Render time is extremely excessive

[Ryan Hannebaum]

[EricBowen] “Does your company not have a dedicated render station for these? If not they need a serious review of their tech investment.”

I don’t work at a professional video editing shop. I’m sort of a maverick in my role within a large company which is not focused on video production.

[Walter Soyka]

[Ryan Hannebaum] “Obviously a huge improvement over 10+ minutes, but 28 seconds per frame with 10,405 frames is still ~81 hours, which is still too long a render time for me to live with, for a 7-minute-long video. Thoughts?”

28 seconds per frame is not necessarily unreasonable for laptop rendering a 3D scene. For a little context, some C4D projects I’ve worked on have had render times of 30 minutes per frame on fast 12-core workstations. I generally count myself happy for 10-15 minutes per frame for 3D work.

That said, what else can you simplify in the comp? If you’re working at 1080p, can you work at 720p instead? If you’re doing “fake” classic 3D extrusions by stacking multiple layers, can you reduce the number you’re using? Are there any relatively static lighting looks that you can fake with a gradient applied to the surface?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ryan Hannebaum]

[Walter Soyka] “If you’re working at 1080p, can you work at 720p instead?”

Is there a good way to reduce the project to 720p without worrying about some layers getting screwed up, size- or position-wise? Is it as simple as changing the Composition Setting?

[Ericbowen]

Then you need to have a serious heart to heart with them and explain either the deadlines come off or they invest in the right tech to handle AE renders in the time frame they expect. They are not getting both in a MBP or any laptop. I have a 1 min comp that takes 1.5 hours to render on Dual 12 Core Xeons ie 48 threads. That kind of processing doesn’t get done on a laptop. BTW you are going to thermal damage that CPU in the MBP rendering for over a day at a time long term. The cooling in those is not meant to handle that kind of energy generation long term.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com

[Walter Soyka]

[Ryan Hannebaum] “Is there a good way to reduce the project to 720p without worrying about some layers getting screwed up, size- or position-wise? Is it as simple as changing the Composition Setting?”

Scripts > Scale Composition.jsx

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ryan Hannebaum]

[Walter Soyka] “Scripts > Scale Composition.jsx”

Thanks!! I didn’t even know AE came with scripts.

Random aside while I have you here and it looks like my comp is rendering much faster; when I add a Fast Blur to one of my nested pre-comps, it moves it inappropriately in Z-space in front of another layer in my main comp.

Example…

Without a duplicate layer with Fast Blur (the blue cog layer is appropriately behind the black screen):

With a duplicate layer with Fast Blur:

[Walter Soyka]

[Ryan Hannebaum] “Random aside while I have you here and it looks like my comp is rendering much faster; when I add a Fast Blur to one of my nested pre-comps, it moves it inappropriately in Z-space in front of another layer in my main comp.”

Here’s the list of things that break 3D intersections:

3D layer interactions, render order, and collapsed transformations [link]

If you want to apply an effect to the layer, you cannot also collapse transformations without breaking the render order.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Ryan Hannebaum]

[Walter Soyka] “If you want to apply an effect to the layer, you cannot also collapse transformations without breaking the render order.”

Oh, OK, thanks. How about using an adjustment layer with fast blur at the top of the stack within the nested comp? Or would that adjustment layer then perpetuate through the parent (main) comp as well?

[Ryan Hannebaum]

[EricBowen] “That kind of processing doesn’t get done on a laptop.”

Good to know, thanks. Would the following be an appropriate machine for this?

Mac Pro
3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache
16GB (4x4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
512GB PCIe-based flash storage
Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
Apple Mouse
Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad - English (USA)
User's Guide (English)
Apple Thunderbolt Display (27-inch)

[Ericbowen]

Preferably the 8 Core or higher and atleast 32 GB of ram whether you get the 6 or 8. Unfortunately the nMPro config is not really good for AE or other similar applications because those 2 GPU’s don’t help at all. It would be far better with 2 CPU modules and only 1 GPU. So half of the system you are paying for means nothing to any performance gains. AE is really best on a PC at this point until the nMPro changes if it ever does.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com