[Todd Kopriva]

> is there a setting that changes this, so that the footage appears at my current time in the timeline

from “Layers overview” in After Effects Help:

“Note: By default, new layers begin at the beginning of the composition duration. You can instead choose to have new layers begin at the current time by deselecting the Create Layers At Composition Start Time preference (Edit > Preferences > General (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > General (Mac OS)).”

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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]

You should contact Adobe Technical Support for installation issues.

Contact information can be found on the upper-right side of this page: After Effects Help and Support.

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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’d use the Caustics effect and the Turbulent Noise effect. Basically, the Caustics effect’s result is to distort a layer (the Bottom layer) according to refractions through a fluid, with the characteristics of that fluid determined by the Surface layer. It’s usually used for water, but it also works for atmospheric distortions like heat haze.

I’d create a composition-sized solid-color layer and apply the Caustics effect to it.

I’d apply the Turbulent Noise effect to a different solid-color layer and then precompose that. Then I’d set the Caustics effect to use that precomposition layer as the Water Surface layer. To make the Turbulent Noise effect generate something like heat haze, I’d set the vertical scaling to something pretty high.

I’d set my footage layer (the footage that I was trying to distort with heat haze) as the Bottom 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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[Todd Kopriva]

> Also do you know what the cache is for?

You could search After Effects Help for ‘conformed media cache’ and find this explanation:

“When After Effects imports video and audio in some formats, it processes and caches versions of these items that it can readily access when generating previews. Imported audio files are each conformed to a new .cfa file, and MPEG files are indexed to a new .mpgindex file. The media cache greatly improves performance for previews, because the video and audio items do not need to be reprocessed for each preview.”

You also asked about the disk cache in your first message. Here’s what After Effects Help says:

“If disk caching is enabled, After Effects can store rendered items to your hard disk when the RAM cache is full during standard previews. The disk cache is not used for RAM previews. As with the RAM cache, After Effects only uses the disk cache to store a frame if it’s faster to retrieve a frame from the cache than to rerender the frame…. For the best performance, select a folder that’s on a different physical hard disk than your source footage. If possible, the folder should be on a hard disk that uses a different drive controller than the disk that contains your source footage. The disk cache folder can’t be the root folder of the hard disk.”

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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]

FWIW, that script from Jeff Almasol is linked to from the introductory section on rendering in After Effects Help. I’ve used it and can vouch for its usefulness. (I’m not just saying that because Jeff works down the hall from me.)

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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]

Could you attach a screenshot of your Character panel? I suspect that something in your settings—like the font size—is set such that the text isn’t visible in the composition frame.

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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]

1940s? WWII? I don’t know what kind of look you’re going for. Scratched film? Old film? Camera shake from cameras being rocked by explosions?

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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]

If all that you need to do is change all of your Vegas effect’s Rotation property keyframes by the same amount, you can select all of the keyframes and then drag the property value in the Timeline panel. (See “Change multiple keyframe values at once”.)

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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]

Sure. Check out the Reduce Project feature. It should do what you want.

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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 After Effects Community Help search for ‘gamma h.264’ brings up several pages that lead to solutions.

The consensus seems to be that there’s a QuickTime problem that you can get around by encoding using an encoder like x264.

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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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