Once you've gone through the process of creating an animation in order to create a self-contained file that lives outside of After Effects CC you need to render. And in this tutorial, we're going to render using the Render Queue. Now, it's always a good idea to watch down your project one more time before you render. So, go to the Timeline and click once in the Timeline panel to make it active, then press the Spacebar and watch your project. This is exactly what I want. So, I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback. In order to render this to the Render Queue since I already have the Timeline of the Composition I'd like to render active all I have to do is go up under the Composition menu and choose Add to Render Queue. Before we dive into a bunch of different settings let me just show you the simplest workflow for rendering a high-resolution video file out of the Render Queue. Under the Render settings I'll just click on the drop-down arrow and choose Best Settings. Under the Output Module click on the drop-down arrow and make sure Lossless is chosen. Then on the right over here under Output To click on the blue text and that will open up a window where you can specify where you'd like to render your project. I'm going to render mine right next to my project files and under File name I'll call this Happy_Lion. Now since I'm on a Windows machine this is going to render as an AVI, if you are on a Mac it'll render as a QuickTime movie. Go ahead and click Save and at this point all you have to do is click Render to actually render your full resolution output. Now, let me show you some of the key settings that you might want to change if you need to whenever you create Renders with the Render Queue. Under the Render settings go over to the word Best Settings and click on it to open the Render Settings. If you want to render a video file that's a little smaller than full res, click on the Resolution drop-down and choose Half or Third. And the video file will only be one-half or a third the size. It'll still be full resolution and it will just be smaller pixel dimensions. I'll change my Resolution back up to Full. Then here on the right underneath Frame Rate there's an option where you can specify the Start frame or the End frame. So, if you click the Custom... button you can specify to only render, say, 1 second of your animation. I'll click Cancel. Let's go to the Lossless area. Click on the word Lossless and this is where you can specify the Format, so by default on Windows it'll be AVI, on the Mac it'll be QuickTime but if you click on the drop-down you could render a JPEG Sequence or a PNG Sequence. JPEG and PNG are just compressed still image files. So, what's interesting about these sequences is if you had audio the audio wouldn't go with it, this would just render the video aspect of things. That's why most of the time people will render to QuickTime or AVI if they want a self-contained video file. I'll click outside of that panel to close the Format Options... Down here at the bottom this is where you can specify the Audio settings but I find the default typically works perfectly well, so I'll just click Cancel out of there. So, to render our project let's go over and just press the Render button. Once the Render is complete I'll just navigate to my File browser and sure enough there's my Happy_Lion video file and to watch it back I'll just double click and it'll load up in your video player and there you have it, Rendering with the Render Queue.

 

There are two distinct advantages to rendering your After Effects CC project using Adobe Media Encoder CC. The first one is the fact that Media Encoder CC contains a ton of different presets. So, if you need to save a file for a portable device or a specific social network, there's a preset for that. The second, is the fact that it actually moves rendering out away from your After Effects CC project into Media Encoder CC. So, if you're really busy you can save a version of your project, send that to Media Encoder CC and then go back to After Effects CC and keep working. Now, I have a composition I want to render using the Media Encoder CC Queue. So, let's start by going to the Timeline and I'll press the Home key on my keyboard to move my Current Time Indicator back to the beginning of the Timeline and then I'll press the Spacebar to preview the animation. The animation looks good. So, I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback. In order to send this to Media Encoder CC all we need to do is go up under the Composition menu and choose Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue... Now it may take a second to launch but once it launches go to the upper right corner of the interface where it says Queue. You'll see your After Effects CC project with the name of the composition that you just sent. This area is divided up into three columns, Format, Presets based on that Format and then the Output File which would be the file name itself. So, I'll click on the Output File name and I'll just call this Town and it's automatically going to create a folder next to your After Effects CC project file to save your renders in. I'll leave that all set, I'll just name it Town and click Save. Let's click on the Format drop-down. You can choose whatever format file you like. I'm actually going to leave H.264 setup. Then under the Preset based on H.264 I have a whole host of Presets I can choose from. Let's say I want to render to YouTube 720p HD, there we go. Now go back up and click on the words Multiple Renders which is the name of your Composition. Once you do that the second button in and the Queue will become active. This will allow you to add another output for this individual file. Now rather than going through the dropdowns to set the compression for this file I'm going to go down here under the Preset Browser and I'll click in the Search area and start typing blu because I'd like to make a compression for a Blu-ray disc. So here I'll choose HD 720p 59.94 and I'll drag that and drop it right on the second entry here. And when I let go now I've got a Blu-ray render that's rendering. I still need to name the file. So, I'll click here under Output File and I'll just call this Town_02 and click Save. Now we're ready to render. As soon as we click this green button I want you to look in the bottom area here in the Encoding panel because it's going to go fast. That's giving me two previews, one for each of my different outputs. So, now if I navigate to my Windows File Explorer there's my Create Multiple Renders with Adobe ... folder and if you open that inside of here there's my Town render and there's my Town_02 render. To preview any of these just double click. So, whether you're trying to create a specific file format or just work more efficiently and render as you work Adobe Media Encoder CC is the perfect tool to integrate into your daily workflow.