[Dave Johnson]

Unless they’re time-remapped, layers that represent nested comps can’t be longer than the comps they represent … in other words, if comp A is 5 seconds long and you put it inside of comp B, that layer in comp B can’t be any longer than 5 seconds. I realize you may not have put any comps inside of other comps, but depending on the characteristics of your PSD, it’s very likely that comps and precomps were automatically created via the process of importing into AE.

[Dave Johnson]

Are you talking about professionally made fonts or internet freebies? There are some decent freebies out there, but many of them are junk so you’ll get jagged edges, incorrect spacing, missing characters, etc.

The better you describe the issue you’re experiencing, the more useful answers you’ll get … “hardly ever display properly” is kind of vague.

What exactly is the issue and have you tested that these fonts display properly in other media creation software (i.e., Photoshop), but not in AE? In this context, it doesn’t necessarily matter how they look in MS Word.

[Dave Johnson]

My recollection of what things are called may be a little off, but will be close enough to understand …

If the “playback controls” panel, isn’t show in your current workspace layout, bring it up from AE’s “Window” drop-down menu. Then, click the checkbox that says “from current frame” and set the “loop playback” button to either “loop” or “ping-pong loop”. The loop button probably has two arrows shown in a circular motion.

[Dave Johnson]

Click the little arrow in the top right corner of the comp viewer panel, go to “view options” and check the boxes that say something like “show camera & light controls”.

Not sure what clicking R had to do with anything since it’s just the keyboard shortcut to show the rotation properties of the selected layer.

Note all that CMD-Z clicking was in fact doing something, just not what you wanted since changing viewing options isn’t an un-doable thing … you might want to check that the last however many actual changes you made to your comp(s) weren’t undone.

[Dave Johnson]

If you’re going to move an adjustment layer, it needs to be bigger than the comp it’s in.

[Dave Johnson]

Before you animate scale, you’ll want to move the anchor points of the tree trunk and/or branch layers too so that they scale from the base instead of the middle.

Sorry, I’ve got no magic beans for ya.

[Dave Johnson]

And, if you have something specific in mind, adding screenshot examples to your post would help get more specific answers … I’ve seen The Hunt for Red October, but can’t say I recall the title sequence and I don’t understand what you mean by “he ones that are used all the time to show – intelligence buildings (CIA)”.

[Dave Johnson]

If I understand what you described correctly, it sounds like you just have the “import as” drop-down menu at the bottom of the import window set wrong … change it to “footage” instead of sequence or project and you’re good.

Do I get my peanut now?

[Dave Johnson]

This part of your question is unclear “I created a freeze frame with 4k footage but what’s next?”, but you can export a frame of footage as a PSD by:

[1] putting the playhead on the frame you want in the timeline and selecting “export as Photoshop layers” from AE’s file menu

[2] adding the comp to the render queue and adjusting the render settings and/or output module to render a particular frame of the comp as a PSD

[Dave Johnson]

Common causes for that kind of issue:

[1] The footage isn’t interpreted correctly … right click on it in the project panel, select “interpret footage” and make sure everything in that window is correct (particularly interlaced or non-interlaced).

[2] There’s a viewing setting wrong that’s making the footage look bad in the comp viewer even though there’s nothing actually wrong … double-check that your comp viewer is set to full resolution (vs. half or quarter) and that the layer resolution is set to full (vs. draft).

[3] The AVI is in some kind of wonky codec … the AVI format is only a wrapper (like MOV) so AVIs can be made with any one of very many different codecs. If that is the problem, the easiest solution is to transcode the file to a more standard codec.