[Todd Kopriva]

There are some sections of After Effects CS3 Help on the Web that are intended to answer exactly these questions—at least the parts about how After Effects works with and compares to the other Adobe applications. (You did ask in an After Effects forum, so I’ll leave it you to browse the Illustrator and Flash Help documents on the Web to find out about how those two compare to one another.)

Here are some links:

“Working with Photoshop and After Effects”

“Working with Flash and After Effects”

“Working with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects”

[Todd Kopriva]

If you drop the footage item into the left portion of the Timeline panel, the new layer will either start at the composition start time or at the current time, depending on whether the Create New Layers At Composition Start Time preference is selected (in the General category of preferences).

If you drop the footage item into the right portion of the Timeline panel (the time graph itself), then the new layer starts at the time determined by the pointer position when you release the mouse button; you’ll see a time needle in the time ruler that shows where the In point will be.

This is all in the “Create layers from footage items” section of After Effects Help.

[Todd Kopriva]

In case you weren’t aware of it, here’s a link to the feature-request form for After Effects:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform&product=57

[Todd Kopriva]

This decision to not provide underlining as a built-in character formatting option was made for two reasons:

1) Animating individual characters that are underlined doesn’t really work—at least not the way most people would want it to work.

2) Underlining text is usually not used when alternative like italic formatting are available. (In other words, underlined text is generally considered ugly typography.)

Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated

[Todd Kopriva]

The answer from yikesmikes is good, but I thought that you might appreciate a link to some more detail. If so, check out the “Track or stabilize motion” section of After Effects Help.

[Todd Kopriva]

Regarding the arcane lingo: In After Effects 7 and CS3, the terminology changed with the introduction of the new user interface. The Composition window was replaced by the Composition panel, the Layer window by the Layer panel, et cetera.

For more information about the terminology for user interface items in After Effects (and other Adobe applications), see the “About workspaces” section of After Effects Help.

Regarding opening text layers in their own layer panels: As Dave says, you can’t open text layers (or shape layers, or other layer types not based on footage items in the Project panel) in their own Layer panels.

[Todd Kopriva]

As yikesmikes suggests, you should modify the Frequency value in the Wave Motion controls. If you slow down the frequency of wave creation but you want to keep the same number of rings on the screen at a time, you’ll need to decrease the Expansion value, too.

You can find information on Radio Waves effect in the “Radio Waves effect” section of After Effects Help.

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.