Thank you Roland, I know that a cut does the job, but you lose anything important in the copy buffer, so deleting is vastly preferable to cutting. ... View more

I had this problem and solved it. After a lot of testing, I discovered that the error went away if I reduced the filesize of the image. The image I was trying to import was an 18 meg Photoshop file (2500 x 2500 pixels). I tried saving it as a 3 meg PNG file, which worked. I also tried halving the resolution, which worked. So filesize seems to be key. I guess we need to work around this problem by compressing high res files, or reducing resolution if possible. ... View more

Thank you / dhanyavaad Shivangi ... View more

Thank you, Stan. That is helpful. I knew that "insert edits" moved the markers along, so I guess you could just insert a dummy clip. But this is still a workaround to a flaw with the program. I have submitted feedback to Adobe, not only to have "track forward" affect markers, but also an overhaul to the markers system: Sequence markers - several improvements – Adobe video & audio apps Please would you take a look at my idea and vote it up if you like it? ... View more

Hello Shivangi and thanks for your answer. Creating clip markers would not help me. In my video, there are several major sections, and each of those sections contains several different video and audio clips, so it would be impossible to mark the sections of the video using clip markers. I just want to be able to label the various parts of my video, for example "Introduction" and "Section 1" and "Conclusion" etc. To me, it seems like an oversight that the sequence markers don't move with the clips when using "Track select forward" and I am going to send feedback to Adobe about this. Thanks again. ... View more

Wonderful, thank you sir. ... View more

It's so helpful to know that I can rule out Element 3D https://forums.adobe.com/people/Rick+Gerard  wrote If you have no budget and you want to dabble in a very capable 3D app that has limited integration with After Effects check out http://blender.org. It's open source and therefore free. Just an example from one of their films: Thank you so much Mr Gerard, that's extremely helpful. At the moment I am leaning heavily towards using Blender as you recommended. It may have more limited integration with After Effects, but the price is perfect - I had no idea it was completely free, which is amazing. Cinema 4D does seem excellent, and if I was going to be using 3D heavily and extensively then I may have thought of investing in the full version. But the idea of "starting off with" C4D Lite bugs me, because I want to know that I own the software that can do everything I'll need. I wouldn't like to think I might one day come up against a functionality cap and be forced to upgrade. So, regarding Blender's integration with After Effects. I use After Effects for all my green screen compositing as it has a lot of powerful compositing tools. So my plan would be to use Blender to track motion to a clip, export JUST the 3D, then bring this into After Effects for compositing. Does that sound feasible, or is there a better workflow? ... View more

Thanks to everyone for the replies, I really appreciate the suggestions. ... View more

Mylenium  wrote "Photorealism" doesn't fall out of the blue in any package. Even advanced commercial renderers like VRay don't produce hyperrealistic imagery at the push of a button. It can take weeks, months, years to understand how a specific shading model works, how it interacts with virtual lighting, how materials need to be tweaked. And even statements like this make no sense: Having spent 25 years working in illustration, photo retouching and video special effects, I am well aware of that. I have spent my career perfecting my skills in creating photorealistic 2D graphics so I didn't expect the transition to 3D to be a walk in the park, though I believe a lot of my core skills as an illustrator will come in useful. Mylenium  wrote You can have the most detailed textures in the world, but when you slap them onto low-res geometry they still won't look "real". Conversely, all the transparent texturing, bump map and normal map cheats in the world won't save you in many cases. I would respectfully disagree with that. I already know from experience that I can take a single flat plane and integrate it realistically into a live action image or scene. And all I want to do is add a couple of simple planes to a scene. So surely common sense says I don't need as many polygons as if I were creating an entire scene full of objects with curves. Mylenium  wrote Overal lit seems to me you have a wrong understanding of the whole process on so many levels and your elaborate list is totally contradictory anbd to some extent pretty nonsensical. I find your reply somewhat patronising. We're all creative professionals here but you're treating me like some kind of fool. Mylenium  wrote All the tools you mentioned can offer some kind of "Photorealism", but of course not necessarily out of the box. You have to master them. So in the end it doesn't matter which one you choose if you don't commit to learning it properly. I don't know where you got the idea that I wasn't going to learn the software properly. I intend to spend many years building up my skills before I would be confident enough to use it in a video. Mylenium  wrote Magic buttons don't exist and looking for shortcuts doesn't help you become a good VFX artist. Again, when did I ask for a "magic button"? I have spent my career mastering the various software I use (particularly Photoshop) and have created stunning images for my clients, blending real and artificial imagery. I always invest a great deal of time and care in my work. I have a great deal of patience, and it has taken me 25 years of hard work to get to the level of experience I am now at. Now I would like to enhance some of my videos with a touch of 3D, but before I delve into any particular software, I would like to know that it SUPPORTS the level of care and attention to detail I intend to invest in using it. Which is why I'm here trying to find the right one. Mylenium  wrote prepping the shoot and palnning the shot layout is just as important for good VFX work. Even if you were an accomplished CG artist already, you could still totally screw it up with wrong greenscreen procedures and so on. I do completely understand that. ... View more

Thank you for the suggestion, though it's not for me. I do like the idea of having more keys, but I still need access to all the normal keys, and the ability to quickly start typing, so moving my left hand over to some other device would defeat the object. Basically I like my keyboard, and it works great for all other applications. But Photoshop is needlessly oppressive when it comes to allowing shortcuts. I've also just realized that there is no way to use keys to move up and down through layers. You can move between visible layers, but if you want to show a hidden layer, you need to use the mouse. ... View more

I've just had this problem - I hit some keyboard shortcut and my canvas color changed to white. SOLUTION: Simply right click anywhere on the canvas and a menu will appear letting you select the canvas color! ... View more

Thank you so much Roland! That was indeed the problem! ... View more

Thank you. Yes, I could just trigger a layer for a few frames, but I was really hoping you could actually add a custom viseme to the list - so that it can be activated just by pressing one key, like the other visemes, and can be edited alongside all the other visemes on the viseme layer. ... View more

Thanks Alank! That was indeed helpful. ... View more

Cool. I'll still be building up my list of suggestions for another week or so, but when I reach a suitable stopping point, I'll post them all together, either in the "Suggestions" forum, or I'll DM you. Thanks! ... View more

Ah, thanks for the clarification! Perhaps the word "guide" could be changed - though if we know about this little feature, people could maybe use it themselves. The main thing is just knowing about it! Having spent quite a long time now getting into Character Animator, I've found the learning curve surprisingly steep, which really surprised me because CA seems so simple in the tutorial videos. I normally pick things up really quick, but rigging my character's various poses and angles has been one of the most confusing things I've ever done. The biggest source of confusion has been the relationships between head, body, independent, dependent, parents, how the software regards all these parts, how they relate to one another, plus the layer structure and naming (which seems to have changed throughout the course of the betas, to make things more confusing). I wish I could click a little button and out pops a little guide (in the program itself), reminding me of the correct layer naming and structure, as well as perhaps a little diagram explaining the relationship between body, head, independent objects etc. Having said that, I'm not complaining at all. I do think the software is amazing and congratulations on it! While I'm here: I've made a list of about 40 suggestions: some minor, some major (purely for the sake of helping development, I don't need answers to them). Is there any preferred place where I should post these? Individually or all together? ... View more

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Roei+Tzoref  wrote you should look in the manual/help files or at least learn from proper tutorial author to really explore the software, and not expect to learn it by intuition. this is for every complicated software there is. and Ae is complicated. do yourself a huge favor and start your journey here: After Effects tutorials | Learn how to use After Effects CC when you are done there, try a course or a book to really get the knowledge you need to operate this complex, most versatile, swiss army knife of a software. To clarify, I was criticizing Premiere, not After Effects. After Effects has a nice big motion blur button located in the main interface. So why can't Premiere have something similar? Yes, I could read the Premiere manual, but there are a lot of filters, and I don't have time to read the technicalities of them all. I'm not a video producer, I'm a graphic designer who occasionally makes basic videos in Premiere. For most of my animation, I use Photoshop for its superior animation capabilities and precision. So I've never needed to know about advanced features in Premiere, but I don't consider it "advanced" to be able to make moving objects animate smoothly with motion blur. To me, that's as essential as having antialiased graphics. ... View more

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Roei+Tzoref  wrote after years of frustration with Premiere and Photoshop's lack of motion blur not entierly correct: https://premierepro.net/motion-blur/ My mind is blown! --------------------------------------------- Mostly by how CRAZY it is of Adobe to make this setting so impossibly difficult for anyone to ever discover and use! --------------------------------------------- • How is anyone ever supposed to know that "Use composition's shu..." has anything to do with motion blur? • How could we know that "shutter angle" needs to be set to 180°? • Why isn't it set to 180° by default? • If Premiere can do motion blur, why isn't this feature available in the normal Motion controls? • And why isn't it on by default? It's extremely rare that anyone would ever want to make an object move without motion blur. --------------------------------------------- My only conclusion is that Adobe have deliberately buried this feature because they know it's one of the biggest selling points of After Effects. --------------------------------------------- (Once again, the line breaks have disappeared from my message so I'm forced to insert minus symbols to give the illusion of gaps). ... View more

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Roei+Tzoref  wrote turn on the master switch: Thanks, that worked! Though I cannot understand why Adobe have made this turned off by default!? ... View more