[Steve Roberts]

In XP, you double-click on the file and it appears as a folder. In 98, you may need to download Winzip. Try Googling it.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

What type of file are you trying to open?
Which file extension? .zip? .rar?
Which operating system? Mac? Win?
Is it an After Effects plugin or standalone?

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

More roto history:
https://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/r/ro/rotoscope.htm

If you want more, Google “rotoscope”, “disney” and “bakshi”.

I think the main thing is to remember that “rotoscope” translates as “labour-intensive”. A little bell should go off if a client or producer says the word.

Steve 🙂

[Steve Roberts]

I like Quickbooks.
If you don’t like keeping books, get a bookkeeper.
An accountant may not save you money compared to his/her fee — it depends on how you run your business and how much money you make.

But there’s a COW Business forum — it would be better to post this there.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

You set the emitter type to “layer” and choose the layer. If you’ve done something to the emitter layer (masked it?), you need to precompose it so Particular can see what you’ve done to it.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

It would be nice if AE could render a truly orthographic camera, but the camera behaves as a “real” camera. However, since an orthographic camera by definition has infinite focal length at an infinite distance …

… you should try a focal length of 10,000 at a distance of 10,000 and you should see an orthographic, perspective-free image.

That said, I’m not sure if it will solve your problem. If everything is lined up, you should have seen an equal shift on both sides. Is the X-position of camera and layers equal? Also, close in on the top view of your camera’s keyframes — is one of them bezier, with a slightly angled handle?

Let us know…
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Did you try clicking the “continuous rasterization” switch for the comp layer?

It’s the little sunburst in the timeline.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

You just animate normally and use file>export.

However … if you want the SWF file to be small, it has to be vector-like, not rasterized. To make it so, you should search the AE help for “SWF”. The help will list the AE features that you should not use if you want a small SWF file. Actually, I think it lists the features that do work, since that’s a smaller list. 😉

For example, almost all effects will give you a huge SWF file, because AE will rasterize every frame, effectively giving you a sequence of JPEGs in your SWF, and that doesn’t make for a small SWF file.

The result of all this is, if you want a small SWF file, it will definitely not use AE to its potential, and you may be disappointed at the restrictions. But hey, that’s the Flash format. 🙂

Anyway, search the help.
Steve

[Steve Roberts]

LW does support that, but you need a Transmotion LW plugin from Al Street. It has its own idiosyncrasies, covered in one of the Meyers’ books.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Have you tried stripping the comp down, troubleshooting-style, to one element? One audio track, nothing else?

Switching off OpenGL?
Trashing the prefs file?

(more stabs)
Steve