[Todd Kopriva]

Have you installed the After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) update? It fixes many crashes.

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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 is the After Effects forum. You’d probably get better answers about Premiere Pro on a Premiere Pro forum.

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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]

I don’t have an answer for why your preview isn’t working in Bridge, but I can point you to a web page that contains previews of the animation presets that come with After Effects, including the text animation presets.

See the gallery of text animation presets.

And, by the way, these are not effects. That may just seem like a terminology quibble, but you’ll have a lot more success with After Effects if you understand the difference between effects and animation presets.

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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]

Michael is right, but I’d go even one step beyond “ask them”. Make sure that you confirm the delivery specifications with the client, preferably with a test clip that they confirm is acceptable. If you want to get paid at the end of your work, leave nothing to assumptions and guesswork at this early stage.

Some of these sorts of concerns are outlined in the “Planning your work” section of After Effects Help, but by far the most valuable advice is in the article by Aharon Rabinowitz that that section links to back here on the COW.

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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 a Community Help search for ‘blinking cursor’ that pulls up several threads about making and using a blinking cursor.

The “Examples of text animation” page has a link to a video tutorial by Rhys Enniks that goes into this in quite a lot of detail.

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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]

I recommend searching using After Effects Community Help search. It is a Google Custom Search Engine that has been constrained to the websites known to reliably contain useful information about Adobe software—including Creative COW and Video Copilot. This is the same search that is used if you search from After Effects Help and uncheck the This Help System Only checkbox.

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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]

Not exactly, but you may find that modifying multiple keyframes in the Graph Editor gives you some of what you’re looking for, plus more.

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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]

Precomposing is a fundamental part of using After Effects. If you’re not familiar with it, then I recommend reading at least the first few sections of the “Nesting, precomposing, and prerendering” part of After Effects Help.

But, basically, you select the layers that you want to precompose together (put into a single nested composition) and then press Ctrl+Shift+C (Windows) or Command+Shift+C (Mac OS). Then you have a single layer (a precomposition layer) that has a composition as its source. You can animate this one layer, and all of the things in the nested composition come along for the ride, just like they were part of one video footage item. You could, therefore, precompose the house and all of its windows together and then wiggle the precomposition to have the whole system wiggle together.

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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]

First, confirm that you’ve followed the instructions regarding R3D files and colors in this post.

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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]

I haven’t used MatchMover Pro. There’s a tutorial by Eran Stern linked to from the “Tracking and stabilizing motion” page of After Effects Help that shows how to uses Pixel Farm PFHoe. Maybe this will help. Not that I’m endorsing PFHoe, but it is a lot less expensive than other matchmoving software that I know of.

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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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