Sending render to encoder from Ae - takes too a long time or doesn't appear at all

[dkm247]

When working on large projects, if I try to send a render to encoder it takes an extremely long time (up to half an hour) to appear in the encoder queue or just never appears at all.  I am currently running Ae 2017.2, encoder 2017.1 and OSX

I am currently running Ae 2017.2, encoder 2017.1 and OSX el Capitan 10.11.6.

(current project causing me issues is an 80mb aep file referencing many vector files. duration of main export is 5min)

I am a freelance animator and have used many different iMacs, towers, and MacBooks and I have been having this same issue in all locations for about 2 years.

There is no way to know if the comp is being processed for rendering or if I am just wasting my time waiting for it to appear in Encoder (I am currently missing my lunchbreak hoping for the comp to pop up in Encoder.)

If this is just how Encoder works then my suggested fix would be a process bar indicating that an ae comp is pending.

[foughtthelaw · Accepted solution]

not the best answer but have you considered updating your OS? I've had this issue in the past but not since updating my Operating System to 10.12 and later.

another work around might be to just render a higher quality format (prores/cineform/animation/etc.) and drag those into encoder. it adds a step but that step will for sure be way less time than waiting for a laggy link between apps. furthermore, you could set up AE to render to a Media Encoder watch folder and save yourself the effort of dragging the lossless renders over.

[dkm247]

Cheers, The watch folder idea is a good call.

I have updated my OS many times over the past 2-3 years and repeatedly come accross this issue on multiple machines.  Currently the new OSX (Sierra) is causing problems on our network so I am holding off on upgrading this machine's OS.

I usually render files of this size straight from Ae in Prores, as per your suggestion, but sometimes I want to cue renders from multiple projects or keep After effects free to make small edits to other jobs while rendering.

[kirkeric]

I've had comps for render that never show in Media Encoder too.  It doesn't appear in any way to do with the size, at least in my experience.  Sometimes, it just doesn't show.

In each case, all I've done is shut things down, reopen the project and try again and it works.  Maybe empty cache along the way.

It's never created too much issue for me to do that though.

Eric

[Nexahs1138]

80MB for an AE project file is huge, that's why it takes a while. AME files will take a bit to show up but if they're failing then clear your image cache and see if that improves anything, and make sure you aren't running any other programmes or apps.

[niravc82249087]

I was facing similar issues, but it used to take a minute or two for me for the composition to appear in AME.

A simple workaround is to drag the composition from the project panel in AE to the AME queue. Worked for me.

[maddieriffin]

Yeah oh my gosh Thankyou this really helped. I have the same problem, and I have to use AME rather than AE rendering because I would like to keep using the 2019 version which dosent have the h.264 option.

after you finished working on your edit pre compose every layer so it’s one big composition and drag that compositon the queue as this person said and it should work ❤️