Adobe After Effects CS3 - Manual (Page 600)

AFTER EFFECTS CS3
User Guide
595
Obey Proxy Settings Use this option with compositions that include proxies to specify whether you want the copy
to include the current proxy settings. If this is selected, only the files used in the composition are copied. If this is not
selected, the copy contains both proxies and source files, so you can later change proxy settings in the collected
version.
Note: If you choose For Queued Comps in the Collect Source Files dialog box, After Effects uses the proxy settings from
the render settings, not the composition.
Reduce Project Removes all unused footage items and compositions from the collected files when the following
options are chosen in the Collect Source Files menu: For All Comps, For Selected Comps, and For Queued Comps.
Change Render Output To Use to redirect the output modules to render files to a named folder in the collected files
folder. This option ensures that you have access to your rendered files when you’re rendering the project from
another computer. Note that the rendering status must be valid (Queued, Unqueued, or Will Continue) for the
output modules to render files to this folder.
Enable ‘Watch Folder’ Render You can use the Collect Files command to save projects to a specified watch folder and
then initiate watch-folder rendering over a network. After Effects also includes a render control file called [project
name]_RCF.txt, which signals to watching computers that the project is available for rendering. After Effects and any
installed render engines can then render the project together across a network. (See “Set up watch-folder rendering”
on page 626.)
Maximum Number Of Machines Use to specify the number of render engines or licensed copies of After Effects that
you want to allocate to render the collected project. Below this option, After Effects reports how many items in the
project will be rendered using more than one computer.
Note: If rendering time is unusually long, you may have set Maximum Number Of Machines too high, and the network
overhead required to track rendering progress among all computers is out of proportion to the time spent actually
rendering frames. The optimal number depends on many variables related to the network configuration and the
computers on it; experiment to determine the optimal number for your network.
4 To add your own information to the report that will be generated, click Comments, type your notes, and click OK.
The comments appear at the end of the report.
5 Click Collect. Name the folder and specify a location for your collected files.
Once you start the file collection, After Effects creates the folder and copies the specified files to it. The folder
hierarchy is the same as the hierarchy of folders and footage items in your project. The new folder includes a
(Footage) folder and may include an output folder (if you selected Change Render Output To).
The names of these folders appear in parentheses to signal to any attending render engines that they should not
search these folders for projects.
Specify file names and locations for rendered output
You can locate a previously rendered item or check the destination of a queued render item by expanding the Output
Module group in the Render Queue panel and clicking the underlined file path, or by right-clicking (Windows) or
Control-clicking (Mac OS) the Output Module heading.