We recently talked about six ways to speed up you’re After Effects rendering and exporting. because it is a hole to waste time waiting for renders. But it’s also disappointing to waste time while working on a project. Therefore, let’s focus on how to accelerate your After Effects workflow.
In After Effects, everyone works differently, and some are more efficient than others. Here are six ways to work faster and accomplish more.
1. Layer with RAM Preview Only:
RAM previews are a source of pain for any After Effects artist. You must display the preview and wait for the animation to play to view its progress. Although Adobe has made important progress in optimizing RAM previews in AE, the process can still be problematic.
By placing individual layers during the preview, you can importantly accelerate the RAM preview. You don’t necessarily need to see the background of the particle or any other elements in the preview to see how a particular piece of text moves.
Try to only isolate the layers that ought to be visible. By doing this, you can avoid wasting a lot of time on RAM previews in the future.
2. Close any panels that are not being used:
It’s a simple piece of advice, but if your computer starts to slow down, it could make all the difference. In the After Effects window, you may have some panels open that you haven’t used. Try closing panels that aren’t in use to free up resources and boost performance even more.
Additionally, closing panels that are not in use clears up visual clutter, making it simpler to locate what you are looking for and saving you time in other areas.
3. Use the plugin for the Video Copilot FX Console:
The Video Copilot FX Console plugin should be used if you don’t already. To begin, it is free. Therefore, no obstacles exist there. Second, the Video Copilot team built it, so you can trust its quality.
In essence, this is a lightning-fast instrument for loading layered effects. Like OSX’s Spotlight for Mac users, it is. To access the tool, simply use the preset’s hotkey to browse for an effect and press Enter to load it.
Although this does not appear to be an important advancement, it is importantly faster than traditional search, in which you must locate an effect and drag it onto a layer. However, it improves.
You can set overrides to load effects from presets you create, set favorites to appear first in results, and blacklist effects you don’t want to use. It is well worth the money, even if it is not free.
4. Make use of keyboard shortcuts:
After Effects comes with a lot of built-in keyboard shortcuts, such as FX Console. 10 After Effects Shortcuts That Will Save Your Life was an earlier piece of mine.
There are, of course, more than 10, and if you use After Effects every day or week, you will probably pick up as many shortcuts as you can. It takes a lot of time for people to search through menus for something. You will discover that simply learning shortcuts can importantly improve efficiency.
5. Reduce the resolution:
It’s normal to want to see all your art’s beauty. Additionally, working at full resolution can be beneficial at times, particularly in the project’s final stages. Working at higher resolutions, on the other hand, slows down both the computer and previews.
Reducing the resolution to half or quarter resolution will result in more compression when rendering a project with multiple layers and effects.
6. RAM preview skips frames:
Another quick trip to speed up your AE workflow is provided here. You can place individual layers and set a lower resolution when creating a RAM preview, as previously mentioned. However, dropping frames into your animation is also possible.
To comprehend the fundamentals of animation, general timing, and location, you do not need to watch videos at 30 frames per second. You can easily see what you need at either 10 frames per second or 15 frames per second.
If you change the skip frames set in the RAM preview settings to 1 or 2, the RAM preview will run 2-3 times faster. This method saves a lot of time and can be undone whenever your animation reaches its final stage.
The software package After Effects is robust and intricate. You will, without a doubt, occasionally get stuck on the road. However, if you follow these hints, you won’t have to waste time repeatedly.
