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After Effects CS4 Slow Rendering
Hello everyone.
I’m having an issue with my renders in CS4. It seems that when I render it starts off good, but then drops off after several frames. I’ve checked all of my settings and i cant seem to find anything that’s out of order. It almost seems that even though multiprocessing rendering is on, it’s not doing it.
I’m running OSX version 10.5.7 with 2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors. My Memory is 12GB 1066 MHz DDR3
I have to produce one cartoon a week and the renders up until now have been taking 30-45 min per scene depending on the length of the scene. Now one scene is taking about 3 hours. Any ideas?
Jon Etheridge
Appsro inc
jon@appsro.com -
6 Replies
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Just noticed something strange as well that seems to be related. Every time the render slows is when a certain character moves. For example, the characters names are Cuddles, Big Pete, and Father Hickey. When Cuddles and Hickey move it goes at a good speed, but when it gets to Big Pete it has a massive slowdown. I checked the source file and it’s no bigger than any of the files for the other characters.
Any ideas on that one?
Jon Etheridge
Appsro inc
jon@appsro.com -
You might have set up AE to use too much RAM and it’s slowing it down.
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I have 12GB installed and I’ve told AE to use only 5 and to use 6 for other applications.
It has to be something to do with that one character. I realized that every time I’ve had a problem with the render it has that character on screen. I’m going to create a new photoshop file and re-rig him for the next episode to see if that clears things up.
Jon Etheridge
Appsro inc
jon@appsro.com -
Hi Jon,
What does Activity Monitor show during the render when you get to Big Pete? If your memory usage is suddenly skyrocketing and the system starts swapping out to hard disk, you might have a strange RAM problem after all.
I recently made this suggestion in a similar thread:
There’s a secret menu in the preferences where you can disable the layer cache and set AE to purge frames during make movie —- though this should be a last resort. Hold down the Shift key, and keep it down. Click After Effects > Preferences > General. Continue to hold the Shift key, and click on the list of preferences. You should see a “Secret” item where you can make these changes.
If your renders were working perfectly, you would see a big performance hit for mucking with these settings; however, since they are not, it may help. Don’t forget to reset them for your next project.
Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production -
Thanks Walter.
I had already tried that and I even reset all of my preferences but neither worked.
I’m sure it’s something to do with the Big Pete file. I rendered out a scene today without Big Pete and it ran fast and smooth like it ought to.
Hopefully when I restructure and re-save the Photoshop file and re-rig the character everything will go back to normal. :p
Jon Etheridge
Appsro inc
jon@appsro.com -
[Jon Etheridge] “Hopefully when I restructure and re-save the Photoshop file and re-rig the character everything will go back to normal. :p”
Good luck — if you ever figure out what the problem with the file was, I’d be interested to hear about it.
Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production
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