After Effects rendering times?

[TomA]

I am thinking of giving after effects a try, using animation image files from Max/Vray.

 

What sort of final movie rendering times should I be expecting from After Effects in relation to Max and Vray. Say from a 1000 frame animation that took 2 days to render with one node in Max and Vray?

 

Thanks

[Francisco Penaloza]

Straight answer to your question it can not be done, because, like everything else, it depends of many factors.

Computer power, Number of layers, number of effects, quality of the effects, Bit depth of your image, size of your image.

This can easy vary of a few minutes or seconds to hours.

Now when you say Give a After Effects a try, what you mean with this, what are you plans for after effects, what it is your regular workflow for animations.

[TomA]

I just want to do basic movies, i.e. stitch some walkthroughs together with a bit of text and sound and a few basic effects over the top. The reason I used the example of 1000 frames rendered in 2 days with Max and Vray was to get a relative comparison, as in would it take 30 seconds or half a day to combine and export into a movie file with some editing in After Effects? - rendering time that is, not including the editing.

 

Thanks

Edited November 20, 2013 by TomA

[Francisco Penaloza]

Stitching frames together and sinc music can be done also in Adobe Premiere, actually you should use premiere to put music and sound effects to your animations instead After Effects. After Effect it is designed to do motion media and compositing duties mostly, of course you could do everything on it too but, you know some tool are faster than other for specific tasks.

Regarding the rendering time, this is complete different than what you do in a 3D Application, VRay work with many other factor while rendering.

So there is not a straight relation of 3d rendering time with Compositing rendering time or Video output rendering time. Usually it is a lot faster, unless of course you are doing lots of post work.

[TomA]

Interesting answer thanks. I think I'll download trials of both and see what works best for me.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Vague question... AE render times depend greatly on the number of things. Here are a few:

 

1) Effects and what type of effects. Something like a curves adjustments will process fast, while something like a motion blur you should only do when you don't need to use that machine for awhile.

 

2) Resolution. 480p will render fast, 1080p or even 4k will take awhile.

 

3) Compression. Render to uncompressed AVI and it will finish quickly as there is little math to do because it does not need to compress the file. Rendering to something like h264 will take longer because of the intense math involved in getting a small file size while keeping a good looking image.

 

 

But to answer you question... simply cutting a video from single frames and adding music should for a 30 second video should lead to movie write out times of 5-20 minutes. The more complex you get with your compositing the effects the longer the write out times for a movie.

[RyderSK]

For me it is usually minutes: I composite in fullHD (1920px), use Chronos plugin (for retiming), Magicbullet Looks plugin (for post-production), Frischluft plugin (for Depth of Field) and something for MotionBlur I can't remember name, and it's still going super fast using 3930k + GTX670.

Anyway, it's worth to do things in passes to speed it up considerably, I never output directly to video formats, I first composite to corrected frames with all effects and only then output to video format. But I usually go to Premier at this stage to the cuts and music.