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PPro with AE dynamic links slow to render

Community Beginner ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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I have a project in PPro with quite a few AE projects embedded via dynamic link - maybe 20 of them.

It's an 8 minute video, rendering would usually take about an hour, this one is currently taking 24 hours.

Is this workflow -- using PPro to edit, with AE projects embedded -- not the most efficient way to work? Would it be better to render out from PPro, then do my effects in AE afterwords and render again?

24 hours seems like a long time to render. I'm not even sure it's going to make it, it moves so slow.

I'm working on a brand new quad-core i5 iMac with versions 5.5 of both programs.

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People's Champ ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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Replace your Dynamically Linked AE comps in the timeline with a pre-rendered

digital intermediate file output from AE using a lossless codec.

It will take time to pre-render 20 comps and replace them, so take that

into consideration... but if you will need to render in multiple formats,

it is probably worth doing.

I recommend to make a copy of your sequence before you do the swap-out.

When I finalize a comp in AE I will always do a full duration, full screen,

full resolution RAM preview just to make sure everything is set up right.

At that point it's simple to save the RAM preview to a lossless DI.

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Community Beginner ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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Thanks Joe, let me try that.

I remember now that I had this problem once before, and I got around it by importing the PPro project into a new AE project, and then rendering that instead of the PPro project with the dynamic links

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Advocate ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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It might be interesting to time how long it takes to render the 20 AE comps then add that to the final PrP sequences rendering time with those 20 renders on the timeline as well.

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LEGEND ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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Chances are no matter how you do it, the total render times will be about the same.  So it seems kind of a waste to be replacing linked comps.

Just bite the bullet and let AME do it's job.  It takes as long as it takes.  (And remember, the current estimate is based on the assumption that the whole project will be as difficult to render as the current frame.  You may well see that time drop significantly if the render hits an easier section.)

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People's Champ ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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When I do a full res RAM preview in AE to finalize a comp, it only

takes a couple of clicks to export as an image sequence or lossless DI.

The export only takes a few seconds once rendered to RAM.

I may or may not use it, but it's there if the AE comp is intensive

enough to slow down a final render and export.

If I don't use the AE exported RAM preview, I dump it.

This is all based on doing a full resolution RAM preview

in AE before finalizing a comp (which I always do).

It's already rendered, so I go ahead and save it in case I need it.

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LEGEND ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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The export only takes a few seconds once rendered to RAM.

But you still have to count the time it takes to generate the RAM preview in your totals.

There's no getting around this, Joe.  The stuff takes time to render, no matter where or when you do it.  It might seem like less if you break it up into chunks instead of doing it all at once at the end, but the total is going to be about the same, no matter how you do it.

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People's Champ ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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But you still have to count the time it takes to generate the RAM preview in your totals.

That's true. You gotta do it sometime,

A full res preview of any AE comp before I consider it final is already part of my workflow.

I often use my saved RAM preview to speed up rendering if I need it.

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Guest
Sep 21, 2011 Sep 21, 2011

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<blockquote><font size="1">
<strong><a href="http://forums.adobe.com/people/JSS1138">Jim</a> wrote:</strong>
<p><font color="800080">Chances are no matter how you do it, the total render times will be about the same.</font></p></font></blockquote>

Sorry Jim, you are not correct.

The total time highly depends on AE comps complexity and may differ tenfold. Once I have already posted a link to my thread in AE Forum about dealing with 'heavy AE comps'. That time rendering lossless intermediate out of AE took of about 9 hours, whereas rendering preview in PrPro took of about 102 hours, and Todd explained in that thread why.

By the way, rendering RAM preview as a basis for lossless intermediate rendered out of AE is not a good idea, 'cos it doesn't provide precise quality (ask Todd). It's much better to send a composition to Render Queue and render intermediate out there...

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People's Champ ,
Sep 21, 2011 Sep 21, 2011

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...rendering RAM preview as a basis for lossless intermediate rendered out of AE is not a good idea, 'cos it doesn't provide precise quality...

A RAM preview doesn’t generate interlaced fields, so this only works for a

progressive composition, but there is no quality difference in the final output

if you specify a lossless format within AE's output module for saving full

resolution RAM previews to disk.

Set codec for saved RAM preview?

RAM preview quality vs. render quality

MaybeTodd will refute Rick Gerard's input?

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Community Beginner ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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As I understand it, AME would need to open headless PPro as well as AE to do it's job with Dynamic link. If the linked comps are replaced, or if I render an AE project, at least it's only running one program, not both. I tried this once and it cut render time 75% compared to rendering a PPro project with dynamic linked AE projects.

I actually rendered this one for about 12 hours before someone needed to use the computer, at which point I paused the render and it was still registering another 13-14 hours were left.

I'm going to jump back on that rig shortly, I'll report back.

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LEGEND ,
Sep 20, 2011 Sep 20, 2011

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I tried this once and it cut render time 75%

Then you forgot to add some render time from somewhere to the totals.  Neither program is that much faster than the other.

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New Here ,
Sep 21, 2011 Sep 21, 2011

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We just finished a fairly large project with 8 videos, with several DL's nested into various sequences/versions...then exporting many thru AME and some to Encore.

Overall we found that dealing with the pitfalls of Dynamic Link were not worth the trouble.  Too many DL's going unrendered, crashed renders, AME crash/failures, Encore problems, etc

It looks great when you demo it, or use it sparingly, and I'm hoping for more stability, but for now, we feel it's still just easier to render in AE and Alt+Drag replace in PPro whenever you make changes.

Keep in mind this is 5.03 with a Matrox MXOLe.

