[Steve Skazenski]

Open up the Info palette before rendering. Sometimes it will display a message about not having enough ram for all the cores and that it’s disabling multiprocessing.

[Steve Skazenski]

The newest MacBook Pros (and MacBooks and the new wireless keyboard) no longer have the fn numpad.

You can modify the keyboard shortcuts file found here:
~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/8.0/Adobe After Effects 8.0 Shortcuts

Search for “Preview” (with quotes).

(Pad0) is the number pad zero key, try changing that to something else, maybe an F key?

[Steve Skazenski]

Do you have any shy layers?

[Steve Skazenski]

Try searching Max’s help for “Render Elements”, it should be one of the tabs in the Render window.

[Steve Skazenski]

I would render it out as QuickTime Animation and then bring it into another program and export as H.264 from there. I use VisualHub for most of my compression needs, its free sibling iSquint only encodes MPEG-4/H.264 and I find it makes much better looking files at lower bitrates than QuickTime and After Effects’ H.264 encoders.

iSquint is marketed as an iPod/iTunes encoder, but you can open the Advanced window for more options than iPod presets.

It’s an extra step(s) than just picking a different Output Module, but I find that the results are worth it.

[Steve Skazenski]

It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but after you add everything to your render queue you can select multiple Output Modules and when change one, you will change them all.

Example: Click on the text “Output Module” (not the underline module itself) of the first comp in your queue. Then click on the Output Module text of the last comp while holding Shift, this will select all of the Outputs between the first and last. Then change the output module to a template and all of them should change.

At least this way you don’t have to click and change thirteen times.

[Steve Skazenski]

You could also select the comp, File > Reduce Project and save the project with a new name.

[Steve Skazenski]

You should use proxies instead. Prerender your nested comp, set the rendered file as its proxy. Then you can toggle the proxy on/off as needed, or open the nested comp and modify it and then delete the proxy.

[Steve Skazenski]

Nope… AE CS3 (8) is the first Universal version. Running it through Rosetta shouldn’t be unbearably slow with a really fast machine like you must have. Though obviously running AE natively would be screaming fast…

Even while under Rosetta, I think it will still try to use your extra processor cores, but I’m not positive. You can check by running Activity Monitor and seeing if AE’s usage goes above 100% (with a 4-core Mac Pro, 400% is the max, and presumably 800% on an 8-core Mac).

[Steve Skazenski]

FYI, AE 6.5 runs in emulation (Rosetta) on Intel Macs like the Mac Pro. This will slow you down significantly.