44 Prerendering and Proxies

Planning ahead can save time later

One of After Effects’ strengths is that you don’t have to pre-render anything: All of your sources, layers, and manipulations are “live” all the time, allowing you to make unlimited changes. However, calculating everything all the time can slow down both your work and your final render. Newer versions of After Effects have gotten much better about internally caching the results of comps and frames it calculates (especially if you enable Preferences > Memory & Cache > Enable Disk Cache), but you will still find yourself spending a lot of time waiting.

In this chapter, we’ll explain how prerendering complex comps can speed up your workflow, and using proxies for footage and comps can ...

Get Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects, 5th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.