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fenrir0wulf
Participant
September 18, 2020
Question

AE render hangs / horrifically slow

  • September 18, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 1093 views

I have a very very simple composition. Two images over each other with two masks that move horizontally. I'm trying to render it as a JPG sequence. The issue is that this composition also happens to be in 10k resolution (10800 x 5400, 30 fps).

 

As such, the render basically either just hangs and stops after a few frames, or is absolutely horrifically slow beyond mesure. The furthest it managed to go is 800 frames out of 2700 (that's 1 minute 30 btw) in 21 hours.

Media Encoder is actually even worse, pretty much refusing to even start the render, half the time even straight up crashing when merely queing the render.

However, the live preview inside AE is perfectly fine and has absolutely no problems. It can be played normally without any issues. It is only rendering the composition.

So, we know 8k videos are possible (what is Red DC after all). Thus a 10k rendering as a JPG sequence should not be out of the realm of possibilities. But somehow AE doesn't seems to be able to manage it, or I'm doing something wrong.

 

It also seems that even though it is set to use CUDA, my GPU seems to go completely unused, as is my CPU. All AE does is eat up all 26 GB of RAM allocated to it. Though I don't think this issue is related to the previous one.

 

And because I see it asked often, here's the Speccy sheet of the computer:

(Standard Monitor is because it is controlled through Remote Desktop)

    1 reply

    Andrew Yoole
    Andrew Yoole
    Inspiring
    September 18, 2020

    Sounds like simply a matter of your system running out of RAM.  Each frame of your huge comp will consume around 5GB of RAM, plus the uncompressed size of all your footage items.  If they are similar resolutions your system could easily chew through 15-20GB of RAM simply to render 1 frame.  

     

    As a test, just created the same sized comp on a 32GB iMac.  I created a solid with an animated 4 colour gradient and rendered a few hundred frames. Averages 3 seconds per frame.  After Effects shows to be using about 20GB of RAM, and the system slows considerably.  Overall, the system RAM is maxed out and it is swapping RAM storage to the hard drive constantly.  Basically, it's struggling to keep up.

     

     

    The best possible solution is to get more RAM. 32GB just isn't enough for a project of this resolution.

    Beyond that, take some precautions to maximise available RAM on your system.  Restart the machine regularly.  Turn off every application and background task that isn't essential.  Make sure your After Effects cache drive and system cache drives have plenty of space for RAM paging.

     

    F
    fenrir0wulfAuthor
    Participant
    September 18, 2020

    Well I wish I could get 3 seconds per frame. So, before, it averaged about 5 minutes per frame before it hung after 21 hours. Right now, what I've done is activated (or rather re-activate) all of the caching and paging option availible. I've put an 8GB system page file and a 32GB cache for After Effects, and as before AE is the only thing running. The odd effect this has had is that now AE only uses around 6GB (CPU and GPU still seem not very in use), and the average time it to for two frames before simply hanging was an astounding 8 minutes (showing me an impressive 192 hours of total time).

     

    In short, it ain't lack of RAM that's the problem. AE is literally choking.

    And ME still crashes on start the same way.

    I'm starting to think that the two transparency masks are the issue here. /s

    I do legitimately wonder if combining them into one would help.

    F
    fenrir0wulfAuthor
    Participant
    September 18, 2020

    So, to my shock and surprise, everything seems to work now. It averages 7 seconds per frame, the RAM use has capped out at 19 GBs out of its availible 26, and the CPU is now seeing some use.

     

    So, what happened?

    It appears I was slightly misled. Caching and paging were not in fact disabled in the beginning. What I did is actually completely disable them now. Both the system paging (that's Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Performance Settings > Advanced > Virtual Memory) and the AE cache.

     

    I just have to be careful to not open anything else or else it crashes. But I expected that.

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