Render times: what is expected?

Hello,
I recently went to render a project, and it estimated that it would take 44 hours to complete. That is, shall we say, less than ideal.
Some specs about my machine:
MacBook Pro
2.6 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM
The Disk Cache:
LaCie USB3 External SSD (200 GB allocated for cache)
Details about my AE project:
AE version: CS6
3:15 (3 minutes 15 seconds) duration
1920 x 1080 (1080p) resolution
Ray-traced 3D environment
17 light layers
3 cameras
All other layers are either shapes, solids, pictures, or pre-comps
I'm trying to render out to h.264 format. It seems to me that 40+ hours is extremely excessive for a 3:15 long video, but I'm not positive that's the case. I'd love to hear thoughts back on expectations and how I can reduce this time (either through settings or better hardware).
Thank you!

rhannebaum wrote:I chose H.264 because it seemed the most common HD video output, and I didn't want to use QuickTime (.mov) because the resultant .mov files were huge. Very hard to transfer around after the fact.
Oh, I was pretty sure that was your reasoning.
Yes, the resulting file will be huge (unless you're rendering to an image sequence in which case the mass of resulting files will be huge ) . You then take that file (or image sequence) into Premiere or the Adobe Media Encoder to create your easy-to-transfer file - in your case, h.264 is probably your best bet. But, for the reasons I enumerated, you do not want to do the h.264 right out of AE.
There are other options to a lossless Quicktime or an image sequence (although the crashing rescue alone is worth the image sequence option). Where I work we use the Cineform codec from GoPro. It's free and it's close enough to lossless for our workflow, but the file size is significatly smaller. Another great choice is the DNxHD codec which is free from Avid. It has the same benefits as the Cineform codec.
rhannebaum wrote:
Are image sequences simple to import into Premiere? Also, is Media Encoder faster at rendering than AE? I know the obvious benefit is that I can keep working in AE while a comp renders in Media Encoder, but not sure beyond that what ME's value is.
Image sequences are as easy to import into Premiere as any other video format. It's great!
Media Encoder is not faster than AE - and, in some cases (as others have mentioned), it can be much slower. However, it does a much better job of encoding H.264. The quality is higher for the same data rate. That (among other reasons) is why, in the new version of AE CC, the H.264 render option has been deprecated.
For your workflow, I would not suggest sending your AE comp to the AME; render a lossless (or nearly lossless) file out of AE and then use the Adobe Media Encoder to create your final deliverable.
One cool thing about the Adobe Media Encoder is that you can set up watch folders so that any time an uncompressed file lands in that folder, it gets encoded per your specified settings.
rhannebaum wrote:
Is Cinema4D a plugin native to AE CC? I'm afraid my upgrade options are limited to what my company approves, but if there is a legit improvement in render times in CC over CS6, that may seriously persuade them...
Cinema4D is the industry standard 3d animation software for creating motion graphics. It's also got some good scuplting, modeling, and character animation tools and is fast becoming one of the big players in all aspects of 3d animation. One of the reasons for its rapid growth (besides the fact that its easier to learn than its competition) is that it integrates very well with After Effects.
Bundled with (and integrated with) AE CC, you get a lite version of C4D. It doesn't have nearly the power of the full program, but it's worlds better than messing with the 3d ray-traced stuff and gives you a lot more tools to work with.
Bottom line: if your company is going to want you to do more 3d stuff, you really need to get into a plugin like Element, 3d Invigorator, or ShapeShifter. They render much faster.
And, if they really want you to do some great 3d, they'll need to get a full-fledged 3d program for you (and the requisite training). Upgrading to the CC version of AE is a great halfway step though.

Similar Messages

Unreasonable render times - What's wrong?

