Placeholders in After Effects

Hello After FX forum.
I've downloaded a free template which contains 4 placesholder to drag and drop my existing files.
But I'd like to make more placeholders for my composition, the problem is I am doing what Ive seen on the net
how to make placeholders, but something Im doing wrong... The images I drag and drop on the placeholders Ive made
dont appear with the rest of the composition.
if you need to see the template to get a better idea how the editor has set it up you can download it and see it from here.
I know each composition can be complicated to understand how its set up. There for Ive added the link for a better insight.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/d24j3xq817he8jt/Presentation+On+TV.zip
Kind regards.

That tutorial won't help you at all. That's for folks who are creating their own work in AE, not adding to templates.
I can't offer you any specific help without looking at your template file, but it's likely a lot more complicated to add stuff to it than you think it is. After Effects doesn't go, "lets animate every placeholder". After Effects only does what it is specifically made to do. A solution for you might be to simply create several versions of your project, each one with 4 elements in it until you've shown all the things you want to show. Then, you can render each one out and put them together in an editing program like Premiere.
If you want to learn how to actually work with After Effects, start here: Getting started with After Effects

Similar Messages

FEATURE REQUEST: After Effects style Placeholders and Proxies

If you feel the needs in efficient proxy workflow, welcome to the club and don't hesitate to submit feature request.
Here is the adjusted to less than 2000 symbols feature request text:
***After Effects style Placeholders and Proxies***
It would be nice if PrPro offered AE style Placeholders and Proxies workflow. There are cases, where they are extremely useful, e.g.:
1. Huge modern formats and resource hungry codecs. Not all machines can easily handle 2k or 4k footages, some can't get real time playback even with AVCHD. Not to mention that CinemaDNG importer was discontinued partly because of inability to get real time playback in PrPro. The issue can be resolved via rendering previews, but that's not always the most efficient workflow.
2. In multicam editing issues mentioned above increase dramatically. Rendering preview for every camera angle is simply impossible. Although PrPro offers offline clips workflow, an editor can't easily see if the clip is currently linked to a source footage or a proxy, and switching between sources and proxies involves several steps every time one needs to switch: selecting assets, making them offline, right-clicking again to link to other media, locating files on a disk; while in After Effects it's just one click once a proxy is set.
3. Adobe Dynamic Link. PrPro communicates with AE projects via single instance of headless AE, which creates a bottleneck and entails the need to render DI for complex comps. Although AE allows to set DIs as proxies and, hence, enjoy the best of both worlds, instantly switching between DI and dynamically linked comp and no needs to replace anything in PrPro timeline, with hundreds of dynamically linked comps PrPro timeline becomes unresponsive and takes forever to render (for my rig test 30 min sequence built out of 935 dynamically linked comps, which are just source footages in their own comps, hence, the equivalent to rendered DIs set to proxies, takes around 27 hours to render, while 30 min sequence built out of the same 935 source footages renders in real time). Meanwhile, PrPro doesn't currently allow to link offline dynamically linked comps to rendered DIs.

As the person who maintains the feature request database for After Effects, I can confirm that the number of times an item has been requested is a major factor when we consider what to work on next. So are other factors, such as how hard the feature is to implement and maintain, how much testing is involved (often the larger concern than programming time), whether the request conflicts with something else that we are already working on, and so on. It is true that we consider not just raw numbers of requests but the details of who is making the requests---e.g., whether the requests are coming from animators or compositors, beginners or experts.
I can only speak for the After Effects team, but the Premiere Pro team works much the same way (which is unsurprising, since we are in the same group and have overlapping team members).
We also try to give some visibility into the most requested items with posts like this:
http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2012/12/top-feature-requests-for-after-effects-in-2012 .html

CS6 takes my After Effects clips offline.

