Adobe After Effect Tutorial (Beginner to Pro). Adobe After Effect Tutorial (Beginner to Pro) An Example of What After Effects Can Do

There is hardly any software for visual video effects or, more simply, special effects like which you see in modern Hollywood blockbusters more popular than Adobe After Effects... For more than two decades, this powerful tool for compositing has firmly won a place of honor among many professionals in the video industry. After Effects is often called "video photoshop" because in fact, both programs have certain similarities, the only difference is that After Effects is designed for video. So, for those who are familiar with the basic principles of working in Photoshop, it will be much easier to master After Effects. In addition, they can work together, importing Photoshop projects into After Effects, you can use the power of both programs and implement the most ambitious ideas.

Adobe After Effects contains a rich toolkit for creating videos for a variety of purposes. These are not only effects for cinema, but also commercials, video screensavers, video presentations and slideshows without restrictions of creative imagination, moving and beautiful infographics, adding beautiful texts and transitions to video plots. For all this, After Effects provides users with a user-friendly interface, built-in easily customizable effects and transitions, support for third-party plugins

Starting from version CS5 - the program is entirely designed for only for 64 bit operating systems, which allows it to work several times faster than the 32-bit versions of previous versions. In addition, improved compatibility with other Adobe products. Various functions have been improved. Collaboration with Maxon Cinema 4D.

Full trial version for 30 days.

Updated: 19-04-2015 | Groups: ---

Tags: Adobe After Effects CC 2014 download trial version in Russian

After Effects overview

An example of What After Effects can do.

System requirements for After Effects.

The program is quite demanding on computer performance, especially if you are going to create a project in FullHD and apply a large number of effects and layers from Hd video. A multi-core processor (Core i5, i7, AMD FX series) is recommended for comfortable work. At least 8GB of RAM. Video card with CUDA support ( nvidia series GeForce GTX, Quadro)

Importing media into After Effects:

• Adobe Illustrator (AI, AI4, AI5, EPS, PS; continuous rasterization)
• Adobe PDF (PDF; first page only; continuous rasterization)
• Adobe Photoshop (PSD)
• Raster (BMP, RLE, DIB)
• Camera raw (TIF, CRW, NEF, RAF, ORF, MRW, DCR, MOS, RAW, PEF, SRF, DNG, X3F, CR2, ERF)
• Cineon / DPX (CIN, DPX; 10 bits per channel)
• Discrete RLA / RPF (RLA, RPF; 16 bits per channel; imports camera data)
• JPEG (JPG, JPE)
• Maya Camera Data (MA)
• Maya IFF (IFF, TDI; 16 bits per channel)
• OpenEXR (EXR, SXR, MXR; 32 bits per channel)

• PICT (PCT)
• Portable Network Graphics (PNG; 16 bits per channel)
• Radiance (HDR, RGBE, XYZE; 32 bpc)
• SGI (SGI, BW, RGB; 16 bits per channel)
• Softimage (PIC)
• Targa Sequences (TGA, VDA, ICB, VST)
• TIFF (TIF)
• FLV, F4V
• Media eXchange Format (MXF)
• MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4: MPEG, MPE, MPG, M2V, MPA, MP2, M2A, MPV, M2P, M2T, M2TS (AVCHD), AC3, MP4, M4V, M4A
• Video Layer PSD File (QuickTime Required)
• QuickTime (MOV; 16 bits per channel, QuickTime required)
• RED (R3D)
• SWF (imported with alpha channel. Audio is not saved. Interactive content and scripted animations are not saved. Animations defined by keyframes in the main top-level fragment are preserved)
• AVI, WAV; Mac OS requires QuickTime
• WMV, WMA, ASF; Windows only
• XDCAM HD and XDCAM EX

A detailed guide to working with the most powerful tool for creating animation and fantastic special effects. Thanks to step-by-step video tutorials, you will quickly master the functionality of Adobe After Effect and in a month you will be able to create such miracles that today seem incomprehensible to you. Start a wonderful journey through the fantastic world of special effects and after a couple of lessons you will realize that everything you can imagine can be created in After Effects.

Introducing After Effects

This course included 81 lessons, with a total duration of 22 hours 37 minutes. While watching the lectures, you will fully master the functionality and become a confident After Effects user. We recommend watching absolute beginners and amateurs who already have basic knowledge. Watch videos, delve into the lessons and consolidate the knowledge gained in practice.

Preparing the project for convenient processing. What settings are there and what are they for.

Familiarity with the function of layers, one of the most important functions of the program. We watch and remember.

In this lesson, you will learn what animation is and how objects move in After Effects.

Let's look at one of the ways to group layers. What parenting is and how it can make working with layers easier.

The basics of shooting against a green background or how to create quality material for easy further processing.

An overview of the Brush, Stamp, and Eraser tools. Analysis of panels and settings.

