[Todd Kopriva]

You didn’t say whether the file that you’re importing is a Photoshop (PSD) file, so I’m going to assume that it is.

You need to import the file as a composition.

To import a still image file as a composition, do this:
1 Choose File > Import File.
2 Choose one of the following from the Import As pop-up menu:
• Composition – Cropped Layers
• Composition

There are quite a few things that can prevent importing as a composition. I can’t remember what all of the limitations were for 6.0, but I do remember that using CMYK or other non-RGB color models in Photoshop was one of them.

Actually, this feature set hasn’t changed so much since After Effects 6.0 that reading this page and this page would be a bad idea. The second of those has a link to a script from Paul Tuersley that makes importing a PSD file as a 3D scene much easier. (I don’t know whether it works in After Effects 6.0.)

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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 I drag the .mov sound track file down to the time line under the .dng photo it does not play.

What are you doing to try to make it play? If you’re hitting the spacebar, you need to know that that only plays video. See “Preview video and audio” for instructions.

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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]

If you’re having problems With After Effects CS4 and haven’t updated to 9.0.2, then I can’t really help you. That update fixed a lot of problems, and I don’t want to waste my time chasing issues that have already been fixed in the available update.

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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]

Have you updated to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2), which fixed several problems, including some crashes?

> Is there anyway to render smaller parts to take the load of the ram?

You can render and export a sequence of still images and then recombine these still images into a movie. It’s common to use a post-render action to take a still-image sequence and convert it to a movie in a container such as an .mov file. Or you can use QuickTime Pro to do that.

You can also carve up a composition into several smaller time spans and render and export each of those separately if one section is giving you problems. Just yesterday, I pointed to a script for doing this.

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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]

There is a Lock To Time option. See this page.

I found this by searching for ‘lock keyframes’ in After Effects Community Help.

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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 long as your movie exported from Final Cut Pro uses lossless encoding, you don’t have to worry about a loss in quality. People often use the Animation codec in a QuickTime container for this purpose, though the PNG codec in a QuickTime container is often even better for compression.

You can also use any of several techniques to get Final Cut Pro projects into After Effects. See this page. (I just realized that that page needs to be reorganized a bit; the FCP information is split between the top and the bottom of the page. Oops.)

You can get gamma shifts between Final Cut Pro and After Effects because of a… um… quirk with QuickTime. If you experience this problem, then follow the guidelines at the bottom of this page and 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]

Update to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2).

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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]

Dan is referring to one of the properties in the Scatter effect itself.

From the Scatter effect section of After Effects Help:

“Scatter Randomness
Specifies whether scattering changes at each frame. To animate scattering without keyframes or expressions, select the Randomize Every Frame option.”

A convenient way to look for answers yourself is 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]

Right-click (or Control-click) on the Scale property in the Timeline panel. Choose Edit Value. Change Units to Pixels in the Scale dialog box. Voila!

I found this answer on the “Scale or flip a layer” page of After Effects Help by searching in After Effects Community Help, using your thread title as the search term.

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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]

There are a few ways to “scale” a set of keyframes in time.

See “Modify multiple keyframes in the Graph Editor” and “Expand or contract a group of keyframes in layer bar mode”.

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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.