Multi-Frame Rendering is here! (AKA The multithreading you’ve been asking for)

[TeresaDemel]

Multi-frame Rendering is here for After Effects beta users. Right now, you will have access to Multi-Frame Rendering for export only. Keep your eye on this forum, as we will be rolling out new features until we launch.

Internally, we have been testing a representative sample of projects with a suite of hardware configurations, and we are excited to finally put this feature in your hands and get your feedback. Test your unique projects on your own hardware so we can ensure that our performance updates benefit all of our customers and meet speed and quality metrics before we launch.

Beta testing of Multi-Frame Rendering will last a little longer than some of our other features because we currently do not support Multi-Frame Rendering in Preview, Motion Graphics templates, Dynamic Link, Adobe Media Encoder and AERender Command Line Interface.

Check out the blog and FAQ post to learn the following:

• What is Multi-Frame Rendering?
• What factors influence performance?
• Which effects have been optimized for Multi-Frame Rendering?

Start Testing!
We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts and ideas in this forum.

• How much faster is Multi-Frame Rendering compared to Single-Frame Rendering with your comps on your machine?
• Does our benchmark project perform at the expected speed on your system?
• If you run into specific speed or quality issues with your project, share your project with us at mfrbeta@adobe.com.

Test Your Comps
Test your comps in Multi-Frame Render mode vs. Single-Frame Render

• Use Ae Render Queue to export your comp in Multi-Frame mode.
• Purge both the disk and memory cache, then
• Use Ae Render Queue to export your project in Single-Frame mode. Note: Use the same output module for Single-Frame and Multi-Frame mode. Go to Preferences -> Memory and Performance -> Enable Multi-Frame Rendering (beta) and uncheck the box to use Single-Frame Rendering Mode

Leave a comment and the following information in this forum:

• Your hardware specs: # cores in your CPU, GB of memory, GPU model and amount of VRAM
• Single-Frame render speed (Use “Render Time” noted in your status bar)
• Multi-Frame render speed

If you detect any problems with render speed or quality, submit your projects

• Open your After Effects project
• File -> Dependencies -> Collect Files -> Collect -> Save As (Name Your Folder)
• After Effects will store your .aep file, footage, and text report (file log)
• Zip up your project and send it to us at mfrbeta@adobe.com (or send a link to it hosted on your creative cloud storage if it’s too large to email).

Share the following information in your comment:

• Your hardware specs: # cores in your CPU, GB of memory, GPU model and amount of VRAM
• Single-Frame render speed (Use “Render Time” noted in your status bar)
• Multi-Frame render speed
• Mercury CPU or GPU Mode used

Test our benchmark project and see how your hardware compares
We would love to know how your hardware compares to the results we have gathered from our test suite:

To test the benchmark project on your machine:

• Download the benchmark project. 
• Use Ae Render Queue to export the benchmark project in Multi-Frame mode.
• Purge both the disk and memory cache, then
• Go to Preferences -> Memory and Performance -> Enable Multi-Frame Rendering (beta) and uncheck the box to use Single-Frame Rendering Mode
• Use Ae Render Queue to export the benchmark project in Single-Frame mode. Note: Use the same output module for Single-Frame and Multi-Frame mode.

Share the following information in this forum:

• Your hardware specs: # cores in your CPU, GB of memory, GPU model and amount of VRAM
• Single-Frame render speed
• Multi-Frame render speed

[jenkmeister]

It puzzles us too... we should do something about it. 😉 

[jagatai]

Mac Pro (Late 2013) 
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro6,1
12-Core Intel Xeon E5 - 2.7 GHz
Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled
Memory: 64 GB
MacOs Catalina 10.15.6

My results were 11:03 with multi-frame rendering on (8 concurrent frames) and 22:37 in single frame mode.

The one issue that I hope will be resolved is that during multi-frame mode, the computer became very unresponsive with severe lag in the cursor so that it was impossible to do any other work while the render was going on.  This was not a problem in single frame mode.

While I don't see this as something that could be changed at this point, it seems to me that it would be very helpful to be able to set multi or single frame mode on a per-item basis.   If multi-frame rendering is not practical on some animations - say due to a plug-in incompatibility - it would be nice to be able to simply set the output module to control which mode is used.

