Encoding time increasing by over 4x and still rising!

[Liam Wiebe]

disclaimer: I am no expert on this subject, this is a school project

I've been working on a video for 3 months now and it is due tomorrow, I am unsure if I will have it rendered by then at this rate.

I decided to do a simple test render (half of 1080p, 3 mbps, H.264) so I could point out any mistakes and fix them before I took on the final render, the estimated time went from 3 hours to 8, so I decided to check over the video within AE for any taxing effects. I removed a fractal noise background animation because it was causing the ram preview to be slow while I was making the video but other than that I decided everything else was essential to the video. So I decided to do the final render

you can see the settings in the picture (but i can provide more info if needed) the video is 11m 30s at 1080p etc. I started the render it at first it said it would take 56 hours, but 10 min later it said it would take 6 hours. So i was satisfied with the amount, and let it be. it rendered for about 2 hours and had 1 1/2 hours remaining. I was quite pleased so I went to bed assuming it would be done early in the night. I wake up 7 hours later and not only was the video not close to done, but the time remaining had increased to almost 5 hours! I was shocked to see that. I came back 4 hours later and the bar barely moved a cm and the time remained was 5 hours?! Now i'm wondering if it actually won't be ready by tomorrow morning.

Is there anything I can do? I believe I could have lowered the rendering time by removing the time each layer was present in the timeline. I probably made many amateur mistakes. But nothing that i would ever think would make this much of a difference.

In short, what can I do? WHY does AME work this way? how does the encoding process work that would make sense for this?

any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks

[Warren Heaton · Accepted solution]

Well, if nothing else, you're at least getting a great lesson in benchmarking your computer based on what you're creating.

Maybe reach out to your instructor with your screen shot and find out if there's any flexibility for when you deliver the project.

Do you have access to a workstation with faster processors?  Let's say your on a i5 machine that's running at 1.8GHz.  If you can get onto a i7 running at 3.2GHz, you should see a good improvement in render time.

Another approach would be to render to a high resolution format that doesn't compress between frames first and then encode that to H264 for delivery.  That won't buy a lot of time, but it should help.

For what it's worth, the longest I've waited in recent years is 72 hours for an 8 second animation.  In the big picture, that's not that long.  Disney's first Cars feature came in at 23 hours per frame (photorealistic 3D rendering on a very high-end render farm).

-Warren

[Liam Wiebe]

Thanks for the helpful info, the computer I'm using is a new one that I made 3 weeks ago and the CPU is the ryzen 1700 (so it should not be that)

I estamate that the video will take 70-80 hours and I intend to look into it as to why that is.

72 hours for an 8 sec render is insane...

As far as the project goes, I improvised to render a lower resolution to at least show the finished product. I didn't have an instructor, I was working on it in my own time for a class.

Thank for the reply