Disc number 1

Chapter 1 "Getting Started"
Lesson 1 - Workflow in AE
Lesson 2 - Project Panel
Lesson 3 - Composition
Lesson 4 - Composition Options
Lesson 5 - Composition Panel
Lesson 6 - Viewing a Song
Lesson 7 - Project Settings
Lesson 8 - Configuring the Interface

Chapter 2 - Importing Files
Lesson 1 - General
Lesson 2 - Disassembling the Project Panel
Lesson 3 - Importing files from photoshop programs and Illustrator
Lesson 4 - Interacting After Effects with Adobe Premiere Pro

Chapter 3 - "Working with Layers"
Lesson 1 - Adding Layers to a Composition
Lesson 2 - Standard Layers
Lesson 3 - Timeline Panel
Lesson 4 - Timeline Switches
Lesson 5 - Duration of Layers
Lesson 6 - Time Management

Chapter 4 - "Animation"
Lesson 1 - Five Basic Properties
Lesson 2 - Animation Basics
Lesson 3 - Spatial Keyframes
Lesson 4 - Time Keyframes and the Graph Editor
Lesson 5 - Interpolating Temporary Keyframes
Lesson 6 - Assistive Tools
Lesson 7 - Puppet Pin Tool

Chapter 5 - "Masks and Shapes"
Lesson 1 - Creating Masks
Lesson 2 - Animating Masks
Lesson 3 - Track Mattes
Lesson 4 - Roto Brush Tool
Lesson 5 - Introducing Shapes
Lesson 6 - Modifiers
Lesson 7 - Repeater Modifier and Stroke Attribute

Chapter 6 - Effects and Transitions
Lesson 1 - Introducing Effects
Lesson 2 - Analysis of the main effects. Part 1
Lesson 3 - Analysis of the main effects. Part 2
Lesson 4 - Analysis of the main effects. Part 3
Lesson 5 - Animation Presets

Chapter 7 - "Text"
Lesson 1 - Creating Text Layers
Lesson 2 - Character Panel
Lesson 3 - Paragraph Panel
Lesson 4 - Animating text. Part 1
Lesson 5 - Animating text. Part 2
Lesson 6 - Animating text. Part 3
Lesson 7 - Three Useful Tricks for Working with Text
Lesson 8 - Text Animation Presets
Lesson 9 - Layer Styles

Disc number 2

Chapter 8 - Nested Compositions and Parenting
Lesson 1 - Parenting
Lesson 2 - Precomposition
Lesson 3 - Nesting
Lesson 4 - Collapse Transformations Switch

Chapter 9 - "Color and Keying"
Lesson 1 - Color in After Effects
Lesson 2 - Levels and Curves
Lesson 3 - Examples of color correction
Lesson 4 - Color Correction Effects
Lesson 5 - Blending Modes
Lesson 6 - Using Modes
Lesson 7 - Shooting on a Green Screen
Lesson 8 - Keying

Chapter 10 - "Drawing"
Lesson 1 - Brush and Eraser Tools
Lesson 2 - Drawing Practice
Lesson 3 - Clone Stamp Tool

Chapter 11 - "Working in 3D"
Lesson 1 - Getting Started in 3D
Lesson 2 - Animation in 3D
Lesson 3 - Working with the camera. Part 1
Lesson 4 - Working with the camera. Part 2
Lesson 5 - Working with the camera. Part 3
Lesson 6 - Light
Lesson 7 - Useful functions when working in 3D
Lesson 8 - Creating Real 3D Objects
Lesson 9 - Reflecting 3D Objects

Chapter 12 - Stabilization and Tracking
Lesson 1 - Tracking
Lesson 2 - Four-Point Tracking
Lesson 3 - Manual Stabilization
Lesson 4 - Stabilizing with the Warp Stabilizer
Lesson 5 - 3D Camera Tracker

Chapter 13 - "Working with Sound"
Lesson 1 - Basics of Working with Sound in After Effects
Lesson 2 - Visualization of sound. Create a stylish equalizer

Chapter 14 - Outputting a Song
Lesson 1 - Output schema
Lesson 2 - Render Settings Group
Lesson 3 - Output Module Group
Lesson 4 - Tips for Outputting Composition

Learning "Expressions"

For those who are already familiar with After Effects and want to expand their knowledge, we suggest considering a tool like Expressions. This convenient and functional tool can turn the creation of any animation into a simple and fun creative process. The entire course consists of 21 lessons, with a total duration of 3 hours 25 minutes. During the viewing, you will receive specific, detailed information on the use of expressions, and learn how to create professional animation.

First look at the Expressions tool. What it is. Where and how to use it.

In this video tutorial, you will learn how to set parameters for your expression.

Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Creating Simple Expressions
Lesson 3 - Learning to manage one property with another
Lesson 4 - Pick Whip Tool
Lesson 5 - Variables
Lesson 6 - Arrays
Lesson 7 - Linking Properties to Different Dimensions
Lesson 8 - Helpers
Lesson 9 - The Wiggle Method
Lesson 10 - Animation Looping Techniques
Lesson 11 - Random Methods
Lesson 12 - Interpolation Methods
Lesson 13 - The value and valueAtTime Methods
Lesson 14 - Math Methods
Lesson 15 - If else conditional statements
Lesson 16 - Practice (Part 1)
Lesson 17 - Practice (Part 2)
Lesson 18 - Practice (Part 3)
Lesson 19 - Practice (Part 4)
Lesson 20 - Practice (Part 5)
Lesson 21 - Scripts

(banner_lesson)

Mocha function

One of the coolest and smartest tools in After Effects is for tracking objects in a video. For example, with Moka, you can easily overlay a logo on a driving car or glue glasses and a mustache to a walking person. Mocha's capabilities are incredibly flexible and varied. Having fully studied the functionality of this tool, you can saturate any video with bright and, most importantly, realistic effects. The course includes 11 lectures, with a total duration of 1 hour 46 minutes.

