Participant

Question

Extremely Slow Render Times Due to AE Dynamic Link

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
May 4, 2019
6 replies
21972 views

Here's to a first post! I've been using Premiere Pro for a long time and as of a few years ago hopped onto Creative Cloud, which I generally keep fully updated. However about a month ago I noticed one of my regular video projects in Premiere Pro was taking an immense amount of time to export. I'm well aware exporting isn't instantaneous, but I also know it isn't normal for a video of mine to have an ETA of 2 days! I tried different creating new projects, removing different audio tracks, nothing helped. I also noticed when all of this was going on, my CPU usage was close to 0 when exporting. Something wasn't right...

However today after poking around a bit more and running into the same issue I've discovered this has to do with the Dynamic Link I'm using to bring in After Effects compositions to Premiere. My videos for the most part are quite basic, I've tried different render settings, and the only time I use Dynamic Link in a project is to finish off my video with a 20 second After Effects composition. I'm a pretty patient person, so I'm not here expecting my 1080p60, high bitrate, h.264, 20 minute video to finish within 10 minutes, but there is a problem. Just from a test: if I delete the After Effects composition from my timeline, I can render this video in about 20 minutes. If I add the After Effects composition to the end of my timeline, my total render time goes up to 50 hours.

Unfortunately I cannot pinpoint exactly when this started to occur, I can only say it happened to me on the previous update and on the current update, and it seems to be directly tied to Dynamic Link. I even did a Render and Replace of that 20 second clip, which took around 5 minutes or so. Is that slow? Probably. However the math does not make sense here, and one AE composition in the timeline is bogging down the entire export process.

20 minute video without Dynamic Link: 20 minutes

AE composition alone rendered: 5 minutes

20 minute video with Dynamic Link: 3,000 minutes

What?!

Anyways, if there's anything further I can provide, please let me know. Until this is fixed I'm going to have to either use Render and Replace or export the AE project out as a video file and use that at the end of my Premiere Pro projects. Let me get you all some specs while I'm at it!

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit Version 1809 (OS Build 17763.475)

CPU: Intel i7 6700K

GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti

After Effects: 2019 Version 16.1.1 (Build 4)

Premiere Pro: 2019 Version 13.1.2 (Build 9)

This topic has been closed for replies.

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pimpmero82

Participating Frequently

Late post but yes... having the same issue of 20 hour exports...

Only simple work around is exporting the final result of AE as a clip itself....

But defeats the whole purpose of dynamic linking and working and changing things on the fly...

Sigh... and the ghost frame and errors that pop up...

You'd think technology would make things simpler.. in some ways yes... but in others it makes you pull out your hair..

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pimpmero82

Participating Frequently

Trying to render first before exporting to cut down the time but... (20 hours for rendering...)

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Huge Larry

Participating Frequently

Hello.

I was having a similar issue with extremely slow direct export from PR. I have pretty big project with lots of dynamic links to AE comps, and those AE comps are fairly complex.

I'm on Windows 10, using the latest version of the CC apps as of today.

For some reason, on my computer, queing the export and using Media Encoder works a lot better than a direct export from PR. With the direct export, my CPU and GPU were being utilized less than 5%, and progress was crazy slow. With the queued ME export, my CPU usage averages around 50%, which is decent.

ME also has a nice visual preview of where you are in the export, which is great for having confidence that things are still moving, and if you do hit a slow patch, you can see visually which part is problematic.

I'm not sure if other folks will enjoy the kind of improvement I'm seeing with ME, but hopefully some people will.

Here are some other things I did to try and speed up the export. I'm not sure if these had any impact, but I'll record them here for completeness:

Restarted my computer to begin from a totally clean slate.
Only opened PR. Did not open AE. While exporting only PR and ME were open.

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Huge Larry

Participating Frequently

Well, I declared vistory too soon.

