The tie-in between layer order and effects inheritance is a limitation of After Effects' workflow, and why many people prefer node-based applications. There isn't a simple way to disable the inheritance, but you can sometimes sidestep it - in your case the simplest solution would be to make the layers and composition 3D, then very slightly nudge them apart in the Z direction until the fish is stacked between the other two. That way the layer order in the composition can be different to the visual stacking order in the video. Note that 3D always sees the scene through a perspective camera so there will be a scaling effect when things move in Z, but with tiny offsets it won't be noticeable. ... View more

That certainly shouldn't be happening. The link between AE and AME uses a local socket connection, and that can sometimes be blocked by firewalls even though the data never leaves your computer - so it might be worth a test with firewall and AV software disabled (while you're unplugged from the Internet just in case!)   Changing the settings on a job also uses the same socket procedure* and that error message means that AME cannot talk to the background After Effects process - so it's probably caused by the same thing.   *When you submit a job, AE creates a copy of your AEP file and hands that filename to AME, but AME itself cannot open the file so when rendering, and whenever you need to do something that depends on resolution, frame rate, etc., a background copy of AE has to be fired up. That's why changing the export folder for a job is instant, but opening the settings window to change anything else takes a few seconds even on a fast computer. ... View more

If you have access to the Trapcode Particular plugin, it's relatively simple to make CGI smoke from scratch that attaches to a moving source and behaves correctly. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDXD6j0760Y ... View more

There is no difference in the way Acrobat Reader and Acrobat Pro render PDFs; nothing is "downgraded" in the free Reader software, and image objects on a page only have one stored set of pixel data.   In Acrobat/Reader's preferences there is a "show large images" option but all that does is turn high resolution bitmaps into gray boxes, it's an ancient feature designed to make scrolling faster on low-spec computers. You might ask them to try toggling "2D graphics acceleration" but I can't see why that would blur anything.   It's possible (likely) the customers are using completely different software. Most just open PDF files in a Web browser, and let the browser's internal JavaScript-based engine handle it. They are, to say the least, limited in their abilities. However that would not be an Adobe or PDF problem. The whole point behind PDF is that a "compliant" rendering application should always display the page exactly the same (assuming the hardware is suitable). ... View more

It's "working" for me today (Firefox/Windows) except that the profile image box is empty, and on the Notifications tab it said I was subscribed to every type of notification despite disabling them months ago. I wasn't getting any emails so I assume the notification tab is not reading the database correctly. ... View more

In Jive it lurked here: ... View more

In Jive being a moderator wasn't just a yes/no setting, there were lots of hidden groups that assigned different rights. You couldn't see your own memberships and which groups you were added to was decided by whoever made you a moderator in the first place. I don't think there was anything you'd call a "policy" about it, but some PMs demanded more control over their fiefdoms than others. ... View more

A "session" normally lasts until you close your browser window (not just the tab), but there are lots of privacy add-ons that can influence it.   Most browsers let you look at the cookies for the currently-open page; there will be a mountain of them doing marketing tracking but the critical ones for keeping your forum login alive are the ones set by the community subdomain, such as LiSESSIONID. The cookies with a host entry at the .adobe.com top-level domain are from the AdobeID form, so if you chose "stay signed in" those should have an expiry long in the future. ... View more

"we can't recognize what's an intended reply and what's part of an inserted signature"   Of course you can. Every system that accepts email submission should parse for the RFC3676 "-- \n" delimiter. Jive did it just fine, and this train wreck of an application is supposed to be an improvement on Jive.   Users will almost always have signatures that include GDPR-protected information. Users will not turn off signatures. If the signature block is inserted by a corporate MTA, they can't even see it. By publishing every received message without stripping the signature, you are breaking the law. ... View more

>>This is not a solution<<   Since it appears AE is ignoring its own RAM limit for this particular combination of effects, one option to try and stop the entire OS crashing is to use an external program to force a RAM cap in the Windows tasker. It might have unintended consequences because if AE still tries to malloc() itself into oblivion Winodws will start giving it pagefile storage, and that's very very slow - but hopefully it'll prevent blue screens so you can cancel AE in time to save the work.   There's an open-source process memory limiter at https://github.com/lowleveldesign/process-governor ... View more

OK, so it's reproducible at least on your setup. Please file a bug report at https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects - if possible including a bare-bones example. ... View more

There are two things going on. First, how the PDF is created:   If software (Word, etc.) exports to PDF (e.g. via a Save As menu), it can include the interactive parts of the document such as links, tables of contents etc. no matter how they are visually represented. If it prints to PDF then all the interactivity is lost, and you only get a dumb visual representation of the document. It's effectively just an electronic sheet of paper.   Then you have to look at how the PDF is viewed - some software (Acrobat/Reader included) will automatically turn all the text URLs and email addresses into clickable hotspots, even if there are no links defined in the PDF itself. That only happens where the visible text contains something recognizable. You can disable this feature in the preferences, but it can confuse people into thinking there are real links embedded in the PDF when there are not. ... View more

Unlike in editors like Premiere Pro, a composition has a fixed duration (which you can change at any time through the Composition Settings menu). The final frame is always limited to the right side of the screen, you can't scroll beyond it, so if you need more space to add stuff, you must change the composition duration first. Extra time is never automatically added.   Often people start out with a comp that's much longer than required, then  they use the "work area" bar to specify the section to render - and when the editing is done they right-click in that work area bar and trim the comp to fit it. ... View more

