3 hour time limit on Adobe After Effects compositions?

[jg145]

Hello,

I am trying to create footage to be projected for a club night (this Saturday, pretty tight I know). The film has a still image for the first hour, after which it changes between different animations. The animations last for about an hour and I plan on looping them for 5 hours, so in total the film will be 6 hours. I need everything to be in the same video so I can press play and leave it to do its thing for the duration of the night. I can't loop the whole thing because I only want the still image at the beginning to appear once.

I am completely new to after effects and have just discovered I can only go up to 3 hours? What is the easiest way around this? Would it be to render out the footage from after effects in two halves and put them together in final cut pro?

I hope this question isn't too confusing! And apologies if I sound like a complete beginner - it's because I am one!

Many thanks,

Jordan

[Towerguy]

Hi Jordan. I would strongly recommend that you do as much of this as you can in FCP and render from there - particularly the still image. What are the animations that you want to do? Can they be done in FCP (or Premiere Pro for that matter if it has more bells and whistles)? After Effects is a complex beast and your render times would be massive (possibly days if you are doing complex effects and animations). I don't mean to be too negative but as a complete beginner I suspect you will be driving yourself crazy before too long and be in danger of not having a product at the end of it. After Effects is not an intuitive program and it takes a fair amount of time to get to understand even the basics. However, it is possible to do sections in AE and then take them into your editor, but doing the lot would be a very demanding ask for a novice.

[jg145]

Hello, thank you so much for your response. By FCP do you mean Final Cut Pro? If so I dont have that software, but I do have Premiere Pro. I have spent a few days with After Effects and have just about got to grips with it, I think what I am doing is very simple. The animations are basically just very simple png sequences, usually only 5 or 6 frames looped with a coloured background and the odd bit of video footage. Do you think rendering a 6 hour video from premiere Pro will take a long time? (Ps you’re right about the driving myself crazy bit)

Thanks so much for your help!

[Towerguy]

Hi, yes FCP is Final Cut Pro (you mention it in your original post). I suggest you look at Premiere Pro and see if it can create the animations you need in it? Otherwise do a sample render from AE (say 1 minute of an animation) and see how long the render takes, then add it into PP. Sorry, I've never rendered anything that long - perhaps you might ask on the Premiere Pro Forum. Were I doing this (I'm an old guy) I would burn it to a DVD with your first image being the Menu Image, then hit the play button and have the one hour animation loop until stopped - for what it's worth (and perhaps it's another  option?).

[Szalam]

Premiere Pro is definitely the way to go. Easy to put stills and animations in there, loop them as long as you want, export as MP4, etc. is much easier than doing it in AE.

Make the animation loops in AE and render them to a production codec like ProRes, DNxHR, Cineform, etc. and then bring it into Premiere Pro.

[Dave Merchant]

After Effects is designed for very short clips, not long-form videos. You are better off working in Premiere Pro; but remember that you also have Media Encoder which can join any number of source videos together into one longer sequence.

[Rick Gerard]

I would not do something like this as a video. I would use Adobe Animate and build a full-screen web presentation. Your one hour still pix would be one frame and a timer. The animation could also be just a few different frames with position timing cues.

You could play the file from any device with an HDMI output. Smartphone, tablet, laptop. Rendering a 6-hour video is probably going to take at least 12 hours. For the project you are describing, a video is the least efficient solution I can think of. It would only be necessary if there is no other way to build your looped sections.

If you have to generate an hour-long video that you want to loop, just make that video an hour long then set the Animate project to loop the video six times.

If a single video is your only option then just render the first hour still and the second-hour animation, then string them together using a compression app that doesn't rerender each frame. That will save you a lot of time. I can even do that on my iPhone.