Overflow volumes and segment settings – Adobe After Effects CS3 User Manual
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AFTER EFFECTS CS3
User Guide
629
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In the Render Queue panel, select Skip Existing Files in the Render Settings section so that multiple computers
do not render the same frames. Make sure that Use Storage Overflow is not selected. Do not use multiple output
modules for one render item when using Skip Existing Files.
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Save the project on the computer where you opened it in step 2.
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On each computer that will be rendering, open and save the project. This ensures that After Effects records the
new relative paths to each computer in the following step.
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Unless the network can handle large file transfers rapidly, copy the project file and all its source footage to each
rendering computer.
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Open the Render Queue panel on each computer and click Render. You do not need to start rendering on each
computer simultaneously, but to ensure equal workloads, start them at approximately the same time. As each
computer finishes rendering a frame, After Effects searches the Output folder for the next unrendered frame and
starts rendering again.
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You can stop and start any computer at any time. However, if you stop a computer without starting it again, the
frame that it was rendering may not be finished. If one or more computers stop during rendering, starting any one
computer will ensure that all frames in the sequence get rendered.
See also
“Network rendering with watch folders” on page 625
“Work in the Render Queue panel” on page 591
Overflow volumes and segment settings
Overflow volume and segment settings are in the Output Preferences category.
Choose Edit > Preferences > Output (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Output (Mac OS).
When the disk volume to which After Effects is writing files is full, it can continue writing files to an overflow volume.
You can set preferences to make After Effects render to up to six different disk volumes, as specified in the Overflow
Volumes list. You can change the amount of disk space remaining on a volume before After Effects considers it an
overflow by modifying the Minimum Diskspace Before Overflowing value.
Note: The log file reports when a render overflows.
After Effects can also render sequences and movie files into segments that are limited to a specified number of files
or by file size; this is useful when preparing a movie for a medium such as CD-ROM, for which file or folder size may
need to be limited to chunks of 650 MB or less. Use the Segment Movie Files At value to set the maximum size for
segments in megabytes. Use the Segment Sequences At value to set the maximum number of still-image files in a
folder.
If you are exporting a movie that is larger than the maximum file size for your hard disk formatting scheme, then
you can set the Segment Movie Files At value to a value under this maximum. Hard disks formatted for Windows
can be formatted using the FAT, FAT32, or NTFS scheme. The maximum file size in the FAT scheme is 2GB, and the
maximum file size in the FAT32 scheme is 4GB. The maximum size for a file for NTFS is very large (approximately
16 terabytes), so you are unlikely to hit this limit with a single movie.
Audio is also rendered in segments, the length of which is set by the Audio Block Duration value. If you hear pops
in audio, you may be hearing a faulty transition between segments; if you have enough memory, increase the Audio
Block Duration to be longer than your output to avoid this problem.