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exporting impossibly slow

Community Beginner ,
Dec 18, 2017 Dec 18, 2017

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hey guys,

when I try to export a short animation (25sec) as QuickTime or anything it gave me a crazy remaining time of about 45 Hours!!!

I have a fairly efficient computer with no virus, no problem to export 10min videos with a lot of effect from Premier Pro (take 10 to 15min).

The PNG and WAV directly from Ch are faster but still really slow (30min).

I haven't seen anyone having that issue on the forum

Hope you guys can help me

cheers

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correct answers 1 Correct answer

Community Beginner , Dec 20, 2017 Dec 20, 2017

SO

I reboot my PC and it seems to behave like before, I notice while doing my back up that my exported scene was 72GB which is... surprising. I don't know how I manage to reach this size but I guess it was the problem, probably in Pr too because the empty space in my computer went from 450GB to 800GB and I do not have lost any files, I don't know how that could be possible but something should've create hidden useless files in my projects.

Still a mystery but the issue is solved.

Thank you so much,

...

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Participant ,
Dec 18, 2017 Dec 18, 2017

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Have you actually tried the 45 hr render? I had one render that calculated initially as over 100 hrs, but after about 15 min, it re-adjusted to around 30 min, (which was the actual time it took.) I had planned to let it render overnight, but when I checked it before bed it was almost done. Just curious if your render would do the same?

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 19, 2017 Dec 19, 2017

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thanks for your reply

TDFAP Yes I have actually tried to let it render and it also re-ajusted but to 25Hrs not 30min

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Adobe Employee ,
Dec 18, 2017 Dec 18, 2017

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That's pretty surprising. One thing that occurs to me is that the headless rendering process that talks to AME doesn't share the scene caches with the main process, so it does need to re-prepare the puppets that are in the scene before it renders any frames. That might cause the estimates to be rather inaccurate toward the beginning. Does your scene have some fairly complex puppets in it?

Also, what scene framerate and resolution are you targeting?

DT

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 19, 2017 Dec 19, 2017

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DanTull thank you,

I am new to Ch and don't really know what a headless rendering is (English is not my first language as well).

My puppet is really simple (draggable hands, one cycle layer triggered once, face behavior).

30fps

I made the scene to maximum height and width because I made my puppet really big in Photoshop so it can be scale down rather than up BUT when I scale down in Ch for recording then it render blurry at exporting and appear tiny in Premiere. BTW if you had a solution for that you'll save my life as well. This is my first professional project!

Thank you very much

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 19, 2017 Dec 19, 2017

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(I forgot to tell you that the time it gave is not really inaccurate IT DOES REALLY TAKE 25 TO 30 HOURS)

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Adobe Employee ,
Dec 19, 2017 Dec 19, 2017

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yannickr32356711  wrote

I am new to Ch and don't really know what a headless rendering is (English is not my first language as well).

No problem. The headless rendering just refers to the way that AME renders a Character Animator project. It starts a separate Character Animator process that has no user interface (window) to do the work.

yannickr32356711  wrote

30fps

I made the scene to maximum height and width because I made my puppet really big in Photoshop ...

How big is the Photoshop image and how big is the scene exactly?

The maximum scene size Character Animator is 7680x4320. I just rendered a 10 second 30 fps scene with the Chloe template at that resolution in a bit over 3 minutes on my MacBook Pro which is about 4x slower than what you're seeing. I scaled Chloe up about 8x and it still managed to render in a similar amount of time.

Still, my best guess here is that the large Photoshop file and/or scene resolution are part of the problem here. How much RAM do you have and how much is being used? Given the performance multiplier maybe the processes are swapping (using disk to cover for too much memory use) or thrashing the GPU (due to overly large textures)? Also, there's no network drives in the mix, right? That can also cause operations to take an order of magnitude more time than they would otherwise. What kind of GPU do you have in your machine?

Just my best guesses.

It might be worth doing a test render with Chloe at both your current scene resolution and 1920x1080 and confirm you're getting sane timings there to get a baseline for reference. If even that is slow, we're looking for a different kind of problem.

