Exploring the Render Queue

- [Instructor] The Render Queue is the last stop in your After Effects workflow. It's here that you can create movies, image sequences, pre-renders and more. Depending on your needs, you can have multiple outputs of the same composition. Here we're explore different parts of the render queue. So here's the composition I'd like to put off to disk, and it's the flying camera through a field of pictures. And in order to render this, we need to add it to the render queue. And we can do that one of two ways. So we can select our composition here in the timeline, or down here in the Project window and go up to Composition, Add to Render Queue.

And by doing that you see that we have a new render item in our Render Queue. You can alternately click and drag one or more compositions from the Project window into the Render Queue. And then we'll add new render items accordingly. I'll delete this. And the first thing we want to look at is the Render Settings. And this is going to define overall the quality of our output. We can click on Best Settings and go in and change these setting manually. We have the options to do Best, Draft or Wireframe so if you're trying to do some kind of lower res QuickTime movie to preview.

You can certainly do it that way along with the Resolution, currently it's set to Full, our 1280 by 720 comp, or any variation of that. So if we wanted to do a quarter res, we can do 320 by 180 instead. The other important one here is the Time Span. Currently it's set to Work Area Only, so if we had work areas predefined in our composition, we can choose to render out just that duration or the duration of the entire comp. So I'll say Length of Comp. Alternately you can customize it here if you have a Custom Time Span that you would like to input.

I'll say okay. And down here we have the Output Module. Now this is the type of movie or output that we're going to create. And we have some presets here for audio only, QuickTime movies, or image sequences if we like. Let's go ahead and customize this. We'll click on the word Lossless We have the options to do QuickTime, any image sequences like Photoshop or TIFF Sequences if we like. I'm going to stick with QuickTime. And over here under Format Options, this is what allows us to choose which Codec we want After Effects to render with. So clicking this list down will show you a list of all the available Codecs that are installed in your system.

Choose which one's best for you. I'm going to choose ProRes. I'll say okay. And we also have the option here to render out RGB, our Alpha channel if we like and if our Codec supports it, we can do an embedded Alpha with our movie. If you have any audio that's enabled inside your compositions, After Effects will automatically include that audio. If you don't, or if you want to not include audio, you can select Audio Output Off here. We'll say okay. And over here we have the file location. So this is where we define where onto disk we want to render our output.

So I'm going to click here and now I'm just going to target the Desktop and we'll say okay. We have the option to rename it here, but I will leave that as is and show you that we have these naming tokens. So let's twirl this down and you see that we have the ability to name the file output the same as our comp name. We can choose to tell it to name it the Comp Name and the Codec, so if I click this, you'll see that we have Master plus the Codec at the end here. Alternately we can add in our own Custom tokens.

So down here at the very end I have the Comp name plus the compressor. I'm going to do underscore and add in the Frame Rate. So let's say okay and you can see that it adds in the Frame Rate at the very end. So within this one render item, we're currently set to have one output module and that's going to render out a QuickTime, and it's also going to render out this one movie here at that predefined location. I can also render out another output module. And so this is kind of cool. We can set, within one render item, another output.

So if I wanted to do an image sequence if I wanted. Let's go ahead and just click this and go JPEG Sequence, and the Format Options, we'll leave that, sure, that's fine. We'll say okay. And this time I'm going to tell it to render out to a subfolder called Master jpeg, let's go ahead and name it what it is. And we'll say okay. And so now within one render, I'm going to output a QuickTime movie and a JPEG Sequence. And I could keep adding as much as I need, just by hitting this plus button.

If we wanted to keep working inside of After Effects, we can certainly tell it to Render in Adobe Media Encoder instead. And so this will launch Adobe Media Encoder and we can keep working inside of After Effects as this render item renders. So otherwise we can just click Render, and as we do, you'll see that we have our current time, where we are, how much time's elapsed and how much time remains, and by twirling down our current render, we have all the nitty-gritty details here. And then we have that final sound of, Hey this is done.

Let's go ahead and go queue up our folder onto disk and we can click the Output Module down here to reveal where on disk it is in case we open up this project 10 months down the line and say, Hey, where did we render this out to? The Output Module remembers that and you can click on here to open up that file path. And so now you see we have a QuickTime movie, and we also have the JPEG image sequence here. So by defining the quality, resolution and file location, we saw how to use the Render Queue to create finalized versions of our compositions to disk using the Render Queue.