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Render screw up! On deadline!
yep I’ve screwed up, any quick help would be very much appreciated. On a deadline! Thank you!
The problem:
I have a composition that is 3230×1080 and I want to export it to 1920×642. (it’s about 60% the original size) Is there a way to set the resolution in the render settings to a ratio that will match my output of 1920×642? So the “stretch” in the output module is 100%, thus retaining optimum image quality for a 1920×642 frame?
I played around with “custom” under the rendering settings to no avail, “half” is less than 1920 and “full” takes too long. Maybe my understanding of the “custom” form is poor (which I’m hoping it is), but it doesn’t seem possible to enter a value between “full” and “half”?
I just tried pre-rendering the layers in my final comp, but that would take longer than just rendering the full thing out.
What’s screwing me besides this absurdly high resolution is that there is a bunch of lens blurs on the layers, which disables multi-processing which I assume is slowing me down further.
But rendering at “half” helps a lot, so hopefully there is a way to render at 60%.
below is a screen shot of the specs of my comp:
I’m using AE CS4
THANK YOU!
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4 Replies
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There is no way to render at 60% through the Render Settings. In addition rendering at “Half” via render settings can cause some sampling errors. Generally I recommend rendering for final delivery at Full resolution.
Since your deadline is tight I can understand the desire to take shortcuts so here are my suggestions:
-Don’t use Lens Blur. If you have $200 to spare you can buy Frischluft Lenscare, it produces better results faster and supports multiprocessing and 32bpc. If you don’t have money to burn and you’re really willing to cut corners, see if you can get away with Compound Blur.
-If your composition is not using 3D cameras or lighting you can pre-compose it by dropping it on the comp icon in the project panel, then go to the composition settings of your new master composition and set the resolution to 3840×1284. Collapse Transformations on your original composition (now the pre-comp layer in your new higher resolution comp) and hit cmd-opt-f to scale it up to the size of the new composition. Render this composition at Half resolution through render settings.
The collapse tranformations step will preserve quality through this process, but won’t work if you’re using cameras or lights in your composition. In that case you could try getting away with the same trick but without collapsing transformations, but I can promise you it ain’t going to look pretty.
In the future I would definitely recommend working at a resolution no higher than the highest you are expected to deliver. Large compositions and large layers easily bring AE to a crawl (especially in CS4 which is not 64-bit).
Darby Edelen
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Thanks for the great ideas!
After writing my first post I also did this:
Made a new comp of 1920×642. Then I copied all my layers from the larger comp, parented them to a null and scaled it down 60%to to fit the new comp. Then rendered at 100%.Is this essentially the same as the process you suggested? Or will time/quality be saved using the collapse transform route?
Thanks again
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just did your suggestion. estimated time remaining is 9 hours. much better than 96. DARBY EDELEN AND CREATIVE COW YOU ARE MY SAVIORS
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Glad to hear you found a way around. Fore future refference you can always use the script that comes with AE to change composition size.
File > Scripts > Scale Composition.jsxTudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist
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