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Dealing with a slow rendering AE project
Hi, I got a few AE projects that were not created by me. The projects are cool and I really like the final results they produce, but they render very slowly. I believe this is due to the fact that most of the layers in those projects have effects attached to them.
I intend on using the projects for different works in the future but I don’t want to wait 5 hours every time I need to render them.
What should I do? Should I just render each layer separately and then create a new composition with the rendered layers, so the new comp would render a lot faster the next time I need to use it?
If this is the thing that I need to do, what should I keep in mind, other than rendering with an Alpha channel?
This was the first thing that came to my mind and I already did an experiment with this. I was not happy with the results. Tried to play with the blending modes too, with not much success.
Or maybe I’m just on the wrong track here and there is a better way to do it? maybe pre-rendering the layers is not what I need?
Looking forward to your advice.
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6 Replies
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Pre-rendering does help and will speed up future renders, however, there are situations in which you can not do that because the transfer modes, the way layers and effects interact with each other. Testing- the way you did- is the best way. You just need to figure out what can be pre-rendered and what not.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
For us the culprits are vector layers.
We use a ton due wide use of Graphic Designers.
yes pre-render as much as possible.
I miss the days when Plug-ins slowed down the system. -
Thanks for your replies, guys.
So basically I’m on the right track with the pre-render method?
That’s good news to hear.Is there a way to automatically pre-render the layers instead of manually pre-rendering them one by one?
There are tons of layers and manual render is pretty tedious.
I tried a script by RD that was supposed to automate the process but for some reason it didn’t do what I wanted.@ Eric Santiago, vector layers?
Are these the ones that contain shapes? I think they are not the ones that slow down the render because they are so simple, but who knows… I will try to pre-render them first to see if there is an increase in render speed. -
I wouldn’t recommend pre-rendering every layer by itself. Instead start by grouping any layers that you can into pre-comps. Hopefully you’ll be able to consolidate a lot of the layers this way, then you can pre-render the pre-comps.
This is assuming that you won’t need to change the transform properties or effects on individual layers in the future.
Darby Edelen
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Thanks, I won’t bother you anymore. I’ll just start experimenting until I come up with something useful.
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Vectors created in external apps like Adobe Illustrator.
The shapes within AE are less cpu crunchers.
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