Participant

Question

Somethings wrong with my setup/config and I can’t figure it out. 10x Longer render times

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
August 21, 2020
2 replies
371 views

So, i just built a new PC to replace my 2015 Mac Book Pro for After Effects and Premeire tasks.

The new PC has the following:

Rysen 9 3900XT 12-core

Corsair Vengence LTX 64GB Memory

Gigabyte X570 Elite Wifi Mobo

2x Samsung Evo Plus's NVMe M.2 drives (1 500GB the other 1TB) both installed on Mobo

1x USB 3.2 Samsung T7 external drive

1x Standard 4TB HDD for storage etc,..

MSI GeForce RTX 2060 8GB GDRR6 256bit

So, yeah, it should handle what I throw at it, I'd assume.

I have my Media & Project Files on the 1TB EVO M.2.

My Cache and Scratch on the 500GB EVO M.2

At the moment i have my OS on the USB T7 drive, but Read/Write speeds are in excess of 2000, so i dont see a problem there, especially for these renders

So i go to load up a project i recently rendered on my MBP last week, and it took roughly 4 hours to render on that machine; i wanted to compare. So i loaded it up on this new PC and the render is STILL going after 3.5HOURS!! It's moving at a snails pace!!! It seems to render fairly quickly until about 75-80%, then it just slams on the breaks and barley moves.. to be specific, form 0 - 75% took only 45 minutes.. from 76 - 100% took 3+ hours. Also my previews in AE are acting extremely undereffecient as well. My ram previews are playing out in a handful of Frames per second - -even on Quarter res. My MBP could at least play through the previews fine on these project files at the res.

To confirm, i have NO plugins in this render, no fancy effects, a couple pre-comps, and some fading text which go along with the precomps -- its a 45min 720p clip.

Something is very wrong here. My CPU never exceed 35% at anytime while rendering, my memory took about 5-8 minutes to use 70%.. This render should've been done in 20-30min max! But its actually about to take longer then a 5 year old laptop with a fraction of the power this PC has -- impossible.

I have also tried 4 other previous projects to see if maybe it was a basic thing in that one render that was causing this.. no change, fast render up to 75-80% then standstill. Some actually froze around there, well sorta, i could click around AE, so the app didnt freeze, but the render did.

UPDATE: Now here's the kicker.. A friend advised me to try out RenderGarden to utilize the multi thread/core aerender advantages. So i installed the script. Loaded up the same project i did originally, and set it to 6 cores (as advised by rendergarden for a 12 core processor) and hit render!

That same 4 hour render took less then 30min. ?!?!? So obviously there's something wrong with AE and its standard rendering process with my machine. I'd like to solve this issue and not have to rely on a $100 script to do it.

here is another project i tested which was only 2 minutes in length. As you can see, Standard AE took 38 Minutes to do what Rendergarden did in 4 min. So either AE has the most inefficient rendering out of the box in history, or something else is up.

As far as i can tell, i have everything setup the way i should; But maybe I'm missing something somewhere. Please ask me anything, ill get back to you ASAP about this. At this point I'm pretty upset about this issue, as i have many projects coming up and need this machine working in peak condition.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

This topic has been closed for replies.

OussK

Community Expert

Did you try to render using AME? Most time it do a better job for me

J

Jon98A4Author

Participant

As i laid out in the first reply, I'm not looking for a "bump" in render times with my posts' question; I'm looking into why its so poorly rendering when compared to the old laptop i rendered the same project with previously. Obviously the native AE render is not the first choice to use, but as i said, i wanted to compare. I'm looking for an answer as to why this system is so vastly underperforming in AE at the moment.

Martin_Ritter

Legend

"But its actually about to take longer then a 5 year old laptop with a fraction of the power this PC has -- impossible."

Possible!

Because AE isn't designed to use all your cores, nor your overkill GPU in any remarkable amount.

Gladfully you decided for a quite good CPU (in terms of AE), but an i7 or i9 with less cores and higher clock rates would have been the better choice. I even overclocked my old i7 to squeeze a bit more AE performance out of it.

The money spend on the GPU was wasted, if this machine is only doing AE stuff. Those RTX card are make trouble with AE, so AE didn't use them at all. Check the forum on that topic!

