Creative help with Rendering.

[CrossTimber]

Howdy, fellow Adobe Hobbists, Enthusiasts and Expert Professionals!

I'm looking for help in Video Output and Computer Specs for Adobe After Effects. (An expert who understands how framerate, bitrate, codec, file format can impact the render times for HD 3D and 2D animation.)  If you've got those answers, please, please consider helping me.  🙂

I am a novice animator, and I've made a complicated 3D animation in After Effects.  So far, I have 4 minutes of animation that takes 2.5 HOURS to render.  Is that normal!?  I hope to make a 30 minute finished version.  Because the video will contain personalized images for each client, I must design this so that the final project can ALL be rendered in under 60 minutes.  I don't mind if it takes days to render pieces of it in advance, so long as when it's finished, I can push out customized one within an hour.

So I need to take shortcuts, or update my hardware, or export in a different way.

Hardware:  Intel i7 6700 CPU 4GHz, 32GB of ram, GeForce GTX 970*

*Note:  AE often reminds me that "OpenGL" is not working, and if I use Media Encoder to select "Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acelleration (Cuda)", then if often tells me it's not working in the middle of rendering, and asks to switch to "Mercury Software Only"  Could this be my problem?

File setup:  3TB SSD for Windows 10, and I designate 2TB of that SSD for AE cache.

Approx 5 GB of images & project files are run on a on a 3TB hard drive with 1.5TB free.

Software: Adobe CC. Media Encoder triples the time it takes to render, so I'm rendering directly out of AE.  AE does not output with compressed formats, so I'm outputing with Quicktime-MOV-animation.  I have only used the default settings for bit depth, CDR/single pass. (I'm a novice)

There are dozens of multi-layered PSD files, and compositions, camera movements, scaling and 3D warping.

Ideas I've already tried:

#1: I have adjusted the resolution of assets to the lowest size that shows the onscreen version of them at HD. 

#2: Since I only need to render the PERSONALIZED elements for every order, I tried rendering everything that is not personalized Quicktime-animation-codec-MOV file and then inserted that into a comp with personalized items on top of that & rendered it as another video.  It's that final render of the personalized files that I have to keep below 60 minutes.

Is this a good way to reduce the render time? Is MOV-animation the right format for rendering a second time with the personalized graphics on top of it?

Ideas I haven't tried:

#1: Upgrade my hardware. But I don't know which part of it to upgrade.  Ram? Video Card?  SSD?

Idea I'm trying right now:

Ask for help.

Thank you for your time!

John Dehnart

[Rick Gerard]

30 Minutes could be completely normal.

Since you are a newbie let me give you some advice. Keep your comps short. Preferably, one-shot, but if you must do a sequence of a few shots, make it short. One sentence of phrase of dialogue or narration is plenty long. More than 90% of my comps are under 7 seconds because that is about as long as any shot I have in any story. Some comps are only a few frames. AE is NOT an editing system, it is a visual effect, motion graphics, and compositing system specifically designed to produce shots you cannot produce in an NLE like Premiere Pro. When you finish a comp, render it to a visually lossless, frame-based production format. DO NOT render any kind of MPEG inter-frame compressed formats (h.264 MP4) for use as a DI. Those formats are for distribution, not production.

When you have your shots rendered cut them in Premiere Pro. That is where add your music and sound effects and do the final polish for the edit. It sounds like more work but this workflow is actually a lot more efficient and allows you to create a much more polished final product.

Render time depends entirely on composition settings and what is going on with the layers. A lot of amateurs render at 60 fps and for almost all projects that can be a complete waste of time and bandwidth. Your screenshot looks a lot like a cartoon. All of the classic cartoons were actually only 12 frames per second. They photographed every animation cell (frame) of every Buggs Bunny cartoon twice, then moved on to the next cell. You might want to try setting the main comp rate to 12 or 15 fps and see how that looks in a media player.

I have a design limit of about 5 minutes a frame for my work. If a frame takes too long to render I see what can be done to simplify the process. PIXAR's design limit is 7 minutes a frame. Your render times don't approach that number.

You can also save a bunch of time designing and previewing your comps if you set your Composition Panel's resolution to Auto and do most of the work at a Magnification Factor of 50%. For all animation projects, you should use the Pencil Test > Ink and Paint workflow that traditional cell animators (and even PIXAR) use. Set up the motion with basic elements in the scene, no effects, motion blur off and if needed, skipping every other frame in preview. When the motion is good, start adding your effects and motion blur, but instead of ram previewing everything run a check on a couple of Hero (critical) frames at full resolution and full size. The no effects half rez part is the Pencil Test, Checking the hero frames is the Ink And Paint part. If the critical frames are good and the motion is good, then send the comp to render and move on to the next shot. The only real way to judge the final render is to look at the rendered footage anyway. Why waste a bunch of time previewing everything when you could be working on the next shot while your first comp is rendering. You can do that with several 3rd party plug-ins. My favorite is Render Garden (look it up). It is about $100 and since I have started using it I have not spent any time waiting for renders instead of working.

I hope some of these suggestions help. When you run into trouble, cropped screenshots are almost completely useless for diagnosing problems. I don't know anything useful about your project from the screenshot you posted. Select the problem layers, press the U key twice to reveal all modified properties of all layers, then PrintScreen and Paste to the forum and then give us a detailed workflow description.

[CrossTimber]

Wow.  Thank you, Rick!   That's a lot for an amature to digest, but be assured that I will not dismiss it just because it's over my head.  I'm going to research some of the terms you used and sift through it to see how your suggestions can improve my process.  I really love the animating part!  It's just the rendering that is bogging me down because I have to be able to render & deliver a 30-min video within an hour.

