invrsleep

Problems rendering in After Effects?

This may not be the most ground breaking thing ever, but it recently just saved my ass on a project. Big thanks to my boss for telling me about it or I’d still be waiting for my render to finish.

Anyway, I’m working with this massive file and for some reason it was taking four hours to render four seconds. This specific file, also, would take four hours to render the whole thing while other versions of it only took one. Clearly something is wrong here. 

I tried everything; emptying the cache, importing into a new project, restarting the computer, purging memory, rendering on 2 different machines. NOTHING worked and it was killing me, as I needed to post something later that day. 

Until my boss showed me this. In your render que, click the arrow next to where it says CURRENT RENDER, and it’ll show you the specific layer that’s being rendered and any effects it has to process. The effect/layer it gets stuck on, is the one that’s giving you problems. 

Once I deleted the problem layer (because I didn’t need it at that time) my render went from 4 hours to 30 minutes. 

Remember this if you run into a similar situation!