Instead of an RTX, you better would have invest in more RAM and RenderGarden.

As you already noticed: there is a hugh performance hit when rendering with RG. Why?

No black magic, but just RG launching the command line renderer of AE several times. You can do this even manually, if you like to write long lines of commands in the shell. It's called aerender.exe and is located in the installation folder.

However, launching instances of AEs renderengine requires a lot of RAM, because each instance requieres its own space in memory.

What you should do now is to check if GPU acceleration is enabled and your GPU is recognized and used by AE.

Next you have to buy RG, or check out RenderBoss or BG Renderer. There is no setting in AE and no optimization in your projects which will affect your rendering times that much than any of those managers.

I'm using the command line renderer for over five years now, startet with my own script to launch it and moved to RG some years ago. I hardly render with AEs render queue and I only use AME for final exports of image sequences. Even on my three years old machine, using only one instance of AE doesn't make any sense in most of the cases.

When rendering your projects, have a look at you RAM usage. If you ran out of RAM, but there is still plenty room left on CPU, consider a RAM upgrade. The more RAM, the more instances, the more instances, the faster the rendering. Simple.

Also check the forum before making a hardware decision. We have posts like this every week.

And as usual, I recommend the real-world and up-to-date benchmarks from Puget Systems - happy reading:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php?filter[]=After%20Effects

*Martin

J

Jon98A4Author

Participant

I should've started by stating this isn't my first rodeo with PC builds nor AE/PR. almost everything you mentioned was taken into account; even the cores on the processor; because as i stated, i also use this for Primiere, which does utilize my cores (amongst other apps i also use this PC for). It was a balance i chose with the Rysen processor as it also has high clock rate when OC'd (roughly 4.45Ghz if pushed with proper cooling). In regards to the GPU, i do use this system for a few other things, but again, Premiere can utilize it.

As for Puget, yes, i have run their benchmarks, and AE scored 919, and Premiere scored I believe around 850 or around there; but I haven't setup anything yet for premiere settings wise. I believe the name i used was "CaptainSweatpants", feels free to look up the results.

But all this is sorta beyond the point here. There were some clear points i made that dont make sense, regardless of the specific GPU/RAM/Processor choices i made. A MacBook with 8GB Memory, a 2 GB GPU, and a single SSD running everything off of it at once during a render, somehow rendered in AE faster then this PC did. I dont care what's overpriced or what processor would've been more ideal, that doesn't make sense. I'm fully aware using the native AE render engine is not efficient, but as i mentioned originally, i did this to compare -- it failed, miserably.

Just the separation of the disk drives should've at the very least sped the process up by a few minutes..

If a 5 year old basic MBP can outperform a new, almost 3x the power (on all fronts) machine, then I'm going to just render off my smartphone next. That MBP had a tough time loading images on a webpage, but it apparently has more rendering juice to outperform this?

As i also mentioned already, i did use RG, and i posted the difference when all my cores are used -- i had no issue with that. Again,,... my point is, i believe there is more potential in this system to render faster in AE then I'm getting -- in all formats and avenues.

Thanks for your opinion on components, if i were in the market for them, I would've appreciated those. Unfortunately, i dont think were on the same page with my question in regards to what minimums at the very least i should be achieving,

Martin_Ritter

Legend

Well, since the code of AE is not published, we cannot really tell why our MacBooks renders the same projects faster or more efficient as your current, more powerful build does.

You can check for GPU utilization and JavaScript expression engine (in project settings) - but beyond that... I have no glue and - more importend - there is nothing you can do.

Since this is a user-to-user forum (no devs around here), you won't get any satisfying answer to your question.

I understand your misery! After Effects is the software we need for your daily work, but not the software we are paying for. Adobe has to move - they have to get things done and they missed all developments in computer technology of the past 10 years.

All we can do is to wait for improvements and check out Fusion (DaVinci Resolve) or the newly release Cavalry in the meantime.

Your case is not an exception and Adobe is dead silence to this. Just read the response to the urge of multi-thread-support in the uservoice forum - it's nothing but a mixture of a joke and incompetence, postes one year ago ...

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911311-after-effects/suggestions/33836305-full-program-multi-threaded-support

*Martin

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