It's not clear what "commercial project" you are talking about.   If you are creating a training course or textbook about Adobe software then it's perfectly fine to include a list of keyboard shortcuts, but you will need to type out the content yourself rather than taking a screenshot from the website. More important is the trademark restriction, there are specific rules you must follow when talking about Adobe and its products, such as ensuring the trademark owners are credited and not using logos or implying any endorsement. For advice see https://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions.html   If you want to use the same keyboard shortcuts in your own software then that is generally considered OK; all the most common shorcuts (save/copy/paste/etc) are universal and Adobe doesn't have any rights to control which keys people press, but the question of whether an entire "scheme" of shortcuts is protectable remains a matter for the courts. ... View more

JSM's link to ZenDesk is just a read-only FAQ page, there is no equivalent to the User Community. Adobe have decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that they don't want Spark discussed.   To answer your original question; a legally-binding statement on Spark and GDPR will not be forthcoming. Putting it politely, Adobe's stance on GDPR compliance is...imaginative. If you're a million-dollar enterprise customer using the Analytics platform you can have all the signed paperwork you want, if you're not then you're on your own. No DPA, no SCCs, no policy documents. All you get is a statement that Adobe believes it complies with Privacy Shield for its business customers.   Adobe is a US corporation subject to the CLOUD Act with servers (both internal and third party) located in several parts of the world, and there is no way for a customer to exercise control over where their data is siloed (as there is with AWS, Azure, etc.) nor is there any transparency over how Adobe does backups, data deletion, physical security, etc.. If a product activates "sharing" on a cloud asset, then other than the tools available in the product itself  - for example some allow you to enforce a password, some do not - you have no control over who can access that asset; if they find the URL then they're in. Customers cannot apply IP-based access controls to any Adobe online service. You should also bear in mind that Adobe websites include user-tracking code for which GDPR consent is required, and your own legal advisors need to consider if that is actually happening on the pages your staff and students will be using. ... View more

Change the user interface brightness using Edit > Preferences > Color Theme. ... View more

You can enable audio in the RAM Preview options panel, but After Effects is simply not designed to work like an NLE, where you can scrub about and hear everything. If you need to sync in AE, then either expand the audio track to expose the waveform and work by eye, or take the audio into a DAW application and add markers which AE will then display on the layer. ... View more

Since you signed out on the old computer, you simply need to install the software on the new computer then sign in to activate it. ... View more

Those look like (badly-made) form fields or buttons. Switch Acrobat to Forms mode (More Tools > Prepare Form) and they should become editable. ... View more

Support for Experience Cloud is and always has been totally separate - we do not respond to questions here. ... View more

All your activity is shown on your profile page: https://community.adobe.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/16509477 ... View more

In theory yes, but with caveats.   The way that rich media (video/audio/3D/SWF) is embedded into a PDF is defined within Adobe's extension of the ISO standard, and that takes years to change; you're not going to see a sudden change to HTML5 embedding just because Adobe killed Flash. But since with embedded audio and video rich media the actual content is always stored in a format that can be read without using Flash (e.g. videos in MP4, audio in MP3), a PDF viewer doesn't need to involve Flash to play them. As it currently stands the "player" is also embedded, e.g. for video it's a tiny SWF file called videoPlayer.swf - and Acrobat in turn loads that into its own copy of the Flash runtime. But it doesn't have to - it could simply read the content and play it through a native widget, just like Web browsers do. The decision to cobble together the Flash playback system was partly to promote Adobe's own software by preventing third parties from implementing all the features in Acrobat, and partly to get around the hassles of the legacy media annotations, which relied on popping open a compatible external application on the user's computer. The argument went that by embedding the player into the PDF, and bundling the Flash runtime with Acrobat/Reader, every PDF would work every time. Of course that argument fell apart when mobile entered the game.   The caveats for a non-Flash-Player future are: As per the ISO standard, right now the configuration you choose in InDesign for how the video/audio player behaves (such as which buttons are on the toolbar skin, whether it loops, etc.) are stored in the PDF in a format designed specifically designed to be understood by the SWF player widget, and anything that replaces it needs to unpick that information. The loop stuff is easy as it's just a text variable, the toolbar "skin" is not as it's yet another SWF file. As well as embedded files, Rich Media annotations can stream online content from Adobe Media Server using the RTMP protocol - and to decrypt those streams you (currently) need the Flash runtime. Of course any annotations that display SWF content itself (e.g. animated graphics or games) will be dead on arrival, but those are vanishingly rare given the hassle of making them. ... View more

Since you have already removed the subscription from your account there is nothing more anyone here can do to help. If you wish to complain about the apparently unauthorized addition of a subscription to your account, that has to be done through the Customer Care system (chat or phone).   Adobe does not prevent "overlapping" subscriptions since there are valid reasons why someone might have them. For example a customer who uses Photoshop all the time, but who only needs the video editing apps once in a blue moon, can start and stop an All Apps subscription as required without affecting their photography work. During that time they have redundant licenses for Photoshop, but it's cheaper than a bunch of single app payments. ... View more

You're exporting at 482x570 pixels (strange, but hey...it's your party). The "screenshot" you posted is much larger, so you've scaled up during playback. Can't do that and expect it to be pixel-perfect! ... View more

I expect you'll have problems with anything RTL, given the inflexible CSS in Adobe's theme wrapper. ... View more