After Effects features a variety of settings that control importing files, opening multiple compositions, previewing audio, the appearance and interactivity of the program, plus numerous other details. In this final chapter of CMG5, we go through each of the 14 individual Preference panes, giving an overview of what these settings mean and what they do and highlighting those settings that we find aid our efficiency. Here are but a few of those tips.

One of After Effects’ strengths is that you don’t have to prerender anything: All of your sources, layers, and manipulations are “live” all the time, allowing you to make unlimited changes. However, calculating everything all the time can slow down both your work and your final render.

In chapter 44 of CMG5, we explain how prerendering complex comps can speed up your workflow, and provide an example for you to work through. Here we’ll share both some background information and specific tips from that chapter.

Chapter 43 of CMG5 is not just about network and scripted rendering (subjects we leave to the book rather than this column here), but also about a set of very useful project management commands found under the File menu inside After Effects. These utilities can help clean up your project by removing duplicate or unused sources, strip out everything except what is needed for selected comps so you can pass a portion of your project onto another artist, collect all of your source footage to one folder for backup or transport, or even enlist the aid of multiple copies of After Effects to help you render a particularly intensive comp. We’ll share a few of those utilities here.

To create a movie or still image from your animations and arrangements, you have to render a file. After Effects is very flexible in allowing you to set up and override certain parameters when you render, as well as to create multiple files with different aspect ratios and file formats from the same render pass. You can also create and save templates of these render and output settings. In Chapter 42 of CMG5 we reveal the internal render procedure as well as discuss each option in the Render Settings and Output Module dialogs; we’ll share a few of those gems here.

There are a number of nonintuitive technical issues – including interlaced fields, frame rates, frame sizes, pixel aspect ratios, safe image areas, and color spaces – that differentiate video from images destined to be displayed on a computer. You can’t just ignore them; they must be handled properly to ensure your final work appears on television as you intended - otherwise your final image may be mangled (not to mention your relationship with your client). Chapter 41 of CMG5 contains an overview of many of those topic; we’ll share a few gems here.