After Effects not using CPU even when simple video conversion.

[asimzb]

Hello everyone.

I'm very new to this forum and this is my first post. the reason i'm here is because I am confused about something which I hope someone could solve my problem.

When I export the video (which is 4K in this example) from Premier Pro, it utilize the cpu well and it takes 4 minutes to convert the video to H.264 format and anything default matching the source footage.

now if I do the same with Adobe Encoder, it behaves the same and utilize the cpu well and takes almost same time to convert,

but the problem is if I use the same video in after effects, create new composition from the source file and do nothing else but just export it to Media Encoder and every settings is the same as with previous example. It takes more time almost 20 minutes and it is using CPU 40% to 50%.

Can someone please guide me telling, what is wrong with the After Effects?

I have read many forums telling that AE is more complex and it has to do computations, but my concern is that, Im not using any effects or else, am jut converting the video, and isn't it logical that the same video should take the same time to convert?  or at lease it should utilize the full CPU, because if its only converting the video file, it should only depend on CPU.

my PC is (in my thinking) capable to handle this kind of job,  i have build it myself with following components.

Asus X99 gaming mothorboard.

intel i7 6800k CPU

Samsung 500GB Evo M.2 SSD on PCI x slot.

EVGA GTX1050 ti  GPU

windows 7 64bit ultimate

After Effects CC 2017

Premiere Prp CC 2017

Media Encoder CC 2017

also note that it is not about 4K video or anything. This problem is there even if I use any video file of any resolution or size, The difference and AE not utilizing full CPU.

please help. Thanks

[Mylenium]

There is nothing wrong with AE. You just don't understand how it works. AE doesn't do any pass-through transcoding like AME or Premiere do and that's all there is to it. AE always fully decodes the footage and expands it to its buffers, requiring a full re-encode when rendering the comp. Naturally that's a whole different thing than just reconforming a data stream. anyway, it's utterly beside the point. If you expect everything to be super fast or even realtime, then you can stop using AE right away. Many things take lots of processing and are extremely slow, yet it's perfectly natural that a heavy effects composition can tak hours to redner. You really, really havce wrong expectations based on reading too much uneducated Internet nonsense from other AE newbs.

Mylenium

[asimzb]

Thanks for the reply.

U said AE is different in nature and u explained how it does things differently which require time. Ok, that was knowledge for me. Then u said i should stop using AE right away because i expect super fast speed.

Its not about super fast or any thing. I have many other AE projects with lots of graphics and layers and effects and they take time to render, but i felt its not using the hardware resources fairly, i check gpu, cpu ram etc.. then what thing makes it slower.

So just for experimenting i did empty project and put a video in it and export it to another format then i realized its not about the effects or complexity which makes it slower. Its something else. So what is it.

Even if i agree what u said about AE way of doing its work, it must be dependant on any hardware resource, if it decodes footage and expands it to buffer, it must be using cpu or gpu or ssd or something else, (obviously its a machine and not human who just do things according to their mood). But im not seeing full usage of them.

What if i want to upgrade my pc further. How can i know which hardware needs to be upgrade if i dont know what limits the AE? What makes it take 20 minutes to export straight video compare to 4 minutes in PP.

Thanks.

[Rick Gerard]

Rendering time depends on the type of footage, the effects used, the frame size and frame rate and the system resources you have allocated to AE. Anything you installed on your system that may be running in the background may slow this down. AE has never used 100% of the system resources for several reasons. The biggest reason that it does not is that AE only processes one frame of video at a time and a frame just isn't that much data. Adobe is supposed to be hard at work trying to optimize the use of CPU and GPU resources to speed things up.

Many of my projects render at the rate of a few frames a second because I'm not doing very much in the comps. Some of my composites take several minutes per frame. I stop adding effects and rethink my design when my render time for complex composites starts approaching seven minutes a frame and this happens about once a month. In most cases I can speed up render time and still achieve the same effect by simply being more efficient in the way I set up a comp. The only way to learn how to do that is by constant practice, study, testing and experience because there is no magic button in the visual effects world that will make AE or any other compositing app automatically speed up. You just have to design your projects around the deadlines you have. I'm working on a character animated explainer video right now that I would love to have about 4 more days to deliver so I could add some more motion, additional characters and more effects to because it would be better, but I deliver tomorrow morning so I have to adjust the design, blocking and effects for each of the shots in this 3 minute video to match the deadline. That's the reality in the world of motion graphics and visual effects. That's even the reality in any creative field.

[asimzb]

i would say, i never mind AE taking time if it has to do some effects work or too many layers or other time consuming graphics, but in my example , the video is straight and layer is single without any effects nothing but a single short video file, i export it to adobe encoder, shouldn't it be straight forward conversion process and shouldn't it take 100% or at least 90% CPU? while every other conversion method i only see CPU is busy 100% doing its work. but not with AE.

and its not about a one video, this happened every kind of video, even if i export to uncompressed format, it takes time. weather in other software I see uncompressed output is only limited by HDD write speed. but not in this case.

i read somewhere that AE had an option for render multiple frame or using multi cores simultaneously. but its not in CC 2017 version

[chromaspring]

Saying that there is nothing wrong with AE is an absolutely hilarious moronic thing to say my god

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi asimzb,

Sorry for this issue. Did you ever find a solution? Please let us know if you have or if you still need help.

Thanks,

Kevin

[asimzb]

Still i couldn't understand why After Effects can not utilize the full power of pc hardware.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Asimzb,

After Effects' performance depends on many things: your system, your footage, etc. Not all combinations of hardware and software can give the best results.

It sounds like your expectations can be better met with smart rendering and Premiere Pro where if effects are prerendered in one codec and then exported in the same codec, it is a fast process to export. The same thing does not occur with cached frames in After Effects. Sorry about that. You can always give feedback to the team here.

Thanks,
Kevin