What is tracking and how to use it. How to launch Mocha from After Effects.

An overview of the planar tracking function used by professional editors to create clips and films.

Lesson 1 - Trekking in the Moka
Lesson 2 - Workflow
Lesson 3 - Planar Tracking
Lesson 4 - Tracking Problems
Lesson 5 - The Rotation Property
Lesson 6 - Shear & Perspective
Lesson 7 - Exporting Data: Transform Data
Lesson 8 - Exporting Data: Corner Pin
Lesson 9 - Exporting Shapes
Lesson 10 - Image Stabilization
Lesson 11 - Removing an Object from the Frame

Bonus materials

Additional tutorials that will expand your understanding of After Effects and of course teach new techniques for working with video. This collection includes a variety of lectures on choosing the right computer, improving productivity, creating live photographs, the basics of animation and video theory. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with these lessons if you are confident in the program and want to gain additional knowledge that will definitely not be superfluous.

As you know, this is a powerful editor that requires significant resources from the computer. So what is the best machine to handle this job? We look and delve into.
(2 lessons)
Create live photos (23 lessons)
Automatic color correction (1 lesson + 20 presets)

Date of publication: 23.07.2014

Putting together a promising and powerful computer for video editing in ADOBE After Effects CC with the possibility of further upgrades.

CPU

Within a reasonable budget, while the Core i7-3930K with a certain overclocking. So far without alternatives, about the prospects - below.

AfterEffect CC even in simple projects manages to eat tens of gigabytes of RAM. Therefore, it is logical to set as much as possible. In our case, it is in four-channel mode.

Why not faster memory? There are three reasons for this:

1.) Officially, memory frequencies above 1600 MHz simply do not exist, it is not certified by JEDEC, you will not find a mention of its support by Intel controllers either, although it will work.

2.) The selected platform has FOUR CHANNEL memory access and the effective frequency will be the same as at 6400MHz !!! How much faster?

3.) High-frequency modules are not very cheap, and with such a huge volume it will greatly inflate the budget.

VIDEO CARD

I will not dwell on hard drives and other media. The normal professional has his own preferences, as do the carriers themselves.

BODY

The case for a powerful graphics station is better to take the EATX standard.

This will not only facilitate assembly, but also save you from hassle in case of installing a large number of components, as well as large-sized video cards.

WHERE TO UPGRADE IT ELSE ??

There is nowhere especially. Although there is a chance that Intel will offer an affordable eight-core processor for the s2011 platform by the end of the year. However, in the case of using the GPGPU computing acceleration technology CUDA 5.0 and higher, which is allowed After Effects CC, it is possible to get a very serious acceleration when working with projects.

When working with certain tools and setting it up correctly, using the Nvidia QUADRO K * 000 accelerators gives many times the speed increase.

True, it is not cheap, and in practice, not everything is so rosy.

Nevertheless, firstly, the case must be large enough to accommodate any card, and secondly, the power supply must be ready for its appearance.

WHAT HAPPENED?

As always - it turned out powerful and reliable computer for installation, as well as for other similar tasks.

P.S. Hopefully this year, video editing stations with 16 or more streams will finally go to the masses. The situation is already ripe and soon either there will be available 16-thread CPUs, or you will have to switch to dual-core configurations.

Perhaps the most popular theme among aspiring 3d artists. In the era of the emergence of the industry - everything was simple - you work on what you have. The choice was only between amd and intel. Now the choice of hardware is so large and wide that it is very easy to get confused. And big money is increasingly not equal to high productivity.

I will write right away that the article written for our days ( August 28, 2013) and in a few years the situation will most likely change. Therefore, I specifically do not give specific examples, since this information will become outdated in half a year.

A few words about the choice operating system (OS).

In the CIS, most studios and freelancers work under Windows (since almost all the software in cgi gets onto it without any problems) and Linux (not every software can be installed here. For example, you probably won't be able to install 3ds max on Linux). Less often under Mac OS (apparently due to more expensive hardware). Although it's worth noting that a great program like Nuke works the fastest on Mac OS. For some reason, it works worst of all under Windows. Mac OS is also preferred by editors because of the speed of work.

Intel vs amd.

Several years ago Intel “overtook” amd in terms of price / quality and now 2/3 of users use intel processors... The most profitable "non-budget" processor for rendering (rendering) 3d scenes today is the i7 3930k, which runs well, as well as dual-processor Xeons. The latter are more tailored for servers, render farms and workstations. It has no competitors among AMD analogues. The only advantage of amd today is its price. If you don't need a super powerful processor, then a motherboard + processor from amd (the same power as Intel) can cost you half the price.

