Extremely slow export

Hi

Sorry I'm very late to this conversation, and i can see others have been helping investigate this for you. My hunch here is that it is the audio. Have you tried removing the audio and then checking on the export times? It looks to me that you are using Motion for a project that it is not really intended for. FCP is the tool for a project like this, whereby you would create the graphics in motion, publish as a generator (or even export as media for the FCP project) and then you would add the audio in FCP. I'm just speaking from experience trying similar projects - where the slow export times turned out to be just how Motion does not cope well with large audio files for export.

@imi_trcz, maybe I'm missing something here, but you are comparing two different projects and apps. Even though they are both video apps, you can't expect the same results.

Your Motion project appears to be 4K, with two 4k layers, one of which is scaled down. There is also a >4K image that is also scaled, plus the title elements. You also have an opacity change, which is a form of blending, and blending operations can impact rendering speeds. Your iMovie example seems to be a looped video with titles. We don't know what else is happening in that one (scaling, opacity changes, transitions, etc.). It may not seem like a lot, but scaling images takes some level of processing and the animation on top of that must be calculated. You also don't indicate if you have enabled other settings in render for Motion, such as "Highest Quality", which enables Motion Blur, and that will definitely increase render times.

You also talk about exporting H.264/h.265 vs ProRes for comparisons, these will almost always be different because of the encoding processing and depending on the dedicated hardware your computer may or may not have for encoding.

I'm not saying there couldn't be something to your issue, but it's not clear that you are comparing apples to apples. If you were to rebuild the beach video (your iMovie example) in Motion with the same project size and general settings, do you still have such a large difference in export times? Also, have you enabled any settings like motion blur in your Motion export?

There are many factors that can affect the export.

Processor usage depends on the export settings and also on the mac model you have.

Mac models with a T2 processor use that for exporting to H264, and that may make it seem like the CPU is mostly idle.

Also, the contents of the projects themselves, and not just the duration, can greatly affect how long it takes to export.

Assuming that there is something wrong with Motion, the first thing to try is to delete Motion preferences.

To delete preferences, hold down command and option while starting Motion, and click Delete Preferences.

Start Motion, set the preferences the way you like, and do a test export. For example, export a play range from the same project and see if the speed is markedly different.

If all is well, then fine.

If the problem persists, please tell us more. Mac model, OS version, Motion version...

Regarding the audio, I have no idea. Motion is not much of an audio tool, though of course if you export a movie and there is an audio track, it should just work.

Would it be possible to share one example of Motion project that exhibits this problem? If you could send it to yourself via wetransfer and post them link here, I would not mind having a look.

Also, in case there is some third party system modification that might be playing a part: Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here.

Use the “additional text” button and paste the report into the text box.

You have Chrome and its evil keystone daemons. They are known to hog system resources while essentially doing nothing, and hurt video applications severely.

I suggest you follow the instructions in https://chromeisbad.com for deleting them. The site also explains why they are a problem.

Once you do that, delete Motion and reinstall from the App Store - this will not delete your projects, just the application.

Try again.

I will have a look at the project.

I did a few experiments, and I saw a similar thing. The export starts fast, using almost 500%, and then it goes down to about 100% and takes a looonng time (I did not have the media, so I just substituted some dummy files but used your project).

A short 1 minute section exported in quicker than real time, but a 18 minute section was on its way to take hours, and I just cancelled.

I have not yet tried other long Motion projects. The ones I do are usually for FCP and very short.

Later today, I will try to compose an hour-long test project to see if that too suffers from the same thing, or maybe one of those behaviors in your project has something to do with it taking so long.

Ok.

Even using about 200%, and unless it is a very complicated project, I can't see it taking 40 minutes.

There may be something in the way of a software issue.

The first thing would be to restart the mac.

Do you have Chrome on this machine?

imi_trcz wrote:

Hello Luis,

have you tried this long-export thing? All same here, I really would appreciate some help.

Yes, I said so above. My experience with your project is similar to yours. It starts quickly, then stalls.

Riccardo_Riva wrote:

Anyone solved this issue? I encountered this problem today, a 30s projects takes well over 40 minutes to render, same length and roughly same complexity used to take 3-4 minutes until yesterday!

Would it be possible to share your 30s project? I would not mind testing that.

The OP's project was much longer, so I am not sure if the problem is the same.

If you want, send it to yourself using wetransfer and post the link here.

Sorry, I cannot since it's work and I'm under NDA, anyways I think it might be the computer and not Motion as I was exporting an animation in Unity and the usage was still very low, topping at around 10%

Hi Luis,

I restarted the Mac, went to uninstall Chrome and all the extra stuff it was on the laptop and still getting these very bad results. I mean, it's literally using 1/4 of the power it has! (Just for the CPU, as you see the GPU is barely engaged but that might be a codec specific way of encoding I guess)

Hi, yes it is an animation that then goes to Premiere to add audio, I had Only video as export setting and now I deactivated the audio also in the project settings, both for the videos in the timeline and in the output. Seems to be working a bit better but not what I was expecting! Thank you for the insight!!