After Effects for newbie users

I have been working lately on After Effects CS3, and I am a newbie I have to admit. So I’m writing you to help other newbies which want to work on after effects small projects, a quick solution to some of the problems I’ve faced this week.

When you make a project and want to save it as a video file, you should not use the File->Export menu, because no matter what option you’ll choose the output quality will be terrible. Instead you should go to Composition and Make Movie (while your on your main composition). Then you will have to press the render button, but believe me you better do not click on it right away because you will get good quality uncompressed file. But the uncompressed file will take more then 1GB of your disk space if you compile a 30 sec. project, and you can not even play it normal, because any video player can’t play normally a 30 sec. clip which size its more then 1GB.

When you press the Make Movie command (CTRL+M) you’ll notice that a new panel shows up on the bottom of After Effects but there are more option don’t click the Render button yet. In case you don’t see those option (usually because of your low screen resolution), click on the Render Queue panel name with the right mouse button,a menu will show up and click on Maximize Panel command. Now your should see that there are two option Render Settings & Output Module.

Go to Render Settings and click on Custom and check if there is something you can modify there. The most important part is Output Module and click on Custom again. On the new opened windows you’ll see a button named “Format Option”. This is a very important part because here you can set a compresion. I prefer using the MPEG 4 compresion but feel free to experiment with the others and choose the one that suits your needs. Also so make sure you check the Audio checkbox otherwise your video wont have audio.Here is a screen shot.

Output Module After Effects Video Compression

Another error which fist time users face in after effects is: they get no audio when they render projects. This is because by default After Effetcs CS2 and CS3 (i have not used CS4), have this option disabled. You can enable it from the Render Queue panel, maximize it again if you cant see the Output Module. Click on the small > arrow and click on custom. On the button of the panel you’ll see the audio part, only check the audio check box and click OK. Render the project and now it will have sound.

Ok now your ready to render the movie, however you’ll notice that its being done to slowly. That is normal because rendering is a processor intensive process. The order of importance for render speed in AE is:

1. processor speed (and number of processors/cores)
2. ram (ideally you’d like 2gb per processor or core)
3. drive speed, particularly if you have lots of processing power…

In my case i had the first 2 requirements, but i still had slow speed. My drive is SATA, so this didn’t justify the fact that it was working very slowly for me. Thinking and thinking all over again, while i was lying in my bed, i figured out that my drive was setup to work as IDE drive in my BIOS. So i changed it back to SATA and i had improvements for like 20%. Also use two disk (if you have two of course ). One for the footage file, and the disk to save the project. This can give you the very very big improvment.

You could also look into external storage…depending on the ports you have on your machine. Use this for you media, both clips and renders. This will free up the system drive bus for caching frames, then you can enable disk caching in preferences>memory & cache. (note, if you enable that with only one drive and drive bus you can actually decrease performance). I have set this option because i was facing errors while i was rendering projects.

The GPU or graphics card will not help you much in After effects. The mpeg hardware is primarily probably more for playing dvds on you system, to off load mpeg-2 decompression from your cpu. If it also doubles as a capture card, you’d be able to compress captured video to mpeg-2 via the card.

The cheap way to try and get better performance would be to get more ram. if you have 2 cores or less, or only use a 32-bit os, 4gb will be fine.