Adobe After Effects CS3 - Manual (Page 65)

AFTER EFFECTS CS3
User Guide
60
Reveal footage items
• To reveal where a footage item is used in a composition, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) the
footage item in the Project panel and choose Reveal In Composition; then select the specific instance you want to
reveal (composition name, layer name).
• To reveal a layer’s source footage item in the Project panel, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) the
layer in the Timeline panel, and then choose Reveal Layer Source In Project.
• To reveal a footage item’s location in Adobe Bridge, Windows Explorer, or the Finder, right-click (Windows) or
Control-click (Mac OS) the footage item in the Project panel and choose Reveal In Bridge, Reveal In Windows
Explorer, or Reveal In Finder.
Refresh footage items
❖ To refresh footage items selected in the Project panel to use the current versions of the source footage files, choose
File > Reload Footage.
Edit footage in its original application
You can open and edit a footage item in the application in which it was created, directly from an After Effects project.
The original application must be installed on the computer that you are using, which must have enough available
RAM for it to run. When you edit and save changes to the footage in the original application, the changes are applied
to all instances of the footage when After Effects becomes the active application.
Note: If you’re editing footage that has an alpha channel, make sure that you’re viewing and editing all of the channels,
including the alpha channel, in the other application. Otherwise, changes you make might not be applied to the alpha
channel, and it may become misaligned with the color channels.
When you edit a still-image sequence selected in the Timeline or Composition panel, the individual image that is
currently displayed opens. When you edit a still-image sequence selected in the Project panel, the first image in the
sequence opens.
1 In the Project panel, Composition panel, or Timeline panel, select the footage item or a layer that uses the footage
item as its source. If you selected a still-image sequence from the Composition or Timeline panel, move the current-
time indicator to the frame displaying the still image you want to edit.
2 Choose Edit > Edit Original.
3 Edit the footage in its original application, and save the changes.
Remove items from a project
• To remove an item from a project, select the item in the Project panel and press Delete.
• To remove all unused footage items from a project, choose File > Remove Unused Footage.
• To remove all duplicate footage items from a project, Choose File > Consolidate All Footage. Note that After
Effects considers footage items to be duplicates only if they use the same Interpret Footage settings.
When a duplicate item is removed, layers that refer to the duplicate item are updated to refer to the remaining copy.
• To remove unselected compositions and unused footage items from selected compositions in the Project panel,
choose File > Reduce Project. This command is available only when the Project panel is active, and removes both
unused footage items and all other compositions that are not included within a selected composition as nested
(subordinate) compositions.