I have an iMac with the i7 processor, 12 Gig of memory and the high end graphics card.
I have a 20 SECOND video I am sending out to render for an AppleTV (second Gen/720) device. Thus far, it has taken over 10 minutes and it is less than 1/4 rendered. Seriously? FinalCutPro X didn't take this long to "render" it to 442 to view it full quality in the editor.
This can not be right. I spent $2500 on this "fireball" and this is the best I can do with a 20 second video? I am going to be working on full length films and 20 minute long videos. If this render time is standard, I will be waiting for days to render a film to just an AppleTV format.
This simply can not be right. How do I tell what's clogging this up?

kb8wfh wrote:
... . If this render time is standard,...
This simply can not be right. How do I tell what's clogging this up?
no, not standard.
on my ol' MacMini C2D/8GB a Project gets exported within 'real time'.
but ....
render-time is determined by two factors:
• is your 'system set-up' ok? you have blazing fast hardware, but is the rest in perfect/intended shape? all apps on intended location? all data in intended location? ... hard to tell from remote. a very nice common mistake for example is, to install an 'OS partition' on the internal hard-drive (for whatever reason ...) - if this partition is too small, doesn't offer enough room for the OS and apps to 'breath', esp. encoding instantly needs hours ... there're many other 'mistakes' optional ....
• complexiity of Project: a multi-layerd timeline with -zillions of effects, color corrections etc etc needs some rendertime - for my hobbyist's projects (max two tracks, some re-timing for slowmos, custom made titles/transitions) this usually happens in the background. I'm actually helping someone with a 4min 'music video' on an i5 Mac, 4-7layered multicam clips, and even without proxies we happily work in real-time.
hard to tell from remote.
you like to add a full screen screenshot of your Project/FCPX?

Looong render times with motion templates

I've been a big advocate for FCPX as there are a lot of great features but there are some things that are just killing me, no.1 render time.
I'm working on some simple presentation edits using motion templates I have built in motion 5 and published to fcpx. The templates all consist of a single dropbox for video with a type field for test messages next to it. These are against a flat white rectangle used to reflect (similar to the coverflow but against a white background) and a subtle camera sweep has been added so it slowly turns from one side to the other by 30 degrees. Each of these is 10 seconds long.
I chop up my imported movie on the timeline (untouched by grade/fx/retiming) and add the template to each of the chopped clips. I then select each applied template in the timeline and use the video well to select the clip below it for the dropzone. I add my text. That's all good. I now have a timeline approx 3 minutes long consisting of these motion graphics templates.
Now, if I chose to either render or export a QT with timeline settings, estimated time is 8 - 9 hrs (I have tried both) I left a 3:30 project exporting last night at 11:45. It finished at 9:00AM.
That is just unacceptable. It is irritating because the functionality of building the sequences in FCPX far outweighs what FCP 7 is capable of but the so-called "renderless" abilities of FCPX
are making life ****.
I use Event Manager X to turn off everything I am not using except the individual project. I have reset preferences in Preference Manager to see if that helps. I have purged using terminal. I have my clips on an external firewire 800 HD. I have no other software running. I accept I need a more powerful Mac - I'm using a 2009 3 Ghz Intel Core Duo iMac with 6gig ram using Lion 10.7.2 and FCPX 10.0.2 but 9 hours for a 3:30 clip?
Any suggestions for where I can cut down on render time are appreciated. The source clip for the video for the dropzones and the final exported presentation movie are HD ProRes.
Cheers

The situation you describe does not seem normal. It should not take nearly that long to render and export your 3:30 movie. Considering that your mac is not one of the most recent vintage, and your are editing in full HD, one could expect it to take a bit of time, but nothing like this.
In the way of troubleshooting, you could try and export just one of these 10 second segments.
I have no way of knowing for sure, but I guess that it might export in a much more reasonable amount of time.
I suspect that memory may be running scarce, which, as has been repeatedly mentioned in these fora, is a problem affecting many of us using FCP X under Lion. You mentioned you used "purge" in the Terminal, but in such a long render you might have had to do it repeatedly...

