Troubleshooting After Effects

Having problems, crashes or installation errors with After Effects 7.0 or After Effects CS3 (8.0)? Here's a collection of tried and true remedies, but before you start reinstalling and trashing things, make sure you've tried to locate what part of your AE project is causing the problems.

Start by isolating the problem:

1. What is causing this problem, and when does the problem occur? Every time you import something, every time you render to a specific codec, everytime you apply a certain effect? Can you reproduce the problem by doing something, or is it random?
2. What did you do just before the problem occured? Can that operation have caused the problem? Can you do the same thing in another way without seeing the error?
3. Does your rendering/preview fail at the same frame on both previews and renders? Isolate that layer with the solo switch and turn off every effect and then turn them on one-by-one.
4. Does the error occur in all projects or just one? If in just one, what is special about it?
5. Does the error occur on other machines with the same version of AE/plugins/drivers? If so, what is unique about this machine?
6. Does it happen without third-party plugins? Are the third-party plugins compatible with CS3? Do you have a third-party video card such as AJA or Decklink? Have you updated those drivers?
7. Have you changed anything about the system lately? Installed a new codec, driver, software or hardware? Try to revert your changes and see if the problem disappears.
8. Do a search with specific keywords from any error messages you get. Enclose terms that have more than one word with quotation marks. Here's a good example:
   "image buffer" "after effects"
   

Workarounds to common problems:

1. If you hold down the Shift key while opening an old project you will force AE to close all comp viewers, so if one of the comps are causing problems you will be able to identify which comp it is.
2. You can also try to import the project instead of opening it.
3. A third solution is to move all source files into a new folder so that AE can't find them, and then locate each source file separately by choosing "Replace footage -> File..." so that you can isolate which source is causing problems.
4. If you are getting rendering errors it might be the codec that is hogging RAM. If you enable "Purge every 20 frames during Make Movie" you will probably get around the problem. You can do this in the Secret preferences by holding down the Shift key and then select Preferences... from the menu. In the Preferences dialog box you can then choose the "Secret" option that will give you hidden features (they are hidden since they will cause AE to render more slowly.)
   Don't enable the other checkboxes, just write "20" in the text field. Also, make sure you enable the "Prevent DLL Address Space Fragmentation" under "Memory & Caches" if your on a Windows system.
5. If you are working with large compositions, images and video files, you may get an error message about creating the image buffer. Here's a tutorial on how to work around that problem.
   

OK, that didn't work?

Bigger problem-solving tools:
1. If you've had any of Adobe's public beta software installed previously, uninstall them and then use the Adobe CS3Clean Script.
If you're on Mac OS X you can't just throw the program folder into the Trash. I repeat: you can't just throw the program folder into the Trash. Instead, in your Applications/Utilities folder, you'll find an uninstaller called (for example) Premiere Pro Setup that you must use to completely uninstall any CS3 program.

2. Check that your system harddrive and the harddrive where you store your After Effects project and footage aren't full, and then run a disk check to make sure they aren't damaged.

3. Run Adobe Updater to see if there are any updates or patches. You can find a menu item called Updates... in the Help or the After Effects menus.

4. Uninstall QuickTime and then restart your computer.

5. Uninstall any third-party video and audio codecs for QuickTime and Windows Media, such as XviD, DivX, FFDShow, BlackMagic, Aja, Avid, Flip4Mac, etcetera. Restart your computer.

6. Reinstall the latest version of QuickTime (unless it is version 7.2.0 or 7.4, which are notoriously buggy.) Restart your computer.

7. Update your graphics card's drivers. If you're on Windows you can download them from the manufacturer of your graphics card's website, such as nvidia.com. If you're on OS X, make sure you're using the latest OS X version by choosing "Software Update..." from your Apple menu. Restart your computer.

8. Remove all non-system fonts (a corrupt font file can cause all kinds of problems.)
On Windows they are found here:
C:\WINDOWS\Fonts
C:\Documents and Settings\**YOUR USERNAME**\Application Data\Adobe\Fonts
and on OS X the fonts can be in a lot of places.

9. Rebuild After Effects preference file (all you preference settings will be lost, unfortunately) by pressing and holding down Cmd-Opt-Shift / Ctrl-Alt-Shift directly after you've clicked the AE icon.