Hello,
I'm running a Mac Pro 5,1 with 32 gigs of memory and an Nvidia Quadro 4000. I have a timeline contaning nothing but After Effects compositions that reside in three or four different AE project files. All were imported into AE CS6 from CS5.5 (it's a long-term project).
Here's the problem:
When I open Premiere Pro CS6 it takes a long time to populate the Project Panel and timeline with the AE linked clips. Some clips never populate and are replaced with red or yellow "media offline" placeholders. To speed playback, on the rare occasion I get a linked clip in every section of the timeline I try to render the clips. Some work and score a green bar (though clips with lots of effects take extremely long to render). Several render only partially before returning a "compiling error" message. When this happens, others that were linked and rendered can suddenly go offline. Sometimes the entire timeline becomes red placeholders.
A reboot and reopening of Pr used to fix this, albeit without giving every previously-rendered clip a green "rendered" status. Now the project rarely finds even a majority of the clips. None have been moved or renamed and all open up in After Effects. Going back and selecting a clip to relink it can work occasionally, but on several occasions has also caused neighboring clips to drop offline.
This is really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my CS6 problems of the past week. If I could just get my timeline up and showing green bars for segments I've already rendered then I would at least feel stuck in place, rather than going backwards.
Can anyone help?
Thanks much,
Gene

Hey,
I do not know if my solution will work for you. I have CS5.5 on MacBook Pro (2.2Ghz i7, 8GB ram, OSX 10.7.4) and I had bunch of clips where I had to stabilize them in AE. I used Dynamic Link for that. I didn't find any solution online.
I work on dual monitors so that's why these screenshots below look weird.
First I did, I opened an AE file, with dynamic links. I had 2 of them (2 projects). [somebody gave a good tip to keep all Dynamic Links in 1 AE project]
Second, I marked all the Dynamic Links which could not be found in PrP. I marked them in the files window.
Then I right click on them and "Link Media" BUT, I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING ELSE. PrP found the files itself. So I clicked "Cancel" in the window which popped up.
I don't know if there has to be that order of doing this. I was doing that first time and this is how I did it. Actually by accident.
ohhh. now I see it was in May... sorry, probably you don't need it any more...

After Effects HD Effects

HI:
I need to purchase a workstation that allow me to make Visual effects in After Effects with footage from HD SR 4:4:4. I will recieve dpx sequences, I will make the effects and I will deliver DPX or Tif sequence with the effect done.
If I am not wrong each DPX frame will be between 12 and 15 MB/s.
I need to know if this workstation I am thinking is OK for that.
QuadCore
8gb or 16gb of RAM memory
Nvidia Quadro FX 1500.
1 PC standart monitor 21'
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1 PC monitor that allow me to reach 1920x1080 preview.
Since AFter effects is not a real time software, do I really need to have a RAID storage that deliver 450MB/s of effective transfer rate to have real time playback?
Wouldn't it be more important to have lots of RAM memory like 16gb to load large video previews in real time ?
Thanks to all
Andrew

I don't quite follow. I think you are over-simplifying and misinterpreting things. First off, the length of a RAM preview is not only determined by the resolution, but also by the processing bit-depth. Previews can be quite a bit longer than 5 sec if run at 8bpc instead of 16bpc or 32bpc.
Secondly: Everyone uses proxies! They all do. Even realtime systems such as flame* merely live by using lower-res placeholders in many situations or lowering the actual on-screen render resolution. In addition, they simply pre-render a lot, which is only logical, considering that the required processing would otherwise prevent realtime playback anyways, regardless of available other resources. It really boils down to those systems rendering the frame and storing it to disk rather than doing RAM previews.
The only thing that really makes a difference is that these systems can do this to some degreee in an automated fashion and as a background process while still doing work in the foreground. That's probably the part where AE is lame, but then again you can always buy NucleoPro to get this functionality to some extent.
As an last item, it also comes down how you understand to use your program. Obviously AE has a disk cache, but of course it won't be of any use if you are constantly invalidating it by doing all your work in one big 500 layer comp. Therefore be smart: pre-compose! If the key lives in its own comp, it will only be rendered once and then cached to disk.
As for the rest - at some point correctly rendering everything is inevitable for screening purposes. You simply cannot expect to preview your work and get final approval on your workstation, regardless how perfectly it may be calibrated to match the final output.
So to conclude: You pretty much only need to establish a workflow that allows you to take advantage of your hardware resources. Get a hellishly fast RAID, use pre-composing in a sensible manner, have a decent graphics card andm ake use of pre-composing and, if you wanan afford it, NucleoPro's features. With that, you can much more rely on playback from scratch disks rather than spending endless hours for RAM previews and worrying about that they always seem to not last long enough.
Mylenium

I am trying to install after effects, but no matter what version I try to download, there is always a different error not allowing me to open or use the program after I have already installed it.

