🗞️ March 2022 After Effects Community Recap

[Rameez_Khan]

Hi, community!

Spring is here! And it's my favorite time of the year. I hope everyone is doing great. Life is getting back to how it was before Covid, and it feels refreshing. It's time to look back at March and recap the top troubleshooting discussions and excellent tutorials posted in the community.

In this edition of the newsletter, I want to feature Jerron Smith, a.k.a thepixelsmith as our community rockstar. Jerron has been actively helping users in the Adobe community. He is an expert in multiple Adobe products, and his responses are friendly and detailed. Let's know more about Jerron in his own words.

Community Highlight

My family has always been involved in art, my mother liked to paint and do crafts, and my younger brother is an illustrator, so I've been creating art and design in one form or another most of my life. At this point, I've been using Adobe software for 25 years, and I've been teaching it for about 20 of those.

I started working with Photoshop to prepare images for graphics reproduction and printing, then I got into Illustrator and InDesign, but everything came together when I picked up After Effects.
These days I mostly specialize in the video side of things. I am an Adobe certified expert in After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Most of my motion graphics and VFX work is corporate stuff, explainer videos, interviews, screen replacements, etc. Not necessarily the coolest stuff on the planet, but good, respectable, reliable video and graphics work.

I've contributed to about a dozen different books on software; most notably, I was the author of the After Effects and Premiere Pro Digital Classroom series from John Wiley and Sons. I've also created video-based training series for companies like Total Training and Infinite Skills. Currently, I am the Program Director for Motion Graphics and Video Editing for Nobledesktop, an NYC-based school that focuses on teaching coding and design classes.

I attended F.I.T. in NYC for Fine Arts and would eventually graduate with a degree in art education after transferring to Queens College in NYC. I taught high school for a couple of years before going into graphics professionally, and I have continued to teach mostly at the college level since the early 2000s. I eventually went back and earned a MA in Communication Arts from the New York Institute of Technology, where I specialized in Computer Graphics.

When teaching or answering questions on the Adobe forums, I like to focus not only on the how of the problem but also help people understand why the problem occurred in the first place so they can understand how to avoid it in the future. Knowing how to do or not do something is important, but knowing why and when to do something is just as important.

We want to thank you for your contributions, Jerron. 🙏🏻

Want to get to know other Adobe Community Professionals and how to become one? Click here.

Top troubleshooting topics from March 2022

1. Several users have reported performance issues with Multi-frame rendering on Apple Silicon

The After Effects is aware of some issues with MFR and is working on improvements in a future release.

2. Rendering a PNG sequence from After Effects would result in the following error:

- AEGP Plugin PNGIO Support: PNGIO library error: known incorrect sRGB profile

This is a known issue and will be fixed in the next After Effects update. The fix is now available in After Effects Beta version 22.3.

Tutorials from March 2022

1. Top 5 AFTER EFFECTS Tutorials MARCH 2022 by LiamCarlin

2. New Ae Tutorial: Motion Design Essentials 27: Staging by Mathias Moehl

3. davidlindgren89 posted four new tutorials

• How to attach proxy files in After Effects
• How to install free sounds effects in After Effects
• How to fix missing file in After Effects
• How to do text reveal in After Effects

4. Create a Curvy Arrow Preset for After Effects by ShiveringCactus

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[Wienke]

This looks like a reasonably good place to offer thanks for an old tutorial:
Recently I needed a refresher on After Effects, of which I own an ancient copy (version 3.0 from the 1990s!), and I remembered having worked through its 35-page tutorial, printed in the bound manual, so I turned to that first.
A quick read-through, no need even to launch the program, and I was up to speed. While absorbing the info, I found myself admiring how cleverly organized the tutorial was, how it introduced the simplest concepts first, then progressed to specific tools, all while generating an attractive project. It must have been so much work, preparing graphics as material for the user, writing the instructions and laying them out on the pages with screenshots, and likely doing all this under a tight deadline.
But there are no credits, no way to send them a big Thank You. I’m glad to see that Adobe now displays the author’s name for each of its excellent tutorials; they’re a kind of art form in themselves.