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Very slow render in an After Effects file with layered PSD’s
Hi there to all you fine folk!
I’d like to start out by noting that I have been working in After Effects for a number of years now – it’s solely how I make a living, so I have a pretty good knowledge of After Effects.
Basically, this is the second time I have received layered PSD files from the client – about 50 of them, which I take into After Effects and animate very simple. There are photos which pan and zoom, and text which slides on. Not very intensive stuff.
Yet when I render out, both projects have taken over 10 hours to render out.
I’m working in After Effects CS5.5, and rendering out as an H.264 .mp4 file. I’ve tried rendering on two other computers, Windows and OSX, and I get the same result. I’ve done a lot of searching, but I don’t find anyone else specifically mentioning a problem with psd files. I’d imagine as they’re both Adobe files, it should be quite compatible?
I’ve even tried the secret settings (purging frames) in the desperate hope that it might change something, even though it’s not for the problem I’m experiencing.
Has anyone else experienced a problem with .psd files? I would love some insight into this.
Jonan Grobler
Editor/Motion Graphics -
15 Replies
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Are there some layers in the PSD file that are especially large? I’ve seen issues where not all of the layers have been cropped and they extend WAY beyond the boundaries.
Also, you shouldn’t render h.264 directly out of After Effects. Among other reasons, AE can’t do multipass encoding. I render an intermediate file out of AE and use the Adobe Media Encoder to create my final deliverables.
– The Great Szalam
(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 think the key issue here is what size the PSD files are, both in pixels and MBs. It may be that the size of the files is overkill for the size of the final output from AE. You want to tread a fine line between the images maintaining their detail, and having so much detail that it doesn’t matter, and bogs down AE.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
In addition to the questions posed by Michael and Joseph, I’d ask what your computer specs and multiprocessing settings are.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Michael – when the psd’s are imported into AE, they don’t extend very far beyond the 1920×1080 borders of the comp I’m working in. When AE exports, does it go to the original psd files and work through them? Or how does it work?
Is there a reason I should not export h.264 from after effects other than for quality reasons? ie is it slower than exporting a jpeg sequence or lossless or whatever it is you use?
Jonan Grobler
Editor/Motion Graphics -
Hi Joe – the psds average around 30-40 mb’s. Pretty crazy, I know.
However, all the psd’s are set to 1920x108o, so the res isn’t crazy or anything. Maybe embedded photos in Photoshop are not actually scaled down? And if so, how could I fix that?
Jonan Grobler
Editor/Motion Graphics -
[Jonan Grobler] “Michael – when the psd’s are imported into AE, they don’t extend very far beyond the 1920×1080 borders of the comp I’m working in. When AE exports, does it go to the original psd files and work through them? Or how does it work?
Is there a reason I should not export h.264 from after effects other than for quality reasons? ie is it slower than exporting a jpeg sequence or lossless or whatever it is you use?”
AE always uses the assets when it’s rendering.
QuickTime with the PNG codec does tend to render faster than h.264 does also, I like having a lossless file for trying out different compression settings to get the right balance of file size and quality without having to re-render my After Effects composition each time. Alternatively, for long renders, you could render to an image sequence so that, if there’s a crash, you can pick up rendering where it left off.
– The Great Szalam
(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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My machine is Windows 8 – 8 GBs of RAM – i5 2.53 GHz
Not that useful if I were rendering out 3D projects or working with lots of particles, but I don’t. My work consists of photo slideshows and animating Illustrator files, all of which my machine easily handles. Seeing as this project is also just photos – PSDs – nothing fancy – I thought it should be fine.
Jonan Grobler
Editor/Motion Graphics -
Thing is, the psd files are 1920×1080 themselves, so is there something about the jpeg file nested in the psd not being properly scaled down?
I mean, I know the person I work for imports images from iStockphoto into Photoshop and arranges everything in there. WHat can I do to make the image ACTUALLY be 1920×1080?
Oh, and thanks a bunch by the way. 🙂 Trying to figure this out!
Jonan Grobler
Editor/Motion Graphics -
You can look for layers that are “smart objects” in the PSD and rasterize them.
Also, make sure you crop your PSD file. Just select the whole 1920×1080 area and Edit>Crop (or Image>Crop, I can’t remember).
– The Great Szalam
(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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[Jonan Grobler] “My machine is Windows 8 – 8 GBs of RAM – i5 2.53 GHz”
If you have multiprocessing enabled, you should turn it off.
Edit > Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing
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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