ChainsawAsh said:My other question: How do I make the crawl "disappear" the way it does in the films in After Effects (I'm using CS4)? I figured out how to get the main logo to dissolve, but it appears that the crawl itself doesn't dissolve uniformly (that is, the upper portions fade earlier than the lower portions). How would I do that in After Effects, for anyone knowledgeable in that subject area?
well this is the way i do it.
once you have your crawl (without the starfield and the logo) composition set up rename it something like "crawl" (you don't have to its just easier if i call it that for the purpose of explaining this) create a new composition ( we'll call it crawl 2) and drag " crawl" composition into it. create a duplicate and disable the bottom layer. now drag the timeline bar to where the crawl should begin to fade (its furthest distance point). use the pen tool to create a cut-out mask so this only contains the bottom section of the frame like this; ( i know this has a starfield but i don't have the project files handy at the moment, but this gives you the idea)
now you'll see that the mask selection is a lot larger than the frame at the sides and bottom. you need to do this due to the next stage. Now feather the mask to a high value. just keep increasing the value of the feathering until you can see the top few lines now appear a lot darker than the rest ( you may have to change the masks expansion to a negative value. change these settings until you get the desired effect but without noticeably eliminating the text. now re-enable the bottom text layer. add the "levels" effect and drag the white output down to 0. the text is now solid black. this is to create a solid text mask so the feathering won't create transparent text when overlaid upon the starfield. now this composite is finished. Now create a third composition and drag 2 crawl 2" onto it. add the starfield and the logo. to make the logo darken as it shrinks just use keyframes and lower the brightness slightly and keyframe the fade.
i'm not sure what is causing the rainbow effect but i do get a flickering effect when i tried it. this is to do with After effects scaling. this can be eliminated but this means more masking, extra composites and effects but i'll get to that in another post.