Skip to main content
S
shadow7eddy
Participant
June 3, 2017
Question

Media Encoder Slows PC while Exporting from After effects

  • June 3, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 2647 views

Hi all.

I have read a lot of discussions lately about Media Encoder slowing the PC down. I have the similar issue. As I could see, people have trouble answering the topic because of lack of information. I have gathered all evidences I could. Hope this will help and will be glad to hear an answer from you.

First of all, my specs.

Product:

AME CC 2017 update from April 2017

After Effects CC 2017 update from April 2017

PC Specs:

Motherboard: MSI Z170-A PRO (MS-7971)

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz

Video: Gigabyte G1 NVidia GeForce GTX 1080 8GB

RAM: Team Group 16GB (8x2) 2400 GHZ

1 HDD split in 3 disks and 1 SSD where Windows and Adobe installed

Project used: https://bit.ly/2n4wtIy  (not mine), free, found on YouTube.

Project Name (from folder): Unknown geometry.

Now the issue.

As I could see, AME, when started, starts to use "Handles" process.

As the project is running, "Handles" process is starting to increase in size (mine in standby is around 40k, in picture you can see already over 156k).

As this number increases, the PC starts to slow down. and at one point (in my case 2+ million) PC starts to lag like windows 95 when lunching Overwatch.

In this situation I used 2 projects (same original project, but with 2 different modification and file name saves) and as you can see, after one project (approximate 1 hour) the handles still where increasing but did not reset by logic.

As I found out, this "Handles" number was working because of a background process of After Effects as in picture below (this is not the Application but a background process!!!), which is bound to the AME.

As a workaround of this, I kill the background process. This is not harming the Encoding, the AME starts another Adobe After Effects process and starts over from the beginning. As you can see, my "handles" number decreases to the lowest point and starts again. As you can see, the second projects still runs.

And the last picture is the RAM allocated to the AME.

Anyway, as I saw, that if the process is killed after 2 million "Handles" (in my case), the project Fails with the message "Stopped by user".

I am relatively new to the After effects hard rendering and I cannot confirm this issue on earliest Version (had CC 2015 before).

I can confirm no issue on Premiere Pro tho (up to 20 projects left to render at night in queue almost for 1 year).

These are my finding and you have the access to the folder and all data I could gather.

I would really appreciate an answer as it is really disturbing killing the background process every 2 hours.

As the end point, and because we are professionals here, I would really appreciate skipping the parts involving: clear cache from after effects, save the project to one disk but export to another, export to SSD, reinstall the application and other things as they were already done several times.

Thanks to all and hope I could help.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Warren Heaton
Community Expert
Warren HeatonCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 6, 2017

Hi shadow7eddy:

How render heavy is the Comp that's being sent to Media Encoder?  For example, is it a 1920x1080 Comp with just a few layers that have keyframes for Transform properties only or is it a 3840x2160 Comp with Roto Brush & Refine Edge applied, or a complex Particle Playground applied, or some heavy color correction applied, or with a 3rd party plug-in like Neat Video applied, or are lots of 3D layers enabled with ray-tracing?  You know, anything that slows render times down?

-Warren

S
shadow7eddyAuthor
Participant
June 6, 2017

Hi Warren,

Thanks for reply,

If you look at the begging of the article, you can see the link for download the project. It is free and you can use it. In the Archive there is a project called "unknown geometry", that's the one I am using.

It is basically a visualizer, you can look into it and see specifically what it does. I also cut almost a half of the effects there (middle line, timestamps, particles light).

My project includes a picture, a music file in mp3 and this visualizer, nothing more.

I am exporting in mp4.

Export is made in 1920x1080 with h.264 codec at 60FPS.

Bitrate (Target 12, Max 15). VBR 1 pass.

- maybe I am exporting in "not the best" format for output (mp4). Maybe you can advise me how to export properly the project from AE and then reincode it in AME tp mp4.

- maybe the picture if too big (i am using up to 8k photos for the background in jpeg)

- maybe I should not use the mp3 format

- maybe the project itself is not very optimized and it needs to be cut in some parts.

And of course I am concerned about Media Encoder using the After Effects background app increasing the CPU load as shown in the pictures above. Or maybe this is the way it should be.

Thanks again

Nexahs1138
Nexahs1138
Inspiring
June 6, 2017

Looks normal to me, rendering is a very heavy process. Although I don't know why you're rendering at 60 fps, drop that down to 25 or whatever the standard is for your country (Europe - 24/25, America - 23.97/29.97) 60 fps is for high detailed cinema, unless you're working on Avatar 2 there is no reason for you to go as high as 48 or 60.

When exporting videos the best default is a YouTube 1080p H.264, unless you want it in a different format.

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices