Before importing footage, first decide which media and formats you'll use for your finished movies, and then determine the best settings for your source material. Often, it’s best to prepare footage before importing it into After Effects.

For example, if you want an image to fill your composition frame, configure the image in Adobe Photoshop® so that the image size and pixel aspect ratio match the composition size and pixel aspect ratio. If the image is too large when you import it into After Effects, you’ll increase the memory and processor requirements of the compositions that use it. If the image is too small, you’ll lose image quality when you scale it to the desired size. See Pixel aspect ratio and frame aspect ratio.

If you can shoot footage with consistent lighting and colors—and otherwise prevent the need to do a lot of tedious utility work in post-production—then you’ll have more time for creative work. Consider using Adobe OnLocation while shooting footage to make sure that you get the most out of your time and footage.

If possible, use uncompressed footage or footage encoded with lossless compression. Lossless compression means better results for many operations, such as keying and motion tracking. Certain kinds of compression—such as the compression used in DV encoding—are especially bad for color keying, because they discard the subtle differences in color that you depend on for good bluescreen or greenscreen keying. It’s often best to wait until the final rendering phase to use compression other than lossless compression. See Keying introduction and resources.

If possible, use footage with a frame rate that matches that of your output, so that After Effects doesn’t have to use frame blending or similar methods to fill in missing frames. See Frame rate.

The kind of work that you’ll be doing in After Effects and the kind of output movie that you want to create can even influence how you shoot and acquire your footage. For example, if you know that you want to animate using motion tracking, consider shooting your scene in a manner that optimizes for motion tracking—for example, using tracking markers. See Motion tracking workflow.

David Van Brink shows an excellent example on his omino pixel blog of why shooting in a high-definition format is useful even for standard-definition delivery, because the extra pixels give you a lot of room for synthetic (fake) camera work, such as zooms and pans in post-production.

Trish and Chris Meyer provide tips for planning and delivering high-definition and widescreen work in articles on the ProVideo Coalition website:

• The High-Def Checklist

• Open Wide: Creating That Widescreen Look

Project settings fall into three basic categories: how time is displayed in the project, how color data is treated in the project, and what sampling rate to use for audio. Of these settings, the color settings are the ones that you need to think about before you do much work in your project, because they determine how color data is interpreted as you import footage files, how color calculations are performed as you work, and how color data is converted for final output. See Color management and Time display units.

If you enable color management for your project, the colors that you see are the same colors that your audience will see when they view the movie that you create.

After you prepare and import footage items, you use these footage items to create layers in a composition, where you animate and apply effects. When you create a composition, specify composition settings such as resolution, frame size, and pixel aspect ratio for your final rendered output. Although you can change composition settings at any time, it’s best to set them correctly as you create each new composition to avoid unexpected results in your final rendered output. For example, the composition frame size should be the image size in the playback medium. See Composition settings.

If you’ll be rendering and exporting a composition to more than one media format, always match the pixel dimensions for your composition to the largest pixel dimensions used for your output. Later, you can use output modules in the Render Queue panel to encode and export a separate version of the composition for each format. See Output modules and output module settings.

If you work with large compositions, make sure that you configure After Effects and your computer to maximize performance. Complex compositions can require a large amount of memory to render, and the rendered movies can take a large amount of disk space to store. Before you attempt to render a three-hour movie, make sure that you have the disk space available to store it. See Memory and storage.

If your source footage files are on a slow disk drive (or across a slow network connection), then performance will be poor. When possible, keep the source footage files for your project on a fast local disk drive. Ideally, you’ll have three drives: one for source footage files, one from which the application runs, and one for rendered output.

For more information, see Improve performance.