[jenkmeister]

Thanks for reporting about the lag. Right now MFR will try to use every bit of your system it can. But we are looking at options for users to be able to dial up and down the amount of the system resources being used so you could say, still do email, or chat, or even do other work while AE renders. That'll come online in the coming months once we've worked through a bit more of the design. 

In terms of per item MFR / SFR settings, we can certainly spend some time thinking about it. Eventually, whether an effect / plugin is compatible, MFR for that comp/effect will still be as fast or faster than SFR. So hopefully there isn't a need to turn it off. But if we can find some cases where MFR is slower, we can prioritize identifying that and perhaps just pulling it back to SFR automatically for you. 

Just as an FYI for everyone, this beta won't be over in a month. We have released this now, really as an early access look and an opportunity for testing across a wide variety of systems and compositions. We need the time to make this work for everyone so we'll take as much time as we need to do that. 🙂 

[Felix Dames]

AEPulseBenchmark:

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64 bit Version 2004
CPU: AMD Threadripper 1950X 16 Cores / 32 Threads @ 3.6 GHz - 4.2 GHz Turbo
RAM: 32 GB G.Skill Trident-Z RGB @ 3200 MHz CL 14 Quad Channel
GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX 1080 GDDR5 8GB Studio Driver ver. 456.71
System Drive: Samsung NVMe M.2 SSD 960 EVO 500GB
AE Cache Drive: Samsung NVMe M.2 SDD 970 PRO 512GB

Rendered File Container: AVI
Codec: None (Uncompressed)

Single Mercury Software: 18 min 04 sec
Single Mercury GPU (Cuda): 17 min 50 sec

Multi Mercury Software: 08 min 30 sec
Multi Mercury GPU (Cuda): 08 min 08 sec

MFR is great so far - more then 2 times faster then single core rendering!

Adobe great job that multicore rendering is finally coming!

I'm really exited and can't wait to put the RAM preview on a test drive 😉

I think my 32 GB RAM are not enough for 16 Cores might that be a bottleneck?

How much RAM is recommended per CPU Core?

Cheers, Felix

[jenkmeister]

We don't have final recommendations just yet, but it's looking around 2-4GBs per core but it is somewhat dependent upon the resolution and complexity of your comps. 

[Felix Van der Hallen]

Windows 10 Pro 64bit 20H2 AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core, 128GB Ram, RTX 2080 8GB GDDR6

Render in Prores 422 Multiframe - Software rendering - 8:15
Render in Prores 422 Multiframe - Mercury CUDA rendering - 7:56
Render in Proress 422 Single Frame - Mercury CUDA rendering - 11:27

I expected a bit more, certainly comparing the results of the other setups here 🙂
But hey, I'm just glad something is happening on the speed front of AE 😄
In the info zone, I saw that 8 frames were concurrent rendering while in Multiframe rendering.

[Felix Van der Hallen]

So, I noticed there was something holding my CPU back in Ryzen Master, I reset the whole software and got the following rather satisfying result. 🙂

Render in Prores 422 Multiframe - Software rendering - 4:19

[Jesse Kerman]

Wow!

Single-frame: 13 min, 10 sec

Multi-frame: 29 seconds (!!!!)

Finally feeling justified in buying all these cores for my work machine.

Specs:

Mac Pro (2019)

2.5 GHz 28-Core Intel Xeon W

384 GB RAM

AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB

[jenkmeister]

As much as we'd be delighted at that sort of improvement, I think your MF render was probably reading from disk or RAM cache. You should purge memory and disk caches before the MFR run just to be sure. 

[Jesse Kerman]

Ooof — you're totally right. My bad for not reading the instructions close enough!

Still, 4 min, 17 seconds is a great improvement!

[christianherbstreuth]

@Jesse Kerman 

Hi, i have the same Setup, exept the Vega II. But i am thinking of an update.

So it woukd be nice to know, did you use Software or GPU/Metal Support for rendering ?

[Jesse Kerman]

@christianherbstreuth — Those numbers were for Software rendering. I just tried out a multiframe render with Metal, and that ended up being just a little faster at 3min, 48sec compared to the 4:17 I got for Software rendering.

