After Effects is really strong at bringing in not just movies but also image sequences which it treats as movies. Now, a lot of people always want to know why you would render out from your 3D application or from any application still images and then bring them into After Effects and there is one really good reason for that. Let's say that you have a, let's say a ten minute fight scene that you render in Lightwave or Maya and you characters fighting, it's a ten minute scene and you decide to save that as a QuickTime movie. Now everything is very, very detailed and its going to take your computer four days to render this fight scene. Alright so, it's two hours before the render is suppose to be finished and lightening hits your house, now your computer is dead or your computer has crashed and you can recover a lot of the files on your computer but that scene is lost. Why? Because it was one QuickTime movie or an AVI file. Now if you have instead decided to render as individual pictures, for example RPF's or JPEGS or something like that all you have to do is re-render from your 3D application just those frames that were destroyed by lightening. So, I'm going to show you how to bring in, in image sequence into After Effects. So I'm going to go to File, Import, file and as you see I already have some RPF's already saved. I created these in Lightwave 3D and I'm going to click on the first one here. And all of the sudden the check box appears and it determines that this is a RLA or RPF sequence, I can force alphabetical order but that's not necessary most of the time and I'm going to import this as footage. I'll click open and then I'm going to leave everything at the defaults and bring it in as straight unmated, click OK and it looks like we have one file. That is because it is one file, all of those images that you saw there are right here from frame to 1 to 120. So this image sequence is 120 individual pictures that is brought in as one file. I'll go ahead and make a composite, I'll put this on a higher quality here, 100 percent, actually I'm going to put that back down to fit and increase my quality here so we can see a little bit more clearly and I'll go ahead and do a very quick scrub on the timeline and as you see this is an animated file and if I was rendering and I got to frame 100 and the computer crashed, not a problem. If 100 came out fine I just would have to go back to my 3D application and render out from frame 111 to 120 and then I could bring the whole image sequence into After Effects and wahla I have my own sequence. So it's really a good idea to instead of rendering from your application into a QuickTime movie or an AVI file just simple choose to set it as sequences instead of images. It's a lot easier on your stress level if things go wrong and this is the computer age and things normally do go wrong when you least expect them.