After Effects region of interest

About two years ago, I posted a list of resources for After Effects. Some sites have come and gone in that time, so it seemed like a good idea to refresh the list. Also, I've added the beginnings of lists in a few languages other than English. Scroll down for French, German, Spanish, and Japanese lists.

If you have a suggestion for a website for this list, let me know in the comments.

After Effects community resources (English)

Resources on the Adobe website

Adobe provides documentation resources for After Effects on the After Effects Help & Support page on the Adobe website. From the After Effects Help & Support page, you can also search for community resources not on the Adobe website.

Adobe and its partners provide a basic set of video tutorials on the Adobe website, in addition to excellent tutorials provided by other members of the community. Many sections of After Effects Help refer to additional video tutorials in context to provide information about specific features. If you know of an excellent video tutorial or other resource about After Effects, please leave a comment at the bottom of the relevant page of After Effects Help on the Web to tell others about it.

To make a feature request or file a bug report, fill out the feature request and bug report form on the Adobe website.

The Adobe After Effects User-to-User Forum is a great place to ask questions about After Effects and have them answered by other After Effects users.

You can subscribe to RSS feeds from Adobe Technical Support so that you can get notification of issues and workarounds related to After Effects (or other Adobe products).

For information on plug-ins available for After Effects, go to the After Effects plug-in page on the Adobe website.

To exchange scripts, projects, and other useful items with other After Effects users, go to the After Effects Exchange on the Adobe website.

Michael Coleman, After Effects product manager, provides news and notes about After Effects on his Keyframes blog.

Todd Kopriva, After Effects documentation lead, provides links to instructional resources and reference material for After Effects users on his After Effects Region of Interest blog.

Adobe provides resources for scripting and plug-in creation on the After Effects Developer Center section of the Adobe website. The Video Technology Center section of the Developer Center has information about all of the Adobe digital video and audio applications. The Adobe Developer Center newsletter, The Edge, occasionally includes material of interest to After Effects users, especially with regard to interactive video and video for the Web.

You can use the Adobe Community Publishing System (CPS) on the Adobe website to write and post articles directly to Adobe.com.

Resources on other websites

A good place to ask questions about After Effects--especially with regard to integration with 3D applications--is the Mograph forum.

The ProVideo Coalition (PVC) website contains articles and blogs on topics of interest to professionals in the video industry. In addition to articles by Chris and Trish Meyer, the PVC website includes articles by Mark Christiansen, Frank Capria, Jim Feeley, Adam Wilt, Mark Curtis, and Scott Gentry.

The Toolfarm website provides forums, tutorials, and other resources related to After Effects and other Adobe products. The AE Freemart website is a division of Toolfarm that provides free tutorials about After Effects.

The AE Enhancers forum provides example scripts and useful information about scripting (as well as expressions and animation presets) in After Effects. Particularly active and helpful on this forum is Paul Tuersley.

Jonas Hummelstrand provides tutorials, troubleshooting tips, and insights about After Effects and motion graphics in general on his General Specialist website.

Trish and Chris Meyer provide instructional resources for After Effects in many places, including their CyberMotion website.

Lutz Albrecht provides a list of After Effectserror codes and some possible solutions on his Mylenium error code database website.

John Dickinson provides tutorials and other resources for After Effects and related softwareon his Motionworks website.

Alan Shisko provides insights and tips about motion graphics on his Motion Graphics 'n Such blog.

Harry Frank provides tutorials on all areas of After Effects, with an emphasis on expressions and use of third-party plug-ins on his graymachine website.

Andrew Kramer provides tutorials and training on his Video Copilot website.

Dan Ebberts provides scripting tutorials and useful scripts on the scripting portion of the MotionScript website. Dan also provides an excellent collection of example expressions and tutorials for learning how to work with expressions on the expressions portion of the MotionScript website.

Lloyd Alvarez, Mathias Möhl, and others provide useful scripts on the After Effects Scripts website.

Jeff Almasol provides a collection of useful scripts on his redefinery website.

Stu Maschwitz provides insights and tips about After Effects and video, visual effects, and compositing in general on his ProLost blog.

The Creative COW website provides several resources for After Effects users. Many of these resources feature Aharon Rabinowitz:

• Multimedia 101 podcast


• After Effects podcasts


• After Effects tutorials


• After Effects articles


• After Effects Basics forum


• After Effects forum


• After Effects Expressions forum

The Layers Magazine website provides articles and tutorials about After Effects and other Adobe creative products.

David Van Brink provides tips, insights, and downloadable utilities for After Effects and other digital video software on his Omino
website.

Colin Braley provides tutorials--mostly about expressions--on his website.

Rich Young maintains a list of After Effects resources on his AE Portal News blog.

Rick Gerard provides tips and tricks on his AE Tips and Tricks website.

David Torno provides tips and tutorials about visual effects and compositing on his AE I Owe You blog.

Dean Velez provides many sample projects (some free) and other useful things on his Motion Graphics Lab website.

Jerzy Drozda, Jr. provides After Effects tutorials on his Maltaannon website.

Dale Bradshaw provides scripts and tricks on his Creative Workflow Hacks website.

Richard Harrington provides tutorials and other useful material about After Effects and other video software on his Photoshop for Video website and Raster|Vector website. He also posts video tutorials on Adobe TV.

Sean Kennedy provides several video tutorials--including some about rotoscoping and motion tracking--on the SimplyCG website. They're all linked to from his website.

Ayato Fuji provides tutorials on his ayato@web website. Some of the tutorials are a little out of date, but much of the material is still strong,
especially for learning to use some of the Trapcode plug-ins.

Chris Pirazzi provides technical details of digital video on his Lurker's Guide to Video website.

Chris Zwar provides articles, After Effects projects, scripts, and other resources on his website.

Christopher Green provides many useful scripts on his website.

Satya Meka provides tutorials, plug-ins, and other resources on his gutsblow website.

Jeff Foster provides tutorials for using After Effects and Photoshop on his PixelPainter website.

Sébastien Périer provides tutorials and other information on his website.

Ressources communautaires d'After Effects (Français)

Ressources sur le site Web d'Adobe

Adobe met à votre disposition des ressources documentaires relatives à After Effects dans la section Aide communautaire d'After Effects du site Web d'Adobe. Sur la page de l'Aide communautaire, vous pouvez également rechercher des ressources communautaires qui ne figurent pas sur le site Web d'Adobe.

Adobe et ses partenaires proposent un ensemble basique de tutoriels vidéo sur le site Web d'Adobe; ils s'ajoutent aux excellents didacticiels d'autres membres de la communauté. De nombreuses sections de l'aide After Effects renvoient à d'autres didacticiels vidéo en contexte pour fournir des informations sur certaines fonctionnalités spécifiques. Si vous avez un bon tutoriel vidéo ou d'autres ressources en français à recommander pour After Effects, partagez-les avec d'autres utilisateurs en écrivant un commentaire en bas de la page concernée sur l'aide en ligne d'After Effect CS4.

Le forum d'utilisateurs Adobe est l'endroit idéal pour poser des questions sur After Effects et obtenir les réponses d'autres utilisateurs.

Ressources sur d'autres sites Web

Le forum du site internet "Le Repaire" est une bonne source d'aide communautaire en français sur After Effects.

Sur son site Mattias Peresini, un jeune motion designer propose de nombreux didacticiels en français sur After Effects.

Les sites
http://www.xplorerstudio.com/tutorials.html
http://cysworld-leblog.blogspot.com/
Offrent egalement de bons tutorials en francais.

Recursos de la comunidad After Effects (Español)

Recursos en el sitio Web de Adobe

Adobe ofrece recursos de documentación para After Effects en la sección Ayuda de la comunidad de After Effects del sitio Web de Adobe. Desde la página de Ayuda de la comunidad, también puede buscar recursos de la comunidad que no estén en el sitio Web de Adobe.

Adobe y sus socios ofrecen un conjunto básico de tutoriales en vídeo en del sitio Web de Adobe, además de los excelentes tutoriales ofrecidos por otros miembros de la comunidad. Muchas secciones de la Ayuda de After Effects se refieren a tutoriales en vídeo adicionales en contexto para proporcionar información sobre funciones específicas. Si sabes de un tutorial en video excelente, o de otros recursos sobre After Effects en Español, por favor deja un comentario al pie de la página relevante de la Ayuda de After Effects en la Web para compartirlo con otros.

El Adobe Foros de usuario a usuario es el lugar idóneo para formular preguntas sobre After Effects, a las que otros usuarios de After Effects podrán responder.

Recursos en otros sitios Web

El sitio AdobeLabo incluye artículos y tutoriales sobre After Effects (y otros productos de Adobe).

El sitio http://aftereffects.260mb.com incluye tutoriales sobre After Effects.
Desglose:

• Conceptos básicos sobre composición y renderizado


• Conceptos básicos sobre importación y nesting


• Animación Básica


• Animación Avanzada, interpolación, easing


• Edición no lineal con After Effects


• Iniciación a los efectos y presets


• Entorno 3D, cámaras, luces y sombras


• Corrección de color, Niveles, Curvas y saturación


• Modos de fusion, darkening, additive


• Modos de fusion, Overlay, difference, color


• Máscaras, pluma Bezier


• Mattes y transparencias


• Efecto keylight


• Mocha, tutorial básico y workflow


• Cinema4D y After Effects: Integración 1


• Cinema4D y After Effects: Integración 2

After Effects Community-Ressourcen (Deutsch)

Ressourcen auf der Adobe-Website

Adobe stellt Dokumentationsressourcen für After Effects im Abschnitt After Effects Community Help der Adobe-Website bereit. Auf der Seite „Community Help" können Sie auch nach Community-Ressourcen suchen, die nicht Teil der Adobe-Website sind.

Adobe und seine Partner stellen der Adobe-Website einige grundlegende Video-Lehrgänge bereit. Sie werden ergänzt durch hervorragende Lehrgänge von anderen Community-Mitgliedern. In vielen Abschnitten der After Effects-Hilfe wird auf weitere, kontextbezogene Video-Lehrgänge verwiesen, die über spezifische Funktionen informieren. Wenn Sie interessante und hochwertige Tutorials oder andere Quellen kennen, die sich mit After Effects beschäftigen oder artverwandte Themen behandeln, hinterlassen Sie bitte einen Kommentar auf der jeweiligen zugehörigen Seite der Adobe After Effects Onlinehilfe, so dass andere Anwender diese auch finden können.


Das Adobe Benutzerforum bietet die großartige Möglichkeit, Fragen zu After Effects zu stellen und von anderen Benutzern Antworten zu erhalten.

Ressourcen auf anderen Websites

Video2Brain stellen Video-Lehrgänge bereit.

After Effects コミュニティリソース(日本語)

アドビ システムズ社の Web サイト上のリソース

アドビ システムズ社は、After Effects のドキュメンテーションリソースを、アドビ システムズ社の Web サイトにある After Effects コミュニティヘルプで公開しています。コミュニティヘルプページでは、アドビ システムズ社の Web サイト以外のコミュニティリソースも検索することができます。

アドビ システムズ社で、ビデオチュートリアルの基本セットを提供しています。他にも、コミュニティのメンバーから提供された優れたチュートリアルも提供しています。 After Effects のヘルプでは、特定の機能に関する情報を提供するために、文中で様々なビデオチュートリアルを参照しています。 After Effects の日本語チュートリアルや、日本語で説明された制作例などをご存知でしたら、After Effects オンラインヘルプの該当するページのコメント欄にてご紹介ください。コメント欄は、各ページの一番下にあります。

アドビ ユーザフォーラムでは、他の After Effects ユーザと After Effects に関する情報を交換することができます。

ご要望と不具合については、アドビ システムズ社の Web サイトの 製品への要望／不具合報告フォーム を使ってご連絡ください。

その他の Web サイト上のリソース

藤井彩人の Web サイト (日本語):
http://www.ayatoweb.com/

日本のAfter Effectsユーザーがリソースや記事を共有するウェブサイトを公開しました。是非ご利用ください！
http://ae-users.com/jp/

Adobe and Wacom have recently identified a problem with some Wacom drivers that can impair After Effects performance.

