The rendering process in After Effects, after I finally accessed it, was actually quite smooth. Or at least the issues I had with it weren’t due to After Effects.
What happened?
When I imported all of the files in to After effects for the first time I forgot to list them as a TIFF sequence, resulting in me having 500 individual tracks to work with – which my computer honestly didn’t appreciate.
After I finally imported the pictures correctly I realised that the all of the TIFF files had very poor lighting, being a novice on the subject I had assumed that it could just be how it displays before a render (it was also very late at night so I wasn’t thinking completely rationally). As it turned out, no. It does not look like that typically, I just had a poorly lit render from Maya.
Back to Maya I went, rendering and re-rendering segments to figure out why until it hit me. It was because I was using Arnold Render. I didn’t know why that was the reason, I just knew it was (I now think it was because I had “Isolate selected” enabled. I switched over to the Maya software render and successfully had all of my lighting implemented. From there it was simple a case of rendering the file out again and hoping for the best.
It worked! The 4 second video did render as a 5GB, 30 second video however that was easily fixable by re-rendering the file as a shorter video.
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