[Touko Maksimainen]

While your suggested solution will work for Hebrew, it won’t work for Arabic for two reasons.

One, assuming it’s made with AE Expressions, which can’t handle unicode characters as inputs (or outputs).

Two, Arabic uses a complex systems of ligatures which will break upon simple text reversal, rendering the result practically unreadable.

Anyway, there is a free Hebrew reversal tool at https://www.modernketubah.com/article_reverse_hebrew.php to help you out.

Adobe also sells a special Middle Eastern edition of Creative Suite, but only as a stand-alone edition. Regular CS can’t be upgraded to such standard. There is hardly any point of paying for your product twice just to get this functionality?

[Touko Maksimainen]

At its current state OpenGL is useless in AE. It’s best to disable it even if it’s working.

[Touko Maksimainen]

Whoa! This is the most useful bit of information all day. I spend A LOT of time getting rid of those pesky “_1″‘s. This is going to make my life a lot easier!

I think it’s should be fine to overwrite stuff by default (Photoshop also has a frustrating habit of appending _copy at the ends of filenames). Simple “Are you sure?” question should be sufficient.

It’s my responsibility to keep my files in order and not have my software babysit me on that, especially when there is no option to turning it off.

[Touko Maksimainen]

I’ve found that “Save frame as” will not save alpha for PSD files due to a bug.

You can save it to something else, like PNG, but that will obviously not export the layers.

[Touko Maksimainen]

I’m having the same problem, except I get white outlines when I have alpha set to Straight. Premultiplied will get rid of the white jitter but instead produces a black halo around my character… My composition background is set to black.

I’m on AE CS4 and Flash CS3, using Make Movie to render FLV’s.

[Touko Maksimainen]

I generally find that with AE all too many times the answer to a question is “just precompose it”. I’d like to see simpler ways to set same track matte to multiple layers, exclude a layer from being affected by an adjustment layer, and generally link stuff together without precomposing. Because as a rule precomposing ALWAYS breaks something, be it layer styles, 3d layers or parented layers. And even if it doesn’t it makes your compositions more confusing and difficult to navigate. I avoid them whenever I can.

I guess the solution would be to go node based.

[Touko Maksimainen]

Well, once you get around the font hurdle you’re likely to find yourself in the same situation as I am. The type looks fine but they are in the wrong order. Arabic and Hebrew are read backwards, from right to left and AE is pasting them in the other way around. Anyone have an idea how to get that right?

[Touko Maksimainen]

I’m in the same boat with you guys. I’ve got 8Gb RAM with a Quad-core setup. I get about half a dozen crashes on any given day. Most of the time everything works fine if I just leave the computer alone, but as soon as I touch anything AE will freeze. Needless to say this wastes huge amounts of my time.

The issues how I understand it is with how AE renders comps, caching (render into RAM) every layer individually and then stacking them up to make up the final render.

Now, the problem inherent in this approach is that it requires lots and lots of random access memory. As AE is still a 32-bit piece of software it has significant limitations on how much memory it can use. Adobe is circumventing this problem by spawning multiple instances of the application, each able to see 3GB.

So there can be up to 8 cores requesting their slice of the memory, which not many people have 3 times the number of cores, compounded by the fact that the OS needs 1-2 gigabytes on top of that.

So if, or rather when, the AE spawlings have insufficient RAM to fight over, AE can’t recognize or handle the situation properly (like dropping cores or start swapping to hard disk) and simply collapses on itself.

Hence the Adobe recommendation for not using the full 8 cores.

[Touko Maksimainen]

Also I’d like to add that it doesn’t work at all anymore, with any project. Not even when I Purge all or restart the computer.

[Touko Maksimainen]

I’m afraid that’s not doing it for me, my settings were already tweaked with the help of that article. Also I have no problems doing regular renders. It’s just that I can’t RAM preview at all, always getting the same “need 2 or more frames” error.
This problem came out of nowhere. I used to work fine but then one day it didn’t and there had been no change to the configuration of the computer either on the software or hardware side.