-
Unbarably long AfterEffects cs5.5 render on a fast PC + I HAVE A DEADLINE
To preface, here are my system specs:
i7-2760QM @2.40
16gb Installed RAM
Win 7 64bit
Nvidia 560m 3gb
OCZ Vertex 3 SATAIII SSD 120gb
WD Scorpio SATAIII 7200rpm 750gbThe project: Music video with 1080p footage scaled down to 720. All non-used footage has been deleted, and the project has been completley purged prior to rendering.
The problem: Every time I render (h.264 CBR 120 w/ audio), it gets about 1/4th way through very quickly and then slows to a painstakingly slow chug. In 15 minutes, it gets through a quarter of the project with an estimated 50″ish” minutes to complete, but the render time quickly doubles…and now I’m at 5 an estimated 5 hours to complete.What gives? I have, from what every guide on the internet has said, optimized AE for my machine….
Oh, and to boot…I have been working on this project nonstop since it was given to me, and my deadline is tomorrow at 6pm…
-
8 Replies
-
So what effect(s) are you using on the clip where the slow render kicks in …. ?
-
Why are you rendering an H.264 out of AE? I would always recommend rendering a master version out as uncompressed, ProRes or DNxHD at your comp’s native resolution and then creating versions with different resolutions and CODECs from the master, as required. Much quicker if you have multiple versions to render and just a little neater in terms of work flow and archiving.
As the previous poster has alluded to, the behaviour you are seeing is usually indicative of a particularly complex or processor intensive part of the comp. Certain effects (such as particle emitters) heavily layered or intensive 3D comps with lots of lights can cause slow renders.
Hope that helps a little bit.
-
I agree with Daniel- don’t render compressed out of AE. Master render uncompressed and then use Encoder or the like to compress.
Besides the above:
Are you rendering w multiprocessing? If so, do you have a min of 2GB per core?
Keep in mind, not all projects (depending on plugins used) render faster on multiple cores. Some are faster on one core with all available RAM.
OpenGL off, I hope.
Can you pre-render some? For example, if you have an Adjustment Layer on top with a CC Motion Blur or some color grading, it’s faster to render without that layer first and then apply those fx to the rendered piece.
Hope this helps.Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
Adding my support to the previous posters:
You’ll often get better results by rendering and exporting a master (using lossless compression) out of After Effects and then encoding that to your delivery format using Adobe Media Encoder.———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support
——————————————————————————————————— -
in addition to what’s been mentioned already, some of the issue may also be related to your preference settings.
you don’t mention your multiprocessing & memory settings, but i’d bet that the at the point of the slowdown, the system (os) has run out of ram and has started disk caching, which can really slow things down.
try leaving more ram to ‘other apps’ in the memory settings. with 16gb, you might try leaving around 6gb or so and see if that eliminates the slowdown.
when you have time, you should also checkout todd’s performance tips:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/543440
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks everyone for the support!
I found the culprit that was resulting in my long times. I was only using Mojo, LUTBuddy and Colorista for color adjustments (filming on 5d2 with Technicolor Cinestyle) but I was using Warp Stabilizer on quite a bit of the footage. I took those off of clips that didnt absolutely need it, and lowe and behold 3 hours later I’m rendered.
As for rendering outside of AE, I actually have very little experience with that. I come from a photography background, and as such have very little experience with video editing. In result, my rendering knowledge is not too savvy. For this specific case, my problem was with Warp Stabilizer — I tried rendering with every setting under the sun (including lossless), but for future reference could anyone recommend a walkthrough on rendering out of AE and then encoding in another software?
If anyone is curious to see, here is the final output:
By all means far from my best work, but having a week and a half turn-around time from filming to final product, it’s not absolutely terrible.
Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Vimeo framework” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
-
Thanks everyone for the support!
I found the culprit that was resulting in my long times. I was only using Mojo, LUTBuddy and Colorista for color adjustments (filming on 5d2 with Technicolor Cinestyle) but I was using Warp Stabilizer on quite a bit of the footage. I took those off of clips that didnt absolutely need it, and lowe and behold 3 hours later I’m rendered.
As for rendering outside of AE, I actually have very little experience with that. I come from a photography background, and as such have very little experience with video editing. In result, my rendering knowledge is not too savvy. For this specific case, my problem was with Warp Stabilizer — I tried rendering with every setting under the sun (including lossless), but for future reference could anyone recommend a walkthrough on rendering out of AE and then encoding in another software?
If anyone is curious to see, here is the final output:
By all means far from my best work, but having a week and a half turn-around time from filming to final product, it’s not absolutely terrible.
Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Vimeo framework” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
-
I will second Dave’s recommendation of Colour Finesse. It is an extremely powerful grading tool. Red Giant make some great products, but I can’t stand the Magic Bullet range.
As for tutorials on encoding… my best advice would be to keep searching ‘the cow and immersing yourself in as much learning as possible. Good encoding is a real art form and can get very technical. There are so many different delivery platforms that it would be possible to cover all bases in a single tutorial.
I’ve lost count of the number f times a client has asked for delivery in H.264. Okay… what for? mMobile? Blu-Ray? Web? What particular web video service? Frame size? Data rate? Audio sample rate?
Cheers,
Daniel
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up