After Effects only uses one core for rendering! Can anyone solve this.

6 years later and not a single thing has changed. I'm sitting here waiting for a 15 second 4k comp to render to prores and its taking 55mins, STILL using only one core and only about 35% of that core. I'm so done with Adobe.

Ive had this same problem with AE for a few years there are some render paths with premier pro that do the same thing also.

Ive gone from a 16core 32 thread to 8core here is the trick that will make a massive difference.

Build the machine as if you were building a gamming machine. Whats important here is single core speed actualy BASE CLOCK SPEED!

Look at your core clock speed its 2.68GHz not being funny but thats is really poor for this task, you may have many threads but its of no use infact its a hinderence.

This is what you do.

Buy a i9-9900K or 9900KS with a liquid cooler and lock your core base clock speed (overclock) to 4.5-5GHz, you can buy bunddle sytems allready overclocked for you. AE requires fast RAM in this configuration you can buy RAM 4000MHz and above.

This will more than halve your render times playback will also be inproved. Ive built hi end machines for years. Its not always the more the better. In this case its the faster thr better especialy with linear work loads. just the way it is 🙂

In fact, AE uses all CPU cores and even GPU, but it highly depends on the project, fx, plugins and workflow.

When I see that you are rendering directly into H265 on the Xeon @2GHz I really wondering what you did expect to happen?

Does Xeon CPU support hardware accelerated H265 de- and encoding anyway? I thought that's a feature of latest i-series CPUs only.

Also, a 2GHz CPU for AE is completely the wrong piece of hardware. I recommend at least 4GHz, the higher the better. You'll find nice test on https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-After-Effects-CC-144/Hardware-Recommendations#CPU

Note that Xeon's are not even mentioned ...

Also, rendering into a video file is not very safe or smart. What when your computer crashes right now? What if you have to change a little asset which appears only for 10 frames at the end? You'll have to start all over... !

It's way better to render into PNGs image sequence. You can use scripts like BG Renderer or RenderGarden to utilize all of your RAM and CPU resources. (But in your case, you won't benefit much from all your cores - when only AE is running and 33% are already used, you can start 2 more renderer and that's it. Running out of RAM increases rendering times in large amounts.).

And you can easily react to changes and mistakes, without the need of rendering everything all over again.

@jebi80938952​

Multiprocess rendering will never come back to AE again. AFAIK it was buggy and dropped for that reason. Also - as you can see with the use of scripts like RG Renderer or RenderGarden - it eats you all your RAM very soon, limiting you in spawning more processes. Every process need its own memory address range and data. But if you have an asset in every part of your comp, this asset will be loaded multiple times into RAM to be available for all rendering processes. This is nonsense.

The future will be multi-threaded and Adobe is already working on it. But this is a slow process: Adobe needs to ensure to not break the software, while keeping it alive by adding features.

In the meantime, we are lucky and can use 3rd party software to fill the gap, thanks to a wide API. That's not common with major software and I'm missing it in most other programs I'm using.

*Martin

I still remember when after efffects used to have a feature called "Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously". It used multiple cores to render different portions of the timeline and it made substantially faster to render previews and scrud through the timeline.

For whatever reason, Adobe removed this feature from AE in 2014 or 2015.

The priority for Adobe should be to bring back this feature. I mean it.

All of this just makes me wish there was some real competition for AE out there. Maybe Serif or Autodesk could seize the opportunity?

Serif already makes great alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator and they don't force to get a montly subscription (i.e. extorsion).

Honestly, Adobe shouldn't be able to get away with this. In the past few years their updates have mainly consisted of publicity stunts with no real benefit for Pro users.

The BG renderer Pro script will help you utilize all your cores when rendering. Rendergarden probably does a similar thing though I haven't used it.

With BG renderer Pro you can simply start up multiple rendering instances on the same system. You have to render to image sequences but for render-intensive projects it certainly works fine and I can use pretty much 100% of my dual Xeon CPU power.

Speed Up After Effects Rendering Tutorial - YouTube

Now, 243 hours has passed. Still 3 hours!

My next step is to gradually give up this piece of rubbish. Cheers! to all those developers!

Render to PNG files with skip existing (multimachine rendering) on and use this BG Renderer Pro - aescripts + aeplugins - aescripts.com

Saved me numerous times when dealing with heavy composites!

Buy this: RenderGarden | by Mekajiki

The best rendering option for AE. Easily up to a 50% decrease in render time and you can still keep working in AE while your comp is rendering.

This is something you should have known already: After Effects only uses one core.  This may be your first post so you didn't seek advice before you began.  Any advice we could give now requires that you stop the render to provide diagnostic information.

You, sir or madame, are STUCK at the moment. Big-time.

You can't stop the render for fear of missing the deadline by even more than you are already missing it.  Pray you haven't made a mistake.

The bright side:  you can do a post-mortem to help speed things along on future projects.