Acquiring, choosing, and preparing footage

Before importing footage, first decide which media and formats you'll 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’ll increase the memory and processor requirements of the compositions that use it. If the image is too small, you’ll lose image quality when you scale it to the desired size. See Change pixel aspect ratio.

If possible, use uncompressed footage: less compression means better results for many operations, such as keying and motion tracking. Certain kinds of compression—such as that used in DV encoding—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. See Keying overview and tips.

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

The kind of work that you’ll be doing 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, you should consider shooting your scene in a manner that optimizes for motion tracking—for example, attaching a small, brightly colored ball to the object that you intend to track. See Motion tracking workflow.

Project settings

Project settings fall into three basic categories: how time is displayed in the project, how color data is treated in the project, and what sampling rate to use for audio. Of these, the color settings are the ones that you need to think about before you do much work in your project, because they determine how color data is interpreted as you import footage files, how color calculations are performed as you work, and how color data is converted for final output. See Color management and Change time display units.

If you enable color management for your project, the colors that you see are the same colors that your audience will see 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 new 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. See Work with composition settings.

If you’ll be rendering a composition to more than one media format, always match the resolution setting for your composition to the highest resolution setting used for your output. Later, you can use output modules in the Render Queue panel to render a separate version of the composition for each format. See Work with output module settings.

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 rendered movies can take a large amount of disk space to store. Before you attempt to render a three-hour movie, make sure that you have the disk space available to store it. See Memory, storage, and performance.