3d render times

I am trying to render a "final quality" 3d animation clip that is 5 seconds long. After 36 hours I cancelled the render.
What is to be expected for render times for Photoshop CS5 for 3D animations, understanding that there are lots of variables?
This kind of rendering time makes the tool unusable.
Do I need to configure something differently on my system to achieve reasonable render times?
I am using:
Model Name:          Mac Pro
Model Identifier:          MacPro5,1
Processor Name:          Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed:          2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors:          2
Total Number Of Cores:          8
L2 Cache (per core):          256 KB
L3 Cache (per processor):          12 MB
Memory:          8 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed:          5.86 GT/s
Boot ROM Version:          MP51.007F.B03
SMC Version (system):          1.39f11
SMC Version (processor tray):          1.39f11
Any help much appreciated.

I'm still not good enough to answer questions on Shake without having shake in front of me... but I'll try.
I think you might need a switch node and noodle in 12 times from your move nodes. There you'll be able to set the range of frames for each one.
Also -- for some reason, I always try to avoid actually pulling more than one noodle off a file-in node. Mainly be cause it can be unmanageable if you want to make a global change upstream on the file-in. You can use a switchmatte node or a colorspace node (not the name of it) set one noodle in and then pull your 12 off of that.
Hope that makes sense.
Good luck,
CaptM

Are my render times normal?

I've been editing DV footage with PP for several years. I'm now working on my first couple of HDV projects and want to check whether the astoundingly long render times I'm finding are due to settings errors on my part or are simply what one must expect with HDV rendering.
One project is chroma keying and general cleaning up on a 107-minute .mp4 file, which is requiring an average of approximately 15 minutes render time per minute of video (as opposed to my experience of between one and three minutes per minute with DV footage).
The other project is a three-camera multiscreen shoot, working with HDV .mpeg files, and again rendering seems to be somewhere in the order of 10 minutes per minute of video.
I'm on a nice fast quad core HP Workstation (Windows 7), and have had no major issues with PP over dozens of DV projects.
Can anyone shed any light, please, as to whether I may have some majorly incorrect project settings here or whether this is just a case of "Welcome to the world of HDV"? Thanks.

That p4 was realeased sometime around 2004-2005 most likely. So it's actually a 7-8 year old CPU. So for computer parts a 7 year old part is basically going to be totally big pain to have to use. It is also a single core CPU. Now days intel CPU's are quad-cores and are also clocked higher than 2.8Ghz. The workstation you listed is also a 32-bit workstation so it doesn't take advantage of cs5 (or a higher versions) 64-bit abilites. It also means you can't have more than 4Gb of RAM. (actually like 3Gb though)
The mobo on that workstation also doesn't have 3 Gbps or 6 Gbps sata connections which is rather limiting.
Here is a benchmark that will show you that a i7-2600k cpu is almost 10 times faster than your current CPU in almost every benchmark.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/92?vs=287
My recommendation would be to do a totally new edit system. There just simply isn't any way it would make since to keep trying to upgrade your current one. What would your budget be if you wanted to do a new build? IMO if it's a tight budget then you should go with a Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge CPU, but if it's big then you'll go with a Sandy Bridge-E, or a Xeon setup.

Reasonable Render Times

Recently upgraded to iDVD 7 and Just completed a 25 minute project that I encoded in professional mode, using the Revolution iDVD theme. Very little noteworthy about the project - it was exported from FCE as a self-contained QT movie with chapter markers. It took 7 hours to render (compared to a 2.5 hour encoding estimate for Best Performance mode) - and this was only the time it took to create an ISO image. (Two thirds of this time was encoding the menu assets.)
Do these render times sound reasonable? (I just read a column that reported a 48 minute render in professional mode for a 24 minute video, but I have no idea how fast the machine they were using was.) Certainly the 2.5 hour Best Performance (to make a direct comparison possible) was quite a bit longer than what I'd have expected in previous iDVD versions. Is it possibly that the new themes are more complex than earlier ones? (Or perhaps my CPU is just plain over-matched?) Or maybe both.

