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Now we are going to look at the OpenGL hardware renderer a little bit later on so let us just make sure advance is set for now and say okay, but we are briefly going to touch on the subject of OpenGL itself in the next composition.

Come over here to the project pane and let us open comp 4 OpenGL. And let us talk quickly about OpenGL itself. Now this might be a term that you are not really familiar with, but if you play games and use computers or work in 3D, this is something that you are more than likely have been exposed to.

OpenGL is actually a standard on most modern day video cards that ship with most computers. Now instead of the computer processor handling 3D or very intricate two dimensional work, special processors built on to the video card itself are optimized to draw and render 3D objects extremely fast.

Now the most common place that you would see this is more than likely in gaming or 3D modeling where construction of objects out of polygons and in through 3D space needs to be accelerated. Now that is really where the power of these accelerated cards come in. now After Effects introduced a 3D engine that we are now looking in way back version 5 which I think is about 4 or 5 years ago now, so it has been around for quite a while.

However it was incredibly slow to start with because the use of OpenGL with the 3D engine was not introduced until version 6. So thankfully now if you have a fully supported OpenGL card in your system, working in 3D and in two dimensions in some places can be a much faster experience.

The first thing you need to know is, does your card even have OpenGL, and secondly if that card is supported by Adobe After Effects. Well you can always go to Adobe's website, go to the After Effects page and there is a link there to give you a list of all cards that are supported by After Effects OpenGL, but you could also check directly within After Effects itself.

If we come over here to the composition window, down in the lower right hand side. You have the previews options, small lightning bolt through the center here to suggest speed of redraw. If we click and hold on that, we will have a choice of the weight that after effects is going to render our scene.

Well first off, let us go straight down to the bottom and choose the fast previews preferences. Now you can also access this by going through the regular preferences and choosing fast previews, thankfully this has been introduced in After Effects to make it even quicker to get directly to where we want to be.

Now under the fast preview settings, we have something called the adaptive resolution limit which is currently set to a quarter. We will see that in action in just a second, but we can see here that enable OpenGL is turned on. That tells me initially that this card is OpenGL compatible.

However if you click on the OpenGL Info button right here, you can see the make and the name of the video card that you are using. In this case we are using an NVIDIA Quadra FX 4000STI. Underneath here I can see that pretty much everything is supporting OpenGL, accelerated effects and here you are seeing lights and shadows. All the important things that you need to be able to work with quickly in 3D, this card is going to do it. So this will give you and idea of whether your card is going to support OpenGL.

Now we are going to look at the OpenGL hardware renderer a little bit later on so let us just make sure advance is set for now and say okay, but we are briefly going to touch on the subject of OpenGL itself in the next composition. Come over here to... click to read more