[Todd Kopriva]

Sometimes rendering takes a long time. A frame per second is not a long time in the context of visual effects and compositing. Expect the old timers to now chime in and tell you about how lucky you are to get 1 second per frame rendering times with any compositing or animation software.

That said, here’s a link to a page that gives some tips on how you can make things faster—though often with tradeoffs:

“Improve performance”

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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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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

Try expanding the mesh a little bit and/or increasing the number of triangles in the mesh.

If the number of triangles is too small, the outline may be too rough, and a little bit of the image may be clipped off and left behind.

See “Work with Puppet pins and the distortion mesh”.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

You mean like you can from Photoshop? No, but it’s a good feature request. Here’s a link to the feature-request form.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

[Oops. Dave gave you a better answer while I was typing mine.]

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

Do you have From Current Time selected in the Preview panel? Sometimes that setting causes confusing behavior, such as when you have the work area set to not include the span that include the current time. Just a thought.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

> If i add anything after the , it sets the value to 99

Was that a typo, or did you mean ‘,’ (a comma)?

Try using a ‘.’ as your decimal point.

If you really entered ‘23,976’, then you would have been telling After Effects to use a frame rate just short of 24 thousand, so it would fall back to using its maximum, which is 99.

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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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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

See “Loop a footage item”.

I found this using this After Effects Community Help search for the terms in your subject line for this thread.

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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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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

I’m glad that you got it to work. If your problematic composition contains nested compositions, then you might want to look into pre-rendering. You mentioned that you’re using a proxy; so this would be just another step in that direction.

> Should I leave multiprocessing off given my issue?

The general answer to that question is that there’s no harm in trying to use this option, but don’t hesitate to turn it off, especially for memory-intensive compositions. It helps in many but not all cases.

Here’s a summary from After Effects Help:

“Using the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature does not speed up the rendering of all compositions. The rendering of some compositions is memory-intensive, such as when you are working with very large background plates that are several thousands of pixels tall and wide. The rendering of some compositions is bandwidth-intensive (I/O-intensive), such as when you are working with many source files, especially if they are not served by a fast, local, dedicated disk drive. The Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature works best at improving performance when the resource that is most exercised by the composition is CPU processing power, such as when applying a processor-intensive effect like a glow or blur.”

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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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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

The size of your layer all by itself is not too great; it’s big, but it’s well within the limits of what can fit into the RAM that After Effects has available. Here’s a partial list of factors that cause the image buffer to be greater for an image of a given size:

– higher color depth (16 bpc or 32 bpc)
– glow and blur effects
– 3D shadows
– color management
– blending modes and layer styles
– applying pulldown
– depth-of-field effects
– temporal effects

you can selectively tweak these factors and see if that allows the troublesome frame(s) to render.

Basically, the issue comes down to how much After Effects has to hold in memory to render a single frame. If it has to hold multiple frames in memory at once (as can happen for blending modes and temporal effects), or if the rendering has to consider pixels outside of the edge of the layer (as with glow effects, etc.), then the amount of memory required is greater. (more here)

The limit is a few GB, which is why a 30,000×30,000 32-bpc image with nothing added still bumps against the limit. John is right that this limit is imposed by the 32-bitness of the After Effects CS4 application.

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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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If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.

[Todd Kopriva]

> …which unfortunately I heard won’t be happening for CS5. I hope I heard wrong.

Anyone who knows wouldn’t be saying, so I can guarantee that anyone who told you this doesn’t know.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
———————————————————————————————————
If a page of After Effects Help answers your question, please consider rating it. If you have a tip, technique, or link to share—or if there is something that you’d like to see added or improved—please leave a comment.