Of course I'm new to HD video work (or any video work!), so my expectations may be out of line, but I was stunned to discover how LONG it takes to do anything that results in output file.
My exports from FCE take ages (granted, I choose HD 1920x1280 16:9, but render times aren't much different for other modes). And my iDVD iso creation times take ages too.
For example, I edited and exported four sequences from FCE, each sequence being about 6 minutes of video. For what it's worth, it was HDV, and I exported/converted to 1920x1280 at high quality. Each export of about 6 min of video took hours - like 3 or more hours per export. So the whole export took at least 12 hours.
Then in iDVD I learned very quickly that the projects that used "fancy" (highly animated) menus took incredibly long to render, so I chose a very simple theme. Even still, generating my iDVD iso took 6 hours I think.
This is on a 24" iMac with 2.8GHz "extreme" core 2 duo.
Having never done video work, I'm just astounded at the apparent time cost. I dunno if it's an issue with coming from HDV (where there's more work required to generate frames), or if it's an output resolution/frame rate (I use 29.97) or what.
Forgive my rambling; point is, the whole process is VERY slow for me too. I've got >200GB free on my drive. I don't think I'm running out of RAM, although I'll report new numbers soon after I add another 2GB (I have 2GB now).

Inconsistent render times

Hey all
I'm relatively new to After Effects and rendering videos and such. My main issue is how inconsisent my render times are and the inconsitency of my % of RAM being used. I don't have the fastest for computer for this and I know that: I expect my render times to take a bit. But When I first started this a month ago, my % of RAM being used was around 85%, and now its like 17%. I never changed anything, it just doens't use as much RAM now. I don't run anything while rendering or mess around on my computer.
Also, the times are weird. I understand that render times differ due to different effects and files and parts and all that, but mine are way off it seems. Yesterday it took me 4 hours to render a 5 minute video, and then later that night it took me 3 hours to render an 11 minute video. Both videos were rendered with the same settings and both featured one video and one audio file. Why are they so different? Any tips on making these speeds faster? I have Windows 7 with 4 GB of RAM and then just a standard Graphics card and all that.
Thanks

Renders can vary by hours due to the type of footage being used in AE, the current settings you have applied to AE, the techniques used in your compositions and the specific types of effects applied to the footage. Since you state none of those, we're flying blind despite your previously-clear statements. Sorry.
You also might find this helpful:
What information should I provide when asking a question on this forum?

Hello my name is Omar Andres Santacruz, finished iMedicalOffice buy a program you have in the app store but what he said on the page is not what I expected, I was very disappointed that, frustrated and reweighed when I check my account had gained 139.99 f

Hello my name is Omar Andres Santacruz, finished iMedicalOffice buy a program you have in the app store but what he said on the page is not what I expected, I was verydisappointed that, frustrated and reweighed when I check my account had gained139.99 for 7 times, I do not understand what has happened that is not the first time I buy something ustedeses thank you very much for your help

Wow, Karan Taneja, you've just embarrassed yourself on a worldwide support forum. Not only is your post ridiculous and completely inappropriate for a technical support forum, but it also shows your ignorance as to whom you think the audience is. Apple is not here. It's users, like you.
If you would have spent half the time actually reading the Terms of Use of this forum that YOU agreed to by signing up to post, as you did composing that usesless, inappropriate post, you (and the rest of us on this forum) would have been much better off.

Final Cut Studio 2 Render Times Exponetianlly Greater

Used to have Final Cut Studio, loved it, render times were very reasonable, I upgraded 2 weeks ago to Final Cut Studio 2 and the render times are not outrageous. What used to take 5-10 minutes to render is 3 hours or so. Am I missing something?

