Extremely Slow Render/Export on Adobe Media Encoder 2022

[Elfean]

I have been waiting for more than 30 mins for the final video to be rendered. It's already 40 mins and it's barely 50% rendered. Never had this issue before. My laptop specs are as below and my GPU is RTX 3070.

Anyone knows how to solve this sudden issue?

[AndrewDacian]

Yeah it's crazy. The 2022 version I use keeps sending back the "accelerated renderer error" message after a while. 

[mxawng*]

i am using version 22.1 for everything and that seems to predate whatever issue causes the crazy delays. when you reinstall an older version, make sure you clear all your media caches before and after reinstalling, and also to backup and then remove your preferences files. those might cause incompatibilites that aren't handled gracefully (i presume adobe mostly tests the upgrade flow and not the backout flow for versioning).

[Warren Heaton]

@mxawng* 

If we want to roll back a version of Adobe software as if the newer version was never installed, the Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool helps with that.

How and when to use the Creative Cloud Cleaner tool | Advanced steps

[jenkmeister]

I realize this is frustrating for you, but we are working on fixing what we can reproduce. I know of a number of fixes that have been released over the past 6 months based on the cases we've been able to reproduce. We have another fix coming for the scenario where you have an AE-based Mogrt that contains a Media Replacement option using a high resolution image, imported into PPro and then rendered out via AME. That will be into beta in the next few days. 

I'm definitely not here to defend that we've solved every problem nor to deny there are performance issues, but we can only fix what we can reproduce. If you have a project you can share that exhibits the problem, please share it. Please also let us know your full system specs, what plugins you have installed, what output formats you're using. We need the details to be able to reproduce the problems so we know we are fixing the right thing. 

The engineering team is also more than willing to get on to screen shares / video calls so you demonstrate the problem and we can try to figure out what's going on directly on your machine. If that's something you're willing to do, post back and we'll get it organized. 

[AndrewDacian]

It takes a google search to see that Adobe is worth 160 billion dollars. Billion, not million. Such a company cannot and should not come up with excuses of why they release broken software and why they don't fix it even after  10 months. 

In any case, I don't want to complain, but to solve my situation. So yes, please put me in contact with someone whom I can send the entire project as well as the details of all my specs plus the installed plugins. And I also want to get on a screen share with someone after that, as I'm certain that sending you my project will solve nothing. 

[jenkmeister]

Go ahead and send me a DM here on the forums. I can either give you a shared folder to upload to, or you can link it and I'll pull it down. 

[AndrewDacian]

I have just sent you all the details, I'm waiting for a solution now.

[AndrewDacian]

For whoever is interested. My problem is partly solved. I switched from Software to CUDA rendering within the AE file (this was strange since I always make sure to set it to CUDA when I begin a project, I guess it automatically reverted), I switched from 32 bpc to 16, and I turned off multi frame rendering.

This works for simple as well as normal projects. However, I don't know how much it helps for very complicated projects. I have one and now the computer restarts when I export it through ME. The only solution I found is to export it through the AE Beta using its own Render queue. 

So currently my workflow is to have those settings, and if a project is too dense, export it through AE Beta Render Queue. And to give credit where credit's due, it's Jenkmeister who guided me with those settings, so thank you.

[Warren Heaton]

@AndrewDacian 

If our project is set to 32 bits per channel (bpc), a 3840-by-2160 Composition is 126MB per frame (as shown in the Composition Settings dialog box).  

At that bpc project setting, a thirty-second 2160p24 Composition is asking After Effects to process about 91GB of data over that duration, not including any overhead for whatever Masks, Effects, and Transforms are being applied for how ever many Layers are in the Comp.  

To work more quickly, do Previews at a low Comp Resolution (Quarter usually works well), but Custom may be needed) and skip frames (start with "1", but try "2" or "3").  

[AndrewDacian]

I will. Thank you.

[mxawng*]

hey, i just want to drop my two cents that this is in bad faith or at least carelessly optimistic. i sent @jenkmeister project files and error logs via DM over three months ago. they have gotten back to me, but as far as i can tell, no engineers have worked to repro and fix the issues i was having, nor have i gotten any detail on what might be happening to slow down my project renders.

i'm not sure of the relevance of this very niche mogrt round-trip rendering issue. my project has nothing more than source files, lumetri and gaussian blur effects. the media encoder sluggishness is not specific to some uncommon corner case. it is the default behavior.

i was able to unblock myself by backing out to version 22.1 for ppro, ae, and me. unfortunately, more recent versions of the video editing suite simply do not function—they might as well be unpaid previews, since they are not able to export video.

[jenkmeister]

We are still looking at your case as well, as I've just written back to you in the DM. 

