Render Bug

[gyulak89818363]

Hello. I made a 22 minute animation. I ran into such an error that everything works perfectly in preview, but in render, the logo disappears at random intervals (in a different place for each render). What could be causing this? Also, what can be the solution?

[Rick Gerard]

If the project contains more than one continuous shot, break it up into individual shots. AE is not video editing software. It is destined to create shots. A 22-minute movie needs to be edited in an NLE like Premiere Pro. Most of my comps are less than 7 seconds because most shots in most movies and commercials, and music videos are less than 7 seconds.

The longer your comp, the more chance there is that something is going to go wrong. As the length of a comp goes up, system resource usage goes up, and the likelihood that something will get overloaded goes up. Pixar, Disney, every other animation studio, and every production house that does movies with visual effects shots treat each shot as a separate project. The shots are rendered to a production format, then edited, color graded, and sound mixed in an editing app. 

Try doing the same with your project. Disappearing assets, render failures, and even compression glitches are very hard to diagnose without seeing your timeline, all the modified properties of the layers that failed, and the time when the failures occur.

To Easily break your 22-minute comp into smaller sections, you can drop the entire comp in a new comp or select all and pre-compose, then find places you can make a cut, split the layer (Shift + Ctrl/Cmnd + d), then pre-compose all of the new layers making sure to move all attributes and trim the new comps to the layer length, then render each of the pre-comps to a production format using the High-Quality output module settings, and then drop the rendered shots into Premiere Pro, polish the editing, and render your deliverable movie from Premiere Pro.

The total render time for all the pieces will not exceed the render time required for the 22-minute comp. It will probably even be faster.  On my M2 Mac, rendering a movie made up of high-quality shots like I have described, with nothing but a little audio mixing and some basic color correction on a 22-minute sequence, would probably take less than 10 minutes. You won't be wasting any time breaking up your long comp and rendering it in short pieces. If the client requests any changes, it's a lot easier and quicker to fix the problem 4-second shot, re-render the production master, then jump to Premiere to update the final.