User Guide

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ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS 5.0

User Guide

2 Create a watch folder on a system that’s accessible to all of the After Effects render

engines on your network. For example, create a folder called AE Watch Folder.

Note: All Windows machines monitoring the watched folder as a mapped network drive must

map that drive using the same drive letter. If this is a problem, make sure that the machine

creating or collecting the project does not access the volume being watched as a mapped drive

letter. For example, connect to the volume as \\network\watch instead of X:\watch.

3 In each render engine, choose File > Watch Folder, and select the watch folder that

you’ve created.

4 Create your projects and compositions, and set them up in the Render Queue with the

render settings and output modules you want to use. For multiple-machine rendering, After

Effects includes a “Multi-machine” sample template that you can use as a starting point.

5 Choose File > Collect Files to copy completed projects (which are set up to use the

Render Queue) to your speciﬁed watch folder. You must perform the collect-ﬁles process

using the full licensed copy of the Production Bundle. In the Collect Files dialog box, be

sure to select the Enable Watch Folder Render option. In addition, you may want to select

the Change Render Output To option, so that the output directories for each project are

stored in the watch folder. All of the render engines need access to these output directories

to complete their rendering tasks. Once you choose Collect Files, After Effects copies the

project or composition and all source ﬁles to the watch folder. For more information on

the Collect Files options, see “Collecting ﬁles in one location” on page 376.

Once the collected ﬁles appear in the watch folder, all monitoring render engines start

rendering automatically. If you prefer, you can use the Collect Files command to store

compositions and their source footage to a speciﬁed location and then initiate the watch-folder

rendering process later. Doing so renders the projects in alphabetical order, rather than in the

order in which they were saved to the location.

6 Monitor the progress of the render engines by using a Web browser to navigate to

HTML pages saved in the watch folder. After Effects generates these pages automatically

when the rendering begins. Click the Reload button in your Web browser to see the

updated status. If errors occur, these HTML pages will describe the errors.

UG.book Page 379 Wednesday, February 21, 2001 12:05 PM