Background Renders

Background Renders

One way to get a lot more power out of After Effects is to
improve upon the standard method of rendering, which
ties up the application itself, and most of the machine’s processing
power, for as long as is needed to output footage.

aerender

Almost any production system these days has multiple
processors and cores, and this has opened the possibility of
background rendering, which allows a render to occur in the
background while you continue to work in the foreground.
The last edition of this book mentioned using the command
line (in Terminal Unix shell on Mac or the DOS
shell in Windows) to run aerender; to do this, you can
locate it in your After Effects CS4 folder and drag it into
the shell window; then press Enter to get the manual.
Arguments in quotes can be added to the command
aerender and the location string of the project fi le.
However, that’s a little complicated and involves typing
in commands, not the favorite activity of most visual artist
types. For that reason I highly recommend loading a
free script from aescripts.com called BG Renderer into
the Script UI Panels folder, also in the After Effects CS4
folder. This script automatically sets up the command line
not only to render in the background, freeing the open
application to be used for more work, but using extra
commands such as nice to set the priority and number of
processors that you specify.
See Chapter 1 for specifics on
multiprocessing, caching, and
previewing.