Should it take 2 1/2 hours to render a 4 min clip??

I

Imthedirector

Member
maybe I'm just impatient and this is what it is but should after effects take over 2 1/2 hours to render a 4 minute clip ?

I'm feeling I just dont have AE configured correctly. I dont have the strongest computer but I dont think its weak either and & I think it should do better than this. Any advanced AE users can tell me if my render settings are correct?

Heres my specs/everything-

AMD Phenom ll X4 920 black edition (quad core)
8 GB ram
I dont have a graphics card but the integrated graphics is an ATI radeon 3300 with opengl supported .
I use xp64.

My render settings may be where this problem lies and they are:

Media and Disk Cache: in 'Disk Cache' and the 'Enable disk cache ' section what should that be? (I have it at 100000MB) <--dont know why that number, should that be specific to my ram?

SYSTEM section It says :

Installed CPUs (processor cores) : 4
Installed RAM: 7.75 GB
Total After Effects memory usage: 6.25
Ram to leave for other applications :1.5

MULTIPROCESSING section it shows:

Render multiple frames simultaneosly is checked.
Minimum allocation per CPU is: 1GB
the slider is set for Faster rendering and the specs below say:
Foreground memory usage: 1GB
Background memory usage: 5.24 (1.75 gb per cpu)
actual cpus that will be used : 3
cpus to leave for other applications is :1

Is there anything I can tweak to help out my rendering time or am I sool and this is the way it is? I do have a few effects like (optical flares, magic bullet, a little blur, not too much to slow it down this much, I think..etc..etc but still, I think it could be faster.

Any help would be appreciated!!

BTW I am rendering 720p 24pn footage from the HPX170 so i have raw .mxf files in the timeline.
 
It all depends on what you're rendering. I just rendered a 54 second clip last night and it took 8 hours. This is on a 8 core machine with 18 GB RAM, MP on for 4 processors, etc. Granted this is a scene with hundreds of 3D layers, depth of field, lots of vectors with continuous rasterization on, etc, but you get the picture. It's heavily dependent on your comp.

For something as long as 4 minutes with those effects (Magic Bullet is pretty render heavy as I remember it, as are some blurs), 2 1/2 hours doesn't seem too bad. Your render settings look fine and you're not over-allocating processors based on RAM with MP so that's good. Adobe recommends 2 GB per core, so if you're using 3 cores you're fine.

What codec are your rendering to? Rendering to lossless/animation will generally be faster that say a compressed codec like MPG or whatever.
 
Thanks for the input. I am actually rendering a QT animation at 100% quality so I can see where I'm at with this video. that sucks. I was hoping my settings were off somewhere and that would speed things up.. ehh.. cant wait til CS5!! native 64 and uses all your ram!

Also, when rendering it says at the bottom Ram usage : 32% of 4GB. why wouldnt it use say, 60% of 4GB and then maybe speed it up from 2 1/2 hours to maybe 1 hour? I dont know, I just have always wondered why it would only use a small % of ram instead of alot more to speed things up..??

BTW since I have you, in my info panel, it says "incompatible effect or expression . multiprocessing is off". Now I know that must mean some effect or expression I am using is not compatible with multiprocessing, my question is, do you know of certain effects or expressions that dont play nice with multiprocessing?? I've never heard of that.



thanks again.
 
Yeah, there are some effects that don't work with MP. I'm not sure which one it may be. You'd probably just have to break it down one effect at a time and see which one is causing it to break, or do some Googling.

I'm on a Mac so I usually check my render activity by opening up the Activity Monitor, which shows all the processes, how much CPU they use and how much RAM they're using. I know there's something like this on Windows, so I would check that out when you're rendering. It should show the main After Effects process, but there should also be three processes called “aesefllink” for each of your cores. If they're each using around 100% and 2 GB RAM then it should be working fine. If you only see the main app, then you're MP isn't working, probably due to the effect or expression message you got.
 
Hey, I really appreciate the replies. now check this problem out, at midway point in rendering it just stopped and said 'keylight ran out of memory' ..?? what the heck is that?

I have 2 parts, 1 about 25 seconds and 1 about 30 seconds of green screen and I am using keylight but why it has run out of memory.. I have no clue. back to googling for problems. this sucks!
 
Keylight does that. Trying purging everything from the edit menu and Google the secret menu and set it to purge every 5 frames. You can also turn up your RAM allocation and then use less cores. Or you can pre-render the Keylight clips and replace the effected ones with a QT of them.

These are the things of AE in 32 bit, hopefully gone with CS5.
 
yeah I purged and then I did the 'secret' file and purged every 10 frames (before you recommended 5) and it made it all the way til the ending part and then just stopped before finishing (which by the way is a green screen using keylight) so I think I'm going to have to pre-render the keylight scenes seperately. Thanks for the advice bro.
 
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I would strongly recommend a stand alone graphics card. So much of CS4 is open GL intensive and I bet you would get better performance on renders with anything more substantial in there. If you plan to upgrade to CS5 look at the nVidia GeForce 285 if you don't have the budget for a Quadro FX card, they're under 300 bucks and have the CUDA processing that will dramatically speed up your workflow in CS5. I agree that's a long time to wait for such a short clip. I hope the results were worth it. - CK
 
Thats not so bad, I've had much worse times before. If you want to see some serious render times start looking at 3D programs like Maya, 3Dsmax, ect
 
Collink said:
I would strongly recommend a stand alone graphics card. So much of CS4 is open GL intensive and I bet you would get better performance on renders with anything more substantial in there. If you plan to upgrade to CS5 look at the nVidia GeForce 285 if you don't have the budget for a Quadro FX card, they're under 300 bucks and have the CUDA processing that will dramatically speed up your workflow in CS5. I agree that's a long time to wait for such a short clip. I hope the results were worth it. - CK
Click to expand...

AE doesn't use the GPU for rendering, only CPU. GPU and Open GL are only for previews within the comp.
 
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