Best way to comp floating Magazine Covers over a background map

Flame Flame Questions
1

Hello

I created an animated slideshow from single shots (~ 100), setting a still duration (00:00:02+08)
during the import in MediaHub. Up until now, it has been a “Timeline-only” project
(with the following Timeline FX: TW, 2D Transform, Text, Resize-FX).
I was hesitant to learn node-based compositing in Batch because the project is mostly shot-based, and I felt the timeline was better for keeping an overview without getting lost in nodes

.

My question:

Can all the effects for the magazine covers (TIFF) floating in the foreground over a scanned map (TIFF) in the background be composited in the Timeline, and maybe in Effects, or is Batch or Batch FX better suited for this?

Thank you in advance!

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Pls see:

Photos-und-Magazine-Covers-floating-over-ElCapitan-Topos.mkv
From 01:34 till 01:47

Pls see: (very short)
Shown at https://youtu.be/urRVZ4SW7WU?t=50
From 00:51 till 00:54

2

This is a perfect project to jump into batch/action compositing. It doesn’t have to be a huge setup either. Add all the single images as different media to an action node. Place them in space and move your camera.

3

Or attach one axis to all the layers and move them together. Sometimes a bit easier than moving the camera and that’s how I used to do the rostrum.

4

Also consider a external bicubic surface and just move the cover through it to give some nice bends and curves. A good effective hack.

5

When adding your still frame layers to the media list in Action, be sure to Lock the media layer (to frame 1, or whatever since it’s a still). This should speed up the interactivity and the render speeds, as Flame will not be reading the media for each layer for each frame of the comp, but rather will keep just the locked stills in RAM. If I’m describing it right…

*With that many still frame media layers, it’d be interesting to know what kind of performance increase is achieved after locking the layers…