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A
arnar?_?
Participant
January 16, 2025
Question

After Effects Render Time

  • January 16, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 687 views

Why does AE take 63 hours to render?? Am I just supposed to wait for more than 2 days for a 20-30 second edit?😭🙏

3 replies

R
Community Expert
Rick GerardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 17, 2025

Render time depends on what is going on in your composition and the resources available on your system. The estimate could be accurate, or it could be way off. Without any information about your workflow and the comp, it's very hard to give you any help rendering. 

MarekMularczyk
Community Expert
MarekMularczykCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 17, 2025

But does it really take so long to render? You need to remember that this is just an estimate and it usually gets reduces quickly.

 

Adobe Community ExpertAdobe Certified Professional
jefubbudu
jefubbudu
Inspiring
January 17, 2025

Yes. It's normal. Mind you, mine usually only took 2-12 hours but for 4-60 seconds of rendered video, I think it's abysmal. A lot of it stems from the fact that very few effects use GPU. 

 

I stick to good ol CS6 from 2012 myself because it's over 20% faster with snappy UI, but generally, performance has gotten worse with each update. If you have some really heavy VFX or a smaller amount of RAM, this is even more apparent. The VFX community generally regards AE as a "student software" now. You learn it because it's on school computers. I've personally lost a couple contracts because the indie directors I was hired by got tired of waiting till the next day for each requested change. AE's performance made me a liability, I think.

MarekMularczyk
Community Expert
MarekMularczykCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 27, 2025

That's very unsual.. What if you export it through Media Encoder? Is it faster?

  

Adobe Community ExpertAdobe Certified Professional
Ishan Y
Ishan Y
Inspiring
January 17, 2025

Hi there,

I can understand how frustrating this must be. Could you let me know which version of After Effects you're using? Please also share more details on your project (total duration, effects used, export settings, composition frame size, total number of layers). These details will help me better understand the issue.

 

Thanks,

Ishan

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