10. If you are still having problems, close AE and then remove the "OpenGL3D.AEX" plugin from the plugins folder found at
OS X and 7.0:
Applications/Adobe After Effects 7.0/Plug-ins/Support Files/Standard/Extensions

OS X and 8.0/CS3:
Applications/Adobe After Effects CS3/Plug-ins

Windows and 7.0:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects 7.0\Support Files\Plug-ins\Standard\Extensions

Windows and 8.0/CS3:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CS3\Support Files\Plug-ins\Extensions



Other tips & tricks:

How to install CS3 programs
I've written some tips for optimal installation of Adobe's CS3 software.


"License has expired"
If you get the dreaded error "The license has expired" with any of the CS3 applications, you have probably forgot to deactivate a previous Adobe product. A temporary fix is to set back the date on your computer if you just need to get through a deadline, and then reinstall at a later date.


Slow performance on multi-core machines without enough RAM
After Effects CS3 8.0 and 8.0.1 had multiprocessing performance issues with multi-core machines, especially high-end 8-core hardware. This was fixed in the 8.0.2 update.
When all 8 cores try to render a complex or memory intensive composition with Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously, the application can become memory starved if each process has insufficient memory. If you have less than 2 GB of available RAM per CPU core, your hard drive will be used as temporary RAM which is at least 100 times slower than real RAM.

To remedy this, there is a text preference in the preference file to control the maximum number of cores that Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously will use.
Open the text preference file and look in the ["MP"] section for:
"MaxNumberOfProcesses" = "0"

"0" is the default setting, which means that all available CPU cores will be used. Calculate how much RAM you have available for After Effects (don't count the RAM used by your operating system.) If you have 8 cores and 8 GB of free RAM, change the setting to "4" so that 4 CPU cores will be used and so they will each receive 2 GB of RAM.
Save the preference file and restart After Effects.

You can find the preference file Adobe After Effects 8.0 Prefs.txt in the directory (on Windows):
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_LOGIN_NAME\Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\8.0
...or for OS X:
Users/YOUR_LOGIN_NAME/Library

/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/8.0/

Data Execution Prevention (DEP)
On Windows, the Data Execution Prevention (DEP) may cause crashes at startup. You can disable it so that AE can start properly.


Icons not working
On Windows Vista all CS3 applications can refuse to start when you click their icons. This can easily be fixed by updating the Acrobat 8 licensing service.


Image buffer problems
Here's a blog post about how to avoid image buffer problems.


Flickering interface, buttons and menues that flash and don't work
Microsoft's IntelliPoint software is known to cause the GUI in After Effects to flash and flicker. Just uninstall IntelliPoint and everything will start working properly (and you IntelliPoint mouse and keyboard will still work!)


Slow and sluggish performance and GUI with GeForce 8800 GPU's
There's a newly discovered bug that only seems to affect Windows users with nVidia's GeForce 8800 graphics cards. The entire user interface in both After Effects CS3 and Encore DVD CS3 becomes slow and sluggish.
Some people have reported that a workaround is to use the programs logged in to a non-administrator account, but if you have these problems, please file a bug report.


Still having problems?
If you're still having problems, here's Adobe's own trouble-shooting tips for version 7.0:
Troubleshoot system errors or freezes in After Effects (7.0 on Mac OS X)
Troubleshoot system errors or freezes in After Effects (7.0 on Windows XP)

...and for version 8.0 / CS3:
Render fails on a computer with 8 or more processor cores
Troubleshoot OpenGL problems in After Effects CS3
Troubleshoot crashes, system errors, and freezes (After Effects CS3 on Mac OS X)
Troubleshoot installation problems After Effects CS3 (Mac OS X)
Troubleshoot installation problems After Effects CS3 (Windows Vista)
Troubleshoot installation problems After Effects CS3 (Windows XP)
Error "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Error..." or crash when you install (Windows XP)
Freeze or crash when you start on a system with Realtek HD Audio (Windows XP)



RTFM
Remember, you have the entire (and up-to-date) manual available at LiveDocs.


Create a detailed log and report the bug to the After Effects team
If everything above fails, you can have AE create a log file for each session, but please note that AE will run slower because it has to write every operation into the text file, so make sure you remove/rename the file after you have had a crash!

