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M
markb22399708
Participant
February 15, 2022
Question

After Effects on AWS EC2

  • February 15, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 3300 views

Hi all,

 

We're using After Effects on an EC2 instance - currently a g4dn.12xlarge, which we thought should work great however it doesn't.  Works great with Resolve but struggles with After Effects.

 

Does anybody know why this might be?  Or alternatively a recommendation for a different instance type to use?  Thanks!

 

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
February 15, 2022

A classic lack of understanding how AE works under the hood and what its limitations are, it seems, no offense. I suggest you educate yourself about these things by looking up the thousands of "How to optimize performance..." and similar threads here on this forum and on the web in general. The sticky points to keep in mind:

 

  • very limited GPU acceleration
  • limited multithreading and barely any actual parallel processing
  • even if the first two points work, it's easy enough to construct complex projects that make AE slow down to a crawl with nested comps, expressions, specific effects

 

Point in case and brief summary: AE is 90% CPU-based even today and in a way where it favors the single most powerful single- or dual-core CPU. Excessive GPU acceleration is useless and so are fancy multicore processors. Memory consumption and disk IO also matter, but there's a lot of myth building and misunderstandings around that, too. At the end of the day, the "lamest" EC2 instance that emulates a core 9i processor with a mid-range GPU is more useful than your twelve core setup with four tensor GPUs.

 

Mylenium

M
markb22399708Author
Participant
February 18, 2022

Thanks Mylenium. 

This has been really helpful! Indeed it seems I was labouring under a misconception of how AE and  also the EC2 instances worked. 

I am having much more success now with instances designed for compute processing. 

Many Thanks! 

 

 

@Mylenium wrote:

A classic lack of understanding how AE works under the hood and what its limitations are, it seems, no offense. I suggest you educate yourself about these things by looking up the thousands of "How to optimize performance..." and similar threads here on this forum and on the web in general. The sticky points to keep in mind:

 

  • very limited GPU acceleration
  • limited multithreading and barely any actual parallel processing
  • even if the first two points work, it's easy enough to construct complex projects that make AE slow down to a crawl with nested comps, expressions, specific effects

 

Point in case and brief summary: AE is 90% CPU-based even today and in a way where it favors the single most powerful single- or dual-core CPU. Excessive GPU acceleration is useless and so are fancy multicore processors. Memory consumption and disk IO also matter, but there's a lot of myth building and misunderstandings around that, too. At the end of the day, the "lamest" EC2 instance that emulates a core 9i processor with a mid-range GPU is more useful than your twelve core setup with four tensor GPUs.

 

Mylenium

 

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