[eckiAMETeam]

mxawng, regarding your Lumetri performance issues: I have discussed the project you provided to us with our color experts.

You were experiencing performance issues while using the Lumetri color effect along with the Luma key effect. The Luma key effect is software only causing strain on the CPU & slow rendering. It also appears that you have applied the Lumetri color effect three times, which is further exacerbating the problem.

To help you overcome this issue, I would suggest that you consider using the Ultra key effect instead of the Luma key effect. The Ultra key effect is a GPU-accelerated effect that should render much faster.

[RennieCMitchell]

I had a similar issue (a pretty basic 5 min video was gonna take 6 hours to render). As I started to pack up and give up, I turned off all my open applications. The very second I turned off AE, Media Encoder went nuts and tore through the render! It seems ME couldn't  handle other Adobe apps being open. Maybe because I'm running a beta OS?

Mac Studio

Apple M1 Max

32GB Ram

Ventura 13.2 beta

Adobe AE 23.0

Adobe ME 23.1

[jenkmeister]

AE, AME, PPro, and other Adobe apps all work under a shared maximum amount of memory based on the Memory preferences set in any of the apps. My immediate thought on this is AE was using a good portion of the memory that it couldn't hand over to AME, but once AE was closed and the memory was released, AME had more memory to use. AE 23.1 (and 23.2 released today) have a number of memory fixes that should help with these situations. 

[blancheeen]

I have the same problem right now. 2 minutes video is rendering now for almost 2 hours and still not the end. How is this even possible? How should I render longer videos and keep my work flow when this is happening? 

[jenkmeister]

Any chance you can describe in more detail what you're rendering (AE comp, PPro sequence, plain video file conversion, etc.), which version of AME you're using, etc? We'd love to help figure out what's going on, so every detail you can give us would be really valuable. 

[blancheeen]

Hi, I'm rendering simple animation (white bg and cca 30 2D squares with shadows just changing position + music. Size 1920x1080). I have MAc studio 2022, using AE 2022 + media encoder 2022. 

[jenkmeister]

If you render directly out of AE, is it as slow, or only when exporting via AME? 

[MattyPen]

@jenkmeister I see this has been a bit of presistent issue, so I thought I'd share my experience to see if you're able to replicate this issue on your end. I'm running into this issue while rendering a video that I edited in Premiere Pro, which has three layers: 1. a small three-band audio spectrum, 2. a foreground image imported using a MOGRT, and 3. a wave form that moves with some music. Both 1. and 3. are After Effects compositions that I linked to my Premiere Pro file by creating an adjustment layer and then selecting "Replace with After Effects Composition." In total, the video is about 4.5 minutes, but is projecting over 1.5 hour to render. When I send the file to Media Encoder to be exported, the video starts rendering quickly but very quickly slows down before eventually grinding to a total hault and stops rendering altogether (about an 1/8 of the way through the render). I have a brand new Apple MacBook Pro "16 with an Apple M2 Pro Max chip, so I was pretty shocked when I saw the render time, as it's about as long as a similar video would take on my Apple iMac from 10+ years ago. Below are the full specs of my computer and attached are both the Premiere Pro and After Effects files I created.

Computer Specs:

Apple MacBook Pro "16

Apple M2 Pro Max

12-Core CPU
38-Core GPU
32GB Unified Memory
1TB SSD Storage

[Benjo3000]

Hi there, same issue here. I did a bunch of updates at once (huge mistake, I know), PR/AE/ME to the latest versions and also  Mac OS 13.2.1 on my 2018 Macbook. Before that, everything was going reasonably well. 

Now I can't use ME to render out my PR projects anymore. It would take over 2 hours for a simple 5 min edit, which takes only about 15 minutes using the "native" PR export. No magic in this project, just some footage with a little bit of Lumetri, some Dynamic Link AE imports (lower thirds).

Totally destroys my workflow. Looking forward for a quick fix here. 

[mxawng*]

i would just revert your update. if you want a newer version of the video suite than you were on before, i've been using 22.1 (the most recent version i was on before updating broke my rendering) with no issues. adobe cc desktop app should let you install and pin older versions.

[Riptopian_Animations]

I have the same issue, but probably 1000x times worse. I want to render a 30 second animation and apparently it's gonna take 149 hours?! That's ridiculous!!! 

[eckiAMETeam]

I am very sorry for your bad experience. Could you please provide you specs (operating system, CPU, GPU)? Would you be able to share your project for vcerification? I couls send you a private message with instructions in this forum.

[Lively_Spirit0D44]

I have the same issue, an AE project rendering for hours that on another PC (Windows 10 with a weaker GPU) only took a few minutes. Restart and Update didn't solve anything.

Specs: Windows 11, Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 39000XT, GPU: NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti, 32GB Ram