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

[rlancemoody]

AMD Ryzen 3960X/ 256GB Ram/ 3xRTX 3090/Win 10/Mercury GPU

To ProRes 422 HQ

With Multiframe: 4:36
Single Frame: 12:36

[Filippo Marchetti]

Apparetly the 20 cores of the M1 Ultra arent't enough for After Effects.

Getting very lackluster performance in the current beta...

[jenkmeister]

We did a lot of testing with Apple during M1 Ultra/Mac Studio development and saw nice performance increases. So do you have more details on what your project contains? Are you running in Rosetta mode or native mode with the Beta? We will need more details to help here.

[Filippo Marchetti]

Running the beta since october 2021; first on my M1 Mini, now my M1 Ultra 128GB.
I'm using the beta because it's faster, but also because now the Rosetta version crashes on boot.
I have noticed very slow performance with anything that's related to displaying images; I'll explain...
When After Effects has to do a simple calculation (like analizing a clip for stabilization or in renders), it's quite fast.
Whenever you have to display images (like adding a png in a precomp) it's quite slow. Sometimes I move layers around (very simple 1080p comps) and it takes half a second to show the element actually moving.
Also very slow performance with anything shape layers.
I created a super simple character with Rubberhose and it was extremely slow.
If there's any specific testing you'd like me to perform, please do let me know, as I have a bout a week to decide if sending my M1 Ultra back.
Thank you.

[anatoliiy25274996]

Specs: AMD Ryzen 5950x / 64 GB RAM / RTX 3090 (nothing is overclocked or put on boost mode etc)

Results:

Single frame: 8 min, 55 sec

Multi-frame:3 min, 54 sec

[Guest]

Almost the same specs here: 

AMD Ryzen 5950x 16 Cores / 128 GB RAM / RTX 3090 FE 24GB

Results:

Single frame: 9 min, 11 sec

Multi-frame:3 min, 48 sec

Tried this beta with other project, render fails because of insufficient VRAM (not true, 6GB used at full load)

Anyway. Adobe, you've made my day!

[jenkmeister]

Awesome result! For your other project, you could try flipping to Mercury Software mode (for now, until we better handle the GPU VRAM OOM issues), and see if it completes.

[OnMyWay]

It's wonderful to see your project show my 12 threads maxed out at 100% usage! 🙂

What would be more wonderful is to see my projects do the same.

I started running some of mine and it doesn't do the same.

Also lumetri had to be diabled as it's not set up for Multi-Frame Rendering.

I know this is beta. But If I would have seen my projects max the cpu usage out I'd be much

more excited.

I love you Adobe, Keep at 'er....

[barbalargas]

Thank you, Adobe!  You have been thinking of me with this update, I am flattered!

Render output:  AVI, Lossless

CPU: THREADRIPPER 3970X 32 Cores

Memory: 128GB 2866MHZ

GPU: GTX 1050ti 4GB

Multi-frame rendering time: 3m44s

Single-frame rendering time: 11m37s

[barbalargas]

In projects that are less effects-heavy and have Single-frame render times of 25s saw an increase in render time with Multi-frame to 44s.

Most of the time was spent initializing the render, whereas the Single-frame render began immediately.  

Is work being done to put the render start for Multi-frame on par with Single-frame?

[jenkmeister]

Yep, it sure is. The architectural changes to make that startup essentially instant are well underway with the engineering team. This is part of the reason we haven't rolled out timeline preview with MFR yet (no one wants to press spacebar and wait some amount of time before frames start rendering). 🙂 

[Puget_Matt]

Hopefully this doesn't come against any self-promotion rules, but we included the AE Pulse Benchmark project in our Multi-Frame Rendering performance article (https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/How-Fast-is-the-new-Multi-Frame-Rendering-in-After-Effect...). We presented the data in terms of FPS, however, so I wanted to make sure the raw min/sec got reported.

