Rendering time

Hi,
I’ve been testing out the mocha pro plugin for after effects.
When I’m in mocha pro and render forward to remove a nadir (following the exact instructions from the tutorial on the website) it goes pretty fast.
However, when I save and render it in after effects it takes 6-8 hours for a 20 second clip to remove the nadir. (I tried a few different render settings).
What are the recommended render/export settings/format to make this process faster?

I have a computer with 64gb of ram and an Nvidia 980M 8GB videocard.

Because if it takes this much time to render just 20 seconds of material I’m not sure I can use the product.
Please advice/help.

You can either increase the stop, lower the frames before and after, or both. That should solve a lot of your render time issues. Working with big files eats a lot of resources, but adjusting those settings can help. You can also try only using illumination modeling when you absolutely need to.

Cheers,
Mary

Hi Robin.

Which version of the plugin are you using? 6-8 hours seems highly abnormal, especially if you’re able to render efficiently in the actual mocha environment.

I’m using adobe After Effects CC 2015 and the rendering in the mocha environment goes very fast. For the 20 second clip it takes about 5 minutes to completely track the background and another 5 minutes to remove a part of it.

I don’t have too much experience with exporting out of After Effects, so I think the problem is in there somewhere. For render settings I use ‘best settings’ with lossless output module.

It now seems to take about 2 hours 30 minutes for a 15 second clip.
Thanks for the help sofar.

What are your settings in the remove module inside of mocha and how many frames is the remove?

Hi Mary,
It was just at the default settings and it was about 600 frames to remove.

The tracking of the 600 frames takes a few minutes, the removing a bit longer but probably less than 10 minutes.
However exporting it from after effects after that takes insanely long. (10 hours for 20 seconds clip)

Could you give an indication of what an average export/render time should be for a 1 minute clip from after effects, and what are the best settings to use?
Thanks a lot

You can optimise this, but I would need to see the project in question to give specifics.

Make sure you are only using what you need:

  • First Frame/Last Frame: These should be set to the range of the clip you're using. If you're not using all 664 frames, you should cull that down
  • #Frames Before/After: This is the search range in time from the current frame you're on. For example, if you're on frame 10 and these values are both set to 5, it will look for background information as far back as 5 and as far forward as 15 etc. The larger these values are, the longer your remove will take, as it has to analyse more frames.
  • Step: How often to look at frames. The default is 1, which means look at every frame. A 2 would indicate to look at every second frame and so on. This is especially useful if you have a slow moving camera. In some cases you can put this up as high as 10 or more, which significantly improves performance.
If you can send me the project files I can make more recommendations.

In terms of the very slow render time in the plugin, I would check how much RAM you are using. If the AE renderer has to swap out memory while rendering, it’s going to take a lot longer.