Copy link to clipboard
Copied
I am working on a composition in Adobe After Effects CS6, and it's running painfully slow. I've tried to mess with some of the settings in the preferences, and lowering the quality of the preview. But I still feel like I'm running terribly slow considering the speed of my computer. Here's what I'm running:
Mac Pro Desktop
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache (per processor): 12 MB
Memory: 24 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 5.86 GT/s
Video Card
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800:
Chipset Model: NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
Slot: Slot-1
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 1536 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x05fe
Revision ID: 0x00a1
ROM Revision: 3426
Displays:
SyncMaster:
Resolution: 1680 x 1050 @ 60 Hz
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Display Serial Number: H9LPA06272
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Rotation: Supported
SyncMaster:
Resolution: 1680 x 1050 @ 60 Hz
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Display Serial Number: H9LPA06265
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Rotation: Supported
Hard Drive
WDC WD1001FALS-41Y6A0:
Capacity: 1 TB (1,000,204,886,016 bytes)
Model: WDC WD1001FALS-41Y6A0
Revision: 05.03D06
Serial Number: WD-WCATR2482149
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk0
Rotational Rate: 7200
Medium Type: Rotational
Bay Name: Bay 1
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
Volumes:
Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
Writable: Yes
BSD Name: disk0s1
MAC OS X:
Capacity: 677.53 GB (677,531,090,944 bytes)
Available: 421.16 GB (421,160,968,192 bytes)
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk0s2
Mount Point: /
Untitled:
Capacity: 322.33 GB (322,328,068,096 bytes)
Available: 183.98 GB (183,976,169,472 bytes)
Writable: No
File System: NTFS
BSD Name: disk0s3
Mount Point: /Volumes/Untitled
The composition I'm working with does have 1 camera, and about 45 small 3D comps built into it. No lights. And all of the footage and data is on the Mac OSX hard drive. Which has tons of space available as you can see. I've played around with the settings in After Effects. But nothing seems to significantly speed things up. Any ideas??
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
If you're using AE's new raytracing feature, you need to be aware that it makes rendering painfully slow. No, excruciatingly slow.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Umm
about 45 small 3D comps built into it.
3D comps are just slow even without raytracing. Collapsing transformations does just that. Simply get over it and accept things as they are. Despite Adobe telling people otherwise for years, AE simply sucks at anything 3D no matter what...
Mylenium
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Workflow is especially critical if you are dealing with 3-D comps in HD. Make sure that your assets are all properly sized. Make sure your assets are in codecs that are easily deciphered by the CPU. And MPEG codecs are definitely not easy for the machine figure out and may slow things down considerably. If you use expressions to tie things together make sure you haven't written a loop where one thing refers to another thing which refers to another thing. These can slow things way down.
The only potential bottleneck in your system is that you are using your system drive to read and write your production files. Things will go faster if you put in a second hard drive. Better yet by three drives and srtipe them together in a level 0 RAID.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Rick Gerard wrote:
If you use expressions to tie things together make sure you haven't written a loop where one thing refers to another thing which refers to another thing. These can slow things way down.
I use a lot of index+1 or -1 on my comps, is this the kind of loop you're referring to?
Thanks,
David.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
He meant an expression that references something effected by an expression which references something else...etc. until one of the expressions references the result of the first one. If that happens, the computer is stuck trying to run calculations on the same loop of expressions.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Thanks man, at first I thought he meant that too, but that will actually crash AE, not slow down your project, hence my question about index, I know it's not a loop but I believe that might be bogging down my system and just wanted to confirm with Rick.
Best,
David.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
expressions using index+/-1 are not necessarily slower, but they will be if they imply a recursion. For instance
LEADER = thisComp.layer("LEADER);
(index===LEADER.index) ? value : thisComp.layer(index-1).property("blah blah").value-5;
will be +++slow, while
LEADER = thisComp.layer("LEADER);
leadIDX = LEADER.index;
LEADER.property("blah blah").value-5*(index-leadIDX);
will behave just normally. Same for valueAtTime.
Xavier.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Hey PJ,
I've been using CS6 since it was released, and while it's got a bunch of great new features, it's basically made Multi Processing unusable unless we're talking about the simplest of comps. I'm working on my second short using AE as the total animation package, and render times for complicated 3D comps (NOT using ray tracing) have tripled. MP used to take forever to spool up, but was fast once it got rolling. Now, disabling MP gives me 3 or 4 times faster rendering, which is still MUCH slower than MP is CS5.5. SOmething has deflineitly changed for the worse, as i'm using the same machine with the same settings and virtually the same comps.
I acutally just yesterday had two animators quit on my because they couldn't meet their deadlines.
I think After Effects is the hydra of programs. They kill one feature and two more fill its place. Unfortuanly we traded functional Multi-processing for falloff lighting and etc... The puppet tool was it 3 version of after effects before it was stable. I'm hoping we don't have to wait til CS7 for MP to sort itself out.
I really don't understand the "deal with it" aspect of the posters here. Surely a functional program that delivers on it's promises is the goal of this forum. We're not asking it to make us a sandwich.
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
Hey Mike, thanks for you input. I guess I sitll don't know what to do though. There are so many $#*^& settings in AE and trying to get the settings just right is like building a space ship (i.e. I need a bunch of engineers). Is there a way to turn off the ray tracing that you mentioned? I turned off MP and it doesnt' seem to help. On a side note, I'm only using one actual video file in this comp and it's a mov file using the Animation codec. Any other ideas? Maybe I should just downgrade to CS5?
Copy link to clipboard
Copied
make sure that the "renderer" in the top right of your viewer says "classic 3D". There are lots of render settings posts by Todd on here, but I haven't seen a CS6 specific one...
this makes a big difference.