Stephen Townsend
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PLEASE MOVE TO ADOBE WORKFLOW FORUM - APOLOGIES!
Some of you might have noticed my previous threads/comments about struggling with rendering in After Effects so I thought I'd share a useful tip I came across myself. This may seem pretty obvious to some but it's amazing how you can overlook the smallest thing like I did.
It's quite common, I imagine, that you just want to export a quick render of some 4K footage you've been adding effects to that doesn't need to be high quality as they are not for client but more likely for one of your senior peers. Here's what I found helpful:
When you send a clip to the render queue you'd typically select the output directory and filename of course and then head over to the Output Module to select your render settings such as Pro Res, H.264, Audio Output, quality etc etc.
If you're rendering for preview you'd typically jump in there, select smaller size, maybe 720p or less, perhaps h.264 at 70% for more compression and set it to render. However, with this method you're likely to encounter a very long render time if it's a long clip and/or has complex animation.
Instead, you want to be jumping in to the Render Settings options (slap head if you didn't think of this first like myself). In here you have several options to help speed up you render; If you've been smart enough, unlike I was originally, to set up some proxies, you can set these to be used which are off by default. As you'll see, there are a number of other settings you can fiddle with but the two most important ones are Quality and Resolution.
I found dropping the resolution of 4K to quarter worked well for myself - it produced a file with more than suitable dimensions for preview. Under Quality you can also choose Draft (I imagine wireframe is pretty pointless) but in my experience Draft renders type and, I imagine, any other vector-based elements poorly so if they are important for preview then keep it at best.
With these settings you should find a dramatic increase in render time - I went from 8 hours to 45 minutes with a clip I've been working on.
The key here is that you are effectively just rendering the same thing as rendering a RAM preview at quarter resolution as opposed to compressing which takes a lot of calculating and therefore a long time to render.
The drawback:
You'll find you probably end up with an absolutely massive file,
The solution:
Handbrake
http://handbrake.fr/
This is the single most amazing and useful (and free) video tool I've found to date. Just drop your render in to their - typically the default settings are fine and set if going. It doesn't usually take very long but I reduced my 7.7GB render to 50MB and there was no noticable difference in quality - witchcraft! (awaits technical explanation on how it achieves this).
One caution with handbrake is that it likes to crop off black borders so if you an intentional letterbox you might want to check the crop settings.
That's about it! Many of you are probably thinking "What a retard..." but I hope it helps some people at least!
Some of you might have noticed my previous threads/comments about struggling with rendering in After Effects so I thought I'd share a useful tip I came across myself. This may seem pretty obvious to some but it's amazing how you can overlook the smallest thing like I did.
It's quite common, I imagine, that you just want to export a quick render of some 4K footage you've been adding effects to that doesn't need to be high quality as they are not for client but more likely for one of your senior peers. Here's what I found helpful:
When you send a clip to the render queue you'd typically select the output directory and filename of course and then head over to the Output Module to select your render settings such as Pro Res, H.264, Audio Output, quality etc etc.
If you're rendering for preview you'd typically jump in there, select smaller size, maybe 720p or less, perhaps h.264 at 70% for more compression and set it to render. However, with this method you're likely to encounter a very long render time if it's a long clip and/or has complex animation.
Instead, you want to be jumping in to the Render Settings options (slap head if you didn't think of this first like myself). In here you have several options to help speed up you render; If you've been smart enough, unlike I was originally, to set up some proxies, you can set these to be used which are off by default. As you'll see, there are a number of other settings you can fiddle with but the two most important ones are Quality and Resolution.
I found dropping the resolution of 4K to quarter worked well for myself - it produced a file with more than suitable dimensions for preview. Under Quality you can also choose Draft (I imagine wireframe is pretty pointless) but in my experience Draft renders type and, I imagine, any other vector-based elements poorly so if they are important for preview then keep it at best.
With these settings you should find a dramatic increase in render time - I went from 8 hours to 45 minutes with a clip I've been working on.
The key here is that you are effectively just rendering the same thing as rendering a RAM preview at quarter resolution as opposed to compressing which takes a lot of calculating and therefore a long time to render.
The drawback:
You'll find you probably end up with an absolutely massive file,
The solution:
Handbrake
http://handbrake.fr/
This is the single most amazing and useful (and free) video tool I've found to date. Just drop your render in to their - typically the default settings are fine and set if going. It doesn't usually take very long but I reduced my 7.7GB render to 50MB and there was no noticable difference in quality - witchcraft! (awaits technical explanation on how it achieves this).
One caution with handbrake is that it likes to crop off black borders so if you an intentional letterbox you might want to check the crop settings.
That's about it! Many of you are probably thinking "What a retard..." but I hope it helps some people at least!
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