How to work on big projects?

[Walter Soyka]

A few general words of advice:

Break big projects down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

Stay organized as you go along. Do not ever, even once, put a file on your desktop. Build a folder structure for your project and stick to it — the files go where they belong the first time, both on your hard disk and in your AEP. Name your comps. Name your layers. Think of a naming convention that is meaningful to you and use it as you work.

Don’t even think of cheating — “I’ll just do this one thing quick and dirty, then I’ll go back in and clean it up” — no one ever goes back and cleans it up, and it will just bite you later on. Do it right the first time so you never have to do it again. When you see you’ve done something wrong, fix it on the spot. Otherwise, it will only get “wrong-er” the longer the project goes.

Familiarize yourself with the concept of technical debt [link], and think about how it applies to motion design: basically, choosing an easy solution instead of the “right” solution early in the process requires you to spend way more time dealing with it later on.

A few Ae-specific words of advice:

Use Increment and Save. All the time. See my tips on safeguarding Ae projects [link].

Use proxies [link] for heavy comps. Remember that a proxy doesn’t have to be low-res; you can do a full-quality proxy and use it in your final renders, too.

Check out the After Effects docs’ Improve performance page [link] for other good tips on speeding up your workflow.

Good luck!

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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