Closer to the case of iron.

Let's start from the profession. Let's designate the main components that help to do the job faster and more comfortable.

If you render (render) a lot:the main emphasis and investment of money should be done precisely on CPU... 99% of programs support multithreading and use all cores and threads that are provided in the processor. The higher the frequency of each core, the faster the rendering will take place (the dependence is directly proportional). Second parameter - operating memory (RAM)... During the rendering of high-poly scenes and fluids (fire, smoke, liquid), it can take more than 32 Gigabytes. The third important element of your computer will be good video card... It will allow you to comfortably (with high FPS) rotate highly polygonal scenes with "heavy" textures. It is not necessary to spend money on expensive ones. gaming graphics cards... Remember, the video card in this case is the third in the list of priorities.

If you are creating visual effects: destruction, fire, smoke, liquid:focus on quantity random access memory and powerful processor... Today, popular programs for this are Houdini and 3ds max with plugins (fumefx, thinking particles, rayfire, krakatoa). There are a number of video cards that allow you to speed up the rendering of dynamics through support for OpenCL. The sidefx site (Houdini developers) has the recommended system requirements for hardware and a list of video cards that "help". It is also worth paying attention to hard drives... It is desirable to have SSD drives that allow you to write the calculated cache faster. Some simulations can eat up terabytes of disk space.

If you compose a lot, do motion graphics, infographics (consider Nuke and After Effects).Very quickly, these programs "eat up" all rAMthat is on the computer. Calculated information is cached there for real-time viewing of the result. Conclusion - we buy more of it (16-32 Gigabytes will be enough for today). In parallel with this, it is important for Edobov programs good video map... Both Nuke and After Effects, in their latest versions, use GPUs for rendering (rendering). See a list of recommended video cards for working in After Effects. In second place is cPU... It does not play as important a role as in rendering. You can get by with processors of the i7 family with 8 threads. After Effects uses all cores and threads for rendering. Nuke, in turn, has old nodes that do not always support multithreading.

For modelers and animatorsthere are no strict requirements for the hardware. Here the amount of RAM and video card play a role. Now such a wonderful program for creating textures and sweeps is gaining popularity as Mariby Foundry . Working in it, you should take care of a good video card and read the recommendations at the office. site.

Optimal configurations.

As I said at the beginning, we will not give specific examples. Since the information will quickly become out of date. There are several living communities where the optimal computer configurations for working with computer graphics are actively discussed. This means that after a year you will most likely find the “optimal configuration” there too.

• http://www.3ddd.ru/modules/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t\u003d6483
  

• buy your components with an eye to the fact that you will update them (upgrade)... If it's a processor and motherboard, take the latest socket. When buying RAM, try to leave a few slots for the future (one bar should have a maximum of Gigabytes).
• it is comfortable to work with computer graphics on 2 monitors... One of them must be with an IPS matrix (and preferably two) - for better color reproduction.
• graphics tablet - speeds up work where you need to draw, cut masks, etc.

PS We would like to tell you about the "Top500" project. Its founders are rating the most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. Read the list. We wish you to work only with such computers.

Adobe Premiere directly supports GPU acceleration capabilities of almost all NVidia video cards with CUDA and at least 1 GB of memory. How to enable CUDA support is described in the article.

ATI chipsets are supported by Premier via OpenCL starting with version CS6 for Mac (6750M, 6770M), in fact with CC, so it is better to use the most latest version adobe programs.

Of chipsets Intel Intel Iris 5100 and Iris Pro 5200 notebooks supported via OpenCL starting with Premiere CC 2014 (version 8.0), now 6100, 6200 are added.

Pluginseg Magic Bullet Looks, Elements3D are standalone programs and may or may not use a GPU, regardless of the settings in the Adobe programs.

CUDA and Premiere:

Fresh versions of Premiere work seamlessly with all CUDA / OpenCL video cards. GPU support in Premiere 5.x and 6.x (Mercury Playback Engine GPU) is limited to a few chipsets. If your NVidia video card is not supported, and in the Project Settings panel instead of GPU Acceleration, only Mercury Playback Engine Software Only is available:

then you need to register it in the file C: \\ Program Files \\ Adobe \\ Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 \\ cuda_supported_cards.txt... The list of officially supported ATI (Radeon) video cards is in the file opencl_supported_cards.txt and can be added manually in the same way. In Premiere CC, Adobe allowed support for all CUDA and OpenCL chipsets, just go to this settings panel at the first start and turn on the GPU manually. Theoretically, it is not required to prescribe by hand, in practice, if Premiere CC 2014 does not see your video card, you will need to create this file yourself and add your video card to it (example of a CUDA file, OpenCL). Older versions of Adobe Premiere: CS3, CS4 do not support CUDA / OpenCL hardware acceleration and it makes no sense to register a video card in them.

what gives GPU acceleration
A graphics card processing unit (GPU) can be used for video editing in two main ways;
1) for geometric transformations over the video (resizing, rotating, transforming fields, transforming the frame rate), color correction, and other manipulations over images, which is supported by many filters
2) hardware encoding, which is topical for h.264, h.265 formats

These are different uses, with different effects. For example, with simple editing of DV video end-to-end, without effects and subsequent encoding in h264, hardware acceleration using the first method will not give any acceleration. But if you use the second method (the package is installed Rovi TotalCode for Premiere, or nvenc_export and your video card is supported by one or another hardware encoder), then the speed of the final render will increase significantly.
Another example, editing 1080p dslr video with color correction filters, Warp Stabilizer, Neat Video noise reduction and subsequent export to dvd. In acceleration by the first method of Warp Stabilizer, the difference will not be noticeable, the work of Neat Video will accelerate, and the GPU contribution to resizing and color correction will accelerate overall result factor of; the second method will not give an effect due to the lack of hardware acceleration in the mpeg encoder.

