Why is rendering so slow? I have 16GB of RAM for Pete’s sake!

[David Bogie]

[Joe Walker] “Why are my complicated projects taking so long to render?”

You can research rendering speed here on the cow. We see this topic at least once a week. The math is interesting if you are expecting Dv performance with HD elements. HD contains an order of magnitude more pixels. When rendering complex projects, you can see 10 times as much time required to calculate pixel modifications for every frame. Maximizing AE’s rendering performance is not about throwing raw power or RAM at it. You deliberately and carefully structure your workflow to take advantage of your machine’s capabilities while sidestepping its shortcomings until you must render at full rez. Most of us do this with proxies and prerenders and low rez previews until we know something is golden. Generally, RAM doesn’t help improve AE’s rendering since every pixel of every frame is calculated pretty much from scratch. Graphics cards don’t help either because OpenGL remains a cruel joke.

If you don’t want to do any of that careful planning, or your projects are just so incredibly unique from everyone else’s that you simply cannot break them down into chunks on which you can save rendering resources, or if rendering is how you make money, you will need to explore setting up a rendering farm.

bogiesan

[Todd Kopriva]

There are several tips about improving performance in the “Improve performance” section of After Effects Help.

If anyone has any additional tips that aren’t in that section or the pages that it points to, please consider leaving a comment.

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

[David Bogie]

the section called >Improve performance by simplifying your project< sounds like I wrote it, excpet, of course, that it's accurate. this part of the help system was new to me: > Render multiple frames simultaneously < and it's got lots of RAM information I did not know. Thanks for the post, Todd. bogiesan