I use Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 7 on PC for general video editing (nothing pro) and I'm pretty happy with it.

But I'd like to do some interesting title work and animation (like a bird flying or something). I installed the AE trial - which is limited to an insulting 2 days (what happened to 30?). I imported an AVI video and dragged it to the workspace, went to play it - and it crashed.

No matter that I restarted AE, it would still crash when I do this. So, very poor impression. I've got 2 GB RAM, XP home, Athlon 64 3000+.

I'm not aware of other animation/effects alternatives. Isn't Premiere mostly video editing (of which Sony Vegas suits me)?

I have this problem too. I believe it is a Vista only error because this happened to me only on Vista PC's. Anyway, theres a work around:

Open up a window with the file that you want to import, and drag-and-drop it into your project area and that should work.

Huh... guess I'll redownload the trial then :o -- I'm on XP though.

I'd say give AE another try, but in the meantime there are other options for a PC.

For Professional and expensive systems there's

Combustion
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5562397

Nuke
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/promo/nuke.html

Fusion
http://www.eyeonline.com/Web/EyeonWeb/default.aspx


On the cheap-end there's:
FX Home's products:
http://fxhome.com/compositelab/?gclid=CNOH49v6-owCFRDaYgod7kg1EA

On the free side (use at your own risk)
Wax
http://www.debugmode.com/wax/

Jashaka
http://www.jahshaka.org/

I personally use and love After Effects, and haven't used any of these other solutions with the exception of Combustion (which is excellent). So please don't consider them a recommendation, but you asked what else was out there. That was just what I could think of. There's likely many more.

you may also want to try converting your file to an image sequence or another format first - just to troubleshoot.

i use eyeon fusion and can attest to it's quality, but it is quite expensive and it is overkill for the vast majority of graphic work if you do not do it often.

My money says you have an OpenGL driver problem; 'cause mine used to crash too.

Remove "OpenGL.aex" from the AE plug-ins folder and see if AE still crashes. If it works, update your drivers and replace the file (and if it still crashes, just remove OpenGL.aex again until you have an updated graphics card and drivers that support it).