Ok. So first of all - 44 seconds even if it is 4K footage shoudl npot render for 17 hours. Ok. I know it can but I'm guessing that your composition is not so compicated that it should. So first think about optimalization of your compositions and workflow: - most common one is to use much images with much larger resolution that it need - rendering from to slow HDD or to to slow HDD - depending on what kind of footage you have As for your question - masking does not help because AE have to count whole composition to show only masked part so your render wont be faster but what you can do is: - render those parts that will not change - so backgrounds, particles - anything what will not change - render several of precomps/layers/effects that will not change and use those renders in your composition - render into image sequences - why? During 17 hours of rendering bunch of things can hapen so it is better to have for exaple 1000 frames good and rest corruptred (power outage, issue with files, issue with computer, codecs etc) and then just rerender last 100 frames and join all of them in AME into one f. eg. mp4 than render for 16 hours and by power outage or any other reason land with corrupted mp4 or mov file that can't be saved/player/used and you have to start from the begining.
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