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

[Rafael Dessotti]

Hi,

i5-6500 4 cores / 32gb ram / Intel HD Graphics 530 / Windows 10 1909

Far from the high-end system that I've seen here :0

I was testing with projects that we work here. They are kind of peculiar, as you can see on the picture.

The most part of them is just transparent frames, without any layer being rendered. Because of that I thought AE would render those 'gaps' faster on MFR, but not. It renders about 30 frames per second on single and multi frame render. When rendering I can see that concurrent frame render is always 1 in both single and multi render.

Should I expect an improvement on performance on the kind of project we have?

Thank!

Rafa

[jenkmeister]

For 4 cores and the Intel card, I would suggest, if you aren't already, to use Mercury Software mode. The GPU is probably fairly limited in available memory and if that's the case, or you're working at a resolution like 4K, then MFR will currently be conservative and only spin up 1 frame at a time. 

[Rafael Dessotti]

Thanks for your reply. Just correcting myself, I'm seing 0 concurrent frames rendering when AE renders those blanks frames.

 

I'm exporting 1080p ProRes 4444 with alpha. Also, I'm using Mercury Sofware mode.

Since those gaps don't have any thing (effects etc, just alpha channel 255), is there any configuration that I could set on AE to copy these frames over instead of render them each time? Something like the ffmpeg 'stream_loop'.

I'm sorry if it is the wrong place to ask this. Thank you very much for the assistance.

Rafa

[jenkmeister]

0 concurrent frames is "correct", though perhaps confusing. Because the frame is fully transparent/empty, there are no threads doing the rendering step, only doing the export/write to disk. So the frames are just being copied over directly, no delay by the rendering stage. With that info though, it sounds like the encode and write to disk is probably the bottleneck for your export right now and writing to an SSD if not already, may give you some performance improvements. 

[Rafael Dessotti]

What you said makes totally sense but using SSD or HD doesn't make difference on speed here. Both has an average of 30 frames rendered per second.

I was monitoring the disk utilization while rendering and it stays at 0-1% most of the time. Sometimes it goes to 10% for less than a second then goes back to 0-1%. 

[jenkmeister]

Are you able to share the project with us? (send a zip file to mfrbeta@adobe.com). Happy to look at it further to see what's going on.

[Rafael Dessotti]

Unfortunately I'm not authorized to send you one of our projects but I made one here that has the same behavior. I'm sending it now. You will see that it is very simple, a 1h long comp with some layers spread with big gaps between the layers.

@jenkmeister thank so much for the attention.

[jenkmeister]

Thank you! 

[jenkmeister]

Mulit-Frame Rendering - April 1st (no April Fools here!) Beta Update

Time for another update. No tricks or funny stories here, it's all serious business. lol. 

Thank you again to everyone for sending results, sending projects, sending bugs, sending excitement. We are amazed and thrilled by your on-going support and involvement in this beta with us. A reminder that if you have projects that won’t render or are slower than expected, please send them to us at mfrbeta@adobe.com.

And now, on to the updates...

MFR Improvements & Bug Fixes (builds 18.1x32 - 18.2x11)

• Just about everyone who has used MFR has commented on the time taken to start up an export in the Render Queue. While we are still working on removing that start up time completely, we've made an optimization that gets frames rendering sooner and should lessen the occurance of "stuck at 0% rendering" issues. 
• Pseudo effects, missing effects or effects that weren't active may have shown a warning icon and message indicating they weren't optimized for MFR. That wasn't right, so it's been fixed.
• Levels and Auto-Color are now using a new thread-safe caching system and should have improved performance. 

