Replication loads forever..?
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I’m afraid that it’s impossible to tell what might be causing this issue without more specific information.
If this is the same project file we discussed in your previous forum post, it’s possible that the Time Sculpting errors that were present there might be causing the replication process to fail. This could be tested by creating a new project with a few basic layers that access the same data and then testing to see if that project has the same issues. If the problem is limited to the previously mentioned project, it likely has something to do with the logic issues that we saw there.
Additionally, we can check the Templater panel, the templater.log file, and the templater.err file to see if any errors are present in those locations. It’s possible that there might be some more specific error messages in one of those locations that could give us a better idea of what’s happening there.
Let’s start there and see if we can get some more information on what’s happening here.
Thanks,
Jeff
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@Jeff First of all, thanks for all of your replies. I managed to fix the other problems, but no matter what i tried this is taking long haha. I left 100 compositions to be replicated, went to the gym for 2 hours, came back, and the tracker says "14 out of 100 replicated. I mean, rendering them directly would of taken shorter.
I couldn’t paste them here, so heres a pastebin link:
The password is 111
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@1337err And this is my timeline:
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Thanks for the update. I notice that there’s one file whose reference is incorrect in the .log. Unless I’m mistaken, camera_1_photo_3 should be “81Tuw8B7+4L.AC_SL1500.jpg” rather than “81Tuw8B7+4L.AC_SL1500.jpgg”. This might be slowing things down a bit due to the fact that AE will have to try to resolve the missing file. However, I think our main issue here is going to be the sheer size of the project file and the number of comps that Templater is reversioning.
If we take a look at the .log file, we can see that Templater is attempting to make adjustments on 246 layers in 167 compositions. Given that level of complexity combined with the knowledge that we’re doing Time Sculpting calculations on some number of those layers, the time to replicate makes a certain amount of sense. If we look at the gap between the first and second replications (20:54:17 and 21:11:09), we’ll see that it took around 17 minutes to complete the reversioning process. While that might be a bit long, it’s not completely ridiculous for a project of this complexity.
I would highly recommend, if at all possible, attempting to streamline the project a bit to see if it makes any difference. Templater is unable to evaluate what layers are “needed” for any specific Job, so if we have any layers that aren’t necessary, it would be beneficial to remove the plugin from them so that they don’t factor into the overall layout calculation. Additionally, it might be helpful to try hosting the files that are being downloaded from pexels locally. It’s also possible that pexels may be throttling the http access to their servers when Templater makes all those requests, which could also slow things down.
Finally, we might take a look and see if there are any places where we might be able to pre-render items to remove them from having to be evaluated by Templater. We spoke before about audio files. It’s worth pointing out that pre-composing an audio file means that Templater has to run twice, once on the pre-comped file and once on the pre-comp itself. It might be more efficient to pre-render those audio files as “blank” .mp4s so that we only have to run Templater on them one time.
Let’s start there and see if we can squeeze any more performance out of the project. If we still run into trouble, we’ll likely need to get the full .log file as well as some other information that would probably best be shared through our direct support address at support@dataclay.com.
Thanks,
Jeff
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@Jeff Thanks a lot.
I will try to store the pexels files locally, and i will also try to remove some compositions to make the video simpler.
One other thing i might try is manually adding all of them to the render queue, because its faster that way (previewing takes 10-15 seconds).
You mentioned pre-rendering some things, how can i do that? I have some files which are static and wont change. How does that work exactly?
Thanks
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@1337err Just downloaded all pexels files and stored them locally, no difference.
Changing .wav to .mp4 is the next thing i am going to try, but theres a huge loss of audio quality.
Is there any way to find out what/which layers exactly are causing the long replication times?
Edit: I also used a lot of pre-made templates for titles and other things. They came in as ‘packages’ where they have 5-6 variations of each title, but these are not used in the project, they are just in the media library bin. Do these affect the replication times? Should i remove them?
For example, i have a “minimal titles pack” which has 100 title effects in it.
Edit: Cleared these up, and it went down to 3 minutes.
I tried it with a simple composition with just a few texts and nothing else, and it was lightning fast.
Edit 2: On my spreadsheet i have a lot of information that doesnt have anything to do with the project, should i remove these? Do they slow it down by any chance?
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Glad to hear that we’re making progress here. The premade title package was probably causing most of the performance issues that we were seeing yesterday. Packages like that tend to share assets between a variety of comps to make them easier to use. So, for example, you’ll change the text field in a “master” file, and that change will be propagated to various comps that all reference the same data.
My guess is that this was causing the performance issues since Templater could end up having to update every comp in the package since they all fed from the same data source. This is just a guess, but based on the performance increase you’ve noted, that’s almost certainly what was happening here.
As far as the spreadsheet question goes, it’s going to depend on just how much extraneous data is present. Templater has to read each data point in a Job before it can begin the versioning process. If we have a few extra data points, that shouldn’t be too much of an issue, but if it’s more like 40 or 50, we’re probably going to want to remove the extra entries just to make sure that Templater doesn’t waste time ingesting that data and when it’s not needed for the reversioning process.
From what we’ve seen so far, I believe the premade project files were almost certainly causing the issue. If removing them cut the replication time by the amount specified, we can probably skip re-coding the audio layers for now.
Finally, you might try looking at the “Remove Unused Footage” and “Reduce Project” options in the File>Dependencies menu. These options can be useful for removing any unnecessary clutter from a project file. However, I recommend backing up the project before using these tools, just in case After Effects removes something vital to the project’s operation.
Hopefully, with yesterday’s adjustments, we’re already heading in the right direction, but if you have any other questions, feel free to get in touch.
Thanks,
Jeff
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@Jeff No matter what i do, it breaks something else haha. Now when i try to render using templater, it fails in the middle. However, when i manually render it, it works. Why is that happening?
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Hmmm. It’s difficult to say without more details on what’s going on. If I had to take a guess, I suspect that there’s some missing or broken asset that’s causing the automation in Templater to get hung up during the versioning process. Templater uses the same render queue as After Effects by default, so if a replicate can be manually rendered, it’s probably a versioning issue.
With cases like this, the more information that you can give us, the better we’ll be able to understand what’s going on behind the scenes. The templater.log and templater.err files are both very useful for seeing errors and reports of what’s happening when Templater runs, so those are great places to start. Additionally, information about what sort of error occurs, if there are any messages, if the client locks up, etc, are all useful.
After Effects is a complex software package, and when you add Templater to the mix, there are a lot of moving pieces, any one of which could be causing a problem. The more information we can get about any particular issue, the better, since it helps us to be able to make better suggestions about where in the process we need to look to solve an issue.
Let us know what you can, and we’ll see what we can do from there.
Thanks,
Jeff
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@1337err I’ve had a similar problem with my replication just stops and keeps crashing/loading until I eventually force quit AE. In my case it was a special character in the “output” filename (a “€” sign) that caused the crash. Replaced it with “eur” and things are running smoothly again. Haven’t read your thread thoroughly, so might not be the case for your project, just thought I’d give a shout.
