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Newbie – Many Questions
Hi all, I am a newbie to After Effects, no make a frustrated newbie. I have a few question hopefully someone can guide me.
1. I am not a professional, I simply need a tool to create some 3D video footage one time only to distribute to friends in DivX most likely. I’ve downloaded the AE 6.5 trial, 30 days should be sufficient to finish my project. Are there any free or cheaper alternatives to AE? Regarding usage, I’ve followed a tutorial to create the Star Wars intro text. (To give you an idea of what I need to do.)
2. If there are no alternatives, is there a decent tutorial out there for a complete beginner? Just the basics, I have only 28 days left.
3. My project looks great, but I need to animate a 2d image, in this case I’ve tried GIF, PNG and PSD. When I import the graphic, I lose the transparency aspects of the graphic… The manual proved fruitless likely because I’m not searching for the right topic.
Many thanks to anyone who can assist!
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3 Replies
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Surely my post merits at least one reply…
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1. Free alternatives to AE? I don’t know. Not likely. Cheaper alternatives? Don’t know. Sorry. Maybe Roxio’s Videowave offers simple motion graphics. You could contact Maxon and try to get Cinema4D CE+ for $99 if you have the time to get up to speed on 3D.
2. Beginner tutorial? Not too many people write tutorials for demo users. That said, you could search the COW for “beginner” and “tutorial” or “newbie” and “tutorial”. I think something was posted recently.
3. AE imports transparency as an alpha channel. If the image contained an alpha channel, it should survive import into AE. If not, select the file in the project window and select file>interpret footage>main, and see if you have any alpha channel options in the dialog. Try straight. If it looks bad, try premultiplied. If those options are grayed out, AE can’t read the alpha.
Steve
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Steve, thanks for your reply. I wish the Adobe products were made available for non-commercial use at a heavy discount… But then again, I wish that were the case for every creative piece of software.
I’ve found many tutorials, but nothing laid out in a logical manner. They all seem to be focused on a particular task rather than learning basic usage from a common starting point.
Using the Gimp, I verified that an alpha channel existed, but like you say, AE is not recognizing it as they are greyed out. I’ll start from scratch and implement layers, perhaps the import will like that better.
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