ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS

Making it Flashy

AFTER EFFECTS IS A monster application, capable of everything from the simplest title sequences and credit rolls to more advanced particle effects and other crazy forms of media content.

It’s quite daunting at first, but with a few tutorials and a quick YouTube search, you’ll soon be on your way to creating impressive intros, transitions, and outros. There’s little else like it at the consumer level.

Coming from Adobe, its computational prowess is similar to that of Premiere Pro. However, unlike Prem, which doesn’t benefit from access to more memory beyond 16GB, After Effects takes advantage of as much memory as you can throw at it. Adobe recommends a minimum of 2GB per core, HyperThreading aside. So, in a 16core system like ours, you should have a minimum of 32GB. Extra memory doesn’t hurt, though, and once you perform your final render, the more memory you have, the faster you can export your final effects.

Memory is shared between all of Adobe’s apps—you can run multiple apps at the same time, exporting from Premiere Pro, applying effects and color corrections in After Effects, and outputting via Adobe’s Media Encoder on a schedule, and you can allocate sufficient memory to each app (configurable within each program’s preferences). In this case, we’re allocating 16GB to Premiere, 96GB to After Effects, and the remaining 16GB of memory to the OS and all our other background applications.

After Effects doesn’t use a scratch disk, but relies on a “Disk Cache.” Usually allocated to C:\Users\XXX\ AppData\Local\ Temp, you can allocate this to a specific disk, and increase its size for smoother previews and renders.