There may also be undefined acceleration from hardware decoding of AVCHD / XAVC / HEVC LongGOP sources when editing on the timeline. Video cards with the NVIdia GM206 chipset have hardware decoding of the PNG format, which really significantly speeds up the work with MOV / PNG footages on the timeline.

Adobe programs currently do not use the video card chipset for h264 and other formats, the chipset accelerates geometric transformations, filters with transitions, and video speed / frame rate conversion operations. The counting speed for CUDA on such operations as transcoding from 1080p25 to 576i will increase by about 5-6 times. In this case, the image quality turns out to be much better than when working on a central processor. Thus, it is necessary that the video render must be Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration CUDA (or OpenCL).

this picture shows how GPU accelerated effects are flagged in Premiere:

AMD dual or quad core - 96 cuda cores or more
AMD FX 6 or 8 cores - 384 or more
Intel dual core - 96 or more
Intel older quad - 192 or more
Intel I7 old - 384
Intel I7 Ivy Bridge - 1344

GPU cores may be smaller, but editing will then slow down.
If you have old computer, for example a 2.0 GHz quad core with 4 gigabytes of memory, buying a GTX-780 is pointless. For such a system it is better to add memory and use a video card with about 300 cuda cores.

Premiere versions and performance

Newer versions show more high productivity... Testing CC 7.2 vs CC 2015 9.1 on Lumetri effect by loading one 1 LUT .cube. Lumetri in Premiere CC, unlike CC 2015, does not yet use GPU acceleration, but it is interesting that in a purely software mode, CC 2015 is faster:
cc7.2 GPU ON, 3.4 fps CPU 35%
cc7.2 GPU OFF 2.9 fps CPU 45%
cc9.1 GPU ON, 25 fps CPU 22% GPU 8%
cc9.1 GPU OFF 3.2 fps CPU 43%.

The downside of new versions can be higher resource requirements, and this can manifest itself as various failures in the work on the project and during the export.

Premiere and memory:

It would seem that Premiere is not so critical to the memory size, but in some situations the lack of memory can paralyze the work. When memory is small, say 4 GB, adobov programs can use a maximum of 2.5 GB for their work. That is, if only Premiere is running, without After Effects and Photoshop, then it has only 2.5 GB of memory at its disposal. And this is at best.

This is enough for DV end-to-end editing, it is enough for simple DSLR video editing, but if the project becomes more complicated, for example, AVCHD 1080 with Warp Stabilizer, Neat Video noise reduction, color correction, h.264 encoding, then the computer starts to seriously freeze, so much so that the mouse slows down. If you look at such moments in the task manager, it becomes clear that the system goes into deep swap, although 1 GB of memory may be free.

The way out in such a situation may be as follows: Edit / Preferences / Memory - Optimize rendering for: Memory and make sure that the Maximum bit depth option is turned off.

You can export when there is a lack of memory using Adobe Media Encoder (Queue button), after which you can close Premiere.

You can also disable the Superfetch service, which deals with advanced caching, which is pointless and harmful when there is a lack of memory.

The number of processor cores and hyperthreading do not affect the memory requirements, which is easy to see by disabling the cores in the Task Manager.

Adobe Media Encoder

In a programme MediaEncoder, CUDA acceleration has been introduced since Update 7.1 for Media Encoder CC on 10/31/2013. For it to work, the appropriate render must be selected.

The peculiarity of GPU acceleration in MediaEncoder is that when converting video files from one format to another, the render engine AME turns on GPU acceleration when changing the frame size / frame rate, and if you just do transcoding, then there is nothing to accelerate. A Premiere (AfterFX) project is rendered in a different way: the premiere core (afterfx) and GPU acceleration of all effects and transformations within the project depend not on the Media Encoder, but on the Premiere settings in the project. For acceleration to work in MediaEncoder on all Premiere effects, the Import sequences natively option must be disabled.

You can check how the video card chipset (GPU) is actually used with the GPU-Z program. GPU-Z shows with checkmarks whether your NVidia has a CUDA video card, or your Radeon OpenCL, and during rendering, you can clearly see how your video card's GPU is loaded (GPU Load). Please keep in mind that other programs running on the system, as well as plugins (for example Magic Bullet Looks) can independently and independently of the settings of Adobe programs load the GPU and this will also be displayed.

If your NVidia video card has CUDA, but it is impossible to select the Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration renderer, then you need to manually create a file C: \\ Program Files \\ Adobe \\ Adobe Media Encoder CC 2014 \\ cuda_supported_cards.txt and register your video card there.

