After Effects can import what are called Image Sequences. Image Sequences are numerically ordered sequences that go, for example, 1, 2, 3, 4, in that fashion. After Effects is smart enough to recognize when rendered images are related to one another. If you look here in my Project Panel we have this Icon here of multiple pictures. This tells me that this is actually an Image Sequence. So what I'm going to do is show you how to bring an Image Sequence into After Effects, but more importantly, I'm going to try to explain why I think it's so important to try your best to always render your 3D animations, if you are indeed a 3D animator, to the Image sequence format, such as an RLA, or an RPF, even JPEG, Targa, any of those file formats. So what I'm going to do is hop over to my friend, Maya, which is where I created the Mage Tower Scene that we're going to be playing around with in this Tutorial, and I'm going to show you that this is a regular animation, so it has like 180 frames, and I have the options, of course, to render this out as a QuickTime Movie. But, let's say I have a five-minute long animation, and it's really a whole bunch of frames. So I say to myself, you know what? I think I'm going to go outside, go to a movie, have some dinner, and hopefully when I come back it'll be done. Well, the thing is, if I choose to render as a self-contained movie format, such as QuickTime, or AVI, and my computer crashes, or lightning hits my house, which it has actually happened before, and my computer kind of blew up. Well, that file is damaged. So, even if it rendered let's say 1,000 out of 1,005 frames, those four frames that don't get rendered are still a part of that file, which means the whole thing is ruined and I have to render that whole thing again, and for people who are used to 3D, you know that rendering takes a very long time, depending on how many lights you have and shadows, and all kinds of reflections, refractions, so, if you want to save yourself a little bit of a headache, render your images out as a sequence. You could always put them back together in applications such as QuickTime Pro, or After Effects, and so on. So let me go ahead back to After Effects and just show you what I'm talking about. If I scrub my mouse in the Timeline you'll notice that this sequence of images is actually a movie, right? So, it moves. And it's like a Flipbook and a Notebook. Every time you draw on a different page it's a separate image, but if you play them quickly enough they look like they're moving. So, I'm going to go to File, Import File, and you'll notice that in the Mage Tower RLAs Folder, which you'll have in your Work Files Folder in the Image Sequences Folder inside of your Work Files Folder, you will then be able to click on the very top one here, Mage Tower 3 underscore 1. RLA, and right away After Effects is going to say RLA/, or forward/, RPF Sequence. It recognizes that without even me clicking this. It knows that 1, 2, 3 all the way down to 150 are connected and they're a sequence. So I'll click Open and then I can bring those in and I have a sequence of Stills that I can put into my Comp that will play back as though they are one connected movie. The advantage of this is that if I have 1,000 frames that I'm rendering in my 3D application and five frames from being done the computer crashes, I still have all those frames as individual pictures that are still good. So all I have to do is render out those last few frames that didn't make it and then I'll still have a complete sequence. So, hopefully that made a little sense and will give you the pros and cons to using QuickTime Movies as opposed to Still Images that you can then bring into After Effects as one file that acts like a movie.