[Todd Kopriva]

from the “Render settings” section of After Effects Help:
“When a log file has been written, the path to the log file appears under the Render Settings heading and Log menu.”

On my computer, the location happens to be here:
C:Documents and SettingskoprivaMy DocumentsAdobeAfter Effects CS4AE Project Logs…

I found this using this search 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]

Blender is free, and it’s pretty well respected for a free 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]

from “Time display units” in After Effects Help:

* To cycle through Timecode Base, Frames, and Feet + Frames, Ctrl-click (Windows) or Command-click (Mac OS) the current-time display at the bottom of the Composition, Layer, or Footage panel, or at the top of the Timeline panel.
* To change time display units, choose File > Project Settings, and choose from the options in the Display Style section.

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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 link seems to be broken. I think that he probably meant this page:

“Preview video and audio”

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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]

Another point that I am now stuck on is how to add an effect to a mask once you have created it? I would like to apply an effect only to the area I have masked.

There are multiple ways to accomplish this, depending on the details of what you’re trying to do.

The first thing to know is that you apply effects to layers, not to masks.

One way is to apply the effect to an adjustment layer and also apply the mask to the same adjustment layer. This works well when you want to have the effect affect all of the layers underneath, but only in the area specified by the mask.

Alternatively, you can duplicate the layer, mask out the background on one layer, and apply the effect just to the layer with the foreground object showing.

You get the idea. There are a lot of relatively simple building blocks to learn, but you can put them together in a lot of different ways once you learn the basics.

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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 second Dave’s recommendation of Pete O’Connell’s rotoscoping DVD provided by the fine folks of Creative COW. In fact, just yesterday I wrote a blog post about rotoscoping in After Effects that reviews and praises this DVD. That post also gives some tips and links for rotoscoping.

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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 can copy and paste motion paths to and from mask and shape paths. This means that you can use all of the tools and techniques that you would normally use to transform mask or shape paths to indirectly transform a motion path.

There are instructions for copying from a motion path to a mask or shape path and back again in the “Motion paths” and “Creating a mask or shape from a motion path” sections of After Effects Help, including some extra tips and a link to an animation preset in the comments.

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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 quote from the “Memory usage and storage” section of After Effects Help:

“The operating system imposes certain limits on the amount of memory that an application can use. After Effects on the Mac OS X operating system can use up to 3.5 GB of RAM, although only about 3 GB is actually available to the foreground application, because Mac OS X uses approximately 500 MB to load the user interface libraries.”

So, the most RAM that After Effects can use to hold frames cached for RAM previews on Mac OS is about 3GB.

That extra RAM that you have is useful for allocating to background processes for multiprocessing with the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously feature.

You can get longer RAM previews by doing things like decreasing resolution for previews. See the “Improve performance” section of After Effects Help for some tips.

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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]

OK. Just to be clear, though, I was thinking that you would apply time remapping to the whole composition (technically, to a precomposition layer nested in another composition). Then you could re-time the whole composition.

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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]

Chris, you can submit feature requests using the feature-request form.

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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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