Planning and setup

Learn to plan your After Effects project setup for efficient workflows and better results.

Correct project settings, proper footage preparation, and initial composition settings can help you avoid errors and unexpected results when rendering your final output movie. Before you begin, think about the kind of work you intend to do in After Effects and the kind of output you plan to create. After you have planned your project and made some basic decisions about project settings, you are ready to start importing footage and assembling compositions from layers based on that footage.

The best way to ensure your movie is suitable for a specific medium is to render a test movie and view it on the same equipment as your audience. It's best to run such tests before you have completed the difficult, time-consuming parts of your work, to uncover problems early.

Storyboards and scripts (screenplays)

Your movie or video production project often starts with the pre-production tasks of writing a script (screenplay) and creating storyboards, which then effectively guide you through your production (shooting) and post-production (editing, soundtrack, visual effects, and so on) stages.

Acquiring, choosing, and preparing footage

Before importing footage, first decide which media and formats to use for your finished movies, and then determine the best settings for your source material. Often, it's best to prepare footage before importing it into After Effects.

For example, if you want an image to fill your composition frame, configure the image in Adobe Photoshop so that the image size and pixel aspect ratio match the composition size and pixel aspect ratio. If the image is too large when you import it into After Effects, you increase the memory and processor requirements of the compositions that use it. If the image is too small, you lose image quality when you scale it to the desired size.

If you can shoot footage with consistent lighting and colors—and otherwise prevent the need to do tedious utility work in post-production—then you have more time for creative work.

If possible, use uncompressed footage or footage encoded with lossless compression. Lossless compression produces better results for operations, such as keying and motion tracking, because the compression is reversible, whereas lossy compression discards some data that cannot be restored (generation loss). Certain kinds of compression—such as the compression used in MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 camera formats—are especially bad for color keying, because they discard the subtle differences in color that you depend on for good bluescreen or greenscreen keying. It's often best to wait until the final rendering phase to use compression other than lossless compression.

If possible, use footage with a frame rate that matches that of your output, so that After Effects doesn't have to use frame blending or similar methods to fill in missing frames.

The kind of work that you do in After Effects and the kind of output movie that you want to create can even influence how you shoot and acquire your footage. For example, if you know that you want to animate using motion tracking, consider shooting your scene in a manner that optimizes for motion tracking—for example, using tracking markers. 

Also consider shooting at a larger frame size than what you need for final delivery if you want "head-room" for post-production, whether for fake pans and zooms, or for stabilization.

Project settings

Project settings fall into three basic categories:

• How is time displayed in the project?
• How is color data treated in the project?
• What sampling rate to use for audio?

Of these settings, it is important to consider color settings before you do much work in your project, because they determine how color data is interpreted when you import footage files, how color calculations are performed as you work, and how color data is converted for final output.

If you enable color management for your project, the colors that you see are the same colors that your audience sees when they view the movie that you create.

Composition settings

After you prepare and import footage items, you use these footage items to create layers in a composition, where you animate and apply effects. When you create a composition, specify composition settings such as resolution, frame size, and pixel aspect ratio for your final rendered output. Although you can change composition settings at any time, it's best to set them correctly as you create each composition to avoid unexpected results in your final rendered output. For example, the composition frame size should be the image size in the playback medium.

Performance, memory, and storage considerations

If you work with large compositions, make sure that you configure After Effects and your computer to maximize performance. Complex compositions can require a large amount of memory to render, and the resulting movies can take up a lot of disk space. Before you attempt to render a three-hour movie, make sure you have enough disk space to store it. 

If your source footage files are on a slow disk drive (or across a slow network connection), then performance is affected. When possible, keep the source footage files for your project on a fast local disk drive. Ideally, you have three drives: one for source footage files, one for the application, and one for rendered output.

Learn more about improving performance and memory and multiprocessing preferences.

Planning for playback on computer monitors and mobile devices

When you create a movie for playback on a computer or a mobile device—whether downloaded from the Web, played from a media drive, or streamed from a site—specify composition settings, render settings, and output module settings that keep file size low without compromising on the intended delivery quality. Consider that a movie with a high data rate may not play well on older devices. Similarly, a large movie may take a long time to download over a slower data network.

When rendering your final movie, choose a file type and encoder appropriate for the final media. The corresponding decoder must be available on the system used by your intended audience; otherwise, they will not be able to play the movie. Common codecs (encoders/decoders) include the codecs installed with media players such as Flash Player, Windows Media Player, and QuickTime Player.

Adobe Media Encoder offers presets that contain predefined settings for various platforms and formats, including mobile devices, broadcast, cinema, web video, and more. 

Mobile devices

Many of the considerations for creating movies for playback on mobile devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, are similar to the considerations for creating movies for playback on computers—but the limitations are even more extreme. Because the amount of storage (disk space) and processor power can vary for mobile phones, file size and data rate for movies must be even more tightly controlled.

Screen dimensions, video frame rates, and color gamuts vary greatly from one mobile device to another. 

Cross-platform project considerations

After Effects project files are compatible with macOS and Windows operating systems, but some factors—mostly regarding the locations and naming of footage files and support files—can affect the ease of working with the same project across platforms.

Project file paths

When you move a project file to a different computer and open it, After Effects attempts to locate the project's footage files as follows: After Effects first searches the folder in which the project file is located; second, it searches the file's original path or folder location; finally, it searches the root of the directory where the project is located.

If you are building cross-platform projects, it's best if the full paths have the same names on macOS and Windows systems. If the footage and the project are on different volumes, make sure that the appropriate volume is mounted before opening the project, and that network volume names are the same on both systems.

It's best to store footage in the same folder as the project file or in another folder within that folder. Here's a sample hierarchy:

• /newproject/project_file.aep
• /newproject/source/footage1.psd
• /newproject/source/footage2.avi

You can then copy the new project folder in its entirety across platforms, and After Effects properly locates all the footage.

File-naming conventions

Name your footage and project files with the appropriate filename extensions, such as .mov for QuickTime movies and .aep for After Effects projects. For using files on the Web, be sure that filenames adhere to applicable conventions for extensions and paths.

Supported file types

Some file types are supported on one platform but not others. Learn more about supported import formats and output formats.

Resources

Ensure that all fonts, effects, codecs, and other resources are available on both systems. Such resources are often plug-ins.

If you use a native After Effects effect in a project on one operating system, the effect still works on the other operating system to which you've transferred your project. However, some third-party effects and other third-party plug-ins may not continue to operate, even if you have versions of these plug-ins on the target system. In such cases, you may need to reapply some third-party effects.