Ae performance boost with cropped layers

[Olivié Charbonneau]

Hello, 

since Ae seems to benefit performance enhancements these days, I am wondering about the potential performance boost with cropped layers as discovered in this article : 

https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-making-a-composition-render-70-x-faster/

The script mentionned is here : https://aescripts.com/masks-to-cropped-layers/

and I wonder if something is planned in Ae (without addon) in order to streamline this consideration. 

Just curious, thank you in advance. 

Best regards. 

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

The best way to improve performance is to properly set up your assets before you start and carefully plan your project. Cropping layers with masks may help some projects, but most of mine don't have a lot of unnecessary pixels anywhere so the performance gain wouldn't be worth the effort. Even if I used a script that cropped all comps or layers to just the size of the masks, I often need the extra comp size because I am using effects that must extend beyond layer boundaries. 

The sample comp in the video with 900 + tiny masks with stroke applied is a great project to demonstrate significantly reducing the number of pixels in each layer, but how many comps do you have that have 50 or even 25 masked layers in the project. I recently did a VFX shot that had about 30 nested comps and each of those comps had a couple of dozen layers, and they all had effects. I only recall having one mask in the entire project, but almost all of the nested comps (pre-comps) were smaller than the main comp, and one of them was considerably bigger because it had to move and it was all 2D so collapse transformations would not fix it. I probably would have done that same project with shape layers or just the AI file and some effects. I could have achieved the exact same thing with a half dozen layers. 

I guess the short answer is; if you are planning a comp with a couple of hundred masks on a couple of hundred layers and you don't need any of the effects to extend beyond the layer boundaries you could try that technique. The key to efficient rendering is efficient workflows, and understanding how AE works is critical in both cases.

[Olivié Charbonneau]

Yes thank you, their example project is quite a specific edge case indeed, and in most cases for production projects the performance improvement would be marginal...

Thank you for closing that door, the light was appealling but probably deceiving overall 🙂 

Have a good day.