Complex projects (like some after effects templates) require a different work style in After Effects, in this tutorial I will show you how to work fast and efficiently on those render heavy compositions.

Popular Files

My Other Templates:

After Effects Text Tutorials of the video

Hello, my name is Gyorfi Szilard. I am the owner of Bluefx.net. This tutorial will be divided into two sections: In the first part, I will demonstrate how you can work and render heavy projects in After Effects; in the second part, I will show you how you can customize and use my free template, called Spin Box.

First, let me talk about working with heavy projects in After Effects. As a general rule, only preview the stuff you really need to see. This is another template of mine: it’s called Movie Trailer. The actual resolution is Full HD: It’s a lot bigger than my screen, so there is no sense in viewing this in full resolution, because the resolution will be scaled down, so I will render all the pixels, and all the frames, but I will see less than 25 percent of it. I have it set to Full resolution; let’s say I want to see what happens here. Now, look how much time it takes to preview just one single frame. Let’s make this time shorter – how can we do that? Let’s put it to Quarter resolution; it’s much faster. But sometimes even Quarter resolution can be too big, so go to Custom and type in 6: so every sixth pixel will be rendered. It goes much faster, and you can even go up to one-in-eight pixels in Full HD resolution.

Another rule: Let’s say I just want to modify the text. Why should I see all the other effects, which take so much time to render? I only need the text; so I select the text, and I Solo it. Everything goes super-fast. You don’t need to see anything else, and now you can see the movement of the text – it starts here, and here it ends. Let’s turn a couple more layers on. It’s good to identify the most render-heavy layer, and shut it off while you work. For me, it’s this particle layer; so if I shut it off, I will have much faster render-preview times. Let’s say I want to preview how this text disappears: I don’t want to preview everything, only how the text moves. So what you do is drag the time selection a bit closer, so you only see what you have to see; then hit the Preview button – 0 on the number keypad. Another cool trick is, when you want to preview audio, you don’t need to render everything, so you just need to press the period on the keypad, and only the audio will play.

Now, let’s say you want to render a quick preview of the project: Not a full one, but just a quick one to see all the movements, and the timing of the video. Go to Composition—Make Movie, and at the Render settings, you don’t need such a high resolution. Use only Quarter or Third resolution, so you see one-fourth of this resolution, which is 480×270 – more than enough to see all the motion in the video. Now, for the output mode, what I recommend is using QuickTime, with Photo JPEG compression. I generally set it to Best quality, but you can use a lower setting for even faster rendering, and you should select Audio if you need it. Select where you want to save the file, name it accordingly, and hit Render. For the final render, you need to use different settings: Select Composition—Make Movie, and at the Render settings, don’t change anything – leave it at Best setting. In the Output mode, we need to change a couple things, so we can use QuickTime with Photo JPEG compression; you can’t really see artifacts in Photo JPEG at Best resolution, it renders pretty fast, and I can recommend it. Select Audio, again, if you need it.

Here’s another thing. Let’s say you want to have your final render in normal HD, not full HD, as it is now. You can do that from here, by setting it manually, or going here and selecting the resolution that you need. It’s very important that, for the final render, you use Stretch from the output mode to resize your composition, because this gives you a higher-quality stretch than if you would use the setting from the render settings – you don’t want to change it here for the final resolution, because it makes your render faster, but the quality won’t be as good. If you stretch it from the output mode, your render will be slightly slower, but the stretch quality is a lot higher.

That’s all! I hope it was useful. If you have any other questions, please leave a comment or send me an email. In the second part of this tutorial series, I will show you can edit and customize and use my free template, called Spin Box. Thank you! See you soon.