Fixing quality issues - After Effects Tutorial

- In this movie, I'll introduce you to the project that we are going to work with throughout this chapter, as well as tackle and solve a few quality issues that can happen when you are working with Illustrator vector files in the composition. But before starting our journey, I just want to show you the place that we are starting from. I've already queue up a RAM preview. I'm going to press zero in order for you to get impressed of our starting state. You can see that I've already animated some Illustrator vector files to create this arbitrary children channel promo, which contains cascading simple animation with two lines of text. All of the vector files, which are those files, are controlled using these Vectors Controller Null. This is a Null Object. If I'm going to press u, you can see that I've already set up two keyframes for its scale. This is what's causing all of those layers to scale down when the title is entering the screen. Before we are going to create a dashed line, I want to draw your attention to some quality issues that you may have when you are working with vectors inside After Effects. For that, I'm going to move a little bit back in time to this area over here. We can easily see that we have problem with the edges of this shape, of this ring. Now, the reason that we have this problem is because this ring, if I'm going to press u, is actually scaling from a very large number, so it's coming outside of the frame, to its original 100%. When we are upscaling these vector files, although this is a vector file, After Effects is converting it to pixels and therefore we can see the problem. In order to fix it, I'm going to select the first layer over here ... We can close this one ... And shift select the last layer over here, and I'm going to enable the icon for the Continuously Rasterize option. This will actually continue to rasterize the vector files. As a result, we can see that we have nice, crisp and very sharp edges, no matter how much you will scale them up or down. I'm going to press F2, because this is not really solving my problem over here. Let's just move a little bit over here, maybe one frame. I'm going to also zoom up to 100%. Let's just take a look at this border over here. We can see that, since this ring contains blending and gradients inside Illustrator, we see almost like a hair-thin lines that accompany it. This is due to the reason that After Effects is trying to solve this problem as fast as it can. But you can actually tell it to use a better interpolation. For that, I'm going to select the layer with the problem, in this case, the Ring layer, right-click on it, and ask After Effects to reveal the layer source in the project. This will show you the layer itself, so you can drag and drop it to the Interpret Footage dialog. Over here, at the bottom of the dialog, you'll have a button name More Options. Go ahead and click on it, and you will have an option to choose between a faster or a more accurate antialiasing option. I'm going to stick, for this layer only, with the more accurate option. I'm going to click Okay over here, and Enter or Okay in order to approve this operation. We can see that now we get rid of this thin hairline and the render looks much better. Now, let's zoom back to fit our viewer by changing the viewer to fit up to 100%, and we are also going to enable Motion Blur. Now, Motion Blur is already turned on for these layers, so I'm actually going to just turn on the Motion Blur general switch for the whole composition. Of course, in this case, since the ring is doing a fast move like this, you may get away with just enabling the Motion Blur without even switching the quality of the rasterize or the antialiasing from faster to more accurate. Now, when we fixed all the quality issues, we can start to design our dashed shapes.