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themartinbailey
Participant
August 26, 2025
Answered

Content aware fill very slow, even on fast PC, and seems to get slower as it goes

  • August 26, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 395 views

I have a new desktop PC (Intel Core Ultra i7, 64GB RAM, 2TB M.2. drive and 16GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX5070Ti), and the latest version of After Effects.

 

I am using content aware fill to remove people from some drone footage. The clip is about 22 seconds long. I created a mask consisting of 7 nodes. It tracks the nodes perfectly quickly, at 1-2 frames per second. However, when I click Generate Fill Layer, while the first few dozen or even hundred frames seem to be quick, it slows down to an absolute crawly, taking over a minute per frame. It's a 4K 60FPS clip, and AE is having to render 1308 frames, but it's already taken about 3 hours to do 900. I did a sample on a 1-second clip and it was done in under a minute!?

 

I have 48% of my RAM free, and CPU is currently running at 10-15% load. Disc activity is also low. I have two GPUs - the integrated and NVIDIA. The integrated is down at only a few percent, and the NVIDIA fluctuates between 1% and 10%, with only 6.7GB of RAM used.

 

Is this normal? Why does it appear to get slower the longer it goes on? What can I do to speed this up? It makes content aware fill virtually unusable if I have to wait several hours for a 20 second clip, even on a new, fast PC.

 

Thanks in advance for any ideas you can give!

 

 

Correct answer Swade18749549

Assuming you have already cleared up your memory & disk cache, have you tried working on a smaller work area at one time? It might be worth a shot to work on a 4-5 second chunk, then move on to the next one. I find AE can sometime get bogged down when asked to process a longer chunk of footage. My guess is it's something to do with the space needed on the cache drive. 

2 replies

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Community Expert
RobShultzCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 27, 2025

This can be a slow process and 4K 60 fps drone footage may be challenging. Swade has given some excellent suggestions.

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Community Expert
Swade18749549Community ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
August 26, 2025

Assuming you have already cleared up your memory & disk cache, have you tried working on a smaller work area at one time? It might be worth a shot to work on a 4-5 second chunk, then move on to the next one. I find AE can sometime get bogged down when asked to process a longer chunk of footage. My guess is it's something to do with the space needed on the cache drive. 

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    themartinbaileyAuthor
    Participant
    August 27, 2025

    I cleared the two caches, set the work area to four seconds and re-rendered. The analysis took about 15 seconds and the content aware rendering took about 40 seconds, so a massive improvement. It's a bit of a pain to have to perform this 5-6 times on a short clip, but far better than each frame taking over a minute to render when I sent the full clip. I will experiment with longer work areas, to see if I can find a sweet spot. I'll also remember to clear the cache more frequently!

     

    Thanks for the suggestions!

    S
    Community Expert
    Swade18749549Community Expert
    Community Expert
    August 27, 2025

    Glad it worked! I tend to split up long clips for intensive processes like content aware fill. Even with a really good machine, it's a lot of work behind the scenes. 

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