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How to find the costliest layer during Render/RAM preview
Hello Friends,
Situation: I have a 30 layer comp and it does good in RAM previews etc. But suddenly it becomes dead slow for RAM previews or Renders after I added an effect in one of the layers (I forget the layer).
Is there any way we can find out the layer taking the most time other than doing a visibility off for each layer and checking?
In one of my cases I found that a Light layer had Shadows On checked by mistake and was taking lot of time to render. But that took me lot of time to realise, in another case the Shine effect on a 3D stroke was taking lot of time.
Is there a easy way out to find the costliest layer?
Thankx so much.
Tx,
Hafeez -
8 Replies
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As far as I know, there isn’t a way to get a “cost” read-out for any given layer. Deselect all your layers, and hit ‘e’ to reveal all your effects on all layers. The layers that have a lot of effects working is probably your culprit, but you’ll have to look at it.
Motion blur (RSMB, in particular), lens blur and match grain always make my comps run slow, so I usually have them off when I’m working and then switch them all back on for the final render.
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In the Render Que, right below the render bar, there’s a little menu that you can click called Current Render Details. Click it down and start your render. It gives you a blow by blow account of what is rendering at that moment. Whichever layer it gets slowed down on will be obvious, because it will be displayed for a long time.
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[Bill Kelly] “In the Render Que, right below the render bar, there’s a little menu that you can click called Current Render Details.”
It wasn’t all that long ago that my Macintosh took a weekend to render 10 seconds of video in AE. It was easy to spot the processing intensive layers. My current Mac simply screams through rendering and I think it is only previous experience that helps me figure out which layers may be slowing things down.
3D makes your scene render at least 3 times as long, maybe 9 times. A light or depth of field increases render time by a geometric progression.
Anyway…if you can locate the problem layer, your next challenge is to figure out how to streamline you rendering pipeline. For me, that’s always a question of deciding what layers I can pre-render and import as movies or which 3D layers can be turned back into 2D or even offloaded to the video editor. I do a lot of text items and few of them require the sophistication of AE. Most of them can be done in FCP.
bogiesan
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Brilliant! Thankx so much Bill, I tried that and I can see all my costly layers caught in action :-).
Thankx Joe and David for sharing your experience.
COW Rocks!!!!
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Bill, that is a great little feature you have pointed out!
I would say I know AE fairly well (though, as we all know, there’s always something else to learn) and this is one of those little options that I just never paid attention to… i can see it being very useful in the future.Actually investigating the palettes and menus we use everyday can reveal the most interesting treasures!
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Thanks for that tip, Bill. I didn’t know that existed either. Now I can totally see myself wasting a lot of time staring at this during renders. 🙂
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Under Preferences > Display there is an option to “Show Rendering Progress in Info Panel and Flowchart.”
If you check this and have the Info panel open while you work every time the renderer starts working it will tell you what it’s rendering as it renders.
Any layers that are taking a while to render will be listed longer than the others. It’s important to note that the layers are described with a “layer number” and these layer numbers are inverted from the layer numbering system in the composition.
Where as the top layer in the comp would be layer 1, the bottom layer is reported as layer 1 in the info panel rendering status.
Darby Edelen
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Thankx Again Darby, this is another excellent tip. God Bless!
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