Finding out the difference

Question

Hi there. My colleagues and I are a bit stumped over why one machine seems to render much faster that the other two. We have three Mac Pro's, one each here. They're the same hardware specs, the software is the same. One of them renders out after effects file much, much faster than the other two, infact there's a horrible lag on the other two machines when trying to edit a file generated by the other 'faster' machine, and we can't figure out what it is.

We've been through the files, turned off all effects to the point where we're basically dealing with 2D text and some shapes but still this awful lag...

Specs on all machines is:

Mac Pro (Late 2013)

Model Identifier: MacPro6,1

Processor Name: 8-Core Intel Xeon E5

Processor Speed: 3 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 8

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 25 MB

Memory: 32 GB

running latest Mojave and After Effects

The files don't employ any third party plug-ins either, although we each have some installed on the machines.

Has anyone encountered this before? Any ideas.

I'm going to speak with IT when they're back but I'm not sure how they'd solve it...

Thanks in advance!

Yapstick79 · Accepted Answer

Hey folks, I forget to get back to this post with the solution (quite a while back actually - business has since updated to PCs - Apple Tax was laughable)

So, it was fonts!

We had one system with an open type variety and the others with truetype, I guess the machine that wasn't struggling was the one that created the original file/template using it's locally available fonts. The other machines then used the other type (can't remember which machines were opentype and which was truetype at this point) to render the font. It seems the font is solely identified by the system through its name only, regardless of whether or not it's the correct type!

So once the machines had the correct font type installed, that matched the project (and I think we uninstalled the other type), things zipped along as you'd expect from a project that was mainly text masks and boxes.

Hope this helps and cheers up some folks out there! I know we were miserable dealing with this! ;D

Rick Gerard · Answer

It could be anything. Drive speed, free ram, background apps, network connections. You have not given us very much information. I experienced a huge slow down just the other day because the thunderbolt cable to one of my external hard drives was apparently damaged. Data transfer rates to that drive dropped to less than 10 Gb/s and when I switched out the cable it went back to 40.

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