Sounds about right. I usually render an all screens pro-res master from Final Cut. Then depending on the player/players I either crop and cut it up into individual vids for each projector, or remap it to fit the requirements of the player.

A recent 4 screen project that I worked on was installed on a brightsign, and needed a single 8k file where…

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Hi Helen,

You could also try exporting an XML of your timeline, and importing it into a fresh project to see if that makes a difference. While you have the XML export you could try importing it into other editing software and see how it works there. Premiere’s constant crashing is what made me switch to FCPX. FCPX is wacky if you are used to…

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I have the same issue, and would dearly love Apple to create an easier way to do this. Something like After Effect’s Command+Option+/. This is the best method I have found for swapping a shot in FCPX. Note, I usually edit in secondary storylines above a dummy main storyline. If you edit on the main storyline, you could lift the proxy clip…

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Final Cut is excellent for editing multiple screens with a large number of layers. That is the reason that I switched to it from Premiere. I am amazed at how many simultaneous streams of video FC can play back unrendered from a fast SSD on a high powered modern Mac. I would at least try editing them all on the same timeline, then chopping them…

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I would say M1 (M2,M3) reigns supreme. After Effects was almost unusable on my 2017 iMac Pro. I could never get previews to playback reliably at full frame-rate no matter what I did. I had to export a movie just to preview my animations. Also, it crashed all the time. Now that I have an M2 MacBook Pro, and am running the Apple Silicon native…

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Does anyone here have experience with older plugins in the latest AE on a new Mac? I am setting up AE on my new M2 Max Mac. I own licenses of Red Giant Trapcode, and Magic Bullet Suites purchased from Red Giant. When I contacted Maxon who now owns Red Giant to find out if I could purchase native upgrades for them, and was told that they are…

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Just saw there was a new version of AE and updated hoping they had fixed this, but no dice. According to Adam’s post on the Adobe Support Community they have fixed it in the beta version though. Thanks for posting that Adam! And thanks for the verification Walter and Matthew!

Does anyone else have a Wacom tablet that they can test with? The latest After Effects 2023 is crashes immediately on my mac when using the brush tool with a Wacom tablet, or when trying to render a project that contains brush strokes created with a Wacom tablet. The brush tool seems to work fine if you use a mouse. I’ve reported it to Adobe,…

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Thanks Walter,

Should have thought to try that. I colored my layers first so I could easily remember which were track mattes. Turns out the offender is the “Paint” effect. Something about it didn’t get translated well between versions.

I have an AE project that I started back in 2018. It got 90% finished and then the client put the project on hold. The project was last worked on in march of 2019. Now in 2023, the project is going forward again and I need to finish it, but it crashes every time I open it in the latest After Effects. I can open the project with the Caps Lock…

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I tried to get FCP’s VR tools to work and never managed it, and we actually have an old HTC Vive in our office that was supposed to be compatible with mac. Steam VR for mac never made it out of beta, and isn’t supported by the latest MacOS. I have wondered why FCP still says it can directly output to VR. Maybe they are hanging onto the feature…

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I hear and agree with all that has been said here. I have been a Cow for a very long time now, and have learned so much from this community, and tried to give back where I can. I loved this website. I loved the magazine. I’m not crazy about the new forum format. I know its the way of the future, optimized for tablets and phones and such, b…

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Heads up if you use After Effects, you should hang on to the 2013 iMac for now(Still get a new machine for Final Cut). I have that same 2013 model iMac, as well as a 2017 iMac Pro. The 2013 iMac is WAY better for After Effects. The iMac Pro is a little faster, though not a lot but it is much more prone to crashing and often can’t play back a…

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I’m willing to bet, that you are trying to export to a drive formatted with FAT32. The FAT32 filesystem only supports files less than 4 gigs in size. If you try to write a file larger than that size limit on a FAT32 drive it will fail and the file will be corrupt. Many usb sticks still come formatted FAT32 by default. Use Apple’s disk utility…

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I guess I’m a hoarder. I still have a bunch of them on my bookshelf. I liked that magazine.

You are not alone. Watch this. It is cathartic.

I’ve used AE for over 15 years. I used to love it. Now it is painful to use and I try to avoid it when I can. It really has no good all around competition for everything it does, so I keep returning to it.

Best alternatives I know of are :

Fusion or…

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Hi Roger, Can you elaborate on the CCC monthly fee? I don’t see anything about a fee on their purchase page. I have been evaluating it as an FCP backup solution and was just about to purchase.

This has been a long running issue for me. I have been using AE for over 20 years now. I used to love it. Now it is an exercise in frustration. See this thread started in 2016!

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/ram-preview-not-in-real-time/td-p/8353465

Have you tried the M1 Native Beta of After Effects? I am hoping…

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Have you tried using a Stroke Layer Style instead of the shape’s stroke? That will maintain width regardless of position in 3d, but only works on the alpha outline of shape. If you need to control internal strokes, you will need to separate your shape into multiple layers.

Did you try duplicating the project, and opening the duplicate?

