BG Renderer
Version: 1.6 Sign up to be notified by email when a new version of this script is posted
BG Renderer is a script that allows you to render your Render Queue items in the background while you can continue working in After Effects. It runs as an embedable panel that is saved as part of your workspace. This version is compatible with After Effects CS3 and above, you can get the AE7 version here. BG Renderer supports multiprocessing (2gb per core is recommended to use this feature) and allows you to control the memory and ram cache for the bg render independently of the main app preferences.
- Usage:
- Queue whatever you want to render in your render queue the way you would normally do but instead of hitting render in the RenderQueue, hit BG Render in the script palette.
- That’s it, a separate window will open in the background and will begin rendering leaving AE free for you to continue working in.
- Troubleshooting:
- Make sure you don’t have any illegal characters in your path or your project file. Illegal characters include accents, apostrophe’s and eccentric punctuation.
- BG Renderer only runs in English, it will fail if you are running a different language.
- You can also check the BG Renderer Error FAQ
Version history:
- v1.6 added pref to turn off render sound and
changed temp file location to fix corrupted .term file bug - v1.5 added additional escaped characters check
- v1.4 fixed additional issues with Leopard, tested and approved for CS4
- v1.3 fixed issues with MacOS 10.5 Leopard
- v1.2 fixed aerender path issue with Windows 64bit systems
- v1.1 added terminal instructions, and MP Ram check and warning on Mac
- v1.0 updated for CS3
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These scripts are awesome. Thank you so much for providing them! I have one request for the BG renderer script. If possible, could you add the 8, 16, and 32 bit toggle to the BG renderer? That way, you can be working in 8-bit, and render in 16-bit without having to change it in throttle to render, then change it back to keep working. It gets hard to remember to do that every time.
Thanks!
Woww.. amazing. thanks for this script.
i just compared the performance of this script against Nucleo Pro 2 in CS4 just for curiosity and was surprised to find that Lloyd’s script was at least twice as efficient in CPU usage and used a little more than half the RAM that NP2 was taking up (running on OSX 10.5.5, Macbook Pro 2.5GHz 2GB RAM). Way to go, Lloyd! have a beer on me! (and everyone else buy him one too!)
This is a great plugin, and I highly recommend it. However, everytime I have the BG Renderer frame docked on my panel, and I close CS4 traditionally, it says After Effects CS4 has crashed. Now, when I take off BG Renderer off my interface panel, and I quit, AE doesn’t give me a “it has crashed” dialog box. I’m not sure if this caused by After Effects or BG Renderer. It’s not really an issue, just an annoyance. Anyways, thanks for the great plugin!
@Brian – This is a known Adobe issue with CS4 on mac at the moment. Please see this knowledge-base article: http://www.adobe.com/go/kb408103
Hi, the scrpt ist very helpfull.
But i have one problem, i render to mounted win-server-2003 harddisc as administrator. That dosent work, the script tell me
“aerender Error: After Effects error: Error in output for render queue item 2, output module 1. Can not create a file in directory /Volumes/renderout/……/output. Try checking write permissions.”
Enybody some idea ?
I can’t get it to work. Mac OSX, 8 Core AECS4.
It’s grayed out.
Is there a way to add the “render and email” script to this? that would be great!
Firstly, thanks for an AWESOME script. It makes AE sooooo much more powerful. Great work!
Is it possible to get the source of the script? I use it all the time and would like to customize it to my particular needs and whims (chief among those being targeting another machine on the network for rendering).
Again, thank you for providing an excellent resource to the AE community.
-Matt
Running BG Render on Mac OS X 10.4 8 Core, AE CS3. With Multiprocessing on, it runs great for about 1500 frames and then the system halts. Rendering continues SLOWLY and the rest of the system is just locked up. I’ve tried reducing Max Memory and the number of cores being used. Same issue occurs. Any ideas?
Works fantastic in non-multiprocessing mode.
Thanks
Adam
@Adam – The MP option requires a min of 2GB per core to operate successfully, unfortunately the number of cores pref in the main app prefs does not work with BG Renderer so unless you have 16GB or more you are likely to see slow performance when using multi-processing. Also, you dont want to lower Max Memory as that will only make things worse.
Does BG Renderer work well with Vista 64 bit Home edtion OS?
Thanks.
It works great with Vista 64. Let me know if you experience otherwise.
can i launch 2 instances of b renderer? can i use bg reneder at the same time as the regular after effects render?
@gybp – yes to both questions, just make sure you have at least 2GB or RAM per render instance
I tried the BG Render script on a WinXP 64bit installation of After Effects CS4. Got it installed properly and able to get the interface loaded AE. Unfortunately, it is unable to process what is in the queue. The Command window comes up when the BG Render button is pressed and disappears after about 20 seconds with nothing processed.