Place an empty text file called After Effects Log.txt in the directory (on Windows):
C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_LOGIN_NAME\Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\8.0

...or for OS X:
Users/YOUR_LOGIN_NAME/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/8.0/

You can look in that log what the last twenty or so operations were and possibly get a clue what went wrong. You can then look at the great list of the often cryptic error codes that Mylenium is regularly updating with helpful tips on what the errors mean.

Make sure you also post a bug report to Adobe.

- Jonas

Greenscreen and Bluescreen Checklist

Shooting for greenscreen or bluescreen? Here's a list of hard-earned experiences from the shoots where I've been vfx supervisor. I don't claim to be a chroma expert, so please post a comment if you have more tips to add to the list!

UPDATE: I've added some info on depth-of-field and motion blur as point number 2.

1. Keep it Blurry in Camera
Turn off all in-camera sharpening! This might make your director of photography (DOP) nervous and it will certainly make it harder for her/him to focus. On Sony cameras, there's usually two settings that need to be turned off: Detail and Skin Detail.

By default, all cameras apply a sharpening filter as a post-process before each frame is committed to tape/disk/memory card. While this makes the image look better, it is makes it so much more difficult to get a good and clean edge between your foreground and your chroma screen. Digital sharpening works by finding adjacent pixels of different lightness values and then increasing the difference, in effect crating a border with much higher contrast. Notice also how the in-camera sharpening brings out noise and imperfections in the chroma screen.

So shoot without sharpening and add it in post instead!



2. Keep it Sharp on Stage
While you don't want the camera to add artificial sharpening, you still want to keep everything in the foreground as sharp and correctly focused as you can. If the chroma screen is blurred in the background will only help to make it more evenly lit and textured, but you want to avoid having to key out blurred foreground, trying to separate it from the chroma.

If the blur comes from a too slow shutter speed or by too narrow depth-of-field, you'll have to tweak the keyer and possible sacrifice other parts just to manage the fuzzy edges. A blurred edge between foreground and background means that you will have to compromise between the edge and despilling settings, and quite possibly have to keyframe these settings to compensate for different levels of blur on different parts of the clip.

Instead, add motion blur in post by using optical flow technologies such as ReelSmart Motion Blur and add depth-of-field by layering chroma clips and post-blurring them.



3. Resolution and Framing
You want to shoot with as high resolution as you can afford, to make sure you keep your options open when you get to postproduction. Even if your finishing in SD, try to capture in HD or even 16 mm or 35 mm film. The more detail you can capture, the cleaner key you'll be able to pull. You can always scale down, but you can't get back image data that you haven't captured...

Keep a constant lookout for how the DOP frames the action. Since you'll be working with the shots in post, you can disregard the safe areas that are normally cut off by monitors and TV sets - that's 10% more image data to use!

I've found that I often have to keep pushing for tighter framing of each and every shot. To make sure that you and the DOP sees the entire image, set the camera viewfinder and the preview monitors so they are underscanned.

Even if you're shooting for a 16:9 production, you'll most likely want the set the camera for 4:3 aspect ratio, unless your shooting something that will fill the entire frame horizontally. Otherwise you'll be sacrificing horizontal resolution, making for rougher key edges.

Another way to squeeze the maximum amount of resolution from your cameras is to tilt them 90 degrees for shots of standing people.



Here's an example of three Sony Digibeta cameras with two of them tilted 90 degrees to capture standing people at maximum resolution.




4. Blue or Green?
What you are trying to achieve is to provide your keyer with a color channel that is as distinct as possible. Since human skin tones and lips tend to be red, that leaves blue and green. So which one to choose? That depends on a couple of things...

Green chroma screens have become more and more popular in recent years, largely because green provides a brighter color channel that tends to have less noise than the blue channel. The relative brightness of green makes it a bad choice for shooting blonde hair though, which is a lot easier to key against blue backgrounds.

The bluescreen has some distinct advantages. When you can't avoid a lot of spill (for example when you have to put the foreground very close to the chroma material) you can take advantage of the fact that we tend to find blue casts less disturbing than people walking around looking sea-sick with green faces. Also, when shooting for something that will be composited on to outdoor backgrounds and water, a slight blueish cast won't be a problem.

So if you are shooting a blonde with jeans, you'll have to settle for a compromise!



5. Don't Depend on the Crews' Imagination
Good storyboards that can be shown to the entire crew, both before the shoot (so that they can bring the correct gear) and during the shoot. Depending on the complexity of the shot you might need animatics, but at least bring sketches or printouts.