If you're having problems with After Effects being sluggish, and you use a Wacom tablet, read this thread on the After Effects user-to-user forum and the pages and threads that it points to.

If you have bugs to report or additional information to provide, please use the bug-report/feature-request form. Those submissions are read directly by the After Effects engineering team. Leaving comments on this blog is not the most effective way to communicate directly with the After Effects engineering team.

UPDATE:
Wacom has released a driver update that partially fixes this performance problem with some computer systems. Adobe and Wacom are continuing to work on a complete fix.

I see evidence that a lot of people just dive into the deep end with After Effects (and other creative software). I understand the temptation to get straight to doing the cool stuff, but I always find myself guiding people back to learning the basics first because--well, to stick with my metaphor--I want people to swim, not flail and drown in the deep end. Hence this post, which I hope will give beginners a good idea of how to start learning After Effects.

1. Hello, world.
If you've never used After Effects before, take a few minutes to follow the step-by-step instructions in this tutorial. It's just a quick warm-up that takes you from nothing to creating a simple movie. You won't learn many details, but you'll break the ice and get a sense that this After Effects thing isn't going to be so hard, after all.

2. Overview
Then read this brief introduction to the basic workflow and fundamental concepts in After Effects.

3. Hands-on introductions
You'll see that at the top of this page there are a few links to other resources that give a general overview of what After Effects is and the basics of how it works. I especially recommend the excerpt from Chris and Trish Meyer's After Effects Apprentice and the excerpt from the After Effects Classroom in a Book, both of which guide you by the hand through creating some simple animations, explaining things along the way. Actually, I recommend those books in their entirety for beginners.

4. Extensive tours
Once you've gotten a general sense of where things are and how the software works, you can really dig into a set of video tutorials that walk you through the basics. I recommend starting with this set of video tutorials provided by Adobe and Andrew Kramer's Video Copilot Basic Training series, all of which are free.

5. Real exploration and creativity begin, now that you have the tools
After you've gotten a good grounding in the fundamentals, I encourage you to just play and create, frequently consulting After Effects Help to learn about more and more features and possibilities. Whenever you have a question, try searching for an answer using the After Effects Community Help search. If you can't find an answer yourself, come on over to the After Effects user-to-user forum.

This is just a quick note to tell you to go and read Michael Coleman's blog, where he has a post about 64-bit plug-ins for the next version of After Effects.

I know that it's no news to anyone that Andrew Kramer makes great video tutorials that show people how to use After Effects. But it surprises me how few people seem to notice the Video Copilot Basic Training series that he provides.

I know that people want to jump right into doing cool stuff, but the only way that you're going to be able to learn how to create anything that you can imagine---rather than just regurgitating what you see someone else do---is by learning the fundamentals. Clearly, Andrew agrees; otherwise he wouldn't have spent so much time putting together this great introductory series.

Here's my summary of what each episode shows especially well, as well as some links to documents that provide more information on the same topics.

• 01. Introduction: Introduces the basics of importing files and interpreting footage and managing footage items. Goes into the basics of compositions. Shows the basics of previewing and some tips about the user interface.
• 02. Effects: Shows how to make a composition with settings that match those of a footage item. Introduces effects, including how to apply and modify them.
• 03. Animation: Introduces animation with keyframes and motion blur. Discusses anchor points. Explains bezier interpolation and Easy Ease for keyframes. Shows some useful keyboard shortcuts. Runs through some of the switches in the Timeline panel and introduces parenting and adjustment layers.
• 04. Keying & Transparency: Demonstrates keying and discusses masks and other means of compositing. Shows how to make and use a garbage mask. Introduces blending modes (though he uses the not-quite-correct term transfer modes). Demonstrates track mattes.
• 05. Motion Tracking: Covers the use of the built-in point tracker to do motion tracking and stabilization.
• 06. Time Remapping: Shows how to slow a movie down with time stretching. Explains frame blending (though he confuses frame mix with frame blending---frame blending is the general term; frame mix is the specific kind of frame blending that just mixes two frames). Shows the more flexible time remapping feature.
• 07. 3D Integration: Shows the basics of 3D layers, cameras, and lights. From the title, I expected this to be about integration with 3D applications.
• 08. Titles: 1 & 2: Starts with a detailed walkthrough of text layers and text animation, including text animation presets. Digresses into CC Particle World, one of the Cycore (CC) effects that come with the full version of After Effects, and then the Glow effect. Shows how to use a null object layer to control another layer. In this section, Andrew deviates from the "basic training" theme, but the tutorial is still good; it's just more like his other work.
• 09. Expressions: Andrew says that "expressions are the scripting language in After Effects". Not exactly. An expression is a little piece of software--much like a script--that evaluates to a single value for a single layer property at a specific point in time. Whereas scripts tell an application to do something, an expression says that a property is something. For information about the actual After Effects scripting features, see "Scripts". For information about expressions, see "Expressions". Andrew spends most of this video on the wiggle expression method and the Slider Expression Control effect.
• 10. Rendering: Runs through the basics of rendering and exporting using the render queue. He mistakenly says that Animation codec is uncompressed. The Animation codec does do compression---it's just lossless compression. But his main point is true, which is that the files are still pretty big. Also, heed what he says about not using the File > Export commands in most cases. See this page for details on the few times when the commands in the File > Export menu are a good idea.

Just don't follow Andrew's one bad habit: referring to effects as filters. Filters are destructive operations in applications like Photoshop. Effects are non-destructive operations, and all such image operations in After Effects are non-destructive.

By the way, Adobe also provides a series of video tutorials in many languages. See "video tutorials, esercitazioni, tutoriales, didacticiels, tutoriels, Lehrgänge, チュートリアル".

Just a quick note about a problem that I've seen some people having:

If you have a problem getting previews of animation presets to play in Adobe Bridge, try enabling software rendering in Bridge. See "Use software rendering for previews".

I just installed Final Cut Pro 7, and I was pleased to find when I did some tests that it's using the same pixel aspect ratio values for older standard-definition formats (like NTSC DV) as we're using in After Effects CS4 and other Adobe Creative Suite 4 applications.

As some of you know quite well, we corrected the pixel aspect ratios (PARs) for some older standard-definition formats. This change caused some confusion and consternation, and we tried to explain the issue and ease the transition for people. But one of the questions that we got was about why other software makers hadn't made the same corrections. Well, it appears that some have.

I'm not a frequent user of Final Cut Pro, myself, so I'd appreciate it if others who have more experience with this application can tell us how this change is affecting their work as they use Final Cut Pro 7 and After Effects together.

Thanks to Thomas for alerting me to this change.

There's a new one-stop portal for Pixel Bender, the Pixel Bender Technology Center. Pixel Bender, in case you didn't know, is a language and software development toolkit for creating plug-ins for several Adobe applications, including After Effects, Flash, and Photoshop. The new Pixel Bender Technology Center has links to the toolkit, examples, tutorials, and a whole lot more.

Creating plug-ins written with Pixel Bender tends to be easier than creating plug-ins written using the C/C++ SDK. Also, the ability to share extensions between Photoshop, Flash, and After Effects is a pretty big advantage.

Don't just take my word for it. Go and read more about this on the Pixel Bender Technology Center page. You can also see what Kevin Goldsmith has to say on the matter; he's the engineering manager in charge of Pixel Bender, so he should know what he's talking about.

Recently, on an After Effects forum, I asked someone why they were using plain ol' Google search instead of the much more efficient After Effects Community Help search. The answer was that he wasn't sure that the Community Help search would find all of the good things that Google would.

Since I'd bet that many other people have the same idea, I thought that I should try to remove this misconception. Hence this post.

I assure you that the After Effects Community Help search will find virtually everything worthwhile about After Effects that a regular search on Google.com would---and the Community Help search will filter out a tremendous amount of noise/garbage.

The Community Help search is actually a Google custom search engine that I maintain. I enter websites that I have vetted as being of high quality and as providing free resources about After Effects, as well as other Adobe software.

If you find something free on the Web that is useful for After Effects users but doesn't come up in a Community Help search, tell me, and I'll evaluate it for inclusion. (One of the ways to tell me about a resource is to add a comment to a relevant page of After Effects Help on the Web, pointing to the resource.)

The After Effects Community Help search is available from the upper-right corner of the After Effects CS4 application and from the upper-right corner of every page of After Effects Help on the Web.

You can also do this search from the main After Effects support center page.

There's also an After Effects Community Help search plug-in for the most common browsers.

Note that you can just search within the After Effects CS4 Help document, too.

I find myself giving the same advice over and over on various forums, so I thought that I should say it here, too.

Give your software enough RAM to work.

This means making sure that you've allocated enough RAM for each process when using Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing, and it also means setting RAM To Leave For Other Applications to at least 2GB.

If you don't set your Minimum Allocation Per CPU high enough, or if you don't set RAM To Leave For Other Applications high enough, then you are going to experience the inevitable problems of multiple components both within and outside of After Effects fighting over memory, which slows things down. One of the things that can really kill your performance is essentially telling After Effects to fire up all eight cores in an eight-core machine and then starving those cores of RAM---which is what happens if you set your allocations too low and don't have much RAM. And if you make the operating system swap RAM to the hard disk because you haven't given enough RAM for other applications, then you've really thrown some serious speedbumps in the way.

It seems that a lot of people have machines with eight processor cores and far too little RAM to feed all of those cores. It is far better to leave some of those processors idle than to try to make them run and then have them shut down because they don't each have enough RAM to render a frame.

Let's take an example of a computer with eight processor cores and 8GB of RAM:

For HD, you want at least 2GB for each process; preferably more. And you almost always want to leave at least 2GB for other applications. That leads to some relatively simple math. For an eight-core system with 8GB of RAM, leaving 2GB for other applications gets you down to 6GB. That's enough RAM for three processes at 2GB each.

(For RAM previews, there's the extra detail that the foreground process has a RAM cache that it uses to hold rendered frames. You can give more or less RAM to this cache with the Longer RAM Previews / Faster Rendering slider. If you drag that toward Longer RAM Previews, then you take RAM away from the background processes that do the rendering.)

To get the most from After Effects CS4 out of your computer with eight processor cores and a 64-bit operating system, you would have 32GB of RAM. If you don't have that much RAM, then do yourself a favor and set the preferences that I've mentioned in this post so that you're optimally using what you do have, rather than forcing your operating system and applications to fight over scarce resources and thus bog things down.

Also, check out "Improve performance" for some additional tips on improving performance.

Of course, all of the numbers that I give here are just intended as a starting point. Every composition is different, and every computer system is different. The reason that there are Memory & Multiprocessing preferences is so that you can set things as appropriate for your work.

Peachpit Press has some videos on their website that support and promote some of their new books. They've recently posted some video tutorials that go along with the new book Video Made on a Mac, by Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman. The book and accompanying video tutorials cover the whole range of video pre-production, through production, to post-production.

I've been watching these videos, and I really like some of them. They're good, solid, methodical (but not boring) instructional material for beginners and intermediate users.

Here are a few of the video tutorials that I found especially valuable:

• calibrating a camera with OnLocation: This video shows the practical details of setting white balance, exposure, and focus using OnLocation and the SureShot card.
• panning and scanning in After Effects: This video shows the basics of animation in After Effects, and it also takes a useful little detour into explaining how and why to use the Exponential Scale keyframe assistant.
• animating text (type) in After Effects: This is one of the best short introductions to the text animation features in After Effects that I've seen. It goes beyond the use of text animation presets and shows step by step how to create text animations from scratch using text animators and selectors.

The one thing that I don't like is that I sometimes had to refresh the page a time or two to get the videos on the Peachpit website to play. That didn't matter too much, though, since I subscribed to the podcast using iTunes and watched most of the episodes on my iPod, anyway.

I'll spare you the gory details, but the quick version is that we just moved our "This Help System Only" searches to a new search platform---the same one that we've been using for the "All Community Content" searches.

The gist is that search results should be much better now when you're just searching within our Help documents.

