A lot of videos being sent to customers are sent in smaller resolutions to what you might be used to. For example: 720p. This is so the load time of the video will be shorter, and as most videos are viewed on mobile, the resolution is considered a non-issue. However, if you want your video to have a longer shelf life you should always work in higher resolution. Most likely 1080p.
So what's the problem? Render times. If you export 1080p IDMs and ask our platform to generate 720p videos, our platform has to do the scaling. This might add valuable milliseconds to the render time. This is an issue especially for real-time projects where a customer is waiting to watch a video as the video is being rendered. Here, the difference between a 2 second wait time and a 2.5 second wait time might mean the customer loses interest.

Here's the right way of approaching this issue:

Using Basic Scripts to Scale Down a Composition Before IDM Packaging

Here's the workflow you should follow:

  1. Do your project in high resolution, such as 1080p. This is in order to make it future proof.
  2. Prepare all your scene comps for packaging.
  3. Use After Effects' built in comp resizing script to resize each comp down to your output resolution (such as 720p). Here's how:
    1. Click File > Scripts > Scale Composition.jsx
    2. In the panel the opens use any of the functions to scale your composition down, for example, choose New Comp Height and input 720 in the input field.

If you want to bring the scene comps back to the original resolution, simply use the same method using the original comp size to scale up.

By following these steps you can ensure your project is future proof, and still renders blazingly fast.