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WHY AFTER EFFECTS STILLS SO SLOW IN THE NEW MAC PRO?

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
May 11, 2014
51 replies
119683 views

I have the new mac pro with this settings:

3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5

64 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 ECC

AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB

Software OS X 10.9.2

And the AE performs slower than in my old mac pro. I have set the preferences as seen on all those tutorials on this site, I have an SSD external disc for cache files, memory and multiprocessing settings correctly...and previews are very very slow, and I can not even render a single comp without waiting 10 minutes. I am very disappointed and frustrated with this situation...

Am I missing something?

Correct answer Andrew Yoole

Without wanting to sound condescending, because I genuinely understand your complaints, I must point out here that some of the onus here belongs to the hardware purchaser. How carefully did you assess the purchase of the Mac Pro?

In my own facility, we were torn about which hardware to purchase this year. After lots of research of available benchmarks, and assessment of what hardware After Effects relies on, we decided not to buy Mac Pros just yet, and bought a bunch of fully specced out iMacs for now.

The thinking for this:

• All the benchmarks we found showed AE performance didn't get a significant enough bump to justify Mac Pro expense. If you're a FCPX editor, Mac Pros are a no brainer - FCPX is optimised for this hardware. But AE is not.

• A significant part of a Mac Pro's cost is in GPUs, which are irrelevant to our main AE use.

• The cost of one reasonably specced Mac Pro workstation was about equal to two fully specced iMac 27" i7 workstations, with 1TB SSDs and 32GB of RAM.

• Any new generation tech is fraught with danger. We decided the 2nd Generation Mac Pro will be a much safer bet, especially since they are manufacturing in an entirely new facility, and the machine itself is a major new design.

Show previous replies

NordicFilmworks

Known Participant

Lol. I'm a proud ALPHA TESTER!

Should we start a petition or a third party website? I'm happy to ALPHA test Adobe's software for FREE, but I'm not willing to be charged to be an alpha tester

M

martinc13962311

Known Participant

‌Been there and got the t-shirt... Pre release program is almost as pointless as ranting on here!

They do what they want... No dissent allowed!

J

Josh Stanton

Participant

I'm on the newest version of AE with a Mac Pro 5,1 with 16GB RAM and OSX 10.10.3. I was hoping that I would see vast improvements in render speed in AE after replacing my old GPU with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 4GB, but it sounds like nothing has changed? Was it pointless for me to even upgrade my graphics card? AE is telling me that it wants me to install ray tracing or CUDA software, but will it even matter? What am I missing?

Herbert2001

Inspiring

You are not missing anything: only the 3d raytracer of AFx supports CUDA and GPU accelerated rendering. Nothing else makes use of it in AFx (well, your openGL view is probably faster now). General rendrting will be as fast or slow as before you swapped out your old graphics card.

T

toneproductions

Participating Frequently

How is everyone finding the 2015 release? I'm seeing some big improvements in interactions, playback, render times etc!

C

Chris Hocking

Inspiring

I'm curious... did the 2015 AE release help any of the MacPro users on this thread?

T

toneproductions

Participating Frequently

Initially I was stoked (see above post) after a couple of hours and finding out that Dynamic link gets bogged down to a point of not working without constantly restarting to get comps to refresh,

my view changed.

It still doesn't utilise my Dual D700 GPUS when rendering previews.

Seems to be registering more CPU usage now.

CTI jumps around all over the place + is disappears if you look at your monitor in the wrong way or drink your tea from the wrong side of your cup or something.

No way to stop a RAM preview once it has started.

I'll add more when it comes to mind/happens and causes me to have a hissy fit.

T

toneproductions

Participating Frequently

when is the new release coming???

Szalam

Community Expert

They're saying, "spring". So anytime between now and June 21.

NordicFilmworks

Known Participant

We are "hopeful" after reading the latest update notes... It seems they have re-programmed the architecture of the code, something they should have done several years ago...

Matthew Altheim,

Executive Producer

Nordic Filmworks

www.NordicFilmworks.com
We are a film, tv, and video production company in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

T

toneproductions

Participating Frequently

WHEN IS THE NEW RELEASE COMING?????

Herbert2001

Inspiring

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/504190/Shared%20Files/I_Die_A_Little_Inside.mp3

Quote from beckmanvfx :

Every time I open After Effects I die a little inside.

Every pick-wip.

Every endless twirl-down parameter.

I die a little inside.

Pre-comps, Track Mattes and parenting.

I die a little inside.

Easy Ease. easy F***G ease!

I die a little inside.

Estimated render completion: 10 minutes... no 12 minutes.... no, wait... 20 minutes.

I die a little inside.

-----------------------------------

Sorry, could not resist ;-)

EoinOBroin

Participant

Any update on this? Surely by now we would have at least a window of when the improvements are going to be implemented. Currently using my 2011 iMac while I wait- outperforms the mac pro by quite a bit.