[Todd Kopriva]

I’ve made some neat Moire patterns while playing with shape layers, such as when setting parameters for the polystar shape type to extreme values or using the Repeater to make a lot of overlapping shapes with small offsets.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

Animation and PNG are both excellent choices. Animation does better for things with large expanses of the same color, like cartoons (hence its name), and PNG does better with more photorealistic gradients. For most of what people do with After Effects, I think that PNG in a QuickTime container works well as a nearly universal lossless compression format in a nearly universal container… but Animation might do better in some cases.

BTW, I recognize that this is a VERY (overly) simple answer to a very complex question. E.g., if you are using a codec as an interchange format within your own workflow, then universality doesn’t matter so much, and you can use whatever esoteric codec that you want. Also, there’s the issue of 8-bpc versus 10-bpc versus 16-bpc versus 32-bpc formats. Animation is 8-bpc. If you’re handing off something as an intermediate file, and you’d rather not lose the data that gets quantized out with an 8-bpc codec, then the conversation gets more interesting.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

It is a clever animation, isn’t it? (No, I didn’t make it.)

The cleverness is in the Rotation and Tracking properties in Animator 1. Play with those values and let me know if you need some help figuring things out from there.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

This Community Help search for ‘gamma fcp’ brings up several useful results, including a thread here on the COW that provides answers.

Basically, the issue (in many cases) is with how QuickTime tags and interprets gamma. This technical support document and this section of After Effects Help describe the issue and some solutions.

The upshot is that you may want to try the Match Legacy After Effects QuickTime Gamma Adjustments project setting for non-color-managed projects. But you should really be using color management.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

What versions of After Effects and Photoshop are you using?

After Effects CS3 and CS4 each contain a complete version of the Photoshop rendering system inside it, so adjustment layers (and almost everything else) should come across.

For a list of things that transfer over, see “Preparing and importing Photoshop files”.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

Here’s an After Effects Community Help search for ‘h264 quicktime gamma’ that pulls up several useful resources for this issue.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

There are some excellent step-by-step tutorials about this. You just have to know what to search for. The magic phrase is ‘screen replacement’.

Here is an After Effects Community Help search for ‘screen replacement’.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

There are some excellent step-by-step tutorials about this. You just have to know what to search for. The magic phrase is ‘screen replacement’.

Here is an After Effects Community Help search for ‘screen replacement’.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

The new MacBook Pro computers don’t have a numeric keypad, so many of the shortcuts that we all know and count on don’t work.

You can still start a RAM preview by clicking the RAM preview button in the Preview panel.

For more information, see the “Preview video and audio” section of After Effects Help.

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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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[Todd Kopriva]

Are you trying to move the whole layer in time, or are you trying to extend the layer in time?

Instructions for doing either are here:

“Move or place a layer in time”

“Trim, extend, or slip-edit a layer”

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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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