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

Using multiple output modules - After Effects Tutorial

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

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Using multiple output modules

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- One thing that I see happen a lot is that people need to deliver multiple files to satisfy the demands of a job, and this might be the fact that you want to make a draft quality for posting to the web and a final quality, or you have different types of outputs that the client's requested. Now, what most people do is simply render the file multiple times, but I'm going to tell you to sop doing that because it is a huge, and I repeat huge waste of time. What you need to realize is that the bulk of processing and after-effects happens not in the output module but during the render portion. This is where things like the frame quality are being processed, the actual information, such as the bit depth and the color space, and the interlacing, and all of the effects and the motion blur, and that takes a lot of time. What doesn't take a lot of time is the actual writing of the file to disc, and if needed, applying a codec or a small change to that written file. Now, let me show you this. If you take a look here, you'll see that an output module is assigned, and remember, that output module is using a codec, a compressor/decompressor, to the frame itself. Basically what it's doing is modifying the written file. It starts off as a lossless full quality frame and then the codec is applied. It likely makes it smaller or puts it into a format that your editing system can actually use. Now the good news is that that process is not time consuming. In fact, you can make multiple versions when you output. Let's go ahead and delete these two here. What I see happen a lot is that people just duplicate an item and render it multiple times. But if you look very closely here, you might have missed a very important button, which is the plus button here that adds an additional output module. So now if you need to make another format, you could. Maybe I want to make a version here that is a different setting, so I can click on this and say oh, I want to make a QuickTime movie and the client also wants that in the Avid DNxHD codec, and they requested that as a 10-bit file. There we go. And no alpha channel, everything else is fine, and I can click okay. Look that over there, looks good. I'll click okay, and remember, if needed, we can say make template, and I'll call that Avid DnxHR 10-bit and click okay. Maybe you need another file. Just click the plus button and it will add another output module. Now, you'll notice once you have more than one output module, if you decide to get rid of one, you can click the minus button to remove it. Remember, every single file is going to need a name and a path, so you'll have to click here, telling it where you want to actually write the files. But you can add multiple output modules. Let's go ahead and save these temporarily to the desktop, and I'll make a new folder called outputs. There we go, and we'll save that file there and this one as well, except I'll add the extension Avid to this one. There we go, and you see that both are there. Let's add one more here and create an image sequence. Now I suggest if you're going to make an image sequence, that you be sure to put that into a sub-folder. You'll notice here that it's automatically checked to write all of those files into a sub-folder and you can name that there. This way it doesn't put tons of files loose. And we'll click save. You'll now see that we have one render setting, but three output modules here, which gives us a lot of great control. Now that we've got this all set up, what we can easily do is just click the render button. But before I do that, I'm going to expand this so you can see what's happening. Now we have some additional detail of what's going on during each stage. Let's click the render button. You'll see that it's going through and you can watch what's happening, but notice that the different files down here are writing quite quickly. You see what's happening here and it's going through very quickly, rendering the individual source frames and then down here it's just writing those different files. You can track exactly what's happening and you'll notice that it's going to be significantly faster to render out multiple versions of a file without having to actually do all of the different rendering that's happening up here. The render settings is where the time consumption occurs. The output module is generally extremely fast, and so taking the time to actually just write this here to different formats is a much better option than rerendering the composition multiple times.

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