- About Classroom in a Book
- Prerequisites
- Installing After Effects
- Optimizing performance
- Restoring default preferences
- Copying the lesson files
- How to use these lessons
- Additional resources
- Adobe certification
- Getting to Know the Workflow
- Getting started
- Creating a project and importing footage
- Creating a composition and arranging layers
- Adding effects and modifying layer properties
- Animating the composition
- Previewing your work
- Optimizing performance in After Effects
- Rendering and exporting your composition
- Customizing the workspace
- Controlling the brightness of the user interface
- Finding resources for using After Effects
- Checking for updates
- Review answers
- Review questions
Optimizing performance
Creating movies is memory-intensive work for a desktop computer. After Effects CS4 requires a minimum of 2GB of RAM. The more RAM that is available to After Effects, the faster the application will work for you.
OpenGL support
OpenGL is a set of standards for delivering high-performance 2D and 3D graphics for a wide variety of applications. Although After Effects can function without it, OpenGL accelerates various types of rendering, including rendering to the screen for previews.
To use OpenGL in After Effects, you’ll need an OpenGL card that supports OpenGL 2.0 and has Shader support and support for NPOT (Non Power of Two) textures. When you first start After Effects, it will attempt to determine if your OpenGL card meets the requirements, and it will enable or disable OpenGL as appropriate.
To view information about your OpenGL card, as well as enable or disable OpenGL in After Effects, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS). Select the Enable OpenGL option to enable OpenGL; click the OpenGL Info button to learn more about your card.
To learn more about OpenGL support in After Effects, see After Effects Help.
Color management
After Effects CS4 supports color management workflows. We encourage you to take advantage of the color management features in After Effects, especially for professional projects. For an introduction to color management, see the appendix, “Color Management in After Effects CS4”.