Office Hour with the After Effects Team

[Rameez_Khan]

UPDATE:

11:10 AM PST - It's a wrap!

Thanks to the After Effects team for participating and answering a ton of the questions. We will get back to the ones that are not answered. 

-Rameez

------------------------------- 

Hi After Effects Community!

What an exciting start to November we’ve had at Adobe with the recent release of After Effects 17.0 and the 2019 MAX conference!  With the recent update, I’m sure there are many questions around After Effects 17.0 features, updates, performance improvements and what’s coming down the line for future After Effects releases. 

Well, here’s your chance to get all your questions answered by the very team who works to create the magic in After Effects! Starting at 10 am on Wednesday, November 13, we’ll have Victoria Nece and other After Effects team members on hand to answer any and all After Effects questions right here, LIVE! Just ask your questions in the comments below for the opportunity to connect directly with the After Effects team.  More details below.

When: November 13, 2019

Time: 10 AM - 11 AM Pacific Time

Who will be attending?

Victoria Nece - Senior Product Manager, After Effects

Victoria Nece is the Senior Product Manager for Motion Graphics and Visual Effects at Adobe, with After Effects as her primary focus. She has also played key roles in bringing Character Animator and Motion Graphics templates to market. Before joining Adobe, she was a motion designer for over a decade, as well as a developer of extensions for After Effects. As Director of Animation at the Documentary Group, she oversaw graphics for broadcast, theatrical and educational productions. As a developer, Victoria designed systems for motion capture animation and created tools used in Hollywood films.

Other members from the After Effects team: 

Sean Jenkin - Engineering Manager, After Effects

Michelle Gallina - Sr. Product Marketing Manager, After Effects 

Jamie Gjerde - Project Lead, After Effects Engineering

John Colombo - Software Quality Engineer, After Effects Engineering

Want to know more about After Effects 17.0? Have questions around After Effects Expressions, MOGRTs, Content-Aware Fill or any other After Effects features?  Wondering how to get started with After Effects? Let us know in the comments below. The After Effects team will be here for an hour to answer as many as they can.

[Locomotive]

I made this post back in april:  https://community.adobe.com/t5/After-Effects/Mercury-Transmit-Video-Preview-Bug/m-p/10673570#M94325

I had been experiencing the bug for months and months but that was my first post about it.  For almost a year, the mercury transmit feature has been broken in After Effects and Premiere.  This is a crucial feature especially at work when needing to preview works in progress to a group, or as a means to view what your output looks like on a 4k screen or any other monitor.  I was hoping this would be patched out by now but with 2020 released it is STILL not fixed.  It just crashes premiere immediately if I try to enable it and it freezes After Effects.  I'm extremely dissappointed that this feature has remained broken this long. Am I just unlucky or is this broken for anyone else? This bug is present on both AMD and Nvidia systems, as I've checked on several systems to confirm that it is broken.  What gives?

[jgjerde]

Hi Locomotive,

Sorry that you are crashing. Have you seen the Crash Reporter dialog pop up after/when the crashes happen?

If so submitting a report with an attached email would be very helpful. There's a good chance the crash report could provide us with the detail we need to determine why it is crashing and potentially fix the issue.

We do actively look at incoming crash reports.

Thanks,

Jamie

[Locomotive]

Appreciate the response. The program usualy blips out of existence with no popup or it freezes to the point that I have to force quit the application with no pop up either. Or the screen that the image is supposed to show up on just turns black and the pciture won't show up until I quit the application. There have been occasions a popup has shown up and I have submitted a detailed report several times. I have submitted a handful of bug reports over the past year to every avenue that Adobe offers to no avail. This has been such a frustrating and ongoing issue that I can't fathom spending another 30 minutes of my work day filling out yet another comprehensive bug report all over again for nothing to ever happen. The issue started on a computer built with an Nvidia GPU and remained present with an entirely new computer using an AMD GPU. All built specifically for After Effects. I have even tested this on coworkers computers and laptops. I really don't know what more I can do. I've been using After Effects for 13 years and I'm certain I've tried everything within reason.  

[jgjerde]

If PPro crashes immediately it would be very helpful if you could just submit the crash report with an email address. That would be a good place to start. If you can do this feel free to send me a private message with your email so I can match the report, I'd be happy to take a look.

[Dan Cristino]

Good day, creatives.

I'm having a problem with my After Effects 2020 after updating from CC 2019.

I have a workspace saved to maximize window as default. But whenever I open AE again, it reverts to a default non-full screen size.

How do I fix this? Is there a problem in the settings files?

Attached is the workspace I saved (fullscreen) and the windows size whenever I open After Effects.Non-maximized windowMaximized saved workspace

[VictoriaNece]

Hey there! You're not alone in wanting the app to stay maximized when you maximize it. We're tracking a bug on this. Any info you can provide about your setup can help us figure out what's going on. Did you import your prefs from a previous version of AE? 

[Dan Cristino]

Hi Victoria,

Yes, I did import my settings from my previous version of AE. Currently using in on Windows 10 v1909

I'm hoping someone can find the solution for this 😞

[Bantos]

Hello, I am developing an effect using after effects sdk. I have a video, and in my effect I want this video to overlap with the video submitted by the user. Are there any tools for loading my video into the code and further work with it? And also, how can i store my video in .prm file or smth like that

[migallina]

This question is hard to understand. Are you asking if we can decode your video in the effect? If you can reclarify the question, we can do better to answer your question. Thanks! --Michelle

[jgjerde]

Hi Bantos,

If I am understanding correctly, are you asking if there is an API for you to decode a video inside of your effect via the AE effects SDK?