We have also been frustrated with Adobe’s performance/stability. Sounds like you are on a Mac so you could try switching to Final Cut Pro X. We made the switch about a year ago and haven’t looked back. FCPX seems wacky if you are used to Premiere or other NLE software, but you get used to it. FCPX absolutely blows premiere out of the water in…

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Try this: Make your text one color. Apply a “Stroke” effect to the text layer and set its path to the same path as your text. Make the stroke your second color, set its paint style to “On Original Image” . Adjust the brush hardness to get your gradient correct. Last apply the “CC Composite” effect with Composite Original set to “Stencil…

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I thought about making everything a compound clip but that gets unwieldy. I have a lot of files, and a lot of layers, and I find compound clips also make headaches when we go to export audio to post, so I try to minimize our use. I wondered if there was something I could do with the proxy workflow treating the placeholder clip as a proxy, but…

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Is there an easy way to replace a stock footage placeholder with a purchased master file in a Final Cut edit, while retaining timing and effects on the clip? Something similar to After Effect’s CMD + OPTION + /? Seems like this should be an easy task, but I can’t find it.

I actually find side by side displays less helpful for Final Cut X. The interface doesn’t work very well when divided over several monitors. I’d love to devote a monitor to a timeline, but there currently seems to be a bug that causes a lot of crashes when I do that. I would go with a relatively inexpensive but giant 4k TV for the primary…

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“Secondary Storyline” turns out to be the buzz word I was looking for. That video was very helpful. Thank you!

What is the official Apple name for the “envelope”(my word) that encompasses a clip or clips that you put above the storyline and put dissolves on? These “envelopes” have some interesting rules as to how they behave, and I would like to learn a little bit more about how they work, but no one seems to talk much about them and I don’t know the word…

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Thanks James, Let me know your experience. I’m still on Intel, but have been curious about the performance of the M1.

Big Sur has been out for awhile and I am considering upgrading. I wanted to know if anyone has had problems with Element 3D or with AE in general under Big Sur.

If I am working in the timeline, and I want to make adjustments to a selected clip in the inspector, I am sometimes experiencing a behavior where when I click in the inspector, it refocuses the inspector to whatever I had last selected in the browser. When this happens, the only way I have found to correctly focus the inspector’s attention to the…

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I can in Catalina.

Thanks Jacqueline and Doug,

Jacqueline, the “smooth” is only applied to the position keyframe, not the scale. As far as I can tell position and opacity are the only two types of keyframes that can be eased in Final Cut. As a keyframe junkie who started as an After Effects animator this annoys me. The best way I have found with stock FCPX to…

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I am a longtime Premiere/After Effects user and am considering switching to Final Cut for performance reasons. I love how smoothly it runs, even with a complex project that I imported from Premiere. Some things I like better in FCPX some worse. One thing I hate in FCPX is keyframing. Is there any way to add an ease to a scaling keyframe in…

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No Effects. Just periods on a path, with some randomized character offsets created with a text animator. I added a little bit of rotation around an offset anchor to give the particles a little bit of turbulence. I also gave it a bevel layer style to make it look a little more like your blender spheres. I can’t point you to a specific tutorial,…

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Sure. Here is a quick and dirty example project that I put together. Text animators take a little getting used to, but are very powerful, and render quickly. They are one of my favorite features of AE. You can do a lot with them, from particle streams to animated arrows, to Harry Potter map style footprints.

I am working on a project in Element3D where I am blasting a hole in a brick wall. I am using the Animation Engine with a radial animator to move the bricks from stacked to open. This is looking nice, but the hole is circular and I need it to be elliptical (roughly 16×12 aspect ratio). Any ideas?

I second the use of text animators. Apply the text to a path that follows that pipe. You can randomly offset it from that path. You can use a period or something from a hand drawn or other slightly irregular looking font, and randomize the character rotation to have them tumble as they move along. You can do a lot with text animators on a…

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Have you tried toggling off “Enable Mercury Transmit”. Closing Preferences. Opening it again, and toggling it back on? That usually works for me. Sometimes you need to do it a couple times. You shouldn’t need to restart AE or the computer. AE get fussy about the external display sometimes, especially if you unplug and replug displays.

I would use Unity. https://unity.com It has a very good video player built-in and I have used it for numerous museum interactives. Like Director and Flash, it has an authoring gui similar to premiere/after effects. While originally focused on 3d games, they have added some very good 2d canvas layout tools. I like to design UIs in After…

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I tend to consider a professional tool as “anything that gets the job done.” I like to try out new tools and see if they have a place in my workflow. I am also a big Affinity fan and have both Designer, and Photo. Affinity Photo’s FFT denoise tool is magic for removing halftone pattern from an image, a task that is very hard to do in Photoshop.… Read more

I like the new forum name. It seems a good place to ask this question.

I’m a longtime After Effects/Premiere animator/editor. I’ve been increasingly disgusted with Adobe in recent years, and have been open to exploring alternatives. Nothing ever seemed to up to replacing that combo for me though.

I recently downloaded a demo of FxHome’s… Read more