• Search: This Help system only (Using After Effects CS4)
• Rechercher: Ce système d'aide uniquement (Utilisation d'After Effects CS4)
• Suchen: Nur dieses Hilfesystem (Verwenden von After Effects CS4)
• Buscar: Sólo en este sistema de Ayuda (Uso de After Effects CS4)
• Ricerca: Solo in questa guida (Utilizzo di After Effects CS4)
• このヘルプのみ検索 (After Effects CS4 ユーザガイド)
• 검색: 이 도움말 시스템만 (After Effects CS4 사용)

If you have any problems with searching After Effects CS4 Help, let me know. That includes telling me if you searched for something and couldn't find it, as well as just not knowing what word to search for.

[Thanks go again to Dan Ramirez, who did the hard parts of this post.]

If you use Apple's new ProRes4444 codec with After Effects and Final Cut Pro, you may notice a gamma shift (i.e., colors will seem to have too much or too little contrast) when you bring the movies rendered and exported from After Effects back into Final Cut Pro.

To avoid this gamma shift, you'll need to edit your After Effects CS4 QuickTime gamma rules XML file. This will add the appropriate gamma tag to your QuickTime files on output.

The XML file is found here:

[hard drive]/users/[user name]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/MediacoreQTGammaRulesCS4.xml

Using textedit.app or a similar text editor, add the following line to your MediaCoreQTGammaRulesCS4.xml file:


<QTCodec codec='ap4h' vendor='****' platform='mactel' direction='encode' versionlow='0x00000' versionhigh='*' gammatag='true' />


'ap4h' is the 4cc code for ProRes4444. You'll notice that the XML file already includes entries for 'apcn' and 'apch'. These are the 4cc codes for the older flavors of the ProRes codec.

Once you've made this change, you should be able to round-trip ProRes4444 media between Final Cut Pro and After Effects without experiencing a gamma shift.

For more information on preventing color shifts when working with ProRes codecs, see this post:
"ProRes 422 colors in After Effects"

For more information on gamma shifts with QuickTime and Apple software, see this section:
"QuickTime and gamma in non-color-managed projects"

Here's a thread on the MoGraph forum in which Dan presents the same solution.

(UPDATE: For After Effects CS3, see my response in the first comment below.)

On the Adobe After Effects user-to-user forum, we have a list of frequently asked questions. These are the questions that I (and others) on the forum answer many times each week, so it's convenient to just be able to point someone to an answer instead of typing the same answer time and time again. We intend for this to be a resource for others to use as they answer questions, too---either for themselves or for other folks on other forums and such.

Do you have any suggestions for additions to this list? Do you have any additions to make to the answers? If so, come on over to the forum and let me know in the thread on this topic.

FAQ: Why doesn't After Effects see and use all of my RAM?

FAQ: Why does RAM preview only play part of my composition?

FAQ: Why are my vector graphics (e.g., from Illustrator) jagged or soft?

FAQ: Why is there no audio (sound) in my output file?

FAQ: How can I play or preview sound (audio)?

FAQ: Why does my layer (camera) move back and forth between keyframes of equal value?

FAQ: Why won't After Effects import my PSD file as a composition but flattens it?

FAQ: Why doesn't AVI appear as an export format in the Render Queue?

FAQ: Why do FLV files with transparency from After Effects look bad in Flash?

FAQ: Why isn't the anchor point centered in shape layers?

FAQ: What's the difference between Make Movie and Add To Render Queue?

FAQ: How do I quickly center a layer in the Composition panel?

FAQ: How do I create a new composition that matches my source file(s) dimensions, duration, frame rate and pixel aspect?

FAQ: Why does only a section of a motion path appear in the Composition panel?

FAQ: How do I make fire, fog, smoke, or explosions?

I just learned about the neat little applet wordle from Tim Clapham's blog.

You just give the applet a URL, and it analyzes the text on the other end of the link to make a graphic with the words that are common and important. It appears that I write about effects and 64-bit applications and operating systems a lot. Duh.

Michael Coleman, the After Effects product manager, has just invited people to call in and talk with the After Effects team this afternoon. Here's his post.

We did this a couple of months ago, and it was quite interesting.

So, check out Michael's post and give us a call.

Michael Coleman has just given a piece of news on his blog that I think will make a lot of people very happy:

"Today we are announcing that the next version of Adobe After Effects will be a native 64-bit application."

Michael also goes into more detail about what "64-bit" means for After Effects users.

Simon Hayhurst has also given the news on the ProVideo Coalition website:

"CS4 will be the last version of Adobe's leading video applications to support 32 bit operating systems."

In this article, Simon also provides links to an FAQ list about the transition and a white paper about the benefits of using After Effects and other applications on 64-bit operating systems.

If you have questions about the future of After Effects and other Adobe digital video applications, leave a comment for Simon on the article on the ProVideo Coalition website or a comment for Michael on his blog post. Don't ask me, since I'll just direct you to Simon and Michael.

For a little more information on the benefits that you can get now using After Effects CS4 on 64-bit operating systems, see this post: "CS4 Production Premium on 64-bit operating systems".

Adam Everett Miller has just posted an article on AETUTS+ that clarifies some crucial After Effects terminology.

He defines terms like script, expression, effect, plug-in, filter, and (animation) preset. Most important and useful is the fact that he distinguishes between these terms and steers people away from common confusions between them.

I try to define terms in context in After Effects Help, usually in the first or most prominent place that each term is used. For example, words like composition, render, and export are defined in the sections "About compositions" and "Rendering and exporting overview", respectively. But it's sometimes good to have someone bring it all together in one place to untangle some of the confusion and misusage.

I appreciate that Adam has taken my definitions and added to them. (That's why we have the Creative Commons tag on the bottom of each page of Help on the Web---so that y'all can reuse the material as long as you attribute it and don't sell it.)

Thanks, Adam!

Mathias Möhl has recently been offering his scripts on the After Effects Scripts website, as have many other luminaries in the realm of After Effects scripting.

Today, he also uploaded descriptions and links for these scripts to the After Effects Exchange website, where I set three of them as staff picks. Because they're great.

I can't tell you how much of a relief it was to see something get posted to the After Effects Exchange that wasn't another commercially licensed project template. Though we do allow and even encourage people to post commercial items on the Exchange, it's nice when people post freeware, donation-ware, or even try-and-buy items. I know that people want to be able to get compensation for their work, but I also like the fact that the After Effects community has historically been a remarkably open, sharing, and supportive community.

I think that the folks at After Effects Scripts (most centrally Lloyd Alvarez) have really hit on the right balance with their pay-what-you-want scheme. Each item has a suggested price, but you can modify that price up or down (even to zero) when you check out. There's one exception that I know of, and that is the unbelievably useful Immigration script.

So, come to the After Effects Exchange, download some free stuff, maybe get some non-free stuff, and then head over to After Effects Scripts to get even more stuff that's as free as you need it to be. But be nice. The system that Lloyd and associates have going on only works when we're all nice---or when enough of us are nice, anyway.

Oh, and don't forget that you can search the After Effects Help document to find links to individual scripts that I link to in context for specific tasks.

Our technical support staff has put together a new document that collects the issues reported on this blog and Michael Coleman's blog about After Effects on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

See "Known issues with Adobe After Effects CS4 in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)".

In case you haven't done so already, I recommend that you check out Christopher Green's website, where he provides several very useful (and some merely interesting) scripts.

Here's a list of his scripts that I find especially useful:

• Queue_Comp_Sections: Use multiple guide layers to designate multiple time spans to be rendered and exported separately through the render queue. As Chris puts it, "This is sort of like having multiple work area settings for a composition."


• Project_Items_Renamer and Selected_Layers_Renamer: Rename compositions and footage items selected in the Project panel or layers selected in the Timeline panel. You can search and replace text in the names, append characters to the beginning or end of the names, or trim a specified number of characters from the beginning or end of the names. The layer renamer also allows you to replace the names with a series of numbers.


• Selected_Comps_Changer: Change the composition settings for multiple compositions selected in the Project panel.


• crg_Text_from_File: Create one or multiple text layers based on the contents of a text file. You can either create one text layer from all of the text, or you can create one layer for each line in the text file. The script also provides options for leading and other spacing.

There are many more scripts on his site; the ones above are just the ones that I have found especially useful.

Oh, and there's a Donate button on his site. I can confirm that it works. I'm just sayin'.

If you want to find even more useful scripts, check out the "Where to find additional useful scripts" section of After Effects Help, where Chris is now listed alongside such creators of useful scripts as Dan Ebberts, Jeff Almasol, Paul Tuersley, Mathias Möhl, Charles Bordenave (nab), and Lloyd Alvarez.

Please take one or both of the following surveys about tasks that you might do in After Effects. Pretty please? Your doing so will help us to learn what people are having trouble with and how we can make it better.

survey 1

survey 2

Thank you.

I've been working lately on providing concise introductory sections in After Effects Help that each give an overview of a topic, provide some related tips, and then give a bunch of useful links to more detailed information.

I'd like to get some feedback on how these sections are working. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog entry or, if you have something specific to add to one of the pages, go ahead and leave a comment on the Help document itself.

• "Rotoscoping introduction and resources"
• "Keying introduction and resources"
• "Motion tracking overview and resources"
• "Color correction and adjustment"
• "General workflow in After Effects"
• "Examples and resources for text animation"
• "Expression examples and resources"

If, as I hope, these overviews and collections of tips and resources are helpful, then I'll do more of this kind of thing.

Chris Zwar recently published a three-part series on the ProVideo Coalition website that is billed as a "3-part video tutorial looking at advanced 3D animation in After Effects ".

Yeah, it is that. But it's so much more.

In part 1, Chris gives a lot of real-world insight into planning a project, including all of the things that you must do outside of After Effects if you want to be successful and have happy clients. He talks about researching the audience, the viewing environment, and the client. He talks about getting reference photographs. This is the kind of up-front work that can make or break a project. I'm adding a link to this part of the series from the "Planning your work" section of After Effects Help (which also, by the way, contains a link to one of my favorite articles by Aharon Rabinowitz).

In part 2, Chris goes into deep detail about building 3D scenes and objects in After Effects. He has some good explanations and tips about collapsing transformations, precomposing, and parenting.

In part 3, he goes into more detail about the importance of textures, lights, and shadows in making a synthetic 3D scene look more realistic.

As Chris himself points out, this isn't a tutorial series in the sense in which the word 'tutorial' has been used too much lately. He doesn't show the click-by-click steps that the viewer can follow without actually building any understanding. Rather, this is a series that aims to demonstrate and explore some important concepts in the context of a real-world project. I think that this gets back to the root of the word 'tutorial': it teaches.

Great work, Chris!

I just pushed a big update to After Effects CS4 Help on the Web. If you tend to work offline, now would be a good time to grab a fresh copy of the PDF version of the document, because there is absolutely no circumstance under which you should be using the local, HTML version of Help that was installed on your hard disk when you installed After Effects. I mean it.

This update is full of a bunch of little changes---mostly clarifications, links to tutorials, and some minor restructuring. I won't bore you with all of the changes here.

There is one big change, though: As many people have requested, I've put all (and I do mean all) of the After Effects CS4 keyboard shortcuts on one page with anchor links. Several people asked that I do this so that they could search on a single page rather than having to click through several individual category pages and search on each of those.

Let me know what you think of this change. Sometimes it's hard to strike the right balance when parsing a large document into discrete web pages. I want to make sure that this is working for y'all.

Finally, I again urge each and every one of you to add comments to the pages of After Effects Help on the Web. Those comments are the source of a lot of these updates. Have you recently watched a video tutorial that taught something about After Effects especially well? Then leave a comment with a link to that video tutorial. Did you recently post a template project, script, plug-in, or animation preset on your website that you'd like to share with other After Effects users? Then leave a comment with a link. Got a tip? Leave a comment. Got a correction? Leave a comment.

Here's an example of a page with a comment from David Bogie that is likely helping every person who reads the page. Thanks, David!

Just sign in at the bottom of the relevant page of After Effects CS4 Help on the Web and click the Add Comment button that appears.

Toolfarm is maintaining a table of plug-ins noting compatibility with After Effects CS4 and some other applications on Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6).

