Adobe After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques

The 7.0 Workflow

37

Figure 1.24. Feel free to create your own preset if none of the listed ones match one that

you will be using continually for your project.

Notes

Several new presets have been added in After Effects 7.0 for increasingly common HD formats.

The Advanced tab in the Composition Settings dialog pertains to options for specifying composition temporal

and spatial settings (Chapter 4) and for working with motion blur and 3D (Chapter 9).

Previews and OpenGL

Nothing sets you apart as a visual effects pro more than the way you examine footage. A tax accountant who

dealt solely with artists encouraged me a decade ago to write off my VCR and any movies I rented or purchased.

She said that the IRS has no idea of the way that effects people look at movies—back and forth over the same

section, frame by frame, and so on—nor the wear and tear it puts on video equipment.

Obviously, the way you look at a clip in After Effects is much different than the way your audience will look at

it once it’s in the finished movie. So to get to the heart of the matter: How exactly does a professional work with

footage in After Effects? This section offers some of the habits of highly effective compositors, to paraphrase

a popular productivity guru.

The strategies outlined here are particularly helpful when working with typically large format footage such

as 2K film plates (film resolution typically footage measuring approximately 2000 pixels, or more precisely

The 7.0 Workflow

38

2048, horizontally), but they’re not bad habits for speeding you along regardless of format (or the speed of

your workstation).

Resolution and Quality

After Effects 6.5 finally made it standard for any new layers in a composition to be set to Best quality in the

timeline (with a check box for the setting in Preferences > General). Long ago, in the era of truly slow desktop

computers, Draft quality was an effective hedge against slow previews, but in this day and age there are far

more effective ways to manage preview speed without creating inaccurate previews, as Draft quality does.

Notes

Avoid Draft quality, because in most cases the potential pitfalls (forgetting that it is set when making

fine adjustments) are no longer outweighed by the benefits (which can be gained by reducing overall

resolution, sampled area, frame rate, and so on, all detailed here).

There are several other effective ways to speed up previews and interactivity without ever resorting to Draft

quality:

• Change Resolution/Down Sample Factor to Half; or in extreme cases, change it to Quarter

• Preview a Region of Interest (ROI)

• Change the way controls update using Preview settings and the Option key (for more on this, see the section

“Caching and Previewing”)

• Enable the Caps Lock key to prevent further updates to rendered views; use only in cases of extreme slow-

down

Tip

In Preferences > Display is an option to “Auto-Zoom When Resolution Changes” but most artists

leave it off, preferring to manage these separately. I find it can be handy with specific tasks such as

rotoscoping.

Production monitors with a horizontal resolution of 1920 pixels or more are more common than they used to be,

but they’re far from universal. Artists working at film resolution tend to use this to their advantage by leaving

the footage at 50% magnification and Half resolution, which keeps things moving more quickly (Figure 1.25).

Figure 1.25. It’s generally good practice to keep the resolution (highlighted, right)

matched to the current magnification setting (highlighted, left); this prevents over-

rendering the current view (wasting your time) and helps RAM Previews to play at full

speed.

This setup allows four times as much data to fill a RAM preview, and preview renders are created in a

fraction—sometimes one half or, in extreme cases, one tenth—of the time required for Full resolution, which

is reserved for cases in which it is necessary to zoom in and look closely, and for final render preparation.

To quickly change the display resolution in the Composition panel, use the keyboard shortcuts shown in Table

1.2.