I am using After Effects 6.5 pro and have had some rendering issues. I guess I have a couple of questions. First, should more detailed effects take a long time to render when doing a ram preview? (by a long time I mean close to a minute for a 15 or 20 sec clip) My computer has a pentium 4 2.60 ghz processor with 1 gig of ram, is this enough to do everything that AE has to offer or should I look to upgrade?
Rendering in After Effects
- Thread starter Jesse
- Start date
Rending just plain takes time - faster systems will render more quickly but for anything with any real sophistication, it just takes time. I've rendered a two minute clip that took 8 hours and I read that a SINGLE FRAME for Lord of the Rings took 4 hours render even with all the firepower they had. So that would mean a second could take 120 hours. Puts things in perspective. Here's an article about what the big boys use.
http://www.digitmag.co.uk/features/index.cfm?FeatureID=1162
http://www.digitmag.co.uk/features/index.cfm?FeatureID=1162
Yup.
The more overlapping layers you have, the longer the render will take. CPU speed limits this.
The actual length of the ram preview that will play in real-time is dependent on available system ram, though.
You can render more in less time with a faster CPU. You can do longer previews with more ram.
In theory, it's possible to render faster than the ram playback... that's not as ideal as it sounds, though.
That's some detailed work they did.
There was a lot of composite work done in Starship Troopers, as well. When the Rodger Young is split in two and starts to break up, there were apparently close to 100 layers of video composited for that shot. I doubt they were using After FX, but even so...