How to Adjust Resolution With Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is a complicated animation and compositing program that can not easily be learned in a few steps. The best way to learn the program is to start simply, learn the basics, and build from there. One of the basic elements to understand is resolution. The resolution of your video is what will determine the dimension of your video in pixels. A low resolution will render faster, but have a more degraded quality, while a high resolution will take more time to render, but a higher quality.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Adobe After Effects
• Digitized video footage

1. Change your render settings. Go to the Edit menu at the top of the workspace and chose Templates, then Render Settings. Here you can set up a template that you may save and reuse as needed.

2. Choose a default template from the drop-down menu called “Movie Default” to change settings for the entire render, or you can choose settings for a single frame by choosing a template from “Frame Default.”

3. Create a template from scratch. Under “Settings” click “New.” In the pop-up box you can specify the Resolution as “Full,” “Half,” “Third,” “Quarter” or “Custom.” “Full” is the full resolution of the footage as you have imported or digitized it, “Half” is ½ the resolution of “Full”, “Third” is 1/3 the resolution of “Full” and “Quarter” is ¼ the resolution of “Full.” Click OK. Enter a name for the new template.

4. Edit an existing template by choosing it from the “Settings Name” menu. Click Edit and adjust the render settings as needed.

Tips & Warnings

• Any changes you make to existing templates will not affect items already in a render queue.
• You can make changes to templates and then save them all at once by clicking “Save All.” Choose the location where you want to save them, and enter the name.