[Todd Kopriva]

The example that you showed didn’t really do anything fancy with the text, so you can probably get by with just some basic knowledge about how to animate layer properties in general.

There was also a bit of drop shadow on the text, so you might want to learn about layer styles, too.

Finally, the text was on top of an animated background that took up the bottom part of the frame. This is usually referred to as a ‘lower third’. The animated background in this case (as in so many cases) was probably made with the Fractal Noise effect or the Turbulent Noise effect. You’ll need to learn how to apply effects to solid-color layers and then use masks to reveal only a portion of the layer.

The whole composition for your example is probably four or so layers: the underlying video layer, the masked layer with some animated background, and one or two text layers with their Position properties animated.

If you do want to get fancy with per-character text animation, answer back.

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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 ‘input contract violation error’ turns up a page in the Mylenium error code database that gives a possible solution.

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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]

Make sure that you’re interpreting the image sequence to be at the right frame rate.

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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]

“But, the strange thing is, exporting from the File menu did have an effect, and the crazy thing is, it’s the opposite effect as before.”

If you’re using the File > Export menu, then you’re turning your rendering and exporting over to QuickTime components. That is usually a bad idea. Colors are handled differently by the QuickTime exporters. Among other things.

I have a post on my blog about preventing color shifts with ProRes, by the way.

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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]

My evil twin and I give this book four thumbs up.

https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2009/06/flash_for_after_effects_and_af.html

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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]

Dave’s suggestion is a good one.

But another idea is to use shape layers. They are vector graphics, and they’re always continuously rasterized.

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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 means that it will work better on a 64-bit OS than on a 32-bit OS. But it’s not a 64-bit application.

For example, a 64-bit OS can see more than 4GB of RAM, so several processes running simultaneously can use a total of far, far more than 4GB of RAM. That means that After Effects can actually get a bigger hunk of a 4GB block of RAM and not have to share it with as much other software. It also means that multiple processes of After Effects can each get a 4GB block of RAM.

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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]

Ah. The Puppet tools were introduced in After Effects CS3.

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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]

We certainly didn’t help the confusion by changing the preferences and terminology between CS3 and CS4. The After Effects CS4 preferences are much more clear overall, I think. But the change has caused some confusion.

By coincidence, yesterday I just happened to add a comment to the bottom of the “Memory & Multiprocessing preferences” page yesterday to try to clear up some of this confusion.

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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]

Kevin is 100% right about the risk of stability problems.

But to the other point: The RAM cache is the part of the memory allocated to the foreground process that can hold rendered frames for RAM preview. The distinction is most clear when using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously, because then that’s the only thing that the foreground process is doing—holding frames in the RAM cache while the background processes do the rendering.

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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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