I do plan on the final cut being in Premiere, but because the personalized objects are in AE, there's a lot that must be rendered in AE.  My 4 minutes has personalized objects in 3.5 minutes of it.  Here's the longest effects shot:

Anyway, I really really appreciate the experienced input.  It pushes me to learn the relevant topics to solve my problem and improve my process.

Permit one followup question.  Because the first 4 minutes uses the personalized graphics, I did use AE to do the editing (individual comps for objects, then assemble them in an animated scene, and then comp that and move it around to simulate camera pan/zoom.)    Here's the longest shot in the 4-minute sequence:  https://youtu.be/kI5H6Z4UqhA    As you can see, the rocket and several items in the room are personalized with a name.

So my question is....    If I MUST use AE to render the personalized elements, is it any better to render each shot individually and assemble them in PR, or just line up all my comps in AE and render them at once?    That said, I will take your advice to do as much editing in PR as possible.

Thanks again!

John Dehnart

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

CrossTimber  wrote

... Here's the longest shot in the 4-minute sequence:  https://youtu.be/kI5H6Z4UqhA    As you can see, the rocket and several items in the room are personalized with a name.

So my question is....    If I MUST use AE to render the personalized elements, is it any better to render each shot individually and assemble them in PR, or just line up all my comps in AE and render them at once?    That said, I will take your advice to do as much editing in PR as possible.

Thanks again!

John Dehnart

The sample is actually 4 shots cut together to form a sequence. Here's how I would recreate that same movie:

1. Layout all of the graphics in Illustrator using separate layers for all of the elements. Starting at the bottom, the view outside the window, then the tree, then the window and back wall, then the furniture next to the back wall, then anything that I wanted in the middle ground, then the rocket
2. Import the AI file as a composition with layer sizes preserved
3. Named the comp that AE created Master, then duplicated the Master comp and named it shot 1
4. Now open up the Shot 1 comp and select all of the layers for the Rocket and pre-composed them naming the new comp Rocket
5. Back in the Shot 1 comp, I would arrange all of the elements and preview the motion of the Rocket to get the path and timing right for the first shot in the sequence
6. Open up the first Rocket Comp (the Pre-comp) and, making sure that Syncronize time of related events was set in the Preferences I would add the flames and any other effects to the Rocket comp then by setting markers, jump back and forth between the two comps to do the animation of the rocket. You can open up a new viewer and lock it so it always looks at the Rocket Comp, lock the other viewer so it always shows the Shot 1 comp and then one timeline above the other to get an ETLAT (edit this look at that) set up so you can fine-tune the timing of both animations while seeing what you are getting.
7. Making sure that the Shot 1 comp had big enough handles so I could do a little editing I would send that comp out for render, return to the Project Panel, Duplicate the Master Comp one more time and name it shot 2. I would then duplicate the Rocket comp in the Project Panel to make a unique copy of it to use in Shot 2 and name it Rocket 2.
8. Open up Shot 2 comp, delete all of the layers that contain the Rocket in the timeline, drag the Rocket 2 comp into Shot 2 and repeat the framing and animation. You will be able to reuse some of the existing animations in the Rocket comp by just retiming it.
9. Rinse and Repeat

This kind of workflow will let you re-use components you have already animated, perfect the camera moves, and end up with shots that will cut together easily because you can preview the cuts. When you have everything rendered, open up Premiere Pro, drag in your rendered footage, create a sequence and edit away. It will be a lot faster than dragging a bunch of comps into AE and trying to do your editing there. Even if you have to wait for renders, you will probably save a bunch of time by working this way VS trying to edit a bunch of nested comps in AE.

As far as rendering and delivering a 30-minute movie in an hour, that is not going to happen with this style of comp. To even have a chance for that to happen your full resolution preview with all effects applied would have to playback without waiting for the preview to cache at half the comp frame rate. If you are working in a 30 fps (29.97) you would have to be able to render at the rate of 15 frames per second. That is not going to happen unless you throw many many many dollars at a dedicated render farm. Once the footage is rendered and edited in Premiere Pro, standard no fancy effects rendering from Premiere Pro to a good distribution format like H.264 MP4 is going to about an hour for a 30-minute movie on most systems. Throw in a couple of levels of color grading and maybe an effect or two and the render time could easily double.

If time is really critical you should invest in a background rendering solution so that you can continue to edit while things are rendering. As I said before, I use Render Garden and it cuts my render time by more than 70% on my desktop machine and AE and PPro do not slow down while it is working.

I hope this helps. If I were planning a 30 minute animated movie with a couple of characters, sound and visual effects and all of the shots had some 3D elements in them I would probably budget at least 10 to 15 days just for the creative. Unless you are using templates, presets, and stock footage, that's how long it takes to do a professional job. Two minutes a day is a good starting point for professional quality cell style animation. 

How long did it take you to animate that 4-minute movie? With a couple hundred hours experience under you belt you might be abble to cut that production time down by about 70%, but the more you animate, the more you are going to want to make it nicer, and nicer takes time.

[CrossTimber]

Whew.  Once again, a lot to digest.  I didn't work long on this project before understanding why there are so many credits at the end of cartoons.  I will examine your steps in detail and see where I can adopt them to my process.

In case the question wasn't rhetorical...    the 4-min movie has taken 2 weeks, with another 2 weeks trying to "fix" it so it would render.  And you're absolutely right; the more I learn, the more I'll want to make it nicer!  And nicer takes tiiiiime.  

Not sure if this will be ready for Christmas, but thank you for pointing the way through the roadblock.

John Richard D.