Help with: Loooong renders in AE CS3

[Richard Mamary]

Even if there is a decent jump in quality by using the animation codec, as it increases render time and file size so dramatically, I will not use it for this project.
As an aside, when I am working with animations I make from scratch with AE, the animation codec files, though large, render at a faster rate in those instances.

I am bit rocked that turning off the fields in “Interpret Footage,” cuts render time in half as well. As there is no scaling, blur etc., this is a great trick. The footage does look heavily interlaced.

When making my mpeg-2’s, (I use Compressor), do I need to undo this, and how?
Should I open the file beforehand with QT, and check deinterlace?
Will that make a difference?

[Darby Edelen]

[Richard Mamary] “When making my mpeg-2’s, (I use Compressor), do I need to undo this, and how?
Should I open the file beforehand with QT, and check deinterlace?
Will that make a difference? “

I believe the checkbox in the QT Properties is for display in QT only and has no effect on whether the file retains its fields or not.

The MPEG-2 encoder should handle the interlacing correctly. If it’s an interlaced source then the MPEG-2 should be interlaced, you shouldn’t notice this interlacing on an interlaced display device and most progressive devices offer some form of in-device de-interlacing… device. =)

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Richard Mamary]

My Friends,
Thank you for all of your help.
All your suggestions helped me to make test tweaks that set me up for the major render that I have running presently.
So far so good, the first hour indicates :30min in with 1:50 left, so that’s well under 2.5hrs per render, with one effect, for every hour of footage. That sure beats 8-9 hours for each!
We’ll see if it holds up. If so, I could have my 7.5 hrs by noon tomorrow… Tell me I’m not dreaming… We’ll see.
These newer number make more sense, and seem representative of that which I was getting running Tiger with 6.5 (Though not much better considering I upped my RAM and Videocard…
But at this traumatic point I would be happy to get m Tiger numbers again.)
I may have further questions when the results come in.
Thank you all.

[Richard Mamary]

Thanks Darby!

[Richard Mamary]

Ok
I’m completely desperate again.
All the help all of you gave me was great, and I was able to shave down those render times.
For whatever damned reason, TimeMachine kicked in, in the middle of the night, and declared, (through a popup window), that the backup drive was too small.
Again, this happened while I dared go to sleep. (Something I’m not likely to chance doing again), and it caused AE to crash with nine minutes left on the second 5hr render.
After rebooting, running utilities, etc. I reopened AE, checked all the settings you all gave me, everything is the same,…
I started another two hour render, (with a single effect), that should have been five hours long max, and its back to telling me it will be 8hrs again.
I am ready to meet my maker at this point.
AE worked so much better on my G5 running Tiger with only 1.5GB memory and a 128mb Videocard.
Since I upgraded to Leopard, increasing my Ram to 5.5GB and adding a 256mb Videocard, I’ve had nothing but renders that are at best two times longer than they should be.

I can’t even revert back to Tiger because I only have my Tiger upgrade disk, and can’t locate the Panther installation disk that came with it.

Is anyone here in the NYC area? And, willing to make a house call? I will pay for someone to come out here. If I don’t get this job done for Christmas, I am going to lose not just an important client, but all the referrals he was giving me.

[Kevin Camp]

i wish i lived closer to nyc to help….

if you are really desperate, i would make a new post for suggestions on getting tiger back. as far as i know adobe still hasn’t released an update for cs3 to address compatibility issues with osx 10.5 (it is supposed to be this month).

you may also want to post in the after effects ny forum that is hosted here at the cow. you may be able to quickly find someone to help you out.

i know this won’t help you now, and i’m not trying to upset you any further… but if you really rely on one system, when you want to upgrade something major, like an operating system, buy an extra internal hard disk and install all the new software on that (you can have multiple boot drives in you computer with no problems, you just pick which one to boot from). then if there is a problem, you can easily switch back to using the other drive (note, ae is not backwards compatible, so you would need to have the same version of ae on each drive to open the same projects).

after a few months or when your satisfied with the new setup, you can then use the extra drive for storage or backup.

i feel pretty confident that you will get this worked out, the main thing is not to panic, just start rendering again and figure out how to turn off time machine.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Richard Mamary]

Thanks Kevin,

buy an extra internal hard disk and install all the new software on that

I actually did clone my original Tiger Disk, which booted fine to start with, and then when I was installing it in an enclosure, the drives board fried.
I tried to find a replacement board for the drive online, but couldn’t find it.
I can’t spend $1,000 to try and resurrect it, through data recovery services, it’s not worth it, so that is done.
I’ll try the NY board, but I wanted you to know I was smart enough to initially do what you suggested. In fact I always do it.
Thanks for all your help.
Richard

[Kevin Camp]

i’m glad you had planned on keeping the old drive intact… i had to learn that the hard way, actually i’ve learned just about everything i know about computer maintenance and software updating/upgrading the hard way, so i can always relate to others who report on similar disasters…

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW