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Want to speed up your Adobe After Effects workflow? In this post, we share a video tutorial that shows you a trick to being more efficient: background rendering in After Effects.

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One quick way to kill editing momentum is to start a render. It’s necessary, but can be painful waiting for your motion graphics or video editing app to process your project. In the past, I’ve always twiddled my thumbs while rendering in After Effects (or jump over to a different program). Now, here’s a better way.

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In this video by DigitalSandwich.net, you’ll see how to use Adobe Media Encoder to do background rendering in After Effects. After saving your After Effects project file, open up Encoder. Bring the AE file into Encoder and target a composition to render. It’s as simple as that.

Note however, background rendering in After Effects (using Encoder) will not be as fast as if you were actually rendering in AE. Glen from DigitalSandwich explains that Adobe products place the highest priority on the application that is at the forefront of your system (the one you are actively using). So, if you’re working in AE while you’re rending your After Effects project in the background using Encoder, After Effects will get a higher percentage of your available RAM. The trade off here is that youre actually able to keep working. In that case, I’ll take the slower render speed.

If you want to see how to do background rendering in After Effects check out this quick and informative video tutorial:

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1. Setting a Comp's Background Color

Ae Background

Setting a Comp’s Background Color

Free Background Effects

The default background color for compositions is black; however, you can change the background to any color you choose. Regardless of what color you make it, the background becomes transparent when you output the composition as a still-image sequence or a movie with an alpha channel. Similarly, if you use the composition as a layer in another composition, the background of the nested composition becomes transparent (Figure 4.10) (see “Nesting,” in Chapter 16). And as with the Footage panel (see Chapter 3, “Managing Footage”) and the Layer panel, you can also view the background as a checkerboard pattern, called a transparency grid.

Figure 4.10 The background of the comp (top image) becomes transparent when nested into another comp (middle image). The result is the bottom image.

To choose a background color for your composition:

1. Select a composition in the Project panel, or activate a composition in a Composition or Timeline panel.

2. Choose Composition > Background Color (Figure 4.11), or press Shift-Command-B (Ctrl-B).

   Figure 4.11 Choose Composition > Background Color to access the Background Color dialog.

   A Background Color dialog appears.

3. In the Background Color dialog, do one of the following (Figure 4.12):

   • Click the color swatch to open the color picker.
   • Click the eyedropper, which allows you to select a color by clicking anywhere on the screen, including the desktop.

   Figure 4.12 Click the eyedropper to pick a screen color, or click the swatch to open a color picker.

4. Click OK to close the Background Color dialog.

   The selected composition uses the background color you specified.