Adobe After Effects CS4 - Manual (Page 308)

302 USING AFTER EFFECTS CS4
Drawing, painting, and paths
Last updated 12/21/2009
Displaying the clone source overlay while cloning between two different layers
A. Clone source overlay B. Current stroke point C. Current sample point
Important: To specify settings for a paint stroke before you apply it, use the Paint and Brushes panels. To change and
animate properties for a paint stroke after you’ve applied it, work with the properties of the stroke in the Timeline panel.
Select Aligned in the Paint panel to make the position of the sample point (Clone Position) change for subsequent
strokes to match the movement of the Clone Stamp tool in the target Layer panel. In other words, with the Aligned
option selected, you can use multiple strokes to paint on one copy of the sampled pixels. In contrast, deselecting the
Aligned option causes the sample point to stay the same between strokes, meaning that you begin painting on pixels
from the original sample point each time you drag again to create a new clone stroke.
For example, select Aligned to use multiple clone strokes to copy one whole cow—which would be difficult to do in
one continuous stroke—and deselect Aligned to copy one flower into dozens of places in the target layer to make a
field of flowers, using one clone stroke per copy.
Select Lock Source Time to clone a single source frame (at composition time Source Time); deselect Lock Source Time
to clone subsequent frames, with a time offset (Source Time Shift) between the source frame and the target frame. The
clone source time automatically loops back to the starting sample point when the current sampling point goes beyond
the end of the duration of the source layer. This looping is especially helpful when you have a lot of frames to repair in
the target layer but only a few good frames in the source layer.
1 Open a composition that contains both the source layer and the target layer.
2 Open the source layer in a Layer panel and move the current-time indicator to the frame from which to begin
sampling.
A
C
B