After Effects Slow Preview and Render!

[jdionson]

Hey! 

Using the newest version of After Effects. I am having a hard time figuring out how to speed up previews in After Effects and have faster render times. 

1. I know I can speed up previews in Aftert Effects by lessening the quality (Third or Quarter) but is there a way to do it with Full Resolution? 

2. What's the best settings to have to ensure fast rendering? I use Media Encoder because After Effects no longer has H.264. I did the "secret" preferences trick, and research for hours on all of these forums and youtube tutorials, but nothing is helping. I read that there is a "multiprocessing" preference but it's not showing up for me. I allocated more RAM to Adobe files (29gb for Adobe and 3gb reserved for other applications). 

I know this has been asked so many times, but I'm hoping that I could get some new answers. I don't think my computer should be previewing and rendering this slow. A one minute video takes 40 minutes to render.

Comuter Specs:

CPU - AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

GPU - Radeon RX 580 Series

Motherboard - Gigabyte Tech B5501 AORUS PRO AX

RAM - G.Skill F4-3200C16-16GVK DDR4 (2 of them)

Storage - Samsung SSD 860 EVO M.2 2TB

[Martin_Ritter]

1. Almost nothing.

You have the quality switch and it's designed to be used.

You can (and sometimes have to) skip frames in order to work any efficient.

You can also pre-render (e.g. during the night) and work with those pre-renders.

And you can take care about a good project structure and a meaningful workflow to lower the workload. Sometimes, just one terrible written expression can slow down your project.

2. Many people are using one of those render managers, namely RenderGarden, RenderBoss and BG Renderer. They don't affect the preview rendering time, but the final renderings are way faster.

You have to look at RAM usage when rendering with AE before using (or buying) them. If rendering with AE-only already eats up your RAM, there is no use for those managers and you have no choice but waiting.

The reason for that is, those managers are running AEs render engine several times and each instance takes its own amount of RAM. Once out of memory, the rendering times are increasing drastically. So, if one instance takes 30% RAM, you can launch a second one for sure, and maybe a third one. But the 4th will bring everthing to a hold (literally).

3GB is a bit less for system and other software. Win10 alone easily takes 4GB. Better increase this.

Concerning your render times: It really depens on what you are doing. Some effects are easily to process for AE, some are terrible slow to calculate. The comparision of 1 minute video to 40 minutes rendering time is pointless.

In Interstellar they had a physical simulation of a black hole, attached to an image generator and this thing calculator 100 hours on a high end server farm just for one frame.

So - 1 minute of what?

Despite this, AE isn't up to date under the hood. Your cpu cores are not utilizied in the way it could be, your GPU is mostly on idle and only spikes for a few seconds and percents. None of this is your fault.

You can only check out other - more recent - software like DaVinciResolve (with integrated Fushion) or Cavalry, which is pretty new in public alpha right now.

*Martin