Anyone else experienced this.
Thankss
U R The best man. Where are the donation links? I’ve been away from away for about 6 months, too much shooting and photography. U know us FCP users are waiting for Ur FCP to AE scripts. Thx a bunch for all Ur hard work scripting and vid tuts.
I’ve been using BG Renderer for a while – super useful. Thanks for making it available. Recently though I get a prompt in the terminal window that says “Badly placed ()’s.” and nothing else happens. I know the project filename contains no illegal characters, and the sequence I(‘m rendering is also good.
What else could it be? I’m stumped.
Hey Lloyd,
I’ve been using this BG renderer for months since I saw you at AENY. This is saving me so much time at work! Thanks.
Lately, I’ve occasionally been getting a file corrupted message or just an empty terminal window pops up. When I try it the second time it is fine. What’s that about? I’m on a Mac, OS 10.5.6, using CS3.
Thanks.
Check out the FAQ to see if this helps
such a lifesaver. thanks lloyd, you are very valued in the AE community!
Thanks so much for making this plug in its been working great! One issue though, I just tried installing it on another machine and I keep getting this error message
“aerender Error: After Effects error: Error in output for render queue item 2, output module 1. Can not create a file in directory /Volumes/renderout/……/output. Try checking write permissions.”
any ideas?
Thanks.
The solution to my problem was to change the permissions in the my render output folder. I located the folder in finder, then brought up the info (command+i) on that folder, then under Sharing & Permissions I had to add my user account name to the list and change my privilege to Read & Write.
“I tried the BG Render script on a WinXP 64bit installation of After Effects CS4. Got it installed properly and able to get the interface loaded AE. Unfortunately, it is unable to process what is in the queue. The Command window comes up when the BG Render button is pressed and disappears after about 20 seconds with nothing processed.
Anyone else experienced this.”
i have exacly the same problem. any solution ?
The BG Render Window do not show the progress. After 10 sec he is stopping to update the progress.In the wondows task manger i can see that there is still a performance running. what coud this be?
In the tutorial video for BG Renderer, it shows that “use multiprocessing” box is unchecked. Can someone tell me why that was done? Assuming one has a multiprocessing machine, would there ever be a reason to uncheck that box?
@Joel You need to make sure your machine has enough ram to handle MP properly. Min 2GB per processor is recommended but in real world test I’ve found that more is usually needed to have a successful MP render. You might also not want to tax all your processors if you are going to continue working in the foreground app.
This script is awesome! Make sure you’re setting the correct amount of RAM. At 16 cores, you’d better have 16Gb of RAM, or lower your RAM setting. I’m not sure if this scales mathematically, but for example if you’re running on 8Gb of RAM and have 16 cores, use <50% for “Max Mem Usage”, otherwise your render will stall.
Hey Lloyd, at work right now and am getting an error with BGR. It stops at the “/aerender” file path and says “no match”. Never got that before and I do have an “aerender” file app located in the app folder. Any ideas? Thanks.
Just a followup, apparently “[" and "]” are illegal Unix characters and caused the error. So word to the wise, make sure you don’t have source project folders named with illegal characters. Pardon me now while I go scold the editors.
Thanks for the help Lloyd.
Please not that some plugins (Zaxwerks 3D Warps 1.5) fails to render in background (multiprocessor mode), when simultaneously used and manipulated in main AE window.
I love your script, works great and has been very usefull.
I was going to write my own for some coworkers as they at times can be “challenged” but this doees the trick.
What I was wondering was if you have thought about adding the following functionality.
1.) When Choosing memory settings, maybe have a info window which will tell you how much memory will be used and in multi-processor mode show you how much ram you may use so one can easily adjust the settings to insure they do not overtax the system.
This happens all the time for my co-workersand myself at times when I forget to look at system resources before rendering.
2.) Additional settings for multi-processor mode, specify exactly how many threads or cores to use, etc. This way i can easily choose to limit processing to maybe 4 of my 8 cores, etc.
3.) Notification when background render is done or an option to run a post render script?
4.) Simple scheduler or sleep setting that you can use to queue the render up but wait until later to start.
5.) Remote rendering?
If configured able to submit the render command to a remote machine to offload the task.
Maybe use ssh, or something similar…..not sure if this is possible or not, just curious….
This is real great plugin. It’s true amazing scripts. Best purely function for web designar. Thanks Guys.
Hi, just installed the script and it is working fine. The only difficulty is that the rendering of each frame is taking an unusual amount of time compared to regular render queue rendering (usually 20 – 30 seconds for relatively simple frames). I have played with Max Mem Usage, Max Ram Cache, and Use Multiprocessing and so far nothing seems to speed things up. Any suggestions?
