[Todd Kopriva]

The “Work with viewers” section of After Effects Help describes this.

I found this by searching for ‘multiple compositions’ in After Effects Help on the Web.

If the Help document doesn’t contain the information that you need, or if you’d like to add a tip of your own, leave a comment using the link at the bottom of any Help page.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

“1) How to substitute footage in the comp. Say I’ve already put clipA on the comp, added a mask, done some effects, and now I’d rather use clipB. I don’t want to do this from the Project window with ‘replace footage’ because I’m using clipA in another comp and don’t want to mess that up. What do I do? I’ve looked in the docs, no luv…”

See “Replace layer sources with references to another footage item”.

“4) Editing keyframes. Is the timeline the only place to edit keyframes? Curves with knots & tangents to play with? If so where?”

You can edit keyframes in a few ways: in layer-bar mode in the Timeline panel, in Graph Editor mode in the Timeline panel, in the Composition panel for spatial properties, in a spreadsheet, and more. See ” Editing, moving, and copying keyframes” and other sections in the “Animation” chapter.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

I’ve seen a few for Lux, Shine, and Particular on Toolfarm.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

You may be able to use Auto-trace to create a single mask around the actor and then apply the Stroke effect to that mask.

If you’ve got another mask on the layer, just be sure to target the correct mask (the one auto-traced around the actor) with the Stroke effect in the Effect Controls panel.

Aharon Rabinowitz shows using Auto-trace to create a mask around an actor as part of a color-keying procedure in his super-tight junk mattes tutorial. The purpose is a little different, but some of the steps that he shows may help you.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Here’s a relevant excerpt from the “About render and export of Flash formats” section of After Effects Help:

“To include the alpha channel in the FLV output, use the On2 VP6 codec and select Encode Alpha Channel in the Video tab of the Adobe Flash Video export settings dialog box.”

Here’s a link to a tutorial in which Bob Donlon walks you through the process of exporting an FLV file.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

I just successfully imported an m2t clip into After Effects CS3.

Are you using an earlier version of After Effects?

Here’s a link to the supported formats for import for After Effects CS3.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

It seems that what you are trying to do is trim a layer by setting its Out point. There are at least a couple of ways to do this without dragging the end of the layer bar: You could change the value in the layer’s Out column, or you could place the current-time indicator where you want the new Out point and then press Alt+] (Windows) or Option+] (Mac OS).

For more information on trimming layers, see the “Trim, extend, or slip-edit a layer” section of After Effects Help.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

If you end up doing frame-by-frame drawing of masks, consider bringing your video out of After Effects to do it. Photoshop has excellent selection, drawing, and painting tools, all of which are better suited to rotoscoping than the tools in After Effects.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

In After Effects CS3, you can set the line join type for strokes on shape layers:

Work with strokes and fills for shapes

I hope that his helps.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

Aharon Rabinowitz has a good tutorial that shows a few ways to make 3D extruded text in After Effects, using duplicate layers or the Shatter effect.

Here’s a link to the page on which many of Aharon’s tutorials are listed.

Here’s a direct link to the video tutorial.

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Todd Kopriva, technical editor, Adobe Systems Incorporated

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putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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