Can a layer in AE be prepared for print?

[Jon Herron]

Under Composition in the tool bar menu, you have the option to ‘save a fram as’. You can save a PSHOp layer and it will save with the layers.
jon

[Zander]

well one thing yo could do is make your composition 1 frame long (ie only one image) and the size you would like. then from there make a movie (comand m on an apple, control m on a windows comp) render it as a photo jpeg, and render it out it will render 1 frame as a jpeg and there you go, what bugs me is there is no create or make freeze frame, like in fcp if there is i don’t know about it, which isn’t saying much

hope this helps and or makes sense

[Zander]

or you could do what jon said, becuase thats way easier

[Jon Herron]

Zander try,
Compostion> Save frame as. You can then select from TIFF, TARGA, JPEG, etc, and also the photoshop file which will give you all of the comps layers

[Jon Herron]

🙂 word

[Mike Clasby]

AE is a great for making Art Prints. I use both it and PhotoShop for Printing Art stuff, it’s great because it’s non-destructive. I only have PS7, not the newest, but AE does greatstuff. Like they said above just make a jpeg, or whatever your printer wants.

Hey, this sounds crazy, but Costco is a great place to print your pieces, $3.00 for an 11″x14″ or 12″x18″ print on Fuji Crystal archive paper (75 year stuff). Three dollars and the prints are great, you can even download the color profiles of each individual store’s printer (but it’s a little more than I need as my monitor and my local Costco printout are very close).

[Jon Herron]

Costco, great heads up yikesmikes. Never thought of that….

[Frank Manno]

Thanks everyone.

So what should my comp size be to start with? Do I start with the usual 720×576 (PAL) or should I start with something much higher since I’m going to save as JPEG for print?

-Frankie

[Mike Clasby]

Yeah, I had a piece at the local coffee shop that was made up of a series (24 total)12″x18″ prints that were offset from each other (and the wall)(3″ max). It was 12 1/2 feet long and 2 1/2 feet tall when assembled. I couldn’t have afforded prints from the usual places ($25 to $40 each) but had less than $100 in materials for the finished piece because of the $3 Costco Prints.

[Andrew Yoole]

AE is a fantastic tool for static design, because it is non-destructive (as mentioned above), resolution independent, and because of the wide variety of great plugins. 3D Invigorator and Shine accessible for graphic design work – great!

Working out image size is just simple math. Say you’re making a standard business card of 3.5 x 2 inches (I made that up) and you want to print at 300dpi (a standard printer resolution – personally, for something small like a business card I’d use 600dpi just coz I can!) Just do the multiplication:

3.5 inches X 300 dpi = 1050 pixels
2 inches X 300 dpi = 600 pixels.

Save frame as file, and then your done! Unless you need to further edit in Photoshop, I’d recommend NOT saving a layered PSD, as some of the blending modes can act kinda screwy.