I would approach it another way; if you are building a machine that will only ever run AE, then save your cash on a top-line CPU and put it into RAM and drive space. An old single-Xeon board with 256gb RAM is almost certainly going to render faster than a dual board with 64gb, since AE has an attitude to memory that the most ardent fans of $5 buffets can only dream of.   If there's a slight possibility that you will run other things (3D renderers, Resolve/Fusion, etc.) then make your decisions based on those apps, because they have far more capacity to make use of high power CPUs, SLI, etc. but only in specific combinations. Some apps prefer high clock cores, others are massively multi-threaded. Some are all about the CPU, others are GPU-mad. In this case, treat AE as just as aside, it will chug along at its usual unimpressive speed on whatever you give it. ... View more

Pagination is enabled but only inside a thread. On the product forum pages the footer still runs off and hides. ... View more

All the lower-bitrate flavors of ProRes were designed for camera footage, hence no need for alpha. Only the "4444" mastering flavors support alpha, and since those are designed for post-production (e.g. CGI compositing) the very large bitrates of up to 500mbit/s are actually quite good; compared for example to an EXR frame sequence. For lower thirds etc. it's total overkill, hence why the Animation codec was retained in After Effects. ... View more

The servers running the old Jive forums couldn't cope with the traffic. The new site supposedly can, but it was implemented in a... cost-effective manner. Apparently by someone whose only inspiration was their Facebook timeline. There are supposed to be regular updates, so keep complaining about whatever bugs you and maybe they'll take heed. ... View more

Try the Quicktime "Animation" codec, one of the few that survived the codecopalypse. RGBA motion graphics/cartoon style content compresses very well. Cineform and ProRes are designed for camera footage and have standardized target bitrates, so the files will still be huge even if the contents are easily-compressible. ... View more

Premiere's captioning tools are a waste of time. Rather than fight them, just render out a quick copy of your timeline and use a proper captioning program to generate your data files. Much faster to use, a full set of tools and no crashing. Aegisub ( http://www.aegisub.org/ ) is free and cross-platform, it's pretty much the standard tool for people who don't want to drop $20,000 on a Telestream license. ... View more

All the specialist sub-forums were killed in the "upgrade". You are supposed to search using "tags" now, but hardly anyone bothers to add them. ... View more

Yes there are feeds - for each board and each thread - but Adobe decided to hide all the visible links to them.   You'll have to look in the source code, or your browser's "page info" tool. The URLs are not predictable, for example the feed for this thread is   https://community.adobe.com/havfw69955/rss/message?board.id=community-help&message.id=54896   which of course has no relation to the message number (10619036) in the HTML version. Go figure.   Feeds can only be accessed for public pages, they don't give any information on who said what, and the formatting is completely jacked, but at least you get the whole page in one go - which is impossible via the website!   ... View more

As it says, " Please refer to the Blackmagic RAW SDK documentation for a detailed explanation of the available functionality". The SDK manual is also free on the BM support website. ... View more

Plugins are installed by the BRAW 1.5 software package from Blackmagic. See https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/readme/dcfcc373277949df9815ad8ae8377fde ... View more

Such devices have been on the market for a while - see https://steadxp.com/ - and of course GoPros from H5 onwards have internal gyros. ... View more

The entries on your profile page are filtered depending on the permissions of the person viewing them - so standard users will not see any mention of ACP/backroom stuff. ... View more

Accounts that did not have a "profile photo" in the old Jive forum were randomly assigned an image from the L1thium internal gallery by the "development team" who handled the changeover. ... View more

There is no "SDK forum" anymore. All the sub-topics on the old Jive site have been killed, now people are supposed to add "tags" to each message to identify what they're talking about. Hardly anyone will of course, and the search in L1thium* is an absolute joke. All the languages have been merged too, so get used to pages of useless text floating in an ocean of white space.   No, there's no going back. The suits in Adobe made a purchasing decision, and the suits never admit mistakes. I expect the serious conversations will move elsewhere; guess the After Effects subreddits will see some action in the coming weeks 😉   *The forum platform is named after a chemical element, but they've censored the word. Go figure. ... View more