Talk to the crew so that they understand how stuff will be used in
post. For example, I have had instances where cameramen have cut off
talents' feet even though I've tried to explain that we needed the
whole body.



6. Don't Depend on the Talent's Imagination
If talents are supposed to look at things that will be added in post, make sure they have something (that can be keyed out later) to look at and interact with during the shoot.




7. Get Good Clothes
Make sure you avoid greens, browns and khaki for greenscreen shoots and jeans and other blue clothes for bluescreens. This cannot be allowed to be something you decide on location, it must be planned beforehand.



8. Get Good Props
Make sure you can dull-down shiny stuff so that they don't reflect the chroma color.

The choice of a shiny metal briefcase in the example above is a particularly bad one, considering it had to be rotoscoped in all the shots. The ear-ring was taken care of with an Inside Mask in Keylight.



9. Match the Lighting As If Your Sleep Depends On It
There's no substitute for good lighting and gaffers that can match foreground and background. You can fix almost anything in post-production, be relighting is among the hardest and least successful things you want to spend your nights with. There's nothing that screams fake as much as wrong lighting!



10. Preview Directly On Set
You can't underestimate the value of being able to compare a roughly keyed-out foreground against the background that it will be composited against. Not only is the immediate feedback important for the talent, it is also invaluable when it comes to matching the lighting and perspectives.

If you can't use a real-time keyer with a feed from the camera, like in the image above, at least bring a laptop and a digital still camera and do a quick key until the lighting matches perfectly.



11. Go Easy on the Tracking Markers
If you use tracking markers, make sure you have sufficient number in each shot, without having too many that you will have to paint-out in post. Try using markers with almost the same color as the screen, for example by using chroma tape, so that you can remove them by a second keying-pass.

The extensive number of markers in the example above comes from the fact that they were to be used for a tight head-shot during a 30 minute interview where the subject didn't want anyone except the interviewer and the DOP present. Therefore we had to make sure we had at least some markers visible at all times.



12. Avoid Unnecessary Spill
Keep the foreground as far away from the chroma screens as possible, since you'll have less spill to deal with. Make sure that all parts of the floor that might reflect chroma color onto the foreground are covered by non-reflective material such as black cloth.

It's up to you to keep each setup as far away from the chroma screen as possible, as people seem to be attracted to the big wall of color. It is your job to check that the entire foreground has chroma behind it during the entire take, which is why rehearsal is so important since it gives you the chance to spot potential problems which will force a setup adjustment.



13. Keep It Clean
Strive to keep the chromascreen as spotless as possible, and stop people from walking on it unnecessarily.



14. Get to Know Chroma Sampling and Codecs
Since chroma keying works on the principle of isolating one color, you would think that it was extremely important to get as much color data from the camera as possible. This is unfortunately not the case in many circumstances, especially when it comes to video. I won't get to geeky here, but you need to understand how digital video is stored.

The human eye is much more sensitive to the luminance/lightness of what we see, than to the color of the world around us. That's why all (but a few super-high-end cameras and formats) immediately throw away at least half of the color information that is captured. This is bad news for keying, since the less color information you have, the harder it is to accurately isolate a color.







If at all possible, you want to capture a 4:4:4 image without any color compression, and then keep that color resolution intact by using an appropriate codec at least until you have passed the keying stage. You should also strive to retain the more than 8 bits per channel of data that many systems capture, such as the 10-bit color depth of DigiBeta.

Trying to key of DV footage is even harder, since the DV codec only stores a quarter of the color data, using a 4:1:1 compression. If you have no choice but to key from DV footage, try to blur the U and V channels before pulling a key, or use a keyer that does this automatically, such as dvMatte from dvGarage.

Here's an example of the low horizontal color resolution of DV footage:




15. Frames Rather than Fields
Try to shoot progressive rather than interlaced, to avoid having to de-interlace the footage. If possible; shoot double the frame rate with progressive if you need to go to interlaced later. Avoiding interlacing not only gives you a cleaner edge and saves time on de-interlacing, but it also provides you twice the spatial resolution which might come in handy if you have to up-res in post.

Interlacing is an evil compression technique that severly limits your options, and you should always try to avoid it, instead adding it at final output.



