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1hr hang before render starts?
Hey!
AE has recently started leaving a long pause between when the render button is pushed and the render actually starts. The scene I am trying to render has a lot of layers and nesting and is at 720p, so I would expect that the render wouldn’t initialise immediately, but Im waiting up to an hour before the render starts (which subsequently takes about 15 mins).
As a control, i’ve solo’ed one un-animated video layer with no effects and tried to export just the first 20 seconds. As a comparison, i made a new comp with just the video layer in it, and performed the same render. The new comp beach-balled about a minute, then rendered in 40 seconds; the solo’ed comp has been waiting 50 mins so far…In a possibly unrelated issue, im getting an ‘incompatible effect or expression, multiprocessing off’ message in the comp, even when the video layer (with no effects or expressions) is solo’ed. Despite this, activity monitor shows 16 instances of aeselflink running at 100% CPU when the render finally kicks in.
Im running CS4 on an 8 core mac pro with OS 10.6. Have tried purging RAM cache and disabling multiprocessing, but to no avail. Anyone heard of this before? (its not background processes initialising). Thanks for reading this long and dry post! Will ply you with jokes and Christmas cheer if you come to my aid!
Thanks in advance guys
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10 Replies
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if you check the activity monitor when you are not rendering, do you see the aeselflinks working? this can happen if ae crashes while rendering with mp on and then you restart ae and will definitely effect performance.
if this is the case, quit ae and see if the aeselflinks quit too. if not, select them (in the activity monitor) and choose ‘quit process’ and restart ae and see if you get the same problem. if you do, try rebooting.
another thing you might want to do is pre-render some of those nested comps. open the nested comp, then choose layer>pre-render, then set the render settings/output module as needed. choosing pre-render will tell ae to import the file after rendering and then replace the nested comp with the rendered footage. the nested comp doesn’t get removed from the project, but it will be automatically replaced in any comp that used that nested comp.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Hi there, thanks for your reply.
Yes, i have 16GB RAM and nothing else running. As I mentioned, the same problem applies with multiprocessing turned off, so I dont think its related.
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if you check the activity monitor when you are not rendering, do you see the aeselflinks working? this can happen if ae crashes while rendering with mp on and then you restart ae and will definitely effect performance.
Hi Kevin, thanks for your reply.
AE had in fact crashed prior to these problems, so after booting up today I have tried the same tests. I turned multiprocessing off, and am trying to render the same solo’ed layer (sorry if this spelling of solo’ed is annoying, really cant think of what else to call it).
There are no instances of aeselflink running, but im still getting an hour’s hang before render starts. I do generally use pre-rendering, but in this case I assume it doesnt apply, as I am only trying to render a single solo’ed layer.
As I mentioned in my original post, importing the soloed layer to a new clean comp renders with only a minute’s pause- this leads me to think that the size and complexity of the project file is the cause of the pause, even if I am only dealing with one solo’ed layer. Are system resources tied up in dealing with the project file? Is there any way i can reduce this without pre-rendering everything? -
Oh, and as promised:
How do you describe a rich elf?
welfy!!ho ho ho, merry christmas!
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you would think that solo-ing a layer or nested comp would tell ae not to load the other layers/nested comps, but that may not be the case.
when you said that you imported the solo’ed layer into a new clean comp, was that a new comp in the same project file, or did you create a new project?
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Yeah, thats what i thought too… but maybe it preloads an image cache or something? (sorry, these are just words.. dont know if they are the right ones).
Sorry yes, I made a new project file and imported it. Have just tested with a new comp in the same (original) project file, and it starts after only a minute or so! So must be that solo-ing a layer is somehow different from having the layer in its own comp. Another thing kind of backs this up; when the layer is in its own comp, multiprocessing is fine, but when solo-ed, I get the incompatible effect/expression error despite the fact that the guilty layer (wherever it may be) is turned off.
How frustrating. Will try to reduce the complexity of the project by pre-rendering as per your advice, hopefully ill be able to bring the wait down a bit.
Thanks for your help, let me know if you think of anything else!
Kei -
it’s possible that it is just one nested comp that is causing the issue…
there are only a hand full of standard ae effects that are not compatible with mp… the cc time blend effects are some of those and they require that frames get cached prior to rendering, so those could account for the long wait.
are you using cc time blend or cc time blend fx? if so, try removing that comp (or comps) from the main comp and try a render just to see if you get that long pause before rendering.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
No, pretty confused about this error actually.. had a check on the AE help file, but not using any time-based effects or anything on that list as far as i can recall. Do you know how an expression could trigger this message?
Its annoying to have an 8-core and then only use 1 processor! This is not such a biggie though, I will just render while i sleep for this project- its an equal danger to spend all my time trying to sort it out, haha. -
Same problem – new issue for me.
I have 16GB of ram 2×2.26 quad core xeons and no other applications running
I’ve tested rendering comps that have one layer of pre-rendered video @ HDTV specs 1260 frames – Still have an insane pre render wait.
After effects will show up as not responding for about an hour before starting w/ or w/o Multi Processing
This makes no sense to me as I’m getting these issues both at home and work.
I tested a simple solid in a comp and that rendered super fast.
Again this issue started about 5 days ago
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I THINK MY ISSUE WAS RELATED TO USING A 16BIT VIDEO IN A 8BIT PROJECT
ODD THAT BIT ISSUE WOULD CAUSE AN HOUR DELAY TO RENDER START-UP TIME
CAP-LOCKS… RENDERING
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