Export Times - Premiere vs. After Effects
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Hi. I’m designing a workflow for a job that can really benefit from DataClay. We’re currently editing/exporting a high volume of sequences with Premiere.
My DataClay workflow is magic and reduces edit time substantially, but I’m finding export times out of After Effects to be nearly 10 times slower than Premiere. Effectively the same 2 minute edit out of a Premiere timeline takes 10 seconds, while a single AE comp takes 1.5 minutes (to clarify, I’m not using the Dynamic Link, just an identical edit). There aren’t any effects other than some opacity key frames.
Is it just expected that exporting takes longer out of AE than Premiere? I’ve checked the GPU and multi-frame rendering options. Tested h.264 and ProRes and I see the same results.
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Typically speaking, Premiere tends to be faster than After Effects when it comes to render times. This is mainly because Premiere was created as an editing software, where After Effects has more of a generative role. That being said, it’s possible that there might be some things that can be done to speed things up a bit. However, before I make any suggestions, it should be noted that optimizing After Effects projects can be very difficult since they tend to be far more complex than typical Premiere files.
First, I’d recommend going through the project and removing any layers, comps, or assets that aren’t going to be used in the final render. Templater doesn’t have the built-in logic to check and see which layers are needed for each render, so every layer in every comp in the project will need to be evaluated before the output can be created. This can slow down a project significantly if many extraneous layers are present.
Next, I’d recommend temporarily removing the subtitle layer with the alpha channel to see if that significantly changes the render time. Since AE is focused more on frame generation than output speed, it’s very possible that calculating the alpha channel attributes for each frame of that subtitle video might be slowing things down dramatically.
Another potential solution would be to set Templater up to replicate to Adobe Media Encoder. While it can sometimes present its own challenges, we’ve seen many cases in the past where offloading the render process to AME can help to free up After Effects processes to focus exclusively on processing the data.
Finally, if none of these suggestions makes a difference, it could be helpful to create a new project with a minimal amount of data and see if the rendering times are the same across the board. Since After Effects is a bit opaque about its processes, we sometimes have to resort to trial and error to see if we can narrow down what’s causing the issue.
Hopefully, one of these options will shed some light on what’s going on here, but if you have any other questions, please feel free to let us know.
Thanks,
Jeff
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@citizensam To add to Jeff’s reply, the way that the Premiere and After Effects renderers work is fundamentally different—it has to do with AE being a layer-based compositor vs Premiere being a timeline-based editor and how the image buffers for each frame are built by each app.
If you really, really want to get in the weeds, I recommend checking out Chris Zwar’s insanely comprehensive 15-part (!!!) series called After Effects and Performance. It dives deeper than you could have ever known possible into understanding why AE is an anomaly both compared to NLE software like Premiere and 3D software like Houdini and Blender.
What sort of hardware are you using to render? Are you using the latest AE 2023? Since 2022, AE has had better hardware utilization than previous versions, as they rebuilt their render engine to be multithreaded. It’s still not going to be as fast as other tools because the Adobe team has still prioritized needing to be pixel-for-pixel accurate with previous versions. If you open an AE CS4 file in AE 2023, it should render identically to how it did 15+ years ago, and there are a lot of compromises or trade-offs that have to be made to make that true.
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@citizensam It’s difficult to say. I don’t think it’ll have that significant of an impact, but I haven’t done a head-to-head comparison before. AfterCodecs does have more efficient compression for h264/mp4 files than Adobe’s, but that’s not necessarily related to render speed. At least a part of the render time can be due to calculating compression, so sometimes it could be an option to test rendering to an intermediate lossless codec and then transcoding to mp4 with an extra step like Media Encoder or FFMPEG. Depending on the workflow you’re building, those might not be ideal, but it’s another avenue of exploration when you’re trying to shave off any time you can.
