Rendering in After Effects!?

[Rambot]

I really need some help, I've finished my video in After Effects and I want to render it as a video (Quicktime Movie) but the file seems to be too big to render and has crashed. How can I make the video small enough to render?

[Ned]

How long is the composition? After Effects has about a 4.5 gigabyte limit on file exports, unless they fixed that in the newer versions. To get past that (or to get past general oversize file issues), all you need to do is split your project up into several compositions, and stitch them together in Premiere. Premiere can easily handle a large movies.

Even if you've kept everything in one composition, you can simply use your in/out markers to export only x number of minutes at a time out of the same composition, then stitch those smaller movies together in Premiere.

[Rambot]

The length is just over a minute and it's running at a resolution of 720p, so it's quite beefy. How do I split the movie with the markers?

[Ned]

In your timeline, there's in/out markers just under your time marker that shows where you currently are in the timeline. Just find the Out marker at the end of your composition, and drag it in towards the middle. When you export the movie, it will automatically use that marker as the end-point for exporting your movie. :) Then of course, simply drag the In marker from the start of your composition to that point, and do the same thing for the next segment.

*EDIT: By the way... Only a minute at NTSC size shouldn't crash you when exporting to a .mov. o_O However, it could be just a lot of stuff in the composition - especially since you mentioned 3D layers before... Either way, if memory or filesize has anything to do with this problem, this fix will cure it.

I nearly forgot to mention something important... Don't export your movies to Quicktime out of After Effects, if you're still going to stitch it in Premiere, because Quicktime is a much lower-quality format. Instead, export to .avi movies, stitch that together in Premiere, then you can export your complete project as a .mov out of Premiere.

[Rambot]

Thank you for the help! I'll give it a shot. I'm not sure if I can find the marker. Is that the same as the composition marker?

[Rambot]

Exporting it as a AVI doesn't really work. The quality is really bad if I do it that way. Exporting it as a Premiere doesn't really do anything either.

[Rambot]

Okay. This isn't working. I've exported my video as AVI file at best quality and I've cut my timeline down to just 10fps at a time. The computer still crashes after a few minutes of rendering. I don't know what to do.

[Ned]

Ouch... There's definitely something wrong there besides just memory or filesize. Perhaps it's unable to render a complex effect you have in the composition? Try a couple things to isolate the problem... First try making just a small test composition with anything in it, and try rendering that to see if it's maybe your After Effects installation. If that's fine, then try sectioning off any real simple areas of the composition which don't contain any real effects, 3D layers, etc., and see if that will render. Perhaps you can isolate the problem area from there...

As far as your exporting to AVI, my mistake for not being concise enough with the directions. You need to set your AVI export to DV/NTSC compression settings, in order to maintain all the quality of the original, only dumbed down to NTSC standards (ie, high res stills, high def. video, etc. will get downsampled, original DV footage off a NTSC video camera will not). Quicktime .mov doesn't have any any settings that won't compress from DV quality. I think Apple Cinema or something is the best setting it has, which will still turn stock DV footage into carp.

[MAK online]

Do you have enough disk space to render to? If you are trying to output a 300 meg file to a 200 meg HD you are going to have problems.

As far as compression goes, Quicktime Motion Jpeg A for all motion graphics type of stuff works well. Digital Juice used Apple Photo Jpeg compression for all their stuff.

[Rambot]

My canvas size is 720px1280 so it's in HD format. I have enough Hardrive space on my HDD. I've managed to get it rendered, but the quality is really bad. I want a decent size, but I don't know how to get around that.

The timelapse for my film is 1 minute long. And I'm rendering 5 seconds each time to avoid my computer from crashing. But the problem is, my computer still crashes just trying to render the first 5 seconds. I really don't know what to do. I've spent so much time on it and I don't want to render it as a really low resolution file.

[Rambot]

As far as compression goes, Quicktime Motion Jpeg A for all motion graphics type of stuff works well. Digital Juice used Apple Photo Jpeg compression for all their stuff. Hold on a minute MAK, you might be onto something here. I just compressed it as a Motion JPEG A file and it seemed to have rendered at full quality. But also, I turned off all the layers, which weren't in the shot at that specific time to avoid crashing.

