Media Copy 2.0 now shipping

Media Copy 2.0 is now shipping! If you need to take your sequences from Avid or FCP to After Effects on a different computer Media Copy may be just the thing for you. It reads your AAF, OMF and XML files and figures out the media being used then copies those media files to a device you specify. Helpful? Indeed.

Learn more at http://www.automaticduck.com/products/mc/

AE CS3 and imports from Avid

Recently we had a few users all with the same problem, After Effects would crash while importing into After Effects CS3 an AAF file from an Avid. We do not know exactly why AE was crashing, but we did discover that the same crash would not occur in CS4.

This leads us to recommend users of After Effects CS3 importing from Avids consider upgrading to After Effects CS4, it seems to solve this potential issue.

Free Automatic Duck shirts!

We've had a bit of remodeling here at the Automatic Duck shipping center and one of the many joys of this project was that some drywall dust got on some of the Automatic Duck shirts we had in storage.

So we're offering these shirts for free*, even the shirts that didn't get anything on them. So our loss is your gain!

During checkout use the coupon code FREESHIRT and get yours before they're gone.


* Shipping charges apply, offer limited to one shirt please, while supplies last.

Resize parameters not exported from Avid to AAF

Avid editing systems do not export parameters for the Resize effect when exporting to AAF. The result in Final Cut Pro when you import via Pro Import FCP is that your clip will not have any of the repositioning information from the Avid. This is not a bug in Pro Import FCP, the problem is on the Avid side where the effect data is not exported into the AAF file.

If you can export OMF 2.0, that export will have the Resize parameters in it.

Click here to see an example Resize in Avid

Click here to see the result in FCP

PIAE and PIFCP updates

Pro Import AE 4.02 and Pro Import FCP 2.04 are now available for download from http://www.automaticduck.com/support/updates/

These two point releases address issues found since the last releases including a fix to the QuickTime 7.4.1 incompatibility on Windows causing error 108 messages. The Pro Import FCP 2.04 update includes the previously announced functionality that improves the "Use existing media" option when using DV25, DV50 or DVCProHD media.

These updates are free to users with current licenses.

Blog moving, please resubscribe

We're moving the address for this blog to http://blog.automaticduck.com

Please update your RSS readers to get the new feed address.

No web browser appears when clicking Activation buttons

A few users have reported that when they click one of the two Get Activation Code Using buttons in the Activation Dialog, no web browser launches.

Quit After Effects then Repair Permissions using the Disk Utility application.

Next, trash your key file.

Then relaunch After Effects and try activating again.

What about OS X 10.5?

Our plug-ins work great in OS 10.5. No problems.