Now, one of the things we did earlier around was to scrub time line in order to get a sense of maybe where the audio falls. If we just scroll the time line up here you can see that the audio icon is still turned ON if we do come back anywhere along the time line and hold down that command key and drag. We do get an idea of audio is scrubbing in the background, but is possible to actually do an audio preview.
If we come back to the beginning of the time line, all you have to do is hit the period key that is on your keypad, not the one that is on the keyboard because you do know by now that the period key on the keyboard will zoom the composition in and the command key zooms out. So, do not get these two confused, period key on the keypad will build up an audio preview. I am going to go ahead and hit that now and we can see what it sounds like.
Okay, so seven seconds of audio works very well. If you have a time line and the soundtrack that is longer and you stop playing it back and wonder why in the earth does it stop playing it eight seconds. Every time I preview this it always stops at the same time that is actually a preference. I will quickly show you where that is.
Once again, go up to your preferences dialog, hit that menu for the PC after effects menu for the Mac, go down to preferences and choose the previews option and you will see here, this is the audio preview. It is set to a default of eight seconds in length. Totally up to you what you want to set that for, but this is the reason because we have seven seconds it does not notice.
So, this is fine for us to live as it is at this point in time. But what we have done there is an audio preview. What about a video preview that combines all of these together so we can see exactly what our animation is looking like?
Well, first office make sure that all of our layers are visible so if we come back over here to the time line, we want to un-solo these three layers over here so we get our final composite and then what we will do is come over to the composition window and make sure we set back to fit up to 100% so we get the entire time line and then what we need to do is invoke something called a RAM preview. But we have done every time so far is hit the space bar and all that does is preview frame by frame and not in real time, everything that we can see going on in screen, but you will also notice that there is no audio.
The space bar is simply to play back frames is just see you can check certain details, but it is not going to give us a real time preview. This is actually done with a RAM preview, After Effects will load as much information as it can and render it into the memory and play it back out of RAM.
Now, you may have noticed this green line that keeps appearing here across the top of the time line. This is actually information that has already been loaded into RAM because we hit the space bar. So, without or reloaded and if I hit the space bar, we are going to get much faster playback almost real time in fact until we hit the area that has not been rendered, but we still do not have any audio.
So, I am just going to click to stop that and come up here to the pallets in the upper right hand side and you will see that you have one here called Time Controls. Now, it is currently compressed that this actually suppose to be longer than this so what we can do is click in here between the effects and presets and the time control a pallet, and drag down until it snaps into position and show us all of the options that this pallet has.
Now, what we are kind of seeing here would these icons are standard once that you really know already. The play key exactly the same as the space bar moving on one frame or moving back one frame exactly the same as page up and page down. Moving to the end or the beginning of the entire time line, same as the home and end key.
So, nothing really useful that we need to point out. We can disable all the audio and we can set the previews to automatically loop which is what is set there, if you click on this icon it will bring up what they now call the ping pong function, but I also refer to it its older name of palindrome where it place a clip backwards and then forwards and backwards and forwards across the entire time line, still looping it but you will always get it forwards and then in reverse the next click across will purely play in one direction only and then stop. It will not loop.
So, we are going to click that back to the original looping icon, but the next path in across here is the RAM preview button. Now, before we activate that, you do have options in the under here that effect how the RAM preview actually work. We are telling it here that we are going to use the default frame rate of the composition. This is why it has parenthesis around there. it is going to use whatever this comp is set to unless we go ahead and choose a different value under here.
Sometimes it is handy if you maybe imagining how this movie might export as a flash file that maybe you are going to playing back at 15 frames the second, you can at least get a sense of how is that going to look.
You can also come over here on the right side and change the resolution. I mentioned earlier that you may need to drop the resolutions sometimes in order to render a preview much quicker. Here it is automatically going to use the resolution that the comp is already set to. In this case, we are still working out for a quality.
You do as have an option to save from the current time. If we did select that when we do a RAM preview, it is only going to preview from this point onwards up to the end of the time line and then continue to loop that small section of time.
So, it is probably a rare occasion that you would do such a thing, but this one I like and use a lot full screen. I am going to turn that ON for just a second because it allows us when we activate the RAM preview to get rid of the entire interphase and play the clip in the center of the monitor nice and clear without any other destructions.
Now, before I do that, there is more thing I want to point out about the RAM preview options if we go here to this drop down menu, you have a second option called Shift RAM preview options.
Now, bear in mind that RAM preview is going to rend that every single frame that it possibly can depending on the amount of RAM that you have and the speed of your process or how much the information it can actually render for you. If you find that you are not getting enough, you maybe on the rendering half of the time line shift ram preview allows you instead to do a render that in this case skips every other frame.
So, what you can do is come in here and choose how many frames you wish to skip and then basically you are rendering less information, but still getting the overall time of the animation and getting a good sense of what it is going to look like. It is going to be as good as a RAM preview, but if you like coming up against those issues then this is a good way to get around it. Skip a certain number of frames, maybe drop the frame rate, maybe adjust the resolution. But we are going to be using RAM preview probably at all times, but I wanted to point out that that is there.
Now, this is the RAM preview button on the upper right hand side but the fastest way to get to it is simply to go back to your keypad on the lower right hand side of the keyboard and hit the zero key.
Now, you can see when After Effects is done there it is build top a full render including sound and video play back of full frame ray on the screen, wonderful. Very cool thing to do and After Effects is also showing us here this constant green line all the away across the top of the time line that tells us that every frame is currently loaded into RAM. If we do not make nay changes we can scrub this time line as fast as we want to because it is not going to have re-render everything it is still retain in memory.
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