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is AE capable of rendering single-frame high-quality stills for prints?
Hey guys,
For a design project I am creating a 3-part poster series. Now, they are obviously stills so they will be made primarily in Photoshop and Illustrator. I would like to add some effects such as particles to simulate a dusty/atmospheric look, but as far as my photoshop knowledge spans, I am not capable of creating the look I have in mind. However, in After Effects I am confident that I will be able to make this look, so I would like to know whether After Effects is able to import in a high quality image and render it out as a single frame after the effects have been applied.
My posters will be A3 size and because they are for print it needs to be 300 dpi. Any suggestions as to how AE could render out an A3 300dpi image would be appreciated. Is this a good/bad way achieving this look for a still?
Thanks in advance, would really like to know! 🙂
Eugene
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9 Replies
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It’s for a school project so that’s a no unfortunately. Thanks anyway. Anyone else know of a possible workaround to this? Have yet to try this but I was thinking export it as a TIFF sequence and make my comp custom resolution to suit the A3 size, and just pick out the frame from the TIFF sequence that looks best. Please point out if this sounds unworkable….or a better method of doing the same thing.
Thanks in advance,
Eugene
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If you want to do your design work in After Effects and then prepare the image for print in Photoshop, consider creating a PSD file from After Effects. After Effects can directly output to other still image formats, too. That’s essentially what is done for each frame of a movie that’s going back out to film. See “Rendering and exporting still images and still-image sequences”. You’ll just be rendering and exporting an extremely short composition.
I do know people who do their print work in After Effects. When I’ve asked why, the response has usually boiled down to either familiarity with After Effects or a preference for the non-destructive nature of all of the effects.
Regarding the dpi issue: After Effects has no sense of dpi. There are no inches in video, just pixels. So, just make sure that you’re working in After Effects with a composition that has the pixel dimensions (width and height) that you need. So, for a 300dpi output to A3 size (11.7inx16.5in), that’s about 3,500×5,0000 pixels. That’s a reasonable size for a single plate for After Effects to work with—on the same order as a 4K cinema frame. So, yeah, you should be able to do this.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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your plan should work fine. i use AFX for print work all the time and for the same reasons. your comp for 11×17 inches@300dpi would be 3300×5100 with square pixels. they’re big but AFX is perfectly capable of dealing with artwork and comps this size. speed of handing will depend on your machine/ram, etc. but you can work at 1/4 screen size and you can render out at the full rez as tiff, pict, or even as photoshop layers if you want to keep everything separate and want to go back into pshop for some reason.
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Oops, like he said. Didn’t see that. Todd’s got the right info and sizes.
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Thank you both Todd and Ronaldo for the very helpful info. So glad to hear it’s possible! Was stressing that I might have to make something in Photoshop that would have looked much worse and would be more tedious to create. Thanks for that :). That information is like gold to me.
Cheers,
Eugene
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Hey Eugene
I have done exactly what you are doing -Im not a big photoshop guy either but Todd is right -just set your comp in AE the exact pixels you need your poster to be(for that big you better have a lot of ram)
when you are done creating -export as a single frame -I think I exported as a PNG file (only reason is that with PNG-you can export single layers and keep the alpha channel. Some of my effects i was using weren’t blending together right so I exported individual layers and composited them back together in Photoshop.
once you take your file back in to photoshop after exporting form AE -change your color space for your poster to CMYK -make final adjustments- set image to 300 dpi (ONLY change your DPI not your PIXELS)
save as a JPEG and your done.
The result you get is this poster all done in AEcs3
https://www.mattstoltzmedia.com/photos/indianapacemates09.jpg
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Hey Eugene
I have done exactly what you are doing -Im not a big photoshop guy either but Todd is right -just set your comp in AE the exact pixels you need your poster to be(for that big you better have a lot of ram)
when you are done creating -export as a single frame -I think I exported as a PNG file (only reason is that with PNG-you can export single layers and keep the alpha channel. Some of my effects i was using weren’t blending together right so I exported individual layers and composited them back together in Photoshop.
once you take your file back in to photoshop after exporting form AE -change your color space for your poster to CMYK -make final adjustments- set image to 300 dpi (ONLY change your DPI not your PIXELS)
save as a JPEG and your done.
The result you get is this poster all done in AEcs3
https://www.mattstoltzmedia.com/photos/indianapacemates09.jpg
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Wow thank you! And thanks to all for your helpful input. It’s great knowing that I wont be restricted to using just illustrator and photoshop in future projects. This is awesome! Feels like I’m open to so much more now.
I did a test render on my macbook osx 2.4GHz with 2 gigs Ram – not a full A3 3000×5000 px but just a 3000×3000 render from Cinema 4D to see how it went. AE handled the large comp size without crashing thank god, and when exported as Photoshop layers everything went well as described. AE didn’t seem to struggle at all, hopefully when I do my full 3000×5000 pixel renders AE handles it smoothly. Should do, fingers crossed.
Again, thanks a million. Hearing that this is possible is music to my ears. Future projects will be so much fun now!
Cheers guys, Eugene
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Hi all,
I realize this is an old thread but it stills show up on top in google search and I found this very helpful and still applicable today.
So to anyone reading this, yes- you can work in AE to do print but you need to figure out the ratio of inches (and DPI) to pixels. In other words, “8.5 x 11 @ 150 DPI” means a different pixel amount compared to “8.5 x 11 @ 300 DPI”. I found this simple website to convert the inches to pixels / pixels to inches for you, though Photoshop can certainly do it too.
https://auctionrepair.com/pixels.html
I’m so comfortable with design in AE that I personally find it a lot easier to work in it where possible. It’s not a great habit, I must admit- both Photoshop and Illustrator are designed for this. But, whatever gets the job done!
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