As I mentioned in a previous post, users of After Effects CS4 should update to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) to prevent some problems with crashing and freezing on start under Snow Leopard.

See this previous post for some additional details.

One problem that I've just recently become aware of on Snow Leopard is from Frank, a reader of this blog: "Unfortunately it is no longer possible to use After Effects in a different language in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Apple has removed the option to deselect languages in the finder info window."

I have heard many complaints about Adobe TV, including complaints about its lousy navigation and poor performance. In fact, many of these complaints that I heard were coming from my own mouth. I had to create a page with an ordered listing of video tutorials because it was hard for users to find the video tutorials within the Adobe TV interface.

So I'm quite pleased that Adobe TV has undergone a huge, substantial transformation.

Navigation is much better. When you're done watching one video, you can actually see what's next in the series or what else is available about the same application. This was flaky at best in the previous release of Adobe TV. There are actually useful channels that make sense and are easy to navigate between and within.

Search is better. This one is self-explanatory, I think.

Performance is better. Videos load more quickly and play more smoothly. (And I hear that this is going to get even better soon.)

Oh, and you can subscribe to shows using RSS feeds.

There are other new features, but these are the ones that I know will make my life better... and yours, too.

Thank you, Adobe TV team!

I can tell from our search logs that some folks are searching for error codes in a way that is not... um... optimally likely to return relevant results. If you just search for the numbers in the error code (like 7 :: 66), then you'll get a lot of results for pages that just happen to include the numbers.

So, here's a tip: Search for the word 'error' plus the error code surrounded by double quotation marks, like this search for the error code 7 :: 66. Implicit in this tip is that you should be using the After Effects Community Help search to do your search.

You'll notice something when you do many searches for After Effects error codes: You get many (most) of the best and most useful results from Mylenium's After Effects error code database. The guy who maintains that database is one of the most helpful and knowledgeable folks in the After Effects community, Lutz Albrecht. Another thing that you should notice is the Make A Donation button in the upper-right of the pages on his site. I've used it. I'm just sayin'.

As I noted in a post a few days ago, After Effects CS4 on Snow Leopard must be updated to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) to use Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing.

It turns out that there are some additional reasons to update After Effects CS4 for use on Snow Leopard, too. In some circumstances, updating fixes some problems with After Effects not starting (or freezing on startup) on Snow Leopard.

Michael Coleman is tracking these issues on his blog.

Michael Coleman is tracking the status of After Effects on Snow Leopard on his blog.

But there's one issue that I wanted to make sure that everyone saw:

After Effects CS4 (9.0.0) on Snow Leopard doesn't work well with Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing. You must update to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) if you are going to use Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing on Snow Leopard.

Of course, there are so many other reasons to update that you've already done it, right? Right?

from Michael Coleman's blog:

"This week we're going to try something different. I'm going to publish a phone number that will let you call into our Friday wine down.

Anyone can call and there is no agenda. We just want to invite you to share some time with us. You can ask us questions, tell us about something cool you're working on or urge us to go in a certain direction, pitch your favorite feature -- whatever. We may even have a few questions for you. "

One of my favorite design blogs, GoMediaZine just posted an article near and dear to me.

George reminds people that the best, most direct, most effective way to communicate with Adobe about bugs and feature requests is to use the official feature-request/bug-report form.

Posting rants on forums may feel good, but don't count on it helping you or helping the software improve. I watch half a dozen forums, but I can't keep up with everything. I do have a real job.

Also, be sure to use the crash reporter.

We really do read all of the bug reports and feature requests, and the software really does get a lot of benefit from detailed crash reports.

Don't forget about contacting Adobe Technical Support or Customer Service, too. For information on how to contact Adobe Technical Support, see this page. (Note that you must register your product before you can open a technical support case for it.)

If you have tried to get help from our support staff, but the service was inadequate, I can help you to escalate your issue if you send me your case number at kopriva at adobe dot com. You must provide me a case number. I am not offering to solve your problem myself; rather, I am willing to forward your information to someone if you have already hit a dead end with our Technical Support or Customer Service.

Oh, and I can't resist this opportunity to remind you to update to the most recent version of the application. If you're still running After Effects CS4 (9.0.0), don't be surprised when the first thing that you hear back from us is that you need to update to After Effects CS4 (9.0.2). We fixed a lot of things in that update, and we don't want to go chasing bugs that we've already fixed.

Finally, if you are going to post your problem on a forum, then please follow some basic best practices that will help you get help faster and keep the forum hosts happy.

Someone just asked on a forum what the earliest works to use After Effects were. That conversation caused Dave Simons to hand me the After Effects 1.1 demo reel from 1993. Of course, I just had to post it.

The movie does have sound---just not in the first few segments. I think that this is from primordial times, before we learned that motion graphics without audio might as well be a blank screen. Even smooth jazz is (a little) better than silence.

If you have some old, old After Effects work to point to, let me know in the comments.

I like this new AIR application for searching and browsing keyboard shortcuts.

This application contains a database of all of the keyboard shortcuts for all of the applications in Creative Suite 4.

To see all of the shortcuts, be sure to click All Categories. The default Essentials view just shows a small subset.

For After Effects, the information appears to be identical to that in the "Keyboard shortcuts" section of After Effects Help. (I'd recognize my own writing anywhere.)

I like the search features in the AIR application, and I also like the fact that I have the shortcuts for all of the applications that I use all in one place.

If you want to search for keyboard shortcuts in After Effects CS4 Help, you can do that, too.

For information on editing keyboard shortcuts, see the top of this page.

David Van Brink is a smart, creative guy who likes to play with After Effects. Even better, he likes to share the products of his play with others.

For example, he provides a quick video walkthrough and downloadable example project that show off some of the things that you can do with the Particle Playground effect.

As you can see, I've already included links to some of David's posts in After Effects Help.

I'm working my way through his other blog posts, learning and smiling. I like it when I can do both of those things at once. I'll post back with some more information about what I find, but I just wanted to say sooner rather than later how much I like the omino pixel blog.

Amusing, mostly unrelated side note: John Nack used to make tutorials about using After Effects and Flash together. Eight years sure is a long time ago in this industry. (link through the wayback machine to John's olde-timey tutorials)

I recently watched the 15 episodes published so far in Steve Holmes's "Real World Footage Effects" podcast on the Artbeats website.

I like it.

Artbeats obviously has an agenda in mind---to sell more of their stock footage---but Steve manages to showcase these assets without being... well... an annoying shill. His experience shows through his practical techniques, and his demeanor is both professional and pleasant. (His experience and creativity also show in the demo reel for Energi Design, for which Steve is the Creative Director.)

Throughout the episodes, Steve is showing you how to make use of stock footage in your After Effects projects. In doing so, he shows some crucial, bread-and-butter techniques. Consider that few if any of the following items in a stock footage asset are going to exactly match your needs for a specific project:

• duration
• timing
• colors
• dimensions (width and height)
• presence of an alpha channel

So, in showing you how to get the most out of the Artbeats clips, Steve shows how to do the following:

• trim, extend, and slip-edit layers
• trim footage items
• time-remap and time-stretch layers
• correct and adjust colors
• scale layers
• crop layers with simple masks
• create and use mattes
• ...and use a variety of clever techniques to create and extract alpha channel information for compositing

• Episode 1: Glow effect and motion blur
• Episode 2: time-remapping, video editing (e.g., trimming and sequencing layers)
• Episode 3: Displacement Map effect
• Episode 4: lights, casting shadows, and accepting shadows
• Episode 5: Compound Blur effect
• Episode 6: more time-remapping, with both fast and slow motion
• Episode 7: layer styles, including a good tip for light altitude in Bevel And Emboss
• Episode 8: track mattes
• Episode 9: Steve's trick with the Linear Wipe effect for cropping
• Episode 10: stacking and compositing 3D layers of smoke
• Episode 11: day-to-night color adjustment and using Motion Tile to repeat an SD rain asset across a larger (HD) frame
• Episode 12: Steve's trick with Shift Channels and Remove Color Matting to knock the black out of a clip of a candle flame
• Episode 13: copying mask from Photoshop, free-transforming masks, mask expansion
• Episode 14: animating a camera to add a camera move to a high-definition image in post-production
• Episode 15: Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator Pro plug-in

Here are two techniques that Steve demonstrates and uses quite often:

When Steve needs to use a clip of fire or smoke that was shot against a black background, he reliably reaches for the Shift Channels effect and the Remove Color Matting effect. He uses the former to take the alpha channel value from either the luminance or (in the case of fire) the red channel of the image. Of course, since the black areas have neither luminance nor red, this sets the alpha channel value to 0 in the black areas. In other words, it keys out the black. The use of the Remove Color Matting effect is to get rid of the remaining traces of the black background in areas of partial transparency (of which there are many in a shot of fire or smoke).

There are many ways to composite a clip with a black background, from the use of something like Knoll Unmult (which is best for keying out black in clips with light effects, like fire and flares) to the use of a blending mode like Screen.

Steve's technique seems to be more versatile than using blending modes when you're using the same asset in a variety of different ways, because it actually creates alpha information. This is a good tool to have in the ol' utility belt.

Normally, the Linear Wipe effect is used to make a transition from one layer being visible to the layer(s) under it being visible. You know, a wipe.

Steve has found another use for this effect.

When he wants to crop a layer from one side, he reaches for the Linear Wipe effect, sets the Transition Completion property to a static value, sets the feather amount, and voila!---cropping done. In some cases, he'll crop from multiple angles with multiple instances of the effect, each with a different feather amount. That's something that you can't do with a single mask, since a mask has the same feather all the way around.

I'm testing some changes to our blog software.

But, while I'm at it, I'll point out that I really like Dave Scotland's tutorials and other informational resources. I recently added some links for his site to the "3D Channel effects" section of After Effects Help. He's got a great pair of videos about the RPF format and how to use the various channels in RPF files (and other 3D formats).

A few months ago, I posted a project and simple set of instructions for creating a radial rays graphic. Today, I had a forehead-smacking realization when I was looking at a tutorial that showed how to get the same result in Illustrator.

Duh.

I like this method better.

Make a shape layer containing a single big circle. Set the stroke width to be the same as the diameter of the circle. Make the stroke a dashed stroke. Set the dash length to taste.

Ta-da!

Thanks to Rype for making me see the obvious.

I'm a big fan of encouraging people to add comments to Help documents to provide tips, links to tutorials, and other useful information.

But, I have to admit that plain-text comments aren't always the best medium for conveying information. Sometimes you need to use formatting, images, movies, and more words to get information across.

That's why I was glad to see the launch of the Adobe Community Publishing System (CPS).

Here's what the CPS folks have to say about it:

We're pleased to announce the Adobe Community Publishing 1.1 beta is live. This new AIR application lets anyone with an Adobe ID publish content on Adobe products and technology directly to Adobe.com.

Community members can contribute tips, movies, code snippets, and more with easy-to-use templates. Contributions are moderated by community experts. Plus, everyone in the community can rate and comment on contributions.

Contributing is easy
1. Download the Community Publishing app: Adobe Community Publishing System (CPS)
2. Author your tip using a simple template
3. Publish it to Adobe.com

Content goes live within minutes and is automatically added to community help search. Exceptional contributions will be promoted in Help & Support pages, Developer Connection, Design Center, and considered for inclusion in Adobe partner publications.

They're right about the interface being easy to use and immediate. It took only a few minutes for me to test it out and write up this little tip/article: "Remove all colors from an image but one".

It helped that there was an article that explained some parts of the interface: "Adobe Community Publishing tips"

You can see all of the submissions here: Community Publishing index page.

So, take it for a spin. I'll be keeping an eye on the submissions for After Effects and including links to the especially good stuff when I update the After Effects Help document.

Adobe is looking for participants for a brief (~1 hour) online work observation and interview.

Participants in these studies will be thanked profusely and given a $100 Amazon gift card.

There are two sets of criteria, each applying to a different study. Read the criteria carefully before responding. Also, you must indicate in the subject line of your response which one of the two studies you meet the criteria for and wish to participate in.

The studies will be conducted over the telephone and Connect (software for screen sharing).

