Hey, again, Tyson France for Motion Revolver.
I just wanted to cover a few ways that you can attempt to speed up the render of your
project.
Again, there's never one simple single answer to making your project render faster.
It's always going to depend completely upon your computer's ability, how much RAM you
have installed, video cards, such things like that, but there are a few steps that you should
always take when rendering a project file, no matter how intense the project is.
Number one, probably one of the most important things is when rendering a file, and I'm just
going to grab one here from our great thinkers project and drop that into the render queue.
Number one, when you have a project in the render queue, or a composition, I should say,
in the render queue, number one, make sure that you click off of everything within the
project window.
Remember you have previewed in this little box right here is actually taking up RAM.
One little trick you could do is go up to After Effects Preferences and go to, I believe
it's Previews, and note is not previews, it is, let me see here, in Display, Disable
Thumbnails in Project Panel.
When you click this box, what's going to happen is when you toggle through here, this
little box isn't going to update, and even though that might be a little bit annoying
because you can't really see what it is, it's actually saving you RAM.
It's not taking memory away from trying to render a preview for this little box, so that
can help you save there as well.
Also when you're going to render a project, make sure that all of your composition windows
are closed because if you have one of your comp windows open and you don't have your
caps lock key on, as you're rendering the project, After Effects is actually going to
try to RAM preview that as well.
It's going to scrub with the play head through the project, so essentially you're almost
going to be rendering the project twice at the same time, which as you can imagine, kind
of kills performance.
Make sure all of your comp windows are closed when rendering.
Another good idea before hitting render is to go up to Edit, Purge All.
What this is going to do, it's going to purge whatever is currently in your memory cache,
whether it's preview renders, whether it's image caches, even your undo states, it's
going to purge everything.
Keep in mind though, if you do this, any undoes that you currently, so basically any steps
that you just made editing the project, by purging these, you're not going to be able
to revert back to those, so make sure that you've saved the project before doing this.
Once I've purged all, that has pretty much wiped the RAM clean and I've got a clean slate
to work with.
Another important thing, especially on a Mac, is to never render with any browser open.
Any web browser such as Safari, Chrome, Firefox, no matter what it is, if there's any way you
could not use a web browser while rendering in After Effects, don't do it because I'm
not sure of the technical aspects, but for some reason it seems that After Effects does
not like when you are browsing the web and rendering at the same time.
That's why it's always kind of nice to have a laptop or an iPad or something like that
to kind of work on while you're rendering because the web browser, especially Safari
in particular, seems to be a little bit of a ram hog and will completely kill any rendering
power that you may be trying to get.
Other more advanced steps that you could try to take include going up to After Effects
preferences and memory and multiprocessing.
We open that up, in here you'll see a bunch of numbers which might look a little confusing
and scary at first and again, these settings completely depend upon your system performance.
Obviously you can see I currently have 32 gigs of RAM installed.
If I were to enable, render multiple frames simultaneously, if I were to enable that,
basically what's going to happen is After Effects is going to try to render more than
one frame at a time because the computer that I have is a six core Mac and it's obviously
hyperthread, so After Effects is seeing that as 12 CPUs.
There are settings here which you could actually customize, leaving a certain amount of CPUs
and a certain amount of RAM for other applications, say if you wanted to work in Photoshop or another
application while you were rendering, which I just advised you not to do, obviously, it's
always better if you're working with intense renders just to leave After Effects alone
and let it do its thing and go do something else for a while.
This is something you may want to Google and find out more about because I've played with
settings with my own computer and I think I have it customized pretty well for what
I have.
I've gotten some pretty fast render times doing this.
This isn't always the best solution depending on the project as well.
If you're rendering, say, a frame sequence, rendering multiple frames simultaneously might
be a good idea, however, if you've got a really, really intensive project with a lot of effects
going on, a lot of 3D layers, this might not be the best option.
You actually might get a longer render by checking this box here, so again, it's all
trial and error, but this is another option you could explore.
Project specific things that you can do to increase or decrease render time, I should
say, and increase performance.
For example, you're working with one of our After Effects projects and you're trying
to render the full HD 1080 resolution composition.
If you're not going to be broadcasting this video over the airwaves, like if it's not
going to go to TV, if you're only going to be playing this on a website or the web, you
may want to consider rendering at a lower resolution.
Again, obviously, HD video looks awesome on the web, so HD 720 would be one option, but
another option you have is to render the HD 1080 comp at half resolution.
By going here to your render settings, if you change this to half resolution, this is
going to create a 960 by 540 file.
That's not technically HD, so if you're going to try to play a 960 by 540 video full frame
on a TV monitor, you're going to have a little bit of quality loss there, but the render
time and the file size differences are going to actually be pretty good.
Say for example, you have a render that's taking you about 10 hours.
By setting this to half resolution, that doesn't actually mean it's going to take five hours.
That might actually mean it might only take two hours.
You don't actually cut the time in half.
You actually might cut it more than in a half as far as the render time goes.
The advantages there as far as time goes might be worth it.
Just keep in mind that you may be taking a quality hit there.
As far as file size goes, I get a lot of questions about why is my file 12 gigs?
Why is it so large?
Quicktime can't play it because it's too big.
Well chances are you probably rendered the animation with lossless compression, which
means that you're going to be producing a very high quality file, but the file size
is going to be massive and likely choke whatever computer you're trying to play it on.
Maybe if you just rendered a full HD 1080 file.
Options that you have would be clicking on this lossless option here and going to, let's
see, haven't done this in a while, go to format options and then change this from the animation
codec to something like photojpeg.
This is a pretty universal codec and should play on any machine.
If we choose that option and then set the quality, say, to 85, that's a pretty good
option usually, the file size is going to go down a lot, but you're not going to really
notice too big of a quality hit.
That's one thing you could do there to lower the file size.
Also as far as the audio goes, sometimes audio can be fairly large.
You don't always have to render 48K audio.
You can usually get by at least on 44.1, sometimes if audio quality isn't a huge issue, you can
render 32kHz as well, but I usually leave the 16-bit and the stereo alone because if
you try to render 8-bit audio, sometimes the results aren't all that favorable.
But anyway, those are some options you can try to reduce the render times of your project.
Unfortunately, like I said, there isn't one single answer or any perfect solution for
everybody out there.
It's really just a matter of trial and error, but hopefully some of these steps might help
you in achieving faster render times and lower file sizes.
But again, I'm Tyson France for MotionRevolver and thanks for watching.