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I don't know if these are important or not, but I thought I would include them anyways.
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Hi all,
I appear to have encountered a problem with After Effects... I was working on a project earlier today which usalizes a VideoCopilot plug-in called Element 3D. After a quick break I came back to the project and attempted to load in the 'Free Earth Project' by VideoCopilot. (http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2012/08/free-earth-project-for-element-3d/). As their site suggests, I had to place a downloaded project folder called 'Earth' into Element 3D's 'My_Models' folder. Immediately after this I tried loading After Effects and encountered the issue. I'm not sure if it's couincidence or directly related which is why I am posting here.
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I have already contacted the support team at VideoCopilot and they have sent me an updated build of Element 3D in an attempt to resolve the issue, unfortunately though this did not work. Addiitonally, I have tried booting into Safe-Mode and tried to launch the application from there, as well as using Disk-Utility to 'Repair Permissions'. All of these steps have failed to get AE working again.
If anyone knows of a way to fix this I would be most grateful. I'm working to a very tight deadline and am afraid that I will miss it. Additionally, if anyone has any fixes that doesn't require reinstalling applications that'll be a bonus!
I've also attached a crash-report to this post incase it's of any use in determining the cause of the problem (I couldn't find a way to attach it directly, so the file is hosted on my website - I apologise in advance if this is against forum rules!) - http://www.starfireindustries.org.uk/uploads/8/6/6/1/8661295/ae_error_report.rtf
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Something similar here:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3826648?tstart=0

CS5 or CS5.5 Adobe After Effects

I have a Mac OS X version 10.5.8 and was wondering if CS5 or CS5.5 Adobe After Effects was available still?

No. You can only buy current versions. If your machine allows, it would be easier to just upgrade OSX, otehrwise you'll have to find a legit used copy of these older versions, which might prove quite difficult...
Mylenium

Serious resolution issues with After Effects CC (2014) on Windows 8.1 Pro on Dell Precision M3800 laptop??

My new company installed Adobe Creative Cloud (There was some annoying Proxy issues at first, because of the seriously tight I.T policies) but we are having some serious resolution issues with After Effects CC 2014 (also have this resolution problem with Adobe Premiere, Media Encoder, Muse) on Windows 8.1 Pro on a Dell Precision M3800 laptop with icons and interface looking too small and hard to see, is there a fix, an update or a work around, can anyone help?
Any help will be appreciated!
k.regards
Ramon

Hi Todd is there a time-frame for this fix, there is a lot of pressure on me, because I convinced my company to get the Creative Cloud and quite a lot of the CC software is not compatible with the latest Windows 8.1 OS.
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Media Encoder CC not using GPU acceleration for After Effects CC raytrace comp

I created a simple scene in After Effects that's using the raytracer engine... I also have GPU enabled in the raytracer settings for After Effects.
When I render the scene in After Effects using the built-in Render Queue, it only takes 10 minutes to render the scene.
But when I export the scene to Adobe Media Encoder, it indicates it will take 13 hours to render the same scene.
So clearly After Effects is using GPU accelleration but for some reason Media Encoder is not.
I should also point out that my GeForce GTX 660 Ti card isn't officially supported and I had to manually add it into the list of supported cards in:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects CC\Support Files\raytracer_supported_cards.txt
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Media Encoder CC\cuda_supported_cards.txt
While it's not officially supported, it's weird that After Effects has no problem with it yet Adobe Media Encoder does...
I also updated After Effects to 12.1 and AME to 7.1 as well as set AME settings to use CUDA but it didn't make a difference.
Any ideas?

That is normal behavior.
The "headless" version of After Effects that is called to render frames for Adobe Media Encoder (or for Premiere Pro) using Dynamic Link does not use the GPU for acceleration of the ray-traced 3D renderer.
If you are rendering heavy compositions that require GPU processing and/or the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing, then the recommended workflow is to render and export a losslessly encoded master file from After Effects and have Adobe Media Encoder pick that up from a watch folder to encode into your various delivery formats.

