Rendering in after effects help. Newbie here

[rameezr35682255]

I am exporting a video of 4 minutes through media encoder and I have 2 compositions in one video but media encoder is encoding them separately in separate files instead of one video. Also rendering in h264 it shows render time of 150 hours!! When I used lossless render in after effects the render time showed 6 hours but the file got so big that I ran out of space in my SSD. it only rendered 1 minute of footage and it was 55gb. please help me. What should I do??

[Mylenium]

What should I do??

Read the help, search the Internet for tutorials. Clearly you have done neither of both and don't understand even some basics like e.g. of course rendering two compositions as one clip requiring them to be used as layers in the same parent comp. The rest we can't know, anyway. You have not provided any useful info about your computer, your composition contents, exact render settings and so on.

Mylenium

[GauravDua]

Download Quick time player. Then use Quick Time as Format in rendering options. Now in format options, reduce quality if you want.

You will have much smaller size than what you were having in Lossless.

Gaurav

[rameezr35682255]

But I heard that the quality gets very bad. Is that true?

[GauravDua]

No not much of a quality reduction occurs until you set the quality in format options very low. At least not much difference is noticeable on my laptop screen. Maybe that difference is a lot on larger screens

[Rick Gerard]

Redner time depends on what you are doing in the composition, what effects are applied, the size the original assets (footage), the frame rate, the frame size and last - your system. I often create comps that take seven or eight minutes a frame to render because they are complicated. I NEVER put an entire movie in an AE comp to render it. That's a crazy workflow. Even 4 minutes is, in my humble opinion, nuts. After Effects should be used to work on shots that you cannot make in any other app. After Effects should not be used to edit shots into a sequence or a movie. More than 90% of my AE comps are under seven seconds because more than 90% of the shots in the movies I work on, which are often feature length films, are under seven seconds long.

If I have a long shot like one that I recently had that was about 2 minutes long with an actor walking down the street passing dozens of 3D elements inserted in the scene, I'll cut that shot up into segments that only contain the effects that I need to work on, then the shot with effects will be reassembled in a NLE for editing.

Without details of your workflow, your project and your version of AE, system and OS down to the last decimal point there is no way to tell if your render times are way out of the ordinary. Just because of your original post I am almost sure that you have edited some kind of 4 minute movie in AE that should have been broken up into many different shots and that not every frame needed to be run through the painfully slow After Effects rendering process.

[rameezr35682255]

I am using after effects cc 2017 on windows 10 64 bit. I made a music visualiser in after effects and am using trap code plugins Tao and sound keys. I also have motion blur and a 3D object that changes shape to the pulse of audio. Is this enough information so that you can tell me whether my render times are normal or not. And yes I do have an i5 6400 with 8 go ddr4.

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Sounds normal to me. Your frame rate should not be above  29.97 fps and the comp size should not be bigger than 1080 x 1920.

You need more ram.

I have not not seen your music visualizer but almost all I have ever seen are nothing special and frankly boring and not at all creative. If I were to ever approach that kind of a project I would try and come up with a design that complements each phrase in the music. Every nuance in tone and mood would be considered, every cresheno, every tempo change, and each would build  visual story that complements the music. That's how you create something exceptional. A four minute song may easily have 20 or 30 mood swings and each would be a separate comp.

I have been editing to music and sound for more than 40 years, my first major was music, I play a half dozen instruments well, and I try not to ever take an a project for granted.

If you really feel like your project is a representation of your best efforts I would love to see it.

[Roei Tzoref]

read this first: FAQ: Why is my output file huge, and why doesn't it play back smoothly in a media player?

also read here: Basics of rendering and exporting in After Effects CC

after you read through it, specify step by step what are you doing and provide some screenshots and details about your setup.

[rameezr35682255]

Done. Got the file a little smaller but didn't fix the render time.