AERenderer and its flaws

written on Saturday, 1st November, 2008

The render system coming with After Effects provides a sophisticated set of configuration dialogs. Be careful using these options!

Working for the illuminated facade of the Spardabank Hessen e.G. headquarter in Frankfurt we have several giant (up to about 7000 pixels wide) After Effects compositions. Some of these setups take hours and hours in the process of rendering.
Due to different needs, we do not always need the full resolution. Fortunately the AERenderer has this small dialog to reduce the actual size a composition is rendered at: Render every [n]th pixel. Unfortunately this will not work as expected in every composition!

One would presume, that the rendering of just every umpteenth pixel works like a pre-rendering-resizing and besides speeds up the whole process because the pixels in between are not computed.
Not knowing exactly what causes errors at this step, I presume that there is a incompatibility of some plug-ins with this functionality of the renderer. Which is especially irksome, since some of the most performance-consuming effects will cause errors in the final display, e. g. the glow effect.

The last composition I had to render wanted to have about 50 hours of full power from my MacBook Pro (2.33 gigahertz, 2 gigabyte RAM) in full resolution. The rendering of every twentieth pixel resulted in a way darker image, then the full resolution rendering. Large parts of the composition are lightened by the mentioned glow effect. In the end I decided to render full resolution in low quality. This took about twenty hours.

Maybe Adobes hands are tied since some plug-ins are programmed by third parties, but at least the default effects supplied by Adobe should work properly. Perhaps this option is not used frequently, so that there is low interest in solving this problem. Perhaps just few people know about this possibility. Anyhow Adobe should improve the rendering process as soon as possible.