Ways to make Rendering faster without loss of quality

Acesonnall · Post by **Acesonnall** » Mon Mar 19, 2012 1:40 am

So it's taking me nearly 4 hours to render an animation with 831 frames. I'm guessing it mostly has to do with the type of processor I'm using atm (Pentium 4), but are there anyways to make it faster without a loss of quality?

I'm using Anime Studio Pro 8.
Thanks.

~Ace

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Mon Mar 19, 2012 9:36 am

Use a newer machine?

Sorry, some things just take their time. If you don't have the time, try fewer things. I'm stuck with an older machine as well, and complex stuff in HD means roughly 1 second of film = 1 minute of rendering.

madrobot · Post by **madrobot** » Mon Mar 19, 2012 10:53 am

3d rendering is a whole fresh hell. Just rendering a short sequence to check it takes so long that you disappear in a vortex of existential dread as you realise what you've been doing with your life.

Then the render finishes, it's not right and you have to fix it. I used Lightwave which touted "physics" and...

Sorry. I was starting to wind up like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character and go on a rageathon.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Mon Mar 19, 2012 11:00 am

That's why I never wanted to do 3D: so long to work for a result, so long to wait for renders. Even on professional machines 1 frame took at least 2 minutes. On my small computer at home the same would've been hours.

AS is quite fast. It sometimes even beats my video editor.

dm · Post by dm » Mon Mar 19, 2012 3:53 pm

What size are you rendering? What codec? How much compression is involved? Say that, then it's easier to direct you what you might change to reduce render times.

Personally, I find a render farm works wonders. Even two junky old machines get things done faster than one. Thrift stores, people discarding their old machines, etc...Six computers here, virtually no cost for most of them.

Acesonnall · Post by **Acesonnall** » Mon Mar 19, 2012 4:49 pm

It's actually alright. After searching through the forums here it seems as if long rendering is normal for old machines (I'm building a newer one with and I7 3.4 GHz processor and gtx 570 fermi video card soon). However I did find a way to speed it up after the many attempts to fix and redo my exporting (I did almost do what you described madrobot lol).
Thanks for the quick responses everyone.

~Ace

madrobot · Post by **madrobot** » Mon Mar 19, 2012 8:15 pm

That's the spirit.
I've toyed with the render farm idea. Would seriously consider it if I was making my own 2d short - run a network cable to the storage under the house and put a few machines down there.

SpaceBoy64 · Post by **SpaceBoy64** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 10:45 am

What are you rendering? Vectors or lots of bit mapped pieces? I found that rendering images from Photoshop takes way longer than vectors.

Also, are you using blurring? soft edges? shading? layer effects?
Try turning things off one at a time until you find the culprit. Then, figure out another way to do that particular thing.

I am a Lightwave user too. That's the usual procedure there too. Turn off unnecessary functions, simplify as much as possible. Some fancy features just aren't worth the time it takes to render them.

rylleman · Post by **rylleman** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 10:58 am

Render in passes. (an anme-file per pass)
If you have a static scene with no camera movements you can render your background and various props as single images.
Render characters as one pass each. If you need to change a little animation on one character you only have to rerender this and not the whole scene.
(Also rendering to image sequence saves a lot of time on rerenders where you can rerender just the frames that are actually changed. Or when render has crashed for some reason)

After you've rendered you need to comp all passes together. I do this in Blender which have a quite good compositor but there are many other compositors you can choose from.

Rendering in passes does save quite a lot of rendertime on projects.

Acesonnall · Post by **Acesonnall** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 3:32 pm

viewtopic.php?t=21781

Is my animation that took long to remember. I can see why it would. What do you mean render in passes? Is there a specific function to do that or is that a strategy?

rylleman · Post by **rylleman** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:15 pm

Acesonnall wrote:...What do you mean render in passes? Is there a specific function to do that or is that a strategy?

Passes might be the wrong term. It's used heavily in 3d rendering where there's different passes for light, animation, shadows etc. which then are composited.

There is no special funtion in AS in this, I'm rather referring to the workflow.
Turn visibility off for all layers except the ones you want in the pass. Save with a good name, scXX_RP01_ is the convention I'm using.
Then turn off visibility for these layers and on for the next pass layers, save this as scXX_RP02_ etc.

When saved all passes open batch render window and drag them all in there. Hit render.

Acesonnall · Post by **Acesonnall** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 11:00 pm

Excuse me if I'm not understanding correctly
---------
So your suggesting saving it in small clips or rendering with the visibility off?

SpaceBoy64 · Post by **SpaceBoy64** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 11:35 pm

Say you have three characters in your scene.
Render each one separately with an alpha channel.
Render background separately as well, or use a still if the camera doesn't move.
Composite them together afterward using After Effects, or Blender (it's free @ Blender.org)

Render to frame sequences rather than movies. Saves time on re-rendering only part of scene, since you don't have to render the whole thing.

I've never use Blender for compositing. That's interesting.

Acesonnall · Post by **Acesonnall** » Thu Mar 22, 2012 2:53 pm

I'll try that in the final version of my animation.