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I’m thinking there is definitely something wrong with AE. I opened AE, just left it like that, didn’t open any project, and bit by bit it started taking up all of the RAM allotted to it, using up and around 96-97% of my RAM. Opening up Task Manager, there’s nothing else taking up much RAM, only AE. So, when exporting, even though my resource monitor says there’s plenty or RAM available, I’m assuming this may have something to do with it. Maybe AE maxes out the RAM and then stalls, which makes the RAM usage drop, but AE is already thrown into a crawl? 🤔
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I also think that as the cache fills up AE starts to have problems. I haven’t seen that when exporting, but I have seen it many times while working on a project and in playback. Normally when it gets too wonky, I check the cache and it’s full or close to being full.
In this case, however, after the first issues, I cleared the cache and even moved stuff out of my export SSD just in case Ae was creating gigantic temp frames, and having issues with not enough memory (though I think it would be impossible to fill up over 500Gb with 250 frames 🤔). But all this to no avail.
What I haven’t tested is putting the rendered 3D frames in another SSD from the one I’m exporting in. Though I’m pretty sure this won’t do any difference, as there is really no difference in my workflow this time with every other time in the past, and I’ve never seen such bad performance.
That’s why I’m leaning toward corrupted software. I would re-install right now, but experience has taught me that doing any such thing in the middle of a project is like Russian roulette… So I’ll just suffer on for now, until I finish these projects I’m on, mid-December (if the clients don’t go crazy asking for a million changes 🤞).
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I’ve really simplified the comp. I’ve decided to solve most of the aesthetic needs in the 3D animation itself, so I’ve taken out most of the layers and masks in AE… But it’s still taking forever. I think that when I finish the urgent projects I have open right now I’m going to reinstall Adobe. I can’t think of anything else that might be causing this unnecessary bottlenecking.
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Hey, Walter, thanks for your reply.
I do have Enable Multi-Frame Rendering checked, and have only 10% CPU reserved for other applications.
The difference between exporting in directly from AE and AME is negligible in this case. It unexplainably still gets stuck in the same places, while not using all my computer’s resources. What seems to be happening is that, as the export progresses, it starts becoming slower and slower, as if it were losing steam. This is what my last export attempt directly from AE looks like:
It shoots past the first 50 frames or so, the next 50 frames take about 2 mins, and from then on it really goes downhill, so that in the end, 250 frames (which is all I’m exporting in this case) renders out in about 40 mins to 1 hour. At around the 15 minute mark it’s at 80%; the remaining 20% is like watching paint dry, and it takes up the remaining 30-45 mins. (All the while, it shows there are plenty of resources available.)
If the comp had changes that warranted places where more processing power is needed toward the end, I would understand, but as it’s all made up of pre-rendered 3D animations working as masks for animated texture layers in AE, it should either all be easy to render, or all be difficult to render.
Finally, the Render Time column for the layer-heavy sub-comp mostly stays between 500-600ms, sometimes going down to 400ms, and up to 800ms. The other layers in my final comp are all between 0-30ms, and added up are less than 100ms.
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P.S. I’m talking about 10-second-long comps, that seem to speed through normally at the beginning, and later into the export they painfully crawl through each frame, making the total export time over 1hr long, if that. 🤔
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Hi, Tom, thanks for your reply.
I wish I could post a comp from it for you to check it out, but it’s part of an ad covered by an NDA. I can give you some technical details:
I’m exporting with 3D animations exported into 2 frame sequences: one EXR with multi-pass layers and one PNG with sketch lines. In AE I’m compositing them into several different layers to achieve a rough, hand-drawn look. That means, for instance, a layer for main colour, a layer for shadow colour, a layer for highlight colour, etc. Each layer has a pre-comp of a “grunge” animation as mask, to make it grittier. And some of the layers I’m blending using the dancing dissolve mode and bringing down the opacity a bit to make it grainy.Because I need to make several “scenes”, I’m using expressions to link each value I might have to change to sliders and colour controls. And I have some expressions going on. But all in all, nothing too extreme. And indeed the playback isn’t too slow, even on “Full” resolution (which makes it more strange that the export takes forever and sometimes even freezes AME). I’m working it on “Half” and everything plays back fast and without any issues. (So I don’t think the expressions are causing havoc, as I’ve sometimes seen happen on really expression-heavy projects I’ve worked on.)
