Now the real power of OpenGL comes into play when you start working with intense 3D scenes. Let us just cancel out of this for a second because we have not really changed anything and take a look at the scene in a little bit more detail.
If we come down to the files previews in just for a second turned everything off, this is kind of like going back to the original 3D version of Adobe After Effects. We have the ability to work in 3D but do we have any acceleration? Well, if we start to scrub through the timeline on this, you can see that it is a little bit slow. What we have got if we just scroll down through the timeline, is a series of layers, in fact let us go all the way down to the bottom. We can see that there are total of 43 layers in this composition. There is a camera, there are a few null objects for rotation but most importantly there is a series of movies in here.
There are many different planets orbiting around I have just created a very quick animation here. Each of these layers contains moving footage. All of this information turned into 3D has to then be calculated by the computer and is trying to play it back as quick as it can for you as you scroll through the timeline. So, all of that information is slowing down the processor at this point because the computer’s processor is having do to all of the work and you can see that is unacceptable level if redraw when you are trying to work fast, when actually that is because everything is turned off.
The next option we have is Wireframe, that is pretty obviously explained as soon as you turned the ON everything turns into Wireframe scrubbing through the timeline now is amazingly fast but we cannot see anything, so very handy if you do need to turn off all of the previews of everything and just see the actual animation of each layer where it exist and get a quick representation of that, Wireframe is a good choice.
Now, the next one down this is Adoptive resolution which is also introduced back with the main 3D functionality of After Effects. This allows you to structure the timeline but as it gets a little bit more congested with memory After Effects reduces the resolution to try and keep up with the speed that you are dragging. So you will see here, is actually looking rather pixilated. Some of these pixels that shows are nice and clean.
You can see that these key frames are highlighted in green, has been loaded in to RAM just because we paused on them long enough but any other frame is having to decrease the resolution in order to keep up, and even then, is not really keeping up. Well, that is because of the preferences. Remember that going down to the fast preview preferences here, the adoptive resolution quality is sent to a quarter that is as far down in quality as after effects will go in order to keep up.
If it is not keeping well enough, you may even have to go down to an eight of the quality which may make the preview speed up to keep up with you but the quality is going to look even worse. So, this is something you may want to play with but is definitely not the ideal resolution if you have OpenGL. So, then we get back down to the OpenGL options themselves.
Now OpenGL interactive or actually turn on OpenGL only when we start to interact with the scene, so when nothing is moving or selected, or being adjusted, we are seeing a finished render at full quality of that frame especially if we have full set here. However, if we click and drag and start moving through the scene, you will see that even though everything is retaining a high quality in this case, and especially in this case it is starting to be sluggish again. Well, the reason for that is, we have so many 3D layers here containing movies.
Every single one of these planets is actually rotates in 3D. You can see the textures are moving across the scene. Well, all of these layers can actually be freeze framed to make it even faster. We come back over to the files preview; you will see that now the OpenGL is turned on. We have an option to freeze the layer contents, that means just show the frame of ea
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services