Excessive render times with Particle Playground?

[Nate Vander plas]

I don’t have Particular, but I have used Particle Playground before and it was very slow for me too. I think I had more particles than that, but they were square. I was also doing a very short clip with at least a GB of RAM and it took at least ten or fifteen minutes.

[Mylenium]

Yes, that’s quite normal and its slowness is effectively what has made people hate PPG and opened up a market for third-party solutions, as half-assed as some of them are. If you ever have such a job again, shelve out the money for Particular – it’s undoubtedly as good as any particle system inside AE can ever get considering the limitations of AE itself.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Jimmy Brunger]

Thanks for the input guys. I *think* I know what it might be….?

The logo that zooms down from 500%>6% is a precomp of the fullsize logo which is 5000×3000 pixels. This precomp also contains a scaled down graphic that’s original size is 4000×4000 pix. I have continuously rasterized both of these so they can be scaled up in the main comp and not be soft. I think this might be the ‘hogger’?

To test:-
I did the same render without PPG – 8.5mins.
same render without mo blur – 8mins.
same render without mo blur OR PPG – still 7mins.

Can’t see what else could be taking so long? There are no lights/cameras or any 3D layers. The shape I used for the particles was a 300×300 pix PS file scaled down to 12% and animated opacity and pre-comped.

It must be the big logo yeah?

I will definitely be investing in Trapcode suite when I get the new workstation…

It’s just difficult with this particular (pardon pun) job because I have my client asking how long I’ve taken (we bill by the hour) and asking if he has to pay for renders…difficult to answer because, YES he has to pay for renders BUT my PC is so slow that if I had an upto date machine it SHOULD be rendered in 10-15 mins all up probably. That’s not his problem is it? The fact I have to render out separate alpha runs for the editbox to see transparency doesn’t help the mammoth 1.5hrs render I might have to charge for!

I guess what I need to work out is how long it would take if we were ‘upto date’???..and charge accordingly. Not quite sure how I’d go about that…

Thoughts?

*Production Studio Premium / *Combustion 3
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0

[Jimmy Brunger]

Thanks Dave, the job’s done now, but I’ll bear that in mind in future. It menas you have slightly less control if you pre-render an animation, but I guess it’s easy enough to go back and tweak it then re-render again. I imagine it’ll speed it up when it’s in the main comp.

One sloution that worked quite well for rendering the alpha runs was to render a 32-bit targa seq irst, re-import that and then render out a matte run form that….8 seconds to render intead of another 15 mins!

You live and learn!….now where’s my new HP xw8400 and new copy of Particular…..

*Production Studio Premium / *Combustion 3
————————————-
Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation / 110GB boot/80GB media/600GB RAID-0