That's all? What have you been doing??? 😉 

• One thing everyone wants is their favorite third-party plugins and effects supporting MFR. Yesterday we released a major update to the After Effects SDK that developers will use to finalize their support of MFR. So look out for your favorite third-party plugins supporting MFR soon! If you're interested in learning more about the SDK update, visit https://ae-plugins.docsforadobe.dev/intro/whats-new.html to learn more.
• Continued work on removing the startup time for MFR. This is a critical piece to unlocking Timeline previews and making MFR exports for smaller comps faster than SFR. 
• Continued work on our dynamic composition analysis. If MFR is going to work well on every computer configuration, we need to make sure we are analyzing composition complexity and hardware usage and scaling MFR accordingly.
• You may have missed it, but we've made a couple of quiet mentions of native Render Queue notifications coming with MFR. We are busily hooking up AE to the Creative Cloud notification backend so you can be alerted when exports complete.
• There are other open bugs that you, our beta testers have reported. We are still working on fixing them. We'll update you as those fixes roll out. If you're still waiting on something from us, we haven't forgotten you!

Puget Systems Q&A - MFR Edition

We were invited to spend time with Puget Systems last Friday to talk about MFR. You can check out the whole interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffFwvBjNiFI (yep, that's me they are talking to). 

Thanks again for all your contributions to making MFR awesome!

Sean

[DavidJackson]

I only intended to scan through the video - alas i watched the whole thing. Very inciteful. Amaing work to you and the team for getting us all to this incredible point. The improvements in performance are really, just fantastic.

I actually worked on and delivered 3 live projects last week, going to the beta to render the projects, because the improvement was so valuable to me, on a very tight turnaround, and very real deadline. 

[amazing_fashion5C22]

Thanks for all the hard work!

I must say the interview with Puget Systems is great. I doubt if anyone here wouldn't want to see more devs and people from inside the team talking openly about their goals, struggles and ambitions. I think this helps putting things into perspective for everybody. Personally I enjoyed it a bunch.

Good luck!

[george5CD8]

I am planning to create a new workstation in September.

I see that AMD CPUs, Ryzen and Threadrippers seem to be taking advantage of the brand ne MFR feature.

However I recall several cases where users mentioned how Adobe software is coded in Macs, then ported on Windows then patched for AMD CPUs, whereas the software didn't need any patching for Intel architecture.

Is this still the case? Since I only upgrde every 8 years or so, I'd hate to purchase a $15,000 workstation only to find out that day-today usage is buggy/slow, just because I bought an AMD CPU.

Any thoughts on this?

[jenkmeister]

Not the case these days. The development team all have Windows and Macs to develop on and all features need to be developed for both platforms from the start. I can tell a good portion of the AE team is also using AMD threadripper based machines every day. Our test labs also contain a mix of Intel and AMD machines. 

[ccced]

So this is the cores/logical processors usage on a Double Xeon Workstation.

This is with multiframe render enabled.

It is clearly visible that AfterEffects is using only one physical CPU, and it does not know how to use the second CPU.

This is less important, but result for multi is 6:23 and single is 20:37.

If it could use both CPUs and all 96 logical processors instead of only 48 the render time would probably drop significantly.

2 x Xeon(R) Platinum 8260M CPU @ 2.30GHz

64gb RAM

3090RTX & 2080tiRTX

WIN10pro latest update

[jenkmeister]

Yep, this is on our backlog to work on. It requires new code to handle and allocate threads across the different processor groups but we'd definitely like to get this working. 

[ccced]

Cool! Great work guys, can't wait to see the beast unleashed.

[Mika988]

Hi!

Great update!

Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10980XE CPU @ 3.00GHz – 18 CORES

256Gb RAM – 3000MHz

RTX 3090 STRIX ROG – 24GO Vram

Windows 10 64Bit Pro

SSD Samsung 970 Evo Plus

Render : Quicktime Animation

AE2021 - V18.0.1 : Single Frame Mercury Software : 15m43

AE2021 - V18.0.1 :Single Frame CUDA : 12m14

AE BETA : Multi-Frame Mercury Software : 05m

AE BETA : Multi-Frame CUDA : 04m35

[pedro.meca]

Dear all,

here are my specs:

AMD RYZEN 7 5800X 8-core - 3800Mhz

64 Gb

Nvidia GTX 1060 6Gb

Multi-frame: 7:33

Single-frame: 26:21

[Rene Andritsch]

@jenkmeister First of all thank you for the great interview with Puget and explaining indepth how it works and what AE users can expect.

