Skip to main content
Adnan7
Known Participant
December 31, 2020
Question

AE running way too slow for a powerful PC!

  • December 31, 2020
  • 5 replies
  • 11277 views

Hello,

I am trying to make a Video that has so charts and animations and I just can't work with this very slow speed i'm getting when I try to preview what I made! I tried every single thing I found online like Adaptive Resolution or skipping frames from the "Preview" Panel but it is still way too fast. For every time I pre-render 3 sec of my timeline I need to wait like 10 seconds! 
This is the PC I'm using: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/37767368
Plus two 2K Monitors.

Is there something I can do to enhance the AE experince? I feel like my GPU is never being used so idk...
Thank you and have a great New Years Eve!

5 replies

thepixelsmith
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 27, 2022

I don't know if this will help but here is an article on how AE & Premiere Pro and how they use system resources:

OPTIMIZING YOUR SYSTEM FOR PP & AE
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/kb/hardware-recommendations.html#:~:text=The%20sweet%20spot%20for%20running,are%20ideal%20for%20Premiere%20Pro.

Puget Systems - Hardware Recommendations for Adobe After Effects

https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/video-editing-workstations/adobe-after-effects/hardware-recommendations/

Carson Jones
Known Participant
February 16, 2021

I'm feeling the pain currently.  My workstation computing power (cpu / gpu) barely gets used at all with AE.  Running the following hardware and when AE rendering is at full power it's using 4% of the CPU and virtually none of the GPU. 

 

AMD TR 3970x (32 core all core at 4.2 GHz)

2x RTX 3090

128 GB memory

 

Adobe need to address their lack of fully utilizing modern hardware asap.  Relying primarily on single core clock speed has quickly become outdated.  Computing power is being left on the table whenever I open an Adobe app.

Participant
November 27, 2022

Exact same feedback here. Having a $3K-$4K machine and not seeing its resources being used is a problem with the software not the hardware, regardless of Expressions, or anything else that's being used. 
Especially when seeing how under Mac environment things work much better 

Community Expert
January 2, 2021

Rendering time depends entirely on comp frame size, comp frame rate, what is going on with the layers, the render settings, the preview settings. and your available system resources. You must allocate at least 2 GB of ram to other applications, Adobe apps like multiples of 2 GB and doesn't like fractional ram values. We have no idea what is going on in your comp, what source footage you may be using, or what your preview settings are. That's why Mylenium chastized you for not providing any information. Without some idea of what is going on with the comp and your system, meaningful suggestions to improve performance are limited to:

  • Set Comp Panel Resolution to Auto
  • Set Magnification Factor to 50% or less
  • Turn off all unnecessary effects - ram previews should only be used for checking timing and placement of objects in the frame
  • Try using Fast Draft
  • If necessary - set preview to skip one or more frames
  • Don't try and edit using After Effects, it is not in any way, shape, or form a video editing app - a comp should only contain a single shot or short sequence that you cannot create in an NLE like Premiere Pro (most of my comps are 1 shot under 7 seconds, my animated comps are seldom longer than one sentence or phrase of music)
  • Do not customize the Comp Size and frame rate unless you have an experts knowledge of video standards, formats, and compression
  • Don't monkey with render settings in the Output Module (Render Queue) or Media Encoder unless you are an expert
  • If the time to render a frame is longer than it is acceptable to you, redesign the comp. My render time limit is about 5 minutes a frame, my average VFX project renders at the rate of a few frames a second, but many of them take one or two minutes a frame to render. Those complicated VFX projects are not ram previewed with all the effects, I just check the hero frames with everything turned on and send the project to render so I can judge the final product accurately
  • Rendering with the C4D rendering option turned on slows things down a great deal. If you don't need to Extrude or bend 3D layers set the rendering option to Classic 3D (if you are using an earlier version of AE do not use Ray-traced Rendering unless there is absolutely no other choice - it never was efficient, it never worked very well.

That should help get you started. 

 

Show us a screenshot of your timeline with the modified properties of all the layers revealed (select, press 'uu' and show us everything). Tell us about your design goal. Include the comp settings (easy if you have the Project Panel selected and the Comp is selected). If the problem includes rendering tell us or show us your modified rendering settings. Tell us about your system down to the last decimal point.

 

One more thing, your Ram Preview may only use 10% of CPU power because AE only works on one frame at a time and one frame isn't very big. If you have projects that are going to take a long time to render I strongly suggest that you invest in a Background Rendering app. I have several. RenderGarden is my favorite. With most BG rendering solutions you can start a render and continue to work in AE on your next comp without any noticeable slowdown. They are well worth the investment.

Ro Hackett
Inspiring
January 2, 2021

[abuse removed by moderator]

Ro Hackett
Inspiring
January 1, 2021

Do you have your preview resolution set to full? I usually keep to a third and a third under the preview window until nearing the end of my project... and under adaptive resolution I keep to 'Fast Draft' a lot of time... but if youre looking to preview in full res you just have to wait till it renders to the cache and then keep your preview panel on loop so after the render loop it should play away fine ... hopefully someone has some good ideas 😮🤔 🤔

Adnan7
Adnan7Author
Known Participant
January 2, 2021

Even at third it is still too slow and the resolution is way too bad... I feel like AE is not using the PC resources as it should. I wouldn't mind it using 90% of my CPU or GPU for example it that would give me realttime pre-rendering!

Ro Hackett
Inspiring
January 2, 2021

In edit - preferences - memory ... you have lots of memory allocated to AE?

 

UNDER PREVIEWS - is it picking up yoyr graphic card?

 

In file - project settings - does changing rendering options do anything? 😮🤔 🤔

Mylenium
Legend
January 1, 2021

Sorry, but this is useless. What does "slow" even mean? 10 seconds rendering time for a 3 second segment? Sounds perfectly normal. And since you mentioned charts it seems to me you are missing the obvious: Expressions and other stuff can slow down things massively. that's quitel likely also the cause why all your messing around with resolution and whatnot doesn't change anything - the expression evaluation takes just as long. Sorry, but I think you simply have a wrong understanding and wrong expectations and may need to study up on how AE actually handles these things. You just have to get used to it.

 

Mylenium

Adnan7
Adnan7Author
Known Participant
January 2, 2021

Great, instead of providing anything helpful just blame the beginner of not knowing how After Effects works. Anyway I was wondering why it doesn't use more that 10% of CPU power and almost non of GPU power for prerendering? Wouldn't that be the solution for this problem?

Thanks for replying though.