Factors that might cause unusually long render time?

[stealingfeathers]

Hello,

I'm relatively new to this particular software program (I love it!). I'm using both Debut and Pro because I'm using it to teach colleges courses and we needed to give students an affordable option by allowing them to do the course work with Debut.

So here's the situation. I'm trying to help one of my students figure out why her file is taking so long to render.

The animation only 50 seconds long. She developed it in Debut.
She has about 8 image files (png's and jpg's) in it. The file res's are not much larger than 1000 x 600 pixels.
Some of the images are being used in several instances.
She IS animating most of these images.
She had a WAV file which I converted to MP3 and that seems to be helping the render time.
She also is using quite a bit of "motion blur."
She has approx. 200 layers (many are sub-layers and sub-sub-layers)

So, my question is simply, what are the biggest contributors to a long render? I brought it into Pro and converted the WAV to MP3. It looks like the render is going to take several hours, but much less time than what she anticipated on her computer using Debut. Comments are greatly appreciated. I really want to understand this program better.

Thanks!

[heyvern]

It's the motion blur.

Motion blur renders multiple frames multiple times on every frame based on the settings. This can really add to the time. It's like rendering the same file "100 times" instead of once. If you have the default setting of only 2 frames, you are still rendering 2 additional frames on every frame. Plus the motion blur also adds transparency and opacity which also can increase render times. Motion blur will seriously add a lot of time to the render.

[stealingfeathers]

Thank you for the feedback! Yes, I did I bunch of testing last night and looked carefully at what she had going on all of her layers. She put motion blur on 20 layers (maybe more!).

Unfortunately, I was having a lot of trouble disabling the blur. Like I said, I'm still learning this software myself -- I kept trying to remove the blur keyframes in a couple of different ways and it was as though the blur kept coming back. I know that's not possible -- blur can't magically return on its own, so obviously I'm missing something. I really can't figure out how to remove all of the instances of it. Any suggestions???

At present, the original render is at 13 hours, and it is approx. 40% complete. I'm not rendering on the best machine, but I guess I'll let it keep going.

Again, any suggestions are greatly appreciated (This time, on disabling all instances of motion blur).

[slowtiger]

If possible, render in parts. I try and organise my stuff in a way that I can easily switch off half of the layers or even more, render this quite fast, then turn on the other layers and render again. In the end I have 2 or more video files which are much easier and faster to combine.

[stealingfeathers]

The final render was approx. 35 hours for a 60 second animation. We then removed all instances of the motion blur and it still took forever to render. I'm curious, does multiple nested layers affect render time? She has a number of sub, sub, sub, sub folders. Just trying to understand the program...

Thanks

[slowtiger]

Doesn't sound unusual to me. My last project was 60 sec as well: https://vimeo.com/77061828, and I couldn't render it in one go because of all the large (gigabyte) quicktime movies. I had 18 movies for the "characters", plus 3 more for background and foreground. Took me about 3 days to render the parts, re-import them, and render again. I'm not surprised since all assets and files together are more than 100 GB.

[Distinct Sun]

If possible, render in parts. I try and organise my stuff in a way that I can easily switch off half of the layers or even more, render this quite fast, then turn on the other layers and render again. In the end I have 2 or more video files which are much easier and faster to combine.

A possible way to organize this up is to set-up Layer comps for each one of those "sections" or scenes that are in the same file. ( Anime Studio pro only feature)

[stealingfeathers]

Thanks for the feedback to everyone. My previous experience with animation programs has been with Flash, Maya and 3D Studio max. I think they might have different/better render engines... I don't know, it just seems like are able to render a lot faster.

I'll look into the layer comps for myself, but most of my first semester students use Debut (Pro is not a requirement for the class). Now that I've gotten my feet wet in both Debut and Pro, I think I should require Pro for students who want to enroll in the advanced class. There are so many limitations in Debut. I can see that it is really more of a "try before you buy" program. I don't mean to slam Debut, but I think it is only good for a beginner.

[AmigaMan]

I have experience mainly with Maya and that can take an age to render. I don't see how you can compare unless each software is rendering exactly the same thing. I've never had a render in Anime Studio take more than a few minutes. But then I would never have anything longer than 10 seconds of animation to render as, like most, I render every shot separately and compile in video editing software.

[stealingfeathers]

I know, there's no way to really make the comparison that was attempting to make. I was surprised at the render time for a number of reasons -- but it is, what it is.