ME is working for about 30 minutes, then it enters some kind of semi hung state where CPU usage drops very low, and the export seemingly freezes. I can pause and resume the export with no effect. I can stop the export, and the UI is still fully responsive. It's like the render is hung, but not the app.

I guess it's time to bite the bullet and start individually exporting my comps from AE, then bringing those into PR, replacing the dynamic links. The major downside of that is the massive file sizes of the intermediate renders when working in 4K. Also, I don't like knowing that there's some quality loss, even though it's probably minimal when using ProRes or one of the other high-quality intermediate formats.

What a bummer, man.

piergiorgioDN

Participating Frequently

The solution in this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScXX54EZEc

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Power__Media

Participant

That's not a solution to the issue on this thread, that's just a video from 2016 explaining the basics of Dynamic Linking.

piergiorgioDN

Participating Frequently

Yes, the basics that a lot of people didn't know so they have speed problems with DL. Try it and you'll see that everything will be faster.

artura96072734

Participant

I've always used Dynamic Links, until about a month ago, my exports to the Encoder started to slow. Reading your problem, I went to do a test and found that the exports are slow for the same reason.

Something happened in Dynamics Links that greatly increased export time. And unfortunately, I do not think Adobe will give a solution ...

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ebluBeta

Known Participant

I can tell you what. but not why.

DL AE comps are rendering in Premiere with almost no system resources. No ram, no CPU time. It's completely throttled.

It's almost as if you have this brand new Sports car, and when you put it into drive, it reconfigures the whole thing, so that it only uses the power that can generated while it's at idle.

I never liked premiere. I'm only using it for a project because that's what my client needs. the dynamic link was the only advantage versus using a professional package for my editing. This is a bullet in the head of my productivity. So... Not going to consider Premiere after this.

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ironmountainfilms

Participating Frequently

I agree. Trying to learn fusion/resolve and will only use after effects as a separate program if needed. Adobe has gone downhill. It used to be a joy working in AE. Premiere is full of crashes and bugs.

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excited_Genie16B8

Legend

Linked Comps in PP render on a single thread, whereas exporting them out of AE will use full resources.

ReplicationAuthor

Participant

I appreciate the explanation, Jim. Do you think it could be a bug in which Premiere is rendering the entire timeline on a single thread thanks to the AE composition dropped in? I notice when everything starts to chug in my Media Encoder or Premiere for exporting, all the audio processing progress can barely keep up. Any timers I have as well seem to update almost once every 15 seconds. Then as for the actual render, my computer's CPU usage hangs out at almost 0% compared to a regular render, which could see it go from 40-99% consistently.

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excited_Genie16B8

Legend

Do you think it could be a bug in which Premiere is rendering the entire timeline on a single thread thanks to the AE composition dropped in?

Normally, only the DL comps will render slower. Everything else should render with full resources.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

I have always found exports more reliable when I replace Ae comps in a sequence with an exported file from Ae. Dynamic Link is a complex thing and can go odd at times.

Once I have my Ae comp finished, I export and replace. Pr then just runs better.

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

ReplicationAuthor

Participant

That's what I'm going to be doing for the time being, I have no doubt it is much more reliable but the problem is that's a workaround, not a resolution. I've been using Dynamic Link as expected in Premiere with After Effects compositions for years now and just started to run into this issue within the past month.

ReplicationAuthor

Participant

You're luckier than me!

I don't use it that much, so maybe I'm not as spiff at the process, but for me ... my Pr project always runs smoother without DL bits here and there. Exports have always been faster without DL bits needing both the "headless" Ae and Pr running.

Neil

Positive way of looking at it, Neil! I guess compared to other people having issues, this first major one I've run into within years of using the program is a pretty good track record. I do agree that performance and such will be better in Premiere without Dynamic Link, it's just frustrating that this is broken. I've seen a few other people post about similar issues on and off here in regards to Dynamic Link bringing their renders to a complete standstill of progress, I'm really hoping this gets resolved.

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