3D layers and motion blur in After Effects require a good amount of rendering time, but here is a quick tip that can help reduce your wait, and have your AEProjects.com templates rendered in less time.
Most people use scanned or digital camera files in our templates and these are usually high resolution, multiple MB sized files. They are also, unfortunately, a cause of slow render times.
In most of our templates the camera zooms into your photo, but it rarely fills the entire 720×480 screen. This means that if your photo is a 3072×2048, 6.3 mega pixel image file, After Effects still has to process and calculate all 6.3 million pixels, even though it is never being shown at a greater resolution than 720×480. Now imagine that you have 40 of these photos spinning around and moving, as in our templates….. thats a lot of pixels to calculate.
So today’s quick tip is to scale your photos down to a lower resolution (such as 720×480) in Photoshop before bringing them into After Effects. Your image files will be a smaller size, your render will be quicker, and there will be no noticeable difference in quality!
To illustrate the difference, I created a small 5 sec animation of a photo moving and spinning in 3D space with motion blur, first with a 6.3MP photo and then a 720×480 version I scaled down in Photoshop. Here are the results:
- 3072×2048 photo = 83 second render
- 720×480 photo = 19 second render
PS: Setup an action in Photoshop to batch process all your photos at once.
2 Comments so far
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As long as your photo is at least 720×480 and it never goes bigger than fullscreen it will look perfect. After Effects does a great job at upsampling images, so I sometimes even push it to 120% if I have no other choice.
Comment by Josh Fozzard 01.23.07 @ 5:45 pmLeave a comment
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Great tip. Would using a smaller photo make a difference on a prject in which it will be projected on a large screen?
Comment by Chris Burns 01.23.07 @ 5:03 pm