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After Effects 4.0 tutorials?
I’ll spare you all the the detailed whining about how much I hate my work place and how out of date everything there is, and just get to the pleading for help.
I’m working with Adobe After Effects 4.0, and I need to find some tutorials to help me learn the thing, with nearly zero prior experience
My boss wants me to make two slide show templates. one for a wedding, and one for a funeral. He wants to just be able to take the customers properly named digital photos and drop them into a folder and have a slidshow pop out of after effects 4.0 all ready to give to the customer.
is this easy to do? is it even possible to do? and are there any tutorials to help me do this? or can someone with some more in depth product knowledge than I tell me what to tell him to make him understand that it just can’t be done?
I could make a slide show that quickly myself, but I’m quitting this job in a month’s time, and he wants me to leave something behind so that he won’t have to train his new people how to actually use the program. (or bother learning himself for that matter.)
thanks for anyone who might be able to help.
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3 Replies
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yes, that tutorial is a good one. most of it works, except for one minor part that I can bypass without losing much, and the part where you copy the effects settings of one layer to multiple layers at once (or if there is an option for that it’s not the same as the one used in the tutorial.) as it is once I get one layer set up I need to paste the effects settings manually onto each subsequent photo, which is alright for a small slideshow, but if I get up over about 50 it gets tedious.
thanks for letting me know the template is a pipe dream. I’ve been trying to make a project file where the media can be swapped out, but unless the customer has the exact same number of photos as the original with the exact same file names and extensions and dimensions then work still needs to be done in the project file after media swapping. I’ve made photoshop batch commands to deal with most of it, but the number of photos really can’t be fixxed that way clearly I’ve had little success.
It just means he’ll need to overlap the new employee with me for a day or two so that I can teach them how to do the same thing. (as well as how to use the Media100 version 2.6 oh the fun)
I thank you for the sense of humor though, it’s definitely appreciated.
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technically there’s two bosses. they’re partners and I’m the only employee (they’re also brothers, which means I get to listen to family squabbles too). and they both run other businesses on the side, so this one doesn’t get full attention from either of them.
nah no squirrels for power that I’ve found, but one of them does come into the room I’m working in to turn out half the lights to save power money though. I think I’ll ask him to pay for it when I need a new glasses prescription a year sooner because of it.
the macOS on the AE machine is 9.x I think 9.2 but I could be wrong.
the media 100 is on its own dedicated box though, running macOS 3.x I forget exactly what. but it takes up to an hour to make it boot properly because half the time it can’t find the system disc. so we need to turn external HDs on and off repeatedly and try to boot the machine till it takes.
they also have box with mac OSX and final cut pro, but refuse to use it because they think their old version of M100 is better. I’ll bet their final cut pro isn’t top of the line either though, but since it hasn’t been loaded up once since I’ve been working here I wouldn’t know.
I tried to tell one of them that the AE template can’t be made and that the sad thing I have managed to cobble together so far is the best we’re going to get, and it’s not nearly good enough to charge money for, and I can make a better one from scratch more easily than trying to work the template. he told me to put an alias on the desktop and that it would be good enough.
the part that makes me sad, is that they know their stuff is obsolete, but they think by saying it’s at the professional standard level right now they can convince customers (and me) that it really is. I’m not sure if that’s worse than actually believing it’s at a professional level or not.
well time to go back to calling customers and telling them that if they don’t pick up their finished product that’s been sitting around for two years soon we’ll have no choice but to throw it away along with their source material, and no I don’t know how long they have because my boss won’t let me answer those questions for fear I get the answer wrong, and no they can’t talk to him because he’s busy elsewhere watching his contractors build houses. this is of course the same conversations I had with the same customers when I called them 5 months ago to tell them the same thing.
your humor has brightened my day and I hope I’ve given you something of a smile too. thanks for the help.
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I have to agree 10,000% with David on this one…
Get the heck out of there!
media100 on os3?? are you kidding?
Kick this place to the curb and move on. I worked in a place like this (husband and wife who are now divorced and I got to hear all of it in the office) and I can honestly say I believe you are harming yourself by staying.
Yes, you are being exposed to tools and experience, but at the same time the gear you are learning… um… well here is the best example I can give that might make sense:
You are playing on an Atari. It has one joystick, one button.
The rest of the world is on PS3, or Xbox 360, and they have two joysticks, 8 buttons. You will never get as good as you can be if all you ever do is play on an Atari.You will learn a lot about how difficult the industry -used- to be, and you will spend a lot of time trouble shooting problems and having to create work arounds that the rest of the modern world have upgraded past.
Why doesn’t your boss use something cheap, free, like I-Movie? I’ve never used it, but my MOM makes movies on it. My mom can’t even set the time on a VCR yet she makes slideshow videos for her classes all the time on her little Mac and has a blast doing it. As far as I know I-Movie is aimed at non-technical oriented people who want fast easy templates to drop picturs in to get movement and such.
AE 4.0 … holy C-COW! My earlist version was 4.5 Production Bundle and it was hard to use. I bought it used on Ebay and tried it for a week. I went and bought the upgrade to 7 as soon as I could afford it, and I was so happy with the upgrade that I’ve followed every upgade since then.
And you don’t even have Automator, nothing… sheesh… yeah, get out while you still watch color TV!
Brian Lynn
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