Very slow render in an After Effects file with layered PSD’s

[Jonan Grobler]

Yeah, it is off. Thanks everyone, you’ve been very helpful.

Jonan Grobler
Editor/Motion Graphics

[Walter Soyka]

A few other potential speed-killers:

You’re accidentally using the raytracing renderer instead of the classic 3D renderer. Open up Comp Settings (Ctrl+K), click the Advanced tab and confirm that the renderer is correct.

Depth-of-field enabled for a camera. This can look great, but calculating realistic camera lens blur is slow.

Motion blur. Again, this looks great, but requires Ae to calculate frames between the frames, increasing render time.

Temporal effects. Effects like Echo require Ae to render and composite multiple frames behind-the-scenes for every frame rendered to the comp viewer or output.

Project bit depth. Rendering at 16bpc gives more precision than rendering at 8bpc, and rendering at 32bpc gives more precision still as well as avoiding clipping between effects and layers, but these also increase RAM usage dramatically, which can in turn significantly slow rendering.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Thomas Leong]

Apart from what the others have advised, I have one question: What is the duration of each comp/resultant video? Reducing the duration and using the playback software to loop the animations will help reduce your render times.

My own experience:
A few months ago, I had a similar assignment – animate 11 psd layered files to be used as backgrounds for a ballroom function. Each psd file was 20,250 pixels width x 4800 pixels height, sizes ranging from 150 – 350MB. Humongous!! My comp for each was 4096 x 1080 (for a panoramic screen covered by 3 x 20K lumens projectors). I had 1 week to complete the job.

Given the above, I made my comp durations at 4 secs each, and used the playback software loop the animations (Dataton Watchout software), carefully keyframing the animated parts so that jerks were not obvious at the loop points (end and start of each animation). The shortest comp I had was 2 secs…and that took 2 hours to render. Surprisngly, the 4-sec comps rendered in about 1 minute – yep, ONE minute for a 4096×1080 H264 file from 20,250 x 4800 psd files, straight out of After Effects, no intermediate codecs. Initially, I made the mistake of reducing the psd resolutions to 4096 x 1080 BEFORE importing into the AE comp. The resultant rendered videos were horrible – jagged edges, obviously grainy, etc. So I had to use the original psd files at their original sizes in order to get quality output. CTRL-ALT-F was used to fit the psd to the comp, and that maintained the quality in the final renders.

The Trapcode plug-ins I have render fast, so I used mainly Shine and Starglow effects with AE’s text position and scale effects to minimize render times. I’m on After Effects 7 (never upgraded since I hardly do this work any more, and my Trapcode effects were bought during those early release days). My render PC, however, was new – slightly overclocked i7 4770K to 4GHz with closed loop water cooling with a 240mm radiator, 16K RAM (now 32K), Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, OS and applications on an Intel SSD, two disk RAID 0 with 7200rpm hdd for data and AE cache, ASUS HD7970 Matrix Platinum graphics card, etc.

Thomas Leong

[Jonan Grobler]

Wow, I’m glad I did not have to work on a project with those resolutions. Your machine is a lot more powerful than mine, however.

Unfortunately, my animations are not set up in a way to allow them to loop. It’s one smooth zoom/pan type thing. Good idea, though.

Jonan Grobler
Editor/Motion Graphics

[Jeff Kay]

Might be late to the party, but I think the two things Michael pointed out are going to be by far the biggest time increases.

Export an intermediary from AE and then encode in Media Encoder (or preferred encoder program). I can safely say that creating the intermediary and then encoding is significantly faster than a direct export from AE (also you still have the intermediary if you need other encodes created). At this point I believe that there are only two different types to export from AE, either raw avi or PNG sequence. This is basically how I export from AVID, except its a DNxHD transcode rather than raw.

Absolutely check for “smart objects” in the PSD’s, those can behave awfully funky with certain commands/use (certain things can’t be done directly with smart objects). AE handles rasterized layers far better and its possible that AE is converting the smart objects every frame. If you aren’t using the individual layers in AE, then you could get rid of those as well. Should be able to just save over the existing PSD files (manually or batch), then in AE select all of the PSD files and hit “reload”. That should work, though if anything happens, just close AE and replace the newly saved files with the originals and it will revert. If you don’t like the idea of messing around with the linked media itself, then you could always just re-import all of the PSD’s as footage rather than layered PSD (or import the modified PSD’s) and then replace each in your comp.

Do those two things and the render time should be cut significantly.