• Adobe After Effects

  Element 3D causing a 72 hour render??

  Posted by Dylan Hargreaves on June 24, 2016 at 12:20 pm

  An After Effects project which has been behaving itself perfectly has suddenly developed a problem on rendering.

  It’s not a particularly strenuous piece – an mp4 clip provided by the client with some text and Element 3D. Normally the render time is around 20-30mins.

  Have spent the past few days attempting to render it both inside AE and via Encoder, and the stated render time has shot up to 72 hours. Even the first few seconds which are literally just a logo animation on a plain white background is sitting there for minutes at a time between frames.

  So far have tried all the usual workarounds: purging caches, changing disc cache locations, swapping the project to a new drive, opening the project inside a new project, trying to render on a different machine, to no avail. The only thing that looks unusual is the RAM usage indicator which is saying it’s using only 3% of the available 64Gb.

  If I Switch off Element, suddenly the RAM usage goes up to over 20% and the project exports at the speed you’d expect – minus the crucial 3D elements of course!

  So it leads me to believe that something has gone wrong with Element, although what that might be I don’t know. As I say, until now, the project has been working and earlier renders have been fine. No changes have been made to the Element parts since the last successful render.

  Any ideas?

  3.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5
  64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC
  AMD FirePro D300 2048 MB

  Project stored on a LaCie 20Tb Thunderbolt drive

  Dylan Hargreaves replied 9 years, 10 months ago 1 Member · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Dylan Hargreaves

  June 24, 2016 at 2:08 pm

  Hi Dave,

  Yes, but only yesterday which was after experiencing the issue.

  As an update, I’ve tried switching the renderer from Classic 3D to Ray-traced, and have switched the output codec to GoPro Cineform YUV 10-Bit (from ProRes422).

  Render time has now dropped to under 3 hours and it seems to be behaving. RAM usage also at 79%. Still a bit slower than it seemed before, but that could be due a feathered mask over a solid to blend some edges perhaps?

  Would be interested to hear your thoughts!

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up