DT

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 19, 2017 Dec 19, 2017

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Thank you for your reply

The photoshop file is 198 M

I tried to scale down the scene and selected "change output size to match source" in the export settings (to fix the blur issue) and it only took 2Hrs, which is still slow but not crazy.

I have 8GB of RAM on a Lenovo Z50-75 80EC

GPU AMD Radeon(TM) R7 Graphics

when I export the CPU is running at about 50%   RAM 4,6GB     Disk jump between 0% and 100%     GPU 5-15%

No network drives in the mix

Chloe did take 5min for a scene of the same duration (25sec) as my own puppet in 1920x1080px

The same scene (Chloe) in 7000x4320 announces 5Hrs for exporting

I also try to re-export a 10min video in Premiere which took me about 13min last week and it announces 11Hrs now! I don't know at all what's happening

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Adobe Employee ,
Dec 19, 2017 Dec 19, 2017

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yannickr32356711  wrote

Thank you for your reply

Sure, I love a good bug hunt. Looks like some good details below to dig into.

yannickr32356711  wrote

I tried to scale down the scene and selected "change output size to match source" in the export settings (to fix the blur issue) and it only took 2Hrs, which is still slow but not crazy.

Chloe did take 5min for a scene of the same duration (25sec) as my own puppet in 1920x1080px

The same scene (Chloe) in 7000x4320 announces 5Hrs for exporting

Ok, good data points to keep in mind. Thanks for running the experiments. So the puppet size and scene size do seem to be the main knobs, so now it's a matter of figuring out why your machine seems to suffer more severely than seems normal when those knobs get cranked toward larger values. It also makes me curious whether 4K size is in the middle or if there's a tipping point where perf goes off a cliff suddenly.

yannickr32356711  wrote

I also try to re-export a 10min video in Premiere which took me about 13min last week and it announces 11Hrs now! I don't know at all what's happening

Interesting that Pr is getting punished now, too. I guess the next details that might be interesting are whether any other processes are showing up high in the memory/CPU/disk stats in task manager (suggesting they might be inter-mixed in the process somehow). It might also be worth looking to see if there are any other stray processes. Maybe there's a wedged rendering or dynamiclinkmanager process somehow gumming things up?

Have you installed any updates lately that might have changed the behavior? Which video export settings are you using exactly? Is there any chance those are different than your earlier (faster) Pr exports?


I just ran across this as well. It might be worth looking at GPU utilization alongside disk/cpu/memory:
How To View GPU Performance In Task Manager In Windows 10

I hate to suggest a reboot because it might keep us from getting to a diagnosis, but it is possible that there's a resource leak leaving the machine in a compromised state that a reboot would clear out? Definitely worth perusing the process list and stats so that if a reboot clears it, there's some info to point to what got cleared out.

DT

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 19, 2017 Dec 19, 2017

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Well, at rest the task manager shows: CPU 6%        Memory 52%         Disk 0--6%    Network 0%          GPU 0%

here is a screen shot of the task manager when I try to export (Pr)Capture process.PNG

I use H264 with preset "match Source - High bitrate"   Use maximum Render quality (try uncheck it but same)

If we trust the task manager everything works well but that causes a deadly slow down in my entire computer every single click takes forever and this is driving me crazy since I just bought it especially for this kind of work. No virus I use another laptop for the internet.

there has been a windows update last week yes.

Someone told me (from adobe support chat) that there is a playback performance issue with Radeon cards, could it be the reason?

will try to uninstall the update and reboot if it doesn't clear it out.

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Community Beginner ,
Dec 20, 2017 Dec 20, 2017

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SO

I reboot my PC and it seems to behave like before, I notice while doing my back up that my exported scene was 72GB which is... surprising. I don't know how I manage to reach this size but I guess it was the problem, probably in Pr too because the empty space in my computer went from 450GB to 800GB and I do not have lost any files, I don't know how that could be possible but something should've create hidden useless files in my projects.

Still a mystery but the issue is solved.

Thank you so much, you are doing a great job, it is not in every company that the customer service is this good

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Adobe Employee ,
Jan 02, 2018 Jan 02, 2018

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Bizarre. Glad you got it sorted out. If you find further clues as to what is leading to that bloat that point to a particular bug, definitely let us know. Thanks for the update!

DT

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