Composition thumbnail images – Adobe After Effects User Manual
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Note:
Anchor
Ray-traced 3D
Click the Options button to launch the Ray-traced 3D Renderer Options dialog box. You can also Ctrl-click (Windows) or Command-click (Mac OS)
the Current Renderer Indicator button in the upper-right of the Composition panel to launch the dialog box.
Here you can choose:
Ray-tracing quality: Click the Ray-tracing quality setting to change it according to your workflow.
Higher values for ray-tracing quality decrease noise but greatly increase render time.
Ray-tracing quality controls the number of rays fired per pixel (for example, a value of 4 fires 16 or 4x4 rays, and 8 fires 64 rays).
A larger number produces a more accurate pixel at the expense of computation time.
A value of 1 will provide better performance, but there won't be any reflection blur (for example, it is always sharp), soft shadow, depth of
field, or motion blur.
Increasing the Ray-tracing Quality value will not increase the sharpness. Instead it decreases the noise inherent in point sampling. You should use
the lowest value that produces an acceptable amount of noise or no noise.
Anti-aliasing Filter: Controls the method of averaging the fired rays for a pixel. None fires all rays within the bounds of a pixel, whereas the
others spreads the grid of fired rays partially across adjacent pixels to produce a better average. Box, Tent, and Cubic (which is not bicubic)
are listed in the order of better quality.
None
Box
Tent
Cubic
The anti-aliasing filter controls the amount of blurriness. None gives the sharpest result but the edges of the projection catcher may look aliased,
with Box blur, Triangle, and Cubic giving blurrier results.
Ray-traced 3D layers use Ray-tracing Quality to control the appearance of motion blur.
Depth of field calculations in Ray-traced 3D are more accurate than they are in Classic 3D (and previously in Advanced 3D).
Click an arrow button to anchor layers to a corner or edge of the composition as it is resized.
For information on specific Advanced composition settings not listed here, see the related sections:
Composition thumbnail images
You can choose which frame of a composition to show as a thumbnail image (poster frame) for the composition in the Project panel. By default,
the thumbnail image is the first frame of the composition, with transparent portions shown as black.
To set the thumbnail image for a composition, move the current-time indicator to the desired frame of the composition in the Timeline panel,
and choose Composition > Set Poster Time.
To add a transparency grid to the thumbnail view, choose Thumbnail Transparency Grid from the Project panel menu.
To hide the thumbnail images in the Project panel, choose Edit > Preferences > Display (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Display
(Mac OS) and select Disable Thumbnails In Project Panel.
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