How do I make long videos using After Effects? My laptop is Lenovo y700 with 4 gb of Nvidia GTX 960m (not the best but it does the job) and 8 GB RAM. Anyways, I am working on a podcast that ranges from 20-30 mins in length. When we upload it to youtube, we need to add visual effects as well (else, obviously it will become dull). The effects are simple and it is mostly an audio spectrum that responds to the voice and perhaps a neon light flickering.
Anyways, as expected 30 mins is a lot for After Effects to render and it takes around 2 hours to render that. I also tried directly loading the after effects save file into premiere but in the end it took around the same amount of time to render. Is there an alternative to bypass such a long render time for such a minor effect?
There is no way to &quot;bypass&quot; long render times. After-Effects needs to calculate where every pixel has to be and then pack all this information into a container such as .mov or .mp4. However, you can speed up render time by enabling hardware-acceleration in the settings of After-Effects. You can also increase the amount of RAM allocated to After-Effects. Lastly, make sure you render the file in a reasonable resolution (1920x1080 is good enough for most cases) with a reasonable framerate (for a podcast you can probably get away with 24 frames per second, depending on how responsive the audio-spectrum is probably even 20.)
That said, on your hardware, 2 hours of rendering for an effect like that over 30 minutes is not unreasonable and perfectly normal. Try out the optimization I suggested above and see if you can speed up the process a bit.