Video: How to Use Time Controls in After Effects

Editing tips for syncing up video footage. Learn how to use time controls in Adobe After Effects compositing software in this computer software lesson from a video production expert.

Video Transcript

All right, now we're going to be talking about time controls in After Effects. So what I'm going to do is take my project and kind of rearrange the workspace here and focus on these time controls. There is a time control tab here and basically these buttons are for previewing your composition. This button over here is the basic RAM preview button. If you click it, it's going to start rendering your project from the very beginning all the way to the end. And what you may want to do, especially if your system is running a little slow, is change the resolution from full to a half or a third or a quarter. What I'm going to do is bring it down to - all the way down to a quarter - so we can see this a little faster. And what's going to happen here is After Effects will automatically look at the settings I have in my composition window and will render the composition at a quarter resolution. So, let's start this RAM preview. It's moving a little faster than it was previously. And that's probably good enough. Let's see what that looks like. So, you can also change the preview settings from the time control window. Instead of looking at the composition resolution settings, what you can do is change the resolution here. If it is set to auto - like I said, it will just look at the composition window settings and use those - you can change your RAM preview settings to a quarter and then have your composition window settings to full. That way, all of your work is previewed here at full resolution, but when you preview your footage, it will preview that footage at a quarter of the resolution. So, those are going to be some useful time saving tricks. Also, in the time controls you have this loop button. You can change the RAM preview to play in a loop, which is the way we had it set before. You can have it set to play once and then play it backwards from that. You can also have it set to play through only once and then stop. And yeah, you can also change the frame rate here on the time controls. Those are the buttons that I use the most really. I don't use much of these at all, because I just like to preview. I pretty much don't like to play around with these guys because I can just use keyboard shortcuts for those. So, if you're familiar with the RAM preview button and the playback options here, that will get you started.

How to Use Time Controls in After Effects

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