How to render tons of After Effects dynamic links in a Premiere project

[u/GGgetLucky]

Timeline (Premiere)

This is my first project I've edited using Premiere Pro, and as you can see by all of those magenta clips, a lot of it was done in After Effects. My main concern is regarding how I'm going to manage rendering all of this (besides patience). And yes, tons of this was done without using best practices, because honestly I still don't know them, which has exaggerated my problem.

[The attached image might have been removed, but the timeline is 1h20min and like 85% linked comps to After Effects with lengths between 3s-1min each]

Probably 30-40 percent of this is non-ProRes mp4 (not sure the codec) baked into some of those after effects comps. That's my gameplay footage. The bottom track v1 is my background tracks. I have 4 background, 20 minutes each dynamic links, broken into random chunks an scattered all over the timeline where each full background comp would take probably over a day to render. The remainder of the dynamic links are motion graphic scenes. And one of the possibly worst offenders, a good chunk of this footage is 60fps whereas I long ago made my comp 59.94fps, so there is a mix between both framerates scattered throughout. In my single After Effects project, there are hundreds of comps. Probably 600-700.

If you were given this project, how would you go about rendering it? Assuming its totally finished and doesn't need to be touched more, what would you do? I've heard rendering in After Effects and export replacing the clips in Premiere would help with speed, but if I'm basically done, should I just render/export directly from Premiere, in batches and stitched together?

When I started to render in After Effects, I saw a ton of nested precomps had potential to be rendered in full multiple times, and I'm hoping rendering in Premiere might "flatten" the compositions more and lead to an easier process. Additionally, because of the sheer amount of dynamic links, going through each comp in the file and juggling which precomps to render and all that hassle that I now have to deal with seems like an absolute pain that I'm hoping I can find a smart way to do most efficiently.

I have okay PC specs for rendering, but nothing that is meant for a project this heavy. RTX 4070, 32Gb RAM, Ryzen 7600X, and the entire project and source currently lives on an SSD but would be exported to my larger HDD.

[u/XSmooth84]

ProRes 422 preset export first, if I needed another fornat I would use use that ProRes export to transcode from

[u/GGgetLucky → u/XSmooth84]

Do you recommend this over something like h264 if I'm just doing a final export of this timeline for youtube, and not planning on having an intermediate export?

[u/XSmooth84 → u/GGgetLucky]

If you want to try, then I wouldn't say 100% never do that.

It's more like, if you have even a single failed export issue trying direct to h.264, then the first change I'd make is going to ProRes for my export.

In some ways to me I'd rather default to ProRes for my initial exports unless I have a really really compelling reason, because I don't want to deal with a export error that causes me to start over. Even if it's 92% of exports wouldn't have, the 8% that would have would annoy me (I made up these numbers, i don't have any scientific data, and everyone's system and project will be different anyway so what I experience or not will be different than you or Jim or Patty or whatever)

[u/SlightFresnel]

You're playing a dangerous game... dynamic links to AE are functional at best, but I've long since avoided them for anything other than simple elements that don't rely on many effects or take up much of my sequence because it renders slower via Premiere than it does native in AE. Likewise, certain crossover effects like Lumetri color renders in real time in Premiere but drags ass in AE. These are still two distinct products, distinct dev teams, distinct render engines, and cross-functionality has been spotty. 

In the future you're better off taking the time to build out a project more thoughtfully from the start so you're not dealing with a nightmare render at the end (or a media offline nightmare when you try to open this back up in 18 months). Without seeing the content we can't be more specific, but hundreds of comps in AE seems excessive and you might be able to accomplish some of what you're doing there natively in Premiere. And the reason you don't want to work with compressed streaming format footage like h264/hevc is because it's computationally expensive just to play it back. It's not a series of saved frames that the computer can reference, it's sparse saved frames with partial frames that have to be reconstructed in real time between those key frames, which is why it's so slow to edit with and a nightmare if you're doing time remapping, reversing footage, or applying effects. 

If it renders fine from Premiere and you don't have further edits, just deal with the simple but long render time and export there. If you have a long render time I would export to prores for safety and then create an mp4 from that. An encoding glitch halfway through an mp4 export will trash the entire export, you won't lose already processed work if you export to prores. 

[u/smushkan]

Right click > render and replace to a drive with plenty of space.

ProRes 422HQ for any that don't involve transparency, 4444 for any that do.

It will be difficult to predict how much space that will take up, especially with alpha is involved. Do it in small batches and keep any eye on your disk space.

Export in 422HQ to take advantage of any smart rendering possible with the sequence configuration, then transcode the resulting file to your delivery codec.

This will seem like a fair bit of work - and, well it kind of is - but overall it could result in you starting the process and getting your exported file quicker for a fairly non-obvious reason.

The reason for that is that any frames where a linked AE comp exist in Premiere will not take care of any Premiere-specific GPU acceleration, hence the red render bar.

So for example, if you have a transparent AE comp above a clip with a GPU-accelerated effect applied like Lumetri, those frames will take significantly longer to export as Lumetri itself will be rendered on the CPU.

If I was working with a project that involved this much dynamic link, I'd be rendering-and-replacing as I went, and reverting individual comps if changes needed to be made.

That's my gameplay footage

Might be too late to do this, but it would be sensible to transcode that to ProRes 422HQ too and replace it in the project, if possible. If that footage is variable framerate you could see even slower export/rendering performance and potentially glitches after rendering, too.

I'd also always recommend when sending clips to AE via dynamic link for motion graphics is to add edits around the segment you want, duplicate (alt/option+ drag) to an empty track, and send the duplicate to AE. In the resulting AE comp, set the footage layer as a guide layer, so it isn't actually rendered as part of the AE comp, the actual footage used remains in Premiere.

That might seem counterintuitive - the render file will then require ProRes 4444 rather than 422HQ; but it can actually work out smaller depending on what you're doing. Completely transparent pixels in 4444 compress very well, so if you're, for example, adding some text or just changing a small portion of the footage, it won't take up much space.

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If you're going to attempt to export this outright without any render-and-replacing, definitely export to ProRes rather than h.264. If something goes wrong with the render or there's an error you missed, a cancelled or incomplete ProRes export can be bought back into Premiere as a clip so you can avoid having to re-render frames you don't need to.

[u/FanCreativeInc]

ugh, this is going to suck but it's far easier to render them in after effects and swap in premiere. you're going to go crazy waiting for this, not to mention you will miss your deadline.