Preparing Your Workspace


For better or worse, the After Effects 6.5 user interfacelike all of the versions that preceded itis heavily based on palettes and menus. When you open After Effects for the first time, the interface itself doesn't tell you a whole lot about how to work with the program (Figure 1.1); you see an empty Project window and a few palettes (Tools, Info, Audio, Time Controls, and Effects and Presets, to be precise).

Figure 1.1. The default After Effects user interface implies little, if anything, about how you use it.


What you don't see are the areas of the programthe Timeline, Composition, and Layer windows, not to mention the Effect Controls window and Render Queuewhere you will do most of your work. (Meanwhile, you could have a ten-year feature film career using After Effects and never once use the Audio palette.)

Also, if you're on a Mac, you may see other open programs or your desktop in the background; on Windows, you should see only a gray background field (and if you have two monitors, you'll see the field and any windows on only one of them when you begin). What happens next is that you begin the sequential work of creating a shot in After Effectsmoving from the Project window to the Composition window and timeline, applying effects, masks, and so on, and rendering the result. You open lots of windows and palettes (Figure 1.2), move them around as needed, and maybe start to feel like you're spending as much time moving things around as you are getting work done.

Figure 1.2. By the time you're ready to render a complex shot, After Effects may look more like thisassuming you're being tidy!


None of the many windows and palettes has a default position, and if you go around to ten different artists' desks, you'll see these tools splayed out differently on each monitor. With too little screen real estateand even with two monitors there never seems to be enoughit can quickly become a bit of a mess, really. There is no perfect, universal solution to this problem, but there are steps that you can take to introduce balance and flow to the interface.

Setting (and Resetting) Your Workspace

Workspaces are an underused feature in After Effects. Everyone knows that you can use the Tab key in Adobe applications to make palettes appear and disappear, but not so many people know that you can make all of your windows snap into place so that the palettes that you actually need remain visible. Some users dislike and avoid this feature before they get very far with it, partly because if you don't take the necessary steps to set it up the way you like it, it's not so helpful.

Under the Window menu, choose Workspace; you'll see it offers three default workspaces and the ability to save more of your own. If you haven't set a workspace before and your screen has become a bit of a mess, you can always choose Window > Workspace > One Comp View to reset the location of your windows and palettes to their defaults (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3. One Comp View is like a panic button for resetting your UI if things get too far out of hand.


The other default options, Two Comp Views and Four Comp Views, are intended for use with the 3D features of After Effects to view a 3D scene from more than one point of view.


How do you get rid of a tab that shares a palette with a tab you want to keep? Simple: Click and drag the unwanted tab away from its palette, which automatically creates a new palette window with just that tab. Now click the X button at the top to close it.


In most cases, however, you want to do better than that, and the way to improve things is to set your own workspace. This means that you set all of the windows and views the way you are likely to want them most of the time, according to the following guidelines, and save this layout as a custom workspace of your own. Here's how:

  • Consolidate palettes. In most cases you don't even need Audio, and Time Controls is not so essential either once you have it set the way you want it and know the shortcut for creating a RAM preview (the 0 key on your numeric keypad). I recommend pulling the Info tab off of the palette with Audio, and dragging Tools and Effects & Presets to that same palette (Figure 1.4). If you prefer, make Info the only palette in your workspace, and activate the other palettes as needed using shortcuts (Ctrl/Cmd+1 through Ctrl/Cmd+9, listed in order in the Window menu).

    Figure 1.4. For the most part, you can be perfectly happy with this single, three-tabbed palette, with Info forward most of the time you are working.


  • Open, resize, and position your most frequently used windows. The Project window is always open but not always used; most of your work is done in the Timeline, Composition, Layer, and Effects Control windows, so open all of these. With an empty project open, create a composition that is the size you normally work at. Add a solid to that composition and apply any effect to that solidnow you have the windows you need to position. Give prominence to the Composition window because that's where your focus is; note that your choice of magnification will be recorded as part of the workspace. Now leave as much space as possible for the timeline. Position the Effects Control window and palettes adjacent to the Composition window (Figure 1.5).

    Figure 1.5. Working at film resolution on one monitor means you'll be zooming in and out of this UI setup. This workspace provides a clean default to return to when you need to see all of the palettes necessary to properly edit the composition.


  • Save your new workspace. Choose Window > Workspace > Save Workspace, give your workspace a name, and then click OK. The name now appears in the Workspace menu, and you can return to that layout anytime your user interface needs to be cleaned up.

Workspaces can get you out of tight spots; if some portion of your user interface seems to be missing, it may have moved to an area of the display where you can no longer click and drag it out, particularly on Windows. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, switching to a saved or default workspace is about the only solution.


One more step you should consider is turning off Auto Resize for the Effects Control window (toggle it off from the window's wing menu). I find a fixed length and position preferable to a window that resizes itself to cover other windows. While you're at it, you can turn off Animation Presets for a less-cluttered UI (Figure 1.6).

Figure 1.6. For a clean, consistent user interface, turn both of these options off.


Create as many workspaces as you needone with a dominant timeline, another with a dominant Composition window, and variations for one- or two-monitor setups if you have that option.