For the text animation study, participants must meet the following criteria:

• no experience animating text in After Effects
• experienced user of Adobe Premiere Pro
• current user of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4
• have Creative Suite 4 Master Collection or Creative Suite 4 Production Premium installed (with most recent updates) on a computer that can be connected to the Internet
• ability and willingness to install and use Acrobat Connect on the same computer as the above software
• a 90-minute block of free time between 9:00 and 16:00 Pacific Time (GMT-8) on a Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday during the first two weeks of August (5August-14August).

If you meet these requirements and would like to participate in this study, please contact me at kopriva [at] adobe [dot] com, with the subject line "text animation study".

For the rotoscoping study, participants must meet the following criteria:

• no experience rotoscoping in After Effects
• experienced user of Adobe Premiere Pro
• current user of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4
• have Creative Suite 4 Master Collection or Creative Suite 4 Production Premium installed (with most recent updates) on a computer that can be connected to the Internet
• ability and willingness to install and use Acrobat Connect on the same computer as the above software
• a 90-minute block of free time between 9:00 and 16:00 Pacific Time (GMT-8) on a Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday during the first two weeks of August (5August-14August).

If you meet these requirements and would like to participate in this study, please contact me at kopriva [at] adobe [dot] com, with the subject line "rotoscoping study".

As most of you know, you can add comments to the pages of After Effects Help on the Web. We encourage you to add comments to share tips, tricks, links to tutorials, and other information that will help other users of After Effects.

Also, Adobe hosts a very active After Effects user-to-user forum. Many of the people who add comments to the pages of After Effects Help to provide useful information are the same people who help to answer questions on the forum.

I'd like to thank these folks for helping out their fellow After Effects users. This community generosity is one of the things that makes me so glad that I'm lucky enough to have the job of working with After Effects. For some reason, the people who use After Effects are so much more willing to help each other out than people who use... well... other software.

It would be nice if you did what you could to thank these people, too. You could stop by their websites, leave a note of thanks, consider buying what they're selling... even use the PayPal donation buttons that some of them provide.

Here is a list of people who have been helping out a lot lately:

• Lutz Albrecht (Mylenium)
• Sébastien Périer
• Rick Gerard
• Andrew Yoole
• A. Cobb
• Steve Patterson
• Dan Ebberts
• Antony Davison
• David Bogie (bogiesan)
• Satya Meka (gutsblow)
• John Dickinson
• Mathias Möhl
• Mike Afford
• Paul Tuersely
• Sam Morris
• Jorge Mochon
• Bruno Quintin
• Alex Czetwertynski
• Ayato Fuji
• Guzman Huerta
• Sara Batista
• Stéphane Lim

(Note that this list doesn't even consider the work that some of these same people do as Community Help moderators, moderating the comments that are added to Help, which is itself a valuable service.)

Again, thank you, all. I'm sure that everyone reading this thanks you, too, but I'll let them speak for themselves.

Please take one or both of the following surveys about tasks that video editors might do in After Effects. Pretty please? Your doing so will help us to learn what people are having trouble with and how we can make it better.

survey 1

survey 2

I'm not saying anything new in this blog post. I just wanted to gather together in one place several useful resources on the subject of the new, corrected pixel aspect ratios (PARs) that were introduced with the CS4 versions of the applications in Creative Suite 4 Production Premium.

First of all, I'll point out that these new PARs don't affect high-definition work or work that is destined for computer monitors. This issue is strictly limited to the old standard-definition television formats.

Of course, the first place that I'd hope that you'd go is the "Pixel aspect ratio and frame aspect ratio" section of After Effects Help, which gives a terse explanation of the change and provides tables with the new PARs and the new square-pixel equivalents for when you're creating square-pixel assets to work within compositions with non-square pixels.

Mike Afford has put together a good explanation on his website. Mike used to work for the BBC, but to get a direct statement from the BBC, you should check out their own paper about the underlying technical details.

Chris Meyer provides a very detailed and thorough article on the ProVideo Coalition website that explains the history and reasoning behind the new and old pixel aspect ratios and---more important---how to work with these new numbers in any circumstance.

Chris also has a "New pixel aspect ratios" video on the Lynda.com website that covers some of the same material, but in video form and not in as much depth.

Chris also shows how change a preference setting to allow you to continue to work with the old PARs in CS4 with old projects.

UPDATE: See this post for the news that Final Cut Pro 7 uses the corrected pixel aspect ratios, too.

A little while ago, someone asked on a forum how they could get a readout of color values for one or more points that would update as you tweaked color correction settings.

I whipped together an expression using the sampleImage method.

The idea is simple: Have a text layer with its Source Text property tied to the output from sampleImage, with the input to sampleImage being a point control that you can drag someplace and then just leave it while you fiddle with your colors.

I'm not saying that this is the most elegant solution, but here is what I came up with.

On the layer that you want to measure, add a Point Control effect (one of the Expression Control effects). You can place the Point Control effect's crosshair (effect control point) wherever you want.

Create a new text layer above the layer that you want to measure, and add this expression to the Source Text property:

targetLayer = thisComp.layer(thisLayer.index+1);
samplePoint = targetLayer.effect("Point Control")("Point");
sampleRadius = [1,1];
sampledColor_8bpc = 255 * targetLayer.sampleImage(samplePoint, sampleRadius);
R = Math.round(sampledColor_8bpc[0]);
G = Math.round(sampledColor_8bpc[1]);
B = Math.round(sampledColor_8bpc[2]);
A = Math.round(sampledColor_8bpc[3]);
outputString = " R: " +R+ "\r G: " +G+ "\r B: " +B+ "\r A: " +A

This will create a text layer that reports 8-bpc RGBA values for the point under the crosshair for the Point Control effect. In the image that I've embedded above, you can see that the effect control point is in the upper center, in the nearly pure white clouds, and the RGBA values reflect this.

If you're using an adjustment layer for your color correction, the adjustment layer is the layer that you'll want to measure.

You can obviously get a lot fancier with this, but this should be enough to get you started.

If you've left a comment on this blog in the past month or so, and you wondered why I didn't approve it or respond, then you might be interested to know that our spam filter went rogue and started killing... well... everything.

I'm digging through the purported spam now, trying to find the legitimate comments and approve them and respond to them.

Richard Harrington and Marcus Geduld have just released a new book about my favorite application and... well... that other one. You see, I'm one of those people who knows After Effects backwards and forwards but has had a hard time making the crossover to Flash. I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of people in the reverse position. (Actually, I know that there are, because I'm constantly correcting people when they use words like 'stage' when talking about After Effects.)

Richard and Marcus have come to the rescue.

The first two chapters of their book are designed for people like me. (Well, one is designed for people like me; the other is designed for my evil Flash twin.) One teaches the basics of Flash in terms that an After Effects user can understand, and the other teaches the basics of After Effects in terms that a Flash user can understand.

The good folks at Peachpit Press have made these two chapters available on their website:

• "Flash essentials for After Effects users"
• "After Effects essentials for Flash users"

The rest of the book goes on to explain how you do creative and production work in each of these applications and then move the pieces and outputs back and forth to get the best of both. But you have to buy the book to get those parts. I'm pretty sure that many of you will do just that as soon as you see the value in the introductory chapters.

Thank you, Richard and Marcus, for creating a two-way information bridge between these two applications.

Of course, there's a section in After Effects Help (and in Flash Help) about working with After Effects and Flash. Richard and Marcus just did a more understandable and thorough job than we did.

I think that we do a solid job with the reference material for rendering and exporting to SWF, FLV, F4V, and XFL for Flash and Flash Player in After Effects Help, so I'm not too embarrassed.

Someone just asked on a forum why expanding a rectangular mask resulted in a mask with rounded corners. I made a little visual aid to answer the question, so I thought that I should post it here.

Increasing mask expansion is not the same thing scaling a mask. Scaling preserves shape. Expansion extends the influence of the mask by growing outward from each point along the mask path by a certain number of pixels.

For each point on the original mask path, imagine a circle radiating outward by the number of pixels by which you're expanding.

In the image above, the white rectangle is the original mask path. The red circles indicate the expansion radius. Note how these circles define a sharp inner rectangle, which is what you get with a negative expansion; and they define a rounded outer rectangle, which is what you get with a positive expansion.

[Today's post is from Tim Kurkoski, After Effects quality engineer.]

When you render and export an FLV file with an alpha channel and then import the FLV file into Adobe Flash Professional (the Flash authoring application), you may get a colored halo in semi-transparent areas of the image if the background color of your After Effects composition is not black.

To work around this problem, do either of the following and re-render the FLV file:
* Change the background color of your composition to black.
* Change the Color setting to Straight in the Video Settings section of the Output Module Settings dialog box.

This problem occurs because the FLV encoder (the Adobe Media Encoder) only embeds alpha channels as premultiplied with black. The encoding happens after After Effects renders each frame and passes it on to the Adobe Media Encoder, according to the output module settings. This means that if After Effects rendered a frame as premultiplied and the background color was not black, then the background color will become embedded in the visible pixels of the frame.

Adobe Flash Professional and Flash Player only support alpha channels that are premultiplied with black. This is faster and simpler for Flash Player to decode than straight alpha channels. Flash Professional does not have a function to control how alpha channel colors are interpreted.

It is safe to use the straight alpha mode in the output module settings because straight mode does not embed the background color into the pixels. Thus there is no color contamination when the FLV encoder converts the alpha to premultiplied with black. However, the default Color setting is Premultiplied (with the composition background color), so you must change this setting manually every time. If you use this setting frequently you can create a new output module template.

Note: Earlier versions of After Effects have the opposite problem: black as the background color will cause a black halo, while other premultiplied colors may appear OK in Flash. FLV encoding in After Effects CS4 was changed so the default options (black background and premultiplied alpha) will produce a good-looking image. For any version of After Effects, choosing straight alpha will produce a good-looking image.

Version 1.7 of the REDCODE importer plug-in was just released.

That, along with the After Effects 9.0.2 update yesterday, means that you now have all that you need to make great use of RED (R3D) footage with After Effects CS4. I have some instructions on using the new features at the end of this post.

Today, the After Effects 9.0.2 update was released.

If Adobe Update Manager hasn't already told you about this, go ahead and check for new updates for After Effects CS4. (Choose Help > Updates, or go to the download pages for Windows or Mac OS and click the "Adobe After Effects CS4 9.0.2 update" link.)

There are a lot of fixes and tweaks in this update. You can read about them in the After Effects 9.0.2 release notes. I'll mention a few here, though, since some of these are important enough that I really want to make sure that people see them.

If you're updating from 9.0.0, you might want to read about the changes that were made in the 9.0.1 update, too. The 9.0.2 update is cumulative, so you'll get the 9.0.1 fixes with it.

You can skip to the last section of this post if you just care about the RED (R3D) support update.

• Well, there's the whole RED thing. See the last section of this post for details.
• XDCAM HD footage as Avid-style MXF files can now be imported.
• There's now a preference (in the preferences text file) to control the interval checking done while rendering QuickTime movies through the render queue. By default, when using the render queue to render a QuickTime movie, After Effects flushes the rendered frames to disk every 10 minutes. This is done to preserve as much of a completed render as possible in case the application crashes unexpectedly. However, incompatibility with certain versions of QuickTime can cause the render to stop at this 10-minute mark. If this occurs, you can change the following new setting in the Adobe After Effects 9.0 Prefs (Mac OS) or Adobe After Effects 9.0 Prefs.txt (Windows) file to 0 to turn off this check:
  
  ["Misc Section"]
"Flush RQ Rendering Every X Seconds (0 = off)" = "0"
  
  Note: Turning off this check (by setting to 0) will no longer preserve a portion of the completed render, but can allow the render to complete without stopping. Also, this setting will not appear in the preferences file until you render with this version of After Effects 9.0.2, but you can add it manually before launching After Effects.
• I've made many additions and corrections to After Effects CS4 Help, many of them based on your feedback and contributions. Please, continue to share your knowledge with others by adding comments to the pages of After Effects Help on the Web.

Here's a partial list of things that we fixed. (Note that we were able to find and fix a lot of these problems because of the great feedback that we got when we asked people to use the Adobe Crash Reporter. Please keep doing so. And don't hesitate to file bugs and send feature requests.)