16. BYOC: Bring Your Own Camera
Take lots of reference shots of locations, the lighting setup and other stuff that will help when you crawl back into your dark post-dungeon. You can never have too many reference shots!



Final Words
Avoid the temptation to think that problems on set can be "fixed in post." Everything that can be done in front of the camera should be done on set. Make sure the time allocated for postproduction is used to enhance the final outcome instead of fixing mistakes done when shooting.

Also, be prepared to pull several keys and to use garbage mattes and core mattes. Remember; you are trying to extract the edges, everything else can be mattes/roto'ed!

- Jonas

Free Download: Beautiful Earth Animation Project

Here's a fully animatable Earth project complete with water reflections and moving clouds. If you move the Sun to the back of the planet, you'll even see the night lights of the major cities!

Requires Adobe After Effects 7.0 Professional.



Download the project file first and then download NASA's free textures:
Night texture (land_ocean_ice_lights_2048.tif)
Day texture (land_ocean_ice_2048.tif)
Cloud texture (cloud_combined_2048.tif)

Post a comment if you have any questions or just to let me know what you've used it for (I'm curious.)

Update: I've relinked the NASA textures since they had been changed.
- Jonas

Tutorial: How to Preview the Size of Text and Graphics for Broadcast and Film

Do you want to preview how big the text and graphics will look on a TV while still working on your computer? Here's how!

1. Create a document with the same height in pixels as your output format. Most software nowadays have presets that also includes the so called safe areas that shows you how much of the standard TV image is masked by the TV.
2. Make sure you are viewing the document at 100% in your graphics program of choice.
3. Then use a common ruler to measure on the screen according to the table below.
4. Multiply this distance by 2 for film shown at movie theatres/cinemas, 4 for standard TV (SD) and by 6 for HD TV, and place your eyes at this distance.

TV system	Document height	Measure this on your screen
Standard definition PAL and SECAM:	576 pixels	518 pixels inside the "safe area"
Standard definition NTSC:	540 (square) pixels	486 pixels inside the "safe area"
HD TV 720p / 720i:	720 pixels	720 pixels (all pixels are shown on the HD TV)
HD TV 1080p / 1080i:	1080 pixels	1080 pixels (all pixels are shown on the HD TV)

Example: You've created a document for NTSC and want to preview how big your text will look.
Zoom your document to 100% magnification. Grab a ruler and place it on your monitor. Measure the distance inside the safe area. In this case it turns out to be 10 inches, so therefore you should put your eyes at 60 inches away from your computer monitor.

Here's the theory behind this method:
European viewers tend to sit approx. 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) or six times the picture height from their standard 32” widescreen TV. This distance can be described as 6H.


When the viewer upgrades to a new HD TV, the perceived picture will be bigger (unless the viewer redecorates the living room, tears down a wall and moves the sofa further away from the set.)


The viewer will therefore sit four times the picture height (4H) away from the HD TV, no matter what HD TV format is used (720i, 720p, 1080i and 1080p.)


At the movies / cinemas the viewing distance is of course very dependant on if you sit up front or in the back, but the general rule is that the viewing distance is around 2H.

Stay tuned for a tutorial on how much you must increase/decrease the size of your text and graphics when you go from a SD to an HD TV production.

Thanks to Lars Haglund and Gunnar Kihlander at SVT for the concept!

- Jonas

AE: Render in the Background, Work in the Foreground

Want to continue working in After Effects while rendering in the background? Here's how to start a second instance of the program that can render without affecting the performance, even if you're working on a lowly single-processor workstation. Once you get the hang of this technique, you'll never be able to blame your long coffee breaks on rendering.

Update: Wow, I just realized this looks like a really complicated procedure, but trust me, it's dead simple to do (just not to describe correctly.) Give it a try, you'll never want to go back!

Preparations for Windows XP:
1. Right-click on the After Effects 7.0 icon in the Start menu and choose Properties...
2. Make sure that the entire path in the Target: field is enclosed by quotes and then at the very end add " -m" (that's a space followed by a minus sign and an m.) On a standard installation on an English system the path should now read:
"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects 7.0\Support Files\AfterFX.exe" -m
Note: If you have a non-English system, the program might be installed in a slightly different folder, which is why it's safer to just add quotes around the original path and then add the space and the -m.