Shared specs for all systems was 4x DDR4-3200 RAM (64GB total) with an RTX 3080 10GB (CUDA MPE) on Windows 10 Pro (2009)

CPU | Single-Frame | Multi-Frame | Speedup

Intel Core i5 10600K 6 Core - 18 min 5 sec | 13 min 10 sec | 1.4x speedup
AMD Ryzen 5800X 8 Core - 9 min 56 sec | 7 min 12 sec | 1.4x speedup
AMD Ryzen 5900X 10 Core - 8 min 57 sec | 4 min 37 sec | 1.9x speedup
Intel Core i9 10900K 10 Core - 12 min 8 sec | 6 min 10 sec | 2.0x speedup
AMD Ryzen 5950X 12 Core - 8 min 39 sec | 3 min 55 sec | 2.2x speedup
Intel Core i9 10980XE 18 Core - 12 min 27 sec | 5 min 17 sec | 2.4x speedup
AMD Threadripper 3970X 32 Core - 12 min 9 sec | 3 min 55 sec | 3.0x speedup
AMD Threadripper Pro 3975X 32 Core - 11 min 26 sec | 3 min 32 sec | 3.3x speedup
AMD Threadripper 3990X 64 Core - 11 min 21 sec | 3 min 57 sec | 2.9x speedup

[rlancemoody]

Is there a list of what doesn't work with multiframe?   This is the vital and crucial isssue related to the succcess of this endeavor.  Plug-ins not working (particularly Adobe's own plugins) is a showstopper.

Thanks!

[jenkmeister]

The list of effects that ship with AE that support MFR is here https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/effect-list.html

This list will be updated as we migrate more effects to support MFR and we'll post regular updates to the forum as we roll out new features, updated effects and bug fixes. The plan is to support all non-obsolete effects before we ship MFR to all users. 

For third-party effects, developers have access to the SDK and many are working on making their effects support MFR. I would expect you'll start to see those appear in the next few months. 

[Szalam]

It's actually not as much of a showstopper as you might think. One of MANY ways this new feature differs from the multiprocessing of old is that one non-thread-safe effect won't kill Multi-Frame Rendering. Multi-Frame Rendering continues on everything except that effect. The computer just has to wait for that effect on the frames it's needed. 

[berniefx]

Great News! Just did a quick test on my setup:

AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 8-Core / 16 Threads // 64 GB Ram // Radeon RX 5500XT 8GB VRAM

Output Module: DPX 10-Bit

Single Speed: 14:20

Multi-Speed: 9:20 (~ 1,5 times faster, expected close to 2x ...)

Have to check with different output modules and compare to actual ME Performance. I'll update later.

[berniefx]

AE 17.6 via ME > ProRes422HQ > 15:33 

AE Beta (Multiframe) > Prores422HQ direct output > 9:44

Love the sounddesign!

[NowaVFX]

Specs: i9-10850K CPU 10 Core / 32 GB RAM / RTX 3080 10 GB

Multi-Frame: 7 min, 29 sec.

Single-Frame: 14 min, 59.

[chfilm]

AMAZING! I was waiting for this so hard! Can't wait to see this in the preview window as well. A bit sad that the GPU still sits completely idle, I think using the GPU for more real time editing would be the next major milestone, but still, this is great! Thanks a lot.

Mac Pro 2019

16 core

2x Vega II

196gb Ram

Mac OS 11.2.2

Multiframe: 5:30

Single Frame: 12:50 

To sum it up HUGE performance gain!!

[coldar]

Intel core i9 9920X - 12 core - 64Gb Ram - GPU 2x2080ti

Multiframe: 6:10

Singleframe: 18:20

[Nick2049]

Interesting, your 12 core 9920X is 2 seconds faster than my 7940x

[Phillip5E97]

Hi, great results here...

CPU: i9-990K @3.60GHz

GPU: 2x Nvidia 2080ti

RAM: 64GB

Multi-Frame: 9min 48sec

Single-Frame: 15min 13sec

[christianherbstreuth]

OS Big Sur / 28 Core / 192 RAM / AMD Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB

Animation Codec

Single

Software : 12:39

GPU / Metal : 12:47

Multi

Software : 4:22

GPU / Metal : 3:59

[Kolja Raybender]

Yes, I have been waiting, and Rendercue results talk for its self.
But, this speedboost has to be implemented i the ram preview if you want to improve my workflow,
I tested this and there is no improvement at all, I guess you will implement the multithreading later on?
Its when you work the boost matters, while scrubbing the timeline, previewing and so...
"Final" render/encoding times is just a matter af planning. But still great to se these results 🙂

Render output:  AVI, Lossless

CPU: THREADRIPPER 3970X 32 Cores

Memory: 256GB 3200MHZ

GPU: GTX 1080ti 3GB

Multi-frame rendering time: 3m35s

Single-frame rendering time: 11m07s

[frank_d]

I second that.

We need the performance boost mostly when working and scrubbing/previewing our keyframes.

It's definitely great if rendering takes less time, but most of the time is spent making the animations.