• Crash on quit if the active workspace when After Effects starts includes a ScriptUI Panel.
• Several memory corruption issues; fix should improve overall application stability
• Crash on startup on computers with very old OpenGL drivers, or unsupported video card manufacturers.
• Crash on startup due to a corrupt XML file in the preferences directory, such as used by workspaces, dialog boxes, and Pixel Bender. Now, the corrupt file will be appended with a .old extension so that startup can proceed.
• Crash on startup due to unsupported codec. Now, a warning message will identify the unsupported codec and associated file name.
• When a PDFL crash occurs during startup, more information is now provided, indicating that a bad font may be causing the crash.
• (Windows only) Drawing surface errors and short RAM previews due to exhaustion of GDI resources (handles). Now, you should have better memory usage, resulting in longer RAM previews and improved performance.
• Cannot open DPX file that can be opened in Photoshop CS4; file converted from Phantom .cine to DPX using Glue Tools.
• "After Effect error: internal verification failure, sorry! {fill me in}" error trying to import multi-image element DPX footage, such as from a Northlight Film Scanner.
• Audio conforming failure when importing certain FLV files.
• Crash when using Pixel Bender effects, GPU-accelerated effects, and Cartoon effect in low-memory situations. Instead of being marked invalid, Pixel Bender effects can be reapplied when memory becomes available.
• Crash in the Puppet effect when generating the mesh on a complex shape (possibly when Expansion is zero).
• (Mac OS only) Crash in the Puppet effect when pasting keyframes into a non-keyframed Puppet pin Position property.
• "could not convert unicode characters (23::46)" error applying CC RepeTile effect in Chinese OS, or crash using CC Particle World on Mac Pro 8-Core i7 (Nehalem) machines.
• Crash trying to interrupt rendering (e.g., dragging to adjust values) for the Fog 3D, Depth Matte, or ID Matte effect when placed after other effects; for Fractal Noise and Turbulent Noise effects; and for EXtractoR and IDentifier effects when placed after other effects.
• Crash when deleting the Tone effect from one composition, when that composition is used (nested) in another composition.
• (Mac OS only) Incorrect Mac type/creator codes for OpenEXR, PICT, PNG, TIFF, and Cineon rendered files, which made them unrecognizable by Final Cut Pro.
• Crash on quit or close of project after multiple layers with various video/audio states (active, solo) are copied.
• Crash on quit with layers on the clipboard that are adjustment layers with effects with points or collapsed layers.
• Incorrect dimensions of a multiple-layer Photoshop file imported as a composition with cropped layers and merged layer styles.
• (Mac OS only) "invalid file location specification (must include name) (3::45)" error on quit if you create or open a project containing Particle Playground effect.

There's a known issue with a specific update scenario:

If you downloaded the After Effects 9.0 trial, then updated to After Effects 9.0.1, and then activated the application with a serial number after purchasing a license (all in exactly that order), then the After Effects 9.0.2 update will fail to update your third-party content, like the Cycore (CC) effect plug-ins. It appears that uninstalling the third-party content and then restarting the application will cause the updated third-party content to be installed correctly.

If this doesn't work for you, please let us know on the After Effects user-to-user forum, and we'll try to help you through it. There's also contact information for Adobe Technical Support on the home page of that forum, and you can get free assistance with many installation issues.

See the After Effects 9.0.2 release notes for other known issues.

You can get the new REDCODE importer plug-in from the RED website. You need version 1.7 of the REDCODE importer plug-in to take advantage of the new features for RED (R3D) footage in After Effects 9.0.2.

The good folks at RED provide a set of release notes and a pretty detailed document (RED Plugin Workflow Guide.pdf) with the installer for version 1.7 of the REDCODE importer plug-in. You really should read the whole thing, but here are some important things that bear reiteration:

• The big change that comes with After Effects 9.0.2 is the fact that RED settings are now like any other footage interpretation settings. I.e., you can interpret footage differently for each footage item, rather than have one set of global settings that applies to every asset/clip/item identically. As I said, this is a big change; now all of the things that you're used to doing with footage interpretation settings work as you'd expect. Click the More Options button in the Interpret Footage dialog box to open the RED R3D Source Settings dialog box. The parameters in the RED R3D Source Settings dialog box are described in the aforementioned workflow guide on the RED website.
• You must not interpret RED R3D files as if their colors are in a linear color space---i.e., don't interpret them as "linear light". Because the default is for 32bpc colors to be interpreted as linear light, check the interpretation settings in the Color Management tab of the Interpret Footage dialog box to make sure that Interpret As Linear Light is set to Off. The aforementioned workflow guide has instructions for making this automatic.
• If you're using color management, interpret RED as HDTV (Rec. 709). The aforementioned workflow guide has instructions for making this automatic.
• The RED R3D Source Settings color adjustments don't currently preserve overbright values (values above 1.0, where 1.0 is pure white). Color adjustments done within After Effects, on the other hand, can and do preserve brighter-than-white colors when you work in 32bpc (bits per channel) color. What's the upshot? To avoid clipping, manipulate things like exposure in After Effects using effects, rather than in the footage interpretation stage in the RED R3D Source Settings dialog box. (See "Color depth and high dynamic range (HDR) color" for more information.)
• If you copy and paste footage items or layers between After Effects and Premiere Pro, the settings set in the RED R3D Source Settings dialog box come along for the ride.
• The RED workflow for After Effects 9.0.1 with version 1.3 of the REDCODE importer plug-in required you to manually install REDSettingsPal.plugin in the Plug-ins/Format directory. After Effects 9.0.2 with version 1.7 of the REDCODE importer plug-in doesn't require this file. In fact, you should manually uninstall this file by removing it from your Plug-ins directory. If you don't, then you'll get an error when using version 1.7 of the REDCODE importer plug-in and After Effects 9.0.2.

For more information about RED and the Premiere Pro 4.1 update, see the Adobe Premiere Pro training blog.

David Helmly provides an overview of new features in Premiere Pro CS4 (4.1) and After Effects CS4 (9.0.2) in a video on Adobe TV. The RED stuff starts at about 14:35, and the After Effects stuff starts at 20:55. He's also got an overview that concentrates on the Premiere Pro features here.

When you start After Effects, it presents a welcome screen, which includes a tip of the day. A few people have asked for a document that contains all of the tips of the day, so that they can be searched or browsed more easily. So, here it is. (Or you can download a PDF version.)

I'd think that people would have a better experience searching the much more comprehensive After Effects CS4 Help document, rather than a somewhat random and redundant assortment of tips, but I also like to give people what they want.

If you have tips of your own to contribute, please do so by leaving a comment at the bottom of the relevant page of After Effects Help on the Web. Pretty please?

(Note: The tips in the application are specific to one operating system or the other with regard to modifier keys like Ctrl versus Command and Alt versus Option. I'm giving the Windows version here, only because my Mac is about 10km away as I write this. I trust that nearly everyone reading this knows how to map the Windows version to the Mac OS version. The Help document gives both.)

I just saw a message that referred to the "top 6 undiscoverable menu commands" in After Effects. I thought that I might be able to make them a bit more discovered (if not more discoverable) by broadcasting a short message telling y'all about them.

View > Look at Selected Layers
This is handy for orienting a 3D view to look at selected layers. It's otherwise too easy to get lost in a huge 3D world, not really knowing where you're looking.

Layer > Mask > Hide Locked Masks
This works well with Layer > Mask > Lock Other Masks. To isolate one mask, you can lock other masks and then hide locked masks.

Layer > Mask and Shape Paths > Free Transform Points
Free-transforming a set of path points (vertices) is a way to scale, position, or rotate a set of vertices together.

Composition > Crop Comp To Region Of Interest
The value of this should be obvious... once you know that it exists.

Layer > Transform > Fit To...
You can scale a layer in many ways, including fitting the layer to the composition's height or width, preserving the layer's original image aspect ratio.

View > View Options
You can toggle which layer controls (light wireframes, layer handles, mask and shape paths, effect control points, motion path controls) to show in a view.

Chris Jackson's book, Flash + After Effects was written for After Effects CS3 and Flash CS3, but there's still a lot of great information in this book for users of After Effects CS4 and Flash CS4.

For example, the chapter on exporting SWF files from After Effects is just as relevant as it was when it was written, since that feature hasn't really changed since After Effects CS3. I found Chris's chapter to be a really good practical companion to the reference section in After Effects Help, "Render and export a composition as a SWF file".

Similarly, the techniques described in the chapter on creating SWF files and QuickTIme movies from Flash for import into After Effects are still valid and useful. I think that Chris did an especially good job of explaining the technical specifications of video standards for the Flash user, so that you can prepare your work in Flash such that it works well on a TV screen. (One change for CS4, though, is an update to pixel aspect ratios and frame dimensions.)

Of course, we also added a few things to After Effects CS4 to make integration with Flash better, like exporting a composition to an XFL file. I hope that Chris covers those in a new edition of this book soon. But, until he does, you'd be well served to pick up the currently available version and check out the "Rendering and exporting for Flash Professional and Flash Player" section of After Effects Help for the new stuff.

Someone asked on a forum recently how they could make radial rays in After Effects.

This is actually really easy using a single shape layer. You just make a polystar (the hybrid object that can be used for polygons or stars) with a huge inner radius and 0 outer radius. Then you can tweak the number of points to change the number of rays and change the outer roundness to change the thickness of the rays.

An additional hack is to set the stroke width to be pretty high, which gives the color to the rays that aren't filled by the standard fill. (To make this work, I had reorder the stroke and fill to make the fill paint over the stroke.) You could also just use the stroke in the normal way and let an underlying solid-color layer or other shape provide the alternating rays' color.

Click here to download the After Effects CS4 project file.

I discovered recently that most people don't know about the loopOut and loopIn expression methods, which allow you to tell After Effects to loop or continue an animation in many different ways. The details about loopIn and loopOut are in After Effects Help, but an infomographic is worth a gazillion words.

Click here to play infomographic.

Click here to download the project file.

Marcus Geduld just released a new book, After Effects Expressions, on Focal Press.

The fine folks at Focal Press have made a couple of excerpts of this book available on the Web. These samples have some great example expressions, as well as some explanation of how some of the trickier parts of the expression system work.

In the "String Manipulation" section, Marcus shows how to use basic JavaScript to manipulate the text in the Source Text property of a layer. He even shows how to use an array of strings so that a layer's Source Text property can be set to a specific word from a list.

In the "Physical Simulations" section, Marcus shows how to use expressions for orbits, bounces, jiggles, and collision detection. I know that math is scary, but just learning to use some basic trigonometry can make realistic animations so much easier. Marcus shows how.

(BTW, Dan Ebberts also has an excellent page on collision detection.)

And, of course, there's a lot of information in the "Expressions" chapter of After Effects Help:

• "Expression basics"
• "Expression reference"
• "Expression examples"

Peachpit Press has released several books recently that include material about Camera Raw. These books were written with a Photoshop focus, but the Camera Raw information is almost all equally relevant to After Effects.

Peachpit has done us all the great service of making some excerpts from these books available on their website. I'm sure that many of you will want to buy these books after you've checked out these useful free samples.

Conrad Chavez describes the changes introduced in Camera Raw 5.2 in an excerpt from his book, Real World Adobe Photoshop CS4 .

Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe provide instructions for using Camera Raw to evaluate images in an excerpt from their book, Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Ben Willmore and Dan Ablan provide a very detailed explanation of Camera Raw in an excerpt from their book, Adobe Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques.

Of course, I also recommend reading through the Help sections on Camera Raw:

• "Introduction to Camera Raw and importing camera raw files"
• "Navigating, opening, and saving images with Camera Raw"
• "Making color and tonal adjustments in Camera Raw"
• "Modifying images with Camera Raw
• "Making local adjustments with Camera Raw"
• "Camera Raw settings"

Layers magazine just posted their "Fourth Annual Layers 100 Wicked Tips" article, which includes 10 tips about After Effects.

Some of the tips are about increasing efficiency, and some of them are about more creative aspects.