If you have an old Adobe software package and you cannot upgrade to version 7.1 or a newer one, there are the following options (in order of difficulty):
1.export directly from Premiere (picture below)
2.install package Rovi TotalCode 6.03 (works starting with Premiere CS 5.x, but does not work with video cards of the Kepler architecture and newer, i.e. 6xx and higher series of video cards are not supported), when encoding in h264 with CUDA support, the speed increases significantly, there is also support for the Intel hardware codec В® Quick Sync which makes it useful when working with embedded video. Besides, the encoder doesn't work well with Premier 7+ CUDA.
3.install package Sorenson squeeze, the package uses the same codec as TotalCode; outdated Main Concept H.264 CUDA, with the same restrictions (no support for new video cards).
4.install the plugin NVENC_export H264 (for GPU GTX 640 and newer) - the plug-in performs encoding by a video card in h264 format, the speed is not lower than realtime. You need to be an experienced user to install the plugin.

CUDA and After Effects acceleration:

In its work, After Effects can use graphics card resources in the following ways:
- acceleration of the 2D program interface - works on all video cards;
- OpenGL - is available on almost all video cards, previews are accelerated (Fast Draft), OpenGL plugins (for example Element 3D);
- and a rendering system for 3D layers, with a camera, light sources, called Ray-traced 3D - only for NVidia video cards.
The next release will add GPU acceleration to the built-in Lumetri and Fast Blur effects.

When exporting, After Effects does the work in the following order: first, the frame is rendered on the timeline with all the effects, then the rendered frame is compressed (encoded) into the output file format. At the first stage, AE uses the available acceleration of the video card, at the second stage, the situation completely depends on the codecs and is described in the section on Premiere.

In any case, After Effects needs a fast CPU and a lot of memory (16 GB or better 32 or more), without this, having a powerful video card will not give any effect, in addition, many heavy plugins simply do not use CUDA and only work on the central processor or on generic OpenGL acceleration.

Ray-traced 3D
3D raytraced render Ray-traced 3D appeared since CS 6 (version 11.0.2 and newer), it calculates 3D layers, camera, light sources in the composition on the video card, in which it is selected by the renderer. Only CUDA GPUs of NVidia video cards are supported. There are some peculiarities of work: the final render can become many times faster, or it can be slower than the classic CPU render, depending on the composition and the video card. Also when you turn on graphics core Ray-traced 3D simultaneously accelerates the display in the Composition window when editing a project.
There are limitations: GPU rendering does not support a number of program functions related to blending modes, track matte, and a number of effects, for example, the Pin Tool, i.e. not suitable for all compositions. Prior to CC 2015.1, Maxwell chipsets are not supported - GeForce GTX 750Ti, all new 9 × 0 series. These are the aftermath of Adobe's failed attempt to deprecate Ray-traced 3D and drag users to CINEMA 4D Lite. If it is not possible to upgrade to 2015.1, the owners of new video cards can replace optix.1.dll (download OptiX 3.8) in the Adobe After Effects CC 2014 / Support Files folder. As an alternative to Ray-traced 3D, you can use Video Copilot Element 3d, Zaxwerks 3d Invigorator, Mettle ShapeShifter plugins in your projects, which are faster and more powerful than Ray-traced 3D.

Difference between OpenGL and CUDA
Hardware acceleration of video cards is provided by special units on the GPU chip: Render output units (ROP), Texture mapping units (TMU), Unified shaders (CUDA cores). There are two technologies for using GPU video cards: OpenGL and CUDA (for video cards from ATI and Intel, the analogue of CUDA is called OpenCL).
Opengl describes a three-dimensional scene in its entirety, and this description does not depend on the video card, but its means cannot perform all the functions of After Effects. OpenGL performance primarily depends on the number and power of ROPs and TMUs; blocks dealing with three-dimensional visualization. OpenGL is also responsible for 2D graphics in the system - for accelerating the user interface (Hardware BlitPipe), managing video modes, and operations with video memory. The Composition window's OpenGL Fast Draft mode is optimized for very fast draft quality previews.
From the point of view of working in AE, OpenGL functions are completely insufficient to use it in the final render, but for plugins that use it, its performance is very important.
CUDA makes it possible to directly program each CUDA GPU core, it is direct full access to the computing power of the video card. To put it simply, many CUDA kernels quickly process a lot of numbers, but they do not work with images as with a 2D or 3D scene. Some semblance of the OpenGL functionality for CUDA is made by NVidia through the OptiX library, where the main program running on the CPU performs mathematical calculations on the CUDA shaders. Render through this library in After Effects is called Ray-traced 3D. Ray-traced 3D does not support all the features of After Effects, but on suitable compositions it can significantly outperform cPU speed render. Whether or not it will win is best determined by a test render of your working project.
From the point of view of working in AE, on compositions with 3D layers this can give a good boost to speed, also CUDA and OpenCL can be directly used by plugins.

