Animation problem preparing next frame excessive time

[Bertensgrad]

I'm having a issue with animating a file thwt will have approximately 1900 frames. This is a test animation so I set the rendering setting to low animation. It renders each scene in less then twenty seconds. The issue is that then it says it's preparing the next frame for over a minute and does this each time. This over triples my rendering time. I got through less then 450 frames in eight hours when I kinda expected to be almost done by morning.

It is a fairly large and complicated model about 45 mb with a fairly complicated animation path. Is this the issue with it taking so long to prepare each frame? What can I do to reduce the time between rendering frames? Would simplfing the animation path and simplfing it reduce it or am I screwed by the file size of materials. I have no problems initializing renders or doing high level stills starting almost instantly. I thought about rendering in small sections to make it faster but I don't know if it will improve it.

My client wanted one sweeping animated video but I was arguing for a collection of carefully edited series of clips showing the same things. Flying, then walking, and then maybe panning around a few areas. I would love to show true model and animation path but I'm under a confidentiality agreement.

[Chris]

The animation path has no effect on the time it takes to load each frame, so feel free to make it however complicated it needs to be.

As to why it's taking so long, its tough to say. Does it take that long from the very start of the animation, or does it become longer and longer? If it is getting progressively longer, or suddenly becomes longer after a certain number of frames, it could be a memory issue where the operating system starts paging memory (which can be very time consuming).

Otherwise, here are some things to look at.
1. Change the Content setting. By default it is set to All which means it reloads geometry every time (along with everything else). If you don't need to change the geometry, set this to Camera & Lights or just Camera. Unfortunately, this means Face-Me components won't orient themselves so that may not be a viable option for you.
2. Check your texture sizes. If Content is set to all, that means that basically everything is dumped on every frame and started over, and this includes textures. Loading textures from memory can be very time consuming if they are large. This includes the sky background (which can often be the largest image in the scene!).
3. Hide geometry that you can't see. If Content is set to All, you can put things on layers based on visibility and hide layers in different scene pages where they aren't visible.

[Bertensgrad]

Ok I will try that on the next run. I only have 3d objects with nothing moving, so there is no reason to load all geometry. There is also tons of geometry since it's a city scene. I also have photo textures on a large landmark building that the plaza is front of. For the entire animation all the lighting remains the same so would I animate only the camera then? You do however move into shadows and stuff under trees. Anyways this may be my issue.

It seems to run at the same speed though I don't know since it ran overnight. If it changed it slowed down and then speeded back up once I returned. I made sure the computer wouldn't shut itself off or be connected to the network web so updates wouldn't happen etc so it should had been a clean run. I'm hoping it was just a issue with the geometry and textures loading each time.

[Bertensgrad]

Ok I'm back in business. I cut the preparation time from 1 minute 10 seconds to less then 3 seconds. It seems to make the rendering faster too. It went from 20 seconds a frame to 10 seconds. I love my custom built rendering computer was hoping it was something simple like this.

[Chris]

Great! Yes, animating without reloading the geometry on each frame makes a huge difference. It's always worth changing the Content setting unless you have changing geometry.

[Fletch]

be sure to check "reuse lighting information" if you are not changing any lighting in the scene... no moving sun/changing time of day, no lights turning on or off.