Adobe Bridge CC not playing After Effects CC animations

Hello,
I am fairly new to After Effects and Adobe Bridge, and I recently ran into a problem.
So, when I turn on After Effects , and in the Effects Panel , I click "Browse Presets", and then It opens Adobe Bridge. But when I single-click in any kind of an animation in Bridge, it's not playing it in the "Preview" panel.
The little Windows's "picture icon" just starts zoomed in, and then it quickly zooms out.
I'm using a freshly installed Windows 8.1 , and fully updated Bridge and After Effects.
What might be the problem?
If you want, I could also record the problem with a screen recorder and upload it to YouTube.
EDIT : I just fixed the problem by updating Bridge to the latest version (CC 6.1)!
The animations are playing smoothly without any problems! Just run the Adobe Update Manager, and update
Bridge!
Edited by Michael Jackson, 1999.

Hi,
Please refer to the help document below:
CC applications close immediately after launch
Regards,
Sheena

I am new to After Effects and Motion 5 and I have a question

Hello there,
I am currently working on a personal side project for a family member. She would like me to make a video with recorded audio and pictures from the 1920’s for my grandmother. I would like to give the parallax and 2.5D effect a try but as I never used After Effects or Motion before I am a little overwhelmed.
I have about 80 images to animate. Right now I am in the ‘Photoshop phase’. I am going through each image and separating the foreground, mid-ground, and background, into separate layers and saving the .psd files to eventually bring into Motion 5 (or After Effects) and animate.
After seeing this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVrYyX3bHI8
I really wanted to animate the images I had in a similar fashion. I really loved how they seemed to move and know that I can accomplish this appearance with the pin tool in After Effects. After seeing this video however, I continued looking into the 2.5d effect and found this movie for Motion 5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmxlm2nkVLA
I bought Motion 5 because I thought the interface seemed more user friendly to newcomers (like myself), the effects were similar, and because I couldn’t afford to pay for After Effects every month.
But now I am kicking myself. Motion 5 is lovely and I do like the camera effects but I don’t think I can accomplish the ‘puppet’ effect with it like I can in After Effects. Does anyone know if it is possible? Is there a plugin for Motion 5? Can I send my .psd files into Motion 5, set up the timeline and cameras, save it, and then move it into After Effects and then use the pin tool to manipulate the images and layers?
I have read that some say it is hard to move Motion files into After Effects? If this is the case, could I save the Motion file, open it in Adobe Premiere, and THEN open it in After Effects and play around with it?
Any help is appreciated. Thank you so much in advanced.

2.5D is fairly easy to do in Motion... that's the good news. The bad news is: if you don't know what you need to do to accomplish it, it's practically impossible to do easily or well.
The first problem to overcome is perspective, and the other problem is parallax.
These two tutorials (by Mark Spencer) will give you all the information you need dealing with moving Photoshop Layers in Z-space. Even though the point of the tutorials is a "fly through", the same information applies to creating 2.5D. Just animate the camera laterally (sweep) instead of dolly.
http://vimeo.com/1344282
http://vimeo.com/1695145 (updated tips)

Bridge CC no compatible with the new After Effects CC 2014 ?

Hi, I'm updating the Adobe suite (CC 2014) .but After Effects CC 2014 no longer works with the old Bridge CC (there is no update of Bridge). Since "browse presets" in After Effects when choosing a preset (dissolves etc) there is an error message:
"After Effects error: can not import file" Entries lum.-marq.calque.ffx "unsupportedfiletype or extension (0 :: 1). With all presets.
I tried on other computers with other adobe updated it makes such licenses except with the old version of adobe after effects (after CC effects) I tried too to change language of Bridge and After effects (beharps this is a langage compatibility problem) but the problem is the same.
So I think the new version after effects CC 2014 is not compatible with the presets adobe bridge CC ??
How can I do? I have to go through the old version of after to apply a preset Bridge? I can not even download it in cloud creativ ... there is only the new version of after effects...

