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Exporting problems/questions….
I just want to know if I’m doing something wrong with my AE project since it wants to take four hours to export my 4 minute and 30 second movie.
I’ll try to give all the details I can think of. Hopefully it’ll only be a little boring.
I’m making a slideshow using about 35 photos that average about 650KB each. I also have some .MOVs thrown in there that are about 70MB each. There are also 2 PSDs that are 500KB each and three .AIs that are about 1MB each. The PSDs are split into about 25 layers each as I have write-on effects going that makes it look like a sketch is being drawn.
On each photo there are fades in and out. There is some AutoColor on the video clips as well as Motion Tracking to stabilize them. There is a also a 4.5 minute song going through most of it.
That’s about it. I want to try to render something relatively small (that can fit on a CD) but still look good enough to be shown to a group of people.
When I try to export with like Cinepak with the quality slider on High or Best, the render queue wants to take about 4 and a half frickin hours to export that thing.
I want to know if that’s normal for someone with a 2GHz Mac G5 PowerPC with 2GB of DDR SDRam.
I’ve collected files into one folder, too. I’ve purged the cache. I’ve tried to do everything I could think of to help speed up the process.
It always seems to take AE longer than it should to export my movies with hardly any compression.
Can someone explain to me what I’m doing wrong (if anything) and – if you like doing so – explain to me what’s going on in the guts of the program when I choose the different compressors? I’ve been using AE for about a year and I still don’t understand all these crazy rendering possibilities.
Thanks to anyone who even reads this.
.brian
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7 Replies
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4 hours to render a 4.5 minute clip is not uncommon .. most of this time is AE calculating what you have done in the project… like effects, motion blur etc … when you are rendering you can expand the “Current Render Details” box in the render queue and see what elements are taking longest to render … compressing it to cinepak or whatever isn’t really taking that long …
so, if you are not positively sure of what final output settings you want, I’d recommend rendering an uncompressed (or lossless codec like animation) … and then compressing this file down for the CD using a program like Compressor or Squeeze … this way you can do it a few times to get it right without having to wait the 4.5 hours everytime … If you still can’t get a file size/quality that you want then try asking in the “Compression Techniques” forum …
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Ah, ok. Thanks a lot. Although now you have me wondering how long it would take to export it with Animation. I’ve always thought it takes less time to export uncompressed than it does with something compressed. Is that right for the most part?
.brian
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yeah it probably would be quicker to render uncompressed because it isn’t doing the encode processes … but it is writing a larger file to disk … I don’t think the difference would be that much .. almost all of the render time is calculating blurs and compositions and such …
i think it’s probably good habit to not make your encodes straight out of the AE render queue … imagine if you had a 1 minute promo and it was a 3 day render because of a really complex project … and you rendered it out for the web … then the client asks for it on DVD … .you have to wait another 3 days!
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Thanks that helps explain some things to me, but I guess I was confusing the two terms. I am using the Render Queue. I basically want to know if my project sounds complex enough to warrant 4.5 hours of render time.
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Maybe it does.
Got motion blur? That slows things down.
What kind of effects are you using?
Are your sources on a different drive from the system? They should be.(Compression has little to do with dragging down render times. It’s generally the stuff that happens to each frame before compression that slows things down.)
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No motion blur on anything. Each photo fades in and out while it scales up. There is autocolor on the video clips as well as motiontracking. There is an adjustment layer that blurs some text as it scrolls up in the end of the project.
All the project files are on a separate drive. I have a few more details about it in my first post.
Could I have over-nested compositions or something? Everything has been resized to 720×480. I have the feeling I am doing something completely wrong.
I wish there was some sort of timetable for comparison.
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Wow. Well then I guess I’m doing ok. Thank you for helping me and telling me what’s what.
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