Very long render times with Content-Aware Fill - what am I doing wrong?

[IITrak]

Hi.  I am using the new Content-Aware Fill feature to remove a small section of a video.  The Analyze footage step goes fairly quickly, but the rendering step is taking hours and hours and hours...

The footage I am using is 4K60 and the clip itself is only about 16 seconds long.  It has been rendering for at least 12 hours now (!!!) and is still only on frame 543 of 996.

I am using a 2018 iMac (Core i7@4,2GHz) with 40GB RAM.  I have been watching the activity monitor off and on and the CPU usage for the AE process is very low (5-10%).

I have tried searching the Forum and other sources but have been unable to find others that are having the same issue or any suggestions as to what I can do to improve things.  Any help/tips would be greatly appreciated!

[Roei Tzoref · Accepted solution]

this seems very unusual, try rendering to PSD instead of PNG. you can change the in the panel settings (hamburger menu). also worth testing if does it happen with other footage? it may be worth trying to transcode your video to another codec like Cineform and try CAF on that.

[IITrak]

Thank you very much for the reply.  I tried transcoding the file and that did indeed make everything work much faster.  I downgraded the video from 4K60 til 1080P60, though, so I don't know if it was the transcoding itself or the smaller video format that made the difference.  I'll try just transcoding the same video clip with the same resolution to see if that alone was enough to fix things.

Thanks again for your help.

[lauraauer]

The same thing is happening to me. I have a brand new iMac and nothing else running, and it won't generate a fill layer for a 3 minute music video. It crashed from running out of memory and after purging cash etc etc etc, it still won't load. It's taking almost 2 minutes per frame so I have only 4,000 frames to go. What do I do?