Hello All,
I was tinkering with AE trying to learn the program, and I think I may have turned on The "desktop cinema" feature or something, because my screen is black and I cant get into menus to set it back. Is there a keyboard shortcut? I think its just a feature to view fullscreen, but I cant get it out of that mode. Please Help!

Does anyone have an idea? Cant even use the program... Thanks!

From your description, it almost sounds like your video display driver is crashing. I'm not aware of any kind of Desktop Cinema feature or option. Does the screen turn black every time you open AE? Has it done this all the time since you installed it or did it just randomly start doing it one day? If it didn't behave like this before, do you remember updating any drivers or software beforehand?

I just went through the menus and help file, and I don't see anything related to a "full screen mode" or anything like that.

Short of re-installation and starting from square 1, I'm not sure what else to do from what you've said.

Thanks for the response!

Its been a while now, but it seems that I clicked something that resembled "Desktop Cinema___" Not sure, but it was working fine before. Its a Mac, and I have had no other problems with the display including after effects before that day. Thanks again.

Forgot to mention, if I use the "Expose" feature in OSX, it then appears in the shadow, but when I select it, it goes back to black. The menu bar at the top is only visible if I put the mouse over it, but when I open a menu, few to none of the options are available. Incuding preferences, which i think is where i engaged whatever feature is causing the problem. Not sure, but I think.

Ahhhh, you're working on a Mac! Now the Desktop Cinema thing makes a little more sense, although I don't know too much about that feature. The last time I worked in After Effects on a Mac, the G3 was the latest thing and After Effects was only at version 4!

Hopefully, someone running AE on their Mac will chime in for you at some point.

Hi Robbie,

The same happened to me, and i was almost getting crazy, but now i have the solution. You only need to put your cursor in the upper left corner of the screen until the after effects menus appear. Then go to preferences and change back the setting. It's easy.