How to handle long 4k, 4GB/min videos in After Effects

[Melina24457318gkcc]

The question here is: How could I optimize huge files before getting them into AE to make it easier to work with them, but without loosing too much quality?

Hello! I seem to have made a big mistake in a project: I shot interviews in front of greenscreen (stupid, I realize that now, I should have just designed a background instead of having to deal with all that greenscreen now...). I shot it on a Canon 5D Mark IV in 4K (hoping that this way I could have the best possible quality so I could edit the green screen out the most realistic looking way). Well, little did I know that this camera shoots its 4K footage in almost 4GB/min (24fps, MJPEG, MOV-files). Because the greenscreen needs to get out of those interviews, I have now at least 30GB of material (already edited in Premiere) that need to be worked on in After Effects.

I admit, a lot of mistakes were made in this project. The easiest would probably be to reshoot those interviews... But well, I still hope I can save it somehow to prevent the embarassment to go back to the customer like "I didn't what I was doing, we have to reshoot" -.-

I guess I will have to compress it in some way to make it possible to work with it without constant computer crashes and Media Encoder Render Times of 20 hours for one minute of finished footage from AE... Anyone having suggestions? I guess the Bitrate is the key, or am I mistaken? Which Bitrate would still give me good quality to work with the greenscreen? I am used to working with proxies in Premiere, but I guess that Proxies in AE won't work, because the settings that I make for the Keying Effects would probably be different for Proxy and Original.

Or do I have to give up the 4K and render it don to 1080p in Media Encoder? The finished video for the customer will probably not even be 4K, but I cling to it for the AE editing because it gets the greenscreen out so fabulously, especially around the hair.

Computer specs:

Gigabyte Aero 15 laptop

Windows 11 Pro, 64-bit

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz 2.21 GHz

Graphic Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Max-Q Design

16 GB RAM

500GB SSD

(I am not sure what else can be of interest)

[OussK]

Let's start from your PC specs, with this specs I think it will be very hard to work with 4K especially if you are dealing with a long movie clip, so my suggestion is if your final output will be in HD 1080, you can transcode your clip on Media encoder and downsize the clip to HD 1080 and save your time.

[Melina24457318gkcc]

Thank you for that suggestion! I am currently planning to get a new tower PC with more powerful specs, I will push to get that done quicker.

[Mylenium]

You can't kill AE with hardware. Has never been any different. Aside from your RAM being terribly low at just 16 GB there's nothing wrong with it. Assuming anything else is just nonsesne. Even these days AE's hardware acceleration is negligible and effects take their time to do their magic one way or the other. Your money therefore would be better spent on upgrading RAM rto 32 GB if possible and buying a commercial keying plug-in that simply does things faster than AE or Premiere. Then render to an image sequence or multiple short intermediate clips, with the real point being that this will behave better than single long clips and you can always re-render one segement if things go boom. Them re-import those in Premiere or AE, slap your background underneath and again let it render to an intermediatte format before finally encoding the actual delivery file from that source in AME or whatever. Did you make soem bad judgements? Sure, but it's not that people in the past didn't get work done on system's liek yours. It's all about the workflow. Even those extra render passes will cost you less time then playing it lazy and trying to render out one big hunky file without any pre-processing treatment. And not to point out the obvious: Where does it say everything has to be Adobe? Sometimes it's just inevitable to use other tools. You know, Resolve has a nice keyer, too, and is in many aspects faster...

Mylenium