For context, I need to render the same After Effect comp an ever-growing amount of times. I've been working with 1000 at a time. I have been able to do this with a comp from spreadsheet plugin and using Media Encoder's watch folder. I'm rendering to an MP4 and the videos are supposed to take 15 seconds to render. However, they eventually slow down to around 1:00 minute, which doesn't sound too bad if there weren't 1000 of them. When it slows down it uses significantly fewer resources, specifically the CPU. Goes from using 30-50% consistently down to 15-20%. To make it worse, it freezes at 6 hours in.
I've tried doing some tests to figure out what the issue could be. Started with the After Effects file first. Thought it might have been because I was using an MP4 file, but it was only audio from it. It wasn't that. Thought it was the pdf file being used, it wasn't that but I did find using a jpeg sped it up slightly. Then I turned off any effects that weren't necessary, nothing.
I also noticed a strange behavior where, if I opened the log to check the render times, Media Encoder would render at the expected render time briefly.
What ended up having an effect was limiting the number of comps submitted to the watch folder at once. I started with 400 and it slowed down around the same time, but consistently rendered around 30 seconds. So then I tried 200 and it looked consistent but slowed down halfway through to 30 seconds. Couldn't figure out how to stop it from freezing.
So this makes me think that the number of jobs in the queue might be what slows down the render time. Does anyone know why that might be? Is there a way to fix this issue on my end?
And if it helps anyone the workaround is to submit the comps in smaller chunks. Probably would do 100 at a time if it's consistent throughout.
Specs:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor
RAM: 32GB
GPU: Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060
3
Replies
AdChoices