General Specialist

2007-10-24

Opening After Effects Projects in an Earlier Version


So you want to open a project saved in After Effects CS3 in an earlier version like After Effects 7.0? Wish there was a way to avoid redoing your entire project just because a client hasn't upgraded yet? Wish that Adobe would let you do a Save to XML just like in Final Cut Pro?

Sorry about the rant, but currently your only hope of opening a project saved in a newer version of After Effects is a manual process that involves a lot of copying and pasting.
  1. Firstly, you'll need both versions installed on the same computer. This usually doesn't cause any problems, I always have at least 2-3 versions of After Effects installed at the same time.
  2. Next step is to manually recreate your project in the earlier version. This involves importing all the sources, creating all the comps and changing all the settings to match the original project. It's a pain, I know...
  3. Open the original project in the newer version and highlight the top layer in your composition and hit UU on the keyboard to reveal all properties that has have non-default values. Great shortcut, huh? Here's a bonus tip: just hitting U will show just the properties with keyframes!
  4. Select all keyframes on the layer by click-dragging the mouse over the names of the properties.
  5. Copy and paste into a text editor (not a word processor, instead use something like Notepad++ for Windows or Smultron for OS X) and changing the first line that says:
    Adobe After Effects 8.0 Keyframe Data
    ... into ...
    Adobe After Effects 7.0 Keyframe Data
    If you are converting the animation into even older versions of After Effects, you'll have to change the number to match the version you are using (only use the whole increments such as 6.0 even if you are using version 6.5.)
  6. Select all text in the text editor, copy and then paste onto the corresponding layer in the older version of After Effects.
Not exactly great, but just a tad bit better than redoing every keyframe. I haven't tested this on earlier versions than 6.5, but if you really need to down-convert to a five year old software, you're in trouble anyway... :)



- Jonas

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14 Comments:

  • I love your tips. They are all awesome.
    HEy..I've got AFX CS3 and I'm doing a 3 minute project but my rendering times are terribly slow like 7 hours or plus. Now I get things like "Run Time Errors".
    I need this project done soon and so it's driving me crazy."
    Also sometimes during renders, the caching eats up like 30 gigabytes of hard disk space and can't finish, "cuz out of disk space".
    Any advice would be great!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Thursday, October 25, 2007  

  • Hmm, you haven't given much info to go on. Step 1 might be to turn off multi-processing.

    Also, enable "Show rendering information in Info panel" inside the Preferences, and make sure you see the Info panel, which will tell you what layers/effects are taking long time to render.

    Make sure all source footage is on a local disk and not on the network.

    Filling up the disk sounds weird, is it "Disk cache" which you set in the Preferences, or is it the rendered file that is filling up your disk? What codec are you rendering to?

    By Blogger Jonas Hummelstrand, at Thursday, October 25, 2007  

  • It happens if I do, or even if I don't compress it. It is the caching and in the caching folders I've set I watched the containing files building up to more than 20 gigabytes while rendering. Anyways the codec I was using was WMV maxed out to it's highest settings cuz I really like the quality of the file.

    I just picked up a new 500 gig harddisk today to see if that helps and also I'm trying to prerender somethings since my final comp has several smaller comps inside. I'll see how it goes tonight. I'm in Korea where I have no "support group" other than the net. So thanks a million for your expert advice!!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Thursday, October 25, 2007  

  • The Disk Cache that you set in AE's Preferences is just a temporary storage that AE only uses to off-load frames/layers from memory instead of throwing them away, and AE only reads the frames/layers from the Disk cache when it is faster than re-rendering them.

    On the other hand, if it is the Conformed Media Cache that is filling up, that's where AE CS3 stores frames that are used in in- and output to temporally compressed formats such as WMV/H.264/MPEG 1, 2 & 4.

    Rendering to these formats via the Render Queue isn't really optimal, since the Render Queue can only do single-pass compression, so you want to use either Export... from AE or render to a lossless format from AE (QT Animation @100%) and then use something like Compressor, QT Player Pro, Microsoft Media Encoder or something similar that can do two-pass compression.
    The Media Encoder (Win only) is free and QT Player Pro costs $29.

    Pre-rendering elements won't really help, since it is the compression part of the process that is filling up your disk. A bigger disk (remember to move the Conformed Media Cache to the new disk) would help.

    A good tip is to ask questions in the AE forum at http://adobeforums.com/ where I frequently contribute.

    By Blogger Jonas Hummelstrand, at Sunday, October 28, 2007  

  • Hi,

    I searched the adobe forum site, and several others, and can't seem to find the solution to this problem.

    Two of my students upgraded their PC laptops to After Effects CS3. During RAM preview, their files sync perfectly to sound, however, when they render them out, animation is off by about a one second delay. (animation not syncing to sound on time).

    This doesn't seem to be a problem with the CS3 upgrade to Mac (which I am more familiar with.)

    Any insight would be most helpful... thanks!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sunday, December 02, 2007  

  • Please post your questions at Adobe's User to User forums:
    http://www.adobe.com/support/forums/

    I would however start by looking at the waveform for the audio, and see if that seems to match in the comp. Holding down Ctrl / Cmd while scrubbing will also let you hear the audio.

    When rendering, to what codec and sound settings are you rendering, and is the audio sample rate in the output the same as the input audio? Is the delay constant, or does it get worse over time?

    Try to pinpoint when it happens, and post your questions in the AE forum, and I'll try to answer!

    By Blogger Jonas Hummelstrand, at Sunday, December 02, 2007  

  • your trick awesoOOm but i am beginner in after effect.
    So sir can you tell me about the sites from where i can learn more and more knowledge about after effects.

    I will be thankful to you!.

    By Blogger zee7, at Thursday, December 20, 2007  

  • Totaltraining.com
    videocopilot.net

    ...would be good places to start.

    By Blogger Jonas Hummelstrand, at Thursday, January 10, 2008  

  • Great info. The company that I work for uses CS3 but I'm currently running 7.0 on my intel laptop. This tutorial works well but when I get to more complicated effects/3rd party plug-ins, I an error message:
    about a code-command in line 23 or something like that not being reable. I'm going to have to check on exactly what it says.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Tuesday, February 19, 2008  

  • ellz,

    Some third-party plugins may have added or removed certain properties so that they don't match. In that case, try to copy part of the properties at a time.

    By Blogger Jonas Hummelstrand, at Wednesday, February 20, 2008  

  • Thanks for the tip. I took it one step further.
    For going from 8.0 to 6.5 you need to delete all of the Words "Transition" from the text. Then move the words such as anchor point, position, scale, ect to the beginning of the line.
    This might work for earlier versions as well but I only own 6.5 and up. The thing to do is check out both versions you are using with the word processor and look for any difference between the two. Match your 8.0 text file to look like your earlier version. Then copy and paste.

    Steve Q
    Bent Penny Productions

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Wednesday, April 02, 2008  

  • Sorry folks, it should have been "Transform not "Transition"

    My Bad

    Steve Q
    Bent Penny Productions

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at Wednesday, April 02, 2008  

  • Thanks for sharing, Steve!

    By Blogger Jonas Hummelstrand, at Wednesday, April 02, 2008  

  • @Anonymous:

    You need to access the "secret preferences" panel in After Effects.

    Hold down the shift key as you open the After Effects preferences (the "General" preferences will do), Once you see the dialog, access the drop-down menu, and a new menu named "secret" appears. The menu used to be called “schecret” in previous versions of After Effects.

    Disable the layer cache. This fixed rendering errors on at least two machines I have worked on.

    By Blogger VJ Woody, at Thursday, January 07, 2010  

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