Every week, Frame.io Insider asks one of our expert contributors to share a tip, tool, or technique that they use all the time and couldn’t live without. This week, Laurence Grayson shares five methods for faster After Effects previews.
Checking your work in After Effects can chew through time, particularly if you’re working on a complex multi-layered setup with a bunch of heavyweight effects in play. Fortunately, there are several ways to speed up renders and previews to get the job done faster.
Preview Presets
It might sound obvious, but the first place to start is the After Effects Preview panel (toggle with Cmd+3). Hitting the Spacebar results in the default behavior, but you can adjust parameters to suit your needs (and your computer’s power). These include frame rate, preview resolution, play from, and range.
What’s easy to overlook is that there are a total of seven keyboard shortcuts you can use to trigger a preview. So, rather than changing these parameters every time, you can set up a range of preview presets and pick whatever works best. You’ll find these under the Shortcut dropdown in the Preview panel.
Set Work Area
On a related note, the Work Area Bar sits at the top of your timeline and you can quickly set the start and end points of it with the B and N keyboard shortcuts. Or you can drag the blue handles at either end, your call. Now you can limit your previews to this range in the Preview controls panel.
Disable Layers / Label Group
If you’ve been using After Effects’ color-coded labels to define asset groups that match your particular workflow (which I’d strongly recommend), then you can use the Select Label Group function to switch off a group’s visibility.
Click on the color of the group you want to switch off, choose Select Label Group from the pop-up, and then you can click on the visibility toggle (eye icon) in the layer stack. Follow the same procedure to toggle them all back on when you’re done.
Disable Effects
Some effects are more processor-hungry than others—Camera Lens Blur is one that springs to mind. So if you’ve got something that isn’t essential for a particular render, switch it off in the Effect Controls panel (F3) until it’s time to toggle it back on again.
Region of interest
If you don’t want to disable effects or layers and only need to check a specific area of the frame, the Region of Interest is your best option. Look beneath the video frame in the Composition panel and you’ll find the Region of Interest button. Click on this and the button will take on a blue highlight.
You can now draw a box on the preview that will essentially create an instant mask, allowing you to render only that specific part when you hit the preview shortcut.
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