Workflow Advice Needed: Rendering 4K 50fps Project in Segments

[S01200]

Hi everyone,

I have a workflow question regarding a 4K 50fps project that is quite heavy on effects and rather lengthy. The render times are going to be substantial on my Mac with 64GB of memory.

Due to a delayed schedule and conflicts with another project on the same computer, I'm considering rendering the project in smaller segments, around one minute each, during breaks. I plan to compile these segments together later.

I haven't attempted this approach before, so I wanted to ask: Is this a problematic method, or is it a normal workflow?

My understanding is that I can set a work area and export each segment individually. Is there anything specific I should watch out for?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Mylenium]

Render with 5 frames overlap or so. Some temporal effects and expressions produce different results without some run-up. That and of course color management stuff. Render to a neutral setting and keep track of Gamma and all that, so it isn't applied twice.

Mylenium 

[Kyle Hamrick · Accepted solution]

I might suggest rendering an image sequence - you can start/stop literally anywhere, and AE will know which frames already exist, as long as you continue exporting to the same folder. If you need to make any changes along the way, just re-export that section. 

Once your sequence is done, you can slap that back into AE, or into Premiere, or whereever else, and marry it with audio, do final color, etc. 

Note: Avoid PNG for this task. The file size is smaller, but you'll pay for it in time, both in creation and when using the file again later. EXR is my go-to format here. 

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Finalizing shots, cutting them into scenes, then assembling scenes into a movie is the most efficient way to work for shooting and producing visual effects and animations. 

I split up long comps, lets call them scenes, into short segments, lets call them shots, and render each shot/comp individually. If render times exceed a minute per frame, I always render image sequences. If you ever have a failure, it is easy to pick up from the last good frame and start over. You never have to render a whole comp again unless you change the whole thing. If a client wants ten frames changed in a 30-second shot, you only need to render those ten changed frames. 

I rarely create a comp that is longer than a single shot. If the comp involves a seamless transition between two shots, I will include the transition to the second shot and no more than a couple of frames.

I do a lot of compositing and effects for movies, and the average shot length for a movie is around five or six seconds. Some training and product demo projects I work on have longer shots (or segments) that last a minute or more, but those are seldom one AE comp. I break that kind of project up into sentences or phrases like "Pick up the cutting tool with the gismo and insert it into the holder...." then in the next comp, "...and tighten the clamp, making sure that the cutting tool is secure." That gives me two comps that are about 4 seconds long, even though the process I am demonstrating is a single action or scene that involves picking up a cutting tool and securing it, it makes more sense to break up the scene into manageable segments that can be seamlessly cut into segments.

I always finalize the edit of a project that is longer than one scene in an NLE. That is where I do the final sound editing, color grading, and audio mixing. If that kind of workflow is good enough for Sony Pictures, Pixar, Disney, and Martin Scorsese, it's good enough for me.