A Second Monitor Is Useful

Adding a second monitor is a little luxury you might consider affording yourself if you budget your own equipment (and you might request it if you don't, considering how inexpensive it typically is). You can use it for user interface elements only and keep the Composition window on your main screen. Figure 1.7 shows the kind of layout possible with a two-monitor setup. Generally, one monitor is your carefully calibrated master monitor on which your color and intensity are carefully adjusted, while the other monitor can be any old monitor you have around, holding only your timeline, Project window and other informational palettes.

Figure 1.7. Ahh, room to breathe thanks to two monitors


Beware that you can get into certain kinds of trouble with a two-monitor setup on Windows, particularly if the two monitors are not the same size. For example, you must stretch the main After Effects window to cover both monitors, which means you can end up with inaccessible areas of the window if the two monitors are not the same pixel aspect). Furthermore, the application sometimes will snap back to occupying only one monitorfor example, if it is minimizedyet there will still be hidden contents of the project in the no-longer-visible area. Luckily, in all such cases, resetting your workspace will allow you a clear view and a fresh start.


Most professional laptops will drive a second monitor right out of the box, and with desktop computers it may mean only adding a video card or changing settings on the one you have. Because the monitor doesn't have to be spectacular, you can go for an inexpensive, even small one (and gamers are an excellent source for cheap, late model display cards because they upgrade theirs constantly). Where I live, used CRT monitors are often offered for free as everyone switches to flat panel displays.

Setting Preferences and Project Settings

While you're getting your workspace more comfortable, take some time to optimize your Preferences and Project Settings for the way you worknot the way the default settings thought you would probably work. Specifically, you may want to make these adjustments right off the bat:

  • Preferences > General: The default is 20. Somehow, at this level, I occasionally run out of undos, whereas if it's set somewhere between 30 and 50, I never notice the limit. Setting it to the maximum value of 99 won't bring the application to a grinding halt, but it may shorten the amount of time available in RAM previews.

  • Preferences > Display: Check on Show Rendering in Progress in Info Palette & Flowchart. This is absolutely one of the Info palette's most useful features: It allows you to see what After Effects is doing anytime you are waiting for a frame to update (Figure 1.8).

    Figure 1.8. You are missing out on very helpful informationshowing what After Effects is doing at any given moment while creating a preview frame in the lower half of the Info paletteif you leave this preference at default.


  • Preferences > Display: Go ahead, set Disable Thumbnails in Project Window. If you never look at the thumbnails at the top of the Project window, you might as well disable the feature. Otherwise, be prepared for situations in which you wait for it to update. If you're working on film resolution files, for example, you can expect delays while you wait for those updating thumbnail images.

  • Preferences > User Interface Colors: You may wish to darken the UI using the User Interface Brightness slider (Figure 1.9). In the same dialog, consider turning on Cycle Mask Colors so that multiple masks applied to a layer automatically have different colors.

    Figure 1.9. On my machine, the After Effects user interface is more pleasing to the eye about two shades darker than the default. On a Mac, which does not let you set system user interface colors, you may even want to go further.


  • Preferences > Memory & Cache: If you can dedicate a disk with the default 2 GB (or more) of free space, check Enable Disk Cache. This adds swap space for After Effects beyond what is available in your physical memory (RAM). Any part of the pipeline that would take longer to re-render than recover will be stored in the cache (Figure 1.10). More on this in the "Caching and Previewing" section of this chapter.

    Figure 1.10. You know Enable Disk Cache is working when you see a blue line in your Timeline window.


  • File > Project Settings (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K/Cmd+Option+Shift+K): Yes, there are yet more preferences on a project-by-project basis (Figure 1.11). If you're going to be working on film projects, change the Timecode Base to 24 fps. It's also standard practice to work in Frames rather than Timecode, so check that. Color depth can be toggled in the Project window (and is explained in depth in Chapter 11, "Issues Specific to Film and HDR Images").

    Figure 1.11. Project Settings are an extension of preferences. They are located in a different part of the UI (under the File menu) because of the potential that they must change on a project-to-project basis. Some users, of course, will always use the same Project Settings.


Digging in Deep: Editing the Prefs File

My top recommendation of a preference to change isn't even found in the After Effects user interface. You must locate the Preferences file itself and edit it. The name of the file is Adobe After Effects 6.5 Prefs.txt, and you generally can find it in the C:\Documents and Settings\"username"\Application Data\Adobe\After Effects\Prefs folder (Windows) or Users/"username"/Library/Preferences (Mac). You can also just search on the filename.

Open the file with a text editing program that doesn't add headers, such as Notepad for Windows or Textedit for Macs; avoid Microsoft Word for this purpose. Search for Drop Footage At Time Zero. Now change the number that follows the equals sign from 00 to 01. Touch nothing else, save, and quit. Any footage you add to a composition now automatically starts at the beginning of the comp rather than the current time.

This can get you out of all kinds of unforeseen difficulty with effects work; you won't see layers suddenly and unexpectedly pop on in the middle of a composition, and you're saved the trouble of dragging them to the beginning of the composition.

Maybe someday this will even be the default, who knows?


To restore Preferences to their defaults, hold down Alt+Ctrl+Shift/Option+Cmd+Shift immediately after launching After Effects, and click OK on the prompt.



Adobe After Effects 6. 5 Studio Techniques
Adobe After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques
ISBN: 0321316207
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 156

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