Text Tool Not Working in AE 7.0!

[Darby Edelen]

I haven’t experienced anything like this before. My computer and system are somewhat different than yours (Mac Pro Dual 2.66GHz, Mac OS 10.5.1) but similar. It’s possible that there’s some problem with 10.4.10 and CS3, but this seems unlikely as I’m sure we would hear many more people complaining.

It seems to me that there are any number of small things that could be going wrong (a keyboard problem? a 3rd party system utility? application switching misbehaving?), but it seems strange that something like that would happen across multiple machines.

Now that I read your post again I realize that you’re using AE 7.0 on Intel Macs… That is the most likely explanation for any problems you ever have… ever. That time your car broke down and you couldn’t get cell reception to phone a tow truck? That was AE 7.0 on an Intel Mac! You should definitely upgrade to CS3, which is a universal binary (native performance on either PPC or Intel). 7.0 uses Rosetta, Mac OS X’s transparent binary translation utility, to run on Intel Macs… Rosetta is nice in that it allows you to use your PPC apps, but it causes all kinds of funky problems with complex applications.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Doug Nash]

Thanks. In as much as I’m sure that you’re right that CS3 would work with better results on our Intel Macs, unfortuantely, it’s not that easy to just buy and install new software.

So, being that this is happening on multiple machines, I have to assume that there are many more people out there seeing similar issues on their Intel Macs, running older versions of CS.

Anyone else have something to add?

Thanks!

[Kevin Camp]

i still have ae7 installed on a 3ghz quad-core mac pro and i don’t have any problems with the text tool (you are talking about the photoshop style text tool, not the text effect, right..?)

there are some tricks to getting ae7 to work on an intel-mac. one of the biggest things is to completely disable opengl in the preview preference. i’m not sure if that is causing you problem or not, but i found that with it enabled, any time i added an opengl accelerated effect ae would crash, unless the effect was applied to an adjustment layer for some reason.

another was to limit the amount of ram that ae could use. i found that this was more help if you had 2gb or less of ram, if you had more ram it didn’t seem to matter as much. it had something to do with a limit of ram that rosetta could allocate to any given application. there used to be a huge thread here, up in the sticky posts about it. i had also seen it on the adobe ae forum.

i’ll try to remember more from back about a year ago when i was having issues with ae7 on my intel-mac…

and i would suggest petitioning for upgrades, this is usually a good time to get them if you are in a large business/corporate landscape… you always want to spend your department budget, even over spend a little, that way you’re more likely to get more money next year.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Darby Edelen]

[doug nash] “unfortuantely, it’s not that easy to just buy and install new software. “

That’s unfortunate, I would also recommend pressuring whoever makes the buying decisions to move forward as quickly as possible with CS3. It’s pretty essential if you’re working on an Intel Mac and the upgrade is relatively inexpensive, I believe Adobe offers discounts on volume licensing as well… the details of which I am not familiar with.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Doug Nash]

Thanks so much for that additional insight. The odd thing, is that other than the text tool (yes, the interactive one such as in PS) the rest of AE7 seems to work fine. Granted, I’m still getting up to speed, and normally use 6.5 on my personal dual G5.

I’ll experiemnt with the OpenGL a little, but I’m hoping someone else might have solved this same problem. Again, to reiterate, when using the text tool, we are unable to effectively edit our text, once typed. We can do a little, in the control panel, but it’s impossible to delete a little or a word, and kerning or navigating between letters with the arrow keys does not work.

Thanks

[Darby Edelen]

Just to clarify, the insert cursor appears and the layer boundaries disappear when you click on the text layer with the text tool? You said that you can’t delete text from the layer, but are you able to add more text to the layer after you’ve created it?

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA