My problem is when I use the animated gif the background it is no longer transparent and the background is instead white. Correct. As a conmpositing program, AE requires proper Alpah transparency, not palette-based transparency. File must be converted to an image sequence with Alpha channel. Next the animated gif is about a 2 second loop, it won't let me drag the bars to extend the time to 10 seconds. How do I loop it for 10 seconds? Footage interpretation --> Loops 1) For the text effect 'numbers' (which I used for the countdown effect) it always renders really shaky and bouncy when i preview it. Is that normal? Yes, it's normal if you are using a non-monospaced font. Use a suitable font. 2) It has the time as 00:00:00:00 (type: timecode 30). How do I make so it only shows 00:00 ? Use multiple layers and effects and mask them out. Mylenium ... View more

why can't I get the color in Illustrator? Because you are working uncalibrated. What you see on screen is not what actually printed and, which complicates matters, the generic CMYK profile AI uses as default may not correctly represent the ink densities. As Scott said, you need to figure out that first. When printed in CMYK, most bright blues are also often printed by using low opacity/ density on the respective plates, so the reflective light from the substrate is stronger. It also helps to use a fine raster. Mylenium ... View more

By definition, OBJ is a geometry-only format (ASCII formatted vertex and polygon lists) from the stone age of computer graphics. Asking for the ability to import it implies just that - you want to animate geometry. A Maya file on the other hand is a scene file that always contains a default camera, a default light and may optionally contain other items/ entities. That does, however, not mean that AE would/ should be able to translate them. It's no different with .blend files, MAX scene files, Collada files etc. - there are scripts that can convert entities that exist in AE and those programs, but neitehr provides a facility for translating geometry because AE simply can't render it in any way without external help. That's al lthere is to it. So ultimately, we fell victim to a misunderstanding because you may not have used the right terminology. That's all there is to it. And don't worry, David is just as much a veteran as some of us. He just prefers not to post that much, hence his low count (or did the black monster swallow his points during the forum transition?) Anyway, no hurt feelings on eitehr side, I hope. Mylenium ... View more

Why can't AE import .obj files? That's an extremely common Well, if AE was a 3D program I'm sure it would, but as they otehrs said it isn't and you are expecting something from it that it cannot do. It may offer more 3D features in the future, but for the time being that entails the use of the described workarounds or the use of third-party plug-ins. Mylenium ... View more

Object --> Expand. Mylenium ... View more

Are you talking about the illustrator file or the InDesign file Primarily the AI file. Even if you add tons of text in ID, this will not affect file size, since text is handled differently, but other elements do. In your case you are probably seeing a few unfavorable combinations of things like compelx paths that get split up into tiny segments in the PDF as well as possibly gradients being converted into discrete overlapping fill areas/ strips to retain their appearance. that's why your vector-based PDFs get so huge and hence my advise on working with pixel graphics. Print quality really should not be an issue on home printers, as their effective LPI/ DPI is lower than 300DPI/ PPI. The differences compared to vector output should be minor and mostly depend on the printer using a slightly different rasterization method. Mylenium ... View more

Well, if it's for a website, then why go through all this song and dance? Flatten the file manually, then export a PNG or PDF (which essentially makes it a JPEG in a PDF wrapper). Even a 300dpi file that will still look sharp on home and office printers will be notably smaller than any PDF with vectors retained. I see no problem here nor a conflict of interest of any kind - if it's for a corparate intranet or for selling it commercially, file size does not matter, for the rest of the world using the described solution clearly is good enough. Mylenium ... View more

File --> Save As... --> choose Photoshop PDF. Anyway, that's not what your printer meant most likely. That's gonna hurt, so hold your pants: Seems you created your current file completely wrong and need to start over. Files for commercial printing need to be 300 DPI (the actual logic behind print res is much more complicated, but 300 DPI is considered a common safe value). Anything below that is more or less unusable, as it will look pixelated due to how rasterization works. ideally you would also creatze it in CMYK and thus be able to provide clean separations of the printing inks, but these days converting RGB post facto is usually not that big a problem.... Mylenium ... View more

