[Todd Kopriva]

It should work. Cross Dissolve is the only transition that should be translated—as a solid with Opacity keyframes. If it’s not working for you, please send a bug report giving some details. You can either fill out the bug-report/feature-request form or send email to aebugs at adobe dot com.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

If you don’t like the way that After Effects is interpreting your footage by default, then you can change the footage interpretation settings. For example, you could tell After Effects not to separate fields;if you import footage with DV PAL frame dimensions, After Effects is going to assume by default that the footage has fields.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

You mean something like what I show in these posts?

radial rays 1

radial rays 2

I don’t watch enough MTV to know what you’re talking about, so I’m guessing based on your description.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

I have these keys on my laptop.

But, if you want to change keyboard shortcuts, see the instructions on this page.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

You produce a smaller output movie by choosing an encoder that does more compression. You do this in the output module settings. For QuickTime containers, there are many good encoders that compress efficiently. You choose your encoder for QuickTime movies by clicking the Format Options button in the Output Module Settings dialog box and then choosing from the Compression Type menu.

Exactly which one you pick depends on exactly what you’re going to do with the movie. If you’re handing the movie off for someone else to work with—say, you’re handing off a visual effects shot for someone else to incorporate into a longer movie—then you want to use lossless compression. If, on the other hand, you’re creating a movie for people to watch on the Internet, you want to use much heavier compression (at the loss of some quality).

See “Encoding and compression options for movies”.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

As far as websites, here’s a list of resources that I recommend.

As far as books go, I recommend Chris & Trish Meyer’s After Effects Apprentice and the After Effects Classroom in a Book for getting started. More advanced books that I recommend are the Meyers’ Creating Motion Graphics and Mark Christiansen’s After Effects Studio Techniques. There are a lot of other good books, too, but these are the ones that are best for an overall view of After Effects.

There are a lot of free excerpts from these books on the publishers’ websites. I refer to most of them in context in After Effects Help, so you can use a search like this one to find the links.

I also review most of these books on my blog.

Regarding tutorials: You’re already on one of the best sites for tutorials about After Effects. There’s a lot of excellent material here on the COW. Here’s a blog post in which I point to a bunch of video tutorials and show you how you can search for tutorials effectively using the After Effects Community Help search.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

Try increasing the number of triangles used in the mesh or expanding the mesh. See “Work with Puppet pins and the distortion mesh”.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

First, you need to convert text from Photoshop to editable text.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

[*raises a shovel toward Dave in noncommittal salute*]

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

> Adobe doesn’t exactly have a stellar record for true, no-fine-print-needed, 100% support of items it claims it supports.

We try to make the limitations, caveats, and tradeoffs clear. Really. For example, I have this near the top of the “Render with OpenGL” section:

“Important: Because not all features of a composition can be rendered with OpenGL—and because some features that can be rendered with OpenGL are rendered with different results—you may only want to use OpenGL rendering to accelerate previews and to provide faster rendering for non-final results.”

If you think that there are some areas that could use some additional details, warnings, or tips, please add a comment to the relevant page of After Effects Help on the Web so that everyone who sees those pages will know what you think.

For example, I wouldn’t mind seeing Dave’s stock answer about MPEG codecs on this page:

“Supported import formats”

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.