3.5 hours to render a 5 min. green screen key?

[Jim Hines]

Thank you Dave. I guess that’s at least something I can tell my client. Don’t try to save money by shooting with an off the shelf HDV camera.

I’m actually glad to hear that answer as I am increasingly worried that I’m doing something wrong.

If you don’t mind can I ask you if it is normal that a 9 sec comp containing a single solid with the fractal noise effect on it and 4-5 parameter tweeks should prevent me from a ram preview longer than 7 seconds at full quality? Same specs as above.

I’m not a basher just feel like something aint right. I have the render multiple frames box checked and have fiddled with the slider without much success. Anything stike you as off?

[Kevin Camp]

hi jim,

if you hadn’t looked up dave’s stock answer #1, there are ather codecs that will cause ae to struggle. common ones are hdv, mpeg-2, mp3g-4 and h.264, but there are others. the problem with these codecs are the use intraframe compression (or temporal compression), so that’s what to look out for. for ae to work well, you want to use interframe compression only.

as far as ram preview duration, if you frame size is 1920×1080, the each uncompressed frame is about 6mb. if it’s 30fps, then 6mb x 30fps = 180mb/s. so, 7sec x 180mb/s = 1.260gb.

ae, being a 32-bit application, can only use about 3.5mb of ram (windows) or 3mb (osx) for foreground processes, so if the max ram cache is set to around 60% or so, that would leave around 1.2gb for the ram preview…

so, yep, 7 seconds of full 1080 is about right for ram previews… we’ll have to wait until ae goes 64-bit to get respectible ram preview durations.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Hannes Paulsson]

I can confirm that too, I have pretty much the same specs as you do intel i7 (at 2.67ghz, so a bit slower), and 12 gbs of ram, and i get about 7 secs too.

[Todd Kopriva]

In addition to Dave’s tips, here is a whole page of ’em:

“Improve performance”

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Jim Hines]

Thanks for that Todd and to Hannes Paulson also for confirming on the specs and of course Dave and Kevin Camp as well. BTW Todd I looked at those roto tuts. Pete O’Connel’s Rotoscoping in AE was very enlightening.

You know what was really holding up my render? A preset for lightwraping I had learned to make at Maltannon’s site. Once I took that off it rendered out fairly well. I mean from 3.5 hours to 39 minutes. And as it turned out even though I had captured HDV footage in Premiere I was exporting .mov files in the animation codec and importing it into AE. That’s how I came to realize it was the preset. Since when I checked my files they weren’t .mpeg

so…I’m a jackass. First for not correctly explaining the situation and also for not getting back sooner with the solution. However I’ve been knocked out with the flu and had to finish that job simultaneously. I really do appreciate all the help.

Still I’ve learned a lot working with this HDV stuff. For instance, I guess you have to export your movies at 1920×1080 square pixel to get them to look right when you bring ’em back to Premiere. Is that right or am I missing something again? I realize HDV is 1440×1080 1.33 but if you export at that aspect when you bring it back it doesn’t look right. Unless of course I did something wrong.