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Export settings for speed
Hello everyone,
I’ve created 4 montages of photographs in After Effects, which last about 30 seconds. All that really happens is a bunch of photographs spin onto the screen, one after the other to create a sort of collage, and then one by one they centre into the screen and spin out again so you can get a proper look at them.
I created a Premiere Pro project with a sequence for each montage and added a soundtrack. I queued them all up to export out through Media Encoder in H.264 format, 1080p, 50fps (same as the sequences and AE comps) progressive, VBR 2 pass, target bitrate 5mbps (max 10mbps). Audio is AAC, 320kbps, 44khz, stereo.
I left them to it over night, and was astonished to come back and find that only two were complete. It’s still rendering out the third one which says the elapsed time is over 6 hours, and still has 30 minutes to go.
I normally always encode my videos with these settings, as recommended by Vimeo – but it doesn’t usually take this long! Having said that, it is normally videos I render out rather than AE animations.
Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can speed up the process without reducing the quality too much? Would it help if I added the audio in AE instead and rendered it straight out of that? I refrained from doing this because I find audio easier to work with in Premiere.
If it helps, I’m using a MacBook Pro, 2.2Ghz, i7, 8GB RAM and there’s about 150GB of space left on the drive.
Hope you can help,
thanks! -
6 Replies
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Hi Jonnie,
My guess is you have a plugin that’s really slowing things down, or you are running out of RAM.
Yes, a direct AE export should be a bit faster, but not by much.
You can try unchecking the Maximum quality box as well, or render CBR at a higher rate.
Of course, not worth canceling this one.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Thanks Vince.
I’ve decided to try rendering out using CBR, which is really about the only change I’ve made after doing a bit of Googling. Maximum render quality was already unchecked :/
Media Encoder still reckons the first 30 second file will take about an hour. Each file only has a maximum of 11 photographs, and the only effect I can think that might be causing some issues is Camera Lens Blur (I’ve used it a number of times on several different adjustment layers). Other than that it’s just scale, rotate, position and opacity.
I’ve just started to render the final files out now, so I can only hope it’s done by tomorrow morning!!
Thanks again.
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Yep, for the camera lens blur, you’re gonna need another 16 cores of processing 🙂
Fast blur might not look nearly as good, but it’s the way to go unless you are working for Pixar…
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Yeah I try to save camera lens blur for shorter segments & projects that don’t require a quick turn around. Fast blur really is the way to go when time is important.
Also set up after effects’ preferences to render multiple frames simultaneously, this will really speed things up on export if you haven’t already set it up. AE should see your i7 as an 8 core processor and you can render up to 8 frames at a time instead of 1 (though I set it around 6 so I have some processor speed for background tasks). -
Awesome, massive thanks to both of you!
I swapped all the camera lens blurs for fast blurs and it seemed to be rendering much quicker when I left it. This time it should be done when I get back to it tomorrow morning!
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What is your graphics card?
Do you have the CUDA cores enabled, or OpenCL? I think the blur functions are GPU accelerated. If so, hardware encoding over software encoding should be a minimum of 10x as fast.
Michael
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