help with rendering: render is too slow, what should i do?

Question

hi, i am quite stuck with my AE since i can not export a, in my opinion, not really heavy on resources video. i will describe things in detail so that you could advise me better since i already made couple of posts asking people about this issue, and it didn't resolve anything

my specs are AMD Ryzen 2700X, 32 GB of RAM, 19 of which is for After Effects. side-note: it uses this memory even when the video is paused, i just opened the project. moved the whole project to SSD which has around 100GB of free space. decided to go nuts, Disk Cache max size is 70 (which yes, to some people is a very little storage, but it's not even filled to maximum)

video is about 5 min, music video

comps are made of .png's, some have the other comps, adjustment layers, and audio converted to keyframes (for example, i use it to link image scale to audio keyframes so it would "bump" to audio)

from applied effects i have fractal noise for one shape, TrapcodeShine by Red Giant on one image (btw, it has an attention symbol saying it's not supported by Multi-Frame Rendering, maybe it's the issue? honestly, i don't know, just noticed that), then couple of Hue/Saturation, Glow, and one adjustment layer which is applied to the whole project which has CC Force Motion Blur. audio spectrums as well, just two.

also, this, with puppet movement which is "simple"? if it's even simple, moving dust. like you can google "how to animate a still image", and it will probably show you couple of videos where you can animate smoke. and this comp looks like this (some layers are overlapping because i keyframed transparency so it's always visible and feels like it's constantly moving)

puppet'ed layers

no 3D stuff, no other crazy stuff or plugin effects or whatever -- mostly stock effects, except for aforementioned TrapcodeShine. also, some wiggle(1,2) to position of images, some keyframes, for example, to automate rotation, etc.

at the same time as AE runs, i have opened Spotify, Chrome which takes ~2 GB of RAM, Discord, and that's pretty much it. sometimes i pause the render to play games, but it's not always opened. this 5 min file is estimated to be exported within ~5 days. i don't know why. most of the time, i exported projects with AME. "no" says AME meaning "no, i won't export it in less than 5 days". i read couple of posts here and there, people advised to render in ProRes, then render to .mp4/.mov. "no" told me AE meaning "no". i read more, people advised me to export image sequence...which i did not do up to this point, even though i tried to start the export, and still, it was VERY SLOW. for such short project. aand when the render is paused, memory is still very loaded, takes about 10-30 min for it to calm down

i have absolutely zero idea what should I do. i do not know whether my processor is relatively good for exporting in AE or not, because well, no one can tell me this in 2024 (at least, all the articles i've found are from 2020 or around that time). at the same time, i have no idea whether i do something wrong with render or the project itself, or with something that is not dependent on CPU

if you need any other my specs, i can name them, but i feel like this should be enough since it's the most important factors for it? i'm not sure. funny thing is, when i exported some of my projects a year ago, which was literally 2 static images, audio spectrum and 2 h .wav file, it exported it in well, 5 days. yet this project takes the same amount of time, even though it's 30 times shorter

or well, at least redirect me to somewhere i can get an answer, if it's not this place

Rick Gerard · Answer

What is too slow? Every pixel on every layer plus every effect is always calculated. Is there any way you can break up this very long comp into shorter shots and render them individually, then edit the shots into the final movie in Premiere Pro?

Your timeline looks to be about five minutes long. Are you trying to edit a movie using After Effects? A comp should ideally be a single shot. Sometimes, you need two or three shots because the elements overlap. When I create text and graphics animations for training or explainer videos, my longest comp is a single sentence or single phrase. I render the shots to production masters (using the High-Quality preset in the Render Queue at a minimum), edit the final movie, add the sound effects, and do the final color grading in an NLE, usually Premiere Pro. It's more efficient than trying to deal with or make changes in a five-minute comp.

What is your comp's frame size? What is the frame size? A 4K comp at 60fps is going to take about 16 times longer to render than an HD comp at 30fps. If you have footage that is twice as big as the comp, and it is never scaled above 50%, it is going to take about 4 times as long to render than a footage layer that is the same size as the comp.

You can also fill up system resources as you render, so the render time increases as the render progresses. That's another good reason to break up a long comp with multiple shots into shorter ones. Sending a comp to the Adobe Media Encoder also increases render time because the AME and comps nested in Premiere Pro using Dynamic Link are rendered using a background copy of After Effects so there are fewer system resources available for the render.

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