After Effects prob: short finished clips

[Steve Williamson]

When I import a clip into After Effects (PC, v6.0) that's, let's say for example, 3 minutes long ... and I apply an effect to it ... once I tell it to render, it churns and burns for a while and produces a file that presumably has the rendered video in it.

That's true, but the rendered video never seems to be more than 10 seconds long.

Even when I manually set the composition to be the same length as the clip I imported, it still seems to only render the first 10 seconds of footage.

What's up with this crazy app?

[John Britt]

After Effects does not render in the same sense that Premiere renders. Premiere will create temp video files of your preview, storing them on your harddrive for complete access. After Effects does not.

After Effects does a RAM Preview -- it does not create "tangible" preview files like Premiere, it only previews as much as your installed memory will allow. Factor in any other applications that might be running in the background and using memory, as well as the "difficulty" of the effects you are rendering, and you may find yourself with only 10 seconds of preview.

[Steve Williamson]

Clarification: I guess when I refer to a preview, I'm talking about the finished AVI file that AE produces. When I view that AVI file in Windows Media Player, it never seems to be any longer than 10 seconds.

[John Britt]

Oh! Sorry for the misunderstanding. That is a strange one. How exactly do you render your footage? Using the Make Movie feature, or with the Export feature?

[Steve Williamson]

I found a setting in the Composition somehwere that lets me set the composition length to be the same as the clip I'm working with. This seemed to fix the problem.

Now I just need to figure out why my Magic Bullet "Look Suite" effects all seem to add random sparks and pixelations to my compositions. My guess it's an artifact from differences in settings between the source clip and the end composition.

But that's a whole 'nother threat.

Thanks.