How to make seamless ribbon content in Adobe After Effects

Question

• How to make seamless ribbon content in Adobe After Effects?

Environment

• Product Family: Content for Ribbon Displays
• Product:
• Components:
• Control System:

Answer/Steps

There are two techniques to achieve seamless ribbon content. The first is placing objects/footage over the seams to disguise it. The second technique is offsetting layers and fading them together.
Technique 1: Objects over seams
1. Import your object/element into your tiled comp (See How to configure a tiled ribbon in Adobe After Effects.)

2. With your object layer selected hit "p" for position and enter 0 for the position X value. This will place your footage at the front of the comp so that only half of it is visible.

3. Duplicate your object layer and change its position X value to the tiled comp width. This should move it to the end and leave the other half of your object visible.

4.
4. Finished! Now your final comp should contain seam-disguising objects throughout.

Technique 2: Offset and fade together

This technique works best with backgrounds and other more abstract elements that can be faded together. This is not for logos or text.
1. Import your footage into the tiled composition.
2. Move your footage to the front of the comp by entering 0 in the position X value. This example is using magma noise footage and positioned it at 0 for the X position)

3. Duplicate the layer and move footage to the end of the comp by entering "your tiled comp width" for position X value.

4. The two footage layers should overlap in the center of the frame. If they don’t scale up both layers.
5. Now fade each layer toward the center of the frame using feathered masks or linear wipes. Repeat this fade so that the left side layer fades toward the middle as well.