Does the video card support OpenGL and CUDA
OpenGL is supported by all NVidia, AMD, Intel graphics accelerators. Fast Draft requires OpenGL 2.0 or higher, and Shader model 4.0 or higher. As a rule, there are no problems with this. CUDA driver version must be 4.0 or higher (CC requires 5.0+ version). Versions can be checked in EDIT / Preferences / Preview / GPU Information.

If the versions are lower, then you need to update the drivers from the NVidia website. If it doesn't help, then it's time to buy new graphics card... If your video card has CUDA, but GPU acceleration is not available, and only software mode is possible, then you can manually add your video card to the file C: \\ Program Files \\ Adobe \\ Adobe After Effects CS6 \\ Support Files \\ raytracer_supported_cards.txt. For After Effects CC and newer, it may be sufficient to enable the Enable untested GPU ... checkbox in the EDIT / Preferences / Preview / GPU Information panel

To enable Ray-traced 3D you need:

1. Turn it on in AE by going to the EDIT / Preferences / Preview / GPU Information menu (pictured above)

2. Select it for each song in which you decide to use it:

IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND !!! - CUDA (Ray-traced 3D) in AfterEffects processes only 3D layers in a composition for which Ray-traced 3D is specified as a render. 2D layers are rendered in Classic 3D anyway. If CPU is selected in the EDIT / Preferences / Preview / GPU Information panel, then regardless of the renderer specified in the composition, Classic 3D will turn on.
The use of CUDA does not guarantee total acceleration: if you make 3D from a 2D layer and turn on Ray-traced 3D, then CUDA will turn on, but the speed will drop. On the transformation of simple elements in space, Classic 3D is also faster, but when lights and shadows appear in the scene, its performance drops sharply and Ray-traced 3D becomes surely faster. Thus, Ray-traced 3D should be installed only for those elements of the project where it gives acceleration, if the wrong choice is made, the rendering will slow down. At the same time, if a layer with another Ray-traced 3D composition is nested in the composition, the choice of rendering is independent for them.
Figure out how it works better by doing Ray-traced 3D / Classic 3D test renders. Don't forget to clear caches before testing - Edit / Purge / All Memory & Disk Cache. Time and monitor your CUDA load. You can control the GPU load in the GPU-Z program (GPU Load value).
All this is convenient and correct - in the project you need to combine 3D elements optimized for video card accelerators with 2D and 3D elements that use all the functionality of After Effects.

Speed \u200b\u200bup editing. Enabling OpenGL
In order to use the ray traced 3D core working through Cuda when editing a project, you need to select the GPU in the EDIT / Preferences / Preview / GPU Information panel.

It is also possible to use GPU resources through OpenGL, that is, to use the capabilities of AMD (ATI), Intel HD Graphics and the same NVidia video cards through software interface 3d OpenGL accelerators. it speeds up work when editing a project: used when rendering a preview, to draw the AE interface when editing a project and some effects (Cartoon, Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista effects use OpenGL both when editing and when exporting).

OpenGL for display in the Composition window during editing and for preview is enabled by the Fast Preview / Fast Draft button in the Composition window. Due to limitations of the OpenGL standard, not all After Effects features work, so Fast Draft may not work for all projects.

Another option to speed up work in editing: enable Hardware Accelerate Composition(if you have CC 2015, you need version 13.6+): In the Edit / Preferences menu, select Display, and enable Hardware Accelerate Composition. This option is responsible for the hardware rendering of the program interface elements (Hardware BlitPipe).

Multiprocessing: speeding up the final rendering

After Effects has a long history of development, dating back to the days when a computer could have one processor with one core. Accordingly, not all program functions, and not all external plug-ins are able to parallelize their work on several cores. This problem is gradually being removed, but for older versions it may be relevant.

More memory makes it possible to use the option Multiprocessing (note that this option does not work when exporting via Media Encoder and in AE CC 2015.0 (13.5)). To enable it, select Memory & Multiprocessing in the Edit / Preferences menu. In the middle of the window that appears, enable Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously (render several frames at the same time). After that, it will be possible to set the amount of memory available for each processor core for rendering. Select a value, if desired, based on the amount of memory installed and the number of CPU cores. If there is not enough memory, After FX will automatically reduce the number of involved cores.

In some cases, this option allows speed up render, but at the expense of more memory. The final render will launch additional copies based on the number of CPU cores used in addition to the copy of After Effects in memory, but without the user interface. That is, on a 4-core processor with Hyper-threading, there will be 9 copies of After Effects in memory. You need to understand that AE will not work 8 times faster from this: if some effect can parallelize its work on several cores by calculating one frame, then there will be no acceleration from Multiprocessing, because to process 8 frames simultaneously, you need to prepare in 8 times more information, send 8 times more information through memory and manage 8 processing threads in a coordinated manner, for example, to process a 17 megapixel photo, about 1 GB of memory is reserved, therefore 8 GB is needed for eight threads. This is an unnecessary overhead. If, when calculating the effect, only one core is involved, and the rest are idle, then giving each core a frame for rendering will be certainly effective. The real effectiveness of this method depends on many conditions and it is better to test it empirically by monitoring the CPU load in the Task Manager (Task Manager). Adobe recommends running 4-6 threads with 8 cores.

