• Adobe After Effects

  After Effects CS5 Render Time has tripled since last render on same file

  Posted by Luke Middleton on November 11, 2011 at 4:57 pm

  Hi guys,

  I’m sure this has been answered before but I did look around the forums and couldn’t find anything. The problem I’m having involves AE CS5 rendering times. I’ve been rendering out a file to h.264 (mp4) all day and each time it has taken me 25mins to render.

  I tried some different settings to increase the picture quality as the previous attempts weren’t that great and the render speed tripled to about 4 hours. I’ve tried changing the settings back to before but the render time still takes 4 hours so I’m not sure what’s happened.

  I’ve also noticed that RAM usage has gone from 48% to 7% if that’s any sort of clue. I understand exporting to h.264 isn’t great for final output but it’s just to put inside a presentation in powerpoint so the file needs to be small but high quality. Does anyone have any answers?

  Thanks again!

  Luke

  Roland R. kahlenberg replied 14 years, 10 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Erik Waluska

  November 11, 2011 at 5:25 pm

  It’s probably just a glitch in your system. I would try to restart the computer and see if that fixes it.
• 

  Luke Middleton

  November 11, 2011 at 6:26 pm

  I tried restarting and seemed like it did the trick at first but it didn’t improve anything. Still takes 4 hours for 20 second clip.

  I’m trying to render out an animation to put in a power point presentation, so it needs to be good quality but a low file size. I though MP4 with h.264 codec was a good format to use, but it causes blocky visuals and grey backgrounds in quicktime and Windows Media Player.

  Still stumped as to why it’s now taking 4 hours to render when before it would render at 24mins.
• 

  Roland R. kahlenberg

  November 11, 2011 at 7:54 pm

  MP4, by definition uses H264. H264 encoded videos are ideal for delivery devices that require decent to good quality visuals with a reasonably good bitrate.

  I have a feeling that you may have switched on settings in either the Prefs or the layers and these are affecting your render times.

  As for the quality of your final renders, oftentimes, a bitrate of 5 -7 MPBS for a HD1080 movie will provide decent quality. I also suggest that you use AME for H264 final renders, to take advantage of AME’s 2-pass VBR encoding which will often result in better quality videos with a smaller filesize/bitrate.

  Additionally, set Keyframe Distance to a smaller value if you want to increase quality. However, this will raise the bitrate of the final movie. As you can see, there are lots of tradeoffs between quality and bitrate/filsize when encoding video.

  HTH
  RoRK

  Intensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
  Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer

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