So, just making sure that is set back to “RGB”, we can go ahead and close this viewer down so we are back inside our four views of the original intro clip. And then if we come down to this lower view again, we can also adjust the quality.
Now, this used to be an issue in all the versions of After Effects on older systems where working a full quality related starts to slow the machines down. Now, it still does depend on the amount of work that you are doing, things like motion blur, how many layers there are, if you have masks that have motion blur on, many things can slow the program down. But a way to actually make it work a little bit faster sometimes is to change the quality of what we are seeing here in the composition window.
Now, we are currently looking at full quality. If we drop down to half quality, you can see that it is slightly rasterizes everything a little bit smoother over anti-aliases basically. And you can go down to third and quarter quality if you find that you are really getting sluggish and you need to scrub through the timeline a little bit faster. But at the bottom of that as well just incase you ever need it, there is custom option, allowing you to choose how many pixels horizontally or vertically this After Effects render.
So, quarter quality instead of showing every single pixel is rendering every fourth pixel horizontally. If you want it to, you can make that even more extreme this maybe try 20x20 and you will see how the preview looks. So, you can completely customize that if you are facing a speed issue. But more than likely, you will probably work with full or even half occasionally.
Now, there are also keyboard shortcuts to activate both of these. I am not going to choose that for a second. “Command+J” or “Ctrl+J” on the PC will take you back to full quality, “Shift+Command+J” or “Shift+Ctrl+J” on the PC will take you to half quality. So very easy to switch back and forth as when you need it without going down to the quality options at the bottom.
Now, this particular function along with the view size we are looking at can come in very handy when trying to do a window preview of your project. Again, you have too many layers maybe too many effects that so much going on that it takes forever to build up a RAM preview. But what you can do instead is let say we are going to work across in this composition for a second and currently set to around about 54.3% or maybe I decide to shrink that down to exactly 50% just using the scroll wheel for that.
If I was to render out this few as a RAM preview, I am actually rendering 50% size but still at full quality and personally that is a waste of memory. You are actually trying to get more quality as of something that has been shrunk down. If you go ahead and change that to just half quality, the visual side of things does not really shift here.
It certainly does at 100% size but viewing 50% size at half quality is almost the same as viewing a 100% size at a 100% quality but this will render slightly quicker. So, just a small technique a little trick there that can help you get RAM previews out a little bit faster if you are faced with that challenge.
Now, a couple of more buttons that we can take a look at, I am just going to press “Command+J” again to change everything back to full quality. If we come back down to the bottom here, there is one icon that allows us to specify a specific rendering area of the screen. We are actually going to look at that a little bit later on. We are just going to skip, pass it for a second.
But you also notice over here, there is a menu that is gray down that says, “Active Camera”. You simply cannot select anything underneath it. The reason for that, this only works when you are working with 3D compositions. We are not going to touch that for now but this is why it is grayed out when you only working in two dimensions in After Effects.
Now, if we skip pass the views because we have covered all the options under there. You have got this next one that allows you to view the pixel aspect ratio correction. Now, this is a term
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