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14 hour rendering…what are my options?
I just completed a 9 minute video using only AE, but it took 14 hours to render. The comp used the 3d effect with the camera quite a bit and a lot of scaling up and down for the ‘ken burns look’. With the exception of a few short clips, only digital photos were used. Was rendered into an uncompressed AVI. My question is, given my project and system (listed below) does this sound normal? If so, what are my options? I have looked at getting a dual core processor, but have hear about using render cards, but have only found info about them for 3d animation programs…are there other types?
My System:
Dell 360 Workstation
512MB RAM
Pentium 4 3.0 GHZ processor
nvidia quadrofx 500 graphics card -
8 Replies
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I have to say if you’re just doing still photo moves, 14 hours does sound long to me. My first reaction is to make sure that you set the IN and OUT points of each layer to the area only where the layer needs to be visible, so that by the end of the 9 minutes After Effects isn’t for some reason trying to comp together 400 stills that are hidden anyway behind the top one.
-Ben
Ben Insler
Editor
Telemark Films -
[Ben Insler] “I have to say if you’re just doing still photo moves, 14 hours does sound long to me. My first reaction is to make sure that you set the IN and OUT points of each layer to the area only where the layer needs to be visible, so that by the end of the 9 minutes After Effects isn’t for some reason trying to comp together 400 stills that are hidden anyway behind the top one.”
That’s not going to help anything when using the 3D renderer. It simply does not this way. Anyway, the render times are quite normal with the 3D renderer, even more so when using the Advanced 3D option. There isn’t much you can do about it. Even upgrading the system won’t do any good (it’s a bit weak on RAM). The only option would be using multiple machines to render.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Are your photos larger than necessary?
For example, if your photo just appears to fill the screen (and gets no closer than that), it does not need to be any bigger than the size of your TV frame.
I hope that was clear …
Steve
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Yeah 14 hours still seems pretty excessive to me. Sounds about right for a 1Ghz Mac, but newer machines should be able to crank things out a bit faster.
I would definitely up your RAM for a AE box. It might be that you are using high-res images that need to swap all the time instead of just rendering in RAM.
The big culprit in something like this would be your images being too large. After Effects really starts to choke when you use huge high res images.
Can we get a look at what you are doing – maybe it would provide some clues as to why you are waiting so long.
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[Mylenium] “That’s not going to help anything when using the 3D renderer. It simply does not this way. Anyway, the render times are quite normal with the 3D renderer, even more so when using the Advanced 3D option. There isn’t much you can do about it.”
I agree with this. The 3D renderer is pretty slow when you are using cameras, lights and shadows. For a 9 minutes video, 14 hours sounds like what you should expect. Of course you could use the OpenGL renderer, but the quality is much worst.
For 3D layers without cameras, light or motion blur, 14 hours would be excessive.
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Thanks for all the input guys. Let me see if I can respond here quickly:
-I did a little research and am definetly going to up the RAM soon, also I will surely start pre-rendering because I intend to these type of videos very frequently (I never used pre-render before because I never did anything longer in AE than one minute). For future reference how do you think a G5 would handle it?
-The picture sizes had to be scaled down to about 50% to see the entire picture, which actually helped in acheiving the effect I wanted anyway, so no real room to budge there.
-Yes, I did use quite a bit of 3d camera and lights to acheive certain effects in certain parts.
-Chris,I don’t have a website or anything to upload it to, to show you what I am doing (not sure if there’s another way to do that). But I can tell you for example, the biggest thing I did in the video is took four comps, made them 3d and then moved them to make the shape of cube so looking from the top view it would look like this: |_|..(just imagine the fourth wall:)). Anyway, on each of those walls I plastered 120 pictures, so visually what you end up seeing is a single picture covering the whole screen and then when the song kicks into an upbeat tempo I pull the camera way back so you see this wall of pictures, then zooms back in on a different picture that now fills the screen and so on…whew, I guess that was a lot to render considering that was just one part of the video. But yes, it looked amazing and blew everyone who saw it.
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[j] “-Yes, I did use quite a bit of 3d camera and lights to acheive certain effects in certain parts.
Well, then there’s no way around it. 3D lights are always a performance hog, in any pograms. To optimise you workflow, use the least number of light possible and trim them so they aren’t computed when not used. Use 2D layers when possible. When doing a ram preview to verify your keyframe animation, drop the resolution to third or even quarter.
I know trapcode has some light plugin for AE, but I don’t know how easy they are to use. They probably are a bit faster than AE’s built-in lights.
A G5 or any powerful dual processor PC will also be faster and more importantly let you work on other apps while rendering. And a quad processor, even more…
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quad processing!?…someday baby, someday….:)
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