Everyone who is experiencing this should report it to FCP Feedback. You can find that in the Final Cut Pro menu within FCP, or here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/finalcutpro.html

Extract Pages- and the Split- not doing what I expect them to

I have a document created in Illustrator (CS4) which has multiple artboards. I want it split into multiple documents, one art board—> one document with only that artwork. When I use the Extract PAges… and the Split… comands to generate multiple documents, I get the multiple docs (same number of docs created as pages in original doc).
Only thing is every doc has all the artboards and all the artwork as the original doc. I could understand all the artwork being there but all the artboards also?? What's going on?
Appreciate any pointers on this.
Trying to write a JSX to run in AI but struggling so far. Thread for AI solution started here: AS) export single page PDFs from multi-artboards

I don't expect mind reading but I'l settle for careful reading
I tried to explain how pages and artboards are qualitatively different objects only to be told they are the same thing and that's all I needed to say.
I tried to explain that opening the very same file in Illustrator showed a lot more objects than it did in Acrobat. You probably don't remember because you breezed over something that you didn't think you needed to know because you were, at each stage, a step ahead of me (slow down already!).
From my second post:
I can't remember if Splitting gave enumerate files or the one file but either way ALL the artwork was in the enumerate files if they got made [.…] I ended up saving as CS3 .ai files which gives a Save artboards to seperate files option and, unlike the artboard range option on Save As PDF, it actually works.
From my third post
An artboard is not a page as far as Acrobat and Illustrator apps are concerned. I was trying to highlight the distinctly different way the two apps handle them. I can watch a one page with just one shape document in Acrobat become a 20 artboard, 40+ objects layout in Illustrator. Same document interpreted as one Page in Acrobat and 23 artboards in AI.
I was on this forum because even a manual Document Menu> Split… command is not doing what I expected with the AI generated 23pp PDF file. I expected the 23 individual 'artboards' and content to each make a separate file.
Thom Parker wrote:
I don't remember you mentioning that you re-imported the PDF files into Illustrator. This is an important detail. You also posted to an Acrobat scripting forum and never said you were not interested in an Acrobat Script. You also never explained the problem you were seeing. You were never clear.
Covered that but note Illustrator doesn't import PDF files. .ai .eps and .pdf are all native files for Illustrator and just open, sometimes with an additional dialogue to choose a page from multiple pages. It imports .dwg, .svg and that sort of thing relying on translator plugins. This is the fourth time I'm saying I should have posted in Acrobat Win or Mac not scripting, apologies I was scripting when I made OP and probably frustrated. You were more clear it's true, clearly ignoring what I was getting at in each post re artboard cf. page objects.
You see, in a PDF file each page has it's own content stream, i.e., a stream of vector graphics operators. Graphics can be drawn anywhere in the coordinate space, but the page view is clipped by a crop rectangle. So graphics can exist in the stream, but never be visible to the user because they are outside the crop. I get the impression that in Illustrator the Artboards all exist in a single coordinate space? And that the conversion to PDF places this entire coordinate space into a single content stream. Then each page would be a different crop of the same content stream. If this is the case then I believe there are PDF optimization operations in Acrobat that would fix your problem by removing all content outside the crop.
Yeah I've hacked lots of PDF files in AI. They use more than one clipping rect per page from memory. Correct, the artboards are defined in a single co-ord space it would seem — artboards are discretely and independently located on the document canvas and can even overlap each other. Yes those operations might work, I never though of that, I came across an Illustrator based solution early on in this thread. There's no conversion going on in Acrobat though I think, the file stays native PDF from AI to Acrobat and back to AI. As I've noted it's the way Acrobat displays or parses the data that in effect hides all the 'off-page' objects but open the same file in AI and it's all still there.
You know, we can't read minds, you actually have to explain what it is you need.
I didn't know it, but I needed to get a confirmation on the artboardRange property bug in Illustrator CS4 and/or a confirmation that artboards are not treated as page objects, and I ended up having to lecture you on something you may have no interest in, sorry if I've been a pain. This is part of bigger bug elsewhere that I've been trying to get resolved or around on and off for a month. Every turn another bug, it gets confusing and frustrating at times

