After Effects 2024 slow rendering even when comp is fully cached to ram?

[Jordan366164316x0e]

Just wondering if something is going on and whether I'm missing something here. My comp caches to ram pretty quickly and 'pre-renders' in AE. However, when I hit render on a sequence from the queue - in this instance a PNG / JPG sequence - it takes ~25minutes to write out 360 frames.

The PNGs are about 5Mb each. The footage is FHD. I swear in older versions of AE this would have exported out in minutes due to it being cached already. I can't understand why it's taking so long.

Anyone have any ideas? 

Thanks in advance! 

[Warren Heaton]

How does the render time compare if you queue the Comp up again but use TIFF instead of PNG?

[Jordan366164316x0e]

Wow, yes, the TIFFs are pretty much instant whereas the PNGs take way longer 

I just don't remember it being this slow before! 

[Jordan366164316x0e]

just tried JPEG too and they're a similar speed to writing the TIFFs (6 seconds) 

[Warren Heaton · Accepted solution]

You may find this article interesting:

https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-performance-part-14-make-it-faster-for-free/

Scroll down to "Don't use PNGs".

The article also gets into writing a frame from a cached render versus rendered from scratch.

[Jordan366164316x0e]

Cheers Warren, I had no idea that they were so slow.
TIFFs it is then!