Here's a list of the 10 tips:

• Your text animation system is a 3D vector graphics toolkit ("Animating text")
• Find things much faster now ("Search and filter in the Timeline, Project, and Effects & Presets panels" and After Effects Community Help search)
• Render once, output many ("About rendering and exporting")
• Hundreds of freebies waiting just for you ("After Effects community resources")
• Your spreadsheet is a keyframe editor ("Edit keyframe values using a spreadsheet or text editor")
• Your right mouse button wants you to work faster ("Open panel, viewer, and context menus")
• Your Shift and Arrow keys want you to work faster, too ("Opening and navigating nested compositions")
• You don’t (always) have to manually set composition settings ("Create a composition")
• Your shape layers want to wiggle ("Alter shapes with path operations")
• You don’t need to preserve colors when pulling a key ("Keying overview and tips")

For details about each, see the article and the section of After Effects Help listed after each tip above.

If you're running After Effects on Mac OS and you have a full keyboard (as opposed to the crippled sub-keyboards on the new MacBook Pro laptops), then you can very easily tell After Effects to generate a list of all plug-ins loaded into After Effects, including version numbers.

Just press Command+Option+Shift+Help. (No, not the Help menu command. There's a Help button on full Macintosh keyboards. It's on the right side on my keyboard.)

But what if you're running After Effects on Windows or using one of the new, maddeningly incomplete MacBook Pro keyboards? Don't worry. The command is still available. You just have to remap the keyboard shortcut to a different key combination.

Just change this line in the shortcuts file and then restart After Effects:

"WriteVersionFileExtra" = "(Ctrl+Alt+Shift+HELP)"

"WriteVersionFileExtra" = "(Ctrl+Alt+Shift+1)"

C:\Documents and Settings\kopriva\Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\9.0\Adobe After Effects 9.0 Shortcuts.txt

David Torno's work on the Pistol Youth video for "In My Eyes" has gotten a lot of positive feedback. He used After Effects together with mocha-AE to replace the faces of the Golden Girls with the face of Bradley Hanan Carter of Pistol Youth. The result is as impressive as it is entertaining.

Now, David has done us all a huge service by posting two detailed videos in which he explains exactly how he did the tracking, compositing, and other post-production work for this piece:

• part 1 (basic)
• part 2 (advanced)

Though it's easy to focus on the motion tracking aspects of these video tutorials, I think that they're just as valuable for the tidbits about rotoscoping, color correction, and time remapping---all of which are crucial for integrating one shot with another as David has done so well. He even shows how to degrade the high-definition footage of Bradley Hanan Carter so that it fits better with the, um, cruddy VHS footage of the Golden Girls.

Thanks, David!

Adobe has just posted a new demonstration and white paper (PDF) that show how to create a searchable video using CS4 Production Premium.

A couple of months ago, I posted about a way to do this using Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Flash. This new paper and demonstration show how to use Soundbooth to create an XML file that contains the metadata, rather than using After Effects scripting to convert cue points.

There are many ways to use the XMP metadata features in Creative Suite 4 Production Premium. Hopefully, these two different approaches to the same problem will help you to see the breadth of these tools.

The Adobe user-to-user forums have switched over to a new underlying software system. I like it (mostly), but there are a few new things to get used to. I'll try to lay out the basics here as well as I can.

You should also read this post on Mylenium's blog, which provides some additional tips and color commentary. (Speaking of Mylenium and forums, here's a blog post in which I join him in pleading for some common sense on forums.)

If you want to discuss the new forum software (rather than the After Effects forum specifically), please do so using this forum, which was created for exactly this purpose. There's an FAQ list about the forum software, too.

new links and some navigation tricks

• main After Effects forum (and here's its RSS feed)
• After Effects FAQ list (and here's its RSS feed)
• After Effects scripting forum (and here's its RSS feed)
• After Effects SDK (plug-in developer) forum (and here's its RSS feed)
• After Effects expressions forum (and here's its RSS feed)
• After Effects resources forum (and here's its RSS feed)

I like using the RSS feeds. Once a day or so, I can open my feed reader (I use Google Reader) and browse through all of the posts that have come in since the last time I checked. The web interface for the forum also sorts threads with recent activity to the top, and the titles are shown as bolder and darker for threads that have unread posts in them. You can navigate to the most recent post in a thread from the list of threads by clicking the "[some time] ago" text in the Last Post column.

What I don't like is the email notification interface, which brings us to...

disabling automatic flooding of your email inbox

I answered a question about these nuisance email messages with a screenshot here.

Sure, some people might want to receive an email message for each time that a post is made on a thread that they've participated in. But I don't.

forcing the forums to use the full width of the browser window

By default, the forum messages only take up a fixed, somewhat narrow part of the browser window. If you want to force the messages to take full advantage of the horizontal space available in a wide browser window, follow these instructions from forum host Andrew Yoole.

script to show and hide the pods in the right sidebar

You can get even more usable horizontal space by temporarily hiding the pods in the right sidebar. Here's a link to a forum post in which Eric@MCA explains how.

new FAQ list (currently in its infancy)

The After Effects FAQ list is intended to be a real FAQ list. You know---a list of questions that people really do frequently ask. Unlike the other forums, this one is pretty heavily moderated. The forum hosts (including me) will prune away and consolidate some answers so that the list serves its purpose as a somewhat definitive set of questions and answers. That said, I do encourage people to contribute both questions and answers to this effort. Over the next few days, I'll be migrating the relevant parts of our old FAQ list to this new place.

using the History navigation tools

If you spend a lot of time on several different forums, you might benefit from bookmarking this page: History page showing recently visited forums

(If you haven't visited any forums yet, or if you're not signed in, that's not going to be very useful.)

This page gives you direct links to your favorite forums. Or, if you're just on the After Effects forums, then you could bookmark the main After Effects page and use the subforum pod on the side.

[Thanks for today's post go to Dan Ramirez, who did the hard parts.]

If you're working with Apple ProRes 422 media in After Effects, you may have noticed some undesirable color shifts. The most likely cause for such color shifts is the fact that After Effects by default doesn't know how to interpret Apple ProRes 422 media. Specifically, After Effects doesn't know what color space the color information in these footage items is in. When After Effects doesn't know what color space a footage item's colors are in, it has to pick something, and it goes with sRGB---which is wrong for ProRes assets, so the colors are misinterpreted.

Fortunately, it's pretty easy to tell After Effects how to interpret these colors correctly.

The automatic way is to add a set of rules to your interpretation rules file. If you do this, then After Effects will automatically identify Apple ProRes 422 as such and interpret the colors accordingly. (You can also manually assign input color profiles to footage items individually, but trust me: it's easier in the long run to edit your interpretation rules file and let the automagic work from there.)

For information on how to edit your interpretation rules file, see the last section of the "Interpret footage items" page of After Effects Help.

Add the following lines of text directly above the line "# this soft rule should be the last in the list of soft rules".

# soft rule: Apple ProRes 422 720x480 & 720x486 are SDTV NTSC
*, 480, *, *, "apch" ~ *, *, *, *, "r6nf", *
*, 480, *, *, "apcn" ~ *, *, *, *, "r6nf", *
*, 486, *, *, "apch" ~ *, *, *, *, "r6nf", *
*, 486, *, *, "apcn" ~ *, *, *, *, "r6nf", *

# soft rule: Apple ProRes 422 720x576 is SDTV PAL
*, 576, *, *, "apch" ~ *, *, *, *, "r6pf", *
*, 576, *, *, "apcn" ~ *, *, *, *, "r6pf", *

# soft rule: Apple ProRes 422 HD is Rec. 709
*, 720, *, *, "apch" ~ *, *, *, *, "r7hf", *
*, 720, *, *, "apcn" ~ *, *, *, *, "r7hf", *
*, 1080, *, *, "apch" ~ *, *, *, *, "r7hf", *
*, 1080, *, *, "apcn" ~ *, *, *, *, "r7hf", *

[Note: Be sure to use a plain text editor (like BBEdit or Notepad), not a word processor, to edit this file. Line endings and invisible formatting from word processors can make the file not work correctly.]

The four-character codes apch and apcn denote ProRes 422 HQ and ProRes 422, respectively.

These rules assign ProRes media the appropriate color profile by looking at the vertical frame size to determine whether the media is NTSC, PAL, or HD. You could add a similar rule for 2k assets, etc.

After you've made these changes to your interpretation rules file, start After Effects. Your ProRes media will now be automatically be assigned the correct color profile.

Of course, assigning the correct input color profile to a footage item doesn't help anything if you're not using the color management features that use those input color profiles to convert colors into the project's working color space (project working space). You must therefore also enable color management by choosing a project working space. (Choose File > Project Settings, and choose a working color space from the Working Space menu.) For information about color management, see the "Color management overview" section of After Effects Help, and the white paper and tutorials that it points to.

(update: When you render and export the movie out of After Effects, make sure that you've assigned an output color profile that is appropriate for your output. If you're "round-tripping" back to ProRes 422, then you'll probably want to assign the same profile to the output file that you used to interpret the input file.)

Rotoscoping (or just roto if you're one of the cool kids hip to the lingo) is the drawing or painting on frames of a movie, using visual elements in the movie as a reference. The most common kind of rotoscoping these days is tracing a path around an object in a movie and using that path as a mask to separate the object from its background. This allows you to work with the object and the background separately, so you can do things like apply different effects to the object than to its background or replace the background entirely.

Rotoscoping in After Effects is mostly a matter of drawing masks, animating the mask path, and then using these masks to define a matte. Many additional tasks and techniques make this job easier, such as using motion tracking on the object before you begin drawing masks, and then using the motion tracking data to make a mask automatically follow the object.

Pete O'Connell has done a terrific job in his Advanced Rotoscoping Techniques for Adobe After Effects training DVD of laying out a highly efficient workflow for rotoscoping in After Effects that is built around motion tracking, decomposition of an object into simple pieces that are easier to draw masks around, and a few other tricks. He's made a couple of excerpts available on his website, and from these you can get a general sense of the overall workflow and of the high quality of the training on the DVD.

Here are some examples of workflow tips that I picked up from Pete:

• Immediately after beginning to draw a mask, press Alt+Shift+M to turn on keyframing for that mask and set a keyframe. This way, you'll never again do that thing that all of us have done at least once: edit a mask frame-by-frame for several minutes (or longer!) and then realize that you lost all of your work on previous frames because you forgot to click the stopwatch to make the mask shape animated.
• Draw your masks on a white solid layer with its Video (eyeball) switch off, above the (locked!) footage layer. This way, you run no risk of accidentally moving the footage layer when you manipulate the mask, and you can also much more easily apply tracking data to the mask. (You apply the tracking data to the invisible solid layer that holds the mask.) This also means that you don't lose your cached RAM preview frames each time you fiddle with the mask, which is a big advantage.
• Turn on the Preserve Constant Vertex Count preference.
• When possible, transform (rotate, scale, move) the whole mask or a subset of the mask vertices instead of moving the vertices individually. This is both for efficiency and to avoid the "chatter" that comes from inconsistent movement across frames.
• Manual motion tracking beats manual rotoscoping. The more effort you spend getting good tracking data for various parts of your scene and object, the less time you'll spend drawing and tweaking and retweaking masks. (To drive this point home, consider that Pete has an old tutorial still up on Creative COW where he uses these same rotoscoping techniques... but from before After Effects had built-in motion tracking, so his motion tracking was entirely manual. And still the techniques work very well.)

We have a copy of Pete's DVD here, and several members of the After Effects team have been passing it around and recommending it to each other. Great work, Pete!

On a related note...

Sean Kennedy provides several good tutorials on the SimplyCG website, including some for rotoscoping in After Effects. Sean maintains an index of these tutorials on his website. One of the more useful things that Sean has done is to provide a free script, TrackerViz, which makes tracking motion and applying tracking data to masks a lot easier. You can get TrackerViz and a series of detailed instructions on the SimplyCG website.

I recently watched Jeff Foster's Learning After Effects CS4 DVD, and I really liked a lot of the segments.

Jeff's DVD provides a lot of useful information and tips on many subjects, but I especially liked the sections on using mocha for After Effects, Keylight, and layer styles.

