[Todd Kopriva]

You shouldn’t use the File > Export menu command to render and export FLV files. Use the render queue.

See the “About render and export of Flash formats” section of After Effects CS3 Help for more information. (The “Render and export a composition as an FLV or F4V file” section of After Effects CS4 Help might also be useful, since this feature hasn’t changed much.)

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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 haven’t watched that tutorial yet.

I’ll venture a guess, though. If you’re moving a camera and you don’t see any change in the appearance of the layers seen through it, I’d bet that those layers aren’t set to be 3D 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]

Anyway is there any disadvantage to having openGL turned off? everything still seems fast to me, what does opengl do anyway

OpenGL in After Effects is most useful for accelerating rendering of 3D layers (for previews or final output). A lot of people run with it off. I only turn it on to accelerate previews when I’m animating a lot of 3D 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]

from the “Installation, activation, and registration” section of After Effects Help:

“Important: The free trial version of Adobe After Effects software does not include some features that depend upon software licensed from parties other than Adobe. For example, mocha for After Effects, some effect plug-ins, and some codecs for encoding MPEG formats are available only with the full version of Adobe After Effects software.”

You can search for ‘trial’ within the After Effects Help document to find details of all such 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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[Todd Kopriva]

Yes.

David Torno used After Effects to replace the faces of the Golden Girls with the face of the singer for this music video.

David said that this was a lot of work, but I think that it was worth it.

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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 Write-on effect is in the Generate category.

You can just type the name of an effect in the Effects & Presets panel, and the effects that match the characters that you type will show up.

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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 “Editing and animating shape paths and masks” page of After Effects Help links to a script that allows you to apply tracking data to mask vertices.

This After Effects Community Help search returns several results here on the Creative COW forums in which folks give some other answers and insights to this question.

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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]

To paste a path as a shape path, you must select the Path property of an existing shape in a shape layer. This selection tells After Effects what the target of the paste operation is; if the target isn’t specified in this way, After Effects assumes that the target is the entire layer and therefore draws a new mask. If there is no Path property—perhaps because the shape layer is empty—then you can draw a placeholder path with the Pen tool and then paste the path from Illustrator into the placeholder path.

See “Copy a path from Illustrator, Photoshop, or Fireworks” for more information.

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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]

There’s some more detail about one potential cause of this error on my blog:

crash on start with error parsing properties list

If you delete one of the XML files in this directory (the directory that contains the preferences file) at a time, then you can avoid needlessly throwing away such useful things as saved workspaces.

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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 but I think adding something on it might encourage more/better use.

Yes, it’s clear that we haven’t communicated this well enough yet. That’s part of why I’m posting here. Thanks for the feedback.

(And whilst I’m suggesting things you could consider adding a “Rate this page” feature to find out what pages people find helpful and what we’re all confused by…)

That’s coming soon.

In the meantime, you can send me email (kopriva at adobe dot com). Or you can leave a comment.

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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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