How to Optimize Adobe After Effects for Performance 2020

[Music] ladies and gentlemen boys and girls welcome back my name is nadian sans this of course is learn how to edit stuff and today i'm going to teach you how to optimize after effects to work better than it may currently be working on your computer and i'm not just talking about performance i'm also going to be talking about setting up your workspace so that it works good for you setting up your render presets so that it works good for you we're going to be taking a look at a lot of different things digging through the menus and i'm going to give you my opinion on how you can optimize your setup no matter what kind of pc you have so that after effects works better that is a money back guarantee i will pay you back if after effects doesn't work better after you watch this entire video send me an invoice all right now before you ask these are my computer specs okay yes i have a pretty decent setup all right that doesn't matter what matters is the information contained in this video so that you can make your setup whatever that is run a little bit smoother so without further ado open up adobe after effects i will do the same because we are getting started right now all right i've got after effects open and for those of you that are curious i'm using version 17.5 but the information contained in this video will work for slightly later and slightly earlier versions from the time that i post this video so don't worry about that the first thing i want to talk to you guys about is setting up your workspace to work best for you now don't pay attention to this this is called flow it's from ae scripts it's just an always up graph editor so i don't have to go into my graph editor every time and it allows you to save presets i don't get endorsed for this but it's 30 bucks on ascripts.com if you want to buy it go for it i'm not going to talk about it in this video what i am going to talk about is my workspace you can see up here at the top of after effects i have my not ian sans workspace set up and this is all the stuff that i use on a regular basis and mine is mainly based off of if you go to window workspace all panels and i have a couple different things in here right gift gun which is something else that i purchased for making gifs my red giant universe dashboard which is kind of like always up over here so i can quickly grab red giant universe effects but what you're going to want to do is set up your workspace to work best for you notice the tabs and everything that you're using over here on the right hand side and just get rid of stuff that doesn't work for you you can just right click over here and go to close panel and you can move all of this stuff around right so i could take flow and i could put it over here just by dragging and dropping again coming over here and putting it on the left left-hand side shrinking it down just like this and whenever you're ready you can come up to your active template and click on these three little lines and then go to save as new workspace and then you can save that out as your own personalized workspace since i moved some stuff around right like i'll go over here throw this over here throw this over here and i've really messed up my workspace it's okay don't worry you can come up to these three little lines and go to reset to saved layout and it will reset it all back to where it was when you started so definitely customize your own workspace because that is going to help you optimize your workflow in after effects that's just like a quality of life thing that's not a technical specification thing but it really does help if you make sure that your workspace is conducive to the work that you are doing okay let's move on to the menus and everything kind of buried in the program nitty gritty i'm going to show you what i use and my opinions on some stuff so first we're going to start off by coming up to edit preferences and we are going to start at the top with general now here are the settings that i use i will leave them up on screen just for a minute so you can make sure that yours looks like mine most of these are set to default i think one of the most important ones that i don't know if it's checked by default is center anchor point in new shape layers so basically anytime you make a new shape layer in after effects it will automatically center the anchor point in that shape layer that's just a little time saving one but check out these options uh not really much for me to comment on here this is pretty general as the menu states is general but we are going to move on next to previews now this one is pretty important we're going to start with fast previews and you should set your adaptive resolution limit as low as it will possibly go so that you can preview large projects faster we will cover the adaptive resolution and fast previews in a little bit outside of this menu but then you can click on gpu information and if you have a gpu in your computer it will tell you exactly what you're rocking right here mine is the rtx 2080 ti i am sorry to those of you that don't have this graphics card i wish i had a 3090 but i'm gonna sneeze i wish i had a 30-90 but i don't okay anyway we're jumping back in so it will tell you if you have a graphics card if you don't it will likely say somewhere in here that you are using your cpu to do your rendering and the fast draft texture memory i've actually looked online and i can't find any like good information on this so whatever your default is set to i would just leave it at that okay we're going to click on ok and under viewer quality i have my zoom quality set to more accurate sometimes when you zoom in on layers and after effects if your project is really big the layers will be super pixelated and that used to make me so angry so if you set it to more