Over the years I have worked on many motion graphics projects and some of them were painful to render, I actually wish I knew some of these tips I will share with you on this blog, hope you find them useful and let me know in the comment area if you have other rendering issue.
Below I have created a list of 15 tips to improve your rendering speed in After Effects, check it out.
1. Do you have enough RAM for After Effects?
Base of Adobe website you need to at least 32GB of ram to render correctly in After Effects, if you have less it is time to upgrade.
How much RAM is good for after effects?
I personally think today in 2020, 64GB of ram is the normal configuration for After Effects.
Here are a list of ram that seem reliable
– Crucial 64GB DDR4-2666 (4x16GB)
– Viper Steel Series DDR4 32GB (2 x 16GB) 3600MHz Kit
– Patriot Viper RGB Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) 3600MHz
2. Do you have the right GPU graphic card?
You need at least 2GB of GPUÂ VRAM. Additionally Adobe recommend to update your Nvidia driver if your rendering crash.
Below a list of the best GPU Graphic card for After Effects.
– EVGA 10G-P5-3897-KR GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 ULTRA GAMING, 10GB
– MSI VENTUS 3X GeForce RTX 3090 OC
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 8GB Dual Fan.
If you need a detail overview of GPU bandwidth and speed check out this page
3. Is your CPU fast enough for After Effects?
Adobe recommend a Multicore Intel processor with 64-bit support.
If I had to buy processor today in 2020 I would go with either
Intel Core i9 9900K 8 Core
or
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 16-Core
Both micro processor above seems to be reliable and should work pretty well with After Effects.
4.Setup your Hard Drives for After Affects Rendering ?
The ideal setup to render is to have a least 2 hard drive.
One drive with After Effects installed
Second drive where you render your file that have plenty of storage space.
By using this method you are not overloading your hard drive with simultaneous calculation.
As far as which drive you should get SSD Solid State drive are great but M.2 NVMe drive are even faster.
Below are the best M.2 hard drives for After Effects in my opinion.
– Samsung 970 PRO SSD 1TB – M.2 NVMe
– Samsung 970 EVO SSD 1TB – M.2 NVMe
5. Optimize your computer for better rendering
Computers get overloaded easily, here are a couple of small tasks you should apply before you hit the render button.
1. Empty your Recycle Bin
2. In After Effects go to Edit > Purge > All Memory & Disk Cache…
3. If you are on PCÂ run a disk cleanup
4. Check your hard drive if it is almost full, make some space.
5. Close all other running software even your chrome browser.
6. Optimize your After Effects Compositions.
After Effects composition can sometime be very messy with layer you don’t even need.
The common problem
1.You have heavy layers that are rendered that you don’t even see on your video and are adding more time to your render.
2. You have multiple overlapping layers or videos
Here is how you can cleanup and optimize your After effects project
A. Select and delete the layers you don’t need
B. Delete unused composition
C. Remove unused footage, images and layer you don’t need
D. Trim your layers or video you don’t need.
E. Check your layer with an image sequence sometime each image can be heavy and delay your rendering.
F. Maybe your composition is way to long (multiple minutes) try keeping it short or use Adobe premiere for the editing work and only the effects are in After Effects.
G. Sometime files in your composition are taken from multiple hard drive, gather all the files to one specific location by using Collect File.
7. Did you optimize your precomps?
Pre-comps are so easy to create on After Effects that you might actually end up with a lot of compositions when your project is done. The main problem is that it might actually hurt you when you render because After Effects is trying to make lot of calculation at the same time when rendering.
Solution:
1.Try to reduce the amount of pre-composition
2. Sometime it is even more efficient to render the pre-composition as video with alpha channel and re-import them on your master composition.
8. Are you using Raytraced 3D / Cinema 4D Renderer ?
As much as possible try to use the standard classic 3D, disable the raytraced 3D/Cinema4D.
When your start using Raytraced 3D or Cinema 4D Renderer it will increase your render time a LOT! even with a good computer.
If you need to use the Cinema 4D Renderer I recommend to solo your 3D layer and render only the 3D Layer as a video with the alpha Channel.
then re-import the video in your composition and delete the 3D Layer.
