excessive render time?

[Rdub]

Correction. 29 hours, not 10.

[Cameron King]

yeah a tad bit long…your ram is being eatin by something. I would save everything and restart everything. Get a clean slate. Especially with estimates of 10-29 hours.

Then again those numbers can be arbitrary (at least in FCP, AE is generally good about time estimates). Yeah restarting fresh would be faster than waiting all night.

cam

[Rdub]

Correction. 29 hours, not 10.

[Anita Sancha]

“your ram is being eatin by something”

I have the same problem with many renders, some days its fine. Starts renders at say 9 mins, if I do it again 37 mins, then 3 hours. I restart the computer before each render. Open only AE. Is it possible to find out what is “eatin the ram?” Activity manager shows full use.

Even purging before a render, does not seem to help much, except with the first 1000 frames or so, but using the “secret” preference (hold shift when clicking the pref general tab and getting another pref) and purging every 15 frames, you can change this, is a little better

tutorial for this AE workflow tips no 2 if you have not seen it.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/workflow_2.php

Thanks for all your help
Anita Sancha.

http://www.anitasancha.co.uk

[Kevin Camp]

[anita sancha] “Activity manager shows full use.”

activity monitor/task manager is a great tool to see if you have your system set up well. anytime you think you’re not getting the most out of your machine, start with one of those to see how well the cpu(s) are working. if the cpu usage is high, then things are set up well and the cores are getting plenty of data to process.

if it’s consistently low, the you probably have something set poorly, and the cores are getting starved for data and are not working as efficiently as they should.

so if your cpus are going full, but the render is taking a long time, well, that’s just how long it’s going to take with your system. if your cpus are going at half their potential, then you’ll want to look into making some settings changes or other upgrades…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Rdub]

Can I render sections of the timeline? Maybe 1 minute segments?

[Anita Sancha]

To get around my problem I export as tagas, then I can render say… 100 at a time… If its really heavy… keep going till the whole sequence is finished.

I get there in the end then composite in fcp or premier.

Thanks for all your help
Anita Sancha.

http://www.anitasancha.co.uk

[Rdub]

My render screen shows that After Effects is using only 12% of RAM. Does that make sense?

[David Bogie]

Many long renders can be improved by precomposing properly and then pre-rendering certain effects and layers and bringing them back in as movies.

There are some effects that simply require huge render times because of their look-back or look-forward settings. Any particle that has a life requires looking back to determine where to draw the trail. If you have a couple million particles on the screen, you’re going to get bogged down.

Some effects should be applied to precomps instead of individual layers. I

Lights in the comp will each load the engine tremendously and the effect on rendering time of multiple lights is exponential.

bogiesan

[Rdub]

What then, is the best way to render one minute segments as an option?