My project preferences in terms of Video Rendering and Effects is set to Mercury GPU Acceleration (CUDA), which is where I normally have it.
I’ve brought it down from 32- to 16-bits on AE, as on 32-bits AME would crash every time. And visually the difference on this project is very small, at least not enough to warrant the headaches!
I’m exporting on AME using hardware, not software. The renderer is set to Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (Cuda). The exported video is 1920×1080, 25fps, Progressive. Im exporting with Render at Maximum Depth and Use Maximum Render Quality checked. Right now, as a preview for the client, I’m exporting as H.264; but the final versions will be in ProRes.
Indeed, it’s using the built-in GPU, which I do expect to be slower, as you mention, but find it strange that only 10-20% of it is being used. Shouldn’t AE use 100% of it before it bottlenecks?
If there’s any other info that could be os use, please let me know.
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Hello, Dan,
Although the OP doesn’t specify, I’m assuming your response is for 3D layers, correct? (Which is why I’m having an error come up using it on a 2D layer.) How could it be adapted to use on a 2D layer? I’m trying several edits here and there but none are working.
EDIT: Sorry, a few minutes after asking I finally found another post (which I hadn’t seen before, promise, although I’ve been searching for a while) where, again, Dan, you offer this simple expression for 2D Layers:
L = thisComp.layer("child");
r = L.rotation;
while(L.hasParent){
r += L.parent.rotation;
L = L.parent;
}
r -
I was so excited to try and see if the Toggle Switches / Modes button would collapse all layers (although I’ve never seen this happening before) but alas it doesn’t 🙁
I’m inclined to think its a bug because if Adobe has intentionally done away with one of the most useful functions that I probably use more than anything else when working on an AE comp… well, I was gonna say I’ll be looking for a substitute for AE but that’d just be an empty threat… With Adobe one can only take it and stew in our frustrations…
Unfortunately, changing the default key shortcut won’t do anything because it’s not that AE isn’t registering my input or something like that, as some layers are acting as expected; it’s just that often it just goes nuts and decides that all layers from layer X down will no longer respond to anything.
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Hi, Michael! thanks for your response. And, sure, here goes the scene. It would be great to get a debug in order to know what I’m doing wrong, once and for all. ☺
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Well–it seems I got 0 bites here… it sometimes happens. Fortunately, after A LOT of tinkering I found a solution which follows the line I was working with. So for any one out there that might in future have a similar issue, I’m uploading the working C4D file for their reverse-engineering pleasure.
Basically, I fixed both issues using constraints rather than making certain objects the children of their “driving” elements. I used a Clamp constraint referencing the Rail element to block any vertical movement from the crossheads (which is what the Rail is for in real life). This solved the crosshead issue but the driving piston head still would wobble up and down, instead of remaining “connected” to the crossheads. So I realised it was because the head always pointed to that IK chain Goal, and as the Goal remained static, then as the head got farther away from the Goal, it would point over or under the rail. Of course, placing the Goal as a child of Joint 2 (the one corresponding to the crossheads) in order to get the piston head to always point to the crossheads meant instant chaos… So I parented the Goal to the Join instead, making sure to only activate Position. That only left the issue of the Joint chain “popping” at certain points, inverting on itself. I figured out that that might be because having the Joint chain as a child of the wheel (ie inside the wheel) would certainly also affect its rotation. The IK chain would try to automatically keep Up upright, but of course one can’t expect it to work 100%. So, again, constraints to the rescue: I took the Joints out of the wheel and in their place put a Null (well, I actually put a square “peg” in the C4D file, as you’ll see, to make it an obvious marker), gave Joint 1 a Parent constraint, and parented it to that Null/peg, again making sure to only activate the Position. And voilà! A perfectly working rig that does exactly what it ought to and never fails! Pheew! 😅 I was just about to give and up and decide that it was impossible without dynamics, which would’ve certainly put a hamper on my plans for further 3D experiments of the sort… no matter, all’s well that ends well!