[Erik Waluska]

I can’t think of anything else to try but I believe I may have that book at home. If you can tell me which psd file on the CD that is giving you problems I will try to open it on my computer at home.

[Erik Waluska]

I assume you’ve already checked that the Audio Level for the layers are not all the way down. That would cause the problem you’re describing.

Can you play other audio clips in AE or are these the only ones you are having trouble with?

Since you said the clips work in other apps, you could try to export them in a different format such as AIFF and see if that works.

As a last resort you can try to hold down CTRL+ALT+SHIFT as you open AE. That will reset AE’s preferences to default.

Hope that helps.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

I’ve not encountered that particular error message but from a quick google search it appears to be somewhat generic and therefore hard to know exactly what is causing it.

I assume that you’ve checked that the PSD files are in RGB mode, right? CMYK files will not import as a composition correctly so that’s the most likely culprit. To check open the files in Photoshop and go to Image>Mode and be sure that RGB is checked and not CMYK.

Since the errors occurred after importing the larger PSD file, then either that file is making AE angry for some reason and/or it has possibly corrupted your project somehow.

Try to restart After Effects and then import the files into a new project and see if you still get the error.

If that doesn’t work, restart the computer.

You can also try to hold down CTRL+ALT+SHIFT as you open AE. That will reset AE’s preferences to default. That fixes a lot of stuff.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Hi Abby,
Check that your PSD file is in RGB color mode and not CMYK. AE does not like CMYK.

If that is not the problem, please give more info about the offending file. For example: Does the problem occur only with that particular file or are you having trouble importing all PSD files? Do you get the error message when importing the file as footage or only when importing as a composition? How large is the file? What type of system do you have? What version of AE? Etc.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Whoa, that was weird! All three of us posted within seconds of each other with the same basic answer. Jinx!

[Erik Waluska]

Rotoscoping or keying the footage. Which one to use depends on the footage and the background.

[Erik Waluska]

If your image is 2048*872, then I would not expect any real problems with memory unless you have a weak system or a lot of other high resolution layers, etc.. If you have enough RAM then you should be good. If it starts to bog down you can set your comp window to half or quarter resolution while your working and/or turn of background layers you don’t need to see until you’re ready to render.

Creating the text in AE will not help. In fact, it would probably make things worse.

If you’re doing these moves in 3D space, and are going from one newspaper or headline to another, then you may want to check out VideoCopilot.net for the free “Sure Target” plug-in and tutorial. It may work well for this project.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Yeah, I see what you mean. I didn’t think about the camera animation. Well, sorry, I don’t know how to get around that. The only other thing I can think of is to copy all of the layers into your HD comp and parent them all to a null and try to scale them up that way. You may have to work with smaller groups of layers at a time until you’ve got them all scaled up and positioned correctly. But it would still be easier than redoing everything from scratch. Just remember that your null will act as the anchor point for whatever child layers you are scaling so position the null accordingly before parenting. You may get away with just sticking it in the middle of the scene, parenting everything to it and scaling it all up at once. Then use the null to reposition as needed.

Of course, this won’t work for your camera animation, you’ll probably still have to do that manually. But since you’ve already established the animation and the keyframes and everything it shouldn’t be too hard to reposition the new keyframes to work in the larger HD scene – depending on how complicated the animation is.

Best of luck!

-E

[Erik Waluska]

Hey Paul,
The easiest way I know to go from SD to HD is to nest the SD comp inside of an HD sized comp and scale it up so the top and bottom edges of the SD comp are aligned with the top and bottom edges of the HD comp. So, if you are using a HDTV 1080 sized comp then set the scale of your nested SD comp to 225%. Then click the “collapse transformations” switch on your nested SD comp so that the comp layers are sampled at their full resolution and will inherit the size of the HD comp, not the nested SD comp.

If any of your SD layers in your original comp are 0.9 pixel aspect, then change them to square pixels so they will show up correctly in your HD comp.

I’ve done this many times and it works pretty good and it’s very easy. But you will likely still have to spend some time tweaking things so that everything works in the 16:9 aspect ratio. Since you’ll have some extra screen area that wasn’t in your original animation you may end up with things you don’t want in the frame or maybe blank spots that need to be filled in, etc.

Obviously, do all of this with a copy of your original project in case something goes horribly wrong.

Hope that helps.

-E

[Erik Waluska]

I’m aware of the difference between extruded 3D text and 2.5D “postcards in space”, which is what I was trying to clarify. By “real 3D text” I was asking if the text itself would be 3-dimensional or extruded, not just flat text in 3D space. I appreciate that you are trying to help, but I felt your reply was a bit condescending.