I just installed background renderer, and it gives me a message:
aerender Error: After Effects Error: Unable to call “openFast” because of parameter 1. Path is not valid.
Then it gives me the path. This path (to the AE project) works fine for AE. What am I doing wrong?
@Dave – Make sure you don’t have any illegal or foreign characters in your path or file name. Aerender (which is what BG renderer uses to render) runs in unix so the paths and filenames need to be unix friendly.
hi,
where I can download the script? I didn’t find the way to download and try it!
Thanks a lot
@Ignacio – To download the script you need to add it to the cart and checkout. The script will be available for download immediately after checkout.
Hi there,
I have been using the BG tool for quite some time now on various 8 core MAC’s and it works a treat. I can only add to what jmayoros has posted a while back, in regards to additional functionality when submitting the render. Especially being able to submit the render to another machine available in the network would be an amazing feature. Even if you have to manually setup a config file.
I personally dislike the MP function AE provides – even in CS4. Especially, when you start rendering long image sequences from multiple machines with “skip existing files” enabled. It sometimes stalls and slows down horrendously (just reading the existing files, not even rendering). Therefore, I always rather use multiple instances of the terminal to launch single core renders, all feeding into the same destination, to get the most out of the machine’s capabilities. This, of course, depends on the task given.
However, not sure whether it is at all possible, but a feature to launch multiple terminal windows at once would be very nice
… and submit to other machines … ?
Great tool regardless
Thanks a lot
Hi! Just wanted to check what this error message means. Can’t seem to render my project
aerender ERROR -609: AESend failed to send apple event at line 751
wii:~ daniel$
thanks
Maybe I should add that this only happens when Multiprocess button is selected
@Daniel – I have never seen this error before but it is an aerender error so I would let Adobe know about it. My guess is that it is project specific. Does it render in the main AE app? You can report bugs to Adobe here: http://adobe.com/go/wish
I too get this error:
aerender ERROR -609: AESend failed to send apple event at line 751
it is not project specific, it only happens when multiprocessing is turned on, and the regular AE render with multiprocessing works fine.
This is an error with aerender which you should report to Adobe at http://adobe.com/go/wish BG Renderer simply passes the project over to aerender in the console, any errors after that have to do with aerender.
Any thoughts on why I’m getting the following error message:
The file “BG_Renderer_temp_file.term” could not be opened because it is corrupt.
Any ideas on how to fix it?
Thanks for a great script!
Trent
Sorry. Didn’t see the fix until after hitting submit!
Check out the BG Renderer Error FAQ
Thanks. I did all the steps but still get the same error. Using BG Renderer CS3.
Restarted Terminal. Restarted AE. Restart Mac?
Thanks,
Trent
Please update to v1.6. It fixes the corrupted .term file bug on mac
Ok- I created a “ScriptUI Panels” folder, inside my “Scripts” folder.
Placed the “BG_renderer-AE7-mac.jsx” file inside the “ScriptUI Panels” folder. Fired up my AE C33. Added a comp to the Render Queue. Went to the Window drop-down, selected the “BG_renderer-AE7-mac.jsx”.
Then I get error massage-
Could not locate aerender
This script requires aerender to run.
Please install aerender in it’s deflault location:
/Application/Adobe After Effects 7.0/
So I change my Adobe After Effects CS3 folder to be Adobe After Effects 7.0. Which I shouldn’t have to do…?
Restart AE again. Place another comp to queue. This time I get a pretty messed up window with the BG controls in it. The window is separate from the nice AE window tab. I click the BG button. Then I get the lengthy “It appears something might have gone wrong.” error message… Tell me about!
Please help.
Machine specs
MacOSX 10.5.8
Macpro 2×2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
12 GB Ram
ATI Radeon 4870
Fibre Channel w/ Sanmp
Kona3
Adobe cs3
BG_renderer-AE7-mac.jsx is an older version which only works with After Effects 7 and will not work in CS3. Make sure you download the new version which you can get by hitting the ‘Add to Cart’ button above
Thanx Lloyd! You work for the community is great! Your work is inspiring and this script is what I’ve been wishing for since…a long time.
Greetings from The Hague!
Can’t get it working. always get an BG Render error. Did everything as written in FAQ but have no luck. Mac OS 10.6.2 AE CS4
Found your interesting tool while searching for pos. to accelerate AE. I´m running AE in german language. Any chance to use your solution?
Thank you
Ed
Unfortunately I am only one person and supporting foreign languages would require more support than I am able to provide. The good news is that it is very easy to switch AE to run in english so you can use the scripts. Check the FAQ above.