hey what's up ladies and gentlemen I'm Ignace Aleya and today it's another tip
trick Tuesday and today's tip trick Tuesday I will show you how to improve
your After Effects performance make it render faster and just improve your
general productivity we all know the story of After Effects crushing or just
freezing or it's just way too slow to to make something sometimes I have these
moments that I'm so motivated to create something and I want to jump into off
your effects and start creating and then everything is so slow and I just get
demotivated within the minutes because I just can't produce what I'm having in my
mind and my mind is going so fast but After Effects is just not willing to
allow me to to produce something and then on other days when I'm not that
motivated After Effects is just working fine so that's something we have to live
with but in this video I will show you a few tips and tricks to optimize After
Effects alright so the first step is actually a very simple one but one of
the most important ones actually imagine you're working on a 4k resolution
composition it's not really ideal especially because you're working and
your preview is actually rather small so if you're going to lower your resolution
while working you're not really going to notice any difference so even if you're
going in fine detail you could actually lower the resolution of your preview you
can simply do that by going over here and going to full and change the
resolution over here so you can go for auto which will automatically choose a
resolution good for your composition you can also go for a half or a third or
quarter I wouldn't recommend going over third
because quarter is really really bad in a resolution quality so if we're going
to take a look here and we can barely see any detail in here but if we go to
third because I'm working with a 4k resolution comp you're not going to
notice much difference between the third and the full resolution or even half in
this case would be a little bit better instead of full but yeah just keep in
mind that these effects will look a little bit different in these
resolutions so if you're gonna see the actual final result go in full
resolution and then when you're continuing I'm working on your project
just lower that resolution all right so the next step actually is also in the
preview monitor you also have another to change the previews quality and to
make it a lot faster so in here you have this little button over here which is
currently set to OFF and means final quality and if we're going to move to
decomposition here you will see that this is the final quality I'm gonna set
this to full so you can see the actual result and if you're going to change
this to adaptive resolution for example you're not going to notice much
difference but it's going to load a little bit faster if we click through on
our effects and so this is a good way to actually work in your composition and
once your composition gets very complex it's actually going to adaptively remove
the resolution a little bit you can also go for fast draft which is extremely
fast but here you have to note that like blending modes and stuff like that is
not going to be noted so you can see that now if we're going to click how
fast that loads click click and you can see that instantly loads up everything
and if I change this back to off you'll see how much time it needs to render so
I click now we wait a second and a half or something and with the fast draft
it's a lot a lot faster so in some occasions you could use that to quickly
scroll through your composition see what's going on and stuff like that the
next step I have for you guys is close all the panels it's very essential to
close all the panels that you don't use because they also use CPU and to perform
and to open up and to have some cash behind them so definitely go and after
effects check what you're using what you're not using for example the tracker
I'm using it for now a line I use it a lot paint I barely use it so I'm going
to close it up let's see here we have the transition shifter which I can also
close and some other stuff so we can see these are things I rather use except
this one and then we can go over here for the info panel I don't need that
preview maybe but actually I just use my hotkeys on the computer on my keyboard I
don't need this neither do I need this or this so now I
closed all these panels maybe close down all the compositions I'm not using for
now and then over here we can see and that we have everything ok so this is
just a base SiC one alright so I know this is kind
of basic but it really helps to make After Effects perform a little bit
faster especially when you're using laptops or any kind of debt especially
in Premiere Pro dis is a very handy After Effects doesn't have all these
panels but when you're starting out on premiere you will see that you have a
ton of panels that you're barely using so close them all right to imagine you
have a few layers like in my composition right now and you're applying a bunch of
effects to each individual layer but the effects are exactly the same that's not
really the best way on going about this because now it has to calculate it for
each different layer so that means five times it has to calculate the same
information so in that case what do you do we can see right here that we have
this composition I'm actually going to set this to off final quality we can see
that if you're going to affect we have a solid composite a Gaussian blur and a
perfect glow which is a preset of ours and apply to do this layer and we have
this applied to every single layer over here so what I'll do is go to this layer
and select all the effects control X to cut them then I'll go over here and
again delete it over here delete it over here and holidays so one more there we
go so now what I will do is select all these layers including their tracking
information and I'll go to layer precompose this move all the attributes
in that new composition and just rename it to like footsteps and now we have a
pre comp so what you could do is now basically go into that composition and
create an adjustment layer or just apply the effect to the composition itself but
if you want to later kind of make this a little bit more complex you have all the
effects in here so I'm going to call this effects and just paste these
effects with control V now we have applied them and actually with the solid
composite it's all it's composites everything so that's pretty great and if
we're going back to that same composition and set the blending mode to
a screen you will see that nothing has changed it's actually all the same so
that's really cool and it's a lot faster now because it's only calculating these
effects and once another thing you can do is actually render out your pre comp
compositions with a bunch of effects of like to them so we can render them
faster later on and also while you're working on your project in order to do
that just solo decomposition you're using and go for a render okay so in
this case I wouldn't go for the final render settings wishes for me mostly
h.264 which is great for online video but this format does have a quality loss
in general so if you're going to do this a bunch of times and you render out
things multiple times the quality is gonna get worse over time so in this
case I will go for an image quality either it's PNG or TIFF so I'm going for
