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

[screen namesss]

Only used half of my available cores.

Specs:

AMD Threadripper 3990x: 64 core 128 thread

256 GB memory 

Nvidia RTX 3090 with 24 GB VRAM

Single-Frame rendering speed:   14 min,  54 sec

Multi-Frame rendering speed: 4 min, 38 sec

I noticed with multi-frame rendering only 64 of the available 128 threads were being used (the primary and secondary threads of the second processor group)

[screen namesss]

I just updated to the new beta version through adobe CC, also changed the output format, adjusted my computer's memory speed, and closed down all other running programs, the culmination of which sped up both render times.  

New Single-Frame: 11 min, 11 sec

New Multi-Frame: 3 min, 55 sec

The process is still only using half of my processor cores, but it's not an insignificant change in render times.

[jenkmeister]

Re: half your processor cores. Neither AE itself, nor MFR have yet enabled support for processor groups but it is on the backlog to see if we can get it working for MFR. We'd love to see 128 cores rendering 🙂 

[screen namesss]

Thanks, so would I!

[Rene Andritsch]

AE Benchmark Project on a MacBook Pro (15 Inch, 2018) MacOS Catalina 10.15.7:

• 2,9 GHz Intel Core i9 (6 cores)
• 32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
• Radeon Pro 560X 4096 MB
• Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

Render Times rendered as Lossless:

• Single Frame (Mercury Software): 24 min 14 sec
• Multi Frame (Mercury Software): 20 min 23 sec
• Multi Frame (Metal): 17 min 27 sec

[NK Films]

A very welcomed update Adobe - Game changer! Thank you so much for working on this, literally very excited for the future of After Effects.

Here's my specs and results:

Specs

Mac Pro 2019

Processor - 2.7 GHz 24-Core Intel Xeon W

Memory - 512 GB 2933 MHz DDR4

Graphics - AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo 32 GB 

Results (exported as prores 422)

Multiframe - software only - 4min 50 secs

Multiframe - Mercury enabled - 3min 55 secs

Single frame (mercury enabled) - 13min 12 seconds

HUGE improvement. 

[AARP]

It works very well

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

RAM:  64 GB Dual-Channel 1600 MHz

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 4GB

931GB Western Digital WDC WDS100T2B0C-00PXH0

Single: 14:20

Multi-Frame: 6:51

[blocsuite3]

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6800K CPU @ 3.40GHz (12 CPUs)
Memory: 65536MB RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
---------------------------------------------------
Rendering to JPG String.

(Beta) Multi-frame - 16mins 47secs
(AE 2021) Single-frame - 28mins 13secs

Any tips on how to improve PC specs to speed this up would be appreciated.

[Nick2049]

Is your CPU hitting 100% across all cores/threads when running the MF test?

Is this CUDA or Software?

[Nick2049]

Should we not all be exporting to the same codec and posting OS and GPU driver versions for more consistent results to compare?

Anyway, here are my results:

Spec:

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64 [Version: 20H2 Build: 19042.867]

CPU: Intel Core i9-7940X [Stock 3.1GHz - turbo averages 3.8GHz]

MEMORY: 64GB 2666Mhz [4 x 16GB - XMP Enabled]

OS SSD: Samsung 970 EVO 500GB

AE CACHE SSD: Samsung 970 PRO 1TB

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti 11GB

Results:

Single Frame - Software: 14m 22s

Starts immediately

Appears to use all cores at an average of 50% utilisation

GPU idle for majority of test

90% memory usage reached at approx. 40% of render time

Both SSD's pretty much idle throghout

Multi Frame - Software: 6m 12s

Takes a little while to start

Appears to use all cores at 100%

GPU idle for majority of test

88% memory usage reached at approx. 50% of render time

Both SSD's pretty much idle throghout

Single Frame - CUDA: 13m 57s

Starts immediately

Appears to use all cores at an average of 50% utilisation

Very little GPU usage, max 30%

Both SSD's pretty much idle throghout

Multi Frame - CUDA: 5m 32s

Starts immediately

Appears to use all cores at 100%

Very little GPU usage, max 30%

Both SSD's pretty much idle throghout

*Notes:

Based on Quicktime - ProRes 422

Performed on a clean boot of Windows. Only one other program open (Outlook)

[Nick2049]

Throughout*

GPU Driver: 461.72 DCH

[nawaz1983]

Here are my results:

CPU:  Ryzen 9 3900XT 3.8GHz 12 Core 24 Thread Processor

RAM: 32GB

GPU:  GeForce RTX 2070 8GB

OS: Win 10 64-bit

Multi Frame: 6 min 40 sec

Single-Frame: 13 min 8 sec

[DavidJackson]

Mac Pro 2019

AE BETA - 18.1.0 Build 28

16 core

1x AMD Radeon Pro Vega II (32gbRAM)

192gb Ram

Mac OS 11.2.3

software only 

Multiframe: 5min 25sec

gpu acceleration (metal) 

Multiframe: 4min 50sec

Singleframe (with Metal): 12min 11sec 

Incredible results. I tried a live project i'm on at the moment. In public release of fully upto date AE an export takes over a 1hour 10mins. This in BETA stopped at 69%. Not sure why, but it just couldn't complete.

[jenkmeister]

If you have time, please turn on logging (Help -> Enable Logging), run the render that fails. Once you've recovered from the failure, use Help -> Reveal Logging Files and then find the After Effects log.txt file. If you can send that to mfrbeta@adobe.com we'd love to take a look at the log file to see what is happening. We know of a couple of scenarios that are causing hangs which we are actively working on fixing, so it'd be great to know if this is one of those or something new. Thanks!

[DavidJackson]

Submitted a few yesterday. Hopefully helpful 🙂 

[donbarrum]

Oh wow, exciting times. Finally multicore rendering, I can't believe it! Getting this in the previewer as well will be a gamechanger for the working experience.

Hardware: 32 Core  (AMD 3970x), 128gb memory (3600 MhZ), Nvidia RTX 3090 24gb VRAM
Single Frame render speeds: 11min 44Sec
Multi Frame render speeds: 3min 26sec

(that's actually more than 3x faster 😉 )

[skilled_friend0D44]

Here's the result of the benchmark (export is pro res 422 HQ):

• AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970x / 128gb ram / rtx3090 - 24gb vram / Windows 10 64bit
• Single frame : 23:55
• Multi-Frame : 4:21

lots of open tabs in chrome too might have slowed down the single frame?

[donbarrum]

That's extremely slow (more than twice my number on single core), considering we have an almost identical system. Do you have proper cooling to let your CPU turboboost when it can? tabs should not cause such an extreme lag. 

[skilled_friend0D44]

hmmm...I'm going to have to look into that. It's a prebuilt PC and I come from a mac background so know nothing about PCs. I just clicked on performancetest and it informed me I'm running on low power saver mode so that might have been it. I'll run the test again without chrome open too, to see if that improves anything. 

[donbarrum]

Low power saving mode might be the reason. That's basically meant for Laptops. On a stationary PC I would consider High performance - it might be the reason

[hellopaul4]

Interesting to see such different results between you, @skilled_friend0D44 and @donbarrum with such similarly specced machines. I'm considering buying a new PC with identical processor/RAM/GPU (when they become available!) as yours and am interested to know why the render times could vary so much.

[donbarrum]

My only suggestion would be Cooling (since Threadripper measures cooling for Tuboboosting) or Ram speeds, since AMD is dependent of fast ram, or if @skilled_friend0D44 has overclocked (the more you overclock the less single core turboboost works because machine will run warmer)..but since I had faster multi core rendering as well, I assume that's not the case. I have not overclocked my system, everything is running in default mode. 

[Joy Raisinghani]

Thanks for reporting those numbers. 

@skilled_friend0D44 Are you clearing the memory and disk cache between the runs on single frame vs multi frame?

Thanks,

[hellopaul4]

Would there be any way for AE to automatically temporarily disable MFR when doing a Composition > Save Frame As > File? By definition, it's only ever one frame, and it takes AE a while to start rendering when in MFR mode - even though it's only one frame.

[jenkmeister]

Let's see if we can fix that for you. Eventually that startup will be gone, but if we are just rendering one frame, we don't really need to prepare to multi-frame the render. 🙂