Does having LAYER EFFECTS COMPS affect the speed of a composition?

[Steve Roberts]

Did you scale it down in AE or PS?
You should have scaled it down in PS before importing it into AE. If it’s a really large image (2000×2000 or whatever), it will slow down AE.

Check the help under “managing projects effectively”.

AFAIK, layer styles won’t slow things down to the extent that you describe.

Steve

[Daniel Haskett]

hi there

I scaled it down in AE, so does it not help scaling it down in AE because the project is about 3000×500 pixels..would that be the reason I guess? I just dont want to loose the quality of it, but I guess if I save another copy of it for use in AE thatd be better?

Thanks for your help

Dan

[Steven Bump]

I’ve been told that it’s best to not precomp at all – as it slows down the speed to one degree or another. But to NOT precomp makes the score on hella mess, and terribly hard to organize. Is this simply a trait of 5.5 that was addressed in subsiquent upgrades, or have I been misinformed ?

sbump@websterdg.com

[Steve Roberts]

Being told not to precomp (for speed) was bad advice. Ignore it.

Any extra calculation increases the processing time in any app, but in the case of precomping, it is negligible.

Steve

[Steve Roberts]

Big source layers in a comp take longer to render than small source layers.

A 2000×500 layer will take longer to render than a 200×50 layer.

If your final image size is PAL res, you gain no more quality by using a huge source and shrinking it down to PAL res, compared to using a PAL res image to start with.

Unless you’re flying a camera close to an image or doing an animated zoom-in, you don’t need to use a really big image. As I said, there’s no quality gain.

Really Daniel, try it both ways (shrink in PS, shrink in AE) and do a comparison test. Compare quality and render time.

Steve

[Daniel Haskett]

Hey Steve

Thanks for your help, much appreciated, I tried what you said and the quality seems to be quite poor when I bring down to PAL size so im just gonna live with long render times I think, thats what Ive been doing up til now, just wish there was a quicker way! I dont understand why when I bring the image size down in AE the quality is still good but in photoshop when i make the image size smaller the quality is poor. I guess less pixels.

Thanks again!

Dan

[Michael Del rossi]

Huh?
I do Film titles 1920X1080 and the only time I make files larger is if I need to pan them.

mdr

[Daniel Haskett]

Hi there

Its because I need to pan along it, my animation is lots of long panning shots basically. That is the problem!

Cheers

Dan

[Filip Vandueren]

Don’t forget about proxies !

If you use the smaller file as a proxy after effects will scale it up, and you can work much faster on your pans but with less detail.
When it’s time to render, use Best Quality, or disable the proxy and they will be ignored giving you the high quality.