why long render times?

[Kevin Camp]

140 hours seems excessive, though i’ve not used primatte. you may want to look at the improve performance page from the manual:

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/improve-performance.html

are you just rendering the keyed footage or are you keying and compositing the footage in one step?

i generally get the key correct, render that out and then composite the render. i’m not saying that’s a faster process, but when you are trying to tweak things in compositing a keyed shot, the feedback is a lot faster if it’s been processed first.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Darby Edelen]

[Robert Norman] “Using Lossless-QT-PNG as render que settings…”

That could be one of the issues. I usually find that PNG QuickTimes are insanely slow to decode, so perhaps the inverse is true and encode is a beast as well.

What codec is the source footage using? Do RAM previews seem very slow as well? You could watch the rendering status in the Info panel during preview or the rendering status in the Render Queue (twirl down the arrow to the left of ‘Current Render’) to see what (if any) steps AE is chugging on.

Darby Edelen

[Dale Kutzera]

I have a tangential question to slow rendering: In the render queue AE says it’s only using 45% or 50% of the 12 GB of ram on my iMac. Is there a way to make it use more? And would that improve render times? Or is this just telling me it only requires that percentage of available RAM?