Previewing - After Effects Tutorial

After you have been working in your composition for a while, there comes a point where you will want to preview it and then eventually render it to disk. There are a few different ways to preview. The most obvious way is usually not the way you want to do it. For example, if you just press the Spacebar, After Effects will start calculating frames from the Current Time Indicator forward, then attempt to play back the calculated frames in real time. The problem with this is that it calculates your entire composition, and if you have a really long comp--maybe a few minutes--you may not want to play through the whole thing. You may want to play through only an isolated segment. The better way to preview is to make sure your Preview panel is open, reveal enough of it to see this Preview button in the upper-right corner, and select RAM Preview. The shortcut is pressing the 0 key on the extended numeric keypad. This also tells After Effects: calculate all of the frames, store them into RAM…