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Making the Background Transparent in AE 5.5?
I’m new to After Effects. Coming for Apple Motion. When you make a new project and/or make a new composition, how do you make the background so it is transparent, so when I bring it into my editing program that the background is not visible? The background is black by default. Is this done when you make a new comp, or when you render?
I was told by someone in the Adobe forum to set the render settings to RGB+Alpha and ProRes4444. That did not work.
My thinking is that you must have tell the background it is going to be transparent or Alpha when you create a new project or composition. In Apple’s Motion you are able to tell it that the background is to be transparent. Where is that in After Effects?
Mac Pro, Lion, AE 5.5 -
4 Replies
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The background is transparent of every comp you create. It’s only showing black because that’s the color you told it to show when you created the comp. (You can change it at any time from the comp settings.) The comp’s background color has no effect on the final render.
At the bottom of your comp window is a button to toggle the comp background color on or off. If it’s off, you’ll see the checkerboard background that means transparency.
Rendering as ProRes with RGB+Alpha should give you transparency. You just might need to tell your editing program that it’s transparent.
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I toggled the transparency grid button like you said and the background stayed black. I made another comp and this time it went from black to checkerboard. Rendered it and dropped it into FCP X and all is right with the world once again.
Thanks for your help with this one, Michael.
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[Michael Szalapski] “The comp’s background color has no effect on the final render.”
This is not entirely true. The composition’s background color is the color that the alpha will be premultiplied with if you choose to render to RGB+Alpha premultiplied.
Darby Edelen
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[Russ Blaise] “I toggled the transparency grid button like you said and the background stayed black.”
Sounds like you have a composition sized black solid somewhere at the bottom of your layer stack.
Darby Edelen
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