[nathangp3]

AMD RYZEN THREADRIPPER 3960X

24-Core / 48 threads at 3.8GHz
64GB DDR4 3200mhz RAM
(3x) GeForce RTX2080 Ti 11GB VRAM SLI enabled

Multi (Software): 4:24
Single (Software):12:02

Multi (CUDA): 4:11
Single (CUDA): 12:27

[massimilianop15912485]

notebook HP Pavilion Gaming - 15-dk0042nl

32 gb RAM

SSD 512Gb m2

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

Great result

[ccced]

It uses just one CPU on multi CPU machines.

All the threads are at 100%, but just on single CPU. I guess this is just something they forgot to think about.

Hopefully they fix it.

It is already double faster compared to singleframe, hopefully goes further with full multi-cpu implementation. 

[jenkmeister]

Can you tell me more about what you're seeing? I'm not sure I understand the "just one CPU on multi-CPU machines" statement. Perhaps a picture of task manager or the activity monitor? 

[Nick2049]

They mean one board with multiple physical CPU's.

I.e. a server board with 2 x XEON's

[Christian Lengger]

Core i7-6700K (4 Cores @ 4.00 GHz), 32 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB VRAM)

Single-Frame: 31min 36sec.

Multi-Frame: 21min. 44sec.

[robertz31648461]

My 3950x CPU with 64GB RAM and GTX 1080 (8GB VRAM):

Single: 12:57 min
Multi: 5:35 min

(Output  on render cue: AVI loseless)

It´s really time for this update..

[hehenno]

iMac Pro

Intel Xeon W 3 GHz 10-core

64GB ram

Vega 64X

The benchmark scene rendered like this:

Single-Frame render: 18 minutes 5 seconds

Multi-Frame render: 11 minutes 37 seconds

[bluezaza2]

-Win 10

-AMD Ryzen Threadripper 299WX 32- core - 3.0 GHz

-64 GB Ram

- Single 20:09 Mercury GPU

- Multi 11:40 Mecury GPU

- Multi 11:25 CUDA GPU

RTX 3090

[mayahi]

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core Processor 3.80 GHz
64gb RAM at 3200mhz
3060ti
windows 10 64 bit

Single: 11:22
Multi: 7:18

[AW Mograph]

Super excited about this option!

• Hardware:
  • Ryzen 7 3700X, 8 core, 16 threads
  • 64 GB DDR4, 3600
  • RTX 2080, 8GB
• Single-Frame render speed:  16 minutes 43 seconds
• Multi-Frame render speed:  9 minutes 28 seconds

[scrozier]

Windows 10

Threadripper 3960x  24 Core / 48 Thread

128 GB DDR4 Ram

 Nvidia 2080ti 11GB

Out of curiosity I opened a "real world" project on some down time.

Standard mix of comps / precomps with effects. Some H264 video files layered in with blending modes, text, track mattes etc. 

6second 18frame comp 1920 x 1080 24p 16bit Mercury on. 

Single Frame 5min 1s -- CPU usage ~ 50-60% GPU 8%. 

Ram Usage - 84%

Multi Frame -- 4Min 59s. CPU usage 65-80% Ram climbs to 85% GPU 10-12%. 

It spends a long time at 0% (2 min) before it starts rendering....so actual render time was probably closer to 3 min if there is a way to get the spin up time down. 

Some of the effects I was using ( not necesarily all of these this is just from the project report) I'm sure many of these are yet to be supported! 

Onwards and upwards. 

Effect: CC Particle World
Effect: Checkbox Control
Effect: Color Control
Effect: Curves
Effect: Displacement Map
Effect: Fill
Effect: Find Edges
Effect: Fractal Noise
Effect: Gradient Ramp
Effect: Invert
Effect: Lumetri Color
Effect: Mosaic
Effect: Motion Tile
Effect: Noise
Effect: Point Control
Effect: Set Matte
Effect: Slider Control
Effect: Solid Composite
Effect: Stereo Mixer
Effect: Tint
Effect: Transform
Effect: Vegas
Effect: Warp Stabilizer

[jenkmeister]

The startup time is something we are working on eliminating currently. Probably another 6-8 weeks of work before we have something to show (this is a deep architectural change to make), but we know it's gotta go! 🙂 

If you look at the effect in the effect control window it should show which effects are not yet MFR supported (yellow warning icon). Or if you enable logging and view the log file, it will show you after the render is completed which effects are and aren't MFR supported yet. Lumitri and Warp Stabilizer stand out as 2 of those off the top of my head.