[Kevin Camp]

if you want to render a comp that has transparency, and you want to maintain that transparency in your render, you just have to render to a format/codec that supports transparency or an alpha channel.

refer to documentation or the help menu for specifics, but to get you started… from your render pane click ‘lossless.’ this should bring up an output settings window, on the right side there are pulldown menus for render options for alpha channels if you have a codec taht supports alphas (lossless, tif, tga, png…) you will be able to select rgb+alpha, # of colors+, and premultiplied or straight.

when you bring in that file into a program can use an alpha channel it should interpret the alpha as transparency automaticly (with some software you will need to invert the alpha, usually an import option).

[Kevin Camp]

i have the same system with the same amount of ram and had no problems running ae7. there is an update for ae on adobe (7.0.1 i think) you could try that… i had run the update before running ae7.

make sure the ram was installed correctly, the macpro interleaves its ram, if its not installed correctly in matching pairs (same size, speed, manufacturer) it can lead to problems, ususally system crashes though.

if you reinstall, reboot first in safe boot mode (hold shift during boot) then install. you may also want to run the hardware test on the os x install disc, this can tell you if you have bad ram or another problem (hold the ‘d’ key down when you boot from the disc to bring up the hardware test).

you said you had 4 750 hds are they all internal? and are they all a striped raid? i would recomend having one drive as your os and application drive, then the other 3 can be striped.

are there any other particulars of your system pci cards, third party ae plugins, etc.?

[Kevin Camp]

if you can’t render a qt dvcpro50 file from ae you can ‘export’ a dv file from the file menu (file>export>dv stream…), then select dvcpro50 from the pulldown. this will render a dv file without the qt wrapper, good for some workflows, but probably less good for fcp workflows.