[Tim Kurkoski]

Hi,

Look no further than the Cow for tutorials on AE:
https://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=/articles/aftereffects_basics.html
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/aftereffects.html

You can certainly find more tutorials out on the web, but it’s such a deep program that I’d generally recommend you find a good book or training series. My favorite books are “Creating Motion Graphics with After Effect” by Chris and Trish Meyer. The Total Training video series is excellent. There are cheaper options out there, though.

AE can be used for, well, a lot. Do a search for “after effects demo reel” and you’ll find a lot of hits. Adobe has some examples of what people are doing with AE on their site:
https://www.adobe.com/motion/customerstories.html

You might also want to visit the web sites of some of the leaders at the CreativeCow AE forum and look at their reels:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_view_posts.cgi?forumid=2

Aharon (allbetsareoff.com) and Andrew (videocopilot.net) in particular have some nice sites. Keep in mind that most artists use more than one tool, so you’ll see a lot of 3D modeling mixed with compositing and effects work in AE.

I couldn’t tell you if AE really is a standard in the video industry or not. All I can say is I know that a LOT of people use it. Different people prefer different programs, and your friend obviously has his preference. AE is not the end-all be-all of motion graphics and compositing tools. AE does some things better than other programs, and other programs do some things better than AE. But no matter what program you choose to learn, you’ll learn a lot about the craft, and that’s what is important, not what particular tool you use.

One more thing- there is an amazing number of plug-ins available that extend AE’s capabilities. After you get used to the basics, try downloading some of the demos, like the Trapcode plug-ins, and see what kind of amazing things you can do with them.

AE is a complex program, but so very very cool. There’s a lot to learn. Enjoy it.

[Tim Kurkoski]

The number of undos is set in the Preferences > General. The History States value is what you’re looking for.

I’ve found that sometimes Photoshop doesn’t want to undo some steps, but if you go to the History palette you can step backwards from there.

[Tim Kurkoski]

What does the test page look like?

[Tim Kurkoski]

I’m not aware of anything that will positively identify a bad font. There might be some sort of font-syntax-checking utility, but it’s not in my realm of knowledge.

Best thing to do is take out everything except what ships with Windows (I’m sure there’s a list somewhere on the web) and take it from there. Then start adding fonts back until it breaks.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Not exactly. There is the Auto-trace command (under the layer menu, I think). It can do basically the same thing, but it works on color or luminance channels. Otherwise you can use a Chroma or Luma Key effect.

[Tim Kurkoski]

It’s possible. The R6025 error is pretty generic and common to Windows apps. That doesn’t mean the problem is with Windows, but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be.

Since the problem happens when you work with fonts, I’d start the troubleshooting there. Take out any unnecessary fonts- the likelihood is that you have a bad one on the system. (Or possibly too many. Windows tends to drag if you’ve got your fonts folder stuffed too big.)

[Tim Kurkoski]

The big problem I see you facing is not creating the subtitles, but how to embed them in a video file. With the right software, you can embed Closed Caption information in broadcast-standard files like DV and MPEG-2. But when I Googled for information on support for captions or subtitles in WMV, I only found one article on the MSDN site that indicated it was possible. And at that, the indication was that the captions would have to go into the “synchronized lyrics” stream of the file.

https://blogs.msdn.com/toub/archive/2005/09/17/470491.aspx

I’m not saying it’s not possible to do, but the tools for doing it seem pretty rare, and you may have a tough time getting it done. All in all, my guess is that you won’t need to input your subtitles into Premiere (or AE), but have them in a text file with properly formatted timecode, and some other program will do the integration work for you.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere Pro 2.0 has a timecode option you can turn on, but no earlier version does. You can create a timecode clip with After Effects, or download one from Mike Velte’s site:
https://www.video2stream.com/timecode2.zip

Place the timecode movie in a track above the rest of your video, and make sure the background is transparent.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere (any version) doesn’t support adding subtitle stream data to a WMV file. (You can always use embedded subtitles- subtitles that are part of the image in each frame. But you can’t turn those off.) Your best bet is probably to use another encoding application to add the subtitle stream after the fact.

I would suggest that the Microsoft Windows Media Encoder app might be your best bet, but I can’t see a way to add subtitles there. I can’t find confirmation that the WMV format even supports it. Are you sure you can do this?

[Tim Kurkoski]

The educational version of AE 6.5 did not come with some of the third-party plug-ins. All versions (including educational) of AE 7.0 come with with all of the plug-ins.