After Effects render/export taking forever!! 10+ HOURS FOR 3 MINUTE VIDEO

I find rendering slows as the machine heats up, so if I remove my side panels and point the fan at it, it speeds things up as the machine is running cooler. 

Same thing happens to me. I can render a video and it'll take 2 hours, then maybe I make an adjustment and 2nd run says 15 hours...huh? But I find if I close AE and start again, it renders in the usual 2 hours. The video I'm referring to has motion tracking and other effects and it a 12 min video, but I'm on a beast workstation desktop.

Also if any of your files are located on an external drive, that can slow things down so I keep all on my main ssd drive.

biggest problem here is the fact your exporting has H.245, the Biggest solution here is to export as QuickTime (not in media encoder, just After Effects render menu) this was something I had to learn the hard way and once you export as QuickTime, reexport as h.245 (saves infinite time lol)

Not sure if this is directly related but lately, maybe for 2 months now, I've seen strange unpredictability in render times when rendering a comp several times (with minor changes not critical to rendering). Render times have been varying between 10 minutes and 1 hour. Also memory consumption has been all over the place each run. IF this is not related to Adobe pushing out flawed versions of AE I suppose I might have damaged memory and/or ssd but my #1 suspect is Adobe having broken something. And that reminds me, why is sending comps the Media Encoder so slow nowdays? Sometimes it takes 10 minutes to show up in ME...?

@Demorae5C2F 

Render times are proportional to processor speed.  Currently with AE, the rule of thumb is fewer, faster cores.

Based on your screenshot, for a faster render you need something faster than a 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7.

A well known After Effects performance test file is published by Equiloud on Vimeo:  https://vimeo.com/118053656

Download that project and render it.  Then use this list as a basis of comparison to see what processor you might upgrade to for a faster render:

• 2 min. 48 sec., AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-Core Processor 2.9 GHz, 256GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX3090 24GB

• 3 min. 17 sec., 2019 Mac Pro, 3.2 GHz 16-Core Intel Xeon W, 192 GB 2933 MHz DDR4, AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB

• 5 min. 11 sec. (Metal), Apple M1 Mac Mini (2020), Apple M1, 16GB, Apple M1 Built in graphics

• 5 min. 55 sec., Mac Pro (Late 2013), 2.7 GHz 12-Core Intel Xeon E5, 64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3, AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB
• 6 min. 34 sec., Mac Pro (Late 2013), 3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5, 64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3, AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB
• 7 min. 35 sec., Mac Pro (Late 2013) 3.5 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5, 64 GB 1866 MHz DDR3, AMD FirePro D500 3072 MB
• 10 min. 9 sec. (Metal), Apple Developer Mac Mini (2020), Apple A12Z Bionic, 16GB, Apple A12Z Built In
• 18 min. 38 sec., 27-inch iMac (2010), 2.8 HGz Quad-Core i5, 12GB RAM, HD 5670512MB
• 22 min. 10 sec., MacBook Air (11-inch, Early 2015), 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 MB
• 32 min. 48 sec., MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2016), 1.2 GHz Intel Core m5, 8 GB 1867 MHz LPDDR3, Intel HD Graphics 515 1536 MB

If you're running After Effects 2022, you can use the Render Time pane in the Timeline panel to see exactly what's taking the longest for your processor to render.  The switch looks like a snail (named Oscar) and is located at the lower left of the Timeline panel.  With After Effects 2022's Multi-Frame Rendering you should see faster renders as well, but with modest render speed increases on a 2015 6-Core Intel i7.

There are some great suggestions in the posts in this thread for getting a faster render; however, you are probably happy with the appearance of your Comp and may not want to make any changes - in which case you're back to moving the project to a faster computer.

Totally agree with comments above, but some addditional notes about ways to reduce render times:

• Reduce resolution. Are you rendering at 4K when you can get by with regular HD, for example?

• Reduce frame rate.  Are you rendering at an unnecesarily high frame rate?

• Reduce the size/resolution of source material.  Ultra-high resolution video and stills can dramatically increase render times, especially if they have effects applied directly to them.  Sometimes splitting an ultra-high definition still image into multiple smaller images can help a lot.

• Turn off motion blur if you don't need it.

• Turn off frame blending if you don't need it.

• If working in 3D, complex lighting and/or depth of field can really add to render times.  Can anything be somplified?

Render time depends entirely on what is going on in the composition. I do a lot of visual effects and compositing. If I design a shot that takes more than two or three minutes a frame I redesign the shot so it will render faster. My goal is to never have a comp that takes longer than about 4 minutes a frame to render. These complex composites are the exception. I maybe have two or three of them a month. Most of my comps render at the rate of several frames per minute. They render faster because they have fewer frames and fewer render intensive effects applied. When designing effects or motion graphics shot I always consider the render time. Pixar used to have, and probably still has a design limit of 7 minutes a frame for their renders and they have a lot bigger machine than I do. It takes that long to give every hair on Scully's body mass and inertia so that it will move like it was real.

What is going on in the comp? What is the frame size? What is the frame rate? Your video is probably somewhere between 4080 and 5100 frames long. If it will render in 24 hours that is about 17 seconds per frame. That might be pretty good. There are probably things you can do to the design to speed things up.

Not sure what you expect. Loading files into the render buffer takes time. Processsing effects and animation takes time. Rendering a frame takes time. Saving a file to disk takes time. AE is far from a realtime app and depending on your composition resolution, complexity, effects and features used rendering times from a few seconds to several minutes per frame are perfectly within reason and if you have to render 30, 60 or  more for each second you easily end up with thousands of frames multiplied by that time. We can agree that 24 hours may be excessive in your case, but 10 hours could be perfectly normal. There's 5100 frames to process at 30 FPS and if it takes about 35 seconds per frame as the values you offered suggest this is perfectly in the realm of normalcy for AE. At 60 FPS it would be half of that and 15 seconds per frame is realyl nothing to complain about. Sorry, but it seems you simply have wrong expectations here and need to educate yourself about how AE's rendering pipeline works. There may of course be potential to optimize and crunch down rendering times, but in order to do that a lot more info about actual project contents, effects and features used and so on would be required. However, even under ideal conditions this may never go significantly lower due to what effects and features you may be using.

Mylenium