After Effects: Fullscreen Preview

Mar

After Effects: Fullscreen Preview

If you actually bother preemptively reading your software documentation, you may have already known this, but this is a huge time-saver over having to render test movies for my HDTV.

At work, I’m using a 27″ 1080p monitor/television as my secondary monitor. We use a model that has a similar color profile for presentations, so using this screen as a preview screen is essential. Otherwise, we’d have to keep our presentation displays unpacked and hooked up to a computer, transfer files, and so on. I won’t get into (more) details, but suffice to say it would be a royal pain.

You can stretch to the edges, but there's still a border.

Even with this setup, I’ve been rendering drafts to an mp4 file and running a video player fullscreen on the HDTV (which matches the production environment). This is still a step I’d rather not have to do, so finally today I did some searching.

‘Lo, and behold! There is a way.

According to Adobe documentation, Ctrl+\ (⌘+\ on Mac) does the following:

Resize application window or floating window to fit screen. (Press again to resize window so that contents fill the screen.)

Since my composition window is on the second monitor already, I pressed Ctrl+\ twice.

Ah, fullscreen goodness.

Comments

francoe 6 October 2011 2:06

Oh man, this is an awesome tip. I have tha same configuration, and I’ve been asking a lot over the adobe forums, creative cow, etc. The replies told me that’s not possible to take off the border. So I’ve been doing a lot of draft test renders until now.
I use to do some video mapping instalations, where replace the secondary monitor by a projector. In this way, I have a live preview to draw vector masks over the architecture. But those borders forcing me to rescale the masks before use it. A hard way, I’m talking about modify a mask’s node, render a draft, pass it to a second machine, play it in the final player software, and check it. This procedure, over 100 times!!
So, I’m really happy with the backslash shorcut.

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Mike 12 October 2011 9:38

Yeah, test rendering was getting to be quite an annoyance. Glad this helped!

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Federico 23 January 2012 21:31

Hi! I’m trying videomapping, and cannot do what you do on cs5 ae, i press crt\ and nothing happens, any I just can maximize but with the borders, but I really need to work on a preview format.
clue what could that be?

Thanks!

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Anthony 4 September 2013 5:13

GAH THANK YOU!! Night before a tv production airs and I need the backdrop to be projected onto an irregular background only (sort of like the fellow above) and this is my answer! Thank you so much for sharing! Seriously just helped 4 days of stressing and wondering go away

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FAZE 30 December 2013 6:47

Hi,

I have been wrestling with the same problem for a while now, and I am glad to see that there seems to be a solution for this, but the sad thing is that I do not seem to get this solution working for me..

I have tried switching the keyboard language settings and pressed almost every key combination there is on the keyboard. Also I have tried changing the keyboard short cut, when going to ” Preference – Reveal Preference In Explorer – and clicking on the Adobe After Effects 11.0 Shortcuts.txt ” ,but when I open this up and search for the desired shortcut “Ctrl+” then the search turns out empty..

I am working behind a PC with CS6.

Do you have any idea how can I work around this problem, or perhaps have any suggestions on how, where and/or what should I look for?

Cheers,

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Mike 2 January 2014 11:02

FAZE: I wrote this article about CS5, and the same trick seems to work in CC, which I’m using now. I found the following in After Effects CC, in the “Adobe After Effects 12.1 Win en_US Shortcuts.txt” file:

"ZoomWindowMega" = "(Ctrl+Backslash)(Ctrl+Yen)"

Hope this helps.

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FAZE 18 July 2014 16:09

Big UP! yo!
Huuh, after all these months through google I wandered back to this blog and now got my answer!

I just had to switch the keyboard to EN (United States)
Then the backslash key would be the key that is exactly next to the lower left shift.
So control pressed twice did the trick!

Many THANKS!
FAZE

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Mike 21 July 2014 10:58

Awesome! Glad it eventually worked out for you!

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Robert 14 September 2014 17:13

hm. thats exact i need. i am using a german keyboard. nothing happens if i press this combination. in the german help text adobe writes “ctrl+#”, but it doesn’t work. what i am doing wrong?

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Steve 31 January 2015 5:17

Have used this technique for years but just ran into a new issue. I was making a mask in the comp and dragged a point too near an edge – the whole image thorugh the projector moved over 2 or 3 pixels. Turns out you can do this at any edge and the image will slide over in the opposite direction and you can now see just the edge of the comp border. Once this has happened there is no way to slip it back to “zero” as any kind of subtle move near the opposite edge slides it at least 2 pixels over if not 3. With some restarting voodoo and a new project I can get back to normal but I can’t tell if this shift gets embedded in the comp or it’s a graphics card issue. Simply quitting AE and firing it back up does not fix the issue.
The comp is 1920, the output resolution of the graphics card is 1920, the projector is 1920, so whats going on here?
(by the way, nothing in the comp has moved, it’s just how the comp is output with fullscreen preview. This does not happen when using a broadcast graphics card, only when using your second or third monitor out to a projector)

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Sean 23 November 2016 16:07

Ohmmannnn this is an old post, and such a simple solution, but WHAT a solution nevertheless!!!

EXCELLENT POST! And it should be on the top of google when searching for ‘after effects cs6 full screen on second monitor’.

I use it to map video on a beamer on the second output.
Thanks for the post man!!

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After Effects: Fullscreen Preview

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