User Guide

16
An Overview of Adobe After Effects
RAM Preview
One of the big challenges in designing motion graphics and visual effects is imagining how
they will look in their final form. Playback controls help, but they don’t really capture the
final experience. That’s what makes the RAM Preview feature so exciting. You can play
back your compositions in real time without having to render them. You can even preview
audio along with the video. If you like the segment that you played back in RAM Preview,
you can save it to a file directly.
RAM Preview lets you play a preview at the frame rate of your
composition, or as fast as your system allows.
To improve performance, you can narrow the region of interest in the Composition
window so that only the specified area of your composition is previewed.
Dynamic preview
Get better visual feedback as you work in the Composition window. Instead of defaulting
to a wireframe view when you move, rotate, scale, or otherwise change elements in a
composition, After Effects transforms layers interactively, displaying results as you make
changes. If the image can’t be updated quickly enough, After Effects temporarily reduces
image resolution to maintain optimal interactivity.
UG.book Page 16 Wednesday, February 21, 2001 12:05 PM