[Todd Kopriva]

You control the rotation of the tiles with a gradient layer. The luminance values of the gradient layer determine how and when the cards rotate.

To learn about control layers in general and how they are used by many different effects, see “About compound effects and control layers”.

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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]

RAM isn’t always the bottleneck. After Effects may be using 12% of your RAM because something else is the limiting factor—e.g., your CPU is maxed, your hard disk is spinning (reading source files or writing output frames), or one of your buses is saturated…

(It amazes me how much people seem to focus on making sure that all of their RAM is always full. It’s the great red herring with regard to this program.)

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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]

CC Rain comes with the full version of After Effects. Are you using a trial version?

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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 know of a way to do that. If anyone does, I’m all ears.

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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 like to use the Puppet tools for this kind of thing.

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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]

Expand that Group 1 property group. Keep expanding until you see a path property. Select it. Paste.

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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 quick back-of-the envelope calculation.

4GB – (OS libraries and what the application needs to run) = ~3GB.

To prevent fragmentation and out-of-memory errors, 60% of the RAM left over will actually be filled with frames. That gets you to ~1.8GB. That 60% is a preference in After Effects CS3. You can increase it, but you do so at your own peril. There’s a reason that we removed that preference in CS4.

The reason for adding more RAM is not to increase your RAM preview length. The reason for adding more RAM is so that you don’t starve the background processes of RAM when you use Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing.

BTW, you mentioned the disk cache. Keep in mind that this has nothing to do with RAM preview. The disk cache is only used during standard preview (aka, spacebar play).
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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]

Check out the Card Dance effect. It does what I think that you’re describing.

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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 Composition > Make Movie command adds a composition to the render queue. It works almost identically to the Composition > Add To Render Queue command. The only reason that the Make Movie command is still in that menu is to not confuse the old-timers. (Of course, leaving it in confuses everyone.) The only real difference between Make Movie and Add To Render Queue is that the latter can add multiple selected compositions to the render queue at once.

In general, you should use the render queue for your rendering and exporting.

You use commands in the File > Export menu to render and export SWF files and XFL files for use in Flash Player or Flash Professional, respectively. You can also export your project as a Premiere Pro project. These “good” uses of the File > Export menu are above the dividing line in the menu. The items below the dividing line are added by third-party components, like QuickTime.

You can also use commands at the bottom of the File > Export menu to encode movies into some formats (such as raw DV streams) using QuickTime components. However, in general, you should use the Render Queue panel rather than the QuickTime components available through the File > Export menu.

Basically, the stuff below the dividing line in the File > Export menu should only be used if you are certain that there isn’t a better alternative available through the Render Queue panel.

All of this (and more) is explained in “About rendering and exporting” in 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]

No, there is no version of After Effects CS4 that is a 64-bit application.

Details of the After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) update are here.
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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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