After Effects Render taking 24hours!

[jordanr91877674]

Hi so basically i've made an Audio spectrum on after effects linked to our podcast, i've added a few images nothing too fancy just to be able to upload it to youtube. the audio clip is 1hour 6 minutes long and its taking 25-26 hours to render. I've tried different settings but they all seem to output a similar render time. Rendering in H.264 in AME was just as fast as Quicktime in AE. Would love to be able to speed this up a bit as I don't really want to be waiting over 24 hours a time to render our podcast. I'll leave my setup specs below for reference. 

My Setup:

Intel i7-9770K

M.2 SSD Samsung EVO 970 - Windows installed on this. 

1TB Harddrive 

250gb SSD

Nvidia Geforce GTX1080 

[davidarbor]

There are many pieces of information that you didn't provide that could help shed some light on why your render is slow, including frame size (resolution), frame rate, and what other effects you're using. That being said, rendering something like ProRes directly out of After Effects should be faster than rendering directly to H.264 in AME. It's good practice to render an intermediate format then convert to your delivery format.

To cut right to the chase, there are scripts you can install that will launch aerender, which is what's called a "headless" (no UI) version of After Effects to effectively render multiple parts of your composition at the same time, thus using more of your resources, and then stitching them together at the end. Note, these tools only help with your final render speed, they won't increase the speed at which you can preview your timeline.

Here are two of the common tools. They're both under $100 and they serve different purposes:

BG Renderer MAX: https://aescripts.com/bg-renderer/

Render Garden:https://www.mekajiki.com/rendergarden/

BG Renderer MAX is cheaper and easier to use, but it might not meet your needs. You should download the trial to see how it works.

[Martin_Ritter]

In addition to @davidarbor:

How much RAM is installed?

Those rendertime are quiet usual for audio spectrum effects. I once rendered a whole week for a 6 minute song.

There is not much to do, since your PC specs are looking good.

I, too, suggest using RenderGarden and Co. to reduce rendering times. However, all of those tools requiere a lot of RAM.

*Martin

[davidarbor]

Yes, absolutely, Martin. I failed to mention that the more cores you use with a tool like Render Garden or BG Renderer MAX, the more RAM you need, otherwise you'll 'starve' your cores of RAM and you won't see any speed gains. Just because you have a quad-core processor with Hyper-threading, doesn't mean you should pick "8" threads when you're using these tools. A good start is half the amount of threads you have, so I would try 4 processes total, but only if you have at least a few GB of RAM to spare for each core, while also retaining some for your OS.

[jordanr91877674]

Thankyou both for your help! I knew i'd miss something out! I've got 16gb RAM upgrading to 32gb in a few weeks and im rendering 1920 x 1080 at 30fps.. which in hindsight maybe isnt necessary. i think i'd get away with 25fps and 720p just fine. I'll have a look into RenderGarden and BG Render MAX and see if that can benefit me and i'll definitely try rendering to ProRes straight out of AE rather than using AME. Thanks again both of you for your help!

[Dave_LaRonde]

You might be able to speed it up a LITTLE, but you're making an effect that's one hour and six minutes long!  Most people's AE stuff lasts 30 seconds MAX, and even then it can take many hours!  So yeah, you're going to pay a price in render time.  Sorry.