Test Gear Frequently Asked Questions

• Is there a manual available?
• How do I open the User's Guide?
• Will Test Gear work in applications other than After Effects? They say they support After Effects plug-ins.
• I installed Test Gear and now I get the error message "After Effects error: unimplemented function" whenever I do a RAM preview. What's up?

Is there a manual available?

Yes, the downloadable installer includes a 30+ page electronic User's Guide in Adobe PDF format.

On the Macintosh, the manual will be installed in the Synthetic Aperture folder within the After Effects Plug-ins folder. On Windows, the manual will be available from the Start Menu under the Test Gear entry.

How do I open the User's Guide?

The User's Guide is in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. You'll need Acrobat Reader 8.0 or later to read the manual.

You can download the free Reader from the Adobe web site.

The test instruments don't update as I scrub the timeline, only when I release the mouse button.

You have OpenGL support turned on in After Effects. This causes the intermediate frames to be processed entirely via OpenGL, not giving Test Gear a chance to read the pixels.

You can disable OpenGL within the After Effects Preferences. Choose the Previews page within the Preferences. Near the top, within the Fast Previews section, there is an "Enable OpenGL" checkbox. Make sure that box is unchecked and click OK.

Enabling OpenGL actually makes very little difference in preview speed within After Effects except for a few specific 3D cases—at least as of CS5—so you are unlikely to notice any difference in performance after you've disabled OpenGL.

Will Test Gear work in applications other than After Effects? They say they support After Effects plug-ins.

No, Test Gear will work only in After Effects. Test Gear makes use of interfaces to After Effects that are proprietary to Adobe and are not available in other so-called "After Effects compatible" applications.

I installed Test Gear 1.0 and now I get the error message "After Effects error: unimplemented function" whenever I do a RAM preview. What's up?

This issue has been resolved in Test Gear 1.0.3. After updating Test Gear, delete the After Effects preferences. The problem should now be eliminated.

If you do not want to delete all of your After Effects preferences, and are comfortable editing the preferences text file, you can delete only the "Pref_SOUND_PREVIEW_DEPTH" line in the "Main Pref Section". This will reset the problematic setting and RAM previews should once again function properly.