Replace the placeholder called "Your Footage Here!" with the footage you want to be included within the animation. Replace the placeholder that represents the Quicktime for the animation with the actual animation file. The correct animation file will be within the same folder that you found the After Effects project for this particular display in. IMPORTANT! You should now do an --->Interpret Footage -->Main on the animation and make sure the Alpha is set to "Premultiplied - Matted with color" (black). If the alpha setting is not set correctly, things will look wrong and you may not be able to see your footage. Separate Fields should be set to Off, and you should use the Use Framerate from File setting. You can also adjust the Interpret Footage settings for your footage if need be. You may need to increase or decrease the length of the Composition depending on the length of your footage. The animation layer is set up to hold on the last frame. Time Remapping is enabled for the animation layer. To make it last the length of your footage simply drag its time slider to the right until it lines up with the end of your footage. --- Adjusting in and out points for your footage --- Once you've loaded the Display's project file into After Effects and have replaced the two placeholders, you may want to adjust the in point where your footage starts playing within the Display. If you just slide the timeline of your footage left or right, you'll also be moving the corner pin tracking data. The result will be that your footage and the Display animation will no longer match up. Instead, you need to move just the corner pin data along the duration of the footage. Here's a way to do it. Expand the properties of your footage and then expand the Corner Pin effect so you can see the four rows of keyframes, one row for each corner. Simply drag a box around all the keyframes of each row so that all the keyframes of the Corner Pin effect are selected. Now you can drag the keyframes to the place in your video that you want to show in the display. Once you have the keyframes lined up with the relevant portion of your footage, you can then slide the track for your footage back to where it lines up with the display's animation. It's usually easier to place the playhead for the timeline at a place where the display animation is only part way through. You can then see if your corner pin footage lines up properly very easily. We hope you enjoy your Corner Pin Displays! The 12 Inch Support Team service@12inchdesign.com
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