I'll see how things go, you could be onto something here.

[Ned]

It sounds to me more like turning off your layers did it for you, than the compression you used, considering all the different compression settings you've tried. It didn't sound right to me that such a short video would have so much trouble rendering, unless it was a complex layer object hanging it up...

[Rambot]

It worked! Brilliant! Thank you so much for your help!

[Ned]

Sweet. :D

Now as payment, you must show us a sample of what you did. ;)

[Todd_Kopriva]

A common workflow is to render and export as an image sequence and then use Quicktime Pro to assemble the image sequence into a single Quicktime movie.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a4f2dff7-79a9a.html

[Rambot]

Will do, I've just got to do some tweaks to it and I'll upload it tomorrow hopefully.

[Ned]

Looking forward to it, Rambot!

[MAK online]

Nice. Glad it turned out OK.

[MAK online]

A common workflow is to render and export as an image sequence and then use Quicktime Pro to assemble the image sequence into a single Quicktime movie.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a4f2dff7-79a9a.html

Depends on the work flow. I only use image sequences in TGA format when I want to mess around with each frame. Most of the time I render to MOV files before going into AE. I find the Animation codec for anything with a 4th channel works just fine. Sure it's just as big a file as an image sequence but it's only 1 file compared to 300+ in a sequence.

[Ned]

That sounds awfully cumbersome to me. What kind of frame rate would you be using, where you could effectively keep an image sequence of your finished render? 300 files should get you about 10 seconds worth of smooth video! o_O

[Totem-Media]

It is kinda weird you're having so many problems exporting a one minute movie. Guess we'll have to see all of the cool stuff you included to get a better sense of your project's scope! :)

I do have one question/suggestion, if you're still having probs. Have you defragged recently? That might be affecting your export.

[Rambot]

Wow, cheers guys. I managed to render it, get it exported at the resolution I wanted and then show it off the to class yesterday. Thing is the actual file size I had at the end was 3.6GB, which is stupidly huge for a 1 minute film.

I'm just trying to upload it on googlevideo now, so stay tuned, because you all deserve to see it, for giving me a hand on this.

[jimking]

I think the size is about right. For every minute of high res video I think it comes out around 3 or 4 gigs. I've worked on videos that were two hours, bloating to a couple of hundred gigs easy.

["Technical" Terry]

I'm just trying to upload it on googlevideo now, so stay tuned, because you all deserve to see it, for giving me a hand on this.

May I also suggest vimeo.com (http://vimeo.com)
They have higher video quality (up to HD resolutions) and it is still free. I just completed a high school football season utilizing them (hhs-indians.com (http://hhs-indians.com)). The only limitation is 500MB file size, so you'll need to re-render using some compression codec (say h.264).

[Ned]

You said you just rendered it into Quicktime format right? Quicktime files are huge.

If you want to make cut down the size, just transcode it for DVD. You should be able to cut it down to about 1/5th the size then.

I thought you said you were using NTSC standard for size though? That is a bit big... I can fit half an hour of NTSC video, DV quality AVI format into 5 Gigs, which transcodes to only a gig for DVD.

Quicktime is going to be a lot larger, that's just natural, but not that much more... You're not using high def, are you (I thought I heard NTSC somewhere in this thread, but I could be mistaken)?

[jimking]

That makes since ned. Those 2 hundred gig files I worked with ended up on a 4 gig DVD. I compressed them using Quicktime pro as an mpeg4. Bitvice is a very good compression program as well.

["Technical" Terry]

PS - Quicktime, avi, and "DVD" are not compression codecs, they are just wrappers for your video. So a quicktime can be larger or smaller in file size than an avi or DVD.

DVDs are very specific in the type of video that is acceptable. Either MPEG-1 (320x240) or MPEG-2 (640x480).
Avi and quicktime allow for much more variation in picture dimensions and the amount of compression.

[Rambot]

Here (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oOJ_DwW09KU) it is finally. I'm sorry about the wait, I was trying to upload it to Google Video, but with no luck. I've got my friends video which is shown first.

Also the aspect ratio is totally screwed up, sorry.