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Render was moving along fine, suddenly takes 10-15min to render a couple seconds, gets fast again, then slow again?!
So I’ve been making several segments for my friend’s funeral/memorial…rendering each one when I finish. Each segment is produced in a very similar way in AE, so I don’t know why this most recent one rendered slow. I use an animated intro, then photo’s in AE’s 3D space with a camera moving between them and occasionally zooming in or out of a photo. I’m not using any plugins that would slow it down…no particle effects. Just drop shadow, sometimes a blur, brightness & contrast, simple stuff.
All previous renders ran at a normal speed (for my computer), with no major slow downs. But this most recent one would slow down so slow I wasn’t even sure if it was rendering anymore. I stopped it once and restarted a new render and it slowed down right around the same spot, but not exactly. It did eventually get through it and move normal again, but also slowed down again. It took 2.5-3 hours for a two and a half minute video (1920×1080) and the majority of that time was waiting for those slow downs, which probably made up 10 or 15 seconds total. This never happened on any previous render and also never happened when I rendered a 15 min vid a few years ago.
The first slow down happens on images that have no effects on them…later on it happens on one that I added a camera lens blur on a large photo, (that effect seemed slow even when I was previewing, if I choose “full”), but later on in the render, another section with the camera lens blur effects rendered at a normal pace. So I just don’t know. One thing I did notice is that if I clicked to minimize AE it would sometimes lag, the say “(not responding)” on the top bar, then start strobing while the mouse cursor changed from an arrow to a circle rapidly, then it would return to normal.
I know I’m on an under-powered laptop: “amd a10-4600m apu with radeon hd graphics 2300 mhz 4 cores, 4 logical processors and 6GB RAM”
but it has never done this to me before. Despite being under powered, AE actually runs pretty smooth for me and rendering, even though it takes a while, moves along enough that I can tell it’s making progress. (before this recent incident)So, basically, I guess I’m looking for help on figuring out why this is happening now — or if someone can tell me if it’s worth clicking on “multi-processing” with a computer that only has 6gb RAM + 4 cores ?
Thanks.
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3 Replies
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On my first attempt I was watching YouTube simultaneously, which affected the speed at which I could switch between my browser and looking looking at After Effects…it didn’t affect the rendering speed…except for the moments when it slowed to a crawl. But I don’t blame that on youtube playing since it rendered perfectly normal for the 30 minutes or so leading up to the slow down. Also, on my second rendering attempt I closed my browser/youtube and let AE do it’s its thing, all on it’s own, and it did the same slow down around the same time.
I also completely closed my antivirus software so it’s not running in the background.
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and are you sure the images that it slows down on are not HUGE? not reading from a hard drive? And not in ray trace mode in composition settings?
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If you open Task Manager (shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+Esc), click More Details, then click the Performance tab, you can monitor your CPU, RAM and disk usage during render. I suspect something is maxing out when you reach the slow point of your render.
It’s possible that some of the hard parts of your render are cached; if Ae can grab the frames it has already rendered from a memory or disk cache, it can zoom through sections of the render that would take a lot longer if it had to render them from scratch.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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