Preview in real time as you make adjustments
Preview comps, layers, and footage, and also view design iterations in real time, adjusting composition properties and resizing interface panels without halting playback.
Published
Adobe has re-engineered the architecture of Adobe After Effects CC to make it much, much faster.
The first and most significant result of this effort is enhanced interactive previews.
If you've used After Effects for any length of time, it'll be immediately obvious the first time you import a clip with audio and press the space bar.
Depending on the speed of your machine, you can get immediate playback.
Notice the green bar indicates that it's caching faster than it plays.
And best of all as soon as it caches, you can hear audio with the space bar preview. [sirens, thunder] This is an awesome feature.
But for the sake of this demo, I'll turn off audio for right now.
But it doesn't end there.
While you're previewing the comp, you can continue to work without interrupting the preview.
For example, this clip may not be very interesting by itself.
But it gets more fun if we add Cthulhu to the background.
This is just a photo of an HP Lovecraft Cthulhu maquette designed by Hollywood sculptor Lee Joyner, imported as a layered Photoshop file, and animated with the puppet tool.
But you can see that we can turn on an adjustment layer, with the transform effect applied to zoom in, and add a couple 4K rampant layers for smoke and particles to add some atmospherics.
It ends up looking pretty cool for—let's face it—a simple comp.
And in every case, the preview has continued to play and update in the background.
Now while things are now faster in After Effects, this doesn't mean that everything is suddenly playing back in real time.
If we add an effect like this camera lens blur, it won't render instantly the first time through.
But this feature is all about interactive performance as After Effects does continue to preview the comp as fast as your machine allows.
You can resize windows, even open a second comp window if, for example, we want to tweak the color of Cthulhu's eyes.
Lovecraft said they were green, after all.
The preview will continue to play along as we tweak elements in other comps, which can be a great way to adjust embedded elements and immediately see the results in context. [sirens, thunder, people speaking] We've seen that the space bar is now a full-featured shortcut for controlling previews and for caching frames for real time preview.
But don't worry if you're an experienced After Effects user who likes to use the zero key on the numeric keypad for previews.
Zero key previews still essentially behave as they used to by default.
A quick look at the preview panel shows familiar controls for playing the comp, navigating a frame at a time, and jumping to the start and the end of a comp as before.
But the old RAM preview button is now gone, and it's functionality is rolled into the play button.
In fact, the term RAM preview has been removed from After Effects, although old timers like me will probably accidentally call it that for a while.
And now when you expand the preview panel by dragging the frame down, you can see lots of new options including the ability to customize almost all of the shortcut functions.
If you need a specific preview behavior that isn't part of the defaults, you can adjust it here.
These popups allow you to control the behavior for each of the shortcuts.
Also the play button will respect whichever shortcut is currently shown in the panel whether that be space bar or the zero key on the numeric pad.
For example, by default the space bar previews from the current time while the num pad zero key previews from the start of the range, otherwise known as the work area here in the timeline.
If for whatever reason you aren't happy with any of these changes, holding the option key on the Mac or alt key in Windows and clicking on the reset button in the preview panel will change the behavior of previews to closely match the way they used to work.
From a workflow aspect, things have changed a bit.
If you have a work area set up in the timeline—for example, if I bring in the work area to focus just on the text animation—then the zero key defaults to rendering what's inside the work area.
The space bar's default, on the other hand, is now work area extended by current time.
And that means if the space bar starts outside of the work area, it will add that extra bit of timeline to the work area before looping that larger segment of the timeline.
Another big change is you can see the red line, called the preview time indicator, or PTI, moving along, but the blue current time indicator, or CTI, stays behind.
Click in the timeline, and it'll stop the preview as before.
However, if we start the preview again and hold the alt key on Windows or option on Mac, you can grab the CTI and move it while the preview continues.
Add the shift key to snap to key frames.
For example, if we wanted to scrub the rotation value of our text key frames to spin the letters a little as they scale up, we can do it without interrupting the preview.
This takes some getting used to, but it's pretty amazing.
However you choose to start a preview, you can interrupt it with the same keyboard shortcut, or by clicking stop in the preview panel, or by hitting the escape key.
Stopping a preview with the space bar will default to leaving your time marker wherever it is, while stopping with the zero key or the escape key will take you back to the position of your current time indicator.
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