Recent Grad - needs help on what to expect for phone interview

Hi, I am a recent computer science graduate of DePaul university. I have been looking for an entry level full time position for the past three months and I finally got a nible. The problem is I have never had a phone interview and I really don't know what to expect. I really need this job so I want to prepare myself as much as possible. The position in and entry level programmer/analyst. Below is the job description, can someone please tell me wher I can find some quick reference for COBOL and C++. I took a class in both and did pretty well but that was school and this is real life. Again, I really want this position and I am a really quick study. Can someone please tell me what kinds of questions I should prepare to answer. I know the is a java forum but I was hoping one of you professional programmers can point me in the right direction. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Role: Programmer Analyst (COOL Developer)
The Programmer Analyst is responsible for developing and managing the
application code and user interface (UI) components for a basic system
on the products and services team. (These systems can include the base TBA
System, desktop applications, IVR systems, or Internet/intranet applications.)
The Programmer Analyst works closely with other programmer analysts,
quality assurance analysts, and systems analysts, with tasks in the following
categories:
Planning and design. The Programmer Analyst takes the specifications
from the Systems Analyst and then determines the detailed tasks required to
create the code and UI.
Developing the application code and UI components. The Programmer
Analyst builds the code and UI components according to the functional
specifications and detailed design.
Other specific responsibilities in development include:
Working with the Systems Analyst to clarify and improve the design as
required. He or she may also prepare user documentation and will unit
test each piece of code to verify the basic functionality before passing it along
for more comprehensive testing. Throughout the project, the programmer analyst
consistently uses code management tools to avoid versioning problems.
Role Requirements
Problem solving and decision making
Learning agility
Client responsiveness
Project execution
Project analysis and planning
Technical Skills
Structured programming, design, and language(s) such as COBOL or C
Operating systems
Relational databases and data models (ex. DB2, Oracle or Access)
Source code management
Editing, compiling, and debugging tools
Creating user and technical documentation
Years of Relevant Experience Required: 0-4 years
Travel Required: None
COOL stands for COBOL Object-Oriented Language. It utilizes some of the
skills involved in both COBOL and C++ programming.
Again ANY HELP WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED.
A

Actually, no. Just need time to get to your post. If you have not had your interview already try this.
One, bone up on your basic program structures.
Know basic keywords, etc.
Have your books in front of you and open to some topics that seem like test questions.
Review the content of the books that are pertinent. Prepare for the interview like you would a test.
ABOVE ALL - RELAX, sound confident that if you do not know the answer now you can look it up. This is an entry level position - They do not expect you to know everything - just have a basic understanding and be able to go from there.
Do not be afraid to say "I don't know but I know where to look in xxxx book".
Sorry, been busy today just got to forums.
If you posted without allowing a few hours for a reply then ....

First Generated Bill DOUBLE what I expected!!!

I just received my first generated bill. It is DOUBLED what I expected!!! I changed plans in the middle of the month to increase my calling minutes and I added four "friends and family." They added $120.00 in "Monthly Access Fees." This is after the fact I have not received my $100 Blackberry Rebate!!!
Is this what I can expect from Verizon every month???? Off I go to the Mass. Attorney General's office.

You just made my day, 48VJ!!!!!
And in response to the OP:
bostonhomeport wrote:
I just received my first generated bill. It is DOUBLED what I expected!!! I changed plans in the middle of the month to increase my calling minutes and I added four "friends and family." They added $120.00 in "Monthly Access Fees." This is after the fact I have not received my $100 Blackberry Rebate!!!
Additional charges on the first bill may be due to prorating for a partial month, then full billing for the next month (as budone stated). Changing plans in the middle of the month also pro-rates your minutes for each part of the month, and can drastically increase your bill. For instance, if you were on a 700 minute plan, and changed at the midpoint to 1400 minutes, the first half of the month's allowance would be 350 minutes; so if you were at, say, 500 minutes by that point, then you would be charged with 150 overage minutes. If this is what happened, then you should call Customer Service (as has been suggested multiple times) and ask them to BACKDATE the plan change to cover the entire first month of service.
Also, your Friends and Family numbers do NOT apply to the whole month, just from the day they were added. Any calls made to those numbers before they were added to your account will subtract from your allowance.
Hope you get this all worked out....

