From the course: After Effects Guru: Work Faster and Boost Performance

Sending items to AME for background rendering - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Guru: Work Faster and Boost Performance

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Sending items to AME for background rendering

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- While rendering with After Effects is a fact of life, you can actually kind of avoid it. You see, when you render in After Effects, you're locked out of doing other things. What that means is is that the render queue takes over and you have to stop working. Now, you can switch over to another application, maybe jump into Photoshop or Illustrator to design some assets, catch up on your email, et cetera, but sometimes it's kind of annoying to be locked out, particularly if you don't have multiple computers at your disposal. For this reason the ability to send to Adobe Media Encoder, or AME, can be quite useful. So, for example, if we open up a project here using the same one as before, you'll notice that under the composition menu I can choose not just to add to the render queue but to add to Adobe Media Encoder, and what this does is sends the project over to Media Encoder. Now, if the composition itself was selected, it will send just that one comp. When you first do this, it may appear that nothing is happening for a while. That's because Media Encoder may need to launch, but, once you've successfully sent something over and the program has launched, it will start to show up over in the project. Again, it can take a second for that handoff to occur, but you see it just popped up there. That's because it's doing a few things under the hood. So avoid the temptation to keep sending it over multiple times and give it a moment to handoff. Additionally, you can manually add things to the render queue here by clicking the plus button. This allows you to navigate to assets that you want to bring in. For example, let's go to the project file here, and I'll navigate to that After Effects project and click open. What this does is then scans the After Effects projects for all of the available compositions, and you'll see that you can select one or multiple projects. Just hold down the control or the shift key and then click okay, and it adds that in. This is a lot like what the After Effects render queue is. You'll notice, for example, that there's a popup list. What's different is that the Adobe Media Encoder supports many formats that After Effects does not. For example, you can easily make an H.264 or H.265 file directly for sharing to the web, social media, or a site like YouTube. You can also create files for Blue-ray or a wide range of other formats including RAW video. As you see here, there are lots of choices. So, for example, if I wanted it to go to the web, I could choose H.264 and then from the preset list here choose a wide range of settings including something like Vimeo 720p high-def. Or perhaps I wanted to render something out to a different format for broadcast like an MXF OP1a file, which is commonly used in the broadcast environment. You'll see here from the preset list that it adjusts and you have different choices depending upon the format, in this case, Sony options that are going to work very well if that's your infrastructure. Again, different choices depending upon what you select. If I choose the H.265 file, it might temporarily lock me out as it installs the codec for the first time, but now from the preset list you'll find great choices available for different thigns like HD, 4K, and 8K workflows, and you see that it'd adjust. Once you got this loaded, it's very simple. I would just suggest that you choose file, save queue. This is going to allow you to capture the files and the settings in the queue in case you crash the program or accidentally quit. This way what's loaded is stored, and you can come back to it if needed.

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