After Effects region of interest

If you’re connected to the Internet, pressing F1 or choosing Help > After Effects Help in After Effects now takes you to the After Effects Community Help and Support page. In addition to a Community Help search field, this page has links to community resources, tutorials, forums, blogs, Help, Adobe Technical Support, SDK and scripting documentation, and just about everything else that you need to use and learn After Effects. Make sure that you expand the groups of links in the right column. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

On the Help and Support page, click After Effects Help (web) in the upper-right corner to get to the home page of After Effects Help on the Web.

Community Help comprises the following:

• Complete, up-to-date online Adobe documentation

• Live commenting, moderated by experts (as described in a previous blog post)

• A custom Google search engine, with which you can search the most relevant online resources for you, Adobe's customers

This search index includes our own Help documents, Technical Support documents, and tutorials, as well as content created by the larger community (like you). The goal of the custom search engine is to help you to find focused answers faster than with a standard Web search.

You can search Community Help in one of three ways:

• Enter a search query in the After Effects application, using the search box in the upper-right corner of the application window.

• On any page of After Effects Help on the Web, use the search box in the upper-left corner of the page. To search only that document, check the “This Help system only” box.

• On the After Effects Community Help and Support page, use the main search field. To filter a search to only Adobe content, click “All Adobe Help And Support” on the results page.

If you’re offline, pressing F1 or choosing Help > After Effects Help in After Effects takes you to a paltry, out-of-date subset of Help that shipped with the product. Never use this. Use After Effects Help on the Web or the PDF version of Help. If you think that you will ever need Help when you are offline, take a moment to download the PDF version of Help now. You can download the PDF version of Help by clicking the icon at the top right of any page of After Effects Help on the Web. The PDF contains the same up-to-date Help available online (without the comments and other online features, though).

This is a new system. We hope that you’ll explore it and let us know what you think. We are listening to customers’ feedback and are always looking for ways to improve the experience.

Please tell us what you think.

P.S.
Conrad Chavez has some great tips for using and searching the PDF version of Help in the comments on the Photoshop Help home page.