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Insane Render Times
I’ve had this issue before but not quite like this.
I have an animation that consists of maybe 60-100 layers creating a 3d model. All layers are PSD files. When I go to render out a movie as H.264 mp4 at any bitrate my 3 minute video decides to take well over 10 hours to render. I have no effects other than a “fill” on a few layers, no motion blur, and no depth of field turn on for the camera.
Also, my machine is pretty powerful.
Intel Core i7 965 @ 3.20GHz 3.33.GHz
12GB RAM
Win 7 64 bit
GeForce GTX 480
Nearly 400GB available disk space on a RAID 0
After Effects CS5Any ideas of what might be causing this. I have other similar projects that aren’t having this issue.
Jared Isham
Stage Ham
https://www.stgham.com
film. video. web media -
12 Replies
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Some additional info that may be of help it attempting to solve this issue.
Some of my PSD files are in the 8,000 x 6,000 pixel size range. Could that be way a frame with 50 pas layers and now effects or blurs are taking between 45sec and 7mins to render?
Jared Isham
Stage Ham
https://www.stgham.com
film. video. web media -
Hi Jared,
Not really a solution as such but have you every thought of using a render farm? I often use a render farm to render my 3d animated sequences, The one I use is called Render-IT (https://www.Render-IT).
Hope that helps.
Gaz
Gaz Evans
Workflow Technician
The diROOM
https://www.diROOM.com -
I find that blurs can take a LOT of render time, as can any dynamic link between CS applications.
To help isolate the problem, you could turn off different effects to see which has the most impact on render time. One suggestion would be to use a very short version of your project (maybe 15-30 frames) and turn off HALF of the effects and see if it changes the time significantly. If so, you know that one/several of those effects may be the problem. If render time doesn’t change significantly, you know that the other half of the effects might be causing the problem.
Continue turning off half/quarter/etc of the effects until you determine those that are the most render intensive. Once you isolate the cause, you can decide if there are other solutions. Also some 3rd party effects do not use all available processors in your i7 – I’ve seen a few that only use one of the cores, meaning that everything is waiting for that one plug-in to process.
Something else to consider: a hundred 48megapixel PSD layers might be more than even your 12gb memory can handle, particularly if you have other things running at the same time.
Jim
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I figured the size was the killer. Note to self – shrink layer sizes before building the comp. As far as effects go I only use the “fill” effect maybe 4 times. Other than that there are no effects used in the composition. I also have multiproccessing turned off along with OpenGL being turned off and it still has crazy render times.
It’s gotta be the layer sizes that’s causing the issues. A half-rez RAM preview only take 15-20 minutes to render, but even that x4 shouldn’t be 10+ hours, right?
Jared Isham
Stage Ham
https://www.stgham.com
film. video. web media -
I would totally be down for using a render farm but not sure the boss has it in the budget to do so.
Jared Isham
Stage Ham
https://www.stgham.com
film. video. web media -
Makes total sense (apparently the final delivery is H.254 which was the basis for going straight to H.264) Running it at lossless avi and it appears to be working better – still a long render.
At this point it may just be better than to wait out the render then attempting to resize everything. Probably faster in the long run.
Jared Isham
Stage Ham
https://www.stgham.com
film. video. web media -
Also, the sudden jump in render time when you go full res, may have to do with RAM usage. If it’s having to squeeze those very large images in and out of RAM (perhaps swapping info on your hard drive too), that can really kill a render.
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(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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I have tested this myself, and can confirm that very large psd files will really slow down your renders. Resizing in PS first is the best way to go.
Adam Duplay
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To change the size of the layers after the event without messing everything up, simply proxy render them to, say, half-size (which will reduce them by 75%). Wouldn’t surprise me if you can get a way with third size (1/9th) for some layers. You can always keep layers that are large in the composition at the original size.
When you then render the final composition you *must* remember to switch proxies ON in the render settings, or AE will ignore all your proxies.
I’ve done this myself on occasion when I’ve realised my photoshop files are unnecessarily large. (I tend to like them large)
It’s better than discovering they are too small…Check out this script to batch render proxies:
https://aescripts.com/rd-approximate/And finally, pre-render background elements or other things if you can and make final quality proxies to use for the final render.
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http://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects -
All my layers are pretty much in one PSD file. I’ve never done a proxy render, so I am assuming that if I resize them in PS and there is a way to save a proxy from that and have AE recognize it?
And this won’t mess up my anchor points and alignments?
I’ll do a little bit more research on it to see what I can come up with.
Jared Isham
Stage Ham
https://www.stgham.com
film. video. web media
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