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How to Optimize Projects in Adobe After Effects CC

Chapter Description

This chapter from Adobe After Effects CC Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques examines in close detail how image data flows through an After Effects project. It’s full of the information you need to help you make the most of After Effects.

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  • —George Bernard Shaw

Sometimes, like a master chef—you can prep items and consider them “done” before the guests are in the restaurant and it’s time to cook the meal. At other times, like a programmer, you must isolate and debug elements of a project, creating controlled tests when necessary to understand how things are working. This chapter provides the technical knowledge to allow the artistry to shine.

Work with Multiple Comps and Projects

A modestly complicated shot can entail thousands of individual edits and decisions, and it’s easy to lose track of assets when projects get complicated. This section demonstrates

  • how and why to work with a project template
  • how to organize a complex, multiple-composition pipeline
  • shortcuts to help maintain orientation within the project as a whole


Precomping and Composition Nesting

Precomposing is often regarded as the bane of After Effects, because vital information is hidden from the current comp’s Timeline in a nested comp. Artists may sometimes let a composition become unwieldy, with dozens of layers, rather than bite the bullet and send a set of those layers into a precomp. Yet precomping is both an effective way to organize the timeline and a key to problem solving and optimization in After Effects. Motion graphics comps can involve the animation and coordination of hundreds of animated elements. In a visual effects context, however, if your VFX composition has more than 20 or so layers, you’re doing precomping wrong, making your work way less efficient overall.


Why Precomp?

Precomping prevents a composition from containing too many layers to manage in one timeline, and it also adds a few other advantages. You can

  • Reuse a set of elements.
  • Organize a project by grouping interrelated elements.


The Project Panel: Think of It as a File System

How do you like to organize your system—tidy folders for everything or files strewn across the desktop? Personally, I’m most content with a project that is well organized, even if I’m the only one likely to work on it. When sharing with others, however, good organization becomes essential. The Project panel mirrors your file system (whether it’s Explorer or Finder), and keeping it well organized and tidy can clarify your thought process regarding the project.

I know, I know, eat your vegetables, and clean your room. Imagine that the person next opening your project is you, but with a case of amnesia—actually, that basically is you after a sufficient period of time.


Figure 4.1

Figure 4.1. A complex project, such as a shot for a feature film, might be generically organized (top) to include numbering that reflects pipeline order and multiple output comps with no actual edits, just the necessary settings. At minimum (bottom), you should have Source and Precomps folders, as well as a Reference folder, to keep project contents tidy.



    Figure 4.2


  • Organize Source folders for all footage, categorized as is most logical for your project.
  • Place each source footage clip into a precomp, so that changes to source footage—where it is replaced for some reason—are easier to handle without causing some sort of train wreck.

The basic organization of master comp, source comp, and render comp seems useful on a shot of just about any complexity, but your template can include a lot more than that: custom expressions, camera rigs, color management settings, and recurring effects setups.

Manage Multiple Comps from the Timeline

Ever had that “where am I?” feeling when you’re working with a series of nested comps? That’s where Mini-Flowchart, or Miniflow, comes in. Simply press the Tab key with the Timeline panel displayed to enable it; alternatively, you can click the miniflow_icon.jpg Miniflow button.


Figure 4.3


What about cases where you want to coordinate work in a subcomp while seeing the result in the master comp? The Lock icon lockicon.jpg at the upper left of the Composition viewer lets you keep that Composition viewer forward while you open another composition’s Timeline panel and close its view panel. Lock the master comp and double-click a nested comp to open its Timeline panel; as you make adjustments, you see the result directly in the master comp.


To locate a comp in the Project panel, you can

    Figure 4.4


  • context-click in the empty area of a timeline and choose Reveal Composition in Project to highlight that comp in the Project panel (igure 4.5)

    Figure 4.5



Ways to Break the Pipeline

Precomping solves problems, but it can also create problems—or at least inconveniences. Here are a few ways that render order can go wrong:

  • Some but not all properties are to be precomped, but others must stay in the master comp: With precomping it’s all or nothing, leaving you to rearrange properties individually.

  • Un-nesting: Changed your mind? Restoring precomped layers to a parent composition is a manual (and thus error-prone) process, due to the difficulty of maintaining proper dependencies between the two (for example, if the nested comp has also been scaled, rotated, and retimed).
  • 3D nesting: Do the layers being precomped include blending modes or 3D layers, cameras, or lights? Their behavior changes depending on the Collapse Transformations setting in downstream comps (detailed in the next section).