One of Jeff's video tutorials about motion tracking with mocha for After Effects CS4 is available on the PhotoshopCAFE program on Adobe TV.

Jeff has also been posting a lot of valuable comments on the pages of After Effects CS4 Help, including the "Tracking and stabilizing motion" page.

I like Jeff's PixelPainter blog, too, which covers a lot of Photoshop and After Effects material. I suppose that's no surprise, coming from the guy who wrote After Effects & Photoshop.

Keep up the great work, Jeff!

English
Adobe and its partners provide a basic set of video tutorials on the Adobe website, in addition to excellent tutorials provided by other members of the community. Many sections of After Effects Help refer to additional video tutorials in context to provide information about specific features. If you know of an excellent video tutorial or other resource about After Effects, please leave a comment at the bottom of the relevant page of After Effects Help on the Web to tell others about it.

Karl Soule just posted a link on his blog to a new white paper about how you can get a big performance bump by running CS4 Production Premium (or just After Effects CS4) on a 64-bit operating system, especially if you cram a lot of RAM into the computer.

The trick to making maximum use of the RAM in your computer with After Effects is to set the Memory & Multiprocessing preferences, including Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously.

With Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously, After Effects can start separate background processes of the After Effects application to render multiple frames at the same time. This can really speed up renders, both for final output and for RAM previews.

2GB per process is the limit on 32-bit Windows without special (and some say somewhat risky) configuration. And, of course, the OS can only see 4GB, so that's severely limiting.

Nearly 4GB per process is the limit on 64-bit Windows, with no special configuration required. ~3.5 GB per process is the limit on Mac OS (though the foreground application gets a little less because of the Mac OS UI libraries). Because these numbers are per-process, and because a 64-bit operating system can see a lot of RAM, you can make use of around 30GB of RAM in an 8-core computer.

More performance tips for After Effects CS4 can be found in the "Improve performance" section of After Effects CS4 Help on the Web.

A few months ago, I posted on this blog about moderators for After Effects Community Help.

Since then, there have been a few changes to After Effects Community Help, many of them based on your feedback. For example, if you've installed the After Effects 9.0.1 update, pressing F1 now takes you directly to After Effects Help on the Web instead of to the more broad After Effects Community Help and Support page.

We've also seen a large increase in the number of people using our community features to engage with us, with each other, and with our instructional and reference resources. A lot of people are adding comments to the pages of After Effects Help on the Web to provide tips, additional information, and links to other resources, as well as to occasionally point out where we got something wrong.

Thank you all. Keep those comments coming,

Of course, comments on Help on the Web are not the best way to ask questions or to have threaded conversations. For that, we have the After Effects user-to-user forum. Several very helpful motion graphics and visual effects professionals assist people on that forum.

And so I thank all of the folks who help out on that forum.

Finally, there are several people who spend a lot of time and effort creating written tutorials, video tutorials, example projects, animation presets, scripts, expressions... all for free. Even many of the folks who make a living by selling materials like these also make excerpts available for free. Sure, they do this in part because it's good business, but I know a lot of these folks, so I can tell you this: They also want to give back to the community that has helped them so much. Because we link to these materials from After Effects Help, I also consider these materials to be part of After Effects Community Help. (Of course, we can only link to things that we know about, which is why I plead with you to add comments to link to online materials that you think are good.)

All of this is why I am so glad to work on After Effects. People who use this software help each other out, and that makes us all better able to realize our creativity and feel more connected with our community, while we increase our productivity and gain practical skills.

Here, in no particular order are the people who I would most like to thank for their contributions to After Effects Community Help. My personal opinion (which is not necessarily the opinion of my employer, Adobe Systems Incorporated) is that you should buy whatever these people are selling, contribute to their online tip jars, give them jobs, and otherwise make use of their talents and ensure that they keep on sharing them with all of us. I have.

• Sébastien Périer has done a tremendous amount of work to translate comments from English to French, as well as adding several of his own. I really like his demo reel, which showcases a lot of clever and artistic uses of After Effects scripting, as well as a lot of more "standard" motion graphics and compositing work.
• Lutz Albrecht (Mylenium) is an all-around superstar contributor. He is an expert at answering people's questions on the user-to-user forum, he moderates comments on After Effects Help, he adds many comments of his own, and his website is the best place on the Web (even better than the Adobe website) for figuring out what those cryptic error code messages mean. All of this more than makes up for the fact that he's even more of a curmudgeon than me. ;-)
• John Dickinson is another all-around star contributor. He creates free tutorials, design breakdowns, and other useful tidbits that he posts on his Motionworks website. He answers questions on forums. And he (together with many cohorts) creates the fantastic Making It Look Great series. He even sometimes remembers to add comments to After Effects Help to point people to these materials.
• Jeff Foster has been a steady contributor of high-quality comments to After Effects Help and to the world of free online materials about After Effects. He also just released a very good DVD of video tutorials, Learning After Effects CS4; I learned a lot from it, especially about using layer styles. I also really like his book After Effects & Photoshop, which still has a lot of valuable information, even though it was written for a previous version of the software.
• Trish and Chris Meyer have been at the forefront of creating materials for learning After Effects for longer than I've known about the existence of After Effects. They do it all, and they do it all well. I have bought, read, and watched everything of theirs that I can get my hands on. You can read all about their various resources on the ProVideo Coalition website. I link to their various resources from many places, including a recent post on this blog.
• Rick Gerard focuses mainly on answering questions on the After Effects user-to-user forum. I am always so glad to see when Rick has answered a question, because I know that the answer is going to be correct, thorough, and based on real-world experience.
• Jonas Hummelstrand is another strong contributor on the After Effects user-to-user forum. Beyond that, he has made some of the most effective and useful posts about After Effects and motion graphics and compositing in general on his General Specialist website. For example, his article about how to shoot footage for color keying work is one of the most valuable pieces of free information on the Web for After Effects users.
• Alex Czetwertynski moderates comments on After Effects Help, and we appreciate that. But that contribution pales in comparison to the wonder that is AE Enhancers. The AE Enhancers forum is the place to go for discussion of scripts, expressions, and animation presets for After Effects. Yes, there are great websites maintained by Dan Ebberts, Jeff Almasol, Lloyd Alvarez, and others who provide scripts and expressions and resources for learning about them. But these folks all hang out on AE Enhancers, too.
• Dan Ebberts answers questions about expressions and scripts on several forums, provides reference and tutorial information on his own site, and just generally does a terrific job of making the JavaScript-based parts of After Effects more accessible to everyone. He recently published a very good and very thorough tutorial about the XMP metadata features in CS4 Production Premium, which covers expressions, ExtendScript scripting in After Effects, and ActionScript scripting in Flash. Yep. If it's based on JavaScript, Dan can create and explain it.
• Lloyd Alvarez doesn't do as much explaining as other folks, but he makes up for it by making freely available some of the most fantastically useful scripts for After Effects.

I know that I mentioned this at the top of the list, but I'd really like to remind you to make use of the tip jars on the websites of these folks. They're giving things away that in some cases are better than things that other folks are selling for a lot of money.

Yes, there are a lot of other folks who make things that help After Effects users, but I can't list them all here... and my point in this post was to especially thank the people who have been using the various community features that Adobe provides---like user-to-user forums and comments on pages of After Effects Help---to let us know about the good materials that are out there. There's a more complete listing in the After Effects community resources page of After Effects Help.

You can run After Effects CS4 in either the local language associated with the installation and activation or in English. For example, if you have the German version of After Effects CS4 installed, you can switch to English. You can switch back and forth as many times as you want. This should make it easier to do many things, including following instructional materials written in English.

Mac OS:

1. Control-click the After Effects CS4 application icon, which is in the Applications/Adobe After Effects CS4 directory.
(You can navigate to the application icon by Control-clicking the icon in the dock and choosing Show In Finder.)
2. Choose Get Info (or the equivalent, such as Informationen in German).
3. Expand the Languages (in German, Sprachen) category in the Info dialog box.
4. Deselect (uncheck) every language other than English.
5. Close the Info dialog box.
6. Double-click the application icon to start the application.

Windows:

1. Open a command shell (Choose Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt).
2. Run After Effects by entering the full path to the After Effects executable file followed by the argument -L en_US.

For example, on my computers running 32-bit Windows Vista and Windows XP, here is the command that I entered to run my German copy of After Effects in English:

"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS4\Support Files\AfterFX.exe" -L en_US

Here's what it would be on 64-bit Windows Vista:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS4\Support Files\AfterFX.exe" -L en_US

Of course, your path may be different, depending on where you installed the application, et cetera.

Note that this behavior is slightly different from earlier versions of After Effects. In After Effects CS3 and earlier, the argument for the Windows command line was different.

Every once in a while, I go through the search logs and through the responses to various surveys, looking for ways to improve your ability to find information about After Effects.

In an attempt to figure out what issues people were having and to elevate the visibility of the pages that I think would have helped with these problematic searches, I'm presenting them here and asking for your assistance. Please try these searches and let me know if there are some pages that aren't coming up that should (or are coming up that shouldn't). You can leave a comment on this blog entry or use the "Give us feedback" link on the Community Help search results page to report how your searches are working.

After Effects Help

People still report that they are having a hard time finding After Effects Help. I think that this is because people are confused when they end up on the After Effects Help & Support page. But if you've installed the After Effects 9.0.1 update, then you won't end up on that page when you press F1 or choose Help > After Effects Help.

Some people look for After Effects Help using terms like manual, user guide, and documentation. I'll add some key words.

And remember, if you want up-to-date information for when you don't have an Internet connection, download the PDF version of After Effects Help. There's a link at the top of every page of After Effects Help. I just updated it this week.

error codes

We tend to have a pretty good collection of documents in our Technical Support Knowledgebase for After Effects error codes, but Mylenium (Lutz Albrecht) has done a much better job of bringing together information on error codes, possible causes, and possible solutions in his Mylenium error code database.

expressions
and
expression reference

I think that the introduction and overview of expressions in the first part of the "Expressions" chapter of After Effects Help does a pretty good job of introducing expressions---in part by linking to material on some other websites.

And I think that the various subsections of the "Expression elements reference" are what most people are looking for when they're looking for reference material about expressions.

I did get one response that said that someone wanted to just search the expressions reference part of Help. Other than searching using the PDF version of Help, I can offer this as a workaround: Search from within the Help document (with the This Help System Only checkbox checked) and include the word 'expression' in your search. This search is an example of searching for 'gaussrandom expression' in the Help document.

camera shake

It seems that the people who were well served by searching for 'camera shake' were the ones who wanted to add simulated camera shake to their movies. But those who wanted to remove camera shake with motion tracking and stabilization weren't as well served.

draw line

When some people searched for 'draw line', it appears that they wanted to know how to underline text.

When others searched for 'draw line', it appears that they wanted to know how to draw a line in the sense of a simple vector graphics element. There are lots of ways of drawing lines in After Effects. Here are a few:

- a stroked mask
- the Write-On effect
- a thin solid layer
- a shape layer with a stroked path
- an animated series of tightly spaced (kerned) underscore or dash characters

Using shapes or masks to draw a line (path) is probably what makes the most sense in most cases.

fog

I think that a lot of people searching for 'fog' are trying to simulate fog, but they end up seeing the Fog 3D effect, and that is just confusing (because that effect is for a pretty limited use case involving renders from 3D applications). I would hope that people would go to the "Fog, smoke, clouds, and such" section, which points to a wonderful document by Mark Christiansen on simulating fog. (You do know that you should buy his book, right? Seriously.) There's also a good blog entry by Daniel Broadway about compositing fog linked to from that page.

slow motion speed

This seems like an odd search string, but it came up a lot in the logs. Sure, I expect to see 'slow motion' or 'fast motion', but 'slow motion speed' is weird. I just added some more keywords to the relevant sections of After Effects Help.

FLV export

You should definitely read this section for FLV export. There's an important note there that warns you away from using the FLV exporter that QuickTime installs.

Color Finesse

The fine folks at Synthetic Aperture provide documentation for Color Finesse. It's in the folder that contains the plug-in.