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Viditude
Known Participant
June 25, 2013
Question

Running an AE CC rendering through Media Encoder

  • June 25, 2013
  • 6 replies
  • 23164 views

Not sure what I need to be concerned with.

The Media Encoder CC is taking about 10 times longer than when I rendered this AE cs6 project in the past.

The AE cc project is 34 seconds and the media encoder is saying it will take 10 hours to render.

It's a H.264 going to YT HD.

Any tweaks for improvement?

it's the only thing running using 6 gig memory.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    6 replies

    G
    glasj2002
    Participant
    July 2, 2015

    Very slow for me too -
    Windows 8.1 i7 8GB RAM

    10 second AE clip with rotobrush taking 17 hours

    Reources on PC are not at max

    Vinay Dwivedi
    Adobe Employee
    Vinay Dwivedi
    Adobe Employee
    June 30, 2015

    Hi,

    Do you have any Expressions applied in the composition or please mention the layers that are there in the comp.

    Also, mention the tech specs of your Machine with the OS information.

    //Vinay

    M
    menagerieincolor
    Participant
    June 6, 2014

    One thing I have noticed is if I close AE when rendering via AME, the render time drops significantly. I'll set up the render, execute it and then close AE once it starts. I had one render that took over 24 hours with AE open, and finished in an hour and a half yesterday, once I closed After Effects for the day. Not sure if this helps, but in a pinch try closing AE.

      N
      niallo
      Participant
      May 16, 2014

      HI ya ...

      Same problem here ... trying to output 8sec and AME comes up with a time of 4hours 33min and then starts climbing. I have spent four hours on to Adobe support but no results as yet. At the moment I'm rendering a .mov and taking it to premier pro and then to mp4 through AME where it works fine ... If I get a solution from Adobe I'll post it here ...

      After Effects CC

      Media Encoder CC

      Premier Pro CC

      MBP 8gig of ram

      R
      RB3_68
      Participating Frequently
      July 2, 2013

      I have a similar slow render issue using ME vs. the AE renderer.

      Win 7, i7-3770k @ 4.22 ghz, 32 gb ram. 15 seconds of animation 1080p, 29.97. I'm constantly cleaning the cache and have it on an ssd.

      After effects CC completes a .mov using the h.264 codec with 100% quality, in just under 20 min.

      The same project with the same render settings takes over 12 hrs in Media Encoder CC. (I didn't let it complete though, that was the eta) 

      Filter-wise I'm not using much, just 1 layer of optical flares and 1 light in the scene. It's a fairly simple scene with a 3d floor, 2d back wall, and a customers logo in the spotlight.  There is a single optical flare layer in 3d space behind the logo.  The logo has 10 copies offset by 1 pixel in z-space to make a fake 3d logo.  They all have shadows on and I adjusted some of the material settings.

      Having said all that, media encoder is severely lagging for some reason, and I don't believe it's a filter issue.  If after effects can complete the task in 20 min, media encoder should not take 720 min (12 hrs), or more, using the exact same project and specs.  That's almost 40 times longer. 

      As was discussed above with the "refine edge" feature, I don't think that's the problem as I am not using refine edge for my project.  To me It seems like the link between ME and AE is broken/slow.

      V
      ViditudeAuthor
      Known Participant
      July 2, 2013

      What I uncovered yesterday was success. These are the rules I followed and I was able to process in AEcc and AMEcc. AMEcc did take longer but not 40x longer.

      1. If possible, restart your machine.
      2. Changed the time to never for the machine to got sleep or darken display (I'm going to try to avoid this tomorrow and go back to my older 1 hour/15 minute timers)
      3. Closed all other programs on my PC (including internet...why I have my smartphone and tablet and kindle near my computer as I work).
      4. Upped my cache storage. Though it was at 91g and I never saw usage more than 15g, I upped it to150g.
      5. Save work.
      6. Clean media cache.
      7. Keep rotoscope area segments less than 5 seconds (so I had 7 segments of about 5 seconds each in the file).
      8. Clean media cache again (just in case I forgot step 3).
      9. Export to AMEcc from AEcc (I also closed AEcc and opened AMEcc to import ... same timings for export/import process).
      10. Clean AMEcc cache.
      11. Render
      12. Go take a nap.

      I need to make some changes to my file tomorrow. I'm hoping for the same results.

      R
      RB3_68
      Participating Frequently
      July 2, 2013

      Thanks for the input.  My cache size is 500 gb, an entire ssd used for nothing but Adobe cache.  There is nothing else on the drive and I clean the cache several times throughout a project to keep things moving.

      My machine is always on, no screensavers or sleep modes.

      Roto areas some times need to be more than 5 seconds per the clients specs, so this is not an option as I can't tell them their shot won't work because it's more than 5 seconds. 

      This isn't a cache issue in my opinion as I have more than enough drive space available on a very fast ssd, more than capable i7 3770k, and maxed out ram, with a mid-range Nvidia card. It also doesn't explain why the after effects renderer performs Much faster than media encoder with all of that empty space just sitting there.  I could see if the cache drive was full, but it is barely at 10% capacity because I clean it several times per day. I don't think that is the problem; especially since the problem isn't repeatable inside of after effects.

      It's a processing issue between the dynamic link manager and ME/AE I think. I watch all cores at only about 26% of capacity with Media Encoder, After Effects uses all 8 cores at 100% when it is rendering through the internal queue.

      Will keep using AE for now until this is resolved.  Thanks for the input!

      Todd_Kopriva
      Todd_Kopriva
      Inspiring
      June 25, 2013

      Are you experiencing the same delay with other output formats, or just H.264? Does this happen with all compositions from After Effects? How long does the same composition take to render and export through the After Effects render queue?

      V
      ViditudeAuthor
      Known Participant
      June 26, 2013

      I only tried h.264 high bit and medium bitrate, I also tried YouTube HD 29. All of them would get stuck. Would you like me to try something different?

      AEcc only allows these options to render in the image below. Doesn't mention any of the options Media mentions (and not like the AE CS6)

      For the Media, it's still "counting up" on the time elapsed as well as the remaining. yet, the bar doesn't seem to be moving. I finally (after 6 hours) decided to kill the job.

      What else would you like me to try? I'm desparate and willing to try anything at this point.

        I
        Community Manager
        ivansullCommunity Manager
        Community Manager
        June 26, 2013

        The MPEG2, MPEG4, and H.264 outputs (and Windows Media) are hidden by default in After Effects CC but you can bring them back by turning on "Show depricated formats" in the Output section of Preferences:

        This will re-enabled these output choices in the Output Module settings menu:

        In general tho' you should use AME to export to these formats.  They were "depricated"  in After Effects because they're legacy versions of the exporters while AME uses newer versions that are still being actively developed.  Only re-enable them if you need to troubleshoot an output issue, like this one, or have older AE projects that are dependent on them.

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