accurate it will actually retain more of the detail in those layers when you zoom in and i'm going to show you later in this video how to like combo that with your fast previews to give you like the most accurate and high quality renders with the lowest amount of time but if you want to just copy me and you want to be like your old pal noddy and sans from learn how to add stuff set it to more accurate and color management quality more accurate except cache preview composition switches automatically enable frame blending and motion blur rendering that is when you turn on motion blur on a layer in after effects it will automatically enable it in the composition so this is a nice little time saving one and audio mute audio when preview is not real time for those of you that have been working with audio and after effects when you try to play something it hits the cache point and then the audio slows down and it sounds like monster like really slowed down audio that really upsets me like on a cellular level i hate it when that happens so if you have this checked it will mute audio when the preview is not in real time that's just a nice one for your sanity going on to display now nothing really to talk about here the bottom two are kind of the most important hardware accelerate composition layer and footage panels and show both timecode and frames in timeline panel import one of the most important ones in here is checking this checkbox for h.264 hardware accelerated decoding which requires a restart so if you don't have this checked you'll have to restart after effects i would recommend restarting your computer just to be safe you never know in order for that to take effect and we are on output now very nice nothing i have changed in output uh so just use default file name and folder cool nothing really exciting going on in the output but now on to grids and guides my recommendation for your grids and your guides especially when it comes to color is making sure that it's a color that stands out you don't want to use something like a gray or a black or a white because it's going to get lost in the shuffle and then your grids and guides kind of are pointless right but your grids will work for your proportional grid and your normal grid and you can also set the style i like to keep mine on lines because it's a lot easier to see just hard lines right on your composition but check this out right now it's set to gridline every 80 pixels with four subdivisions so what that means i'm going to exit out of this menu is if you come down here to this little like target and you turn on your grid this is what it looks like and it is very chaotic right so grid every 80 pixels and these are the four subdivisions that it's talking about so inside one of these big squares there's four more vertical and horizontal squares and this is like really nauseating to look at i am not a huge fan of this so if we come back over into our preferences and go to grids and guides what i would recommend doing at the very least is turning your subdivisions down from four to two and when you do that everything becomes a little bit nicer to look at but i don't even use this grid most of the time what i use is the proportional grid which will set up a grid based on your composition dimensions so i'm going to turn off this grid and i'm going to turn on proportional grid which will give me nice proportions all the squares are even across the board and this is set up based on your dimensions so depending on which one you want to use is up to you i like proportional grid and as for your guides if you hit control r on your keyboard it will bring up the ruler and then you can come over here to the left hand side or the top and you can pull down guidelines which will give you access to kind of put your own lines into your composition so you can frame stuff up and again based on our menu items these are red and my guides are green and if you want to show and hide all your guides it is control semicolon which will turn them on and off and then you can also hit ctrl r again to get rid of your rulers but that is how you make your own guides and if i bring in another one it'll bring them all up here from my previous version and then to get rid of them you just drag them correspondingly up or over to the side to get rid of them so different ways to use grids and guides but definitely make them a color that stands out so you can use it appropriately and if you're not using grids and guides welcome to the future labels nothing really going on here i think these are all the exact defaults but if you want you can change all of these colors and you can label them all yourselves if you're super super ocd about your labeling and after effects uh this tab is gonna be the right one for you type a people media and disk cache okay very very important now i understand that not all of you will be able to do this but what i recommend what adobe recommends is using a hard drive on your computer specifically for your cache drive and it should be a solid state drive something that's very fast so if you go back into the menu i have my maximum disk size set to 500 gigs and i have an internal ssd inside of my computer just for my after effects cache this is going to make sure that it doesn't go onto your c drive it's not bogging down something else on your computer taking memory and hard drive space away from other applications if you can if you can afford it definitely get an internal drive for your computer that is a solid state or very fast drive that you can set as your after effects cache drive i can't stress the importance of this enough it is very important and it will just speed up your workflow entirely if you can do it and if you guys are having speed issues inside of after effects you might need to empty your disk cache so regardless of what this folder is you can come in here and click on empty disk cache and it will delete all of the files that are on your computer and this will speed up after effects if you're running into any caching issues so i have 208 gigs of disk cache on my computer but that's okay because i have the drive for it and i'm going to clear disk cache for all versions of after effects click ok and it will free up some hard drive space as well bazinga i'm also going to clean my database and cache and apparently it's going to take about a minute so fast forward through this part okay so now i have cleaned my database and cache and now i have a little bit more hard drive space and after effects in theory should run a little bit smoother now that we've done this and the last two in here are right xmp ids to files on import i do this because it makes sharing between programs and sharing between editors a little bit more smooth and i think create layer markers from footage xmp metadata is already checked for you so you can just leave that on video preview i don't have mercury transmit enabled because i don't want my output of my composition to be going to any of my monitors so if this is enabled you can disable that which will i think save a little bit of power for your computer appearance uh this is where you can make after effects brighter if you want if you're a psychopath this looks disgusting dark mode always i have cycle mask colors unchecked i think it is checked by default and that's when you're making multiple masks on a layer it will cycle through all the different colors and sometimes i find that after effects will make a mask color very similar to the color that i'm trying to mask out and so it gets really confusing so i just have that unchecked and you can you know customize the look and feel of after effects here if you want to new project uh you can load up a project template if you'd like i'm not really going to go into that i don't have that it's just the after effects default auto save very important i save every six minutes for a maximum project versions of 200. how many times have you been working in after effects and then you crash and you lose like 15 20 minutes of work or you have your maximum project version set really low and then you hit your cap and then your auto save kind of stops and then you lose work don't lose work all right after effects project files are not very big in file size so set that max project version really really high and set your auto save duration really low and always auto save next to project always always way easier to find memory you're going to want to lower this number down as low as it will possibly go on your computer you have to reserve ram for other applications unfortunately i wish i can give all of my ram to after effects but lower this down as much as it will possibly go and that will help speed up your workflow a little bit you could also check this checkbox reduce cache size when system is low on memory that will help you at some point but you can always purge or delete your media cache as well audio hardware this is just the audio that's coming out of your computer so i have mine set to default audio output mapping again set to default sync settings i think everything is set to default uh but this will basically allow you to sync your preferences into creative cloud and then download them on another computer and when you are syncing i'm going to you can come right up here to this little button that is your sync settings and it will allow you to sync your settings with your after effects account uh so that's a real easy way to kind of transfer computers if you wanted to finishing up here type my text engine is set to latin all of this is default scripting and expressions all of this is set to default and 3d all of this is set to default click ok and now ladies and gentlemen we have gone through the preferences menu i know it was kind of arduous and boring but it is important for you to kind of have better performance in after effects on your rig now a common problem i hear all the time is ian after effects is running slow is there something that i can do to speed up my performance and the answer is yes mostly so let's go through some of those things you can come up here to edit first and foremost and go to purge and it will allow you to purge all your memory and disk cache we did this earlier but you can purge right from the edit menu and that will help speed things up a little bit and the next thing i want to talk to you about is adaptive resolution so if you come right down here follow the mouse follow the mouse this little lightning bolt with a little box around it and a down arrow if you click on that it will show you what you're looking at as far as fast previews and you can turn on adaptive resolution and let me open up another project so i can show you exactly what this does okay here's a project that i was working on the other night while i was streaming this project is just some dj visuals that i was working on so a lot is happening and with adaptive resolution set which it is on right now i can kind of scrub through and it will give me a low resolution preview as i'm scrubbing through my timeline which is really important to kind of see in bigger projects if you have adaptive resolution turned off your computer is going to be trying to render full res previews while you're scrubbing and it's just going to take forever and you're not going to be able to do anything or see anything because your computer is just going to spend a lot of time loading so with adaptive resolution and also fast draft it is down resin the quality of your timeline so that you can actually scrub through and see what's going on in a lower quality preview and if i were to let go of the playhead you see that eventually it snaps into full resolution but this will allow you to