Yes, AI has some basic adjustment filters inherited from PS and of ycourse you can use blending modes to achieve specific colorization effects. Just be aware that this stuff will always affect the whole image and you cannot easily limit it with selections and masks... Mylenium ... View more

Yes, it only ever tracks the currently selected/ active object. I don't see a problem here, though. To me it sounds more like you are trying to use the feature in an odd way it wasn't designed for. You expect it to guess what you are trying to do without defining a clear structure and that possibly cannot work... Mylenium ... View more

Look into using other OCR solutions that can be trained like Finereader or Cooliris. Acrobat's OCR is really only meant for contemporary tasks like recognizing form data, not for book restauration. It's not the image quality or anything, you have to have a way to teach the program to interpret specific gaps and artifacts differently and you can't do that with Acro. Mylenium ... View more

A client supplied an eps Logo with one layer and many "sub-layers" Wrong terminology. EPS files have no layers. They are flat files that contain a bunch of objects. So what you see in AE is correct. Your file must be organized into proper layers first in AI. Mylenium ... View more

And specifically? What's the budget? Do you want to run PS extended or PS Standard? Do you want to run otehr apps? Pretty much any computer you can buy these days should be able to handle PS, even the 300 Euro ones. Which one to get really comes down to more specific details... Mylenium ... View more

Do the respective log files (Windows Event Viewer --> Security) show anything? If the socket connection is terminated due to DEP or UAC, it should trigger an entry. Do the droplets run if you turn all that (temporarily) off? might also be worth to download Sysinternals' process Monitor and monitor the droplets. This may reveal some more details... Mylenium ... View more

Do you use DEP? Anything with UAC? Anything up with firewalls and virus scanners? If they can't communicate, then the socket is being closed, which usually is an external influence... Mylenium ... View more

Insert palette/ toolbar --> mode : Text Mylenium ... View more

Read this and this, then reinstall! If, as you say, you have issues with the whole suite, it was never installed correctly in the first place. Mylenium ... View more

Which one is right? Neither. For all intents and purposes, RAL colors are realworld colors (as in FS colors for paints), not even print-specific spot colors, so anything on screen can at best be an approximation. Safety orange cannot be simulated properly, anyway. It's a reflective luminescensce color just like DayGlo orange. Mylenium ... View more

As I wrote, it needs to be in the Documents (Dokumente) sub-folder, not the root of the user home dir. Mylenium ... View more

Create a file called ae_force_english.txt in your user home directory's Documents sub-folder. Mylenium ... View more

If you had the issues already in PS CS4 (or any other app using OpenGL for that matter), the blame goes to the card itself and the driver. Crashes such as you describe them usually point to issues with cooling in the card or your system's power supply being to weak to feed the card with enouugh "juice" - when things get demanding, the card revs up, but then fails due to overheating or low voltage. You may also have a problem with your PCI timing and the motherboard's TurboBoost and power management settings. Mylenium ... View more

I suggest the OP check the BIOS and his Windows Update status. The installer even trying to install 64bit components on a 32bit OS sounds fishy. I suspect that it does so due to an incorrect system DLL for your AMD processor fooling it into thinking it was a 64bit system. You may be able to fix this by installing the right version (may require a manual search in Windows Update) or turning off EMT64 extensions for the processor in the BIOS. Mylenium ... View more

Certainly a problem with teh tablet driver in combination with the old operating system and CS5. Other users have reported similar issues with suddenly losing pressure sensitivity. you can only try to reinstall the tablet driver, but beware: The latest Wacom 6.15 driver does seem to only make things worse, so use the same version you have now for the reinstalls. Mylenium ... View more

Maybe there is a nifty file converter routine out there if photoshop really does not support this. Your nifty file converter routine is a dedicated export plug-in for AutoCAD that can either produce structured PDFs or layered TIFFs/ PSDs. In short: without special prerequisites, PDFs only store the appearance of a page and that means that text gets outlined or paths arbitrarily split up. Therefore, you'd still have the same problem in Illustrator. Sorry to shatter your illusions, but there is no simple or free solution here. I could imagine, though, saving multiple "layers" from ACAD by hiding elements and then re-assembiling those separately exported documents in PS or AI... Mylenium ... View more