Tone audio effect with expressions that grinds to a halt in rendering HELP!

[Todd Kopriva]

I’m rendering the composition from your uploaded file right now. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.

Please send bug reports (including offending project files) to aebugs@adobe.com.

You can also submit bugs using the bug-report/feaure-request form.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Todd Kopriva]

I was able to render the first couple of thousand frames with no problem in about ten minutes. I need to shut this computer (my laptop) down and head to the office now, so I had to stop the render.

It seems to me that you’ve just got a rather complex composition—a lot of keyframes and expressions—so there’s naturally going to be a lot of computation involved.

When you say that it would “grind to a halt”, what do you mean, exactly? Sometimes, you just have to leave a long and complex composition to render overnight.

I’m not trying to be dismissive of your problem. I’m just saying that from a quick render test it seemed to me that you should try leaving this to render for a long time and see if it works.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Remy Mainz]

hi thanks for trying that

I rendered it all night and it only got 2/3 of the way through.

It slows down as it renders but can render the first couple of thousand in a few minutes but then gets slower and slower until it will take days and I need to render many examples to make different sounds. So the bug will make things worse in the long run.

I have tried rendering later parts and cutting out each section, and deleting most of the keys but nothing makes any difference, the later parts of the comp take forever even though there is no difference in what is happening. It just needs the values on each frame only so should not get slower.

Try rendering from a later frame like 10,000.
I have submitted a error report but i dont think its going to solve my problem thanks again

[Remy Mainz]

Is there a way to make sure its getting the current frames key value and not cycling through all the prior keys?

so

thisComp.layer(“24h1b [0001-25402].tif”).effect(“top left Color Sampler 200”)(“Slider”) at frame (currentframe)

[Filip Vandueren]

It’s definetely not a bug or a processor/memory hog in the expressions.
Converting all these expressions to keyframes took 4 minutes on my system.

However, it might just be a side-effect how the “Tone” effect works: it’s a bunch of sine oscillators, and their frequency does not just change every frame, or you would here clicking sounds, they would have to calculate the current frequency theoretically at the start of each new sine cycle, or even more.

Even if they optimized the code and it checks the keyframed value every 1/10th of a frame or whatever, the oscillators still have to find out at what phase they were, or you would get small audible gaps inbetween the sine-cycles when the frequency changes.
That could mean at every frame or subframe, the algoritm must check back from the beginning of the timeline up untill now, much as expressions need to do because they are “state-less”

I’m not a programmer, just a scripter, but maybe Tod can dig around at adobe and find the original code author for this plugin to explain.

[Remy Mainz]

wow that kinda makes sense thanks a lot for figuring that out.

I will check back to see if any one has any other ideas but at least I know Im out of my depth for now.

The funny thing is even if I cut off the beginning of the clips so that it doesnt have to render from the start it still does the same thing.

[Remy Mainz]

And another weird thing is that I can preview the audio all the way if I set a very low custom preview resolution. And it manages to do that fine.

[Remy Mainz]

I fixed it finally by using the Adobe Media Encoder to render the project which worked fine so as I thought it was just a bug in the AE renderer!

AME Add AE comp blah blah