Maybe this will be obsolete once all effects are ported to Multi Frame Rendering but as there are also a lot of 3rd party effects that will take some time to be adjusted it might be helpful to get a different warning icon in the Effects Panel if the effect does not support MFR. This would help to identify possible MFR slowdowns immediately. At the moment it is the same icon like when getting a warning about bit depth. A different color would already do …

[hellopaul4]

I've had exactly the same thoughts as you!

[Felix Dames]

AEPulseBenchmark - UPDATED for AE Beta 18.2.0 (Build 17):

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64 bit Version 20H2 (Build 19042.867)
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)

MFR Mercury Software: 08 min 30 sec (AE Beta Version 18.1.0 Build 31)

MFR Mercury Software: 08 min 15 sec (AE Beta Version 18.2.0 Build 17)
MFR Mercury GPU (Cuda): 08 min 08 sec (AE Beta Version 18.1.0 Build 31)

MFR Mercury GPU (Cuda): 07 min 53 sec (AE Beta Version 18.2.0 Build 17)

Looks like you make some good progress with the latest AE Beta Version 18.2.0 (Build 17).

Rendering time decreased approximately about 15 seconds!

Rendering startup time also decreased significant!

Well done so far keep up the good work 😉

Felix

[Rene Andritsch]

AEPulseBenchmark AE Beta 18.2.0 (Build 17):
Hardware: MacBook Pro (15 Inch, 2018)

OS: MacOS Big Sur 11.2.3
CPU: 2,9 GHz Intel 6-Core i9
RAM: 32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4
GPU: Radeon Pro 560X 4096 MB | Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

Mercury Software
Single-Core: 25 min 15 sec
Multi-Core: 20 min 25 sec

Metal
Multi-Core: 17 min 36 sec

The startup time is much much shorter compared to AE v 18.0.x. Single core is 28 seconds slower than im my test in February. Multi-Core Mercury Software improved by 2 seconds. No error with Metal now and significantly faster by 2 min 49 sec.

[FrankG72]

My machine is pretty much right out the dark ages... 

Mac Pro Late 2013

3.5Ghz 6-core

64 G RAM

Dual Firepro 700D

Single: 27 Min, 35 Sec

Multi: 17 Min, 48 Sec 

So quite a big boost in render times.

I tried it out on a project I'm working on currently, not really any FX ecept some drop shadow & a lot of paint, but a gazillion AI layers... so far I have only successfully got it to render out once, and it knocked a 49 minute render down to 25 minutes, so quite a significant boost in speed.. However, 90% of the time it stalls/hangs mid-render at a random spot. Anyone have idea why this may be the case? 

[jenkmeister]

Are you able to zip up and send us your project (mfrbeta@adobe.com)? If not, go to the Help Menu and choose Enable Logging & Restart AE. Render out the project until it gets stuck and stop the render. Then go to Help Menu -> Reveal Logging files and find the After Effects Log.txt file and send that to us (mfrbeta@adobe.com) - hopefully we can see what's going on.

[FrankG72]

Hi, thanks for the response.

Increasing the cache size & moving where the cache is situated sems to have resolved the issue somewhat (3 successful renders this morning, although had a couple of fails yesterday). I tried an output with preview on, to see if I could spot where issues were occuring, and it seems to be happening where I have layers arranged in 3D space. Interestingly render times have slowed down a bit with an increae in cache size. Also interesting to note that the multithreading render runs slower over some areas of the comp than the single threading does.

I'm not sure logging would work as AE doesn't crash per se, it merely...  stops rendering or writing frames. Yuo can stil pause the render queue & restart it etc. Regardless, I have not had a misfire since enableing logging.

I have to deliver thisn project in a couple of days, once that's done I will bundle up the project files and send through to see if you can replicate my problem. 

Thanks.