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Adobe After Effects CS3 Tutorials

Footage / File Types

Subtitles of the Movie

After Effects is used in quite a few different industries, so it makes sense that it can import a large variety of file types. So what I'm going to do is go to file, import, choose file and we're going to focus up here where it says all acceptable files. I'm going to hold my mouse down and show you that we have a large list here and I'll cover just a few of them or the most basic ones that you might use in your workflow. Of course it will import an After Effects project, an aiff file, which is the standard sound format on a Macintosh computer. It stands for audio interchange file format. A bit map, camera raw file which is straight from your digital camera. It will bring in GIF files or GIFs depending on how you like to call them and these are the files you find on the Internet as well as JPEGS, which I think is Joint Photographer Exchange Group or something like that. We have the illustrator file format which you can bring in PDF's as well as EPS. You can bring in a Maya scene and if you use 3D applications such as Maya that will be quite handy. You could bring in MP3's which is another audio format, MPEGS, Photoshop files, picts which is another version of a picture file like a bitmap. Pixer files, PNG which is portable network graphics, once again another version of a web graphic. PNG's by the way also bring in transparency and you might want to check out my alpha channels little lesson on how to use that. I do use a PNG format for that list. It will bring in a premier project and a pro project, QuickTime movies, it will also bring in soft and mage picts. SWF files which are from flash, Targa's which is another popular 3D application file format. Tiff, which I believe is tag image file format which is a very useful one you want to use files between two different platforms such as Macintosh and PC's and wave files which like the AIFF up there is the standard sound format on a Windows platform. So After Effects is pretty much very friendly and will allow you to bring in files from all types of different applications. Now one more thing I want to point out is this is RLA /RPF, if you ever watched any of my Lightwave tutorials, you'll notice that I use RPF's quite a bit and this format will allow you to bring in all kinds of information in your 3D render such as depth information, speed information and that kind of thing which can be quite helpful for helping After Effects determine how to put on a motion blur and how far into your scene fog can go and that kind of thing. So, very cool format as well. So After Effects can bring in a lot of different file formats and we're going to use quite a few of them in this tutorial.

Tutorial Information

Course: Adobe After Effects CS3
Author: Dwayne Ferguson
SKU: 33843
ISBN: 1-934743-46-1
Release Date: 2008-01-14
Duration: 7 hrs / 125 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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