Media Encoder takes an hour to render 4 min AE video

[Kunjesh, DIBC]

Hi.. i have a fresh install on a new machine. 

Rendering H.264 1080 Mobile preset of an after effects video with simple text/image floating in-out as an overlay to an underlying video. 

11th gen i5 + RTX 3050 8gb + 16gb ram + 500gb NVME

Win 10 with latest hardware drivers downloaded from official site.. 

Both AE & ME installed from creative cloud, so should be latest. 

Both CPU & GPU utilised under 5%

HDD utilization 0-1%

Request you to guide on how to go about it.

Thanks & Regards,
NEGANDHI Kunjesh

DIBC

Mumbai, India.

[David Arbor]

There's not enough information to tell, so the first thing to do is eliminate AME as a potential bottleneck and look directly at your After Effects comp. How quickly does your comp preview at Full resolution in AE? Also, as a test, how long does it take to render out an intermediate format (such as ProRes) directly from After Effects?

[Kunjesh, DIBC]

Tried with quicktime and avi, same video takes about 5 & half min. still GPU utilization is under 5% but gets CPU to max.

Also, the same file when taken in media encoder and rendered to h264 finishes in less than 2 min and uses 20-25% GPU, 

[David Arbor]

AE doesn't use the GPU the same way other apps like Premiere do. It does most of its rendering on the CPU, and if you're not using a lot of GPU-accelerated effects (and even if you are for certain parts of your comp) you won't see high GPU utilization across your entire render. In your original post, it sounds like multi-frame rendering wasn't being taken advantage of by AME if you were barely seeing any CPU utilization, but it definitely is enabled in After Effects if you're seeing max CPU utilization.

What do you mean in your last sentence when you say the "same file" is taken into AME and converts to H.264 in less than 2 minutes Are you talking about the rendered MOV or AVI you mentioned in the first sentence? If so, that makes sense because AME can now use the GPU to transcode as H.264, but it doesn't mean the GPU is used the same way to render your AE project in the first place. Rendering is an incredibly complex topic, especially when you're taking about performance and rendering in After Effects. Your reply still doesn't give a lot of information and it's unclear if your problem is solved because your H.264 conversion happened in less than two minutes, but you said it took over an hour in your original post.

When asking for help on these forums, you have to imagine the people responding don't know anything about your setup or project at all and you have to be very explicit; there are too many variables to consider in each situation.