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.