Tip: Render Faster & Smarter in After Effects with BG Renderer

My only assumption with this tip is that you use Adobe After Effects CS4 (or even CS3) on a multi-processor machine, Mac or Windows. Beyond that:

• maybe you only have one main machine and often face the dilemma of wanting to render while continuing to work
• perhaps you monitor your system’s performance carefully and have noticed that your After Effects renders don’t always peg all of the processors
• possibly you own or have owned a copy or copies of Gridiron Software’s Nucleo Pro and have experienced the joy of background rendering in After Effects already. However you’re not experiencing that joy in CS4, because Gridiron has been too busy with another little project to update it.
• It could even be that you are aware that you can kick off an After Effects render in a shell (Terminal on Mac, DOS on Windows), allowing you to render without the GUI, and thus keep working. If so, if you’re like 99% of visual artists, you’re not that fond of memorizing, typing or optimizing code.

If any or all of these is true, get ready to buy Lloyd Alvarez a beer, because he offers the answer to all of these and more.  Lloyd’s site is home of many useful tools, another of which may appear in this space this month, but as my first true tip of the month I wish to promote his most infinitely valuable script. And I say infinitely valuable because BG Renderer is offered free, a 100% discount off the alternatives.

April is Tip Month

My turn! In April I aim to post a tip a day, despite the distracting spring weather, my birthday, and NAB. If you also get distracted, celebrate your birthday or just forget to check in, I will also ping these daily from Flowseeker on Twitter.

I’m doing this as a kind of penance, and to test a theory. I admit that when I think of posting here as a founder of Pro Video Coalition I tend to think of crafting a long and/or weighty article. something more along the lines of what I would have sent the magazines where I used to write with some of these people.

I also have 29 topics already outlined, many of which have been kicking around, and I’ve even grouped them (in my own mind, at least) into 7 subtopics, one for each day of the week. Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind, and to offer a May Day Bonus if the mood strikes me (and I haven’t collapsed by then).

You may expect these tips all to be about After Effects, since my book focuses on compositing and designing effects in that software, and quite a few of these will at least involve After Effects, but many will go further afield. If you’re interested in more tips and workflow having to do specifically with After Effects, check out the new April term at fxphd.com beginning April 13, where I’m teaching a class that uses my book as a starting-off point, and delves into some of the many areas that are either easier to show than write, or just further explores topics that are worth exploring further.

Ah, but if I didn’t leave a tip today, that really would be like April Fool’s, wouldn’t it?

Today’s tip is not really a tip at all – at least, not like the others to be posted – it’s my strategy on how I plan to weather the current economic conditions.

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