After Effects just isn't designed to use all the resources of multi-core processors. It can only go as fast as the slowest task (that could be disk I/O reading the source items, effect calculation or layer compositing) - and many of those tasks are not multi-threaded, so until each one is done the rest of the CPU is just waiting. AE renders frames one by one, so even though you have "spare" resources it won't try to use them. Outputting to H.264 also makes things a bit slower, as it needs to compare several rendered frames in memory to work out the B- and I-frames (as opposed to just writing each frame to disk as an image). Historically we could tell AE to "render multiple frames simultaneously", but that feature was dropped years ago. There are commercial third-party plugins which try to speed things up by starting several copies of AE, telling each to render part of the timeline as an image sequence, then stitching them back together at the end - but you cannot escape the system bottlenecks, and require a lot more RAM. ... View more

The "glitches" just look like compression artifacts. If you start with compressed footage (MP4, etc) and re-encode it into another compressed file, the quality gets worse. That's just mathematics. ... View more

vrvince  wrote I imagine they think the Find Answers search is the be-all-end all of AI-fueled navigation, so no need for such archaic ideas as a simple list. And you would be correct. The Powers That Be work on the assumption that people only visit the forums to get a specific question answered, and that the only possible routes to achieve that are (1) to type in the search box, and (2) to ask a new question. They reject the idea of "browsing". This is a Q+A database, not a place to chat; hence why the "Adobe Community" name was dropped. Some of us have been arguing for a more recognizable "bulletin board" style user interface ever since the old software was replaced (which - surprise surprise - looked like a forum) and Adobe actively try to block that idea by removing and obscuring the navigation. On the Embark pages Adobe have removed the mode links (overview/content/people/etc) completely, and said if anyone wants to get to the content page "they can just edit the URL" ... assuming they can guess what to type. You can imagine how difficult it makes our job as ACPs/MVPs! The banner graphics and the layout of "widgets" on each page are entirely controlled by the product managers. When they edit a page almost all the widgets are fixed by the corporate theme, so the editor just moves a few boxes around and changes titles. I would say in very slight defense that when editing the overview page the mode links look a bit different - but as soon as you save the changes it's blindingly obvious when the color combination doesn't work. Nobody proofs the changes or checks for accessibility compliance. ... View more

Your Camera is parented to the null, so wherever you "move" it the camera follows. ... View more

Yes, you use orb to make the "shell" of dots. ... View more

For a planet with a single shell of "moving dots" I would use the free Orb plugin: https://www.videocopilot.net/orb/ - which can make the planet itself, and the satellites can be done by setting a composition that has a simple grid of moving dots as the opacity texture.  Getting dots to move along lines can be done in many ways, the simplest is to draw lines in a shape layer, then play with the stroke Dashes > Offset value. ... View more

You can access the layers (Optional Content Groups, or OCGs) through Acrobat JavaScript. Here's a trivial example of a search-and -rename function: var layers = this.getOCGs(pageNum); for (var i=0;i<layers.length;i++) {   if (layers.name == "change-me") layers.name = "new-name"; } Note that OCGs exist on a per-page basis, so for multi-page documents you will need to handle that in your code (by looping through pageNum, starting at zero, until you find the page with your layer on it). You can run scripts through the JS console while testing them (Ctrl-J / CMD-J) then put them inside an Action for batch editing once they're doing what you want. Full documentation on the JavaScript API is in the Acrobat SDK. ... View more

sRGB is not a valid profile for H.264 video. Internally, the frames are not stored as RGB values, but as YUV. In theory YUV data covers the full range of sRGB, but there limits on extremes. Rec.709 (the standard for HD footage in H.264) only uses the 16-235 "video" range for brightness, so if a playback application is expecting 0-255 "data" levels it will get it completely wrong. There's also rec.2020, which is used for high dynamic range video and cinema. Unless you know what you're doing, avoid it - hardly any consumer displays can handle it properly, neither can playback apps. Unless you're exporting footage with luminosity outside the broadcast range (e.g. pixels at 255/255/255 white or 0/0/0 black), the exported footage should look visually close to the original when viewed in a color-managed display (i.e. re-imported back into After Effects). You'll sometimes notice the whites are a bit dull, and pixel-peeping will reveal some very minor shifts in hue cause by the RGB<>YUV conversions, but it's not a major problem for video playback on consumer devices where the range of badly-adjusted brightness and contrast settings your audience will have is many times more significant. If you re-import the footage and it looks completely different, and you've checked that it is being read correctly (footage item > interpret footage > color) then there's something fundamentally wrong with your workflow, and we'll need to look at your settings in detail - the project color window, the export options window and the headers of the exported file. Judging whether the video is "right" using QuickTime Player is just pointless. It is broken, always has been, always will be. Professionals don't touch it with a mucky stick. For desktop playback tests, try VLC (it understands display color profiles and if you change the video output mode to OpenGL it should exactly match the preview windows in AE). If you want a "known good" playback tester separate to After Effects and don't want to install VLC, then import your video into Premiere Pro. If your file works in VLC, then tell the client to use VLC. If they insist on using broken software, they get broken results. What would your mechanic say if you walked in and demanded "I refuse to put oil in this car, but you have to make it work!" You say this video is destined for a 'digital wall', but unless the wall hardware is calibrated (and it's usually not) then what you actually see on the final screen will be anyone's guess. If a client wants perfect color matching then you have to work with the wall provider to create an end-to-end managed workflow, where they calibrate each panel with a spectrometer and specify a LUT or output transform to use as a virtual "preview filter" when editing. It's not as simple as throwing them an MP4 file and assuming that your RGB 909090 text will appear on the wall as RGB 909090. I guarantee it won't. If you want to convince clients why "exact color" is a pointless demand when you're producing video, try playing them the same file in different browsers (IE,Chrome,Safari,Firefox) and on YouTube vs Vimeo. Then put it on a USB stick and play it on a TV. Pretty much every instance will look different, but the general public aren't complaining. They just don't notice. If people could tell that their TVs and monitors were all whacked, everyone would be buying calibration pucks. They're not. Although rare these days, walk into any store selling TVs and try to find two that look the same. The salesdroid will tell you the bright blue over-saturated colors are a "special movie enhanced mode" and charge you more for it! ... View more

Intentionally over-correcting your exported footage so it looks "right" in an external video player is completely the wrong approach. Assuming you have followed the rules for setting up a calibrated display and enabling color management for the composition window, then what you see in After Effects is "correct", in the sense it is a true representation of the appearance of each pixel (because color management takes account of your display calibration profile to "adjust" the image, it may not be sending the exact RGB value to the screen that is stored in the frame - but if you set up two different color-managed computers side by side, each with a calibrated display, the composition previews should look exactly the same). If a third party playback app shows something different, then there are three possible causes: That app is not using color management, so it is ignoring the "adjustments" needed for your calibrated monitor. That app is reading the file incorrectly, for example ignoring or mistaking which color profile has been set in the file header. Your video file has been incorrectly saved from AE or AME (for example by mangling the header). (1) is extremely common. Very few players - either on desktops or within web browsers, are properly color-managed. On mobile devices just forget it. It's possible to calibrate a phone screen using a spectrometer, but nobody ever does it. There is an option in AE to disable display correction, which will send the pixel RGB values direct to screen without adjustment. That makes the preview window look wrong, but it will probably match what you see in third party apps. It's still wrong though. (2) is also common, and QuickTime player is notorious for it. Washed-out or over-contrasty playback is almost always the result of QT getting confused by data or video levels (whether the brightness range for R/G/B is 0-255 or only 16-235). It also has big issues understanding gamma. Unless you have a specific project goal to target QT Player, you should avoid using it for any color-critical testing. It's just... bad. Since you have After Effects all set up and working, the best way to test your exported video is to import it back into AE, and play it in the Footage window. If it looks the same as the comp window, you're all good. For common formats we can generally discount (3), as it would affect everyone and be reported and fixed very quickly. While it is possible to trick AE/AME into saving a file with invalid headers, it requires effort. ... View more

I have explained several times that color swatches in CC Libraries are NOT yet implemented in After Effects. They show up on the panel, but they are absolutely not intended to be used in any way. Just forget they exist. The people that built CC Libraries (who are not part of the After Effects team) designed it to be used in two ways, and two ways only: Drag a color between the Library and the application's own "swatches" gallery. Use the right-click menu to "apply" a color or pattern to the selected item. 1 is impossible as AE has no swatches gallery. You cannot drag colors in After Effects to or from anywhere, period. 2 doesn't exist. It is not simply a case of adding the menu. How do you "apply" a Pantone spot color to a YUV colorspace video? What do you do with patterns and gradients, neither of which exist in AE in the same way they do in Photoshop or Illustrator? Doesn't matter what your project color settings may be, it is completely wrong to try and 'eyedrop' from anywhere outside of the After Effects video monitor frame. ... View more

bontempos  wrote I know color spaces can be messy, but is it so complex even Adobe developers can't deal with it between their own applications? Basically, yes. The developers of each app do their own thing, and in some cases have no contact with the other teams beyond installing the apps after launch. ACPs are actually a useful conduit here because we're often in several beta programs, and can argue for more uniformity. Although it's slowly improving, the codebase of each app remains neck-deep in legacy code and home-brew features, so it's not simply a case of copy-pasting a C function from inDesign to After Effects. As I said earlier, CC Libraries came from the print people. They gave it features they wanted. The code that generates the panel was bundled into the other Creative Cloud apps, but whether or not those apps could use it was left to each team. For AE, that pretty much means we're at the stage of a "hello world" example. The fact in 2019 we still have to tell people to switch to the operating system picker in order to save a custom swatch value is just insane, but it reveals the underlying issue - that for many time-served video app developers color is only ever something you adjust by eye, or with scopes. If if looks OK, it is OK. Whether it's C0C0C0 or C1C1C1 is completely meaningless to their way of working. They never export in CMYK or spot, so if a file in that color space doesn't display, or doesn't even import, they just tell the ink-stained print designer who sent them the file to go away and "fix" it. It's not just an Adobe attitude - Resolve has no swatch library, and FCP users have been complaining about color picker problems for years. Of course this should be a golden opportunity for third parties to sell "swatch gallery" type plugins - it's perfectly possible to write one with the features exposed via AE's SDK - and the fact it hasn't happened suggests that most people using After Effects either think the same about color as those developers, or have gotten used to it being awful and work around it. Either way it means there's no pressure on Adobe to change the status quo. ... View more

After Effects' face tracking system is pretty basic, it's designed to identify regions for adjustment (e.g. to change eye color) and to transfer information into Character Animator (so the face motion drives a virtual puppet). It is not designed to "skin" a face with a replacement copy - it's simply not accurate enough and only sees the world in 2D. It cannot cope with heads turning, hair moving, phonemes, teeth reveals, etc. If you have a trivial scene (e.g. a face staring directly into camera and frowning) then it's just about possible to morph a matching photo to fit using a mountain of puppet pins or the auto-generated reference points from face tracking "detail" mode, but even on a simple shot linking the pins and painting in all the detailed stuff like wrinkles and shadows so it looks "real" is a huge amount of work. The best you'll get is something that looks like a man in a rubber mask. If you have a budget then it's done in CGI using a ZBrush model or point-scanned head tracked onto the original in true 3D space - not something AE can do - or with a GAN neural network (a topic that became briefly infamous last year and further discussion of the software involved is not permitted here). If you have no budget it's done with makeup at a reshoot. ... View more