After Effects Rendering Slow.

brandondull

brandondull

Well-known member
Hi guys,

My After Effects CS6 is rendering really slow. I am pretty new to the After Effects software. I could not get my new composition to import into Premiere Pro it says "unsupported file formats." My composition is an intro/outro title but thats fine because I was trying to export it anyhow. I added it to the render queue. I selected h.264; quicktime file to output to my desktop. My composition is 10 seconds long. My render is sayings 40 hours. I enable disk cache in media & disk cache on my a/e preferences and set my maximum disk cache size to 500 GB. I made a folder on my desktop for the cache. Then I went to memory and multiprocessing tab. I am working with 8gbs installed ram. My ram reserved for other application's is 1.5gb. Ram available for a/e is 6.5gbs. I have turned a/e multiprocessing off. should that be on? it says I have installed cpus; 8 - cpu's reserved for other applications; 6 and ram allocation per background cpu 3gb. Actual cpus that will be used; 0. I have listed my current Mac setup specs below;

Early 2011 17'' macbook pro
0S X: 10.8.2
Processor: 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory: 8GB 1067 Mhz DDR3
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MB
Mac HD: 675 GB Free out of 750 GB
Lacie external HD: 980 GB Free out of 2TB


Am I at a point where if I want to get intensive with After Effects, should I save up and get a MacPro desktop? I know that I can max my MacBook Pro to 16gb. (8gb in each slot) Apple just does not advertise that though; read it on a forum although in Premiere Pro CS6 my sequences work flawlessly. I am just not sure whats going on why a/e is taking forever to render. Any help would be awesome.
 
That sounds uber slow. On my PC with pretty similar specs to your mac a pretty complex comp of that length renders in 20 minutes or so, much faster of course for simpler comps. I generally leave the ae multiprocessing off as well and your ram partitioning seems ok. How complex and how high of resolution is your comp?
 
Have you googled this? There have been some threads about 5.x users having big problems with speed in 6.

You need to try different settings in the prefs, and pay attention to OpenGL.

if you really want to get deeper into AE, I'd think a current desktop is a must. Raid, scratch disks, video cards, etc... and ram, ram, ram. Can't do that on a laptop/iMac.
 
use uncompressed or image sequences(psd, tga, png, tiff) in ae, and export to uncompressed or image sequences then use the exported file in encore or any other encoding program.
 
Wow 40hrs for 10 seconds. Either you are running every render-whoring effect there is in AE at once, or there is something wrong.

Here's my overall setup, with this i get pretty fast renders even running a lot of camera lens blurring. Remember that not only is it the ram it uses, but also your graphics card. 1GB should do fine, but 1GB now is the 256MB graphics card from before.

AE Running off 40GB SSD
12GB of ram usage
Multile frames rendering on
Disk cache = 256GB SSD

I'd highly recommend an SSD for disk cache. You shouldnt be rendering, reading and using a cache from the same drive, it should all be from different ones.


Amr Rahmy said:
use uncompressed or image sequences(psd, tga, png, tiff) in ae, and export to uncompressed or image sequences then use the exported file in encore or any other encoding program.
Click to expand...

^ This will also speed up your renders times ALOT. When I'm seeing something is taking a bit longer than I want it to, I just cancel the render and do it as a PNG sequence to render out all the effects, then re-render it in AE as .mov from the PNG Sequence. It will save you at least 50% of time from the original render time
 
You can export this to Premiere if it doesn’t use any plug-ins that are not present in Premiere. You can export as Final Cut XML then Import that in Premiere.


I find CS6 much faster than CS5, but I’ve got a dual CPU, 8 core Mac Pro desktop with 24GB, a Rocket RAID card, striped SSD’s and 2 Quaddro 4000 CUDA cards. Oh and I’m running Windows 7 on it, muwahahaha. I think most Mac users would despise me for the latter choice.[FONT=&quot][/FONT]
 
Rendering as an image sequence is handy if your render chokes halfway through, too.

When I get into long render times, it's more due to motion blur, particular, time warp - processor intensive stuff - and lots of layers. I don't see a big diff rendering out to a compressed format (prores for me) or not, but I'm still experimenting.

Many people say to close all open comps. A huge help is prerender everything you possibly can, particularly particle stuff, background comps, etc. It adds more overall render time to the entire project - maybe across a day or several days - but they're shorter bursts of rendering and don't choke your whole system (so you can do billing, email, etc.). Just make sure you're rendering an alpha channel if needed, I find sometimes that doesn't default as it should. Really complex comps with tons of layers seem to take exponentially longer than "the sum of their parts". And (in my case) they can bring the whole machine to its knees so you can't do a damn thing. Another benefit to pre-rendering - it makes you commit... gets you out of an endless loop of tweaking things nobody may notice. And if you just have to adjust something, replace the pre-render with the comp and have at it.