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Sep 21, 2011 Sep 21, 2011

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Since I was cited here a couple of times, I thought that I should respond:

Fuzzy is right about one thing: Rendering an intermediate file out of After Effects can be faster than saving the rendering until the end because in the first case you can make use of the After Effects multiprocessing features---whereas in the second case you're stuck with a single After Effects process doing the rendering.

But regarding the use of saved RAM previews... If you've got your RAM previews set up to be full-frame-rate, full-resolution RAM previews from the active camera view, then the uncompressed frames stored in RAM are the same as what will be created during the rendering process for export. It may be that what Fuzzy recalls me saying is that you need to be very careful about this, because most of the time your RAM previews are not set up in such a fashion. For example, I tend to have my RAM previews set up at fractional resolution (if I'm checking timing) or at a low frame rate (if I'm checking image quality). I don't tend to have a full-quality, full-length RAM preview for most compositions.

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Advocate ,
Sep 21, 2011 Sep 21, 2011

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Is Premeire Pro capable of multiprocessing like AE? I dont want to make a feature request if it just aint gonna happen   This info is really the best argument against using dynamic links since the faster the render the better for just about all of us users.

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Sep 21, 2011 Sep 21, 2011

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> Is Premeire Pro capable of multiprocessing like AE?

Sorta yes, and sorta no.

The variety of multiprocessing that I was referring to is the After Effects feature known as Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously mutliprocessing. This starts up multiple instances of the After Effects application, each of which works on its own frame, so that several frames are processed in parallel. This is not something that Premiere Pro can do. Note that this feature is the main reason that After Effects can productively use as much RAM as you can cram into your computer (up to ~48GB RAM).

But Premiere Pro can spawn mutliple threads and spread the processing of a single frame across multiple CPUs, as can After Effects.

I show these varieties of multiprocessing in this video:

http://www.video2brain.com/en/videos-5355.htm

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Advocate ,
Sep 21, 2011 Sep 21, 2011

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I understand.

I must admit, this insight is really make me reevaluate DL. I do lots of AE for projects and if I can render faster in AE then theres no reason to DL from PrP that I can see.

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Sep 21, 2011 Sep 21, 2011

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> I must admit, this insight is really make me reevaluate DL. I do lots of AE for projects and if I can render faster in AE then theres no reason to DL from PrP that I can see.

I find Dynamic Link to be extremely useful for the back and forth (and back and forth again and again) process of sending something from Premiere Pro to After Effects. I tend to tweak something, hop back to Premiere Pro to see the result in context, tweak it again, and so on. Rendering out intermediate files for each of these iterations would be a nightmare.

But then, when I'm happy with my result, I do rather often do a render-and-replace for my larger dynamically linked elements.

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Advocate ,
Sep 21, 2011 Sep 21, 2011

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Using the best of both worlds (read processes)...that makes sense. Thanks Todd. This opens up new doors of work flow for me.

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New Here ,
Jul 30, 2014 Jul 30, 2014

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Thanks Todd for this information. I have used DL quite a lot since I started using the Adobe suite and have really enjoyed it, but I do find that when I'm rendering in Premiere it's so much slower. But using the tool but then rendering in AE is a great suggestion. I can literally feel a few hours of my life coming back to me. Thanks!

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Guest
Sep 22, 2011 Sep 22, 2011

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Thanks for the clarification Todd! Much obliged! <img src="http://www.kolobok.us/smiles/standart/thank_you2.gif">

Joe, thanks as well!

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Contributor ,
Sep 29, 2012 Sep 29, 2012

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Todd_Kopriva wrote:


Rendering an intermediate file out of After Effects can be faster than saving the rendering until the end because in the first case you can make use of the After Effects multiprocessing features---whereas in the second case you're stuck with a single After Effects process doing the rendering.

I understand that this is true, but I don't understand why. What is it about dynamic linking that limits AE to a single thread? And when will it be fixed? I'd like to use AE more, but the cost is huge at output time, so I do everything I can in PPro, even if it means buying plugins to duplicate some functions available only in AE. This is... silly. I'd rather not do it, but Adobe has us backed into a corner. Again, why?

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Community Beginner ,
Sep 22, 2011 Sep 22, 2011

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Thought I should report back here with what I found.

Earlier I wrote:

"I remember now that I had this problem once before, and I got around it by importing the PPro project into a new AE project, and then rendering that instead of the PPro project with the dynamic links"

As someone pointed out, that was wrong. Rather, I was remembering it wrong. That's not what I did.

Anyway what I did in this case was open all the dynamically linked projects in AE and rendered a lossless intermediate of each. There were actually 38 of them. This took about 8 hours.

Then I dropped those back into my PPro project, replacing the dynamic links, and rendered that via Adobe Media Encoder. That took about 3 hours.

So the total time it took using those intermediate files was 12 hours, versus the 24 hours it would have took rendering the project out of PPro with dynamic links. (Keep in mind PPro estimated it would take 24, and I quit after 12 and it was about halfway through).

So based on my own experience with this, and in reading this thread, dynamic link is not bad for some quick and dirty work, and maybe even for rendering a PPro project with one or 2 of them, but if I have a lot of these then it's faster to render them with AE and swap them into my PPro project.

Thanks for the help with this, I appreciate it.

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Advocate ,
Sep 22, 2011 Sep 22, 2011

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Thanks Riddley23.  I appreciate the update on your rendering experience.

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New Here ,
Nov 15, 2011 Nov 15, 2011

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What lossless code would you recommend for going to AE? My original footage is h.264 footage out of a  DSLR. I'm looking to use the warp stabilizer to get rid of some shake.

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