Whether you're coming to us organically, or you've purchased one of our thousands of incredible After Effects Templates, there are a lot of questions when it comes to working with AE projects. But not to worry! Below is a general overview of the interface, as well as some general tips on working with and understanding After Effects templates.

1. This is the project panel, which is where your project can be organized. All of your folders, compositions, solids, and other assets like photos and videos will be listed here. With Pond5 AE templates, you'll usually see folders like "Edit Comps", "Render Comps", "Assets", and even "Don't Touch This Folder."

2. This is your composition panel. This is where you can view your template when you play it back or scrub through the composition.

3. This, along with number 4, are considered your timeline. The layer names and their controls will be in this area.

4. This is the other part of the timeline where you can see the layers across the timeline duration, along with any keyframes.

5. For standard workspaces, the info panel will be here, which gives you the audio waveform as well as some color information, along with the render preview controls.

6. The effects, character, and any other tools or windows can all go in this area. It is usually set to this as the default, but will be changed depending on the project and the selected workspace.

For more information on the Adobe Interface, you can read our Getting started with After Effects blog here, or check out this in-depth post on Adobe's Help Center.

Find the After Effects project folder or .zip folder on your computer, and locate the template. You can double-click to open the file, or you can open After Effects on your computer first, and then click on open project on the start up menu, or go to File > Open and find your project.

1. Project must be converted from version XX - This is the least troublesome issue. This just means that the project was made in an older AE version, and it will need to be converted to fit yours.

This happens when a project uses a font that you don't have installed on your computer, and is also nothing to worry about. You can check the zipped folder you downloaded from Pond5 for a text document containing links to the fonts, or you can simply do a quick search to find the fonts online and download them. You can read how to install fonts on a Mac here, and on Windows here.

Some templates were made with special plugins and other 3rd party effects that don't come standard with Adobe After Effects. If you get this error, it's usually a bit more serious, as the template likely will not function properly, if at all. You'll need to either purchase and install the missing effects like "Particular" above, find another template where the effects are pre-rendered. If you purchased your template through Pond5, you can reach out to the artist directly by clicking on their artist name on the item page, and then clicking on the envelope icon on their artist page:

You can ask them to upload a pre-rendered template to see if that will work. Lastly, send us an email and we'll be happy to assist you further if it's still not working.

If you open a template and you see this message, it means that After Effects is looking for assets in the spot where they were located when the template was created or moved, and they're not there. This could mean that you simply need to "tell" After Effects where the items are, or it could be a bigger issue and the template is actually missing the assets. First, try to find the missing items by doing the following:

Once you open the file, you'll see any folders and compositions displayed in the project panel. There may also be some open compositions located below.