  • Comp settings nesting: Is there motion blur, frame blending, or vector artwork in the subcomp? Switches in the master composition affect their behavior, as do settings on each nested layer, and this relationship changes depending on whether Collapse Transformations is toggled on.
  • Layer timing (duration, In and Out points, frame rate) and dimensions can differ from the master comp: When this is unintentional, mishaps happen: Layers end too soon or are cropped inside the overall frame, or keyframes in the precomp fall between those of the master, wreaking havoc on tracking data, for example.
  • Duplicating a comp that contains subcomps: The comp is new and completely independent, but the nested comps are not (see Tip on this page).


Boundaries of Time and Space

Each composition in After Effects contains its own fixed timing and pixel dimensions. This adds flexibility for animation but if anything reduces it for compositing. Most other compositing applications (such as Nuke) have no built-in concept of frame dimensions or timing and assume that the elements match the plate, as is often the case in visual effects work.

Therefore it is helpful to take precautions:

  • Enable Collapse Transformations to allow the nested composition to ignore its boundaries (Figure 4.6).

    Figure 4.6


  • Add the Grow Bounds effect if Collapse Transformations isn’t an option (see the “Grow Bounds” sidebar on page 109).

Collapse Transformations is the most difficult of these to get your head around, so here is a closer look.

Collapse Transformations

In After Effects, when a comp is nested in another comp, effectively becoming a layer, the ordinary behavior is for the nested comp to be rendered completely before the layer can be adjusted in any form in the master comp.

However, there are exceptions. Keyframe interpolations, frame blending, and motion blur are all affected by the settings of the master comp—they use its frame rate, and thus keyframe timing (which can become tricky; see the next section). 3D position data and blending modes, on the other hand, are not passed through unless Collapse Transformations is enabled. Enable the toggle and it is almost as if the precomposed layers reside in the master comp—except that any 3D camera or lighting in the subcomp is overridden by the camera and lights in the master comp.

Any layer with Collapse Transformations enabled loses access to blending modes—those in the subcomp take precedence (and you can’t set two blending modes to one layer, obviously). Now here comes the trickiest part: Apply any effect to the layer (even Levels with the neutral defaults, which doesn’t affect the look of the layer) and you force After Effects to render the collapsed layer, making blending modes operable. It is now what the Adobe developers call a parenthesized comp. Such a nested comp is both collapsed and not: You can apply a blending mode, but 3D data is passed through (Figure 4.7).

Figure 4.7

Figure 4.7. You’re not supposed to be able to apply blending modes to ray-traced and other 3D scenes. You can precomp such a scene and enable Collapse Transformations so that all of its ray-traced 3D qualities are passed through, but you still can’t apply a blending mode such as Add (shown here). However, if you add a simple effect, such as Levels, unadjusted, transformations and shading are still passed through—occasionally a handy trick.

So, if you need to collapse transformations but retain 3D data, apply any effect—even one of the Expression Controls effects that don’t by themselves do anything—to parenthesize the comp.

Nested Time

After Effects is not rigid about time, but digital video—whether source or output—definitely is. You can freely mix and change frame rates among compositions without changing the timing, as has been shown. However, because your source clips always have a very specific rate, pay close attention when you

  • import an image sequence
  • create a new composition
  • mix comps with different frame rates

In the first two cases, watch out for careless errors. But you might actually want to maintain specific frame rates in subcomps, in which case you must set them deliberately on the Advanced tab of the Composition Settings dialog, as follows.

Advanced Composition Settings


Preserve Frame Rate maintains the frame rate of the composition wherever it goes—into another composition with a different frame rate setting or into the Render Queue with a specific, alternate frame rate set there (as was mentioned in Chapter 1, it can be done). So if a simple animation cycle looks right at 4 frames per second (fps), it won’t be frame blended across the higher frame rate, but will preserve the look of 4 fps.

Preserve Resolution When Nested controls what is called concatenation. Typically, if an element is scaled down in a composition that is then nested into another comp and scaled back up, the two operations are treated as one, so that no data loss occurs via quantization. This is usually a good thing. If the data in the subcomp is to appear pixelated, as if it were scaled up from a lower-resolution element, this toggle preserves the chunky pixel look.

2. Special Case: Adjustment and Guide Layers | Next Section

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