A Video Editing and Photography Blog

Recently, a super cleaver Art Director – Tim Haldeen, showed me a tip that blew my mind for productivity in After Effects.  What if I could render out a comp and still continue to work on other comps on the same machine?  In addition, what if I could use all of my available ram?

This trick does just that – using the terminal (sorry windows guys) not sure what your solution is.

1. Add your comp to the render que – (command+m) “make movie” is how I remember.
2. Under “output module” select, under “format” – PNG Sequence (rather than quicktime movie).
3. Under “render settings” select the check box at the bottom for “skip existing files” – this is what allows you to maximize your ram usage on your single machine.
4. Save the project file
5. Open terminal
6. Find the file called “aerender” which should be in your applications folder for After Effects and drag it into the terminal window
7. Now hit space “-project” space, and drag your AEP into the window and hit return.

This begins the render!

Bonus Points if you want to use more than 2GB of ram here is what you do:

Copy/Paste the command into another terminal window and hit return.  Each time you do another window you are allocating another 2GB to the render.

Happy animating and designing!