January 2021 After Effects Community Recap

Report · Feb 05, 2021

Community Highlight:

Hey community!

Welcome to the January edition of the community recap.

In this edition, we want to highlight our community rockstar, Michael Szalapski a.ka. Szalam. Michael is one of the most knowledgeable and helpful members of the community who is welcoming to new users. He is a motion designer, 3d animator, and videographer based near Nashville, Tennessee. He has been working with digital video since the year 2000. His current full-time job is producing training and support for a unit in the US military where he uses Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, Audition, Photoshop, and Illustrator as well as Maxon's Cinema 4D (with X-Particles and Cycles 4D) and cameras by Sony, Canon, and GoPro. "Being able to quickly edit footage in Premiere Pro (thank you, Q and W shortcuts!) and then just copy and paste that edit into AE means I can make a high-quality product under some pretty extreme deadlines. My goal is always to exceed expectations and having the tools work together so seamlessly really helps with that!" he says. "I do have a unique job," he adds, "I don't know many other motion designers who also have a flight suit, a helmet with PELTOR headset, and a vest with 'bullet-resistant' ceramic plates in it as part of their job kit."

Michael was first introduced to After Effects in 2001 or 2002. He was working as an in-house print designer and someone asked if he could "make this stuff move". So, he got some VHS tapes of Brian Maffit's Total Training After Effects series and got to work!

In his early days, he found a lot of support online in places like the Adobe forums and Creative COW, so he decided to give back as soon as he was able. He started answering super-beginner questions and found that helping others learn actually helped him learn better too - and the rest is history! Now, he is an owner of the Motion Design Artists Slack (motionslack.com), runs the After Effects subreddit, has helped teach After Effects and Premiere Pro labs at Adobe MAX, presented multiple times at the Music City Mograph Meetup (a Nashville-area motion design group), and is an Adobe Community Professional.

Michael currently lives north of Nashville across the border in rural Kentucky in an 1800s farmhouse with his husband, two kids, and their dog, Buffy. He serves in the worship band at his church singing harmony and playing percussion. He enjoys hiking, camping, creating craft cocktails, and (of course) learning more about motion design.

He is available for freelance work. His website is www.szalamproductions.com
He just started a not-at-all-regular tutorial series on Things You Missed in After Effects. The first video is out now: https://youtu.be/NfWhpwPXh1A the next will be coming...sometime.

Top three troubleshooting topics from January:

1. Wacom Intuos failure in After Effects

Many users have reported that their Wacom tablet stops working after using it for a few minutes in After Effects. We're investigating this issue and are working on a fix. Meanwhile, you can work around this issue by following these steps:

Go to System Preferences > Wacom Tablet > Pen and changing the click behavior to "Pan/Scroll (Legacy)" or "Keystroke" and then choose Spacebar as that keystroke (Thanks to alexr71835211 for sharing the keystroke workaround)

2. How to fix "Display Acceleration Disabled" in After Effects

Follow the troubleshooting steps given in this article to fix this problem - How to fix Display Acceleration Disabled

3. Double-clicking on a composition doesn't open the timeline panel