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how large can an AE project be, safely?
Hello all, I am working on an animation sequence of epic proportions (delivery length approx 6mins). it includes video, psd, ill and jpg files and over 50 comps so far. My question is: is there a experience or guide lines in how large a project is safe to get to still be able to render out of it. the proj is 17mb and now takes close to 10 secs to save it on my dual g5.
i have several other projects from where I do pre renders and smaller animation,, but the main project still contains all the major files and as everything is cross-used I don’t really want to spend time splitting it up?is it safe?
thanks/ david -
7 Replies
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I think it’s safe.I used to work on such a big project, nothing happened and everything was ok!:)
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I love After effects! -
thanks for telling me what I wanted to hear 🙂 keeping my fingers crossed /d
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I would backup that file everyday under a different name in case it gets corrupt or something. If one thing goes wrong in the file, you would hate to lose yur whole project.
Brian
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I would second that, wholeheartedly. Always save incrementally under a new name: whatever01.aep, whatever02.aep, and so on. It’s been easy to do since 6.5.
Your time between saves should be the same as the amount of work you’re prepared to re-do in the event of a crash. Save incrementally once a day, be prepared to re-do a day’s work. Do it every hour, be prepared to re-do only an hour’s work.
If you’re concerned about disk space, maybe delete (or Zip) 9 out of 10 files after a week or something.
Steve
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This is what happened me with AE 5.5 and 6 long ago, I hope it can help:
I made a 12 minute long short movie with lots of effects, masking, rotoscoping, color correction, time remap. Quite amateur but with a dedicated postproduction. After editing in Premiere, I transfered everything to AE. I had no problems then. For pure safety reasons I separated work on different aeps, but just by saving it into different names and then working on different parts in each project. After it was finished, I wanted to integrate all of them in the same aep, but found problems for a stupid reason: Importing the same footage again and again made AE crazy in those days, so I had to delete the unused footage in each small aep before importing. Dumb me. After that, it worked, but it still was going slow and making the final adjustments was quite tedious. I think it was solved in AE6, because it felt a bit smoother when I went back to it.
I also had another problem with AE6 at the time. I was making an animation for a videogame with lots of cartoony footsteps appearing on the floor. I discovered that AE went crazy on my computer after adding 40 3d layers or so. It was not a memory problem, they could be big or small and the problem persisted. Even through deactivating them and precomposing, AE crashed.
If you want to know what kind of projects I am talking about, check out the short movie
https://www.youtube.com/w/Empathy-in-Blue?v=05pUYWPolVI
and the intro
https://files.filefront.com/FILE_VOTE/;3671837;5;/fileinfo.html -
cheers! will check out those links… and THANKS to all for your replies. no worries, I am backing up regularly and not running out of disc space yet – for a couple of hundred gigs on 🙂 just wanted to check that I wasn’t blindly heading into a some sort of well mapped out mistake of having too large projects. that’s all though. cheers again 🙂 /d
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AE 5.5: I’ve had comps go over 50mb. The interface definitely responds slower, as it would if you have heaps of layers in a comp. Saving is boring, but no stability issues specifically. Cheers
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