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Improving Rendering Times and Ram Previews
I’m trying to find some ways of improving the performance of AE.
I’m currently work on a photo project which is something simple. However after the first photo can’t get a ram preview of more than a handle full of frames. This is problematic as most of the photos are 10 – 20 sec in length and only have a transformation keyframes placed for position and scale with no effects applied what so ever?
I don’t know what I did between the first photo which had no problem up till now though. Rendering out One 20sec photo takes 30+ mins which seems long for something that’s only 20secs and has no effects applied.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Especially if it comes sooner than later! 🙂
Jaleel
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7 Replies
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There is another odd thing I noticed. I did a movie preview and the render not only took 30+ mins but the file was over 20GB for a 20sec photo!? What am I doing wrong?
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Your comp and/or images may be too large.
How large is your comp in pixels? In general, it should be the size of your final video, say, 720×486 for NTSC.
How large is each photo source file? If it is expected to fill the frame and be no larger, it should be no larger than 720×540 or so. If this is your problem, then your photos should not have been scanned larger than 720×540 or so.
Image size (inches) x dpi value (pixels per inch) = final scanned size in pixels.
Is this the problem?
Steve
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Steve,
I think you might have nailed the problem. I did in fact scan the photos in at a very large size I didn’t want them to be too pixelated when I output them. Is there anything I can do to correct the problem short of rescanning them?
Thanks
Jaleel
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Take them into Photoshop and shrink ’em down there. If you have a lot of photos consider doing a batch action.
Steve
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What you want to do is scale down your photos in Photoshop so that when they’re scaled to their largest size in After Effects they’re around 100-110%.
Say that there’s a face in the photo you want to zoom into. When you zoom into that face the scaling should be around 100%. If you’ve zoomed into that face and the photo is scaled to around 20% that means your photos are more high resolution than they need to be, and that might be slowing down your renders.
Unfortunately, if you scale down your photos in Photoshop you’ll have to redo your keyframes in AE. You should do a “Save as” on the scaled photos so you can keep your original composition as a reference.
As to why a 20 second movie is 20GB, that shouldn’t be. Are you working in NTSC or HD or what? A 20 second HD Quicktime, uncompressed, might be 3GB, NTSC would be, maybe, 700MB uncompressed.
Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics -
Steve,
I just wanted to thank you again for the help! I found out that I was doing ALOT wrong after your help with the first problem.
I ended up forgetting to resize the comp size due to the fact that I was just dragging the photos to the create new comp button and the comps being created at the same size as the photos. This caused them to be very very large; bigger than HD large.
I did a batch resize of the photos however, they didn’t look good when I zoomed into them. So what I did was redo all the animation for the photos after I resized comps to DV size. This worked perfect as well as allowed me to do ram previews and render them alot faster! All 22 of them in less than 40mins.
Again thank you! I hope this helps someone else down the line.
Jaleel
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Shawn,
I scanned the photos in extreme large and I said before I let AE create comps based on the size of the photos which were huge! I need to learn more about compression as this was one the things my school neglected to teach me because of the exports are 1GB in size which is too large for something 30secs. I really appreciate the help that you have provided.
Jaleel
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