Preparations for Mac OS X:
1. Locate the After Effects app file (on a standard installation you should find it at Applications/Adobe After Effects 7.0) and duplicate it (Cmd-D), so that you have two identical icons. If you rename the app something like AE 7.0 Second Instance you'll be able to tell the two instances apart.




Workflow:

• Step 1. Start After Effects via the Windows Start Menu icon you have modified, or on OS X via your duplicated icon.


• Step 2. Open your project and set up your render(s) in the Render Queue, but before you hit the Render button, save the project with Ctrl-S (Cmd-S on OS X.)


• Step 3. Go ahead and start the render(s).


• Step 4. Now it's time to make sure that the rendering doesn't suck up the resources that you need to continue working. We do this by telling your operating system to not prioritize the rendering program.
  On Windows XP you hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc to bring up the Task Manager and under the tab Processes right-click on the AfterFX.exe and set the priority the Below Normal.
  
  
  On OS X it's a bit more complicated, since you can't just point and click like you can on Windows (the irony, the irony...)
  A. Start a Terminal window, type top and hit the Enter key.
  B. Look at the row listing After Effe and memorize the four-digit PID number in the first column.
  C. Type q to get back to the command prompt.
  D. Type renice +20 XXXX where the X:es should be replaced by the PID number you just tried to remember.
  E. Exit Terminal.
  

• Step 5. Start a second instance of After Effects, on Windows XP via the same icon, on OS X via your duplicated app.


• Step 6. When the new instance has been started, load the same project into it with Ctrl-Alt-Shift-P (Cmd-Opt-Shift-P on OS X.)


• Step 7. To avoid saving over the project that is already rendering in the background, immediately choose Increment and Save from the File menu (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S on Windows XP, Cmd-Opt-Shift-S on OS X.)

Now you can work on your project while it (or another project) is rendering in the background. Since you lowered the priority of the program that is rendering, you shouldn't notice any performance degradation. The operation system will only let it use CPU cycles that would otherwise have been wasted doing nothing. The beauty of this technique is that it even works on single-CPU and single-core machines, even though rendering will of course be even faster the more processors you have.

The only drawback is that you don't want to change stuff in your Preferences or save new Workspaces while running two instances, since both will fight over who can write to the preference file.

This is basically a crude way of doing what the excellent and highly recommended Nucleo software does automatically. Even better is the Nucleo Pro plugin that will use spare CPU cycles to either render stuff in the Render Queue or even fill up your previews while you can continue to work.

Thanks to Chris Prosser at Adobe, here's a challenge for someone with the skills to write a .term file for automating this in OS X.
A. Start Terminal and navigate into the directory with the application Adobe After Effects 7.0
B. Type ./Adobe\ After\ Effects\ 7.0.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ After\ Effects\ 7.0&
C. Get the PID number
D. Enter the command renice +20 PID (replacing PID with the actual PID number.)
E. Press up arrow on the keyboard twice to get the command listed under point B again and press Enter.
F. Voilà, you will have a second instance with a lowered priority.

Use After Effects' Shortcuts with non-English Keyboards

Frustrated about not being able to maximize AE panels with the ~ shortcut, since your keyboard doesn't have the tilde character? The same goes for many of the most useful shortcuts that don't work on many non-English keyboards. However, there is a relatively easy way to fix this before a future version hopefully ships with the nice shortcut editor found in Photoshop CS2.

Update: Thanks to Nils Fridén for providing the OS X procedure!
Update 2: Added the paths for After Effects CS3 and a link to a script for AE CS3 that will let you edit the keyboard shortcuts easier, but you'll still have to find the Unicode for all those non-English keys.


How to map the "Maximize Current Panel" shortcut to the same key on a foreign keyboard

• Step 1: Locate the text file Adobe After Effects 7.0 Shortcuts.txt (Adobe After Effects 8.0 Shortcuts.txt for AE CS3.)
  On Windows XP and AE 7.0 you can find it in the folder
  C:\Documents and Settings\XXXXXXX\Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\7.0
  ...and with AE CS3 it's:
  C:\Documents and Settings\XXXXXXX\Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\8.0
  Replace XXXXXXX with your current username, for example "jessica".
  On Mac OS X and AE7.0 you will find the text file in:
  User/Library/Preferences/Adobe/AfterEffects/7.0/
  ...and on Mac OS X with AE CS3 you will find the text file in
  User/Library/Preferences/Adobe/AfterEffects/8.0/
  


• Step 2: Create a backup copy of the file, just to be on the safe side...


• Step 3: Open the original file and search for the word "maximize" and you will find the row where it says
  "ToggleTabPanelMaximize" = "(`)"


• Step 4: Now comes the tricky part; you have to find out which character is actually sent when you press the key you want to map the Maximize command to. I chose the same key as is used on English keyboards, above the Tab key, which on Swedish keyboards sends the § character. However, AE doesn't recognize this character, so we have to find out the Unicode code and enter that instead.


• Step 5: On Windows XP, choose Run... from the Start menu (or simply hit your Windows key and the R key) and type charmap and hit Enter. This brings up a small utility called Character Map.
  On Mac OS X you start the utility Character Palette.
  Write, drag-and-drop, or copy characters to the search field..


• Step 6: Find the character that is sent when you press the correct key by pointing and clicking on it. When you've found the character, hover the mouse pointer over it to get the Unicode which in this case is U+00A7, and switch back to the text file.



• Step 7: Change the text between the parenthesis to the code you just wrote down, but relace the "-" (dash) with a lower-case "x".




• Step 8: Save and close the file and then make sure you restart After Effects so it can load the changed shortcut.


• Step 9: There is no step 9! ;-)
  Just pray that Adobe makes it easier in upcoming versions. My preference would be that pre-configured shortcut files where automatically installed for the most common non-English keyboard layouts.

AE Preset: Scaling a Motion Path

If you've set up an After Effects animation with lot's of position keyframes, you probably know that you can move the entire animation around by parenting the moving object to a null, and then move the null. But if you suddenly want to scale the animation path without scaling the moving object itself, you're in for a hard time. After watching Aharon Rabinowitz's very complicated method of getting around the problem of not being able to scale a motion path, I thought to myself; "there must be an easier way" and decided to use this as an excuse to dip my toe in the pool of expressions. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that Aaron spends so much time on all his great AE tutorials and AE podcasts! Here's an After Effects 7.0 Animation Preset that you can apply to a layer with an animation, and then just scale the animation to your heart's content. If you want to rotate the animation, just parent it to a null, and rotate the null! Download preset Scale MotionPaths (ZIP-file, 1 KB) Of course there's a way to both scale and rotate without the help of a null. I asked the expressions-guru Dan Ebberts who instantly whipped up this preset that will let you do both: Download preset Scale and Rotate MotionPaths (ZIP-file, 1 KB)
Tags: Adobe, AfterEffects, AE, MotionGraphics, graphics, animation, tutorial

AE Presets: Smooth Vertical Scrolls for TV

UPDATE: The presets now come in both PAL and NTSC variants, and include a flicker-reducing filter that adjusts itself to the chosen speed.

Working at a TV station, I see so many jumpy titles that were created in After Effects. This comes from the fact that interlaced video gives a sort of venetian blinds effect to your content, making vertical scrolls flicker if you don't scroll at certain fixed speeds.

In version 6.5, it was easy to tell people to set two keyframes and then just move the last keyframe so that the pixels/sec velocity read-out was an even double of the framerate. This was a useful feature that was actually removed when the Graph Editor was introduced in version 7.0, since you can't see this value until you release the keyframe.

When I got the question the last time I couldn't find where to enter the value anymore, making me feel kinda stupid. In a vain attempt to look like I was on top of things, I came up with the simple and unsofisticated solution of three Animation Presets for the three common scrolling speeds.

The layer that you apply the preset to will start to scroll upwards from its original position as soon as it appears in the timeline. The nice thing is that you can just drag it around to set the starting position, without having to modify any code.

//Smooth SD vertical scrolls by Jonas Hummelstrand
// Version 1.3, http://generalspecialist.com/
// Can be applied to a non-square NTSC comps or to both square and
// non-square PAL comps.

// Change the value of "intPixelsPerSecond" below based on the speed you want:
// Normal scrolls are 100 for PAL and 119.88 for NTSC
// Fast scrolls are 200 for PAL and 239.76 for NTSC
// American Idol scroll speeds are 300 for PAL and 359.64 for NTSC

intPixelsPerSecond = 100;

y=position[1]-((time-inPoint)*intPixelsPerSecond);
[position[0],y]

Here's a ZIP file with the three PAL and three NTSC speeds pre-configured.

Thanks to Nathan Shipley for the error-correction.