a PNG sequence and I'm going to click on PDF PNG sequence right over here you can
also render it out with an alpha if you want to in this case it's not necessary
so I'm going to toggle that off because it's going to keep well it's gonna give
me less information to render out so export as a sequence go for the location
open up that folder and rename it to footstep with steps actually sequence
and save that out and just click OK and export these right over here so now we
have your image sequence rendered out and go into After Effects to import it
again so what I will do is go to my project manager and go right click
import Final which I suppose is clear for you guys then go through that folder
and click on the first layer make sure that you have PNG sequence checked on
and import that PNG sequence so now we have an image sequence that is going to
be imported in Adobe After Effects right here now very importantly before you
actually switch up these two compositions well at this composition
for this footage go to your composition and go to composition settings here
we'll see that you have a frame rate of 24 fps very importantly is to right
click on your image sequence go to interpret footage main and change this
back to assume this frame rate 24 click OK otherwise the length is not gonna be
exactly the same click on your footsteps go alt and hold alt and click on your
layer and then just drag it over that will replace this with your image
sequence and now if we're going to install this Luke how freaking fast this
renders oh my god you thought everything had to be
difficult in order to optimize your rendering but actually a lot of people
just run around everything as a PNG sequence or tip sequence and then just
reinforce it to continue on they're more complex scenes now let's dive into the
settings a little deeper to see if we can solve anything a little bit more so
if we go in After Effects and go to edit preferences here we can go to previews
and we can choose the adaptive resolution limit right here maybe even
lower and you can also change the zoom quality and the color management quality
to be faster but in my opinion the default settings are really necessary
for my projects but you can play around with these try to see what it does and
how it works then next you can go to media and disk cache so here you can
choose a folder for your disk cache I would suggest that you go for a folder
that is SSD so currently it's set to my C Drive which is not as the go to your
computer SSD create a new folder and maybe rename this tube cache open up
that forward create a new folder and rename it to after-effects there we go
and click select this folder so now our cache files are going to be sent to an
SSD drive which is going to read and write your cache files a lot faster and
that's actually very nice we can also maximum this cache size set this to
maybe like 30 or just increase it as much as you can and you can also empty
the disk cache once in a while to just make sure that you don't have a full set
folder for this so here we go we have cleaned our cache then you can also
clean the database and cache and now let's say After Effects crashes a lot or
you have a lot of problems with your computer also another tip that doesn't
necessarily improve the performance of After Effects but it improves your
projects in general because if After Effects crashes you didn't save it for a
long time you lose everything so you can also go in here to the auto save
settings and actually save it every 10 minutes for example because in 10
minutes I actually do a lot and if I would lose 20 minutes of work that would
be very frustrated so you will see an autosave often but more often but I
actually want to trade that in for a safer project and
then go into memory so in memory you have the installed RAM so I have 32
gigabytes of RAM and now you can also select the RAM reserved for other
applications and while you're using After Effects so I would make this as
low as possible because in order well the more ram you give to off your
effects the better it will perform which is kind of logical after that just click
OK and we're done with these settings the next step is just to simply solo
your layers that you're working on so if you're working on a complex project like
this one and you're working on this specific foot you can just go in here
and so so load these two or just so load this foot and focus on it if you want to
see something more just so load that one as well right over here and then you can
kind of compare these two but just don't work on all of them all at the same time
and soloing is the easiest way knowing which layers you need and which you
don't so you can just install these and then you see the entire composition
again you can also uncheck your adjustment layers again while you're
working and now for our last step just don't work with effects that are
intensive for your processor if you don't notice you will actually notice it
while you're working on them like glows are very slow blurs are very slow
especially motion blur so for example if you have set up motion blur by toggling
the switches setting all the motion blur to on and you also have motion blur
checked on for the composition in this case I don't really have anything that
actually needs motion blur but anyway if you would have that just then check
motion blur for now if you have a perfect glow applied just try it first
look how that looks on your footage and then just disable it for now and then
just wait until you're done with the entire project to come back to this and
just enable it again because these things are essentially what makes After
Effects slower while you're working on the project and yes it is kind of a
trade-off that you don't see your entire project completely dumb already but just
it makes it a lot better and now for a last bonus tip just save more money for
a better computer alright I know this was kind of rude of me because a lot of
people are just doing this as a hobby or trying to learn or are just too young
don't have the budget to invest in a better computer but I would advise you
if you're looking into a computer for better performance after effects on a
budget I would recommend you to go obviously to a Windows computer because
it's a lot cheaper than Mac computers and it also is easier to kind of improve
your computer later on I would also advise you to make your own computer or
let someone that knows how to do it build it but it's going to be a lot
cheaper for one and you have one hundred percent control on what you put in your
computer we'd also advise you to work with an
Nvidia and graphics card because that supports CUDA and the CUDA performance
in video editing software is amazing so I would really advise you to take a look
for that if you're looking into some kind of laptop but you see yourself
often at home then I would also invest in a desktop computer because these are
again lower budget have a better airflow and it's just generally better for
heavier projects and yes this is all my personal opinion but I just want to give
you some tips when you're looking into buying a computer if you want to see
what computer I'm using I will put a card on this video right here and so you
can go and check it out alright so that's it for this video I hope you
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to see you guys in the next one good bye