How to Export Transparent Background Videos in After Effects

Key Takeaways

what's up everybody it's r18 you know we're doing today we're talking about how to export transparent videos in After Effects that's right I'm talking about alright I'm super excited I know you are too let's go okay so this technique is super useful whether you're making animations gifs lower thirds titles you name it it's super dope because the versatility that you get from having a video with a transparent background is just endless we're gonna get right into doing that so I literally use this technique throughout the channel on a whole bunch of videos or even client projects and yeah it's just really useful for a whole lot of reasons we're gonna jump right into it okay so let's get right into this we're wasting no time at all we're gonna hop right into After Effects so as you can see here in the composition here I have a pretty cool animation of our logo this is gonna go ahead and play this through so you can see it the first step before rendering out a transparent video is to make sure that you don't have anything in the background and you're probably noticing that the background of this is black but if I go ahead and click on this button right here this is called the show transparency button it's gonna change the background from black to this checkered texture which pretty much means that it's transparent that's how Adobe communicates that and if we go ahead and press that button again it's gonna change back to black but don't worry this is just to make it easier to preview the animation but in reality I didn't add a solid background or anything to that so this is looking pretty good we have it checked that we have made sure that this animation actually has a transparent background so how do we export it well we're just gonna go ahead all the way up to the top click on composition and you're gonna find a button called add to render queue you can press ctrl and when you have the composition selected on your keyboard to pull that up as well or if you're on a Mac it's gonna be command control and okay so next we're gonna go ahead and change the settings this export now by default you're gonna probably see this blue text here that says lossless or whatever it says and whenever you click on this that's how we pull up the settings so let's go ahead and do that right now right here in format I'm gonna make sure that this is selected for QuickTime which is gonna be a codec that allows for transparent video and then all the way down here in the video output section I'm gonna change the channels from RGB from RGB plus alpha which is super important it's like the most important step to make sure that you're doing one rendering and after-effects because by default it was just a to RGB anything that's transparent with the video even though we've made sure beforehand is actually gonna get rendered as black but when we keep RGB plus alpha then the transparent information which is also called an alpha is going to be stored inside of that video for us to use lighter so that's why we're selecting RGB plus alpha now we can play around a little bit with the format options I'm gonna leave this at animation because that's one that supports RGB plus alpha but some versions of ProRes allow it as well one of the ways that you're gonna be able to check to make sure that this is still working is if you change it to a format like let's say pro res LT which doesn't support RGB plus alphas then when you go back into the render settings and click OK you're gonna see that the RGB plus alpha section is grayed out I just means that you can't do that so make sure you select one that actually lets you do that I know animation is one that's pretty good Perez 444 or also works well and once that's all set we just have to click OK and I'm gonna go ahead and choose this next blue text which is gonna let me take the output folder in the output name let's just enter them something real quick here and hit OK and then we're gonna go all the way over to render and let this render out now this is gonna take a few minutes Surrender pending on your computer but this is also a really great time to go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button if you haven't already make sure you turn on notifications as well because we going over all sorts of co-op defects stuff and you don't want to miss that let's check back in the after effects cool so it looks like the render finished and go ahead and open this file up just to check and what you're gonna notice is that on my computer it's showing up with a black background but that's just because that's how Windows is rendering it but when I take this in to something like Adobe Premiere let's just open this back up in after-effects in the same composition I can go ahead and add all sorts of different videos behind it I can change the background color I can do all kinds of things and this makes it a super versatile video file now and animations actually use this in our email signatures at the bottom so that whatever people are getting is it's not showing up with the you know a black background but whatever background you know works you can use it on websites it's literally endless possibilities so cool you are all set to make transparent videos I hope that was helpful let me know what she thinks you want me to go over something else in After Effects leave a comment down below if I don't get to it maybe someone else who's reading it is gonna also get to it as always I hope to catch you on the next one peace [Music]