kind of scrub and see things on your timeline a lot faster than if you were to have the full quality one turned on which leads us very nicely into paused resolution versus playback resolution and you can tell which is which right down here underneath your composition where it says full this is your paused resolution so what resolution is this while the video is paused if i were to change this from full to quarter you'll see that my text gets pixelated because i am viewing my pause in quarter resolution and this is not the same as playback resolution playback resolution can be found under preview and coming down here to resolution and you see i have mine set to quarter what i would recommend for everyone and especially in bigger after effects projects is to always be previewing in third or quarter resolution and have your paused resolution set to full because that will render the full resolution while you are paused and this is just a nice way to speed up your playback because it's going to render your playback in quarter res but it'll allow you to kind of see details in full when it's paused and last but not least as far as performance is concerned follow the arrow all the way down to here your bits per channel of your composition if you click on that i have mine set to 16 bits i believe the after effects default is 8 bits per channel but the higher your bit depth the higher the pixel density for color information will be i really tend not to use 32 bits i usually stay on 16 but according to the after effects website your bit depth while working in a higher bit depth it provides a higher precision for calculations and greatly reduces quantization artifacts such as banding ingredients if you've ever applied a gradient to anything in after effects and you see there's like bands around the outside that's probably because your bit depth is too low try increasing your bit depth and that will help get rid of some of that banding the more you know and the very last thing i want to talk about is render presets it's a huge huge time saver and something you should absolutely be utilizing i'm going to hit ctrl m on my keyboard to bring up my render queue if i go to my output module i can click on this little arrow and i can go to where it says make template now for me i use prores plus alpha for almost everything that is a quicktime codec it is lossless it is uncompressed and it includes an alpha channel but you can set your movie default to be whatever you want so let's make a new preset let's call this prores no alpha and i will come down here to edit and i will keep my format at quicktime and i will do my video output to be rgb only and under my format options i'm going to make sure that apple prores 444 is selected click ok click ok again and now i have saved that as a setting and i could automatically set my movie default to be pro resno alpha if i want just by selecting pro resno alpha here click ok i'm going to remove this from my render queue come back over here control m and now you'll see that prores no alpha is set as my default for every render that i output from after effects so this is a nice convenient way to not have to like guess what you're choosing here and set your own custom preset if you wanted to use adobe media encoder you could do that as well which will allow you to export in h.264 out of after effects you can come right up here to file export and go to add to adobe media encoder queue and then you'll use media encoder to do your export instead of internal after effects things that is a lot of information folks but i hope that some of it or all of it probably all of it was useful to you in trying to make after effects cooperate on the rig that you are currently using now again everything that i showed you today are the things that work for me and my rig again here are my specifications they're likely not going to match yours but that's okay because the information that we talked about today should help you navigate your own rig and hopefully get some performance back out of after effects if you're having any issues and ideally if you follow at least 50 of the things that i talked about in this video you should have a more pleasant after effects experience hopefully drop a comment in the comment section below if anything that i talked about today is new information or has helped you on your after effects journey well i want to thank you very much for listening to me ramble on about after effects for a while how long is this tutorial i don't know i don't keep track if you're new here to my channel please consider subscribing i would very much appreciate that if you're a returning subscriber thank you for watching this video there are links in the video description below for you to check out some of my social media you can join my discord you can download some presets that i've made you can support me in this channel by getting some stuff from envato and an epidemic sound it mostly supports you but it also supports me everything is in the link tree in the video description below thank you once again for watching this video my name is nadian sands this is learn how to edit stuff go grab a cup of coffee get into after effects and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Learn How To Edit Stuff

Views: 80,430

Keywords: learn how to edit stiff, notiansans, after effects, tutorial, after effects 2020, optimize after effects, make after effects faster, how to speed up after effects, can my computer run after effects, after effects 2020 tutorial, Adobe AE, how to optimize after effects, after effects settings, preferences, after effects preferences, 2020, how to make after effects render faster, render faster in after effects, optimize, how to, video editing, editing tutorial, how to edit video

Id: M2jsG0D8kAU

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020