Links, resolution, and quality are familiar - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] We've already had a glimpse of how linked files operate in After Effects and they are indeed similar to how they work in InDesign. But the similarities don't just end with being able to link outside files. One thing that you have to keep track of with links in InDesign has to do with resolution and the same is very much true of After Effects, although it works a little bit differently. So to take a look at this, I'm still working with my HD 1920 by 1080 solid in a composition of the same size. And once again, rather than bring in a new file, I'm just going to replace the solid. Now this isn't necessarily a normal way to work but it allows me to show you what comes next in very clear terms. I'll choose a file this time that is a different size. I don't necessarily immediately know that although it is shown the pixel dimensions up here in the Project panel but if I just zoom out, and I'll do that with the scroll wheel on my mouse, you can see this border of the layer, same color as you see the layer down here, and it's way outside and the paste board so it's actually double sized. This is 4K footage and that's a shorthand, it's actual dimensions are a little bit less than 4,000 on the horizontal. But anyway you might be thinking, as an InDesign artist, well, great, that means I've got all that extra DPI or PPI to work with. Not exactly. So I will scale this down and if I just start dragging it, it's non uniform so I have to hold down Shift to get uniform scaling and that looks roughly like it, I can use my scroll wheel again to zoom in and now we have the full frame image. And if I want it to be exactly full frame, I could twirl down here to my transform controls and just type in exactly 50 for the scale. But because there's no DPI or PPI there are only pixels in video, I haven't really gained extra resolution. What I have done is banked extra resolution if at any point I need it. So if I want to apply an effect or do something else that will eventually scale this up, I've got it, if I need that. Meanwhile, I do have a high quality image. So the idea of a layer and its resolution being somewhat independent things and scalable is a topic that I think you'll already understand. You'll also understand that if I scale this way up, we're going to have a problem. Things are going to start to look bad so you don't want to go above a hundred percent scale. But one final thing that I think you'll really get, as an InDesign user, has to do with zoom resolution and output. So if I zoom back out, you can see this little control right here shows that I'm at 25% magnification. Here's 50 and here's a hundred. Meanwhile, this control here, and I know there are a lot of controls on the Composition panel, we're just focusing on these two right now, has to do with the resolution and the downsample factor. What is that? Well, as I go down, right now it's just showing at full but if I set this to auto, now at 50% it's showing half and at 25% it's quarter, if I go to 33% is at 1/3 Now what's that for? Well, this is the equivalent of previewing an image at lower resolution so you can work faster. So if I press the Space bar to start previewing, I'm getting a preview in real-time. But if I go up to full resolution and start previewing, things are not real-time, it's going quite a bit slower and I'm going to have to wait for this preview. Now, the way a lot of animators work in After Effects when seeing the full image isn't of utmost significance is to stay at half or a less resolution and, as we saw, you can adjust it independently of your zoom. So this is an area where you InDesign people have an advantage. You also understand that when we output it these settings won't affect the output. There's a separate set of settings to, as we say in After Effects, render the file. So now we're going to move our attention to how the two applications compare for design, specifically when working with type.