I'm wondering though - any consensus of video card vs. RAM? I've got 14GB on my AE machine, and a 512mb video card. Mac video cards are such a ripoff compared to PC. Wondering what to upgrade first.

Also, a while back I researched SSDs, but at the time they benchmarked slower than a basic RAID for scratch disk - they didn't really excel at that kind of file writing and reading. Supposedly the hardware has evolved a bit though. Anyone checked on this? I plan on replacing my system drive with one soon though.
 
it's not about sustained throughput, it's cache and burst performance. SSDs do small tasks really fast. but would you rather have a bigger scratch disk? 256 GB vs 3TB. you will be able to work and do more pre-rendering and handle uncompressed footage with 3TBs. newer sata III drives moved from 32MB to 64MB drives for the +2TBs. just make sure it's at least 7200 rpm, if it says green or intelligent, smart, stay away, those drives are more concerned about power consumption and not performance. sometimes that means slower drives but more importantly some lag when starting tasks.

while there is a small premium in video cards, hard drives, processors. people often compare them to the cheapest alternatives. but it's usually business or enterprise class hard drives, server quality processors and the video cards, they choose better models and under-power them or lower the ram so they don't produce as much heat. so there is some thought process and quality control that goes into that premium that your paying. your still paying a premium, but it's not as much as people make it out to be.
 
RickyC said:
Wow 40hrs for 10 seconds. Either you are running every render-whoring effect there is in AE at once, or there is something wrong.

Here's my overall setup, with this i get pretty fast renders even running a lot of camera lens blurring. Remember that not only is it the ram it uses, but also your graphics card. 1GB should do fine, but 1GB now is the 256MB graphics card from before.

AE Running off 40GB SSD
12GB of ram usage
Multile frames rendering on
Disk cache = 256GB SSD

I'd highly recommend an SSD for disk cache. You shouldnt be rendering, reading and using a cache from the same drive, it should all be from different ones.


^ This will also speed up your renders times ALOT. When I'm seeing something is taking a bit longer than I want it to, I just cancel the render and do it as a PNG sequence to render out all the effects, then re-render it in AE as .mov from the PNG Sequence. It will save you at least 50% of time from the original render time
Click to expand...


yeah its crazy. I downloaded a 3D template from Adobe. I think there is something wrong. Should I upgrade my RAM and get a SSD? or get rid of my MacBook Pro for an iMac b/c I can't afford a MacPro right now.
 
My 3D compositions are still taking forever to render after switching everything to different hard drives. My new 8 second piece I just made says 3 hours. Any Idea?
 
can you provide some screenshots of what your doing, the workflow, the source files, and some resource monitoring or task manager performance activity.that's not bad per frame performance depending on what your asking the computer to calculate and generate on the screen.
 
Amr Rahmy said:
can you provide some screenshots of what your doing, the workflow, the source files, and some resource monitoring or task manager performance activity.that's not bad per frame performance depending on what your asking the computer to calculate and generate on the screen.
Click to expand...

I would label myself a beginner in the After Effects first off but for the second project I tried doing. I filmed my Sony FS100 moving on the floor. I took that shot uploaded it, put it into Adobe Premiere CS6. I then clicked the clip; replace as new After Effects Comp. Now in After Effects I all I wanted to do is a 3D text while the camera is moving across the floor. I applied the camera tracker effect, made it a 3D layer. then typed my text and bumped up my extrusion depth of the text layer and created a spot light. To ram preview this 5 second clip took 20 minutes at a third of the resolution. (did not even add my shadow catcher b/c I was getting frustrated) Then I made a change in the text placement so to play it smoothly again, I had to ram preview - I was not going to wait another 20 minutes, so I added it to the render queue, with my render settings at best and output to .mov file to my desktop. After I waited and played it, I noticed my camera tracking dots are still in the export! After Effects is just one big mess for me right now. I have looked into some tutorials on video copilot and creative cow but it seems like everything they are doing is some type of 3D and thats where my MacBook Pro can't handle it I think. When I use my video project footage from premiere pro cs6 with Color Finesse through After Effects to color grade, it works fine.
 
brandondull said:
Then I went to memory and multiprocessing tab. I am working with 8gbs installed ram. My ram reserved for other application's is 1.5gb. Ram available for a/e is 6.5gbs. I have turned a/e multiprocessing off. should that be on? it says I have installed cpus; 8 - cpu's reserved for other applications; 6 and ram allocation per background cpu 3gb. Actual cpus that will be used; 0.
Click to expand...

I'm a bit late to the party here, and maybe I'm missing something here ... but shouldn't the actual CPUs being used be greater than 0??? I would turn multiprocessing on and switch your CPUs reserved for other applications to 2. Then possibly switch your RAM allocation per CPU to 2GB (it seems somewhere between 2-3GB is the way to go for this).
 
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