After Effects CC Rendering Issues.

Question

Hey guys,
I'm rendering DSLR footage out of After Effects for editing and grading. I have every clip in it's own comp with the Neat Video denoising plugin applied and some film grain, and I'm rendering every comp individually as DNxHD. The problem is that each comp seems to taken significantly longer to render than the one before it. For example, the first comp I rendered was about 11 minutes long and took a little under 2 hours. The next was only about 10 minutes long, but took 5 hours. I've even walked into the office in the morning to find comps on pace to take 10 hours. I'm rendering off a 2013 iMac with 24 GBs of RAM and a 3.5 GHz i7 processor rendering onto a 4 TB thunderbolt G-Raid. I have 18 GBs of Ram allocated to AE, and mulitprocessing enabled. Any ideas? I'm assuming there's some aspect of memory management that I'm not using properly. I should also point out that when I start rendering, the fan on my iMac goes into overddrive, but when I come in the next day everything is whisper quiet. Could my computer be overheating a scaling back it's work load?
-Mike

Answer 1

Here's a workflow idea:
You can import a Premiere project into AE and it makes a composition with each cut on its own layer. So you could import your edit into AE and maintain all of the cuts. (As mentioned, you won't have transitions in place, but a dissolve is easy enough to create in AE.)
There are scripts out there (like VideoCopilot's Trim Compose script) that will make a composition for each layer (each cut, in this case) and you can then render each cut out with your noise removal.
You could then import those files into Premiere to carry on with your XML to Resolve workflow and you won't have rendered hours of noise removal out of AE that you'll never use.
Another option is to skip putting each clip into its own composition and simply render the whole thing out and then grade that. Alternatively, you could precompose whole scenes in AE and render those out.
Another, entirely different thought, would be to use Color Finesse in AE to do your color grading. But, if you're familiar with Resolve, you might prefer that.