Render time in HD

What is the standard time to render and export a quicktime movie in HD format. My format is DVCPRO HD1080i50. PC Specification is quadcore dual intel xeon mac pro with 6gb of ram. I need approx 8 min to render a 3 min video. Plz help. I am using fcp7 in OSX Lion.

What HD format? There are many. Full resolution DVCPRO HD? ProRes? H.264? For YouTube? Vimeo? BluRay?
What plugins/filters do you have on the footage? Render times will vary based on that.

Slow render times in Premiere when linking After Effects media

I'm an Avid Media Composer editor but I just switched to Premiere for a special project that needs to have non-interlaced output. I've been pretty impressed until I integrated an After Effects project into my timeline. My render times have now increased exponentially, despite the fact that the After Effects effects are quite simple - single layers of video with very simple moves. Can anyone else chime in with their experience integrating After Effects projects into Premiere? This just seems too horrible to be true.

I've found that the time to render out of After Effects versus the time to render a Dynamic Link comp in PPro is roughly identical. In fact, in many cases it's a bit quicker.
For heavy duty comps, I'd expect to see PPro struggle a little bit more, but definitely not with the basic work you seem to be talking about.

Premiere-After Effects Dynamic Link render times vary wildly after minimal composition changes

Here is something strange that happens a lot to me.
I'll have a sequence in Premiere Pro CC 2014 that is entirely or largely an AE comp that I have dynamically linked. I'll use a specific case as an example, but it's happened with various projects.
In this most recent one the visual (but not audio) of my Premiere sequence is one AE dynamically linked comp of about 90 seconds. It's more or less a fancy slide show- some photos with moves, some text, motion blur, masking, maybe a few filters. Fairly basic stuff as far as After Effects goes.
Anyhow, I like to render the sequence in Premiere and then watch it down with music to see if the timing works and make adjustments from there. That's my usual workflow. The strange thing is that when I render, the render times can vary tremendously. With this particular project, one time rendered in about 2 minutes in Premiere. I watched it down and I noticed a spelling error, which I fixed. Just changing one word of text in AE. This, of course, causes the entire linked comp to need to be rendered again in Premiere. This time when I go to render, it took about 20 minutes and it only got about 70% of the way through. A huge difference and all I changed was a couple letters, which shouldn't impact how intensive of a render is needed. What I usually do is cancel the render when it takes that long, then quit Premiere, reopen, and render right away after I open. When I do this, after the application restart, the sequence will then render in the faster approximately 2 minute duration. Almost invariably this is true.
So I end up quitting and restarting Premiere a lot to get the faster render times. But of course that's annoying.
What is going on here?
I know that some might have critiques of the workflow and watching in Premiere and the fact that one letter change forces the entire sequence re-render. I know I could break it up and there are ways around that. But I am not interested in such critiques. My work flow actually is quite efficient when the 2 minute render time happens. Just not when it takes 10x more than that for the same thing. Why are there these huge render time swings?
My guess is that some cache gets filled up, so when the application is just started, and the cache is empty, the render works much better. But I really do not know.
Help please.

There is currently a bug that causes Dynamic Link performance to be poor when the main After Effects application is running. (The underlying issue is that the main After Effects application is sending many more messages during Dynamic Link than it needs to.)
The easy workaround is to quit the main After Effects application when using Premiere Pro to process a dynamically linked After Effects composition.
This bug is fixed in an update due to be released in less than two weeks.

Render times: what is expected?

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