You need to ask in Community: Premiere Pro | Adobe Community but do not expect Adobe to discuss future plans
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform for bug reports or feature requests
This forum is about the Cloud as a delivery process, not about using individual programs
If you start at the Forums Index https://forums.adobe.com/welcome
You will be able to select a forum for the specific Adobe product(s) you use
Click the "down arrow" symbol on the right (where it says All communities) to open the drop down list and scroll
Also, this is an OPEN forum, not Adobe support... please do not post personal information

New PC, downloaded CC 2014. Flash not showing up as option to rip in Adobe Media Encoder or in After Effects. Help?

Why is .flv not an option in Adobe Media Encoder or Adobe After Effects?
Also, when Adobe Captivate converts the video it looses the Alpha channel.
Help

Thanks for taking the time to answer this question. Knowing this isn't possible at least narrows my options down. It would be helpful to provide some kind of list of what comp settings carry over into AME from After Effects. Is it essentially everything that is enabled in the Timeline? (I know that motion blur settings do.)
I'll put this in a feature request, but yes, we need the other half of After Effects Render Queue in AME in order for AME to be a good replacement for rendering from AE. I'll give you my thoughts on why Render Settings are essential before you would actually want to render with AME instead of doing so because you have to (either because you want to render in the background, or need a codec that has been removed from AE.)
1. Speed: Simply applying a Render Settings preset is much faster than manually setting motion blur, frame blending, work area, etc.
2. Reliability: Not being able to apply a Render Settings preset at the time of render is a recipe for missing a crucial setting buried in a comp, then having to redo a render and wasting time.
3. Features: As noted above, there is no way to approximate Render Queue's ability to change resolutions at render, which results in a lot of wasted time when that feature is needed.
Render Settings I think are crucial to making AME rendering worthwhile for AE users:
1. Rendering resolution
2. Work Area/Entire Composition toggle
3. Field Rendering (wait, does this mean AME can't currently render to fields?)
4. And PRESET ability these settings, so I'm not doing them manually every time.
I realize that your team clearly doesn't spend the same amount of time I do making low res H264 previews and sending final files out in H264 format, so you don't appreciate the impact of the changes you made. Moving to AME for that stuff is a real inconvenience, but implementing the settings above could help soften the blow.
Thanks,
Jerry

Adobe Media Encoder renders in Lossless, such as After Effects?

Adobe Media Encoder renders Lossless like After Effects too?

There are multiple codecs that can losslessly encode video. One example is the PNG video codec in a QuickTime container. Another example (which matches the After Effects output module named Lossless) is the Animation video codec in a QuickTime container.

Photoshop CC 2014 crashes when After Effects is open (ntdll.dll module failure)

Recently, I upgraded from CC to CC 2014. Once I was satisfied with 2014, I uninstalled CC. Since then, I've been having a major issue where if I try and use Photoshop CC 2014 and After Effects CC 2014 simultaneously, either Photoshop or both will crash.
The event viewer gives me this:
Faulting application name: Photoshop.exe, version: 15.2.2.310, time stamp: 0x5480338c
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.18247, time stamp: 0x521eaf24
Exception code: 0xc0000024
Fault offset: 0x00000000000cd7e8
Faulting process id: 0xe58
Faulting application start time: 0x01d02c8024742b4a
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2014\Photoshop.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 6a2ab0d5-9873-11e4-91b7-14dae9d81d5a
Photoshop generally doesn't give me an error message, but when After Effects crashes, it's almost never the same error message twice, though frequently mentions Dynamic Link in the message.
I've uninstalled and reinstalled Creative Cloud multiple times, including using the Cleaner tool. I'd really like to avoid having to wipe my hard drive and reinstall my OS, like support immediately told me to do.
Running Win7 64-bit Ultimate, 32GB RAM, Intel i5-2500k, NVIDIA GeForce 560 Ti. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I do not have After effects. Your CC 2014 seems to be up to date. Are all Windows Updates installed and did you install the Dec 23 2014 Nvidia driver?
GeForce Game Ready Driver
Version
347.09 - WHQL
Release Date
Tue Dec 23, 2014
Operating System
Windows 7 64-bit
Windows 8.1 64-bit
Windows 8 64-bit
Windows Vista 64-bit
Language
English (US)
File Size
293.36 MB

Placeholders in After Effects

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