After Effects Render Time

[arnar?_?]

Why does AE take 63 hours to render?? Am I just supposed to wait for more than 2 days for a 20-30 second edit?😭🙏

[Ishan Y]

Hi there,

I can understand how frustrating this must be. Could you let me know which version of After Effects you're using? Please also share more details on your project (total duration, effects used, export settings, composition frame size, total number of layers). These details will help me better understand the issue.

Thanks,

Ishan

[MarekMularczyk]

But does it really take so long to render? You need to remember that this is just an estimate and it usually gets reduces quickly.

[jefubbudu]

Yes. It's normal. Mind you, mine usually only took 2-12 hours but for 4-60 seconds of rendered video, I think it's abysmal. A lot of it stems from the fact that very few effects use GPU. 

I stick to good ol CS6 from 2012 myself because it's over 20% faster with snappy UI, but generally, performance has gotten worse with each update. If you have some really heavy VFX or a smaller amount of RAM, this is even more apparent. The VFX community generally regards AE as a "student software" now. You learn it because it's on school computers. I've personally lost a couple contracts because the indie directors I was hired by got tired of waiting till the next day for each requested change. AE's performance made me a liability, I think.

[MarekMularczyk]

That's very unsual.. What if you export it through Media Encoder? Is it faster?

[jefubbudu]

The same, or slower, unless i've queued up all two renders and started sleeping because that time doesn't exist. But it makes sense. CS6 has less overhead, and a hack that emulates multithreading, but on my 2017 PC on a benchmark with green screen transparency, moving solids with masks, text, and a couple color correctors, all moving, yeah CS6 was faster. That was back in 22 or 23, but honestly it's been noticeable. I was doing 6k comps back in CS3, and the biggest issue is just that the software runs like molasses. You never had to wait for the UI to catch up, and the entire program started in about 5-15 seconds on a bargain bin computer with like 4GB of RAM. It is baffling how much slower it is, and it seems to me that there is some inconsistency with the development culture between 2007 and 2015 that changed, where quality took a nosedive, and everything was just strapping on more plugins, more libraries and scripts, and reworking more checks and subsystems into what used to be a fast core loop that did the bare minimum important things for every interaction.

It feels like at some point they weren't allowed to make it better, they wwre only allowed to add features.

[Rick Gerard]

Render time depends on what is going on in your composition and the resources available on your system. The estimate could be accurate, or it could be way off. Without any information about your workflow and the comp, it's very hard to give you any help rendering.