Todd Kopriva
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See the comment at the bottom of the “Preparing and importing Photoshop files” page of After Effects Help for a link to a script from Paul Tuersley that does this.
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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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Yeah, definitely install the After Effects CS4 (9.0.1) update. There were a couple of very important bug fixes in that update.
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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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David and Kevin are right.
If you’re using the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature, then there’s one more thing that you can try to squeeze a little more duration out of your RAM previews:
Dedicate more RAM to the foreground process, since that’s the one whose address space stores the frames for RAM previews.
In After Effects CS4, this is pretty intuitive. There’s a slider that says “Longer RAM Preview” at one end and “Faster Rendering” at the other. You get to choose.
In After Effects CS3, the process was more arcane and less reliable, involving changing the Maximum RAM Cache Size value.
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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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Instructions for previewing audio are in the “Preview video and audio” section of After Effects Help.
As Bryant indicated, RAM previews are one way of playing audio. Spacebar play is not.
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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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Instructions for After Effects CS4 are here:
“Render and export a composition as an FLV or F4V file”
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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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Yeah, the native After Effects motion blur acts on transformations to layers within After Effects, not on motion within the footage item. But there are some ways of getting motion information out of the footage item and using that information to simulate motion blur.
One option is to use ReelSmart Motion Blur. There’s a link in the “Motion blur” section of After Effects Help.
You can also hack together a pretty good approximation of motion blur by applying the Timewarp effect, setting Speed to 100, enabling motion blur within the effect, and using the manual shutter control features to adjust the motion blur.
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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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You can save and reuse render settings templates and output module settings templates.
The changes are stored in your preferences file, which is the Adobe After Effects 9.0 Prefs.txt file at one of the following locations (for CS4):
(Windows XP)
C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\9.0(Mac OS)
[user name]/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/9.0You can copy this file from one computer or account to another, but—as Dave said—beware of overwriting all of the preferences by doing this.
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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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The “About alpha channels and mattes” section of After Effects Help contains an explanation and a visual aid, plus a link to a video overview here on the COW by Aharon Rabinowitz.
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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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Yes, that feature has been removed. If you want to request that this feature be put back in, you can fill out the feature-request form. I remember a survey done of a few hundred professional users of After Effects in which none of them said that they used this feature. I’m sure that the person reading the feature request that you send will be very interested to know that you used this feature (and how you used it).
BTW, if you want to know how something has changed in After Effects CS4, you can check the comprehensive list of UI changes from AFter Effects CS3 to After Effects CS4 or this blog post about new and changed features in After Effects CS4.
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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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Okay then, Todd, what CAN you with this new CS4 feature that makes it useful? I’m scratching my head over that one….
Simple things.
At the bottom of the page that I linked to is a link to a video tutorial by Mark Christiansen that shows how to import and use a 3D object layer from Photoshop. The model is a relatively simple 3D text logo.
I think that you’ll get more out of this feature if you think of it as a Photoshop integration feature, _not_ as a complex-3D-in-After-Effects feature. It’s really important to us that people are able to work in After Effects with anything that they can create in Photoshop. But the Photoshop 3D features are intended for relatively simple 3D work. After Effects does not remove those limitations.
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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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