If so there is no such functionality provided through the AE effects SDK.

Thanks,

Jamie

[Bantos]

Yes, this is what i meant, thank you for answer. Then maybe you could suggest some way to do the following: I have a video file containing some effect (for example, a few randomly circling red ellipses). In my effect, I would like these ellipses to overlap on the layer filed by the user. How can i do this? I'm making effect for Premiere Pro, so maybe some features from premiere sdk can help.

[jgjerde]

It's possible, but you would need to do the video decoding and image processing with your own code in the plugin effect.

Thanks,

Jamie 

[felixHonda_]

I'm trying to find the matchname for the new dropdown menu. I can't seem to find any documentation on where to find it (like how the matchName for slider controls "Slider" is "ADBE Slider Control-0001").

Examples:

- effect("Slider Control")("Slider"); == effect("Slider Control")("ADBE Slider Control-0001");

- effect("Dropdown Menu Control")("Menu"); == effect("Dropdown Menu Control")("???????????");

I tried just renaming it ("Menu" to "ADBE Menu"), but that threw an error. Then I went through a few other variants with no luck ("ADBE-Menu," "ADBE Menu Control," and "ADBE Menu Control-0001").

So then I tried using a bit of ExtendScript to find the name:
var matchName = app.project.activeItem.layer(1).effect("Menu").matchName; alert(matchName);

But that returned a weird Pseudo effect (Pseudo/@@idZWVuvPSc X9B4Ja6ne4w).

So just want to know what the correct matchname for the new dropdown menu controllers.

Thanks in advance!!!

[Dan Ebberts]

I believe it's a known issue that scripting doesn't have full access to expression dropdown menus yet.

Dan

[felixHonda_]

Darn. But what about for mogrts that use it? Do you think 'effect("Dropdown Menu Control")("Menu");' would break in a different language?

[Dan Ebberts]

Good point. I don't know for sure, but my guess would be yes.

Dan

[JohnColombo]

Hi felixHonda_

The new Dropdown Menu Controls are actually pseudo effects. They are generated each time they are applied to a layer or when menu items are changed. As such, every Dropdown Menu Control will recieve a unique matchName.

Since the matchName isn't static, a locale-friendly option for expressions would be to use the index of the property:

effect("Dropdown Menu Control")(1)

The Menu property will always be the first property of the Dropdown Menu Control effect, regardless of language.

I hope this is helpful, please let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,

- John

[wm•drescher]

If I have Mercury Transit selected in the preferences but have not Selected a Monitor, then I cant see a preview. Ram Caches and then show blank on the Mac.  (10.13.6)

We use an Apple TV or a third Mon to share a view with others in the rooms.   When I turn it off. I need to go back into the Video Preview settings and TURN OFF Mecury Trasnit.. wait for it...sometimes.

#/dresch

[jgjerde]

Hi Dresch,

What version of After Effects are you using?

Can you provide a screen shot of your Video Preview Preferences?

Thanks,

Jamie

[Zeppedeus van Hoygsma]

I just updated to After Effects CC2020, and now the keyboard shortcuts to jump to the layer in and out points (hitting i or o on the keyboard) don't work anymore, on both my Windows 10 machines. On a friend's Mac the i still jumps to the in-point, but o opens a small window for the opacity.

The shortcuts do appear in the keyboard setting page, and even if I exchange i and o with shift+i and shift+o (or the alt key) and save this as a custom keyboard layout it won't work. I also tried alt+0, just to see if a different key might work, but with the same result, it just won't jump to neither the in nor the out point, which is very inconvenient.

Anyone else experiencing this problem?

[jenkmeister]

We are aware of this issue and will have a fix for the upcoming patch update. 

[basstaster]

Why is the transform>position array value the only value with a "separate dimensions" option? That would be so useful for every property! It would save me so much time.

[JohnColombo]

Hi Basstaster,

Great question! The Position property is unique in that it exists as 4 properties: a single combined Position property with 3 values, and as separate X, Y, and Z Position properties. When "Separate Dimensions" is enabled, the combined Position property is hidden and the 2 or 3 separated properties are shown instead. The same is true when the layer is changed from 2D to 3D; the Z Position is shown or hidden depending on the 3D switch. These additional properties are not currently added for other properties.

Enabling this same command and added properties for all the other properties is a great feature request. You can add your vote to After Effects' UserVoice here: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/37622269-separate-position...

Additionally, there is an included preset for "Separate XYZ Position" which provides an expression and an effect control which you can then copy over to any other positional property to split the dimensions and keyframe them separately. Let me know if you'd like more details on using the preset.

Thanks so much!

- John

[benjamina50420205]

Whenever I click on an expression to edit it, I get a huge dialog box with a massive blinking cursor and nothing else. I've tried going into the expression editor preferences and changing the font size but it makes no difference, I cannot even see the demo text in the small syntax box in order to adjust the theme color preferences for the editor font. All I see there is a large blinking cursor as well and nothing else.

I have already restarted the program, restarted my computer, done a fresh install of the program, and nothing seems to make any difference.

[jenkmeister]

What version of After Effects are you using? There was a known issue with this in AE 2019 that should be fixed in the most recent patches or in AE 2020.