Network render
After Effects allows you to set up rendering over the network, on multiple computers. Before tackling this, you must remember that the fonts / codecs used in the project must be installed on all machines involved in the render.

Export to h264 and After Effects CC
Starting with the CC version, export to h264, WMV and MPEG is disabled by default. Moreover, since the CC 2014 version, it is completely disabled. This was done due to the fundamental impossibility of using two-pass codecs in After Effects. For these formats, developers recommend exporting via Adobe Media Encoder. AME does not support Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously - an option in AE to speed up rendering, but it supports many export formats, and you can also connect codecs with hardware encoding acceleration in it.

There is still a possibility of direct export to h264 via Quicktime, unfortunately the h264 codec is of low quality. For the After Effects CC version, the possibility of single-pass h.264 encoding remains, for which you need to enable direct export to h264 in the settings, and independently configure the Output Module in the render queue:

Simultaneous work of AE with other Adobe programs
After Effects strives to cache all preview rendering results, and takes up all available memory, regardless of its size. Such caching significantly speeds up editing in AE, but lack of memory leads to various crashes and crashes of programs at the most inopportune moment. To minimize this when switching between AE and Photoshop or Premiere, simply free up memory: Edit / Purge / All Memory.

GENERAL ISSUES

Video card memory
You need at least 1 GB of memory on the video card, and it is better if it is DDR5. DDR3 memory is good for work, but if you buy a new video card, then DDR5 is wiser. For full HD, formally with a large margin, 2 GB is enough, however, when one frame is composed of several source frames (picture in picture) or effects that simultaneously process several frames (noise reduction, etc.) are used, the memory consumption increases significantly. If GPU acceleration is used, all this memory must be on the video card. Therefore, 2 GB is a reasonable choice, and 4 GB is better and absolutely necessary for UHD / 4K video.

Quadro
The only point to use Quadro series video cards in video editing is in the case of 10-bit material and a 10-bit monitor, for example HP Dreamcolor. Otherwise, the Quadros are not fast enough and too expensive.

Food
Cards NVIDIA GeForce at full load they consume from 200 to 700 watts (paired or SLI).
It should be remembered that other components of the system also consume energy. The second in power consumption is the central processor, for a quad core Q9650 it is 65 W, in this case a 300 W power supply is sufficient. Or the I7-930 draws up to 130W, and a 500W PSU might not be enough.

	idle, W	CUDA cores
GTX 460	80	160	336
GTX 660	80	275	1152
GTX 660Ti	80	320	1344
GTX 670	80	340	1344
GTX 680	85	390	1536
GTX 690	100	510	2x1536
GTX 730	10	38	96
GTX 760	95	300	1152
GTX Titan	109	335	2688
GTX 960	105	270	1024
GTX 980	110	390	2048

Cooling
Need to control working temperature video cards. There are several programs that allow you to do this. For example, the same GPU-Z or HWMonitor (you can download it from www.cpuid.com). Additional cooling is provided if necessary. Also monitor the CPU temperature.

Regardless of the measures taken, at least once every six months it is necessary to clean the radiators and the fan from dust.

Working with multiple GPUs
Graphics cards such as GTX 690, Titan are essentially already dual video cards. Premiere CC works with them, and, moreover, it works if there are several video cards in the system, and SLI mode is not required, which means that you can use video cards of different series. This mode of operation is also known as MultipleGPU... The performance gain here is not unambiguous and depends on the balance of the computer configuration.
Additional room for maneuver is provided by the use of GPU by third-party plugins. In this case, you can assign CUDA acceleration of one video card to the Premiere, and assign OpenGL acceleration of another video card (for example, Radeon) to a plug-in (for example, the Magic Bullet series works through OpenGL). In addition, more and more plugins appear directly using MultipleGPU - Neat Video 4, Beauty Box 4, Twixtor, DE: Noise, ReelSmart Motion Blur.

Optimizing disk management
It is necessary to prevent fragmentation of scratch disks, control it and, if necessary, perform defragmentation. For Premiere, place the Media Cache on the dedicated quick HDD is better than SSD. For Adobe After Effects, enable Disc Cache in Preferences / Media & Disc Cache and place it on the dedicated quick disk, ideally an SSD; also enable Disc Cache \u003d Current Settings in the Render Settings of the Render Queue.

Photos
If you load ~ 20 megapixel photos into a project, and then work with them, for example, reducing them to 25%, then it is better to first reduce them in Photoshop. Thus, each such operation with this photo in the Premiere, each effect will be performed 4 times faster.
In addition, there is a limitation of GPU acceleration in Premiere: ((width * height) / 16.384) megabytes of memory on the video card are reserved for frame processing. If the value is greater than the available memory, Premiere switches to the CPU. This means that on this frame, GPU acceleration will not work on any effect. For example, the image size with Canon 550D is 5184 × 3456 pixels. As a result of the calculation, we get 1.094MB, which is physically more than 1GB of memory on the Quadro FX 3800.

Aero
Aero runs on GPU acceleration and consumes resources. Therefore, it can be disabled

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/system-requirements.html - system requirements
http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/category/technical-focus