9. Did you setup your render queue correctly ?
One of the reason After Affects is rendering slow might be your render queue settings not optimized correctly. To make it simple I have capture a screenshot of my default render settings so you can compare with your render queue settings.
Below the other reason why your rendering might be slow, check them out
Video Size
Are you rendering at 4K or higher?
Rendering at 3840×2160 pixel take a lot more time even if you have a good computer!
When you test your animation just render at 1920×1080 this should help to render faster and make adjustments.
Frame Per Seconds
Are you rendering at 60 Fps or higher? Try to drop it down to 29.97 Fps and see if that help.
Format Output
Some video codec can take a lot longer to render, personally you should always render in Mov Quicktime and then convert your video to your specific format.
10. Check your After Effects Effects ?
Plug-in and Effects are awesome however some of them can use a gigantic amount of memory and computer resource when rendering.
To be clear the standard effects you get by default on After Effects are usually ok, I am talking more about third party effects that produce particles, light, water, fire effects…
I have also seen a lot of people buying After Effects template on the internet and getting stuck on the rendering part because the template is using lots of effects.
How to troubleshoot Effects Slow rendering.
1. Solo your layer or composition that contain the effect.
2. Render it as a video with the Alpha Channel
3. Re-import the video in your composition and don’t forget to delete your old effect layer.
Sometime the easiest solution is to remove effects on some of your layers and render again to see if that make a difference.
The main thing you can do is render only your effects as a video and re-import the video to your After Effects composition.
11. Optimize your After effects Preferences
Media & Disk Cache
Go to Edit > Preferences > Media & Disk Cache
1. If you can change the disk cache folder location so it doesn’t overload your main drive
2. Same things for media cache database and cache change the location to another hard drive
Memory Preference
On this one try a couple of variation and see what fit best for you. The lower RAM you give for other application the better.
Just watch out though your overall system might slow down because after effects take too much memory.
12. Video Rendering and Effects GPU Rendering.
You have an awesome GPU graphic card you might as well use this resource to render faster, After Effects has an option to switch from CPU to GPU rendering.
Here are the main difference I got from the Adobe website between the CPU default setting and Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Acceleration)
- Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Accelerated) is a renderer used to process GPU-accelerated effects and enhances playback.
- Hardware-accelerated Encoding is used to accelerate the encoding performance while exporting the timeline in H.264/AVC and HEVC codecs.
- Hardware-accelerated Decoding is a process which is used to accelerate decoding H.264/AVC and HEVC media while playing back the timeline.
Here is how your make the switch!
Click on Project Settings…
Click on the Use: drop down and change it to Mercury Playback Engine (GPU Acceleration)
13. Color per Channel
If you have changed the default 8 bits per Channel to 16 or 32 bits per channel in your project settings you might encounter some delay on your rendering.
make sure you really need those settings otherwise switch it back to the lowest 8 Bits per Channel.
To change to color per channel in After Effects go to Project Settings
Click on the Color Tab, then change to the option you need in the drop down.
14. Render with Adobe Media Encoder
If your Render Queue still rendering slow try to render with Adobe Media Encoder.
Here is how you can render in Adobe Media Encoder:
1. Make sure you have Adobe Media Encoder installed from your Adobe Cloud Account or download the free trial version.
2. In After Effects, select your desired Composition in the Project panel window
3. Then click on File > Â Export > Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue…Â
Or use the shortcut below
Win:Â Â Ctrl + Alt + M
MAC:Â Option+Command+M
4. You should see this opening Adobe Media Encoder Screen starting
5. Now in the Queue panel your composition should appear.
6. Make sure the Format is dropdown set to H.264, these are the specific settings should have,
obviously you can edit and optimize it to reduce the mp4 file size.
7. Click on the green play button icon to render to mp4 video format.
15. Optimize your Videos and Images
In After Effects It is so easy to drag and drop videos and images that we might often forget that heavy assets might affect the rendering time.
Here are a couple of things you should check if you render is slow.
– Review each video you have in your composition make sure they are compressed to MP4 and not gigantic Mov video 🙂
– If you are using only a specific part of a video probably just cut it and re-import it in After Effects, not need to full video when
– Check your image sequence, sometime each images is too heavy and require to be compressed
Still rendering slow? or your have other tips and tricks to render faster in After Effects I would love to hear about them in the comment area below. Thanks!!!
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